Thursday, November 26, 2009

What are you thankful for?

Everyone has something. I feel more blessed than most.

I'm thankful...

...for my son's health. He's been home for barely over a year, and has been briefly ill twice, both times with colds. And this despite having been premature.

...for my husband, who also happens to be my best friend, and the other half of my soul.

...for my family's love. They may not always be comfortable with the choices I make--and downright disapprove of several, including the choice to defend myself if need be--but they've never done anything else than love me (and my husband, and my son).

...for my much-improved relationship with my in-laws. My mother- and father-in-law really didn't like me much until I started grad school (and did, in fact, attempt to break us up at our first Thanksgiving). I love them now as much as if they were my parents instead of my husband's.

...for the time being, I still live in a country that allows me to own guns, keep guns in my home, and on my person. I'm grateful that I was able to get a permit to carry concealed out in public to protect my infant son. Because when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

...for the CCW class instructor, who, being a husband and father himself, as well as an officer of the law, told me to ignore said law when I go back to teaching on campus. That my life, and the lives of my students could hang in the balance, and that all of us surviving was far more important than some rule that a gun-fearing, criminal-loving, lily-livered leftist had come up with to make themselves and their buddies feel safe.

...for being done with grading first drafts of papers until next week.

...that my other half and I have sense enough to have paid off all consumer debt we have.

There are many other things for which I am thankful--far too many to cover in the short amount of time I have before we leave for my in-laws. What are you thankful for?

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Talk about honest to God racism!

In the name of "cultural competence" which (supposedly) will enable white middle-class teachers (nearly all of whom know who their fathers are) to be able to reach non-white inner-city students (most of whom won't know even what color their fathers are), teacher ed students in Minnesota are being required to repudiate the idea that anyone can get ahead on hard work, regardless of color, nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

I don't even know where to start on this one. I'd say I thought it was hard to believe, but it simply is another example of the anti-American biases so endemic on college and university campuses today.

About six years ago, I had a student from an inner city in the Midwest. She was, of course, of the skin tone you'd expect. I never heard her mention a father. She had no clue that there was such a concept as a complete sentence, much less how to write one. She signed up for tutoring, and (on my recommendation) worked incredibly hard, bringing a 59.5% up to an 85%. I couldn't have been prouder, and I told her so.

A year later, she showed up in my cubicle, asking for help with a colleague's freshman comp II course. She was terribly frustrated, all the way to tears, because she thought she'd learned what she needed to know to make better than a D.

Turns out that, because she was a young (model-gorgeous) black woman from the inner city, her (leftist, liberal, feminist, white, gay, upper-class, guilt-ridden male) tutor had done most of her work for her, without her realizing that he wasn't really teaching her.

He didn't believe that she could work hard enough to get ahead on her own merits. Because she was from an inner city and black, she was doomed to fail without intervention.

(On a different, but related instance, her twin sister was hired on at a clothing store at a mall--just long enough to fulfill affirmative action minority quotas. Then she was fired.)

Two years later, I had another student, at a different school, also a black student from the inner city, accuse me of racism. He thought I was grading him harder on his papers because he was black. I asked him whether it was more racist to hold him to the same standards as his classmates, or to grade him easier, because where he was from and his skin color doomed him to failure. (His reaction was to announce, in shocked horror, that all of his high school teachers had been racist, and so was affirmative action.)

Two years after that, I had another black student (not one of mine, just one I was tutoring for the football program) call me racist for not appreciating one of my former students (who happened to be white) being insulted. I replied that it was far more racist to inject race into a conversation where it had no bearing, and that I didn't give a rat's ass whether my students were white or minority, but that I would defend them from bullying.

I'm honestly glad to be teaching online. I'm not racist. I don't give a damn what color anyone's skin is. All I care about is the effort they put forth in my class, their attitude, and their character.

After all, I'm not too many steps above white trash. And some of my family actively is white trash. I have no room to talk.

I feel like I have done the impossible.

I graded two sets of papers--a total of about 85-90 (thank God so many have dropped)--in two weeks.

I've actually had one of the sets sitting in my hard drive for the past month, while my husband had a cold, then I caught the cold, then my son caught the cold. I'd been either sick, taking care of someone else who was, or both at once for a month.

I tend to get sarcastic and mean in the comments, rather than offering constructive criticism, when I don't feel good. I try very hard not to, but I fail.

