Of One or Two Mindsets?

March 8, 2026 Leave a comment

A 7th century BCE proverb, attributed to Greek poet Archilochus, speaks of two ways of perceiving the world:

“The fox knows many truths, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

The fragment on which this metaphor was found doesn’t include what the poet meant or to whom he was referring to. But amplified versions of the two contrasting ways of thinking have come along.

Basically, hedgehog types, it is said, ignore many things available to them and relate everything to a single organizing idea – one big thing – that guides how they understand, think and feel.

Fox types, on the other hand, take in the big picture. They pursue many ends and draw upon many experiences and perspectives, some of which may be self-contradictory. They are pluralistic and know many things and approach issues from diverse perspectives.

In his 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas explored these two different approaches to perceiving reality – diversity or unity in thought; breadth or depth in intellectual pursuit.

Berlin saw hedgehog types as possessing a singular, unifying vision that guides their understanding of the world. To get to an essential monistic worldview, hedgehog thinkers simplify the complex and may even accept easy explanations. They hold strict beliefs and are not likely to consider alternatives. As such, they are idealists who are not likely to waver from their purpose. They have a singular focus.

Berlin saw Fox types as being curious and wanting to explore, as knowing many things. They draw upon diversity and complexity. With new perspectives, they adapt. They are practical and not ideological. Foxes see the world in all its intricacy and interconnectedness.

Robert McCrum, writing in The Guardian about Berlin’s essay: “the division of humanity into hedgehogs and foxes had become not only a witty means of classification, but also an existential way of confronting reality. Foxes, for instance, will come to understand that they know many things, that a coherent worldview is probably beyond them and that they must be reconciled to the limits of what they know . . .

“Berlin’s hedgehog, by contrast, never makes peace with the world and remains unreconciled. His or her purpose is to know one thing and” quoting Isaiah Berlin’s biographer’s words, “strive without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.”

The subtitle of Berlin’s essay: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. The Greek poet’s saying had Berlin seeking to classify Lev Tolstoy as a either a fox or a hedgehog based on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history as expressed in his novel War and Peace. Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina are written with an overarching moral order and with life’s intimate details. And, there are characters in each novel that exhibit the two different mindsets.

Asking whether Tolstoy’s “vision is of one or of many, whether he is of single substance or compounded of heterogenous elements,” Berlin decided, “there is no clear or immediate answer.” Berlin thought that Tolstoy embodied both the fox and the hedgehog types of thinking. 

Berlin did categorize well-known thinkers and artists.

 Those with profound central visions, were systematic and held rigid ideas about life he considered hedgehogs. He included Plato, Dante, Pascal, and Dostoevsky in this category.

Those who took in and thrived on a wide range of multi-layered experiences were the foxlike. He included pluralist thinkers Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Joyce in that category.

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The above is a brief summary of a school of thought that summarizes mindsets into two groups. You can read more about the Fox and Hedgehog Theory and how the two ways of thinking have been compared and how each mode is thought to apply at What is the fox and the hedgehog theory? where this table is found:

Using the supposed traits of each mindset, some have extrapolated how each mindset operates in terms of business and politics and in problem-solving and leadership skills.

Some may compare the two ways of thinking as a Fixed or Growth mindset.

Of course, Berlin’s interpretation is not supported by the Archilochus fragment. And there are those like myself who see the project as oversimplifying the multifaceted way we think and do so in diverse contexts.

Consider, for one example, the single-minded focus of a violinist who, in private, rehearses Paganini Caprice no. 5 and then at the time of performance, tunes her instrument to A440 and then plays focusing on the bowing and her performance.

Think of an orchestra conductor who sees the scoring of all the instruments and hears the sound of the whole ensemble. He directs the musician’s phrasing, tempo and sound according to his interpretation of what the composer had in mind.

Both solo violinist and conductor are focused on their “one big thing” and both are aware of the setting and the acoustics. They each listen to what comes forth and adapt as needed to enrich the performance for the listener.

hedgehog–the-fox_Chapter-1

Introduction to Berlin’s Division – Hedgehogs and Foxes

https://www.bookey.app/audiobook/hedgehog-%26-the-fox

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Northwestern professor Gary Saul Morson refers to the fox and hedgehog saying and to Berlin’s essay in the conclusion of his magnum opus on classic Russian literature: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter.

Throughout the book, Morson provides examples of how certainty and wonder played against each other in the writings during the Soviet era.

The nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and its Bolshevik successors embodied Certainty. The intelligentsia or “party-minded” related everything to a single central vision – a scientific-materialist-atheistic worldview – and did so with dogmatic certainty. Everything, everyone, and reality itself had to conform to the iron-grip of ideology. Violence made sure.

Russian realist prose, with questions posed, evoked Wonder. Realist authors drew upon the complexity in the world, its many human experiences and perspectives. They wrote about the world and the human condition in realist terms – as it was and not as it was end-of-history supposed. They knew life had contingencies and that there was no one single way to go about things

You can read more about this in my previous posts A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Hand Over and Reentry.

Implicit throughout Wonder Confronts Certainty is the contrast of the fox and hedgehog mindsets in Russian writers. Only in Conclusion: Into the World Symposium does professor Morson refer to the fox and hedgehog saying and to Berlin’s essay. He does so to make the point about “true dialog.” He writes:

Life is eternal dialogue, a world symposium that never ends. In Bakhtin’s notebooks we discover his core belief:

The dialogic nature of human consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, and his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire life in discourse, and his discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium.[i]

Further on, under the subheading The Fox Knows Many Things, Morson writes:

Given human difference and the plurality of viewpoints, wisdom consists in learning to see the world from the perspectives of others. By intellectual as well as emotional empathy, we can bring discrete positions into open ended-dialog. When we do, we enrich both ourselves and the world.[ii]

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I don’t see a need to classify myself as a fox or hedgehog. There are benefits of both mindsets. I can hold two different things in my mind at the same time, and I am able to adapt to new situations.

I don’t have a degree in any area. As an autodidact, I have an open-ended humanities attitude toward life.

I am by nature a fox that takes in the big picture and I am also a hedgehog that focuses. I see the whole and wonder. I then drill down to explore my wonder. The game is afoot. A reader of my blog over time will notice this. I touch on various topics and often drill down to explore meaning. I do this so that I may understand what I think and to send it out in a post and have it come back to me as wisdom I can use.

