RUTHFULLY YOURS

The superintendent of a Michigan school district has apologized for allowing the display of what is erroneously referred to as “America’s first flag” because it is a “symbol of exclusion and hate.”

Forest Hills School District school superintendent Dan Behm apologized for the “incident,” which occurred during a high shool football game between a predominantly white school and a predominantly black school.

Washington Post:

Some Forest Hills students were parading around not only with the first flag but with a Trump banner, in addition to chanting “Go green” and “Go white,” which are the school colors.

The combination offended, among others, Matthew Patulski, a white parent of two students enrolled in Grand Rapids public schools — the Trump banner because Donald Trump is “a candidate known for his tacit support of racist ideologies,” as Patulski wrote in an open letter on his Facebook page, and the “Betsy Ross flag” because it’s “a piece of history co-opted by white supremacists who see it as a symbol of a time in our nation’s history when slavery was legal.”

#NotTheOnion MI HS Superintendent: 13Star Betsy Ross Flag Injects Hostility’ & ‘Hate @MichCapCon https://t.co/4auffXsYFK
— Chris #Bossy McCoy (@ChrisYMcCoy) September 14, 2016

Admittedly, I am not up to speed on what is fashionable among white supremecists. But this is the first I’ve heard of what is commonly referred to as the “Betsy Ross flag” being adopted by the racists. If they did, they’re almost as dumb as the school authorities.

The army that fought under that flag was integrated – freedmen and freed slaves made up about one quarter of the Continental Army, according to some sources. Others put the number at about 9,000 blacks fighting for the Continentals, state militias, and in the American navy.

The army was not integrated again until after World War II, but many black regiments fought during the Civil War and the Spanish American War.

The patriots accepted just about anyone who wanted to fight for them. How this translates into “exclusion and hate” is a mystery.

I strongly suspect that the Trump sign had far more to do with this “apology” than the flag.

At first, Forest Hills’s Behm told MLive that the Forest Hills students were participating in a “red, white and blue” theme night. “The theme for each game changes, but students have generally had the ‘red, white and blue’ theme each year around the Sept. 11 anniversary,” MLive reported.

Did you know that it was actually Mr. Obama who first told us he was Kenyan?
I am happy that this birther movement has finally passed away. I never bought into it, and I felt that it gave Democrat-friendly reporters something else to ask the GOP about.

After all, it’s better to ask about birthers and about David Duke – a man, by the way, whose name I’ve never heard mentioned in countless of GOP meetings. This is certainly a lot better than to ask about black youth unemployment, the lousy inner-city public schools that a lot of Democrat leaders like the Obamas and Clintons do not send their kids to, the total and complete mess in the Middle East, and a GDP that has not been anywhere near 3% since President Obama came into office.

So goodbye, birthers! At the same time, let’s remember a couple of things about this birther movement that are not often mentioned in the media in the tank for Hillary Clinton.

First, it was actually Mr. Obama who told us he was Kenyan. It happened when his literary agent said so. Later it was corrected, as I understand. Did Mr. Obama know that? Was it a mistake? Maybe so.

Let me add this: I am not a famous author like Mr. Obama, but I would have lost a lot of credibility if someone had mentioned in a press release that I was born in Sweden and then wrote a story about a Cuban kid going to Wisconsin. I would have gone out of my way to correct the mistake. Obama didn’t, and that’s weird. Maybe he was just too busy being a community organizer in Chicago!

Second, it was the Clinton ’08 team that put this whole issue on the front pages. Patti Doyle of Clinton ’08 admitted that it was the work of a “rogue” staffer. I guess someone in the Clinton ’08 staff wanted to start a rumor that Mr. Obama is not American. Imagine that! How deplorable! Then Sid Blumenthal got into the act, as he always does when the Clintons need an assassin.

So goodbye, birther movement. Now maybe the media will finally start talking about issues and stop asking about David Duke!

The world of fashion means little to me. But the steady encroachment of Islamic norms in our culture does. It seems no place is safe from sharia’s creep into every aspect of our society. Most recently it popped up on the fashion runway when Indonesian Muslima Anniesa Hasibuan had her clothing designs featured at New York’s Fashion Week.

(Hasibaun swaddled in high-end Muslima attire.)

All the models wore hijabs as they strode the catwalk.

Here’s one model being readied for her hijab. Oh, it’s so exciting! (sarc off)

A hijab is not a fashion statement. It’s not an accessory like a hat or a scarf. It’s a statement about Islam and sharia. These models (none of whom, I speculate, is Muslim) had no business wearing hijabs. In so doing, they normalized them and made them seem innocuous when they’re anything but. What next? Will they have to recite the shahada before strutting their stuff on the runway? (See here for an excellent discussion of what a hijab means, presented by Bill Warner.)

