America's Navy: A Global Force for Good

Here's the "Power" advertisement that ran this week during the Olympics:

Hollywood Homosexual Takes Credit for 'Tastes Like Hate' Vandalism in Torrance, California

As I've mentioned previously, these are homosexual criminal values.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Chick-fil-A vandalism investigated by police in Torrance":

Huge crowds turned out Wednesday in a show of support for company President Dan Cathy, who ignited a national debate by publicly expressing his opposition to same-sex marriage. Critics have also said the company supports causes harmful to gays and lesbians.

Denise Spencer, who visited the Torrance restaurant Friday, said that she was sad to see the vandalism and that it hurt the message of tolerance that gay marriage proponents are pushing.

"The president of the company has the right to say what he feels, just like gays and lesbians do, but when you destroy someone's property ... it only creates negativity," Spencer said.

A gay artist took responsibility for the graffiti in an interview with the Huffington Post on Friday. "Everybody is entitled to free speech, but it seems like for the gay tribe, this is more of an issue of equal rights -- human rights," Manny Castro told the site. "I'm against what these people stand for, what this company stands for. They're trying to take away what little rights we already have."

Also at CNS News, "'Gaga Christ' Artist Claims Credit For Chick-fil-A 'Tastes Like Hate' Vandalism."

PREVIOUSLY: "'Tastes Like Hate' — Classy Homosexuals Vandalize Chick-fil-A for National 'Kiss In' Day."

RELATED: "'Tolerant' Homosexuals Graffiti 'Don't Hate' at Chick-fil-A in Des Peres, Missouri."

'Tolerant' Homosexuals Graffiti 'Don't Hate' at Chick-fil-A in Des Peres, Missouri

"Don't hate."

Right.

At Twitchy, "Second Chick-fil-A vandalized by ‘no hate’ crowd in Missouri."

And see KSDK 5 St. Louis, "'Don't Hate' Spraypainted on Des Peres Chick-fil-A."

BONUS: A roundup at Theo's: "Classy Homosexuals Defile Themselves on Chick-fil-A 'National Kiss-In Day'."

Bar Refaeli Rocks Maxim September 2012 Cover in Luscious Lingerie Shoot

Lovely, as usual.

At Egotastic: "Bar Refaeli Smoking Hot Lingerie Pictures Grace the Pages of Maxim Magazine."

FLASHBACK: "Whoa! Bar Refaeli Tops Maxim's 2012 Hot 100!", and "Is Bar Refaeli, 'Maxim's Hottest', Dating Skate and Snowboard Champion Shaun White?"

'Whistle'

My youngest likes Flo-Rida:

Gabby Douglas' Mom Talks About the Future

I've very happy for Gabby and her family:

And this is interesting, at Poynter, "How AP photographer captured Gabby Douglas Olympics photo: Practice, practice, practice."

However, some of the responses have been unusual. See William Jacobson, "Saturday Night Card Game (NBC gets an itsy, bitsy taste of its own medicine)."

I posted on that previously: "NBC Runs Commercial With Monkey Doing Gymnastics Right After Gabby Douglas Wins Olympic Gold Medal."

And here's this at London's Daily Mail, "NBC forced to apologise after ill-timed ad features a monkey doing gymnastics - right after showing Gabby Douglas' gold medal victory." (Via Memeorandum.)

Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser Knocked Out of Olympics

These guys dominated in Beijing in 2008. It was a bit of shock watching them lose yesterday.

At LAT, "London Olympics: U.S. men's beach volleyball team loses to Italy."

Hateful Chick-fil-A Drive-Up Guy Posts 'Apologies and Clarifications' to YouTube

Following-up my earlier entry, "Adam Smith, Hateful Chick-fil-A Drive-Up Guy Who Made Videotape, Fired From His Position as Executive at Vante Corporation."

William Jacobson has the dude's new video, "Adam Smith video – “Apologies and Clarifications”."

I watched it last night. I'm not embedding it --- the guy's an asshole.

Actually, I much prefer Antoine Dodson instead:

More at the DC, "Antoine Dodson: ‘The gay community — we have went from being bullied to becoming bullies’."