I avoid binary, black or white, either/or, left-brain oriented thinking. The “dialogic nature of human life,” if invested in, can make a person knowledgeable and wise. And so can Michael Polanyi’s concept of knowing: ‘from-to’ subsidiary-focal-integration. See the video below.

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How Can We Know Anything? Artful Knowing with Esther Meek

Philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek to explore how our understanding of knowledge shapes everything, from faith to creativity to everyday life. Esther challenges the modernist assumption that knowledge is merely information gathering, arguing instead for a view of knowing that is personal, participatory, and artful.

“Polanyi will argue that apart from personal epistemology as he describes it, not even knowledge is possible, let alone realism. Positively, he will view realism as integral to personal knowledge and vice versa” Esther Lightcap Meek

Discussed:

How the “knowledge as information” paradigm cuts us off from reality

Michael Polanyi’s concept of subsidiary-focal integration

Why imagination is essential to all knowing (including science!)

The relationship between attention, love, and knowledge

How artful knowing can help us navigate crises of faith

The doctrine of creation and wonder in the ordinary

Re-enchantment vs. the “lively real”

Comparing Esther’s work with Iain McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere research

https://www.estherlightcapmeek.com/

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Hedgehog Mindset?

Monologue – Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes

We are clerks, medieval clerks leading this mental life that is natural and healthy only to men serving a transcendental idea. But have we that now? And what then does all this thinking, poring, analyzing, arguing become – what but so much agony of pent-up and thwarted action? The ceaseless driving of natural physiological energy into narrow channels of mentation and intellection… (p. 80)

Hedgehog TDS:

In a January 2026 media article in The New Criterion – A range of derangement: On the persistence of Trump hatred – James Bowman notes a Wall Street Journal article Is Trump Derangement Syndrome Real?

We now have it on the authority of a licensed psychotherapist that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (tds) is clinically real—though it’s probably not destined to have its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association any time soon. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Alpert claims that he finds a mental illness worthy of the name in his Manhattan-based practice,

where the presentation aligns with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders: persistent intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation and impaired functioning. Patients describe sleepless nights, compulsive news checking and physical agitation. Many confess they can’t stop thinking about Donald Trump even when they try. They interpret his every move as a threat to democracy and to their own safety and control. Call it “obsessive political preoccupation”—an obsessive-compulsive spectrum presentation in which a political figure becomes the focal point for intrusive thoughts, heightened arousal and compulsive monitoring. (Emphasis mine.)

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Speaking of hedgehog TDS:

Responses to a squishy feminized elite:

Late Friday, New York Times columnist David French snarkily referred to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth as a “walking MAGA caricature” on X.  

Four hours later, Hegseth’s troops were pounding Iran in an intricate series of strikes that left its evil regime reeling.

The response to French — who has not withdrawn his sneer — was unsympathetic. 

My favorite: “Let’s have a contest . . . you and Pete show up at Fort Bragg, see who the troops respect more.”

Is Hegseth a caricature? 

To French and his ilk, maybe; but to many others, he’s a guy who gets results. 

Presumably a 1945 David French would have considered Gen. George S. Patton a caricature, too . . .

As commentator William Wolf observed on X, “The fact that a billionaire real estate playboy who liked to slap his name on steaks and wine has proven to be a better diplomat and military strategist than every other politician and foreign policy expert over the last 30 years is such a damning indictment of the DC establishment I honestly don’t know how they recover.” Emphasis mine.)

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

Why Trump and Hegseth’s swagger leaves the ‘elite’ seething

Fox Mindset?

Time for climate education:

Dr. Willie Soon Reveals the Real Driver of Climate Change in New Video – PJ Media

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[i] Morson, Gary Saul. “Conclusion: Into the World Symposium.” In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, 384. Harvard University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.1791936.16.

[ii] Morson, Gary Saul. “Conclusion: Into the World Symposium.” In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, 388. Harvard University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.1791936.16.

Filed under Philosophy, Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Who is Laying Hands on Our Children?

February 8, 2026 Leave a comment

Anyone even remotely familiar with Jesus will remember the following interaction recorded in three gospels, Mark’s gospel account (10:13–16) being the earliest:

“People brought children to Jesus for him to touch them. The disciples reprimanded them. But Jesus was angry when he saw it, and said to them, “Let the children come to me! Don’t stop them! The kingdom of God belongs to people like that. I’m telling you the truth: anyone who doesn’t receive the kingdom of God like a child will never get into it.

“And he hugged them, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.”

Aware of this, the Evil One, just as he did with two innocent beings in the Garden, works to have us lay hands on children to pervert the innocence, teachability, and trust in a loving Creator that children embody. Both a murderer and a liar, the Evil One works to have children disembodied in the womb. Out of the womb, he wants children to be physically, mentally, and emotionally abused out of any notion of a loving Creator. For his own rule and dominion on earth, the Evil One wants to stop children from ever coming to Jesus.

Anyone even remotely familiar with Jesus, including Progressive Jesuits, will have heard this warning, recorded in Matt. 18: 6:

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

The obvious ones deserving a millstone necklace include financier pedophiles, elite pedophiles, Hollywood pedophiles, illegal immigrant pedophiles, human traffickers, those who Queer children, and the cabal of “gender affirming” lawmakers, doctors, and therapists who provide youth gender “medicine.” Darkness doesn’t come any darker than what comes out of these (Matt. 6:23).

But then again, what about certain school teachers who turn their classrooms into a type of jihadi Madrasa, a religious school for the incubation of destructive mindsets? What about teachers who turn their students into America-hating, white-hating, body-hating, Queer-loving, Marxist anarchists, climate activists, and anti-ICE protestors?

These teachers, Democrats and members of the NEA, a teacher’s union, want to lay hands on our children for indoctrination purposes. They have already submitted to Marxist education in the university and to on-the-job critical race theory and queer theory training. Their moral basis has been formed by Marxism, deconstructionism, gender identity politics, DEI – basically relativism which over time turns into nihilism.

What comes out of the content of their character are ways, including using Rules for Radicals, to leverage power for themselves. They teach and act in terms of the ends justifying the means and the use of any means necessary to obtain political power. Their behavior, like the millstone-deserving above, includes exploiting children to advocate for the “oppressed” against the “oppressor,” a narrative of power relationships that they’ve been taught to believe explains everything.

And so, we find teachers Indoctrinating babies for political trafficking purposes, without concern for what happens to the child:

(Note: There are more of the same videos at the link above. You can read the full article here.)

