Memorial Day, 2010 - A Day to Remember Significant People

As the proprietor of Sippican Cottage says,

Have a pleasant Memorial Day.
Try not to forget what it's about.

On his program this morning, Dennis Prager talked about the struggle which civilized nations face in finding a balance between (1) preserving the idea of the sanctity of human life and (2) determining when it is worthwhile to risk lives, as in war, police work, etc. Donald Sensing touched on similar issues in the preamble to an essay for Memorial Day, on "Courage."

Dennis also suggested this morning that a nation which loses its memories is as inwardly dead as a person who loses all his memories. Commemorating major holidays is one way to preserve a "national memory" and the sense of a common background and purpose.

Communist theory recognized the importance of memory to national cohesiveness. One major goal of many communists and socialists (even the non-violent ones) has been the eradication of common memories and interpersonal connections. Pol Pot was so successful at eradicating memory that almost no one in Cambodia knew how to grow food after the educated were slaughtered in the Killing Fields. Everyone who understood what needed to be done had been killed or had fled. Even farmers were considered a threat to the perfect new civilization. Pol Pot came very close to his goal of starting his new civilization at "year zero". We are so fortunate in this country never to have faced a similar situation. Though we have had our trials. And we face a less-drastic loss of our heritage by ignoring the reasons for national holidays in favor of shopping.

The everyday people in the video linked at Sippican Cottage above remind me of something else Dennis Prager says:

The famous are seldom great and the great are seldom famous.

or, sometimes, in terms of personal influence on people's lives:

The famous are not significant and the significant are not famous.

These are real, significant people, coping in often-heroic (and sometimes, persistently courageous) ways with terrible situations.  There's an evocative, personal story spanning decades here.

Another video in which you might find some things to think about. Listen to the words of the song.

Here's another. Featuring some of the good guys.

Captain Ed quotes President Reagan concerning the meaning of Memorial Day, and reminds us that not everyone "celebrates" on this day. Lots of nice links to other thoughts on this significant day, when we remember courageous, significant people who were lost and other courageous, significant people who were left behind. Here's one of them.

Kids sing "Thank You". Want to show some adult appreciation? Try one of the organizations linked here.

"Blogfather" Kaus vs. Barbara Boxer for Senate

Mickey Kaus, one of the two or three bloggers who got me hooked on reading political blogs (way back during the Gray Davis recall) is running against our long-time senator, Barbara Boxer, in the Democratic primary. It's kind of a David Vs. Goliath contest, so she doesn't think she needs to show up for debates. Too bad, because he seems much more sensible and intellectually engaged than Boxer - not one of my favorite politicians.

Kaus deserves the "blogfather" title. He seems to be a fairly moderate Democrat on most issues. He doesn't like corruption. He has some creative ideas sometimes. I have had a hard time following his Slate blog, Kausfiles, more recently, because it was his habit to keep adding new material to each daily post as the day wore on, and I lost track of earlier points he'd made. In recent years, I have generally only read his work when someone linked it.

He leaves a good general impression with me. But even if by some miracle he won the primary, I'd have a hard time voting for a Democrat in California, because the party machine in this state is so corrupt. I'm not real excited about the primaries, so far. Time to do some serious study, I think.

Update: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman won the Republican primaries for senate and governor. Heard Fiorina today on Dennis Prager's show. She sounded genuine and reasonable. I'm not totally happy with the way the primaries turned out - campaign finance rules have intimidated people who would otherwise give money to candidates to get their messages out. As it now stands, races are dominated by dinosaurs and zillionaires. A referendum for an open primary passed. A similar set-up in Louisiana seemed to contribute to corruption.

Mickey Kaus, with a budget of $40,000 and a very short campaign, took 5% of the vote away from Barbara Boxer. He's still trying to make some things clear to the electorate. A few decades ago, there were many more sensible Democrats like him.

Postmortem: What did he accomplish and what did he learn? Interview with Glenn Reynolds. He opposed unions, especially teacher's unions and other public unions, and immediate amnesty. Teacher's unions were the most unpopular of his "target institutions" with the people he spoke to.

Moms Against Debt

What many moms are thinking about.

More on the West's Indifference to Communist Cruelty

I was disheartened to learn that western scholars are not much interested in parts of the Soviet archives which are available for study. Scott at Powerline discusses revelations about the impression left with a Soviet operative (if you trust what he said to his bosses) that Senators Biden and Lugar wanted to APPEAR to be interested in the fates of Soviet dissidents but were far more concerned that actually pushing the issue might make their negotiations on other issues more difficult.

In the current issue of City Journal, Claire Berlinski has an interesting essay on Soviet archives copied and removed from Russia by Pavel Stroilov and Vladimir Bukovsky. Berlnski describes the archives removed by Stroilov as copies of documents held by the Gorbachev Foundation. 

