This story is fairly typical of modern life, but what makes it special is the phrase “in his Equal Employment Opportunity office at Police Headquarters.”

Jock itch’ cop in gay flap quits

BY JOHN MARZULLI
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Thursday, October 23rd 2008, 10:05 AM

A gay NYPD lieutenant found guilty of sexually harassing two sergeants retired Wednesday, but vowed to keep fighting to clear his name.

Lt. Kieran Crowe, a 23-year-veteran, was suspended 60 days without pay for rubbing his crotch, simulating masturbation and wiggling his tongue at the male sergeants in his Equal Employment Opportunity office at Police Headquarters.

Crowe admitted at his department hearing that he may have scratched his groin area, but said it was because he suffered from jock itch.[More]

Crowe’s Lawyer, Rae Koshetz is appealing the departmental decision.

“Does it make sense that this gentle, homosexual man would seek to coerce and seduce two large, burly heterosexuals?” Koshetz said.

That would be stereotyping, Ms. Koshetz. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

A new documentary, A Singing Revolution, has been released, which tells the story of how Estonians stood strong against the Soviet bear through their shared culture, expressed through singing.

This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. “This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression,” says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics. [...]

The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.
[How Estonians sang their way to freedom, Christian Science Monitor, Oct 24, 2008]

See also a Youtube interview with the film’s director for historical details.

The trailer below is filled with its stunning choral music. The final line of the voiceover is “This is the story of how culture saved a nation.”

Indeed, a united culture is very powerful, a basic knowledge about human nature that has been eroded by the daily multiculturalist propaganda from the liberal press. Hopefully a future immigration historian will not write “This is the story of how the false ideology of multiculturalism destroyed the American nation.”

The middle column of this graph lifted from Dr. Housing Bubble is the interesting one — it shows by year what percentage of first-time home buyers in California got a mortgage with no down payment.

In the last three years of the Clinton Administration, it was only about 7%. In 2002, Bush started making speeches denouncing down payments as the primary barrier to minority home ownership. By 2003, 20% were getting their first house with zero money down. By 2006 it was 41%. Think about the quality of debtor who was left to buy his first home in 2006 with no money down after two years in which one-third of all home purchases were no money down. Does the term “scraping the bottom of the barrel” come to mind?

Was it different in the rest of the country? I don’t know, but California is more or less what mattered. Remember the old John Prine song about a smack addict, “Daddy Has a Hole in His Arm Where All the Money Goes”? Well, California is the hole where all (or about half) of the defaulted mortgage money went. Similarly, if Bush’s plan to add 5.5 million minority homeowners by 2010 was going to happen, it had to happen most of all in California, which has 20 million minority residents.

If Bush was a cynical bastard like Richard Nixon, he could have told his people right after he got re-elected in late 2004 to turn off the money machine. Think of how much less damage there would have been without all the idiotic loans of 2005-2007. But, no, Bush drank the Kool-Aid. No soft bigotry of low expectations for him!

Let’s take a fond look back at one of Alan Greenspan’s greatest hits:

Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
Consumer Finance
At the Federal Reserve System’s Fourth Annual Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, D.C.
April 8, 2005 [i.e., during the heart of the Housing Bubble]

It is a pleasure to be here today as you conclude your discussions about our dynamic consumer finance market. Our nation’s vibrant [chain-yanking ahoy!] financial services industry is remarkable in many respects, with myriad providers offering consumers a broad range of transaction and credit options. The industry is central to the functioning of our robust consumer sector. Therefore, it is essential that policymakers, regulators, bankers, researchers, and consumer groups remain fully engaged in monitoring developments in the consumer finance market and continually seek to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the financial services industry, including how well it serves lower-income and underserved consumers. ["Underserved" is a euphemism for minority.]

Evolution of the Consumer Finance Market

A brief look back at the evolution of the consumer finance market reveals that the financial services industry has long been competitive, innovative, and resilient. Especially in the past decade, technological advances have resulted in increased efficiency and scale within the financial services industry. Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. …

… For example, information processing technology has enabled creditors to achieve significant efficiencies in collecting and assimilating the data necessary to evaluate risk and make corresponding decisions about credit pricing.

With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. The widespread adoption of these models has reduced the costs of evaluating the creditworthiness of borrowers, and in competitive markets cost reductions tend to be passed through to borrowers. Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s.

For some consumers, however, this reliance on technology has been disconcerting. Credit-scoring models are complex algorithms designed to predict risk. Consumer advocates have raised concerns about the transparency and completeness of the information fit to the algorithm, as well as the rigidity of the types of data used to render credit decisions. Consumer advocates contend that the lack of flexibility in the models can result in the exclusion of some consumers, such as those with little or no credit history, or misrepresentation of the risk that they pose.

To address these concerns, some firms have worked to customize credit-scoring systems to include new data and to revalue the weight of the variables employed. Also, new organizations have emerged, developing new systems for collecting alternative data, such as rent payments and other recurring payments that will enable creditors to evaluate creditworthiness of consumers who lack experience with credit. [In other words, lower credit standards.]

Improved access to credit for consumers, and especially these more-recent developments, has had significant benefits. Unquestionably, innovation and deregulation have vastly expanded credit availability to virtually all income classes. Access to credit has enabled families to purchase homes, deal with emergencies, and obtain goods and services. Home ownership is at a record high, and the number of home mortgage loans to low- and moderate-income and minority families has risen rapidly over the past five years. Credit cards and installment loans are also available to the vast majority of households.

The more credit availability expands, however, the more important financial education becomes. In this increasingly competitive and complex financial services market, it is essential that consumers acquire the knowledge that will enable them to evaluate products and services from competing providers and determine which best meet their long- and short-term needs. Like all learning, financial education is a process that should begin at an early age and continue throughout life. This cumulative process builds the skills necessary for making critical financial decisions that affect one’s ability to attain the assets, such as education, property, and savings, that improve economic well-being.

Tom Wolfe explained the inner economic logic of an earlier social work counseling fad in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers:

Brothers from down the hall like Dudley got down to the heart of the poverty program very rapidly. It took them no time at all to see that the poverty program’s big projects, like manpower training, in which you would get some job counseling and some training so you would be able to apply for a job in the bank or on the assembly line–everybody with a brain in his head knew that this was the usual bureaucratic shuck. Eventually the government’s own statistics bore out the truth of this conclusion. The ghetto youth who completed the manpower training didn’t get any more jobs or earn any more money than the people who never took any such training at all. Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor.

Of course, things have evolved since the Great Society hey-day of job counseling. I wonder how many ACORN-style “credit counselors” decided they had to get in on this homebuying game and have since defaulted on their own mortgages?

The USA Today article Rob Sanchez linked to below includes the following story:

Danilo Danga, 33, is in his fourth year teaching special education at Baltimore’s Calverton Elementary/Middle School. He taught English and social studies in the Philippines for eight years.

At first, he says, students disrupted class and cursed at him, yelling, “Shut up, Jackie Chan!” and other taunts.

Colleagues advised him to assert himself and offer rewards for good behavior. He did. Among the rewards was Filipino chicken adobo he cooked himself.

“Each year is becoming better and better,” he says. “I’m excited to come to school every day despite all the challenges.” [Schools in need employ teachers from overseas, By Emily Bazar,USA TODAY October 22, 2008]

My first thought was “What kind of rotten little kids yell ‘Shut up, Jackie Chan!‘ at an Asian immigrant teacher?” and my second thought was “I bet I can guess!”
I always remember the article Black Racism by Ying Ma, published in  The American Enterprise, November 1998.

“During my secondary school years, racism, and then the combination of outrage and bitterness that it fosters, accompanied me home on the bus every day. My English was by now more fluent than that of those who insulted me, but most of the time I still said nothing to avoid being beaten up. In addition to everything else thrown at me, a few times a week I was the target of sexual remarks vulgar enough to make Howard Stern blush. When I did respond to the insults, I immediately faced physical threats or attacks, along with the embarrassing fact that the other “Chinamen” around me simply continued their quiet personal conversations without intervening. The reality was that those who cursed my race and ethnicity were far bigger in size than most of the Asian children who sat silently.

The racial harassment wasn’t limited to bus rides. It surfaced in my high school cafeteria, where a middle-aged Chinese vendor who spoke broken English was told by rowdy students each day at lunch time to “Hurry up, you dumb Ching!” On the sidewalks, black teenagers and adults would creep up behind 80-year-old Asians and frighten them with sing-song nonsense: “Yee-ya, Ching-chong, ah-ee, un-yahhh!” At markets and in the streets of poor black neighborhoods, Asians would be told, “Why the hell don’t you just go back to where you came from!”

And whenever you suspect that problems at a school are racial, you can look up the school on Greatschools.net, which shows that Baltimore’s Calverton Elementary/Middle School is 4% non-Hispanic white.

Students

Student Ethnicity

Source: NCES, 2005-2006 Ethnicity This School State Average Black, not Hispanic 54% 38% Hispanic 32% 8% Asian/Pacific Islander 8% 5% White, not Hispanic 4% 49% American Indian/Alaskan Native 2% <1%