Category Archives: Culture

Culture, Education

GRADUATED CHANGE

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Prudence attended graduation at a well-known college in Boston’s Fenway section recently.  This particular school graduates no chemists, engineers, lawyers or business majors; no biologists, entomologists or astronomers; no materials scientists or agronomists or hydrologists, and no oceanographers.

Their purview is social work, and a healthy dose of “education.”  That is, education B.S. degree-recipients who, I think, they hope will teach the next generation along the lines of ultra-liberals who have been taking over education aggressively for the past 75 years. Fortunately, they sometimes fail and a graduate escapes with her (mostly hers and wannabes, there) internal philosophy intact, her understanding of reality clear, and her intense desire to educate young kids, rather than indoctrinate them, ready to run.  One such is Prudence’s only reason for attending.

Prudence’s eyes were opened, however, to the existence of this and other nests of socialist vipers, who churn out radical “change agents,” as were frequently referenced in the interminable speeches and last-second directives that made not a single reference to God, although the very last instructress managed to say, “… let the Divine …” which was amorphous enough to get through.  That tiny reference was among the last dozen words of last-second directions to the posse of Bachelors and Masters ready to change America.

The otherwise clear, May, day began with breakfast – free food, so to speak, catered in to the College’s Brookline facility.  Being observant was revelationary.  The professors are constantly professing, we noticed.  Tattoos, for example, profess attachment to the odd fascinations running rampant through society where women, sometimes grossly obese versions, have acres of “body art.”  It’s a statement of inclusion… or a test.  After all, if our campus is one of welcoming and inclusion and non-discrimination for students, then it must be for their instructors, too.  See how it works?

There seemed to be a single statement being uttered by a large fraction of both staff and graduates: There is no weirdness on OUR campus – all are welcome.  Prudence has no argument with the “welcom(ing)” part.  In other words, if you are as different and as unusual as you can make yourself, come, attend our college – we’re just as unusual as you!

Every speech underscored the same concepts of challenging the status quo; the difficulty is, today, that the status quo, having grown fairly weird itself, requires ever more strangeness from those who wish to challenge it.  This might explain, in part, the number of strange appearances of students, but it is unnerving to apply the same measure to staff and professors… at least it was to Prudence.

Sexuality is key to both protest and education, it seems.  Prudence needn’t describe sexual appearances and apparent expressions as most are indescribable and likely wide of the target.  But, unusual male-female iterations are more commonplace on college campuses than elsewhere in the world.  Perhaps it’s simply because these are the age groups where “youthful” experimentation is most likely.  Shouldn’t some adults guide these wandering – and wondering – children toward the most appropriate paths of action and belief?

Aren’t we intending to create new adults of our culture and social fabric?  Or is it our purpose to indulge every strange, interruptive feeling and treat it as if it were as valid as reality?  Reality is so restrictive: two genders… huh.  Are we kidding?  I mean, honestly!

Are there any lines a culture shouldn’t cross?  It’s not a trick question.  We used to decry drug use and numerous other forms of debasement.  Why?  Because it makes for a stronger, more nurturing society.

We used to require people to make their own way, no welfare and all the rest.  It inadvertently made for stronger people and children.  Problem free?  Of course not.  Too many fell through the “cracks,” as it were.  Some level of social support was required for simple fairness TO CHILDREN, and civil kindness to the helpless.

We used to require universal education that reinforced moral lessons, some Biblical, without damaging ANYONE, reinforcing shame for bad actions and strengthening the consciences of individuals… and their basic honesty.  These were good, strengthening-of-society kinds of structures.  Phenomenally, we have succumbed not to foreign powers but to our own cleverness, talking ourselves out of our heritage, our very culture, and of shame, itself.

We are so smart.

Murder, for example, now has shades of evil, some not so bad as to require equivalent sanction.  Indeed, abortion-at-will, deemed “murder” by half of the nation, has amorphous codified status and taxation support!  Suicide by drug overdose is a form of murder by drug-pusher, but we, the wealthiest, most sophisticated culture on earth, with more police forces per hectare than any other, has failed steadily for 60 years to clamp down firmly on drug commerce.

Now we are in a race to legalize ever purer and stronger pot despite its risks (there aren’t any, according to pot users) and to arm first responders with Narcan.  We’re smarter than we even realized.

The largest “industry” in the United States is welfare of a thousand titles.  Statists have found that the philosophies of the most rock-ribbed, self-made American stalwarts can be purchased with enough dependency, as recent “conservative” outcries against threats to Medicare makes clear.

The higher education “industry” is nothing if not opportunistic.  With TRILLIONS of dollars flowing from the Federal and state levels, colleges have justified turning out an army of social workers to soak them up.  Here and there people in need are truly helped, but the lion’s share of those dollars goes to the army of concerned, compassionate care-workers and, especially, to the army of administrators who make sure they are not wasting any money.

