Assorted

     Apologies in advance, Gentle Reader. It’s going to be one of those days...and you know what that means.

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1. The Fake News Chronicle.

     The heading of this section is my preferred name for the New York Times. Ann Coulter explains why:

     Antwon Rose II was a 17-year-old boy shot by an East Pittsburgh police officer in June 2018 after he bolted from a jitney car that had been stopped by the officer. The Times published about a half-dozen stories on Antwon Rose — or as the Times calls him, “Antwon, who was unarmed.”

     After the officer was acquitted on all charges in March of this year, the Times ran an article by Adeel Hassan on the verdict.

     Here’s what you would learn from the Times:

• Antwon was unarmed.
• Antwon “was in his high school’s honors program.”
• Antwon “played basketball and the saxophone.”
• Antwon “volunteered for a local charity.”
• In 2016, Antwon wrote a poem titled, “I Am Not What You Think!” which included these lines:
            I see mothers bury their sons
            I want my Mom to never feel that pain.
• A policeman stopped the gold Chevy Cruze Antwon “was riding in” because it “matched the description” of a car “involved” in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier.
• The jury consisted of nine whites and three African Americans.

     If you read the Times piece, all you would know is that an honor student who loved his mom … was KILLED for the crime of riding in a car similar to one that had just been used in a crime.

     Miss Coulter goes on to present some additional, rather relevant facts about Antwon Rose and the incident in which he was killed that the Times, wholly focused on smearing America and American justice as incorrigibly racist, felt it would be impolitic to include. Please read it all.

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2. Two From The “Mad Dog.”

     Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman has posted two excellent pieces on education in these United States:

• What Happens When You Allow Progressives Free Rein In Education?
• What Should We Do In Education?

     Please read them both. I have two tangential observations. First, note that “educators’” unions, politicians, and educational bureaucracies are dead set against allowing parents any escape route from the government schools. Indeed, Bill De Blasio, New York City’s Marxist mayor, has done his level best to destroy all alternatives to the city’s educational sewers. The amounts of money and votes available from rigidly supporting and defending the educracy are hard to forgo, especially for those who want children funneled into an indoctrination system that will inculcate them with leftist precepts. So despite the repeated successes of vouchers, charter schools, magnet schools, and private alternatives, we must expect intense political and educratic resistance to them to continue.

     Second, no matter where children are schooled, or by whom, there will be a transmission of values from teacher to student. That makes it a parent’s paramount responsibility to his kids to monitor curricula, teaching methods, and related developments in the schools they attend, whether private, public, or some hybrid. That responsibility can never go away...until the kids themselves go away, of course.

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3. Identity Politics.

     Today Paul Mirengoff at Power Line cites the work of Mary Eberstadt on the correlation between the decline of familial bonds and the rise of identity politics:

     Both the family and identity politics provide a partial answer to this question: “Who am I?” The more one answers this question in familial terms, the less likely one is to answer it primarily in racial, ethnic, or gender terms.

     Unfortunately, as Eberstadt shows, family ties have become more and more attenuated in the last half century. It’s not just the absence of fathers, though that’s certainly an enormous factor. Shrinking family size has meant the relative absence of siblings. According to Eberstadt, “diverse findings show that being accompanied through early life by non-parental contemporaneous others (i.e., siblings) gives children and teenagers a leg up on socialization—in other words, knowing who they are in the social order.”

     Indeed. Personal identity, while it can be defined without reference to other persons, can only be sustained by buttressing it with associations formed with others. Without such buttressing, the endless assaults on identity that arise from ordinary existence will weaken it to impotence. Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Abraham Maslow is nodding and muttering “I told you so.”

     Food for serious thought.

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4. Meanwhile, Across The Pond...

     The British scheme of constitutional monarchy is widely believed to render the monarch a mere figurehead, for ceremonial uses only. That’s not quite the case:

     While Queen Elizabeth II does not express political opinions as monarch, she respects the will of her people. And the people voted for Brexit. Which means the queen was always going to come down on the side of the vote of the people. So when her new prime minister, Boris Johnson, asked her to prorogue Parliament, she agreed to it.

     What’s this? Elizabeth II has actually taken a hand in the Brexit controversy? But of course! A monarch is a sovereign. No sovereign wants his sovereignty weakened by subjugation to some overbearing “union.” So Her Majesty has assisted Prime Minister Johnson’s quest for a clean departure from the EU by suspending Parliament for the duration. That’s one of the British monarch’s remaining political powers:

     The queen has some limited political powers, which people often forget about because the concept of royalty to the American eye seems largely ceremonial and antiquated. But there have been moments where British monarchs in the constitutional era have used their political leverage – not always for the best reasons. The monarch opens and closes Parliament – it does not come into session without her approval. At the same time, she also gets to “prorogue” it – meaning that she gets to send them on vacation, suspending all parliamentary activity until the start of the new session. However, the queen does this only at the advice or request of her Privy Council, who did call a session at Balmoral (the queen’s summer residence in Scotland) in order to get her answer to Prime Minister Johnson’s proposal.

     Parliament will now be prorogued from sometime in early September until October 14th. Deal or no deal, Brexit is happening on October 31st.

     “And there was much rejoicing.”

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5. Obsessives Gonna Obsess.

     Does anyone else remember, during the contest over the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, George Stephanopoulos asking Mitt Romney about his position on the legality of birth control? I do. There’s video at the link, if your memory isn’t as sharp as mine.

     The Left has made sex and phenomena attendant to it one of its favorite sticks with which to flog conservatives. That’s not going to stop any time soon. And longtime sex-obsessed lunatic Amanda Marcotte – remember this episode? — is ever ready to lead the charge:

     The reason Republicans keep taking away birth control is because Republicans want to take away your birth control. They hate the power it gives women, especially young women and low-income women.

     Conservatives are modern Puritans and, as H.L. Mencken famously said, they are driven by the "haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

     Mind you, this clearly mentally ill woman – I assume she’s a woman, but these days it’s hard to be sure – is ranting about the recent ruling from the Trump Administration that Title X funding cannot go to abortion providers, nor to organizations that refer patients for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or medical emergency. But it’s all the same to Marcotte: an “attack” on “women’s rights” and the “power” they have. And the Left, happy to use the sex shillelagh against the Right, applauds her every word instead of getting her the therapy she so badly needs.

     Great God in heaven! From Marcotte’s ravings you’d think we in the Right dislike sex. Hardly! Neither do we believe that babies are born by fission, or from cuttings. But obsessives gonna obsess, and political obsessives gonna obsess politically, even on subjects as firmly settled as the legality of birth control.

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     That’s all for now, Gentle Reader. Long Island has a deluge pouring down on it at the moment, and a distressing fraction of it is finding its way into my basement despite recent, very expensive waterproofing work. Back later and hopefully drier.