We begin with two forlorn non-music anniversaries. Today in 1897, Oldsmobile began operation, eventually to become a division of General Motors Corp. … but not anymore.
We begin with two forlorn non-music anniversaries. Today in 1897, Oldsmobile began operation, eventually to become a division of General Motors Corp. … but not anymore.
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones released the song that would become their first number one hit, and yet Mick Jagger still claimed …
Today in 1967, the New York Times reported on a method of reducing the noise recording devices make during recording. The inventor, Ray Dolby, had pioneered the process for studio recordings, but the Times story mentioned its potential for home use.
Ray Dolby, by the way, is no known relation to the other Dolby …
Today in 1987, Lindsey Buckingham refused to go out on tour with Fleetwood Mac for its “Tango in the Night” album, perhaps thinking that the road would make him …
The band probably told him …
… but look who came back a few years later:
I was on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review Friday morning segment this morning, which you can listen to or even download here. (Listen for the references to nuclear holocaust movies, which didn’t include “The Day After” or “Fail-Safe.”)
This week starts the high school football season, which means I am announcing a game tonight and a game Saturday night, both of which can be heard online. The start of high school football is not a holiday, but, believe it or don’t, today is Black Cow Root Beer Float Day, National Aviation Day, National Hot and Spicy Food Day (you’d think that and the previous holiday wouldn’t really go together), National Potato Day, National Men’s Grooming Day, National Sandcastle and Sculpture Day, World Humanitarian Day and World Photo Day.
Saturday, by the way, is highlighted by National Radio Day, National Honey Bee Day, Lemonade Day, National Bacon Lover’s Day and National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day.
But about tonight and tomorrow, Travis Wilson writes on the state of high school football:
It is en vogue to take shots at football for being too violent, too dangerous, and something that will not last the next few decades.
In Wisconsin this year, three 11-Man football teams have canceled their seasons in the last few weeks, with a pair of 8-Man teams suffering the same fate. It led to numerous questions about the sustainability of high school football, especially in the small schools. Newspaper articles and internet commenters rushed to forecast the demise of high school football.
However, despite challenges faced in the arena of public opinion, the actual game at the high school level in the state of Wisconsin remains strong.
In data provided by the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, while overall high school enrollment in the state of Wisconsin (public and private schools) fell by 3,094 students from the 2014-15 year to 2015-16, the number of players out for football at the start of 2015-16 was 883 higher than the previous season, this despite four fewer teams overall.
An analysis of enrollment and participation data provided by the WIAA shows no significant change in the overall participation rate in high school football over the last 16 years. In 2000-01, the first year private schools joined their public school counterparts in the WIAA and the first year full data is available, the beginning-season football participation rate amongst all high school students was 9.50%. Outside of several years where full private school enrollment information is not available, which skews those seasons, the football participation rate has remained between 9.12% (2003-04) and 9.63% (2001-02).
The participation rate for the 2015-16 season of 9.46% was the third-highest of the last 16 years (not counting the years of no enrollment data for private schools). So, in the face of increased publicity about concussions, heat-related dangers, etc., the sport continues to be the highest participation sport in the country and the state at the high school level, and the participation rate has been largely unchanged for nearly two decades.
While it is true that the raw participation figures for football are decreasing over the last 10-15 years, it is a result of decreasing populations in the state of Wisconsin more than a decrease in the interest or participation levels.
The WIAA and the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association have done a great job trying to spread the message about the measures taken in recent years to make football even safer, with numerous studies continuing to show that football is as safe as it has ever been. But public opinion and the shots taken at the game in the media are an ongoing challenge.
Both the WFCA and the WIAA, along with the schools impacted by low numbers in football programs, have to search for solutions to ensure that those student-athletes and communities that want to continue the sport of football have that option. As evidenced by recent rules changes that make the game safer as well as increased support of 8-Man football, the leadership in the state remains proactive and I trust will continue to do so. No one wants to cancel a season, especially right before games begin.
There is a sense among some that the start date of football, which has crept into the end of July the next two years, is chasing away players. While that may the case in some isolated instances, the overall participation numbers continue to show no significant change. Many coaches cite other reasons (sport specialization, not going to start on varsity, jobs, etc.) that players have given for not coming out for football.
