the Happy Meal of DOOOOOOM!!!!

Yes, that's right. The Happy Meal of DOOOOOOM. Or at least, that's what they're saying in Santa Clara County, California. Since apparently we're to moronic as a society to be able to be able to figure things out on our own, SC Co is, according to the LA Times, considering banning toys. Well, just the toys in your kid's Mickey D's meal. Well, not all of them. Just the ones that have more than 485 calories, or 600 mg of sodium or "high amounts of sugar or fat". Which, is, let's face it folks, all of 'em.

But why?

Well, because a ban (in one small county of just a million and a half people) there in old San Jose will force restaurants to offer healthier meals! And, according to the dude who thought this up, toys in their fast-food meals make kids fat!

What?

Toys encourage kids to pester their mom to buy them a happy meal on their way home from soccer practice because of a little plastic thing that will fall apart in five minutes, and because of that shoddily made plastic gremlin, they'll get an unhealthy meal, and then they'll be fat. Or obese. Or chubby. Or whatever the "nice" word is these days to refer to being rotund.

Apparently, being a crappy parent isn't in the cards here. Apparently, because you're too busy getting a manicure, or watching Sex & the City, or  doing yoga, or whatever it is that parents do in San Jose, and you take no responsibility for making sure your children are well taken care of, physically, mentally, emotionally, etc ... you need to ban the McDonald's and Burger King's of SC County from putting in a 25 cent toy in your kids meal?

Wow.

I'll be over here, in the corner, crying, after beating myself into a coma with my desk.

the LA Times article: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-happy-meals-20100427,0,4578399,full.story

And thanks to the Corner at the National Review for notifying me about this outrageous and indecent usurpation of your own rights, liberties, and responsibilities.

Book Review: Dumbing Us Down

Apologies to my one reader for my absence last week. The passage of Health Care disturbed me deeply, and I still cannot quite find the words to express my dismay at what is happening to the states and country.

However, I also read a book this week, and before you start asking questions, it was, thankfully, a small one. It's titled Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, written by a NYC public-school teacher John Taylor Gatto.

(Insert appropriate oath of horror and astonishment here - yes,  I do read).

If nothing else, this book should be a required read for all people interested in starting a Reformation or Revolution here in America in order to give our children a fighting chance at enjoying the fruits of their liberty and of this Land. It is a most enlightening exposé on the practices and motivations behind the general public school system that is terrorizing growing Americans.

I, thank God, did not go thru' the system while growing up due to the decisions of my Parents. There were many times, particularly while being a teenager, that I wished that I was able to be with those few friends that I had IN the local HS. However, after this, I fervently thank God Above that that never came to pass.

The book is essentially a selection of essays and speeches given by the Author. The first two chapters are perhaps the most vital, concerning the function of the public system of Education, and how it corrupts the very nature of Society. The later chapters are perhaps not as vital to the ideas, but they are valuable in their own right as being necessary expositions on the ideas set forward previously, and also showing that the monolith currently served obeisance is not neccessary, drawing on free-market and histroical examples.

The first two chapters is called The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher and The Psychopathic School, respectively. Chapter One deals with what Mr Gatto refers to as the National Curriculum, that you and I, as taxpayers, in effect promote.

First: Confusion- there is no natural progression from one thing to the next and all things are artificially segmented.
Second: Class Position - jealousy of higher classes and contempt of lower, a complete affront to even the egalitarian worldviews that this system cries that it is trumpeting
Third: Indifference
Fourth: Emotional Dependency - surrender a child's will to the designated Chain of Command, here, quite possibly, very similar to the one used by Jayne Cobb - "You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who's in ruttin' command here!"
Fith: Intellectual Dependency - do not do anything until instructed to do so, think only what told to think, etc.
Sixth: Provisional Self-Esteem -  the perpetuation of dissatisfaction, and the demolition of self-confidence.
Seventh: One Can't Hide - privacy is destroyed, the ability to learn from someone other than the designated authority is destroyed, &c.

The second chapter essentially deals with the complete and utter uselessness of the current education system, specifically delineating the difference between Schooling and Learning. While Learning may indeed take place while a person is in school, and while that is trumpeted as the basic and essential reason for public Schooling, that is not in evidence. Mr. Gatto defines schooling here as a moulding of character into a deformed shape, and gives eight specific examples, or symptoms, of what happens to people when they are schooled rather than educated. These symptoms are as follows: children are indifferent to the adult world, curiosity-less and attention-less (or functionally ADD), minimal understanding of past and future, compassionless, avoid intimacy of all sorts, materialistic, and lacking in intestinal (and other kinds of) fortitude.

While I will also readily point the fingers at the social and familial vacuum that people grow up in in these days, the notion that public schooling is in some parts directly (in some manner or another) responsible for these faults is one that worries me.

