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Archive Listing
June 18, 2006 - June 11, 2006

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

SCOOPING DRUDGE:
Michael Jackson's
Extreme Makeover

A new look for the King of Pop.

AN XOFF NEWS 'XCLUSIVE'. Reliable unnamed sources have informed InstaPunk's XOFF News Team that one week from today, Matt Drudge will be breaking the most shocking story yet about the final days of the Jackson trial:

The Drudge Report has just learned that in the frantic final days of jury deliberation, the Jackson camp was so alarmed about the prospect of a guilty verdict that the decision was taken to prepare the troubled singer for a term in prison. The strategy? Another round of plastic surgery, the most extensive yet undertaken by the former King of Pop.

The much publicized trips to the hospital in the week prior to the verdict were an elaborate deception, during which Michael Jackson was actually admitted to the hospital for surgery to give him the likeness of the late Charles "Sonny" Liston. A Jackson spokesman said privately that the intention was to enable the singer to survive the physical confrontations of life in a penitentiary.

The spokesman said, "Let's face it. A face that could scare the then Cassius Clay could probably still scare the most dangerous brutes in the joint. At least, that was the hope."

The person who returned from the hospital to Neverland and subsequently attended the reading of the verdict was an impostor, reportedly a young Greek woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jackson despite being 25 pounds thinner. Her silence before and after the reading of the verdict was necessary to conceal the fact that her voice is considerably lower than Jackson's.

In an ironic turn, the surgery was completed just prior to the delivery of the verdict, and the Jackson spokesman cited above says that the full head and body makeover will now be spun as a measure to prevent small boys from being so overwhelmingly attracted to the singer in future.

"I've seen him since they took the bandages off," said the spokesperson, "and believe me, he'll scare the pants off little kids from now on. Well, maybe I didn't word that exactly right, but you know what I mean..."

No word yet on how Michael Jackson feels about the result of what in retrospect was unnecessary surgery, but in the days since the end of the trial he has already begun work on a new album, tentatively titled "Git Down with the Godfather of Pop," from which we've been able to acquire the following brief clip: CLICK HERE

The XOFF News Team will continue to beg, borrow, and steal whatever we can from the Drudge Report, in accordance with the highest standards of journalism, as always, to keep our audience up to date on the vilest gossip we can pass off as news. Stay tuned.

Monday, June 13, 2005

Ungrateful Followers -- Part III -- Readers Write
Before you write, keep up with our helpful hints for readers writing. Here, we discussed the gradations that can be experienced by combatants. And, here we discussed the necessity of the use of a dictionary and other helps which could be consulted when posting a comment. But, the beat-all was pointed out here.

You cannot use the phrase whatever to support your position. What does it mean? Why write anything if that is all you've got? Well, that is what our reader, Mike, had to say to a thoughtful response posted by InstaPunk. Take a look at the comments section for the reparations article. We're not joking. Right there at the top, Mike says, ":D Whatever." Too much and too funny.

Write with caution.

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Afleet Alex puts the hammer down.

Zoom zoom zoom.

PSAYINGS.5Q.25. What kind of a horse is this? If you ever had any questions about it -- which we never did -- they're answered now:

NEW YORK (AP) - This ride was as smooth and impressive as his Preakness win was harrowing.

Scattering rivals with a stunning move on the far turn, Afleet Alex rolled to a seven-length victory in Saturday's Belmont Stakes, the last and longest of the Triple Crown legs.

Jockey Jeremy Rose turned him loose on the turn for home and Afleet Alex responded with locomotive-like power to blow away Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo and nine helpless rivals.

"He's a beast, he's a freak of nature, he's made out of steel," Rose said. "He's the best three-year-old in the country."

There will be those who continue to regret that the Churchill Downs stewards decided to frame this year's Kentucky Derby as a wild west stampede rather than a horse race, but in retrospect the Triple Crown that wasn't seems more powerfully evocative under the circumstances than a perfect threefold victory would have been. Alex's namesake knew more than most of us ever want to know about loss -- loss unfair, agonizing, and permanent --� but her memory is full of light because she overcame loss to create an unexpected legacy of hope. And so, too, with Afleet Alex, the superhorse. Somehow, his exorbitant determination and brilliance in the wake of defeat lend a unique glow to his mere Double Crown that make it shine brighter than a one-two-three statistic. He has become instead a story that people will tell and retell with so much enduring emotion that they will exalt him, in the end, to the stuff of myth. A Triple Crown is a pretty thing, but the legend of Afleet Alex will be a thing of beauty.

