Update III (9/13): Did you land here from a search on “Juan Williams Enough?” Follow this link to access my review of his fabulous book.
Update II (9/1): Juan Williams on Getting Past Katrina.
Commenter Tracey writes: “Our problems start in the home with the family. “The Man†doesn’t make Black men be irresponsible and bail on Black women. ‘The Man’ doesn’t make Black women devalue themselves by settling for dishonorable males and then being second generation of welfare recipients with too many mouths to feed. ‘The Man’ doesn’t make us glorify rappers as heroes and put down the Juan Williams, the Bill Cosbys, the Rev. Jesse Lee Pattersons and the La Shawn Barbers who demand that we hold ourselves to a higher standard.
“I get so frustrated hearing my fellow Black man or a Black woman say how we are so disenfranchised and too weak to go vote (by voting machine according to Cynthia McKinney), get an education, get employment and to stop having kids out of wedlock.
“I am ordering my copy of this book now and I can’t wait to read it. I plan on giving it to a couple of my bitter, liberal “revolutionary†friends that I met in college who still have those beliefs.”
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Just finished an interview with NPR’s Juan Williams, author of a new book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It.
The interview will be excerpted for my Washington Examiner column and incorporated into a separate book review.
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Also see:
I’m not a big fan of the anonymous (or pseudonymous) blogger or commenter.
I blog under my name, spreading controversial ideas and unorthodox opinions that people like me usually don’t write about or utter in public.
Every now and then something I write generates a wave of dissent throughout the blogosphere. A couple of weeks ago, I endured the wrath of homosexual bloggers and commenters because I dared use the word homosexual in a less than favorable context. I used to think black liberal dissenters were the worst sort. I was wrong on so many levels. Tolerance is a word entirely devoid of meaning in this PC age, and those demanding it of others the loudest don’t practice it themselves. Hypocrisy and irony come to mind.
Last year I was called “anti-Catholic” because I made biblical assertions in reference to the recently departed Roman Catholic pope (at the request of Catholic readers, ironically), and several bloggers “de-linked” me. And the usual self-hater, race traitor rhetoric almost always sent by people using obviously phony names, appears in my inbox from time to time, though less frequently than it used to.
It takes nerve to write what I write and use my real name online, a virtual world inhabited by all sorts, including perverts, maniacs, and just plain old bored fools who get off cyber-harassing others. Don’t take it personally, anonymous bloggers and commenters, but my online experiences have biased me against anonymity, especially from commenters who do nothing but criticize my views.
For these and other reasons, I admire people who blog under their real names. But I understand why some don’t or can’t use their real names. Perhaps they’re whistleblowing employees trying to expose nefarious acts and avoid reprisal at the same time. Others may be concerned about their physical safety or worried that an idiot scoundrel will post their home addresses on the web. Some bloggers use their blogs as online journals, writing about their jobs, relationships, and other issues, and don’t want to be fired or hurt friends and family.
Although I believe people should stand behind what they say, write, and do with their real names, there are exceptions, of course. But one thing that’s unacceptable is taking on a different persona with the intent to deceive.
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by La Shawn on August 28, 2006
in General
John Karr may or may not be a murderer, but he didn’t murder JonBenet Ramsey, according to the DNA. (See legal documents)
The strange-looking pedophile is free to seek attention elsewhere. Don’t ask me what I think he should do now or where he should go, because my answer wouldn’t be very “Christian.”
Columnist Bill Johnson and others called it. Skeptical from the beginning, I said authorities were grasping at straws and that DNA was the key.
Previous post: Arrest In JonBenet Murder Case
Update: The pervert is not free to go, apparently. He’s being held on unrelated child porn charges.
Update II (8/29): I’m not following the Duke case as much as I used to, preferring to wait for a major development. If you get bored at work today, read all 22 posts (good grief!) in the Duke Rape Case category. There’s a “Next Page” link on the left side at the bottom of the page, although it isn’t always visible. Drag your mouse over that area, and it should appear.
There are several bloggers who’ve created a niche for themselves. For the latest news on Mike Nifong’s circus of a case, visit the following blogs:
Feel free to discuss the Duke case in this thread.
Note: Please don’t go off on a tangent about “judging” the men, people. The question is: “Christians, what would you do if some maniac held a gun to your head and asked you to deny Christ or die?”
Let’s keep the discussion on topic.