Berlinski explains that when Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of archival documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation. In 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov.

Among the documents are "reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee's International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev's advisor until 1991." According to Berlinski, Zagladin was both an envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.

The essay is a little long for easy consumption online, but it would be a shame to miss this 1979 glimpse of Joe Biden (and Richard Lugar) from Zagladin's reports:

Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for "human rights." . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

Apparently, no one questioned the senators at the time this information was published. The Front Page article linked by Scott is a bit tough to follow, as the English is non-standard, but it is fascinating.

And there's this:

Bukovsky's book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky's words, tried "to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective." Bukovsky replied that "due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship." The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it.

Pej adds:

I am with Claire Berlinski: More people should care about, and be interested in the content of the Soviet archives. Indeed, the indifference to them is nothing short of shocking, but I suppose that said indifference is easily explained by the fact that the archives revealed Mikhail Gorbachev to think (a) that the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 was good for giggles; (b) that the Chinese were right to massacre protesters in Tienanmen Square in 1989; (c) that the Soviets themselves were right to massacre peaceful protesters in Tbilisi in 1989; and (d) that Zionism/Judaism is equivalent to racism. If the Soviet archives had revealed that Gorbachev was the humanitarian everyone publicly believed him to be, I would bet that there would be significantly more interest in publishing them.

The fact that the archives reveal that there were efforts made to merge the European Parliament with the Supreme Soviet “to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse,” that European socialists believed that perestroika was supposed to lead to “socialist revolutions,” and that socialists “cannot accept” it when “passages in the documents of ‘G7’ [state that] the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level,” might also serve to explain why there is no major push to publish them. Too many intellectual applecarts might be upset by revealing that the Soviet corruption of supposedly mainstream European institutions really was as bad as some people claimed it was. . .

He mentions other evidence of Soviet corruption of European institutions from the scholars who had access to the archives. This issue is worth some study.

Uh-Oh. Attorney General Evasive about Causes of Terrorism

Eric Holder seems to be part of the Reality-Based Community. His level of uncertainty about the causes of terrorism and the best ways to combat terrorism may be higher than Janet Napolitano's.

But there is one exception to this type of uncertainty among the elite in our country: Dennis Prager:

The Left's inability to identify the religious beliefs of Islamic terrorists and instead ascribe their murders of Americans to the terrorists' psychological tensions and economic problems — while at the same time utterly certain that conservative white Americans have only the most vile motives — is an expression of the Left's failure to recognize and confront real evil.

Just remember this: If Shahzad had not been identified as the would-be bomber, the mainstream (i.e., liberal) news media and leading Democrats would have told us repeatedly that a white male — surely a conservative white male — was the Times Square terrorist, and that we should therefore be looking suspiciously at our fellow Americans on the Right, especially those attending tea parties. For while liberals claim not to know the motives of Muslim terrorists, they are always certain of conservatives' motives: racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.

When, one day, the Left exits from history's stage, its epitaph will read: "Those who do not understand evil will not understand good."

UPDATE: Tim Blair links Mark Steyn:

Listening to Attorney General Holder, one is tempted to modify Trotsky:
You may not be interested in Islam but Islam is interested in you. Islam smells weakness at the heart of the West. The post-World War II order is dying: The European Union's decision to toss a trillion dollars to prop up a Greek economic model that guarantees terminal insolvency is merely the latest manifestation of the chronic combination of fiscal profligacy and demographic decline in the West at twilight. Islam is already the biggest supplier of new Europeans and new Canadians, and the fastest-growing demographic in the Western world.
Therefore, it thinks it not unreasonable to shape the character of those societies – not by blowing up buildings and airplanes, but by determining the nature of their relationship to Islam.
For example, the very same day that Eric Holder was doing his "Islam? What Islam?" routine at the Capitol, the Organization of the Islamic Conference was tightening its hold on the U.N. Human Rights Council – actually, make that the U.N. "Human Rights" Council. The OIC is the biggest voting bloc at the U.N., and it succeeded in getting its slate of candidates elected to the so-called "human rights" body – among them the Maldives, Qatar, Malaysia, Mauritania and Libya. The last, elected to the HRC by 80 percent of the U.N. membership, is, of course, a famous paragon of human rights, but the other, "moderate" Muslim nations share the view that Islam, in both its theological and political components, should be beyond discussion. And they will support the U.N.'s rapid progress toward, in effect, the imposition of a global apostasy law that removes Islam from public discourse.
Attorney General Holder seems to be operating an advance pilot program of his own, but he's not alone. Also last week, the head of Canada's intelligence service testified to the House of Commons about hundreds of "second- or third-generation Canadians" who are "relatively well integrated" "economically and socially" but who have become so "very very disenchanted" with "the way we want to structure our society" that they have developed "strong links to homelands" that are "in distress."
Homelands such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Hmm. If you're wondering what those countries might have in common, keep wondering. No words beginning with "I-" and ending with "-slam" passed the director's lips. If the head of the Crown's intelligence service has narrowed his concerns about "disenchanted" "second- and third-generations Canadians" to any demographic group in particular, evidently it's classified information and can't be disclosed in public.
The U.N. elections are a big victory for the Organization of the Islamic Conference. By the way, to my liberal friends who say, "Hey, what's the big deal about the Organization of the Islamic Conference? Lighten up, man," try rolling around your tongue the words "Organization of the Christian Conference." Would you be quite so cool with that? Fifty-seven Prime Ministers and Presidents who get together and vote as a bloc in international affairs? Or would that be a theocratic affront to secular sensibilities? The casual acceptance of the phrase "the Muslim world" – ("Mr. Obama's now-famous speech to the Muslim world" – The New York Times) – implicitly defers to the political ambitions of Islam. And, if there is a "Muslim world," what are its boundaries? Forty years ago, the OIC began with mainly Middle Eastern members plus Indonesia and a couple more. By the Nineties, former Soviet Central Asia had signed on, plus Albania, Mozambique, Guyana and various others. In 2005, Russia was admitted to "observer" membership.

