Posts Tagged → Harvard
A Day for Mourning…Doves
Satiricist + pianist + comedian-ist + mathematician-ist + Harvard-ist from a long distant past when a degree from racist + fakist + indoctrinationist Harvard used to mean something Tom Lehrer died the other day. He was 97 years old, and apparently laughing and humor were good for him, gave him longevity. Or maybe long life was due to him not having kids. Or being married…
Tom Lehrer’s silly music was a fixture on a radio show I was fixated on as a kid, from age nine to probably nineteen, called the Doctor Demento Show. This very silly, often demented, and highly entertaining show was the audio version of Mad Magazine, also a fixture of my mis-spent youth. My youth happened at a time when kids did actually read things to entertain ourselves. There were no videos, no constant and endless television shows, or, the horror, mind-evaporating video games. Mad Magazine was low brow humor, and forcefully informed two generations of American boys about the man-eating birds, killer bees, and fake female breasts available for only ninety-nine cents.
Aside from being chock full of hilarious and acidly cruel parody, long before Hollywooders started taking themselves seriously, Mad Magazine also had ads for mail order “variety” stores. For a pittance, these stores would sell kids fake vomit that was sure to make your mom jump sky high when strategically placed on her mother’s Persian rug. Also sold were palm buzzers, whoopie cushions sure to embarrass your mother’s friends over for tea, and toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin.
Toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin, you ask?
Yes, America was once such a cool and free country that little kids could buy through the mail from demented strangers things soaked in genuine high explosive in order to terrorize family pets and grandpas smoking their pipes or cigars. These explosive toothpick slivers came in an innocuous, small, round steel tin, and their gist was for demented youngsters to slip one into the end of a cigarette, cigar, or the stem of grandpa’s pipe, and then sit back and mock the unfortunate recipient of the inevitable explosion. Just the touch of a match or lighter flame was needed to set them off. They were truly explosive.
For one summer I did indeed use these things against my dad and my Papa Morris, to my great mirth and to their unforgiving unhappiness. But I also received my just punishment one day as I was running around in our yard, as mindless summer-minded boys used to do, and damned if the mere friction of my leg movement did not set off that whole tin of explosive toothpicks in my pocket. The loud report sounded like a gunshot, and the immediate pain was real. So I dropped to the ground, yelling “I’m hit, I’m hit!”
Not until I realized not another soul was anywhere near me or our home or our twenty-five acres surrounded by unbroken farmland and forest did I begin to explore the perfectly round hole in my pants. I had not received friendly fire from a neighbor kid, nor had my dad finally tried to take me out. So the cause had to be closer to home, like what the hell was I carrying in my pocket.
My thigh skin was badly bruised, already discolored and puffed up from the injury. And then I found it, the bottom half of the steel tin. Lodged halfway through the fabric in the pocket of my dungarees, it had been driven with great force against my body. Its lid had also been blown off with great force, through the fabric of my dungarees, and was lying somewhere out on our “lawn” as war shrapnel.
For decades I kept that little tin bottom in a small cedar box where I kept other childhood keepsakes, like old stone Indian arrowheads and beads I found in the tilled fields around our home. This little round piece of non-descript light-blue metal symbolized to me all that a boyhood in America used to be or could be: Free, foolish, exploratory, mischievous, silly, dumb, and filled with painful and sometimes near-death learning experiences. In a word, awesome.
Poor kids today have no idea how much fun we kids of yesteryear had. Yes, we had the Doctor Demento radio show, Tom Lehrer songs, and the scandalously mature kid reading material, Mad Magazine. But we also had access to small amounts of explosives, and dirt bikes, and often firearms. And whatever we did that did not permanently maim or kill us made us stronger and more interested in chemistry than any kind of textbook or classroom experiment could achieve. (I once blew off my eyebrows and eyelashes, the huge fireball also leaving my face an unnatural and alarming red color. Upon arriving at home late for dinner, my mother merely tossed my plate of food in front of me, wordless and by then immune to frighteneing answers and smart enough to no longer ask what the hell happened to you).
