This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Society

  • College educated Obama supporters

    Yesterday, a commenter tried to make the point that college educated people tend to support Barack Obama more than they supported either Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I’m not going to argue against that because the commenter, of course, didn’t provide a source for his statistics, nor am I all that interested in proving or disproving that. I will, however, offer a reason that such a thing happens; the more time people spend sitting in a classroom, the less real life experiences they have.

    Life isn’t covered in books and professors, cloistered behind their ivy-covered walls, have no experience in life. They can quote Kafka and Dostoevsky but they can’t do their taxes or change a battery in their car.

    College students support Obama in droves – because to their half-empty minds, he has loads of experience. But what do college students know? They’ve been supported their whole lives and worry about how they’ll support themselves when school ends. He must be smart because he was a teacher –  teachers have been telling students for years how smart they are. But ask someone with a real job how smart they think teachers are.

    Yeah, I went to college – after I lived half of my life. That’s when I discovered how stupid teachers really are – when they told me about historical events that I had lived and knew their version was wrong and they wouldn’t accept my eye-witness account because it conflicted with what they’d learned from other stupid teachers.

    The truth is; high school was tougher than college. Somehow in the twenty years between the time I went to high school and the time I went to college, high school and college lowered their expectations of students and they started graduating morons (how else do you explain remedial reading classes in college?). I breezed through college. I dropped out of a Master’s Program because it was a waste of my time – they weren’t teaching me anything I couldn’t learn on my own.

    Diplomas are the goal now instead of the education a diploma is supposed to represent.

    Some of the smartest people I knew growing up had never graduated eighth grade. They couldn’t quote Kafka or Dostoevsky  but they could change a car battery. I look around my workplace, which is full of college graduates, and they’re probably the dumbest people I’ve ever known.

    So, I hope that explains to that commenter who tried to influence me to vote for Obama by making me feel stupid why I thought his comment was the dumbest thing I ever heard.

  • Secessionists unite

    It must be Mud Season in Vermont again. A year ago, almost to the day, the blogs were a-buzz about the Vermont secessionists and I succumbed to the buzz, having been a Vermonter for a brief period when it was a Republican stronghold. Well, today I got an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center, of all people (I thought maybe I’d be on their list of racists – since they consider everyone a racist) warning me that Vermont secessionists had united with Southern secessionists;

     In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a new green flag for Vermont and started selling T-shirts, particularly popular with the state’s many tourists, that read, “U.S. OUT OF VT!”

    But in recent months and years, SVR’s actions have gone from way out to worrying. Starting in 2005, SVR leader Thomas H. Naylor — along with SVR’s very close ally, the Cold Spring, N.Y.-based Middlebury Institute that is headed by longtime leftist Kirkpatrick Sale — began openly collaborating with a collection of Southern extremists to build a national secession movement.

    SVR’s disturbing new partner is the white supremacist League of the South. The Alabama-based group is against interracial marriage, believes the old Confederacy never surrendered, and wants to reestablish “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions” in a newly seceded South. It seeks to accord different classes of people differing legal rights in what sounds very much like a medieval theocracy of lords, serfs and clerics.

    First of all, I checked on the League of the South and they’ve said they’re not racist as a matter of policy;

    We believe that Christianity and social order require that all people, regardless of race, must be equal before the law. We do not believe that the law should be used to persecute, oppress, or favour any race or class.

    We believe that the only harmony possible between the races, as between all natural differences among human beings, begins in submitting to Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love our neighbours as ourselves.” That is the world we envision and work for.

    We believe that the politics of race — baiting whites against blacks and blacks against white has been profitable for politicians but catastrophic for the South and Southerners.

    We believe that all Southerners – black and white – want and need the same things: a safe country for their families, liberty, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

    Actually, they just seem nostalgic for the ante-bellum South; the Walt Disney version, probably not the Mark Twain version. But they’re a bit on the looney side – they claim the North never won the Civil War and because it never won, nothing about the constitutionality of secession was ever settled.

    The Vermont secessionists are real traitors, though. Their ultimate goal is the dissolution of all 50 states under a federal government.

    Political Independence. Our primary objectives are political independence for Vermont and the peaceful dissolution of the Union.

    Luckily, the majority of Vermonters disagree with them;

     UVM Center for Rural Studies 2008 poll

    […]
    3. Do you think it would be a good idea for Vermont to secede from the United States and become once again an independent republic as it was between 1777 and 1791?

    Yes __11.5%__
    No __88.5%__

    […]

    That’s too bad, really. I’d like Vermont to secede, but only if they promised to take Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean and Pat Leahy with them.

  • Pull out now! The war is lost!

