The Halloween Nazis struck again

Cultural appropriation. That’s the big buzz phrase of the politically correct these days. You especially hear that around Halloween. This past Halloween many college campuses across the nation issued warnings against offensive costumes that appropriate culture.

According to CampusReform.org, the University of Michigan published a statement admonishing cultural appropriation “often adopted by those who hold power and privilege in society.” Does any college student hold power? This is typical leftists claptrap intended to make victims out of anyone who doesn’t happen to be white and male. They profess to fight racism when thinking that anyone who isn’t white needs their protection is the most condescending form of racism.

I was recently listening to a pitiful story on NPR of a woman whose mother is Chinese and whose father is Italian. She wore some native Chinese garb to school and got shamed by another Chinese girl for culture appropriation. She tried to explain that even though she didn’t look Chinese she really was. The girl told her that if she didn’t look Chinese she had no right to dress like one.

Now, you would think she’d get back up in this girl’s face. Instead she went home and hung the dress in the closet never to wear it again. She says to this day she’s embarrassed to express her Chinese heritage. In other words, she’s playing the victim.

Here’s the deal. If I want to dress up as an Indian or a Mexican or a German I will. You know why? Because this is America. I’m free to do whatever I want. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. It doesn’t matter if you’re offended. I’m free to express myself as I please and if I’m feeling a little bit Arab today then get over it.

But here’s the flip side. You don’t have to like it either. However, just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean I can’t do it.

I don’t think many of these PC people understand where they’re going with this cultural appropriation stuff. If that’s the way they want to play it then the Canadians called and they want their basketball back. Try telling LeBron that he’s appropriating somebody else’s culture. 

If we’re to follow their ludicrous edict then only Germans can drive cars since Karl Benz invented the automobile. And although the Germans lay claim to the printing press, it was actually invented in China about 600 years before Gutenberg was born. I guess only Chinese folks can read printed books. Only white Americans can fly since the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Writing was invented by ancient Sumerians in what is modern-day Iraq, so I guess if you write anything you’re stealing from the Iraqi culture.

What these crazy leftists don’t seem to comprehend is nobody owns a culture. We all use language that grew out of different races and ethnicities. Many of the pop culture expressions of today come from black Americans. That wasn’t always the case. To “butter someone up” came from ancient India. “Turn a blind eye” is a British expression. “White elephant” is a Siamese expression, which is modern-day Thailand. Get the picture?

There is no copyright on culture. Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of India. His garb sparked a fashion sensation in the ‘60s called the Nehru jacket. The Beatles sported Nehru jackets as did several Bond villains. They didn’t have to ask Nehru for permission.

Sure, there is a line of good taste regarding costumes. We don’t need the politically correct drawing that line because they obviously don’t know where it is.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

A model of climate hysteria

‘What to Make of a Warming Plateau.’  That was the headline recently in the New York Times.  Though the Times writer clung to the debunked theory that we as humans are causing the world to heat up the evidence is now swamping the global warming alarmists.

The Times calls what’s happening a “plateau” or a “slowdown.”  NPR said a few years ago that global warming was on vacation.  (And they weren’t even trying to be funny)  All this despite record amounts of what the alarmists keep telling us is ruining the planet: carbon dioxide.

It’s time to face the music.  The theory from Al Gore and the rest of the hysterics was that we were spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and the result was the planet was going to heat up.  We are spewing CO2.  It’s not a poison, by the way.  It’s what plants need in order to thrive.  Despite our spewing, temperatures are not rising.  In fact, all of the climate models have been wrong.

Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville have been tracking global temperatures for years.  They recently published a graph that plots 73 climate models and compares those models to the actual temperature trends taken from satellites since we’ve been tracking the earth’s temperature which started in 1979.  Every climate model was way off.  They all predicted a huge increase when temperatures, since we first started measuring with satellites, have been flat.

Why have the climate models been wrong?  Because they all assumed a cause-and-effect of carbon dioxide and temperature rise.  As CO2 levels have risen global temperatures have flattened out.  You don’t have to be a scientist to figure this one out.  Manmade CO2 has little or nothing to do with temperature.  There are so many other variables that have a much greater effect on global temperatures.

One of the major theories supported by Dr. Spencer is water vapor or global cloudiness.  Dr. Spencer refers to this as the sun shade.  Some scientists are studying how global cloudiness affects the global temperatures and they still don’t have a handle on it but they do believe this is where we should be concentrating our efforts rather than on CO2.

Another theory is an obvious one that, for some reason, is completely ignored by those determined to blame man for the destruction of the planet and that’s the sun.  The sun, naturally, is a huge determining factor in temperature.  How it behaves, even the slightest change, can have major repercussions on our planet.  The problem is if it’s the sun then there’s no one to blame and, in turn, no one from whom they can redistribute the wealth.

