Simple!

You know that sexual harassment/sexual assault scandal that's got the military falling all over themselves with politically correct (literally) initiatives, like banning all the Playboy magazines?  Well, it turns out the answer to the problem was amazingly simple!

The Air Force discovered this simple solution.  All they had to do was put teal-colored robes on their students, and like magic the problem disappears.  They're sure of it.

Via former Air Force member, reader, friend, former colleague, and Idaho real estate mogul Doug S., who comments: “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

As a former Navy enlisted man, I have a lot of trouble wrapping my brain around these changes, and also the idea of women serving on ships.  Now don't get me wrong, I'd have loved having women on the ship I served on – what I'm having trouble imagining is the women handling it.  The average age of the sailors on the USS Long Beach, in the '70s when I served on it, must have been around 24 or 25 – and all male, of course.  These young, testosterone-drenched men wandered about the ocean with no contact with women for up to months at a time (the USS Long Beach was nuclear-powered, and the brass loved to show off how long we could stay at sea). 

The ship was chock-a-block full of pornography; anything from lingerie photos to hard core 8mm movies (no streaming Internet video back then :).  Then when we finally did pull into a port somewhere – anywhere – the local version of “sailor town” was waiting for us.  On the surface, the sailor towns consisted of two things: sources of alcohol (in whatever form you preferred) and sources of sex (in whatever form you preferred).  Dig a little deeper, and you'd find sources of drugs (anything at all) and other illicit, er, entertainments. 

I once served on “hard hat” Shore Patrol (the Navy's military police) in Olongapo, Philippines for six months; it was just such a sailor town, perhaps the largest in the world at the time (this was during the Vietnam War, and Olongapo was just outside the gates of the Subic Bay Navy base, one of the largest bases in the world).  I can tell you from personal experience and observation that the vast majority of the thousands of sailors who visited Olongapo every night – officers and enlisted – had just two objectives for their visit: to get plastered and to get laid, not necessarily in that order.  And Olongapo was there with hundreds of bars and thousands of willing girls to help them meet those objectives – and to separate them from as many of those lovely U.S. dollars as they could.

So I wonder...

Has human nature somehow fundamentally changed since I was in my 20s, in the '70s?  Have young men evolved into some new, higher order of being, in which the desire for sex is not so...urgent?  What happens when one of the new “co-ed” ships hits port in a place like, say, Hong Kong?  Where once legions of rental girls lined up to hawk their attributes to the sailors, what's there now?  Soda and ice cream trucks?  Or are there rental boys for the female sailors? 

Inquiring minds want to know :)

Every American Had It...

The use of past tense here is very sad:

Et Tu, West Virginia?

Jared Marcum is a 14 year old eighth grader from West Virginia.  In April, he wore the T-shirt at right to school.  It's an NRA shirt promoting gun rights protection.

He got into an argument with a teacher who didn't like the shirt, was charged with obstructing the education process and obstructing an officer, was arrested and suspended.  That's bad enough, especially when you find out that the officer doesn't even allege that any threats were made.

But now it gets even worse: Jared is facing prosecution, with the possibility of a $500 fine and a year in jail.

This is just plain crazy.  A kid wears a perfectly legal, non-obscene T-shirt to school – and he could end up in jail?  What the hell is happening to my country?!?!  Jared should be celebrated for his willingness to stand up for his beliefs – a quintessentially American behavior – not persecuted.

Suddenly, I hear drums in the distance.  The drums of doom...

The Drums of Doom Beat Ever Closer...

In California they do.  We're raising a generation on notions like this one: that a Swiss Army knife is an evil weapon:

A fifth-grader in Cupertino, California was suspended and threatened with expulsion for bringing a small Swiss Army knife on a school-sponsored, science-oriented camping trip.

We have got to get out of here...

Oh, Nooz!

Via reader and (former) colleague Doug S., this disappointing news: a major retailer (Williams-Sonoma) has decided all on their own to stop selling pressure cookers.  But only in Massachusetts.  And only in brick-and-mortar stores.  An employee says “It's a temporary thing out of respect.”

Well, I have some self-respect, too.  And it tells me that I won't be buying anything at Williams-Sonoma anytime soon, as I'm not interested in lending even the slightest support to such craven posturing...

Drums of Doom...

There are days when I wake up uncertain what country I'm actually living in...