Somewhere, and here and there, are schools, churches and other institutions that respect and promote the concepts of self-reliance, absolute personal responsibility, honor and sublime integrity.  They must struggle against an onslaught of socialist control of budgets and information.  Is the ultimate success of the ultimate anti-God philosophy certain to overwhelm what made the U. S. great?

That future depends upon the ignorance of a majority of Americans.  How smart did you say we are?

 

Culture, Economics, Governance

When Robots are Rights

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We must, as thinking, contemplative beings at least somewhat concerned about the future, consider the implications of robotics and so-called artificial intelligence: machines that learn. It’s all a matter of large-enough databases and rapid-enough retrieval. So what? you might ask.

Civilization came to be built as it is through an economic reality that forces individual humans to strive for improvement – both personal and financial. That is, at one level or another, life has been tough for most of us, causing each to become stronger in order to be able to adjust one’s surroundings to greater comfort or safety… or both.

In the past century or so we have managed to elevate enough of ourselves to support elaborate industries designed only to entertain us due to growing levels of “leisure” time. That is, modern life for a large fraction of humankind (but not all, certainly) permits complete creation of safe and comfortable living conditions (standards) with about 40 hours of “labor” of very specialized kinds per week, or about 25% of available time.

In fact not even 25% is needed, as many forms of labor provide for weeks of non-work time each year in addition to “holidays,” storm-days, “personal” days, sick days and, increasingly, family and maternity “leave” periods. Politicians and other panderers – advocates and socialists of various stripes – are constant in their demands for more time off for ostensibly “civilized” and crucial purposes. Employers are, after all, mere thieves of workers time and comfort and must not be allowed to earn a profit from their labor, if such dis-allowance is at all possible.

In any case and by whatever fraction of productive employees’ time, businesses must find ways to produce the millions of products and services that they and others need or want in order to create and maintain the kind of safe, comfortable living conditions each desires. And those products must be profitable enough to justify all the investment, risk, work and education that goes in to producing them, delivering them and warranting their quality and usefulness, AND to permit sufficient taxation of both profits and of labor itself, to pay for all of the “public” works and subsidies that politicians think we need – including those that we truly do.

Together we, many of us, understand the multiple contracts and assumptions and personal costs that are enabling lives we like; and we understand, largely, the changes we must each choose to make to have “better” lives and proportions of leisure time. Robots are changing the “contracts” we have made between individuals, companies, governments and ourselves – and we are largely unprepared for the future that they are creating.

Right now the contracts of the economy depend upon parties who have striven to be part of the economy and who have striven to be “good” and “useful” people – most of us, anyway. What each has attained-to is the basis on which each of us judges the other as a qualified member of our society and culture, evaluates him or her as to qualities of charity, kindness and “fairness,” or lacks thereof, and on what his or her productive value is determined.

It is very important to us whether the person we are considering is one who “pulls his or her weight” or, barring genuine disability, “coasts on the work of others.” Is he or she “pulling the wagon” or just “riding?” Like it or not, every one of us needs to grasp these values for the current system to “work.” We understand and agree to abide by the hundreds and thousands of “contracts” that cause society, products, services, profit and pay to function with a net gain of living standards over time for the largest number of our fellow society members.

Are you with me so far?

Here and there, and in growing numbers, people who are employers, which is to say, producers in our economy (“job-creation” being simply a result of profitable productivity), are squeezed by governments – including their legal systems – through taxation and liabilities of increasing types. Customers demand redress and compensation from producers’ profits if anything goes wrong with a product, its delivery or its use, almost regardless of “fault.” Governments need more and more revenue to perform vital deeds and to buy votes from constituents.

To compensate for growing assaults on profits producers must steadily become more productive without raising costs… and this means reducing labor costs – employee costs. Given myriad labor laws protecting workers, insuring them, insuring their families and paying them at certain rates, producers are turning toward automating as many procedures as possible: ie. robots.

Robots don’t have to look like manufactured humanoids. They can be as unassuming as ATM machines and self-check-out lanes at Home Depot and a thousand other retailers. “Robots” can dispense prescriptions, take orders at fast-food restaurants and, soon, custom-tailor suits with nary a sales-clerk or store-manager needed. What do YOU do? What function are you compensated for? Maybe you build houses.

Robots make it possible to factory-manufacture modular homes that come with wiring, piping and alarm and computer circuits already in place. They’re delivered by truck and bolted together on site. Altogether there can be barely 20% as much labor needed to produce a single-family home. For modular multi-family buildings, there is even less per housing unit. What will all the tradesmen be doing?

