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#REDFORED = #RESIST

Teachers rally outside the state Capitol for the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 3, 2018. Reuters

The recent teacher strikes – mostly in “red” (i.e., Conservative) states – are intriguing. What started out as a cause to boost the pay of truly underpaid teachers in West Virginia has metastasized into Occupy Wall Street, something under the rubric #redfored. In truth, I think that the lefty hive is being ginned up as the Supreme Court deliberates its decision in Janus vs. AFSCME. If Janus wins, the cushy power relationships of public employee unions will be deflated. But here’s the big scoop from the ruckus: government unions are lefty enterprises.

PHOENIX, AZ – APRIL 26: Arizona teachers chant in support of the #REDforED movement as they walk through downtown Phoenix on their way to the State Capitol on April 26, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona.  (Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images)

It’s a familiar script. Trump gets elected and hyperventilation replaces deliberation – mostly on the left but also in some extreme precincts on the right. The swarming extends everywhere the left has a stranglehold. The only surprise to me is the length of time it took for the education blob to catch on.

What has the adoption of California-style taxes to do with teacher pocketbook issues? Clearly, for the firebrands, simply raising pay is too vanilla. The slogan is bloated to include lefty planks like the adoption of the progressive tax nightmare and dolloping layers of bureaucracy on the schools. Poor pay was simply the vehicle to swarm the hive and cloak the wolf in a pleasant disguise.

Well, it took some time but the genus Ovis aries (sheep) costume was outed. Now the “#redfored” is no different from “#resist”, “Bernie Sanders for president”, or Occupy … [fill in the blank].

RogerG

* Check out “Teacher strikes morph from pocketbook clash to partisan street theater”, Frederick M. Hess, Education Next, AEI, 5/8/2018,  http://www.aei.org/publication/teacher-strikes-morph-from-pocketbook-clash-to-partisan-street-theater/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjM1pERXhabUZsWVRBNSIsInQiOiJzeFpQdkVWblBGaExlMGhtQnFwTFB4dEd4VmlDbFBxYWdZSVF5QXJoQVVzNDdYK3J3bDNEb0xycDBHT2dJOWUzVGI5Rjh1QTdIOU9mMWhDYllmWWFodVpneWxPNXhWSUo5T0VtWGZsK3BGSGtIV2ordDBHM0ZqcVhiVUxvSnhyYiJ9

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Equality Run Amok

International Women’s Day protest march in Sydney, March 2017.

I can’t help noticing it. One of the crazes of our times is the attempt to force equality in almost all its guises, a hell-bent exercise in the ludicrous and insane. While flitting about online this morning, even as I was booting up, the Windows 10 startup pic was graffitied with reminders of female underrepresentation in technology and inventions. And, of course, they announce what Microsoft is doing to even the score … as if “underrepresentation” was enough to embark on a major campaign to redirect the company’s resources. The tendentiousness of it is astounding.

And this coming on the heels of reading Heather McDonald’s speech at Hillsdale College in “Imprimis”.* Her thesis is the danger of “#MeToo” morphing into a jihad (my words). She recounts the orchestrated shaming that would make the Khmer Rouge proud. In America’s boardrooms, professional associations, and cultural centers, the suits are running to the hills with proclamations of their own efforts to even the score.

Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute.

Click on the link on the wallpaper and you’re sent to Microsoft’s “#MakeWhatsNext Patent Program” site. Hiding beneath the surface of these “programs” is a false premise: We are all the same and chromosomes are completely irrelevant. For these commissars, chromosomes should be put on a par with melanin. They assert that what is true for skin tone must be true for chromosomal development from blastocyte on. Really!

And to think that none of this matters to those caught up in the craze. Put your mind to imagining the consequences when a country tries to live a lie. No good will come of it.

Stress, anxiety, and chronic dissatisfaction may await as some women torture themselves to live a lie.

