ISIS and Liberals: Working Toward the Same Ends

Hardly a day goes by that the news does not contain a glib reference to ISIS destroying some ancient monument or some other piece of our ancient history. This week, they managed to combine their two favorite activities, grisly executions and destruction of human cultural heritage, into one when they blew up three prisoners by tying them to historic Palmyran columns and just exploding everything all at once.

When I was younger, this might have gotten much more attention. Today, not so much. This event does not concern the modern American because he is already inured to human and historical destruction. You do not need to look very long at the comment section of any such story to see the ignorant screeds of today's liberals vilifying the killers as religious even as they ignore or even applaud the destruction of something from our common history (or ignore the destruction of a million fetuses every year in our abortion clinics).

Today's college kids secretly love this shit: History, after all, is sexist and racist.

One disturbing trait in the typical liberal today, even those who have allegedly been educated in our most respected institutions of higher learning, is the almost entire lack of any regard for the past. A columnist somewhere wrote that today's youth are basically technopeasants. They are enamored of their technology and think themselves very advanced but they basically have no knowledge of anything outside their computers and their phones. They disregard history (and most think that math is a school subject too hard to take seriously). As for great historic figures such as Agamemnon or Julius Caesar, they were probably sexists and racists (though any juicy tidbits about the pederasty of the Greeks and Romans are always enjoyed by this crowd.)

I briefly taught high school classes after many years as a Montessori teacher in the elementary grades. It sickly amused me one day when my students disparaged historical figures about whom we were reading because they were so backward and "now we're more educated and stuff." My head nearly spun. The children in front of me were barely literate and knew next to nothing about anything outside their phones and their social media accounts. Nineteenth century farmers could have told them more about the world around them in an hour than they will ever learn in life.

Political correctness has erased critical thinking from our natural skill sets. Young people are finding it more and more difficult to integrate into the working world because it is a composite of cold, hard facts. It does not matter how you feel about showing up to work on time or what your perception of your boss is.

This is not to say that you should not have concerns about the way that your work environment is arranged. What handicaps young people is the idea that their feelings are real things. They are not. Justice is a real thing. An employer may be unjust to his employees and this is a real concern. That he is simply mean is...meaningless.

Today's young, liberal youth coming out of school would be much better prepared for the world if they had ever had to take seriously the lessons of our past. Greek sculpture, Byzantine painting and medieval Catholic art should be taken seriously not because you necessarily believe in their gods but because they are beautiful and meaningful parts of our history. You do not have to believe that the world is 6,000 years old to derive meaning from the story of Noah in the opening chapters of the Old Testament or accept Jesus as your Savior to appreciate the concept of mercy demonstrated in the Gospel According to Luke.

Unfortunately, these texts, as well as many of the great Greek philosophers and Roman orators, are practically non-existent for school children today. Publicly deemed too difficult (and secretly reviled by the PC police as sexist, racist, genderist and whatever the fuck else they can think of), these texts are increasingly hard to find in modern classrooms.

The PC police are no different than the extremists in the Middle East. They see themes in the work of the ancients that do not come to the same conclusions as they have in their multi-cultural religion. Like the ancient Christians whom they ignorantly and mistakenly accuse of destroying ancient works (when, in fact, they preserved those works for us), the antifas and the PC police eagerly erase or ignore cultural jewels from our past.

Politically correct censorship is just soft Jihad.

Donald Trump: Bullying Opponents Out of the Race

Donald Trump is looking to bully another GOP opponent out of the race. It is becoming obvious that this was and is a major technique for Trump in business. Using pure, masculine aggressiveness to improve your position and drive away weaker contenders. It probably works well for him in the business arena but it remains to be seen if it will work in the long term in politics.

You're Fired!

Trump is forecasting that Rand Paul will soon drop out of the race and takes credit for pushing him into this decision.Rand Paul generally garners about 2% of the vote in polls conducted among likely GOP voters. All this after years of hard work and a much bugger percentage gained by his father in GOP races in 2012. In fact, Ron Paul went all the way to the General Convention and still got 190 votes when Romney essentially had the thing locked up.

Trump is probably right. Rand Paul, as well as several others, look poised to bow out of the race. Though there is still a long way to go and anything can happen, with so many contenders it just makes sense for someone with roughly 1% of the vote to step out. What is remarkable about this moment in American politics is how it appears that a leading candidate is actively trying to push people out of the race.