As for the audience at fashion show, after the sharia-on-the-runway display, they went wild with excitement. CNN reports:

The show concluded with a standing ovation from audience members.

Lori Riviere, the press manager for the event, said: “I have been doing this for a really long time and I have never seen a standing ovation at the end of a show. We all had goose bumps.”

Why a standing ovation? Oh, that’s right. That’s what dhimmis do. Muslims are a special class as Islamophilia spreads like wildfire across the West.

Meanwhile, no event like this would be complete without the now predictable reference to “making history,” as reported in Teen Vogue:

A designer just made history at NYFW in the most inclusive and inspiring way. Designer Anniesa Hasibuan marched an army of gorgeous girls down the catwalk, all in full hijab. While the collection boasted intricately embroidered gowns, metallic brocade tops, and lust-worthy jewelry, it was the headwear that stole the show.

Yeah, you heard that right: “teen.” Let’s get our girls ready to don their hijabs and brainwash them to perceive Islamic garb as normal and not indicative of anything problematic.

Teen Vogue wasn’t the only place to breathlessly push the “historic” hype. CNN, the BBC, and other media outlets were all on board (here, here, and here).

I’ll tell you what would be historic at this point. Let’s stop embracing all things Islamic. Let’s stop going to bat for Islam. Let’s stop lying and try speaking the truth about Islamic law and how Islamic cultural norms run counter to American values.

Let’s stop legitimizing, glamorizing, and elevating Islamic expression in the West. Let’s stop buying into the meme that Islam is not at all different from any other religion. Let’s stop peddling the lie that Muslims are victims and that the slightest of slight accomplishments (even faux ones like Clock Boy’s non-invention) must be met with gushing recognition and praise.

Here’s a novel idea: let’s stand for America and American values and let those who embrace values diametrically opposed to our own live elsewhere instead of infiltrating and colonizing the greatest nation that ever was – a nation that will fail to be if we continue down this insane path, from our aversion to naming the enemy to models on NYC runways wrapped up in hijabs and everything in between.

American universities have crossed a new threshold in the progressive war on independent thought: Clark University has told its students that “showing surprise” can now constitute an act of aggression against another student.

Last week, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen against Subtle Insults.” It opens by recounting a question-and-answer session with Clark’s microaggressions czar, chief diversity officer Sheree Marlowe. A student — who begins by saying she’s “really scared to ask this” — asks Miss Marlowe if, when she’s in her car, or with a group of white friends, its “okay” to sing along with music that uses the “N word.”

Miss Marlowe’s answer, says the New York Times, is an “unequivocal ‘no.’”

Also verboten: asking Asians students whom “you don’t know” for help with math homework; asking a black student if he plays basketball; asking a student whose race you’re unsure of about his race. This is all pretty standard stuff on the modern campus. But Clark has entered new territory by expanding the category of forbidden aggressions to include thought crimes: “Showing surprise when a ‘feminine’ woman says she is a lesbian” is, according to Clark, an aggressive act.

There’s a famous scene in Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus Pulp Fiction in which two characters are getting to know each other:

“Actually, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you about, but you seem like a nice person, and I didn’t want to offend you,” says Vincent Vega to his boss’s new wife, Mia.

“Oh,” says Mia, “this doesn’t sound like mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat. This sounds like you actually have something to say.”

“Only if you promise not to get offended,” says Vega.

