The "Epic Beard Man" of Oakland, and the Double Standard

An essay by Alexander Hart that bears repeating:

Americans fed up with black on white crime have found an unlikely hero in Thomas Bruso, who has been dubbed "Epic Beard Man". In a widely circulated YouTube video posted on February 16, Bruso defends himself against a black thug. [Bad language warning—YouTube may require you to sign in because of adult language or violence.]

Bruso is a 67 year-old Vietnam veteran, who apparently has some history of mental illness. While riding the bus in Oakland, he was talking to someone about getting his shoes shined for his mother's funeral and a black man named Michael—whose last name is unknown—managed to get offended because the words "shoe shine", "boy", and "brother" were used in the same sentence. He confronted Bruso, who initially misinterpreted the man as offering to shine his shoes. Michael yelled "Why a brotha gotta spit-shine yo' shoes?" and "Why a white man can't shine his shoes?"

Epic Beard Man responded by saying he wasn't into prejudice, [VDARE.com note: Proving that Mr. Bruso has totally missed the Political Correctness memo he expressed his unwillingness to discriminate on grounds forbidden by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by saying "It could be a Chinaman--it don't matter. I ain't prejudiced." ] to which Michael said "You take your a-- back up there and get the f--- out mah face right now."

Not wanting trouble, Bruso went to the front of the bus, but said "You ain't scaring this white boy. I'm 67 years old", as he walked away.

When Michael continues to harass Bruso, he tells him to "Sit your little black ass down."

Needless to say, Michael does not leave him alone. Iyanna Washington, a black female college student (!) who taped the incident, egged Michael on calling Epic Beard Man "pinky"—a racial slur for Whites—and yelling, "Beat his white a--! F--- this bitch!"

Michael went to the front of the bus and sucker punched Bruso who was sitting down. But Epic Beard Man rose up and scored several clean shots to Michel's face. He was knocked to the ground and covered with blood.

Bruso then storms off the bus, yelling "He f------ hit me first! He hit me in the face! It was self defense! Don't f--- with me boy! Don't f--- with me!"

(...)

Michael, who just got a bloody nose, is seen both whining to "call an amba-lamps [Ebonics for ambulance]" while at the same time saying "I will come back, I will kill dat n------[sic]"

Washington then videotapes herself going through Bruso's bag, which he had left on the bus, yelling "Go through dat sh--!"

She tells Michael, "We can press charges, I got it on videotape", apparently oblivious to the fact that Michael is clearly seen starting the fight and she videotaped herself stealing.

Later that day she posted the fight on YouTube, still oblivious to how bad it made her look. [Epic Beard Man, Encyclopedia Dramatica]

The video instantly became a hit. At one point, "Epic Beard Man" was the 16th most frequently searched term on Google. To date, over 3 million people have seen the original video entitled "AC TRANSIT BUS FIGHT I AM A MOTHERF*CKER." At least another million people have seen it posted under other names like "OLD WHITE MAN BEATS THE SHIT OUT OF A WANNABE THUG ON THE BUS!" and "Epic beard old white guy beats the s*it out of *sshole black guy."

The original video has over 50,000 comments. Virtually all of the comments praise Epic Beard Man, and many are even too politically incorrect for VDARE.COM. Some of the more sober ones include:

• when will the black girls that yelled "beat his white ass" be brought up on racial hate crimes?
  
• I try to see everyone as the same and not agree with stereotypes/ racist comments until they are proven by an individuals actions. But African Americans are always complaining that whites don't like or respect them......... Well... that stupid, ignorant man picking a fight with an old man is the reason we don't. So instead of getting angry at racist comments how about you try and prove us wrong.
  
• I love the part where the lady filming says, "I got it on tape. We can sue his *ss!!"…Mmmmmhmmm....only in America can you assault someone, get your ass beat and sue.

Meanwhile, thousands of video responses and parodies are made such as making the fight look like the videogame Mortal Kombat, or animated versions imagining that Epic Beard Man was having a Vietnam Flashback.

Many videos make light of Michael's Ebonic pronunciation of "ambulance" as either "amber lamps," "m and ms" and "ambalamps." There are even websites and videos devoted to an attractive girl who is sitting next to Michael on the bus, and is listening to music who manages to completely ignore the chaos a few feet away from her. She is dubbed "Amber Lamps."

Many websites are even selling shirts with slogans like "Mess with Epic Beard Man...Go Home In An Amber-Lamps."

What should we make out of this internet phenomenon? It is easy to dismiss it as just some silly incident between two crazy people caught on tape that brings out a few racial slurs from immature anonymous internet posters.