So, back to Mad Magazine, its crazy ads, and the related Doctor Demento Show, described on complete bullsh*t weakipedia as “Barret Eugene Hansen (born April 2, 1941),[1] also known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and unusual recordings from the dawn of the phonograph to present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at KPPC-FM in Pasadena, California.”
From 1971 until, yes, college, I listened to the Doctor Demento Show. As a kid this was done quietly at night with the crusty old 1960s radio in my bedroom, after my parents had declared “lights out.” In high school, I listened to the radio show along with one or two other misfits also disinclined to be serious about homework. We sat there in silence, occasionally laughing hysterically. In college, I was joined by even more misfits, but by then we also had beer, hard alcohol, and would sing along together to our favorite silly songs spun by Doctor Demento.
Songs like Fish Heads, and of course every single song by Tom Lehrer.
Tom Lehrer’s songs were a mainstay of every Doctor Demento show, and sometimes his funny lyrics were woven into a Mad Magazine article. Adults found his song about pollution poignant and timely, as everyone knew by then that just about every summer the Cuyahoga River would actually catch on fire because of the wild amounts of combustible pollution dumped into it by unchecked industry (note to today’s young people: Water is not supposed to burn). Whereas urbanites, already surrounded by pollution, warped by it, dying early from it, creating it, and imagining themselves immune to it, were much more entertained by Lehrer’s song Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
Because who the hell doesn’t hate urban pigeons?
Tom Lehrer, comedian, humorist, satiricist, and core of the beloved Doctor Dementow Show
My Eighth Grade school portrait, alarmingly alike to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neumann, of What, Me Worry? fame.
“Higher Education” is dead
What was over-generously called “higher education” since the 1950s, when a college degree became the American standard and cultural norm for most coastal kids and the middle-America elites, has died. Also known as “the academy” and “academia” and the “ivory tower,” colleges and universities across America have just collectively rolled over, died, and begun to stink badly like the unburied rotting corpses they are.
How did this entire nation-wide network of institutions suddenly give up the ghost? Because of a known but unanswered, unaddressed, uncured cancerous rot inside of it that began in the 1920s, and hit its zenith in the past few weeks. The cancerous rot metastesized, spread throughout the body of each college and university, and finally killed the host. We who are reading this essay now have with our own eyes just witnessed the mass die-off of the species once known as higher education. We have seen it happen on the news, in first-hand documentary reports by participants and observers alike, on social media, and in the first-hand experiences college kids have relayed back to their friends and families.
What happened?
To start with, “higher education” became neither higher, nor education. Instead of having quantifiably elite thinkers spending time carefully training students measurable skills, especially critical thinking skills designed to have well-trained students capable of unemotionally resolving complex problems, colleges long ago began indoctrinating students with toxic cultural slogans and bullsh*t political narratives.
Such indoctrination strips away the thin veneer of Western Civilization, and appeals to the most base animal instincts all humans have, and which Westerners have long since buried deep and far away from our daily lives. This indoctrination taps into the most raw feelings of hate, anger, and a sadistic desire for personal retribution that people can have. We saw the full results of this indoctrination in the Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps, the Socialist Soviet gulags, the killing fields of Cambodian communist Pol Pot. Nazis and Communists alike enjoyed the help of children denouncing their own parents, because the toxic indoctrination was so deep.
This indoctrination in America began in the 1920s with the penetration of Marxists and communists into education at all levels, as they appealed to normal people’s acceptance of strange versions of “fairness” and “compassion.” And after that, the cancer simply metastesized and spread. Sure, we had some heroes like Senator Joseph McCarthy who tried to warn Americans about what was happening. But McCarthy and other patriots like him who tried to diagnose and treat the cancer were shouted down and shamed by the mass media and entertainment industries, which before the academy had already been penetrated and quietly occupied by Marxists and Communists. Who spread the indoctrination in their own way.
So over the past few months and weeks, Americans have watched the result of all the indoctrination in every single academic field, to the point where even math is said to be “racist.” The premier, most elite, “best” examples of so-called higher education literally emerged in the past weeks from decades of politicized hiring and indoctrination as living examples of Lord of the Flies. Amid hysterical shreiks of young women and mooing noises of young men, civilization is tossed overboard while students, faculty, and administrators alike contort into a frenzied violent orgy of racist hate and anti-American slogans.