New York (CNN)An explosion ripped through the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City Saturday night injuring dozens and a second device with wiring was found blocks away, authorities say.
Police officers and federal agents were scouring the streets with flashlights, robots and dogs to ensure there were no other devices in the area.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters early indications are that the explosion at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan that injured 29 “was an intentional act.” Investigators believe the blast was caused by an explosive device in or near a dumpster, a law enforcement source told CNN.
Police have video from businesses on the street where the explosion occurred, which could yield key details about the hours before the attack. Investigators are looking at surveillance video appearing to show a person near where the explosion at the 23rd street location occurred, according to a local and federal law enforcement official. Investigators are trying to determine if that individual is connected to the explosion.
De Blasio says “there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection” and there is no “credible and specific threat” to New York City. Police have increased security across the five boroughs as
Ambulances arriving at some local hospitals were being checked by armed guards.
24 people were taken to the hospital after the explosion, but “none of those injured are likely to die,” the mayor says.
De Blasio says they also believe there is no specific connection to an earlier incident in New Jersey, where an explosion went off in a garbage can on the route of a Marine Corps charity run.
A second device blocks away New York explosion leaves dozens injured in Chelsea – CNN.com
A device at a second location in Chelsea appears to be a pressure cooker, according to multiple local and federal law enforcement officials.
As first responders converged on the explosion site and began blocking off streets in the Chelsea neighborhood, attention soon turned to a second device.
Blocks away from the first explosion, what appears to be a pressure cooker with dark colored wiring coming out of the top center of the device was found, according to multiple local and federal law enforcement officials.
The device is connected by silver duct tape to a small dark colored device attached to the outside of the pressure cooker, according to multiple local and federal law enforcement officials.
None of the officials would say at this point what was inside the pressure cooker.
CNN has viewed an image of the device verifying the description.
Some residents in the area say they were told to stay away from windows when police were searching the area.
Police combed the second location with flashlights, looking under cars, looking in trash cans and looking in doorways, CNN’s Richard Quest reports.

Dr. Finlay is a microbiologist specializing in bacterial infections and the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Arrieta is an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Calgary. This essay is adapted from their new book, “Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child From an Oversanitized World,” published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Our friend Julia moved to a small free-range pig and poultry farm when her first child, Jedd, was a preschooler. When her second baby was born, she would strap him on her back every morning so that she could go to the chicken coop to pick up eggs. Jedd would chase and ride the chickens—and sometimes taste their feed and touch the fresh eggs. A couple of times, she even caught him chewing on something he had picked up from the ground.

At first, all of this caused Julia to freak out. But once she realized that Jedd wasn’t getting sick from these encounters with the chickens, she relaxed a bit. Her second child, Jacob, soon followed suit and never hesitated to get dirty on the farm. She once found him knee-deep in a cesspool of pig waste. Her early worries that her children were going to contract diseases from all this messiness dissipated, and she was pleased to see that they remained healthy.

Was Julia being an irresponsible parent—or might we all have something to learn from her example?

For most of the past century, we have considered microbes bad news, and for good reason: They cause disease, pandemics and death. Most human communities have experienced the benefits of medical advances like antibiotics, vaccines and sterilization, which have radically reduced the number and severity of infections that we suffer throughout life. Dying from a microbial infection is now a very rare event in the Western world, and, in the U.S., lifespans have increased by some 30 years since 1915—in large part because of success against infectious diseases.

Unfortunately, this progress has come with a price, as news reports have been telling us for some years now. Our anti-microbe mission has been accompanied, in industrialized countries, by an explosion in the prevalence of chronic noninfectious diseases and disorders. Diabetes, allergies, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases, autism, obesity and certain types of cancer are at an all-time high. The incidence of some of these disorders is doubling every 10 years, and they are starting to appear sooner in life, often in childhood.

All of these diseases have a genetic component, but their alarming growth cannot be explained by genetics alone. Recent studies find a direct link between the presence and absence of certain bacteria and all of the chronic diseases mentioned above. It turns out that the microbes within us are much more than quiet residents; they are an inherent part of our physiology, and altering them leads to disease.

Our own 2015 study (published in the journal Science Translational Medicine) found, for example, that 3-month-olds who had four particular microbes in their feces were much less likely to get asthma later in life. When those four microbes were introduced into mice, they protected against experimentally induced asthma, showing for the first time that alterations in gut microbes can drive the development of the disease. Lab experiments also have found that obese mice lose weight when they get a transfer of gut microbes from lean mice (and the reverse holds true as well, with lean mice growing fat after a transfer from obese mice).

The practical upshot of all this research is clear: Our health depends to a large degree on maintaining a robust and diverse community of microorganisms in our bodies—and establishing good gut-health as children is especially important.
During the first few months of life, the microbe community in our bodies is considerably less established and stable than later in life. Any drastic changes to it have a much higher chance of permanently altering our microbiota (as specialists call this world of tiny organisms within us) and our long-term health.

From the moment we are born, we begin getting colonized by bacteria, which kick-start a series of fundamental biological processes, including the development of our immune system. Before birth, the lining of our gut is full of immature immune cells. When bacteria move in, the immune cells react to them, changing and multiplying. They even move to other parts of the body to train other cells with the information they have acquired from these intruders. If deprived of this interaction, the immune system remains sloppy and immature, unable to fight off diseases properly.
Never before in human history have babies and children grown up so cleanly.

Scientists haven’t figured out exactly how microbes do this at the molecular level, but we do know that most bacteria will teach these immune cells to tolerate them, whereas some bacteria—the pathogens that cause diseases—prompt strong resistance. The result is to make the intestine a relatively controlled and harmonious place.

