School Teachers Have Principles Too

Some people would rather go on food stamps than shop at Wal-Mart. It’s the principle of the thing.

For years, substitute teacher Jack Powell had shopped at Wal-Mart because of its Always Low Prices Always. But then he got into discussions about Wal-Mart with Sandra Carner-Shafran, a teaching assistant at BOCES and a member of the Board of Directors of New York State United Teachers, according to Liza Frenette of The New York Teacher.

Shopping at Wal-Mart? This is a place that encourages employees to get social services because it does not provide adequate health insurance or wages; sells goods made in sweatshops; and upsets entire communities by undercutting the downtown stores, then raising its prices when the locals go out of business.

And anyway, the children of his partner didn’t like shopping at Wal-Mart. “They knew what the store stood for.”

There was only one moral thing to do. Jack Powell went on food stamps.

"I'm just trying to live my life. I try to set an example and do what I believe," said Powell... [who] sings and strums about health and environmental awareness.

What can you say about a guy like that?

Girls Just Wanna Have...

April Fool! It turns out they don’t want to have fun after all. A study of womens’ attitudes towards one-night stands presented by Dr Sharron Hinchcliffe of Sheffield University discovers that they regret it. According to Nic Fleming in the Daily Telegraph

Around nine out of 10 of those questioned felt casual sex was immoral and that those women who engaged in it were not doing so primarily for pleasure.

Researcher Dr Hinchcliffe seemed puzzled by the results of her survey.

"It makes me question whether women have really gained all the sexual freedom they are supposed to have gained since the Sixties."

Yep. It takes an academic to say something as stupid as that.

Inspired by the results of the study columnist Mary Wakefield decided to do some research among her friends while out on a “hen weekend” in the country.

"Actually," said one, "I regret nearly all the men I slept with before my husband." Down the line, one by one, came cautious noises of assent.

No doubt the caution issues from the instinctive feeling that they might be seen as betraying their sexual freedom by the likes of Dr Hinchcliffe.

But the ladies all wished “that we'd drunk less and said No more often, but [all agreed] that it would be a crucial error to ever admit this to men.”

Er, the ladies lost me there. Just what is it that they are trying to hide from their men? That they really didn’t like those rolls in the hay? That they want relationships not sex?

Have they ever thought that there might be some men out there that would actually be relieved to know that women really don’t feel that good about the much vaunted sexual revolution?

Noah's Flood and Global Warming

Four thousand years ago, more or less, we humans so polluted the environment that God sent a flood to clear away all the polluters and save the one righteous man, his family, and a bunch of innocent flora and fauna.

Four years ago, more or less, the environmental priests of the world in Kyoto assembled declared that Gaia was being offended by the sins of the world and that the consequent global warming would cause a great flood that would inundate the low lying areas of the world. The priests called upon the righteous to turn the evil hearts of the corporations and repent.

It’s lucky that our global media does not call environmentalism a religion. Because then it might feel obliged to be more skeptical of the movement’s claims. For the rest of us, we are bound to observe that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore is not amused.

[T]he beauty of it is that everything can come under the rubric of "saving the planet". Whether it's speed limits or disposable nappies or second homes or cheap flights or old fridges or how many babies you have, you can be told not to do whatever it is you are doing. And if you complain, you can be marked out as a selfish pig.

When you don’t have a real religion, such as that one with a lover God who wants you to love him back, then you have to invent one. And the chances are it’s not going to measure up to the ones already on offer.

And there’s another thing. One of the keys of a successful religion, you may have noticed, is that it insists that the faithful go out and multiply. It’s an insurance policy to make sure that there are plenty of believers in the next generation.

Our new red-green socialist-environmentalist religion seems to have slipped up on that one. It’s a mistake that could be fatal.

Should Blacks Join the Culture War?

The Urban League just issued its annual “State of Black America.” The state, writes Errol Louis in the New York Daily News is “Not so great, could be better.” What is needed, he writes, “is a culture war,”

Specifically, we need aggressive, concerted action by members and institutions of the respectable black middle class to do open combat against the rise of an ancient enemy: a bold, seductive street culture that exalts lawlessness, addiction and anti-family behavior like pimping, sexual promiscuity, ignorance and personal selfishness.