Barry Rubin, Middle East Expert and Voice of Moral Clarity, Diagnosed With Inoperable Lung Cancer

Please join me with a prayer for Professor Barry Rubin, "Why I’ve Always Written So Much with Such Intensity … And Why I Won’t Stop Now." (Via Blazing Cat Fur.)

I attended Rubin's lecture in Brentwood last year, "Dr. Barry Rubin, Lecture, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Los Angeles March 10, 2010." No one wrote with more authority on the revolutions in the Middle East. Rubin's voice was crucial in understanding the implications of events, especially in Egypt.

Homosexual 'National Kiss-In Day' Small Compared to Chick-fil-A 'National Appreciation Day'

Hey, maybe the homosexuals weren't too comfortable about the public sex part.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Chick-fil-A 'Kiss in' protest small compared to appreciation day."

At a Chick-fil-A in Torrance where vandals painted the words "Tastes Like Hate" on the side of the restaurant Thursday night, the "National Same-Sex Kiss Day" was off to a slow start.

A steady parade of cars made their way into the parking lot as diners strolled in and out of the restaurant. Some held signs that read "Jesus is the only answer." Many said they were there in support of Chick-fil-A and denounced the vandalism.

"It's a civil debate; it has nothing to do with defacing someone's property," said Alfonzo Rachel, 40, a Torrance resident who said he dines at the restaurant regularly.

Cole Donahoo, operator of the Torrance restaurant, declined to comment about Friday's vandalism.

"I'm just trying to operate a business," he said.

Donahoo said he did see a great turnout at the restaurant, at 182nd Street and Hawthorne Boulevard, for Wednesday's national "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day" event, championed by conservative talk show host Mike Huckabee.

That would be AlfonZo Rachel, on Twitter here.

PREVIOUSLY: "Chick-fil-A Makes Front-Page at Los Angeles Times — Gets Slammed as Out of Step With 'Mainstream' Corporate Practices."

PHOTO CREDIT: Ringo's Pictures via Zombie.

Chick-fil-A Makes Front-Page at Los Angeles Times — Gets Slammed as Out of Step With 'Mainstream' Corporate Practices

Okay, following up on my post yesterday, "Did Media Coverage Ignore Chick-fil-A 'National Appreciation Day'?"

So here comes the Times with its front-page piece, on how Chick-fil-A's a corporate freak, or something. See, "Chick-fil-A Official Has Little Company in the Corporate World."

And here's the online version at latimes.com, "Many businesses seek favor among LGBT customers":

Chick-fil-APresident Dan Cathy's public opposition to gay marriage has landed him in a lonely corner of corporate America.

While the fast-food chicken chain has inflamed gay organizations and their supporters nationwide, many companies are going out of their way to court those groups.

J.C. Penneythis year hired lesbian talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as its spokeswoman and featured same-sex couples in its catalogs. Kraft Foods recently posted a photo of a rainbow-hued Oreo cookie to its Facebook page.

Bank of America and nearly 40 other companies now offer tax relief to gay employees — triple the number of firms with the same option last year. In Washington state, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his wife last month donated $2.5 million to back a gay marriage ballot initiative already endorsed by Microsoft, Starbucks and Nike.

Business donations to Los Angeles gay pride events, including a festival and a short parade, have doubled in five years to $300,000 last year, when Bud Light, Johnson & Johnson andCoca-Colawere sponsors.

It's not hard to see why. Estimates peg the self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender demographic at about 3.8% of the American population — or roughly 9 million people. Their buying power is expected to reach $790 billion this year, according to Witeck Communications, a marketing firm specializing in LGBT issues.

They're not shy about spending, dropping more than $60 a week each on restaurants, according to a 2010 report from Community Marketing Inc. More than a quarter of gays and lesbians bought a high-definition TV that year.

Nationwide, more Americans now support same-sex marriage than oppose it, according to recent surveys from the Pew Research Center. Backing is particularly strong among young people, a demographic that advertisers are keen to reach. LGBT characters are gaining prominence in popular entertainment, with more major roles in music, television, movies and even comic books.

As customers shift with the cultural tide, many formerly conservative companies are doing the same.

