Restoration

Thanks to a gracious fellow blogger, Stogie at Saber Point, who more or less rebuilt the site, Reflecting Light has been returned to something like its previous appearance. There will be further retouching -- for one thing, I don't see any way for the reader to call up a posting from the six years worth of previous blogging, assuming anyone should contemplate such a folly -- but we're back in business.

The passionate weasel: A view from the politically correct right

A self-described "middle aged political heretic" asks in a column for the Baltimore Jewish Times, "Where is the outcry?" Edward ("Braveheart") Leventhal is unhappy about the George Zimmerman lynch mob led by the usual ambulance-chasing reverends.

I do know that the public persecution of George Zimmerman, by “black leaders” such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, black fascists of the New Black Panther Party, liberal idiots such as Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr and by the supposed unbiased mainstream media has been an utter travesty of justice. Former NAACP leader C.L.Bryant accused Jackson and Sharpton of exploiting the tragedy to racially divide the country.  

Okay, I suppose it is some sign of progress that Braveheart feels safe in publishing unkind words about the black Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. But then, "Former NAACP leader C.L. Bryant" has given him permission.

That isn't what he sees as the missing outcry, however. The proud heretic then launches into a weaselstrike.

Weaselstrike is a word of my own coinage, as far as I know, meaning an allegedly conservative argument that "concedes the primacy of non-conservative values."

So, at a moment when the ethnic cleansing of whites by blacks is gathering momentum, our Baltimore Braveheart is looking for the outcry ... against crimes committed by blacks against other blacks.

A special report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2007 revealed that somewhere between eight and nine thousand African Americans are murdered annually in the United States of America. Of these murders, African Americans account for 93% of the perpetrators. This analysis is supported by records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation which also showed that in 2005, 49% of all homicide victims in the USA were black and that it came almost solely at the hands of people of their own race. So what we have mostly are young black men killing other young black men. Our jails are filled with young black men not only for crimes of violence but also for drug related crimes adding to another problem in the vicious cycle of black life

The news isn't all bad, though.

What do we know about George Zimmerman? Well, the first thing we found out is that he is not Jewish. And honestly speaking, how many of you reading the Jewish Times right now breathed a collective sigh of relief as I did, because his name sure sounds like he is one of our tribe.  

Braveheart then returns to his regularly scheduled programming.

Just as surely as hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and heart disease are risk factors for death, so is being a young black male living in the inner city. And the dirty little secret is that no one wants to say anything about it. Someone has to stop this genocide before it is too late.

Uh huh. And just as surely as hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and heart disease are risk factors for death, so is being a white person when black mobs are on the prowl.

Someone has to stop this genocide before it's too late.

Still circling Moose Jaw

Later I will see what I can do about reversing my inadvertent self-sabotage of the old template. Wish me luck. Perhaps I was born too early to understand intuitively all this technological carry-on. If I have to re-design the site, well, let that be a lesson for me: save the bloody template regularly.

Uh-oh!

Blogger, in its wisdom, has seen fit to change the interface for posting. The explanation: the usual blather about "the completely new, streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts." Through unfamiliarity with the new streamlined super-duper 3-D turbocharged look, I found myself unable to make a small change to the sidebar by editing the template, got flustered, and must have made a wrong turn. The old template disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving what you see now.

As time permits I will see if the old template is recoverable.

Without excusing my own undoubted carelessness, I have to say Blogger's making a tossed salad out of the old familiar way of posting is typical of one of the curses of our age: endless "updating" and "upgrading" to no purpose. Nothing about the cooler-than-cool interface makes posting any easier; as far as I can tell, it's just the same stuff rearranged. You have to waste time figuring it out and developing new habits.

They used to call this "planned obsolescence," a term usually applied to automobile design in the simple old days. What we have now in excess is planned technological obsolescence. Recently my office upgraded to the new version of Word, with the old drop-down menus replaced by a scroll bar at the top and various functions located in different menus. The new Word isn't better; it isn't worse; it's just change. Spare change. Meaningless change.

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, Emerson said. He would have understood planned technological obsolescence perfectly. The nerdy techno-freaks who keep re-programming stuff get their kicks from the technology as an end in itself. They can't imagine that 95 percent of their customers simply care about the technology as a tool, don't want pointless new features, and particularly resent software revisions that offer no real-world benefit.