Are these teachers creating the future mayors of Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and New York? Are they spawning future deep state bureaucrats?

The Pro-Palestinian protests that occurred on university campuses during April of 2024 are the product of a Leftist jihadi education system. What we are currently seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and LA is the product of radicalized Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in the classroom. What happens in these classrooms is no different than what takes place in Islamic Jahidi Madrassas and in Soviet classrooms under Lenin and Stalin.

Jason Littlefield, in We Need to Give Children True Social and Emotional Skills, Not Marxism, writes

“Some regard Social Emotional Learning (SEL) as an educational necessity; others as a Trojan Horse for neoMarxism indoctrination. Based on my experience as an SEL Specialist in Austin Independent School District from 2014 to 2021, I know that true SEL is important to learning and that the SEL in schools is a Trojan Horse for neoMarxism indoctrination. . .

As Jason explains, SEL started out as a good thing. In 1994, an organization was formed to advance advancing SEL research, practices, and resources in schools: CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning). CASEL at one time stated

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions.”

Then, as Jason writes, “In 2018 CASEL shifted SEL from the above focus on individual life skills and turned to collectivism. For example, in Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Toward SEL in Service of Educational Equity and Excellence, the authors focus not on children’s well-being in a liberal democracy but, instead, criticize the cultural, political, and economic traditions of these same democracies. It blames health problems, unethical behavior, and climate change on American society while complaining that schools promote America’s unhealthy acquisitive individualism.”

Then, another perversion of SEL: “At the end of 2020, CASEL officially rebranded SEL as “Transformative SEL” (TSEL), which it defined as,

“a process whereby young people and adults build strong, respectful, and lasting relationships that facilitate co-learning to critically examine root causes of inequity, and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal well-being.”

I encourage every parent to read Jason’s complete article at the link above or download the article below. He talks about SEL changes and about aspects that are essential to good SEL.  He also mentions the mental health issues affecting our youth, citing alarming statistics and the need for “actively promoting positive social-emotional outcomes.”

The CDC reports Data and Statistics on Children’s Mental Health

“Mental health conditions can begin in early childhood and the prevalence changes with age. Although there are some exceptions, most mental health conditions are more common with increased age (see 2022-2023 data below. See article for statistics.)

“It’s important to remember that diagnosed conditions do not tell the whole story about mental distress in children. This is because children can also experience some symptoms without meeting criteria for a condition, or they can meet criteria for diagnosis but remain undiagnosed.

“Among adolescents, mental health, substance use, and suicide are concerns. Data obtained directly from youth can tell us more about the scope of these problems.” See article for statistics.

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The young are especially open to formation through the experiences adults provide. See the example of Jesus above. He calls them to himself to lay his hands on them, affirming them as the “very good” of his Gensis creation, as fulfilling his desire for his creation – goodness.

But what will be the social skills, character education, emotional intelligence of children laid hands on by Leftist teachers? Aren’t we seeing the deleterious effects on our Democratic Republic as it is being torn apart by stupid willful people?

What will become of the moral imagination of children laid hands on by Leftist teachers? Will they accept lying because they learn that the ends justify the means? Will they use any means necessary to get their way? Will they act like Caligula “little boot” types wanting to be recognized as a god?

The American political system is infested with grown children who were taught that they are a moral law unto themselves by an American education system infested with Marxists, elitists, globalists, queers – with utter darkness.

School choice and homeschooling are vitally important to parents who see what is going on in the classroom. And, of course, the Left doesn’t want school choice and homeschooling. The Left wants your children (and your money) under their control. The Left wants your children in public schools, universities and even divinity schools where Progressives can lay their hands on them and send them on their way as activist fellow travelers.

We Need To Give Children True Social And Emotional Skills, Not Marxism – American ThinkerDownload

Two sites to help parents:

Home
Home

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Sound of Freedom Quotes

“You can sell a bag of cocaine one time. But a child, the most precious child, you can sell a five-year-old kid five to ten times a day for ten years straight.”

God’s children are not for sale.

“Over two million children a year are being sucked into the deepest recesses of hell. Trust me, man, if we do nothing, their pain is going to spread and spread until someday it’s going to reach the likes of you. And that will be a nightmare that you’re never going to wake up from.”

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Derek Hunter asks How Did Democrats Get So Stupid?

“That there are so many people in this country who are so wildly ignorant enough to follow the political left over the cliff is not a shock; the public schools in Democrat-controlled cities have essentially been “ignorant factories” for decades. Manufacturing a mis-educated voting base is the surest way to ensure uninterrupted power, and it sure beats the hell out of having to try to argue in favor of the garbage Democrats advocate for.”

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Larry Snd writes in The National Miseducation Association: In addition to being consumed with left-wing politicking, the teachers’ unions inflict significant harm on the nation’s children noting that

“ . . .  the National Education Association, the largest union in the country, is an organization whose primary concern is its radical political and social agenda. But do they benefit education in any way?

Hardly. . .

The NEA has long been a leading proponent of “restorative justice.” This touchy-feely, new-age canard, which took hold in the 1990s, has taken root throughout much of the country. It emphasizes “making the victim and offender whole” and involves “an open discussion of feelings.” Restorative justice emerged because black students are far more likely to be suspended than other ethnic groups. The suggestion here, of course, is that white teachers and administrators tend to be racist. But the racial bean counters never explain why the racial disparity exists even in schools where black principals and staff predominate.

Colorado Public School Gives Class to Children on How to Follow and Doxx ICE Agents

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What are the protesting school children learning to protect?

As reported at https://www.chattanoogan.com/: (Emphasis mine.)

Rep. Dan Howell said the Tennessee District Attorney General Conference report on crimes committed by illegal immigrants in Tennessee is “bad, really bad.”

The report was released on Saturday.

Rep. Howell said, “These are the criminals liberals want to defend while trying to defund ICE.

“Forty-one Tennesseeans are dead at the hands of illegal immigrants and hundreds raped. This will not be tolerated in this great state and we will do more to keep you safe.

“Every single one of these crimes could have been prevented.”

He listed:

21,648 total criminal charges in 2025
•2,183 violent offenses
•41 homicides
•1,592 assaults
•145 sexual offenses
•11 child rapes
•40 aggravated kidnappings
•2,920 DUIs
•5,318 cases of driving without a license or on suspended/or revoked

The report is at

https://www.tndagc.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025-PC998-Immigration-Report-Final-2.pdf?st-lid=18642696

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Right before I posted my article, Sam Faddis, retired CIA Operations Director, posted his:

Many Pied Pipers Now – What the NEA And the Sunrise Movement Are Doing To Your Children

Sam writes “In folklore, the Pied Piper was a character who played a flute and led the children of Hamelin, Germany, away – never to return. Whether he was real or simply a fictional character remains unclear. What is clear is that the National Education Association, the Sunrise Movement, and their allies are leading your children away from you at this very moment. They, too, may never return.”

You will want to read the complete article to get a sense of the revolution at hand.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: CAMBRIDGE Q&A ON CONVERSION, CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS

Former ‘new atheist’ Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali shocked the world when she announced her conversion to Christianity in 2023.

Hirsi Ali recently spoke with Dr James Orr for a Trinity Forum Cambridge event about her new faith, her concerns about radicalization at top Universities, and the need to educate young people about Christianity. She also talks about the difference between Islam and Christianity.

At the end of the podcast there are excellent conversations w/students who became Christians (not shown on the video). Download podcast here:

Season 2, Episode 3 – Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Cambridge Q&A on conversion, Christianity and politics – Justin Brierley | Think Faith

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“Advocating Genocide”: Musk Slams Far-Left Spanish MP’s Demand 500,000 Illegals Be Made Citizens For ‘Population Replacement’ | ZeroHedge

You do understand that when an illegal votes, your vote for all that concerns you – your people, your place, your past, and your prayers, everything that has been given to you down the years and you want to pass on to your children – is negated.

And make no mistake. The deep state loves the activists – the children both young and old parading around protesting about ICE, climate change, race and gender identity politics -anyone who is focused on issues that keep them from focusing on what is really going on behind the scenes.

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https://twitter.com/ShadowofEzra/status/2021068314819141820?s=20

If the wolf hadn’t been caught, what then?

Filed under 2026 Current Events, children, cultural Marxism, Culture, Education, mental health, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

“We have a Bunch of Cowards”

January 26, 2021 Leave a comment

Watch this video before YouTube pulls it down!

David K. Clements, a business law professor at New Mexico State University, presents a cogent and courageous response to an emailed letter from NMSU President John Floros. Go and do likewise.

Added 1-28-2021:

I will not take the vaccine. Here’s why …

Dr. Dolores Cahill, professor of molecular genetics, School of Medicine at University College Dublin, and chairwoman of Irish Freedom Party:

Filed under 2020 election, 2021 current events, cultural Marxism, Culture, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Guess Who Came to Dine on You?

April 9, 2016 Leave a comment

The Ruling Class Cannibals!

Who are these Kulakovores?  They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding.  They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves.  They are the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government, the ones with secret servers, the “saviors of the planet”, those in the “know”, Progressives, the entitled, the “living Constitutionalists”, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, the #SJW, #BlackLivesMatter, the gerrymandering, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people…the Hannibal Lecturers.hannibal

Obama finger gun

The power-hungry…

They came for your family:

“The ruling class is keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children — but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize “child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party’s most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” — The Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution by Angelo M. Codevilla

They came for your children and their “privilege. They came to put them on the menu:

Here is what is going on in social engineering social studies.

Privilege Quiz

Hey kids, how much privilege do you have? Quiz riles Florida parents

They came for your wealth:

Ruling Class Cannibals (RBC) Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump et al, all have a taste for power. And that means that your hard-earned tilled-the-earth money is on the menu so as to whet the appetites of would be RBC voters.

Oh sure, these social warriors will tell you that they want to make things “fair and equal and right”.  But, these Kulakovores are bibbed up and ready to devour you and yours at a power lunch trough feeding.  Their mere mention of “Wall St.” has already marinated your tender #Occupywallstreet minds.  Hannibal Lecter power lunch

Raising the minimum wage by coercive law is an injustice done to business owners and stockholders.  Such increases steal the owner/investor’s income. Period.

It is immoral for someone to take my wealth and give it to someone else.  Only when there is an injustice between two parties should there be restitution. (Being born black is not an injustice unless you are deemed unworthy of being born by the Ruling Class. Welfare and Domination are the perverted restitutions offered by Democrats).

The Ruling Class Cannibals are at the gate!

They came for your…  Hold on!  Don’t do me like that! Time for a bit of truth telling. The following will give the Ruling Class indigestion!

This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders

GE CEO: Bernie Sanders says we’re ‘destroying the moral fabric’ of America. He’s wrong.

Swedish Economist Schools Sanders On the Ravages of Socialism

And now for the Big Gulp!

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Lynn Stuter — Common Core – New Name, Old Agenda

January 27, 2016 Leave a comment

Source: Lynn Stuter — Common Core – New Name, Old Agenda

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If Its True Its Not New OR Don’t Stick Your Head in the Oven

August 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Following on the heels of my previous post “The Vision of the Anointed is Our Nightmare; Ivy league Progressives and Their Creeping Racism” I offer the following video discussion. And, once again real adults are involved. No trigger warnings or pacifiers issued here.

 The discussion led by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute centers on the current state of liberal arts education. Joseph Epstein and Andrew Ferguson both share from their extensive experience. The participant’s credentials, included in the video, won’t be repeated here.

 “We may fairly ask, could any field other than liberal arts yield as broad and as significant an introduction to life’s comparisons and choices; could any other provide a more vital classroom experience for the development of men who are free not primarily because of birth, but because they have learned to use their birthright to chose a way of life? Quoting from Dartmouth College President John Sloan Dickey’s Convocation Address,1954, as recorded in the Dartmouth Review, March 13, 2013, page 11

Considering my birthright to be that of an autodidact liberal arts student, I look at the world from both ends of a telescope. And, though my pay-the-bills ‘FT’ job is in the field of engineering I seek out all manner of wonderful going beyond the rote of everyday life. From my posts you’ll see that this includes and is not limited to quantum physics, genetics, theistic “old earth” evolution, philosophy, psychotherapy, Christianity, music, art, poetry and both non-fiction and fiction literature including Shakespeare. I say this not out of braggadocio but to let you know that I was taught early on to seek wisdom, knowledge and a good understanding. I have an insatiable appetite to learn.  I need clarion answers and I also need a universe full of space, time and matter to ponder.

