A Voice for Freedom

An hour on a roof with socialist usurpers

2009-04-25T07:17:00.000-06:00

I spent some time on a roof yesterday. The roof of a London primary school, to be exact. This is not normal. So I should explain. See, this school is under threat of being demolished. I've passed by a few times and seen posters and things on the fence saying "Hands off our school!" and such. I thought it was neat that the kids wanted to save their school. They've even managed to get it listed as a historic building, which doesn't prevent the demolition but makes it more difficult. Anyway, some teachers, parents, and local residents are now camping on the roof, which is sort of like laying in front of the bulldozers, but cooler.

When I passed by the school yesterday, I went up the ladder to sign the anti-demolition petition (nice rhyme, that) and talk to some people. And, well...disappointment and disillusionment followed. I asked one woman what it was about this school that was special enough to warrant doing all this to keep it going. I was expecting to hear something to do with students. 'Cause that's what a school's about, you know. I was expecting to hear that it had a great teaching staff, or a unique method, or a great community of students, or a record of achievement, or something. That the students coming out of the school were better for having been there, and really cared about keeping their school. But of course, what she said was nothing of the sort.

Instead, she went off on a lecture about class conflict and multicultural communities and inclusivity, and compared the situation to laid-off factory workers, and basically spewed a whole lot of Marxist mumbo-jumbo that had about as much to do with children as a geriatric healthcare plan. She accused the government of tearing down the school to try and get rid of working-class and special needs students, and of planning to build a new secondary school in its place in order to line the pockets of the big businesses that sell school uniforms and IT systems. I felt like I was on Greenham Common.

The school was just a symbol for the real issues, see. We might as well have been on the roof of a church, or a hospital, or a sprocket plant. I don't even know what a sprocket IS, but there you go. Because, as always, this wasn't about the kids. It was about adults using children to fight for their own issues, not the children's. I hate these people. They call themselves parents and teachers, but I wouldn't let them near my kid if they were bound and gagged.

I wish I could be a kid again. You get to be friends with much more intelligent and morally superior people.

PS: I know it's been a long, long time since my last post, and it may be a while before my next one. Don't know why, I just haven't been in a bloggy sort of mood recently. But quick update: I left Alaska, I live in England (again), and I'm really hoping I get to vote in the election that finally ousts Labour.

Questions for Obama supporters

2008-11-05T01:35:00.002-07:00

Not arguments. Not attacks. Just questions.

1) Has Obama ever actually defined "change"? What is it, exactly, that he intends to change? How? Into what?

2) Why is change automatically a good thing? How is it that Obama has convinced the American public that "change" is an intrinsically positive word?

3) Isn't saying "this election result shows progress against bias in our nation" (or somesuch) incongruous? Doesn't this statement itself make a racial judgement and imply that race is important in politics?

4) How are we going to regain the world's respect by withdrawing troops from Iraq and leaving an unstable ally to its fate?

Just some questions.

Where I have been, am, and will be

2008-06-08T23:44:00.002-06:00

I can't believe it's been nearly three months since I've posted anything. I've found a lot of things since then that I've wanted to write about, but simply haven't found the time. Student teaching involves a lot of busywork - more so, I think, than being a regular teacher, since you have to keep up on university paperwork and such on top of teaching duties. Anyway, I'm done now - graduated a month ago! - but though it seems like that would give me a chance to get back into blogging, there are two reasons that this is not the case: first, election season tends to turn me off to politics for some reason, and second, I'm leaving for Russia tomorrow, and I won't be back until July 29. I'll have no internet access for almost all of that time. However, do expect to see me back in August. For now, dosvidaniya!

Connecticut principal saves honor student from food fascists

2008-03-15T10:54:00.008-06:00

MSNBC reported this week on what just might be the most ridiculous example of nutritionist zealotry yet. Michael Sheridan, an eighth-grader in New Haven, CT, was recently caught - horror of horrors! - buying a bag of Skittles from another student. He was unfortunately unaware that in 2003, as part of a "wellness policy", the New Haven school system completely banned the sale of candy in its schools, even from one student to another. For his "crime", he was suspended for three days, barred from attending an honors dinner, and stripped of his title as student council vice president. Watch the video below for interviews with the student and his mother, both of whom are understandably confused.

As mentioned in the video, Sheridan's suspension was reduced from three days to one after his mother complained, and this past Thursday, his school's principal agreed to give him his student council post back. That reduces his total punishment for buying a bag of candy to being barred from having his academic achievements recognized at the school's honors dinner and being suspended for one day - one day when the students are, according to the principal, "in the middle of taking the Connecticut mastery test".

Sheridan appears in the video above to be a rather normal-shaped kid, maybe even a bit on the skinny side. But even perfectly healthy Americans have something to fear from the nutritionist mafia now. It's terrifying to think that someone has actually succeeded in turning sugar into contraband in American schools. Isn't is illegal for a public institution to control the purchase - not the sale, the purchase - of something that is not a controlled substance? If it isn't, anyway, it should be. But that wouldn't stop them even if it were the case. Goodbye, free market...it's been nice knowing you.

CBC: Only caring about the East for 72 years

2008-03-09T14:52:00.000-06:00

According to CBC, you're not Canadian enough if you don't know enough about the East.

Out of a sense of morbid curiosity, I took a Canada Day quiz on the CBC site a while back. I managed to get every question right, by the way, so whoop-de-doo for me; I guess studying the same Canadian history every year from grad 5 through grade 8 finally paid off.

But you know the really interesting thing about this quiz? The nature of its fourteen questions. Here's a brief rundown:

Six questions on national trivia, such as the national anthem and who the Canadian head of state is.

Five questions on national history, such as the role of the Hudson's Bay Company and what the first four provinces were

Three questions on Eastern Canadian trivia, involving things like Lake Algonquin and Quebec bilingualism

No questions at all about the West

Why am I not surprised?

The UN: if they weren't serious, they'd be hilarious

2008-03-09T14:21:00.004-06:00

Wow...been gone a while, haven't I? It's been a busy two months - not bad, mind you, but busy. It's been tough, too, because there's a lot of stuff I would've liked to talk about, but of course I can't remember much of it now. One thing I can remember, though, is this little gem of irony. Apparently the UN considers the Canadian government racist for its use of the term "visible minority", used in all manner of documents and processes in a backwards attempt to reduce discrimination. "Visible minorities" legally refers to "persons, other than aboriginal people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour" - thereby, strangely enough, singling out whites (though of course the UN was not at all concerned with the well-being of Caucasians). Apparently having this "minorities" tag attached to them could cause problems for people, though what those problems are was never really discussed.

The same report, by the way, called for Canada to provide welfare services to "undocumented immigrants and failed refugee applicants". Yes, that's right, people who are in Canada illegally and people who were actively rejected for entry to the country now apparently deserve services paid for with taxpayer dollars. I'd mock that, but honestly, I can't find anything more stupid to compare it to.

Britain and Europe losing their economic freedom

2008-01-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Guess who's #1 on the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom this year. It's not who you think. Believe it or not, that honor goes to Hong Kong.

Other countries considered "free" are Singapore, Ireland, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, and Canada. Yeah, that last one surprised me too, but if you look closely, we made it in by a margin of 0.2 percent, and had an extremely low score on the "government size" indicator.

But I digress. The point is, there's one glaring absence, one country which has been on the "free" list for years but has now taxed itself into the "mostly free" category: the United Kingdom. It's easy to point to the causes of the slip: years of Labour Party government and a certain socialist idiot who recently took power and announced tax raises that would make any Swedish government proud. Government spending equalled nearly forty-five percent of the UK's GDP last year and it's not going anywhere but up.

Other EU countries have also slipped, Italy and Greece being two of the worst examples - they now rank below most of the former Communist bloc, which themselves are eagerly democratizing. It'll be interesting to compare eastern and western Europe in ten years; I suspect the west will be lagging far behind in economic freedom by then.

Another reason I'm never moving back to Canada

2008-01-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

Remember the Danish cartoons of Muhammad that caused such a big hoo-hah two years ago? Well, Ezra Levant, co-founder of Western Standard, has been ordered to submit to an "investigation" by the Alberta Human Rights Commission for republishing the cartoons in February of 2006. The commission could order a full hearing if it decides one is warranted. But until that decision is made, the commission itself remains a obscure bureaucratic body which spuriously claims the legal and moral right to prosecute and punish Canadian citizens, without regard for due process, for actions which are protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

I must admit to having no idea that Alberta had created this type of thought police organization, and that's the most terrifying thing of all - they're not only the thought police, they're the secret police as well. Mark my words, in fifty years, these people are going to be able to grab you off the street and haul you into a reeducation facility when they pick up anti-diversity brainwaves.

Luckily, people like Levant are willing to stand up to the egregiously badly-named "Human Rights Commission" and other such cryptofascists. Here's the video of his opening statement; I envy his chutzpah and, I must admit, the ability of the Commission investigator to keep from getting the slightest bit angry when confronted with such cutting arguments.

Just how old do you have to be to put an X in a box properly?

2008-01-13T20:25:00.000-07:00

As much as I may hate Gordon Brown, his right-hand woman seems to have her head screwed on straight on at least one issue. In an astounding move toward acceptance of the radical notion that human beings under the age of eighteen are actually people, Harriet Harmon, deputy leader of Britain's Labour Party, has suggested that the voting age in the UK might be lowered to 16 in an effort to combat political disengagement among young Britons.

I've been saying for a long time that one of the biggest problems with our political system is that we teach kids about what it means to be a citizen, tell them to get involved, go on and on about how important it is for the people to be a part of their government, and yet at the same time we tell them they're too stupid to participate in the political process. And at eighteen, what they've learned about politics is hypocrisy, and that they really have none of the political rights they've been told about for so many years. For the formative years of their lives, people have no rights, and that's what they learn, that's what they internalize. So what happens when they finally do have those rights? Many don't exercise them, don't understand what they mean, and most disturbingly, don't care when someone tries to take them away.

So I say, lower the voting age to 16. Heck, lower it to 14! Many will say that's too young to understand what's going on, but that's a totally fallacious argument; fifteen-year-olds who aren't interested in politics, just like fifty-year-olds who aren't interested, simply won't vote. And the number of ignorant teenagers we'd be unleashing on our polling places every other year is nothing compared to the number of ignorant adults who are already there.

Therefore, I'd like to offer a big "congratulations" to the Labour Party for considering a move toward liberating the last unspoken-for minority in the democratic world: the young. Let's hope we see such forward thinking continue.

Got overdue bills? Check out the company you're in.

2008-01-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

Well, if this isn't the funniest thing I've seen all year (in other words, in the last week and a half). The FBI lost wiretaps on hundreds of suspected criminals recently because the Bureau failed to pay its phone bills on time.

The bill for one field office alone totalled over $66,000 once late fees were tacked on. The FBI also lost $25,000 to theft by a crooked agent last year. The Bureau blames both embarrassing incidents on an "antiquated" bookkeeping system. They could probably afford to set up a better system, if only they could keep track of their money a little better.

Thirty thousand employees and they can't pay their phone bills on time any better than the average American household. Somehow, I find that frightening and comforting all at the same time.

Iowa? Finding it hard to care.

2008-01-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, it's been quite a while since my last post. December was a whirlwind, between vacation, moving, and final essays and exams. But I'm back, and I'm going to start off the year with my first real post about the 2008 presidential election.

Quite frankly, I haven't talked much about this election because I can't stand any of the frontrunners. Edwards and Clinton are both nutcases. I have the feeling that if I met Barack Obama personally, I might like him, but there's no way I could vote for him. Practically all the Republican candidates have come out against gay rights. Giuliani - and I can't understand why so many Republicans don't get this - is a pro-abortion, anti-gun liberal with no right to run under a GOP banner. Huckabee's at times extreme religiosity drives me up the wall. McCain's so-called "campaign reform" is unconstitutional. And Paul's idea of foreign policy is to have none, to delude ourselves into thinking we can be nice to everyone and they'll all be nice to us. So who do I support? The short answer is "no one". If I had to pick anyone, it would probably be McCain, but at this point this blog will remain neutral (that is, pro-Republican but apathetic about which one). Am I being too picky? Maybe. Maybe we just got a bad crop this year. But whatever the reason, I find it hard to care about the primaries. So while most other bloggers pick their favorites, I'm just going to sit back and watch with mild interest.

American Brainwashing

2007-11-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've written many times about the imposition of orthodox beliefs on American university campuses, but never before have I seen anything so terrifying as what was happening at the University of Delaware until this November. UD's residence halls - in which all students are required to live during their freshman year - subjected residents to ideological reeducation, referred to as "treatments" in official university documents. This reeducation program included mandatory training sessions, residence hall activities, and one-on-one meetings designed to alter students' beliefs and lifestyles.

Students in UD dorms were forced to display "sustainability" decoration on their dormroom doors, take action to reduce their "ecological footprints" by 20%, alter their "daily habits and consumer mentality", take action by advocating for an "oppressed" group, and develop "empathy" and "awareness of oppression and inequity that exists at a local and national level".

Residence Advisors, the frontline troops of UD's campaign of indoctrination, were given training on "diversity facilitation". They were instructed to ask such invasive questions as "When did you discover your sexual identity?" during one-on-one meetings with students, and to attempt to force students to admit to having stereotypes and prejudices during floor meetings. The following are a few examples of what the campaign's victims were expected to "learn":

Race is "a specious classification of human beings created by Europeans (whites) which assigns human worth and social status using 'white' as the model of humanity and the height of human achievement for the purpose of establishing and maintaining privilege and power." There is no such thing as biological race, and no human groups had concepts of race prior to contact with white Europeans.

"A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (ie, people of European descent) living in the United States [...] people of color cannot be racists".

Reverse racism is "a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege." People who use this term are "in denial". "In the U.S., there is no such thing as 'reverse racism'." The concept of reverse racism was created as a Republican campaign tool.

"Non-racist" is "a non-term", "created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called 'blaming the victim')."

Saying "I'm not a member of any race except the human race" is "an evasion of responsibility for [one's] participation in a system based on supremacy for white people".

The idea that racism is "the result of individual, not institutional, behavior" is a "false concept".

"Mainstream white institutions demonstrate preferential treatment to all white groups as compared to all groups of people of color."

White Americans are responsible for a "campaign of confusion" designed to obscure the issue of racism.

"White culture" is the only culture which has no value. "If you want to have a 'multi-cultural table', what does white culture bring to that table? The table."

Racism is worse than all other forms of discrimination and comparing it to any other form of discrimination is a "false analogy".

American promotion of democracy abroad is done "under the banner of white nationalism".

The "information" provided also mocks and insults whites, even anti-racist whites, at every opportunity. The total effect was to require all white UD students to admit to being racists and to alter their attitudes and behaviors to be in line with the institutional orthodoxy, and to humiliate and vilify all white students at the university. This was above and beyond the indoctrination that's been seen at other American universities in recent years; this was a reeducation program of the sort that would make any dictator in history proud. It cannot be considered a victory that the program was recently dismantled; it can only be counted as a terrible blow to freedom that it ever existed in the first place.

The Libertarian's Eight Simple Rules for Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T18:01:00.000-07:00

1) Eat turkey. Preferably one you shot yourself. If there are any vegetarians at your table, make fun of them. Make "vegetarian stuffing" for them and put bacon bits in it.

2) Overeat. Give thanks for excess calories and trans fats.

3) If anyone mentions Native Americans, thank them for introducing Europeans to corn and move on. Mention of the "dark history" of Thanksgiving should be met with something along the lines of "that was four centuries ago; get over it, you moron". The phrase "smallpox blankets" should be met with a faceful of mashed potatoes.

4) Set the table with an obscene amount of food. If the family wacko with the Obama bumper sticker accuses you of not caring about starving people in [insert random distant part of the world here], you've done well.

5) Following #4, donate leftovers and/or canned food to a local church or homeless shelter, undermining your Obama-voting relative's claims that conservatives don't care about anyone but themselves.

6) Drink and smoke, if you are so inclined. If someone says you're "taking years off your life", offer to do the same to theirs.

7) Buy your food and decorations at Wal-Mart. Not only will you be saving money, you'll be contributing to that terrible American culture of demanding low prices and convenience.

8) And, of course, enjoy the holiday, and give thanks for all the good things in your life.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Well it's about time

2007-11-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

Just short of three years since US military deserters Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey applied for refugee status in Canada to avoid serving in Iraq, the Supreme Court of Canada has finally decided that they do not qualify as refugees. As many as three hundred AWOL American soldiers are believed to be living in Canada, and as a result of this decision, they could all face deportation. My reaction in one word: finally.

This is utterly ridiculous. The people who ran from the Vietnam War draft weren't much better, but at least they hadn't volunteered to fight like these people did. Yes, it is the duty of officers to refuse to follow immoral orders. But an immoral order is something like, I don't know, killing a thousand Sunnis - not attacking a dictator's army. These deserters are cowards, plain and simple. And you'll notice that even though they've been denied refugee status in Canada, they've managed to stay out of the country long enough to avoid the worst of the war.

Anyway, at least they are being sent back, unlike the tens of thousands of Vietnam draft dodgers who were welcomed by Pierre Trudeau, who called Canada a "refuge from militarism". Those draft dodgers, I'm convinced, bear a large portion of the responsibility for the current anti-Americanism in Canada. But thanks to this ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada's common sense score is now above zero for the first time in my life. Not that the same holds true for the opposition parties, all of whom seem to favor allowing the US soldiers to stay. Which is also what a poll cited by MSNBC suggests is the feeling among the majority of Canadian citizens - until you read that the poll was conducted entirely in Ontario. Is it any surprise that the bastion of idiocy which still returns double-digit leads for the notoriously corrupt Liberal Party over the Conservatives would also favor doing something that would disrupt American efforts in Iraq?

Disgusting

2007-11-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

I just don't know what to say about this. An eighth grader in Illinois has just been served two days of detention for - no kidding - hugging two friends. 13-year-old Megan Coulter says she doesn't think she did anything wrong and that the punishment was "crazy". Not the word I would have used, but then again, the words I would have used would almost certainly have earned more detention!

It's Hallowe'en time, so let's have a scary story....

2007-10-28T14:54:00.000-06:00

I'm straying a bit from my normal subject matter today; this post isn't going to be the most political I've ever written. But it does involve politics, and moreover, this is something that all Americans - especially American parents - should know is going on.

As regular readers know, I'm an education student. As of this January, I'll be off for my student teaching semester, and this time next year I'll be teaching social studies somewhere in Alaska if all goes according to plan. I've written a number of times about the questionable teaching practices of professors at the College of Education here, which include publicly belittling white students because of their race and barring male students from entering a discussion on so-called "women's issues". Today, though, it's not professors I'm going to talk about. I'm here to tell you some shocking stories about my fellow students. Because as an insider in the profession, I've met a terrifying number of people I would never allow to teach my own children, and I think others should know just how bad things are.

We've all had that English teacher who didn't seem to know what an adverb was, or didn't know that "there is" is singular and "there are" is plural. That's bad enough. But would you let your kid be taught the English language by someone who can't figure out what the word "antiquated" means? How about someone who admits that she can't understand complex sentences? A man who says "like" an average of every four words (I counted)? Or perhaps a woman who ends nine out of ten sentences with "y'know"?

How would you feel about your kids having a teacher who tells his students that liberalism is the center of the political spectrum? Presents opinions like "it is important to buy locally" as facts? Calls conservative students "stupid" in front of their peers?

But the most sickening incidents I've seen have been in the area of respect for students. From ordinarily reasonable people I've heard "any group of fifteen-year-old guys out late is going to get up to no good". I've been told that the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to citizens under eighteen, and that teenagers don't have the right to privacy. I've seen people who are going to be teaching as early as the beginning of 2008 cackling at the accents of students from Kentucky, and when I stood up to one of them, saying "I suppose if you had that student in your class, you'd be laughing in his face all year", the answer I got was a shrug and a "yes".

You might say these are isolated examples. Well, they are – but the people discussed above represent nearly half of next year's graduates in the Secondary Social Studies Education program, as well as a few people in other education programs I happen to have interacted with. To put it bluntly, my university is going to send a large number of new teachers into the world next year who are unintelligent, disrespectful of their students, unbelievably biased in their teaching, or all three at once. And a number of the rest will simply fall into the current and let it happen.

How's that for a horror story?

People like this scare me to death

2007-10-15T16:27:00.000-06:00

I had an interesting debate with a coworker today. Some of us in the office were talking about idiots who buy big pickups and don't bother to learn how to drive them. Innocuous enough talk, right? Unfortunately, no...because the conversation soon turned to how terrible it is for the environment to drive anything larger than a sedan. And how people "don't have the right" to drive big trucks or SUVs. And of course, I said that actually, they do have that right. The government has no authority to regulate what I can purchase.

Then, of course, like all good liberals, one of my coworkers suggested a new tax. Specifically, he said the government should tax SUVs. There's a tax on cigarettes, he claimed, because smoking pollutes the air around you - which is incorrect, actually, since cigarette taxes have been around far longer than concerns about second-hand smoke. But anyway, from there, he continued to say that if we're going to tax smokers, we should tax SUVs because they damage the environment. He also said there should be a "special tax for alcoholics" because they harm "society", there should be a tax on pornography for the same reason, and it sounded like he was about to keep going with this insane litany when I raised a hand and said "Excuse me, but why don't we take this just half a step further and tax anyone who's different?"

He protested that I was putting words in his mouth, then proceeded to make a Tourettesian outburst about "swaggering drunken rednecks" and move on to attacking me personally, calling me "completely blind" and "uneducated". Which is amusing to say the least, given the fact that only last Friday I was at an awards ceremony being congratulated on the 4.0 average I earned last semester.

Anyway, he tried to claim that he wasn't advocating taxing difference, as I suggested, but really, wasn't he? People who smoke are bad; tax them. People who drive big cars are bad; tax them. People who drink are bad, people who buy porn are bad; tax them too. These are societal judgements about how people are "supposed" to act, and he advocates enforcing them financially. And so government controls what we do, what we buy, what we drive, how we spend our time and our money. How much further from there is it to government controlling what we say? And from there, it's barely any distance at all to controlling what we think.

Interesting, very interesting....

2007-10-10T01:11:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Times comes more evidence that global warming is just a lot of hot air. Yes, I did actually just say that, and I apologize.

A slight miscalculation on the part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration previously led to the identification of 1998 as the hottest year on record. NASA has corrected their data and now says that the hottest year recorded is in fact 1934. Not only that, but the list of the five hottest years on record is as follows: 1934, 1921, 1931, 1998, 2006. Five years, four decades, and skewed towards the beginning of the last hundred years rather than the end. And the temperatures in the warm years of the 1920s, '30s, and '50s were a few tenths of a degree higher than the supposedly dangerous temperatures of the last two decades.

If you do a google search, by the way, you'll notice that only one major newspaper bothered to do a story on this - and even that was only an editorial. But if that makes you think that it might not be accurate, check out this graph, direct from the NASA website:

As you can see, the five-year mean also peaked during the 1930s.

I'll say it, just for laughs...I wonder why the New York Times didn't pick this up.

Smile! You're in a police state.

2007-10-07T01:29:00.000-06:00

There are over 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom. That's twenty percent of the world's security cameras in less than two percent of the world's land area. There's currently no regulation CCTVs in the UK, and the power-happy Labour Party is more concerned with building John Twelve Hawks' "virtual Panopticon" than with protecting individual rights. But of course, you knew all that. What I'm here to tell you today is that technology has recently taken another leap that will have terrifying consequences for personal privacy: major advances are being made toward creating programs that will allow computers connected to CCTVs to read the lips of people seen on the cameras. Intel has recently begun developing lip-reading software and distributing it as open-source, meaning that anyone can use it for free. UK policing authorities, who have been working on this type of technology on their own, are undoubtedly jumping at the chance to get their hands on software that will add eavesdropping on tens of millions of people to their list of capabilities.

There will of course be the usual arguments: "It's for our own good!", "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about!", etcetera etcetera. To those people, I offer two pieces of advice: get your heads out of the sand and start giving a bloody damn about your freedom before it's gone for good. Oh, and actually one more: don't breed. The next generation doesn't need you dragging down its collective IQ.

See, intelligent people will actually worry about the fact that anyone in the police or the government might someday in the very, very near future have the ability to call up every conversation you've ever had in a public place. Some CCTV systems already identify people demonstrating "unusual behavior" and track them using facial recognition software. A year from now, an unusual behavior tag could mean a computer tracking your every move and recording your every conversation for days. And a year past that, someone will ask why we're not recording all conversations, just in case. And somewhere in Whitehall there will be a large grey box filled with hard drives containing every conversation ever had on a bus or train, in front of an ATM, at a traffic light, or anywhere else a camera can watch you. And if they have the records, they will use them. The doors on that grey box will have the hardest-worn hinges in Britain.

Hollywood brain-snatchers have struck again

2007-09-24T16:27:00.000-06:00

So, has anyone heard of this new show Aliens in America? Basically, it's about a kid in some little midwestern town who's having a hard time in high school, a guy without much of a social life, so his mom signs up to host an exchange student in the hopes that'll at least give him one friend. The exchange student turns out to be a Pakistani Muslim named Raja who's even more out of his element in an American high school than the American kid, so of course they become fast friends. Which all sounds like a decent concept for a sitcom. But - you knew there was a "but" coming, right? - leave it to Hollywood to wreck it.

I've just seen a "sneak peak" of the show at the CW Network website. And three guesses what all the American characters in the show have in common. That's right, they're all racists.

It starts when the family first finds out that their exchange student is a Muslim; they try to "return" him, saying he's "not what they ordered", and complain to the principal of the school, who made the arrangements. The principal says that another family pulled out of the program when they found out they were getting a Muslim student, which is why he didn't mention it. Soon enough, Raja finds himself in a class with a teacher introducing him as a "real-life Pakistani who practices Muslimism [sic]". The teacher asks the class how they feel about "Raja's differences", whereupon a girl raises her hand and says she's angry at him because of 9/11. The teacher asks "who else is angry with Raja?", and every hand in the room goes up.

I'm sorry, but what the hell is wrong with the media? I'm used to subtle and not-so-subtle accusations against whites, men, Westerners, conservatives, and Americans in general interspersed throughout television programs these days. In fact, other than Stargate, I'm not sure there's a program I watch these days that doesn't make snide little comments every now and then. But an entire series - a series meant to be a comedy, no less - which hinges on assuming that almost all of its characters are racists? Since when is that funny? Are they really expecting people not to notice that this is all just an exercise in propaganda? Wait, I can answer that...yes, they are. And they're probably right.

So, are they teaching anything?

2007-09-22T00:06:00.000-06:00

Pop quiz: name five major figures of the twentieth century. If I were asked that, I would probably say Joseph Stalin, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill. All pretty major people, right? Then would it surprise you to learn that three of them have just been removed from the list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in secondary schools in the UK? Since two of the people on my list are American presidents, you can guess it's not them. Yep, that's right; high school teachers in the UK are no longer being recommended to teach Stalin, Hitler, or Churchill.

The History Curriculum Association says the move "promotes ignorance".

One person who remains on the list of key British historical figures is William Wilberforce. "Who?" you ask? Apparently, he was one of the lawmakers instrumental in ending the slave trade. I guess leaders in the fight for freedom are only important if they lived before 1900. Martin Luther King Jr has also been removed from the list.

It's hardly confined to the UK. I already seem to be the only person in the College of Education who's ever heard of the Cambodian Killing Fields. Ten years from now, I shouldn't wonder if half of American high school graduates have never heard of World War Two. Heck, if you take "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader" as evidence, they already think New York to Chicago is a transatlantic flight.

Ever feel like you're standing on the Titanic bailing water out the porthole with a dixie cup? That's my feeling as a teacher.

Being reborn? Stay out of China.

2007-09-20T00:33:00.001-06:00

I thought this was a joke when I first heard about it, but apparently not. In what has to be the most ludicrous totalitarian act in history, China has officially banned Tibetan Buddhists from reincarnating without government permission. The Chinese government calls it "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation".

It appears that China is attempting to stop the exiled Dalai Lama from reincarnating in Tibet. As the Dalai Lama refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese occupation, however, this seems to be rather pointless.

Oh, and also, there is the small matter of it being totally insane!!

There are two options when it comes to reincarnation: either it's real or it isn't. If it isn't real, this is all totally cuckoo. And if it is, then I think it's quite unlikely the Chinese government can actually control the ingress and egress of departed souls through its borders. How are they going to enforce this law? Maybe they'll post a sign at every port of entry: "ATTENTION: If you are a spirit seeking reincarnation, you MUST have a Rebirth Visa (form #38905-B). Violators will be warded off with sage."

Looking for intellectual freedom? You'll have better luck with leprechauns.

2007-09-15T21:25:00.000-06:00

For those who don't know, I spent my first year of college at Cornell University, a place with 25,000 students and about six and a half Republicans spread amongst the loony majority. And I mean loony - Ithaca, New York, which contains both Cornell U and Ithaca College, is the only community in the entire United States which returned a Green Party majority in the 2000 federal election.

Anyway, today, I found a very interesting article online, which was published in the Cornell Daily Sun which was published not long after I left Ithaca in 2004. The Daily Sun is generally a centrist newspaper (the Cornell Review and Cornell American are conservative, while the other twenty-five-plus student publications are liberal). The article, reproduced here on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a response to a challenge to send in "concrete examples" of anti-conservative discrimination in academia. Amusingly, within two days of this challenge being issued, the Student Assembly attempted to defund the aforementioned Cornell American. This action was spearheaded by the Student Assembly vice-president, who also happened to be president of the Cornell Democrats. Hmm...conflict of interest much?

A few lines from the article tell us things we shouldn't be surprised by:

96.8 percent of presidential campaign contributions made by Cornell faculty went to John Kerry

To [Professor Arthur] Bellinzoni, the incarnation of evil is George W. Bush.

When Wells [College, Aurora, NY] Republicans last year published their study on the faculty's political makeup, Prof. Jonathan Vawter responded with a campus-wide e-mail labeling Republicans "stupid," and calling for "lobotomies" for all Republicans. Shortly thereafter, Wells' version of the SA denied the Wells Republicans' request for recognition as an official club, which would have qualified them for funding.

However, the article also revealed some things that even I, your cynical and chronically jaded host, find shocking:

At Ithaca College, faced with the evidence that there was not a single Republican in the politics department she chaired, Prof. Asma Barlas boasted "we have a range of progressive views in our department." Apparently for Prof. Barlas, intellectual diversity means spanning the spectrum from liberal to Maoist.

In 1997, when some students took issue with articles in another conservative publication, The Cornell Review, they stole and burned hundreds of copies of the newspaper. The administration meted out no punishment for such blatant trampling of others' free speech. To the contrary, as former Sun columnist Joe Sabia has noted, the only official reaction was an attempt by the Student Assembly (notice a trend here?) "to defund the Review, ban it from campus, and send all of its editors to the Judicial Administrator for sensitivity training."

At Ithaca College, Time Magazine recently reported ("The Right's New Wing," Aug. 22, 2004) that "you don't have to spend much time at the college to see that liberals run the place. It posted a website after 9/11 devoted almost exclusively to critiques of the U.S. The site includes the text of a talk by Professor Asma Barlas, who chaired the politics department last year, in which she blames 'Jewish groups' for 'introducing modern forms of terrorism into the Middle East' and suggests that capitalism 'provided the breeding grounds for much of modern day extremism.'" When Time asked politics professor Charles Santiago whether he assigned conservative thinkers, "he responded, completely without irony, 'I am teaching Hitler.'"

An exposition of blatant discrimination at the University of Miami and the University of Colorado at Boulder rounded out the article:

Until public outcry forced the university to back down, white students at the University of Colorado at Boulder were barred from taking the popular School and Society course on Fridays. The school had reserved that class period for "students of color" in order to provide "a much safer and open environment."

Former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala, now President of the University of Miami, permitted the denial of recognition of a new conservative student group on the theory that the College Republicans speak for all conservatives, despite the fact that Miami recognizes six liberal groups.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'll be out of the academic world soon. Every time I hand an essay in these days, I feel like there's a club hovering over my head waiting to come down the moment someone shouts "CONSERVATIVE!".

I can't believe I never thought of this

2007-08-31T18:53:00.000-06:00

You know, something I was watching on TV the other day brought the subject of abortion to my mind, and something occurred to me. Something so mind-bloggling simple it's taken me years to think of it (funny how that works). And here it is:

Abortion advocates tend to take the view that everyone who believes a child in the womb is human is coming at the issue from a religious standpoint. They claim that we believe a fetus has the same rights as anyone else because that's what the church says. In essence, they say that anti-abortion folks base our arguments on something mystical, something not measurable or understandable.

Wait. Something's not right here. There is no scientifically observable difference between a baby an hour before it's born and the same baby an hour after it's born. Except for the umbilical cord (which can't be said to constitute a biological change within the child), every inch of that child is exactly the same. And we can extend this to far beyond an hour before birth. The current world record for the shortest successful pregnancy is 22 weeks - that's less than three months. Most babies born premature after the end of the second trimester live. In fact, past the embryo stage, a child's "structure", for lack of a better term, is essentially fixed; growth is the only change that continues. Therefore, I would argue that it could be said that there is almost no biological change between the beginning of the fetal stage and the hours after birth, or indeed the rest of life. Mental development is the same: the basic structures of the brain are there from the end of the first trimester, and stay the same until death.

So if there's no real change in biology from fetus to child, what is it that changes when a baby exits the mother? The answer, of course, is that it must be something unobservable. Something, in other words, mystical.

And there it is. Liberals, who so often claim to be secular and level-headed on the issue of abortion, in fact believe that some sort of humanity (or soul, if you prefer) just whooshes into a baby the instant it leaves its mother's body. Opponents of abortion, in contrast, believe that what is there the moment after birth has been there from the moment of conception - body, mind, and, if you do happen to be religious, soul. So who is it that bases their opinions on the unseeable, on something taken on faith? Who is it that believes in something supernatural which happens to a baby at a particular moment and therefore makes killing that baby wrong? It is not the abortion opponents, not the conservatives, not the "religious right"; it is the very people who claim to oppose laws based on faith and belief.

Interesting, isn't it?

Nutritionist buzzkills strike again

2007-08-30T18:29:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm back. In case you're wondering, I was on a trip to Alaska for the last three weeks, which aside from an ATV rollover accident (I'll be walking without crutches by sometime next week) was a lot of fun.

Anyway, I haven't really been following the news recently, but I did happen to find this. In Putnam County, New York, senior centers hand out free day-old donuts. Nutritionists, who as we all know are considered gods in the state of New York (remember the trans fat debacle?), said that this was an "unhealthy" practice, and people over 65 should not be eating donuts. 250 seniors signed a petition to the county started by Joe Hajkowski, 75, who says he personally doesn't eat the donuts.

Absolutely idiotic, this. What's going to happen if the nutritionists get their wish and every senior citizen in Putnam County suddenly goes on a strict diet of rabbit food? Their average life expectancy might go up by, what, 2 hours? If you're 70 years old, whatever your lifestyle is going to determine about your longevity and health is pretty much decided. You'd think the county would let these folks be happy in the last decade of their lives instead of making itself feel all morally high and mighty by misappropriating their apple fritters.

When this is what government spends its time and money - our money - doing, there's no choice but to conclude that they have too much of both on their hands. As if we didn't know already.