Roots (Katt Williams Said Kevin Hart Is A Plant)

 

 The darkest visions of Kanye West are nothing compared to real life. 

   

 Within a minute-and-a-half of this Candace Owens critique of Emily Ratajkowski, Owens mentions Gloria Steinem, as leading a second wave feminism that hurt us all, over my lifetime. There was no way to know Steinem's name would come up.  

   

So it would seem pretty random, except, previous to watching the Candace Owens video, I'd just watched a video about Gloria Steinem's participation in the CIA. Hmmm.

   

 Once you realize your own government's not only been launching coups around the world, but even against your inner life, you'll be surprised if "good" can still describe brewing a decent cup of coffee.

 

Get A Gander At What's Good For The Goose Nowadays

It appears some people have a problem with this decal, saying it demeans the opposite sex. My reply:

"A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle"

Shoot - after 40 years of hearing that - I'm telling you:

The feeling's more-than-mutual.

Now get in the back of the truck,...

 

Eww: Feminists Are As Ugly As Their Immorality

Shit, we wish she'd also explain the heavy-eyebrow-and-mustache thing:

I am not a good person to ask about feminism "because I am a male chauvinist." Feminism is a phony movement rooted in Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute nailed it way back in 1991:

While feminists claim to be pursuing justice for women, it is becoming ever more apparent that their actual goal is the obliteration of justice.  More precisely, their aim is to eliminate that which makes justice possible: objective standards. Instead of urging employers, for example, to adopt objective standards of merit in hiring and to apply them consistently to all candidates, irrespective of the (irrelevant) fact of gender, feminists call for the very opposite.  They demand the lowering or the suspension of standards, in order to accommodate certain women.

Caroline Glick eviscerates the phony feminist movement in a recent column, "The Feminist Deception," in which she says that "the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women.  It has been about advancing the Left's social and political agenda against Western societies."  Glick adds that "rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women's rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women.  So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception." 

The proof of that is how feminists react to genuine oppression of women.  Every time they are approached after an honor killing, feminist groups defer and redirect the media inquiry to Muslim groups.  Why?  Is there a form of femicide acceptable to feminists?

Apparently so: Gloria Steinem's Ms. Foundation provides funding to the American Society for Muslim Advancement, one of the pseudo-moderate Islamic supremacist groups behind the Ground Zero mega-mosque.  I guess Steinem doesn't care that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an open proponent of Islamic law (Sharia), the most oppressive system for women ever devised in human history, or that his wife Daisy Khan counsels women in how to deal positively with polygamy (multiple wives is de rigueur in Islam).

These vicious, parasitical feminists are worse than useless. They are dangerous, as evidenced by the Jew-hating, pro-jihad feminist mob in Philadelphia.  Do these women know that lesbians are executed in Muslim countries?  Do these women know that the jihad in Israel is about Islamic anti-Semitism, not land?  Do these women care about the gender apartheid in the Muslim world?  How do they look at the faces of the victims of honor killing and then look in the mirror? The craven silence of feminists in the face of the left's withering criticism of my honor killing taxi ad campaign and freedom buses for apostates from Islam is a stunning indictment of their motives.

Feminists' mission by objective is not empowerment, but just the opposite: slavery. They want government-funded independence. Oxymoronic.

To say that feminism was one of the worst things to happen to women is being kind. I blame the left for the feminization of men.

Quick, somebody call Meade:

He's sure to pay her a visit, babbling about "fear".

NewAgers: Those Who Don't Think (Because It Takes Too Much Thought - And A Mirror)

"...Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or 'natural' categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code, 'So Dark, the Con of Man.'



The 'con' in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus’ true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought.


Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the 'mother' of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book, The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.
 

Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky. Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. 'Before it could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was strangled by the anti-European church with all the means in its power,' he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would debunk the 'counterfeit of the great image of Christ' found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

'Christianity,' writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, 'was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars.' It was 'the advent of Christianity' that first unleashed the 'spiritual terror' upon 'the much freer ancient world.'

Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions.
For example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastest growing religion and religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million depending on whose numbers you accept. If you add 'New Age spirituality,' the number of Americans involved in such avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual qualities of 'pre-Christian' and 'matriarchal' paganism. In Revolution from Within she laments in all earnestness the 'killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.


The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the antiwitch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: 'The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed. He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit—dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or 'witches')—to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.


Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers’ Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its membership was a veritable Who’s Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw."

-- Jonah Goldberg, quoting from his own book, Liberal Fascism, in The National Review Online.

Don't Forget To Buy Your Dad A Really Nice Tie

"Momma's gonna make all of your nightmares come true.
Momma's gonna put all of her fears into you.
Momma's gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing."

-- Lyrics from Pink Floyd's "The Wall", taken from TIME Magazine's collection of the 10 Best & Worst Mothers in pop culture.

Of course, I'm going to focus on some of the bad girls because, well, they're bad! And do you seriously want a discussion about Dumbo's mother, and - I shit you not - "Gaia"? (TIME is just waaay too insanely NewAge,...)

Also, these characters speak to the motivations of many women throughout time: their need to control, to seek revenge, to break the rules - and kill. Unfair? Maybe. But in a time when emulating bad men seems to have been redefined as a goal for the "weaker sex" (and it's almost taken as a given that it's a woman's birthright to do so) it's at least something we should take note of:

TIME claims it's "not great" that Mrs. Robinson was married when she seduced Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate" - not wrong, mind you, just not great. "The gracious thing to do would have been to step aside" when "Benjamin falls in love with Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine," intones the magazine, but, as we know, "the knives really come out" instead.

Cheating on your husband, deceiving your friends - and sleeping with their kids - only to attack them when they fall in love with someone their own age. All very - what's that word again? Oh, yes - "sophisticated".

That's the word used by the Mrs. Robinson Society, "a movable social club and think tank for sophisticated, vibrant, fully evolved ladies of a certain ilk". And what "ilk" is that, I wonder? Liars? Home-wreckers? Destroyers of the family? Child molesters? They don't say. There are two rabbits featured on their home page, though, so it must have something to do with "good breeding",...

TIME seems to have returned to it's senses when it comes to Hamlet's Queen Gertrude, so I'll let it's text stand on it's own:

" She's a complicated lady. Yes, she married her dead husband's brother, and yes, her new husband murdered her old one. But it's never quite clear how much of the crime she's in on: she never owns up to it, and she has more empathy for her tortured son than anybody else in the play. While everybody's trying to figure out what's bothering Hamlet, she's the only one willing to state the obvious: 'His father's death and our o'erhasty marriage.' Well, yes.

So what's she doing on this list? The special horror of Gertrude lies in the fact that she truly feels tender, maternal love for Hamlet — yet she betrays him anyway. One minute she's all compassion, the next she doth protest too much. And she's an incorrigible flirt, the original Elizabethan MILF: no wonder Hamlet could never settle down with that nice Ophelia, when his mom won't free him from her Oedipal apron-strings. 'What have I done,' she asks her sulky son, 'that thou darest wag thy tongue/In noise so rude against me?' Think for a minute, Gertrude. You'll get there."

The "special horror" link, above, leads to a page about "the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person" Warren Beatty had claimed to have ever "known", Julie Christie, who played Gertrude ("Such a weird part."). It ends with this perceptive bit of Christie's political foreknowledge:

"An inveterate lefty, she plans to leave Britain for somewhere like-minded, France or Spain. 'I won't see my own history being dismantled in front of my own eyes.'"

Smart lady. After making her name playing a self-destructive fashion model ("Darling"), a 1960s "free spirit" ("Petulia"), a tough, unflappable madam ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller") and, finally, a woman with Alzheimer disease who forgets about her husband and falls in love with another man ("Away From Her") I'd suggest France as the proper destination for her particular politics, outlook, and talents.