If I can't resurrect the old template, I guess I'll have to start with one of Blogger's and tweak it myself (like I did last time). Meanwhile, please forgive this abominable-looking thing.

Hey, Jude

I am not a Catholic, but I have always been fond of St. Jude, one of Jesus's disciples and the patron saint of lost causes. There is probably zero historical knowledge of Jude, but his importance is symbolic: the Church assures the faithful that when God is in the picture, no good cause is ever truly lost.

Paul Weston, the head of the British Freedom Party, is fighting for a cause that in my opinion is already lost: stopping the U.K. from becoming an Islamic, Sharia-enforcing country. As he shows in this video, of a speech he made in London on April 7, Islamization isn't something theoretical; it isn't in the mists of an unforeseeable future; it is occurring now and is well along.

Even today, it's hard for Americans to comprehend what a risk Paul Weston is taking merely by publicly expressing an anti-Islamization view. He could be arrested and charged with a thought crime for this speech, and no mistake. That is Britain today: softened up for 60 years by the Left, which now works hand in hand with radical Muslims, each imagining the other a tool to be discarded later.

Weston looks like a fairly young guy with a lot of time ahead of him. He is taking a chance that he will spend his prime years behind bars in the developing Islamic State of Britain, simply for opposing Muslim domination.

St. Jude, I ask your protection for this man, and for his country.

Happy talk blues

Yesterday I had an MRI test, where they insert you into a tube and you listen to what sounds like machine gun fire and other sinister noises as the device pings whatever region of your corpus is a bother. While the lab technicians were readying the MRI machine, I was in a waiting room where CNN was playing on a wall-mounted TV. All in all I preferred the MRI experience, and not only because it is one of the wonders of modern medical diagnosis. CNN did more to set my teeth on edge.

We won't get into CNN's politics. There was nothing political about the news except a brief tape of The Failed Messiah continuing his 3.5-year campaign for a second term. I didn't listen; he probably didn't either. He was talking at a factory in Ohio I think. All that registered on me was "jobs ... jobs ... jobs ... jobs ... ." It reminded me of the description in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 when he and his co-psychos were holed up in a motel room, stoned on some astonishing mixture of drugs, with Nixon on the telly. According to Thompson, he could only make out from the president's speech, "sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice ... ."

I can't claim to have ignored CNN, though. I have deliberately been without cable TV for so long it was a novelty. Two things I noticed. One was what so many race realists are complaining about: half the people in the ads were blacks. Rather an over-representation for a non-race (race is only a social construct) that is 13 percent of the population. Naturally they all looked middle class or professional, or were sports stars I'd never heard of.

The other thing was the behavior of the news anchors and reporters or commentators. What a lot of happy talk!

You know what happy talk is, right? It used to be mostly on local news programs, where they get finished with the day's shootings and building collapses and the anchors engage in light banter with the weather forecaster or sports reporter.

"Okay! Time to check in with Lew Mandible and see what the skies have for us. How's it, Lew?"

"Great, Jill. Terrific news for all of you who are sick of this balmy spring weather. There's a backlash front heading our way, should be sitting on our heads by tomorrow morning. We can look forward to three days of bat guano mixed with used frying oil raining on us."

"Oh boy, Lew, is that the best you can do for us?"

"Ha ha, Jill, knew you'd be overjoyed!"

Except now this chit-chat seems to be de rigueur for every story that involves cutting away from the anchor to an on-the-scene report. "A shocking story from Lansing, Michigan, where a teenage mutant allegedly blew up a skid row flop house, spreading dirty roomers around town, then allegedly led police on a 400 mph chase in his Citation V until he was finally pulled over to the side of the air by an unmarked UFO. We go now to Marie Scaffoldmaker standing by at the scene of this shocking event. Marie, what can you tell us about this situation, a real shocker?"

Satellite-bounce pause. Marie stares at the camera like a python hypnotizing a bird.

"Hi, Billie! Yes, everyone I spoke with is simply stunned. Absolutely no one was expecting it. This community is in deep shock ... ."

There is very little I enjoy more than not watching TV news. The more I don't watch, the more I love it. Enough to do a little happy talk.