An old preacher once told me, “If it’s new it’s not true.  If it’s true it’s not new.”  This adage applies especially to a liberal arts education wherein one can unearth ancient wisdom, dust off traditional values and compare them to today’s instantly gratifying, mostly politicized and ‘Democratic-ized” popular icons of ‘knowledge” (e.g., global warming is a man-made crisis, crime originates from poverty and poor government institutions, etc.). This adage aptly applies to the physical sciences as well since what is being discovered has been around since the beginning of time

 Knowledge-wise I cut my teeth, so to speak, sans ‘higher education’ when I began questioning common knowledge, spitting out popular ‘wisdom’ and seeking to rid myself of the scourge of acid-like sentimentality that eats away at the protective enamel of wisdom. The dentist told me to floss every day. And, Socrates told me that “an unexamined life is not worth living.” They share the same Hippocratic Office, I think.

 Some of my liberal arts ‘findings’ are presented in my posts. I write the posts to remind myself of what I have read, to reinforce the content in my mind and to learn to parse, focusing only on what is true, good and worthy. And, then, there is also this reason… 

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

 Some thoughts on the most important aspect of a liberal arts education-gaining wisdom:

Hopefully by now you have noticed that science’s data collection and life’s growing empiricism do not counterbalance the super-sized questions of life weighing you down. Please don’t “scien-tize” your life as Joseph Epstein coined in the video or meta-data yourself into boredom. Wise-up your life.

 And, even though the wisest, most circumspect and ‘experienced’ man in history, King Solomon, writes his direst thoughts in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, telling us that life is …

 

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.

Everything is meaningless!”

 

…we are reminded that Solomon asked God for the gift of wisdom yet Solomon did not use all of the wisdom given to him. That led him to…

 

The Conclusion of the Matter

 

Not only was the Teacher wise, but he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs.  The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true.

 

The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them.

 

Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.

Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:

Fear God and keep his commandments,

for this is the duty of all mankind.
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.

 

There is just too much of life to be taken in to ever be bored with life or to find time to despair. No head in the oven for me.

~~~

Allan Bloom, American philosopher, classicist, and academician, in his 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind How Higher Education Has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students” writes about how liberal arts education became impoverished and the consequential effects.

 Here is a previous post with quotes from Allan Bloom: Fear and Loathing In America

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Worker Bees, Outcome Based Education and Our Little Ones

June 21, 2014 Leave a comment

“The US education reform system creates…”Worker bees—cooperative, collaborative, team players, not too well educated but willing to work for a pittance for the good of the collective whole (ie, the state). Knowledge is power! A culturally illiterate nation will not long remain free. William Pearson Tolley, Chancelor of Syracuse University, wrote, in 1943,

“In a slave state, vocational training may be education enough. For the education of free men, much more is required. “”

“As parents look at education reform, little do they realize that education and the purpose of education are being transformed. No longer is education to produce an innovative, creative, intelligent child, who has a broad but intensive liberal arts background such that he or she can reach for the star of stars of his or her choice. The purpose of education, under this transformation, this paradigm shift, is to mold the child to meet the needs of the global economy of the 21st Century, to produce a world class worker with the attitudes, values and beliefs wanted by big business.” Lynn Stuter (emphasis mine)

Above quotes from: http://www.learn-usa.com/education_transformation/~education.htm

The following quotes are from Lynn M. Stuter’s The Psychology of Becoming:

Some might look at this title and think, “This sounds like something from Abraham Maslow or Carl Rogers.”

The world view of systems governance is humanism, a religion immersed in the concept that “no deity will save us, we must save ourselves” (Humanist Manifesto, 1973). To that end, systems governance has been developed and fine tuned over a period of several decades, the purpose being to “create the future;” to decide what the world is to look like at a designated future time, then design and align everything to achieve that vision. The ultimate goal is to attain and maintain the global sustainable environment.

The concept that we must save ourselves finds basis in the humanist principle that man has no spirituality or self-determinism, that man is merely a product of his environment and must, therefore, be “conditioned” to the perceived environment of the “created future” as one system of many systems.

Conditioning necessarily requires the change of one’s existing world view — one’s existing attitudes, values, and beliefs, one’s existing behaviors. In book after book written by those advocating systems education, that it is the behavior of the individual that must be changed is apparent:

“… a large part of what we call ‘good teaching’ is the teacher’s ability to attain affective objectives through challenging the students’ fixed beliefs and getting them to discuss issues.” (Bloom, 1964)

“The individual acts consistently in accordance with the values he has internalized at this level, and our concern is to indicate two things: (a) the generalization of this control to so much of the individual’s behavior that he is described and characterized as a person by these pervasive controlling tendencies, and (b) the integration of these beliefs, ideas, and attitudes into a total philosophy or world view.” (Bloom, 1964)

“Since the real purpose of education is not to have the instructor perform certain activities but to bring about significant changes in the students’ patterns of behavior, it becomes important to recognize that any statement of the objectives … should be a statement of changes to take place in the student.” (Tyler, 1949)

“… education, as now conceived, leads to demonstrable changes in student behaviors, changes that can be assessed using agreed-upon standards.” (Conley, 1993)
The question becomes how to achieve the change in behaviors … world view … attitudes, values and beliefs.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed a process known as the Hegelian Dialectic in which opposites (thesis and antithesis) are brought together in compromise (synthesis) to form a new thesis which becomes the view of the group participants, individually and as a whole. Hegel theorized that through a continual use of this process, small groups would evolve to a “higher plane” signified by their becoming part of an ever larger group, until “oneness of mind” in a society theoretically would occur.

Today, this process is known by at least three other names: the Delphi Technique, the Alinsky Method, and the facilitated process of consensus building. It is also the process of the “guide on the side, not the sage on the stage” ~ the teacher (now called a facilitator) in the classroom. It is the process of critical thinking, conflict resolution, peer mediation, focus groups, consensus circles … The process has the effect of forcing the individual, in order to be a member of the group (which is aggressively encouraged and pursued), to give up his individual beliefs for the beliefs of the group.

Building on Hegel’s theory, Marx came to the conclusion that religion, with its authoritarian principles and higher authority, caused alienation of the individual from the group. As such, Marx wrote, religion is antithetical to the cohesion of the group and must be eradicated.

The Hegelian Dialectic is about compromise ~ the bringing together of opposites, and from those opposites, theoretically, a new truth emerges. In this environment, there is no right or wrong answer, only differences of opinion ~ how people “feel” about an issue. In this setting right and wrong stand on equal footing.

What happens when you synthesize right (good) and wrong (evil)? Which will prevail, right or wrong?

If you believe that man is inherently good (humanist world view), you will say that man will choose right over wrong, good over evil. But if you believe that man has a sin nature (Christian world view), then you will say that man will, unless he has been instilled with a moral compass of right and wrong in obedience to the teachings of a higher authority, choose wrong or evil.

 

So it is, in consensus building, that right does not prevail, but wrong does prevail in the name of synthesis. As stated in one conflict resolution curriculum, “conflict resolution is rarely about honesty or establishing truth~it is more about unifying perceptions.” (Bodine, 1994) If you have a bully and his victim in conflict resolution or peer mediation to achieve consensus (compromise), who will prevail in such an environment? Obviously, the bully will prevail.

Returning to the concept that man must be conditioned to the perceived environment, one proponent of the New Age world view wrote:
“You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. … Of the Aquarian Conspirators surveyed, more were involved in education than in any other single category of work. … Marion Fantini, former Ford consultant on education, now at the State University of New York, said bluntly, ‘The psychology of becoming has to be smuggled into the schools.'”

At this point, it is imperative that we remember what the new basics are: “team work, critical thinking, making decisions, communication, adapting to change and understanding whole systems” (WTECB, 1994)
As noted above, in book after book, advocating systems education, it is made very clear that behavior must be changed to achieve the wanted outcomes or exit outcomes defined at the state level, benchmarked to the national goals for workforce development, and implemented at the local level. Assessments are the tool used to determine if the wanted behaviors are being achieved.

This is occurring in the classroom via teachers (facilitators) and paraprofessionals (facilitator aides); in the counselor’s office; in the school psychologist’s office; on the playground and in the hallways via social workers who watch students and note their observations (called “profiling”).

 

What is happening in the classroom, in the name of education reform, amounts to medical malpractice. What is even worse is that the created future cannot be achieved unless a majority of children in the government school acquire the wanted belief system. That psychological manipulation is the only route (because the philosophy is not normal or natural to the human condition) from present to future should serve as a wake-up call to parents and citizens.

But many parents are going along with this, believing their child(ren) actually needs psychological help. Very few children really need psychological help, and those who do certainly do not need the type of psychological help they are getting in the government school.

The name that has been given this non-directive, feelings based education system is “psycho-education.” Psycho is right. It is destroying or badly damaging young lives and leaving children ill-equipped to meet the realities of the world beyond the classroom.

Some Christian parents send their child(ren) to the government schools, believing that in so doing, they are following the commandment of God to “go forth and witness.” The bible also says, in three consecutive chapters;
“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin … to stumble … to be offended, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (KJV)
Can we surmise that Christ commanded us to protect these “little ones” from harms way? Most adults could not withstand what these children are being subjected to on a daily basis in the closed environment of the government school. How could any Christian parent believe their child(ren) could withstand the same?

Quotes from Lynn M. Stuter – The Psychology of Becoming (February 26, 2003!!!)

Now a few chilling words from Cynthia Weatherly:

 

 

 Education:

Logocentrism