Or, the counter workers, potato-fryers, and on, and on, and on… what will they be doing? Retailing is disappearing before our eyes, along with its jobs and buildings, janitors and re-decorators, security guards and on, and on, and on. There are very, very few jobs that are not threatened, except, temporarily, robot-maker.

Will this happen overnight? Not yet, but overnight began about 30 years ago and is accelerating as rapidly today, tomorrow and next week, as computing power and miniaturization permit. So what are the political and human consequences of the robotic devouring of what we now call “jobs?”

First, people who now control productive enterprises, from small to large, will be controlling larger and larger fractions of production generally, whether of precision-engineered parts or of sandwiches, and with fewer and fewer employees. This will concentrate productive surplus – which is to say: profits – and wealth as well, in those same hands or corporations. How, under the U. S. Constitution, will this wealth be “shared” among the soon-to-be jobless citizens? (“Soon” being in 20 years?)

Shall we raise taxes much, much higher? Should laws be passed that require producers to share remaining jobs among 4, 5 or 6 individuals (however inefficient that will be)? What happens to the essential right of private property? Will all hiring and profits become the purview of the least-efficient institutions on the planet: federal bureaucracies?

And how will individuals prove their worth? Not only to their friends, wives and children… but to themselves? If lots of humans don’t need to be very smart to survive, will more than the owners of production and the builders and programmers of robots, bother to become so? What happens to politics, then?

The stratification we have acquiesced to so far – stratification in which those elected deem themselves superior and entitled to office, ideas they have “sold” to relatively ignorant constituents – will become stricter and more calcified, virtually unassailable by the welfare-supported masses of citizens. Those will be they who never vote against wealth-sharing and at ever greater sharing rates. How will democracy or a republic or religiosity survive?

Just as large fractions of us, now, can’t find our ways without “GPS,” or feed ourselves without welfare, what will we become when there is no need to strive… and dependence upon robots approaches totality? What will civilization be? Constant leisure? A complete absence of sacrifice? SHALL WE ALL BECOME ENTERTAINERS? Shouldn’t we be thinking about these things?

Do you think of them? Fear them?

Culture, Health Care

TO LIFE, TO LIFE, L’CHAI’IM

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Now that life, itself, is measured only in financial terms, at least for many – mostly young First-Worlders, the shining wisdom of liberal thinkers is becoming clearer… and more frightening. Canada recently completed a study that showed “savings” of nearly $140 Million, Canadian, that might be realized with more accessible “end-of-life” care, as they call it.

Or suicide, for the crudely honest. And that $140 Million could finance, ummm, infrastructure improvements and transportation safety! For those who remain, of course. One hopes that all that protein won’t go to waste – maybe pet food. After all, we’ve been eating animals like forever and they’re only human, too.

This is a side-effect of socialized health care, like those ads for the latest wonder-drug where the disclaimers about side effects like moods of depression or suicide, elevated heart rates, rash, constipation, diarrhea, dry mouth, bad breath, loss of vision and tingling in hands and feet, are three-fourths of the ad. Certain cancers and even death have occurred. If you experience any of these symptoms, speak to… your… doctor. He or she is a caring, white-smocked employee of the Government Accounting Office.

Abortion as a “constitutional right” is the first step to the destruction of not just life, but of freedom. We have been sold on abortion providing “Freedom” of choice for women who are shocked, shocked to find themselves pregnant when a child is too much to cope with… for any number of reasons. Even Planned Parenthood, responding to the outcries of stranded, pregnant, shocked women, has found ways for all that protein to not be wasted, as a market exists for whole, pre-natal organs and tissues. Financial value and loads of freedom for those who remain. They’re a non-profit, you know, so not much help with the infrastructure thing.

Some Planned Parenthood executives have had their own infrastructures improved.

And yet, despite all the excess babies we produce, “scientists” are struggling to clone humans like frogs and sheep, as if there were not enough, already. Maybe we just don’t want to accept the risk of imperfection; let’s replicate a human that “we” like.

We’ve followed the liberals, the socialists, the communists, the progressives and the Democrats down the path to where dollars or other forms of power define the value of life, even as the role of churches, religion, spirituality itself, are cast aside like so much magical mumbo-jumbo, a drag on society and on tax-receipts. We should be taxing all that church-owned property because our collective costs to protect it are born unfairly by non-believers. Abortion, and infrastructure, and voting… that’s real.

Since we can’t keep up with fertility, and since more people born into the last, best hope for freedom is a big public problem, we have got to destroy hopefulness, as they have in Russia, for example, where too few people are being born. Perhaps some terrorism will help spur the youngest, most fertile citizens to fear bringing children into “such” a world… a world where Donald Trump can be elected. Let’s just hook up after lecture hall and if I get pregnant I can get an abortion before mid-terms.