While the crazy banter and Bruso's colorful personality makes this video very amusing, and allows people to get away with more politically incorrect thoughts, it is the audacity of some blacks that really inspires most of the comments. It is not just that Michael picks a fight with an old man that makes people upset. It is that he starts it because he imagines a perfectly innocuous comment is racist. It is that after he starts the fight, both he and videotaper Iyanna Washington still think they are in the right. It is that the Washington thinks she can yell anti-white slurs and steal on tape without any repercussions.

They may have seen the video of a white student brutally beaten by blacks on a bus in Belleville, IL who does not even try to defend himself.

Americans are glad to see someone finally fight back.

Bruso clearly has a few screws loose. He had earlier been videotaped getting tasered by police at an Oakland A's game for being belligerent. But given how self-defense against blacks is often criminalized, as in the Rodney King and Bernie Goetz cases, you need to be a little insane to stand up to the abuse.

Many commenters noted that had the situation been reversed and a white attacked an elderly black man with other whites yelling "Beat his black ass," he would have been charged with a hate crime, which is obviously true. It is also true that had this not been caught on video tape, Epic Beard Man could very easily be charged with a hate crime himself--especially after staying "You ain't scaring this White Boy" and "Sit your little black ass down", even though he clearly was acting in self defense.

During the Rodney King trial, Lew Rockwell joked "Liberals talk about banning guns. As a libertarian, I can't agree. I am, however, beginning to wonder about video cameras."

But in 1992, no one could see videos that weren't on the evening or cable news. The Main Stream Media selectively showed the police subduing King without the context of King violently attacking them.

No doubt if this fight were caught on tape ten years ago, the MSM would splice a video together with Epic Beard Man yelling "sit your little black ass down" and then hitting Michael, without any of the context.

Thanks to the internet, I'm willing to drop the campaign against video cameras.

Whitman proves California GOP leaders still don't get it....

I have been unhappy with the campaign antics of both Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, but what is really glaring is the California Republican Party leadership. They have apparently anointed their candidate, and no vetting of her is allowed! Never mind that you can bet the Demunists in California will do much worse "vetting", and never mind that the California GOP is choosing another wealthy dilettante without a political track record.

Earlier this month, former Gov. Pete Wilson sent out a letter calling on good Republicans to "unite" behind former eBay CEO Meg Whitman's bid for governor. A largely Democratic effort had been formed to raise $40 million to defeat the billionaire candidate, which Wilson argued, forced Team Whitman to launch its general election campaign early.

It was an arrogant move — calling the GOP primary before a single voter has cast a ballot in the June 8 election. Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is still in the race. No wonder Poizner recently told me, "She wants to be ordained."

After pouring $39 million of her own money into her campaign, Whitman has blanketed the airwaves with commercials and, as a result, has been trouncing Poizner in the polls. Poizner, who is also rich and put about $19 million into his effort, has preferred to campaign using free media, including debates with former rival Tom Campbell (which Whitman skipped). Poizner wants to debate at the GOP convention in March. Whitman says no.

I reached Wilson on his cell phone Wednesday to ask: How can a candidate who never has run for office, and ducked every debate to date, dare to try to elbow out of the primary the one candidate who has won statewide office?

Wilson answered that even though Whitman is skipping a debate at the March GOP convention, she has agreed to a later debate. I should understand, he said, that Whitman is doing what all savvy candidates, including the likely Democratic nominee, Attorney General Jerry Brown, do — limiting debates and press interviews. "You don't accept every one," Wilson explained, using his why-do-I-even-have-to-say-this voice. "I think this is small potatoes, Debra."

Wilson added, "I don't know what more clear evidence there is" that Whitman is the stronger Republican, other than the fact that Democrats have made it clear that she is the Republican "they don't want to face in November."

Indeed, protesters turned out to picket against Whitman on Tuesday night as she addressed the Commonwealth Club in Lafayette. Big Labor and big Democrats have put together an independent expenditure effort called Level the Playing Field 2010 — an allusion to Whitman's supersize wealth, if an odd title for a group dedicated to outspending any entity that tries to introduce fiscal discipline to Sacramento.

 Inside, the Commonwealth Club moderator was a chummy fellow who asked only one tough question about her spotty voting record. (Whitman responded with a mea culpa.)
(...)
I still don't know why GOP voters are supposed to trust Whitman to take on Jerry Brown, when they don't even know if she can out-talk Poizner.

George Will: Climate Science Tantrums

This is so good it bears repeating:

Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

"They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder — and I hope they put it on their faces every day."

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement. Global warming alarmists, long cosseted by echoing media, manifest an interesting incongruity — hysteria and name-calling accompanying serene assertions about the "settled science" of climate change. Were it settled, we would be spared the hyperbole that amounts to Ring Lardner's "Shut up, he explained."

