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Because my daughters were such fans of Prince back in the day, I fell in line and started liking him, too. I've been to many of his concerts over the years and have always found the audiences as entertaining as the performer. What adulation would erupt when Prince played one of his old favorites. The problem became, because Prince is so obstinate, after a while all he wanted to perfom were new songs that, to me, were forgettable. My enthusiasm for his music gradually waned. I still love old school Prince of the 80s but "Adore" is the last song I can think of that I really got into. Truth be told, I outgrew Prince. To me, he became too self absorbed while becoming a caricature of himself, and his music didn't grab me anymore. But, he does have longevity, having maintained his following while cultivating a new generation of fans. So, what do I know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. I've heard all of this Republican propaganda before so put a sock in it. The case you state for them is full of holes. Or am I interested in hearing your maudlin preaching. I have no use for Republicans/conservatives because, at my advanced age, I trust my radar which is reinforced by a gut feeling, both of which instinctively tell me that these snakes in the grass do not have the best interests of black people at heart. The only ones they care about are those who make up corporate America, the one percenters who have facilitated capitalism's take-over of democracy while burdening the middleclass and blathering about god and country and the American way. Barf. They are, as I am sure you are, the syncopants of Faux News. Who's your favorite talk show commentator? Rush Limbaugh? I'm sure you think Dr. Ben Carson will make a good president since he knows how to crack people's skulls and incise their brains, while suffering from amnesia when it comes to how he got where he is. And what a legal scholar Clarence Thomas is. A rubber stamp lackey who can't even write his own opinions. Your naivite is amazing in that you apparently have no concept of tokenism when singing the praises of certain Blacks who have had doors opened for them. I lived through the Civil Rights struggle, and all your subtefuge about red states and blue states back in the day doesn't resonate with me. I know what I witnessed and who I witnessed doing it You're all over the place, spouting statistics and relying on Wikipedia for your facts(?), spreading your right wing gospel. Knock yourself out. I prefer the liberal philosophy of "lifting others as you climb" as opposed to the conservative "I got mine, now you get yours" approach. I may not always practice this in my pragmatic personal life, but I know which way I would go, if I had the wherewithal to make change. Conservative America with its fascistic leanings, myopic mysogynism, gun nut fanaticism, religious zealotry, capitalistic piracy are not my cup of tea. They totally turn me off. As for your thinly-disguised defense of unarmed suspects being gunned down in the street, - it sucks.

You obviously know nothing about history. Look at an election map from anytime before 1980. The South is solidly blue whereas the Northern and Western states are variably red. Even Wikipedia will tell you this. Before 1964, black voters were about evenly split with both parties. If you truly believe the party behind Abolition and Reconstruction simultaneously created the KKK, then you are horribly misguided. You might as well blame Lincoln for "taking jobs away from black people." You claim to be in favor of individual freedom and then bury black conservatives for not thinking monolithically, i.e. using race as an excuse for not succeeding, when they themselves have succeeded by rising beyond race. I'm not telling you so much "vote Republican" as I'm telling you people should have the right to vote for whomever and whatever they want regardless of what they look like and without fear of being ostracized and called racist slurs by you and other race-baiting liberals. Seriously, how is this form of Democrat harassment all that different from Democrat harassment a century ago? Intimidating voters to only vote a certain way is pretty much the same as intimidating them to not vote at all. Furthermore, how is "Uncle Tom" any different from "nigger?" They're both racist and demeaning. Look at what atheism has done to society: children don't respect their elders, degenerate behavior runs rampant and is constantly being promoted, people no longer think they have to be held accountable for their actions, and believers are ridiculed just for saying "Bless you." A 6'4 thief assaulting store owners and even cops is anything but "innocent." You may not want to believe it, but society has changed during your lifetime. Look how long ago the Amadou Diallo shooting was, and how long before that the Rodney King beating was. These events have become so rare since the days of Jim Crow that they do draw much attention when they do happen. Contrary to all the media spin, it's not like they're happening every day like black youths killing each other. Where's the outrage there? Is black on black not newsworthy? How about brown on black? Lord knows black on white never gets any coverage.

Yes! I meant "objective"! I corrected it. It's funny how one wrong word can change the whole gist of a statement. My ageing thought processes are catching up with me. Ann Coulter is the physical template of Republican women in the media but her airhead colleagues cannot match her in deviousness. She has a response to every liberal argument because she is a supreme sophist, skilled at advancing specious arguments. As a cynic, I have to giver her credit for bamboozling the public. Thomas Sowell's tendency to be a detached observer of the passing scene is also what makes him tolerable to me. Al Sharpton has tempered his militancy since joining MSNBC, even to the point where other Blacks are calling him a sell-out". But his loud mouthed delivery can still be a turn-off to Whites who don't judge Al by his words which might not be that different from those of Sowell, but by his pimp persona. Just another example of the influential effect of image. The longer I live, the more I realize that the world is gonna "do what it do", and in the long run People are at the mercy of trends and cycles and are just along for the ride.

As is often the case, I miss postings probably because of the method I use to access a thread, which consists of clicking on the the last post under a heading. So, I didn't see the video of Ann Coulter until I accidently stumbled across it today. It was quite funny. But what I really was impressed with was what appeared when her video was over, which was a collage with links to a roster of conservative oriented topics. One of these topics was an interview with Thomas Sowell, a prominent black academic who I've often glossed over because I considered him too far to the right. But he had some very interesting things to say about intellectuals. Something I always suspected. He contended that intellectuals enjoyed an inflated status, and he outed them as pedants who weren't held accountable for their pontificating because they dealt in abstract ideas as opposed to brick and mortar results, and that they were fixated on their own points of view. He also dismissed "experts" as unreliable because they are paid to embelish whatever claims they are hired to verify. Sowell really has some inconoclastic views about people who are getting by on reputations and credentials which qualify them for nothing more than opportunities to promote their personal theories and philosophies. In other words, half the people in the world are not objective enough to know what the hell they are talking about. I wanted to ask Sowell, if that applied to him. Me, I've always felt that there is the world as it is verbalized and condensed into language which can be misinterpreted. And then, there is the real world as it actually exists. But - what do I know?