Tom McLaughlin

Backlash Against Thought Police

2012-02-01T05:26:00.008-05:00

The left-wing Thought Police have gained strength in recent years and they’ve been flexing their muscles wherever they can. Christian ministers in Canada and in the UK who speak publicly against homosexuality on Biblical grounds are charged with hate speech. Students, teachers, and many others have muzzled themselves in fear of retribution by politically-correct superiors, but there are signs their reign of terror may have peaked.

The Roman Catholic Church has been in their sights because of its teachings that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and that abortion is murder. Direct confrontations with the Catholic Church have been mostly avoided until recently.

In Ontario, provincial authorities are requiring that Catholic schools establish “Gay-Straight Alliances” or “GSAs,” ostensibly to prevent bullying. In Canada and in the US, this has been a Trojan Horse for pushing the homosexual agenda in schools from kindergarten through high school. Catholic authorities in Ontario refused, arguing that promoting homosexual acts violates church teaching. They’ll establish clubs to prevent bullying, but will refuse to teach anything implying that homosexual acts are acceptable. The ball is in the Ontario Ministry of Education’s court now. Catholics there are wising up, finally, and drawing a line in the sand. Expect a battle.

In the Diocese of Maine, Bishop Malone instructed all its priests to read a letter from the pulpit challenging President Obama’s mandate that the Catholics in the US provide contraception services as part of health insurance coverage to employees of Catholic hospitals, schools, and other social service agencies. This coverage must be provided without co-pay and must include tubal ligations, vasectomies, and so-called “morning after pills.” The Catholic Church teaches that the primary purpose of sex is procreation and that artificial birth control is wrong. It also teaches that human life begins at conception and so-called “morning-after pills” work by destroying embryonic human life. Here too, Catholics are wising up and drawing a line in the sand. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is claiming a violation of its rights under the First Amendment’s “free exercise [of religion]” clause. Expect a battle here too.President Obama is gambling. He’s trying to get his secular/socialist camel’s nose into the Catholic tent. He knows a majority of Catholics disagree with the church’s teaching on contraception and many don’t agree on abortion either. Quite a few liberal Democrat members of the US House and Senate are nominal Catholics who have been openly pro-abortion for decades, yet still receive the sacraments publicly in their parishes. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) ruled in 2006 that individual bishops could refuse them the Eucharist but most declined to exercise that authority. Some did however, including bishops in dioceses serving former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius as well as now-former congressmen David Obey (D-MO) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI). Ironically, Sebelius is serving in Obama’s cabinet as Health and Human Services Secretary and was named by my priest last Sunday morning as the author of the Obamacare ruling against which Maine’s Bishop Malone strenuously objected.

Conservative Catholics are encouraged by the USCCB’s public challenge to President Obama. We’ve been waiting a long time. Early in the Obama presidency, the White House asked Georgetown University to cover up the symbol “IHS,” which stands for “Jesus,” that would have been visible behind Obama as he spoke. Unbelievably, Georgetown - a Jesuit university - complied. Talk about cowardice. No wonder Obama believes he can bully Catholics.

On another front: The fields of psychology and social work have been virtually taken over by the left-wing, homosexual Thought Police. Recently however, graduate schools of social work around the country are being sued after requiring students to accept homosexuality as normal regardless of their religious objections. One woman in Augusta, Georgia was told to attend “gay pride” parades or be denied a degree. She was ultimately expelled from the program and a federal appeals court sided with the university on December 11, 2011. An identical lawsuit by a Michigan woman expelled from her counseling program because of her religious views on homosexuality was upheld by a different federal appeals court just the other day. Given these opposite rulings in two different federal appeals courts, it would appear that the US Supreme Court will have to resolve this ultimately.

Obama’s open challenge to the Catholic hierarchy as represented by the USCCB on this Obamacare ruling may be a major misstep. Six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court are Catholics, and at least four of those take their religion seriously. They’ll be ruling on the constitutionality of Obamacare in just a few months.

As the culture war escalates on all these fronts, fence-sitting Catholics as well as other Christians in the US and Canada will be forced to get off on one side or the other. It’s past time they did, but better late than never.

Fiery or Milquetoast?

2012-01-25T06:57:00.013-05:00

There’s no fire in Romney’s belly, but Gingrich has it. It’s in his eyes too. People see it. They like it, and they don’t sense it in the other candidates either. That’s the biggest reason Gingrich won South Carolina. Conservatives wanted someone who will take it to Obama and his media lapdogs and they know Gingrich will.

Conservatives believe media went after Gingrich because he’s conservative. They loved watching him give it back. They believe Obama gets a pass - and he’s our president only because media have worshiped him since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention. They believe media look for dirt on conservative candidates but turn a blind eye when it comes to liberal Democrats. When they’re forced to report it because new media like blogs and AM radio have been on a story for days or weeks, they’ll grudgingly put it on page 16. Gingrich gave voice to conservative anger and the base affirmed him with an overwhelming victory.

CNN's John King being lambasted by Gingrich in South Carolina

As I moved across the political spectrum from left to right over the past 25 years, I’ve become much more aware of how pronounced liberal media bias is. It seemed like brilliant insight when I was a liberal, but when I matured into middle age and life experience opened my mind to alternative viewpoints and I realized that, as Margaret Thatcher said, “The facts of life are conservative,” liberal bias became more and more obvious. Gingrich gets it and so do Republican primary voters.

Audience in South Carolina responding to Gingrich

But will a majority of the American electorate get it in November? That’s the question that haunts. Should conservative voters ignore their gut and vote for the candidate that they think most Americans will support? Or do they look for a leader who will be able to shape voter opinion between now and then? The late Bill Buckley, founder of modern conservatism, established the rule that Republicans should vote for the most conservative candidate with the best chance of being elected. So who should it be? The fiery one or the milquetoast one?

I’ve been present for Romney speeches at least five times. Once I questioned him personally. He’s an intelligent, articulate and good-looking candidate. But he’s like a “Ken” doll. It’s as if there were a string in the back of his neck that someone pulls and he goes out and talks until it coils back in. He’s bland. He’s boring. I was in the Washington, DC audience when Romney pulled out of the 2008 race in favor of McCain. He’d been introduced by Laura Ingraham at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) and she was far more interesting than Romney was. She had fire but he didn’t.

I’ve been present for about five of Gingrich’s speeches too. I’ve questioned him publicly and had a couple of short conversations with him. He’s intelligent, articulate and rather ordinary-looking, a little pudgy too. He’s also spontaneous and quick, sarcastic and insightful. He shoots from the hip and from the lip, and he’s never boring.

Romney at CPAC 2010

My encounters were all at large conservative conferences. Other speakers would be introduced and then enter stage-left to polite applause. Not Gingrich. He’d be introduced in the usual way, but then the sound system would start blaring “Eye of the Tiger” while he entered from the back of the hall with an entourage as if he were the heavyweight champion of the world. He’d be smiling and shaking hands with people in the aisles as he approached the podium - the way presidents do when entering the House chamber to deliver State of the Union speeches. By the time Gingrich got up to the dais, the crowd was his. Even after such a build-up, he never disappointed when he spoke. This guy can rally the troops. South Carolina wasn’t a fluke.

"Rocky" Gingrich approaching the dais at CPAC 2009

But can he do that with independents? I think he can. He’s a history teacher. He can educate people about what Obama, Congressional Democrats, and their media lackeys have done to this country and that’s exactly what he must do with independents. He’ll have to go after Obama with gloves off, and go after the media too because they’re just as much the enemy as Obama is. We know they’re both going to go after him. The media already have. Obama will do his dirty work vicariously and he’ll have a billion dollars. That buys a lot of hatchetmen.

Gingrich as professor

All that’s going to happen no matter who the Republicans put up because Obama cannot run on his record. We’re in the mess we’re in because of him. It’s obvious after three years that he doesn’t know how to be president, but he was good at running for it. Blaming Bush for everything won’t work so well this time, so he’s blaming “the rich” now and conservative Republicans in the House. He’s going to escalate attacks like that with his billion-dollar war chest and it’s going to be an ugly race. Republican voters must consider who is most capable of winning that kind of fight.

Borrowing, Abortion, Obama

2012-01-18T07:19:00.012-05:00

Americans aren’t happy with the government they elected. Why? If a man’s had multiple marriages and hates his ex-wives, what do his choices say about him? Unless he’s willing to take a long and deep look at himself, he’s likely to hook up with another woman he'll come to dislike. In the same way, Americans are likely to choose a government they disdain again and again.

Our government reflects us. Government doesn’t face reality because a majority of voting Americans doesn’t want to look at it. Fifty-two percent voted for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. An honest look at him tells us much about ourselves.

Two facts about President Obama: He’s the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had by far, and he’s borrowed far more money than any previous president. Last week he asked Congress to borrow another $1.2 trillion. At this pace, he’s set to borrow $6.2 trillion in one term - more than all our presidents from George Washington to Bill Clinton - and twice as much as George W. Bush. While campaigning in 2008, Obama called Bush “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” for raising our nation’s debt. Now he's borrowing at twice the rate Bush did and blaming him for it.

We cannot go on like this. We’re headed off a cliff and we’re going to smash on the rocks below, but we just keep on going. Why? Our leaders lack the courage to tell Americans what they know already but don’t want to look at. We don’t want to wean ourselves from our dependence on government. We pretend we can continue to put off dealing with mounting debt but we cannot. The point we’ve come to is equivalent to that of a family whose credit cards are maxed out, whose bank is about to foreclose, whose electricity is about to be shut off, and whose oil tank is almost empty. If we’re put out on the street, we can’t look to government to feed us, clothe us and give us shelter because we are the government. We’ll be bankrupt and at the world’s mercy. We couldn’t look to Europe because they’re in the same mess we are, so who does that leave? China, Russia, and the Muslim world, that's who. How much mercy are we going to get from them?

Thirty-nine years ago next Sunday, the US Supreme Court ruled in Roe Vs Wade that women have a constitutional right to abortion. The father of our Constitution, James Madison, rolled over in his grave. Those who champion Jane Roe’s case in Texas claim to oppose abortion personally, insist that an unborn baby isn’t a human being, and seek moral cover behind “pro-choice” rhetorical legerdemain. That cover thinned considerably when the Texas Legislature passed a law encouraging women to see a sonogram before going through with their abortions. Feminists don’t want a woman to see what would be sucked out of her and thrown away. They insist it’s “unconstitutional” to show her what abortion really is and they got a federal district judge to agree with them.

Feminists insist it's a lump of tissue, but a sonogram pierces the lie for tens of millions of American women who’ve had over 40 million abortions since Roe Vs Wade. Feminists stifled the Texas law, but not for long. Last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the district judge’s ruling and further ruled that the sonogram requirement could be implemented immediately. This is highly threatening to Democrats - the Party of Abortion - the principal guardian of the lie that abortion is the moral equivalent of removing a tumor or a wart.

The Party's leader, Barack Hussein Obama, argued against the “Infant Born Alive Act” when he was in the Illinois legislature - the only legislator in the state with the temerity to do so. Obama argued that if an infant was born alive after a failed abortion, the state of Illinois should not force doctors to treat it, that it should be left alone to die. Obama’s habit was to vote “present” on controversial issues, but he spoke up on this one.

Abortion isn’t mentioned in our Constitution, but our Declaration of Independence states that: “We are endowed by our Creator with . . . the right to life.” Despite American Psychological Association claims, abortion traumatizes not only babies but women and many fathers as well. How much collective trauma exists in a country populated with tens of millions who live the continuing denial that abortion doesn’t kill a human life? That’s the critical mass of voters who gave us Barack Hussein Obama. This is a guy who, when asked in a debate about when human life begins, said: “That’s beyond my pay grade.” This is a guy who said about his daughters: “When they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” This is a guy who again and again omits the essential words “by our Creator” above when quoting the Declaration of Independence in silky-voiced speeches.

There's a critical mass of Americans that won’t take responsibility for the human life it conceives and it loves Barack Obama. It’s made up of men whose view of sex is “Slam, bam, thank you m’am. Oh, you're pregnant? Here’s $500 for an abortion.” It’s made up of women who would sacrifice their own children in the name of “liberation.” These are the Americans who would continue borrowing indiscriminately from the future to keep their unsustainable benefits flowing as long as possible. Obama helps them all feel good about themselves. They voted him into the White House and they will again unless an opponent emerges who can persuade them to take a long, honest look at themselves.

To Die For

2012-01-11T13:45:00.001-05:00

On the first day of school students would wander into my homeroom and sit, some in front and some in back. They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. Some greeted me. Others didn’t. I’d look at each one and if I got eye contact I’d say, “Good morning,” and he or she would respond in kind. By eight o’clock all the busses would had arrived. Announcements would come over the intercom. When the Pledge of Allegiance was over they all sat down I’d walk to the front of the class, fold my arms over my chest and look them over. Every one would be staring back at me wide-eyed and expectant. I’d scratch my chin, knit my brow, then slowly shake my head saying, “Why? Why do they always give me the ugly ones?”

In shock, their eyes would grow wider. Girls would turn to each other with hands over their open mouths. After a few seconds a boy would laugh - and it was always a boy. Then other boys would laugh. After a few more seconds, they all knew I wasn’t serious. I’d keep my poker face on for another second or two before smiling.

One year, a girl asked, “Why did you do that?”

“When I stand in front of you at the beginning of each class,” I said, “I want you to be quiet and pay attention. You’re more likely to do that now. I also want you to get into the habit of thinking critically about everything you hear. I want you to ask yourself: ‘Is this opinion? Is this fact? What evidence exists? Is there enough evidence to constitute proof?’ Stuff like that.”

After a week went by I’d begin each of my four or five history classes saying: “I have good news and bad news. What do you want first?” Inevitably, they’d want the bad first, so I’d say, “You’re all going to die.”

Some would look surprised. Some had no discernible reaction and others would just smile. Then a student would say, “We know that.”

“Okay, good,” I’d say. “I don’t mean today or tomorrow, but some day.”

“We know.”
“Right. Good. So then it’s only a matter of when and how.”

“What’s the point?”

“Some of us will live a long time and some of us won’t.”

“We know that.”

“It’s one of the very few things we can be certain of,” I’d explain. “It’s good to keep in mind that we’re here for a limited time, not forever, and what we do every day matters.”
“You’re going to die too, Mr. McLaughlin.”

“Yes, and probably before you do,” I’d respond. “So I probably think about it more and give it closer attention than you do. That’s the nature of things. On average, someone my age can expect about twenty more years, more or less, and each day gets more precious with that awareness. Not a bad thing.”
“The good news is that - if the past is any guide - most of you will live longer than your parents, your grandparents, and your great-grandparents,” I’d tell them. Then I’d go on to explain average life expectancies for Americans today, compare them with what they were at other times in history, and with those of people in other places. That would work into how long a generation was and so forth. Teaching 20th century US History, I could say, “This would have been going on when your grandparents were children,” or “around when your great-grandparents were born,” etc. That helped put what might otherwise just be obscure events into perspective.

That’s the way I began my last several years in the classroom. When Veterans’ Day came in November, I’d point out that veterans were willing to give their lives for things they believed more important than themselves - usually the things students said every morning in the Pledge of Allegiance. When Martin Luther King Day came in January, I’d quote King, saying: “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.” I’d then ask if there were anything they would die for. Some indicated they would be willing to risk their lives for their families. Upon further questioning, I’d be dismayed to learn that others could think of nothing worth dying for. When Memorial Day weekend loomed, I’d inform them of the meaning of this holiday - honoring those who not only risked their lives, but gave them.

The theme of our limited lifespans presented many opportunities for lessons throughout the school year, including Ben Franklin’s quote about death and taxes, our radical Muslim enemies willing to die in their efforts to kill us, as well as different ideas about the meaning of human life, including the nihilist view - widespread in the late 20th century - that it had no meaning at all. It was a rich mine, and I drew from it often.

Paul Appeal

2012-01-04T07:25:00.000-05:00

There’s a curious blindness evident when political pundits talk about Ron Paul. Though he’s been a major candidate for the Republican presidential nomination since the early days of the race, he’s been virtually ignored. When they do mention him, they preface their remarks by saying something like: “Although he’ll never be the nominee . . .”

Here’s a guy who has polled high since the beginning of the nominating process. Romney has been on top in most opinion polls since the beginning. Other candidates took turns as the “anti-Romney” candidate: Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, now Santorum. Romney has consistently polled in the low to mid twenties and is seen as the likely nominee by most. Paul has been just as consistent as a major candidate, but pundits treat him like he’s not there. Bachmann won the Ames, Iowa straw poll last August with 28.55%, but Paul was so close with 27.65% that less than 1% of the vote separated them. Who got all the publicity however? Bachmann. Paul was virtually ignored.

So why does he get so much consistent support from Republican voters this year? Three reasons:

First, he proposed $1 trillion in specific cuts to government back in October. No other candidate did that. Gone would be the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Interior, as well as Housing and Urban Development in a Ron Paul Administration. That appeals strongly to people who know America will cease to be America if we don’t drastically cut the federal government. The out-of-control deficit is killing us all. Voters know it, but the other candidates lack the political courage to say it explicitly the way Ron Paul does.

Second, he believes people should solve problems for themselves rather than look to government. During his appearance on Fox News Sunday this week, for example, Chris Wallace quoted from Ron Paul’s 1987 book “Freedom Under Siege” in which he wrote: “The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care.” Wallace then asked if he still felt that way.

Paul answered: “I don’t know how you can change science. Sexually transmitted diseases are caused by sexual activity. That’s been known for some 400 or 500 years, how these diseases are spread. If a fault comes with people because of their personal behavior, and in a free society people do dumb things, but it isn’t to be placed as a burden on other people, innocent people. Why should they have to pay for the consequences? That’s a sort of a nationalistic or socialistic attitude.”

Wallace then baited Paul saying: “Do you think someone with AIDS should not be entitled to health insurance as opposed to someone who has a heterosexually transmitted disease?” Paul responded patiently - explaining how the insurance market would handle it and offered the example that one doesn’t seek insurance after getting pregnant, but before.

Third, he has consistently spoken against fighting prolonged wars in the Middle East. Paul supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 but not the protracted conflict there. He opposed the Iraq War and the US effort in Libya. Many conservatives would agree that fighting a conventional war against unconventional enemies is foolish, but Paul wouldn’t act against Radical Islam at all unless Congress declared war. Therein is the Achilles’s Heel of Ron Paul’s foreign policy. There’s no nation-state against which to declare war, so how would he propose that we deal with Radical Islam - which is not a nation-state, but a movement across the Muslim world on five continents?

Last August, a man asked him that at a campaign stop in Winterset, Iowa. According to the Des Moines Register, Paul said: "I don’t see Islam as our enemy. I see that motivation is occupation and those who hate us and would like to kill us, they are motivated by our invasion of their land [and] the support of their dictators that they hate."

In the same exchange, Paul reiterated his belief that the September 11th attacks were motivated by American actions. While conservatives agree with Paul about strict adherence to Congress’s exclusive constitutional authority to declare war, they’re appalled (no pun intended) that Paul would blame America for September 11th. It’s a deal-breaker for conservatives including this writer, but it’s a plus with Paul’s legions of young supporters raised to believe America is imperialist. That Ron Paul’s Libertarian beliefs would include repealing marijuana laws is also a plus with them - and they comprise the bulk of his powerful, enthusiastic, boots-on-the-ground, campaign organization.

Results of the Iowa caucus just came in as I’m filing this. Paul came in a close third behind Romney and Santorum. Sarah Palin advises the GOP to be careful not to marginalize Paul and his supporters. Good advice. The GOP establishment has been foolish to ignore the appeal Ron Paul’s consistent, strict-constructionist view that federal government be cut back drastically. Ron Paul is not a fringe candidate. His consistently-large voter support makes him viable no matter what the pundits claim.

Life and Death and Then What?

2011-12-21T06:37:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died last Friday. He was 62. Though it’s too early to say with surety, it seems he died as he lived - convinced that as the title of his last book declared: “God is Not Great,” and further convinced there was no such thing as God. Many of us wondered whether he would have a change of mind and/or heart after being diagnosed with terminal cancer of the esophagus but, so far, there are no reports that he did.

Unlikely as it would seem, Hitchens interested me as he did other conservatives. Unlikely because he was an apologist for communism, an admirer of Leon Trotsky who, with Lenin and Stalin, led the Russian Revolution, and he was a bitter critic of Mother Teresa. He was a darling of the left because he was an intelligent, articulate, atheist socialist.

He was a champion for the principles of leftist orthodoxy until he came out in support of President Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s. The left was in shock. Then he wrote a book about the Clintons called “No One Left to Lie to: the Values of the Worst Family.” That was heresy for a “progressive.” Next came the September 11th attack on the United States which, among other things, made him decide to become a US citizen. Following that, he exposed the left’s myopia in its refusal to condemn radical Islam in spite of its treatment of women, homosexuals, its denial of free speech, freedom of religion, and its willingness to use violence wherever and whenever to impose sharia on everyone. The final straw occurred when in 2003, he supported the US invasion of Iraq.

Hitchens pursued truth as he perceived it. He had heart and he had integrity. That’s more than I can say about most of the people I encounter on life’s journey. We perceived the world differently but I trusted the man in some intuitive way. He seemed to put the search for truth above himself, and I’ve discovered that I can relate only to people who do that. I’ve come to believe that Truth has a capital T but Hitchens denied that to his death.In his last essay for Vanity Fair Hitchens wrote:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that "Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger."

He was referring to the debilitating effects of chemotherapy on his body.

