Hermione's Transfiguration

Well, Potterheads, you've gone off the deep end again.  This time thanks to a new play.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (because JK Rowling just can't find anything else to write about) is about an adult Harry, Ron and Hermione dealing with kids and some magic stuff and something.  I have no idea really.  The wizard train left the station long ago for me, but it's being called book 8 in the series so there you go.  And while there's been eager anticipation by the folks who still think owls make good pets, it's being overshadowed by the fan's fury at the audacity to hire a black actress to play Hermione on stage.

First, it's a play.  Second, Hermione's not a real person.  And for all the fuss, it's a play most Potterheads won't even have a chance to see.  Do you know how expensive tickets cost?  Do you really think they'll be a performance outside of Brittain?  And if there is, that the same actors will be in it as the version you're all so freaked out about?  Look, I'm sure the lady is a fine actress and it'll be a fine play so calm down.  And if you hate the idea that much, you don't have to watch it.

God, I'm tired of everything in life being about race.

But here's the part that pisses me off.  Rowling has the audacity to say Hermione was always black.  Her race was "never specified" in the books so she could very well have been black all along.  Ok.  If Hermione was always black, who the hell cast whiter than white Emma Watson in the MOVIES?  Why was Hermione ALWAYS portrayed as white until NOW?  Don't con me lady.  This is a publicity stunt to get butts in seats for your stupid play.  It's as transparent as Moaning Myrtle.

I don't care who plays Hermione in the play.  I don't care if Ron doesn't have ginger hair.  Because it's a play and the original actors probably weren't available and things are always different in plays.  Black Hermione, more power to you.

But I take offense at Rowling making claims that obviously aren't true in order to sell tickets and to make her books appeal to black audiences by using their race to appear more inclusive.  Your books were about white kids, JK.  Don't go changing the narrative now because you're pressured to be more politically correct.  You should have thought about political correctness when you first created the characters 20 years ago.  It's a disgusting publicity stunt and I'm very disappointed.

A million points from Gryffendor, Miss Rowling.

Racism: An Equal Opportunity Problem

Listen to the rhetoric on any thread tweeting "Black Lives Matter" and you hear it.  Read the comments section in any online column regarding police brutality and you hear it.  Take a walk through the ghetto and listen to people talking in their own front yards and you hear it.  Black racism.  It's everywhere black people are in America and we can't keep looking the other way.  We can't pretend it isn't there because it isn't socially acceptable to admit it is.

There is a growing movement in the black community that is hardcore Afro-centric.  If it ain't black they don't like it.  In their ideology, blacks came first and lighter skin is a genetic mutation.  YouTube is littered with claims of "new scientific evidence" that blacks are the master race, the race all other races sprang from, and therefore are the most purest.  Blacks are the purest humans, by default the most noble, and everyone else are dogs beneath their majestic feet.  They are royalty oppressed by lesser beings who fear them.  Sound familiar?  Sounds Nazi-esque to me, but this what they espouse.  This is what they got out of humanity's turbulent history.  A big ego.  They learned nothing.

They even believe Native Americans were not the original inhabitants of the Americas.  They claim Africans settled America and that Native Americans are the result of white Europeans raping African women.  Same thing the world over.  Hawaiians were black originally and Asians raped their women and that's why native Hawaiians look Asian.  Yes. Pseudo history is everywhere and always the myth that the black race came first and was beaten and oppressed by the evil white man, who is a deformity in the genetic code.  Hell, the idea that Africa is the birthplace of all life on earth is a totally unprovable theory now taken as fact.  Pseudo history is everywhere and should be taken with a grain of salt until concrete evidence proves otherwise.  There is NO WAY to definitively determine the true origins of man.  Get over it.

But it's more than just faking history to make yourself feel special.  What's truly maddening about the whole Afro-centric movement is the rampant increase in racism and calls for racial violence that come with it.  This isn't a celebration of black culture if it ever was.  It's a call to arms for the black man to fight the white man and it's as dangerous as anything ISIS can come up with.

While the racism extends to several groups, most notably Asians, most black racism targets white people and they are quick to use a racially tense history to justify it, but does that make it ok?  Does the slavery of the past make it ok to be racist towards white people because of something their ancestors may or may not have done? I say may not have done because, contrary to the rhetoric, not all white people have ancestors who once owned slaves. A lot of whites are the descendants of Italian and Irish immigrants who came to this country at the turn of the century long after slavery was abolished.  They were usually poor as dirt and there's no indication of many of them ever owning slaves. But all white people are continuously blamed for slavery to this day even though no one alive today has ever owned a slave and no black person alive today has ever been a slave.