The value of life is primarily spiritual, if there’s any purpose beyond finance and fun, at all. Isn’t that the big question? What is the purpose, the meaning of life? Didn’t you see the movie? Hilarious. No, but honestly, sometimes I get the feeling that there just must be more to it than eating and screwing, don’t you think?

Well, we could help people who are having problems – that always makes me feel good. You should take that job at the clinic and you could help girls with unwanted fetal masses. When I get my promotion at the condom factory we’ll have enough money to maybe donate to Greenpeace or PETA. How would that be?

I’d rather donate to my alma mater where the money could help poor kids get their Masters. Aren’t they a religious school? Oh, they used to be.

Roughly speaking, Americans can choose, now, between the Death Party and the Life Party. The Deathers are pretty firm in their beliefs, while the Lifers are kind-of soft in their defense of Life. The former can state their death wishes as matters of Freedom, and Choice, and purging the country of brown people… except they don’t mention the last part. Lifers are almost afraid to mention their beliefs or their spirituality, yet they somehow won an election the other day. Seemed like spiritual intervention, but with all this warm weather we’ve been having, who can worry about that?

The main thing is to get back on the death track or we’ll never balance the budget. Consumer confidence is high, though. Maybe Christmas sales will cap a really good year, financially.

I hate Christmas, don’t you? It’s so commercial.

Culture

More than a game

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What can be said that hasn’t been beaten into the ground already, about football? Well, some things can be said about the meaning of it. Your response may be that there must be something more important to expound upon, but there is a point, here, worth making.

Football is a metaphor for America. Not because of the “sport” aspect, but because of its declaration of excellence being rewarded and celebrated, vicarious inclusion of couch potatoes, and attraction of profits – even the creation of millionaires.

“Aww, c’mon,” you say, “it’s just a game.” No, no it isn’t.

Football is a great business, and Americans react well to this because we are, like every other human, innately capitalist. We recognize and appreciate smart business, smart marketing, and that wonderful effect of smart business: secondary benefits to multiple other businesses and tremendous flows of profit dollars into charities.
Even better, football succeeds, itself, because it grandly recognizes and rewards individual excellence and discipline.

No matter how loosey-goosey our morals appear to be, we each value excellence and we honor those among us who strive, daily and hourly toward perfection. We are awed and thrilled by organizations whose profit motivations imbue their individual members toward constant improvement… and success.

“Do Your Job.” Americans respect and reward responsibility. No matter the qualities of leaders – and successful organizations, particularly business organizations are led, obviously, more than simply managed – every individual following a leader is ultimately responsible to that leader, to his associates who depend upon him or her, and to him- or her-self, for the task each has trained and learned to accomplish at the moment of execution. Ya’ gotta’ love it.

There are a handful of truly great and greatly led moments in our history, when large fractions of the nation followed, even sacrificed, for the proper purpose a recognized leader had placed before us. The Revolutionary War – in a sense our first Civil War, as we “seceded” from England – is a perfect example. Clearly Washington was a superb leader who was able, in the face of extraordinary odds and opposition, to maintain the shining goal and keep his under-fed, under-supplied and under-appreciated troops striving toward an “impossible” goal: Independence.

The Americans weren’t fighting for treasure or even for comfort or out of fear, but for a set of ideas and ideals. To maintain leadership for such an effort is rare and justification for our reverence of General Washington.

Lincoln showed similar, not identical traits. But his sense of “mission” was no less complete than Washington’s. And there was a purity of purpose that never faltered and was apparent to enough people in the “Union” to re-elect Honest Abe in the midst of our bloodiest, most-hate-filled war ever.

In a sense, Washington led his troops to become the prow of the ship facing war’s stormy waters; Lincoln was, himself, the prow of that same ship. Both were leaders for the right reasons… and respected. Those being led were able to sacrifice for the purposes each leader embodied. Americans respect and honor that stuff!

Another, more refreshing example was the Apollo Moon-landing mission. Jack Kennedy was a leader. It’s not because of any significant executive experience – far from it. It was because of vision. For those of us born during WW-II, the 1960 election was the first we could vote in. We grew up under Eisenhower, but he didn’t “speak” to us. His presidency marked the end of an era and of his career… he was our parents’ president.

Kennedy represented the vitality of America and the start of new adventures, new ideas… the New Frontier. He was our start, too, and anything was possible. Somehow, in spite of his practical naiveté Kennedy perceived that the competition with the Soviets was a competition between cultures, between beliefs, between dreams, and that American needed a new dream every so often, and that the times and the possibilities were coming together. The U.S./U.S.S.R. conflict was a challenge to the ideas of America, and there simply was no room to come in second.