That last quote is, ironically, attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche - author of the famous phrase “God is Dead” that has become the mantra of 20th century secular nihilism and championed by Hitchens during his lifetime. Nietzsche, however, predicted that the post-Christian 20th century would cause a decline in civility, indeed of western civilization itself, because Christianity has been responsible for the rise of those cherished western values including individual freedom and equality. As frequent Hitchens’s debate opponent Dinesh D’Sousa put it: “Unfortunately for the critics of Christianity, even values they care about will, according to Nietzsche, eventually collapse.” Nietzsche, Hitchens and millions of others like them believed the universe, our world, and those of us in it just happened by chance, and our existence doesn’t mean anything. That’s the essence of nihilism, which has which has become the ruling ethic - if you can call it that - of our age. Ironically, Christopher Hitchens had a brother, Peter Hitchens, also a writer, who is both a Christian and a political conservative. Evidently they were never close, even in childhood, but they were civil to each other most of the time. Often they debated God publicly and politely. After his brother’s death, Peter Hitchens wrote:

While I was making my gradual, hesitant way back to the altar-rail, my brother Christopher's passion against God grew more virulent and confident. As he has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more convinced we cannot know such a thing in the way we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not. I think it better by far to believe.

So it seems Peter Hitchens’ belief in Christianity is informed more by Pascal’s Wager than by intrinsic faith. During one of his debates with brother Christopher he said: “I think both the atheist and the Christian fear there is a God, but the Christian also hopes there is one.”
Christopher Hitchens believed fervently that his body would turn to dust and that would be it - lights out. I wonder what he’s thinking now.

Cultural Clues

2011-12-14T06:21:00.000-05:00

As American culture gets more strange, people’s ideas about what is attractive get more and more strange too. A couple of hours at the Maine Mall last week depressed me as I looked around at people and mannequins. Sloppy is popular. People go to great pains to look unkempt. They put enormous time, money, and effort into trying to appear as though they don’t care how they look. It’s oxymoronic. Jeans and hats look worn out, but they’re for sale. Trendy stores sell clothing that would be rejected at the Salvation Army or Goodwill thrift stores, but they’re expensive at the GAP.

Mannequins I saw there appeared unfinished. It was as if clerks started to put clothing on them but got called away before they had time to button the shirt or tie the laces. The jeans had patches in them - crudely sewn at that. It’s fashionable to look like you don’t care how you look, but yet it’s obvious that the mall rats who dressed just like the mannequins cared very much about trying to look that way. They were posing just as the mannequins were too. The mall rats moved around, but might otherwise be mistaken for the headless plastic models.

Hairstyles followed similar themes. Men, if one could call them that, stood around with affected carelessness. It seemed their intention was to look like they didn’t have time to comb their hair after getting out of bed. They had put some kind of stuff in it to make parts stand out perpendicular to their scalp, while other parts stuck out at different angles. Many kept their pants down below their butts as well. I’d hoped that trend would have died out by now, but no. On it goes.

Dye-jobs, tattoos and metal stuck in faces abounded. I wrote about this in a column called “Skin Graffiti” last year. It annoyed the pierced and tattooed around the world for months as one can read in the comments that followed. If you’re seeing this in a newspaper, they can be found here: . I described people who stretched out their ear lobes by painfully inserting ever-larger discs into them. Others stretched out their lower lips in the same way and I wondered what they were going to do when such things went out of fashion as they inevitably will. They’ll likely search for a plastic surgeon to fix them. There are specialists who repair cleft upper lips on newborn children so I guess they could repair stretched-out lower lips on crazy people just as well.

Speaking of which, there have been some bizarre stories of botched plastic surgeries in the news lately. A woman in Miami impersonated a plastic surgeon and was arrested after she had injected “fix-a-flat” substance into the face of another woman. You know that substance you can buy in a pressure can for $5.00 at the auto parts store that will plug the hole in a flat tire and inflate it as well? That’s the stuff. The “patient” ended up with bubbles in her cheeks. The “doctor” had also injected fix-a-flat mixed with cement into her own butt, presumably to make herself look attractive. How did she look? Just as if she’d injected tire inflator into her butt, that’s how. She must have thought “buns of cement” would be a less strenuous alternative to “buns of steel.” The arrest photo showed her dressed in stretch pants and a stretchy pullover - items she’s going to have to stock up on in her wardrobe from now on.

A young man in New Jersey had silicone injected into his penis by a woman in New Jersey who was also pretending to be a doctor. He later died of a blood clot and the woman was arrested for manslaughter. It’s hard to believe someone would be dumb enough to seek out that kind of service. Thinking about it though, it’s a relatively short step from getting pierced or getting dye injected for tattoos. I’ve heard that many have had these things done to intimate parts of their bodies. To a narcissist, silicone breast implants to silicone penis injections would seem a short step too.

All this makes me think I’m fortunate to have been born before the 1960s. Though I lived through them and their aftermath, I can still remember what it was like before that awful decade, and can hold out hope that someday we’ll overcome the insanity it catalyzed.

Cracks In The Veneer

2011-12-07T07:10:00.000-05:00

Civilization is but a thin veneer over the seething mass of humanity.

That outlook on the human condition is attributed to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and shared by others, myself included. A more recent example would be William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” that novel baby boomers had to read in school. It resonates with me still and more so lately. For the unfamiliar I’ll summarize the plot: A plane crashed near a remote island. On board were early-adolescent British boys and some teachers, but only the boys survived. They had to stay alive on the island without adult supervision, and how well or badly they did that is the main theme of the book. Mostly, they devolved. Their innate savagery emerged and became stronger than the civilizational constraints with which they had been imbued.

Golding obviously believed humans to be innately prone to savagery, able to overcome it only by the constraints of civilization which they receive through western tradition, and which is maintained by the supervision of elders within that civilization.

An opposite view of humanity held by many in the west would be that of the “noble savage,” the idea that humans in their natural state are given to peaceful coexistence. Such adherents would write a different kind of novel - one in which the boys shared and cooperated on the island rather than fighting and killing one another. Anarchists within the “Occupy Wall Street” or OWS movement would hold such a view - that without the constraints of government to control them, the default mode of humanity would be one of sharing and mutual cooperation. It was interesting to observe their naive attempts at uber-democracy such as their cult-like chanting repetition of a speaker’s remarks, and their refusal to move in any direction unless there were a
group consensus supporting it.

During the short life of OWS, the notion that we’re all inherently good and nice when not influenced by capitalist greed was not being borne out. Fights, assaults, rapes, thefts, drug overdoses, and vandalism abounded in virtually every camp across the country. In nearby Portland’s relatively peaceful “Occupy Maine” camp, three were arrested when one beat on his drum to wake up the rest of the campers in Lincoln Park, only to be choked by another and hit with a hammer by still another who wanted to sleep in. The western mainstream media heralded the “Arab Spring” as a renaissance of secular democracy against oppressive military dictatorships across Muslim North Africa. I wrote weeks ago http://tommclaughlin.blogspot.com/2011/10/visions-of-left.html how Van Jones, President Obama’s disgraced “Green Jobs Czar,” declared OWS to be an “American Autumn” in the spirit of the Arab Spring, as if it were comprised of smiling happy people holding hands in blissful anarchy, but none of that is panning out either. Egypt’s recent elections have given over control of the country to radical Islamists who will impose Sharia on everyone. It won’t be long before Egyptians start pining for the relatively blissful days of Mubarak’s military control. A year or two should suffice. Ask the Afghans. Ask the Iranians. I wouldn’t want to be a Christian, a woman, or a homosexual in Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over.

The British government is preparing for riots when the Euro collapses - and they’re not even in the Eurozone. Greeks are rioting already - and they’re not in default yet. What will happen when they are? Western democracy is a wonderful thing, the highest attainment of western civilization, but it’s not sufficient by itself. If democracy were imposed on the island described by Golding in his novel, who would win power? It wouldn’t be the civilized Ralph.

Jack, leader of the savage group, would prevail and then what? There wouldn’t be any more elections, that’s for sure. Hitler, remember, attained power in a democratic Germany. The majority in any democracy can elect a government that President Reagan described as like a baby: “an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other,” a government that will tax, borrow, spend and print money until everyone is destitute. That is what’s happening in Europe and in the United States. When those governments collapse it won’t be pretty. What will it be like? Look at Somalia. Look at Afghanistan before we invaded. That’s what it will turn back into when we leave too. Authority will be in the hands of whomever controls the most men with automatic weapons riding in the back of pickup trucks. That thin veneer of civilization is showing cracks in Europe as hard times approach, and we’re likely see more in 2012. What scares me is that we’re on the same path Europe is, just a bit further back. If we don’t change direction soon, look out.

Change Course Or Collapse? Choose

2011-11-29T13:30:00.000-05:00

Hard times are ahead. As a nation, we’re marching toward a cliff and the question is: Will we continue and go off the precipice or will we change course? Anyone with a basic knowledge of arithmetic knows things cannot go on as they are. Political leaders have promised that we can provide medical care for the poor, the elderly, and now everyone else as well - forever. They talk as though it will be possible to provide food, clothing and housing for anyone who asks too. I’m no math genius, but even I know that’s impossible. Yet our political leaders insist that if we increase taxes on the rich we’ll be able to keep marching. They have to know that even if we taxed the rich at 100% it would only provide enough revenue to keep going for a few more months before bankruptcy.

So many Americans have depended on government for so long, they don’t know how to take care of themselves. But if the country goes bankrupt - if we march off that cliff - all that government assistance will end abruptly. Then what? Chaos, of course. Many are preparing for exactly that scenario to one degree or another and I see what they see, but isn’t there still some way to avoid it?

That we cannot continue as we’re going is indisputable, but what’s the alternative? How can we avoid marching off the cliff? Can we make cuts to the checks and programs slowly? Can we do it slowly enough to both avoid the cliff and give dependent Americans time to adjust to making their own way? Will they? There was a time in America - still in the memory of living citizens - when people did live by their own labors. Those who could not were supported by families or by churches and private charities. Can we gradually return to that kind of nation? Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I prefer to think we can. I prefer to think there are still enough Americans who realize the path we’re on leads to bankruptcy and chaos. I prefer to think there are enough of us to elect a congress and president who will cut the behemoth government has become - cut it surgically, systematically and incrementally. If we do it gradually, can we avoid chaos? Can we avoid violence? Whoever we elect must also be capable of explaining to the American people in terms they can understand why cutting is vital to our survival, why it has never been possible for government to fulfill the promises it made. Look at Social Security alone: it can only work when there are more people being born than are growing old - as long as children in American families outnumber parents. That’s how it was in America while I was growing up, but it isn’t that way anymore. Those who dreamed up Social Security during the New Deal and added more expensive social programs during the Great Society, then started preaching about over-population. They championed birth control and abortion to prevent births, then justified it all by preaching that “the planet” couldn’t sustain them. What they conveniently overlooked was that the world they thereby created couldn’t sustain their beloved Social Security either. The children they prevented or the 45 million they killed in the womb since Roe v Wade in 1973 would not be paying FICA taxes. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme with elderly baby boomers as its beneficiaries until it collapses. Those children they did allow to be born are the ones who get stiffed. Medicare and other Great Society programs have similar scenarios. The handwriting is on the wall. Unlike Babylonian king Belshazzar, we don’t need a biblical prophet to translate it for us. We don’t even need a calculator because the arithmetic is simple. The handwriting on the wall for 21st century Americans reads: “Change course or collapse.”

What Comes First

2011-11-29T12:00:00.001-05:00

Family, that's what. The older I get the more I realize it. Here are Lila (my newest granddaughter) and her mother (my daughter Annie) in their pew just before Lila's baptism.Love in in my daughter Annie's face.

Here, Lila becomes a child of God thanks to Father Paul Dumais. Andrew is Lila's father.Water must drip off her head for an official Catholic baptism

Looks like it took.
Lila is pleased

We take the granddaughters home to give Annie and Andrew a break sometimes. They're still little enough that both fit in the kitchen sink for a bath.Claire and Lila

Before you know it though, they'll be teenagers amazed that they were ever that small.

My wife Roseann and I went walking on Westport Island, Maine where we've been staying over Thanksgiving. These two guys were doing off-season carpentry work on a vacation home and took a lunchbreak sitting on sawhorses. Beyond the lamp post on the left is the lighthouse on Southport Island in the distance. Beyond that, the Atlantic.Lunch break on Westport Island

We were all together in the big rental house for five days - grandchildren, adult children, sons-in-law.Riley, Alex, Sarah, Claire

It went good. I'd forgotten how it was living in a house full of children. It's nice, but as you hear so many grandparents say - it's good when it's over too.Coloring with Auntie Annie

I love oak trees. My ancestors used to worship them in Ireland before St. Patrick set them straight.Oak trees and ocean

Next morning the sun rose through more oak trees outside our bedroom.Sunrise over Sheepscot River

Then it went down over the other side of the island.Sunset over Westport Island, Maine

Tomorrow we head back home. It was a nice Thanksgiving with family.

Thanks for November

2011-11-22T08:45:00.000-05:00

Don’t think I’ll ever want to go south for the winter. I’m a New Englander. As such, I savor the smell of each new season. Though I’ve experienced sixty of each, I love the feel - the changing light, the scents wafting on the breeze. I love the crunch of new snow underfoot, and when I feel it for the first time each winter, memories of all the similar sensations from previous years come right back, and I feel that this is where I belong.Smart's Hill in November

Late November sun illuminates but doesn’t warm much. There just isn’t as enough of it. What there is doesn’t last as long and seems more precious as a result. In July we take it for granted, but not during these short days. We who live in the woods become more aware of sun at this time because leaves have dropped from most of the hardwoods except for oaks and beeches. Its angle in the sky is lower too so it illuminates the exposed bone structure of those hardwoods. After the brilliant color of October’s foliage, we see hardwoods as grayish frames. Smooth bark on upper branches shows light gray against darker gray shadows. On a distant hillside, a thousand skeletal treetops mesh into soft grays interspersed with dark greens of pine groves.

Animals and plants know to prepare for winter when late fall is evident all around. Some humans know too but others remain unaware of the changing season - insulated from nature in buildings, their sense of the world filtered through television or computer screens they stare at all day. They don’t hear wind rattle branches, only sounds produced in studios - electronically filtered through magnetized speakers. No smells come with electronic sights and sounds - no feelings either except for whatever has been stored away from past experiences.Kezar Lake looking north from Pleasant Point in November

November has been warm and peaceful around here this year. For three consecutive days, Kezar Lake was so smooth and tranquil that just being around it was calming. Water mirrored sky and shore more perfectly than I’ve never seen, and so quietly the sound of my camera’s shutter seemed to echo.Looking northeast toward Quisisana

November also brings Thanksgiving. To Whom do we give thanks? When I was teaching, I’d ask students that question and most of them would say it was “Indians.”

“Where did you learn that?” I’d ask.

“In school,” they’d answer. That’s because God is persona non grata in public schools and has been so for decades. American history is being distorted to push God out - with consequences beyond historical ignorance. But that’s for another column.

Thanksgiving is a time for Americans foster an attitude of gratitude, focusing on what we have rather than what we’d like to have.That’s a good thing, especially in these challenging economic times. We’re more likely to be thankful for simple things like a warm home, a job, good health and the presence of loved ones.For all this, I'm thankful

That’s especially true in my family this year, it being only a few weeks since “little” brother Paul was diagnosed with stage-four throat cancer. He begins chemotherapy as I write. Family and community are pulling together to support Paul and his family of wife and seven children. He’s self-employed in the plumbing and heating business and we often talk early mornings since he does all that work on the properties I manage. He’s a big, jolly guy always quick with a joke. He told me he’s going to be “Chemo-Boy” this winter and I said “How about we call you “Kemo-sabe”?Paul with daughter, Aimee

He laughed, though his throat was sore after removal of a cancerous tonsil. Radiation follows chemotherapy and laughing will be more painful - but if I know Paul, that won’t stop him. He’ll laugh through his eyes.

A benefit supper for him and his family will be held at the Lovell Fire House - intersection of Hatch’s Hill Road and Main Street in Lovell Saturday, December 3rd from 4:00-7:00 pm. Spaghetti - with and without meat - rolls, dessert for $8.00 per person.

Occupy Wall Street Focused? Come On

2011-11-15T11:47:00.000-05:00

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) isn’t “focused” as Nancy Pelosi claims. It’s about as many grievances as there are people in attendance at its multiple sites around the country. I’ve questioned people at two local sites in my futile search for unified themes, but the only constant I found other than discontent was class envy. Those who have worked through envy know it when they see it - and it’s always ugly. That’s why envy is one of the seven deadly sins.

Democrats fertilize and exploit envy, especially of the rich. Evidence indicates they catalyzed OWS through their public-employee unions and remnants of ACORN. Pelosi and Obama both endorsed it but it may backfire on them. Violence, drug dealing, overdoses, sexual assaults, filth, disease, and death are all escalating as OWS gets crazier every day, especially on the left coast. John Nolte of Biggovernment.com is keeping a running tally of lawlessness at all the OWS sites, lately called “Obamavilles” by those of us who see Saul Alinsky fingerprints. Each Obamaville is a microcosm of the Democrat Party: socialists, communists, anarchists, homosexuals, revolutionaries, trust-funders, students, and others including radical Islamists in their keffiyehs spouting anti-semitism. By the time this is published, more violence may have occurred as cities evict left-wing squatters from public parks this week - especially on the left coast.From Zombietime

The old saying that “It’s as if the country were turned up on its side and all the loose nuts rolled into California” is verified again by OWS Obamavilles in the Bay Area. There are left-wing loonies everywhere of course, but San Francisco and Oakland have the highest concentration. Traditional Democrat constituencies at these Obamavilles aren’t getting along with each other though. They’ve segregated themselves in Oakland as evidenced by a Zombietime.com photoessay. One area is fenced off with pink ribbon and a sign declaring “Women, Queer + Trans ONLY.”From Zombietime

Another sign declares “PEOPLE OF COLOR TENT!” Some Obamaville homosexuals “of color” had an identity crisis over what victim group they most identified with, so another area was designated “POC/QPOC - People Of Color - Queer People Of Color - information - conversation.”From Zombietime

If they can’t reconcile, there’s a giant white board featuring workshops to attend at the OWS Oakland Obamaville including: “Medic training with the Black Cross” (What’s the Black Cross? I’m sure I don’t know); “Anti-capitalism”; “Anarchism & Anti-colonialism”; “Marxism 101”; “What To Do When The Police Come”; “Resistance Training”; “Gang Injunction Presentation”; followed by “What Are Gang Injunctions?”; followed by “Student Speaking Out About Gang Injunctions”; followed by “Ken Knabb: The Occupation From A Situationist Perspective.” Yoga and Meditation workshops interspersed all others.From Zombietime

Don’t those sound exciting? What else would we expect from the Bay Area -headquarters for the Land of Fruits and Nuts?

When leftists around Conway, New Hampshire got the urge to join the OWS movement, I had to drop in to ask questions. About 40-50 people occupied four street corners for an hour, and I visited each. At the first corner I asked a man holding a sign declaring: “GET BIG $$ OUT OF POLITICS!” how he proposed to accomplish that.

“Who are you?” he asked, and I identified myself. “I know you,” he said disdainfully. The local Conway Daily Sun has published my column with a picture for years. Others on that corner murmured and cast sidelong glances my way.

“You’re about as welcome as chlamydia!” Someone said over my shoulder. Turning, I recognized a radical feminist who wrote columns in the Sun critical of me and whose email address was “Madamovary@[something-or-other].com”

“You’ve had chlamydia?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, as the conversation continued downhill. A short, bearded guy with a hostile look came over holding a big microphone and I thought it prudent to walk over to another corner. Madamovary mentioned my visit on her web site describing me as “Our local purveyor of hate speech.”

At the next corner another woman recognized me and shouted: “You’re the devil incarnate!”

“And you’re abrasive,” I said.

“I wondered what I’d do if I ever met you - and here you are!” she said.Woman on right called me the devil incarnate

“Yup. Here I am,” I responded, and then spoke to an older couple about their sign as she continued glaring. They were peeved that some corporations paid no income tax but weren’t sure what to do about it. I asked if they would support a flat tax with no deductions for corporations and people. They would, they said, and we found ourselves in agreement.Guy Fawkes guy on right

At the next corner were the local Unitarian/Universalist minister with the obligatory rainbow banner, someone wearing the obligatory Guy Fawkes mask and holding a sign proclaiming: “THE PEOPLE ARE TO (sic) BIG TO FAIL,” and others holding signs you’d see at any OWS site. I wanted to ask the Guy Fawkes guy if he advocated violence - given that the real Guy Fawkes stockpiled gunpowder under the House of Lords in 1606 in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy Parliament. The hour was nearly over however and I didn’t get a chance.

I found no one at local OWS sites who understood Constitutional government. People were angry and resentful but had little idea how to address their myriad grievances. OWS is anything but focused. It’s a discontented mass that could devolve into an ugly mob if history is any guide.

Time, Money, and Government

2011-11-09T07:05:00.000-05:00

Government should stay away from regulating time, just as it should most other things. It bugs me that I have to set all my clocks back in the fall and ahead again in the spring. Even though I figured out how to change the time on my pickup truck clock last spring, that doesn’t mean I remember how to do it again this fall. Six months is too short an interval for the procedure to stick in my feeble brain. The procedure is different in my little car and in my wife’s car of course. I can’t remember them either and I’m sometimes driving while I fidget with various buttons in my effort to remember how it’s done. Not a good thing. Most of us are perfectly capable of screwing things up all by ourselves without government complicating things further.

Time zones were not invented by government. It was private business - particularly railroads - first in England, then in other countries. People didn’t have to comply with those zones if they didn’t want to, but most eventually discovered it was advantageous to do so. Government doesn’t have to be involved then and doesn’t now either, but it is of course. Benjamin Franklin had lots of good ideas, but Daylight Saving Time wasn’t one of them. Some people think it’s wonderful to “get an extra hour of daylight” as if they really did. Neither do I change the batteries in my smoke detectors at this annoying interval either. I wait until I keep hearing that irritating beep for a day or two before I start searching around for another nine-volt battery.

