Noticing Things

I know I’m getting old when I remember multiple incarnations of a fashion trend. High, up-to-the-knee leather boots on women are popular again for the third time. My sisters and most other women wore them in the sixties. They were ubiquitous again in the eighties and nineties - way back in the 20th century. Now in winter, 2014, I’m seeing them again. They've never gone out of fashion in the sado-masochist community, I learned while doing research for this column. Evidently leather and arousal go together for a lot of people. Now I'll have to add that to the long list of the things I've never understood.

Staying in Lovell full-time, I didn’t notice fashion trends much. Clothing items in a rural area with harsh winters tend toward the utilitarian. I own two pairs of leather construction boots that I treat with waterproofing several times a year. One goes just above my ankles for walking in woods and fields as well as muddy or sandy areas or in light snow. The other pair goes halfway up my calf and those are good for deep snow or walking through heavy brush. My wife almost never wears boots. She might own a pair, but maybe not. She prefers sneakers and she doesn’t accompany me when I’m in the brush or deep snow. Nobody does, now that I think about it, but I digress.

Lately I’m spending a couple of days a week in the Portland area. There I can perceive style trends seldom apparent in Lovell. The other day I cut through Macy’s on my way to the Apple Store in the Maine Mall because it was raining. That took me through the men’s clothing department and I noticed the mannequins were wearing shirts with the collars up. Back in the 1980s, my fashion-addicted students always wore them that way. The mannequins were dressed in two layers of shirts and both collars were up. Perhaps this was fashionable during some other period of my lifetime and I didn’t notice. My wife says I don’t notice a lot of things going on around me and she’s probably right because some things just don't interest me. I won’t be conforming to this latest fad though. All my collars are the button-down type. I like those because I wear a string on my glasses that goes around my neck and it gets caught on collars that aren’t buttoned down.

Several times this winter I put my collar up and didn’t even know I looked cool. It’s not likely that anyone noticed though because it was when I was snow-blowing my driveway in a strong wind or going out for a run on a cold morning. Sometimes shelter from the elements and fashion coincide, but not very often.

Women are more fashion-conscious than men - or straight men at least. Always have been. Studying history, I notice relatively wild swings in the way women clothed themselves during the 20th century, which is the period I taught for many years. Men, by contrast, don’t look very different at all except for the presence or absence of whiskers. Business suits or just jacket-and-tie hasn’t varied much and that’s good for my wallet. I don’t own a suit anymore but I do have several jackets, ties and two pairs of dress pants - the flimsy kind that cling to my legs with static electricity during winter. I hate that, and they don’t keep out the wind either. I don’t like wearing them and seldom have to except to weddings and funerals. Unfortunately there have been several of the latter recently.

Wearing shirts outside one’s pants instead of tucked into them has been stylish the past few years I’ve noticed. It was considered sloppy when I was a kid though. My mother was constantly ordering me to tuck my shirt in and it seldom stayed that way for long. So there’s a fad I can endorse heartily - at least until I’m outside in a cold wind.

American Shrinkage

America is in decline economically, militarily, culturally, morally, educationally - choose your area. Guess I could include athletically as well given that, at this writing, we’re number 7 in gold medals at the Winter Olympics so far, but that’s not so important. Economists expect China to pass us in a couple of years. Generals at the Pentagon worry that we may become unable to defend our Pacific allies against China if present trends continue. The cultural, moral and educational pieces are the causes of the economic piece, some would argue, and I’d tend to agree. But then I’m a former history teacher and familiar with what happened to the Roman Empire.

New Hampshire’s Mark Steyn wrote a couple of books about America’s decline. One, “America Alone,” was a warning. The second, “After America,” you could call a post-mortem preview because Steyn isn’t optimistic that our decline can be reversed. I am. I’m not saying a renaissance is around the corner but it’s possible.

Think about how it is with people in decline. I’m not talking about aging, here. I’m talking about becoming stuck in a negative pattern, a moral slide. The seven deadly sins have brought many individuals to ruin but can they bring down a whole society? We’re watching it all around us aren’t we? What makes men and women decide to do the work necessary to turn their lives around? Pain, usually. They look at themselves and don’t like what they see. They don’t like what they’re becoming and they decide to do something. It’s not easy though. We all know that at some level and most of us choose not to do the necessary work. Some try for a little while and give up. Others persist. They do a one-eighty. They completely change course.