These schools are not institutions of higher thinking, high principles, or anything else rooted in Western Civilization. They are now hives of terrorist training. And the shreiks and moos of bratty, spoiled children.
Best representative examples include former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, engaging in pathetic moral relativism in Congress, only to then get outed as a serial plagiarist and lose her president job, but then keep her $900,000 a year job “teaching” utter garbage and subjective nonsense at Harvard. To save her feelings, if not her students. Everything that happened around and after the Claudine Gay Incident revealed Harvard to be the exact opposite of an elite institution. Claudine Gay’s humiliation was months ago, before the nationwide college campus hatefest and orgy of violence began.
Another example is the nationwide college campus hatefest and orgy of violence we all get to see every day now. It’s not just that a few radicalized young people are doing this destructive assault on our civilization. It is that large portions of the students are enabled by their faculty and administrators alike to act like savage wild beasts. That is, those adults (the college professors and administrators) who are supposedly the best embodiment of elite education and higher values are themselves actual Nazis and communist Stalinists, all rolled into one angry, bizarre, gobbledigook speaking and acting person.
(To say nothing of the daily neo-Nazi Islamofascist violence visited upon major capitol cities worldwide. Especially on bridges and major city streets, and often filled with the same students, faculty, and administrators that are seen and felt on campus.)
Instead of using their leadership roles to diffuse the illegal and policy-breaking violence and racism, the college professors and administrators enable and promote it, usually joining the overgrown children themselves. And often repeating or teaching the overgrown children the indoctrination’s disinformation, lies, and fake political narratives at the core of the “protest” activities. And so, we see a total vertical breakdown of almost all “higher education” institutions, from the highest overpaid and underworked administrator to the untenured part time adjunct faculty to the first year middle income spoiled brat: Everyone involved in college today is a useless windbag with no discernable skills or value to larger society, but full of disinformation coming out of their ears.
But boy, do those “higher education” institutions sure charge a lot of money! What a scam!
Now that the mask is off, and we Americans see what a load of horse crap a college “education” is, here is what we can learn and apply:
- Parents: Don’t send your children or your hard-earned money to college, unless your child has a high aptitude for math, science, or technology, and will only study those subjects.
- Parents: Don’t expect your college graduate children to be able to do much for themselves or for society or for you, but to actually be a liability.
- Parents: Explore trade school for your kid. And if your kid does not have an aptitude for math, science, or technology, then teach them yourself how to work hard, save money, forego immediate gratification, and to plan ahead. Help them find a job where they can be themselves and succeed.
- College-age kids: Question authority and motive, especially of your teachers and their administrators, and always respect and appreciate your parents. And whatever you do, don’t go to college, because your brain will end up as dead and useless as those “higher education” institutions have become, and you will end up as a dumb loser with high debt for something that did not benefit you. Yes, you might feel that being throw-away cannon fodder for the anti-America movement is exciting, but this is only a flash of a moment. After this is over, your reputation will be in tatters and your future will be a big question mark. Your future will be as dead as the college that made it.
Is DEI really gone with Claudine Gay’s departure from Harvard?
So embattled plagiarist and Mein Kontext-touting DEI diversity-hire Claudine Gay resigned from her crazy person high perch at Harvard University on New Year’s Day 2024. Good. Apparently Harvard University’s board decided that setting their reputation on fire to save this incompetent buffoon was not such a good idea.
Interesting how those “reasonable man in the street” trade-off decisions work when unfettered free market forces are at work, right? I mean, Harvard could have decided that Claudine Gay was the ultimate symbol and pinnacle of American academic achievement, notwithstanding all of her now oh-so-public failures of scholarship and loooow moral character, and then staked the school’s reputation on their choice to keep her in place forever after.
But what Harvard faced with Claudine Gay as president was receiving eternal dismissive sneers of 90% of the America that Harvard deigned to sneer at. Being on the receiving end of moral judgment and intellectual mockery is not where Harvard’s caretakers see the institution or themselves, and so they had to cut loose the anchor that was dragging them down into the depths. Bye-bye Plagiarist President Claudine Gay, you will not be missed.