Unless you count sex slaves and African ladies who sell themselves into virtual slavery as housekeepers in order to be fed.  But that's not the white man's fault either because white people are not actively running an African slave trade anymore and aren't the only ones who market sex slaves and housekeepers.  Yet do black Americans hold those Indians who purchase housekeepers or their black African cousins who keep sex slaves in the same contempt they keep holding whites in for something that isn't happening anymore?  No.  Heaven forbid they acknowledge that 300 years ago blacks sold other blacks into slavery for money and alcohol.  It would mean holding their own ancestors accountable for slavery too and it's much easier on their egos to just blame white people.

The white man owes you nothing anymore.  We won't forget slavery happened because it was a horrible thing, but we learned from it.  We now will never see it happen again in this country and we fight to stop it from happening in other parts of the world.  We learned from our mistakes.  Why can't you?

Most whites are all for racial equality.  We protest for black equality too.  Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago.  Young white liberals took to the streets demanding justice just like blacks did (only probably not as violently).  Whites marched with King in the 60s.  Whites ran stops in the underground railroad. It's obvious that not all whites are out to get the black man. All that keeps getting ignored though.  All that doesn't matter.  Whites are and always have been the villains of the story.  Can you blame whites for being tired of it?  Tired of the scapegoating, of constantly apologizing even though they personally didn't do anything wrong?

Listen to the rhetoric coming from a large portion of the black community these days.  They aren't calling for equality.  They don't want to be equal to the white man.  They want REVENGE.  They want to make the white man their slaves.  That's the only way they will feel content.  Dominance is the only reparation they will accept.  It's a sick attitude that is so pervasive, it's undeniable.  Whites see it and they are afraid.  They recoil from it.  When a white person crosses the street at seeing a black man walking towards them, it's out of fear and NOTHING ELSE.  Generations of whites have been taught to be extra nice to blacks because of our past.  Don't offend black people.  That's the mantra.  Generations of blacks have been taught to hate whites for something that happened before they were born.  Then you see blacks being violent on tv.  Then you hear angry rants about getting even.  Get whitey night.  It's not a white hatred of blacks that keeps most of us away.  It's the fear of what blacks might do to us if we're not protected because we have been threatened.

I know not all blacks feel this way, but enough of them do and the numbers of those who do are increasing so rapidly that it's going to become a problem when blacks start out ranking whites in a few decades.  Reverse racism is a stupid name for it because racism is racism no matter who it's directed towards, but the painful truth is, a lot of black Americans are extremely racist and things are going to get worse the more extreme they get.  Not just towards whites, but to everyone of every color because that's how racism works.

Let's be perfectly clear about black racism.  It exists and it's just as wrong as racism from any other group.  Whatever vitriol you think the KKK may have, the Black Panthers have just as much.  Blacks can be racist too.  It's a fact.  I'm not being racist for pointing it out though I'll no doubt be accused of it by more than one reader.

Because we don't acknowledge black racism.  The media even goes out of its way to ignore it.  Never do you see it when a black cop does something wrong. Only white cops make the news.  How many Native Americans and Hispanics have been injured by police?  It's never reported.  Only when it involves a white cop and a black person.  It's like the aristocrats running the media WANT a race war so we'll be too occupied fighting eachother to pay attention to how they're robbing us blind.

I'm sick of it.  Blacks keep saying we need to have an honest discussion about race in the country but every time we do, white people are always the only bad guys and everyone else are always the poor victims.  AND IT'S NOT TRUE.

I'm not going to pretend there aren't white racists, but I'm not stupid enough to presume only white people are capable of it.  Racism is NOT a white only problem.  It's not nor has it ever been something only white people do. Every racial group has its fair share of racists.  Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Blacks.  Doesn't matter.  They all have racists among their ranks.  Until we acknowledge that, until we approach the issue fairly instead of just bashing white people, we're never going to solve the problem.

Black people keep saying we need to have an honest conversation about race in this country.  They're right we do.  But blacks need to be honest too or there isn't a point.

