Conservatives are usually pretty easy on bloggers, as the most important and influential blog swarms tend to be generated by conservative bloggers trying to right the wrongs of the leftist mainstream media (MSM).
That’s why I was taken aback by Kathleen Parker’s latest column, Lord of the Blogs, where she likens some bloggers to the marooned little (murderous) souls in Lord of the Flies.
That was way harsh, Kathleen.
She must have been burned recently, I thought, though I’m sure I’d have remembered reading about it. Whenever anyone, no matter their political persuasion, criticizes bloggers, I get defensive. It’s a natural reaction. I love blogging. I make my living blogging and helping other people blog, so I’m just a tad sensitive when I perceive anti-blogger sentiment. Parker writes:
There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere – the big-bang “electroniverse” where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of “blogs” (Web logs) and “bloggers” (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.
Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new “citizen journalist,” I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.
Dropping the self-centered defensive pose for a moment, I realize she has a point. Blogs are a powerful new medium, and I believe blogging is catching on so fast because the power and freedom of expression it provides are intoxicating. It is truly an alternative to the dominant media, and ordinary people — non-journalists — can cajole, criticize and chastise MSM.
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by La Shawn on December 27, 2005
in Faith
December 29, 2005 – Every year Ann Coulter updates an op-ed called Kwanzaa: A Holiday from the FBI. Kwanzaa lovers will hate it. Check it out.
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Check out debate the origin of Christmas.
I neglected to include a couple of links from the previous Kwanzaa post (2003). For more discussion on the “Christmas is pagan” meme and tired “Saturnalia” retread, read Is Christmas Pagan? and Christmas is NOT Pagan…
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In the past two days I’ve received close to 500 hits on a Kwanzaa article I wrote a couple of years ago (Originally published in December 2003 as Why Black Christians Shouldn’t Celebrate Kwanzaa) and posted on this blog. I hate that I have to write about Kwanzaa, and I hate that it’s seeped into the mainstream to point where white people are wishing black people a “Happy Kwanzaa.” Thank God nobody’s said that to me lately.
Googlers have been landing on my blog because I’m one of the few bloggers who’ve written about Kwanzaa, and as you know, blogs tend to appear quite high in search results.
Here’s the most irritating thing about running a blog with commenting. Sometimes it’s difficult to express oneself clearly to people of varying cognitive abilities. Some process information better than others. Some are able to reason better than others. The less bright may miss the subtlety and nuance. Certain readers may know a bit of the history behind a particular subject; others may be completely ignorant of it. The intellectually curious may do some independent research in an effort to support or dispute my arguments, while others just want to get in their 2 cents regardless. A few may lack common sense altogether, and still others want to be contrary just for the sake of being contrary.
To condense my thoughts into a coherent post, especially with a subject like Kwanzaa, is not easy. It’s 10 times as difficult to explain spiritual matters to non-believers. It’s unfortunate that biblical literacy is not considered important anymore. As this nation was founded on biblical principles, it was a matter of course that people had at least a cursory knowledge of the book, whether they believed it was the word of God or not.
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by La Shawn on December 26, 2005
in Bloggers
by La Shawn on December 23, 2005
in Faith
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn….
“Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2)
Merry Christmas! 
Update (1:42 p.m.): I’m off until Tuesday or so of next week. While you wait, check out The Carnival of Christmas.
by La Shawn on December 22, 2005
in Liberals
What’s that old saying? The squeaky wheel gets the most…scrutiny…or something like that. 
Some of you may be wondering why I always pick on groups like the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and NAACP. They turn the spotlight on themselves with their useless whining and complaining, pointing fingers at others while they do little more than organize fancy dinners for their limousine liberal friends.
The CBC, which railed the loudest against the federal government, President Bush in particular, for its “slow” response to help the black victims of Hurricane Katrina, hasn’t given away any of the money purportedly raised to help the evacuees. From CNSNews:
The [Congressional Black Caucus Foundation] CBCF then launched its own relief fund on Sept. 21, with a stated goal of raising $1 million to help Gulf Coast residents rebuild their lives. As Cybercast News Service previously reported, the CBCF claimed immediate success, telling reporters on Sept. 21 that it had already received $700,000 in corporate pledges.