"Corporate America is definitely following the trends, reading the tea leaves," said Jason Snyder, an assistant professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. "It's more symbolic of what's happening in society — that supporting gay marriage is becoming a less risky or taboo position."

Gay consumers also tend to react faster and more forcefully to slights. They pay attention to which companies promote diversity and lend support to same-sex causes — factors that heavily influence where their dollars go, according to the Community Marketing report.

And the LGBT population is often highly organized in using Twitter and Facebook to pull together mass petitions and boycotts within hours. More than 14,000 people signed up on Facebook for National Same Sex Kiss Day atChick-fil-Aon Friday, an event arranged mostly online.

The Times, to its credit, had good coverage yesterday of the left's vandalism of the Torrance Chick-fil-A location. But as noted, its coverage of the Wednesday buycott was relegated to the business section, not the front-page.

And so look at this today: A total of 14,000 people organized on Facebook "within hours"? Well, blow me down! And how many people turned out around the country on Wednesday to support Chick-fil-A's corporate practices? The company won't release exact details, although it did say that the sales were "unprecedented." That is news. That is front-page news. We'll see how it goes at some of the rest of the national media today. Here's Thursday's report at the Weekly Standard, "Mainstream Media Blacks Out Chick-fil-A Story?" And at AoSHQ, "Media Blacked Out Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day":

Okay, in the post below, I was going to claim the media blacked it out, but I didn't know if that was true; for one thing, I don't watch the media, so I had no idea. For another, I saw a stray mention in a comment or on Twitter that it was being covered on some local broadcast. So I thought maybe they were covering it.

Nope. The major papers embargoed the actual news.

More later.

I'll choke on my chicken if a photo of homosexuals kissing makes the front-page a major metropolitan daily.

P.S. Not mentioned by the Times is how gay marriage referendums have failed each and every time they've been placed before the voters at the state level --- 32 times by the latest counts. Kudos to Jeff Bezos for putting his corporate money where his mouth is. We'll see if he's on the right side of history when Washington state voters head to the polls in November.

U.S. Audits Gold Bars Stored at Federal Reserve Bank of New York

More serendipity.

It turns out I just watched both "Die Hard" and "Die Hard With a Vengeance" last week. And now here's this, at the Los Angeles Times, "What's in your vault? Uncle Sam audits its stash of gold at the New York Fed":

NEW YORK — For decades, the U.S. government has stashed gold five stories beneath Manhattan in a vault under the Federal Reserve's fortress near Wall Street.

Or has it?

Some conspiracy theorists suspect that the billions of dollars' worth of bullion might have been looted in a dramatic heist, a la the movie "Die Hard: With a Vengeance." Others claim that the gold has been used in a shadowy government transaction, or swapped with gold-painted bars. It's even caught the attention of politicians like Rep. Ron Paul and members of Germany's Parliament.

Now all of us may finally get some answers.

The federal government has quietly been completing an audit of U.S. gold stored at the New York Fed. The effort included drilling small holes in the bars to test their purity.

The Treasury Department has refused to disclose what the audit has revealed so far, saying the results will be announced by year's end. But as one former top Fed official said recently, the testing may finally prove that "Goldfinger didn't sneak in at night" and take the gold.

"The calls for audits are saying, 'We don't trust the government for the last 200 years,'" said Ted Truman, a former assistant Treasury secretary and Fed official. He called perennial questions about the country's reserves "the gold bug equivalent of the birther movement."

RTWT.

Global Warming in U.S. Wildly Overestimated, New Study Shows

I posted Anthony Watts' announcement at my sidebar a week or so ago. Watts Up With That? released a major research paper on Sunday, July 29: "New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial."

I skimmed the paper. It's not too long. And pretty interesting. Doctor Zero has a summary, at Human Events, "THE DEBUNKING OF GLOBAL WARMING CONTINUES." And following the links takes us to James Delingpole, "Global Warming? Yeah, right":

What Watts has conclusively demonstrated is that most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable. Around 90 per cent have had their temperature readings skewed by the Urban Heat Island effect. While he has suspected this for some time what he has been unable to do until his latest, landmark paper (co-authored with Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville) is to put precise figures on the degree of distortion involved.