Is her dismissal the sign that normal, healthy, honest, hard working, tax-paying, meritocracy-loving America has been waiting for? You know, the beginning of the end of the evil DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) fad that bizarrely swept across America? DEI, the racist, mean spirited, violent, anti-intellectual, Neo Nazi anti-meritocracy belief system touted as the utopian solution to all of the ills that America never experienced, was what Claudine Gay represented and symbolized most. And with her sudden departure, DEI has taken a big hit.
Others are pointing out the delicious irony of Claudine Gay having in effect been “canceled,” because she, Ms. Gay, was the ultimate canceler of innocent people at Harvard. She of low quality and even lower achievement was the destroyer of their hard-earned careers and lives, and the brutal enforcer of the arbitrary and subjective standards for which DEI is best known and despised.
If Harvard University had at one time been best known for rigorous intellectual debate and achievement, and academic scrutiny, Der Fuhrer Ms. Gay took the school back to the Stone Ages with her implementation of DEI’s racism and savage cruelty. It was one way or the other, and Harvard was definitely going backwards at rocket speed under her watch.
Whether or not DEI is now on the chopping block remains to be seen. My sense is that rumors of its sudden demise because Harvard’s Wicked Witch of The East is now gone are greatly exaggerated, because if there is one thing the Left does not like doing, it is going backwards in their Long March against Western freedoms. Claudine Gay may be gone at Harvard, but look to this so-called “school” to select someone just as horrible as Ms. Gay, or even worse, to make their point that they and they alone now own Harvard.
Harvard U is fake, no longer “Harvard”
The plagiarism scandal around Harvard University’s low quality, diversity-hire president Claudine Gay has now destroyed not just Gay’s personal and academic reputation, but Harvard’s as well. Harvard is no longer an academic institution based on rigorous intellectual debate and merit, it is a nakedly and proudly political activism site motivated by far left wing ideas and values.
In her PhD dissertation (the subject is useless nonsense and subjective fluff), Claudine Gay plagiarized material from a number of authors and academics, not the least of which was her own PhD dissertation advisor at Harvard. Her plagiarization has led to a lot of discussion across the Harvard University campus, some academic advisory boards, the Harvard University board of trustees, academics, racially-based groups, and American society. Understandably so, because Harvard University has been the flagship educational institution in America since its founding nearly four centuries ago.
Harvard’s reputation has always rested upon two simple things: 1) The highest intellectual rigor for its students and its educators, 2) the most exclusive and competitive screening of its students and its educators. For hundreds of years, to either teach or be taught at Harvard has been the gold standard for academic achievement in America and worldwide. The cold and uncaring application of logic, reason, proofs, and meritorious capability have winnowed the desirous from the truly stellar there for centuries. Well, no longer and not any more, as Inspector Clouseau said as he smashed the priceless Steinway piano into splinters.
The debate about whether or not Claudine Gay has the academic merit and the necessary high character to remain as the university’s president has torpedoed Harvard’s reputation. Simply because the widespread formal response by Harvard University to Gay’s failures of judgment and moral character, and to her academic cheating, has been to not only allow her to stay on as now a really, really blatantly incompetent diversity hire (no white man or white woman in that position would have ever made it beyond the first few minutes of this multifaceted crisis), but to also literally allow Gay to cheat even more, only this time in public.
Claudine Gay is now being allowed to retroactively amend her PhD dissertation with the necessary citations and quotation marks that were missing when her doctoral thesis was approved. This is like the judge allowing the robber to go back to the bank and put the money back in the vault, in order to avoid being charged and held accountable for the original crime of robbing the bank, now that the robber has been caught.
Gay is being allowed to do this re-crime so that her detractors are no longer empowered with the truth, so that they can no longer accurately accuse her of academic cheating. And for those who don’t know it, academic cheating is an automatic FAIL on every real academic report card, and it is usually the means for ejection from whatever school the cheater is enrolled at.
Harvard University’s board of trustees and the academics behind this brazen sleight of hand have basically told everyone in academia, in research and development, in the business of important ideas, and in the competitive world of merit that some animals are more equal than other animals, and that there are harsh rules for everyone, except for those few special people who some remote, self-anointed elite group has artificially determined should not be judged by the same standards as everyone else.