There are mechanical clocks and digital clocks and body clocks. My body clock sets itself it adjusts to the gradual diminishing of sunlight in fall and the gradual increase of it in spring. It gets me up before dawn and puts me to bed after sunset, except during winter when I say up a few hours after the sun goes to bed. I don’t like it when government interferes with that process twice a year and I have to rely on alarm clocks to wake me. Though some government-lovers may think it really can control the sun, it only pretends to. Barack Obama can’t control the ocean levels either no matter what liberals may believe.

Speaking of things government screws up, President Obama announced that Fannie Mae will now refinance people with mortgages under water up to 25%. Government should get out of the housing business altogether. The “troubled assets” still plaguing our economy were caused by the same sort of thing: government forcing banks to lend to people those banks considered bad risks, and then taking over and guaranteeing those sub-prime mortgages through Fannie Mae. That put taxpayers on the hook - not only by bailing out Fannie Mae, but also banks and insurance companies who invested in various forms of those shaky mortgages - now called troubled assets. These assets were troubled by giving mortgages to people who never should have gotten them. Further tinkering of the type Obama announced last week won’t fix it.

Government intervention in the form of artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve and then making mortgage guarantees it couldn’t afford to make has caused the bubble in housing prices. That bubble needs to deflate entirely. Prices have to bottom out if the housing market is ever going to recover. Long-postponed foreclosures must be processed. All that foolish spending by people and banks must wash out eventually so let’s just get it over with. Lots of people are waiting for that before they invest in real estate again. Last-minute Obama-bandaids only postpone the inevitable and cost taxpayers further billions as government tries to fix what it screwed up in the first place.Government has always controlled our money. The Constitution gave Congress power to coin it - which means print it, or create it digitally, or in whatever other forms it may take - but has chosen to give over that power to the Federal Reserve. Its chairman - bald, bearded Ben Bernanke - has been creating trillions of dollars out of thin air and buying Treasury bonds nobody else wants. That makes the dollars in our wallets and in our bank accounts worth less and less. Government, through him, is stealing our wealth. That’s why so people many are buying gold - they don’t trust the Federal Reserve or Congress, and who can blame them?

Ben Franklin was right about at least one thing when he said: “Time is money.” My wish is for my government to stop messing around with either one. We’d be better off making our own decisions about such fundamental things and dealing with those consequences as individuals.

"Shut Up!" She Explained

2011-11-02T09:36:00.000-04:00

Why is there any such thing as the “Congressional Black Caucus”? Its defenders purport that it exists to advance the interests of black people. This, however, begs the question: are the interests of black people any different than the interests of any other people in America? If they are, then we have a problem.

Undeniably, black people were discriminated against in our history. That organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) came into existence to fight that is understandable, but it was outlawed forty-five years ago - two generations ago. If it still exists anywhere in America, it can be prosecuted. To those who claim it does, I ask: Where? Show me. If discrimination doesn’t exist, we get back to the original question: Why is there any such thing as the Congressional Black Caucus?

The CBC is with us because it enjoys immunity from criticism in the liberal mainstream media as it works to preserve and expand racial preferences for blacks. With the exception of its newest member, Florida Republican Congressman Allen West who opposes racial preferences, its members are all left-wing Democrats. As such, they’re allowed to say and do outrageous things for which they’re seldom held accountable in the press. For example:

In an astonishing display of incompetence, a CBC congressman from Georgia questioned an admiral about deploying a group of Marines on the island of Guam, a US possession in the Pacific Ocean. He asked how big Guam was and how many native people lived on it - because he was afraid the island might tip over if too many Marines were landed there! I’m not making this up. This is dumb on so many levels I’ll leave it to the reader to ponder them. The embarrassing exchange was videoed and posted on Youtube last year a few months before congressional elections. With the exception of Jay Leno, the mainstream media chose to ignore it. Relatively few Americans ever heard about it and Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) was reelected in November, 2010 with over 70% of the vote in his Georgia district. As intellectually challenged as he is, Congressman Johnson looks like a genius next to the woman he defeated - former CBC member Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)- after she punched a Capitol Police officer.

Hank Johnson may be dumb but he seems like a nice guy. Several women of the CBC, however, are not only dense, they’re obnoxious.

In another display of ignorance, a CBC congresswoman from Texas declared that: “Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace.” This woman got a BA in political science from Yale in 1972. She’s a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. How could she not know that America lost the Vietnam War and north and south were reunited? You’d think there must be some mistake, but this is the woman who asked NASA if the Mars Rover would take a picture of the flag Neil Armstrong left there. Let me point out that she sits on House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics too. She’s been in Congress since 1995 representing Houston where they’re prone to hurricanes. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) wants to change how hurricanes are named. Rather than “lily white” names, she wants the National Hurricane Center to use names like “Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn.” Although the mainstream media ignores her remarks, conservative bloggers, radio talk show hosts and Fox News gave as much attention to them as they could. Jackson-Lee’s response? “Shut up!” she explained.

Another congresswoman from Los Angeles lectured oil company executives, saying: “Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be about socializing … uh, umm. … Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.” The word she couldn’t find, of course, was “nationalizing” their companies. This congresswoman called the 1992 LA riots a “rebellion . . . a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.” She excused looting by explaining:

One lady said her children didn't have any shoes. She just saw those shoes there, a chance for all of her children to have new shoes. Goddamn it! It was such a tear-jerker. I might have gone in and taken them for her myself.

Columnist Michelle Malkin said: “This is a woman who visited the home of Damian Williams, the infamous thug who ‘expressed himself’ by hurling a chunk of concrete at white truck driver Reginald Denny and performing a victory dance over the innocent bystander.”

In case you never heard of her, I’m talking about Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA). She’s facing an ethics investigation for using influence on behalf of her husband’s bank. The investigation’s outcome is likely to follow that of that other CBC member. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who was censured.

Running out of space here, but I have to include Frederica Wilson (D-FL). The only thing she loves more than her funny-looking hats is playing the race card. She, like all the CBC ladies I mentioned above, despises the Tea Party - which would shrink the big government they depend on. “The real enemy is the [racist] Tea Party!” chants Congresswoman Wilson who blames 40% unemployment among black youth on “racism” despite ubiquitous racial preferences imposed nationwide at all levels.

If these people weren’t left-wing Democrats, the mainstream media would be all over them like flies on you-know-what. If you don’t believe that, look what they’re doing to Herman Cain on the basis of unsubstantiated, anonymous complaints. Then ask yourself: If it’s all right to have a Congressional Black Caucus, why not a Congressional White Caucus?

Defining Poor

2011-10-26T10:14:00.000-04:00

“We have the poor, and the poor have us.”

An old selectman with whom I worked twice a week for several years repeated that often when we discussed “General Assistance” cases, the only issues we kept confidential. Everything else was on the public record. He was almost old enough to be my grandfather and first served on the board back in the 1940s. Welfare existed at the local level then. Before President Johnson’s “Great Society” transformed everything, selectmen were “overseers of the poor.”

The old selectman's refrain had subtle implications. Regarding the first part: “We have the poor”: we have them to test us - to see what we’re made of. If it’s more blessed to give than to receive, we helped ourselves by giving to them. However, our judgement was also tested when deciding how much to help, ever cognizant that it was possible to help too much and cause the poor to become dependent - to lose the initiative to help themselves. The second part, “The poor have us” implied that not only did the poor have us to support them, they “had us by the short hairs,” as well. Basic human compassion obligated us to help when they faced existential threat, but we had to summon the toughness to say no when they were gaming the system. Such judgements were difficult enough to make at the local level, but even more so at the state level - even in a small state like Maine. When federal government mandates welfare in its many forms, such judgement becomes virtually impossible.During my nine years as General Assistance Administrator for my town of Lovell, Maine, I’d estimate that only one in three receiving assistance were in genuine need. Two out of three were scamming. In my particular circle of family, friends and acquaintances, there are several receiving all or a portion of their support from government. Some have legitimate needs, but for most I have my suspicions. I don’t think my circle is unusual. How is it in yours?

So what is poor anyway? Politically, it’s a volatile word and important to define. The federal government defines poor as below a certain income level for an individual, a couple, a family of three, four, five, and so forth. But numerical definitions mislead, especially considering that income derived from the underground economy is impossible to account for. Most of us would agree that someone is poor if (s)he hasn’t enough money for food, clothing, shelter, or medical care, so how many Americans are poor by that definition? Very few, if any. You might find some on the streets, but they tend to be alcoholic, drug addicted, or the deinstitutionalized mentally ill not taking their medications. A few weeks ago I noticed several of Portland, Maine’s street people participating in the “Occupy Wall Street” or OWS activities.Demonstrators at Denver OWS (from Atlas Shrugged)

Once I volunteered at a soup kitchen and noticed that most of those who came in for a free meal were overweight. I didn’t go back.

A Heritage Foundation study just last month reported that in American households classified as “poor”: 92% had a microwave oven; 82% had air conditioning; 74% had a car or truck and 30% had two or more; 64% had cable or satellite TV (34% with plasma or LCD televisions); half had personal computers and 42% had internet service; 70% have a VCR and 64% have a DVD player; 54% had video game systems. More than 90% lived in single-family homes or apartments. The rest live in mobile homes.Another at Denver OWS (from Atlas Shrugged)

The list goes on and remember: I’m talking about households our government classifies as “poor” here. Go back fifty years and people with these things would be considered prosperous. It’s hard to sympathize with people who turn out at OWS demonstrations and complain about “The 1%” of Americans who have more than they do. They join with communists, socialists, radical Muslims, public employee union thugs, and assorted whiners. They claim to be part of “the 99%” and they want to eliminate capitalism, the very system that enables the “poor” among us to overeat while watching cable TV in their warm homes.From politifake.com

Rather than be content with food, clothing, shelter, medical care, televisions, cars and X boxes, they’re consumed with misery when they visualize others who have more. They want government to take it away from “the 1%” and give it to them. Collectively, they’re the largest constituency of the Democrat Party which is driving our federal government into bankruptcy. They don’t seem to understand that benefits they’re already getting are unsustainable, that even if they took all the income from “the 1%” it would only be enough to keep the system going for 90 days.

This is what happens when federal government usurps authority from local government. If we don’t elect people in November, 2012 who begin dismantling the federal behemoth, it will bring us all down with a mighty crash.

Learning and Discerning

2011-10-19T08:52:00.000-04:00

Too much information is coming my way and there isn’t time to digest it all. It’s causing me stress and I’m trying to do something about it.

It’s the internet. So much of my work - and yes, I’m still working even though I’m retired from teaching - involves a computer on my lap. I do banking for myself and a client. I write. I exchange emails with friends, family and business associates. I store images. The laptop is one of my portals on the world, past and present. I cannot remember the last time I wanted to know something and couldn’t find out about it on the internet.

Last night, for example, I looked up the life span of Ignatius of Loyola after discussing the Society of Jesus with a friend. Ignatius was born in 1491 - just before Columbus discovered America - just before Muslims were driven from the Iberian Peninsula back to Africa after centuries of domination. As Ignatius grew to manhood, his country became the richest, most powerful on earth by taking in gold and silver from the New World. The Protestant Reformation rocked Europe. Ignatius founded the Jesuits and led the Counterreformation. Thoroughly engaged in the far-reaching ideas and events of his time, Ignatius died in 1556 at 65. He had been overwhelmed by world events as a young man and then chose to step back drastically to digest it all and seek direction. Then, all through the rest of his busy and productive life, he retreated periodically to process.A client's dock on Kezar Lake, Lovell

Not being bound to a classroom anymore gives me more time to absorb information, but not enough. I’ve subscribed to news feeds from many interesting and trusted sources but I still can’t read them all. I scroll down my email list and think: “I’ll read that one later and that one too,” but the lists still get longer. My server warns me that my inbox memory is reaching its limit and I must delete still-unread news feeds. It pains me to watch as information I can’t absorb vaporizes back into cyberspace. Reading a book is different. It’s all there in my hands and I can see where the end is. A good author fashions the information with a beginning, a middle, and an end and that can be comforting.

Ignatius went to live in a cave and pray all day to make sense of his world. While I’ve been visiting regional caves with my wife lately studying archaeology and geology, I don’t want to live in one. What I’m learning to do however, is tear myself away from my laptop periodically and go outside. I’ll drive around Kezar Lake and look over the properties I’m responsible for. Smelling fresh air and feeling a cool wind helps clear my head as I watch what light and wind do to the water’s surface. I’ll stroll around nearby archaeological sites and see what may have been turned up by wind and rain. Most days I can pick up a piece of stone discarded by an unknown someone centuries or even millennia before - and that can put the hyperactive 21st century into perspective for a while.

There’s a limit to what I can know and understand. I’ve been pressing against that ceiling lately and discovering I must be discerning about what I feed into the mill wheel between my ears. I have to be careful about what sort of grist my mind should grind, and how much. I have to glean the important and chuck the rest. Walking around outside helps that process.Kezar Lake, looking northwest

At such times I’m reminded of people I learned about when moving to Lovell thirty-four years ago. There were about a half-dozen women who wouldn’t come out of their houses for months at a time and then only briefly when nobody was looking. I pondered why there should be so many afflicted with what seemed to be agoraphobia in a small town of fewer than eight hundred souls. Was it because they’d grown up during the early twentieth century and couldn’t absorb the changes going on around them? Life in Lovell before electricity, paved roads, or automobiles was essentially a nineteenth-century existence. Then, all of a sudden there were radios, televisions, cars, planes, telephones all around bringing noise and information galore. Did all that overwhelm them and cause them to retreat into their more-controlled domestic environment where they would get news only when someone stopped by for a chat? It would be easier to process information that way. It could be measured out in digestible chunks and discussed with a familiar human being.Mount Washington from Christian Hill in Lovell

Lately, I’m trying to do that too. I’m arranging to spend time with others who have common interests, one at a time, and process things. So far, it’s helping.

Visions of the Left

2011-10-12T08:29:00.000-04:00

The left is on the ropes. Their Keynesian tactics to “revive” the economy are making it far worse instead. Conservative Tea Party types pushing the Republican Party to the right and taking over the House of Representatives are making it difficult for tax-and-spend liberals to continue on their road to bankrupting the country. The Supreme Court is poised to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. President Obama is sinking in the polls. The European Union, the ideal welfare-state leftists used as a model for decades, is disintegrating. Pundits claim that if the election were held tomorrow, Democrats would lose the Senate and the White House too. They took over everything in 2008 and they’re going to lose it all in 2012, so what is the left doing? They’re trying to start a left-wing tea party called “Occupy Wall Street,” or OWS.What's left when the left occupies New York City (from London Daily Mail)

One of OWS’s catalysts is Van Jones. Remember him? He was President Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar.” He was going to turn America’s energy economy around to wind mills and solar panels, lower the oceans and defeat capitalism. Then he was forced to resign when people began realizing he was a nut case. He was a “Truther” who believed America orchestrated the September 11th attacks and he was a communist. He announced to the Mainstream Media his “American Autumn” which was going to “rebuild the dream” of America in the spirit of the Arab Spring. He described the “phony, made-up deficit stuff” as if our bankrupting $14 trillion debt didn’t exist. “If we could pass the president’s jobs bill . . .” everything would be all right. He wants 99% of Americans to tax the richest 1% and spread the wealth.Hungry mouths to feed? This Chicago woman is overfed.

OWS’s unique brand of weirdness is coming to a city near you if it’s not there already. Do they know what they want? A perfect world, it looks like. Some want to plant trees. Others want free colleges and forgiveness of five and six-figure student loans they ran up as Gender Studies and Queer Studies majors. They certainly weren’t Math majors or they’d know that if we took all the income of the richest Americans, we could run our federal government for less than three months.OWS freaks blocking Brooklyn Bridge (From Christian Science Monitor)

Others want the homeless to be given homes. Many are just strange-looking, smelly, dreadlocked, pierced, tattooed freaks. They’re the social/political, left-wing equivalent of, evolutionary-throwback, agricultural types one sees at Fryeburg Fair. They make you wonder where they go the rest of the year. They can’t possibly work; who would hire them? A head shop? A punk-music group? A marijuana farm? They followed the Grateful Dead for years until Jerry Garcia died, and now they’ve found something else to do.Old Hippie camped out at "Occupy (Portland) Maine"

Others are trust-fund babies, left-over hippies who believe in governing by consensus in long meetings in which everybody feels safe to talk about their feelings. Drudge posted an example of what OWS calls “collaboratism” from Atlanta. “Occupy Atlanta” discussed allowing Congressman John Lewis to speak. A leader with a microphone spoke in three-word cadences so that the entire consensus-cult could chant in repetition everything he said. They used weird hand gestures to communicate consensus or lack thereof. Others took turns speaking in the same creepy cadence - which were, again, repetitively-chanted by the group, while Congressman Lewis waited and watched. The expression on Lewis’s face indicated he was thinking: "Who the f*** are these people?" just as I was when watching the spectacle on You Tube. Ultimately, these politically-correct zombies decided against letting Lewis speak, and he walked away with his union entourage. Those reading this in a newspaper really should go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZlp3eGMNI and see for yourself what many of these OWS people are like. "Occupy Chicago" led similar zombie chants.

Unlike the smelly, dreadlocked contingent, these zombie leftists appeared to maintain personal hygiene standards. Mentally, they’ve gone over the edge. I sat through enough teacher staff meetings at which we had sensitivity consultants coach us about how to make everyone present “feel safe” enough to speak - so we could “come to consensus.” They trained us to use “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” and “thumbs sideways” gestures so the leader could “take the temperature” of the group non-verbally. Sometimes I was tempted to make other hand gestures, but restrained myself so my hot-house-flower colleagues wouldn’t faint. If the sensitivity consultants trained us to do the OWS repetitive-chant technique, I’d have left the profession much earlier.I don't get it, do you? Sign at "Occupy Maine" encampment in Portland.

Though they were organizing behind the scenes from the beginning, the public employee unions SEIU and AFSCME are in the open now. They’re joined by street people drawn to the free food provided by sympathetic businesses. Teenage party types come too, drawn by drug use and public sex. Others are paid by Soros-funded recruiters who advertise on Craig’s list. Many in the OWS contingent are anarchists. In what is becoming the icon of the OWS “movement,” one was photographed by the London Daily Mail defecating on a police car in Manhattan. Other pictures showed mountains of trash.OWS Movement (from "London Daily Mail")

None of this was seen at Tea Party demonstrations. The contrast between left and right in America is quite stark, and which side wins in 2012 may well determine the survival of our republic. For almost three years now, we've been seeing what leftist policies do - and it's very clear that our country cannot survive them much longer.

Woodsmen's Day At The Fair

2011-10-05T07:32:00.000-04:00

After thirty-four years of wanting to, I finally went to Woodsmen’s Day at the Fryeburg Fair. It’s always been on a Monday and I always had to teach at my old school about half-a-mile away. If I skipped and went to the fair I’d see dozens of people who knew me, knew where I was supposed to be, and who could see I wasn’t sick, so I put it off until after retirement. Weather wasn’t the greatest though. Rain was forecast. It didn’t come, but the day was mostly cloudy, damp, and raw, and that added to a certain sadness I felt.Why sadness? There was a kind of “John Henry” feeling about it. Older readers may remember hearing someone like Johnny Cash sing a version of the old “Steel-Driving Man” ballad. As the legend goes, John Henry was a big, strong man who drove steel spikes into wooden ties to hold down the rails. His job was threatened by a steam-driven machine that would replace human labor and he challenged that machine to a contest. John Henry won, but it wore him down so much that he died of exhaustion in the way a horse will run itself to death.Woodsmen’s Day had lots of ax-wielding events - though axes are a tool you’re not likely to see at a logging site anymore. There were buck-saw and two-person crosscut saw events too. All these old tools were replaced by chainsaws, of course, and there there were also competitions for those. Guys with whining souped-up saws cut through a 10X10 pine beam three times - down, up, and down again - in less than four seconds. If you blinked, you missed it.Lately, even chainsaws are being replaced in the woods. Giant machines called feller-bunchers with big steel arms grapple onto trees while a huge steel circular saw cuts them off at the stump, then lays down a bunch of them for newer grapple skidders to muckle onto and drag to the landing where another giant machine grabs them and feeds them into a chipper. They’re getting more common than chain saws and old-style steel-cable skidders. Feller-bunchers were on display for sale in an area adjacent to the Woodsmen’s Day events. You’ll probably still see a chainsaw on a logging site today but it’s seldom used. Somebody may pick one up to cut a little tree out of the way or, ironically, to drop a tree too big for the huge machines to handle. As far as I know, there are no competitions planned at Fryeburg Fair for feller-bunchers, and Paul Bunyan isn’t around to challenge one of those machines the way John Henry did in the twilight of his profession back in the 19th century.They’re all dead now, but when I moved to Maine way back in the 20th century, there were still guys around who had logged with horses, crosscut saws, buck saws, and peaveys. One showed me how easy it was to limb a downed tree with a sharp ax. Chainsaws and skidders had taken took over by then however. Most loggers worked in three-man crews - one called a chopper downed the trees and limbed them. Another drove a cable-and-winch skidder to drag logs to the landing, where another worked to cut the trees to market-length logs. When the landing was full of logs and/or pulpwood, an independent with a logging truck would come in and haul them to the mill.

Cutting firewood and twitching it out of the woods with an old tractor for about twenty years gave me enough of a taste to know it’s all very hard work, and dangerous too. I cut only ten or twelve cords a year - just enough to keep my family warm and sell a little once in a while. As soon as I became prosperous enough, I went back to using oil and only worked up a little wood here and there for the fireplace. I could still do it, but I won’t unless I have to.Quite a few competing in the Woodsmen’s Day events were older than I am and there was a special category called “Masters” for them. That’s a euphemism for old-guy league and I found myself rooting for them. They came from all over the country and Canada too. One looked amazingly like Tommy Lee Jones in “No Country For Old Men.” Jones’s character played a sheriff in rural Texas who was near retirement and struggling to deal with how much the world and the people in it had transformed around him.Tommy Lee Jones in "No Country For Old Men"Separated At Birth?

