HALF-FULL REPORT 08/16/13

Zurich, Switzerland.  I’m here speaking at a conference and having a great time. 

I’m learning as much if not more from the other speakers and the attendees as they are from me.  The weather is perfect, the Swiss are impeccably nice and courteous, Zurich is charming, efficient, and spotlessly hygienic.  The only downside is that it’s insultingly expensive.

A 12-minute taxi ride from the airport to the hotel is $88 (82 Swiss francs).  A "continental" breakfast of coffee, juice, and bread is $39.  I could never afford coming here if I weren’t a conference guest.  Only the exceedingly wealthy can – say, like Oprah Winfrey.

Wikipedia lists Zurich’s main street, Bahnhofstrasse, as "one of the world’s most expensive and exclusive shopping avenues."  Right off it near the Goldman Sachs Bank is a boutique called Tres Pommes (Three Apples).  This week, in a pathetically revolting publicity stunt for a lousy movie she stars in, Oprah Winfrey attempted to ruin the life of a defenseless salesgirl at Tres Pommes by accusing her of racism.

Oprah says the salesgirl wouldn’t show her a $38,000 crocodile leather handbag – yes, 38K for a purse, this is Zurich – because she assumed Oprah couldn’t afford it as she’s black. 

Instantly there was a media frenzy with headlines all over the world, almost all of which assumed Oprah was the victim of racist bigotry.  As did the Swiss Tourism Office, cravenly apologizing without even bothering to determine the truth or defend the salesgirl.  Oprah Gets Apology for Racist Diss in Handbag Shop is how ABC News so objectively put it. 

So it was up to the salesgirl to defend herself – and she did, saying Oprah lied straight out.  As one headline put it: Oprah ‘Cannibalized’ Me: Shop Clerk in Zurich Handbag Scandal Says TV Host Is Lying About Alleged Racist Incident.  Good for her – and good for her boss, Tres Pommes owner Trudi Goetz, who supported her employee’s side of the story and called Oprah’s accusation "absurd."

And at least some in the media aren’t being suckered.  "Celebrity website" TMZ’s headline on Tuesday (8/13): Passive Aggressive Oprah Gives BS Apology for Switzerland Racist Flap.  "Oprah’s Swiss encounter wasn’t really about race — Oprah was just mad she wasn’t treated like Her Royal O-ness because the shop employee didn’t recognize her," TMZ explained.

So now the story is blowing up in her fat racist face.  Yet instead of apologizing for trying to ruin a shopgirl’s life, yesterday (8/15) Oprah doubled-down and repeated her accusation. 

I never paid much attention to Oprah, never watched her show, but always thought it was admirable that she made such an extraordinary success of her life.  Now we see that there is a part of her soul that is truly ugly.  Thanks for exposing yourself, Oprah.

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Speaking of unspeakably tiresome phony libtard frenzies about racism, we were subjected to a second one this week.  Last Saturday night (8/10) at a rodeo in Sidalia, Missouri, a rodeo clown made fun of Zero by wearing a mask of him.  While the audience enjoyed the fun, a libtard named Perry Beam got his panties in a twist and put pictures of it on Facebook. 

On Monday (8/12), a St. Louis station, KSDK, launched the frenzy, calling it a "hideous mockery of the president." The next day, CNN was outraged: Rodeo Clown Mocks Obama at Missouri State Fair.  Immediately came the groveling apologies.  The Missouri State Fair Commission announced it "apologizes for the unconscionable stunt," and that the clown involved, Tuffy Gessling, was "banned from ever participating or performing at the Missouri State Fair again."  Just about every Missouri politician, Pub and Dem, abased themselves as well.

Then on Wednesday (8/14), the media freak-out went off the rails when the NAACP publicly demanded the Justice Department and the US Secret Service investigate and prosecute the rodeo clown for "inciting violence against the president."  