It is important for everyone to be up front and honest about the possibilities of injury and the out-of-season work it takes to be involved in football. But it is also important to continue to spread the word about the measures taken to improve the game, and wherever possible, cultivate a sense of excitement, not trepidation, about high school football.
As a former football player under coach Jim Harris and WFCA Hall of Fame coach Avitus Ripp at Richland Center High School, I can certainly attest to the many positives that I took from the game, and can tell you unequivocally that I have no regrets about coming out for football my sophomore year after choosing not to play as a freshman. It is a great game that you will cherish for the rest of your life.
Because there are always naysayers, and because the naysayers are not always wrong, something called The Geek Nerdom has a few negative things to say about “Star Trek: The Next Generation”:
Star Trek: The Next Generation was my first genuine Star Trek series. It appeared when I was in my teens and I was totally taken in about everything. This ranged right from Picard’s serenity to Troi’s diving necklines. I devoured each new episode and couldn’t wait for more. However, I shouldn’t have re-watched the show recently. Here are ten things I detested about the show;
1. Offensively Inoffensive
Interpersonal clash was a relic of the past in Gene Roddenberry’s brain by the 24th Century. This makes for some dreadfully dull viewing especially when the greater part of the regular cast is one huge happy family. They get along well except when one, or many of them, gets possessed by some alien that was simply searching for understanding right from the beginning. TNG is a great therapist-friendly show. It refuses to blame in any direction. It would most likely make for an idealistic culture in which to live, yet not one to set a drama in.
This is the biggest flaw in TNG, though changed in “Deep Space Nine,” although in both cases the interpersonal conflict mostly occurred when the Enterprise types interacted with non-Federation species, or non-Enterprise people, such as Captain Jellico vs. Commander Riker in “Chain of Command” (read here for comments from actor Ronny Cox, who played Jellico) or Riker vs. Commander Shelby in “The Best of Both Worlds” (both two-parters, interestingly), or Riker vs. his father in “The Icarus Agenda.” As I’ve said on this subject before, if you think thousands or millions (depending on your worldview) of years of human nature will be nullified in the next 300 years, you’re mistaken. Whenever you have human interaction, you will have conflict, and conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For that matter, accepting orders without question should be somewhat frightening to contemplate.
From here on, the reasons start to get less and less logical:
2. It Was Clearly A Product Of Its Time
The Next Generation is so much more awful than the first Trek. I don’t mean culturally. However, the visuals: Being shot on video and with special effects that extended from truly cool to truly horrible, the show now looks more like something cheaper and lower quality than the normal Syfy Saturday Night film. This is difficult to get that out your head while you’re viewing it.
Every TV series is a product of its time. The Original Series was a product of the 1960s (hence the female Enterprise crew’s “skorts”); TNG was a product of the 1980s.
3. It’s An Allegory
The original Trek had many allegories. Don’t misunderstand me, yet it felt as if that is all TNG might have been: Every single week, the show would handle a genuine subject with the state of mind of “But it’s happening to aliens.” Thereafter the crew of the Starship Enterprise would come, glare and reprimand aliens like their parents and everything would be over within 60 minutes.
Wrong reason, right rationale. It isn’t that there were too many allegories; it’s “glare and reprimand aliens like their parents.” The moral smugness in the series sometimes got quite overwhelming; it marred one of the best first-season episodes, “The Neutral Zone,” when Picard proclaimed “We have eliminated need.” (Irrespective of the bad economics, but you knew about that.) I used to hate episodes with Q (which included the first and last episodes, plus the introduction to the Borg), but at least Q smacked the Enterprise crew in their moral preens.
4. Very Inoffensive
For a show that was so unequivocally politically right, it was shockingly timid too. Do you recall when the first Trek made TV history by having the first on-screen interracial kiss? Definitely, not at all like that in TNG. Additionally, after the multi-cultural unique cast, the altogether caucasian TNG team appeared like a step taken in reverse. This is particularly considering one of the black on-screen characters played an alien and the other invested a large portion of his energy keeping the engines running.
Well … I’m not sure from this what the writer has in mind. It’s one thing to be “diverse”; should you count cast members’ ethnicities based on their characters (La Forge is black, but there are no Asians) or the actors (Michael Dorn as Worf)? Or: How about following the suggestion of Martin Luther King (a big fan of TOS) to judge others based not on the color of their skin (or what planet they’re from, presumably) but on the content of their character?