I was surprised to see women competing in their own classes for nearly every event. Most looked like Russian weight lifters, but not all. Some looked quite feminine and handled their axes and saws with great skill. That got me wondering if the Fair Association will ever start calling Monday “Woodsperson’s Day.”

Exploring An Ancient Cave

2011-09-28T06:35:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of things I want to do “someday.” One has been exploring an ancient mine on Mount Jasper in Berlin, NH. Long-postponed somedays are here now since I decided last spring to cap my teaching career at thirty-six years. So, a couple of weeks ago my wife and I climbed to the top of Mount Jasper’s southwest-facing cliff, then carefully threaded our way down to an old cave. It’s a man-made cave that took thousands of years to hack into a seam of multi-colored jasper. The material is also called rhyolite and it threaded diagonally up the exposed ledge of the mountain after forming over a hundred million years ago.

For years, I’ve been finding stone artifacts and flakes left by prehistoric inhabitants of the Fryeburg area, many of which I noticed were made from distinctive kinds of stone. Online, I learned some of it was a material called rhyolite from a source near the upper Androscoggin River in Berlin. Available evidence indicates that early Americans discovered it there and have been extracting tool-making material from this cave for about nine thousand years.Berlin from the ledge above the mine. Rain shower coming in from the south.

The first I’d learned of the mine was in a column by Ed Parsons in The Conway Daily Sun back in 1998 or ’99. Parsons writes mostly about hiking, and it seems he’s been up nearly every hill and mountain in the area. Included was a photo of the City of Berlin taken from top of the ledge above the mine. That’s when I made up mind to go there someday and check it out.

Two things made this a trip my wife and I could enjoy together: one - it involved rocks, which we both like. Two - it involved hiking, which isn’t one of my passions, though I do it occasionally because she likes it. “Just to get to the top” doesn’t motivate me to walk up up a steep hill for hours. If there’s a pegmatite mine on top, that would be some incitement, but that kind of mine is common in this part of the world and there are many I can drive to. If there were old cellar holes to examine on the way up a hill, that would motivate me too, but if there’s just a nice view, well, there are lots of nice views around I could drive to and enjoy with a sip of wine without getting all tired and sweaty climbing up and down. The historical significance of the Mount Jasper mine, and that it’s one of the oldest human-made sites in the whole northeast, excited me greatly and it was only about a half-hour hike up. All that put it near the top of the bucket list for this retired history teacher.

I researched it as much as I could before going, of course, and learned that ancient Americans probably didn’t spend a lot of time on site. Evidence uncovered thus far indicates that they went to replenish their tool supply. They would chisel pieces of jasper/rhyolite out of the cave, lug them to the top of the ledge or down to the bottom near the Dead River, and begin working them into tools like spear points, arrowheads, knives, scrapers and drills. Sometimes they would make cores, or rough chunks, which they would lug back to their settlements to further knap into the finished tools listed above. The flakes I found in Fryeburg were a result of this process.Close match. The one on the right was found at the entrance to the cave. The two on the left I found in Fryeburg.

Those who made finished tools there would sometimes discard their worn-out knives or arrowheads made of stone they’d gotten elsewhere in the northeast - like Mount Kineo or Munsungan Lake, Maine. These were found in the two working areas above and below the mine, which were partially excavated by Archaeologist Michael Gramly, whom I’d had the good fortune to meet and talk with for hours while visiting in Oquossoc, Maine. He strongly encouraged me to make the trip to Mount Jasper.Different facets show different effects of weathering as rhyolite chunks have been chiseled away over time.

When first glimpsing the entrance to the cave we noticed pieces of rhyolite strewn about and exposed to the elements. Material on the walls of the mine inside was not weathered and showed different colors ranging from red, blue and green to gray. I’d found both weathered and unweathered artifacts and flakes of Mount Jasper rhyolite in Fryeburg, and I’d carried some to the mine with me for comparison.Close-up of image above. It's a pretty rock.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rhyolite would change its appearance after weathering. Old stone walls turn gray after little more than a century while newly-dug-up stone looks distinctively different and contrasts older stones when added to an already-existing wall. Some of the rhyolite artifacts I’ve found had been laying around a long time. Others seem to have been covered by soil shortly after the knapping process and retained their fresh appearance. I found these latter while examining freshly plowed and harrowed fields after a rain.Mount Jasper cave ceiling

In my research, I learned there’s another, even older site near Mount Jasper in Jefferson, NH where a similar kind of rhyolite was being knapped twelve thousand years ago. The “someday” I explore there will likely arrive later this fall.

Obama Fatigue

2011-09-21T08:03:00.000-04:00

People must be peeling Obama stickers off their Volvos lately because I’m not seeing nearly as many as I used to. There are holdouts - people who believe the only reason Obama hasn’t been able to come through with the hopes and changes he promised in the forms of green jobs, lowering ocean levels, abolishing nuclear weapons, and making friends with Radical Muslims, is because Republicans refuse to cooperate. Those nasty Tea-Party types are stonewalling him because they’re racist and they don’t want to see a black president achieve marvelous things for America. And, they’re trying to blame poor Obama for the economic mess President Bush caused in the first place.The holdouts won’t change their world view no matter what happens.

Others used to feel good about their Obama bumper stickers - which proclaimed to the world that they were “progressives” who understood it was time America had a black president. They believed the whole world would see, because of the votes of forward-looking people like them, that America wasn’t the greedy, capitalist, warmongering, energy-guzzling oppressor they thought it was. Obama could make speeches all around the globe and people everywhere would see for themselves how smart and how nice he was. They would stop hating us because they would see how a country that elected such an articulate president wasn’t so bad, and might even be good. After enough speeches, the world might well become a place full of smiling, happy people holding hands and celebrating diversity.

Then Congress passed Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, and all those proud progressives with Obama stickers waited for the summer of recovery predicted by the president and his faithful sidekick, Vice President Joe Biden. So many shovel-ready projects were in the pipeline, they’d promised, that unemployment should start diminishing right away. When it didn’t they were patient, realizing that environmental impact studies had to be done. Permits had to be applied for and obtained, so when unemployment numbers continued to rise, they maintained their hope for change. Joe Biden promised them that the summer of recovery would surely manifest in 2010.

But it didn’t. The faithful hopey-changey progressives began to wonder, and their first pangs of doubt followed. They considered that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to borrow all those trillions of dollars, especially when each job Obama “created or saved” was costing hundreds of thousands - even millions - that we didn’t have. Some figured out that “quantitative easing” amounts to the same thing as printing money, and Obama’s Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was using the Federal Reserve to buy US Treasury bonds, creating digital money out of thin air. He had to do that because neither the Chinese nor the Indians wanted to invest in US Treasuries anymore and were buying gold instead.

Yet Obama was still spending dollars hand over fist. They remembered stories from high school history class of the Germans printing marks after World War I and the ruinous inflation that followed. They watch the European model Obama praised and emulated crack up under unsustainable welfare-state spending, government union guarantees, socialized medicine costs, guaranteed vacation and early retirement expenses for their unionized workforces - coupled with shrinking birth rates. They start wondering if maybe the same kind of crack-up could actually happen here in America too. Worse: maybe it already is. Hope and change is turning into despair and disaster.Soon-to-be-former progressives are noticing that Obama isn’t making any progress, and they’re not feeling proud of those bumper stickers anymore. They’re thinking that maybe they made a big mistake in the voting booth back in November, 2008. Any tingles they may have felt in their legs or anywhere else while listening to his speeches have stopped. Even your favorite song gets old when you hear it over and over too many times. You get so sick of it, you’re thinking you don’t want to hear it ever again, but Obama keeps on making speeches anyway because that’s all he knows how to do. Now, as his green-energy projects are going bankrupt, he’s making more speeches and yelling that he wants to spend another half-a-trillion and create or save more expensive jobs.Many are thinking he should just shut up, go away, and take his teleprompter with him.

Like Whatever

2011-09-14T07:21:00.000-04:00

The expression “thrown under the bus” puzzles me. It’s understood to mean putting blame on someone else for something you might have been responsible for, but how did it originate? I’ve been hearing it for years and it irks me. It was a cliche in 2008 when David Segal wrote in the Washington Post “Hardly a week goes by without someone reviving the cliche of the 2008 campaign -- that a former ally of a candidate has been thrown under a bus.”People knew what it meant, but no one I asked could tell me where it came from. Wikipedia offers this: “In Septuagenarian Stew (The Life of a Bum), published in 1990, the Charles Bukowski character Harry pushed his friend Monk in front of a bus, and then stole Monk's wallet while Monk lay unconscious and probably dying in the street.” I have trouble with this explanation because Harry pushed Monk in front of a bus, which is different from throwing him under it. Also, the act seems like pure selfishness. There’s no blame put on Monk; he’s a victim of assault.Charles Bukowski

What bugs me about it, I guess, is that people use it because it’s shallow and trendy. What’s wrong with “thrown to the wolves” or “made a scapegoat”? Those phrases mean the same thing and each has a history. Each can be visualized. People have been thrown to the wolves, and according to Dictionary.com “scapegoat” originated with “a goat let loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur after the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head. Lev. 16:8,10,26.” Has anyone ever been thrown under a bus? No. So let’s all stop saying it okay?Words and phrases become faddish as if they were clothing or hairstyles. Stephanie Rosenbloom wrote a piece in The New York Times last week, for example, about overuse of the word “authentic.” As an example, she quoted Anderson Cooper’s comments about his new show: “In everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to just be authentic and real.”

That's oxymoronic. We don't try to be authentic. If you have to try, you failed. If you have to tell people you’re authentic, you probably aren’t. The best we can say about Cooper’s comments is that he’s tempted to be phony and is struggling to resist.

Also quoted by Rosenbloom was Naomi S. Baron, author of “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World.” Baron says the word “awesome” is so overused it has become devoid of meaning: “Technically it should be used to describe an awe-inspiring sight like the fjords in Norway, but these days ‘awesome’ is a perfectly acceptable response to something as mundane as ‘I can meet you for lunch at noon.’”

Almost every day I hear about how someone has “signed off on” something or other. Growing up, I’d hear a radio or TV personality say he was “signing off” as his program was ending. I’d hear friends say they’d “signed on” to a four-year hitch in the Marines. So, to say one has “signed off on” something seems confusing at least if not contradictory. Let’s avoid it and just say approved or endorsed okay?

And then there’s “moving forward.” That’s tiresome too. At dull meetings, it’s used either at the beginning or at the end of proposals for change, like: “Moving forward, we’re going to do it this way,” or “This is the protocol moving forward” - as if any other method would be moving backward. Sometimes it’s just a filler, like “ahh” or a prolonged “aannnnndd . . . ” all of which which President Obama uses when he’s forced to speak without his teleprompter and needs time to figure out what he’s going to say next. I hear “moving forward” most often from people who call themselves “progressive,” as if a different perspective must be regressive.

“Have this conversation” is another tiresome phrase, as in “He and I are going to have this conversation.” If you have a script for how a conversation is going to go, it’s not really a conversation is it? To converse requires give and take, a sharing of ideas to see what emerges. Saying you’re going to have a conversation is a veiled threat, a weak attempt to talk tough. If a boss has to give instructions, he or she should just deliver them directly and avoid the pretense of being open to alternatives.

One of the benefits of being a retired public school teacher is that I haven’t heard anyone say “Whatever!” or “I’m like, ‘Oh my God’!” or “I’m like, so ‘Oh my God’!” for almost three months now.

And that’s been nice.

No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

2011-09-07T07:48:00.001-04:00

Ben Franklin said that “God helps those who help themselves,” but government helps those who don’t. In his recent book “After America,” Mark Steyn points out how many Americans have become dependent on government: “ . . . by 2004, 20 percent of U. S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government [and] another fifth of households . . . receive about 40 percent of their income from the feds . . .” Is that the kind of republic Franklin had in mind when he worked at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia? No. I don’t think so.

So, government is supporting over 100 million of us, but can the rest of us afford to continue paying for it? No again. Under President Obama, we’re borrowing forty cents of every dollar we spend. We’re borrowing money we probably can’t repay. We’re borrowing money our children and grandchildren will have difficulty paying back, and we’re spending it on ourselves, not them. This is sinful.

Forty percent of Americans are hugely dependent on government. It’s also true that forty-seven percent of Americans pay no federal income tax. How much overlap is there between those two populations? Are we talking about the same people? In most cases, yes. How many of them are likely to vote for a congressman or a senator who says we must stop spending money we don’t have? Not too many when they discover that the only way to eliminate deficit spending is cutting back on the checks they get. We’re a country more and more divided between those who pay and those who get paid.

How long can we take money from our most productive and give it to our least productive? How long can we borrow from foreigners? Not much longer. The whole rest of the world doesn’t have enough money to keep lending to us - especially when they know we’re paying interest with dollars printed under Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s policies of “quantitative easing” and artificially low rates.

Too many Americans have learned that it’s easier to let government support them than to support themselves. Reflecting back on thirty-six years of teaching since my recent retirement, I saw a similar pattern in our government schools. A school district’s eligibility for federal money is often figured based on how many parents fill out forms that enable their children to get free or reduced-cost breakfasts, lunches and dinners. The higher the percentage of families who qualify, the more money the school or the district gets. Schools, therefore, are naturally disinclined to scrutinize financial data parents put on the forms. The tendency is to qualify all who apply. Parents and schools both benefit. Not all kids do, however, because some them will grow up to become the citizens expected to pay back the forty cents of every dollar spent on “free” lunches this year. The old adage still applies after all: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Just as an aside: if you saw how much of that food qualifying students throw in the wastebasket every day it would make you sick. People tend not to value what they don’t pay for, students included. Early in my teaching career, I noticed that custodians would save the discarded food for local pig farmers. Then federal government regulators ruled they couldn’t do that. Ever since, it’s gone into the waste stream.

The percentage of students dependent on expensive federal programs is increasing right along with the percentage of adults dependent depend on federal government checks. Students qualifying for federally-mandated special education are “coded.” Even though I earned an advanced degree in special education decades ago, I still have trouble deciphering criteria for certain codes. For a while at least, the simple explanation for someone qualifying as “learning disabled” was functioning at a grade level lower than what would be expected with his/her measured IQ score. The truly disabled had some measurable perceptual or processing deficiency. Others didn’t, but were nonetheless functioning below grade level, and were, therefore, coded. They received the special assistance of a teacher or an educational technician all through school. Several I got to know well over the years, and it was my personal and professional opinion that they simply didn’t want to do the work. They learned early to be helpless as teachers would administrators would lower the bar for them to pass on to the next grade. Every year I’d have several, and it was rare for even one to be kept back. Much more was spent on such students per capita than on those who did the work expected of them.From Motifake.com

Others were coded for behavior problems and that designation changed periodically as well as euphemistically. Some years it was “Behaviorally Handicapped.” Other years it was “Emotionally Disturbed,” and so forth. Some even got their own “educational technician” to follow them around throughout their school day acting as personal secretary or manservant. Parents of these children qualifed for so-called “crazy checks” amounting to several hundred dollars per month. The Urban Dictionary describes them as “often approved for simple and common conditions such as a child (usually in a single-parent household) who can't behave in school.” If their children learned to behave, their crazy checks would stop.

Teachers are encouraged to believe that every child comes to school ready to learn. Trouble is, too many learn that if they don’t work, others will support them. That’s the lesson they carry with them throughout their lives.

And we wonder why America is going bankrupt.

Don't Vote For Dummies

2011-08-31T07:42:00.000-04:00

The mainstream media being the only source of news for most people, it’s very likely you know that liberals are smart and conservatives are dumb. People my age remember how smart Jimmy Carter was running for president against Gerry Ford. Carter was a nuclear engineer. Ford was a football player and famously dumb. Lyndon Johnson said he played football too long without a helmet. Saturday Night Live showed him tripping over something every week.

The highly-intelligent Carter won, then made a weak economy many times worse. When our ally the Shah of Iran was deposed by radical Muslims, Carter sat on his hands while Americans were humiliated for a year and a half in the hostage crisis. Radical Muslims gained confidence and started believing they could bring down all of western civilization. After one term, Carter was seen as the worst president in the 20th century, if not for all time.

He was wicked smart though.

In spite of his vast intelligence, Carter lost the 1980 election to a dumb conservative. Reagan, the “amiable dunce,” presided over one of the greatest economic recoveries in American history by dismantling much of big government built up by the wicked-smart liberals. Reelected by an overwhelming majority, he proceeded to win the Cold War. Hard to understand how he accomplished all that being so dumb.

When his term was up in 1988, media found another wicked-smart governor in Massachusetts whom they figured would make a great president but they couldn’t sell him. Americans believed him a nerdy automaton and elected the first George Bush instead.

In 1992, however, the media found another wicked-smart southern governor in Arkansas whom they thought would make a great president. He was actually smart enough to realize soon after inauguration that Americans didn’t want nationalized health care and abandoned it. He was also smart enough to go along with the dumb conservatives who took over Congress halfway into his first term. He made their programs of scaled-back government and balanced budgets look like his ideas and finished two terms. He wasn’t very smart in his personal life and almost blew everything, but he managed to hang on for eight years.

Then media told us how smart his vice president was. He invented the internet. He figured out that burning coal, oil and gasoline was melting ice caps, raising oceans and killing cute polar bears. As you might expect, he was running against another dumb conservative - this one a cowboy governor from Texas and son of a former President. The media understand that all presidents have to go to church and pretend to believe in God in order to get elected. This guy was so dumb, however, that he really did believe, and didn’t try to hide it either. Somehow though, he won.

Then media found another wicked-smart nerd from Massachusetts to run against him, just like they did against his father. This guy had three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for bravery. People listened to him and questioned just how smart and brave he really was, but he wouldn’t release his college transcripts or his military records. Then it came out that the dumb cowboy got higher grades they he did at Yale, and other soldiers claimed that, while he puffed his chest a lot, he really wasn’t very brave either. He got medals for minor scratches and the dummy won again.

Then we got a wicked-smart guy from Chicago who was going to fix everything and lower the oceans too. He gave good speeches with his teleprompter, even bringing it to a fifth grade classroom. Media tell us he is so smart, he has an IQ of 160 - but he won’t release his college transcripts either. When he talks without reading he doesn’t sound smart and people are wondering about that IQ. Plus, he’s screwing up the economy even worse than Carter did. He said he’d been to all fifty-seven states, and didn’t know how to pronounce “corpsman,” saying “corpse-man” instead of “core-man.” Media ignored it, but those pesky conservatives on AM radio, the internet, and Fox News didn’t. People are thinking now that maybe he’s smart like Jimmy Carter - especially the ones who are out of work.

Wouldn’t you know it though, it looks like another dumb governor from Texas could be running against him next year. This guy actually believes in God too - and he shoots coyotes. He’s like a male version of that dumb woman from Alaska whom conservatives put up for vice-president. Saturday Night Live sure did a number on her, just like they did to Ford thirty years before. She actually believed in God too and shot caribou. Plus, this guy is even more of a cowboy than the last one. Like the Alaska governor, he didn’t go to ivy league schools either. What intelligent person ever came out of a state university?

This time the media aren’t wasting any time showing Americans how dumb he is. They started right after he announced he was running. They’re going to make sure this time that people don’t elect him over the wicked-smart president we have who only needs another four years to really fix things.

Right Rick

2011-08-24T08:32:00.000-04:00

Was Texas Governor Rick Perry out of line to suggest that bald, bearded Ben Bernanke would be almost treasonous to print more dollars? No. I don’t think so. His remarks got a rise out of President Obama right away. Even former President Bush’s advisor, Karl Rove, criticized him. Bush, after all, was first to appoint Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, perhaps on the advice of Rove. Obama re-appointed him when he took office and it looks like Bernanke has been doing his bidding ever since.

Speaking in Iowa, apparently in response to an inquiry about the Federal Reserve, Perry said, “If this guy [Bernanke] prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. I mean, printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history, is almost treacherous, er, or treasonous in my opinion.”Perry at CPAC 2011

When I was born, pennies were made of copper. Dimes, quarters, and half-dollars were made of silver. Even if people were to lose faith in the government that minted their coins and whose images they bear, citizens could still depend on the copper and silver being worth something. Paper dollars could be redeemed for a certain amount of silver or gold back then too. The paper dollar was understood to be the same as the personal check, and they’re about the same size as checks too. When I write a check to someone, he or she must have confidence that there’s enough cash in my account to back it up. I’m instructing my bank to “pay to the order of” whomever, a certain amount of cash. Paper dollars back then were called “silver certificates” which were instructions for government to turn over a certain amount of silver maintained by the federal government for such purposes. People didn’t cash them in for silver as a rule, but were confident they could if they wanted because they trusted their government.None of that applies anymore. Pennies are made of zinc with copper paint. Dimes and quarters are made of copper with silver paint. The paper dollar cannot be redeemed for precious metal anymore either - in any amount - unless you choose to buy gold with it from a private dealer. Not too long ago, you could buy an ounce of gold for about $40. At this writing, it would cost over $1800 and by the time you read this in a newspaper in a few more days, an ounce of gold might cost over $2000. Why? Several reasons, but mostly it’s because people don’t trust the US Government as much as they used to. Why not? Because Ben Bernanke has been printing trillions more dollars without putting any more gold or silver in Fort Knox to back it up. Why is he doing that? Because he can. Why can he? Because President Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1973. The amount of dollars isn’t tied to the amount of gold in Fort Knox anymore. It “floats,” say the economists.

A February, 2011 article in the newsletter Imprimis compared “floating” the value of the dollar with “floating” the weight of a kilogram. Seth Lipsky wrote that “a global scramble is under way to define this most basic unit after it was discovered that the standard kilogram—a cylinder of platinum and iridium that is maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures—has been losing mass.”