Nazis really bad, Communists not so bad

A while ago, a young man helped me move a couch into a friend's apartment. He wore a large dog-tag style emblem of the communist hammer and sickle around his neck with the French motto, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" on the other side.  I wondered if he realized how much suffering and death that symbol represents.  

The Communist holiday, May Day, continues to be widely celebrated. No one would openly celebrate a Nazi holiday today. But the evils of communism largely remain hidden.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

Follow the links for an excellent discussion of the reasons our elite class is not interested in documents uncovering the horrors of the old USSR. The City Journal article also discusses what is happening with parts of the Soviet archives which became available to scholars a few years ago. Imagine a world in which a huge totalitarian country more-or-less dissolves and the scholars of the world are not interested in its formerly-secret archives. We live in that world.

Dennis Prager, who studied the Soviet system in graduate school, gives several reasons for the differences in the way people think of Nazis vs. Communists. At the end of the piece, he notes:

 Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.

One way to help the Left face reality: Turn May Day into "Victims of Communism Day".

Give me that hot new religion

College students are apparently losing their religious faith in great numbers. On the other hand, many are embracing a new kind of religion.

. . . great masses of Americans have rejected and repudiated, they think, the non-rational desire for religious meaning in their lives.


But what they've actually done is only reject and repudiate conventional religion's offerings in this area. Having rejected the usual method of finding transcendence in everyday life, and yet still possessing a strong desire to discover such transcendence, they simply begin attaching religious significance to traditionally non-religious ideas and actions, such as buying local organic produce and fluorescent bulbs. . .

 The connection between "black angel" movies and the election of President Obama is fascinating. Follow the links to the City Journal articles. Ace calls them "Magic Negro" movies, bringing to mind the liberal hate-fest after Rush Limbaugh played a parody song based on the early reaction of black "civil rights advocates" to Obama's candidacy when they complained that Obama was not "authentic". It was a liberal black journalist who originally called Obama a "Magic Negro". He had something of a point, when it came to how whites viewed Candidate Obama. Even before he became the Democrats' nominee, Obama was aware that he had the ability to lead people to project their own hopes and dreams onto him. Don't know if he realized that some would think of him as  Alpha and Omega.

And Candidate Obama promised some magical things. As Tim Blair noted,

Obama's one great advantage over McCain is his stunning speaking style, which is so powerful Obama sometimes gets away with statements of almost pure absurdity.


In his acceptance speech, for example, Obama declared it "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal".

Obama's team later tried to back off from some of his grand statements  to prevent a sudden let-down among his supporters. But Obama was right about the rise of the oceans beginning to slow. We found out that the world was not warming as rapidly as Al Gore had warned. Without Obama taking any actions which would substantially reduce carbon emissions, the rise of the oceans was slowed. Amazing. Maybe he is kind of mystical.

Of course, Obama's statement claiming credit for slowing the rise of the oceans that night was a terrible insult to former messianic figure Al Gore, who had been working to slow the rise of the oceans for years by urging government action and starting "green" businesses. Gore may have lost out to Obama in the messianic department, but he has lots of money to console him. And properties near the ocean in San Francisco and Montecito, with at least the one in San Francisco within the flood zone were oceans to rise as much as he said they would in "An Inconvenient Truth". Among his other fancy real estate holdings. Being a messiah, even a former messiah, has its potential rewards, if one invests wisely in ones' own messianic program.