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By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the release of two FOX News journalists captured a couple of weeks ago by group of idiot thugs. According to one of the journalists, Steve Centanni, he and his fellow captive Olaf Wiig were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.
A few short months ago, a former Muslim was facing death in Afghanistan because he’d become a Christian. The blogosphere rallied in support, and I blogged about it here, recounting the story of the first Christian martyr, Stephen (depicted above in Rembrandt’s “The Stoning of St. Stephen”). Read the biblical account beginning with Acts 6.
Abdul Rahman did not deny Christ. He was willing to die for his beliefs, but God said, “Not yet.”
There’s no indication in the FOX story or any I’ve read that Centanni or Wiig were Christians. If they were, they probably would’ve said so. All Centanni said was:
“We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint,” Centanni told FOX News. “Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Embrace Islam or die. That would be a simple choice for me, though not an easy one if I had a gun to my head.
(Isn’t it strange that Centanni, who said he “converted” only because he had a gun to his head, felt the need to be apologetically politically correct by expressing the “highest respect for Islam”? Unbelievable on so many levels.)
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September 11, 2006, will mark the fifth anniversary of terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that killed close to 3,000 people. These attacks were carried out by Muslims, the perpetrators of terrorist acts across the globe.
Stacy Harp, blogger and podcaster at Active Christian Media, interviews Annie Jacobsen, author of Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again. I can’t say I’m looking forward to finding out what’s in the book, but I plan to read it.
Download the MP3 (right-click and select “Save Target As”). More links below the fold.
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by La Shawn on August 25, 2006
in General
Update: Bloggers who’ve picked up the meme so far: Cobb and Mark La Roi.
Hube responds.
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Note: There are four “tagee” bloggers listed below. If you respond on your blogs, let us know by sending a trackback to this post. I’m using Friday memes as an opportunity to look back on my life and figure out what I’ve learned, re-strategize my goals, and look to the future with these lessons and new goals in mind. I hope the posts help you do the same with your lives.
1) What haven’t you done yet in your life that you’d really like to do someday? Why? Will you do any of those things in the near future? Are you making progress toward them?
— I want to get married and have children, write books (published books), and visit western Europe someday.
Everybody wants to be married, right? Married people are healthier and happier, and I prize the companionship above all. And children are a blessing, a gift from God. Being blessed more than I am already would be amazing. God willing, these not-yet events will happen in the near future. Am I making progress toward them? That, loyal readers, is in The Vault. 
— People take you more seriously if you’ve written a book. Being a published author builds your credentials and helps establish you as an expert, especially if you’re writing about a niche business topic. If a publishing house believes in you enough to buy your book, others (TV and radio show producers, influential people, etc.) will be more interested in what you have to say, IMO. Also, it takes discipline to write a book, and that’s a quality we should all strive for. Am I making progress? Yes.
— Who wouldn’t want to go to Europe? As a closet anglophile, I’d love to live in England for a couple of years, then tour the rest of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The United States is a baby compared to these countries, with recorded histories and heritages that go back thousands of years.
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Update II: For the most part, my commenters are cool. One just alerted me to a related blurb in the Washington Times (8/21), which reports, “The robbers are described by police as dark-complexioned black men thought to be in their mid-30s.”
Emphasis added. So are we to believe Post reporters weren’t privy to this information? Reporting crimes, with all relevant details in the story, isn’t for the faint-hearted. Take a memo, Post.
Update: A commenter posted a link to a follow-up story, “3 Robbers Caught on Store Camera.” (8/22)
The man in the video looks black to me, but my eyes could be “jumping the gun.”
The story says one man wore a bandana over his face, one had a baseball cap pulled low over his head, and another, reportedly wearing a white T-shirt, was apparently uncovered.
I’m almost certain that witnesses told reporters what race the thugs were. You’ll notice the follow-up story doesn’t mention race, either, although it includes the store video shot.
By the way, the suspects are still as free as birds. Thanks to the video shot, concerned citizens now have some idea what one of the suspects looks like.
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Washington Post reporters must be on crack.
That’s my assessment, based on the fact that during a high-profile crime wave, they failed to mention the race or physical description of robbery and attempted murder suspects still at large.
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RightWingSparkle blogger Kathleen, a very nice lady I met at Justice Sunday in January, is experimenting with video blogging. (By the way, Kathleen has a blogging gig with the Houston Chronicle. Groovy.)