Then he asked why not just let the kilogram float like the dollar? “After all,” he wrote, “when you go into the grocery to buy a pound of hamburger, why should you worry about how much hamburger you get—so long as it’s a pound’s worth? A pound is supposed to be .45359237 of a kilogram. But if Congress can permit Mr. Bernanke to use his judgment in deciding what a dollar is worth, why shouldn’t he—or some other Ph.D. from M.I.T.—be able to decide from day to day what a kilogram is worth?”Lipsky described how the Second Congress “established the value of the dollar at 371 ¼ grains of pure silver. . . . [and] did not expect the value of the dollar to be changed any more than the persons who locked away that kilogram of platinum and iridium expected the cylinder to start losing mass. In fact, in this same 1792 law, they established the death penalty for debasing the dollar.”We should demand a rubber glove and KY jelly at least

The death penalty? Hmm. That was the punishment they established for anyone committing treason as well. That's how seriously the Founding Fathers (many of whom were in Congress at the time) took their constitutional power to coin money.

Tea Party conservatives know the US dollar isn’t floating. It’s sinking, because Bernanke is printing them wildly. Those of us who have saved up dollars are losing wealth with every dollar he prints - and all that hard-earned wealth is going down the black hole of the federal government. It’s a hidden tax. Bernanke calls his money-printing “quantitative easing,” but it could also be called counterfeiting. It’s linguistic legerdemain for theft by a federal government which is driving America into bankruptcy.Maybe Bernanke and the president who appointed him think printing money is good for the economy and will save America. If they do, they’re both fools. If they don’t believe it, they’re intentionally sinking our ship of state along with our dollars. Tea Party conservatives like Perry see the practice as foolish at best and treasonous at worst.

Governor Perry is entitled to his opinion that it’s the latter.

Mob Mayhem

2011-08-17T06:30:00.000-04:00

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . .”

So begins Rudyard Kipling’s century-old poem “If,” which comprised the text of a card I got graduating eighth grade and has stuck with me ever since. In the ensuing forty-six years I saw how rare it was for someone to actually do it - to stay centered within oneself in the midst of hysteria. To achieve that is to live beyond the influence of the mob.

Mobs are big news with riots in England and flash mobs assaulting people and property in the United States. The first night of London riots was said to be in response to police shooting a young black man, variously described as a “father or four” and “tied to London gangs.” That night’s rioting may have started spontaneously, but it continued and spread to other UK cities with electronic social network coordination, and that is a common thread in both the UK and in the United States. Another common thread is race, though the mainstream media in both countries try to ignore it.2011 London riots

As Kipling said, it’s indeed difficult to keep your head when all others about you are losing theirs because we’re all subject to peer pressure. If one is ever going to grow up, to mature, to become an adult, it is necessary to have made an individual decision. Each of us has to ask himself/herself one question, and it can be phrased in various ways: Am I the captain of my own ship, or am I at the mercy of whatever winds blow around me? Am I controlled from within or from without? Do I rule myself, or do others rule me? Do I behave the way I choose to, or do I behave the way I think others want me to? Unless each of us decides how to be and has the discipline to follow his or her own rules, we’re no better than herd animals - part of the mob.1992 LA riots

Meeting new people, it doesn’t take long to sense whether they’ve asked themselves that question and answered it. Personal rules vary, but contain common elements of respect for individuals, families, their dignity, their property, which successful civilizations championed for millennia.

Observing rioters in 2011 London or 1992 Los Angeles, it’s evident they have either avoided the question or never considered it at all. Each is controlled by whatever others around them do. There are no individuals who make choices and take responsibility. They’re part of a tribe, a race, a mob, and the mob is impulsive. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t reflect. It doesn’t make decisions. Pants hang below asses. Sub-woofers blare (c)rap music full of anger, hate, selfishness and nihilism. The mob acts it all out, mindlessly, in the default mode of the horde.David Starkey

British historian David Starkey claimed that white youths involved in last week’s riots were imitating black gang culture. Naturally, he was branded racist by the liberal media, and I’m sure I will be as well. As a long-time public school teacher, however, I can attest that white boys mimicking black gangster culture were consistently my least-functional students.Prime Minister Cameron

Groups of individuals tend to be civilized and creative. Mobs are invariably barbaric and destructive. Liberal mainstream media proclaim the young, all-black or mostly-black and male mobs making mayhem are comprised of frustrated victims of discrimination and lack of opportunity. Conservative media say they’re products of the liberal welfare state responsible for our “slow-motion moral collapse.” UK Prime Minister David Cameron blames: “Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged - sometimes even incentivized - by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally demoralized.”Economist Thomas Sowell

Some officials in UK government threaten to cut welfare for anyone arrested during the riots. American economist Thomas Sowell writes: “While the history and the races are different [in England and America], what is the same in both countries are the social policies and social attitudes long promoted by the intelligentsia and welfare state politicians. A recent study in England found 352,000 households in which nobody had ever worked. Moreover, two-thirds of the adults in those households said that they didn't want to work. As in America, such people feel both ‘entitled’ and aggrieved.”

As my grandmother used to say, “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.”Mayor Michael Nutter

Here in the US, the mainstream media strenuously avoid the racial angle of destructive flash mobs springing up in Milwaukee, Peoria, Chicago, Kansas City, and other cities across the country. Liberal media rabidly report white-on-black assaults like the James Byrd case in Texas, or even imagined ones like the ludicrous Duke Lacrosse Team “rape” case in North Carolina. Mainstream media and government officials tripped over each other to trumpet their outrage over something completely fabricated. For black-on-white assaults and robberies, they’re virtually silent. If mentioned at all, young black men are called “youths.” The only media reporting it honestly are blogs and Fox News. The only government official confronting it is Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who told pillaging blacks in his city: “You have damaged your own race. . . . Take those God-darn hoodies down, pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”

The demography of the mob may differ through history from biblical times through the French Revolution to the 21st century, but there are things common to all: they’re nasty, brutish, ugly, and enemy of the individual.

Maine Mountains Meandering

2011-08-10T08:45:00.000-04:00

Rangeley Lake from the cabin

Mountains or coast? Maine has both and that’s what my wife and I discussed when deciding to move here thirty-four years ago. We decided on mountains and settled in Lovell - a little town north of Fryeburg near the border with Conway, New Hampshire. Last week, we rented a small cabin on Rangeley Lake, also in the mountains, a couple of hours north of Lovell. Relatively undeveloped and surrounded by wilderness, it was like going back in time.

The weather reminded me of Ireland. The sun would be out, then it would cloud up and rain. Then the sun would come out again. Then it would rain again, and so forth. It wasn’t good for kayaking, but did make for some beautiful sunsets.

Rangeley Lake

So few people live around Rangeley that most of the land isn’t organized into towns. Even recent maps show very few roads either and the existing ones are gravel. Most of those are closed off - and not just with a steel cable - but with substantial metal gates. Timber companies or groups of hunters and fishermen own big chunks of land up there and it looks like they maintain many of the roads.

Foreboding clouds in Rangeley

The earliest known evidence of human activity in Maine was found thirty years ago on the nearby shores of what had been the Magalloway River and is now Lake Aziscohos. Ironically, the discoverer was Francis Vail of East Stoneham, Maine - the town just north of where I live in Lovell. People were hunting caribou there more than 11,000 years ago when it was nothing but treeless tundra. Artifacts from a dig on what’s known as the Vail Site are on display in the Maine State Museum in Augusta. The site is under water now, but having read about it, I’d looked over maps of the region and tried to check other places likely to show evidence of early activity by Paleo-Americans or later Indian tribes, usually at the confluence of lakes and rivers of which there are many in those parts. Often, I can walk along a shoreline and recognize flakes of various kinds of chert and quartz left over from tool-making (knapping) millennia ago. My searches were frustrated, however, by those ubiquitous gates. My wife was patient, reading a book on the passenger side, as I drove around.

Fluted knife from Vail site

Looking for a place to rent, I was surprised to see that rates for many establishments are more expensive during winter than summer. Heat would be a factor and Saddleback Ski Mountain is nearby, but it’s mostly snowmobiling that draws the people. It’s big up there. I believe I’d have access to more places on a snowmobile, but I wouldn’t be able to recognize evidence of ancient tool-making on ground covered by snow.

Mike Gramly, the archaeologist who supervised the Vail site excavations, was speaking to the Rangeley Historical Society last Friday. I had a chance to pick his brain for almost two hours. That was the highlight of the trip for me. Again, my wife patiently read a book on the porch of the museum while we talked.

On a rainy Tuesday we drove up to the Wilhelm Reich Museum grounds called “Orgonon.” On the access road was an office. We saw someone stirring inside and he came out wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. He was long-haired, looked stoned, and in spite of that and the metal stud through his tongue, he explained that the museum was open only Wednesday through Saturday. Back at our cabin later I researched Wilhelm Reich and the creepy feelings we had at his former home/museum were confirmed. According to Wikipedia, he was an associate of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, but they parted company because:

He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their "orgastic potency." He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God and that he called "orgone." He built orgone energy accumulators that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.

Reich also invented a "cloudbuster" machine which purportedly could use this orgiastic orgone energy to produce rain. Online, I found another visitor’s account worth a read. I was glad the place was closed because it would be more edifying to watch an old episode of the Addams Family. I have to wonder how they have the funds to keep the place open fifty years after Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary. According to Wikipedia: "His work influenced a generation of intellectuals including Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs . . . [and] Norman Mailer." No wonder I don't like reading those guys.

Maybe it’s the cloudbuster machines, I don’t know, but weather there reminded me of Ireland. The sun would shine; it would cloud over and rain; the sun would come out, then it clouded over and rained again - all within a couple of hours. That pattern continued for days with a hailstorm thrown in. One afternoon, however, permitted a sidewalk art show with some impressive work by Maine photographers, painters and other craftspeople. Watercolors by local Rangeley artist Pamela Ellis struck me most and I purchased some of her prints - rare for someone cheap as I am.

Topographically, Maine is as big and varied as the other five New England states put together and it’s going to take a while to explore it. With my teaching career behind me, I’ll have time this fall to continue discovering more of the northeastern half of New England.

Pogo Was Right

2011-08-03T06:51:00.000-04:00

About ten years ago, my cousin told me of his bankruptcy settlement. I wondered how it was possible that he could have so much debt forgiven and still keep his house and his truck. I figured I’d wait and see. When we were kids he had been so hyperactive and impulsive that I could only hang out with him for short intervals before feeling so drained I had to keep my distance for several months. He had moved to Florida and I hadn’t seen him for a few years, but he called me every month or so and even his phone calls left me feeling tired.

He had told me a couple of years earlier that he had over $40,000 in credit card debt and I was shocked. He had owned a house in New Hampshire at the time though I don’t know what the mortgage was. We were riding in his then-new, four-wheel-drive pickup truck equipped with every option, and I didn’t think he and his wife together made $40k in a year. He said he was worried and I could believe that. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I were in his shoes, yet somehow, he was able to sell his house in New Hampshire and buy another in Florida, and that’s where his questionable bankruptcy judgement was made. It was all difficult to swallow and that’s how it had always been with my cousin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about him while watching the debt talks in Washington. My cousin said he was able to keep his house and his truck, and if he was, it was only because his creditors had to eat his debt. Others would have had to pick up the slack for him because he wouldn’t discipline himself enough to control his spending. I believed he would get himself right back into debt again if he were ever issued more credit cards - and I don’t see our government behaving any differently either unless we pass a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution.

The eleventh-hour budget compromise in Washington will supposedly prevent bankruptcy for the USA, but I’m not confident it will. How can this congress bind future congresses for the next ten years? Doesn’t the Constitution allow them to tax, borrow and spend under Article I, Section 8? Without a balanced budget amendment they can do what they please and I don’t trust them to change any more than I do my cousin. Both sides claim there are huge cuts to government spending included in the compromise. How can that be true when the plan adds $7 trillion to the debt over the next ten years? Presidents and congressional leaders set off my internal BS alarm just as much as my cousin always did. The way they conduct their personal lives is similar too, but there’s not enough space in this column to go into any of that.

My cousin depended on everyone else when he went belly up, but if the USA goes bankrupt, who would save us? China? According to one Chinese official, we’ve already defaulted on our debt to them because we’re paying interest on it by printing dollars that are worth less than the ones we borrowed. US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke likes to call it “quantitative easing” but you could also call it counterfeiting. He reminds me of my cousin too.

Another of our creditors, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said the other day that: “They [Americans] are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy.” The way he describes us Americans, we’re all seeming more like my cousin, no? Putin went on to say, “They [Americans] are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar”

Is he right? I’m afraid he is. How did we get to the point when a communist Chinese official and the former head of the Soviet KGB are making more sense than the US Federal Reserve Chairman and the President of the United States?

As I think about all this, it occurs to me that, for decades, my cousin would call me after a long hiatus and I would go and hang out with him again. It also occurs to me that we Americans keep electing presidents and members of congress who act like just like him. I believe Pogo was right when he said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Adult Children of America

2011-07-27T06:56:00.000-04:00

When my parents were born, Americans took care of themselves. They didn’t depend on government to feed them, clothe them, house them, or pay their doctor bills. If they fell on hard times, they got temporary help from family, friends, church, or private charity - none of whom were obligated to help, but who did so out of human compassion. Now, millions of Americans - perhaps even a voting majority - cannot imagine life without government paying for all their basic needs from birth to death. Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said the other day: “We write 80 million checks a month. There are millions and millions of Americans that depend on those checks coming on time.”

When Americans got help from family, friends, church, or private charity, they tended to be grateful. They were motivated to give back after getting past their hard times. Both giver and receiver got something out of the dynamic. Extended families became closer. Bonds were strengthened. Communities were fortified. Americans today, however, feel entitled to whatever assistance they get from government. They don’t even know who contributed the revenue they receive and don’t care either. They may not even know who their next-door neighbors are. All they know is, a check comes in the mail. This kind of big-government “assistance” doesn’t strengthen us as a nation. It weakens us at every level.

What happened? How did we become a nation of dependents in only three generations? It began with FDR’s New Deal, expanded with LBJ’s Great Society, and now is disintegrating under BHO’s (Barack Hussein Obama’s) Devastating Debacle. These were Democrat Administrations constantly expanding the scope of government and its cost. They’ve changed us from a nation of independent citizens into a nation of dependent children afraid of life without the indulgent-parent government taking care of us cradle to grave - adult children of the nanny state.

Between the above administrations, Republicans have either made half-hearted attempts at dismantling big-government entitlements, or actually expanded them as George W. Bush did with his prescription-drug benefit. Federal and state governments are going bankrupt because they cannot afford to pay for the promises they’ve made since the 1930s. The money simply isn’t there, and won’t be there in the future either.

Take Social Security for instance. Passed during FDR’s New Deal in 1935, it was designed as a trust fund people pay into all their working lives and then draw from it when they retire. Americans visualize it as a pile of money built up by millions of citizens. Al Gore counted on that illusion when he promised to put it all in a “lock box” while running for president eleven years ago, but there is no pile of money. Government has already spent it all - every last cent - around $2.6 trillion. Last week, President Obama inadvertently admitted as much when he warned that, unless Congress raised the debt ceiling beyond $14.3 trillion by August 2nd, he couldn’t send out Social Security checks August 3rd - “because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." The only things Al Gore would have been able to put in his lock box were piles of IOU’s from the federal government.

Most of the federal budget is spent on social programs and interest on the debt, not on defense or infrastructure. The federal government has largely become a vehicle to suck money out the wallets of Americans who work so as to send checks to people who don’t. The former group is dwindling and the latter group is growing. At some level, we understand that this cannot go on forever. Yet, still, we borrow trillions from the rest of the world, and when they balk at lending us more, we simply print it.

“Progressives” in the White House and Congress insist that if the rich would pay more of what they earn, the gravy train could continue for everyone else. This kind of class warfare rhetoric is the progressive stock-in-trade. Yet even if “the rich” were taxed at 100%, there would still be mounting deficits passed on to our children and grandchildren to pay back. Nonetheless, President Obama stokes the fires of class envy by repeating the mantra of “corporate jet owners” at least six times in just one press conference June 30th. Granny and Grampy are starving because rich people fly jets. America’s adult children don’t want to take care of Granny and Grampy themselves anymore. They’d rather put aging parents in nursing homes and let government pay.Lee speaking for the Congressional Black Caucus

Left-wing progressives refuse to acknowledge the borrowing and spending must stop, that government cannot continue supporting a nation of dependent adult children. Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), for example, blames Tea Party conservatives in the House for “manufacturing” the debt crisis because they’re calling attention to it - because they’re insisting that there be real cuts to unsustainable, pie-in-the-sky, entitlement programs. According to Lee and the millions of Americans who think as she does, the problem isn’t progressives like her who spend us into insolvency, the problem is with conservatives who make us face up to it. They don’t want anybody pointing out that we’re about to go off the cliff if we don’t reverse course.From Gateway Pundit

America was founded on the principle that “We’re endowed by our Creator with . . . rights . . . to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We’re not guaranteed happiness - only the pursuit of it. We’re not children and government isn’t our mommy or daddy. It’s time those among us who don’t understand that to grow up, and soon.

Monhegan Maine Mystique

2011-07-20T07:14:00.000-04:00

There’s something about an island, any island. Maine has lots of them and that’s part of its mystique. I’d been hearing how picturesque Monhegan was and my wife had been suggesting for years we make a visit. There’s a ferry to the island from New Harbor, Maine and we spent a sunny day out there a couple of weeks ago.Monhegan, near the harbor

On the journey over, the ferry captain told us - twice - to use the bathrooms on the boat before arriving so as not to have to use island facilities “And, bring your trash back when we pick you up because you won’t find trash cans there,” he added. As a former selectman in a small Maine town, that put me in mind of disposal issues every municipality has to deal with, which would be more challenging on an island of little more than a square mile. There are only 75 people there year-’round, but over 1200 in summer. Thousands of day-trippers like me would add to the burden.Manana Island from Monhegan

It was a perfect July day, sunny and not too hot. I could see why painters have been attracted to Monhegan for more than a century, including Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and Jamie Wyeth. Wyeth commented recently that “Maine is very emblematic. But what interests me is to go deeper, to go beyond cuteness and prettiness to get to the angst of which there is a lot in Maine.”Waiting for the New Harbor Ferry

Emblematic of cuteness, prettiness and angst? Is that part of Maine and Monhegan mystique too?Kevin Beers' "After the Last Boat - 5pm"

I had enough time to check out one gallery and, though I don’t know much about painting, works by contemporary Monhegan artist Kevin Beers impressed me most. He’s a realist and I like what he does with color and light. Wish I could have afforded to buy one of his paintings, but it cost $2000.Monhegan on the eastern horizon

I’d been looking at Monhegan while staying in New Harbor, beautiful against the distant eastern horizon. It’s even prettier getting closer from the water. Soon I noticed four-inch, cast-iron sewage pipes leading directly into the sea over the seaweed-covered rocks. I wondered how they got away with that. Later I learned they have a special exemption from the state. Electricity comes from a diesel generator.Monhegan, looking northwest

Walking around, I was thoroughly charmed by the ocean views visible over rooftops from its many hillsides. There was something special about the lighting and I wondered if all that ocean around reflected it in some different way. I don’t know, but I was inspired to take more than 230 shots. Then I was thinking like Wyeth that it can’t all be this beautiful, and I began looking for an underbelly.Lobstering gear

I noticed the newer lobster traps made with plastic-wrapped wire weren’t as appealing as the old wooden ones that aged so nicely, and they were stacked up in various places along with other gear alongside neglected outbuildings. But even they had their charm. It was in their colors - purples and yellows and lime-greens against weathered cedar shingles.buoys

Near a small beach at the end of one waterfront lane, however, was a burn area with traces of partly-singed trash. Nearby was discarded garbage on rocks exposed at low tide, including lobster and crab shells as well as a pig’s foot in which even nearby sea gulls weren’t interested. Guess they’re picky on Monhegan, being so well-fed. Wyeth must have been talking about that spot when he said about one of his experiences there: “I was down among garbage. Other artists were shooting the surf [and] here I was covered with garbage saying, ‘Thank god they don't see this you know…’”Cliffs on Monhegan's ocean side

My wife asked me why there was so much more sea glass on that tiny beach compared to others we’d explored on the mainland. I could only shrug my shoulders, but a lady eating at a picnic table nearby said that locals smash their bottles on the rocks. Many shards were still sharp. “Well, that’s another way to recycle,” I thought. Glass is made from sand after all, which is made from rocks.Monhegan's Lighthouse

No car ferries make the 11-mile trip and only a few islanders had pickup trucks for the narrow, gravel roads - and they have the right-of-way. We had to step off the road many times when one came by. Most of the houses are old and kept up nicely. Some were built in the 1700s. European landings on Monhegan were much earlier than most of the rest of Maine. Some claim there are Viking inscriptions on Manana, the smaller island that helps form Monhegan’s harbor but I didn’t have time to go over there. Others claim John Cabot visited in 1498 and Verrazano certainly was there in 1524. Samuel Champlain and John Smith came in the early 1600s. It’s since been settled and abandoned, destroyed and rebuilt because of wars in Europe and on the mainland, but it has survived into the 21st century.Looking for supper in Monhegan Harbor

It’s worth a trip.

Maine Mystique

2011-07-13T07:31:00.000-04:00

There’s something about Maine, a kind of mystique I think. While traveling elsewhere in the United States people ask me where I live. When I say “Maine,” I often hear, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go there,” or “I was there once and I really want to go back.” It’s happened so often I’ve been thinking about why. Do people think differently about my state than others? I’m suspecting they do but I haven’t thought to ask them yet. Have they heard others talk about Maine? Have they seen pictures? Have they read Stephen King novels? Seen movies? I’ve decided to start asking.

When meeting English-speaking people in other parts of the world they usually recognize me as an American and then ask where in the US I live. Most of the time, they never heard of Maine, so I explain that it’s north of Boston on the coast and bordering with Canada. “Ah,” they say, and leave it at that. Maine’s mystique, insofar as it exists, is mostly with other Americans I suspect.