So there's one reason I haven't blogged--too much actual work that I get paid for to do. The other reason?

I can't force myself to do more than give cursory glances at the news every couple days. I hate what's going on, and feel totally helpless. It's hard for me to post over things when I don't feel like there's a solution. Feels too much like the whining that is so much a family institution within my family.

Oh, funny story, though--my other half has a hard time being able to tell when I'm sick. I don't complain about it unless I'm not able to function (i.e., really sick). And he's not the only one.

But, had I graded those papers while I was so stopped up I couldn't breathe, my students would have been able to tell, right quick, that something was wrong.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Even muggers have more respect for our armed forces than the current administration.

A group of them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, did, after all, return their victim's wallet and belongings once they found his military I.D.

And I haven't heard of any administration returning taxes taken out of military paychecks. Not one.

Monday, November 9, 2009

From an e-mail

First Book of Government, Psalm 2009

Obama is the shepherd I did not want.
He leadeth me beside the still factories.
He restoreth my faith in the Republican party.
He guideth me in the path of unemployment for his party's sake.
Yea, though I walk in the valley of the bread line,
I shall fear no hunger, for his bailouts are with me.
He has annointed my income with taxes,
My expenses runneth over.
Surely, poverty and hard living will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will live in a mortgaged home forever.

Another reason why concealed carry should be a nationwide law.

A man walked up to a car full of women and children sitting at a gas station in St. Louis, and shot all three women in front of the children.

If one of the people at that station had been carrying, the perp wouldn't have been able to empty his gun into the car, and might not have killed all of the victims.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Without naming the enemy, we cannot win the war.

I am not a civilized person. I don’t have a knee-jerk gut-level fear of the unknown, don’t have the bone-deep instinctive understanding of social mores that permit people to live together in relative harmony. I don’t trust my neighbors (though they’re good people and I like them), don’t trust the authorities to do their part to enforce the laws, don’t trust the laws to protect me. In fact, I am fully prepared to protect myself and my family when—not if—the laws fail.


Civilization could break down tomorrow, and I’d probably adjust without losing my mind.


That doesn’t mean I don’t understand how and why civilization works on an intellectual level. Or that I don’t understand that it’s best for the majority.


This could possibly mean that I have a greater appreciation for what we have achieved, in Western, enlightened civilizations in general; and in this country, in specific. I think it means that I have a greater than average appreciation for just how badly we’re going to lose the War that Dare Not Speak the Enemy’s Name.


In World War II, we had huge enclaves of the enemy that perpetrated one of the worst surprise attacks on American soil in history living amongst us. There were eyewitness accounts in Hawaii of Japanese taxi drivers cheering the radio reports coming in about Pearl Harbor. There are, for those who care to look, accounts of sleeper cells in our West Coast states, ready to jump to answer the call of their native Japan. Many of the agents in those sleeper cells were native born American citizens.


After Pearl Harbor, we were never again attacked on our soil by the Japanese. FDR did do a lot of things wrong during his four term tenure as president, but taking the war to the enemy and fighting to win was not one of those things.


In 2001, the second worst sneak attack perpetrated on our soil took out the World Trade Center. And part of the Pentagon. The attackers were nineteen in number, and mostly of a single nationality, and ideology, which political correctness forbids us to name. There are eyewitness accounts of they who cannot be named cheering the murder of thousands of American civilians—civilians, not officers and enlisted men in a military target, unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, not quite sixty years earlier. Like World War II, there are huge enclaves of this enemy living amongst us, with many sleeper cells planted through the whole of the country, not just on the West Coast. Many agents are native born American citizens, about half of whom have converted to this ideology that must not be named.


We have been attacked, repeatedly, even upon our own soil, by individuals who follow this ideology that must not be named. Our leaders, immediately after the attacks, did take the fight to the enemy, but not with the will to win. Nor have our leaders—then or now—taken the necessary steps to keep us safe.


FDR was a progressivist president who, because he was one of the East Coast Brahmins who were born to wield power and control and care for the masses, did what had to be done to protect our citizens from sleeper cell terror attacks on our soil: he rounded up the enemy and isolated them from anywhere they could do damage to the United States.


BHO is also a progressivist, but I have never been less sure that he was not one of the sleeper agents who may or may not be a native born American citizen.


Yesterday, a member of this ideology which cannot be named, one who managed to insinuate himself into the United States armed forces, shot and killed thirteen people on the military base where he was posted. Between twenty-eight and thirty more were wounded.