5. Riker And Troi: Science Fiction’s Most Passionless Unrequited Love
Better believe it, truth is stranger than fiction: For the majority of their assumed backstory of lovers torn apart because of duty, Riker and Troi figured out how to keep their feelings covered up. They did this by having no chemistry onscreen. I find the actors at fault. However, Jonathan Frakes had a demeanor of steady amusement about him amid everything past the second season. Therefore, the scripting must be blamed too.
I believe Riker and Troi were not supposed to be an item in TNG, in order to be able to (1) have Riker channel his inner Kirk the ladies’ man and (2) have Troi be able to be unattached. I admit to not liking the Worf and Troi romance (if that’s what it was), but they fixed that when Riker and Troi got married in the “Insurrection” movie.
6. Nearly Everything About Data
I realize that this is similar to saying that I abhor Santa Claus. However, Data never truly did anything for me except give deus ex machinas and irritate me. We’d seen the “What does it mean to be… human?” thing before with Spock (and, peculiarly enough, again with Ilya probe in The Motion Picture), and Brent Spiner’s depiction moved from innocent to strangely conceited amid the show’s run, making him even more irritating.
To quote the late John McLaughlin of “The McLaughlin Group”: “WRONG!” So Data was TNG’s Spock. I fail to see what is wrong with that. One would expect a science fiction series to cast at least one alien to observe us humans, wouldn’t you? Data was played sort of as a cross between Spock and, well, a puppy, eager to learn and eager to please. (Well, minus the part about using the floor as a bathroom. I think.) Odo played a similar role in “Deep Space Nine,” and Neelix and eventually Seven of Nine did the same thing in “Voyager.”
7. The Rest Of The Crew
OK, maybe Patrick Stewart can be spared from the storm of “Well, they weren’t the best actors on the planet” hate. However, there truly was a level of acting skills from the regular cast that appeared to support soap opera scale responses to anything unpretentious, enchanting or reasonable. I’m taking a look at you specifically, Michael Dorn. Klingon or not, there was a great deal of howling there.
Well, maybe the directors watched TOS, which was filmed in a day where TV acting was closer to stage acting than movie acting. I can’t say I buy this objection, though some characters were easier to watch (Riker, told by Roddenberry to act like Gary Cooper) than others (“Shut up, Wesley!”).
8. Those Uniforms
I’m sure you agree with this. Especially the main couple of seasons, where they were all wearing those all-in-one things.

The uniforms certainly improved when they became less form-fitting. Maybe by the 23rd and 24th century everyone will be in perfect physical condition, but 20th-century actors are not necessarily so. (See Shatner, William.) Others would argue that the uniforms shouldn’t have deviated from TOS’ palette of greenish-gold for command, red for engineering and the security redshirts (R.I.P.) and blue for science and medical. (For that matter not that many characters died in seven seasons of TNG vs. three seasons of TOS.)
10. It Ruined The Franchise Until JJ Abrams Saved It
The Next Generation changed what had been a series about adventure, exploring and quite goofy into something calmer, genuine and less fun. It took a ton of the imperfections of humankind out of the thoughts behind the show and supplanted it with… well, I don’t know. Each successive series attempted another trick to fill the gap. You can watch an original Trek and although it’s not perfect, there’s a feeling of excitement and revelation and is convincing to watch. However, The Next Generation has this embarrassing quality to it. It’s as though simply doing sci-fi is excessively lowbrow for its own tastes, thus it’d rather accomplish something more brainy and “important.”
The concept that Abrams “saved” Star Trek with a bad ripoff of TOS is blatantly offensive and demonstrates that the author has as much brainpower as a Morg. As with every Abrams thing not named “Lost,” Abrams’ approach is to assume that original fans will be satiated by references to the previous series, while doing a shoot-’em-up for today’s attention-span-deprived audiences. Abrams’ second Star Trek movie grotesquely miscast Benedict Cumberbatch, a fine actor who nonetheless looks like neither an Indian (Khan) nor a Hispanic (Ricardo Montalban). His third movie, which swiped the tired trope from the previous Star Trek movies of destroying the Enterprise, has done so poorly at the box office that it may well have killed Star Trek as a movie franchise.