The Death Spiral of the Welfare State

Greece is just the beginning of the unfolding financial disaster in Europe.

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies. . . .

And what happened in Greece is not too different from what is happening in California.

Canadian Human Rights Advocate Mark Steyn explains some of the ways the world is changing. Click to full screen mode after starting the video you select below. If you're the impatient type, just go with the Chapter 4 or Chapter 5 video. Interesting ideas, whether or not you agree with them.

Chapter 1 Breaking down the numbers: why the West is dying
Chapter 2 Unsustainable habits of the West
Chapter 3 Civilizational exhaustion
Chapter 4 Response to critics
Chapter 5 Comparing Europe and America

The Sub-prime Times Square Bomber

Canadian human rights activist Mark Steyn applies his typical dark humor to the Times Square Bomber incident.

The story of the Times Square bomber reads like some Urdu dinner-theater production of Mel Brooks’ The Producers that got lost in translation between here and Peshawar: A man sets out to produce the biggest bomb on Broadway since Dance a Little Closer closed on its opening night in 1983. Everything goes right: He gets a parking space right next to Viacom, owners of the hated Comedy Central! But then he gets careless: He buys the wrong fertilizer. He fails to open the valve on the propane tank. And next thing you know, his ingenious plot is the non-stop laugh riot of the Great White Way. Ha-ha! What a loser! Why, the whole thing’s totally — what’s the word? — “amateurish,” according to multiple officials. It “looked amateurish,” scoffed New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. “Amateurish,” agreed Janet Napolitano, the White House amateurishness czar.

Contessa Brewer makes her bigotry concerning the hoped-for identity of the bomber clear.
Captain Ed:

Brian Maloney gives us this entry for the Someone Left the Irony On Department, in which Contessa Brewer tells Stephanie Miller that she’s really unhappy that she couldn’t use the Times Square bombing attempt to prove Tea Party “bigotry.” Never mind that this clip shows the bigotry of Brewer in relation to conservatives — that all of the opponents of Barack Obama and the Democrats are somehow the equivalent of the Hutaree militia in Michigan. Brewer really wanted a way to smear conservatives, and now she’ll just have to wait a little longer:

Listen to the video at the link. In her mind, the bomber is a typical example of an immigrant who wants to become an American citizen.  ( Never mind that he went to Pakistan for terrorist training).  She really seems to have no clue how much she has insulted typical immigrants, or made suspicion of them more likely.  AMAZING.

Yes, Contessa, there do seem to be a lot of people who want to “justify writing off people who believe in a certain way” as either terrorists or racists. Your network employs more than a few.

The young Contessa can't help it. She was taught in school to close her mind to thinking outside the progressive catechism. She is upset that "there are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent . . . as justification for really outdated bigotry." On the other hand, the form of bigotry she reflexively expresses is the New Hotness and needs no justification. All her friends think like that. James Lileks:

Good people not only don’t judge before-hand, they want to refrain from judging after-hand, so they can theoretically judge someone who didn’t do it, but might.

Steyn applies a little reality to Mayor Bloomberg's similarly bigoted speculation about who was responsible for the bombing attempt.  But first, he lets some air out of the exaggerated fear of prejudice against Muslims among those on the Left.    The Left once again demonstrates that it is easier and more satisfying to stand up against a threat that's not very threatening than against a really dangerous imminent  threat:

As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since 9/11, au contraire: Were America even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen, and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the last nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” America might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society: Instead, President Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” — rather than the rights of the ever lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized, and murdered for not wanting to be covered. America is so un-Islamophobic that at Ground Zero they’re building a 13-story mosque — on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning.

So, in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.

And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mayor Bloomberg a day or two before Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit was “someone who doesn’t like the health-care bill” (that would be me, if your SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). Even after Shahzad’s arrest, the Associated Press, CNN, and the Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Just as, after Major Hasan, the “experts” effortlessly redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone, so now the housing market is the root cause of terrorism: Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit? . . .

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Now we get beyond cultural issues to the really serious political issues: Read the first link, to a piece by Richard Clarke concerning the inevitable bomb plot which DOES NOT fail. He worries, among other things, that counter-terrorism officials will be blamed, even though these attacks are extremely hard to stop:

The reason such attacks are hard to stop is rooted in the identity of the attackers. They often seem to be successful or well-educated members of society, uninvolved in any form of radicalism. But then, the drip-drip of terrorist propaganda -- either on the Internet or circulated through friends -- has its effect. They quietly make contact with radical groups overseas, perhaps even traveling abroad for training and indoctrination. They throw away the life they have made in the West and agree to stage an attack. Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square terrorist, fits that profile, as have others in the United States and Europe.