For the full story go to Watts Up With That NOW!

There is, of course, one very, very sad aspect to this story – and truly it pains me to mention it but journalistic duty compels me to do so – and that's the dampening effect it may have on the grandstanding of a hapless fellow by the name of Professor Richard Muller.

Yes, the Richard Muller thing. It turns out that Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist and erstwhile global warming skeptic, published a breathtaking op-ed at the New York Times the day before Watts' paper came out. See: "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic." Read it at the link. Not only does Muller do a complete about-face, he also fingers humans "as the cause" of so-called global warming.

But what really got me going here was a post from radical history professor (and Middle East expert, not climate science expert) Juan Cole, "The Collapse of the Climate Change Contrarians and the End of Coal." Cole is responding to Professor Muller's turnaround. I recommend the whole thing, but this paragraph captures the spirit:

Since 1750, humans have begun altering the climate in a steady and systematic way, overwhelming the ability of the earth to absorb the CO2 and causing it to build up steadily in the atmosphere, producing long term effects on surface temperature. Human activity in the past 250 years has interrupted and reversed a 2000-year long natural climate tendency toward cooler temperatures. If we go on the way we have been, spewing ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we will produce a tropical planet with no ice on it and will forestall any further ice ages for at least 100,000 years. Since there are places humans now live, such as cities in Sindh, Pakistan, that already reach over 130 degrees F. in the summer, likely the planet we are creating will have large swathes of uninhabitable scorching places on it. Climate change will involve extreme weather events like massive storms, and these in turn may damage the ozone layer, sunburning us all to death. [Bold is in the original.]

It's HUMANS, HUMANS, HUMANS!!

You see, if it really is humans who're causing all of this, then boom!, we can get rid of fossil fuels and implement the United Nations-approved supranational environmentally-sustainable socialist redistributionist green energy program. It's as simple as that!

And one more thing. The New York Times has an amazing surprise of a report, which is the perfect conclusion to all the blather about CO2 this and NOAA that. See: "Who Are Your Sources?":

Two years ago I traveled to southern Indiana to write about a House race between an incumbent Democrat, Baron Hill, against a Tea Party-supported Republican, Todd Young.

Mr. Hill said he believed that climate change was real, human activity was causing it and government must act to address it. He voted for a cap-and-trade bill that passed the House by a narrow margin in 2009. Mr. Young said he was skeptical about the human impact on the climate and that any global warming trend was probably a cyclical phenomenon. His Tea Party supporters agreed with him, and he won the contest by 10 percentage points.

A number of voters who supported Mr. Young and shared his views on climate change told me they got much of their information from Fox News, a handful of radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the Bible.

As part of The Agenda series in The Times, I’d like to explore more deeply where people go to learn about the state of the earth’s climate, which sources of information they trust the most, whether people change their minds and, if so, what causes the shift of opinion.

Some of the best work on these questions comes from Yale University and George Mason University, which have jointly run a project on climate change communication for the past several years.

I can't comment on the Times' "Agenda" series. Mostly, what the article shows is that the debate on climate change is completely political. It's barometer for partisanship and ideology, and one's orientation toward the proper role of government. And because the stakes are so high, it's doubtful that there will ever be any meaningful consensus on the science itself. No amount of carefully conducted studies, rigorously vetted and peer reviewed, will convince either side. Especially since the scientific process itself has been corrupted by the very same people and institutional forces who have the most power over the political agenda. I'm referring to the Climategate Scandal. The best source on that is Steven Hayward, "Scientists Behaving Badly," and "Climategate (Part II)." Also, "Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning."

And because this is political, the policy outcomes on climate change will continue to reflect the balance of political power. The Obama administration has relied on bureaucratic mechanisms [EPA] to implement its green energy agenda. It can't do it through the Congress because there's no political support for such radicalism. And if the Republicans can retake the presidency and retain the House in November, then perhaps the U.S. can start moving toward a new comprehensive energy policy that protects the environment and builds on new technologies, while exploiting the breakthroughs in extraction that will allow the U.S. to reduce reliance on Persian Gulf oil.