Well now do I hear the pleading of such organizations as the teacher's unions, the educational establishment, &c, for more funding in order to correct the slow dissolution of functional education in our nation's public schools. Of course, we all know that the government is the best possible organization in the entire world  to je put in charge of any and all facets of our life.

I suggest this book to any and all of you. Please, particularly if you intend on teaching, or if you have children soon to be schooled ... Read.

So how is this reformable? Only by its very destruction. You must call, you must write, you must genteelly kick in the doors of Congress, State Senates and Representatives, Governors, County Commissoners, &c, and demand that they give you choice  in your child's education. You must never cease in that demand. You must use that choice and send your children to private schools or school them in your home. You must convince them and those around you that Public Education as an institution is only an institution in the same way a mental hospital is an institution, and that to keep sending our very children to such a place is irresponsible in the least, and an act of such desperate laziness and corruption that deserves the most strident and insistent damnation.

And you must teach children that they are precious as jewels in your eyes. You must teach through your actions. If you truly care about your children, and about the future of your state, you must not ship them off to a factory of the mind. You must show them worth, and you can only do that if they are around you constantly.

Trust Regained.

There was a man, back in the day, by the name of John Dickinson, who in 1768 said this: "A people is traveling fast to destruction, when individuals consider their interests as distinct from those of the public. Such notions are fatal to their country, and themselves."

Hm. Sound somewhat familiar?

Now, we have established to some degree that there has been a drastic loss of community and public trust within the United States, and that, to a certain degree, the instigator of this loss of trust between people is a Grail-like figure of immense desire to many fashionable people these days. This Grail-figure is multiculturalism. Or diversity, or cultural pluralism, or any other name you wish to assign. We reach this new Sangreal through the quest of better, continuing, better funded education. Education. Are we supposed to believe that our current public education system is even remotely capable of conducting a reversal of racial, cultural, and ethnic avoidance when people can't even find where they live on a map of the United States? My mind is purely boggled.

Now, we certainly can't legislate this away (Congress has tried, in vain, in multiple ways) and the only result of forcing people to be around each-other is that the entire education system slowly topples, people start moving to where they do not have to be forcibly integrated (Boston, anyone?)

So we can't outlaw "not-trusting-each-other-because-of-x, we can't educate it away, and funnily enough, by promoting our differences as being the same, only different, as being equally valid and important and one is not better than the other &c, &c.... we make our problems worse!

Strewth.

So what can we do?

Well, my friends, I think we have a couple of options, that are, let me stress this, equally important. We must do them both, because if we skip or even skimp on one or the other, we lose. And we lose more than just being able to trust those we see. We lose the benefits of being a unified country, and all the possibilities within that framework.

So how can we regain that trust?

First we must stop teaching that diversity and pluralism are beneficial. We must stop believing that they are and that those ideas are what a truly "enlightened" civilization will hold most true. We need to teach ourselves and our children that we must bind together, as a community, as a country, as one people,  to truly be able to reach true liberty, equality, &c. We must bind together in support of a mutual goal, the betterment of ourselves and this world for our children and their children. We must purge our natural inclination to separate, and blend. We must melt together. We were able to do it once. My ancestry and my wife's and one of our good friend's is proof that it is possible and also good to do so. In the old days, before multiculturalism became cause célèbre, my ancestors were those dirty Irish who nobody would lend a hand unless it was to stick a knife in the back. The same goes for my Lithuanian wife, and our Italian friend deGiovanni. Nowadays, about the only way to tell us apart is I can lay claim to better beer, deGiovanni has better food, and my wife can do wonders with beets. Ahem.

The other side is that we must reform ourselves. Without wanting change, without changing, without reforming our ways from the very soul we lose everything. And I'm not just talking about political reformation here. There must be change in the very soul, in your very marrow, away from the vicissitudes of modern idealism. Now, politically speaking, I don't give a damn what changes you inside. It could be the Christ, it could be Allah (we'll talk about that later), it could be you want to be a Gardnerian and dance in woods nekkid. I believe that YHWH is the only, true way to that, but that, once again, is not necessarily  germane to the current political discussion.

So there you have it. To regain trust, and incidentally, to regain America, we need to become America-centric. Both in the outer sphere of politics, education, broad societal mannerisms and goals .... and internally. Without changing the external, we die as a culture now. The culture that has given the world the greatest things of all history save Jesus of Galilee, Shakespeare, and the Pax Romana will vanish away like grass in the sun. And without changing internally, all that happens is we postpone that dying. To flourish, we must reform. We must return to the ideas, manners, customs, &c, that brought America out into the world as a great good. Possibly the greatest secular good in millennia.

St. Patrick's Day

Yes, let's all go out and be Irish, drink thousands of gallons of beer, get completely pissed out of our heads, and wake-up with those same poor heads throbbing like the drums in a Sioux war dance. Oh, yes, that's the perfect way to celebrate the traditions of Ireland and the memory of a good man.