How much money would you have paid for tickets for this concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco today in 1964:
The Cato Institute released its latest Freedom in the 50 States study, which …
… presents a completely revised and updated ranking of the American states based on how their policies promote freedom in the fiscal, regulatory, and personal realms.
This edition again improves upon the methodology for weighting and combining state and local policies in order to create a comprehensive index. Authors William Ruger and Jason Sorens introduce many new policy variables suggested by readers. More than 230 policy variables and their sources are now available to the public on a new website for the study. Scholars, policymakers, and concerned citizens can assign new weights to every policy and create customized indices of freedom, or download the data for their own analyses.
In the 2016 edition, the authors have updated their findings to:
- Improve estimates of the “freedom value” of each policy (the estimated dollar value of each freedom affected to those who enjoy it);
- Provide the most up-to-date freedom index yet, including scores as of December 31, 2014;
- Include citizen choice among local governments as an important factor modifying the freedom value of more locally based taxation;
- Significantly expand policies affecting business and personal freedom, including new variables for occupational licensing, tort liability climate, land-use regulation, entry and price regulation, alcohol laws, and civil asset forfeiture;
- Analyze how the policies driving income growth and interstate migration have changed pre– and post–Great Recession.

And what can be said about Wisconsin, which is, you’ll note, 27th of the 50 states?
For all the talk about Scott Walker’s “radical reforms,” we find that economic freedom has been more or less constant since 2011, relative to other states, whereas personal freedom has grown substantially.
The Badger State has relatively high taxes, which have fallen only marginally since 2012. State taxes are projected to be 5.8 percent of personal income in FY 2015, while local taxes have risen since FY 2000 and now stand at 4.4 percent of income, above the national average. Wisconsinites have ample choice among local governments, with more than two and a half effective competing jurisdictions per 100 square miles. State and local debt has fallen somewhat since FY 2007, and government employment and subsidies are below average. Overall, Wisconsin has seen definite improvement on fiscal policy since 2010, but it hasn’t yet reached the national average.
On regulatory policy, we see little change in recent years, although our index does not yet take account of the 2015 right-to-work law. Land-use freedom is a bit better than average; local zoning has not gotten out of hand, though it has grown some. The state has a renewable portfolio standard, but it is not high. Apart from its right-to-work law, Wisconsin was already reasonably good on labor-market policy. Cable and telecommunications have been liberalized. Occupational licensing increased dramatically between 2000 and 2006; still, the state is about average overall on extent of licensure. Nurse practitioners enjoy no independent practice freedom. Insurance freedom is generally good, at least for property and casualty lines. The state has a price-gouging law, as well as controversial, strictly enforced minimum-markup laws for gasoline and general retailers. The civil liability system is above average and improved significantly since 2010, due to a punitive damages cap.
Wisconsin is below average on criminal justice policies, but it has improved substantially since 2010 because of local policing strategies. The incarceration rate has fallen, as have nondrug victimless crime arrest rates. The state’s asset forfeiture law is one of the stricter ones in the country, but equitable sharing revenues are a little higher than average, suggesting some evasion of the law. The state was required to legalize same-sex marriage in 2014. Tobacco freedom is extremely low, due to airtight smoking bans and high taxes. Educational freedom grew significantly in 2013–14 with the expansion of vouchers. However, private schools are relatively tightly regulated. There is almost no legal gambling, even for social purposes. Cannabis law is unreformed. Wisconsin is the best state for alcohol freedom, with no state role in distribution, no keg registration, low taxes (especially on beer—imagine that), no blue laws, legal happy hours, legal direct wine shipment, and both wine and spirits in grocery stores. The state is now about average on gun rights after the legislature passed a shall-issue concealed-carry license, one of the last states in the country to legalize concealed carry.
Next to last, to be precise. The only thing that could be said to be libertarian about this state is the aforementioned alcohol freedom. The existence of the minimum-markup law is an embarrassment to 21st-century commerce. Despite tax cuts, Wisconsin remains one of the highest taxed states in the U.S., in large part because Wisconsin doesn’t require an actually balanced budget, hasn’t really made actual state budget cuts and has no constitutional limits on spending and taxation.
