Educational Indoctrination

America, Education, Family, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

What is happening in our schools is beyond shocking. A whole generation has been brainwashed to believe things we and our parents would have written off as lunacy.

A firsthand account by a public school teacher in Gross Pointe, Michigan of what’s going on in the halls, academic lounges and in kids’ heads these days alarmingly summarizes what we should find frightening if we care about our children and grandchildren. The article, entitled “Worse Than Ever: Government Schools After 35 Years“, by Lawrence M. Ludlow (American Thinker, August 15, 2019) describes what he found upon returning to the classroom after a hiatus because the local high school was unable to replace a retiring Latin teacher.

The first clue was the difference between the certification process in 1982, when he previously taught, and 2018. In his own words: “The 1982 certificate only listed the courses I could teach.  In contrast, the 2018 version had a 300-word “Code of Ethics” that amounted to a profession of faith in collectivism, egalitarianism, state schools, and diversity (typically limited to superficial things like skin color and gender, not ideas).”

His next exposure was to the students themselves, who were woefully deficient in English grammar much less ready to study Latin. In what was supposed to be a superior school system, many students didn’t bring books to class, complained incessantly about homework, expected to receive high grades regardless of proficiency and performance and the Principal was instituting a process whereby students would not be compelled to take any more than one test in a day! And this kind of education was supposed to be college preparatory!

The warping and rewriting of history, the Leftist brainwashing on the topics of socialism versus capitalism, communism versus democracy, globalism versus nationalism, nepotism versus meritocracy, redistributionism versus self-reliance, moral relativism, collectivism versus individualism, the blatant promotion of gender dysphoria, group identity, victimology and outrage culture…THIS is what’s being taught to our children and grandchildren in elementary and secondary schools and on college campuses today. (I will leave for another time the attack on boys and boyhood, men and manhood.) Oh yes, occasionally the three R’s are thrown in, but increasingly, this kind of harmful, Leftist nonsense permeates every subject.

It’s no wonder that home-schooling is taking off. It’s no wonder the competition for private school slots is cutthroat. And despite ever increasing spending per capita, it’s no wonder “Johnny [still] Can’t Read.”

Where does the fault lie, and who’s responsibility is it to fix this problem?

As regards fault – I chalk this up to the natural impact of what I call the “fat and happy syndrome.” Briefly, I submit that the Boomers, recipients of the peace and prosperity won by the Greatest Generation and not having to struggle through a Great Depression, allowed boredom, indolence, envy, drugs, moral depravity and many other societal ills to infect a “fat and happy” population.  “Free Thinking”, “Free Love”, anti-establishment rhetoric and the abandonment of God or thousands of years of right and wrong moral yardsticks resulted in a new educational approach. The result, “New Math” (remember?) and now, the Common Core panacea. In short, the hippies took over academia.

Regrettably, George Bernard Shaw was right. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” With exceptions, for example shop and trade-school teachers who pass on truly useful skills and learning, academicians are so caught up in complying with the orthodoxy established by teacher union leadership, publishing or perishing the “proper” material in the case of college professors, or crushed by the collective mob if they try to deviate from the dogma, that there is little chance of a return to the basics.

As for the solution. Somehow, and by smarter people than I, we must eliminate the ability of teacher unions to impose their Leftist canon on our system. Whether we do this by abolishing teacher unions altogether (and ALL government employee unions by the way) or through some other means, we must break up the monopoly and MAKE OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM GREAT AGAIN.

I also suggest that those parents who can place their children in private schools do so. If unable to do so, I urge them to strongly consider home-schooling. Something like 2 million school-age kids are being home-taught today, with extraordinary results as compared to public schooling, and that figure is growing exponentially.

Finally, I urge parents to demand that their children reduce their obsession with social media and technology and create opportunities for them to interact in healthy ways with one another. Supervised play dates for the youngsters, organized sports (left me emphasize here the importance of competitive TEAM sports), participation in interpersonally engaging, non-technical social activities like music and theater, science and outdoors clubs for adolescents.

It’s been argued that our ability to influence our children ends about the age of 8. While that’s debatable, those of us who have raised children know that somewhere around the onset of adolescence we become the enemy and what we say is far less important than the current “meme”.

Yet judging by what I see in college and twenty-something, even thirty-something age kids today, when reality bites and they’re forced to become increasingly self-reliant…they become receptive to guidance and influence once again. All of sudden they discover that their parents have grown up. (As an aside, there is nothing more heartwarming than hearing our own words coming out of the mouths of our older children as they instruct their younger siblings, or their children!)

I urge us to find ways of resisting the temptation to become our children’s friends as they morph into grown-ups and, hopefully, adults, but rather continue to set an example for them, teach them correct principles, and help them understand what was right and what was wrong about the subject matter they were just exposed to over the previous 12-16 or more years.

If they haven’t learned them already, teach them about skepticism and critical thinking. Teach them the manners, decorum and civility that they didn’t receive during their ‘formal’ education. Teach them self-reliance and how to rise on the basis of merit, not political maneuvering or nepotism. Teach them about determination and perseverance. Teach them thrift and self-discipline, and teach them by example whenever possible, the difference between Right and Wrong, and Right and Left.

I submit that the blatant Leftist indoctrination of our children and grandchildren in today’s schools and colleges (whether public or private) is the REAL DOMESTIC TERROR threat in our country. May we who believe in Traditional Values be strong enough and wise enough to arm and teach our loved ones how to fight this scourge.

Celebrating the Male Chauvinist Pig

America, Family, History, Morality, Politics, Reason, Religion, Society & Culture, Values

Compared to “misogynist”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “angry white male”, “supremacist, “PSM” (Pale, Stale, Male)… these days excoriating a traditional man as a “Male Chauvinist Pig” seems kind of quaint!