You have no friends on Facebook

So there's this show called Catfish, based on the movie by the same name, that highlights stupid people who fall in love over the Internet without ever meeting the love of their life in person or in most cases, even seeing them.  I don't feel sorry for people who get "catfished".  If you do stupid things, you deserve a broken heart.  DON'T DATE SOMEONE ONLINE.  MEET THEM IN PERSON.  Duh.

But that's not what this rant is about.  In the show, the hosts often turn to the suspect's Facebook page to determine if it's a fake or not.  One of the ways they do this is by counting how many Facebook friends they have.  If they don't have friends numbering in the hundreds, they consider the profile fake.  Well, that's stupid.

First, not everyone on Facebook is going to have hundreds of strangers friended.  A lot of people just use Facebook to stay in touch with family.  It doesn't mean they aren't real people or that they're running a fake sight.  Your logic is flawed if you think that.  Most people don't know hundreds of people personally.  The ones who claim to are the liars.  Therefore, anyone with more than a hundred friends on Facebook are the ones to look out for.

But to another issue that pissed me off.  People, we need to learn the difference between FRIEND and ACQUAINTANCE.  Facebook may call them friends, but that's just because acquaintance was too long a word for them.  Just because you friend someone on Facebook, it doesn't mean they're really your friend.

I prefer the Twitter terminology.  You don't have friends on Twitter.  You have people who follow your profile.  Guess what.  The same goes for Facebook.

A friend is someone who will come pick you up at 3am if your car breaks down.  A friend is someone who's been to your house so often they know their way around your kitchen. A friend is someone you can fart in front of and not be embarrassed.  A friend is someone you trust watching your kids.

If you can't do any of that with your Facebook friends, then they're not real friends.  They are acquaintances.  They are people you know casually but that is where the familiarity ends.  They are people who follow your profile and nothing more.

Would you know your Facebook friends birthdays without Facebook reminding you?  You would if they were a real friend.  You know your friends favorite foods, colors, what books they enjoyed as children and most importantly, you DON'T forget.  Because you're their friend.  With an acquaintance, you only know what they post.  An acquaintance is someone you just share cat memes with.  A friend is someone you share a bond with.

And don't tell me it's ok if you've met them once and liked the conversation.  That's not how friendship works.

Friendship takes time to cultivate.  It takes effort to maintain.  You don't instantly become friends at first sight.  There is no love at first sight either.  There's an interest at first sight followed by months and sometimes years of getting to know eachother before taking the step beyond acquaintance to a real friendship.

Truth:  You have no friends on Facebook.  Ok, you may have one or two, but outside that small circle, anyone you have a strictly online relationship with or who you've only ever met a handful of times, is NOT your friend.  They are merely an acquaintance.

Catfish is stupid and so are people who mistake a friend request from a stranger for a friendship.

Let the past go or else

I'm so sick of being blamed for crap that happened years ago before I was even a twinkle in my daddy's eye.  I don't care what color I am.  I am NOT responsible for slavery.  I am NOT responsible for Jim Crow.  I owe you NOTHING.

Every African American I've ever come across seems to think the white man owes them.  That everything wrong in their life is white people's fault.  Not only is that stupidly wrong, it's incredibly detrimental.  Why?  Because scapegoating doesn't address the REAL issues.

Blaming white people may feel good.  It may make you feel better about yourself.  Go ahead, burn down your own neighborhood if it helps you feel important.  But it doesn't do a damn thing.  Blaming white people doesn't CHANGE anything.

Black folks have had plenty of opportunities to change their lives for the better and didn't take them.  They won the right to vote and didn't use it.  They won the right to an education and still have the highest drop out rate in the country.  They can be doctors, lawyers, politicians, teachers, cops.  Whatever they want to be.  All they have to do is work for it.

And a lot of them understand this.  They made something of themselves.  Kudos.

But a hell of a lot more are sitting in the hood, smoking their weed, gang banging with their pants falling off their asses, rap music blaring, living off welfare, unable to use proper grammar complaining about how oppressed they are instead of doing anything about it.  And I don't mean burning down the hood because that's stupid.  YOU LIVE THERE.

No, what I mean is they aren't interested in getting an education.  They want to be ballers, rap stars.  They may take honest jobs to pay the bills, but that's it.  McDonald's is as far as their expectations go.  Like the Civil Rights movement was a giant waste of time.

For the record, my ancestors were poor Italian and Irish immigrants who came to this country years after slavery ended. They never owned slaves.  Know something else? They were discriminated against.  Ever see an Irish person?  They're white.

