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Louisiana State University has one reason to be pleased about yesterday’s 21-0 loss to Alabama in the BCS championship game — the defeat saved the school from a six million dollar outlay.
LSU football coach Les Miles made $3.75 million in salary this year, plus another $400,000 in bonuses for winning the SEC championship and qualifying for the BCS. But he missed a huge payday by losing yesterday, since his contract has a clause guaranteeing him an automatic salary hike to $1,000 more than the highest-paid public university coach in the SEC if he ever wins a national championship.
That highest paid coach happens to be Alabama’s Nick Saban, who made $4.7 million this year (plus $400,000 for beating LSU yesterday). Over the six years remaining on Miles’s contract, that bump would have worked out to exactly $5,706,000.
The LSU system raised tuition some $14 million this year, with plans for another $38 million in 2012-13. Miles’s salary hike would have amounted to $40 per student per year.
Whew.
Who died a year ago today in Tucson, in the mass shooting that nearly killed Representative Gabrielle Giffords?
A trial-level federal judge, John Roll, on the bench for twenty years. A lawyer who gave up the much higher salaries of the private sector for the rewards of doing justice every day.
A congressional staffer, Gabe Zimmerman. Not just any congressional staffer, but a director of public outreach. The guy whose job it was to meet with constituents, wrangle local issues, set up community events like the one he was attending that morning.
A nine-year-old kid, Christina Taylor Green, just elected to her lets-pretend school council. A kid who jumped at the chance to tag along when a family friend announced she was going to meet her Congresswoman.
Three older people — Dorothy Murray and Dorwan Stoddard, both 76, and Phyllis Schneck, 79. Anyone who has spent any time around local politics could tell you what they were doing there. Community events attract the elderly — folks with time to spare, opinions on issues, a sense of the importance of civic participation. Folks with a hunger to be engaged, to be involved, to listen and be heard.
These six shared something in common. They were all the kind of people who, finding themselves with some free time on a sunny Saturday morning, could think of no better way to spend it than to schlep out to a supermarket parking lot to wait on a line next to a folding table for a chance to hang out with an elected official for a few minutes.
And that’s a beautiful thing.
Ron Paul’s various publications from the 1980s and 1990s have gotten a lot of attention recently, due to various bigoted statements that appeared in their pages. But it’s not until you sit down and read the originals at length, as I’ve done over the last few days, that the full scope of their ugliness becomes apparent.
The worldview of the Ron Paul newsletters is the worldview of the late 20th century American rightwing fringe — not merely racist, but paranoid, conspiracist, sexist, anti-Jewish. It is, in short, the worldview of The Turner Diaries, the apocalyptic novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City.
The Turner Diaries, a bizarre fantasy of race war, white supremacist revolution, and nuclear holocaust, is far more extreme than the Ron Paul newsletters, but the obsessions and even the writing style of the two documents resonate powerfully with one another. The two are even weirdly contemporaneous — though The Turner Diaries were written in 1978 and revised in 1980, they are set in the years 1991-1993.
I’ve compiled twenty-five short quotes below, about half from The Turner Diaries and about half from Ron Paul’s newsletters. If any of you can identify them all correctly without cheating, I’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in town. Do your best, leave your guesses in comments, and I’ll post the answers before too long.
- A lady I know saw a black couple in the supermarket with a cute little girl, three years old or so. My friend waved to the tiny child, who scowled, stuck out her tongue, and said “I hate you, white honkey.”
- On September 1, a federal data bank for tracking health-care professionals began operating. This program is designed to monitor physicians, but it will spread to all professions and businesses.
- Our biggest difficulty is that the public sees us and everything we do only through the media.
- Washington—with its racist government, racist radio, racist ministers, racist universities, and racist attitudes–is the black New Jerusalem, so no white is supposed to question it.
- I had a chance to do some thinking on the plane from Washington. From 35,000 feet one gets a different perspective on things. Seeing all those sprawling suburbs and freeways and factories spread out below makes one realize just how big America is and what an awesomely difficult task we have undertaken.
- Perhaps the most scandalous aspect was the response by the media and the Washington politicians. They all came together as one to excuse the violence and to tell white America that it is guilty, though the guilt can be assuaged by handing over more cash. It would be reactionary, racist, and fascist, said the media, to have less welfare or tougher law enforcement.
- In January 1990, I predicted major race riots before this decade ends. I may have to move up my timetable!
- For the first time in our nation’s history, the organized forces of perversion were feted at the White House.
- All ticket counters, motels, physicians’ offices, and the like will be equipped with computer terminals linked by telephone lines to a huge national data bank and computer center.
- Most of all, though, many of them seem to be convinced that any effort at self-defense would be “racist,” and they fear being thought of as racist, even more than they fear death.
- “Let’s do a victory dance,” barked one minister, as a sea of fists gave the Communist/black power salute and the congregation shouted anti-white slogans.
