Come for the Politics, Stay for the Pathologies



Friday, October 28, 2011

Catholic University of America and the Slippery Slope of Accommodation. UPDATE

I apologize for having so little time available for blogging lately, but I pass along for your consideration this thought provoking message that I received yesterday from Dan Friedman. It is a  simple example of what is meant by a “slippery slope.” I would remind you that we’re still slipping, heading for the bottom and, as the laws of physics dictate, the speed is accelerating.

From Mr. Friedman:

This is a good time to reiterate Friedman’s Laws of History #2: Wherever and whenever, Muslims reach a certain strength and critical mass, they seek to dominate the surrounding non-Muslim community.

One of my correspondents sent this along today:

Subject: Liberal Catholic University hoisted on its own petard

In 2009 at the request of the Obama regime, Georgetown University covered up a cruxifix (sic) in a hall where President Obama was to make a speech.  The President had asked to speak at Georgetown, they had not invited him.

Georgetown University Hid Religious Symbols at White House Request

GU_IHSHere are the symbols found so offensive by the White House. We probably shouldn’t allow religious universities in Washington D.C. anyway, because the whole town is really a government entity.

Also in 2009, Notre Dame University invited President Obama, the most pro-abortion president in US history based on his legislative voting record, to be its commencement speaker in spite of objections by many Catholics in and around the University.

Notre Dame Students Protest as Pro-choice President Obama Picked to Give Commencement Address

large_Barack-Obama-John-Jenkins-notre-dame-051709As you can see, the protestors lost to those who voted for the awesomeness of the Won’s rhetorical genius, Catholic values be damned. Literally. But you know what – Notre Dame isn’t really Catholic in the old fashioned sense anyway.

Now, Catholic University - a private university - is being sued by Muslim students because it has Catholic symbols in every room - which offends the Muslims.

Apparently, a private institution allegedly cannot have its own religious symbols within its building without offending Muslims demanding their own religious rituals on their terms.

I don't know about you, but I would tell these students to be very careful to not let the door hit them in the behind as they left the building, never to return.  But that's just me.

Catholic University is more likely to capitulate its principles just like Georgetown and Notre Dame did for President Obama.

Do Crosses at Catholic University Violate “Human Rights: of Muslims?

Quote:

The Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights confirmed that it is investigating allegations that Catholic University violated the human rights of Muslim students by not allowing them to form a Muslim student group and by not providing them rooms without Christian symbols for their daily prayers.

The investigation alleges that Muslim students “must perform their prayers surrounded by symbols of Catholicism – e.g., a wooden crucifix, paintings of Jesus, pictures of priests and theologians which many Muslim students find inappropriate.”

Unquote.

We’re all aware of the fact that there are Muslim factions committed to suicide missions. I’m concerned that America has factions that are likewise, but unknowingly, committed to the same end. WAKE UP OUT THERE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

Honestly, some days I just really can’t take it any more.

Georgetown-UniversityGeorgetown University

 

catholic university of america washington d.c.Catholic University of America

Hey - you know what we really don’t need in Washington anyway? Two intolerant Catholic universities! How about we use our Supreme Court authorized powers of imminent domain to confiscate one of these from the Church and give it to the Muslims? Because they don’t have a university of their own and that would make everything a lot fairer; and keep the Muslims off our back for awhile.

UPDATE From Dan Freidman:

An email I sent out recently, “Liberal Catholics Find They Let The Fox Thru The Door,” was based on a piece of erroneous information contained in the source I cited:

“Now, Catholic University - a private university - is being sued by Muslim students because it has Catholic symbols in every room - which offends the Muslims.”

In fact, no Muslims students are involved in the complaint, as I learned in this report from the Blaze. It seems this is the work of one attorney, John F. Banzhaf III, with a long track record in “public interest” law. In the past, NYC-born Banzhaf has tilted against the tobacco industry, women’s rights, and once sued Spiro Agnew to recover the bribes he received.

Based on what I know now, the skew that this incident is another Muslim attack on our freedoms is unjustified. Better to clear that up now. There are more than enough real  Muslim attacks on our freedoms to go around.

H/T Jerry Gordon of the Iconoclast

Although none of this negates the lesson of the slippery slope. It also speaks volumes about George Washington University’s Law School (read the Blaze article for a sample of Prof Banzhaf’s activist philosophy).