Will America? Not without suffering. What form will it take? Hard to say. Some say the stock bubble fed by all that money-printing will burst, wiping out trillions in wealth, including pension funds. Some say inflation will follow with higher interest rates. As government bonds turn over to finance our $18 trillion debt, high interest payments will crowd out other items the federal budget. Entitlements will have to be cut drastically. How will that affect that large percentage of Americans who have become dependent on big government? Will they passively accept cuts? Not likely. Will pain take the form of massive civil unrest? Many Americans expect it to and have prepared to ride it out. Whatever kind of painful reckoning our burgeoning federal government brings down on us, my hope is that a new majority of Americans will seek a return to small government and strict adherence to our constitution after suffering through it.

Maybe our pain will arrive as a foreign policy crisis. Little good will result as long as President Obama and his chief dopelimat John Kerry continue to appease our enemies, abandon our allies, and diminish America’s influence worldwide. The stage is being set for serious shenanigans that could flare up most anywhere because we’re not being taken seriously anymore.  Last week alone, Iran sent warships to our Atlantic coast to send “a message” while our “ally”- Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai freed sixty-five Taliban prisoners who killed Americans!

More dopelimat than diplomat

Steyn makes the case in “After America” that the British Empire’s decline was genteel with the USA coming right in behind them before a power vacuum could form. England, for example, had been powerful enough that it could provide somewhat credible enforcement of its edict outlawing the slave trade in 1807. The trade continued, but it was diminished when slavers had to constantly look over their shoulders for a British warship on the horizon. Up until lately, leaders of rogue countries like Iran and North Korea worried about how America would react to their shenanigans. Now? Not so much. What will follow America? In his book “After America,” Steyn claims it’s basically “After us, the deluge.”

Who will police the world’s oceans? We see what’s been happening off the Horn of Africa after Somalia fell apart. It’s not unlike what Mediterranean shipping experienced under the Barbary Pirates during America’s infancy. That situation spurred President John Adams to build our first navy. Will piracy spread to other oceans and seas as the US Navy shrinks? Who in the world will fill America’s shoes as we pull back? Nobody else is capable.

Malignant regional powers will likely emerge. A Russian-allied, nuclear Iran will be the dominant player in the Middle East. Nuclear North Korea will be China’s pit bull in east Asia. Will Japan will re-arm itself? Will South Korea? Maybe Saudi Arabia will buy some nukes from Pakistan and think about a navy. Israel will do what it must against its existential threat from Iran and it won’t consult us anymore.

Left, Right, Forward March

It’s time again to tell readers that I wasn’t always a conservative-racist-homophobic-misogynist bigot. No. Back in the day people though I was a weirdo-hippie-commie-pinko-progressive. I worked with Saul Alinsky radicals and then for John Kerry’s 1972 congressional campaign. I believed poverty caused crime and people were poor only because other people were rich - and got that way by ripping off the poor. I believed in big government because it was the only way to counteract big corporations who were our real enemies. I believed government worked best when it played Robin Hood and spread the wealth around. If I hadn’t grown up, I’d probably be working for the Democrat Party or writing for some progressive think tank, and I’d likely have voted for Barack Obama twice. Ugh.

But I did grow up twenty years ago, and I’m embarrassed it didn’t happen sooner. What can I say? I was a late bloomer. The process began years earlier, but the transformation wasn’t complete until about 1994. So, I was a diehard lefty from about 1970 to about 1990 or so, then the transition, and for two decades since I’ve been the thoroughly conservative writer with whom you’ve become familiar on these pages. It hasn’t been helpful for my bottom line though. I would likely have progressed farther income-wise if I’d remained a lefty both in education and in writing columns, but I just didn’t believe in that world-view anymore and I couldn’t fake it.

What caused the change? Too many things to include here. My book goes into detail about the transformation and I’m past the halfway point writing it. I should be ready to shop it around to publishers come early summer. It compares how conservative critics treated me when I was a lefty teacher/writer to how lefty critics treated me when I became a conservative teacher/writer. The latter part is much longer though. It goes into depth about how various “tolerant” and “open-minded” liberal individuals and groups tried to get me dismissed or silenced. Book-publishing is a competitive business, but I believe readers will find my book interesting and I’m prepared to give my best effort when selling it to publishers.