The second link suggests one of the things that Clarke fears: firing the head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. Partly because she does not seem to recognize the profile of past attackers which Clarke describes, and partly because of the brazenly political nature of her rhetoric.

And contact between would-be attackers and radical groups has not always been as "quiet" as Clarke suggests. The Underwear Bomber's father, at great personal risk, went to a U.S. embassy to warn about his son. But the son still got on a plane bound for the U.S. Napolitano said "the system worked". And the Times Square bomber went to a terrorist training camp:

Napolitano's rhetorical slip is a little too serious to be palmed off with some linguistic woolgathering. She has made clear repeatedly that she believes people with Gadsden flag bumper stickers are a greater threat to domestic tranquility than out-of-the-closet terrorists who receive training and material assistance in foreign terror centers. She has been wrong about this every time, and she will continue to be wrong until Americans actually die.

This is an obvious politicization of her office. (Napolitano's favored targets -- health care protesters and disgruntled veterans -- are distinguished not by their propensity toward violence but by their opposition to the administration.) But if you believe in the necessity of a Homeland Security Department, every day Napolitano is in charge of it creates an actual risk to life and property. Napolitano has a positive burden of proof: She needs to demonstrate some understanding of how to do her job, or she needs to be fired, for the security of the United States and the safety of the American people. . .

It's one thing when Contessa Brewer is judgmental only against politically-approved targets. It's another thing when Janet Napolitano is similarly blinded by politics.

MORE on the irrational belief in higher education that today's political violence is most likely to come from the Right.  And these people call themselves "Reality-Based".  

Parental Warning Label on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence?

We MUST protect children from history (and science - read on, and please watch the Michael Crichton videos).

Children must be especially vulnerable to history when they get to high school, judging from the actions of some educators. In North Carolina, they proposed starting high school American History in 1877. You know. About the time the Progressive Movement got its start. Earlier history would be "covered" in civics and economics (???) classes. Our intellectual betters dropped this proposal after protests and made new proposals which would meet their goal of downgrading early American history.

Orson Scott Card:

Remember that the people creating this new curriculum were taught in college not to value the old "hero-centered" stories; they were taught to despise the works of "dead white males."

But America was created, like it or not, by the mostly-British-ancestry men who led the struggle for independence and created the Constitution and then fought the bloody Civil War to end the evil practice of slavery in America.

They were the good guys. They were the heroes. And if we downgrade their achievements, and then make the modern heroes of the Left the only ones we teach about in high school, it's still going to be propaganda for the Left. . . .

It is time that tax-supported education cease promulgating the values of the extreme Leftist elite that dominates the university faculties and the educational establishment, and accept that the job of education is to transmit the values of the people who pay the taxes.

When we require people, under penalty of law, to send their children to the public schools, then there is a solemn responsibility to pass on to those children the culture that made our nation a light to the world. (Which it is, except in the delusional mindset of America-hating intellectuals who have no qualms about attacking America while sucking on the public udder.)

There are no educational experts; their "educational science" is a joke; and even if it were not, their expertise as "professional educators" would only extend to methodology, not content.

The content of courses is another matter entirely, and we all have a right to a voice in deciding that. Especially history courses, since those are the classes that create the American self-story for the next generation.

No one group should own the teaching of history in our schools -- like our government, it should be a compromise among all the beliefs that are part of our polity. But the arbiter should always be the facts, not one ideology.

State and national educational administrations have long been dominated by one elitist minority which thinks its favorite facts are the only ones that it is important to teach.

They are still in charge. That is the problem, and the fact that they are still proceeding with the downgrade in America's founding stories (and the misplacement of the religion of environmentalism in world history instead of science) says that their agenda has not changed at all.

How did this happen? It's quite simple, really. Democrats have been controlling the state government for decades. . . .

Orson Scott Card is a Democrat. He's not a totalitarian. Read the whole thing.  (No wonder home schooling is becoming so popular these days.)  He also had a few words to say about science education:

And another thing: When they're designing the course for world history, they have shown no sign of eliminating that offensive proposal of including in it a unit on environmentalism. . .
The only appropriate place to teach about the subject is in biology class, and it will be called "ecology" and it will be based solely on actual science. Which, as has been obvious all along to anyone who understands what honest science looks like, will include "global warming" only to the same extent that biology class should include "Piltdown man" -- as an example of how science can be temporarily damaged by hoaxes designed to promote a particular point of view.

