Karl Marx would be giddy with pride seeing what our public schools are teaching my kids today. – Lyle over at The View from North Central Idaho – Critical Pedagogy Hits Home
RTWT.
Home
Finally.
Remember when I said I’d gotten some travel vouchers from United? My parents are planning a trip, and I asked my dad if he could use them. “What airline?” was his question. “United,” I replied. “I’d rather walk,” he said.
United has merged with Continental.
Now, flying to Houston was painless. Getting back, not so much. I arrived at the airport at 07:15 for my 09:20 flight – and discovered that said flight had been Cancelled. Oh. Joy. So off to the ticket counter goes I to find out what my options were.
Continental had rebooked my flight. For TUESDAY. BZZZZT! Sorry, wrong answer! Well, they could book me on the 6:00PM flight. That was all they could do.
OK, how about Phoenix? I can get a rental car and drive down to Tucson. Sure, they can do that. There’s a flight leaving at 09:10, or they can put me on standby for the 11:50 flight. The earlier the better, so I have a boarding pass for the 09:10 flight to Phoenix, boarding to begin at 08:35, and to compensate me for my inconvenience, they give me a $6 voucher for food from any vendor in the airport. By the time I leave the ticket counter it’s 08:15.
By the time I make it through security theater (don’t even ask about that) and get to the gate, it’s 08:50.
And boarding has not started yet.
We finally start boarding at 09:00. We push back from the gate at about 09:25. And sit on the tarmac for thirty minutes. Seems there’s a hydraulic problem. We’re going back to the gate. We get back to the gate about 10:00. And sit. Oh, wait! They’re going to let us off the plane while it’s being repaired – no, they have another plane for us!
At a different terminal.
It’s the 11:50 flight they offered to put me on standby for. I don’t know what they did, but they had one completely full flight when we pushed back from the gate.
At 12:20.
An hour into the flight, we have a “medical emergency” – a passenger is ill. However, they decided to continue on to Phoenix rather than divert. We land in Phoenix at 12:50 local time. We wait while EMT’s check out the ill passenger and take her off the plane first. I’m in the back of the aircraft. Debarkation takes twenty minutes. I head for the car rentals.
Do you know how much it costs to rent a car one-way from Sky Harbor to Tucson International? Don’t ask. Somehow I doubt it will be a reimbursable expense.
I call my wife once I’m in the car on the way home. I’m going to be home in time for the birthday dinner at The Cheesecake Factory for my stepdaughter and my neice’s husband.
No I’m not. My mother is in the hospital. Dad took her in at 03:00 this morning with shortness of breath. She has atrial fibrillation and fluid buildup around her heart, and isn’t getting enough oxygen. This is the second trip in a month for this condition. Apparently they didn’t adjust her meds properly. So instead of going home and then out to dinner, I went straight to the hospital.
Now I’m home.
Houston is a 17-hour shot down I-10 from my house. Next time I think I’ll drive.
But Knoxville is next weekend. I hope American Airlines is better.
Traveling
I’m flying to Houston, Texas today and will be in meetings most of tomorrow. Dinner Friday night with a couple of bloggers (I hope) and returning to Tucson on Saturday. Saturday night I’ve got a family obligation, so needless to say blogging will be light. There’s an überpost simmering on a back burner though, that I hope to hit “Publish” on in a week or so.
Meanwhile, the free ice cream machine is on the fritz.
Sometimes I Wish I Drank
As Tam said, “Et tu, Clarence?” The Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision basically rubberstamped the Indiana Supreme Court’s Barnes v. Indiana decision, further eviscerating the 4th Amendment’s guarantee of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects in the name of the War on (Some) Drugs™.
And I find that I am in complete agreement with Justice Ginsberg:
The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases.
I’d expect this of Clarence Thomas, not Ginsburg.
I feel a strong urge to get completely drunk and take a long, very hot shower.
One Hundred Years of Public Education
My brother sent this to me tonight. I think I’ve seen it before, unattributed, but it’s right in most particulars.
The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.
A comment in response to it seen elsewhere, however, puts it in perspective:
I’m not worried about the 1/5 of America that voted for him, I’m worried about the 3/5ths of America that didn’t care enough to vote at all.
And Yet Another
Following up on the previous post, Instapundit links to a piece about playwright David Mamet and his new book on losing his liberal outlook. Some choice excerpts:
Higher ed, (Mamet) said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—”Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.
“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”
This is the whole strategy of “critical theory” – the Frankfurt school’s methodology for using the education system to de-moralize (hypen used intentionally) the population. Thomas Jefferson? He can’t be a great man, he was a slave owner and adulterer! Pull the lever! Writing an essay on economics? The grader will be a Keynesian, so it had better slant that way! Pull the lever!
On cognitive dissonance:
“The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people’s? One thing they can’t do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd.”
To admit failure would require them to question their ideology, and that loses them their position in the herd.
In the beginning of Mamet’s conversion, his Rabbi sent him books:
One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the “constrained vision” of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet’s greatest plays—and the “unconstrained vision” of man’s endless improvement that suffused Mamet’s politics and the politics of his profession and social class.
“He came back to me stunned. He said, ‘This is incredible!’ He said, ‘Who thinks like this? Who are these people?’ I said, ‘Republicans think like this.’ He said, ‘Amazing.’ ”
I didn’t have to be converted by Sowell’s magnum opus, but Conflict of Vision‘s effect on me was similar.
And, of course, the article points out the inevitable herd reaction to Mamet’s conversion:
After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.
Read the whole piece.
I think I just added another book onto my pile.
