Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon

Economy, Education, English, Literature, Objectivism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture

“Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND. The WND version has been scrubbed of the “salacious sex scene,” excerpted below, which happens to be required reading in some kids’ English class:

The fraught relationship between state and society carries over into classroom and town hall. Something of a commonplace in police state USA is the scene in which a citizen is arrested for speaking his mind to a public official, pedagogue or politician.

Our story begins with a dad, William Baer, a lawyer, I believe, who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” For speaking out of turn at a school board meeting, Baer was cuffed and carted out of a forum of educrats and obedient parents, herded together at the Gilford high school. An arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct followed—Baer, after all, had exceeded the talk time allotted to him.

“It was basically, you make a statement, say what you want and sit down,” the dad told a local television station. “‘Sit down and shut up’ … [is] not how you interact with adults.”

In the background to the online YouTube clip of the event one can hear the dulcet voice of a female emcee, delighting in the petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.

Mr. Baer was protesting a novel which was required reading in his 14-year-old daughter’s English class: “Nineteen Minutes” by home girl Jodi Picoult. (One of Australia’s finest writers, also the copy editor of this writer’s last book, relates that every time he gets on a train or a bus, there seems to be some female or three reading a Jodi P. “masterpiece.”)

Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Picoult’s novel is the rotten writing throughout:

“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ”
… She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
… (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.
“Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”

The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political. Inculcating kids early on with these cumbersome, constricted constructs serves to stunt young minds. The young reader is intellectually disemboweled, as he is steered into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines. …

… Without the literary canon, young minds are doomed to become as dim and sclerotic as those of the educators who assign them the piss-poor reading material aforementioned

… Read the rest. “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND.

Who You Gonna Call? Oath Keepers

Business, Free Markets, GUNS, Judaism & Jews, Private Property

If there’s something strange
in Ferguson
Who you gonna call?
Oath Keepers!—adapted from Ghostbusters

Sam Andrews, “Yale-educated attorney and former army paratrooper,” is the heroic founder of “The Oath Keepers,” which “claims to have active chapters in all 50 states, as well as an estimated 40,000 members – which,” according to Yahoo News, “would make it one of the fastest growing far-right organizations in the world.”

Sam and his merry men rescued damsel-in-distress Natalie DuBose, proprietor of “Natalie’s Cakes and More,” which “was broken into and looted” in Ferguson.

“I didn’t have the extra savings or extra money to replace everything that was destroyed,” she told ABC News following the vandalism. “The threat of not being able to take care of your children makes you feel like less than a human being.”
DuBose’s story caught Andrews’ attention. He was watching the news at home 40 miles away.
“I can’t even imagine a governor that would leave a woman like this and her business to burn, like they did,” Andrews said. “But I value this woman as much as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Dressed in full camouflage and armed with an assault rifle and handgun – [Sam] climbs to the roof of a dentist’s office to begin his nightly surveillance. … the Oath Keepers …is … taking up armed positions on the streets and rooftops with the intent of protecting local businesses.”

He says he’s here to defend “the best part of America, the creative part, the small businesses, the hardest working people in the United States of America. To defend them from arson.”

Oath Keeper Sam Andrews sounds right, not far right, as Yahoo “News” would have it.

… What separates the Oath Keepers from other militia groups is that they recruit men and women of the military and law enforcement – vowing to disobey “unconstitutional orders” from what the group sees as an increasingly tyrannical president and government.

But what do you know? More often than not, the police is not on the side of private-property owners and their protectors.

St. Louis County Police declined an interview with ABC News, but confirmed that it is investigating whether the Oath Keepers are breaking the law by providing security without a license.

This must lead one to a sneaky suspicion that with government controlled law-enforcement, serving and protecting private property is secondary to monopolizing the production of defense.

St. Louis County Police has an illiberal partner in who else but the “Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.” It “called the Oath keepers an ‘extremist, anti-government group.’”

What’s new?!

“Everything that they say [they] stand for is based on this notion that the world and the government is going to become a dictatorship to try to prevent Americans from having their freedoms,” said director Oren Segal.

Blah, blah, blah.

UPDATED: Eric Garner, RIP: This is What Murder-By-Cop Looks Like (WRONG Decision)

Criminal Injustice, Law, Natural Law, Regulation, Taxation, The State

I will be appalled—so should you—if a grand jury decides against indicting the NYPD officers who murdered Eric Garner. A decision is nearing in the case of the New York entrepreneur who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

The city medical examiner has ruled the death of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old father whose death in police custody sparked national outrage, a homicide, saying a chokehold killed him.
The medical examiner said compression of the neck and chest, along with Garner’s positioning on the ground while being restrained by police during the July 17 stop on Staten Island, caused his death.

William Norman Grigg documented and deconstructed the murder by cop of Mr. Garner, chocked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, for being entrepreneurial; trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force.” As always, Grigg gets to the nub of the issue, and beautifully so:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Eric Garner, a peaceful and productive citizen, had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the NYPD. He told one of them to leave him alone. Such impudence by a mere Mundane cannot be tolerated, so Garner was murdered in the street in full public view.

Several plainclothes officers were prowling Garner’s Staten Island neighborhood on the afternoon of July 17 seeking to harvest revenue by catching harmless people in the act of committing petty infractions. Police Commissioner William Bratton describes this as “stamping out petty offenses as a way of heading off larger ones.” in practice, this means authorizing police to commit actual crimes in their efforts to turn harmless people into “offenders.” …

The first fatal mistake Garner made was to act as a peacemaker. The second was to assert his self-ownership in the face of someone employed by the contemporary equivalent of a slave patrol. Within minutes, five police officers attacked him, one of them slipping behind him to apply an illegal chokehold. Garner died of cardiac arrest after being swarmed and suffocated in front of numerous horrified witnesses, one of whom captured the entire event – from first confrontation to homicide – on camera. …

“Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and his murder by an army of occupation immeasurably more vicious and corrupt than the Redcoats could precipitate a long-overdue rebellion against the omnivorous elite that army serves. …”

UPDATE (12/3): WRONG Decision.

Manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide: Those are the counts that ought to have been easily authorized by a jury empaneled to decide if to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who was responsible for Eric Garner’s death and oblivious to his helpless pleas for air.

Watch how the cops panic when they realize they’ve killed this poor, innocent (in natural law) man. Watch how they begin ordering observes to leave, so that no witnesses to the REAL crime remain. And observe the absence of any attempt to resuscitate Mr. Garner.

Stick To The Racial Script, Benjamin Watson

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Race, Racism

Mention G-d, sin and Ferguson in conjunction, or try to hate honky a little less—and, despite being a black man, you stand to be ostracized by liberals and other blacks. Thus, not all approve of how the admirable Benjamin Watson, New Orleans Saints NFL player, tackled the grand jury’s decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

Watson writes:

I’M ENCOURAGED, because ultimately the problem is not a SKIN problem, it is a SIN problem. SIN is the reason we rebel against authority. SIN is the reason we abuse our authority. SIN is the reason we are racist, prejudiced and lie to cover for our own. SIN is the reason we riot, loot and burn. BUT I’M ENCOURAGED because God has provided a solution for sin through … his son Jesus and with it, a transformed heart and mind. One that’s capable of looking past the outward and seeing what’s truly important in every human being. The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It’s the Gospel. So, finally, I’M ENCOURAGED because the Gospel gives mankind hope.

CNN retorts:

While the religious nature of that final section may turn some readers off, Watson says he thinks it points to a way that people of different races can solve some of the issues they face.