No society can sustain itself with this kind of fake justice system, or this kind of fake educational system. With this decision to both allow Claudine Gay to retroactively amend her already finalized dissertation, and to retain her as president, every single internal brake and decision-making system designed to ensure that all of Harvard University’s outputs are the best possible on Planet Earth have failed.
It has been determined by the powers that be at Harvard that the institution is now a (leftist) political activism center with no intellectual rudder, no universal standards for behavior or achievement, no universal code of conduct. Only subjective political decisions will be used henceforth to run the school, and we now see that certain skin colors and certain Marxist outlooks will be the preferred choices.
There are a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see a presidential election fraught with so many wild irregularities across so many states and jurisdictions. I did not expect to see the entire media establishment and the entire political establishment not only fail to address those electoral irregularities, but to jointly sweep everything under the rug, declare a winner who had not even campaigned in public, and to accuse those who questioned the election results as “election deniers.” I did not expect to see the force of law be used against the “election deniers” for questioning the outcome and legitimacy of the questionable election, and who have since become persecuted political dissidents and outright political prisoners in their own “democratic” country. I did not expect to see the rule of law fail as widely and as quickly as it has, and I did not expect to see the rise of a totalitarian federal bureaucracy as fast as it has happened.
I also did not expect to see America’s flagship academic institution (the school now formerly known as Harvard University) gleefully burn down its own reputation in a public bonfire of vanities.
With all of these spectacular and unbelievable failures, Harvard’s just being the latest, we are seeing the severe cultural rot America has been experiencing since the 1960s finally come to fruition. All of the cultural safeguards, institutions, and legal infrastructure designed to keep America functioning as a constitutional republic are failing and being failed on purpose and in front of our faces. We are told by the agents of these failures that we must accept these outcomes not as failures, but as inevitable changes necessary to re-make America into the socialist utopia it was always meant to be.
It now seems possible not just that the Hamas loving racist academic fraudster Claudine Gay will be retained by Harvard as its president, but that she could be forcefully installed by the federal bureaucracy and its media wing (not elected by the people) as the next president of the United States “for our own good.”
Symbols have now officially become more important than facts in America. We all see that Harvard is fake, and we are told that it is still Harvard.
Jews are the original “indigenous people”
Harvard University is now universally known as the place where capable young minds go to die. Literally only a few hours after the Hamas massacre of roughly a thousand Israeli civilians, and while the beheaded babies and raped women’s corpses were still warm, something like forty (40… 4-0 count ’em) student groups at Harvard University publicly announced their “solidarity” with Hamas and its broadly broadcast images of butchery.
Included among this Harvard University gathering of aspiring young sadists and Stalinists we also saw the Black Lives Matter students raising their fists against their imaginary foes, colonization and imperialism. Somehow, somewhere on the Harvard University campus, which to be fair is not anywhere near alone among so-called universities in this epic mis-educational failure, these students had been incorrectly taught that Muslim Arabs are the sad victims of a colonizing and imperialistic state of Israel. Probably more propagandists than we care to think of masquerading as serious university professors at Harvard University have been unchecked in stating lies as facts to the “young heads full of mush.” Not just about Arabs, Jews, and Israel, but a whole host of subjects.
So wackily radicalized and so failed has the universal university “educational” experience become (check out Miss Irony Of The Year award recipient and terribly mis-educated black NYU student Ryna Workman in her full on racist mode) that the political orthodoxy enabling the propagandists-faux-educators prevents college campuses from even hosting guest speakers who speak something different. Never mind that the different topics usually involve the actual, factual truth…
The factual truth about Israel and Jews and Arabs and Muslims, as evidenced by several hundred years of archaeology in Israel that jibes hand-in-glove with the Torah/ Bible, as well as well documented history of the Near East/Middle East region, is that the Jews are the only indigenous people in Israel, and likely in a good bit of the surrounding region.
But aren’t Arabs and Muslims the majority there? Weren’t they oppressed by the World War I and World War II European governments? Were Arabs and Muslims not moved, re-settled, dislocated, and treated badly?