If you're not going to take responsibility for your actions, it's not my fault.  Stop making excuses. Stop assuming my family owned slaves.  In fact, stop rubbing my face in slavery period.  I never owned slaves. You never were a slave.  We don't forget the past, but we can't live in it.  It keeps us from moving forward and if we don't move forward, we die.  Cuz life only moves forward.

Time to stop blaming everyone else for your own shortcomings and do something to improve you life. Only you can improve your life.  But first, you have to let go of the past.

Put down the smart phone!

I appreciate my cell phone.  It allows me to communicate with people without having to physically track them down.  It's a lifeline in an emergency.  It's something to occupy me when I'm bored waiting for the bus in the morning.  I like being able to Google something when I need to know it.  I don't have a problem with cell phones per se.

I have a problem with people never putting them down.  When I'm trying to have a conversation with my sister and she's checking Facebook every five minutes, I have a problem.  So... I'm not as important to you as some cat meme?  My feelings do get hurt when someone picks their phone over me and so should yours.

When you can't go more than hour without touching your phone, you have a problem.  Smart phone addiction is real.  Just look around you.  EVERYONE has it.  And there's NO etiquette when it comes to phone use because the addiction is just too strong to put them down.

I hate when I'm trying to check out and the person in front of me is super slow because they're on their phone instead of paying attention to checking out.  It's not just wasting everyone's time.  It's rude.  You're supposed to be polite to your cashier.  Not ignore them.  They're human beings. Show some respect.  And, hello, how do you know if there's an error if you aren't paying attention?  You could be getting screwed but glad Lakeesha got that VD cleared up.

And that's perhaps the rudest thing of all.  People have NO sense of what should be discussed in public and what shouldn't.  Why are you telling everyone Lakeesha has VD?  No one wants to know who in your life is sleeping with who or the details of your proctal exam.  They call them private things because they're meant to be private.  It's rude to prattle on about stupid stuff to an unwilling crowd.  Save it for when you're in private.

Driving and cell phone use is deadly.  It kills people and it's stupidly insane how people need to be constantly reminded of something so fricking common sense.  People don't just carry on their rude conservations.  They text them.  They post them on Facebook.  It can wait!  When you're in the car, focus on driving.   Don't even answer the phone until you're parked and it's safe to do so.  Put it in the back seat if you have to.  That cat meme?  Lakeesha's VD?  They aren't worth your life and they damn sure aren't worth mine.

People have actually been known to post to Facebook that the building they're in is on fire BEFORE leaving the burning building.  One of the easiest ways to stalk someone is by their posts on social media.  Smart phones are the number one thing stolen in the United States.  It's insanity.

I don't know why people engage more with smart phones than with other people.  Society is falling apart and technology, once our savior, is now destroying us.  I do know this though, it does the entire world good when we put our phones away and look around us.  When we talk to eachother, we understand eachother.  When we understand eachother, we get a long better.  The number one treatment for insomnia is to turn off electronic devices at least two hours before bed.  Especially smart phones.  That should tell you something.

And stop telling the world your private business.  We don't care.

On Evolution

Ah the things you discover when you have insomnia.  So I was surfing YouTube and found this random link that claimed black Africans were better than other races because they were more pure genetically.  I've heard for a while that the oldest signs of human life were found in Africa, but what this video suggested was that this meant all human life on earth ORIGINATED in Africa.

I don't think we have sufficient evidence to say definitely all human life began in Africa just because the oldest life we KNOW of was found there.

But this idea that Africa is the cradle of life is so accepted that no one questions it and black people either wanting to feel good about themselves or to stick it to white people are using this belief to say they are more important than everyone else.  Some claim Africans were the original inhabitants of North America, not the Native Americans we know of who apparently came from Asia and enslaved the original black inhabitants.  Some claim that black Africans were the original Israelites, not the Jews who came from somewhere else and enslaved the black Israelites.   Black people just keep getting enslaved, don't they?  These theories may make you feel proud to be black, but are they really true?

Reading the racist comments left by black viewers made me cringe.  It was bad enough the video called lighter skinned people an "invasive species" but then for so many viewers to suggest that every race that is not distinctly African is genetically inferior is just plain hateful.  I didn't think black Nazis existed until I happened across the movement claiming all life came from Africa.