Like Gloria Steinem, after telling other women, since the 60's, there was something hideously wrong with the institution, Christie married "discreetly" in 2007.

Ah, Livia Soprano, who can forget her? Master manipulator of everyone she encountered, ultimately trying to have her own son killed by his uncle. (And the fact she also kind of looks like my ex -wife is fitting.) What a gift to mankind.

" Oh, she doesn't have it easy. Since his retirement, Enid's husband Alfred just sits in his chair all day doing nothing. Just sits there! Her daughter Denise is divorced. One son, Gary, won't stop criticizing, and the other, Chip, has gotten fired from his job. It's only natural that Enid should nag Alfred constantly, even though he's seriously ill, and that she should tell all her friends that Chip is "doing law," even though he's doing temp work for a law firm, and that she should hound Gary into a state of neurotic depression, even though he's worked all his life to please her, and that she should be convinced that her daughter is having an affair with a married man, even though she has no real evidence to support such a conclusion.

Enid wasn't born a monster. She was born a loving, sensitive, intelligent woman, but life disappointed her so incessantly and irreversibly that she can no longer appreciate those things she still has, and she makes sure everybody around her knows it. Unlike the other mothers on this list, she isn't an outsized creation; she's chillingly life-sized and utterly plausible. Which makes her that much scarier."

-- Lev Grossman, for TIME Magazine, on the mother in Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections", a book I own but haven't found time to read. I will now.

In another TIME article on the author, Richard Lacayo adds:

"The social disorders of the 21st century are expressed mostly through the personal distempers of the three siblings and their flight to the false consolations of sex, careerism and consumerism. 'They all lose something in leaving behind their parents' values,' says Franzen."

I can't wait for the movie.

It's weird when TIME's writers (in this case, Lev Grossman again) agree with me while trying to be cute. Check out this description of Carrie White's crazy mom:

" Granted, Carrie White probably shouldn't have telekinetically murdered her high school classmates at the prom. But her home life almost justifies it. Mrs. White — played in the movie by Piper Laurie — is a religious maniac who believes that Carrie is getting her period because she is sinful, and that the proper remedy, rather than a tampon and an awkward conversation, is to lock her in a closet and make her pray. Also, she refers to her daughter's budding breasts as "dirty pillows," which is just bizarre.



Laurie reportedly thought her character was so over-the-top that the movie she was acting in must be a comedy. Which of course didn't turn out to be the case, but you can see where she was coming from: Margaret White's religious mania is beyond caricature — "Eve was weak! Say it, woman!" Though in her defense, it's worth pointing out that on some basic level Carrie's mom was right: Carrie was a witch, and it probably would've been better if she hadn't gone to the prom. If she'd only been a little quicker with that kitchen knife, so much unpleasantness could have been avoided. Kids: what they really want is discipline."

Why aren't I laughing?

"Unlike many of the mothers on this list, Joan Crawford was, sadly, a real person: brilliant Oscar-winning actress, amazingly lousy mom. The movie 'Mommie Dearest' was based on a a memoir by Crawford's adopted daughter Christina the recounting the many traumas her vain, demanding, perfectionist mother visited on her as she wrestled with the (not unrelated) problems of her alcoholism, her flagging career and her hopeless love life. Matters come to a head in the unforgettable sequence where Joan goes berserk after discovering that Christina has hung her dresses on wire coat hangers. ('You live in the most beautiful house in Brentwood, and you don't care if your clothes are stretched out from wire hangers!' Well, she did have a point.)"



"Though the memoir was a huge bestseller — it was published after the mom in question's death — the movie was a critical disaster, and it's often said that Faye Dunaway, who played Joan Crawford, never quite recovered from the role. But 'Mommie Dearest' (as Joan instructed Christina to call her, and 'mean it!') quickly flipped into a camp classic — audiences actually showed up with wire hangers and cleaning supplies, ready to participate in the fun, a la 'Rocky Horror'. A bad mommy, even unto death, Crawford left her daughter precisely nothing in her will."