I an not sure that this is a good idea for Donald Trump in the long-term. It may be satisfying and it may appeal to his desire for conflict, but it may also strengthen his more popular opponents. One wonders how many Paul voters are likely to come into Trump's camp rather than throw in their lot with Rubio, Cruz or Fiorina. Paul was known for his libertarian views and it is anyone's guess where his support may go.

The Chink in Trump's Armor

At the same time, Donald Trump seems to have displayed, for the first time, a weakness. He already admits that he has a fallback plan for failure. If his numbers get down to Scott Walker levels, he claims, he will just go back to running his business.

Is this an accidental slip that reveals some psychic weariness of the whole race? Is Trump already thinking about quitting and going back to his natural realm in business? Surely, the few times that his handlers have convinced him to moderate his remarks or apologize must rankle him. Perhaps Trump will make his own exit before anyone expects it.

That certainly won't happen now. Donald Trump still has a loyal core of followers giving him roughly 25% of the support available for GOP candidates. I am not sure that he will make it to the primaries due to his own quirky nature but I am sure that he will continue to entertain us for a few more weeks at least,

Hiatus Explained

It has been a long time since I have posted. There are a few reasons for this hiatus.

I could say that I have been really busy. Since I last posted in March, I have jumped through all the hoops to get into nursing school, acquired a full-ride scholarship, completed 17 college credits and another nine credits in the first semester of the program. All, this time I have trained as a CNA and begun working 30-40 hours every weekend (Friday –Saturday) so that I could go to school full-time during the week. I also have four kids that need a certain amount of monitoring and intervention.

I also could say that I lost interest. Looking at blogs, most seem like pretty lame versions of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Go back inside, I could say to most bloggers. No one wants to hear it. You’re boring. I had to include myself in that crowd of uninspiring bloggers. Really, who cares what supposedly sublime thoughts I may have about the latest Pope or a movie that I watched?

I have been a little more than depressed as well. I have been going through a divorce, against my will, which was finalized in June. Stubborn as I am, I refused to give up and am still in the process of mending fences with my now ex-wife. It is a day-to-day struggle which saps my strength and devastates my ego.

Furthermore, I had been living as a full-time content writer for a couple years, up until I began working a as CNA in August. The work was nerve-wracking because I had to write 5,000 words minimum every day just to get by. In addition, I rarely knew when I would have work and could not find enough time to do so. In short, I was a nervous wreck.

Work Relief

Finding full-time work as a CNA was an incredible relief. The work is very hard and there are regular periods of high-pressure. Nevertheless, it was pure joy to know that I had work every week. I also liked committing to 12 and 16-hour shifts and being simply absorbed by the job for virtually an entire day. There were no more questions about whether I would have work or not. And it was pleasant to see how my work was helping people. That was not something that I could feel while writing Internet content.

This may be the final post or it may be the first in a renewed series.

Why I Quit Teaching - Part II - The Kids

I spent fourteen years teaching, mostly in upper elementary and middle schools. I endured the last year as a high school English teacher. That year definitely confirmed some notions that I had about the educational system.
Given the title of this post, you might think I am going to rant about how awful kids are today. Well, they are awful but I won't rant about the fact. I think they have probably been awful ever since adolescence was invented a hundred years ago so there is little new there for me to say in that direction.

My favorite students were, for the most part, those that did poorly in my class. This bothered me a great deal. It wasn't that they were unintelligent. In fact, these favorite students of mine were generally very bright. They just didn't buy into the bullshit set-up that higher education is or has become. Mostly boys, these students were simply putting up with school until they could join the military or get a vocational job. However, when I spoke with them, I could see and hear their innate intelligence and, in many cases, a sort of wisdom others might call street smarts.

My best students, the ones that kept their grades up and carefully reviewed all grade reports to make sure that they were accurate, were awful people. Sure, they possessed a certain body of knowledge and were able to complete assignments on time and more than adequately. But they were also uninspiring, boring and small-minded. Equally disenchanted with the educational system as my worst students, they had long ago surrendered to despair and dryly tapped out their lifeless writing assignments and other paperwork so that they could qualify for whatever scholarship or school they sought.

Of course, the student body did not exist in this perfect dichotomy. There were good students that were also pleasant people and plenty of scumbags that did poorly in my classes. But the trend noted above was significant and disturbed me all year.

Now, it would be easy to blame me for this issue and say that I should have struggled to inspire those favorite students of mine so that they would perform. And I admit I am not a perfect teacher and that maybe someone else could have turned things around. I certainly tried to do so. But in my opinion, after so many years in the classroom, the problem is with the system.