Congratulations to this marvelous horse, his jockey, his owners, and the people of the Delaware Valley. (Congrats, too, to the NY Times, which published a stunning series of pictures about the Belmont. Take a look at both the article and the 'slide show.'.)

The last laugh is the best laugh.

We have one more idea to share. How about a match race between Afleet Alex and Smarty Jones? It would be a local affair, just for fans in the Philadelphia-Delaware Valley region. No one else need come. The track has to be Delaware Park, and for once it would be filled with the kinds of sports aficionados our area is known for -- great big half-naked fat guys wearing funny things on their heads and screaming continuously and unintelligibly. Rude signs on bedsheets, booing, and jumbo beers are all allowed, of course, if not actively encouraged, because this time Philadelphia can't possibly lose, and both horses will always be winners, no matter what happens between them. Gate receipts could be donated to the Lemonade Fund.

And in tribute to our reputation as the most impudently ungrateful sports fans in America, we'd call the event SMARTY VS ALEX. Admit it. It's perfect.

Smarty vs. Alex
A match made in heavenPhiladelphia.

Friday, June 10, 2005

The 3rd Rail of Racial Politics

Images of� Slavery: whip scars (left) and crucifixion scars (right).

IT'S TIME. In yesterday's Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby reported the following about a major U.S. bank:

AS SOON as he learned the ugly truth, the chairman of financial-services giant Wachovia Corp. issued a remorseful nostra culpa. ''We are deeply saddened by these findings," Ken Thompson said last week. ''I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans." Wachovia acknowledged that it ''cannot change the past or atone for the harm that was done." But it promised to make amends by subsidizing the work of organizations involved in ''furthering awareness and education of African-American history."

It's not hard to guess the subject of all this remorse: slavery. Wachovia must somehow be implicated in the American slave trade of the 19th century. Here's how:

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, and Wachovia wasn't founded until 1879. The slaves for which Thompson was so apologetic were owned decades before the Civil War, when slavery was still lawful throughout the South. They were owned not by Wachovia but by the Bank of Charleston and the Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. -- two of the approximately 400 financial institutions dating back to 1781 that over the centuries merged with or were acquired by other institutions that eventually became part of the conglomerate known today as Wachovia.

In other words, Thompson's apology was for something Wachovia didn't do, in an era when it didn't exist, under laws it didn't break. And as an act of contrition for this wrong it never committed, it can now expect to pay millions of dollars to activists for a wrong they never suffered.

Jacoby's point in telling us all this is to highlight a legal fad which began in the City of Chicago and which has since spread to Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia; the operative mechanism is an ordinance requiring all bidders for city business to disclose any links between their institutions and the conduct of slavery in the pre-Civil War United States. The purpose is to build a documentable legal basis for the exactment of reparations from businesses which were in any way involved in slavery when it was legal. Jacoby correctly points out that these kinds of legal antics are only the hors d'oeuvres of an anticipated feast backed by what may prove to be an inexhaustible appetite:

If Thompson thought he would put the slavery issue to rest by apologizing abjectly and promising to put even more money into ''diversity" and ''organizations that support African-Americans," he was mistaken. No sooner had he issued his statement than it was dismissed as insufficient. ''Wachovia can and must do more," declared the head of one advocacy group in the Raleigh News & Observer. ''It . . . must reinvest in the communities and the people who have been wronged." Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, a key reparations strategist, warned Wachovia that if it doesn't ''provide comfort to the descendants of slaves," this issue ''will haunt them for a long time."

Jacoby concludes by suggesting that reparations are a Pandora's Box which will do little good to open and may do much harm, including the exacerbation of national wounds that should be permitted to heal:

America long ago paid the price for slavery: a horrific Civil War that killed 620,000 soldiers, more than half of them from the North. It is as vile to insist that white Americans today owe a debt for slavery as it would be to insist that black Americans owe a debt for freedom. What the reparations extremists are demanding would make a mockery of historical truth and inflame racial strife. Their cynicism is toxic, and corporate America had better find the courage to say so. [emphasis added]

His article is worth reading in full (registration required), but his appeal to reason, forgiveness, and institutional guts seems unlikely to stem the tide that is now building to flood force. Therefore, I am going to take the argument precisely in the direction decried by the sentence boldfaced above -- not for the purpose of transforming the descendants of slaves into debtors, but to illuminate the only rational basis on which reparations could be calculated in dollars and cents. I know that it's risky to apply cold logic to an issue so fueled by emotion, but I ask readers to follow my logic to its conclusion before exploding in righteous fury.

