Words mean things...

...until they don't. 

An example: take the word silly.  What does that mean?  Stupid?  Goofy?  Childish?  Sure.  That's what it means...now. 

Originally, the word meant blessed.  The word evolved to mean joyful, then happy, and has...yeah.  Devolved is a good way to put it. 

Take the word racism.  Or, better yet, racist.  Used to, it meant someone who actively said or did awful things to people of other races--Native American, Chinese, African, you name it--because they thought those of other races weren't really human.  Barely a step up from an animal. 

Now? 

Well.

The word is applied to anyone born of visibly Caucasian background.  No, you don't have to do or say anything--in fact, silence is now deemed being racist.  Not noticing the color of people's skin is racist.  Treating everyone exactly the same is racist.

It's ironic, really.  Many of the proponents of this view are, at best, agnostic, and more often rabidly, evangelically atheist.  Yet the language they couch "racism" in is very familiar to Christians. 

It's Original Sin, just repackaged by leftists to make it useful for them to hit the rest of us with.  But, unlike with Christianity, there's no salvation, at all, ever. 

I am beginning to respond to the screams of "racism" with a shrug, and a "so what?" 

Words mean things...until the word's definition devolves to mean nothing. 

Food for thought...

One of my students from last semester posted something interesting on Facebook:

"If a jet is shot down, then how can they consider it a plane crash?"

Good question.  The answer is both simple, and complex.

The simple answer: language shapes perception.  If they keep calling it a crash on the news channels and evening news, then people will eventually forget that a jet carrying passengers--including American civilians--on the way to an AIDS conference was purposely shot down by a ground-to-air missile.

The complex answer is to the unstated, but assumed, question of why are they doing this?

Why, indeed. 

Language does control perception.  "Plane crash" is much less threatening than "jet shot down."  Plane crashes happen all the time: it's an accident.  A tragedy.  Pilot error, or mechanical stress.  A missile hitting a passenger jet, on the other hand, is a deliberate act of war. 

And it's a war we're not capable of starting, much less fighting and winning. 

Part of that is because of the way spending has tipped.  Since Vietnam and Johnson's tenure as POTUS, national spending has gone from being majority what was listed in the U.S. Constitution as federal responsibilities (infrastructure and defense) to more than half being spent on welfare programs, both corporate and individual.  Without a major shift in mentality from "gimme, gimme, gimme" to "Oh shit, we all gonna die," we will not be able to free up the funding to pay for what's needed to stomp those fuckers flat. 

So, our illustrious leaders tell the media to shift perceptions.  "Plane crash," indeed.

The other issue is with the "stomp the fuckers flat." 

We haven't done that since August of 1945.  There has not been a single use of overwhelming force going in and making the other side concede that they have been decisively defeated since we fucked Japan with a sandpaper condom without lube.  There is no political will to win, and honestly hasn't been since then.

Not even after 9/11/01.  Otherwise, we would have gone in with overwhelming force and destroyed any semblance of culture and/or government everywhere in every Islamofascist-controlled country, and taken over for the next ten generations.  Since we didn't do that, we have lost.  And they're forcing us to bleed ourselves to death.

We are overextended.  Thanks to the policies put in place by Truman (full credit, here: I understand why he didn't want to push too hard, and have to use nukes again) that prevented full victory in Korea.  That set the precedent for the flat-out loss in Vietnam.  And for what's going on in the Middle East, now that the POTUS has decided that the job there is done (it isn't, and won't be, until every Muslim over the age of two is dead). 

With the lack of funding for the military (which is mandated by the U.S. Constitution) because of the welfare funding for everything else (which is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution), we cannot simply field more units.  Without the political will to win, we can't stomp the old fuckers flat before we move on to stomp these new fuckers flat. 

And so...we have the media working their asses off to slant our perceptions, and cover the asses of their political masters. 

Doesn't surprise me.

Just read another story about a newborn baby thrown in the trash by his teenaged mother.  Ho-hum. 

Yet...people in the comments were shrieking about the evil of the act, like it's worse to throw away a baby that was still covered in afterbirth than it is to vacuum one out of the womb and kill it.

Honestly, people--what did you expect?  You make life disposable with pro-abortion laws and advocacy,* and assisted-suicide laws, and euthanasia laws, and then you scream about a young girl who's internalized the lessons you didn't realize you were teaching? 