Dominique Moceanu Interview at Los Angeles Times

Last night, NBC ran a feature segment on the 1996 women's U.S. Olympics team --- mostly about Kerri Strug, and how can you forget her, right?

Okay, but while watching I couldn't remember Dominique Moceanu's name. Turns out she has a new book out, Off Balance: A Memoir.

And she's interviewed at the Times, "5 Questions: Dominique Moceanu on Olympic training":

Dominique Moceanu captured the world's attention as the youngest member of the 1996 U.S. women's Olympic gymnastics team, the first American women's team to ever win gold for the United States. Moceanu was just 14 when she competed that year in Atlanta and quickly became the new face of the sport.

But in her new book, "Off Balance" (Touchstone) the now 30-year-old mother of two describes as cruel the legendary coaches Bela and Martha Karolyi and criticizes the methods they used to create champions. Here, she talks about her experiences.

In your book, you talk about the training methods used by your former coaches, Bela and Martha Karolyi. Do you think that what they did is necessary at the Olympic level, or could it be toned down a bit?

I don't think it's necessary at the elite level. I don't believe that it's ethical for people to use intimidation and humiliation as a method to achieve success.

Weighing your athletes in front of their peers is humiliating. They did that at the 1996 Olympics and at training camp. [Bela Karolyi] was always using me as an example and making me feel insecure. There was name-calling — imagine being a 14-year-old girl and getting called "Easter egg," "piggy," "balloon." They were using these terms when they thought I gained weight.

But they had this success in the sport, so people feel that they were doing something right.

More at that link.

Bela Karolyi and his wife were interviewed at that NBC program last night. He commented on his reputation as being mean and abusive, shrugging it off as what it takes to churn out champions.

A clip of Moceneau from 1996  is here. She was so tiny, like a little pixie.

Her website is here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

RELATED: At The Other McCain, "The Olympic Princess Fantasy."

Rafalca Derangement Syndrome

This is perfect, from Michelle, "Horse hockey: The Left’s Rafalca Derangement Syndrome":

You don’t need to be an equestrian expert to understand that the Left’s vicious, class-warfare attack on Mrs. Romney reeks worse than horse hockey. The GOP presidential candidate’s wife began riding horses 12 years ago as therapy for her multiple sclerosis. As Dressage News reported, “Back then, Ann could ride the trot on a horse for not even close to a minute and then have to walk for at least anther five minutes because of the crippling effects of MS.” Mrs. Romney has devoted her time ever since to promoting therapeutic riding programs and clubs across the country.

When Democratic operative Hilary Rosen disparaged Mrs. Romney for having “never worked a day in her life,” First Lady Michelle Obama herself said “families are off-limits. And I think my husband said it, and he was clear on that. And I totally agree with him. I also — and my comment that I tweeted, which was we need to respect all women in the — in whatever positions and roles they play in this society.”

Using Rafalca to smear the Romneys and stoke class envy is vulgar abuse of a political figure’s family member. Don’t take my word for it. The Democratic National Committee itself acknowledged earlier this month that it had crossed the line with its own video mocking Rafalca — although it blamed viewers for misconstruing its slimy intent.

Democrats are basically human refuse. These attacks on Mrs. Romney really hit bottom and keep on digging.

More at the link.

Harry Reid Has Long History of Romney Bashing

An interesting report, at the New York Times, "In Reid’s Taunting of Romney, Taxes Are Just a New Opening":

WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid’s decision this week to hurl a taunting, unsubstantiated accusation at Mitt Romney is hardly out of character for the cantankerous Democratic leader of the Senate, who revels in provocative comments and once called Mr. Romney “kind of a joke.”

On a personal level, Mr. Reid has long been publicly contemptuous of Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee and a fellow Mormon. In 2008, he said Mr. Romney would have been “a tremendous drag” on the Republican ticket. Last year, he said Mr. Romney “doesn’t stand for anything.” And in the last month, he has said that Mr. Romney could not be confirmed as a dogcatcher or a cabinet secretary.