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    We must pull our police out of the war ravaged 5th District of Washington DC. This weekend’s death toll was 8 according to the Washington Post;

    As District residents and officials grappled with what was already shaping up as one of the city’s most violent weekends in recent memory, another young man was fatally shot and still another injured in Southeast early yesterday.

    No arrests had been made in the death of Edward Mitchell, 21, who was found bleeding from the stomach in the 4600 block of Livingston Road SE by officers on routine patrol about 2:40 a.m. The slaying remains under investigation, police said, as do the other shootings and stabbings in the spate that began Friday night. The weekend’s tally: eight people dead and at least eight wounded. (One death resulted from a police shooting in a domestic dispute. The man killed was identified yesterday as Clyde Tinch, 52, of Northeast Washington.)

    Most of the weekend’s killings took place in the 5th Police District in Northeast, despite increased police patrols since a crime surge in April.

    I lived in the 5th District until two years ago and moved when I saw the increase in crime. I warned my council member, Vincent Orange, a year before I moved that things were getting more violent, but he cited the decrease in murders as reason to be unconcerned. When it was apparent that no one was going to do anything, I moved.

    But, to use the Democrat’s proposed strategy in Iraq, we should just pull the police out of the Fifth District and let the residents fend for themselves. It’s probably the police presence there that’s causing this anyway.

  • Hollywood vs. reality

     

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    If anyone is wondering why Hollywood’s movies don’t make the bold statements they did decades ago like “Casablanca’s” anti-Nazi message and that other Bogart wartime thriller “Across the Pacific” anti-Japanese message, you need to look no further than the daily news.

    Arabs complained about the Bruce Willis movie “The Siege” for their depiction of Arab terrorists – it probably led to the rewriting of the Tom Clancy classic “The Sum of All Fears” rewritten from it’s original Arab villains to rich, white neo-nazi bad guys.

    The North Koreans complained that the James Bond movie “Die Another Day” depicted them as cruel and violent people led by a despotic regime. Of course, their North Korean victims of their cruel and violent behavior weren’t able to comment.

    But, most recently, the new Indiana Jones movie has taken the most ridiculous criticisms from two groups. First, the old Soviet Communists are upset (CNN link);

    Members of Russia’s Communist Party are calling for a nationwide boycott of the new Indiana Jones movie, saying it aims to undermine communist ideology and distort history.
    Indiana Jones

    “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” stars Harrison Ford as an archaeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed with mystic powers.

    It hit Russian screens Thursday.

    Communist Party members in St. Petersburg said on a web site this week that the Soviet Union in 1957 “did not send terrorists to the States,” but launched a satellite, “which evoked the admiration of the whole world.”

    Moscow Communist lawmaker Andrei Andreyev said Saturday “it is very disturbing if talented directors want to provoke a new Cold War.”

    They went on to threaten Harrison Ford with an ass-whoopin’ for depicting the old Commies as needlessly violent thugs.

    But, probably the oddest protest of the Indiana Jones movie comes from the oddest group (Washington Post link);

    I know that the Indiana Jones series is just a campy tribute to the Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s and the B-movies of the 1950s, but believe me, it totally misrepresents who archaeologists are and what goals we pursue. It’s filled with exaggerated and inaccurate nonsense. Even the centerpiece of the new movie — the “crystal skull” — is a phony. Archaeologists have long known about this class of rare and bizarre artifacts, purportedly from the pre-Columbian cultures of Central and South America. But in the current issue of Archaeology magazine, Jane McLaren Walsh of the Smithsonian Institution reveals how she and her colleagues discovered the telltale marks of modern drills and sanders on their surface — and recognized that these supposedly mystical ancient relics were made by profit-hungry forgers to feed the modern black market in antiquities.

    Even worse, the picture of the vine-swinging, revolver-toting archaeological treasure hunter is all wrong. Gone are the days when all that mattered was museum-quality treasure, and the “natives” didn’t matter at all.

    Bespectacled nerds of the archaeological variety don’t like that Harrison Ford makes their lives seem exciting and his character gets the ladies. Apparently that offends archaeologists.

    silberman.jpg

    Not much chance you’ll be confused with Harrison Ford, Mr. Silberman, with or without the fedora.

    I guess it doesn’t bother some of them that they’re lumped in with the rest of the amateur theater critics that think that Americans are too stupid to realize that when we’re sitting in a theater, the images on the screen usually aren’t real.