But on Wednesday, exactly three months after the news conference launching the CBCF relief fund, Rice told Cybercast News Service that the Foundation has actually raised “somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 to $400,000.” She added that the distribution of the money would not begin until January or February of 2006 at the earliest. (Source)
Why the delay? Don’t be surprised to hear about some lavish, impromptu New Year’s Eve “charity” bash. But you didn’t hear that from me. Meanwhile, evacuees will be in hotels for the holidays.
(Hat tip: Michelle Malkin)
Related post: Katrina Killed Across Class Lines…
The lily-white liberals in Boulder, Colorado, support the idea of skin color diversity as long as they don’t actually have to live around coloreds or send their kids to school with them.
Did you ever notice that utopian experiments in skin color harmony dissolve once liberals have a mortgage to pay and kids to raise? The single and childless (urban dwellers, especially) can afford to play such “tolerant” games, but when it comes to their precious progeny, it’s a different story altogether. They still preach diversity, of course. For you and your family.
The neighborhood around Columbine Elementary School is 87 percent Anglo. But enrollment numbers indicate that many neighborhood kids are going elsewhere. This year, the school in northeast Boulder is 82 percent Hispanic. (Source)
Oh, the humanity!
Sarcasm off. Actually, I don’t blame lily-white liberals for sending their kids as far away from Spanish-speaking illegal aliens (who drag down a school’s academic standing) as possible. According to Colorado state law, citizens have a right to send their kids to the school of their choice.
Choice is powerful, isn’t it? Don’t be surprised if the state rescinds the law to force whites to send their kids back to government schools overrun with illegal aliens. Or…the state will do what it always does in cases like this: erect unconstitutional and futile skin color preference policies:
Garcia says the district can’t do anything about the state’s open enrollment law, but a citizen task force in June suggested several strategies to disperse the district’s students more equitably.
That could include enrollment targets for minorities and economically disadvantaged students at Boulder schools. The targets would be achieved through enrollment caps and preferences.
So, 50 years beyond government-mandated segregation, we’ve come full circle. The government is still in the illegal business of categorizing citizens by race and coercing people to conform to their hare-brained scheme of racial balance, an empty and scandalous policy that will cause resentment among all races and force whites (and other groups) to send their kids to private or parochial schools.
Good luck with all that.
Related posts:
Update: New find – Deport Aliens
by La Shawn on December 21, 2005
in Faith
Update (12/22):: Yes, Samantha, there is a God.
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“[C]omplex design is random—didn’t you know that?” — James White
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” — Charles Darwin
As I’m sure you’ve heard, a federal court has decided that it is unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design, the audacious claim that precious life didn’t emerge by chance — out of some primordial muck, randomly evolving from single-celled organisms, which are themselves astoundingly complex beyond our meager understanding, into thinking human beings — but from an Intelligent Being who designed it all, from the entire universe, including planet Earth, which happens to be PERFECTLY suited for life, down to the irreducibly complex eye, breathtakingly stupendous in its design and function.
Take a breath!
Secular humanism is the state religion, an actual violation of the Constitution and not the court’s misinterpretation of the Establishment Clause. Its nutty hypothesis that miraculous life was dependent on “random chance,” that man evolved from apes, and the glorious creation we see all around us is simply a well-timed accident, is what kids in government schools are to be taught, with no room for an alternative explanation for our existence.
The idea that a Creator had a hand in it all is relegated to the home and church, although we pay taxes for schools that teach the state religion. Secularists don’t even want the issue debated or kids exposed to “ignorance.” We came from apes, there is no God, and that’s that!
(Somebody tricked the godless into believing that faith and science are mutually exclusive and only atheistic types, those who don’t believe in a supernatural being, are reasonable. The rest of us are unintelligent, ignorant and Dark Ages kooks.)
I had to run some errands this morning and didn’t feel like taking the subway. I took a cab. The driver’s got National Public Radio blaring in my ears, and guess what was on? Diane Rehm and a couple of “scholars” were discussing the “victory” with unrestrained glee. I thought, Great! A young, Middle Eastern, Muslim, secular humanist cab driver who LOVES NPR. What are the chances (pardon the pun)?
Well, at least he’s cute.