Monday, October 17, 2011

Ennui On Wall Street

It’s not as if some of the 99% don’t have good reason to be upset. Having learned very little about critical thinking in K-12, they embraced the myth that all they had to do to realize the American Dream was plunk down the money for a college degree. Some got useless degrees, and some got degrees that might have been valuable even a short while ago. But once law schools began pumping out lawyers faster than bagels, as chronicled by Glenn Reynolds, not  only are law degrees of questionable value, but in the inevitable trickle down flow of economics, so, too, are paralegal degrees. Those jobs are being gobbled up by credentialed lawyer-wanna-bees. I’m pretty sure you can get a paralegal degree in 2 years at a community college.

If that’s not prima facie evidence of some kind of fraud, I don’t know what is. lawyers ate my job

Exhibit 1 in the “The paralegal vs. the lawyers” case. Allegation: Lawyers who paid five times as much for their degrees as I did stole my job. That’s not fair! 

Setting aside the whole issue of over-education, the ennui on Wall Street movement was inevitable. Beginning sometime in the 70’s, parents, in concert with the education system, began trying to shield children from life’s inevitable disappointments rather than preparing them to deflect them.  Accordingly, kids received gifts not just on their birthdays, but on their siblings birthdays as well. so as not to suffer from the trauma of getting nothing when someone else was getting something.

And so it began. Soon all teams received trophies, everyone got a gold star for something and at the end of the school year every student was honored with an “award” for not much of anything. Self esteem was as important as actual accomplishment, and everyone was “special” for something. Unfortunately this enlightened approach to education failed to clarify for the kids that once they moved out of mommy and daddy’s house (sometime around age 35), life really wasn’t going to be fair, and no one else was likely to appreciate their “specialness.”

As coincidence would have it, at that same moment in time the education system began its now decades long commitment to replacing a moral value judgment system with the self-leveling floor of moral relativism. No longer were things evaluated on the basis of “right” and “wrong.” America’s moral compass was replaced with a  politically correct, multi-cultural gyroscope that was perpetually seeking, but never quite finding, equilibrium. In this brave new world, all ideas and all people were deemed equally valid. With such a tenuous tether to reality can we really blame the Gen Xers, and their Millennial followers for expecting life to be fair?

Discovering the inherent unfairness of life for the very first time while simultaneously being kicked in the teeth by an economy set on “death spiral” can be quite overwhelming.  So yes, I do understand some of the disillusionment these young and young-ish Occupy Wall Streeters are feeling. I’ve been accused of being mean and heartless for not empathizing with their lot, but frankly most of them have had altogether too much empathy in their lives and way too little reality. And if taken at face value there are a lot of truly sad stories being posted. But yes, I’m skeptical. This is the “look at me” generation who learned histrionics before they graduated out of the child safety seat. Many of them are natural performers by the time they reach middle school. So do I suspect a bit of embellishment? Yes. Yes I do. 

And then there is the whole group of simply pathetic whiners: “I’m doing ok because mommy and daddy could afford to send me to a great school, but I feel so bad for those of you who are not in the 1% like I am.”  That’s what passes as compassion in empathy camp down at the end of the road, and to the left. “I feel your pain, man!”

Then there’s a raft of  “I’m doing fine now, but that could all change in a moment” stories. Yes, it could. For any of us, for ever and always. Where’s the news here?  And here, verbatim, is one of my favorites: “Is it my fault I chose happiness over money?”  You have got to be kidding. What kind of a question is that? I’ll assume rhetorical. And just a tad histrionic.

I get it that some people just can’t find their way out of the tunnel with a flashlight, and that occasionally there’s a train coming from the opposite direction. But to the rest of this angry mob that has relied on the MSM for what little knowledge they have about business and economics (and it is little) all I can say is you’ve been sent in to fight  straw men. And the OWS organizers are relying on your continued ignorance to keep you flailing at them through the 2012 election. Nothing smells like a Democratic victory like a ginned up grievance.

Through their media “education” the 99% have come to believe that the housing collapse was exclusively the purview of “banks” who sold “credit default swaps”- a term they learned on NPR but I sincerely doubt many could explain. They rail at corporations and corporate corruption and corporate lobbying without reflecting for a moment on the fact that their friends and OWS benefactors, big labor, are part and parcel of the crony capitalism pact as well.

My biggest problem with this group is that they don’t realize they are just the useful idiots that the people who wish to control your lives always find to do their bidding. Willing pawns.

And so they protest: believing that it is the nameless, faceless “corporations” fault that they can’t get the job they want, banks’ greed that created the housing-bubble, and the government’s responsibility to educate them (for free) heal them (for free) and pay them when they are unemployed. Like they do in all those wonderful European socialist countries they want to move to. They aren’t aware of the fact that those countries are even closer to economic collapse than we are.

We didn’t arrive at this point by accident, anymore than the OWS crowd arrived in Zuccotti park “by accident.”  The Marxists-by-any-other-name have been working feverishly for half a century. They own the Left wing of this country and by extension they own the MSM – the gateway to the heart of the culture. They also own the education cartel – the gateway to the mind. Kids get leftist propaganda pumped into their heads from kindergarten on: a constant, consistent socialist philosophy promulgating the new collectivism, “social justice,” in every curriculum from geography to math. As I wrote back in 2008:

The “social justice” platform doesn’t just lean left, it takes a hard left turn head-on into the wall of socialism. The philosophy of “social justice” has become firmly entrenched in the Education schools of most colleges and universities. This philosophy teaches the subjection of the individual will for the benefit of the masses. This patently communist theory is fueling the whole contemporary education platform. What exactly is social justice? For the liberal interpretation it is a radical philosophy that is opposed to such basic American traditions as individual justice and free market economy. Nothing critical mind you, just the basis of the political system upon which our republic was founded. It supports a major redistribution of wealth through exorbitant taxation, and isn’t fond of personal property rights either.

This radical doctrine holds that America is an oppressive society that is systemically racist, sexist and classist and therefore institutionally discriminates against women, non-whites, working Americans and the poor. One of the leaders of this educational philosophy is William Ayers …editor of the Columbia Teachers College 12 volume series “Teaching for Social Justice” which is used in numerous education programs across the country. An analysis of the curriculum reveals a radical philosophical belief that free-market capitalism … is the most oppressive practice amongst a sea of oppressive practices...

Combine 12+ years of programmed classroom anti-capitalist propaganda with kids who believe they’re  special and that all of their wants, needs and desires will  be met, and you have created a generation of people predisposed to entitlement.  Add to that predisposition the idealism of a life-unlived, a mountain of student debt, an eroding economy and you have a group ripe for agitation. Bring in the organizing arms of the two largest professional agitators on the planet – organized labor and the Democratic party - and throw in the council of the left wing media and you’ve almost guaranteed yourself a revolution.

Mark Steyn predicts it will usher in geopolitical decline of the US, with none of the niceties that accompanied Europe’s decline:

As I said, these are more or less conventional symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions but increasingly ineffectually. But what the Council on Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant. In Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of Empire. Today’s Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, have better health, and take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline, but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility. Americans could be forgiven for concluding that, if this is “decline,” bring it on.

But it’s not going to be like that for the United States: Unlike Europe geopolitical decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand. Indeed, they’re already underway. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented preeminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything and we would still be Number One. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.

Don’t say I haven’t been trying to warn you - about Detroit I mean.

Meanwhile the ingenious force behind OWS continues to gather to their fold the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to live free and dump their wretched refuse on the golden door of Wall Street’s banks and America’s corporations. The 99% crowd is easy to make fun of (and we have: here, here and here) because of their economic and social naivety and their narcissistic neediness but we can’t simply dismiss them as a bunch of malcontents because they have powerful interests at their back.

As the professional rabble-rousers take more control and the OWS continues to take council from all of their highly trained free advisors, we are beginning to notice something on the We are the 99% site: the posters are aging in front of our eyes. It looks like the professional drum beaters are succeeding in sucking the adults into their grievance game too. Instead of trying to help their kids get a grip on reality and dealing with it, they are jumping into the pity pit along with them. 

We are living in dangerous times. The Left has tapped into a vein that can provide constant lifeblood for their class warfare. Organize yourselves for the next election. I don’t care if you’ve never done anything political in your entire life: do something this time around. The opposition may be ignorant, but they are far from stupid when it comes to knowing how to agitate to get their vote out. We have to organize ours.

Although, in closing, I’ll grant you that some of them might be stupid too:

about those ass earsI give up: you tell me. Nice donkey ears though.

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, Thanks!

Saturday, October 8, 2011

“Up Against the Wall, Mother Jones, Inc.” The OWS Crowd Gets Tough.

 corp sponsorsH/T Doug Ross

I must tell you that for the first time in my life I actually fear for the country’s ability to maintain social order.

When you have a ruling party stoking the fires of class warfare, it’s probably time to order Glen Beck’s emergency food kit.

We have a pack of economic imbeciles,  orchestrated by community organizers and union-mob bosses, who have gone on holiday to set up camp and get in people’s faces in order to rage against unfairness and corporations. I would be dumbfounded if you could find more than 1 in 1000 of the merry pranksters who could correctly explain how a corporation actually makes money. Or coherently explain what they are trying to achieve by Occupying Wall Street. I will disregard the fantasy Christmas Winter Holiday wish list published on their website. It was so moronically ignorant of even the most rudimentary economic concepts and common sense that even some of the squatters felt compelled to disavow it.