O. C. Card is not the only famous science fiction author who has worried in public about the damage to science by the environmental movement. Watch the three Michael Crichton videos linked at the link above. We could all learn something by studying the thoughtful way in which he answers students' questions. It's a shame that he left the world when he was so young. We're fortunate that educators allowed him on campus to talk with students, and that someone recorded these extraordinary encounters.

Federal Budget Austerity during the Recession

In April, President Obama promised to find ways to cut 100 million dollars from the federal budget. This video puts that number in perspective.

So why would the President make a big announcement over a budget cut which is said to equal the amount the federal government spends every 13 minutes? Just about anybody could do better than that with their own budget.  Maybe because it's all about image:

President Obama has reportedly been working closely with noted behavioral economists, and their studies have shown that most people are “insensitive to scope,” meaning they are not very good at putting large numbers in their proper context. People will react about the same to a policy proposal whether the cost/benefit is $10 million, $10 billion, or $10 trillion. Consequently, the $100 million cut may seem huge to many voters.

What else mightt the President do to enhance his budget cutter immage and to fulfill his promise to bring America together?

Conservatives should welcome converts, and ask President Obama to not stop at a measly $100 million. Why not come together to cut:

· At least $55 billion in annual program overpayments;

· $60 billion for corporate welfare;

· $25 billion in unused federal property

· $123 billion for programs for which government auditors can find no evidence of success;

· $140 billion in potential budget savings identified in the CBO’s “Budget Options” books; and

· Massive program duplication, such as the 342 economic development programs?

May Day in San Francisco (and Fresno)

Communists in Fresno?
Surprise! Fresno was once a hotbed of communism. The Fresno Bee was once known as a "communist rag". One of the artifacts of that concentration of hard leftists is the Pacifica Radio station which broadcasts from Fresno, with most of its programming coming from Berkeley and San Francisco. Most people think of Fresno as a pretty conservative place. But there is still that leftist San Francisco connection, and some local leftist activists. We get the radio signal from Fresno out here in the country, and we have some lefty activists, too.

The Sixties live on in San Francisco
Last week, before Arizona rocked the country with its immigration enforcement law, I heard part of a program on Pacifica Radio by representatives of the "Women's Wisdom Circle" or something to that effect, out of the Bay Area - San Francisco, Berkeley or a nearby city. The host of the program was celebrating the memory of the discovery of LSD. She remarked that this discovery was certainly an auspicious development for people seeking insight, as "Neptune was rising over San Francisco" at the moment that LSD was discovered in Switzerland. She and her guests enthused about other "mind-expanding" drugs for a while. She was filled with wonder at the fact that the common name for cannabis in Spanish, "marijuana", is feminine. This seemed like a big deal to her.

They talked about receiving wisdom from the plants around us, which could teach and heal us if we only listened to them. For example, the bane of the Southeast, kudzu vine, spread at the same time as Lyme disease, which they said kudzu vine can treat. Plants just show up around us to heal us when we get sick. One noted healer diagnoses illness by finding out which plants grow in the patient's yard. These plant would then be used to heal the patient.  Western medicine relies far too much on "reason".

If only they knew this in Africa. There would be no need for Western medicines for AIDS and malaria. They should just listen to the plants which start growing near them.  Why wouldn't this group scrape a little money together to send the healer described above to Africa to teach people how to end the suffering?   Are they too absorbed in their own little world, surrounded by nurturing affluence, seeking new enlightenment?

The program closed with an enthusiastic notice that Neptune is rising again, leading the enlightenment-seeking women and men of San Francisco to expect another era of fabulous insight right away. I hope that this time, enlightenment doesn't come with phenomena like teenagers sitting on the freeway during an LSD "trip" to see the lights coming toward them.

This little snippet of radio programming was sort of a nostalgic return to the heyday of the hippies. Who needs Western medicine when plants talk to you and your parents send you money so you won't starve while becoming enlightened? Who needs Obamacare? Of course, there is also programming on this station which suggests that the United States should go much faster than Obamacare in socializing medicine. Somehow, these ideas fit together in the minds of the folks at Pacifica.

May Day in the Greater San Francisco Area (AKA Aztlan)
Today, the programming was different. Angry. I heard about 20 minutes of May Day protests. May Day commemorations had, of course, already been planned in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere, without much regard for the cruelty this represents toward the millions of victims of communism.

With the passage of the Arizona law, the focus of the May Day commemorations changed to immigration. Of course, Pacifica Radio is solidly on the left side of the left, so the themes ran from the rights of "indigenous peoples" directly to vile, vicious demonization of anyone who was in favor of enforcing current federal immigration law. Demonization in the name of love, of course. It is critical that anyone who does not support open borders be labeled as "draconian", "Nazi", "Fascist", "Racist", etc. They need an enemy.