Political Correctness...

Abigail Esman is a writer who has written often about the horrors of female genital mutilation (FGM).  Recently she wrote an article in which she called FGM “barbaric” – and Amnesty International wrote her, saying (in part):

We try not to use this word. The use of the word ‘barbaric’ suggests that the people who do this are less than human, which isn’t so because they are being led by social pressure which is what needs to be fought. So we avoid using this word to not judge the people.

Ms. Esman doesn't think that's a good idea. Her conclusion:

These are the times I worry that we stand upon a precipice, and fear for the ideas and the ideals that form the fundament of civilization and democracy. We censor words and language, as Howard says, bending our knee to the tyranny of political correctness, concerning ourselves more with the sensitivities of the perpetrators than the lives and safety of the victims.

It was another British Home Secretary, Mike O’Brien, who famously said in 1999, “multicultural sensitivity is no excuse for moral blindness.” They are words we would still do well to heed.

Political Correctness in Our Military...

Reader and friend Doug S. (who is a U.S. Air Force veteran) passed this link along.  This is the sort of thing that started the German military along the path to its current “toothless tiger” status.  It's also what happens when an entrenched bureaucracy tackles a problem: common sense and pragmatism are thrown out the window; mindless rules and perverse incentives rule.

I hear the drums of doom.  They don't sound so very far away...

Science and Political Correctness...

In an article titled The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis, scientist Satoshi Kanazawa relates his experiences when his scientific investigation ran headlong into political correctness.  It's a dismaying tale for anyone interested in advancing science, but not really surprising – scientists are, after all, as human as the rest of us.  As I read his article (which relates a story in psychology), I was thinking about climate science and how political correctness and financial rewards have distorted the field.  The impact of political correctness on science varies wildly according to the particualr field of science.  For example, political correctness has little impact on nuclear physics, mathematics, or inorganic chemistry – but a lot on anthropology, psychology, climatology.

The only defense I know against this sort of thing is to be a determined skeptic – don't believe anything without reproducible evidence to support it...

Just When I Feel a Glimmer of Hope...

...a news story like this one comes along, and crushes that hope like an elephant stomping on an ant.

I don't want to believe that any public official could be that stupid – but this story is multiply-sourced and appears to be completely accurate.  This does not bode well for my country's future...

Fired for Doing Her Job...

We're talking about Naomi Schaefer Riley, a journalist who dared to make uncomfortable (and most definitely not politically correct!) observations about the value of Black Studies.  Of course, in modern America, that meant she had to be fired.

If you project political correctness forward, at some point it forces all thought to cease.  The “thought death” of America.  

Three perspectives from today's WSJ, from Naomi herself, from the editors, and from James Taranto.

Political Correctness vs. Common Sense...

At JFK airport in New York, this past week, TSA agents strip-searched a ticketed passenger going through security. 

Why? Because the passenger didn't want to go through the X-ray equipment, fearing that it might interfere with her defibrillator.  The usual alternative is a pat-down search (something I've had done myself), but in her case, they opted for a strip search. 

Why?  That's a bit unclear, as the passenger didn't fit any threat profile I've ever heard of: she's white, 85 years old, weighs 107 pounds, and uses a walker.

Somehow in the process of doing the humiliating strip search, they managed to injure her as well.

The only reason the TSA would strip-search a passenger like that is in their eagerness to avoid “profiling”.  In an all-too-familiar example of the triumph of multi-culturalist political correctness over common sense, our TSA has decided that we cannot recognize the rather clear fact that terrorists seem to be overwhelmingly (1) Muslim, (2) young men, and (3) Middle Eastern.  Not that there aren't exceptions (though I'm pretty certain that 85 year old Caucasian women are not amongst them), but the preponderance of terrorists do, in fact, fit this profile.  There, I did it: I used the politically-incorrect word.

The good news: Europe, where our “elites” get their cues, seems to have figured out that the multi-culti movement has been a disaster for them.  The first steps to reversing the ravages of multi-culti are underway.  If they can avoid a new Nazi takeover as the pendulum swings the other way, even our “progressives” will wake up and start singing a different, politically-incorrect song.

I can hardly wait!

PC in the Military...