Grow a soul, and stop holding the attitude that when someone else's life is inconvenient, it should be ended.  Stop pressuring the world to agree with your morality that it's okay to choose to end someone else's life.  Stop equating the murder of babies with using a condom or taking a birth control pill.

And maybe, just maybe, sixteen year old girls will stop seeing their new infants as disposable trash.

*I do not advocate changing the law to make abortion illegal for a doctor to perform--just illegal to choose as a "contraception" method after the heart starts beating.

More Orwell

If a President defines job creation by the effects of his favorite law, then I can now understand why he named his law the Affordable Care Act. 

Chick-fil-a was swamped...

We took the kids there to eat, today for lunch.  I hadn't ever been there, before, but after Boston then Chicago telling the company that they weren't welcome to do business there, I had to go give them my vote of support. 

The food was okay, I guess.  I mean, I loved the waffle fries, but I got a grilled chicken sandwich, and I gotta tell you, I prefer the pre-cooked, frozen, Mesquite grilled chicken breasts I get by the four pound bag at Sam's Club.  Maybe the spicy chicken is better...I don't know. 

I will say this: they have an indoor play area, with a huge window from the seating area looking into it.  The imp spent lunch plastered to the window, watching the other little kids play while he ate.  After he finished, Odysseus took him in to go play...and the pixie stopped eating.  She wanted to go play, too.  And she hadn't eaten very much, maybe half a chicken nugget, two waffle fries, and a couple of pickle slices.  She usually will eat two whole chicken nuggets, and about twice that in veggies.  She was way too focused on getting down to go play.

Yeah, not going to happen.

So, she and I cleaned up the mess, and I picked her up and took her to the door of the play area, and found Odysseus already putting shoes back on a thrashing imp.  "No!  Play more!"

Yeah.  Uh-huh.  Not. 

What shut it down was getting into his face and telling him that if he didn't stop pitching a fit, like now, we would never go back. 

As it is, I think we'll probably go back sometime next month.  Not sooner, because he has not.  Stopped.  Nagging.  about it since. 

Maybe after he goes a month with dry pants while he's awake, we'll go again for a treat. 

Otherwise, the food wasn't that great for the cost, and the temper tantrum at the end really wasn't worth it.

As if we needed any more proof.

Glenn Beck is a nutter--I will be the first to admit that--but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there haven't progressives out to tear our country apart for more than a hundred years. 

The Puppet-in-chief proved that in his State of the Union Address.  According to The Blaze, it had an "uncanny resemblance" to Teddy Roosevelt's address in 1906--more than a century ago. 

I can't wade through Obama's dribble (and believe me, I tried--it's bad enough to listen to, but as a teacher of composition, I wanted to scream and throw my netbook), but I did read the text of the 1906 speech--and the progressive/liberal talking points haven't changed substantially (except in a few areas, like integration, and treatment of crime and criminals) in over a hundred years.

So, the next time anyone wants to know what happened to the sense of self-reliance that this nation was founded on, just remember that we've been electing traitorous creeps that want to return us to serfhood, and have been working toward that goal, for longer than many of our grandparents have been alive. 

Unless the American people as a whole wake up and start demanding leaders that not only verbally repudiate the progressive agenda but actually act against it, we as a nation are sunk.

Like war is peace, and ignorance wisdom...

...somehow the increase in food stamps is the fault of the Republican party. 

Whose policies started the Great Depression?  Hoover was the man in the seat when it started, but his policies were sabotaged by a congress that wanted protectionist laws passed, which, when FDR (a raging progressivist Democrat) did so, did nothing but lengthen the duration of the financial crunch.  Before his policies were enacted, most recessions/depressions lasted somewhere between one and three years.  The effects of the Great Depression lasted much longer--we didn't totally recover until the federal government's attention was distracted from domestic policies by WWII.

Who was it that started the War on Poverty, creating food stamps and welfare checks for bums?  Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat.  Meant well, he did, but what a clusterf**k.  Went totally against Franklin's admonition to make the poor uncomfortable in their poverty to help them work to leave it, and created what is now a permanent underclass. 

Honestly, the only Democrat POTUS that did anything to reverse the march of increasing entitlements was Bill Clinton, and he was pushed into signing the Welfare to Work legislation (which Obamoron rolled back, increasing the number on the dole, and decreasing the number leaving it) by a conservative majority in congress.