Kennedy’s May, 1961 Moon-landing proposal to Congress met every aspect of what a leader should include in laying out a mission: it was bold, it was a challenge, it was timed and measurable, and it had a specific goal – a goal that rose and set every day. It was perfect, and what the nation needed at a time when popular, slanted news was extolling the amazing progress the Soviet system had made in everything from rocketry to housing to medicine and to education.

The other element of the Apollo challenge was technological, and a certain boost to our economy… something every President needed. What happened?

Military leaders, scientists, engineers, colleges, think-tanks, machinists and a thousand businesses with their own leaders, adopted the mission and devised a thousand missions of their own. Most of the knowledge needed to pull off the moon landing and a safe return to Earth, was unknown. Many of the skills were floating around among the disparate parts of the nationwide, about-to-be-team, but they’d never been marshaled to a single goal until Kennedy presented a new dream. Still others had to be invented.

Again, what happened? A new unity of purpose. Indeed, there was an irresistible force of purpose that caused levels of sacrifice, stress, service and a striving for perfection rarely experienced by any industrial society… and success. The success was so profound that it swept up the vast majority of Americans into a new belief in what we stood for and could accomplish. It has not been repeated.

But metaphorically, its impact is out-pictured in teams’ quests to reach the Super Bowl. And the fans of those quests, fans of every team, respect the sacrifice and discipline, study, practice, learning and leadership that’s needed to get there. Brady would be nowhere without good leadership at the head of and within the Patriots organization, and within himself in fact.

Americans get that, and respond, even to buying shirts and hats as if to absorb a little of it.

The same qualities exist in the military, although the sacrifices are so compellingly greater. And Americans grasp what it means. We honor and respect the training, discipline, leadership and near-perfection elite teams strive for in every service… and even more, the physical, sometimes mortal sacrifices made in furtherance of the greatest mission on Earth: defending America. We share the pain when we back out of conflict without victory; we try to honor the many victories it has taken to get even to there.

We felt and respected some of the magic under Ronald Reagan, perhaps never recognizing the nature of his and our victory over the Soviet communist system.

But the momentum of dis-education and the constant anti-American pressure that has marked American culture since Nixon was forced out of office, was bearing fruit… and nuts.

From the utter debauchery of the Clintons, through the distorted semi-conservatism of Bush-43, through the Obama dislike of America, of Whites and of Christians, and his greater respect for everything we are not, Americans have yearned to respect again; to respect, perhaps, themselves. We have yearned to respect our institutions, and people, and systems and teachers and churches and everything that has, no matter how hidden or suppressed, the innate sparks of leadership, training, practice and sacrifice, that we know has created greatness in this land and in us.

No ONE can do that, and certainly he or she cannot BE that – not even Donald Trump. But he, at least, knows what IT is and its importance to the ideas of America. Like JFK, he has succeeded because he sensed Americans’ need for a new dream, every now and then.

Now is good. Go Pats!

Culture

CODIFYING TOLERANCE

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The latest issue of the National Geographic has a trans-sexual boy, a de facto girl, on the cover. The balance of the issue explores multiple examples of “trans” children, primarily, and how girls grow up and are often mis-treated (by our standards) around the world. Throughout are stories of the very rare instances of genetic mis-firings that yield unusual development of reproductive organs in humans, animals and insects. A survey is quoted that says “milennials” (in the West and U. S.) see “gender” as a spectrum rather than just male or female. Hmmph.

So there is no misunderstanding, this old stump is decidedly uncomfortable with the publicity afforded sexual incongruity. I don’t like the new rush to normalize exotic behaviors, which has proceeded with such politicized demonization of those not embracing it, as to make declarations of normalcy statements of gross intolerance and even of hate.

We are on the wrong track, it seems to me, to be denigrating and attacking very tolerant Judeo-Christian moral guidance (and institutions) and the essentially Judeo-Christian mores of Western societies and of the United States in particular, while affording equal, if not superior credence to the abject tolerance of non-believers and refuse-to-believe-ers. One group, attempting to adhere to socially-strengthening traditions while having compassion and tolerance for new conditions, desires and loves, is trying to maintain ideals about family, sexuality and moral purity. The other, mostly young, instantly connected and instantly knowledgeable (regardless of reality) is rushing toward license and the intentional destruction of all moral strictures. “It is their right,” some trumpet.

For purposes of the most tawdry and SHORT-LIVED political expediency, sexual oddities have received legal status that not only offends faithful Jews and Christians, but which force “straight” citizens (over 95% of us) to change our habits, practices and even beliefs, if we are to not be labeled “haters” for expressing our own condition! Within this twist of social norms are corrosive, acidic re-definitions of words, and IN-tolerance of normality.
Every Christian expression must be stricken from the public arena, for example. Christian beliefs that are the foundation of law and social norming, may no longer be uttered, EVEN WITHIN CHURCHES in some views, as they are deemed offensive to a tiny, tiny fraction of society who, not needing to have actually heard the scripture that they claim would have offended them, need only to hear that it was heard by others. Instant media sweeps across their non-judging (non-thinking) consciences and yields the “offense” they seem to seek and celebrate.