- If you’re trying to convince the public that the races are really equal, how can you admit that it’s worse to be locked in a cell full of black criminals than in a cell full of white ones?
- We learned long ago not to count our enemies, only our friends.
- It’s astounding how many dark, kinky-haired Middle Easterners have invaded our country in the last decade.
- The president also promised to look the other way when the Soviets crush the Baltic states and the other captive nations in the USSR. The timetable for the planned massacre is as soon as US troops move against Iraq, and the media’s attention is riveted there. The wonders of the New World Order.
- In San Francisco the rioting was led by red-flag carrying members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. A friend of Burt’s, a jewelry store owner, had his store on Union Square looted by blacks, and when the police arrived in response to his frantic calls, their orders were not to interfere with the rioting.
- The largest blood bank in San Francisco succumbed to political pressure and holds blood drives in the Castro district, where the people give at three times the usual level. Either they are public spirited, or they are trying to poison the blood supply.
- We have to do an end-run around the controlled media and get our message onto TV ourselves.
- None of the politicians are willing to face the real issues involved here, one of which is the disastrous effect Washington’s Israel-dominated foreign policy during the last few decades has had on America’s supply of foreign oil.
- The reporter, who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist, claimed that Roony believed that blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. Roony denied making the remarks, although only in today’s crazed environment could such statements get you in trouble.
- Is this really the same race that walked on the moon and was reaching for the stars 20 years ago? How low we have been brought!
- The inability to face reality and make difficult decisions, that is the salient symptom of the liberal disease. Always trying to avoid a minor unpleasantness now, so that a major unpleasantness becomes unavoidable later.
- The streets of New York City are terror zones, and home burglaries are not even investigated unless someone is hurt or more than $10,000 of property is taken. There are a zillion well-paid police, but they are of virtually no use.
- We now know, if we did not before, that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality.
- As everyone is aware, the bands of mutants which roam the Waste remain a real threat, and it may be another century before the last of them has been eliminated.
On your mark, get set … GO!
Early last year, women’s studies professor Hugo Schwyzer disclosed on his blog that he had attempted to murder an ex-girlfriend in the course of a 1998 suicide attempt. That admission first attracted broad attention a few weeks ago, and has since sparked considerable controversy regarding Schwyzer’s position in the feminist movement.
In his 2011 account, Schwyzer said that he called a friend to warn her of his plans before he slipped into unconsciousness, describing this as the successful effort of “the small sane part of me” to ensure that help arrived in time to rescue them.
But in a 2007 blogpost, republished in 2010, Schwyzer — who at the time described the incident exclusively as a suicide attempt, and the woman as his girlfriend — made no reference to any phone call, and declared that it was only his neighbors’ noticing the smell of gas that saved their two lives.
Earlier this week Schwyzer edited the 2007 and 2010 posts to remove the reference to the neighbors and acknowledge that the attempt to kill the woman was intentional. As I write this on January 7, the original version remains in Google’s cache of the 2007 post. The relevant passage reads as follows:
My last episode of drinking and drug use ended on June 27, 1998; my body filled with massive amounts of alcohol and prescription pills, I blew out the pilot lights on the stove in my old apartment and turned on the gas, trying to kill myself. I not only nearly took my own life, I came close to accidentally taking the life of my girlfriend as well. Had the neighbors not smelled gas and called 911…
I just wanted to get that in the public record before the cache went away.
August 2, 2013 Update | Yesterday Schwyzer posted to his blog a new retelling of the story of the murder-suicide attempt — his fourth or fifth, by my count. It’s longer than the previous accounts, and intended, he says, to correct the original version, which he now describes as “sloppy” and “terrible” in the course of suggesting that it was the cause of much of his recent trouble.
I don’t, however, see much that’s new in it. The claim that the murder-suicide was thwarted by his drugged decision to call a friend is still there, as is the oddly eroticized tone. Neither does the most recent account address Schwyzer’s past refusal to understand the murder attempt as a gendered act of domestic violence. But as he describes this version as “the final record on that sad story,” I thought it would be appropriate to reflect that here.
December’s unemployment rate, announced this morning, was 7.9% for women, 8.0% for men. But it was 8.5% overall. Who’s missing?
Teenagers.
The unemployment rate for Americans aged 16 to 19 was a staggering 23.1%. For black teens it was nearly double that — 42.3%. If you were a black teenager in the US last month, and you were actively trying to work — not just hoping to work, not just willing to work, but actively searching for a job — the chances were almost 50/50 that you weren’t able to find even a part-time gig.
And you want to hear the really scary part? These numbers are an improvement. Teen unemployment has dropped almost ten percent (from 25.3% to 23.1%) since August, and black teen unemployment has fallen from 46.3% to 42.3% in the same stretch.
studentactivism.net 
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