The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children's story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months, which began Nov. 19 with the publication of e-mails indicating attempts by scientists to massage data and suppress dissent in order to strengthen "evidence" of global warming.

But there already supposedly was a broad, deep and unassailable consensus. Strange.

Next came the failure of The World's Last — We Really, Really Mean It — Chance, a.k.a. the Copenhagen climate change summit. It was a nullity, and since then things have been getting worse for those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.

In 2007, before the economic downturn began enforcing seriousness and discouraging grandstanding, seven western U.S. states (and four Canadian provinces) decided to fix the planet on their own. California's Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned, "We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment." The 11 jurisdictions formed what is now called the Western Climate Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Or not. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently suspended her state's participation in what has not yet begun, and some Utah legislators are reportedly considering a similar action. Brewer worries, sensibly, that it would impose costs on businesses and consumers. She also ordered reconsideration of Arizona's strict vehicle emission rules, modeled on incorrigible California's, lest they raise the cost of new cars.

Last week, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar, three early members of the 31-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said: Oh, never mind. They withdrew from USCAP. It is a coalition of corporations and global warming alarm groups that was formed in 2007 when carbon rationing legislation seemed inevitable and collaboration with the rationers seemed prudent. A spokesman for Conoco said: "We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and consumers." What a concept.

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today's, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today's supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change — yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government — warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

The "Man Made Global Warming" scam unravels....

....further and further still.

political fraud and scientific swindle can be measured by collapsing "science." The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain was regarded as the leader in climate research and the fount of raw data on which the science was based until leaked e-mails between researchers revealed evidence of doctoring of data and manipulation of evidence. The director of the research unit, professor Phil Jones, was regarded as an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming. He was pressured to resign in the wake of the scandal. Now he has conceded to an interviewer from the BBC that based on the evidence in his findings, the globe might have been warmer in medieval times. If so, the notion that fluctuations in earthly temperatures are man-made is rendered just that, a man-made notion. 

The learned professor told his interviewer that for the past 15 years there has been no "statistically significant" warming. He conceded that he has lost track of many of the relevant papers — that his office was overwhelmed by the clutter of paper. Some of the crucial data to back up scare stories might be lying under other stuff, but he's not sure. An environmental analyst for the BBC said the professor told him that his "strengths" include "integrity" and "doggedness" but not record-keeping and "office tidying." He's just not dogged about keeping things straight. 

This was good enough in the early years of the scam, but not any longer. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and once a ranking member of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the temperature records have been compromised and cannot be relied on. The findings of weather stations that collected temperature data were distorted by location. Several were located near air-conditioning units and on waste-treatment plants; one was next to a waste incinerator. Still another was built at Rome's international airport and catches the hot exhaust of taxiing jetliners.

The global-warming hysteria, on which the Obama administration wants to base enormous new tax burdens, is a fraud. Leftist Man wants more statist control over us and invents this fraud with which to do it. But I think it goes even deeper than that. Leftist Man is driven by his ego and finds it impossible to think even the weather is not all about him.

The other main organ of the climate "consensus" is the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It won the Nobel Peace Prize for its 2007 report, which turns out to have been so riddled with errors it could have been researched on Wikipedia. It said Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, warned that global warming could reduce crop yields in Africa by 50 percent by 2020, and linked warming to the increased economic cost of natural disasters — all nonsense.

These aren't random errors. As former head of the IPCC, the British scientist Robert Watson notes, "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact."

Of course they did.....

Too many of the creators and guardians of the "consensus" desperately wanted to believe in it. As self-proclaimed defenders of science, they should have brushed up on their Enlightenment. "Doubt is not a pleasant mental state," said Voltaire, "but certainty is a ridiculous one." The latest revelations don't disprove the warming of the 20th century or mean that carbon emissions played no role. But by highlighting the uncertainty of the paleoclimatic data and the models on which alarmism has been built, they constitute a shattering blow to the case for radical, immediate action.

But does that give the hoaxers pause? Of course not. They double down.

The real purpose behind class warfare

Thomas Sowell, as he so often does, has the Left's number:

....those who are taking away our freedoms, bit by bit, on the installment plan, have been incessantly supplying us with people to resent.

One of the most audacious attempts to take away our freedom to live our lives as we see fit has been the so-called "health care reform" bills that were being rushed through Congress before either the public or the members of Congress themselves had a chance to discover all that was in it.

For this, we were taught to resent doctors, insurance companies and even people with "Cadillac health insurance plans," who were to be singled out for special taxes.

Unless those plans were Automaker Union or government employee plans, of course. Then the Demunists fell silent.