Perhaps the worst example of the dangers of codifying tolerance is the experience of Aaron and Melissa Klein whose Gresham, Oregon bakery was put out of business by a lesbian couple whose feelings were hurt when the Kleins refused to apply their artistry to a custom wedding cake for the upcoming nuptials of the same-sex couple. They did not refuse to bake a cake, nor to sell them one. On religious grounds they refused to decorate a cake that would assist in glorifying a wedding that contravened their faith.

Immediately the lesbian couple garnered widespread support against the “discrimination” and supposed hatred exhibited by the Kleins toward same-sex weddings and therefore anyone who favored or accepted such ceremonies. Next, they filed a complaint with the State of Oregon , which resulted in a fine of $135,000, payable to the “offended” couple, which was ultimately paid. The Kleins’ business was shuttered very quickly as hatred toward THEM yielded threats, picketing, slanders and public intimidation.

The offenses toward the Kleins, engendered by the “flash-hatred” of social media in favor of all things homosexual, were not defended against by any state laws. Indeed, the state took the side of two people whose feelings were ostensibly hurt, helping them in their campaign of hatred and destruction so as to put the Kleins out of business, and to punish them for refusing to employ their artistic abilities for the benefit of an event that their faith forbade.

In effect, this couple was told that they might live according to their (Christian) faith ONLY inside their home or their church, and that adherence to faith is not legal if one has a business. There are many examples of private citizens suffering severe economic punishment for merely expressing their faith with no related “illegal” actions!

We are in the realm of thought-policing. Free-thinkers (without moral anchor) like to compare everyone with whom they disagree to Hitler. No doubt the Kleins are among those so compared. But, it was Hitler who first imposed rules that faith may be expressed only in church. Delightful company, he.

Culture

Drugs and Governance

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teen-drug-abuse-s2-statisticsWe are not serious about ridding ourselves of drugs. We’ve been touting a “war on drugs” since 1971. Nixon’s concept was dead-on. Yes, it was a reaction to the wantonness of the ‘60’s, and an unpleasant adult’s attempt to restore adult control over the dangerously immature. But it is impossible to measure the destruction of lives that could have been avoided over the fifty-plus years since: the loss of fertile minds, the waste of generations of inner-city youth, the corruption of law enforcement and even the judiciary, and, now, the virtual abandonment of moral authority by governments at all levels.

The instinct to protect ourselves and others from mind-corroding drugs is now conflicting with a new, unprecedented concept of “rights.” America was founded in a time of moral adjustment and intellectualization of models of governance. Smart people, sensitive to history and the writings of philosophers both current and precedent, and fresh from the struggle of revolution, conceived of a constitutional republic where qualified citizens would vote for three levels of government: local, which elections already existed, state, which had existed for domestic issues despite top-down controls from England, and the new, federal, yet divided, central government. Overarching was the logical fear of creating a new tyranny to replace the old one: government could not be trusted to govern itself.

None of it worked without a shared morality among the citizenry and, most basically, moral self-governance. The Founders expected, and observed, a general ability to govern oneself, and the social agreement of when self-governance had failed. How distant those concepts are.

The Constitution, revered in theory and acknowledged in breach, has become the means to separate individuals from all external moral forces, starting with one’s parents. Not the original intent, but enough lawyers and psychologists, teamed with power-hungry political weasels, have managed to literally talk us out of our heritage. Shame on us.

We are now at the critical knife-edge of history where a civilization finds the courage to defend and restore itself, or passes from history to join the other failed attempts to organize societies with a measure of individual freedom. For the new power-meisters, morality and moral stricture are the obvious enemies of the individual’s enjoyment of life, and they are happy to take the votes of the threatened and pass laws that prevent morality from interfering very much. So long as “things” hold together – things like infrastructure, utilities, law-enforcement and food and energy supplies – individuals’ new friends in government will continue to find ways for their voters to avoid responsibility, taxes and work. Maybe. It’s all crap.

Meanwhile, human potential is dissolving in mixtures of chemicals, both legal and, nominatively, “controlled.” Parents are crying over suburban kids dying from heroin, boys and girls, while legislatures rush to legalize marijuana. The edge of logic has become fuzzy. Lives of otherwise responsible people are being distorted, ultimately twisted, by cocaine. Oh, but not “crack” cocaine! No, no, no; that’s for stupid people.

And the ‘War on Drugs’ goes on, accumulating statistics. What is missing is the will to actually stop the drug business. Succeeding will ruffle a lot of feathers.

Suppose a tough governor and a tough U. S. Attorney, working for an adult, a-political Attorney General, agree to designate a venue like a group of urban counties, and said governor agrees to take the heat for allowing a federal “state of emergency” in those counties. Under that declaration a special form of “martial law” would establish a camp, or camps, where National Guard troops will hold everyone arrested for even minor drug infractions. There they may be held indefinitely until the source of their drugs is identified and proven, on the presumption that ALL drugs have crossed state or international borders and are subject to federal penalties.

Detention camps will have ‘detox’ facilities. Addicts obviously are in possession of drugs on, or in their persons. They will be detained until their sources are identified. Then their sources will be arrested and detained until their sources are identified. And on, and on, until serious distributors are detained. As each level of source has been identified, the corresponding identifiers will be released to normal legal processes with all evidence gained under martial law admissible. We are either going to save our children – and society – or we are not.

Is it inevitable that individual freedom shall destroy our families, communities, schools, police and judiciaries? Because of our cleverness with words? Or do we have the right to cleanse society of corruption and disease, and to raise succeeding generations in clean, nurturing environments? Let’s choose rightly.

Sex

Free Sex and Freedom

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Titian-Bacchanal-1523-1524
Homosexuality and other sexual expressions have changed. No news flash there, but what does it mean? In many ways it is a frontal attack on religious belief and expression, but it is also an attack on free enterprise, Constitutional protections and the public covenant. AIDS was its greatest ally.
AIDS was spread almost exclusively from particular sex acts by men. It can infect both genders but it began with men doing unnatural – as in non-evolutionary – sex acts. And it was and is terrible.
Once it was identified and named, teams of researchers began seeking a cure and seeking voluminous funding from governments to expand the fight against AIDS. Within a couple of years AIDS had legal standing, virtually unique among diseases. Special non-discrimination provisions were added to our laws so that sufferers would not be ostracized and suddenly, everyone was feeling sorry for – and accommodating – homosexuals! Gays, queers, trannies, lesbians, dykes and butches were organized in ways and with successes, never achieved before.

It was great news when the first non-gay was infected because now AIDS was “everybody’s” threat and problem. Now, straights and gays were the SAME! No more could gay friends and co-workers coexist through tolerance or ignorance of their differences, now the path was celebration, equality, pin-point anti-discrimination, and marriage! Glory be to politics! Being recognized not for gender but for sexual practice was a new pathway to power, codified, publicized, made equal in education and made equal to religion. Soon it was not equality but dominance that was sought – and here it is.
Homosexuality is not an evolutionary trait. It occurs in nature but by definition cannot procreate and pass on more and more “successful” homosexual genes. Homosexuality, at least until the twentieth century, was never more than a tiny percentage of humanity because it is constantly dying out.
What has happened? Homosexuality has gained a social value, and, therefore, political value and power.

Non-heterosexuality (NHS) is not normal in that it is unable to reproduce, which is to say, it cannot strengthen the gene pool. This is not to say it does not occur. Even some animals display same-sex courtship activity, but whatever motivates such action, it will not “enter” the genetic stream.
This was the case for all of human history until quite recently. We can look back from our new ethical platform and say that it was terrible to treat NHS people so poorly. Today, except for Islam, most social systems have decided to accept NHS at varying degrees of ignore-ance, tolerance or “equality.” Muslims kill homosexuals. They kill lots of other groups they don’t agree with, also, but they are just about the last belief structure that applies torture and death to NHS’s. In most cases, then, homosexuality is now tolerated. In our cloudy enlightenments America and Europe not only tolerate it, we give it “equal” status with heterosexuality. That is, NHS’s can now “marry” some one not of the opposite gender. However, they are not really “equal,” because they have also gained legal protections that restrict only heterosexuals.

Indeed, the diaphanous basis for enacting laws that benefit only NHS people is constitutionally questionable, to say the least.

Lately the battle lines are between the tiny, tiny number of self-identified “trans-gender” NHS people. These are they who claim – and perhaps believe – that their “identity” and their bodies don’t match. For those not suffering the same way this is not only hard to empathize with, it is hard to tolerate in its outward expression. We are adapting, little by little, largely through force of the new political power connected to all things sexually deviant – deviant in the sense that they are not evolutionarily functional, only socially.

“Transsexuals” want to utilize facilities where clothing comes off, based on what they believe about their bodies. Removing one’s clothing is a basic sexual act in western society. It is also a necessity in order to relieve one’s self, bodily, or to bathe or to replace soiled clothing with fresh. For transsexuals, these things cannot be separated. Their perceived “gender” is the determinant of their rights and necessities, evidently with no compartmentalization.

Social norms require that our sexual beings be limited, which is to say, mostly private. We celebrate the events in the creation of families, from marriage to pregnancy to birth and on and on. Families are the keystone to our civilization. They are strengthened by shared restrictions on sexual activity, and destroyed by sexual abandon, debauchery, adultery and so forth. That destruction hurts our children and their upbringing and maturation, things that society – all of us – want to see happen. These norms – and our children – are under assault.
Ultra-feminism has a role in all this, as does liberalism generally, which gains through group identities and group victim-hood. First, feminism has distorted the roles of men and boys. It wants softness, less manliness, sensitivity. It demands that rambunctious boys be corralled and defined by female control.

Feminism has changed ratios of success and achievement in education, business, politics and medicine. At the same time it has equalized sexual abandon and destructive habituation. Most of all it has confused the roles of men and women in the key functions of love, romance, marriage, family and child-rearing. Politics, feminist-driven, has enabled and profits from this demand for both victim-hood and dominance. Manhood is retreating.

Non-heterosexuality is growing socially, not genetically. It has become simultaneously acceptable – celebrated! – and less-threatening to bond with another man or woman than to undergo the rigors and risks of heterosexual courtship and responsibility. Almost like gang initiation and in-group recognition or status, “coming out” removes one from fulfilling roles that accept the burdens and risks of society and family and love of, and sacrifice for, a true spouse. And, we have the full force of government – right down to first grade and earlier – punishing heterosexual expression when it isn’t even sexual.

We bring up children amidst all of this and (feminist-driven and politically protected) unfettered abortion of unwanted babies, and then marvel at their growing reactions as they choose to couple purely for fun, hetero or homo – responsibility be damned.

The arenas in which men fulfill male responsibilities and accept risks are shrinking, even in the military. Every form of sexual aberrance now has “rights” that all institutions in society (religions included, except Islam, apparently) must accommodate, if not promote. The destruction of culture and social strength that is racing to an end we pretend won’t come, is all of our faults. Shame on us and shame on the professions and politicians that enable it, rationalize it, give it classy names and ride the waves of new unfairnesses for their personal gains.

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One would think that personal feelings could not be a premise for codification. There is no empirical evidence of feelings and as a result, any “law” based upon them cannot be enforced equally for all. A good example might be separation of bathroom and shower facilities based on gender. In keeping with the protection of females from feral males, and with the protection of children from pederasts, restricting access to “boys’ rooms” and “girls’ rooms” has been one of the most fundamental and successful social norms since civilization got organized… and crowded.

Indeed, as mass communications became increasingly sexualized in both words and images, and with heightened mingling of young men and women in schools, jobs and elsewhere, the removal of clothing became more and more of a point of risk for unwanted sexual contact with people unrelated to one’s family, and unknown in proclivities. The segregation of bathroom facilities – and other places of disrobing, even partially – is increasingly important, not less.

The fears of individuals – particularly females – about being assaulted in places of compromise or of temptation, are valid. The rights of those offended or just unnerved by the presence of someone other than one’s own gender, are equally valid, and codified in law! But, somehow, such laws are being over-ridden in the interest of… what? Celebration of mental incongruities.

The syndromes, or popularly-honored sexualities that have been named by psychiatrists as if to impart patinas of reality, are little more than mental distortions. This is not to say they aren’t deeply felt and troubling for those who feel them. They don’t derive from the wrong number of genes; these people are not genetic oddities. They are odd in habit and have, they claim, deep feelings. For whatever emotional, mental reasons these are feelings that express through sexuality and deserve, I think, sympathy.

It is impossible for heterosexuals to empathize with someone who feels like his or her gender is a mistake. But, we should be kind; we should be completely civil; we should not denigrate or mock or chastise that person. He or she is human and deserves to exercise inherent human rights.

A proper question is whether we are being kind when we facilitate self-mutilation in a most fallible attempt to re-order the flesh to please the mind. Suicide rates would argue the negative.

What is the legal status of a gay or lesbian person who elects – chooses – to live a straight life. It happens all the time. People who have lived “straight” for even decades, decide to “go gay” at some point. That happens, too. In BOTH instances, the change is not genetic, it’s self-declared. Yet when he or she has decided to be gay or lesbian, he or she is protected by unusually strict anti-discrimination laws… laws so severe that “straight” people accused of such discrimination can be ruined socially and financially with the aid of government police powers. That is, when straight they are at great risk for persecution under laws that apply only to heterosexuals. Is there no definition under the 14th amendment?

As we move farther and farther away from the fundamental rights protected (ostensibly) by the Constitution, we get mired in the soft police-statism of creating rights that may only be enjoyed by taking rights away from others! To paraphrase a great mind’s observation: “The road to fascism is paved with good intentions.”