Quote of the Day

From the Yuri Bezmenov interview which has been painstakingly transcribed (trust me, I’ve done transcription) by Useless Dissident:

(Ideological subversion is) a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one being demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, drop-outs, or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people… the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years…(this interview occurred in 1985) actually, it’s over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his… then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless… even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

Instead of 15-20 years, we’ve been at it since at least the 1950’s. But, as noted, the products are now the ones sitting in the places where the decisions about education get made, so changing the path we’re on would require tearing it all down and starting over from scratch.

Read the whole thing, or watch the segment I have posted. As I said, it fits all the available evidence.

Good job, UD. Thanks for all that hard work.

Kwoat of teh Dey – Edumakashun Edishun

Victor Davis Hanson from Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts:

After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education.

The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

And yet we’re to believe that this is not indoctrination, but education in the skills of critical thought. Oh, and Dr. Hanson is what’s known as a primary source on this topic!

(h/t to Unix-Jedi from a comment yesterday.)

UPDATE:  Thanks to the herculean efforts of reader John Hardin, the original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post is available here.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Where I live, owning a gun is sufficient to deny hiring. People would try to deny housing. The HOA here would love to kick me out. The goblins would try to rob my house. I have a family to think of Bill. I think you are trying to step on my first amendment and natural rights to say what I want. Are you sure you support individual rights? Ride Fast & Shoot Straight, Why They Call You a Traitor, Bill Schneider

Gee, you’d think that gun owners there are treated as badly as blacks and gays used to be. More fodder for Joe Huffman’s anti-bigotry campaign.

Give ‘Em Hell!

Give ‘Em Hell!

Ride Fast and Shoot Straight does a damned fine job fisking the clueless Bill Schneider’s latest column in New West, What I’ve Learned from Gun Nuts. He’s obviously learned the wrong damned lesson, and Ride Fast schools him.

An excerpt:

I’ve learned that most gun owners aren’t hunters and some have nothing but scorn for hunters because we’re soft and care about other amendments. So, they mock us, calling us Elmer Fudds. But the hunter’s revenge is the Pitman-Robinson Act, which mandates excise taxes historically paid mostly by hunters, but now mostly paid by gun owners who never hunt or even loathe hunters as turncoats. Back at you, buddy.

Some, a small minority, may have jokingly called you Fudds, or maybe mocked you. Your guy, Zumbo, called me a terrorist. Who’s the nasty bastard now? Bill, the point is we should be on the same side. Hunters fully supporting mere gun owners, shooters supporting hunters, sheep dogs supporting collectors. It’s really is all about the guns.

As someone once said to me: You beat that man like a rented mule! Bravo!

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Another 12-hour day. I see my readers have been having fun in the comments! Here’s a golden oldie from Rev. Donald Sensing via a new blog, Occupied Nashville:

I think that others, mostly the various gun-control groups, really just can’t stand freedom exercised by others. They want to live their lives a certain way and make sure that everyone else does, too. They seek a highly ordered, regimented society made up of people just like them. This desire to control others is pernicious and dangerous. They are “invincibly ignorant” in their campaigns because the actual facts about guns in America mean nothing to them. They simply do not want you or me to own a gun, period, no matter for what reason. They do not want us to be free and sovereign. – Rev. Sensing, Heller and the right to bear arms

RTWT, as usual. Sensing’s worth it.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

I’m beginning to think that one of the ways one can judge the degree to which a society has progressed towards a government-controlled police state is to look at the reaction of the police to encroachment on “their turf.” In a free society where the police are truly viewed as the servants and protectors of the citizens, the cops respect the rights of the citizens and see them as partners in the battle against crime. In a place like New York or San Francisco where the government is pressing towards complete control of the citizens, the cops bitterly resent any interference with their monopoly on the use of force and treat all citizens as simply potential criminals. – Toren Smith of the late, lamented Safety Valve from a July 21, 2003 comment at the Samizdata post, Tony Martin: Political Prisoner

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

A long one, this time:

Seriously, folks, it’s already evident from his first week in office (since presidential power is primarily persuasive, the “-elect” doesn’t mean much) that President Obama is exactly what I guessed: nothing. A Gatsby, a Zelig, a warm breeze in a suit. A bright, but completely characterless and forgettable young man, with an unusual but hardly unique talent for reading speeches on TV. In short, America’s new anchorman.

Once again, America has re-elected her permanent government. Of course that was the only option on the ballot – as it has been since Wendell Willkie. There’s no need to worry at all. Nothing significant in Washington has changed, will change, or can possibly change.

For the next four years, public policy will flow smoothly from America’s universities to her agencies, unimpeded by Neanderthal populism or corporate corruption. Oh, no. All the populism will be of the fashionable, happy-clappy, Starbucks Unitarian flavor. The corruption will be communist – with a small ‘c,’ of course.Unqualified Reservations: Barack Obama for the Last Time

Via Van Der Leun.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

We don’t have a Justice System, we have a Legal System, the purpose of which is to (supposedly) apply the law fairly to all in a predictable manner.

But even that’s gone by the wayside. The fact of the matter is that it appears that those in the system are interested in getting convictions, not in serving justice.

Found via David Codrea, here’s today’s QotD:

I have long been troubled by the uneven rules among circuits governing the use of unpublished decisions. It made a very irregular and unjust usage. Depending on where you lived, the precedent applicable would vary. Even worse, many courts in circuits which had rules prohibiting citation of unpublished decisions regularly used them for precedent in their own decisions. It made the principles underlying stare decisis unworkable. You should be able to know ahead of time what law will apply to the case you are researching. Use of unpublished opinions in some decisions and not in others, also raised the decision-making of courts to a level of secrecy and unpredictability that may have abridged constitutionality.Out of the Jungle: “Done” Scotus: On using unpublished opinions

(Bold emphasis mine. Italics in original.) RTWT.