The backlash against this libtard looniness has been enjoyable.  There’s now a Support Tuffy Gessling Facebook page, with (as of today) over 70,000 "Likes."  The comments are terrific.  In fact, as this report in the St. Louis Riverfront Times shows, Tuffy has suddenly become a celebrity whose popularity is "skyrocketing" (read the whole story – great graphics at end.)

I couldn’t be prouder of my buddy, Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX), who on Wednesday announced his support for Tuffy by inviting him to perform at rodeos in his district (Texas 36, east of Houston to the LA border).

So – is Tuffy Gessling, Steve Stockman, Trudi Goetz or her Tres Pommes salesgirl (identified only as Adriana) the HFR Hero of the Week?

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Notice what these two "Libtards Crying Racism" spasms have in common besides hysterically using the only card they have left in their deck now.  It’s what they both have in common with the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman debacle.

In all three cases, the liberal media establishment attempted to destroy an unknown ordinary person’s life to further their political agenda, without the slightest regard for who they were demonizing.  This should be a Teachable Moment About Liberals:  that they are profoundly uncompassionate, uncaring, indifferent to human suffering in terms of actual individual human beings.

All liberals consider themselves compassionate and caring, but all they really care about is abstractions which don’t exist – collectives of people like "the workers," "the poor," "the blacks," whom the lib defines as such.  But there is no such thing as "blacks" or "the poor."  There are only individuals who happen to be black or poor among a vast number of attributes they also possess.

If you, by any chance of bad luck, encounter a liberal this week who brays about his compassion for people, ask him or her how much their heart goes out to Tuffy Gessling, a rodeo clown who risks getting his body crushed by brahma bulls to make a living entertaining people, or a young sales girl in Zurich so terrified by being demonized by one of the most famous and richest women in the world she won’t even give her name?

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Believe it or not, there’s still another racist controversy this week.  However, it’s in India.  On Wednesday (8/14), the London Guardian reported on India’s Unfair Obsession With Lighter Skin.

"Indians are very racist" for preferring people with lighter skin over darker, declares famous Indian actress Nandita Das – who, as you can see in the link, has lighter skin herself.  Auto-racism in India?

It’s easy, though, to sympathize with her efforts and the goals of her Dark Is Beautiful campaign.  The sad reality is that, no matter what effort she makes and how much you or anyone else agrees with her – India will continue on the whole to prefer people with lighter skin as it always has.

That’s because every society and culture on the planet always has.  Life and reality are indeed unfair.  As discussed in Of All The World’s Countries, Which Is The Least Racist? (April 2012):

"Discrimination by lighter-skinned people towards darker-skinned people seems virtually universal.  The phenomenon has been dubbed colorism, resulting in pigmentocracy which is global. There seems to be no society in which the darker-skinned dominate the lighter-skinned.  Whether it is China, Japan, Korea, Europe, Brazil, Mexico, India, or just about anywhere else, the lighter-skinned have higher social status, the darker the lower…

"You see colorism and pigmentocracies all over Africa.  Ads for skin whiteners are common.  Here’s a typical one I recently saw in Togo:

"Where does America come out in all of this?  One way to answer is to ask, where else in the world have more peoples of different ethnicities been made more welcome and given more opportunities to flourish than in America?  Looking around the world, I don’t know of any.  If you do, please let me know.

"Or:  what other country has striven harder to overcome racial tribal bigotry endemic to all human societies than America?  Again, if you know of one, I’d like to hear of it."

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This week, there was yet an additional example of tribal bigotry, and it touched me personally.  It took place in Ecuador.

The capital, Quito, and most of the population are in the Andean highlands.  The entire eastern half is Amazon rainforest called the Oriente (East).  Less than 5% of Ecuador’s people live there, most all of whom are "tribus primitivas" – primitive tribes.

As you may know, when I was 16, I lived with and was adopted into a clan of one of them, known as Jivaros, the headhunter tribe famous for making shrunken heads of their enemies.  But there was another tribe that even the Jivaros were scared of, the Aucas.