Yes, there is a major increase in the number of people on food stamps.  That's due entirely to the policies enacted by a congress that veered left during Bush II's time in office--hello, remember Pelosi's idiotic assertion that economic recovery would be aided by extending unemployment benefits, keeping people on their butts at home instead of working at whatever jobs they could find?--not because of any "lack" of regulation on Wall Street. 

If they really want to point fingers, then they need to realize how many fingers are pointing back at them. 

"The year was 2085, and finally, everyone was equal."

Thanks to the covetous, race-baiter, nigger thugs that pose as civil rights activists.

The "Reverend" Al Sharpton probably thinks that "Harrison Bergeron" is a utopia. I cannot imagine how he thinks "social justice" is achievable when the government is used to smash everyone down to the same terrible standard of living.

True social justice is when everyone has the same chance to make something of themselves. It's up to the individual how much work to put into it. Equality of opportunity is not illustrated by perfectly equal results.

Al Sharpton's definition of social justice is my definition of theft and tyranny.

We're being tested, and tested hard.

How else do you explain this? And how do you explain it being called a "nonevent"?

Sorry, exploding luggage in an airport doesn't strike me as a nonevent. It strikes me as another failed terror attempt, or at the very least a test. And calling it a "nonevent" strikes me as someone trying to cover just how bad a job airport security is doing.

We are so fucked.

Agendas revealed.

The unconstitutional bill that was unconstitutionally passed in the House Sunday night is already making itself felt by way of coercive taxes on behaviors the government deems unacceptable. This goes a good way toward illustrating what Representative Dingle says about the purpose of the bill:



Did you hear that last? The federal government wants to control us.

Further, we're seeing previews of what awaits with the government's anti-life agenda at high schools across the country. Not only are our children being educated to hide their pregnancies and abortions from us, their parents, but their schools are aiding and abetting them in perpetrating this crime against life and childhood during school hours.

We are not taking this lying down. Many states are suing the federal government to overturn this unconstitutionally passed abridgement of our God-given, Constitutionally protected freedom. Others are suing merely on the grounds that there's no funding in place, no budget cuts elsewhere to cover the costs.

Nor are we the people silent:



We did not want this. And, Dear Leader, sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LA, LA, LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU," does not excuse you from listening to the people that you serve. And that is another thing that you would be wise to remember: you serve us; we do not serve you. We are citizens, not subjects. You are supposedly the duly elected president, not the king. You must, by law, listen to us.

We are speaking. You are not listening.

Ironies...

On the list of books banned from libraries:

Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

This book is about censorship and those who ban books for fear of creating too much individualism and independent thought. In late 1998, this book was removed from the required reading list of the West Marion High School in Foxworth, Mississippi. A parent complained of the use of the words "God damn" in the book. Subsequently, the superintendent instructed the the teacher to remove the book from the required reading list.

Also on that list was Twain's Huckleberry Finn (banned for the use of the word "nigger") and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (also banned for language--and, likely, by the current administration for its frank depiction of the Great Depression)

Now, a school library in Virginia has pulled Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Because she confesses, in her own words, that she has an affair with another young Jew being hidden in the same attic. Yup, she had sex on the attic stairs sometime before the Nazis found and murdered her, and some modern stick-up-the-ass-prude parent thinks it's not fit for modern kids to see a girl from Hitler's Germany stealing a few precious moments to lose her virginity before she dies.

These twits make me sick. They dare to carp about their first amendment rights while they do this in the name of decency and taste.

These actions are no better than what they howl about the left doing to silence conservative opinion.

Nobody has a right not to be offended. And nobody has a right to withhold the right to learn and the right to choose what to read from anybody else.

You've got to be freakin' kidding me!

Here's a classic example of what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," and Orwell termed "doublethink": the no-longer-so-White House has claimed that Dear Leader has strengthened America in his first year in office.

I guess that explains the likelihood of a double-dip recession. Or a Depression. Whatever you want to call this ever-accelerating slide down into the lake of burning socialism.

Doublespeak and Doublethink in Widespread Use!

That's made clear by this headline:

Obama: We Can't Treat Tax Dollars Like "Monopoly Money"

I believe he's got the wrong definition of "can't," here.

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.

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.

What, do they have an invasion timetable or something?