For, you see, that’s what this whole global warming argument has been about.  If Gore and the rest of the warmists can convince you that you’re to blame for destroying the planet then they can get you to go along with a carbon tax to atone for your sins.  The producers of energy will pay those who aren’t producing.  The money-changers who facilitate the transaction pocket the commission and become billionaires in the process.

It’s a brilliant plan.  There’s only one problem.  It’s all a lie and now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.  They were hoping they could frighten us with their climate models and force us into cap-and-trade laws but we were able to stall them for far too long.  Long enough for their climate models to be proven a complete hoax.

One sure-fire way to tell is someone is lying is to look at their track record.

How Benghazi, the IRS and the AP are all connected

There are three stories swirling around in the press right now and I'm going to tell you how they're all connected.  There's the Benghazi cover-up.  We'll get back to that one in a moment.  There's the IRS story in which the IRS was targeting conservatives.  Then there's the AP story.  The Obama justice department subpoenaed phone records from the AP ostensibly in search of a leak about a CIA operation in Yemen.  This is the story that connects the other two.

You see, the Associated Press and most of the mainstream media view the subpoenaed phone records as overreach, at the very least, and a gross violation of the sacred bond between a journalist and his or her source, at the very worst.  Once anonymous sources understand the government will violate that bond whenever they please then secret sources will cease to exist.  The mainstream media types view this as an abuse of power by the Obama administration and they know that anonymous sources are the bedrock of investigative journalism.

The AP story may not yield anything criminal by the administration.  After all, they saw a CIA operation compromised by someone who leaked information to the Associated Press and they're probably within their rights to plug that leak.  The White House denying any knowledge of the details of the story is laughable but that's another issue.  But what that story has done is it has made the mainstream media suspicious of the White House.

The IRS story, although it only involves conservative victims at this point, is troubling to the mainstream media because they know an administration powerful enough to sic the IRS on conservatives is powerful enough to sic the IRS on them, if they ever have a mind to.  That's why they're covering this story.

ProPublica, which bills itself as an investigative journalism organization, is really little more than a front group for George Soros and his liberal agenda.  They are funded, in part, by Soros' Open Society Foundation.  And they partner with practically every mainstream media outlet in the country including NPR and all the major news networks, as well as many establishment newspapers.  Pretty scary.  They have now admitted to getting nine confidential applications from the IRS last year and using them in hit pieces they tried to pass off as investigative journalism.  As the noose tightens on the IRS scandal it was inevitable that ProPublica would be exposed.  They tried to get out in front of the story to pass themselves off as whistle-blowers when, in fact, they're part of the entire ugly conspiracy to target conservatives.

ProPublica's involvement in this nasty affair is a not-so-subtle reminder to the rest of the mainstream media that the thin line between their being used by this administration and serious journalism is far thinner than they were previously willing to admit.  They feel sullied by it all.  They've awakened to the sad fact that they had become little more than apologists for this administration instead of holding it accountable, as is their duty as journalists.  The news in recent days that the heads of CBS News and ABC News both have siblings who not only work in the Obama White House but are directly involved in the Benghazi affair surely are jolting enough even for a jaundiced news media.

The AP story and the IRS story have caused the mainstream media to double back and start asking more questions about Benghazi.  What first appeared to them as conservative hysteria over minor details is now being viewed through the newly-grinded lens of an administration that will disregard any law to get what it wants or to cover up its indiscretions.  Here we are eight months after the Benghazi attacks and the major networks are just now demanding to see the e-mails pertaining to the talking points on Benghazi.

The AP story will probably pan out to be a non-issue but it will prove to be the catalyst that finally opened the eyes of the mainstream media about what's been going on for the last four-plus years.

For the first time ever the mainstream media don't trust Barack Obama.  Welcome to the club.

Boston bombing - Ignoring the obvious

We’ve all be captivated by the events that transpired in Boston since the Marathon bombings took place.  I know it sounds cliché but it was like something out of a movie.  Almost immediately news outlets like MSNBC were leaning toward a right-wing nut theory.  After all, it was tax day and, to be sure, this was the work of some government-hating tea party type.

One commentator even went so far as to publicly wish it would turn out to be a tea partier.  As the week unfolded and the pictures of the two suspects were released speculation began to swirl.  They were young white males.  Could it be the left-wing media’s dream was coming true?

But soon those dreams were dashed with the revelation that the two brothers were Muslim.  I happened to be traveling from Washington, DC to Pennsylvania by car as the dramatic events were breaking.  The only source of news I could find was NPR.  The hosts were constantly reminding us that just because we had learned they were Muslim didn’t mean their religion had anything to do with the bombings.  Of course, common sense told us otherwise.