Another fundamental function of microbes is to aid in the regulation of our metabolism. Like other animals, humans obtain energy from food that is digested and absorbed in the intestines. Besides helping us digest certain foods that the intestines can’t handle on their own, bacteria produce compounds that help to define how we use or store energy in our bodies. New research also shows that our microbiota plays an important role in neurological development and even in the health of our blood vessels.

Such discoveries have led scientists to call our microbiota a “new organ,” perhaps the last human organ to be discovered by modern medicine. Most of this knowledge is still relatively new and many pieces of the puzzle remain unsolved, but protecting the initial developmental stages of our microbiota clearly has a significant impact on our health.

Inflammatory diseases (such as asthma, allergies and inflammatory bowel disease) and metabolic diseases (such as obesity and diabetes) are characterized by alterations in our immune system and our metabolic regulation. Knowing what we do now about the role of the microbiota, it is not surprising that these diseases are being diagnosed in more children. They are, to a great extent, a consequence of relatively recent changes in our lifestyle—modern diet, oversanitization, excessive use of antibiotics—that have altered the specific microbes that affect our metabolism early on. We urgently need to find ways to modify our behavior so that our microbes can function properly.

Never before in human history have babies and children grown up so cleanly, and our diets have lost many of the elements most crucial to the health of our guts. We have become very bad hosts to our microbes.

“Cultural Appropriation” is a common term among intellectuals–and a political strategy used by ethnic- and racial-identity groups on the left. It deserves to be understood so it can be called-out as a political strategy that undermines the essential commonality and cross-borrowings of American culture. Ours is a culture that, at its best, incorporates, borrows, and transforms from the multiple groups within it. That’s why tacos and pizzas are now regular features of American food.

In ZipDialog’s Daily Roundup of News Beyond the Headlines, I featured a fiction writer Lionel Shriver, who shreds the academic conceit of “cultural appropriation” and the “clamorous world of identity politics” which gave birth to it. Shriver’s essay ends with her declaration, “The last thing we fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to us.”

The issue is so central to identity politics, though, it deserves a separate post to explain what “cultural appropriation” is and how it works.standard-shaming-strategy-for-cultural-appropriation

You are classified as a member of a group, say, transgender, Mexican-American, or fat. Your group membership should then dominate your self-conception, at least politically.
Your group deems itself oppressed, or rather its most vocal, politicized members say the group and all of its members are. They use this group identity and its oppressed status as tools for political mobilization. The key is for most members of the group to accept this putative group identity and its oppressed status as dominant (indeed, unquestioned) characteristics of their personal identity.
Having organized and mobilized the oppressed group, you identify the oppressors who are responsible for all the group’s misfortunes and attack them. Oppressors can only attain absolution (the secular equivalent of salvation) by supporting the goals and actions of the oppressed group. Those goals and actions should never be questioned by the oppressor group or reshaped by them.west-side-story
A key element of your attack: Only your own group has the moral right to depict its own experiences, to write about them, paint them, or use their music. All others are shamed if they try to do so, especially anyone deemed to be from the “oppressor class.” Those people are “appropriating your culture.” Shame on them.

New video has surfaced from last fall showing a group of students yelling at Nicholas Christakis, the former master of Yale University’s Silliman College, accusing him of promoting violence because he didn’t support one of their social-justice causes.

In case you’re not familiar with Christakis, the story goes like this: Last fall, his wife sent out an e-mail criticizing Yale for telling students not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes because she didn’t think it was the administration’s job to tell students what to wear, and then Christakis agreed with her and refused to apologize. The anger and protests that ensued over it eventually resulted in both of them having to resign last spring.

Immediately after the controversy, video surfaced of a student screaming in Christakis’s face that he should be fired. That was bad enough, but the newly publicized videos show that the hysteria went way, way beyond that.

The things that these videos show are beyond parody: One student says the real reason he didn’t remember her name was because he’s a racist. Another student compares the pain she endured from his supporting his wife on that issue to getting a soccer ball kicked in your face and having your nose broken.

Throughout, Christakis is clearly trying to remain calm. He says things like “I’m doing my best,” “One of my limitations as a person which I always had was I wasn’t very good with memorizing names,” “That’s a good argument,” and “I’d like to apologize for having hurt your feelings.”

Their response? They insist his difficulty with names is a personal, racial issue. They gang up on him, snapping and laughing and shouting over him as he tries to speak, and accuse him of lying when he tries to make amends.