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Update III (12/23): This post is closed for comments and trackbacks. We’ve all said what needs to be said, so let’s move on.
Update II (12/22): WordPress (the engine behind this blog) has a feature that gives me the option of approving first-time commenters before the comments appear. If the comment is deemed worthy, I approve it. If not, into the void it goes. Critics get themselves all bent out of shape crafting the rudest comments, only to realize they’re not showing up. Love it.
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I get e-mail from black people (and a few whites) asking me if I hate black people. I usually don’t dignify the question with an answer, but I get the point.
I am more critical of blacks than I am of whites because, no offense, I care more about what happens to blacks. That is, I care whether they’re valuing education as highly as they should, whether they’re pushing themselves and their children to be the best and not wallowing in excuses or hurling unfounded charges of racism.
Having grown up black among black family and friends, I noticed a certain undercurrent that didn’t have a name. Whether a person actually suffered from racial discrimination or not, there was an urge to “keep whitey on the hook,” a term I picked up from John McWhorter. He articulated it so well in Authentically Black. We are never to allow whites to forget our historical grievances, whether an individual white person was guilty of discrimination or not. Most whites seem intimidated by blacks who do this. I dare say some of my white commenters are probably intimidated as well, despite their boldness on this blog.
I vowed to take the opposite approach. Rather than using this blog to bit** and moan about slavery, institutional racism and such, I’d use it to “keep blacks on the hook.” It’s a fresh approach and much more interesting than telling whites how racist they are. Blacks need to be reminded, constantly, of our responsibility in this mess.
For example, as we all know, black crime statistics are outrageous, especially considering our proportion of the population. Rarely, if ever, do you hear black people expressing disgust for out-of-control crime rates or lecturing other blacks about their responsibility to stay out of the criminal justice system.
At least I haven’t. I perceived the void and decided to fill it. That makes a lot of blacks angry, and a few whites, too. But that can’t be helped. Here’s the beauty of living in a free country: if you don’t like what I say or write, you can counter it with your own op-ed or blog or other form of communication. Free expression.
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January 18, 2006: Looking for information on Ray Nagin’s Chocolate Factory? Follow this link!
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“It’s time to be honest about doing terrible things …” so writes Charles Krauthammer in his article “The Truth about Torture.” I agree, especially in light of John McCain’s politically motivated, loop-hole-filled amendment to extend portions of the U.S. Bill of Rights to unlawful combatants.
Total War
War is indeed a terrible thing and as displayed through a number of selected historical citations and quotes, Krauthammer argues the moral merits and reasons for taking prisoners of war – and the exceptions accepted by most civilized societies.
This to me is a good argument gone astray. War is an obscenity – making any tool of this beast equally obscene. The best we can hope for regardless of methods is that one prosecute it as swiftly, powerfully and terribly as possible to break the will of one’s opponents with as little judgement to both sides as possible. Done effectively once, the threat of overwhelming force should be enough to to compel new opponents into compromise and/or to collaborate a workable solution to avoid the storm altogether.
One need only compare the avoidance of a nuclear attack by all potential confligrants during the Cold War against the politically induced unfinished-war ongoing in Korea.
Torture as a Tool
First let me say that I’m all for prosecuting the idiots perpetrating the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Such acts only strengthen the resolve of one’s enemies and provide nothing useful to the captors. Second, though there is a huge difference between ‘beating the snot’ out of a detainee with a rubber truncheon and keeping them awake for 48 hours through bright lights and rock music – though I suspect neither is very effective in harvesting information from death-cult Islamofascists.
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Silly Democrats, tricks are for kids! Last Friday I was a bit upset by our friends in the print media. Led by the nose, papers like the WaPo parroted the NYTimes ‘pimp my book pre-sales’ account of how George Bush was tapping your 79-year-old grandmum’s phone line. As if making her wait long periods in uncomfortable positions at all hours in the AM at the security check at the airport isn’t enough … but I digress.
What upset me was that instead of being proud of the U.S.’ contribution to a significant and long-lasting geopolitical event – namely the successful parliamentary elections in Iraq – the party out of power took a cheap shot at my country’s international prestige by making something necessarily covert sound illegal. Add to this insult that neither the NYTimes nor WaPo would put an effort into uncovering the person who disclosed these secret details with the same fervor as they’ve covered PlameGate … but I digress.