Back in the 60’s, while some of us were working our butts off, obeying the laws, seeking to get ahead, providing for our families, treating everyone with respect irrespective of their color, creed, religion, and holding doors open for women, others shed their steel capped shoes for birkenstocks, grew their hair long, wore tie-dye with beads around their necks and smoked dope. With the latter celebrated in song, dance and Hollywood, it’s no wonder that women eventually began to look with derision at limp-wristed washouts and loser men abrogating both their responsibilities and, well, their manhood.

Forced or at least compelled to pick up the slack, women, many whom really were discriminated against, took what has always been a battle – the “Battle of the Sexes” from a cold war to a kinetic one. What started in the early 1900’s as a demand for voting rights has now turned into vicious misandry.

Look up male chauvinist pig and you find it refers to men who think that women are inferior, objects to be used or kept like pets. The definition is now used by militant feminists as depicting ALL men, but particularly white men. And while we old white guys can laugh it off much as we do all the other Leftist hysteria and political correctness, the assault on men has now permeated pre-K and elementary schools, where normal boy behavior is denigrated and labeled “toxic masculinity.”  

Nicholas Chauvin, of course, was a legendary soldier in Napoleon’s army who was famously supportive of his emperor and his country. Chauvinism, therefore, meant patriotism but in the 60’s morphed into a pejorative label referring to bigotry or bias on the part of any man.

I believe actual MCP’s in our society are few and far between. Of course one can always find examples of men who treat women as inferior and exhibit truly reprehensible behavior, but the vast majority of men whom I’ve seen and encountered throughout our country, (and I’ve traveled widely) treat women with respect, dignity, sometimes even reverence, and always have!

Does the row of hard-hat construction boys with open lunchboxes ogle and smirk and occasionally whistle at the women walking by? Yes, and it’s more than just bad manners, but it isn’t male chauvinist pigism! Do the vast majority of them head home after work, help their wives get dinner on the table and the kids with their homework afterword? Yes, in my experience, that’s precisely what they do.

Boyhood is and has been under attack for some time. “All boys, especially white boys, are rebuked for their masculinity. They watch as girls are told they are special. They are told they are privileged, guilty, and must atone for their sins as if they are themselves were white supremacists. The expectation for white boys is that they should get in line behind girls, children of color, and illegal immigrants.” – Noel Anenberg, August 16, 2019, American Thinker, “Ideology, the Schools, and Murder: The McInerney/King Case“

Should women look at every man as a potential rapist or molester? Should men never again compliment a woman for any reason? Shall men allow themselves to shrivel up and just sit quietly in a corner while feminazis (my preferred term for the small minority of loud, bitter, militants who have hijacked the noble feminist agenda),  foment their warped ideology and escalate a battle that has resulted in anti-patriotism (e.g. the Women’s Soccer Team) and, for example, female quotas for football teams and military combat units?  

I think not.

Not too many years ago I held open a door for a woman who nastily said as she came through, “I can open it myself.” Should I have slammed it in her face? I felt like it, but no, in fact, we traditional men are going to have to suck it up and ride out this war, picking our battles and alternating between fighting and diplomacy, between stiffening our spines and quietly acquiescing, between speaking out against the male-bashing drivel and just staying quiet and letting the feminazis spew their venom. I’m heartened that traditional women are increasingly throwing down the BS flag on radical feminism and pushing back with “You don’t represent ME!”

In short, if holding to traditional views of gender roles, civil, polite and well-mannered manhood is being a Male Chauvinist Pig, please feel free to call me one!

Courtesy Matters

Family, Morality, Society & Culture, Uncategorized, Values

It’s tough to be courteous to vile people, and the Left are becoming increasingly, unbearably vile.

Yet, we need to try. If we’re ever going to restore civility and traditionalism to our country, we need to respect what our parents taught us about courteousness.

I have a complete repertoire of lawyer jokes and have more than once repeated the old joke about how 5,000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean is, “A start.” But there’s one thing we can learn from lawyers, particularly trial lawyers. Watch any law-themed series on television or better, attend a jury trial in a real courtroom, and you’ll see the attorneys act (99% of the time) with professionalism and courtesy towards the jury, the plaintiff, the defendant, their counsel and the judge. How they do it in the face of the distortions, spin, deflections, etc. that are thrown around by each side; how they can be civil when the integrity of witnesses, particularly, are impugned so viciously albeit courteously, is extraordinary. The performances may be part of the theatrics of litigation, but they’re instructive nonetheless. Often, the attorney who makes the best impression is the one who wins the case, and courtesy is an integral part of the act and how they make that impression.

Many years ago I was recruited to serve as the CFO of an obscure tech company. Seeking a ground floor opportunity in the post Y2K, burgeoning tech world, I responded to the offer to talk to them. One bright, sunny morning I visited its headquarters in Manhattan and was ushered into a conference room to await the CEO.

As I stood looking out the window over the Manhattan skyline, a young fellow came in and began gathering up some used styrofoam coffee cups and arranging and stacking some coasters that sat on the highly polished conference room table. He had on an open collar, rather wrinkled plaid shirt, jeans, and he had hair down to the middle of his back tightly pulled back on his head and gathered in a pony tail with a rubber band at the nape of his neck.He went about his business sheepishly, almost furtively, without speaking.

Having turned to see who had entered the room, I offered a pleasant “Good Morning” and then proceeded to help him gather up the cups and tidy up the room. He held open the garbage bag while I tossed in some of the debris from an earlier meeting, and he thanked me as he completed his task and left.

