Thoughts on the Aftermath of Hurricane Ike

A week after Hurricane Ike hit the Texas Gulf coast, things are just about back to normal for me. The power is back on, I'm back to work, and I am again enjoying hot showers. The last week was a real inconvenience, but that is just what it was: an inconvenience. I know this sort of thing hits the working poor disproportionately hard, and for them, and others who sustained damage to their property, it will take a little more time before things are back to normal. I don't mean to minimize the impact and hardships caused by Ike, however, I had plenty to eat and drink, and a place to sleep each night. Sure, I had to 'suffer' through poor cellular and internet service, and had to do without a lot of the things that make life easier for a middle-class American, but I got by, as did/are most people. It may be frustrating, but soon it will be just a memory or a story to tell.

I guess what I am trying to say is this; we have it good. We really are blessed in the U.S., and it's not because we are special or because God wants to bless us more than some other nationality because we are a "Christian" nation -sorry, we are not. The majority of the people on this earth live in conditions worse than what we have experienced for 365 days of the year. For instance, in Africa, the lack of potable water rivals the AIDS epidemic as a health/quality of life crisis, and according to Data.org, "seventy percent of Sub-Saharan Africans live on less than $2 a day, and 200 million go hungry every day." Add to this the fact that children as young as seven and eight are forced into service as child soldiers in armed insurrections in places such as Uganda and Sierra Leone, and you can see what I mean. This is what occurs on the red soil of Africa day after day, and these same issues are played out all over the world, while we mostly close our minds to them. That is something we should think about...

***

Let me leave you with the lyrics from the song "Cold Cash and Colder Hearts" by one of my favorite bands, Thrice:

They are sick, they are poor
And they die by the thousands and we look away
They are wolves at the door
And they're not gonna move us or get in our way

'Cause we don't have the time
Here at the top of the world
Feeling alright
Here at the top of the world

We hold our own by keeping our hearts cold

Different god, darker skin
They are just not a burden that we'd like to bear
They are living in "sin"
There are so many reasons for us not to care

But I'm feeling alright
Here at the top of the world
Doing just fine
Here at the top of the world

We've learned money matters most
So we keep our cards held close
Here at the top of the world

We hold our own by keeping our hearts cold
And we've learned what matters most
So we keep our hearts cold

They are no one
They are nowhere
They are not our problem
Not worth saving
Nonexistent if we keep our hearts cold

They are no one
They are nowhere s

Last Post

I am taking a break from blogging.

Brainwashing at the University

Pajamas Media reports how the University of Delaware attempts to brainwash and indoctrinate their freshman. A sample:

“The program’s stated intent was for the approximately 7,000 students in U.D.’s residence halls to espouse, in FIRE’s words, “highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.”

Program materials for this ideological reeducation, which have been removed from the U.D. Website, included race/gender/class/sexual orientation "trainer" Shakti Butler's definition of a racist as “all white people living in the United States” and her edict that “people of color cannot be racists.” An intrusive rating instrument, “Discovery Wheel,” was used to prompt students to admit to their putative racism, and they were instructed that the U.S. is as “an oppressive society” whose “structures of oppression” it is their “duty” to eliminate.

“The treatment” was also mandatory and punitive. Students were required to attend training sessions, group floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Advisers (RAs), who, having been coached in interrogating vulnerable freshmen, plied them with invasive questions. Thereafter students were rated on a scale of “best” to “worst,” according to how they complied with the prescribed campus orthodoxy. For example, students were grilled about when they first discovered their sexual identity. One resistant student who replied, “That is none of your damn business,” was written up as having one of the "wors[t] one-one-one" sessions, and identified by name and room number."

Really this could be described as outrageous were it not so typical of the indoctrination that occurs in academia in America.

Various comments, quotes and etc.

***

"I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

"I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

... These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the [expletive deleted] up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong."

-- David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice

***

It came to light this week that Eliot Spitzer, now former governor of New York, was engaging in liaisons dangereuses with high-priced call girls. He said this was a private and personal matter. Others have said, 'it's just sex." This same case was made when President Clinton was having fellatio performed on him by that woman -Monica Lewinsky.

Two points:

1. It is just sex, but it's not.

For Spitzer, it involved structuring, which is the manipulation of bank transactions with the intent to evade reporting requirements, the Mann Act, and, possibly, money laundering. As attorney general of New York, Spitzer made his name going after white collar crime and corruption in government and business, so it is rather ironic that he may face charges under the very laws that he often used in a heavy-handed way.

For Clinton, it was about much more than fellatio; it was about perjury. If perjury isn't a big deal, then why did Martha Stewart spend time in prison? Why is Barry Bonds facing trial for allegedly lying to a grand jury? Why is Migual Tejada and Roger Clemens being investigated for possibly perjuring themselves before a Congressional Committee?

So, you see, it is not just sex.

2. Even if it was 'just sex,' it would matter.

How one conducts himself in private matters will manifest the same way in public affairs. There is not a dichotomy that separates the public and the private. If one will lie, deceive and betray those closest to him, then he will also behave in the same way toward a nameless and faceless crowd (i.e. the public).

Remember that the next time you hear that it doesn't matter how our elected officials conduct themselves in their private lives.

***

T.S. Eliot...possibly my favorite poet.


"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

-T. S. Eliot

Following is Part V of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men:"

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

A Courageous Act: Cuban student speaks truth to power

"You can only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power-he's free again."

‡ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I am a regular reader of Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus column over at Nation Review Online. Often, he writes about the heroism of political and religious dissidents in places such as China and Cuba. Today, he noted this:

"Be sure you know the name of Eliécer Ávila Sicilia. He is a computer-science student in Cuba, and amazing. He did something unthinkable: He questioned Ricardo Alarcón, head of the sham legislature known as the Cuban National Assembly, in a public forum. This young man asked Alarcón why Cubans are not allowed to travel abroad. He also asked why they are forbidden to enter certain hotels on the island. (They are foreigners-only.)

Alarcón, disturbed, both ducked the questions and lied. He said that, in the U.S., Hispanics are kicked out of stores, because of their appearance. In any case, how does that address the “tourism apartheid,” as it’s known, in Cuba?"

Eliécer Ávila Sicilia may well find himself in one of Castro's prisons one day, but if people like him were to stop standing up against this totalitarian regime, with the chattering class calling for normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, then it would be almost impossible to think of a day when Cubans can taste the freedom that we take for granted. It's easy to 'speak truth to power' when absent is the possibility of consequences, which is why Mr. Sicilia's act is so courageous and inspiring.

You may find Mr. Nordlinger's complete column and more on Mr. Sicilia's story here.

This Land is My Land, this Land is...

Just a thought that I want to leave with you...

Throughout our history, the United States has been known as the Land of Opportunity, when did it become the Land of Grievance, the Land of Complaint? It seems it has become a rather mundane, run-of-the-mill place where everyone is a victim, and personal responsibility is a forgotten virtue...

Out-of-Control Cop Accosts Skater Boy

Obviously, like so many other cops, this dude is suffering from an inferiority complex. Is it any wonder that so many people have little respect for cops, when this kind of behavior is not the exception, but the rule? Police officers need to understand that respect is something earned by how one comports himself -not by wearing a uniform or badge. That he lost control so easily proves that he has no business being a police officer. This 'dude' should be fired.

While the kid's behavior wasn't exemplary, he is just a kid, and nothing he did warranted being verbally abused, or thrown to the ground by the neck.

At the end of this video, the cop starts to say, "if I find myself on Yout..." Well, he did, and I hope he gets or got what is or was coming to him.