The first step is to acknowledge that any claim of reparations pursued through the courts now is on behalf of people who have not themselves been slaves. The specific pain and suffering illustrated by the photograph(s) above was committed by people who are now dead against victims who are now dead. All possibility of reparations as a moral expiation of guilt is moot because all parties to the immoral� acts involved have been deceased for about a century. For this reason, the question of what reparations might be owed to the descendants of slaves must be a purely financial one, computed in terms of opportunity cost; that is, what financial losses are still being experienced by African-Americans that they wouldn't be experiencing if slavery had never existed in this country.

It is easy to see that the only valid comparisons we can make in this regard are between contemporary African-Americans and contemporary sub-Saharan Africans. The latter are the control population -- that population which was NOT captured, chained, sold to slave traders, and carried to American states for resale to slave owners. It is equally easy to see that the only statistic which matters is the lifetime financial expectations of African-Americans versus those of sub-Saharan Africans.

Lifetime financial expectations can be estimated based on two variables: per capita income and years of life expectancy. A contemporary African-American must accept the premise that without slavery in the U.S., his lifetime financial expectations would be those of an average contemporary sub-Saharan African, which can be calculated according to the following formula: Number of years of life expectancy multiplied by average annual per capita income.

Granted, these numbers are hard to acquire with a high degree of accuracy, but we can make approximate estimates based on surveys and studies which have been performed in recent years. For example, with respect to life expectancy, a 2000 report from the World Health Organization provides a worldwide summary, including this:

All of the bottom 10 countries were in sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV-AIDS epidemic is rampant. In ascending order... those countries were Sierra Leona, 25.9 years of healthy life for babies born in 1999; Niger, 29.1; Malawi, 29.4; Zambia, 30.3; Botswana, 32.3; Uganda, 32.7; Rwanda, 32.8; Zimbabwe, 32.9; Mali, 33.1; and Ethiopia, 33.5.

The overall life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has dropped precipitously over the past 10 years, mostly because of the AIDS epidemic, the WHO says. Life expectancy dropped for female babies from 51.1 years to 46.3 years. For males, the level dropped from 47.3 years to 44.8 years.

To be conservative, we should round the figure upward; call it 50 years, on average. And what of per capita income? The figures that are available to us come from sources like the World Bank. A written summary of the year 2003 states:

In marked contrast to East and South Asia, poverty actually rose in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1981, a 13-percent contraction in GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa resulted in a near-doubling of the number of people living on less than $1 a day, from 164 million to 314 million, a rise from 42 to 47 percent of the region's population.

Close to half of sub-Saharan Africans make less than $365 per year. For them, lifetime financial expectations are less than $18,250. Obviously, the 53 percent who make more than that may make considerably more than that, and fortunately the World Bank does break out figures for individual countries. Here's a link to a spreadsheet that captures the World Bank figures for Sub-Saharan African nations (2003) and also captures population data from another source. The result is a computation of per capita income for all of Sub-Saharan Africa: $509.

This gives us an easy way for anyone to guesstimate his lifetime financial expectations if he happened to live in Sub-Saharan Africa. We can call it the "50-500 Formula": (50 years ) x ($500) = $25,000.

If this number turns out to be greater than the lifetime financial expectations of an average African-American, the descendants of American slaves can sue for the difference.

What do we know about per-capita income for African Americans? Here's an indication, drawn from a Tennessee source that cites national census data:

African-Americans moved closer to per capita income parity between 2000 and 2002. In the former year, African-American real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income was $15,451. Although that number decreased $10 over the following two years to $15,441, overall per capita income fell even more, declining $541. As a result, African-American per capita income increased from 66.2 percent of per capita income for the general population in 2000 to 67.7 percent in 2002.

Oops. It begins to look as if any African-American who lives at least two years is going to enjoy a higher lifetime income than a Sub-Saharan African. What can we determine about life expectancy?

Racial disparities in life expectancy have declined since 1960. However, the pace of the decline is slower than what occurred in earlier years. For both blacks and whites, improvements in the life expectancy are relatively very small. From 1960 to 1990 the life expectancy for whites increased from 70.6 to 76.1 years, and for blacks the life expectancy increased from 63.2 to 69.1 years.