I will admit, despite being proudly Irish-American, that St Patrick's Day here in America is a rather useless holiday. You can't even get it off work, unless it falls on the weekend, and you really go out and do is drink far too much alcohol. Is everyone trying to relive the glory days of being in college and never being less than permanently half-drunk?  Hmm.

What a way to celebrate a day that is the only Holiday America has dedicated to a missionary. For that is who Patrick of Ireland was, what his whole being centered around - preaching and converting people to Christianity. In fact, in can be argued, in light of facts, that Patrick was instrumental, instrumental, in preserving the shadow of the Classical World for the people of the Renaissance and today. But that discrepancy is typical of this country and our current culture- we "celebrate" a religious holiday that honors the most famous missionary of all time by frivolously drinking away and carousing into all hours of the night.

Hmm.

Food for thought, tá?

the Loss of Trust.

Trust is a big thing. Without trust, between you and me, between me and my neighbors, family, friends, and community, between us and the government, between us and them, America is, in essence, a corpse. Perhaps a beautiful corpse, all shine and glitter like Edward Cullen in the Twilight series, but a corpse nonetheless. And yes, I'm comparing the current state of this nation to a crappy, forgettable, badly written vampire and his "epic love story". But that is another rant for another time.

Dictionary.com defines trust as

1. reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.

2. confident expectation of something; hope.

3. confidence in the certainty of future payment for property or goods received; credit.

4. a person on whom or thing on which one relies.

5. the condition of one to whom something has been entrusted.

6. the obligation or responsibility imposed on a person in whom confidence or authority is placed.

7. charge, custody, or care.

8. something committed or entrusted to one's care for use or safekeeping, as an office, duty, or the like; responsibility; charge.

Reading all that, and hopefully understanding that all those comprise this idea of trust, I'd like you to go out and find people you trust. And not just who you say you trust, and that you might, on a nice, clear, sunny day in June, but people you trust will be there when you're traveling thru' the very Pits of Hell, and have done so. I think, in general, you would find that there aren't that many people, really. You probably trust your family, your friends, the fire department, and depending on where you live and who you are, your neighbors. You may or may not trust cops (again, depending on where you live and how you were brought up), journalists, and politicians. If you trust politicians ...

But here's the rub: in order to have a good, decent, and orderly society (theoretically something we all want) - we need to trust them all. Yes, even the politicians and the journalists. We used too, back in the founding days of this Republic. Fascinating, isn't it? Especially considering the current relationship between the citizenry and the political aristocracy is anything but cordial and trustworthy.

Do we trust our politicians? Do we trust those people that we elect to represent us and to make sure that things get done in an good and decent manner? I would have to say, no, not really. Do we trust those people who are tasked with keeping the peace, informing us of all things that going on in the world? Do we trust the people who have come to our nation to pursue a new course of life (and who drag their cultural baggage with them and demand that they get all our American benefits without having to adjust to doing things our way)? No, not really.

So how are supposed to combat this lack of trust, which, I am told, is on par with racism, giant corporations, owning a gun, personal property, Adolf Hitler, Sarah Palin, and the Oakland Raiders. Ahem. The answer, my friends (to everything except the Raiders, because let's face it, no-one really understands the Raiders)?

Education!

Yes, dear friends, we must educate. Only by making sure the general populace of America is educated will we destroy racism, etc etc etc. And the substance of this education? We need to recognize that all cultures, all economic positions (except the hard working ones), all people, no matter how weird they are (unless they're Christian-based), are all the same, and deserve the same opportunities provided them.

And who are we to trust this education project to? Th-th-that's right folks - the Gub'mint!

You are now allowed a chuckle or two.

Nut what has the nice government and the nice education establishment decided is the best way to make folks trust each other, and especially get rid of that nasty little thing called racism and elitism and this-ism and that-ism?

Multiculturalism / Enforced Diversity, AKA lets all sit around a big ole campfire together and sing Kumbaya! Yay! Three cheers for pluralism! Diversity is the best thing to happen to the world since sliced bread!

Now, there's a fellow, a nice, academic, somewhat politically-left fellow named Robert Putnam. He authored a little thing called Bowling Alone, which looked at the decline in civic, social, associational, and political life, represented by the number of people bowling in leagues or groups and by the number of people bowling all by their lonesome, or with an unorganized group of friends. He came to the conclusion that the ability to bridge gaps between groups (cultural, ethnic, etc) was declining over time leading to troubles between ethnicities, etc.