Indeed. We need a war to combat the problem, as Jonah Goldberg writes, that

Black men, particularly those who do not finish high school, have been falling off a cliff for decades. If you include blacks in prison or not seeking work — which conventional unemployment surveys don't — the true jobless rate for black men in their 20s without a high school diploma is 72 percent.

We know how to solve this problem. Have done for ages. For sure, as Louis argues;

More teachers, preachers, politicians, journalists and other black Americans with a pulpit need to enlist in the battle against the self-defeating lure of street culture... [and the] purveyors of vulgarity and irresponsibility.

But there’s another way, one that blacks already possess in their churches. It is through the miracle of the Christian god, “a lover,” as Spengler writes in the Asia Times, “who demands love in return.”

This is the paradoxical offer that Christianity makes to the drug-addled homeboy and his rage. God loves you, even you, the least and the lowest. He only asks that you love him in return. It is a startling offer, when made to the down-and-outer who has just spent ten years spiralling downwards into rage and self-hatred.

The amazing thing is that it works.

On Immigration The Issue is Inhumanity says Liberal

The brilliant columnist to the world, Mark Steyn (perm) said it all when he talked to Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday. He illustrated the shocking double standard that liberals use when approaching any political question. And it applies in spades when it comes to immigration, of which Mark Steyn has personal knowledge as a legal immigrant from Canada:

If you're a legal immigrant, and you enroll your children in a local grade school, they want to know whether they've had all the shots, you know, for this and that.

...

If you actually just say okay, scrub that, they're not legal immigrants, I want them redesignated as illegal immigrants, then you won't be asked for any paperwork.

Liberals insist on the strictest adherence to the law from middle-class Americans, from corporations, and from fundamentalist ministers. But when it comes to their liberal clients, hey, it’s inhuman to insist that they follow the law. That applies in the workplace where they insist on the most rigorous adherence to the law by employers but insist that employees are helpless victims. It applies to the criminal law where liberals insist that the polics cross every “T” and dot every “I” but insist that their marginalized gangbangers go free on the slightest pretext.

And it applies in spades to immigration. On Chris Matthews Hardball left-wing Pacifica Radio host Amy Goodman asserted that it was “inhuman” to build a wall on the southern border of the United States. In other words, the laws of immigration should not be applied to people illegally entering the United States from Mexico.

This double standard has served the power interests of liberals for over a century. It has brought them money, power, votes, fame, and the love of beautiful women.

It is time to bring the liberal double standard to an end. The law must apply to everyone. Even liberals. Even liberal clients.

Bush and Truman: Incompetent Boobs

One thing seems to be a constant. Our educated elites don’t like bold, decisive presidents. Sixty years ago President Harry Truman was beginning to make the decisions that would shift the nation’s strategic focus from defeating Nazism to containing communism. Then as now, people talked about the little man in the White House.

The start of the cold war was similar to the start of the war on terror. Writes Alan Dowd in the Weekly Standard:

[Truman] drew a line around Moscow's empire and promised to wage global war if Stalin crossed it; and spent billions to rebuild European industry and revive European democracies.

In our time it is the underappreciated President Bush who is waging global war on terror and spending billions to rebuild Iraq and spread democracy in the Middle East.

[Truman] created the super-secret National Security Agency by executive fiat, with the goal of having a central node for monitoring and deciphering information from all over the globe.

On top of that he created the CIA and “retooled” the FBI to catch “spies and saboteurs.”

The president’s critics tore him to pieces as the
“Cold War's first four years... 'were filled with starts and stops rather than any considered policy or long-range goals.'”

Now, of course, we look back at the Truman Administration as an era of giants. Will they do the same for the Bush Administration?

Teach Immigrants to Love America

We teach immigrants to become cultural Americans. We teach them to become economic Americans.

But we do not teach immigrants to become political Americans, to love this country with heart and mind.

That is what Peggy Noonan writes in OpinionJournal.com. And being Peggy she is very polite about it. Instead of sweeping her snickersnee through a platoon of the usual suspects she just writes:

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual...

In fact, the United States is a political, cultural, and economic miracle, the prototype for the global community of all the nations, all the faiths, and all the races. It is a witness that the people in the village down the road and the city across the world need not be enemies. They could be friends.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it.

For over a generation educated Americans have been taught that the sophisticated position on life is an ironical detachment, especially with regard to the United States, its people, and its culture.

Of course, they have been taught nonsense. The only thing to do with life, and the only thing to do with the United States is to love it.

And if you do, America will love you back.