For the past several years I’ve been exploring Maine’s long coastline. Each summer my wife and I rent a cottage for a week on one peninsula, of which there are many on Maine’s coast. My wife likes the beach so I’ll spend a day sitting and walking on the sand with her, but then I’ll drop her off and drive up every road that doesn’t have a “No Trespassing” sign. In the off-season I’ll rent a motel room for a weekend and do the same. Either way, I always have my camera with me and I’m seldom disappointed with what there is before me to shoot.New Harbor, Bristol, Maine

Last week we vacationed in New Harbor, which is actually a village and harbor in the municipality of Bristol. Pemaquid and Round Pond are also part of Bristol, and the latter is actually a harbor. On Pemaquid Point is the lighthouse represented on the Maine version of the new quarters. Browsing around the fishermen’s museum in the light-keeper’s house, I listened to a woman from Virginia talk to the old fisherman who was working there and answering questions. She thanked him for preserving the old tackle, the old newspaper articles about shipwrecks on that rocky point, the old lobster traps, handlines, and so forth. I heard her tell him how much she liked visiting Maine and how wonderful it was. When she worked her way over to where I was standing I asked her what exactly she liked about Maine.Pemaquid Beach, Bristol, Maine

She found it amazing that there were no security cameras in the museum and that she was allowed to pick things up and touch them.

“Did you notice the house where you can buy eggs on the honor system?” I asked. “You would have passed it down the road about a half a mile.”

“I did,” she said. “You’d never see that where I live, which is in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.”

She said Maine was well preserved, that being here is like going back in time. She liked that there were few chain restaurants, few traffic lights, and that people kept their property up. She noticed how people looked her in the eye and talked to her easily.Fourth of July, Pemaquid Beach

She was renting a place in Damariscotta and had toured the Boothbay Harbor region which I haven’t explored yet. “People take pride in their homes over there,” she said. “All the lawns were mowed and the flowers were so pretty.” I could see Boothbay looking south out the museum window, and as she talked I pictured some places around where I live in western Maine that were not well-kept at all. They were littered with old snowmobiles, abandoned cars, discarded furniture and assorted trash - all overgrown with weeds. It’s true, however, that most of Maine is fairly well-tended, but I haven’t traveled enough to know if others states are different in that way.Stone Sculptures on Pemaquid Point

Interesting rock formations below Bristol’s Lighthouse Park are typical of what can be found over all of Maine’s coast. Layers of sediment laid down hundreds of millions of years ago have been melted into wavy lines, interspersed with magma, pushed up into the perpendicular, and weathered by wave, wind and frost for God knows how long. According to one geologist, Maine has the most varied bedrock formations of any other place on earth of similar size and it’s all on display where land meets water.Mexican Man from one angle

Just above the normal high-tide mark, visitors used small stone fragments to construct their own delicately-balanced variations on Nature’s work, forming them into trees, dogs, and people.Mexican Woman from another angle

There they sit until the next big storm smashes them back into random jumbles of stone. I was careful not to brush against any as I walked among them taking pictures on a clear, sunny morning at low tide.Stone people and trees

It’s good to get fresh perspectives on familiar things, and seeing Maine through other eyes can be a nice way to do that. I shall continue to ask visitors why they come here and residents why they choose to live here.

Gun-Free School Zones

2011-07-06T07:06:00.000-04:00

A teacher meeting was just ending in my room a couple of years ago when the school secretary announced over the loudspeaker that the school was going into lockdown. Students were in their “Unified Arts” classes, which used to be known as Gym, Shop, Home Ec, and Art. Emergency procedure dictated that I stay in my room with the door locked, the lights out, and out of sight of anyone who might look in the windows.

Cowering in the face of a threat is not in my nature, however. I knew I was supposed to sit there quietly and let the appropriate authorities deal with whatever the threat was, but I couldn’t. I looked out into the hallway to see what was going on. Policemen were searching student lockers which were lined up on either side of the wide corridor. Later, I learned that someone had scrawled “I have a gun” on a wall in one of the girls’ bathrooms. The principal decided to take the threat seriously and called police. Hence, the lockdown.

Before learning that, however, I ran the possibilities through my mind of what the threat might be. In declining order of likelihood, I figured it could be an irate parent who felt aggrieved by a custody decision. It could also be a deranged student or students reenacting a Columbine-type episode, or, least likely, it could be a terrorist attack. Whatever it was, I knew one thing: because of the screwball Gun-Free School Zones Act enacted during the Clinton Administration, we could all be assured that the perp would be the only one with a weapon and all the rest of us would be at a distinct disadvantage as his unarmed victims.

Feeling the familiar frustration of the many ways federal intervention had screwed up public education during my then-35-year teaching career, I reflected on the what I’d recently taught my students about “gun-free zones” as part of a Second Amendment lesson. Fox News had put together an effective, short satire on them in the form of an infomercial. The pitchman explained the benefits of putting up “gun-free zone” signs in homes, businesses and public places. A potential robber with a gun would try to hold up a store. The owner behind the counter put his hands up and pointed to a “gun-free zone” sign, whereupon the robber put down his gun and left the store in frustration. Then he repeated the scenario in a sidewalk mugging and in a home invasion. Students caught on immediately to the absurdity of the whole “gun-free zone” concept.

Asked how many had guns in their homes, about two-thirds of my students raised their hands. We discussed the correlation between the high rate of gun ownership and the low crime rate here in Maine and in other rural areas of the country as well as the high correlation between strict gun control laws in our major cities and their high crime rates.

All this came back to me when Chicago Mayor and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s newly-appointed a new police chief blamed the National Rifle Association and Sarah Palin for the roving hoards of bandits and murderers terrorizing that city. “[It’s] federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms, into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children,” he said. However, there are way more guns in Maine, per capita, than in Chicago, and lots of people here leave their doors unlocked and they don’t kill each other. As the saying goes: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. In this case at least, a bumper sticker slogan easily trumps progressive “thinking.” The problem lies with people in Chicago, not the guns. All those Alinsky-inspired community organizers have done a wonderful job in the Windy City, haven’t they? If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, do you think smug progressives would learn anything if they were forced to put up “Gun-Free Zone” signs in front of their own houses?

When I first taught here in Maine back in 1977, I noticed students driving to school with rifles on racks across the rear windows of their pickup trucks. During November, they hunted before and after school, and so did many teachers including this writer. Parents dropping their children off in front of the school often had rifles visible in their vehicles as well. Then in the 1990s I found myself distributing notices to parents warning them against doing that anymore after the ludicrous Gun-Free School Zones Act was signed into law by President Clinton. The notice students were instructed to take home and give to parents said those parents could be arrested if they drove onto school grounds with their deer rifles or shotguns in their vehicles. This, progressives insisted, was going to make us all safer.

God save us all from progressive do-gooders.

Adjusting

2011-06-29T12:41:00.000-04:00

“Enjoying your retirement?”

Having taught more than 3500 students for more a third of a century in the same small community, many people know me and I hear that question many times a day.

I smile and shrug. “It hasn’t sunk in yet,” and that’s true. It’s been more than a week since I cleaned out my classroom and got an engraved glass plaque from MSAD 72 thanking me for my years of service. Early summer feels about like it always has, however - going around the the properties I manage, shooting red squirrels, making sure everything works, reminding contractors about various repairs and maintenance. It’s only when I walk by the boxes of books and files from school on the floor of my garage where I unloaded them from my truck on the last day of school. That’s when I remember I’m a former history teacher now. I’ve got to update the profile on my web site this week to indicate that.

The academic calendar has ruled my life for more than fifty years. Early on, we Catholic school kids got out more than a week before the public school kids did. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood but the others in a neighborhood filled with young baby boomer kids were still in school. I remember feeing good realizing that I had no more homework for a few months. I could slip out of the house with my fishing rod before my mother could think of something else for me to do and have Round Pond all to myself. Digging worms and fishing alone was different though. With no one to talk to, I was much more aware of the sound of wind, birds and insects and the feel of the sun on my body. I enjoyed all that up to a point. I was alone with my thoughts and feelings. If I caught a good-sized bass or pickerel there was nobody to share the experience. By mid-afternoon I’d find myself waiting at the bus stop for my public school friends to come home and try to get a baseball game going. When they finally got out for the summer I wouldn’t think of school again until those first cool days in August.

Later, as a teenager and then as a college student and teacher, I’d work summer jobs and savor the weekends. After I was married and with a growing family, I’d have building projects, the honey-do list, and planned recreational activities. I was very aware that there were about ten weeks to get everything done. Each week that was counted off, I’d measure against what there was still to do. Come August, I’d have to triage because I’d never get done all I planned before school started again. This year, one week is already in the can but I don’t feel that pressure. Though I’m just as busy as I’ve always been in late June, I feel more relaxed because my schedule will remain flexible for the foreseeable future and I won’t feel the crunch come Labor Day weekend. School will start for others, but not for me, I won’t have to jam work on unfinished chores into weekends in the fall. This time, I’ll be able to get all my work done before the weekends come, maybe even before.

Juggling three jobs for so many years put me in hurry-up mode most of the time and it became an almost permanent state of mind. Bumping into friends and acquaintances at the post office or the store, I’d have to be aware of the time because I was usually hurrying from one job to another. I’d drop off my briefcase and my car, change clothes, put things in my truck and go off again. When home, I was dealing with phone calls and emails. As my wife would put it: “You’re a human doing - not a human being.” That stuck in my mind when mulling the decision to retire last February.

As I said, my first week of summer was busy as usual, but I’m getting caught up. I should have it all current soon and then I’ll again become a human being, if I can remember how.

Correction: In my June 16th column I referred to the author of “The Forgotten Man” as Emily Schlaes. Her name is Amity, not Emily. My apologies.

Teaching the Dismal Science

2011-06-15T05:51:00.000-04:00

Attitudes toward President Obama have changed drastically since last year here in western Maine. I just finished correcting my final batch of about six dozen elderly interviews which I’ve been assigning to students around here for thirty years. There will be no more since I’ll become a former history teacher after Friday. Students select someone seventy years old or older. ask the twenty questions I give them, and then ask ten they make up themselves. One assigned question asks who their favorite president was and why. The other asks who their least favorite president was and why.

Answers to the first question have always varied widely with no president getting a majority. However, a plurality each year for the entire thirty years has gone to Franklin Roosevelt. As for why, the typical answer has always been that “He got us out of the Depression.” Last year, President Obama got quite a few endorsements for favorite president - about fifteen or so if I remember correctly. Most people said things like: “He’s turning the economy around,” or “He’s going to help the little guy,” or “He’s very smart.” This year, however, only three people indicated that Obama was their favorite president. Instead, he got about fifteen votes for least favorite - second only to Richard Nixon.

For the past three years or so, George W. Bush was selected by about fifteen people for least favorite president but he was only mentioned three times this year. Evidently people in western Maine hold Obama responsible for our weak economy, even though he’s has been blaming Bush for nearly three years now. The bloom is definitely off the Obama rose if my informal annual polling is any guide.

One lesson from all this is that James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” advice to his client Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign sustains today. More recent histories like Amity Schlaes’s “The Forgotten Man,” question the enduring myth that President Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression.” She makes a strong case that his New Deal policies worsened and prolonged the Great Depression rather than ended it. Roosevelt surrounded himself with big-government control freaks who were fervent believers in the ideas that came to be known as Keynesian economics after the late British economist John Maynard Keynes. They borrowed and spent with the notion that they were priming an economic pump, or jumpstarting an economic engine which would rev up under their hyper-regulatory direction. They went off the gold standard and set the value of money by fiat. The Federal Reserve went along, just as it is going along with Obama’s new-New Deal now.

None of it worked, but Roosevelt seemed to be doing something. He convinced enough people in his fireside chats that happy days were here again, even if they weren’t. President Obama and his economic team are using the same tactics and getting the same results. Keynesian economics didn’t work for Roosevelt and they didn’t work for Johnson, Nixon, Ford, or Carter either. What’s it called when someone tries the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?

Reagan, by contrast, believed in the ideas of Frederick Hayek, who suggested that government should stay out of business affairs and let markets work things out. My students studied the conflicting economic ideas of Keynes vs Hayek this year and how they’ve played themselves out in the 20th century. John Papola and Russ Roberts put together a clever rap video outlining the conflicting ideas of the two economists, the refrain of which states: “They’ve been going back and forth for a century. ‘I want to steer markets [says Keynes];’ ‘I want them set free [says Hayek].’”

My students loved it so much they were singing it in the hallways by their lockers after class and showed it to their parents on Youtube. Then last month, an equally clever Round Two was produced. Lots of ideas were packed into the lyrics and imagery in each and both moved very fast, but they were great motivators in my quest for students to learn principles of what many refer to as the “dismal science” of economics.

My hope is that at least some of my charges will go away with a conceptual understanding of what government’s role in the economy should be. Maybe that will at least partially offset the enduring myth that Keynesian economic policies worked under Franklin Roosevelt.

Voters, meanwhile, are trusting their own judgement on how those ideas are working out under President Obama. Let’s hope that’s reflected in the 2012 election results.

Gender-Bending Lesson

2011-06-08T06:16:00.000-04:00

After studying the 1960s, including themes of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement, I gave follow-up lessons on legacies of those and other issues in American culture today. This is one.

“Feminists and homosexual activists use the words ‘genders’ and ‘sexes’ almost interchangeably. They’ve been pushing an idea that there are more than two genders since at least the 1990s,” I told them. “They’ve been trying to pass a United Nations resolution that instead of two genders, there are five.”

“What would those be?” asked a girl with an incredulous look.

“They claim that male and female are out on the edges of a spectrum,” I explained as I wrote on the board. “That inside the female on the extreme right are lesbians. That inside the male on the extreme left are homosexual men, and than in the middle are ‘transgender’ people who go either way.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “A lesbian is still female. She’s not another gender.”

“That’s crazy,” said a boy.

“To them,” I explained, “it’s another battle in the Sexual Revolution.”

“Well I hope they lose,” another girl said.

“Remember last month when a speaker came in to discuss bullying at an assembly in the gym?” I asked.

There were nods all around. “Last year it was a football player,” said a boy.

“Yes,” I said. “What did you think of those lectures?”

“They were good,” he said.

“What do the rest of you think?”

Most indicated the lectures had been interesting.Joel Baum Fox News

“Well, in Oakland, California, students get different kinds of bullying lessons,” I said, wheeling the LCD projector into position and plugging in my laptop. “Watch this.”

It was a “bullying” lesson on “gender diversity” in which the lecturer told fourth grade students they could be a girl or a boy or both. Joel Baum told students: “They can feel like girls. They can feel like boys. They can feel like both, and they can feel like, as I said, kinda like neither.”

Baum is educational director for Gender Spectrum, an activist group pushing the idea that the two sexes - male and female - are too rigid. Students can move around on the “gender spectrum” depending on how they feel. They can change whenever they want.

“They’re way too young to be listening to that stuff in the fourth grade,” said another girl.

“They shouldn’t teach that stuff,” said a boy. “It’s crazy. Those kids are going to believe it now. They believe anything the teacher tells them.”

“Would you think it was all right to teach this,” I asked the the girl, “if the students were older?”

“Yes,” she said.

“At what age then?”

“I don’t know - high school maybe.”

“It’s mandatory for all students in Oakland to take it from kindergarten to twelfth grade,” I said. “Mandatory means they have no choice.”

“That’s brainwashing,” said a the boy. “Those schools shouldn’t be doing that. It hasn't got much to do with bullying.”

“What if it were taught only in high school and students could choose to take the 'gender spectrum' course or not to take it?”

“That would be okay,” he said.

“The California Teachers’ Association, the CTA, is paying for this. That’s the teachers’ union,” I explained.

“Why?” he asked.

“Teachers’ unions all over the country are very left-wing,” I said. “They think this stuff is wonderful, and teachers’ unions are the most powerful groups in the Democrat Party.”

“You’re not left-wing,” said a girl.

“I’m unusual,” I said. “There are very few conservatives in this profession.”

“And you’re retiring.”

“Yup.” “This kind of gender-bending stuff is happening all over the country,” I explained. “The Maine legislature, for example, is about to vote on a bill that would prevent males who claim to be females from suing when they’re not allowed to use the ladies’ room in middle school or in a restaurant. In two cases, a boy’s parents and a man have sued a school and a restaurant and the Maine Human Rights Commission has agreed with them. Now the Orono Middle School is being forced to allow a boy to use the girls’ bathroom. A Denny’s Restaurant was forced to allow a man dressed as a woman to use the ladies’ room there.”

“In both cases here, the newspaper article refers to the boy and the man with the personal pronouns of ‘she’ and ‘her’ as if they were indeed females,’” I explained. “I don’t do that.”

“If you were in the Maine Legislature, how would you vote?” I asked. “How many of you would vote ‘yes,’ which would allow schools and restaurants to prevent males from using female bathrooms or locker rooms?”

Five or six hands went up.

“Who would vote ‘no’?”

Two hands.

“Who isn’t sure?”

Another five or six hands went up.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see what the legislature does.” 

Clueless Commander

2011-05-25T06:24:00.000-04:00

Israel’s enemies and our enemies are the same. Why doesn’t President Obama know this? This guy is supposed to be brilliant? Either he’s clueless or he’s conspiring to turn our biggest ally in the Middle East over to our mutual enemies. I cannot think of any other reason why he would make a major speech saying Israel must return to its 1967 borders. Doesn’t he know this would invite still another invasion of Israel by the hostile, Arab-Muslim countries which surround it? They’ve already invaded three times: First in 1948, then again in 1967, and still again in 1973. These countries didn’t want peace with Israel. They wanted Israel gone.The Amin al-Husseini, Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, cooperated with Hitler during WWII, recruiting Muslims to serve in Himmler’s SS to kill Jews during the Holocaust. During their attempted 1948 Arab invasion of Israel, Nazis were recruited to kill Jews again. At least some Palestinian Muslims were advised to get out of the way because the invaders intended to kill Jews and it would be nasty, so thousands left for Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt lest they get in the way. They expected to return when the Jews were all killed, but it didn’t work out that way. Those pesky Jews, with their backs to the wall and fighting for the first time in two millennia for their own homeland, prevailed over much larger invading Arab armies whose humiliation was intense. Afterward, they had all those Palestinian Arab refugees in their home countries to whom they’d bragged about their military prowess. These hapless Palestinians were now homeless and unwanted even by their fellow Arabs. Arab Muslim humiliation was so intense they invaded again in 1967, but again were defeated by scrappy Jews. This time though, Israel retained the West Bank from the invading Jordanians, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from invading Egyptians, and the Golan Heights from the invading Syrians. Even though those countries invaded Israel again in 1973, Obama wants Israel to give those strategic lands back to the invaders as a way to “achieve peace” in the region? What planet does he live on?Yours truly at the Temple Mount (taken from Palestinian East Jerusalem)

After 1967, Jews were in possession of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount - their holiest place - for the first time in 2000 years. Constructed on top, however, was the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, as an “in-your-face” gesture to Christians and Jews more than 1200 hundred years ago. Nonetheless, Israeli allowed Muslims to maintain control over their shrines on top, and were content to worship at the Wailing Wall below the Temple Mount in the back - all that remains of Herod’s Temple. Now President Obama expects Israel to give it all over to the radical Muslims in Hamas who are dedicated in their very charter to destroy the Jews. Is he crazy?Church of the Nativity

If Israel went back to the pre-1967 borders as Obama insists, not only would Israel become indefensible, Hamas would also control the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Old Jerusalem. Those are the holiest sites in Christendom, where Christ was born, where he died and where Christians believe he rose from the dead - sacred places for 1.5 billion people around the world. What could we expect with radical Muslim control of these sacred sites if it becomes a Palestinian state?Church of the Holy Sepulcher

In 2002, Muslims assaulted the Church of the Nativity - oldest Christian Church in the world and held it for 39 days. It is located in Bethlehem, of course, which is in the West Bank. Radical Muslim Palestinians shot it up, ransacked it, urinated and defecated inside and held Christian clerics hostage. When I was there in May, 2007, it still hadn’t been completely cleaned up.

Israelis know what their Muslim enemies have planned for them even if President Obama doesn’t, and they won’t go like sheep to the slaughter as they did under the Nazis. Radical Muslim Iran is building nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the map,” but Israel has had its own nukes for fifty years. Does Obama really think Israel is going to lay down and die to appease Muslim pride?

If he does, he truly lives in La-La Land. His proposals won’t lead to peace in the region. Instead, they’ll make a wider, more devastating war more likely. It’s time for Obama to become our former president.

Borrow, Spend, Collapse

2011-05-18T05:43:00.000-04:00

Gas prices are going up. Food prices are going up. Unemployment is going up. The national debt is going up. Earnings for most Americans are either going down or are stagnant. There are fewer and fewer high-paying manufacturing jobs because the federal government has allowed companies to move factories overseas where people work for less, then ship their products back without paying protective tariffs. Nice for them, but tough for working people here. At the same time, feds look the other way while millions of illegal aliens pour over our southern border to either work cheap and drive down wages, or to go on every form of public assistance and drive up government spending still further.From Gateway Pundit

This is serious. Most people know it cannot go on much longer or everything will collapse. Some voted for President Obama because they believed the “hope and change” rhetoric, but regret it now. Many formed into Tea Party groups all over the country and took over the US House of Representatives. They’re looking for a 2012 presidential candidate who has courage enough to tell the American people that we have to put all this into reverse and that it’s going to be painful for millions of us, but that there’s no other way to avoid complete collapse.