NPR invited on various experts and reporters who had discovered more and more details about the brothers.  The older one, we learned from his aunt, had become deeply religious over the last four or five years.  We learned they were both Chechen. We learned the older brother had traveled to Russia, specifically Dagestan, which is known as a hot bed of radical Muslims, for six months. 

Then there were the details of his domestic abuse charge for slapping around a girlfriend.  We were told he had posted anti-American and pro-radical Muslim videos to YouTube.  Still the commentators warned us not to jump to any conclusions about his religion.

Had the two brothers been middle-aged white guys from the South and had ever voted for a Republican and even taken a sip of sweet tea they would immediately have been labeled as tea party terrorists yet we were constantly urged not to connect the dots between their religion and the terrorist acts they committed in Boston.

There was plenty of misinformation during the course of the week.  CNN at one point reported that an arrest had been made.  Later, red-faced, they were forced to retract.  NPR was reporting the two held up a 7-Eleven in Cambridge.  That, too, turned out to be false.  The left-wing news outlets had no problem going to air with flimsy intelligence about breaking news – or what their sources were telling them was news – but they could never bring themselves to state the obvious: This was the work of Muslim terrorists.

Even after the younger brother was captured hiding in a boat, CNN continued the search for a motive.  It seems the network, that had desperately tried to regain relevance with a breaking news story that ended up being false, couldn’t even bring itself to report the one piece of news that, by then, was obvious to everyone.

Even as of this writing, some are still feigning an attempt to “understand” why these brothers did what they did.  Even as the FBI was raiding terrorist sleeper cells some news outlets were still begging us to believe the two acted alone and we still don’t know why.

What go unreported are the stories of immigrants – legal and illegal – who have no business in America.  There are people sent here to kill us and still some news outlets are in denial.

The trouble with media bias is not so much what they tell you, it’s what they don’t.

Disabled by our stupidity

National Public Radio recently produced a feature called Unfit for Work.  It was about the startling rise in people on disability.  CNSNews.com and others have been calling attention to the disturbing rise in disability benefits for some time.  What was new in the NPR piece was the fact that states have been making a concerted effort in this direction for some time.

They told the story of PCG, Public Consulting Group.  This is a private company that states having been paying to sift through their welfare rolls and shift as many people as possible from welfare to disability.  Why?  Well, it’s always about the money, now isn’t it?  States have to pay a certain percentage for each person on welfare.  If that same person moves to disability, instead, then it’s the federal government that picks up the entire tab.

Of course, we the taxpayers are getting screwed either way but there has been an astounding shift from welfare to disability over the last 20 years.  Bill Clinton vetoed the Republicans’ welfare reform twice before finally signing it in 1996.  What’s interesting is what happened after that.  The number of families on welfare began to drop dramatically.  What no one was paying attention to was the number of new disability claims.  If you overlay the welfare chart on the disability chart you see the number of people on public assistance remained essentially the same.  They just started collecting disability.

What’s also interesting is what they’re claiming disability for.  In 1961 the number of disabled workers claiming back troubles was 8.3 percent.  That number today is 33.8 percent.  Have we had an epidemic of back trouble over the last 50 years?  I don’t think so.

I did my own research on a hunch.  I took the top 10 states for disability claims and ran a comparison to the top 10 states for obesity.  Guess what?  Six of the top 10 states for obesity were also in the top 10 for disability.  Imagine that.

So, what am I saying?  I’m saying that obviously there are states that don’t have an obesity problem and there are states that do.  I don’t think it’s the climate so it must have something to do with personal choices.  That should be considered when we dole out tax dollars.  Are you doing everything you can possibly do to remedy your situation?  If not, you don’t get a dime.

The number of people on disability also obscures the true number of unemployed.  Those people, although they’re of working age, don’t show up in that highly-touted unemployment number from the Labor Department.  The more people who go on disability the better that number looks.  The percentage of workforce age people on disability in 1985 was 2.2 percent.  In 2005 it was 4.1 percent.  By 2011 it was 5.4 percent of the workforce. 

In typical NPR fashion, they managed to find an excuse for the explosion of disability claims rather than the glaringly obvious reason of too many lazy people.  “There are now millions of Americans who do not have the skills or education to make it in this country,” they stated.  Wait a minute.  A guy with a second-grade education can sneak across the border from Mexico and find a skilled job laying bricks and you’re telling me too many Americans don’t have the skills or education to make it in this country?

There are truly those who are too disabled to work but certainly not triple what it was in the ‘80s.  In the process we’ve robbed millions of their dignity and that’s something they may never get back.