An Example of Critical Pedagogy
From the comments to my recent post A Failure of Critical Pedagogy comes this video of a Tucson Unified School District board meeting in which a parent stood up and read from some of the books used in that district’s “Raza Studies” program, which I’ve covered before in Balkanization and Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around.
Watch this video, and listen to what the speaker has to say. Then listen to the response from the TUSD governing board member. Is he in denial, or just completely obtuse?
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
Do you want that taught to your kids? How do you feel about it being taught exclusively to students of hispanic descent?
Out-Fvk!ng-Standing
Stingray unleashes on a TSA goon employee. Savor it all.
This Blog R 8
Eight years ago today I hit “Publish” on the first post to this blog. Short and sweet, it went like this:
Testing, testing, testing….
Is this thing on?
Apparently so. Too bad I managed to lose the opening essay it took me an HOUR to compose. Oh well. I’ll reconstruct it and put it back up later.
Welcome to The Smallest Minority, so named because most of the really good names, Eject! Eject! Eject!, USS Clueless, Instapundit, Acidman, and so on were already taken. And while not a Randian, I accept a lot of Ayn Rand’s observations as accurate, and it was she who wrote: “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
This blog is about the rights of individuals, that smallest of minorities, so it seemed apt.
More (hopefully MUCH more) to follow.
And much more has followed. According to Blogger I’ve published over 5,000 posts, an average of 1.7 per day. (Haven’t kept that pace recently.) According to Sitemeter, the site has drawn over 2.2 million hits, an average well over 700 per day (and trust me, it didn’t start out anywhere near that high).
I lost the 40,000+ comments collected by Echo (and before that, HaloScan) over the previous seven years when Echo decided that increasing their fees by a factor of ten was a smart business decision. Oh, I still have the comment archives, but I was never able to successfully import them to Disqus. Dammit. Surprisingly, the old comment threads are still working (like to the Überthread – it’s 574 comments long, so give it a chance to load) but I don’t have links to each and every comment thread for every post – nor do I know how much longer those links will be working. I’m still seriously bummed by that.
Eight years in the blogiverse is a long time, and I’ve enjoyed most of it, but as I noted in This I Believe, this blog has been an exploration of the core beliefs that guide my daily life. Some of those beliefs are unpleasant. But then, reality can be a stone-cold bitch. While I still believe that the courts will not save us, (further evidence given just recently) I will admit that I was far too pessimistic about what could be accomplished via that path but not at all pessimistic enough about what can still be done to us via that same vector. I’m even more amazed at what we’ve been able to accomplish legislatively.
I do wish I was less pessimistic about our political “leaders.” Hell, I wish I was less pessimistic about the electorate.
Still, on the whole I’m glad I chose to start this blog and stick with it. I hope in addition to giving me that place to explore my core beliefs and rant to my heart’s content, it has also provided a service to those of you who visit, read and comment here on a regular basis. I do this to entertain me, but I probably wouldn’t have done it nearly as long without that feedback.
So, thanks. Thanks for making all those hours worthwhile. Thanks for giving me things to think about and things to laugh about. I think I’ll keep at it, at least for the next couple of years. The Mayan calendar notwithstanding, 2012 looks like it’s going to be one helluva year.
Barnes v. Indiana
That’s the decision making all the rounds of the gun- and libertarian-blogs right now, in which a 3-2 majority of the Indiana Supreme Court held:
…that there is no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police officers.
What part of “unlawful” don’t they get? OK, I’ll unreasonably resist.
This is a classic example of what a “living Constitution” philosophy eventually leads to. Also from the decision:
The English common-law right to resist unlawful police action existed for over three hundred years, and some scholars trace its origin to the Magna Carta in 1215. The United States Supreme Court recognized this right in Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, 535 (1900): “If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest.” The Supreme Court has affirmed this right as recently as 1948. United States v. Di Re, 332 U.S. 581, 594 (1948) (“One has an undoubted right to resist an unlawful arrest, and courts will uphold the right of resistance in proper cases.”)
So it’s established Supreme Court caselaw, right? And inferior courts may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch, right?
Nazzofast, Guido. Here’s that “living Constitution” philosophy:
In the 1920s, legal scholarship began criticizing the right as valuing individual liberty over physical security of the officers. One scholar noted that the common-law right came from a time where “resistance to an arrest by a peace officer did not involve the serious dangers it does today.” The Model Penal Code eliminated the right on two grounds: ―(1) the development of alternate remedies for an aggrieved arrestee, and (2) the use of force by the arrestee was likely to result in greater injury to the person without preventing the arrest. In response to this criticism, a majority of states have abolished the right via statutes in the 1940s and judicial opinions in the 1960s.
Really? They did? Under color of what authority? I’m unaware of any Supreme Court decisions post 1948 that established this new interpretation. I’m unaware of any amendments to the Constitution prior to or after 1920 that did so.
To quote Alan Gura from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago:
States may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of American citizens, but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional.
As 9th Circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his August 2010 dissent to that court’s U.S. v Pidena-Moreno decision, another case involving Fourth Amendment protections:
Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home’s curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.
And I am reminded once again of our complete disconnect from the difference between the citizenry and the police as expressed by Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing, most especially Principle #7:
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
That stopped when the public became “them” to the police.
One more quote, this one from a TV show, Battlestar Galactica the recent version. Admiral Adama, when asked to place his space Marines in the position of policemen to the refugee fleet demurred with some writer’s very cogent observation:
The police protect the People. The military defends the State. When the military becomes the police, the People become the Enemy of the State.
Our police forces are becoming more and more militarized defenders of the State every day, and rulings like this one are helping that happen.