The whole incident took no more than perhaps 60 seconds, and I thought nothing of it. A minute or two later the CEO came in, dressed in a suit as was I, and we sat and had a straightforward and frank conversation about the company’s needs, my qualifications, etc. – everything you’d expect from a standard executive interview.

And then the CEO said, “You know, I’d like you to meet the President of the Company who is really my partner and co-founder. Do you have a few more minutes?” I of course replied, “Certainly,” and the CEO left, returning a couple of minutes later with, you guessed it, the man who previously had come in to tidy up the room.

I am convinced to this day that the judgment about hiring me to become the Company’s CFO was made in that two minute interval when the CEO left to fetch the President. And I am also convinced that the pivotal trigger moment which sealed the deal had nothing to do with the interview, but everything to do with the simple courtesy I extended to the President in that little interchange before the interview started.

A wise man was once quoted as saying, “The true greatness of a person, in my view, is evident in the way he or she treats those with whom courtesy and kindness are not required.” Joseph B. Wirthlin

Most of the time, simple courtesies aren’t recompensed with a job offer, or even acknowledged. Yet, a kind word, treating others with respect and dignity no matter what their station or role in life, is the right thing to do.

Courtesy matters.

Rubbernecking and The Crisis du Jour

America, Entertainment, Reason, Society & Culture, Uncategorized, Values

“If it bleeds, it leads.” Everything is a crisis! Today news reports, tweets, Facebook posts and even conversations with friends are constantly linked to CRISIS! The more provocative, the more incendiary the topic, the better. Attention everyone…we’re becoming immune/desensitized to REAL crises!

The Iranians, Chinese, Russians, Venezuelans, North Koreans, European Union, the NRA, White Supremacists, Old Angry White Men, Epstein’s suicide or murder, the Border, Mass Shootings, lead in the water in Newark, N.J., California earthquakes and wild fires, heat waves in the Southwest, inflation, deflation, stocks up, stocks down, hail in Colorado, racism, fascism, xxxxxism, melting icebergs, expansion of the Antarctic, meteors coming within a million miles of the Earth…they’re ALL a crisis. We are receiving a constant firehose of hysteria.

Good news doesn’t have a chance. Sure, there’s occasionally a “human interest” segment that talks about the surprise return to his family of a soldier from the war front or neighbors looking out for neighbors, but it’s as if they’re thrown into the lineup just so the media can assert they also report good news. And if that good news doesn’t have a heart-string-tugging video associated with it, you’ll never hear about it.

If it isn’t crisis, it’s oddity, faux science, or just plain clickbait: “DNA determines your politics” is one headline. “Cop pelted with Chinese food during wild Bronx melee” is another. If it’s true that we are what we read, watch on TV or listen to… THIS is what we’re becoming: a population of paranoid, terrified, morbidly curious onlookers!

There’s no changing the info-feed. It’s going to continue like this so long as we click on the link or keep tuned to the tabloid channels (which is what virtually every cable news outlet is today with the exception, perhaps, of One America News).

My recommendation is simple…subscribe to ONE newsfeed and only pay attention to what they cite as breaking or important headlines – mine is the Wall Street Journal’s, and I may get one or two “notifications” a day. Watch ONE evening newscast – I watch OANN’s 6:00 PM Report with Patrick Hussion. And for goodness sake don’t spend hours on Social Media and tabloid sites!

We’ve simply got to refocus on Stuff That Matters. Please America, let’s eschew nonsense and deviance and embrace substance and goodness.

Let’s say a silent prayer and keep looking ahead when we pass the ambulances, fire trucks and wreck by the side of the road.

Don’t Just Do Something, STAND THERE!

America, Government, Morality, Politics, Reason, Society & Culture

The hyperventilating politicians can’t help themselves. Doing something, ANYTHING whether it makes sense or not, is not only predictable, but to every thinking American, laughable. We see this in children desperate for attention, except these are supposed to be adults. “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Insidiously true!

First come the cries of “We have to have a serious conversation…”. Almost immediately thereafter comes the search for a scapegoat, “It’s the [fill in the blank]’s fault!” Then come the condescending vituperations and finally, if enough celebrities jump on the bandwagon, come the protests and sometimes riots.

For example, let’s take the current “mass shootings”. Even though it’s been said a dozen times over that all the legislation needed to enforce gun laws are already on the books, and nothing being proposed would have made any difference in the great majority of the incidents, the theatrics are omnipresent. The 2020 presidential candidates’ hand-wringing, eye-rolling, blame-their-opponents, gnashing of teeth, weeping, wailing, demands to “do something”… it’s all unadulterated nonsense.

Why? Because if every gun in America were eliminated on a Monday, how many guns would there be on the streets by Friday, and who would have them? Of course, the answer is hundreds, if not thousands, and it’d be the criminals and the madmen! And then we’d have to defend ourselves with baseball bats. I submit you’d have to have a hellavu swing to knock out of the park a 9MM bullet shot by a determined gunman threatening your family.

But on the Left, the rhetoric is tantamount to “confiscate all guns and America will be a safer place”. More nonsense. It’d be like giving everyone in the country a tee-shirt with a target on it and the words, “shoot here”.

“We’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them,” is another familiar cry. Enacting legislation that tries to do this would create more injustice to responsible gun owners. Whether a responsible gun owner goes to jail or not would then be dependent on how good the victimhood act from the aggrieved party is. “He (or she…let’s not be sexist here) is an angry old white man who’s threatening me!” Of course, the spouse making that allegation may have just had his or her belongings destroyed by that baseball bat or some other infliction, and the threats were made by the non-gun-owner party. Who gets arrested?  