But Mr. Reid’s latest series of tart-tongued volleys — in which he cited an unnamed source who claims Mr. Romney has not paid taxes for a decade — have generated more than the usual outrage from his Republican colleagues and from Mr. Romney himself, who on Friday spent a second day condemning the remarks.

“Harry Reid really has to put up or shut up,” Mr. Romney said as he campaigned in Mr. Reid’s home state, north of Las Vegas. “I have paid taxes every year, and a lot of taxes, a lot of taxes. So Harry is simply wrong, and that’s why I’m so anxious for him to give us the names of the people who have put this forward.”

The testy exchange between the two men is the latest manifestation of the broader Democratic strategy to highlight Mr. Romney’s wealth and offshore accounts as the party’s leaders seek to disqualify him in the eyes of middle-class voters. The Republican candidate has refused to release more than two years of his tax returns, prompting sarcastic television ads from President Obama and his allies.

The Democrats have no decency at all. The lowest of the low.

Continue reading.

NBC Runs Commercial With Monkey Doing Gymnastics Right After Gabby Douglas Wins Olympic Gold Medal

More #NBCFail.

At Buzzfeed, "Did NBC Just Air a Racist Commercial?" (Via Memeorandum.)

Saying it's "bad timing" won't cut it. Or is that just too PC? Check Ed Driscoll's response, "Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkeys — and Walruses…and Cannibalistic Self-Devouring Ice Cream Men?"

The Last Refuge of Radical America

It's Oakland, California, according to the New York Times, "Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America":

Why are radicals so inexorably drawn to Oakland? The cheap rents don’t hurt (free, if you’re willing to squat in an abandoned house or industrial space, and hundreds apparently are). Oakland is urban, dangerous and poor — fertile social conditions for inciting revolution. What’s more, it has a long, easily romanticized history of militancy. America’s last citywide strike, in 1946, took place there; the Black Panthers were born in Oakland; and David Hilliard, a former Black Panthers chief of staff, still gives three-hour tours of the movement’s local landmarks and sells his own line of Black Panthers hot sauce: “Burn Baby Burn.”

Running parallel to this history of political militancy is a history of lawlessness. In the early 1970s, when the Hell’s Angels were scandalizing America, their most infamous clubhouse was located in East Oakland. The Oakland native Felix Mitchell was one of the first to scale up corner drug-dealing into a multimillion-dollar, gang-controlled business. On his death — he was stabbed in Leavenworth in 1986 — the city gave him a hero’s send-off: thousands came out to see his coffin borne through his old East Oakland neighborhood by a horse-drawn carriage trailed by more than a dozen Rolls Royces and limousines.

In Oakland, the revolutionary pilot light is always on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Oakland writer and social activist Jack London said this to a group of wealthy New Yorkers: “A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times — you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you.

It’s a dream that still exists in Oakland — that the world can be taken from the haves and delivered to the have-nots. Like all dreams that are on the brink of being extinguished, its keepers cling to it with a fierceness that is both moving and an extreme exercise in the denial of the reality that is at their door.

“I’m not afraid to call myself a Communist,” the rapper and activist Boots Riley told me one morning last spring in the kitchen of his weather-beaten yellow Victorian house in Oakland’s Lower Bottoms section. “I think some people call themselves everything but, because they don’t want to associate themselves with the failures and mistakes that other folks who have called themselves Communists have made. But Christians don’t stop calling themselves Christians just because some other Christians made some mistakes.”

Riley was getting dressed as we talked, combing out his black-power Afro with a cake cutter, a once-popular African-American grooming accessory that he now has to order from online cooking sites. He covered his face unevenly with shaving cream and carefully sculptured his prominent sideburns — tapered muttonchops that stretch to the corners of his mouth like a pair of giant peninsulas. Virtually anywhere else, Riley would look and sound about as out of place as someone speaking Old English in colonial dress. But in Oakland, a kind of Amish village of retro-radicals, he makes perfect sense.

When Riley first visited Occupy Wall Street’s encampment in New York, it didn’t do much for him. “It bothered me that there was no agenda,” he said. “Just a lot of folks saying, ‘I don’t have an answer.’ ” But Occupy Oakland felt different. “Our strategy is not just to get people to say, ‘We don’t like the banks,’ ” he said. “This is about getting folks to confront the system where they are.”