As a committed conservative, the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012 discouraged me deeply. Most of my like-minded friends have since given up hope of a conservative resurgence, but I haven’t. “Look,” they say. “The left controls the media, education, the culture (Hollywood), most of the judiciary, the White House, and the Senate. What have we got? Talk Radio, Fox News, some churches, and the House. That’s it.” They’re correct in all that, I know, but I have more faith in the American people. My pessimistic friends expect the fed to keep printing money, government to keep spending it, the debt to keep increasing, more people to go on welfare, fewer workers and businesspeople to pay taxes - and for everything to go on like that until it all collapses. 

That could happen, I admit, and it could happen sooner rather than later. A lot of Americans have become dependent on government programs of one kind or another - even a majority by some counts. There are many “low-information voters” out there and their numbers will increase enormously if amnesty for illegal immigrants passes. It can get discouraging, no doubt, but I guess I believe in the common sense of Americans more than most of my conservative friends. Most of us know as some deep level that it just can’t go on like this. According to Rasmussen, two out of three Americans believe we’ve become too dependent on government. That would have to include people who are themselves dependent to one extent or another, but they know the government gravy train will go off the rails eventually. Not enough of them went to the polls in November of 2012, but that can change in the next two election cycles.

More and more Americans will be discovering this year what was in the Obamacare bill Democrats rammed through in 2009 and they won’t like it. I think it’s safe to say that most already don’t like it, but that number will reach critical mass sometime in 2014 as millions more lose their coverage and are forced onto the exchanges. Others who think they’ve already signed up will discover how much more Obamacare is costing them compared to what they had before its implementation.

We’re in for some economic and foreign policy shocks, but I expect Americans to survive them and smarten up in the process. They’ll learn that, as Margaret Thatcher put it: “The facts of life are conservative,” and vote accordingly. We’re in a deep hole, but I choose to believe we can still climb out of it.

Unemployment And Illegal Immigrants

We’re told our unemployment rate is 7.2 percent. How can that be when there are 92 million Americans who can work but who have dropped out of the work force? Because they’re not counted, we’re told. Why aren’t they counted? They’re unemployed, right? Why aren’t they figured into the unemployment rate? They’re not too old or too young to work. They’re not disabled. They’ve just given up looking for work, but they’re still unemployed. If you ask me, the unemployment rate is really about four times higher than we’re told. It’s really about 30 percent or even higher, isn’t it?

In his State of The Union Address, the president talked about immigration reform and  income inequality. That’s good because they’re closely related, only not the way he tells it. Illegal immigrants have been pouring into the United States - about 12-20 million of them. Half or more work under the table for less than Americans who are on the books are paid. That depresses wages and drives up unemployment, worsening income inequality President Obama claims he wants to fix.

Now the president wants to grant them amnesty - and Republican leaders in Congress agree. More and more illegals are encouraged to sneak in, depressing wages further, and driving up unemployment, creating more income inequality the president claims he doesn’t want.

He says immigration laws are broken and need fixing. Which ones? All of them? Some of them? He won’t say, but he decided not to enforce them. He’s not going to deport illegal aliens who get caught after sneaking in here. Why not? Didn’t he twice swear an oath on the Bible “that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”? The Constitution requires him to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

He isn’t.

It’s not our immigration laws that need reforming. It’s the president that needs reforming. He only enforces laws he likes and ignores laws he doesn’t like. And, he promises to make new laws whenever he feels like it. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he says. He’ll write executive orders. He’ll call people and tell them to ignore existing laws and do things for which there are no laws.

That’s not the way our Constitution was set up, and he taught constitutional law so he should know that. I think he does know it, but he doesn’t like the way the Constitution was set up - so he ignores it and does what he wants.

So far he’s gotten away with it. Will he continue to? Looks like he intends to keep going unless Congress does something. What can Congress do? Only two things: It can defund his initiatives and it can impeach him. They’ve been toying with the first, and rumbling about the second.

Congressman Trey Gowdy

The Constitution says: “The House of Representatives shall…have the sole Power of Impeachment.” If Congress decides to do something, that’s where it would start - specifically, in the House Judiciary Committee where they’re already talking about it. The committee held hearings in December in which Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asked an expert witness if the president, since he was dispensing with laws on immigration, marijuana, and other things, “Could he dispense with election law?”

The witness said no, but Gowdy pressed him: "Why not? If he can suspend mandatory minimum [sentencing laws] and immigration laws, why not election laws?"