No, the solution to the mass shooting problem is not more legislation. The solution is easily described but terribly difficult to achieve. It is the return to and practice of traditional values in society. Fundamental morality has to become popular again. The teaching of right and wrong has to be the norm. Heroes have to be good rather than evil, and the Golden Rule has to prevail. In the late sixties, before the pendulum swung completely to the left, it would not have been such a herculean task. Today, with the pendulum so far left it’s near the 270 degree mark, it is.

We are repeating the mistake of history. Every great civilization: Egypt, Athens, Rome, Western Europe and now America, has gone through the same pattern: growth, prosperity, indolence, moral decay, the rise of deviant, destructive hedonism and demagogues, challenges from envious nations, the crumbling of traditional family units, the celebration of evil and immorality, the eventual decline of the culture, sovereignty impugned until its demise and replacement by another civilization in an earlier stage of the cycle.

Where do you think we are in this continuum?

The rampant demagoguery we’re witnessing is the sad symptom of a great civilization that is very ill. Is our situation fatal? Absolutely not. There are many among us who are speaking out and trying to push that pendulum back the other way. We do so by word and deed. In public we no longer speak in whispers or hushed tones about the rabid and caustic influence the Left is having on our society. When we walk our dogs, we don’t just pick up after them, we take an extra bag along and collect wrappers and cans and plastic water bottles along the street as well.  

Sadly, but inevitably, it takes an outside shock like a world war, a natural disaster, a pandemic or some other cataclysmic event to wake us up and propel us to pay attention to the basics again. And by basics I mean the STUFF THAT MATTERS.  

But the one thing we need more than anything to turn our civilization around is MORAL LEADERSHIP. The fact that so many would scoff at the previous sentence is symptomatic of how great the need is.

The 2016 presidential election was a cataclysmic event and it indeed caused us to reflect on what matters. Now we need to pick up the pieces of our society broken by the events of the last 11 or so years and MAKE GOOD COOL AGAIN.

And we have to somehow get rid of demagogue politicians and replace them with serious adults who ACTUALLY care about our country and its future rather than power, influence and money – ones who will sometimes stand there and do nothing instead of making things worse.

So, It’s Like, Vocal Fry and Upticks You Know?

America, Education, Family, Society & Culture

I can’t stand it anymore! At a restaurant the other night I felt like jumping up and grabbing the two millennials at the table next to ours by the throat and screaming “Stop it!” Between the gravel in their throats and the upticks at the end of sentences that each had a minimum of three “likes” in them, my wife and I cringed. It actually ruined what would have otherwise been a very nice dinner at our favorite dining spot. (If you don’t know what vocal fry and upticks are all about, just do a search on YouTube.)

It’s everywhere, not just in public but also in the workplace. What was particularly jarring was that the girls were talking about their college experiences and their schools were two of the best in the nation! How faculties can allow their students to graduate high school much less college without an ability to string two coherent and grammatically correct English sentences together is shocking and lamentable!

In our day, the filler words were “you know”. “It was nice at the beach yesterday, you know?” “I can’t understand, you know, how she could have said that.” “You know” was annoying, but I guess we were blessed that the painful vocal fry and uptick problems weren’t so common.

There were regional accents of course: Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens; Midwest; Minnesotan; Texas; Boston Brahmin, Southern and Deep Southern. None were offensive. They were quaint. At times, incomprehensible, but quaint, not grating!

Today, however, I often feel like I’m in a foreign country. Mind you, it’s not the actual foreigners and recent immigrants with whom I have trouble communicating. It’s most often those born here whom I can’t understand!

Other pet peeves…

Starting a sentence with “So”. I don’t know whether it’s supposed to make the speaker sound smarter, whether it’s just another filler phrase, or whether it’s like a cat that hunches down, sticks its butt in the air and flicks its tale before pouncing, but this too is such an annoying corruption of our language!

“Right?” It’s incredibly annoying to hear people end their sentences not just with an uptick but the word right, right?”

Oh, and there are the slightly more sophisticated but equally obnoxious phrases, “Let me be clear”, “To be completely honest”, or “At the end of the day.” You get the idea.

Perhaps it’s because my wife is English that I’m more bothered than most about the deterioration of our grammar and diction. You know the Brits… whether they’re from Chelsea and speak “frightfully” or are from London’s East End and speak like Eliza Doolittle before her transformation in My Fair Lady, or the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins, they always sound so much more educated and serious than we. Let’s be fair, however. The way they speak and spell English can also be troublesome! But, as she constantly reminds me whenever we get into a spat about the proper way to phrase something, “Just remember, we gave you the language!” End of conversation.

Back in the stone age of 1972 William F. Buckley gave a guest lecture at my college. The auditorium was filled with 60’s vintage, recycled hippies and liberal academics. After laying out the ‘conservative case’ he took questions. The showboating engaged in by the Leftists as they asked pointed and mostly insulting questions was classic drivel. I’ll never forget, however, the extraordinarily deft way that Buckley calmly used incisive, fact-supported arguments, words and language to thoroughly gut each and every one of his antagonists. His mastery of English was incomparable. He also had that great side flick of the tongue to accompany his responses, and when the moderator finally submitted to the shellacking being dealt out, ending the session, the handful of us in the audience who weren’t 60’s radicals or poor attempts at imitation thereof stood up and loudly and unapologetically applauded!

While we’re trying to take back our country from Leftists, let’s try to restore American English to its proper, beautiful state…the English as written by our Founding Fathers. The English we heard spoken by the likes of Lincoln, Reagan, and William F. Buckley. And let’s try to restrain ourselves from wringing the necks of the valley-talk kids around us!