- Everyone in Europe and the Near East was mistreated, re-located, dislocated, displaced, and treated badly in Word War One and World War Two. Literally every single ethnic and religious and linguistic group suffered greatly at some point beginning about 1912 and ending never. Germans started both wars, inflicted unbelievable suffering on their neighbors during the two wars, and then suffered very badly at the end of both wars. Everyone around Germany suffered. The suffering was shared and meted out liberally by the Turkish Empire, ally to the Germans.
- Yes, about 500,000 Muslim Arabs were dislocated about ten to twenty miles by the 1948 civil war they started in Israel, and also about 1,000,000 (one million) Jews were similarly displaced from across North Africa to Iran, in the same time period. If anyone is a sad refugee in this situation, it is the Jews.
- Arabs are -historically speaking- and -factually speaking- from Arabia, which is known today as the Saudi Peninsula or Saudi Arabia. Islam (Muslims) began in Arabia and spread throughout the region due to the violent colonizing of Arabs and the imperialistic success of Muslims.
- Arabia is not Israel or Judea or Samaria or the Golan or the Galilee. For people to leave Arabia and then lay claim to Israel and Judea and Samaria and the Galilee and the Golan (all areas with unbroken Jewish communities for the past 4,000 years) they would have to be really aggressively practicing both colonialism and imperialism.
- Sick irony of moronic ironies, the word Palestine is now used to fakely name an artificially new place that never historically existed with this name…except when the ultimate colonizers and imperialist ROMANS used it.
- Again, are you the reader not amazed at the weirdness of people who right now lay claim to the ultimate symbol of Roman colonization and imperialism as their evidence of being “indigenous” to the land they occupy? There was no Palestine, there never was a Palestine, and the only time there was any historic referral to the name Palestine was by the Romans, who fought the Jews in a long and brutal civil war, and who then tried to de-Jewishize Israel and Judea by renaming the area. And this is why modern day colonist Arabs and imperialist Muslims seek once again to re-name and de-name Israel into something else.
If you are truly bothered by colonization and imperialism, then you have to question how the heck there came to be more Arabs and more Muslims in downtown Cairo than there are Jews in the entire world. Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism are responsible for the spread of Arab Islam and Islamic Arabs across a huge swath of the planet.
The question of whether or not these Muslim Arabs today across North Africa and the Near East and the Middle East are entitled to claim all of the area they came to dominate through terror and violence and ethnic cleansing is a discussion the world ought to have. I mean this. Neither Arabs nor Muslims are indigenous to any place except the Arabian Peninsula. I am not advocating that they all go back there right now, but to the more educated and clear-thinking readers here, I am asking you to weigh out the actual history of the region and the causes of the problems that the region now faces.
We must have an authentic discussion about this, which I recognize is something today’s university student has probably not experienced.
Israel and its indigenous people – Jews – right now face a genocidal force that is unhappy about not controlling every corner of the earth, including lusting after Spain and Austria and Israel to begin with. We gotta address this problem, people, or the problem is going to continue.
In the meantime, Am Israel Chai – the Jewish People Yet Live, a battle cry, slogan, a rejection of foreign colonialism and imperialism, whatever you want to call it, that has persisted from the throats of Jews standing on the dirt of Israel for thousands of years, until this very day. Like right now today, as Jews in their homeland of Israel fight back against foreign imperialism and colonization as presently embodied by Hamas and their evil supporters.
Dr. Wil Steger, My Friend, My Hero
Dr. Wil Steger sat next to me on a domestic flight, up in Buffalo, New York, I think, in 1994.
By the end of the flight, I was a big admirer of his, among a long line of admirers around the world. We maintained a relationship up until today, when he died peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by family.
A former employee of the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, Wil and his wife Sheila started their own analytical service provider, CONSAD, in Pittsburgh, in the 1960s. Wil’s PhD in economics from Harvard shaped the way he saw government policy and decision making, and it allowed him to remain objective and aloof from the messy politics involved. As a result, Wil’s dispassionate and insightful research was sought by private and public customers around the world.
Wil was an economic and policy advisor to every president from JFK through W, and he showed me his blue “WHITE HOUSE” cap with pride. He had been in the White House a lot; more times than he could recall.
