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January 21, 2010

Earthquakes Aren’t Man-made, Poverty is

The tragedy behind the tragedy in Haiti

By Selwyn Duke

Natural disasters are bad.
They’re far worse when they combine with unnatural disasters. We’re all calling
the recent Haitian earthquake devastating, but it’s more correct to say that in
Port-Au-Prince there is tremendous devastation. And there is a difference, as
more “devastating” quakes have caused less devastation in other places.

Famed
economist Walter Williams brings this to light in a recent column.
He points out that while Haiti's 7.0 quake has a death toll of more than
200,000, northern California's 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 quake and San Francisco’s
1906, 7.8 quake — which was about eight times the intensity of Haiti’s —
claimed respectively, only 63 and 3,000 lives.

Read the rest here.
January 21, 2010

Tuesday’s Savage Nation Appearance: The Quayled Lady — Why You Should Forget about Sarah Palin

https://selwynduke.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/savage-presentation-the-quayled-lady-01-19-10.mp3 The Quayled Lady: Why You Should Forget about Sarah Palin – 01/19/10
January 20, 2010

Obama’s Healthcare Discrimination: Making Some More Equal than Others

By Selwyn Duke

One thing we get with our
mother’s milk today is revulsion for what civil-rights lawyers call “invidious”
discrimination. For the civil-rights
lawyers who attained their status through the invidious discrimination known as
affirmative action, the parenthesized word means “likely to
create ill will” or “offensively or unfairly discriminating.” Now, the problem with judging invidiousness
is that it requires you know what fairness is.
For instance, it certainly creates ill will when Americans are rejected
simply because they’re too white or too male (yes, it makes sense — think San
Francisco), but the government doesn’t trouble much about that.

(more…)
January 19, 2010

What is More Troubling than Pat Robertson’s Remarks?

By Selwyn Duke

Of all the responses to the
devastation in Haiti, the most copy-worthy is televangelist Pat Robertson’s
claim that the earthquake was divine retribution. In making his case, he told a story about how
Haitian leaders long ago made a pact with Satan, promising to serve him if he
would help vanquish their French oppressors.
The Devil delivered, said Robertson, but the consequence is that the
nation has ever since been cursed, with one disaster befalling it after
another. It was reminiscent of when the
late Jerry Falwell said — and Robertson agreed — that those who have authored
America’s descent into sin were partially responsible for 9/11.

(more…)
January 17, 2010

The Quayled Lady: Why You Should Forget Sarah Palin

By Selwyn Duke

Really, there’s precious little
fairness in the world. People tend to be
slaves to emotion, and prejudices often reign supreme even (in fact,
especially) in those who rail against prejudice. This is why we’ll see millions of Americans reflexively
dismiss a politician simply because of the letter following his name; it is why
people will often oppose a position they would otherwise support simply because
it’s being advocated by someone they dislike.
Ah, that troublesome human nature.

This brings us to Sarah Palin,
the Wasilla woman often billed as the best hope of the GOP. She certainly isn’t one of those plain
vanilla characters who inspire blasé reactions, that’s for sure. It’s just so often the case that people either
love her or hate her, believe she is the cat’s meow or the pig with lipstick, a
political sensation or a puerile simpleton.
I’m in neither camp.

(more…)
January 14, 2010

Trial Begins for Woman Who Cut Baby from Womb

By Selwyn Duke

It sounds like a dark story from the days of ancient pagan rituals:
A person tears open a woman’s womb while she’s still alive and takes
her baby from it. I wrote about
such a crime in August of last year, but, tragically, it was no
isolated event. And now a different case of this kind is coming to
trial, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Forty-year-old Andrea Curry-Demus of Wilkinsburg, a Pittsburgh
suburb, wanted a baby badly. Very badly, it seems. So her hopes must
have been buttressed when a urine test showed that she might be
pregnant — yet a subsequent blood test would dash those hopes. This is
when Curry-Demus put a deadly plan into action, one that would leave a
woman dead and a baby motherless.

Read the rest here.
January 13, 2010

A Foolproof Tax Plan: So Simple Even a Caveman IRS Commissioner Could do it

What
does it tell you when even the IRS commissioner doesn’t prepare his own taxes
because the code is “complex”?

By Selwyn Duke

Given that my father had been a
WWII-era prisoner of war in Germany, no one could accuse him of not doing his
part for America. Yet he was no fan of Uncle Scam. So many times he’d passionately
say, “The government is worse than the mafia!” His point was that when you pay
protection money to the local don, no one will dare vandalize your property. But
there’s no such assurance when paying tribute to little g, a fact we were
painfully aware of living in the Bronx.

There
are few bureaucracies in America that inspire hatred — at least among that
ever-diminishing class of productive citizens — like the Internal Revenue Service.
Doing its part to mitigate materialism, it liberated enough money from our
pockets in 2009 so that we had to work until April 13 for the
government. Some call this part of the “social contract” — which, incidentally,
I don’t remember ever signing. Others call it legalized theft. Yet others call
it slavery.

Read the rest here.
January 13, 2010

The Economy is so Bad That . . . .

OK, I usually don't post emails I receive, but this one is just too good. I hope you enjoy it.

The economy is so bad that:

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

I ordered a burger at McDonald's and the kid behind the counter asked, "Can you afford fries with that?"

CEOs are now playing miniature golf.

(more…)
January 11, 2010

Bravo to Brit Hume: Why Faith is Not a Private Matter

By Selwyn Duke

Not too many things raise my
eyebrows in these days of through-the-looking-glass America, where I fully
expect up to be down, left to be right and right to be wrong. It’s not that I’m a pessimist — just a
realist. And this is why hearing mainstream-media
newsman Brit Hume recommend Christianity over Buddhism on FOX News Sunday,
well, made my eyebrows say bonjour to my hairline.

(more…)
January 8, 2010

Berkeley High Poised to Eliminate Science Classes Because They’re Too “White”

By Selwyn Duke

There are some things you just can’t make up — and many of them seem
to originate in Berkeley, California. Berkeley really is stranger than
fiction, and the latest example is a proposal to
eliminate science classes at the city’s high school because, get the
Digitalis, they’re too white.

Thomas Lifson at AmericanThinker.com treats the issue, writing:

The racial madness that has left-wing
America in its thrall finds its apogee in the Berkeley, California
public schools. Berkeley High School is now poised to eliminate science laboratory classes because "science labs were largely classes for white students." Eric Klein writes in the East Bay Express:
"The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved
recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of
teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the
structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial
achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the
state average while black and Latino students are doing worse."

Read the rest here.