“When the Left Snatches our Kids” – Verbatim Repost of an Exceptional (!) Article

America, Education, Entertainment, Family, Government, History, Morality, Politics, Reason, Religion, Society & Culture, Values

I pray it is not too late. I pray there are still places in our country where traditional values still prevail. But the other day I read an article in American Thinker: “When the Left Snatches our Kids” by Sally Zelikovsky, to whom all credit is due, that so closely reflects my fears that I’m going to “retweet it”, i.e. reproduce it in full. It is precisely the kind of alarm I’ve been trying to raise for my own children and grandchildren. It isn’t so much prescriptive as a call to arms. It succinctly rifles to the crux of all that’s going wrong with our society.

While I’ve been careful to distinguish between Conservative and Traditional in my writings, one could do a cut and paste, replacing the word Traditional with Conservative in the article and it would remain spot on. The italics are mine.

“I am skeptical that our efforts as conservative parents to produce conservative offspring will materialize.  Even with the best of intentions, the odds are not in our favor to successfully counter the Democrat-Media Complex, the educational system, and pop culture. That doesn’t mean there aren’t success stories (some in my own family), but I hear more about the failure and the disaffection it engenders in conservative families.

Conservative parents have learned the hard way that how your kids turn out depends on a host of factors that, at some point during the maturation process, are way beyond our control — friends, personal experiences, a particular book or documentary, brain chemistry, friends, a teacher/professor/boss, personality, a romantic relationship, college activities, pop culture, hobbies, and…friends.  Usually, it’s not one but an amalgamation of several factors and presto chango!  The kid who was once the lone conservative arguing at the lunch table, now thinks David Hogg and AOC are bitchin’. 

We see them everywhere — the emaciated college-age vegans working at Starbucks, hysterical young girls pounding on Supreme Court doors, attractive anti-Semites leading the charge in Congress.  I’m sure some of them had conservative upbringings — you cannot assume they were all raised by liberals.  Yet, in her reporting about out-of-control liberal college students some time ago, I heard Laura Ingraham link their behavior to their upbringing.  Only a parent whose children hadn’t yet attended high school could make such an absurd connection.  We can try but we cannot guarantee what our children will believe.  

Once again, I find myself referencing Red Scare movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It resonates.  We have to be vigilant, stay informed, understand the arguments of the other side and how to combat them.  If we don’t, eventually the pods take us over.  I graduated high school a Reagan Republican whose political arguments were admittedly my Dad’s.  When I arrived at a competitive college filled with smart, often private-school educated Merit scholars, I lost every political debate. I just didn’t have the breadth of information and understanding of history to counter their arguments.  Thus, I graduated college…a Democrat.  In time, I fell back on those critical thinking skills my parents instilled in me.  A desire to understand more as I graduated from law school and entered the work force, led me to self-educate and, eventually, return to my conservative roots. 

That was also in the ‘80s and early ‘90s when life was simpler and more balanced: when “gay marriage” was still an oxymoron; before triggers and safe spaces, the internet, social media, doom and gloom “climate change,” and legalized pot; before we had an alphabet of sexualities to choose from and the ability to change sexes; before blended families became the norm; before hatred became the quintessential reason for all of society’s ills.  

Not all teachers and professors were proselytizing progressives, the media was less corrupt, and your politics were not a factor in getting or retaining a job.  Because of the deep societal changes since then, not every Millennial or Gen Xer has the wherewithal, the background, or the backbone to recognize and then punch back against the forces of propaganda, fess up to and toil with their own ignorance, or simply engage in respectful debate with those who have another point of view — no matter how steeped in conservatism their childhood. 

I am not suggesting we stop lecturing our children about competing points of view, stop teaching them to be skeptical about what they learn in school or from their peers, or stop challenging the false orthodoxies they are barraged with on virtually every topic from sexuality to climate, energy to food, and national security to border security.  We should continue to bang the drum.  We must.  And we must remain hopeful that someday those we lost will return to the conservative fold because they see the wisdom of conservative principles.  But for all of you young parents out there who think you’ll do better than those before you, be prepared for disappointment. 

The conservative path is littered with the bodies of well-intentioned parents who are devastated when their formerly straight kids come out of imaginary closets, transition to the opposite sex, or demand to be called “they”; when their Jewish Day School educated children announce their support for the BDS movement; when their evangelical  children support blatant infanticide; when their happy, well-adjusted kids go off to college and return believing weed is innocuous, struggling with drug addiction, or suffering from mental illness. 

These cultural maladies affect liberals and conservatives alike, but are unusually bitter pills for conservatives to swallow because they are packaged in a lifestyle and value system antithetical to everything we teach our children — resilience, pride, integrity, honesty, open-mindedness, self-reliance, individuality, taking responsibility for our actions, doing right when we screw up, and teaching a man to fish.  Liberals cast us as hypocrites whose principles clash with reality, but what they don’t understand is that we believe in taking responsibility for and learning from our missteps so we constantly evolve into better beings (and don’t get mired in unbridled, misplaced hatred and lifelong victimhood).

Secondly, conservative parents are treated by their children with a level of hostility that doesn’t seem to afflict liberal parents with conservative children.  Loving, nurturing conservative parents find themselves catapulted to Holocaust-denier status and demoted to homophobic, intolerant, racist, privileged, religious zealots.  Relics of an oppressive past. It is painful when your kids reject everything you raised them to value. Despise you. Scoff at you. Turn against you. Align with your political foes. Resent you for brainwashing them with yourhateful, 1950‘s agenda.