I’m thinking about doing this myself, and I believe more bloggers should try it. Not only is it a great way to get more people to link to your blog (Kathleen kindly mentioned me) but it helps personalize the blog.
Feedback requested. Would you want to watch an occasional video blog post at LBC? If you “read” video blogs, let us know what’s out there and what’s good.
Perhaps video blogging will remind readers that there’s a real person behind this blog, risking unfair and sometimes nasty criticism from anonymous Internet freaks surfers. The negativity is, I must admit, vastly outweighed by the kindness of strangers.
I implore you, can’t we all just get along? Do it…do it for the children. 
Addendum: Video commenting?
Sunday, August 27: Diseases once eradicated have returned. Third world inhabitants who enter the country illegally bring their third world diseases and lifestyles with them.
Another Update: They all come here to work, right? The poor things…
Gang-rapes and anti-trust lawsuits and $49 billion in welfare over the next five years, Oh my!
I suspect that catch-and-release policies aren’t the most effective way to enforce immigration law. But hey, what do I know?
Update: Can’t wait to read this. (Not bad, PB.) I’m sure it’s an update to this. If you had a choice, would you rather live during the rise of a great civilization or its decline?
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I haven’t blogged about illegal “immigration” in awhile. The subject makes me very angry, I admit, and I don’t like blogging when I’m angry.
I’m angry that I can’t do anything about the Bush administration’s determination to keep the borders porous and to reward illegal aliens with citizenship. I hate it. It’s a collective slap in the face to millions of Americans who pay taxes and to legal aliens who sacrifice and go through the proper channels to become citizens.
I struggle with this issue. I definitely don’t reveal all my struggles on this public blog, but I reveal enough. It’s important to me that people know I hold myself to the same standards as I hold everyone else. Like all human beings, I sometimes fall short of those standards, but I learn from the struggle.
Exactly what I’m learning, I couldn’t tell you. 
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It’s been eons since I read any of “The Great Books” of Western Civilization.
On the college track in high school and an English major once I got to college, I had little choice but to sometimes struggle through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and John Milton’s poems. I’m glad I was “forced” to do it because I managed to glean valuable insights in the process.
Reading Shakespeare and Milton are also part of a “classical” education, which begins with the works of Greek and Roman poets like Homer and Virgil. These writings also mark the beginning of the western canon. The world’s great authors and philosophers have been influenced by what came before them in some way or another.
Contained in the great works are ideas we now take for granted, patterns that reveal the whole picture of civilization and provide glimpses into the human mind. They teach us who we are and how we came to be. From the Code of Hammurabi (the first written body of laws laid down by a Babylonian king), the Hebrew Bible (written and compiled by the hand of God through inspired men), the works of men like Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Tolstoy, and women like Jane Austen, to the body of knowledge still accumulating through the efforts of people with a love for learning and creating, we are indeed blessed to have free access to these writings.
We all should study history more often because it reminds us that before we (individual you) arrived on the scene, there existed a wide range of events and people molding and shaping the world as we know it today. Each moment in history is like a link in a chain, connecting one event to another to form the whole, for better or for worse.
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Friday, August 25: Thanks for the link and fair reading of the post, Will.
Thursday, August 24: Julie Gorin writes: “If terrorism indeed has a distinct appeal to the average Muslim, and yet the religion is not the cause, then what is? Genetics? Is it time to start talking about the terror gene — and asking the uncomfortable question: Do they choose it, or are they born that way?
And if Islam isn’t the cause of murderous proclivities, have we considered that at the very least it must be a symptom?”
Wednesday, August 23: I agree with Daniel Pipes. It’s going to take thousands more dead Americans for the government to profile the way it knows it ought to. He writes:
“Noting the limited impact that losing 3,000 lives had in 2001 and building on my ‘education by murder’ hypothesis — that people wake up to the problem of radical Islam only when blood is flowing in the streets — I predict that effective profiling will only come into effect when many more Western lives, say 100,000, have been lost.”
I also agree with Walter Williams. I wish this country fought wars the way it used to.
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by La Shawn on August 18, 2006
in General
- Still telling anyone who’d listen that I’d witnessed the birth of my year-old niece
- Working for a Democratic senator on Capitol Hill at the height of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial
- Celebrating two years of sobriety
- Reading the Bible from Genesis to Revelation for the first time
- Welcomed into the body of Christ
What were you doing seven years ago?