And yet, unlike the Tea Party’s “angry mob” this one seems to pass muster with the administration. The President commends them, his press secretary says it’s just like the Tea Party, only democratic, Pelosi defends them and Biden agrees. Meanwhile commie Van Jones is actively fomenting a revolution. I’m sure he wishes that Obama hadn’t dragged his feet on getting that civilian police force in place that’s going to be “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded as the military.”

33-OTeamfall2010copy_thumb10

It doesn’t seem like such an innocuous way to create or save civil service jobs now, does it?

What the HELL is going on around here?

Allow me to explain. They are the Wons they’ve been waiting for. This is what they came to do. Really. Like paranoia, just because Glen Beck is crazy doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

If you still don’t believe that the Marxist/socialists have had their eyes on America as their prize for a long, long time, you’ve either not been paying attention or you’re one of the progressive sheeple “occupying” Wall Street who thinks you just dreamed up the socialist nirvana of America without borders and corporations all on your own. Or, worse yet, you are one of the titans of Wall Street who donated a gazillion dollars to “Organizing for Obama” to elect this posse of Stalinist morons.

As we’ve discussed ad nauseum, socialist doctrine has been insidiously co-opted and incorporated into the curriculum of the public schools  for the past 50 years. And once you’ve indoctrinated the next generation, you own their minds, you own their politics – you own them. Tyranny has showed up in cultures throughout history through many different vehicles. But 20th century tyranny has always been preceded and accompanied by propaganda and agitprop, most notably in the schools. Because, as I just mentioned, once you own their minds, you own their generation.

Back in the early 90’s I had a colleague who I considered a bit reactionary, and altogether too extreme for polite society, because he and his wife had decided to homeschool their children.  In retrospect, they appear to have had the wisdom of Solomon and the foresight of a Steve Jobs.

Of course, it’s not as if the Marxist/socialists tried very hard to hide their agenda. They told anyone listening exactly what they intended to do. They told us exactly how they intended to do it. We were just all too busy, and, let’s face it, no one really thought  that America would ever give itself over to communism. We’re independent. And free. And we practically invented modern democracy and free market capitalism, right?

It seems that while we were busily complacent, others were busily… busy. Very busy indeed.

And if I still don’t have your attention, it’s time to revisit the Cloward-Piven Strategy for America. The strategy was originally unearthed by David Horowitz in Discover the Networks:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

The strategy was further explored by James Simpson in a series of articles in American Thinker. In this one he cites the original source article:

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

It gives a rather more sinister twist to the term “community organizer” does it not?

The Coward and Piven strategy was made famous by Glenn Beck – you know: that whacky guy with the whacky agenda? Cassandra’s come in every guise. So let’s not focus on the messenger while the other side, with their nihilistic agenda, continues to Grind America Down.

bastards3Do you like my new corporate logo?

For the record: Mother Jones Inc. is a 501(c)(3) “not for profit” corporation: that doesn’t mean they don’t make a lot of money, it just means they don’t have to pay any taxes on it.  So you could say that they’re not paying their fair share – not helping to spread the wealth around. They get a pass though, because they’re sort of an “educational”  public service. See how that works?

mojo

Linked By:  Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, Thanks!

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Yes, Steve Jobs’ Life Was Special

 

apple store A special Toy Story, brought to you by Steve Jobs

In retrospect, pretty much everyone agrees that Steven Jobs was one of the masters of the 2oth century universe. His vision, creativity, intelligence, commitment and work ethic allowed him to shift life into a new, faster lane.

So much has already been written about his exceptional gifts and contributions to the modern world that I can’t add much. Everyone knows by now just how special his gifts were and how special his life was.

But did you know that his birth mother knew he was special even before he was born? Maybe that’s why the young, unmarried graduate student chose life for her baby rather than abortion. I choose to believe she knew that her baby’s life was special. Because, yes, every life is special.

I’m sure Paul and Clara Jobs felt that the baby boy they adopted and named Steven was special. I’m quite certain they were glad that his mother choose to give birth to her out-of- wedlock baby (what an anachronism that is) rather than death. I doubt that any of them knew exactly how special their son would one day be considered in the eyes of the techno-world, but the first time any of them held him I bet they knew he was very special anyway.

The world, although saddened today by Steven Jobs passing,  is still glad that Joanne Schiebel chose life.

choose life

 

Kevin D. Williamson has a fine column at NRO regarding Jobs and the Occupy Wall Street crowd if you’re so inclined:

“I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.”

Prepare yourselves, the administration is hell-bent on instigating a real-live class warfare. God help them; once they get it launched and realize they can’t control it any better than they could the “democratic” revolution in Egypt and Libya, they’ll need it.