Trouble is, there are millions of other Americans who have allowed themselves to become dependent on government handouts of one form or another. Some of them know the gravy train cannot go on forever and entitlements must be cut, but they’ll only support cutting the programs other people use, not the ones they use. Few would support politicians who would cut across the board. Do these government addicts comprise a majority? It’s close, and we’ll just have to see. If they do, America as we’ve known it will cease to exist. The country our children and grandchildren grow up in will be vastly different. The “can-do” America will have irreversibly transformed into the “I-can’t-do-it” America that expects government to do it instead.From Joshua Kennon

The federal government spends three dollars for every two it gets in taxes. It has already borrowed so much that interest payments are about as high as our defense budget, and most of those in Congress want to raise the debt limit and borrow still more. When our Chinese creditors balk at lending any more money, government just prints it. The US Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke has increased the money supply by well over a trillion dollars in the past few years. Every dollar it prints makes the ones in all of our wallets and in all of our bank accounts less valuable. This “quantitative easing” as Bernanke calls it, is just another way government takes money from us - and from everyone else in the world whose assets are in dollars. That’s why other countries want to abandon the dollar and use some other as a base currency.From Washington Post

At supermarkets and gas stations, most people use credit cards. If they can’t pay off their balances each month, they realize they’re going further into debt and they have to cut back in some way or the interest will kill them. Either it’s driving less, getting a smaller vehicle, changing the way they eat, or whatever - they must cut back or their household will eventually collapse.

We’ve all known irresponsible relatives and neighbors who have ignored this reality and fallen apart. Now we see our government - and many of our states - doing the same thing and taking us all down with it. If a credible candidate shows up on the scene with the courage to run on a platform of drastically cutting government - including entitlements - he or she will move into the White House.

If not, we’ll continue on the road to ruin.

Gutsy Decision?

2011-05-10T17:31:00.000-04:00

“This is a Viet Cong captive being waterboarded,” I said to the class after fast-forwarding through a videotape from Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A Television History.” We were studying the Vietnam War in the context of the Cold War.

“You can see that South Vietnamese intelligence officers have placed a cloth over the captive’s face and are pouring water on it. This gives the captive the feeling that he is drowning as the water goes into his mouth and up his nostrils when he tries to breathe.” After viewing the whole clip, I asked: “Does this look like torture to you?”

Each had watched intently but none would offer an opinion. Then I explained that after we captured the third-highest-ranking official in al Qaeda, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, he was waterboarded and gave up information that eventually led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. “And,” I told them, “Khalid Sheik Mohammed planned the September 11th attack for Osama Bin Laden.”

I waited for that to sink in and said, “Is this torture?”

“It was worth it if it led us to Bin Laden,” said a boy.

“Okay,” I answered, “But is it torture?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, Khalid Sheik Mohammed wasn’t a prisoner of war. He was a terrorist, so I don’t think the Geneva Conventions apply to him,” said another boy.

“Is it torture?” I repeated.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

“Left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded to see what it was like,” I explained. “He said it doesn’t simulate drowning: ‘You are drowning, or rather being drowned. . . . Believe me, it’s torture.’”
I played the Hitchens clip from Youtube.

“So what do you think?” I asked. “Is it torture?”

“It’s all right if it was done on the guy who planned the September 11th attacks,” said a girl. “He killed 3000 people.”

Back in September I’d shown them a “Today Show” recording of the events of that day to give them a feel for what happened in 2001 when they were only four years old. “The Bush/Cheney Administration called waterboarding one of their ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’” I explained. “Is that a euphemism for torture?”

“It’s all right if it’s against terrorists,” said another boy.

“Is it torture?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Open your books to page 885,” I said. “Look at the Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights.” I asked a girl to read it.

Dutifully, she read: “‘Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.’”

“Thank you,” I said. “The part where it says, ‘nor cruel and unusual punishments imposed’ is what I wanted you to see. Our country has a long tradition of outlawing torture, but that would be against American citizens.”

“Yeah,” said the boy. “These people were not citizens and they weren’t prisoners of war either. They were terrorists. They had no rights. It was all right to waterboard them to get information that would be useful in fighting them.”

“Obama’s CIA Director, Leon Panetta, said the information about who Bin Laden’s courier was - someone who carried messages back and forth between him and others in al Qaeda - came from Khalid Sheik Mohammed while he was being waterboarded during the Bush Administration,” I said. “With that information, the CIA tracked him down and began following him. He led them right to the house where Osama Bin Laden was living with three of his wives. Without waterboarding, the USA might never have gotten Bin Laden. Other officials in the Obama Administration, however, deny that.”

“So, who thinks it was all right to waterboard KSM?” I asked.

Half raised their hands.

“Who things it was wrong?”

Three hands went up.

“Eric Holder, Attorney General in the Obama Administration, is investigating our CIA agents who waterboarded KSM and two other terrorists while Bush was president. He’s trying to build a case against them for war crimes,” I explained. “That might be one reason other officials in the Obama Administration deny that waterboarding had anything to do with discovering where Osama Bin Laden was hiding.”

President Obama was interviewed about killing Bin Laden on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, but Steve Croft didn’t ask him any tough questions,” I continued. “However, Obama’s National Security Advisor, Tom Donilon was interviewed on “Fox News Sunday,” and Chris Wallace asked him, ‘Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper . . . but [waterboarding] Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is just as bad an operator, isn’t?’” 

“Donilon said, ‘[Waterboarding] is not consistent with our values.’”

“Then Wallace said, ‘But shooting an unarmed man in the face is consistent with our values?’”

“Donilon said, ‘We’re at war with Osama Bin Laden.’”

“Wallace said, ‘We’re at war with Khalid Sheik Mohammed.’”

I played the above exchange for the class and asked, “Did Donilon answer Wallace’s questions to your satisfaction?”

“Not really,” said a boy.

Other students shook their heads.

“Another thing,” I continued. “Generals appointed by President Obama made new ‘rules of engagement’ for our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan - many of them former students from this classroom - under which our guys can’t shoot until they’re shot at first. And, if they’re shot at from a group of civilians, they can’t shoot back at all.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said another boy. Others nodded agreement.

“And now, even in cases where they capture Taliban terrorists who they’ve videotaped planting IEDs or ‘Improvised Explosive Devices,’ or ‘roadside bombs’ as they’re sometimes called, which have killed hundreds of our soldiers, and these terrorists have been tested to reveal explosive residue on their hands, they have to be released after 96 hours. Our soldiers know they’re going to plant more bombs and still they have to release them! This is discouraging to say the least, and it makes it much more risky our our guys.”

“Our Commander-in-Chief is putting our soldiers at risk with these rules of engagement,” I continued, “but his staff is telling us what a ‘gutsy decision’ Obama made by approving a strike on Bin Laden from the comfort and safety of the White House.”

Time To Leave

2011-04-27T05:54:00.000-04:00

Time to leave teaching. It’s been thirty-six years - two in Lowell, Massachusetts teaching juvenile delinquents and thirty-four in Maine public schools. I’m going to miss it because I love teaching US History and current events to fourteen-year-olds, most days. They can be trying sometimes. When I tell people what age I’ve taught, they often say, “God bless you. I could never do that.”

What I’d come to like about fourteen-year-olds is that they’re capable of learning virtually anything and most of what I teach they’re hearing about for the first time. They don’t have many biases or preconceived ideas about the wider world and they’re very bright. Each year I’ve realized that many are brighter than I am. But I’ve been around longer. I’ve had more time and opportunities to learn, often the hard way. When I teach them classic concepts, they ask extremely perceptive questions I never hear in discussions with jaded adults. Their questions have forced me to consider fresh perspectives on ancient enigmas and those have been my biggest rewards in this work. When I didn’t enjoy teaching, it was often because of some fault of my own - usually my attitude.

Never did expect to be at it so long, but that’s how it unfolded. There were times I wanted to do something else but circumstances prevented career change. Twenty-five years ago, I was diagnosed with a medical condition for which I needed several expensive surgeries, each requiring about six weeks of recovery. With a young family, a mortgage and a pre-existing condition, no other insurance company would take me on. So, for a while, I felt stuck in the job. That wasn’t good for me or for my students until I managed to I change my attitude by counting my blessings - of which there have been many.

For the past few years I’ve met with a retired history teacher to chat about the trade. I asked him how he knew when to give it up. “When the time comes, you just know,” he said, but it didn’t feel right the last time we had lunch. My five-year teaching license was due to expire in July and I went through the process to renew it.

Soon after doing that, however, I went to CPAC - the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, for the fifth time. I renewed contacts and new opportunities opened up. I decided to call the Maine Public Employees Retirement Service and inquire about what my pension would look like if this were my last year.

The numbers didn’t point to a cushy life with medical insurance looming as the biggest expense. The economy doesn’t look promising for the foreseeable future either, but I could be dead by the time that changes. My wife and I are physically in good shape right now and we have no debts. She’s gotten her counseling practice down to a manageable pace, and I’ve been the one who is too busy. I’ve maintained a small property-management business for the past twenty-six years and written a regular weekly column for twenty, and I intend to continue with both. My income will diminish. I won’t be able to travel as often, but I’ll have time to pursue other interests which I expect to enjoy more than teaching.

There’s at least one book in me about what it’s been like as a controversial columnist in the same community where I’ve taught. Early in my career I was a liberal and I annoyed conservatives. Then I morphed into a conservative and annoyed liberals, who have been by far the most intolerant of opposing views. Public education is a very liberal profession which doesn’t abide conservatives well, so it’s been lonely. I started writing the book a few years ago but my life has been just too busy to make any progress. I’ve saved most of the paperwork generated by adversaries - most of it in the form of letters to various principals, superintendents, the school board, the state licensing board, and so forth. There are angry letters to the editor from various newspapers in which my column has appeared, and they number well into the hundreds. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sell the book to a publisher once it’s written, but hey: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.There’s been no shortage of people who have publicly declared me unfit to teach and who have tried to have me dismissed over the years, but I’ve weathered it. I’m leaving now because I want to. I expect I’ll have a few pangs when I see school busses roll by in September and I’m not part of it anymore, but I’ll get over it.

Right To Life

2011-04-20T12:31:00.000-04:00

Friday, April 8th I was involved in a debate with Shenna Bellows, executive director of the MCLU (Maine Civil Liberties Union), which is Maine’s chapter of the ACLU. The moderator chose three “set piece” questions for us including this one: “Are reproductive rights guaranteed by the Constitution?” Following are my abbreviated remarks:

The US Constitution is silent on reproductive rights, except for an indirect reference in the Preamble which proclaims that the Constitution is ordained “to secure the blessings of liberty to . . . our posterity.” Until 1973, government involvement with reproduction, as such, was handled at the state level, and that’s where the Constitution meant for it to stay. If there were any doubt lingering about that, I would refer you to the 10th Amendment, which states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The only example I know of when reproductive rights were denied to Americans is when citizens designated “feeble-minded” or “immoral” were - by state government authority - sterilized against their will in states like New Hampshire, Maine, and many others in the early to mid 20th century. One venue for this was about fifty miles west of here at the Laconia State School in New Hampshire. Another was about 25 miles east of here at the Pineland Center in New Gloucester, Maine. It’s estimated that somewhere around 65,000 people were forcibly sterilized around the United States up until 1963.

All this resulted from the Eugenics movement, begun by people who called themselves “Progressives.” They formed groups like the American Eugenics Society and others. Eugenicists were among the first social engineers of the twentieth century, deciding who should reproduce and who should not - and they used the power of state government to enforce those decisions.Progressive eugenicists included Democrats and Republicans such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, radical right wingers like the KKK, and radical left-wingers like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, who went on to establish Planned Parenthood, leader of the abortion industry in America today - federal funding of which is heatedly debated in Congress right now, not because they disseminate birth control, but because they kill our posterity.

Adolph Hitler admired the American eugenics movement.

Goldman and Sanger pushed dissemination of birth control to women but were thwarted by state laws. It’s ironic that states forcibly sterilized people but disallowed dissemination of temporary birth control methods. It wasn’t until Griswold vs Connecticut was adjudicated by the US Supreme Court in 1965 that a “constitutional right to privacy” was declared which negated state laws outlawing dissemination of birth control. In his minority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said:

“We are not asked in this case to say whether we think this law is unwise or even asinine. We are asked to hold that it violates the United States Constitution. And that I cannot do.” He would let Connecticut citizens persuade their legislature to repeal the law. Griswold vs Connecticut was the basis for Roe vs Wade.

While our constitution is silent on reproductive rights, our Declaration of Independence declares a “right to life,” along with rights to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Our Constitution designed a government to manifest its principles and here I refer you back to that phrase in the succinct Preamble declaring that one purpose is to “secure the blessings of liberty to . . . our posterity.” Killing our posterity in the womb would obviously go against that, not to mention violating their “right to life” - which is “endowed by our Creator.” Those are four words that stick in President Obama’s throat. He purposely omits them when quoting that section of that famous document. That our rights are “endowed by our Creator” - and not by our government - will remain in the Declaration of Independence until the ACLU sues to have it removed. Would it surprise anyone they did?

Every state had laws against abortion until the 1960s when New York legalized the procedure, followed soon after by other states until the US resembled a patchwork quilt of legality and illegality. Into this waded the US Supreme Court in 1973 with Roe V Wade.

The majority decision in that case which claims a “Constitutional right to abortion” is based on the afore-mentioned Griswold vs Connecticut birth control case. Progressive justices in both cases claimed rights to birth control and abortion under a “right to privacy.” Trouble was, the word “privacy” doesn’t exist in the Constitution, so they claimed that it emanated from the penumbra of an implied right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments - none of which mention the word! To call this an exercise in gymnastic nomenclature is an understatement. They wanted it to be there so they insisted it was there, even though it wasn’t there.

If progressives wanted to establish a constitutional right to privacy or abortion or birth control, there was the Amendment process outlined in Article 5. It’s a cumbersome process and it was purposely designed to be so by the founding fathers because it requires a widespread debate in Congress and in all the states for ratification. Instead, seven progressive Supreme Court justices usurped that process. They usurped powers delegated to the states as well. Seven men produced a right to abortion out of whole cloth.

Said Justice Hugo Black of the process: “I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.” [Should the court continue this] “shocking doctrine,” he said, [it will wind up as] “a day-to-day constitutional convention.”

Planned Parenthood and the ACLU deny that a human life - our posterity - which has the right to life endowed by our Creator - is killed in an abortion. That’s why they work so vehemently against state laws requiring mothers to see ultrasound images confirming that what they’re carrying is a human baby before they choose to kill it.

Progressive justices imposed their will. They usurped the amendment process in Article 5. As a result of Roe vs Wade, abortion has been the most divisive issue in America ever since 1973.

Affirmative Action: Euphemism For Discrimination

2011-04-13T05:22:00.000-04:00

Last Friday night, I was involved in a debate with Shenna Bellows, executive director of the MCLU (Maine Civil Liberties Union), which is Maine’s chapter of the ACLU. The moderator chose three “set piece” questions for us including this one: “Are Affirmative Action programs constitutional?” What follows are my remarks.

Affirmative Action is a euphemism for government-required policies that discriminate on the basis of race, sex and national origin. The very same discrimination that government legislates against in some areas of public life, it mandates in other areas. It’s a kind of schizophrenia.

From the ACLU web site:

The [ACLU] Racial Justice Program supports affirmative action to secure racial diversity in education settings, workplaces and government contracts to remedy continuing systematic discrimination against people of color, and to help ensure equal opportunities for all people. As part of this commitment, we are working to defend affirmative action in states that are threatened for a civil rights rollback.

Hmm. Systematic discrimination against people of color? Where? It’s been illegal for two generations. The ACLU claims:

Affirmative action is one of the most effective tools for redressing the injustices caused by our nation’s historic discrimination against people of color and women, and for leveling what has long been an uneven playing field. A centuries-long legacy of racism and sexism has not been eradicated despite the gains made during the civil rights era. Avenues of opportunity for those previously excluded remain far too narrow. We need affirmative action now more than ever.

Hmm. Injustices caused by our nation’s historic discrimination against people of color and women. What injustices? Where? Students at our colleges and universities are 60% female. If there’s any evidence of discrimination, it’s against men, not women.

Professor Russell K. Neili summarized a study by two sociologists at Princeton of the admissions process at ten elite private colleges and universities:

To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410 and an Asian student a 1550.

Is this what the ACLU means when it cites “the gains made by the civil rights era”?

When the ACLU says “we are working to defend affirmative action in states that are threatened for a civil rights rollback, they’re talking about initiatives like those proposed in several states like this one in California called the California Civil Rights Initiative:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

What the ACLU objects to are the five words “or grant preferential treatment to” of course, because those words shine the light on what affirmative action actually does. By lowering the bar for some groups like the aforementioned “people of color,” they must raise it for other groups with whom the preferred “people of color” are competing for employment, college admissions or contracts. To the ACLU, treating everyone equally regardless of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin is “a civil rights rollback.” That is what you call distorted thinking. Orwell called it “Doublethink.” What the ACLU wants to hide is that affirmative action does not preserve civil rights - it discriminates against whites, males and Asians by its very nature.
If one of my loved ones needed brain surgery and I wanted the best possible surgeon to do it, I’d have to consider what affirmative action has done with our medical schools. I’d have to look around for an Asian neurosurgeon and avoid black ones who could get admitted with the lowest scores. Wouldn’t you? I don’t like it, but this is the legacy of Affirmative Action.

People tolerated it back in 1965 when the Civil Rights Bill passed, but it been almost forty years - two generations. The ACLU insists we need it now more than ever. I don’t think so. Affirmative Action is racist and sexist. It should be abolished immediately in all its forms.

Early Old

2011-04-06T05:05:00.000-04:00

Most of you are reading this in a newspaper on Thursday, April 7th which is my 60th birthday. My sister, Jane, sent me a card saying: “We spent our entire youth laughing at old people.” Inside, it said: “We are SO screwed.”It’s actually my 61st birthday if you count the first in 1951 at the end of which I was one day old. A year later, when I was one year old, would have been my second birthday, and so on. Today is the first day of my 61st year. I’m not just 60 - I’m “in my sixties.” I’m beginning my seventh decade. A friend reached this milestone last year and when asked how old he was, he’d say “Fifty-ten."Our newest granddaughter, Lila

The way we measure time is relative and this was best exemplified by a small sign I saw on the outside of a bathroom door once which read: “How long a minute is, is relative to which side of this door you’re on.” When I was about ten, a year seemed a very long time because it was one-tenth of my life. Now it’s only one-sixtieth and goes by quickly. I formulated a scale for age when I was ten: Up to twelve, you’re a kid. Then you’re a teenager until age twenty. After that you’re a young adult from twenty to forty. Forty to sixty you’re middle-aged and from sixty on, you’re old.

I finished “late middle age” yesterday. Today I’m “early old.”

I’m not sure how sixty is supposed to feel, but so far it’s pretty good. I’m in good shape, but I haven’t as much stamina. I can still do everything, but I prefer shorter intervals. I can deal with that, but mentally there are other effects. Sometimes I can’t recall the name of something until ten or twenty minutes after the conversation has ended or shifted to another subject. It’s in my head somewhere, but it’s as if it were on a slip of paper and buried under stacks of other paperwork on the desktop of my mind.

My hair is thinning, but it’s still mostly brown. Students ask me if I dye it and it bothers me that they’d think I would. If it were gray, I definitely wouldn’t dye it. That’s okay for women, but vain for a man. Why? I don’t know. That’s what I feel about it. My wife is a year younger than me and her hair is mostly silver. I’m glad she leaves it that way because it’s attractive. There’s a certain strength I sense in women who take care of themselves and allow their hair to age naturally.

Another thing that makes me feel older is when guys in their thirties call me “Sir.” It’s not when they’re trying to sell me something either. It’s happening when I meet them socially. I’ve never been in the military and to be addressed as “sir” is unfamiliar. Students have been calling me “Mr. McLaughlin” for decades but that’s different. The “Sir” thing is going to take some getting used to.

Softball season starts soon. It’ll be my thirty-fourth year playing Thursday nights at Westways in Lovell. I’m one of the older guys now, but last year there were still some showing up who were older. This year, we’ll see. Some younger than me have stopped playing already and come just to watch and drink beer.For about ten or twelve years now, I haven’t had a strong urge to hunt deer - and it used to be overpowering. I’ve been thinking maybe it’s due to diminished testosterone levels because I’d rather go into the woods and shoot pictures. So, I buy chuck-eye steaks at Hannaford’s Supermarket, which I like better than venison anyway. It might not be testosterone though because I still get the urge to punch some someone in the head once in a while. I haven’t actually done it for about thirty years, but it has crossed my mind, and that’s a testosterone thing too. Maybe the urge will diminish someday or go away entirely, but I don’t think so. There’s no shortage of people around still who desperately need a punch in the head, and they still cross my path.

An old priest once told that “As I get older, I care more and more about less and less.” I took that to mean he didn’t sweat the small stuff anymore. He accepted things he could not change and he tried harder to change the things that mattered most - and upon which he could have some effect. I’m pondering his words more lately and it’s helping me make decisions about what to do with whatever time remains for me on this earth. 

In Dubious Battle

2011-03-30T05:32:00.000-04:00

There’s a war in Libya and we’re in it. Obama Administration officials don’t want to call it a war and they don’t want to call it a battle either. They prefer to call it a “kinetic military action.” President Obama ordered our military to protect civilians in Libya who were being killed by Colonel Kaddafi as he tries to wipe out rebels there who want to overthrow him. It’s much more complicated than that though, as wars always are. We’re taking the side of the rebels in a civil war. They’re going to benefit as we restrict Kaddafi’s forces, but who are these rebels we’re helping? If and when they take over Libya, will they be better than Kaddafi? Let’s hope. Might they be worse? Evidence exists that they could be worse, both for Libya and for us. We don’t know, and that’s the problem with what President Obama is doing.

Does our president have a long-term policy in the Middle East or is he just reacting to events as they occur? Is he operating under the auspices of the United Nations? NATO? Is the United States leading this operation or following? Who is with us and who is against us? None of that is clear. If we’re protecting civilians from a dictator, why are we doing that in Libya and not Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Bahrain, or Iran in which civilians are suffering fully as much as they are in Libya?

Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, advised him that Libya was not a threat to America and we had no strategic interests there. Several weeks ago, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, advised him that we needed to establish a “no-fly zone” in the country as soon as possible and so did Senator John Kerry but Obama did nothing for two weeks. He claims to have been a professor of Constitutional law, but then he acted without consulting Congress, which is constitutionally dubious and which prompted Ohio Democrat Congressman Dennis Kucinich to call for his impeachment.

We have a commander-in-chief who can read a speech from a teleprompter very well. While campaigning, he can appear confident and smart to voters, 52% of whom elected him. Reading from a teleprompter isn’t enough anymore, but it’s increasingly evident that he isn’t good at much of anything else. He’s president now though, and he has to make tough decisions. He can’t just vote “present” the way he was accustomed to in the Illinois legislature, but he’s avoiding decisions until he’s absolutely forced to make them - and Libya is the result.

Is there some other way to make sense of all this? It looks to me like Obama epitomizes the worst of the liberal baby-boomer world view. He’s a reflection of the people who elected him. Baby boomers blame their parents for the evils of the world; Obama blames George Bush. He believes the world would be a better place if it were not for capitalism and US foreign policy. Rather than believing that America is an exceptional country in the history of the world, he sees America as a problem. He’s a utopian who thinks people around the world would get along fine if they weren’t “exploited.” The world would be all smiling happy people holding hands if it weren’t for US imperialism.

Obama admires a Europe which has spent two generations apologizing and flailing itself for colonizing Africa and Asia and then expanding socialist welfare programs for everyone, including illegal immigrants. Now it looks like he’s earnestly trying to copy those policies here in the United States. That both Europe and America are going bankrupt as a result seems not to bother him.

As for dealing with the Middle East, President Obama’s actions so far indicate that his plan has been to make nice speeches in Muslim countries apologizing for American “arrogance” and all will be well there, but it isn’t working. They’re burning him in effigy just as they did George Bush. That the rebel commander we’re helping in Libya fought against the United States in Afghanistan, that he recruits al Qaida terrorists to his side doesn’t seem to trouble our president. That they’re murdering black immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t trouble him either.Rebel Commander Abdel-Hakim Al-Hasidi from Daily Telegraph UK

Until last week when he intervened, Arab Muslim terrorists were killing each other in Libya and we didn’t have to do anything but watch. What could be better than that? Why mess that up? I just don’t understand the rationale and neither, it seems, does our president. I listened to his speech Monday night, but came away still not understanding why we’re going further into debt and further committing our already overstretched military to install a government in Libya that shows all signs of being worse than terrorist, transvestite, mentally-disturbed Colonel Kaddafi.

If our commander-in-chief is going to commit our soldiers anywhere, he has to know what the goal is, then use maximum force to achieve it as quickly as possible. Or, don’t go in at all.

How Much Will It Really Cost?

2011-03-23T05:32:00.000-04:00

Back in the 1980s, The US Department of Energy had plans to bury “high-level nuclear waste” in the form of spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants in the eastern United States - under the towns of southern and western Maine and eastern New Hampshire. My own town of Lovell was on the northern edge of the site they were considering. Recent events in Japan have brought it all back to me.

I was in my first term on Lovell’s Board of Selectmen when volumes of bound studies as big as the Obamacare bill arrived at our town office in January, 1986 as well as every other town between Lovell and Westbook, Maine and Conway, New Hampshire. I didn’t know much about nuclear power and neither did most other town officials, so I went to an impromptu informational meeting somebody called at Lake Region High School in Naples, Maine. Interesting people from all over southern Maine appeared and lined up at the microphone.Guys who had served on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers explained what they knew. Retired geologists familiar with what was under the ground in our part of the world explained gave their opinions. Retired federal employees explained what they knew. Guys who had been drilling wells all over the area explained what they’d discovered - and they all kept it simple enough for lay people to understand. Mostly, I sat and listened, very impressed by how many bright people from varied backgrounds lived quiet lives in rural Maine, and how well everyone cooperated to deal with this threat to the land we all called home.The "pluton" is light-colored on this portion of the 1985 Bedrock Geologic Map of Maine

The DOE (US Department of Energy) was implementing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which had become law in 1982 and directed the DOE to find a “high-level nuclear waste repository” somewhere east of the Mississippi in which to “dispose” of all those spent fuel rods crowding storage pools in dozens of nuclear power plants. They said there was a “pluton” under the ground here at least 1500 meters thick, and it was flawless. It was contiguous. It had no cracks or seams. Vertical shafts could be cut down 1000 meters and lateral shafts could be cut horizontally. Spent fuel rods could be stored in those shafts deep down there and be safe for 10,000 years.

The more we studied their proposal, the more flabbergasted we became. We knew the “pluton” under us had lots of cracks in it because most of us had sunk wells into it and had been using the water that flowed through those cracks for years. It was anything but flawless. How could the DOE insist it was a seamless mass of granite? Were they fools? Did they think we were? This “pluton” underlay Sebago Lake - Portland’s water supply.

Other informational meetings were held. Thousands more came to learn and become outraged at what the federal government proposed for our state. Television cameras were set up, and wherever there were crowds and cameras, there were politicians. Whoever was running for governor, congress or the state legislature showed up to make speeches that didn’t seem to help much. Ironically, local citizen’s groups here in Maine adopted the yellow Gadsden Flag with the coiled snake saying “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” which is, of course, the same one citizens’ groups protesting big government and calling themselves “The Tea Party” have adopted. We especially liked it because the “ME” at the end is the postal abbreviation for Maine. I’ve had mine hanging right under the American flag in my classroom for twenty-five years.Reluctantly, DOE bureaucrats came to Maine and Conway, New Hampshire, conducted their hearings, and felt our wrath. From January to April, I was out at least three or four nights a week at meetings and hearings or organizing opposition. At one of those meetings in Casco, Maine on the night of April 26, 1986, we heard about the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev in the Ukraine. Right after that, the US Department of Energy abruptly discontinued its search for an eastern repository for its nuclear waste. The issue was too politically hot for the federal government to handle. The "Eastern Repository" idea was shelved and the DOE concentrated on "disposing" its waste inside Yucca Mountain, Nevada. We were off the hook. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, however, had the Yucca Mountain site in his home state of Nevada killed last year. The DOE is back to square one.

The still-unsolved problem of what to do with nuclear waste is the Achille’s heel of the nuclear industry. Today, just as liberal and conservative politicians in America are actively considering nuclear power again, Japan is shining a light on it for the world to see. It’s their spent-fuel-rod pool they’re having the most trouble with at this writing. When nuclear powered electric generation was introduced in the 1950s, some said it would be virtually free - too cheap to meter. Today, we still don’t know how much it really costs per kilowatt hour because we don’t know the expense of storing those mounting spent fuel rods or disposing of them - if we ever figure out how.

Aesthetic Attempts

2011-03-16T05:48:00.000-04:00

My camera is with me wherever I go, on a strap over my shoulder or nearby in the car or the truck. When I see something beautiful or interesting, I want to capture its image. If I should forget it, I’ll turn around even if it makes me late.It’s rare though when can I replicate what I see - especially beauty, which, as the saying goes, is “in the eye of the beholder.” What my eye sees and my camera sees are similar but never the same and neither sees the world as it really is. Objective reality exists, the perception of which I can only approach with the faculties my Creator gave me, or with the device Nikon made. I try to understand the world around me using my brain, and I try to perceive it with my senses knowing those faculties are limited and the results will always be imperfect.It’s helpful to keep this in mind when editing pictures, which I like to do, but for which I seldom have enough time. Editing is so much easier with digital photography and cheaper too. All one needs is a computer whereas in the old days, a darkroom was necessary with enlargers and chemicals. Amateur photographers I know refuse to edit, considering the process unacceptable compromise. One won’t even crop, believing that if he didn’t frame it properly when shooting it, too bad.I’ll bet that if I asked them, few would object to converting a color shot to black-and-white, yet they wouldn’t consider digitally enhancing colors or contrasts or brightness. I use to feel the same way about my images, but not anymore. The way I see it all now, whatever emerges in my picture-taking or my editing will be just another imperfect rendition of reality. I’ll always keep the original, however, and edit a copy. I’ll play with it to enhance whatever feeling I had that prompted me to shoot it in the first place.Every image has feeling associated with it - if it’s my idea to take it. If I’m shooting for someone else, that probably won’t happen. To the extent I can capture the beauty of what I see, I capture the feeling with it. Others may not feel what I do when they look at it, or feel anything at all. Guess that’s because we all perceive the world differently.If I’m shooting, then I’m right with the world. If a week goes by without taking pictures of something I’m not doing well. I’m preoccupied or I’m too busy to live as I should and I need to change something. I’ve learned that it’s a barometer I shouldn’t ignore.Often my children and grandchildren have inspired me to pick up my camera. As infants and toddlers, they’re almost all feelings and they catalyze instinctive, reciprocal feelings in me. My daughters notice my connection to my grandchildren because their love is more intense than mine. They like to see themselves and each other as little children too. Old pictures tap old feelings.When my children were little, I couldn’t afford color prints, so I shot a lot of slides which were cheaper and we’d have set up a slide projector to see them. That was a bother, but it did foster attentiveness. When I made prints of favorite slides, they never looked as good to me as they did when projected onto a screen in a darkened room. Today, I much prefer to see my images on a back-lit computer screen than as a print on photo paper. I’ll enlarge some, frame them and hang them up, but I’m less satisfied with the result. I prefer them on a high-definition TV screen, and if I ever become more prosperous, I’ll purchase some of those large, framed LCD panels to display my images where I live and work.Here’s hoping I never again go off unprepared to capture whatever the world would show me.

Green Goons

2011-03-09T05:52:00.000-05:00

Traveling to Madison, Wisconsin last week, film maker Michael Moore said, “America is not broke ... Wisconsin is not broke. The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers.”

Hmm.

We know that Michael Moore is not broke. He became a millionaire making dubious documentaries that attack gun owners, oil companies, General Motors (before Obama took it over), and “the rich.” We also know that he’s not starving. He’s the most corpulent communist in the country, but he’s wrong about America not being broke.

The United States government debt is over $14,000,000,000,000. President Obama’s budget will add $1,500,000,000,000 to it next year bringing it to $15,500,000,000,000. Then he proposed to do that again the following year bringing the debt to $17,000,000,000,000. After that, many of us hope he becomes former President Obama, but we’ll see.

Michael Moore is right, however, about the broken moral compass of our rulers. For example, gasoline prices go up nearly every hour. It’s getting so people are afraid to drive more than 150 miles for fear that they won’t be able to afford the gas to get home again. Still, President Obama refuses to allow oil development either on government-owned land or just off our coasts. We have enough petroleum in the ground right here in the United States to last us centuries but Obama, the Democrats and their green goons won’t let us get at it for fear there might be a spill and a sea gull might get oil on its wings. It’s all right though to send $1,000,000,000 a day to Muslim countries who use much of it to finance jihad against us in their radical quest to destroy western civilization. Our liberal Democrat rulers want fossil-fuel energy prices to go up in hopes that Americans will turn to solar panels, windmills and Chevy Volts.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said, "[T]his administration's policies have been designed to drive up the cost of energy in the name of reducing pollution, in the name of making very expensive alternative fuels more economically competitive. . . . In the United States, it's harder to get a permit to mine coal than it is to get a heart transplant. . . . we are going to produce about 13 percent less petroleum in the U.S. this year than last year. Now how is that good policy at any time when energy security is supposed to be a priority, but particularly a time of turmoil in the Middle East in the oil-producing states?"

Barbour may run for president as a Republican in 2012.

Leaders who would intentionally drive up energy prices for every American do indeed have broken moral compasses as Michael Moore suggests, but that isn’t how those leaders see themselves. When they look in their mirrors, they see modern-day saviors of the world looking back because oil and coal are fossil fuels. Michael Moore, President Obama, and millions of other Chicken Littles have been predicting for decades now that we’re all going to be boiled alive by global warming allegedly caused by burning those evil fossil fuels.

Just by inserting the word “allegedly” in the previous sentence, I’ve made myself a heretic in the rigid religion of Environmentalism. I’ve become the equivalent to a Holocaust-denier, a shill for oil companies, anathema to the “Greens” - just like Haley Barbour.People like Barbour and me are understood by the environmental saviors as suck-ups to “the rich” whom they think are ripping off everybody else on earth. Environmental saviors are also champions of “the poor” and those members of the middle class who bow at the same altars they do. They’re on the side of the public-employee unions who portray themselves as champions of ordinary Americans against “the rich.” They would save us all from the the evil intentions of “the rich” who conspire constantly to make everyone else poorer and destroy the world. Wisconsin and America “are not broke” because there are still some rich people who could pay more taxes. No matter that they’re already paying most of our federal income taxes. No matter that, according to an article on CNBC’s web site: “[S]ocial welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries [in America] this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960” Who do they suppose is paying for all that?Hope this isn't a Wisconsin teacher

Michael Moore and Barack Obama, both millionaires, know how much money we’re all supposed to have. They know how much is enough, how much is too much, and what amount each of us deserves. They would use government to take wealth away from “the rich” and fix everything for everybody so we can all live happily ever after driving our Chevy Volts and plugging them in every thirty miles.

Hang on America. The journey to the Big Green Paradise is going to be expensive and if you’re not broke yet, you soon will be.

The Laptop Is Mightier Than The Tank

2011-03-02T05:54:00.000-05:00

If the pen is mightier than the sword, the laptop is approaching omnipotence. Instantaneous flow of information changes our world so fast it’s hard to keep up. The power and scope of the internet is enormous and growing. It may have originated with government research decades ago, but it has grown so rapidly because government has had nothing to do with it since. It’s not clear how long that will continue though because we’re witnessing how vulnerable governments are around the world when citizens are informed. Their control over what citizens know or don’t know is diminishing fast.And it’s not just in the Middle East. Two years ago at this time, nobody in the United States ever heard of the Tea Party, but in about eighteen months it virtually took over the US House of Representatives. The United States government, however, is not so vulnerable compared to middle eastern dictatorships. Thanks to the First Amendment, we’ve always had a free press. Americans have been as informed as they wanted to be and our media has tended to keep government relatively honest throughout most of our history. Ours is a government designed to be responsive to the will of its citizenry - especially the US House of Representatives and state houses.

Here the internet threatens the mainstream media, which has become entrenched and complacent with a profound left-of-center bias. Lately, they have tended to protect politicians who share their political perspective, like Bill Clinton and the current White House resident. After wielding their power to depict George W. Bush as a moron and anointing his successor, Barack Obama, as a savior, the mainstream media ignored the Tea Party movement for about six months, then tried to portray it as an angry mob. It grew anyway, however, because the MSM no longer controls what the public knows or doesn’t know.

The New York Times’ motto has been: “All the news that’s fit to print” - the news its editors believed was fit to propagate, that is. Every evening, the alphabet networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasted pretty much what the Times printed on its front page - no more and no less. Today, however, people can find out whatever they want online and they do. They can also spread that information around to their friends and associates via email and social networks.

So, when Democrat congresspeople went home to their districts in the summer of 2009 and conducted “town hall” gatherings as they always had, they didn’t find the usual sleepy meetings where they could shake hands and renew acquaintances. Citizens had informed themselves about President Obama’s proposed health care bill and they asked questions the representatives could not answer. They knew more about the bill than their representatives did. They recorded congressional ignorance on video and put it on Youtube where it “went viral” as the expression goes, and most of those congresspeople were voted out last November in a conservative, Tea Party tsunami.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi never knew what hit her. She’d heard about the crowds her minions were encountering in their home districts back in 2009. She sensed how nervous they were too, but she insisted those crowds did not represent a grass-roots uprising of concerned citizens as her fellow Democrats suspected. She called the boisterous, town-hall gatherings “astroturf” as if they were rent-a-crowds ginned up by Republicans. Not recognizing that a new political phenomenon was emerging, she thought it was politics as usual and rammed Obamacare through her chamber. She found how wrong her assessment had been when she became the former Speaker of the House.

And it’s not just Congress. The Tea Party voted out governors and state legislatures across America and the new ones have started cutting government in formerly-Democratic enclaves like Wisconsin. The Democrats’ core constituencies - bloated, overpaid, arrogant, out-of-touch government unions are on the ropes and getting pummeled. Union demonstrators are the “astroturf” Pelosi thought she was seeing two years ago. Unions turned out their troops in Wisconsin, Indiana and elsewhere to protest state budget cuts and they were getting paid to do so by taxpayers. Public-sector parasites called in sick at their schools and civil service jobs and had tantrums at state capitols - hoping to keep the taxpayer money-spigot flowing.

Tea Party taxpayers showed up to counter-protest at their own expense. They paid to be there and realized that they were paying for the other side to be there too. They were even paying for the publicly-funded doctors who wrote phony sick notes to shield teachers from accountability in their districts.

Thanks to the internet, the Tea Party understood that they were funding public employees who don’t work as hard as they do, who have more job security than they do, who make more money than they do, who have a better medical plan than they do, who have more generous pension benefits than they do, and who pay less for it all than they do. President Obama supports his public-employee-union constituents and the mainstream media depicts them as sympathetically as possible, but it’s not working the way it used to. Citizens aren’t buying it. Why? They have their own sources of information now.

Old political play books have to be re-written everywhere. The internet is changing everything. The laptop is king.

Are We Going To Win This War?

2011-02-23T08:53:00.000-05:00

We’re at war. Our enemy is radical Islam. It's the aggressor and its goal is to put the world under Sharia Law. Its biggest obstacle is the United States of America because we are the epitome of Western Civilization. Our goal is to defeat radical Islam.

“Are we going to win this war?”

That critical question was asked by someone from the audience at a panel discussion called “The Sharia Challenge in the West,” I attended two weeks ago at the three-day CPAC 2011 (Conservative Political Action Conference). The panel of experts included former CIA Director James Woolsey; former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy who successfully prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombers in 1993; Clifford May - president of the Foundation For the Defense of Democracies; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali - one of the most courageous people alive.

“Are we going to win this war?”

None of the panelists answered with an emphatic “Yes” and that depressed me, even if it didn’t surprise me. Each indicated we could win, but whether we will or not depends on how much Americans want to win. That, unfortunately, is still an open question.Andrew McCarthy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali at CPAC 2011

Panelist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has the most to lose if we don’t win because she’s already marked for death by our enemy. She wrote the script for “Submission,” a movie directed by Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and grand-nephew of the famous Dutch painter. “Submission” criticized Islam for sanctioning abuse of women. Both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh were threatened with death if they released it, but they did so anyway.

Shortly after, in broad daylight on the streets of Amsterdam, a Muslim immigrant shot Van Gogh eight times, cut his throat, and pinned a note to his torso with a dagger, saying Hirsi Ali was next. Ever since, she’s been under armed guard 24-7-365. Even though she was an elected member of Dutch Parliament, her government has balked about paying to defend her. She moved to the United States and accepted a fellowship with the American Enterprise Institute. Her security is now paid for privately.

“Are we going to win this war?”

The question lingered in the air. Hirsi Ali said the way to win is to “offer an alternative vision,” and I couldn’t agree more strongly. Western Civilization is itself an alternative vision, but our universities and our media are dominated by liberals who blame it for the world’s ills. American colleges and universities are eliminating western civilization courses. And, The Muslim Brotherhood’s goal is to “bring down western civilization from within,” (If you hit this link, scroll down for the English translation). The American left (including many in the Obama Administration) supports the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring, Hamas. Ramsay Clark, Bill Ayers, Code Pink, and A.N.S.W.E.R. tried to bring aid to Hamas by breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza last year. The American Left abhors Western Civilization and cooperates with the Muslim Brotherhood to bring it down. “The way you fight this thing is to expose it,” said panelist Andrew McCarthy. Trouble is, leftists dominating our universities shout down speakers who try to expose it. Sharia is Islamic law. Under it, women cannot go out in public unless accompanied by a male relative. Thieves get their hands cut off. Adulterers and homosexuals are stoned to death. If you reject Islam, you’re killed. A woman’s testimony in legal issues is worth half that of a man.

The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is:

Allah is our objective.
The Prophet is our leader.
 Quran [Sharia] is our law.
 Jihad [holy war] is our way.
 Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

Our enemies are anxious to die for their cause. Millions are brainwashed from birth as was Ayaan Hirsi Ali growing up in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. She said: “Their paradigm is a paradigm of death. That is their core vulnerability. It is a core of death. You defeat it by pushing a core of life.”She’s right of course. We need a massive propaganda campaign to expose Sharia Law and the theist totalitarianism of radical Islam for the dark-age depravity it is. We must contrast our enemy’s vision with the values of our constitutional democracy embodied in The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of Rights.

“We’ve inhibited ourselves,” said Hirsi Ali. “We’re not speaking out enough,” because too many of us have been indoctrinated with multicultural political correctness. “If they defeat us,” she added, “it’s because of our lack of confidence.”Right again. As our leftist media and our leftist universities continue their indoctrination, fewer and fewer Americans understand that our republic is the summit of civilization. Many won’t ever realize that unless we lose it. Then they’ll find out the hard way, but the rest of us need to witness confidently while there’s still time. We need a president who will celebrate Western Civilization, not apologize for it, who will call our enemy by its names: Radical Islam, Sharia, and jihad. We need a president who will champion American exceptionalism, who will foster patriotism in every American and proclaim the United States as the greatest country in the history of the world - because it is.

European leaders including Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, and the UK’s David Cameron are finally declaring that leftist moonbat multiculturalism is a total failure. As columnist Pat Buchanan puts it: “Only in Canada and the U.S., it seems, is the issue still in dispute.”CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) will, no doubt, scream “Islamophobia!” But, as panelist James Woolsey put it: “If you’re opposed to the beating of women and the killing of apostates, you are not an Islamophobe.”

Please ponder this: How can we expect to defeat our enemy if we’re unwilling even to offend him?