In response to a group of Aucas killing five American missionaries in 1956, Time Magazine described them as "The worst people on earth… their neighbors, the Jivaro Indians, Ecuador’s famed, ferocious headhunters, are said to pale with fear at the very mention of the primitive Aucas."

In 1972, I met a helicopter pilot at an oil exploration  baseon the Napo River on the edge of Auca country.  The Aucas had just speared to death several of their workers in a remote line camp.  His name was Tony Stuart and he told me he had located where the band of Aucas lived in a distant part of the jungle.  He also told me there was a clearing where he could land, but hadn’t tried.  "I’ll try with you," I told him, and off we went.

It was the first of my three "first contacts."  We spent the afternoon with Aucas that had never had contact with the outside world before.  I never smiled so much in my life – and they smiled back, especially when I gave them boxes of matches (fire from nowhere, magic!) and a flashlight (light from nowhere, magic!). 

In turn, they gave us cooked monkey to eat, a stone axe (they were true Stone Age, no metal of any kind) to Tony, and a blowgun to me (which I still have).  They did not threaten us in any way. 

This was in deepest Auca country near the Columbian border.  While some Aucas way to the west, where the missionaries had been killed, had been Christianized, this area has remained untouched – so much so it’s been designated as "the most biologically diverse spot on earth," and a UN Biological Reserve called Yasuni National Park.  That was in 1989.

Since then, oil has been discovered in Yasuni, yet the government of Ecuador pledged to leave Yasuni alone (Ecuador has lots of oil elsewhere).  Until the election of Rafael Correa in 2006.  A protégé of Hugo Chavez, Correa is one of those handsome, charismatic sociopathic corrupt crooks you find often in Banana Republics.  We have one here in the US.

Correa promptly began demanding bribes to not drill the Yasuni, via a shakedown called the Yasuni-ITT Initiative.  If the "International Community" – rich Western countries like ours – would fork over $3.6 billion, what he claimed was 50% of the value of the Yasuni’s oil, then he wouldn’t drill.  Compared to Correa, Jesse "Shakedown" Jackson is a total piker.

But the shakedown failed.  Thus today (8/16), Correa in a nationally televised speech announced that Yasuni would be drilled and exploited because "the world has failed us."  He railed at "the great hypocrisy" of the rich countries who refused to stuff his pockets with billions.

Note the linked story says that the Yasuni is "home to two indigenous tribes living in voluntary isolation."  Those are Aucas.  "Auca" is what they’re known by in Ecuador, including the Jivaros.  Collectively they speak variants of a language linguists have dubbed Huaorani that has no relation to any other language on earth.  The two Auca or Huaorani groups in Yasuni are some 300 Taromenane and a tiny number of Tagaeri, a recent splinter group.

From their description and where they live, the Taromenane are "my" Aucas.  Forty-one years later, they are still left alone and free.  I pray they remain so.

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We’ll close with a few quick notes.  First, it looks like Rand Paul (R-KY) has taken Jack Kelly’s advice to Kick the Obamacare Can Down the Road.  Paul told Hannity this week that delaying, not defunding, Obamacare may be the best strategy right now.

Then on Monday, Oliver Stone, the ÜberLeft film director, said in a speech to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo:  "Obama is a snake.  He is a snake and we (the Left, the Media) have to turn on him" for his National Security Agency spying programs that have become "more about silencing protestors than finding terrorists."

Let’s pray they take his advice.

And lastly, you’ve probably heard Filthy Bob Filner, the mentally ill serial sexual harasser – and Democrat – Mayor of San Diego.  This week, all the Hooters restaurants put up a notice banning Filner from their premises: 

"The mayor of San Diego will not be served in this establishment.  We believe women should be treated with respect."

Cosmic irony, cosmic justice – and very clever marketing.  It’s also a very good reason for you guys to support Hooters by giving them your business and enjoying the view.