Wisconsin in fact has never been remotely free, in large part because of, as you’ve previously read here, our toxic-to-freedom mix of “Yankee founders and northern European immigrants; combine Protestant reformers and a strong Roman Catholic presence; add the labor activism of the industrial era to agrarian roots; douse liberally with the “Social Gospel,” the Wisconsin Idea, and Progressive-era legislation,” which gave us the “moralistic” political tradition that “considers government ‘a positive instrument with a responsibility to promote the general welfare.’ This culture is predominant in 17 states that stretch from New England through the upper Midwest to the Pacific coast — what several observers of American history and politics have called ‘Greater New England.’” Including, unfortunately, this state, as well as Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Colorado, Utah and Oregon.
That is an interesting observation about “choice among local governments.” Wisconsin has 3,120 units of government, second highest in the U.S. behind Illinois. (That number will be decreasing by one in the next few years as the cities of Madison and Fitchburg swallow up what’s left of the Town of Madison.) “Choice among local governments” could be another way of saying “too many units of government,” given, for instance, the 15 separate municipalities between Neenah, Kaukauna and the Calumet County part of Appleton (the cities of Neenah, Menasha, Appleton and Kaukauna; the villages of Fox Crossing, Kimberly, Little Chute and Combined Locks; and the towns of Neenah, Menasha, Grand Chute, Greenville, Vandenbroek, Buchanan and Harrison), which could be said to be 14 too many, at least in police and fire and other governmental services. Merging municipalities should take out the salaries at the very top.
At least the trend is sort of going in the correct direction …
… though with no real speed. Wisconsin ranks worse than Indiana (fourth), Iowa (ninth) and Michigan (24th), but better than Minnesota (38th) and Illinois (44th) among our neighbors.
Mercatus suggests the state needs to …
- Fiscal: Reduce the income tax burden while continuing to cut spending on employee retirement and government employment.
- Regulatory: Abolish price controls.
- Personal: Eliminate teacher licensing and mandatory state approval for private schools.
It’s pretty clear the political will to make our state more free even in those three areas is lacking. (The authors probably don’t know the widespread loathing of property taxes in this state.) Republicans refuse to do the work to get voters to approve constitutional limits on spending and taxes, and won’t even get rid of the minimum-markup law.
And yet, Democrats do nothing but (seek to, given their out-of-power status) raise taxes and expand government, persisting in the mistaken belief that government is anything beyond a necessary evil, perhaps because they think it’s the 1920s and Fighting Bob La Follette is still alive. It’s impossible to believe that the creator of the federal government Golden Fleece Award denoting ludicrously wasteful government spending, Sen. William Proxmire, was a Democrat. Think Sen. Tammy Baldwin or former and possibly future Sen. Russ Feingold want to cut your taxes? How about the would-be Democratic governors out there?
How can two songs be the number one song in the country today in 1956? Do a Google search for the words “B side”:
(Those songs, by the way, were the first Elvis recorded with his fantastic backup singers, the Jordanaires.)
Today in 1962, the Beatles made their debut with their new drummer, Ringo Starr, following a two-hour rehearsal.
Heather Mac Donald has written about the unnoticed increase in urban crime, which got noticed last weekend:
The war on cops, ideological and sometimes lethal, may be expanding into a broader race war, in which only one side fights. The thugs who torched businesses and police cars, assaulted cops, and shot at firemen in northwestern Milwaukee on Saturday night went after “white bitches,” among other targets. (The riots were inspired by the fatal police shooting of Sylville K. Smith, a black man. Smith, who had an extensive arrest record, including for a shooting, fled from officers after a traffic stop while carrying a stolen handgun; he refused commands to drop the gun. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has activated the state’s National Guard and declared a state of emergency, but violence continued into Sunday night, with four officers injured, three squad cars damaged, and multiple businesses burned down.) The Black Lives Matter-inspired assassin who murdered five police officers in Dallas in July 2016 said that he wanted to kill white people, as well as white cops. The vitriol that officers working in urban areas now encounter on a daily basis is inflected with racism.
And if the war on cops escalates into more frequent attacks on whites and their perceived interests, the elite establishment will bear much of the blame. For the last two years, President Barack Obama has seized every opportunity to advise blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system. We should not be surprised when that belief, so constantly inflamed, erupts into violence. Even in his remarks at the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas cops, Obama had the gall to trot out his usual racial vendetta against the police, even though he was fully on notice that cops were being killed because of it:
When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment; when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently, so that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime; when mothers and fathers raise their kids right and have “the talk” about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—“yes, sir,” “no, sir”—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door, still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy—when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.