One can certainly empathize with the predicament of people who have crossed the border illegally, wanting only to work. They have come while our government looked away and their government actively encouraged them to take the risks to come. They have been living in an uncertain status that keeps them in the shadows, and their situation is complicated by children born in the U.S. They are desperate for a better life than the one they had in Mexico and have been exploited because of their illegal status, then dumped into social service programs. The non-enforcement of our current immigration laws and the maddening difficulty of legal immigration has led to a giant problem which politicians have tried very hard to ignore.

One can also empathize with the people of Arizona, who have become desperate as violence and disorder have mounted due to gang members and drug runners who enter the country along with the workers. And due to social disorder started by having laws on the books which are not enforced.  This leads to selective enforcement of other laws, etc.  But the folks at Pacifica Radio ignore the plight of Arizona residents and look far beyond the day-to-day concerns of illegal immigrants and their families. Their programming had a bit of a fantasy-like quality to it.  The Pacifica broadcast studio was repeatedly referred to as the "mother ship" during the protest broadcast.

Contribution of Academia to the Current Anger
We heard reports from the San Francisco Civic Center and from a protest in Santa Rosa, characterized as coming from the "streets of Aztlan". Aztlan is a mythical territory covering a huge part of the United States, which some Chicano Studies types consider to be theirs, because a few Mexicans reached there shortly before Americans. In addition, there is a legend that the tribes which lived in Mexico when the Spaniards came had originally migrated to Mexico from the Southwestern U.S. in about the 11th century.

The more radical Chicano Studies types planned to re-claim Aztlan from the United States through "La Reconquista",  by subversion and force.  They had a government system worked out which would put their racial group in total charge.  Only non-Mexicans who agreed to subservience would be allowed to stay.  It had strong neo-marxist elements, but paid tribute to a mythical Mexican culture as well.  Even Mexicans who lived there would have to follow the strict  dictates of the leaders of the movement.

Because of the obvious racialism inherent in their early goals and plans, many of the radical Chicano Studies types later adopted the "cover ideology" of activism in behalf of "all indigenous peoples" in order to avoid criticism from others on the Left. "La Reconquista" is now more commonly thought of as a demographic process (becoming the majority through immigration and high birth rates), along with promotion of Chicanos in political positions and other positions of power.

 There are lots of fervent promoters of this idea in the State bureaucracy.  Other ethnic groups respond in kind, sometimes making hiring a new employees a matter of bargaining between different ethnically-based coalitions.  This bargaining is degraded into old-fashioned nepotism and cronyism, with a noble patina of seeking equality.

At the May Day protest, there were calls for universal amnesty or, even better, abolition of immigration laws in favor of free migration for "indigenous peoples" without regard to national borders. One fellow explained that it was all the fault of the United States that security and the economy in Mexico were so abysmal. It is all the fault of NAFTA. And "that's why we come here".

And that's one big reason that he hates the United States. There was a lot of talk about returning sovereignty to "the nations and pueblas of the earth and mother earth". I probably didn't get that last phrase exactly right, but it's close.

Why do they hate us?
What is really interesting is that the people who organize these protests are insistent that the federal government solve all their problems and give them a lot of money, but at the same time they want to overthrow our system of government: to replace the "Declaration of Independence" with a "Declaration of Interdependence" between the "nations and pueblas of the earth" (with due respect for the rights of Mother Earth). These are anti-globalists. They also want other nation-states to disappear. In other words, they want a return to multi-cultural tribalism. Spengler made this observation in Asia Times in July of 2008:

History seems awfully unfair: half or more of the world's 7,000 or so languages will be lost by 2100, linguists warn, and at present fertility rates Italian, German, Ukrainian, Hungarian and a dozen other major languages will die a century or so later. The agony of dying nations rises in reproach to America's unheeding prosperity.

An old joke divides the world into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't. America is one of the things that sorts the world into polar opposites. To much of the world, America is the Great Satan, the source of the plague of globalization, the bane of the environment, the Grim Reaper of indigenous cultures, the carrier of soulless industrialism, and the perpetrator of imperial adventures. To hundreds of millions of others it is an object of special grace. Whether one subscribes to the concept or not, America's grace defines one of the world's great dividing lines, perhaps its most important.

Violent antipathy to America measures the triumph of the American principle, and the ascendance of America's influence in the world. . . .

The Convoluted Path to Utopia presented from the  San Francisco Area
In the fantasy world of Pacifica Radio, there are a few steps missing between the destruction of the United States and other nations of the world and the establishment of their utopian replacement for the current world systems of government. This reminds me of the way early communists left out or downplayed the totalitarian stages in their descriptions of the path to to a utopia peopled by perfectly unselfish, productive "Soviet Man".