  • Search “The Wall”

    Footnote.com and the Washington Times have made the Vietnam Memorial searchable;

    Now you can add your story and remembrance to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In collaboration with the archival search company Footnote, The Times has made each of the 58,000-plus names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial searchable, a place where you can add personal stories. A digital image of the wall — actually thousands of photos fused together — locates each veteran’s name where it appears on the memorial. From there, any visitor to The Times site can leave their stories and remembrances or upload photos of veterans. Start by clicking on the “Search the Wall” box, where you can select “Search” or “View.” Once you find the name of a soldier, you can add your stories or photos.

    The Times doesn’t mention this but the project was funded by the National Archives and launched a few months ago. This is a perfect example of things the government should be doing – making our history more available to us. If you click on the picture of the Wall above, it’ll take you to the “virtual” Wall.

  • How to Raise Fuel Prices

    I stumbled across this at BitsBlog. I don’t see any step that was missed…

    Create shortages in the oil markets by ensuring domestic oil supplies can never be used. This will force us to get oil from the least stable spots in the world, thus forcing not only higher prices, but forcing us to fund people intent on destroying us.

    Regulate domestic suppliers out of business with NIMBY, and enviro-whackjob policy, and regulations and of course, the great leveler, taxes.

    Make sure that no new refineries are built over a period 30 years, to meet the need.

    Mandate that everyone buys only governmentally mandated formulations of gasoline, thus creating shortages of the ingredients.

    More at the BitsBlog

  • Racism vs sexism

    Even though Democrats are proud of the fact that they’ve got a black candidate and woman candidate running for the presidential slot on their party’s ballot, it seems no one can be a winner in the Democrat Party.

    This morning Hillary “decried sexism” during her campaign according according to the Associated Press;

    Hillary Clinton called sexist attacks on her campaign “deeply offensive” Tuesday, as female supporters sprang to her defense, saying she speaks for all women and should stay in the Democratic race to the bitter end.

    […]

    “I believe this campaign has been a groundbreaker in a lot of ways. But it certainly has been challenging given some of the attitudes in the press,” Clinton said of the contest that will crown either a black or a female presidential nominee for the first time in history.

    While Hillary was railing against sexist Democrats and the misogynist press, the Chicago Tribune discovered that Clinton was benefiting from racism in Kentucky;

    “They won’t vote for a black man,” Rife said of the people he has lived around all his 57 years. “That’s all there is to it. They just can’t bring themselves to do it.”

    A walk around this central Kentucky town of 1,500 supports Rife’s opinion. Whether in the Dairy Queen or the dollar store or along the sidewalks of a courthouse square ringed with shuttered business, people speak freely of their dislike for the lanky senator from Illinois.

    Terry Jordan, 47, who runs a year-round garage sale in front of an old filling station on Main Street, put it simply: “It’s his color.”

    […]

    “Right now it’s not that Hillary attracts the white vote,” said Jack Bunnell, 79. “It’s that Obama’s black.”

    Seems to me that Democrats have a problem. They’ve wrapped themselves up in these half-witted rants about victims and voting for people because of WHAT they are instead of WHO they are, the rank and file aren’t getting the message that they’re the party of inclusion. They can’t blame Republicans for this one, can they?

    It’s Vintage, Duh found Politico worried about racism before the votes were even counted this morning;

    And though Kentucky voters may also factor race into their votes, they also might be more reluctant to admit it to exit pollsters, said Laurie Rhodebeck, an associate political science professor at the University of Louisville.

    “Voters get a little prickly here if you say race” drove their choice, she said. “They’ll say, ‘It’s more that we’re concerned about his church ties or his lack of military experience or that he seems so young and untested.’ Those may be socially acceptable ways of saying they’re uncomfortable with a black candidate.”

    If I were a Democrat, I’d be ashamed to admit it at this point, because no matter who I support, I’m considered a hater at this point. In which group of haters are you?

  • ACLU consistency; ban assault weapons from police

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    Last night, four people were shot in Southeast DC in a drive-by shooting by an attacker using a semi-automatic high power  rifle. It comes at a time when the District is in the process of arming their police department with the same types of weapons. Despite the draconian gun laws in the District, nearly 3000 guns were recovered last year from people arrested in DC and as last night’s shooting demonstrates, the Metro cops are in dangered of being outgunned.

    CBS Channel 9 did a report last night on the impending issuance of more powerful weapons to DC cops last night and they interviewed a member of the ACLU named Johnny Barnes whose concern is more with keeping with the District’s gun laws than the ability of the police to protect the public.

    Phil Mendelson, District council member, also expressed concerns about the asthetics of having a fully prepared police department. He complained that the question came down to whether we want our police force to look like a military force or a police force.

    It just highlights that the Left places more importances on appearances than safety – the same way they approach the discussion of war. How will it look to the rest of the world? Just like everything else, the Left is more concerned with the emotional aspect of the issue than the reality of it.