Category Archives: Education

Don’t Go Changing, ‘Mad Men’

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Education, English, Feminism, Film, History, Hollywood

Why of course “Mad Men” is superb television. It is produced in Canada, by Lionsgate Television, whose studios I’d pass almost daily when I lived in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Canada makes quality, understated films.

“Mad Men” is a “cable period drama” about an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, Manhattan (New York), easily the most magnificent place I’ve ever been to.

The nostalgia the production triggers is a nostalgia for the days when women did not look and sound like Meghan McCain—had soothing, soft voices, spoke in complete sentences, and seemed so much smarter and refined than their modern-day, emancipated shrew sisters. Men were men, unapologetic, bold, unafraid and purposeful.

Don Draper fell in love with just such a lady. Or so its seemed. It was all so dreamy and romantic.

But all is not perfect. The lovely Megan Draper has begun to sound whiny and silly. Like her 2012 sisters, a good deal of sibilance has crept into her once pleasant voice.

Cringe factor rising. The not-to-be-mistaken current usage, “I feel like,” has crept into the dialogue.

HELP!

Bitchy Betty Draper (otherwise played by a very convincing actress) said, “I feel like something or another” in the course of a weight-loss coven. Others on the show have repeated this linguistic barbarity. I’m listening to the tapes of that great First Lady Jacky Kennedy in the car. Believe me, no one said “I feel like” in the 1960s.

Another recent, Mad-Men English abomination which gave me the shudders: “Like [a pregnant pause follows], I know that…”

Oh, and Peggy Olson holds her pen as do members of America’s much younger Idiocracy. And that includes our president, BHO, although footage of this sign of illiteracy has been removed from the Internet (something that happens all too often).

Adults of that era were taught as kids to hold a pencil on the first day of school. You graduated to a pen after perfecting your cursive in pencil.

Don Draper is, of course, still divine.

Happy Meal Time for US Students

Debt, Democracy, Economy, Education, Elections, Republicans, Socialism, Welfare

“Happy Meal Time for US Students” is my new column. Here is an excerpt:

“Barack Obama has promised America’s miseducated Millenials to keep the student-loan bubble from bursting. Campaigning in Iowa, the president vowed to keep college affordable, because, like every other welfare and warfare program, it “is at the heart of who we are.”

Interest rates for Federal Stafford Loans are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, on July 1. You just know how bad things are when a socialized financial market like student loans attempts to correct itself. Nevertheless, if the glut of miseducation is to be curbed, higher interest rates are healthy.

Why the president’s promise? The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, smuggled into the Constitution by statute, artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, youngsters get to vote for dibs on the livelihood of those who do.

It’s Happy Meal time for the nation’s students….”

Read the complete column, “Happy Meal Time for US Students.”

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UPDATED (8/23/2017): ‘Lincoln’s Marxists’

Barack Obama, Communism, Cultural Marxism, Education, Government, History, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, States' Rights

TAWE (The Ass With Ears, Obama) likes to repeat—in fact he said it yesterday again—a quote he attributes to “Republican Abraham Lincoln”: “The government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves and no more.”

Left-liberals like TAWE should be reaffirmed in their love of Lincoln.

A new book, Lincoln’s Marxists, reviewed in Chronicles Magazine, provides insight into the radical (Marxist) revolutionaries, or Radical Republicans, with whom Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself. Writes Clyde Wilson:

“The early German settlers of America were peaceful and pious farmers, escaping militarism and religious strife. Not so the immigrants of the 1850s, who were militarized advocates of violent social revolution, prototypes of later European communists and fascists. Revolutionaries and socialists on both side of the Atlantic enthusiastically embraced Lincoln’s war as a continuation of the French Revolution and of their own failed revolution of 1848.

This is documented by [Al] Benson and [Walter Donald] Kennedy in full chapter and verse. The Forty-Eighters furnished at least four Union generals, several of whom were intimates of Karl Marx [emphasis added] and Friedrich Engels, and a host of colonels and Republican party activists.

The later-coming Germans may have made possible Lincoln’s election in 1860 by tipping the demographic balance in previously Democratic states.
Marx, who knew even less about America than he did about everything else, described the conflict with the kind of grand abstractions that appeal to people of that ilk, even celebrating the rich corporation lawyer Lincoln as a hero of the working class.

The Forty-Eighters did not dominate Lincoln’s party, but they were a very strong element within it. Nor did they necessarily have a complete picture, but recognized that the Union cause was a step in their Marxist direction—an unappealable centralization of power combined with the violent destruction of reactionary elements.

Since that time, their ideas have triumphed completely. Marx’s description of the war of 1861-65 as a defensive effort against violent reactionaries engaged in a wicked rebellion to spread slavery is now the mainstream p.c. interpretation, in the schools and media, of America’s central event.” (Chronicles, April 2012, p. 27)

UPDATE (8/23): Lovely Lincoln.

UPDATED: No Surprise: Left-Libertarianism Prevails Among The Young

Affirmative Action, Education, Elections, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, States' Rights

I’ve long since contended that establishment-endorsed libertarianism, touted on the Fox News and Business channels, is a left-libertarianism. Like neoconservatism, this “Libertarianism Lite” equates liberty with abstract propositions that—against all evidence, historic and other— purport to work when applied to every individual, Afghani, Israeli and Iraqi, provided he or she gets the proper (invariably American) instruction.

A libertarianism that refuses to recognize “Liberty’s Civilizational Dimension,” sadly, prevails among the young (leftism is, after all, second nature to youth).

Writes VDARE’s James Kirkpatrick:

Students for Liberty, forthrightly supports exterminating the American identity. It defends capitalism precisely on the grounds that it undermines conservatism and traditional values. Its campus coordinators enthusiastically champion the usual “civil rights” causes and are particularly obsessed with championing gay groups. They invite immigrants like Reason Magazine columnist Shikha Dalmia (email her) to punish us for letting her come here by lecturing their mostly white audiences on why their ideology requires more immigrants.
Needless to say, Students For Liberty avoids Politically Incorrect causes that may technically fall under the cause of “liberty.” A column posted on its website about an affirmative action bake sale by the College Republicans says the real root of racism is “statism.” [Don’t Just Bake, Strike the Root!, by James Padilioni, Jr., September 27, 2011] There’s even a defense of critical race theory, and needless to say, no mention of official multiculturalism and its reliance on state support. [The Law Perverted: A Libertarian Approach to Black History Month, February 1, 2012 by James Padilioni, Jr.]
Movements that supposedly champion the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard might want to look at what he actually said on the subject.

Note that, as a paleolibertarian, I do not give a tinker’s toss about gay marriage. It is NOT a libertarian issue (other than to stress that “whatever is not specified as a power of the federal government and is not prohibited to the states, is reserved to the states or the people“). However, it is incongruous to profess libertarianism, while supporting affirmative action, anti-private property Civil-Rights laws, and public education extended to all trespassers—these are policies that violate private property, which is the cornerstone of libertarianism.

MORE.

UPDATED: In reply to HBK on Facebook: The stand most libertarians take is that libertarianism is neither Right not Left; we are all supposed to uphold the non-aggression axiom (although left-libertarians, aka the Beltway think-tank type, were more likely to evince full-throated enthusiasm for Bush’s war than the Rightists; I came out against that war on Set. 19, 2002, and never again heard from Neal Boortz, who used to link to my stuff prior). There is something to the eschewing of Left and Right, but in my opinion, it is, for the most, a cop-out. Beltway lefties were also quite hostile to Ron Paul at the inception. Since the nation’s memory is non-existent, they now love him—talking about him gets them on TV.