Now, some of that is typical teenage/young adult angst and rebellion.  When frontal lobes are soothed by the right combination of hormones and our insecure little monsters segue into more confident adults, those nasty side effects often dissipate. But much of the antipathy they are exposed to is encouraged by “the man” in the liberal camp — we’ll call him “the burning man.”  He instructs us to hate authority, hate anything established, hate tradition, hate the moral code you grew up with, hate anyone who is white or successful, and hate those who embrace any of this. Hence, hate your parents.  Hate your old neighborhood.  They are the problem.  And while today all you have to do is oppose them, someday you might have to actively go against them, even “turn them in.” The burning man says this is okay because you are right and the end justifies the means. I’m not being paranoid. Our entire educational system is based on appropriating the minds of our children and undoing all they have learned at home, turning them into weapons of mass societal destruction in the burning man’s toolbox. 

We have all participated in holiday dinners and family vacations ruined by dissension and door-slamming.  Family harmony devolves into family discord, function into dysfunction, and closeness morphs into estrangement.  Parents are instructed to just shut up already! Politics and religion are off the table.  Dinner conversations revolve around silly cat videos and trivial drivel.  Soon there is little left to discuss.  After all, everything is political now — from your sneakers to your bus commute during Pride Month. 

Once upon a time, we could fall back on cultural interests like music, movies, theater, travel, and sports to avoid potentially explosive conversations at family gatherings about politics and religion.  Now, virtue signaling is so ubiquitous that everything seems to fall into the Realm of the verboten.  It becomes more and more difficult to find common ground.  Constructive input I like your haircut and simple questions Did you decide on a major?  What are you doing for break? How do you like your job? are potential triggers.  Family get togethers are so contentious there is an increasing tendency to minimize interactions.  Even life’s big “hatching, matching, and dispatching” events are often fraught with tension — relatives who couldn’t be seated together because of some family squabble are now separated because one has a worldview the other finds detestable.

Some parents give in. They don’t want politics or values to stand in the way of their relationships with their kids, so they re-visit their Weltanschauung.  Constant pressure from your 20-year-old bubelah goes a long way towards re-educating Mom and Dad. Senator Rob Portman was against gay marriage until his son came out and then… he evolved.  I’d rather fight than switch is a paean to another time. 

This is nothing new.  Many parents drank the Kool-Aid and became part of the 60s counterculture their children brought home.  Ironically, many of their hippie children became yuppies and did the unthinkable — morphed into their conservative parents.  Hmm.  I suppose we can be clear-eyed about the transformative societal and political forces pulling our children away from conservatism, at the same time we cling to the hope that our liberal progeny will switch and fight for conservative principles and maybe even cling to their bibles and the Constitution, too.”

Wish I could have said it like that!

Comment by DOC DURACOAT August 3, 2019:
“All you people should move to Boca Raton, Florida! Our public high school has been rated A for the last 10 years straight. We have a very active ROTC program, and it is routine to see these kids in the halls wearing military uniforms. The flag is respected, everyone stands for the pledge of allegiance, even the minority students. Graduation rates and college acceptance rates are very high. 

Discipline is enforced, disrupting class is not tolerated. My kids and their friends all graduated as sports playing, modest dressing, great conservative kids. Come on down and bring your guns and bibles! Your kids will graduate with a great education and strong conservative moral values.”


Social Science Isn’t Science

Reason, Science, Society & Culture

It’s not that the study of human behavior and interaction in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics, Geography, History, Law, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology and Sociology, the so-called Social Sciences, isn’t useful. It’s just that they’re not SCIENCE, and one of our big problems today is that their practitioners use a lot of questionable or rigged scientific data and analysis to advance special interests and hidden agendas.

Science, as it was rationally taught when I was in 6th grade, was based on the use of the Scientific Method, the principles of which have been around since Sir Isaac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. “Social Science”, misleadingly named to give it an air of formality, rigor and credibility that Newton would never have ascribed to it, and to which the Scientific Method can’t be applied, belongs to what serious scientists label as Junk or Pseudo Science.

Today, the Left-infested science curriculum has turned the Scientific Method into mush. Here’s the definition from the website Science Buddies which illustrates what I mean:

“The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions. Does this mean all scientists follow exactly this process? No. Some areas of science can be more easily tested than others. For example, scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star’s life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses. When direct experimentation is not possible, scientists modify the scientific method. In fact, there are probably as many versions of the scientific method as there are scientists! But even when modified, the goal remains the same: to discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining the evidence, and seeing if all the available information can be combined into a logical answer.”

This kind of relativist nonsense is but one example of how our kids and grandkids are being brainwashed into believing that there is no right or wrong, no good and evil, everyone deserves a trophy and other Leftist necroses of traditional common sense.

One of the keystones of the Scientific Method is repeatable process. A hypothesis, then a theory, doesn’t become a fact until controlled experimentation occurs in a methodical, empirical manner. But importantly, it has to be reproducible by others using identically controlled methods.

In March 1989 two respected University of Utah professors published a paper insisting they produced so-called “cold fusion” in their laboratory: the production of energy without the usual exothermic reaction that occurs in nuclear fusion or atomic bombs.  Their scholarly work was widely circulated and got the whole scientific and business world in a tizzy. What doomed them was that no-one could reproduce what they say they observed notwithstanding the precise replication of their methods!

One of the other cornerstones of the Scientific Method is that a theory has to be able to be validated.  Another way of saying this is that theory only becomes fact once it can no longer be refuted by experimentation and observation. The social sciences rely on the review of gathered data, rather than the scientific method of hypothesis – theory – experimentation – validation – reproduction – peer review to assert facts that simply aren’t! And what social scientists do is put forth an idea based on some interpretation of the data, whether accurate, selective, falsified or otherwise, and then say, “Prove me wrong” to the rest of world. Their theories almost by definition can NOT be validated and thus can’t seriously be considered science. Oh, and “send me more money so I can continue to do research.” That is the very essence of Junk or Pseudo Science.