Unrelated Update (8/19): This is an update to Blogging: An Innocent Fraud?, but I decided to post it up top. I thought you might be interested in a 2003 article from the “early” days of blogging (about nine months before I joined the blogosphere), “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.”
By the way, thanks for the shout-out, John.
Hispanics make up about 13.3 percent of the population — and I’d wager that more than a few illegal aliens, who are not supposed to be here, are represented in that number — surpassing blacks (about 13 percent) as the largest minority group.
For the past 30 years or so, blacks have enjoyed preferred minority status, ostensibly to make up for past injustices like slavery and government-mandated racial segregation. Hispanics, who were never slaves in the U.S., are staking a claim on preferred minority status.
Hispanic groups are coming out in full force, demanding their piece of the skin color entitlement pie. See “Hispanic groups blast OPM.” They represent 7.4 percent of the federal workforce, while blacks make up 17.4 percent (”No fair!”). Download the comically titled Federal Equal Opportunity Program Annual Report to the Congress for fiscal year 2005 (PDF).
Proportionately speaking, hispanics are underrepresented in the federal government, while blacks are overrepresented. Ironically, blacks are grossly overrepresented (a whopping 44.3 percent) in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the bloated and unnecessary agency charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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by La Shawn on August 16, 2006
in General
Tuesday, August 22: At first I thought it was a fluke. Every group has its set of deranged fringe members. But I’ve concluded, in my almost-three years of blogging, that homosexual trolls and “straight” trolls who read certain blogs are the absolute nastiest I’ve ever encountered. Worse than the angriest and most militant black liberals, and more odious than any malodorous bigoted white liberal trying to slip through under the cover of Internet pseudo-boldness and anonymity.
Congratulations.
Stick around. I have several “offensive” posts to publish next week.
Monday, August 21: From a commenter:
Just read the ridiculous post at the Malcontent regarding this matter and thought I would share my comment with you:
“Yeah, well, I’m gay and I don’t get the leap you make between what she said and HATESPEECH HOMOPHOBIA PANIC BAD CONSERVO!! at all. So she said he looked like a homo-pedo…That’s the same thing I thought! I gandered at him and 1st thing I thought was “that dude looks like such a QUEEN!†Oooowwwww…must be my “internal homophobia†talking! Gimme a break; Any time someone says “homo†in a context you dislike it does not make them flaming homophobe monsters. I am vastly more concerned with the homophobia of Islam and the impotence of the Democrats in taking it seriously then I am in LaShawn noting the obvious…â€
Not all us gay guys are so freakin’ PC and idiotic LaShawn, I promise!!
Keep up yer good works
Eric
Sunday, August 20: Bangkok doctor says Karr was a patient at a sex-change clinic.
Saturday, August 19: Grasping at straws.
Later…Says columnist Bill Johnson: “John Mark Karr as much killed JonBenet Ramsey as Mickey Mouse did.”
Johnson wrote the column I would have written had I been quicker on the draw.
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by La Shawn on August 16, 2006
in Bloggers
Update (8/17): The blogger at Media Lies gave me one of the best compliments I could ever receive as a blogger:
“But you, my dear, are a phenomenon. Unique, refreshing, stubbornly principled and amazingly fearless. I read you every day but don’t get to comment nearly as much as I should. I can count on one hand the number of bloggers who truly amaze me routinely. You are in that list.”
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I read a rather depressing post yesterday by technology writer and blogger Nicholas Carr, whose blog I read through Bloglines. In “The Great Unread,” he writes about the disillusionment “long tail” bloggers feel. Be sure to read the comments, which are more optimistic than the post.
The long tail is a statistical distribution model like the bell curve. Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson wrote an entertaining and informative book on the subject called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. It’s a niche world out there, and the Internet is responsible for weakening the “hit” paradigm and opening up a marketplace of almost unlimited choice. Anderson’s book is a must-read, and I’m not being paid to say that.
In the context of the blogosphere, the long tail refers to the vast majority of bloggers who aren’t on the A-list and will never generate lots of links or readers. At the “head” of the curve are the Malkins, the Instapundits, the Daily Kos crew, and others. In the “tail” is everyone else. Some of these bloggers get a few thousand readers a day; others a few hundred or a few dozen.
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