In Oakland, Riley is radical royalty, which in hard-left circles helps offset the somewhat credibility-undermining fact that he’s also a legitimate hip-hop star, albeit one with a mostly cult following. His father was an N.A.A.C.P. pioneer, militant organizer and civil rights lawyer who met Riley’s mother at a 1968 student strike at San Francisco State University. Hanging in Riley’s kitchen is a picture of him as an infant, clutching a copy of Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” an anti-colonialist manifesto that was required reading for radical ’60s activists.

Many local radicals come to Oakland via a nearby U.C. campus: Berkeley, Davis or Santa Cruz. Riley is Oakland-bred. The first action he ever led, at age 15, was a strike to protest budget cuts at his predominantly black public high school. The rapping came later, after the rise of politically conscious, militant hip-hop. There’s a long history of popular musicians taking up revolutionary causes. Riley inverted the equation: He was a revolutionary who turned to music to get his message out to more people. His band is called the Coup — as in coup d’état.

Riley’s politics are extreme. He doesn’t want to see capitalism reformed; he wants to see it toppled. “We need a system that’s not based on profit, but that’s based on helping people, that’s based on some sort of mutual control of resources,” he says...

This is a long article, so go grab a cup of coffee if you want to finish it.

Oakland is messed up. It's going broke, it's segregated, deindustrialized, and its professional sports teams are bailing out ASAP. I have cousins in Oakland. It's a black burg. The city's demographics shifted with the changing economy, back in the '70s, and white flight left it with a reputation of reputations among all California cities. The crime rate for decades had been one of the worst in the country (I think Oakland was in fact the murder capital at one point).

In any case, I think Boots Riley should be commended for his honesty. He's willing to come out and say publicly what so many other hangers-on won't: that Occupy's goal is the topping of the capitalist system. Dress it up how you want, but when you dig down deep, that's what it's about. More from Times piece on that:

Oakland’s government mistakenly treated an insurrectionist movement as a progressive one. Occupy Oakland’s organizers weren’t disenfranchised liberals but committed anarchists operating from a revolutionary playbook that prohibited all negotiations with government officials. In fact, government officials were at the top of their target list. As one Occupy Oakland blogger put it, the goal was to launch “unmediated assaults on our enemies: local government, the downtown business elite and transnational capital.”

Exactly.

PREVIOUSLY: "The Jacobin: Chris Hayes of MSNBC."

The 'Road Warrior' Culture of California

From Victor Davis Hanson, at PJ Media, "California: 'The Road Warrior' Is Here":

Where’s Mel Gibson When You Need Him?

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.

In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but without the ability to reproduce the means to satisfy them: in short, a sort of Procopius’s description of Gothic Italy circa AD 540.

Our Version

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not safety-based, protocols — a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and benefits will not be cut.

A coarsening of popular culture — a nationwide phenomenon — was intensified, as it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.

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U.S. Seeks Better Footing in Track

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Seeks to Lift Athletes After Management Missteps":

LONDON — America's track and field team enters the London Games in a funk.

For decades, its men's 4 x 100-meter relay team was one of the most successful in Olympic sports, winning gold in 15 of 20 Games through 2000. Then came the losing streak.

Great Britain won the relay finals in Athens in 2004. Four years later in Beijing, the U.S. team failed to finish in an embarrassing preliminary round. A distraught sprinter, Darvis "Doc" Patton, called his wife in Dallas after: "We dropped the baton," he said, breaking into tears. "We dropped the baton."

The 123-member U.S. track and field team arrives at the London Games with a new chief executive, a roster of top athletes and plenty to prove. The question it will answer in coming days is whether it can reverse the team's long, slow decline.

Once the dominant arm of the U.S. Olympic team, track and field has looked more like a faded dynasty. Years of falling medal counts have since 1988 yielded to swimming the title of America's highest-achieving Olympic sport.

Well, U.S. swimming sure topped the Olympics this year. We'll see about track and field, but watching some of the women's 100m heats last night, it looks like there's some really tough competition out there, especially from Jamaica.

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