A Landscape With Dragons; Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself

The Higher Education Bubble (Encounter Broadsides)

 

Educators:

The People of the “White Privilege” Lie

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Five Years of Faithfulness

June 7, 2014 Leave a comment

Wordpress anniversary-5Yrs

You Registered on WordPress 5 years ago!

Sally, you registered on WordPress.com 5 years ago!

So, Sally Paradise you are five years old!

 Born in the Year of the Dragon (the author, that is), Sally has fire in her belly.

 A lot has happened during the past five years: A lady friend from church went to be with the Lord last month. Over a thousand people came to her Memorial Service last weekend to remember her and to rejoice in her work in the Lord.

 And, it was almost a year ago, almost Father’s Day that my dad went to be with the Lord. He was 85. There were others lost, both physically and spiritually.

 Beyond the losses there have been multiple gains and blessings from God.  One of which has been there has no no change in my job status ~ I am still working, though many around me have been out of work since Obama (the Greatest Income Unequalizer of all time) took his second oath of office. 

My first post, Jun 4, 2009 @ 17:59, a short story:

Almost Like Praying

Since this is a party of sorts I thought I should drudge up some Sally snapshots ~  some forgotten posts ~ which over the five years have gained the most attention and have also been some of my favorites. I’ll pick. You decide.

 I’ve written posts on many topics, topics which piqued my interest. Most topics originated from a book, an essay or an article that I read on the train to and from work. Here are a few posts born out of those many miles on parallel tracks.

 Political Commentary:

 Sally, not to be outdone by the late night comedians, joked when administrations changed hands. There is always a new supply of fodder for the Animal Farm of politics. And, with cogent insight, Sally has shared reflections upon our country’s state of mind.

Obama’s First Christmas Album

The Ebony Calf

 Here goes. Start the bubble machine.

 Politics:

Course Correction Needed: 2012, I’m Shovel Ready 

Human Rights Repository

 

Social Commentary:

Tear Down That Anthropocentricity

Boy, Are You in Trouble!

Label Me “In Christ”

The People of the “White Privilege” Lie

America’s ‘DeValued’ Moral Currency

 

Human Evil (Sally recommends KingdomVenturers blog):

“Hell is Empty and All The Devils Are Here”

 

Human Interest:

tête-à-tête

History as Cynicism

 

Poetry:

Resurrection Doesn’t Stop There

The first snow of the year fell last night

How Do You Know Its Christmas?

When I Think of Christmas

Earthquake Day

 

Short Stories: 

Work 

Wild Horses 

Afternoon Aliens

 

Science:

God Saw That It Was Good – All Along (Theistic Evolution)

Envision

God Saw That It Was Good and So Do I

Man-Made Panic: Climate Change & Anti-Industrialism

Climate Apocalyptic-ism & The WannaBe Oppressed

Cooler Heads Will Prevail 

Cartesian Circle

 

Free Market Capitalism/Economics:

The Good News and Capitalism All Under One Tent

Feral Gov’t Debt Limit Explained

A Tale of Two Waitresses

The Taxonomy of The No-Class Warrior’s Obamanomics

Exactly!

Depends On You

Minimum Wage Or The Price We Pay For Stupid

Looking Out for Number One and Finding Zero

 

Book Reviews/Situation Ethics:

Ritual Meet Entropy: A Father’s Story

Crooked Letters Come to Terms Among the Kudzu

 

Education:

Worker Bees, Education Reform and Our Little Ones

Logocentrism

A Landscape With Dragons; Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture

 

Gender Issues:

The Church and Gender

What’s “Biblical” About It? 

Good Company – He Chooses You

 

Apologetics/Philosophy:

Atheism in Retreat

Alvin Plantinga & atheism’s arguments

Wrestling with God?

Saving Leonardo and Modern Man From Himself

The Faith Based-Materialist Myth & Baron Muchausen

 

Christianity/Character: 

So God Gave Them Up

Enter In His Gates

The Catch of The Day

Pretense, Part 1: A Look at Evil, Pretense and Suffering

Life Lessons I Will Pass On to My Kids

The True Gospel

The Road Less Traveled By – To The Solidification Zone

Beginning to Imagine the Kingdom of God

Exclusion & Embrace in the Garden of Good & Evil

“Doubly Dead and Uprooted” 

“All who are thirsty come”

 

 This is sum of Sally: “That’s the whole story. Here now is my final conclusion: Fear God and obey his commands, for this is everyone’s duty.” Ecclesiastes 12:13

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Boy, Are You in Trouble!

May 24, 2014 Leave a comment

Let it be known that I am a Christian & a handgun owner. The handgun is for my protection and it’s fun to shoot at a target.  Now…

No doubt you’ve heard reports across the country concerning certain school teachers and school administrators suspending, expelling, punishing, guilt-shaming, tyrannizing and otherwise verbally torturing young boys just for being boys.

This extreme behavior has been formed in college, where the ‘educators’ are taught, indirectly, to dismiss males as being off point and always domineering, with way too much get up and go and not enough “sit there and listen to me.”

In other words, guys are a pain in their collective ass, even for the male ‘educators’.

Often, at elementary schools where these ‘educators’ are unleashed to vent their disrespect and begin their over lording of young males the teachers submit to a form of groupthink which easily takes over.

Like the gun free zones stickers which serve no purpose other than to disarm law-abiding citizens so that they are now totally dependent on a 911 call made hopefully by someone who is not shot dead by a criminal who could care less about the sign, a boy’s signed ‘civility pledge’ is most likely meant to inform him of the ‘order’ he is supposed to keep and the consequences of his failure to rightly align his behavior with Teacher’s emotional mood-at-the-moment code of conduct – it basically informs the boy that a teacher can freak-out at will and there will be swift ‘justice’ and without due process. More importantly, though, it is meant to cover asses in the future.

These ‘educators’ prefer the student who hangs on their every spoken word, who does their assignments in perfect cursive and also languishes after class to see if the teacher approves of their work.

Are there kids who do bad things? Absolutely. A small percentage of a school’s population are kids who do ‘bad’ things. Girls will bully other girls verbally. Teachers will bully students verbally (as witnessed by the overreaction of now, nationally known ‘educators’ who have placed themselves on the cusp of being all- wise in the eyes of their pay grade.

Boys will bully other boys physically. But a picture, drawn by a boy, of a handgun, is not a felony, a misdemeanor or a crime. It is boyishness played out on paper. No one and I mean no one has been bullied or hurt by such a drawing.

It was the teacher, in fact, who gave the boy a loaded pencil. But, the pen being mightier than the sword, a chestnut well-known to the ‘cultured’ ‘educators’, the teacher should have known: boys will be boys and the hand drawn gun was not loaded except with a teacher’s perverse ‘educated’ angst.

A drawn picture of a gun or a cracker bitten into a shape of a gun absolutely destroys a teacher’s female Victorian sensitivities. Immediately, they flip out and go way over the top in their reaction to the ‘militant’ boy. The boy is to be wounded emotionally, scared to within an inch of his life. This is purposefully done by the Gestapo school Admins.

As ‘educators, they are clueless as to HOW to teach boys. They were taught that female learning is the best way to learn – via emo.

I have Zero Tolerance for these ‘educators’!!!!

It is time, RIGHT NOW, to end the War on Boys!!!!!!

Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship And The End Of the American Debate by First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff

More at Legal Insurrection:

Forecast: Cloudy, with a certainty of Zero Tolerance Insanity

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America’s ‘DeValued’ Moral Currency

February 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Pervasive throughout our land is the avoidance of asking the hard questions.  We shun the real questions about life and death and about God.  We do not want to talk “good and evil.”  We glibly talk about body and soul, about reason and revelation, about eternity and time. 

 The other day I happened to watch The Lord of the Rings (LTR):  The Return of the King.  Putting the above statement into LTR terms, we want to live peaceably in the shire without ever having to venture out and deal with the Ring, a Ring which has consequential power over us. We may say to ourselves, “Why destroy the ring when we don’t know for sure it exists? We may have thoughts that all that the shire presents to us is all there is to life. We will go on with our quietude in order to avoid conflict and to live peaceably. We choose society’s ‘safe’ surroundings and its costly ‘insurance’ policies to avoid the dangerous quest that truth demands of us. We fear what it might take to make the journey.  We fear we will lose ourselves on the way and never return to the shire. We fear, we fear and we fear again.

   We fear conflict.  And this is because inherent in conflict are the morals or ethics that each of the disparate parties brings with them. Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid.  Our “dialectics” begin with opposites and often end in synthesis or in the exclusion (or boycott) of the ‘other’.  We will seek out the ‘no-fault divorce’ of our language from its historical meaning. We give a pass to “Political-Correctness” (PC) because PC talk bypasses truth and goes straight to a word originally devoid of any value in and of itself but now given full political power: “diversity.”  

With the acceptance of “diversity,” also a code-word for “whatever” or “it-depends,” moral relativity’s child, lawlessness, increasingly becomes a de facto way to govern and self-govern. Yet, “Wisdom shouts in the street, She lifts her voice in the square; At the head of the noisy streets she cries out; At the entrance of the gates in the city She utters her sayings…”