Obama’s indictment ignored, as usual, the astronomically higher rates of black crime that fully explain racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, Obama hasn’t uttered a word in condemnation of the lawless behavior in Milwaukee, two days into the events.
Hillary Clinton has been just as quick to enflame black hatred of cops and, by inevitable extension, of “white” society. She said during a January 2016 Democratic presidential debate that it was “reality” that police officers see black lives as “cheap,” adding that “there needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” (In fact, there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police; tens of thousands of black lives have been saved thanks to data-driven, proactive policing.) The July 2016 cop assassinations had no more deterrent effect on Clinton’s determination to keep anti-cop tensions at a boil than they did on President Obama. Speaking at the NAACP after the Baton Rouge assassinations, which followed the Dallas massacre, Clinton said that “we cannot rest until we root out implicit bias and stop the killings of African-Americans.” Showing herself to be as statistically challenged as Obama, she continued: “Let’s admit it, there is clear evidence that African-Americans are disproportionately killed in police incidents compared to any other group.” (Blacks are actually killed at alower rate than their crime rates would predict. And at least four studies this year have shown that police officers are less likely to shoot blacks than whites, whether armed or unarmed.)
Last week, the Justice Department emitted yet another mendacious indictment of alleged cop racism, declaring the Baltimore Police Department guilty of a pattern or practice of systemic civil rights abuses. Baltimore officers accost and arrest blacks in Baltimore at higher rates than their proportion in the population, the Justice Department’s civil rights division wrote, carefully avoiding any notice of the crime that brings cops to black neighborhoods. The Justice Department report was ecstatically received in the media, and no doubt word of the confirmed racism of Baltimore police—and by extension, all police—trickled down into northwestern Milwaukee.
These nonstop rhetorical sorties against police officers and the criminal justice system inevitably expand into a broader indictment of the society that the criminal justice system defends. The Black Lives Matter riots of the last two years are inseparable from a hatred of what is perceived to be “white” society and civilization.
And as important as the political stoking of that hatred is the academic race industry that keeps black victimology at a fever pitch. The 2015–2016 school year saw an outbreak of delusional self-pity among black college students across the country. They claimed to be discriminated against by faculty, administrators, fellow students, and academic standards. Never mind that many allegedly disparaged students were attending the colleges in question only because ofracial preferences, despite having test scores that would automatically disqualify white or Asian applicants. Never mind that nearly every waking hour of a college administrator is devoted to the cultivation of a separatist racial consciousness among black students and to dreaming up new racial sinecures for faculty and other administrators.
The academic version of Black Lives Matter was not as physically destructive as the Milwaukee riots, but it had as corrosive an effect on civilizational norms.Last fall, a group of black students at Yale surrounded and screamed insults at their college master. (His sin was to be married to a Yale professor who had sent out an email suggesting that Yale students could select their own Halloween costumes without policing from Yale’s diversity bureaucrats.) One student was caught on video shrieking at the master to “be quiet” and calling him “disgusting.” Other students were just as savage, but their behavior was not recorded. The shrieking girl and her classmates have never been reprimanded for their uncivil behavior. To the contrary, Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, penned a sycophantic missive to the Yale “community” after the incident, gushing that he had never been as proud of Yale students as in the last few weeks of protests. Even the college master who had been screamed at by his charges expressed contrition for his failure to understand the oppression experienced by Yale’s coddled minority students.
Yale was hardly the only college to excuse racial attacks on basic manners and decency. Black Dartmouth students stormed into the library spitting on and cursing at white students. The administrators let it pass.