RogerG

* Please read “The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement”, Heather McDonald, Imprimis, April 2018, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-negative-impact-of-the-metoo-movement/?appeal_code=MK418EM15&utm_campaign=imprimis&utm_source=housefile&utm_medium=email&utm_content=april_2018_metoo&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–nx1IRYEsOfVpXhXSv_00N_BJDcN0RdDFM962GZJdXztH6TfJuTDMLRifXm7zued-LhNvNqUTlHHNRgIb5FxjnDohB4Q&_hsmi=62504373

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Our Failing Schools and the Second Amendment

The wake of the Parkland school shooting brought to mind a little-known incident from my teaching days (retired in 2015). As the Social Science Department chair in my high school, and with the responsibility for making requests for new and updated textbooks, I noticed a subtle change in one commonly available supplemental and historical document: the English Bill of Rights. An older version of the piece included the following clause: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence [sic] suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law”. The newer form of the document had it removed. Why? I was suspicious then and still am.

The English Bill of Rights of 1689.

I have always understood the opposition to the Second Amendment to be part ideological and part cultural – maybe mostly cultural. I suspected that a bias due to the ascendancy of the values and beliefs of a narrow subset of our population was at work, for the most part.

An eatery in NYC’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Putting the best face on the item’s exclusion, the abridging of the document caused the publishers (Holt McDougal) to weed out those things considered less important. Still, though, that’s just a roundabout way to knowingly or unknowingly display the same prejudice.

Children will go through life not understanding the full connection of the English experience and our Constitutional legacy, particularly the parts that are embarrassing to our self-anointed cultural potentates. The result is profound ignorance about our most cherished natural rights, and the susceptibility to end up like David Hogg (made famous by the Parkland shooting) and other young and eager enthusiasts for gun control.

David Hogg at the March for Our Lives this past March 2018.

Let’s set the record the straight: (1) the “militia” was all able-bodied men with the expectation that they be privately armed, and correspondingly not an organ of the government but part of civil society; (2) the English Civil War was as much a religious as political affair; (3) Charles I, in an attempt to squash religious and political dissent, called out the militia with their best private weapons and then quickly disarmed them; (4) privately-owned weapons were long held to be an inherent right of Englishmen for defense from threats to personal safety and tyranny; and (5) a great majority of the people who originally settled here carried this legacy with them to the new world. The right to bear arms is clearly an individual right – indeed, a “natural right” – as based on the words’ clear meaning to the amendment’s authors and the history leading up to its inclusion in our Constitution.

Modern reenactor of a 17th century English militiaman.
Pre-revolution Virginian militiaman.

It’s a lesson increasingly lost on successive generations brought up on the progressives’ love-state fetish. The deficiency is built into the curriculum and nearly everything the teachers were taught. Ignorance begets ignorance … and poorly informed 17-year-old agitators.

RogerG

** Thanks to The Avalon Project of Yale Law School for preserving our cultural inheritance: “English Bill of Rights 1689”,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp .

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Make-Believe and Its Costs

Student fights at West High School, Bakersfield, Ca., 3/15/2017.

Today, there seems to be a concerted effort to make-believe everyone is the same, not just equal: among the sexes, genders (?), racial and ethnic groups, social classes, everyone. Of course, this is a flagrant contradiction to multiculturalism’s worship of differences. But, pushing the incoherence aside is the pogrom against any real or imagined bigotries. It takes the form of a jihad to eradicate “disparate impact” – or the presence of unequal outcomes. If we are more than equal, but the same, too many of one group in an unsavory category is said to be proof of amorphous and shadowy forces of bigotry. The only problem: It’s all nonsense and, when implemented, a hot mess.

Recently, the Kern High School District in California was sued by the Dolores Huerte Foundation for a negative “disparate impact” in its discipline policies. Too many minorities were said to be kicked out of school. Now, in caving in to a judicial shakedown, the District implemented PBIS. Don’t fret over its meaning. It can be translated to mean more mothering for hellions. Too bad if you’re a good student or well-meaning teacher.

Bakersfield High School teachers expressing their fear and dismay:

Here’s a clip of fights at neighboring West High School from last year:

You see, hellions aren’t evenly distributed in a population any more than the social conditions that give to their rise.

Read the article: “‘Out of Control’: Teachers describe KHSD schools after anti-discrimination settlement”, Jeff Platt, Eyewitness News staff, BakersfieldNow.com, http://bakersfieldnow.com/…/out-of-control-teachers-describ….

