"African-Americans consistently have expressed far less faith in "most people" than the white majority does. Racism, discrimination and a high rate of poverty destroy trust.

Nearly 8 in 10 African-Americans, in the 2012 survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago with principal funding from the National Science Foundation, felt that "you can't be too careful." That figure has held remarkably steady across the 25 GSS surveys since 1972.

The decline in the nation's overall trust quotient was driven by changing attitudes among whites. It's possible that people today are indeed less deserving of trust than Americans in the past, perhaps because of a decline in moral values."

Some perspective, in case anybody wants to insist on the delusion that black slaveowners, white slaves, or free blacks were some major phenomena:

"In 1860, 89 percent of the nation's African Americans were slaves,…." 

 Flash-forward, to my birth, 100 years after The Civil War (when, supposedly, all the bad stuff ended) and white society still hadn't come to it's senses - while claiming they were behaving normally. Whites still worked over-time, before "Say It Loud - I'm Black And I'm Proud!" trying to convince blacks like me we were the ones with the problem. They expect to walk away from that decades-long mindfuck, without it being mentioned, too.

You see, they want my help in claiming everything happened long ago.

And now, somehow, we're supposed to buy the story blacks should be happy and/or satisfied watching whites posing as authorities on everything - but, especially, justice, ethics and (as the divorce and adultery rate shows) morality - while openly spending the money blacks made once whites gave themselves a multi-century free ride.

Or is it that we should just take our lumps and let them go about their business? 

Either way, what a weird thing to expect us to be thankful for,...

 

While some have tried to convince me being right is a sin, Neil DeGrasse Tyson's getting away with this:

"I like—and I've worked hard at this—the ability to just speak something that is so fundamentally true that it's not subject to your opinion about what I just said."

Clearly, I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd,...

 

Knowing Adolf Hitler was a NewAge, vegetarian, occult-worshipping type, I can't grasp how - after years of kindergarten, elementary, jr. and senior high, and maybe even a college education - The Hitler Youth still grow into adulthood, hearing their master's call:

"Toxins are like cholesterol clogging an artery, except they block the path to woo-woo transcendence instead of the left atrium. Or, as Vanessa Grigoriadis puts it in New York magazine, “Food is the focus of an enormous amount of modern moralism ... One wants to be skinny because one wants to be healthy; one wants to be healthy because one wants to be good.” As religion declines among elite urbanites, a new scripture—“sprouting and enzymes and whatnot”—is swirling into the void.

The problem with this way of thinking is that food and weight are not matters of morality. Thin is not “good,” carbs are not “bad,” and in a world of actual pressing political and social ills, your dinner plate should not be the ground zero of your ethical renewal. Don’t call me evil—or “toxic”—because I’ve never quested after the liquid sublime. (Also, your breath smells like dandelion root.)

But the cleanse mentality is more than just judgmental and irritating: It’s dangerous. Making each meal a drama of discipline, deprivation, and control? Floating along on a superior high that isn’t really about how much weight you’re losing (but actually kind of is about how much weight you’re losing)? Seeking to express your achievements, be they moral, social, or financial, in the most visible terms you can manage? Does anyone else think this sounds a lot like an eating disorder?

Yep,...

 

"At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

…Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

Thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013. I understand your wanting to raise your own children as you see fit, science be damned, but you're selfishly jeopardizing more than your own children. Carry your baby around in a sling, feed her organic banana mash while you drink your ethical coffee, fine, but what gives you denialists the right to put my health at risk—to cause me to catch a debilitating, humiliating, and frightening cough that, two months after I finished my last course of antibiotics (how’s that for supporting big pharma?), still makes me convulse several times a day like some kind of tragic nineteenth-century heroine? "

“Republicans love people who have money”

“40% Of Veterans Need Food Assistance”

“'The Armstrong Lie': Don’t blame Lance, blame us

The disgraced hero remains creepy and clueless in Alex Gibney's 'The Armstrong Lie,' but we all enabled his fiction"

Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away.

H/T - Ann Althouse

Anyone who acquires the narrative of 12 Years A Slave and finds it within his shrunken heart to continue any argument for the sanctity and perfection of our Founding Fathers, for the moral wisdom of their compromised document of national ideal that begins the American experience, or for their anachronistic or historically understandable tolerance of slavery — they are arguing from a desolate, amoral corner.

If original intent included the sadism and degradation of human slavery, then original intent is a legal and moral standard that can be consigned to the ash heap of human history. Hardcore conservatives and libertarians who continue to parse the origins of the Constitutions under the guise of returning to a more perfect American union are on a fool’s journey to decay and dishonor.

A few weeks ago we published what turned out to be a controversial article, questioning the ethics of sexual relationships between yoga students and yoga teachers and presenting an alternative, yet respectful and well-argumented view on the subject.

  The feedback we received from many people in the yoga community, was to say the least, surprisingly angry, under often hateful, degrading and insulting comments, emails as well as other disrespectful and accusatory open responses published online that clearly misunderstood, in our opinion, the point being made by the author.

“If that’s what they wanted, I’d have to hold my nose, I’d have to bite my tongue and they’d probably have to hold a gun to my head, but yeah, if that’s what the citizens of the, if that’s what the constituency wants that elected me, that’s what they elected me for. That’s what a republic is about. You elected a person for your district to do your wants and wishes, not the wants and wishes of a special interest, not his own wants and wishes, yours.”