Oops again. Using round numbers, we can easily calculate an average lifetime financial expectation for African-Americans: (70 years) x ($15,000) = $1,050,000. Approximately $1 million.

Finally, we can compute our average per capita reparations owed to African-Americans: $25,000 minus $1,000,000 = ($975,000). Of course, the brackets and red type indicate that it's a negative number, meaning no reparations owed. End of legal case. Period.

I am not going to argue that African-Americans should feel grateful about the enslavement of their ancestors, but I will propose that our 30 million African-Americans acknowledge they are far better off in America than their 600 million ancestral cousins are in Africa, living on average 20 years longer and making approximately 40 times as much money. In addition, they no longer face the prospect of becoming enslaved, which many Africans cannot say. Here's an excerpt from an overview on modern slavery.

When a ship carrying hundreds of people was recently turned away from Benin, Africa, officials suspected that the children on board were human slaves. The incident once again brought attention to the problem of slavery. At this moment, millions of men, women, and children�roughly twice the population of Rhode Island�are being held against their will as modern-day slaves.

Sometimes referred to as bonded laborers (because of the debts owed their masters), public perception of modern slavery is often confused with reports of workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working conditions. However, modern-day slaves differ from these workers because they are actually held in physical bondage (they are shackled, held at gunpoint, etc.)...

The slave trade in Africa was officially banned in the early 1880s, but forced labor continues to be practiced in West and Central Africa today. UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from this region are sold into slavery each year. Many of these children are from Benin and Togo, and are sold into the domestic, agricultural, and sex industries of wealthier, neighboring countries such as Nigeria and Gabon....

The enslavement of the Dinkas in southern Sudan may be the most horrific and well-known example of contemporary slavery. According to 1993 U.S. State Department estimates, up to 90,000 blacks are owned by North African Arabs, and often sold as property in a thriving slave trade for as little as $15 per human being.

Animist tribes in southern Sudan are frequently invaded by Arab militias from the North, who kill the men and enslave the women and children. The Arabs consider it a traditional right to enslave southerners, and to own chattel slaves (slaves owned as personal property).

Physical mutilation is practiced upon these slaves not only to prevent escape, but to enforce the owners' ideologies. According to an ASI report: "Kon, a thirteen-year-old Dinka boy, was abducted by Arab nomads and taken to a merchant's house. There he found several Dinka men hobbling, their Achilles tendons cut because they refused to become Muslims. Threatened with the same treatment the boy converted."

In point of fact, only one of the two photos at the beginning of this article is of an American slave. The photo on the right is only a few years old. It shows the legs of a boy named Joseph who was crucified by his slavemaster in the Sudan.

The United States of America indisputably has slavery as a part of its past. But if we can seriously be entreated today to wipe out all the current debts owed by the corrupt and frequently vicious governments of Africa, then perhaps African-Americans can finally forgive the debts owed by long dead white men to their long dead ancestors. Sound reasonable?

I'm guessing it won't sound reasonable to a lot of you. I await the deluge.

Modern slaves in the Sudan

UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle Malkin -- welcome to MichelleMalkin.com visitors. Feel free to take a look around.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Hot off the wire!

BREAKING NEWS. Here are the people and places that make up the screaming headlines in today's state-of-the-art news media. We'd like to talk about more important topics, but sometimes you have to give the audience what it clamors for. So here are some stories we always thought we'd have the guts to ignore.

Michael Jackson's Legal Fix. It's the biggest gamble of his career, and according to the pundits he is in a "dicey situation." Well, yeah.

Aruba Looking for Outside Help. They just don't have the resources to work through normal channels. Word is, they're breaking new ground in seeking "how best to implement" their response to the situation.

Russell Crowe Assault. This time, the Australian actor may have bitten off more than he can chew. Here's the lowdown on what one master of understatement calls "a bad use of celebrity."

Brad Pitt Acting Sleazy. Is he really as scuzzy as some people think he is? The gossip mill is working at full tilt.

Hillary Clinton Ups the Ante Against Republicans. The Senator from New York is apparently pulling out all the stops against her political foes if you can believe this report from San Francisco.

Not Much Miami Heat. A terribly disappointing loss puts Miami's dreams on ice for now.

Impressed? We can play the tabloid game pretty darn well when we want to.

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