RogerG

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Flash: Greater Freedom and More Opportunities for Women Reduces Likelihood of Women in STEM — U. of Missouri Study

STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. And, if given freedom of choice and abundant opportunities, more women prefer other fields. Conversely, straitjacketing women through poverty, and cultural and legal devices, ironically means more STEM women (More or less is a percentage of a study population). The upshot: depressed countries meet the modern feminist ideal more than free, open, and prosperous ones. So, should we adopt the Sub-Saharan African model of social and economic organization to boost our female STEM numbers? And/or, should we continue our efforts to artificially construct the new woman according to recent Hollywood stereotypes?

Check out the articles:
** “Countries with greater gender equality have lower percentages of female STEM graduates MU study finds”, News Bureau, U. of Missouri, 2/14/2018, https://munews.missouri.edu/…/0214-countries-with-greater-…/
** A good synthesis: “Gender equality paradox: fewer women in developed nations go after STEM degrees”, Philip Perry, BigThink, 3/1/2018, http://bigthink.com/…/the-downside-to-greater-gender-equali…

RogerG

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Colossal Ignorance Abounds

Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).

Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC

Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.

Hunter with a bolt-action rifle.
Sighting-in an AK-47.

Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.

Top: Browning semi-auto hunting rifle. Bottom: AR-15.

I guess that we should expect a news anchor to be infatuated with cosmetics.

RogerG

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CNN’s Little Red Guards

SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND – FEBRUARY 21: Students from Montgomery Blair High School march down Colesville Road in support of gun reform legislation February 21, 2018 in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution.

CNN’s townhall (2/21/2018) on guns was staged in Broward County, the scene of the shooting, and also a Democrat bastion in a state trending Republican. Remember, Al Gore tried to cherry pick friendly counties like Broward County for never-ending recounts for manufacturing votes to reverse his loss of Florida in the 2000 election, only to be stopped by the Supreme Court.

Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot, 25 November 2000, at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  AFP PHOTO/RHONA WISE / AFP / RHONA WISE (Photo credit should read RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)

On 2/21, CNN conducted a theatrical display of ritual humiliation reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards during the weighty days of the Cultural Revolution. Go view CNN’s tape of their event and compare it to this 7-minute exhibit of rage, youthful exuberance, and inhumanity from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Today’s young firebrands, in their bullying antics towards Southern statues and the NRA/guns, has striking similarities to Red Guard attacks on bourgeois decadence and, of course, statues.

Toppling a statue in Durham, NC.

We don’t have to look far into the pages of history for evidence of adolescent cruelty. Movements built around coercive utopias have frequently found a receptive audience among the young. Italy’s Fascist Party youth, the National Socialist Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Young Pioneers, Mao’s Red Guards, Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys (Hungarian Soviet Republlic, 1919) show the capacity for enthusiastic intolerance among the young. The spectacle of orchestrated hate depicted on CNN is true to form.

Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys, the enforcers of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.

We must understand these things for what they are. They are not forums for calm deliberation, but devolve into kangaroo courts for compulsory humiliation. Let’s stop the pretense of calling it a “townhall”.

RogerG

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Can’t Question a 17-year-old?

!7-year-old David Hogg

David Hogg has thrust himself into the difficult gun control debate. There’s a reason for the age distinction of minority/majority in law. There’s a reason for the separate existence of juvenile courts. There’s a reason for the determination of minors to be not fully capable in law of “consent”. It’s the same reason they cannot be a representative, senator, or president. Mental immaturity, raging hormones, and victim status aren’t qualifications for the seat of Solomon.

Hogg has been treated with “kid” gloves (pun intended) as he has thrust himself onto the public stage. His opinions have the depth of reasoning of a kid’s Christmas wish list. His demands should be confronted and dispatched, not indulged. There’s too much at stake for millions of others to let rantings go unanswered.

David, you wanted a debate; now you should get it.

RogerG

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Now, What To Do After Parkland?

Nikolas Cruz and Douglas Stoneman High School on the day opf the shooting spree, 2/14/2018.
Missoula, Mt., student protest against guns, 2/21/2018.

The children’s marches in the wake of Douglas Stoneman High School shooting elicit gut-wrenching sympathy for them. Let the aggrieved have their mourning. But the traumatized may not be a proper catalyst for good public policy. It’s a reason for the elevation of the issue, not the dictate for a particular approach … if any.