As we go on and find more and more moral conflicts and in order to avoid angst we find it easier to believe nothing of import so that we do not have to fear disagreement, ostracism or even death for what one believes. And because we do not believe in anything then we cannot be responsible for outcomes. Nihilism’s union with materialism begets the DNA of nihilism – lives drained of any meaning other than the moment. In fact, we are told duplicitously “to live in the moment.”

 To choose to believe nothing means that absolute truth is discharged from our lives.  Its voice is no longer heeded.  In fact its voice is now being drowned out.  The commotion that you hear daily is man’s raucous resistance to leaving the shire ~ his tweeting and texting of empty words, the ever streaming pop/rock music filling the void, the Surround sound of ubiquitous blaring entertainment.  It is as if men and women were walking around in the dark calling out to each other and never finding the light switch. They have chosen to stay in the purgatory of their fears.

 The avoidance of pain and conflict has become our primary goal in life.  This is seen in the young voter’s desire for Obamacare.  The health care reform is seen by them as in line with their “values”.  The reform is also seen as providing a sense of self-esteem in that it affirms the young voters wish to avoid pain and insecurity at all costs. On the surface Obamacare appears to provide security for themselves and for others while in truth it is a compromise of what is good and what is evil – the good being the desire for your well-being and the well-being of others and the evil which is the lie that Obama and the government will somehow provide self-esteem and security for you and others and do it with altruism. Remember, God has now been replaced by social science, social science based on rationalism and egalitarianism (think John Rawls, Laurence Tribe, etc.) all under the banner of “Social Justice.”  Rationalism’s,’ “Social Justice” trumps God every time.  Social science is now becoming the creator of society’s values, e.g., God is not to be talked about in public but homosexuality must be.  All of this in spite of the fact that rationalism without revelation could never create value. As Benedict XVI said in 1969:

“What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational, just as the state that aims at being perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason.”

 The avoidance of truth with its inherent conflicts with other than the truth affects our relationships, our sexuality, our creativity, our culture. In place of absolute truth Americans, as mentioned, have latched on to “values.” And our new “value” system has a new way of talking:  “lifestyle”, “Be Yourself;” “Be original;” “Let go and be;”  diversity;” “I have my rights.” But now “rights” are no longer the natural inalienable God-given rights “of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Now “rights” have morphed into feelings worn on our sleeve.  We demand that others accept what we feel and that others be open and tolerant. This is what we value above all else. Right and wrong (and love (read not sex)) no longer have a place in our psyche. “Values” – a synthesis of good and evil dominates our diseased culture. And when we ignore serious questions we create words with synthetic meanings to describe our lives.

 “Charisma” is one of those words often heard today. Charisma was once considered a God-given grace but has been used as cover for the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt, political philosopher, notes when talking about Hitler’s appeal.

  Allan Bloom, another political philosopher, notes in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind:  How Higher Education Has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, “Charisma both justifies leaders and excuses followers.  The very word gives a positive twist to rabble-rousing qualities and activities treated as negative in our constitutional tradition.  And it s vagueness makes it a tool for frauds and advertising men adept at manipulating images.” Consider that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both been called charismatic leaders.

 In the introduction to his book, Bloom writes about what he sees in the classrooms of higher education: 

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of:  almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes that truth is relative….They are unified only in their relativism and their allegiance to equality….They have been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society…The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance.  Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.  Openness ~ and the relativism that makes it only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings ~ is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger.  The study of history and culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism.  The point (now) is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”  (emphasis mine)

  In a later chapter titled The German Connection, Bloom relates how Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hegel, Weber, Freud have influenced American thinking.  Americans, within a “pro-choice” democracy, have assimilated this German thinking sometimes turning it on its head.   Bloom writes, 

“…there is now an entirely new language of good and evil, originating in an attempt to get “beyond good and evil” and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore.  Even those who deplore our current moral condition do so in the very language that exemplifies that condition.”

“The new language is that of value relativism and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” (empahsis mine) …

“Value relativism can be taken to be a great release from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil, with its cargo and shame and guilt, and the endless efforts that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other enjoin. Intractable good and evil cause infinite distress – like war and sexual repression – which is almost instantly relieved when more flexible values are introduced.  One need not feel bad about or uncomfortable with oneself when just a little value adjustment is necessary.  And this longing to shuck off constraints and have one peaceful, happy world is the first of the affinities between our real American world and that of German philosophy in its most advanced form, given expression by the critics of the President’s speech.”

 Here Bloom is referring to the clamor arising when President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.”  When yet at another time Reagan said that the Soviets had “different values,” this statement was met “at worst with silence and frequently with approval,” thus revealing our loathing of absolutism in the former statement.

 At the beginning of the chapter Values, Bloom, relates, “We have come back to the point where we began (in the book), where values take the place of good and evil.” (emphasis mine)

And so like Gollum we place the utmost value on the ring of power, becoming blind to its tyranny over us. Along with the ring we call our values “My Precious.”  Under the yolk of temporal “values” and without facing the serious questions of life we lose ourselves, we lose the real.  We lose love, romance, culture, art ~ everything that gives meaning to life.

 Love or charity, a virtue which must be constantly worked at, is replaced with ‘sexual rights.’ Consider that in our culture sexual activity is not to be repressed or self-controlled but rather it is to be given preeminent unrestrained “value.” Think Sandra Fluke and contraception. Think in-your-face homosexuality. Does America “confirm her soul in self-control” or not?

 Romance, apart from truth is portrayed in movie after movie as just a response to nihilism. Nowhere to be found is the expectation, the unrequited desire and the hoped-for revelation of real romance. Without absolutes there can be no true romance.

 We are a culture that seeks therapeutic counseling.  Yet modern psychology, the sworn enemy of shame and guilt, refuses to talk about good and evil and therefore offers nothing for the soul. Freudian psychology only brings the patient back to repressed sex.

 Modern art has nothing of consequence to offer. Consider the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

 Deafening music, pop or rock, pummels our ear drums daily evoking barbaric passions and depriving the soul of its senses.

 Tattoos deface our bodies so as to reveal our disdain for the discipline that purity of mind and body requires. Inking is given the (non-)value of counter-culture and rabble-rousing.

 Religion, wherein serious questions are faced, is being replaced by positive thinking as preached from the temples of TV.

 In view of the fact that our nation is becoming increasingly devoid of absolutes and truth while at the same time becoming increasingly laced with relativism and sliding scale “values” consider this:

 Jesus, the Son of the Living God and The Way, the Truth and the Life says, “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Free from what? Free from fear.  All fear:  the fear of the unknown, the fear of facing ultimate accountability, the fear of death, the fear of loss and personal suffering, the fear of evil.  Jesus’ perfect love casts out all fear. Because of this we can face the serious questions of life head-on knowing that God ~ Father, Son and Holy Spirit love us, that They stand with us and that Jesus has gone before us through the same difficult places. Seek Him and He will be found.

 Going back to the LTR analogy do you remember how Frodo and Sam and the rest rejoiced that the ring had been destroyed, that their arduous life and death journey had been accomplished? Their courage and resoluteness saved the shire, themselves and Middle Earth even while the others in the shire had no clue as to what was going on.  You and I must do the same.

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