I didn't leave a link to the video in question.  I have no desire to spread that level of hate and ignorance.  Instead I did a little research on the African origins movement and found a scientific research paper discussing possible theories for why lighter skin evolved in humans.  The writers of the paper also assumed that all life began in Africa.  They cited evidence they found in their research which suggested some 80,000 years ago or so Europeans were all black migrants from Africa.  They then theorized on why our black ancestors got pale.  A lot of vitamin D apparently.  I put the link for the paper at the bottom in case you needed a laugh.

Here's the problem I have with this whole thing.  Say all human life really did begin in Africa.  Say black people really did come first and all life on earth was black and humans only evolved lighter skin as they migrated to colder climates in order to survive.  Let's say black people are more genetically pure than other races.   Does that really make other races mutations?  Or does it really mean that black people aren't as EVOLVED as other races?  If we take the African origin theory as gospel truth, then blacks may have come first but lighter skinned people evolved into something better.  And according to the laws of evolution, species who adapt live while the species who doesn't adapt becomes extinct.  Meaning eventually black people will die out as all inferior species do.  I don't know about you, but I have a problem with that.  I simply refuse to believe that black people are the original humans and everyone else is a more evolved cousin.  Seems kinda hateful, don't ya think?

I don't know how accurate the theory of Africa being where humans began really is.  I'm not here to tell you it's right or wrong.  I'm saying there's no way in hell we can know with any certainty where the first human like creature originated and we should be wise enough not to assume a theory is fact.  I do know that, contrary to what blacks want to believe about human origins, whether or not we started in Africa, black people are NOT more pure or any better than anyone else.  They are NOT the chosen of God any more than any other race is.  Why do so many think God is as racist as they are?  Or that God made us all different just so he can have a chosen people?

Look, we're all human.  We're all the same.   That's what matters.  No theory is going to change that.  Read the paper if you want, but don't pretend you're better than me because your genes are more African than mine.  That's just racist garbage.

http://m.livescience.com/7863-people-white.html

Communication is essential

I'm sick of people bitching when I comment that immigrants need to learn English when moving to an English speaking country. It's not racist, you morons. It's not anti Mexican.  It's common frickin' sense.

You HAVE to be able to communicate with the people around you.  Communication is so important we invented sign language for people who can't speak so they'd be able to do it too.  It's not a racial issue.  It's not to penalize spanish speakers.  It's FOR YOUR BENEFIT.

Say there's an emergency and you need to tell the paramedics what's wrong with your loved one so they don't die.  If you don't speak the language the paramedics do, you can't tell them anything and your loved one could be toast.  Say there's some sort of disaster and you walk right into because you didn't understand what the people warning you were saying.  Not knowing the language everyone else is speaking can be potentially disastrous.

But it's not just emergencies.  It's every day life.  You struggle through basic stuff like checking out at the grocery store or registering your kids in school.  Traffic stops, trying to ask what bus you need, ordering food at a restaurant, renting an apartment.  How can you get your point across if you're relying on your five year old to translate?  If you don't know the language, you don't get far.  It's that simple.

And stop with the memes about how someone who speaks broken english is better than me because they know a second language. I speak broken spanish, that doesn't mean I'm always able to get my point across. If you're not fluid enough to hold a coherent conversation, you don't really know the language.

And stop telling me I have to make concessions for Spanish speakers because they're our closest neighbor and such a large portion of the population.  First, we have immigrants from all over the world who speak languages other than English or Spanish. If you're not willing to translate signs and what  not into ALL the languages spoken in the US, don't tell me to make concessions for Spanish.  That's not fair to everyone else.

Don't move to my country and tell me I need to learn YOUR language.  You're in MY country.  And don't even mention Native Americans. The past can't be changed, but we speak english here now and that's the ONLY thing relevant in this conversation.

And don't criticize me for pointing out the hypocrisy of making me do something for Mexicans that Mexico isn't willing to do for me.  It's the truth and if Mexicans aren't willing to learn english and have english tv stations in Mexico, it isn't fair to demand an English speaking country accommodate them.

And by the way, few countries make concessions like the US does for immigrants who don't speak the native language.  So don't tell me I'm not being fair.  That's how the world works.

Some countries even make it MANDATORY to learn their language prior to being allowed to immigrate there.

Communication is essential to life.  If you can't communicate, your quality of life sucks.  But if you really want better for yourself, you'll make it a point to learn the native language.