Parents wait for news after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Joel Auerbach

I’m loathe to raise the matter as many are in the grips of great sadness. Nonetheless, many are exploiting the event to pursue their own pet causes. They must be confronted before trauma is allowed to escalate into bad policy.

Protest at the Florida State Capitol building on February 21.

Reasonable analysis of mass school shootings goes way beyond guns. We have created a breeding ground for alienated and disconnected young males. Girls infrequently appear on the lists of mass killers and suicide bombers. What’s happening to our young men?

Elliot Rodger, Dylann Roof, and Adam Lanza (l to r).

A toxic culture permeates: fatherless homes, the decline in traditional spirituality, a biased and incomplete education, the pervasive emotional detachment of a digital world, absentee parents, a girls-girls-girls contemporary obsession to the exclusion of boys, an emphasis on extreme behavior in pop culture, etc., etc. I could go on, but it is a culture of our own making.

Next, we have been softened to accepting state aggrandizement. This happenstance is partly a product of urban lifestyles, of a large part of the population acclimated to a coddling government. It goes further, though. Our schools propagate the benign state. As a result, our discussion is limited to the different ways to expand the powers of the state.

Progressivism’s view of government is approvingly taught in our classrooms (an advanced placement U.S. History teacher at Appomattox High School).

Lost in the debate is the reality of government’s potential for great malevolence and huge waste. “Civil servants” can be what Churchill was alleged to say of them: they can be neither civil nor servants. Whether a person is employed by the state or elsewhere, deep down we are the same, with all our flaws.

More waiting periods, gun bans, gun registrations, and liability regs will not repeal human nature, will not reorient the disoriented, or do anything to create an informed citizenry in dealing with traumatic situations. Until we get a handle on our toxic culture, all the state embellishments will be worse than wishful thinking.

What to do? First, up-armor the schools to survive in a toxic culture. Next, get parents back into the home and into the kids’ lives. Next, more church-going will help. Next, the relationship between an armed citizenry and a free state must be taught to counter progressivism’s state-love. And more could be done, before we ever get to the assault on “assault weapons” as a realistic option.

How’s that for a laundry list?

RogerG

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Guns and Loony Trump “Nixon-to-China” Demands

Nikolas Cruz being subdued about an hour after the shooting spree.
Students gather at a memorial in Pine Trails Park in Parkland, Fla., in honor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victims. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times).

A school shooting reflexively leads to calls for gun control, and currently for Trump to be a “Nixon-to-China” emissary to the NRA to make gun ownership more difficult. Lost in the noise is whether any of this will do any good, and any suggestion that there be a Pelosi-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby or Schumer-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby. It’s only Trump-to-the-NRA.

This boilerplate, one-sided prescription ran at the top in “Axios AM” for 2/16 by MIke Allen: “1 big thing: Why Trump drags his feet on guns”. According to Allen, a Trump delegation need only go to the NRA. I’m waiting for Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and the rest of the Democratic Party apparatchiks to be envoys to the Brady Campaign. Allen’s blinders don’t seem to allow a place for moderation of gun control zealots in his field of vision.

Probably Allen’s blinders has much to do with the sociopolitical nest that he inhabits. Speaking of sociopolitical nests, we’ve got a national one that goes further to explain the gun violence than anything off the lips of Nancy Pelosi. The straws of the nest include: (1) many no-dad-in-the-home families; (2) insular lives in an obsessively digitized world; (3) a craven fixation on girls, girls, girls that leaves little room for boys – except for Ritalin; (4) the attempt to embed morals through secular means only; (5) the segregation of faith into the home and sanctuary; (6) absentee parents in pursuit of material comforts, etc., etc., etc.

The Dems’ only answer is some form of chant about gun control. If guns were confiscated or regulated and priced out of society, would we be any safer? In other words, would making the whole country into one big soft target be preferable? I doubt it. The preferred method of mayhem would shift to cars, machetes, pressure cookers, box cutter/commercial jets ….

 

Here’s a suggestion: Let’s turn our schools from soft to hard targets. It’s what we might have to do in a culture of our own making.

RogerG