But you would never know that Wil was so smart, or so successful. He was humble, and self-effacing, and funny. He and Sheila were committed to their Pittsburgh community, to financially needy families, to educational institutions, to friends, and to family.
Some of my best adult memories are of sitting in their Squirrel Hill living room late at night, with a glass of wine or a tea in hand, talking about whatever with both Sheila and Wil, and then with just Wil after Sheila left us.
Bye, old friend. Your advice and professional guidance helped me make a lot of careful decisions that shaped my career, personal life, and my family, and I am forever indebted to you for your kindness and good way. May you rest in peace.
The service is Monday, in Squirrel Hill.
Simple formula about life on Earth escapes many people
After World War I, “the war to end all wars,” antipathy towards anything military related ran so deep in England and France, that both countries practically disarmed to both cut costs and to symbolize their break with “militarization.” America followed suit to some extent.
England’s Neville Chamberlain was famous for his “peace in our time” mis-statement, as he allowed the alligator of German aggression to eat more and more of Europe, in the hopes that eventually the alligator would become full and not go after England, too.
Obviously Chamberlain’s approach of appeasing evil tyrants Hitler and Stalin did nothing to stop them, and barely delayed their ambitions. England suffered terribly from German attacks, and only survived because America awakened from her slumber and engaged. Militarily. As in, sending troops, boats, bombs, bullets, planes, guns, and tanks to England to both defend England and to use England as a launching ground to take the fight back to Germany.
Winston Churchill holding the very American Thompson submachine gun is a famous icon of Western resolve to withstand tyranny.
Fast forward to Ukraine, now being invaded by a reinvigorated Russian empire…like the old evil Soviet empire. You know, the one that fell apart from sustained Western military, economic, and diplomatic pressure.
Now, where is that pressure? Obama is using appeasement and laughingly empty threats against a tyrannical, militaristic, imperialistic would-be emperor, Vlad Putin. It won’t work. All that appeasement does is make the inevitable military clash all the worse, because it gives the bad guys all the time they need to build up their military strength, while the good guys wring their hands, and dither.
Question here is, Do people learn from history, so that they can survive? Answer here is, No, not those people whose ideology or religion (sometimes it is impossible to tell the two apart) inclines them to ignore what is in front of their faces. To wit:
Yesterday I was in the Washington, DC, area for an event, and had plenty of opportunities to talk with long-time liberal politicians and activists gathered there. Yes, I was one of the few conservatives/ traditionalists present. So the liberals felt comfortable speaking from their hearts, and it was a fascinating experience. One man, Hal, presently on a large city council and deeply involved in Congressional oversight, asked me what my number one problem with Obama was, from a functional perspective, not values or ideological view. “A lack of accountability for Obama’s actions and misdeeds,” was my response.
Naturally, Hal asked me what those were, and I could not get past pointing out that ObamaCare has received thousands of politically -based waivers from the White House, not to mention the many delays in implementing it, so that the pain felt by Americans would not be translated into punishing Democrats at the polls. When I pointed out that none of these waivers or delays are permitted by the law, Hal simply and repeatedly said “Yes, but it is his signature effort, his defining law.”
As if that excuses unconstitutional actions by an out-of-control, out-of-bounds executive. But in Hal’s mind, it does excuse Obama. And I am positive Hal is representative of liberals everywhere: The ends justify the means. Because the ends are pure (they think), any means of achieving those ends is acceptable, including violating the Constitution. A young student named Ms. Korn, now being indoctrinated at Harvard, recently wrote an essay in the Harvard Crimson where she declared that the First Amendment rights of conservatives are getting in the way of her (and Obama’s) version of “justice,” and that in the name of achieving that justice, the First Amendment should be vacated. Ms. Korn is probably representative of her generation, having been indoctrinated by people like Hal.
And thus we see the deficiency of liberalism going inter-generational. Pragmatism is something used only if it advances the liberal agenda, not if it defends Americans or democracy. And seeing what is going on in Ukraine (and Syria, and Iran, and and and…), one must wonder what Obama’s agenda is? And do a majority of Americans care, even if the basic rules of successful life on this planet are violated?