I Am Already Tired of Colin Kaepernik

So an over-privileged individual who plays a kids' game for a living won't stand for the National Anthem.  He thinks black people are oppressed in America.  Certainly black people still have some legitimate complaints about their status in society, mainly due to 90% of them voting Democrat every time there is an election.

Kaepernik is the biological son of a black father who abandoned Kaepernik's white mother as soon as he found out she was pregnant.  The child was then adopted by a white couple and raised in middle-class conditions.  Being a gifted high school athlete, Kaepernik went to college, where he was successful enough that he was drafted into the NFL.  He has, through talent and hard work, done quite well, having signed an extremely lucrative contract with the 49ers.

Everything Kaepernik knows about the black experience in America he learned from watching the remake of "Roots".

But the man is an American citizen, and, paradoxically, as such, he has every right to sit on his ass when "The Star-Spangled Banner" is played.

What matters about his life is what he does on the football field.  That's all that matters.  His opinions and protests are worthless, pointless, and hypocritical.  It is a waste of my time to suggest that demeaning him is a waste of time.  He is of so little actual value that we might as well criticize a pig for failing to stand for the Anthem.

This is our problem in America today.  We allow ourselves to be led and influenced, bullied and herded by those who do not matter.  Celebrities, athletes, politicians, and various media-labeled "experts" give their opinions, and we are expected to cower and try to appease our "betters".

Sorry, I can't work up the emotion to get angry at ungrateful, ungracious louts like Kaepernik.  He can keep his job.  I am not going to watch him play, buy his jerseys, shoes, or whatever else.  He just doesn't matter at all.

Reviews and Ramblings

So, now that Hillary has exposed the awful darkness that is the Alt-Right, I am willing to confess that I have been reading a lot of Alt--Right stuff over the last year or so.  It's nice to know that there are people -- especially younger people -- out there who agree with me, or are nearly as warped and twisted as I am.  I'm not sure "We. Don't. Care." is going to replace "Don't Tread On Me" or "Molon Labe", but it does sum up a lot about how I feel.

Since it's confession time, Vox Popoli is pretty much a daily stop for me.  This has led me to some interesting reading, e.g., The Missionaries.  This is an entertaining send-up of the bureaucratic do-gooder with the tabula rasa outlook.  A reader will get no great insights, the characters are mostly one-dimensional, but it is at times, rather funny and reinforces what we already know about the nanny state.

Another book that I bought on Vox's recommendation is Brings the Lightning by Peter Grant.  I am well into the first section of the book.  I'm going to finish it.  Mr. Grant is competent, but he is not Louis L'Amour.  Grant is good on the technical details of weaponry, and I'm sure there is going to be plenty of action later on.  The writer's greatest strength so far is also his weakness.  He wants his hero to be fully equipped, like Batman's utility belt from the old '60s TV show.  There's a hint of MarySue-ness in the early going.  I hope it will get better.  If it doesn't get better soon, I will withdraw my recommendation.  For now, my thumb is in the horizontal position.

The next one is two thumbs up -- Son of the Black Sword by Larry Correia is easily the best fantasy novel I have read in a long, long time.  I love Gene Wolfe's New Sun books, but, honestly, they can be a bit of a slog with his derived vocabulary.  Correia is not as literary as Wolfe, but this series looks to be considerably less pulpy than, say, David Gemmell's Legend.  I have a number of Gemmell's books, most of which I have read at least a couple of times.  They are like Howard's Conan works -- pulp fiction -- great pulp fiction, but not in the same arena with Tolkien.  It's like kids and grandkids, I love them all -- just in different ways.

I had planned to review the book on the Benghazi debacle, 13 Hours, but it's not fair to blurb it.  So maybe I'll do a full review next week.  It's a well-balanced, non-politically motivated, objective write-up of what led to the disaster.  What I'll tell you is that if you read The Missionaries, you will not be surprised by what happened at Benghazi the night of September 11, 2012.

The other thing I want to review is my Ruger AR 223.  I'm really having an on-again/off-again relationship with this little piece of crap rifle.  It's not the rifle's fault.  It's me.  I knew the first time I fired one of these 35 years ago that I didn't like it.  I've added a Leupold 1.5-4x scope.  For me, it's a niche firearm, but I have it, and I'm going to keep it.  I will complain and praise more later.

Have a good weekend.

I Am So Racist

Well, it is really Mr. Derbyshire, but he does kind of have a point:

Look: Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 black riots inDetroit,Newark, and, yes, Milwaukee. 

Fifty years—two entire human generations—andstill they riot. Fifty years of fretting and fussing, of nagging and shaming, of affirmative action and contracting set-asides; fifty years of jobs programs, food programs, billion-dollar overhauls of school systems. Fifty years of pushing role models, black doctors and detectives in movies and TV, black athletes as culture heroes, black actors playing God.Fifty years of Martin Luther King Day s, Black History Months, and Kwanzaas. Fifty years of black mayors, black police chiefs, black Attorneys General, a black President…And still they riot. 

Wouldn’t prudence suggest that we hold off on importing more diversity until we’ve made some progress in getting blacks to stop rioting? 

I guess Prudence doesn’t live here any more. (Links in original)

 I guess not.

But that isn't the really racist part.  This is:

My answer: Different races—different local varieties of Homo sap., that have followed different paths through evolutionary space for many, many generations, end up with different distributions on most heritable traits. That includes traits of intelligence, behavior, and personality. 

So in a multiracial society that rewards certain traits and penalizes others, different races will precipitate out, average-average, at different social levels. American blacks, for example, with low average IQ, low average impulse control, and high average inclinations to antisocial behavior, will tend to pool at the bottom of society, in slums and prisons and criminal gangs. 

The blacks thus pooled, being too dimwitted to understand anything about biology or statistics, will attribute their sorry plight to the malice of hostile agents. They’ll develop a lot of anger against those agents, the anger occasionally breaking out in riots.

 ******

Follow the link at the top and read the whole thing. It is sad that my country has come to this.  

Constitution Party

If you haven't done it already, there's a site where you can take a quiz about what you believe and support politically.  It popped up  on fakebook yesterday, and I took it.  I came closest to Darrell Castle, candidate of the Constitution Party.

You can see my results at the second link.  State sovereignty issues and an end to "foreign entanglements" are some of the points that push me up to over 80% agreement with Castle.  The Constitution Party is the Libertarian Party without the reefer and dead babies, but then I agree with Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, on more than three-fourths of the issues -- the same as with Trump.  I even have some agreement with Jill Stein of the Green Party on foreign policy.  I apparently agree with Clinton on a few minor issues.  I suppose a stopped clock is right twice a day.

The best thing that could happen to the States, and probably to the world, would be for a meteor to destroy Washington, D.C. and it's bureaucratic elite during next year's State of the Union address.  It couldn't be too a big meteor.  We don't want it to get out to where John lives.

Anyway, if you want to vote out of habit, like I'll probably do, you can find out which candidate best represents your point of view, and vote, as they say, your conscience.