The point is, despite their best efforts, the old media was minimally successful in steering the public’s attention away from the Bush administration’s successes (on behalf of the U.S.). What they should realized that if they really wanted to refocus the news cycle by stomping some poor Texan into the turf, they really need only focus their energies and finances into Joe Gibbs – whose Iraq-election like victory over “America’s Team” is all the buzz in our (my) Nation’s Capital.
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by La Shawn on December 18, 2005
in Rants
I try to keep posts like this to a minimum so as not to fool haters into believing I’m following their antics or will change anything I do or say. Just a few of observations:
1) Blogging for over two years, I’ve learned a lot about obsessive human behavior: jealousy, envy, cyber-stalking, bad parody, the lure of online anonymity, just to name a few. I’ve been accused of self-hate, black-hate, woman-hate, Clinton-hate — the list is as long as it is ridiculous.
But the most ridiculous accusation is “excessive” self-promotion. Writers, performers, business people, companies — you name it — use web sites to promote themselves. That’s what a web site is for, and a blog is no different. After all, most people who blog aren’t being paid to blog. They do it for free, and readers have access to free content.
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by La Shawn on December 18, 2005
in Lunacy
…as many of normal intelligence suspected.
(Source)
by La Shawn on December 18, 2005
in Dinosaurs
If you plan on joining the NAACP, you’d better check your brain at the door.
Unless you’re ranting about so-called “great issues of racism, politics, social calamities, health crisis’s (sic), war and peace,” don’t bother having, let alone expressing, a negative opinion about another black person. Follow the script, and you won’t be called out and emasculated even more than you already are as people apologize on your behalf as though you were a child instead of a grown man.
A man named J. Whyatt Mondesire, president of the NAACP’s Philadelphia chapter, wrote, in so many words, that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback god Donovan McNabb was overrated. Mondesire’s fellow dinosaurs in the NAACP hit the proverbial roof. (See the press release)
Be warned. Mondesire’s column is atrocious; it contains grammatical errors, incomplete sentences, etc. Standards in just about every area of life have fallen very low in the past generation, and “excellence” is an archaic concept. Consequently, if we were to ignore Mondesire’s column for those reasons, we may as well stop reading altogether. It’ll be a struggle, but try to get through the whole column. An excerpt:
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Update (12/17): Bush responds to the dunces:
Defending the program, Bush said in his address that it is used only to intercept the international communications of people inside the United States who have been determined to have “a clear link” to al- Qaida or related terrorist organizations.
He said the program is reviewed every 45 days, using fresh threat assessments, legal reviews by the Justice Department, White House counsel and others, and information from previous activities under the program.
Without identifying specific lawmakers, Bush said congressional leaders have been briefed more than a dozen times on the program’s activities.
So the screaming-banshee politicians were briefed ahead of time, the warrantless monitoring was done on international communications (as I wrote yesterday), the program is reviewed by the Justice Department, and Bush says he will continue monitoring international communications that may be linked to Islamofascists, despite what liberals say. Good for him.
I guess lazy reporters have got to create news out of something, don’t they?
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Do we advance against terrorism to make America safer or do we retreat? – Senator Bill Frist
Islamofascists hiding out in the United States must be ecstatic, visions of 72 virgins dancing in their murderous heads.
Determined to undermine national security and leave Americans vulnerable to Muslim terrorist cells because they hate George Bush, Democrats in Congress decided that rejecting “the Bush Administration’s” Patriot Act is worth the gamble of another terrorist attack.
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by La Shawn on December 16, 2005
in Justice
Death Penalty Sought in Pa. Slayings
The 18-year-old will probably be in his 30s before he gets the needle, that is, if the jury chooses death during the penalty phase and if the death sentence isn’t thrown out on some technicality.
But I wonder…which vain and vacuous Hollywood celebrities will demand that David Ludwig’s life be spared the way they did for gangbanger Stanley “Tookie” Williams?
I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting to find out. Scott Peterson’s still waiting for his celebrity drag.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sympathetic. If I ran things, I’d be inclined to throw murderers in a giant vat of boiling oil, no matter what color they were.
But that’s probably too medieval for our post-modern sensibilities…