The rioters in Milwaukee have likely not attended Yale or Dartmouth, but they have absorbed the same narrative that originates with university race-mongers and is then adopted by the media and government. Perhaps the narrative’s biggest lie is that white people are the most powerful source of racism today—a lie embraced by elite white society itself. When that society is not twisting itself into knots trying to hire or promote as many blacks as possible, it is in a constant state of anguish trying to track down those deep, if invisible, pockets of white racism that supposedly explain ongoing racial disparities. Black racism, however, is far more pervasive than any vestigial white racism, as anyone who has spent time in inner-city black neighborhoods knows. I have been warned by residents of one Harlem housing project not to venture into a neighboring project because the hatred of whites is even more acute there. A resident of the Taft Houses in East Harlem told me of the abuse she took as a child because her mother was Irish. Black flash mobs and participants in the “knock-out game” are motivated by anti-white animus, though the media strive frantically to ignore both the violence and the emotion generating it. Blacks are the primary source of interracial violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author by a Bureau of Justice Statistics statistician. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the interracial crimes between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. It would be naïve to think that some of that black-on-white violence does not have a racial tinge to it.
And the academic discourse of white privilege, microaggressions, institutional racism, and “intersectionality” promotes its own effete version of anti-white animus, eagerly promoted by white professors and administrators.
The exculpations of the Milwaukee riots started up immediately. “Do we continue—continue with the inequities, the injustice, the unemployment, the under-education, that creates these byproducts that we see this evening?” Milwaukee alderman Khalif Rainey asked portentously. “The black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression.” The website Vox informed its readers: “Historians and experts say these types of violent outbursts are typically rooted in longstanding anger toward a system that has in many ways failed them. . . . Compounded with the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, people were clearly furious—and lashed out.”
The rioters were not so furious about the five blacks who were fatally shot in Milwaukee by other blacks in the 24 hours prior to Sylville Smith’s shooting or about the overwhelmingly black victims of Milwaukee’s 73 percent surge in homicides in 2015, the result of what I have called the Ferguson effect.
The Milwaukee riots were low on the topic totem pole of Sunday morning talk shows and have almost disappeared from sight on cable news channels on Monday. Racial violence is becoming normalized, like Islamic terrorism. More attention was devoted to the Baltimore Justice Department report and to Donald Trump’s war on the press than to the breakout of anarchy in a major American city. The shootings of cops on Sunday—a police officer in Eastman, Georgia, killed following a traffic stop; a police officer north of Atlanta shot on Sunday morning after responding to a call—also got little media notice. (Did race play a role in those shootings? The media is not interested in the question. Thesuspected killer of Eastman officer Tim Smith, Royheem Delshawn Deeds, is black; Smith was white. Had Smith killed Deeds, the media would have been all over the story. Yet the relationship between victim and killer in the Smith death is far more typical of fatal encounters between blacks and police officers. Police officers are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.) Fatal shootings of cops this year are up 68 percent through August 15 compared with the same period last year. Chicago cops now operate under a death sentence, with the pact among Chicago gangbangers to take out a cop in retaliation for the Paul O’Neal shooting.
If we continue to look the other way at racial violence and the hatred that fuels it, we may find ourselves in a state of anarchy. The Milwaukee rioters chanted “black power,” a clear evocation of the 1960s. This time, however, the “establishment” is only a rhetorical target. In point of fact, it is an enabler and coconspirator.
Bernie Quigley has perhaps the most optimistic view of Evan McMullin in this strange presidential race:
Pundits have said that one more is too late, and not enough—that backing someone other than New York tycoon Donald Trump or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “throwing away your vote.” But this is a special election at a special moment in history. There are actually four parties today, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Greens, with the willful and positive Jill Stein at the helm, and the Libertarians. Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, brings forth the Jeffersonian vision of libertarian Ron Paul out of the discussion stages, and into the streets. Meanwhile, Stein brings a more comprehensive, relevant, and timely approach to true left dissent.
She should have been the recipient of the Bernie Sanders “revolution.” Had the Vermont senator not folded in with the Clinton Democrats, and thrown in instead with Stein, it really might have been a revolution; she would have gathered the 15 percent that would have allowed her to be on the debate stage in October with Clinton and Trump. Very likely Johnson could garner enough support to get onto that stage as well.
The two-party system is much like the Ford guys and the Chevy guys, before other cars—better cars—appeared in the streets. The two-party system is a generic model of politics for a generic model of culture, personality and citizenship. Throwing in with the Ford guys and Chevy guys would be throwing away your vote. One has more inspired and humane options in this remarkable time of new political beginnings.