Because, Obama is an idiot. He has decided to pull out of the missile defense shield without first warning Poland and the Ukraine* (though he denies that Russian belligerence has anything to do with that). He has decided that it's a good idea to further slash our nuclear arsenal, thereby lessening its utility as a deterrence.

And it's still not enough to make Mother Russia happy.

What, does Uncle Sam have to spread his own cheeks for Mother Russia's giant, unlubricated, black rubber strap on?

*I always thought it was rude to pull out without warning the one being screwed that things were about to splatter all over them.

Who are the violent nutjobs again?

It certainly doesn't seem to be those who are anti-abortion. Or those who are anti-mandatory Medicaid. Or those who don't belong to unions.

In fact, I haven't really heard much recently of violence perpetrated by the so-called "right wing terrorist militias." All of the violence I've heard about was perpetrated by left-wing thugs that can't seem to win on logic.

Prejudice, my lily white ass!

Rangel says that it's "bias" and "prejudice" fueling opposition toward Obama's health-care plan, according to this story.

What Charlie doesn't seem to get is that he and the rest of Obama's supporters are the only ones mentioning race. If there is any prejudice, any bias, any racism, it's on their parts, because they're the ones injecting race into a discussion where it isn't applicable.

I will admit that there is "bias" and "prejudice" fueling my opposition toward mandatory Medicaid: I'm biased and prejudiced against any sort of government intervention into the realm of private enterprise. Government intrusion does not add competition--no private insurer can compete with a socialist government that sees nothing wrong with defrauding millions of taxpayers out of trillions of dollars every year.

Oh, hell no.

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."--The Declaration of Independence

It's time, my friends. Our government no longer provides for our security, but has had us riding that long train of abuses and usurpations delineated in the Declaration of Independence. Not only has our own judiciary been acting in the same manner as King George III when the various pacifistic and loyal British men who lived on this side of the Atlantic realized that the British monarchy did not see them as British subjects equal to those living in the British Isles, but our President has ignored and broken his oath as required by Article 2, section 1, clause 8 of the Constitution: "Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation: 'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.'"

He has decided that it isn't against our interests to house known terrorists amongst our people.

He has decided that it is his duty to apologize to a world full of our enemies for our strength, and to reduce that strength both in appearance and in fact.

He has decided that it is within his power to take earned wealth from the few and give it to those who haven't earned it.

He has decided that it is within his power to revoke our God-given rights, by ignoring what limits are placed upon his power and the power of the legislature and judiciary by the Constitution of these United States and the amendments thereto.

I speak specifically of section 304 of the fully unconstitutional Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

This section refers to energy efficiency of buildings. All buildings, publicly or privately owned, businesses or residences. Common readings suggest that this bill would infringe upon private property rights to the point that no one would own their own home in more than name only.

After all, how much do you actually own if the government forbids you to alter it in whatever way you see fit, within common-sense building safety codes?

This is unconstitutional on many levels. Not only is it unconstitutional in that nowhere in the Constitution is the right to pass legislature like this enumerated (making it expressly forbidden, by the language of the tenth amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people"), but in several other amendments passed to protect private property rights from infringement and intrusion by the federal government:

AMENDMENT V

No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

"Due process of law" in this case means specifically legal process against the individual, such as the determination of whether or not a crime was committed, and the punishment of said crime, not sweeping, unconstitutional legislation intended to deprive large groups, if not the entire citizenry of the United States of America, of rights to live as they please, in freedom, and with full rights to their own property purchased with money they earned, and improved with their own money, sweat, and blood.

AMENDMENT IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment says that these rights are God-given, not government-granted by the Constitution or the amendments thereto, much less any legislation or treaty passed by the government that this document was designed to limit, and not empower. Which, again, means that the state does not and cannot tell you what to do with your own private property.

AMENDMENT XIV

...nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

Again, "due process of law" refers to the legal determination of whether an individual committed a crime; however, this applies the Fifth Amendment (which had formerly only applied to the federal government's actions against its citizens) to the level of state government.

This particular section of the cap-and-trade bill violates every limitation of power that the Constitution places upon the federal government. As such, it is upon us to refuse to permit our government to remain in power.

By any means necessary.

And, as my forefathers swore, I will put my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor behind this stand.

Further proof that TIGHTER GUN CONTROL WORKS!!

Okay, done with the snark.

Truthfully, the only thing that gun control laws accomplishes is disarming the victims.