Meanwhile, our freedom to make our own medical decisions — on which life and death can depend — was to be quietly taken from us and transferred to our betters in Washington. Only the recent Massachusetts election results have put that on hold. 

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against "the rich."

The distracting phrases here include "obscene" wealth and "unconscionable" profits. But, if we stop and think about it — which politicians don't expect us to — what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn't we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced —and increasing a country's productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting "the rich."

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called "unconscionable" but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

The assumption that what A pays B is any business of C is an assumption that means a dangerous power being transferred to politicians to tell us all what incomes we can and cannot receive. It will not apply to everyone all at once. Like the income tax, which at first applied only to the truly rich, and then slowly but steadily moved down the income scale to hit the rest of us, the power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and supplicants of politicians.

The phrase "public servants" is increasingly misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters — like aptly named White House "czars." The more they can get us all to resent those they designate, the more they can distract us from their increasing control of our own lives...

Global Warming? Child Obesity? The Big Lie Agenda

They're caught lying about "Global Warming"--again:

During the 1960s and into the 1980s, the number of stations used for calculating global surface temperatures was about 6,000. By 1990, the number of stations dropped rapidly to about 1,500. Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of the Earth. Not adjusting for their lost made temperatures appear to be higher than was in fact the case. According to Science & Environmental Policy Project, Russia reported that (the British) Climate Research Unit was ignoring data from colder regions of Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data. That means data loss was not simply the result of station closings but deliberate decisions by Climate Research Unit to ignore them in order to hype their global warming claims.

(...)

Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little difference in terms of the response to manmade global warming hysteria. Why? Vested economic and political interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at stake. Therefore, many people who recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to defend it anyway. Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing "green cars." General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL). Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies.

(...)

I bet that even if the permafrost returned as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional stooges would still call for measures to fight global warming.

And They are hyping a Childhood Obesity Scare, which *they* caused:

Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don't care about slimming your kids' waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students' physical fitness. The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation's mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children.
(...)
For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal "boondoggle" in a seminal essay for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan. But Democrats demagogued the GOP's responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as "starving the children." While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House's most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What's in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: "A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added)."

There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. "More robust expansion" of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats' health care takeover bill).

The SEIU's front group, "Campaign for Quality Services," is clamoring for "the right to sick days and training" for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of "putting our kids at risk" during flu season by resisting the SEIU's sick day coverage demands. "Without sick days, I can't take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school," an SEIU janitor lamented.

Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes "serving justice, and serving lunch." Opposing the union means opposing children's health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: "I love my work, but it's getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we're working with. It breaks my heart to see a child who's hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed."

Actually, that's the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a "stronger nutrition safety net." Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.

And Meg Whitman makes it worse....

Now Meg Whitman won't debate Steve Poizner.

As if one dumb move justifies another.

Do you two *want* the Jerry Moonbeam Brown and the Commiecrats to win?

Have a spirited campaign and keep it positive. It's all you two have to do. Really. Please.

Steve Poizner: Crybaby or Paranoid?

You decide.

Steve Poziner seems to me to be a crybaby putz here. All the Whitman campaign was saying in the memo was "Let's bury the hatchet rather than have Poizner and Whitman tear each other apart, and keep the focus on preventing Former Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown from becoming Governor again (shudder)...."

Poizner could have replied that he still wanted a healthy competition and reaffirm that he would not go negative (which Whitman has not done as of yet). Indeed, if Whitman goes negative, my sympathies would be with Poizner.

There is a good argument for Poizner politely disregarding the Whitman campaign offer:

I, for one, don't want Poizner to drop out. With the occasional exceptions, contested primaries are good for the candidates. It warms them up for the general election, helps them vet their strengths and weaknesses, and those of their campaign organizations. They can learn from bonehead moves like complaining to state and federal law enforcement because an opposing campaign asked you to drop out, and avoid similar mistakes in the general election.

Republicans cleared the field for Attorney General Dan Lungren in 1998, on the theory he'd enter the general election at the head of a united GOP against the nominee of a Democratic primary splintered by a bitter primary. Gray Davis pulled a win out of that firefight, and went on to wallop Lungren by twenty points.

So better for campaigns to get poorly-conceived tactics like this one out of their systems early on when few voters are paying attention, and learn from the mistakes.

But Poizner is still being a putz here. And to go to the now Attorney General and future rival Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown to cry about it--wow, that's just political genius at work!!!!

You know, initially I favored Steve Poizner, the seasoned politico, over Meg Whitman, the wealthy dilettante. But not anymore. I wasn't sure which of the two was the more Real Republican and which was more of a RINO. But as of now, I'm choosing Meg.