Yowsa! All TIME's wink-wink irony just falls away when the real world is unavoidable - which is (surprise, surprise) just like dealing with women!

See? It all holds together in the end. Kinda.

Yea, I'm outta here.

Heartbreaker

It's not often that I hear about the death of a business owner and think, "Aww", but discovering the death of Lovie Yancy (above) breaks my heart. She opened the original Fatburger on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, the street where I grew up, providing me - and billions of other people - with fond memories we will never be able to replace:

Memories of good food, good music, and lots of laughter, even if you were stuck out front in the rain.

Here's a picture of the original Fatburger:

That gritty photo, along with Miss Yancy's personal story, remind me why I'll never fit in with the NewAge "movement" so many have fallen victim to:

I was raised by people with values from another time and place.

Strong black people, informed by life and death struggle, in post-World War II Los Angeles. People that produced true greatness - whether anyone noticed or not - not today's ceaseless illusions of it, promoted at fever-pitch, and worth as much as a broken mirror.

In reporting Miss Yancy's death, the L.A. Times tries to make it seem like there was a period when it was unusual for a black woman to open a business, but, growing up in South Central, I never heard of such a time. In South Central, women and men always did everything the same - opened businesses, organized communities, led households, gambled, drank, and fought in the streets. All you had to have was heart.

Very few South Central women had the kind of weaknesses that produced feminism's harpies, and they laughed at Gloria Steinem & Co. when they emerged, thinking their "issues" were as lame as the women that produced them. In South Central, both sexes were strong - "macho" even - because, together, they had to face down the pressures of alternately - and constantly - being killed, exploited, marginalized, or ignored, by everyone in the larger (white) community but the police; who, even worse, represented all those things at once. (Check out Denzel Washington's Devil In A Blue Dress, above, for proof:)

Gloria Steinem couldn't have survived there,....

But Lovie Yancy survived - and thrived - eventually providing South Central, Los Angeles with something we could always be proud of:

A true "homegrown" success story.

At the Fatburger of old (before it was franchised) you could "have it your way" long before Burger King imagined such a thing; stacking your sandwich ten layers high, with everything under the sun, just like ol' Dagwood in the comic strip Blondie. Many of us practically lived there for that.

Later, when I returned home for a visit, discovering the franchised Fatburger was a letdown - I found them as sterile as any McDonald's. But they were still a source of immense pride:

Fatburger!?!

South Central's Fatburger - that little fucking shack - had "made it", BIGTIME, and I had to have one, whether it was like "the old days" or not.

And, of course, it wasn't.

But how could it be? This Fatburger was in North Hollywood - not South Central, L.A.. There was no music, or crowds, and, now, special orders are unheard of (especially the kind where you bring your own favorite ingredient and just tell them to "throw some of that shit on there".). And, just like every other burger joint, three layers are as high as they build them.

Still, I savored that thing like I was eating Duck l'Orange, and it was a hell of lot more satisfying than that French crap will ever be.

Which makes me think of one more, final, thing:

Lovie Yancy lived to be 96, and, as the owner and founder of Fatburger, no one can claim her long life was the product of eating properly, or taking especially good care of her health. Like my first foster mother (who survived 101 years on KFC, Taco Bell, and the occasional beer) Miss Yancy lived a long life by having good genetics and a clear understanding of what life was about:

Truly caring about others.

She was trying to give other people not just what she thought they wanted but what they clearly asked for and needed. And - in the case of the original Fatburger - that was, always, good food, good music, and lots of laughter,...even if you found yourself stuck out front in the rain.

Goodbye, Miss Yancy, and thank you so very, very, much.

The Classic Feminazi Package

"Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let's not forget Hillary, the governor's wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock.

Hillary's disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem's fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary."

- Camille Paglia, writing for Salon.com