Sometimes Pacifica Radio's positions with regard to Big Government seem to contradict each other. The far Left has many groups which have seemingly irrational policy positions. Like "Queers for Palestine". Why would self-identified "Queers" agitate in behalf of a government which would execute them in a horrible manner if they lived in Palestine?

Photo-blogger Zombie explained this oddity (elsewhere. the link is work-safe, unlike some of his other journalistic records): Queers for Palestine is an anarchist group which believes that by turning the West against the Muslim world, both will be weakened enough that THEY will be able to gain control and run the world with sweetness and light. People might take them more seriously if they could explain the steps between the collapse of the old governments and their benevolent takeover.

Some of the people I heard protesting today sounded like they had a rather naive belief that if the big, bad West could only be defeated, everything would just naturally revert to a peaceful, prosperous system where various tribal groups and "pueblas" traded with each other in total fairness and in harmony with Mother Earth. A sign of indoctrination by Ethnic Studies programs in college.

The Bumpy Path to Aztlan in the Fresno Area
When I was substitute teaching, one of the kids (a European-looking young man) in a local high school history class declared in a rather hostile manner that "all tyrants in history have been European". It was typical Ethnic Studies racist hate speech, taught to him by a respected adult. They have to lie to keep their narrative pure.

There were several activist teachers in our town (some did not have the required credentials) who had majored in Ethnic Studies at Berkeley and elsewhere. I totally understand the additional proposed law in Arizona to eliminate Ethnic Studies classes and education of children aimed at overthrowing the United States. I expect that their influence is as destructive in Arizona as in our little town. But on a larger scale, perhaps.

In our town, these public school teachers, with a group of other activists, almost destroyed our city government and school system a few years ago. They developed ties to the regional Democratic party. Soon, members of the community were afraid to attend community meetings.

One of the teachers disabled the sound system in order to ruin a patriotic program put on by elementary school kids. One second grade school class for ESL students where I taught had walls covered with stories about the mythical, noble Aztec ancestors of the kids, and suggestions concerning how to show their pride in being part of this noble ethnic group and how to return their "Aztec" ethnic group to its rightful, dominant place. He presumed to assign an ethnic identity to his students and to identify it as better than other ethnic identities. Pity the poor kids in the class from countries other than Mexico, especially those whose ancestors were dominated by the Aztecs. And kids of, say, Mayan ancestry from Mexico. Somehow, the teacher who put up these murals didn't consider himself to be a racist.

One result of this kind of activism was a dispute I witnessed between kids of Mexican descent and recent Arab immigrants in a fifth grade class. They fought over whether Arab or Mexican culture was superior. There was no mention of American culture. America was not considered by these students to have a culture, as far as I could tell. After I mentioned that I knew someone from the UAE, one Yemeni child described for me a movie (a fantasy in his mind, I think) in which Arabs killed Mexicans with machine guns. I asked why Arabs would be fighting with Mexicans. He wasn't sure. But he was sure that Arab culture was superior to Mexican culture. None of these kids even seemed aware of an "American Culture".  I'm not sure that increasing tensions between Mexicans and Arabs was the original intent of Ethnic Studies.  But Ethnic Studies classes have now been scientifically demonstrated to increase racial tenstions in universities.  Most people are not surprised that the same is true at lower grade levels.

One wonders how area and ethnic studies professors would feel if they were ordered to undergo diversity sensitivity sessions themselves to try to straighten out their problems.

Though most immigrant parents in our town wanted their kids in English immersion classes, these teachers pushed to keep recent immigrants speaking Spanish as much as possible. Whole classes of children who had good English fluency in kindergarten lost much of that fluency in first grade, because they were taught in Spanish, except for half an hour per day. The English-speaking Ethnic Studies elites can't maintain control if their "clients" are fluent in English, too. And it's so romantic to push for maintaining purity of cultural identity. The Arab and Punjabi kids learned English AND Spanish.

The disintegrating political situation in our town started to turn around when there was a serious assault by one prominent activist (in political office) and some of her relatives, and the local police made no arrests. It became a big scandal. The school system was also in serious trouble academically at that point.

Back to Reality
Back to my ill-informed high school student: I named a few non-European tyrants for the class and talked about some of their atrocities. But I should have mentioned that many of the worst tyrants in history, at least in the 20th century, spent time in Paris - home of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". Tyrants of several different ethnicities. It's remarkable, really.

Somehow, the Ethnic Studies folks at Berkeley and the ernest radio programmers at Pacifica Radio can get socialism and tribalism mashed up into some really convoluted ideologies. I should have helped my students to get a glimpse into the origins of some of the irrationalities of the Left, so maybe they wouldn't end up in an Ethnic Studies program in Berkeley.