"Because we live in a government of laws, and the president is bound to obey them and apply them,” [the witness] answered.

“Well he's not applying the ACA [Obamacare], and he's not applying immigration laws, and he's not applying marijuana laws, and he's not applying mandatory minimum. What's the difference with election laws?" Gowdy said.

Another expert, Georgetown University professor Jonathan Turley, told the committee this: “The president is required to faithfully execute the laws. He's not required to enforce all laws equally or commit the same resources to them, but I believe the president has crossed the constitutional line.”

Things are stirring in the House. It’s controlled by Republicans, but who controls them? Republican leadership obeys corporate leaders like Mark Zuckerberg who want amnesty. The Tea Party Caucus represents small business and ordinary people who oppose amnesty for the reasons I outlined. 

Pat Buchanan

In a recent column, Pat Buchanan claims Republicans lost middle America when they worked with Democrats to pass free-trade laws that shipped American jobs overseas. “While manufacturing sought to move production abroad,” he wrote, “hotels, motels, bars, restaurants, farms and construction companies that could not move abroad also wanted to replace their expensive American workers.” 

How can they do that? Illegal immigration. It’s supported by Democrats because they want more voters dependent on government. Republican leaders support it because big corporate donors own them, just as they do Democrat leaders.

Tea Party Republicans, however, are in their way. They’re the only friends unemployed Americans have right now.

The Smart Phone Challenge

American soldiers liberating German concentration camps in 1945 were horrified. So angry were they at German SS guards who claimed they were following orders, they sometimes turned them over to surviving inmates who administered their own justice. Americans then turned their anger toward civilian Germans living in towns near the camps. They refused to believe civilians who insisted they didn’t know what was happening next to their villages. Some American officers marched those civilians into the camps and forced them to see and smell the horror perpetrated by their government. Believing they had to have known what was taking place right in their midst, our soldiers sometimes forced them to personally carry emaciated, rotting Jewish corpses and drop them into mass burial pits.

Lt. Col. Ed Seiller of Louisville, Kentucky, stands amid a pile of Holocaust victims as he speaks to 200 German civilians who were forced to see the grim conditions of the Landsberg concentration camp, on May 15, 1945. (AP Photo)

Colonel George Lynch of the US Army’s 102nd Infantry addressed German civilians at another death camp and said: “Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither - it is the responsibility of the German people . . .”

Citizens of Ludwigslust, Germany, inspect a nearby concentration camp under orders of the 82nd Airborne Division on May 6, 1945. Bodies of victims of German prison camps were found dumped in pits in yard, one pit containing  300 bodies.

Though I wasn’t born until six years later, I believe I understand how those Americans felt. During the Dr. Kermit Gosnell murder trial last year in Philadelphia, horrific images of another holocaust were displayed in court. Numerous photos of fully-developed babies born crying in Gosnell’s clinic were systematically murdered. Clinic workers said there were hundreds. Lately I feel that it’s becoming necessary to not just tell my fellow Americans, but to show them what abortion actually is, the dismembering and poisoning of babies in the womb.

Evidence at Gosnell Trial. Moton worked there.

The Gosnell trial photos were comparable to the images shown during the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Those were very closely covered by our media (including Walter Cronkite) back in 1945. Our mainstream media of today, however, completely ignored the Gosnell trial for over a month, while I wrote extensively about it here. Like German civilians who so outraged our soldiers, Americans seem ignorant of what is going on right in their midst as well. Abuses by Gosnell were reported to Pennsylvania authorities over and over for decades, but state officials ignored them all until police raided the clinic looking for drugs. The horrors they discovered there sickened them just as much as the death camps sickened our soldiers in 1945.

Reserved seats for media at Gosnell trial

The Gosnell trial seems to have had little effect on Americans in Houston though. Months after Dr. Gosnell was convicted of murder, a grand jury there refused to indict abortionist Dr. Douglas Karpen for twisting the heads off of babies born alive after failed late-term abortions. It listened to eye-witness testimony from three Houston clinic workers who had reported Karpen. They even saw photos of dead babies those workers took using their cell phones. Have Americans changed somehow? Have we become inured to horror? How did we lose our capacity for outrage?

In a recent fundraising letter, the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee claims Republicans who oppose abortion are “revolting.” New York’s Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo thinks people against abortion should get out of New York: “[T]hese extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York . . .” he said last week.