Remember this guy?  He's Major Hasan, the Muslim extremist who happened to be an Army psychiatrist – who attacked his fellow soldiers in Ft. Hood just over a year ago, killing 12 of them.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has an excellent piece in today's WSJ discussing the results of the military reports on the incident.  An excerpt:

In this report, titled "A Ticking Time Bomb" and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan's skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense's official report on the Foot Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan's well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting "Allahu Akbar!"—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator's ties to radical Islam. Even today, "A Ticking Time Bomb," co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn't specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

There is something seriously amiss when the military can't (or won't) see the obvious evidence of our main enemy's infiltration into its own ranks.  The political correctness/multicultural movement is bad enough in the civilian world.  In the military, it puts our warriors unnecessarily in harm's way...

Parable for Our Times...

Via reader Dr. Simi L.:

"Winston, come into the dining room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband. "In a minute, honey, it's a tie score," he answered. Actually Winston wasn't very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington.

Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and the "bad example it sets for the rest of the world," Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as exciting.

Yet it wasn't the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another TofuTurkey. Even though it was the best type of VeggieMeat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce and mince-meat pie), it wasn't anything like real turkey. And ever since the government officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving Day" to "A National Day of Atonement" in 2020 to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims' historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the TofuTurkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats-which were monitored and controlled by the electric company-be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family. Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of live-saving medical treatment. He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program. And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort. "The RHC's resources are limited," explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone. "Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled. I'm sorry for your loss."

Ed couldn't make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines-for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn't want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there.

Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were flying in. Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists." Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022. That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine. Almost.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact. "A living Constitution is extremely flexible," said the Court's eldest member, Elena Kagan. " Europe has had laws like this one for years. We should learn from their example," she added.

Winston's thoughts turned to his own children. He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism or any of a number of other calamities were "just around the corner," but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility. It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being. Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13. The latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated was, once again, to "spur economic growth." This time they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement. At least he had his memories. He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before Obama and government promises to make life "fair for everyone" realized their full potential. Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them.

He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2012, when all the real nonsense began. "Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is enough' when we had the chance," he thought.

Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.

Juan Williams Firing...

I haven't said anything about this because I didn't have anything to add to the reams of stories already out there, and I figured it would be obvious to my readers where I stood on it.  But I just finished viewing this video of Juan Williams own reaction (below), which I think is worth viewing in its entirety.





There are several possible outcomes from this imbroglio:

• Juan Williams gets a better job.  Done: he's accepted a full time role at Fox News that came with a considerable raise.
  
  
• NPR loses it's government funding.  I think this would be great, but it's not likely.  By the time Congress could act on this, the fervor will have all but died down.  Dang it!
  
  
• NPR's incredibly under-qualified CEO could lose her job.  This seems likely to me, if there's any justice in the world.
  
  
• NPR could fire a bunch of its other propagandists journalists, in order to appear fair to Juan Williams.  Unlikely, I think.  More likely: these journalists will start looking for other work, feeling at risk after Juan Williams' treatment.

This is What Happens...

...when you continue a little further down the path this country has been on, and that Obama et al would like it to stay on.

I'm feeling hopeful that on November 2nd, the voters will deliver a course correction...

Again...

Once again, the politically-correct, anti-free-speech regime in Britain has resulted in the arrest and jailing of somone – just because what he said offended someone.  This time the offender is a Christian preacher, and what he said was that according to his beliefs, homosexuality is a sin.

In any country that actually has free speech, this man would have been free to say such a thing, and anyone offended would have the freedom to yell back at him.  But in today's U.K., such speech is a crime, and this preacher is guilty.

I sure hope we can avoid this in the U.S. – but I'm not optimistic.

What a bunch of thin-skinned ninnies Europe has developed into!  And the portents are that we're headed that way, too.

Where do the normal people live these days?  Is there somewhere to escape to?

Excellent Rant About the Geert Wilder Trial...

America, Please Don't Go Here...

The United Kingdom has become the land of politically correct.  Tragic incidents like this one appear in the news there almost daily.  In this case a little girl trapped underwater in a car is left there for almost two hours, even though potential rescuers were on the scene.  Why?  Because safety regulations forbade anyone other than a specialist rescue team from entering the water.  Nobody on the scene even tried to enter the water. 

They'd all been emasculated by the pervasive political correctness in the U.K. today.

I'd really hate to see America go this route.

Since the story linked above was posted, the little girl has died...