So, when Leftists of all stripes spout their dogma and profess it to have scientific backing, I urge you to throw what we call the BS flag! Don’t let the attachment of the word “science” to anything said by a politician, an economist, a lawyer, a psychologist, a sociologist or any kind of bureaucrat, (Right or Left by the way), cloud your judgment. That’s unless it’s REAL SCIENCE as we learned it in the sixth grade , not FAKE science!

Myers-Briggs for Traditionalists

Family, Reason, Society & Culture

I’m not a fan (understatement) of pop-psych, but of all the tests and profiles that various employers put me through during my career, one stands out as actually practical and useful: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. I have consistently found it to be uncannily accurate in explaining and predicting human behavior, particularly interpersonal behavior. In our families, the MBTI® can promote understanding, enhance communication, and fuel patience and forgiveness that we might not otherwise be able to muster.

Based on the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, the MBTI was created by Katharine Cook Briggs (1875-1968) and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1979). In this article I’ll barely scratch the surface of the behavioral model, so apologies to the psychologists and psychiatrists among my readers who would justifiably quibble with my treatment and usage. But here goes.

The MBTI groups people into personality “types” based on four behaviors or dimensions:

a.            How we get our energy
b.            How we gather information
c.             How we make decisions
d.            How we order our lives

Within each of these four behavioral dimensions there is a range or continuum which describes our “preference”.

The first behavioral dimension is: How we get our energy. The continuum ranges from what Jung called Extraversion at one end of the spectrum to Introversion at the other, the so-called ‘E-I Preference‘. Note that the first is spelled Extraversion, not extroversion. It’s not about how we behave outwardly, i.e. whether we’re socially extroverted or introverted. It’s more about how we respond to others and whether interpersonal engagement energizes or depletes us.

At a party, for example, the individuals with the E preference gain energy by being around others. As the night wears on, they seem to get perkier and perkier (with or without alcohol) while those who are natural I’s become more and more exhausted.

It’s probably a good idea to emphasize here that no-one is either always Extraverted, nor Introverted and this is true vis-à-vis the other three dimensions as well. Whether a person is a so-called “E” or a so-called “I” is relative. E or I is a preference and we can be both. It’s just that we’re born, as the theory goes, with a natural tendency or “preference” one way or the other. Fold your arms. You have a natural preference for which arm goes over the top. Now fold them the other way. You can DO it, but you clearly prefer and have a preference to do it the other way right? That’s what we mean when speaking of preference in behavior.

The second behavioral dimension describes How we soak up information. The preference continuum here extends from Sensor to Intuitive. I like to explain this dimension by telling the story of the two people sitting side by side in a plane approaching their destination airport. The plane is in thick clouds and the plane is bump, jumping up and down in the turbulence. The two people have their eyes glued on the window, but all they can see is grey. Suddenly, they burst out of the clouds and the airport is plainly visible below. The Intuitive says, “Ah, we’re there.” The Sensor replies, “Not until we’re on the ground we’re not!”

For the Sensor sees precisely ‘what is’ while the intuitive sees ‘what could be’. Where we fit on this preference continuum has a major impact on how we take in information. The ‘S’ and the ‘N’ individuals as they’re called, can be presented with the exact same set of facts or sensory input and interpret them 180 degrees apart! Not surprisingly, 70% of men are S’s while 70% of women are N’s. (Hence the term ‘women’s intuition’!)

The third behavioral dimension is How we make decisions. The preference continuum here is Thinking at one end and Feeling at the other. In recent years we’re heard a lot about “Emotional Intelligence”. In a way I believe that concept gives support to the argument that decisions don’t have to be made in our left brains all the time. They can also be made in the gut, and they’re just as valid. But ‘T’s are all about laying out the evidence, analyzing it, coming to an incisive and informed decision. ‘F’s are about unconsciously mulling things over viscerally and making their decisions based on how they ‘feel’ about them. Needless to say, most scientists are T’s, and the majority of men are T’s, while the majority of women are F’s.

The final behavioral dimension is How we order our lives. The preferences range from Judgers on one end and Perceivers at the other. Judgers are ordered. They make lists. If they accomplish a task that they didn’t put on the list, they’ll write it on the list after the fact and cross it out! Perceivers prefer to ‘go with the flow’, and are spontaneous and accepting of whatever comes at them. This preference, in my opinion, causes people who are strongly opposite to make each other crazy!

With four behavioral dimensions and two end points on the preference continuum each there are 16 possible combinations of Dimensions and Preferences and we tend to, upon testing with the MBTI, fall into one of the 16. So, in one corner of the matrix for example we have an ESTJ person: the Extraverted Sensor Thinker Judger. At an opposite corner we might have the INFP, the Introverted Intuitive Feeler Perceiver.

Going back to the party. The ESTJ or ENTJ commands attention, some would say ‘holding court’. He or she has an opinion on everything and anything and will tell you about it. When offered a tray of cocktails they might first select the martini, then in a split second put it down and instead take a gin and tonic. They will of course take a cocktail napkin and hold it under the drink as they bring it to their lips. The INFP, meanwhile, is politely smiling as someone bends their ear. They nod, they listen actively and intently. When the cocktail tray comes by they ask the waiter to describe the contents of each drink. They put their fist to their chin and take quite a few seconds to mull over what they want. Once they make up their mind, however, they take the drink and will not change it two seconds later like the ESTJ did.

By the way, the ESTJ is attracted (opposites attract right?) to the INFP because they display the qualities the ESTJ does not. The opposite is of course true of the INFP, who admires and values the ‘strength of character’ of the ESTJ.