The real war on women

In preparation of the 2014 election, Democrats are ramping up their claims that conservatives who oppose abortion are “Waging War on Women”. That’s brazen considering that preserving abortion is the biggest single issue in the Democrat Party platform, and considering that half the 55 million babies slaughtered since Roe V Wade in 1973 were girls who would have grown into women.

41st Annual March For Life last week

While thousands of young Americans marched against abortion in sub-zero wind chills in Washington DC last week in the 41st Annual March For Life, President Obama praised Roe V Wade in a speech in which he never uttered the word “abortion.” The feminist group that used to call itself the “National Abortion Rights Action League” changed it’s name to NARAL, evidently not wishing to include the word “abortion.” Now it calls itself “NARAL Pro-Choice America” to further distance itself.

They’re not “abortion” rights anymore. They’re “reproductive rights.” Gosnell called his charnel house “The Women’s Medical Society.” For Democrats today, abortion is not revolting. Rather, people who oppose abortion are revolting. Arguing that abortion is necessary for women to have an active sex life, a guest on MSNBC said about pro life activists: “Their sex lives are so miserable that they’re going to do everything in their power to just beat the drum of repression.” 

Now imagine how American soldiers would have reacted in 1945 if German civilians were to have said something like: “Personally I’m opposed to the mass murder of Jews, but I wouldn’t interfere with someone else’s choice to kill them.”

Nazis sickened by pictures at their trial

The next time someone tells you that about abortion, take out your smart phone and challenge them to look at pictures of what an aborted baby looks like.

Just Another Rock? Nope

Rocks interest me. Always have. One I picked up last spring from a banking that led down to Willard Beach in South Portland has been in the pocket of the fleece I was wearing ever since. It’s very familiar to me now because I feel it every time I put that fleece on. My thumb goes carefully across its sharp edge, just as one might feel the edge of a sharp knife. The rest of the stone fits my thumb and index finger fairly comfortably - just as I believe it fit into the hand of at least one other person hundreds - perhaps thousands of years ago. It’s a prehistoric tool. It isn’t a JAR - “Just Another Rock” - in the parlance of some Maine archaeologists with whom I’ve worked.

A little of Fort Preble and Portland Harbor in upper right

Waves from winter storms had worn the banking away and exposed strata in an area I knew had been settled very early by some of the first British colonists in Maine. Just above the bank is a cemetery established in 1658, which is on the campus of Southern Maine Community College now. It was March, and thick vegetation that grows there in summer hadn’t sprouted yet, so I climbed up for a close look. Just beneath the turf were late-20th-century artifacts like detachable pop tops from aluminum cans. Old enough to remember those? I am. Layers below that showed pieces of red brick that could have gone back from the 20th to the 17th century. There were pieces to old ceramic dinner plates and crockery interspersed with them, so I concentrated on the layers below. I was looking for prehistoric stone artifacts.

Shipping channel just off Willard Beach

Certain kinds of stone were favored by prehistoric Americans and quartz was one. It’s the most difficult stone to shape into a useful tool by knapping - that method of striking that chips off pieces in predictable ways - but quartz will hold an edge better than others. It’s very hard, and it’s ubiquitous in Maine. There are seams of quartz in the metamorphic sedimentary rock one sees all along Maine’s coast, so when I saw a small piece sticking out of the bank, I picked it up right away. Unlike jasper and rhyolite and flint, which are stones also favored by Maine’s early inhabitants, white quartz doesn’t change appearance much from weathering. Even very old pieces are fairly easy to recognize.

White quartz outcropping just below the banking

I’ve picked up lots of prehistoric quartz tools in the Fryeburg area along the Saco River over the years, but this was the first I’d found in the Portland environs. There are plenty of potential sites to explore in that area, but there’s been so much building and re-building over almost four centuries of the historical era that finding prehistoric artifacts is much more difficult. I’ve found artifacts further up Maine’s coast where there’s been very little development. It’s relatively easy to find small shell heaps above the high tide marks further east just by walking along - if you know what to look for. My wife usually accompanies me  at such times and she’s learned to be patient. She likes to pick up shells and rocks with visual appeal while I search for artifacts. I like those pretty rocks too, but they don’t interest me nearly as much as stone worked by prehistoric Americans.

Southern Maine Community College last summer

Some of you looking my piece of quartz may think: “No. That’s just another rock.” When as a kid I saw pictures of similar artifacts in National Geographic - picked up by archaeologists who claimed they were tools. I was skeptical too. They looked like ordinary rocks. After a few years of studying knapping techniques and some field work, however, I’m better at distinguishing an artifact from a “JAR.” When walking near a river or beach these days, I’m always picking up stones and looking them over. When I find a stone artifact, I imagine the landscape as it looked when the last human being handled it.

Scooped up by a dragger off Bass Harbor (photo by Joe Kelly, University of Maine)

It’s somewhat frustrating, however, when I realize that most of the earliest prehistoric sites along Maine’s coast are very likely underwater now. Sea levels were much lower 12 thousand years ago when the last glaciers melted away from Maine and the people who were probably Maine’s earliest inhabitants likely gathered their seafood along a coastline that is now deeply submerged. Draggers occasionally bring up stone tools from the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere along America’s Atlantic coast. Exploring those sites would be much more problematic though, so I guess I’ll stay on dry land when pursuing my avocation - looking for prehistoric stone artifacts.

King Turning Over In His Grave

If you’re a public school teacher and you’re white, you’re probably a tool of institutional racism and you need to be re-educated. Don’t fret though. The Obama Administration is issuing guidelines that will help you become more conscious of your “whiteness.”

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder cautioned school districts about their “overly zealous disciplinary policies” that, according to an AP story: “lead to a school to prison pipeline that discriminates against minority students.” The guidelines “[tell] schools that they must adhere to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don’t.”

Actually though, they’re telling schools they must do just the opposite of [adhering] to the principle of fairness and equity. They’re telling schools to judge students by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. Martin Luther King would be appalled.

Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been intimidating schools, I mean “gathering data” for a while now and they claim that: “Although black students made up 15 percent of students in the data collection, they made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.” Neither Holder nor Duncan offer any data evidencing that racial discrimination is what causes the disparity. They assume no one will ask, I guess. To them, the numbers are enough. If blacks are disciplined more, it must be because of racism, not because of their behavior.

Around the country, the school districts being intimidated, I mean, “studied,” have tried kissing up to Holder and Duncan by spending millions re-training teachers to root out their unconscious “institutional racism” and make them conscious of their “white privilege.” According to Williamette Week “Portland Public Schools has [sic] spent millions to help stop racial profiling of students in discipline cases. [but] The problem is getting worse.” Principal Verenice Gutierrez of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Portland said the very mention of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches could be racist, because minority students may not eat them.

I’m not making this up.

Nathan Harnden, writing in “The College Fix,” describes the extensive trainings, staff meetings, classroom observations and other workshops teachers must deal with to change their teaching methods when dealing with minority students. He quotes the “Portland Tribune”: “[T]he first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation - to examine a news article and discuss the ‘white privilege’ it conveys.”

All this comes from a company called “Pacific Education Group,” or “PEG” owned and operated by Glenn Singleton who has become rich by charging school districts huge fees. Like President Obama, Singleton is a disciple of Derrick Bell’s “Critical Race Theory” which purports that something called “systemic racism” permeates white culture. Virtually all us white people are consciously or unconsciously racist, so Singleton, Obama, Holder, and Bell are determined to cure us of it. PEG sends its trainers coast to coast on the taxpayer dime to do so.

Bell: "I live to harass white folks."

I first wrote about “white privilege” seven years ago. My wife received indoctrination while working at Tri-County Mental Health in Bridgton in the 1990s. At least one, and probably several of the student teachers assigned to my classroom was assigned Peggy Macintosh’s 1988 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by the University of Southern Maine as are thousands, perhaps millions of other college students around the country. The 15th Annual White Privilege Conference will be March 26-29 in Madison, Wisconsin. Many, if not most, will attend at taxpayer expense.

In his first major speech after being confirmed as US Attorney General in 2009, Eric Holder said America was a “nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race. This writer would suggest that Mr. Holder is obsessed with it. He threatens “strong action” against schools that suspend black students or turn them over to law enforcement more often then students of any other color. He wants schools to treat disruptive young black males as victims of racism at the hands of teachers insufficiently conscious of their “whiteness.” Black students need “restorative justice” delivered through “courageous conversations” (whatever the heck those are) rather than discipline.

Our race-obsessed Attorney General wants more power over public schools. He wants to reinforce the idea that all black people are victims and ramp up white guilt because that’s what put the Obama Administration, and him, in power. It got Obama reelected and insulates Obama from criticism for destroying our economy, our health-care system, our foreign policy, for spying on the press, and for using the IRS to harass his political enemies. 

Looks like I retired none too soon from my long career in the public schools. There’s no way I would sit through a training session on “white privilege” quietly.

Bondage Dolls and Green Weenies

Up Early

This year I took down the Christmas tree. Usually it’s my wife who decides the season is over and it’s time to move on into the less charming part of our long, New England winter. Granddaughters Claire and Lila were against taking it down, however, and I had to deal with their profounddisapproval during the process. Ten-month-old twins, Henry and Luke, were indifferent. They were content to sit on the living room carpet and watch me as, one by one, they picked up various toys around them and put them into their mouths. They know something really exists only when they experience it orally. Most of what they were tasting were round, painted pieces of wood they removed from a Christmas-tree-shaped pole upon which they had been stacked up. I assume the paint was non-toxic, because they have teeth now and they like to gnaw on things. The toy was labeled “Melissa and Doug,” whom I assume were the designers and manufacturers.

Henry and Luke

Which brings me to the two “Melissa and Doug Annie 12-inch Drink and Wet” dolls which Santa Claus put under the tree for Christmas morning. After unwrapping them, Claire and Lila asked their grandmother to get them out of the box they came in. She fumbled with one for a several minutes and then handed it to me, saying “I can’t do this. Can you?” I took it, wondering how difficult could it be to take a doll out of a box. It turned out to be the hardest thing I had to do all day.

The peeing dolls were bound inside their little prison boxes to prevent any possibility of escape unless industrial-grade extraction tools were utilized. Each sitting doll was bound hand, foot and neck by plastic-coated steel wire. I have fairly strong fingers, but I couldn’t fully un-twist even one of the sadistic bonds that held the poor doll in place. I went to the kitchen drawer for some wire-cutters, but they weren’t sufficient either. I had to go out to the garage for the bigger ones and then it was hard to avoid cutting off the dolls hands as I severed the wire. “What’s taking you so long?” my wife hollered from the living room as I was cussing out Melissa and Doug and thinking they must be clandestine bondage fetishists. Thankfully, I don’t think Claire or Lila heard me. Later I saw reviews of the peeing doll on Amazon:

It is really precious BUT I almost lost my religion trying to get it out of the box!!! Please tell me what awful thing happened in your childhood that you would package your toys in such a horrendous, frustrating way!!! Seriously! I broke nails, bled, and cursed trying to undo all the "tie downs" before I finally freed her of her prison of a box! Please lighten up a bit. There has GOT to be a better method! 

Watching television news later that day, I saw that a ship was stuck in Antarctic ice and a Chinese ice-breaker was trying to rescue it. It was very cold in Maine Christmas Day and I felt sorry for the passengers. It wasn’t until a week later that I learned the ice-bound ship was on an expedition to observe the effects of “human-caused” climate change. That’s what the Greenies used to call “human-caused global warming” until the globe ceased warming after fifteen years of increasing carbon in the atmosphere. As I write this, my thermometer is struggling to get above zero in midday, making me wish we humans actually could cause global warming. I’d actually lobby for it if I didn’t know what a mass-hysterical scam it was.

Very Cold at Two Lights State Park - Cape Elizabeth Maine in 2014

Newsbusters reported that 96% of coverage by the mainstream media networks neglected to mention the actual purpose of the ice-bound expedition when reporting the story. As of January 3rd, they continued to keep the mission’s objective a secret. Too embarrassing for the liberal-biased networks, I guess, especially after they’ve spent more than a decade beating the “climate change” the drum for environmental neurotics. After the Chinese icebreaker also got stuck six miles from the original Greenie-weenie ship, they sent two more icebreakers, so the story has enough legs to bring it well into 2014. Wonder if they’ll ever say what the ship was actually doing down there. I doubt it.

Enviroweenies in La-La Land

Somehow I don’t feel bad for those climate-change-kool-aid-drinking Greenies anymore. I feel bad for the rest of America still caught up in their pseudo-scientific, mass hysteria.

UPDATE
The Enviroweenies pictured above were rescued by helicopter yesterday. Today, however, the ship that deployed the rescue helicopter is itself stuck in the ice. I wonder if they're still dancing. I wonder if the mainstream media will report on what their mission was now.