Authorities were aware that this individual was a danger to national security, but did nothing. They failed to protect the unarmed citizens that were their responsibility. Therefore, the thirteen deaths lay as much at their feet as they do at their killer’s.


I’ve said before: I’m not civilized. I don’t have a gut-level instinct to follow the rules society lays before me. I do see the reason behind those rules—without them, no one could cooperate long enough to build the great society that’s so quietly being torn down from the inside—but, as an outsider looking in, I also see that those rules are being used by the unnamable enemy to tear down the greatest civilization in the world.


One of those rules that society has laid down is that one must not be intolerant of one’s neighbors. It doesn’t matter if said neighbors rape children or murder pregnant women, it’s not our place to judge.


I say it is our place to judge. I will name our enemy—the one who’s hiding behind the name of their god and their race and the accusation that anyone who speaks against them is a bigot. I don’t care if someone calls me “bigot” or “racist” or “ethnocentric.”


I am, have chosen to be, an American citizen. A loyal American citizen, born and raised in the greatest nation on earth. I am a member of the most tolerant, least judgmental society on the face of the planet.


I am tired of turning the other cheek. Both have been slapped, repeatedly, by the enemies living among us, smiling in our faces while plotting to plant the knife in our backs, as they’re commanded by their holy book and their false god.


Our enemies are Muslims. They are of any nationality, race, or gender, and may claim to be moderates that abhor the violent radicals. They may be fundamentalist radicals. It doesn’t matter what they claim to be—they’re ordered by their own religion to lie to the infidels. Until proven otherwise, every Muslim is the enemy of every member of Western Civilization in general, and the United States in specific.


Islam is sowing the wind, and eventually, when enough average Americans wake up and shout “enough,” they will reap the whirlwind.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

I have my suspicions...

There was a shooting attack on one of the most strongly gun restricted areas (i.e., a military base) in the U.S. today. The perp--ah, I mean, suspect--a Major Malik Hasan, who just happens to be (in his cousin's words) a devout Muslim, is reported to have been afraid to be deployed to the sand box.

My suspicions are these:

1. If the U.S. military allowed carry (open or concealed) on base when not going to the range, this camel jockey wouldn't have been able to get more than one shot off before being turned into sausage--er, sorry, hamburger.

2. Religion played far more of a role than anyone is willing to admit, and this was a terrorist attack.

They won't be able to keep this quiet for long, if at all--though I have no doubt that The Messiah (peace be upon him) will likely try harder to shut Fox News up for letting this tidbit out:

"Federal law enforcement officials say Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats."

The only way shit like this can be stopped before it starts is to start profiling for Muslims. Let them all complain that they need to see a proctologist daily because of how intrusive our surveillance is. I don't give a damn if they aren't violent. Unless and until the so-called moderates make it clear to the murderers that they will not tolerate the few to give a bad name to the many (if this type of attack is indeed only dreamed of by the few), every last sand louse is responsible for each act.

Given our president's Chicago politics background, watch for Hasan to be "killed in an attempt to escape" to keep it quiet that this was religiously motivated.

Update: My initial reaction was actually a lot more violently and viciously angry than my blog post would suggest. I tend to err on the side of moderation in my outward reactions because my inward first reaction is always toward violence. Usually toward the government that disarms the victims. And my first reaction is so geared toward violence, I think I may be overreacting. So I force myself to tone it down.

Well, this time, I'm not the only one: Oleg Volk has much the same opinion.

(Oh, and Ken, Guy? You need to go look at his photo gallery. Y'all will like his nsfw pics, like the one in the post below the one I linked.)

They ought to just let the sorry S.O.B. kill himself.

The Iraqi immigrant who ran down his daughter in an honor killing on October 20th has been put on suicide watch.

The more I read on Joanne Jacobs' site, the more I think I should homeschool.

Granted, this was in Britain, but when you take into account various university "tolerance" programs, and brainless "zero tolerance" (of everything from plastic picnic knives, to over the counter painkillers, to prescription asthma inhalers, to defending themselves from bullies) policies practiced by public schools, I don't doubt that looking for racism in very small children is on its way over here.

I won't subject my children to this kind of abuse by public school officials.

Monday, November 2, 2009

No wonder Russia didn't like the anti-ballistic missile shield!

Russia's been "simulating" a nuclear attack on Poland.

So much for Obama being our one and only chance to mend relations with allies.