Now, later on, he also studied the levels of trust within communities and the amount of ethnic diversity evident in said communities. Now, he found that the level of diversity within a community did relate to the amount of community trust, but the problem is, it is negatively related. In other words, the greater the amount of diversity, the less the amount of trust between ethnic groups, and not only between ethnicities themselves, but there is less trust and confidence in government, less confidence in a person's political influence, less interest in politics and voting and interest in making change, less trust in others to help a community to get through any sort of difficulty, less chance of working together on a community project of some sort, less volunteerism, less happiness, fewer friends, and more time rotting one's brain in front of the television. I don't know about you, but that sounds mildly damning of diversity, right there.

Now, an interesting note about this work, was that he only published the data in 2001. He actually published his full research and conclusions in 2007. Those intervening six years were spent "developing proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity". Right. So, basically, one hides the bad things happening in pluralistic society so you can fix it before anyone notices that something is not what it's "supposed" to be. Seem a little off to you? Perhaps it's just me.

So how are we supposed to fix this trust problem? Putnam argues that education is the answer. Well, we've seen where the State Education leads, so the true, real, common sense fix? That, unfortunately, will be the next post out, simply because I'm a blogger, not a thesis writer, and this post is almost a term paper.

PS:
HTML Link to Putnam's Paper in full:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118510920/HTMLSTART

The Tea-Party Reformation

One of the words being bandied about these days is "Reformation". In some ways, it's becoming almost a code word and a rallying point for the politically-disenchanted people and those who would see peace in the Middle-East, among others. There has already been one great Reformation in history, so why not another? We as a nation are growing sicker and sicker of the puerile and inane idiocy that has taken over Washington, DC, the state governments, and mainstream media. Or at least most of us are.

But what is this Reformation of American to accomplish? Some poorly-defined notion of Change? Hope? We already have this in the White House. And not much has changed in truth, merely the faces on television and the strength of the push to become like the rest of the world. So no, we do not really want Change. Or at least, not that change.

So what change do we want? If some current events are to be believed, we want fiscal conservatism. We the people, we the American People, in all shapes, colors, piercings, and sizes, want our Government to stop spending as if there was no tomorrow. To save, to be thrifty, much like many of us must be during these horrible economic times if we are to provide meaningfully for our families.

But to have a penny-pinching government, to get back to representative taxation, or hell, just back to representation in government, we have to reform. We have to reform America, we have to reform our government, we have to reform ourselves. Are we, as a nation, as one people (as all nations should be), willing to remake ourselves, our very ways of looking at the world? Probably, possibly, no. At least not as far as we need to go, now. Maybe later. But we have a start in the Tea Party Movement.

The Tea Party movement, if you haven't heard, comes from grassroots rallies, meetings, and spontaneous local gatherings that protest the way the current administration / government is taking the tax dollars of our grandchildren to make sure rather large corporations, the economy, and other different things do not fail. That is the most vocal part of the Tea Party. Yet the Tea Party is at its core a group of concerned citizens who want their government to do what it is supposed to do: be responsive to the desires of its citizens. All of its citizens.

These citizens want certain things. They want fiscal conservatism in their government, or rather they want common sense to prevail and take real world approach to problems. The main focus of their protests is the bailout and the stimulus packages. The government has poured, or hosed, or flooded, or whatever simile you want to use, a staggering amount of money that they don't even have yet into certain parts of the national economy. I personally cannot even begin to imagine the amount of dollars "spent" on making the American economy stable and healthy, and I'm a very smart person. But more on this later.

They also want a stronger connection between their government and themselves. We supposedly elect our officials, from county on up to the White House, to represent us. But slowly, gradually, since at least the middle of the last century, our representatives have stopped looking out for their constituents and been more concerned with both the perks of office and making sure that they do whatever is necessary to stay in said office. Witness the special hidden offices in the Senate, where Senators while away time doing something, to the untold number of broken promises that they have pledged, to the chicanery that they employ when confronted with their moral ineptitude.

I can go on. But to distill this, the Tea Party folks are normal citizens who want a sensible government. They want a reformed government. And "reformation", at its very core, means returning to the purer, simpler state that existed in the past. Not creating a new way of doing things that supposes to be better, but the way that has been lost and corrupted.

The system we have now, to a degree, is just plain busted. Broken. Damaged. Etc. The National Parties, Democrats, Republicans, etc, cannot fix it, as they are most of the problem. They need replacing, either by no parties at all, or by many parties (and go the way, as much as it pains me to admit it, of European parliaments), etc. I don't know the best answer. But I do know that what we have tried isn't working, and I truly believe that, in part, the Tea Party idea is the best chance we have. Because through it, we are able to connect with like-minded folk all across this great nation of ours in a way that going to the main Parties just would not allow, either because of chance, or because it was Not Wanted.

So please, join me and work towards a great Reformation, an Awakening if you will, of America. Reach out to others, band together, rediscover what made America great among all the other nations, and strive wholeheartedly to bring that back. Before it's too late.