The rise of these new parties to greater influence clearly suggests that we are at an important turning point, possibly one as great as any since 1860. It was presaged by the overnight rise of Sanders, it was presaged by Ron Paul, but most of all if this turning of events are to be understood in the most primary anthropological terms, it was presaged by Trump.
I said a year ago that Trump was “the Trickster who churns the ages, and the others’ fate depends on where they stand in relation to the Trickster. He is the one necessary component in the campaign so far. Without Trump, there is nothing.”
Other commentators made a similar observation: Corey Pein in The Baffler, “I propose that Donald Trump is the personification of a Norse god named Loki.” And Esther Goldberg in The American Spectatorsays Trump is best explained and illuminated by Friedrich Nietzsche in an allegory from Thus Spoke Zarathustra of a tightrope walker moving intrepidly between the ages.
For those who didn’t get the reference, think musically:
Or …
Midway across to the new age just ahead, the tightrope walker classically reaches a crisis, and so have we today. Trickster is presage to every important movement in history. Without the half-mad John Brown, the New England Transcendentalist preachers would never have awakened to the vision of Abraham Lincoln. Without the rustic, iconoclastic, and original troubadour Bob Dylan, The Beatles would never have found their way to the greater Vedic aesthetic (“I am he . . . “) of the Sgt. Pepper era. They would not have been allowed by the wider culture.
The Trickster destroys the past. But without the Trickster, there is no possible future. And when his work is done, Trickster returns to the forest. Or, as Trump says he might do if he does not achieve his White House goal, he then takes “a very nice long vacation.”
Which I think is where we are today, waiting again for the “new man” presaged by the Trickster; the singular pilgrim, warrior, holy man, the “one good man; a spirit who would not bend or break who would sit at his father’s right hand” as Johnny Cash and U2 so well described him, who enters us into the millennium.
But we have yet to see him. And that is why Evan McMullin is important.
McMullin appears to have come to us from nowhere, having emerged out of the darkest corners of the collective unconscious, that otherworld which undercover CIA agents inhabit. And he comes alone. Those of us outside the Beltway know little about him, but first impressions bring intuitive hunches. A 16-minute TedX talk at the London Business School, “Why saying ‘never again’ to genocide is not enough,” reveals an astonishingly singular man, fearless in his daily walk and resolute in a kind of personal piety that we rarely see in our time.
McMullin is on the ballot in Colorado, and will be in Utah, along with many other states, as he lays out his 50-state strategy.
The presence of McMullin opens a path which will widen in October. He makes the fledgling Greens and Libertarians suddenly irrelevant—now they won’t get the 15 percent needed to be on the stage at the debates with Trump and Clinton. McMullin will. He may even have his 15 percent by summer’s end.
He does not come alone. Earlier this month, 50 GOP officials publicly turned away from the candidate of the Republican party. More will follow. This is, in effect, an “intervention,” similar to how the Iraq Study Group of 2006 brought an “intervention” to the Bush/Cheney Oval Office and its War in Iraq. New policy and personnel would soon follow. A bipartisan group of venerable party elders gathered to trump the authority of the rank and file Republicans in the White House by bringing dominance through their own, inherently greater, authority. The elders won.
And that is an intervention arising. The Iraq Study Group was an ad hoc“council of elders” brought together to change the course of political events. That’s what is gathering here.
McMullan is, or will be, the single combat warrior to this rising, spontaneous “intervention.” He will easily get the 15 percent which allows him to be on stage with Trump and Clinton. It will change everything. Again. And in this new environment, McMullin could quite possibly be the last man standing in this long and winding political journey to 2017.
The Beatles were never known for having wild concerts. (Other than their fans, that is.)
Today in 1960, the Beatles played their first of 48 appearances at the Indra Club in Hamburg, West Germany. The Indra Club’s owner asked the Beatles to put on a “mach shau.” The Beatles responded by reportedly screaming, shouting, leaping around the stage, and playing lying on the floor of the club. John Lennon reportedly made a stage appearance wearing only his underwear, and also wore a toilet seat around his neck on stage. As they say, Sei vorsichtig mit deinen Wünschen.
Four years later, the council of Glasgow, Scotland, required that men who had Beatles haircuts would have to wear swimming caps in city pools, because men’s hair was clogging the pool filters.
Today in 1968, the Doors had their only number one album, “Waiting for the Sun”: