Author: Kevin

What a Difference Five Years Makes

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Five years ago, Kansas City Star sportswriter Jason Whitlock wrote an op-ed on the topic of violent crime among black males after Washington Redskin Sean Taylor was killed by an armed burglar.  His death was due to a gunshot wound to his femoral artery.

At the time, Whitlock wrote:

Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now. The life they knew has been destroyed, an 18-month-old baby lost her father, and, if you’re a black man living in America, you’ve been reminded once again that your life is in constant jeopardy of violent death.

The Black KKK claimed another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a checkered past this time.

No, we don’t know for certain the circumstances surrounding Taylor’s death. I could very well be proven wrong for engaging in this sort of aggressive speculation. But it’s no different than if you saw a fat man fall to the ground clutching his chest. You’d assume a heart attack, and you’d know, no matter the cause, the man needed to lose weight.

Well, when shots are fired and a black man hits the pavement, there’s every statistical reason to believe another black man pulled the trigger. That’s not some negative, unfair stereotype. It’s a reality we’ve been living with, tolerating and rationalizing for far too long.

Well, after Kansas City Chief’s player Jovan Belcher’s murder/suicide, Whitlock is still peddling “aggresive speculation” and blaming a “KKK,” but his target has shifted a bit:

Sports gets so much attention, and people tune out the real world, that I try to take advantage of the opportunity to talk about the real world when sports lends itself to that and try to open people’s eyes. You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture – I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].

I think it’s obvious if you’ve traveled abroad, and traveled to countries where they have legitimate gun laws, that we don’t have to have what we have in America, where people somehow think a gun enhances their liberty, and that people somehow think a gun makes them safer. It just doesn’t. A gun turns some kids listening to music into a murder scene. And uh, you know, if you don’t have a gun, you drive home. You know, kids listening to some loud music, you don’t like it, you go home and complain to your wife. But when you have a gun, you open fire, potentially, and take the life of a child.

So, it’s no longer the black KKK, but the NRA KKK that’s at fault for, well, black men killing black men (and women.)  It’s no longer the “black KKK” (aka: the gang culture) that turns “kids listening to music into a murder scene,” it’s the NRA’s culture!  You see, black men don’t die of murder at six times the rate of any other group in America because their culture tells them that getting “dissed” is a capital offense, oh no!  It’s because they’re unable to overcome the evil brain-melting rays that guns produce!

Must be a genetic thing, no?  So we need to disarm Billy Bob and Cletus so that a Jovan won’t kill his girlfriend and then himself.  But what about Alexandria?

Sounds like rationalization to me. But what do I know. I’m just some cracker….

(h/t: SayUncle)

They Don’t Control Their Monster

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One thing that constantly bemuses the gun-rights supporter is why gun-control supporters fear good people possessing the means to defend themselves.

I submit, it’s largely because they don’t trust themselves.  They do not know and definitely do not control their inner monsters.  And they don’t think other people can do it, either.

Unless those people have been sprinkled with the magic fairy dust of government authority.

How We “Lost the Culture War”

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It’s been a pretty steady refrain, from Bill Whittle to CNN that the reelection of Barack Obama proves that the Right has “lost the culture war”. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over how this happened, but it’s been apparent to me that it started in our public school system, and here’s an interesting article to that point.

From City Journal, Spring of 2009 edition, Pedagogy of the Oppressor:

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.

The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Read the whole article. If you have children in public school, ask their teachers if they’ve read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and if so, what they think of it. Remember, this book was mentioned prominently in the “Raza Studies” fight here in the Tucson Unified School District.

Now, here’s an interesting coincidence:

As a case in point, consider the career of Robert Peterson. Peterson started out in the 1980s as a young elementary school teacher in inner-city Milwaukee. He has described how he plumbed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking for some way to apply the great radical educator’s lessons to his own fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual classrooms. Peterson came to realize that he had to break away from the “banking method” of education, in which “the teacher and the curricular texts have the ‘right answers’ and which the students are expected to regurgitate periodically.” Instead, he applied the Freirian approach, which “relies on the experience of the student. . . . It means challenging the students to reflect on the social nature of knowledge and the curriculum.” Peterson would have you believe that his fourth- and fifth-graders became critical theorists, interrogating the “nature of knowledge” like junior scholars of the Frankfurt School.

What actually happened was that Peterson used the Freirian rationale to become his students’ “self-appointed political conscience.”

AKA, their political officer.

After one unit on U.S. intervention in Latin America, Peterson decided to take the children to a rally protesting U.S. aid to the Contras opposing the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The children stayed after school to make placards:

LET THEM RUN THEIR LAND!
HELP CENTRAL AMERICA DON’T KILL THEM
GIVE THE NICARAGUANS THEIR FREEDOM

Peterson was particularly proud of a fourth-grader who described the rally in the class magazine. “On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras,” the student wrote. “The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads. When we went protesting it was raining and it seemed like the contras were bombing us.”

These days, Peterson is the editor of Rethinking Schools, the nation’s leading publication for social-justice educators. He is also the editor of a book called Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, which provides math lessons for indoctrinating young children in the evils of racist, imperialist America.

Rethinking Schools, if you remember, was the source of the piece that inspired my education überpost The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Continuing:

Partly thanks to Peterson’s efforts, the social-justice movement in math, as in other academic subjects, has fully arrived (see “The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug,” Summer 2006). It has a foothold in just about every major ed school in the country and enjoys the support of some of the biggest names in math education, including several recent presidents of the 25,000-member American Education Research Association, the umbrella organization of the education professoriate. Its dozens of pseudo-scholarly books, journals, and conferences extol the supposed benefits to disadvantaged kids of the kind of teaching that Peterson once inflicted on his Milwaukee fourth-graders.

And now you know why schools can’t teach algebra, as detailed in The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Again, read the whole piece. Do you understand now how we “lost the culture”?  And why we aren’t going to get it back?

Bug-Out Vehicle

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aka: The Earthfucker.

Added a new vehicle to the stable, something more suitable for going to the range or out in the sticks hunting, or – in the extreme – bugging out of Dodge with the family than the ’11 GT Mustang:


It’s a 2005 F250 Crewcab SuperDuty 4×4 with a 6.0L turbodiesel and a 5-speed automatic. Gotta put nerf bars on it, or my 5’0″ wife will NEVER be able to climb into it. It’s a bit of a stretch for me.

The (factory) color is “Screaming Yellow.” I call it “The Tonka Toy.”

I figure when the Zombie Apocalypse hits, I can run over anything I can’t outrun. An in-bed auxiliary fuel tank is high on the list of accessories for this thing.

UPDATE: Oh well, I guess not.

Quote of the Day – The Destruction Principle

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From Captain Capitalism:

It is easier to destroy something that already exists than build something of genuine value up from scratch.

This is key to understand the psychology Crusaders and Crusaderism because when given the choice of:

“Work hard, study something rigorous, and put in the effort into a long and demanding career”

or

“Find something in society that already exists, villianize it and declare it evil, then wage a campaign against it”

the lazy, mathophoic, work-fearing leftist crusader will ALWAYS go for destroying institutions and pillars over doing something that requires effort.

And you must understand how arrogant and truly evil this is. The crusader doesn’t target these pillars or institutions of society because those institutions and pillars are evil. They target those things because the crusaders are evil.

An Accurate (if ominous) Prediction

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Mark Steyn as interviewed by Ed Driscoll, Sept. 17, 2012:

DRISCOLL: So with all of that as prologue; with the ongoing collapse of so many aspects of what make up Barack Obama’s worldview, why is Mitt Romney seemingly flailing in the polls as of the time of this interview?

STEYN: Yeah. That bothers me too, because this guy ought to be losing by ten points at least. And I know people say well, it’s a fifty-fifty nation and it’s going to be a tight election and all the rest of it. If it’s tight this time around that says something very alarming. You know, a lot of people don’t — simply don’t get the numbers. The word trillion doesn’t really mean anything to people; it has no relation to their lives. And at a certain point it takes on a bit of unreality because if you can spend trillions of dollars you don’t have and you do it for one year and you do it for two years and you do it for five years, people think well, why can’t we keep on doing that. So that doesn’t seem like a real problem to many people.

And then I think there’s something even more worrying. That if you go back to 2008 — and we all did this at the time — we said basically those of us, you know, who however reluctantly supported McCain. When he lost we said well, the guy gave the impression he wanted to lose and people were exhausted by war and people were tired of the Bush administration and the Republicans hadn’t covered themselves in glory in the previous couple of years and this guy would be the first black president and everyone’s saying he’s the greatest speaker of all time and he’s a real glamorous celebrity figure.

You know, McCain did the thing where he was mocking Obama as the celebrity. Now we’ve had four years of him. He’s a crashing bore. He’s not a great speaker. He’s got nothing new to say. He staggers around doing the same — giving the same leaden speech as the economy flatlines, as the jobs market shrivels, as people in their early fifties go on disability and people in their late 20s move back with their parents.

If he gets sort of elected as the nonglamorous failure, what that would mean is that America is essentially saying there’s no prospect of recovery. We’re sticking with big nanny Obama because at least he’s guaranteeing our food stamps and our disability checks. And they would essentially be accepting — they would be accepting, I think kind of — a European nanny state view of America that would in effect spell the end of this country. They’d be basically saying there’s no possibility of an American dream.

Yes, we could vote for Romney, but who wants to take a flyer on economic recovery. At least if we go with Obama we have the certainty of the food stamps and the certainty of the disability checks. That’s a — there’s no hope — he’s basically offering them the hope — the certainty of no change. And he’s saying when everything gets bad, and it’s going to be bad for as far as the eye can see, vote for me because you’ll get your food stamps.

I think he called it.