For fun, I’ll stipulate that the ESTJ is a guy and the INFP is a gal. They get married because they are, in fact, opposites attracted to one another. However, fast forward a few years and it’s inevitable, in my experience, that that opposite-ness causes tremendous conflict. That’s not to suggest that they shouldn’t have gotten married. It’s almost inevitable, however, that they really have to work at their relationship.

Meanwhile, two ESTJ’s get married. They constantly bang heads and argue and fight, but they go to separate corners and unwaveringly come back at it until they come to some sort of truce, compromise or shared understanding. Two INFP’s get married and they’ll sit silently in a room together and simply enjoy and be completely satisfied in one another’s company. Eventually, they’ll fall off a cliff holding hands but won’t argue while doing so. And they’ll end up on their feet anyway!

One of the things I like about the MBTI is that it doesn’t make judgments good or bad, positive or negative about these preferences. In fact, the seminal work on the model is called “Gifts Differing”, suggesting that each of the 16 personality types has gifts or talents, and there is no right or wrong among them. They’re just, well, different.

Here’s an example of how an understanding of “Type” can be useful. The ESTJ and the INFP are sipping the last of their wine at the end of dinner on a Sunday evening in August. The ESTJ husband says, “Hey Hon, how about we go skiing as a family next February.” The INFP wife, after a pause, says, “That’s not a bad idea.” The husband takes that answer as a thumbs up and a month later he’s got a whole family ski trip planned out. Along the way, he’s checked in with his wife, “What do you think of this condo, or that kids instruction package?” He repeatedly gets an answer similar to the first, “That’s not a bad idea.”

The family takes the vacation, has a great time and ten years later in family counseling the wife brings up this episode, emphatic that she never wanted to go on that trip! Struggling to remember the details, the husband says, “Hey, I checked with you at the outset and every step of the way in planning that trip! Why didn’t you speak up?” The wife replies, “Because you never gave me any time to think about it!”

Had the ESTJ husband understood Type, he would have realized that asking what seemed like a straightforward question of his INFP wife was not straightforward at all to her. Rather, the INFP needed to process the question: take in the idea and internally explore it (the “N” in her), then mull it over at the gut level (the “F” in her), and finally take time to consider the whole concept and come to a complete and clear decision (the “P” in her). By the time she’d done that, the ESTJ husband was miles down the planning road!

The patience required of polar opposite husband and wife to reach a mutually satisfying compromise decision is huge, emotionally draining and if that kind of difference in approaching life is tested many times a day, one will understand why opposites attract but inevitably have to work so hard to have a good relationship!

I could go on and on sharing anecdote after anecdote of how the very opposite personality types deal with one another within families, in the workplace, among friends, among strangers, in public, in private…how an understanding of the personality type of someone with whom we’re dealing could help us achieve whatever goal we have with that interaction, or how it is that when one is under stress one tends to behave as if they are the exact opposite of who they are when not under stress.

Instead, I urge you to read Gifts Differing, and if you’re still working or thinking about your career, the book named “Do What You Are“.  I’ve also provided below a cheat sheet (credit to Jake Beech) that pithily summarizes the 16 MBTI types.

HAVE FUN WITH THIS!

By Jake Beech – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30859659

The Forgotten Majority

America, Economy, History, Society & Culture

The Left assiduously and furiously manufactures, celebrates and loudly publicizes victimhood. This gives them a pretense to extort money they can use as currency to gather power, influence and advance their agenda. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans keep their heads down and continue to do their jobs and their best for their families, their friends, their community, their country, and themselves.  

In her exhaustively and incisively researched seminal work, “The Forgotten Man” (Harper Collins, New York, 2007) Amity Shlaes argues conclusively that the Great Depression was man-made and completely avoidable. She borrowed the term “Forgotten Man” from  William Graham Sumner’s use of the term in his 1883 speech of the same name. The Left has always equated the Forgotten Man with those who stood in the bread lines during the Depression. However, Sumner and Shlaes used the term to denote the regular guy who had to pay for all the promises that politicians, both before, during and after Roosevelt made to garner power and control.

I submit that today, the Silent Majority is the Forgotten Man, comprised of similar salt-of-the-earth people who have had to pay for all the promises made by Roosevelt’s intellectual progeny, including today’s Leftists.

It used to be just the snail darter. Remember them? It’s tiny a fish that bleeding-heart enviro-fascists manufactured victimhood for in 1973 to halt completion of a dam in California. The controversy went all the way to the Supreme Court. Long story short, the dam was built, the snail darters relocated all at a cost no doubt of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions to taxpayers. It, however, lined the pockets of the Defenders of the Snail Darters Brigade (I made that up but I can’t help but wonder if money could have been made on a tee-shirt run with that emblazoned on it!) and Leftists were left (.sic) to feel good about how they’d saved a species. As a side note, the environmental shamans themselves assert that 150 species A DAY (!) become extinct. But the snail darter became the cause célèbre du jour and the money, when followed, led right into the wallets of the enviro-fascists, their cohorts and allies.

Today, pick whatever Leftist drivel you wish, on whatever topic you wish: border protection, religion, free speech, 2nd amendment, abortion, gender confusion, climate change, taxation, law and order, national defense, public education, etc. etc. The economic price, the damage to our society and culture, the frightening impact on our children and grandchildren of what the Left has concocted and viciously squeal…the burden will be carried by the hardworking Forgotten Majority who always pay the price, just as they did during the Depression.

When the Left professes to worry about some minority victim being offended, or potentially offended (think Colin Kaepernick and Betsy Ross Nike sneakers) and seek to punish the offenders; when they rewrite history and seek to “fundamentally transform” our nation according to their warped ideology (think the painting over of the George Washington school mural in San Francisco), let’s not forget the majority, The FORGOTTEN Majority.

Copyright © 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 - All rights reserved - Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy