Education

00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Education - Family - Media Bias - Race - Religion - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

PC Roundup – The Foolishness, Absurdities and Cultural Destruction of the Politically Correct

March 22, 2007 by 3 Comments

-By Warner Todd Huston

From time to time we all hear stories that reveals the stupidity of a dreaded PCism run amok. We hear the tales, shake our heads in disbelief and go about our day without taking much more notice of it afterward. It seems, as we hear of each case, that they are isolated stories, outrageous yes, but not interrelated. Perhaps, viewed as separate incidents, they really don’t mean much. Unfortunately, such incidents culminate to far more than merely incidental occasions.

Let’s just take a few incidents of the last week as examples to reveal the utterly vacuous nature of the Politically Correct, multiculturalism that has happened in both the US and England. The following are all examples of the kind of consequences of liberalism that damages society. We have one example that even ends up with the kind of unintended consequences that would horrify the very leftists who initiated the PCism in question.

From the silly…
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Family - Religion - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Warriors for God

March 22, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Old Testament story of David and Goliath offers guidance to living a true Christian life.

Sunday’s sermon at the Long Ridge Congregational Church (non-UCC) in North Stamford, Connecticut, was delivered by Rev. David Smith, who heads the Pivot Ministries.

Pivot Ministries reorient men out of the thralldom of drugs and alcohol by giving them the personal experience of Jesus Christ’s saving love. They do a wonderful job, guiding men of all ages and from all walks of life along an 18-month program.

Pivot’s website is http://www.pivotministries.org/ . They need contributions to carry on. Contact them and give them your support.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Education - Family - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Liberal Theories of Human Nature

March 17, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

If liberal theories are correct, humans are passive bundles of nerves at the mercy of intellectual tyrants.

If only what we can detect and measure with our physical senses is real, then a human being is no more than a mechanism for registering pleasure or pain. This is a fundamental premise of psychology, one of the social sciences created by the French Encyclopedists. Liberals don’t buy the idea that people might be self-governed by their consciences and their moral sense. They presume that people are motivated only by desires for sensual gratification, power, or money.

Hence the extraordinary importance attached to Sigmund Freud’s theories at the beginning of the 20th century.

Psychology reflected this materialism perfectly in its behaviorist school of thought later in the 20th century. J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner went so far as to dismiss, not only the human soul, but even conscious thought as determinants of human behavior. The idea of consciousness, they said, was pre-scientific superstition and witchcraft. Taking materialism to the extreme, they theorized that the only determinants of behavior are external environmental factors, which completely outweigh inherited characteristics.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Education - Elections - History - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

The Genealogy of American Liberal-Progressive Gnosticism

March 16, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Whence came the deformed conceptions of anti-Constitutional, regulatory government and judicial activism?

American liberal-socialism is the gnostic descendant of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. The genealogical connection begins with Henri de Saint-Simon, the French intellectual who codified the doctrine of socialism in the first decades of the 1800s, shortly after the Revolution.

His colleagues and followers, including Auguste Comte, formed a body of disciples known as the Saint-Simonians. They spread the Gnostic gospel to German universities, where it became mixed with the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel.

During the ferment preceding the French Revolution, the same intellectual influences produced the English constitutional radicalism of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, he published Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which outlined the Utilitarian doctrine that all political action should be in the form of regulations scientifically calculated to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In this, Americans will recognize the genesis of New Deal regulatory agencies and the liberal-Progressive obsession with controlling every aspect of our daily lives.

At first hearing, the Utilitarian principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” sounds good. The rub is that implementing it necessitates overturning existing social traditions and constitutional principles, just as President Franklin Roosevelt did with his 1930s New Deal.
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Media Bias - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Mr. Ignatius, Meet Mr. Bok

March 15, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius thinks that American colleges are just swell. Former Harvard president Derek Bok disagrees.

David Ignatius’s opinion piece was published in today’s Wall Street Journal. Its opening paragraphs are the following:

Higher-Ed Superpower
By DAVID IGNATIUS
The Washington Post
March 12, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — When people think about American power in the world, they usually list the country’s forbidding arsenal of bombers, aircraft carriers and troops. Yet America’s greatest strategic asset these days might not be its guns, but its universities.

Higher education is arguably the last area in which the United States dominates the world. We’re discovering the limits of military power in Iraq, the pressures of economic competition from China and India, the vulnerability of our financial markets to sudden changes abroad. But in this globalized world, American universities remain the gold standard.

Mr. Ignatius’s home venue, The Washington Post, is not the most radically liberal of the major newspapers, but it’s up there in the rankings.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Education - Media Bias - Scott Cleland - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized

America’s Unique Internet Success

March 11, 2007 by

-By Scott Cleland

A tech legislative priority of congressional Democrats, “net neutrality,” threatens America’s unique Internet success, because it would reverse America’s 11-year, bipartisan policy to promote competition and not regulate the Internet.

Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are co-sponsors of Dorgan-Snowe (S.215), a net neutrality bill that for the first time would mandate broadband provide equal treatment to all Internet content. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also supports net neutrality as does House Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, who plans a series of hearings soon to promote net neutrality legislation.

To justify massive new government intervention in the Internet marketplace, Democrats are busily manufacturing a “broadband crisis” and an “Internet blocking problem” that simply does not exist. Policymaking by false premise is always dangerous. It’s downright irresponsible when it threatens to undermine the unregulated Internet, one of the key engines of our nation’s economic and productivity growth.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Education - Science - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Rational Evolutionary Hypothesis?

March 1, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Evolutionists make truly wild assumptions to fill the gaps in their hypotheses. Check out Richard Dawkins’s thesis that DNA originated spontaneously in inorganic mud crystals.

Richard Dawkins is one of today’s most widely known defenders of Darwinian evolution. Professor Dawkins goes beyond defending evolution, using extravagant language to attack the personal qualifications of anyone who questions Darwinian evolution. Of such people, he opined, It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

Needless to say, as a believer in evolution, professor Dawkins regards himself as not ignorant and not stupid. Yet, some of his speculations, to a non-believer in evolution, appear to be a few cards short of a full deck.
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00Publius Contributor - Economy/Finances - Education - Entertainment - Family - History - Science - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Vince Johnson

New World Realities!

February 19, 2007 by

-By Vince Johnson

I’m currently in the process of moving from the Coast to Aumsville, Oregon and short on time for writing a REALITY FACTOR. Therefore, this issue is an opportunity to relay some startling information prepared by an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. He is Director of the UCEA Center for Advanced Study Technological Leadership in Education. The following information was obtained from his web page:

  • If you are 1 in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you!
  • The 25% of the Chinese Population with the highest IQ’s is greater than the total population of North America. Translation for teachers: They have more honors kids than we have kids!
  • Did you know that China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world?
  • If you took every single job in America and shipped it to China, it would still have a labor surplus!
  • During the time it takes you to read this column, 60 babies will be born in the USA, 244 babies will be born in China, and 351 babies will be born in India.
  • The top ten jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004!
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00Publius Contributor - Education - History - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Society as Clay in Liberals’ Hands

February 18, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

An enduring society is not a random assemblage of people drawn together, like pigs around the feed trough, waiting for welfare-state handouts.

The liberal paradigm recognizes no spiritual dimension to human nature or to human society. In the liberals’ atheistic and materialistic world, humans are merely animals a notch along the evolutionary scale from the apes and, like them, motivated only by material factors: water, food, sex, and shelter.

Societies, in that paradigm, are held together by whatever may be the currently reigning regulations governing those material wants. A political society theoretically is a lump of clay that intellectuals are capable of shaping anyway they wish.

In contrast, Cicero, the great Roman orator and admirer of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic philosophers, observed in the Republic:
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Media Bias - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

New Mexico Radio Station Won’t Use ‘Unnamed Officials’ Quotes in News

February 16, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

Here is a refreshing change of pace. According to Editor and Publisher, New Mexico Radio station KSFR has made a new policy to eschew usage of newswire stories based on quotes from “unnamed officials” or other unattributed sources.

News director Bill Dupuy sent the following message to his news staff:

Effectively immediately and until further notice, it is the policy of KSFR’s news department to ignore and not repeat any wire service or nationally published story about Iran, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or any other foreign power that quotes an “unnamed” U.S. official.

What we have suspected and talked about at length before is now becoming clear. “High administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity,” “Usually reliable Washington sources,” and others of the like were behind the publicity that added credibility to the need to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our news department covers local news. But, like local newspapers and others, we occasionally are taken in by national stories that we have no way to verify.

This is a small news department with a small reach. We cannot research these stories ourselves. But we can take steps not to compromise our integrity. We should not dutifully parrot whatever comes out of Washington, on the wire or by whatever means, no matter how intriguing and urgent it sounds, when the source is unnamed.

I am also calling on our colleagues in other local news departments — broadcast and print — to take the same professional approach.

Though I disagree that these “unnamed” sources in any way added to any “credibility” to take us to war — it was rather the opposite, really — the unnamed source has become the scourge of government. So, this is a great idea and would cut down on the kind of destructive leaks that have so consumed the “News” purveyors of late.
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00Publius Contributor - Economy/Finances - Education - Family - Health - Science - Security/Safety - Selwyn Duke - Society/Culture - Uncategorized

The Temperature Also Rises

February 16, 2007 by

By Selwyn Duke

With the issuing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on February 2, waxing climactic about the climatic is the order of the day. The esteemed, government-funded scientists with no agenda who rendered the study inform us that man is almost certainly responsible for rising temperatures and, furthermore, that dramatic climate change is unstoppable. But, after seeing various luminaries sound the alarm, I think I can confidently say that, hell’s bells, we’re darn well gonna try anyway.

And it’s about time. We’ve long known we were going to die unless we stopped spewing that plant-sustaining CO2 into the air. The thing is, though, my botanical sources tell me the plants are fearful that they’ll die if they don’t stop spewing that human-sustaining oxygen into the air. So our task is clear.

We must beat the plants.
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00Publius Contributor - 2nd Amendment - Education - Family - Immigration/Immigrants - Islam - Islamofascism - Media Bias - Religion - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Utah’s Teenage Killer, the Muslim Connection Ignored

February 16, 2007 by 4 Comments

-By Warner Todd Huston

I have been watching the “reportage” on the regrettable incident of a teenaged killer’s rampage in a Utah shopping mall with mounting interest. In nearly every story of this crime the fact that this youngster is from a Muslim background is either muted or ignored altogether.

The AP, for instance, avoids identifying the boy as a Muslim in all their stories that I saw. In one, they merely identify the region in Bosnia in which he lived as the “northeastern enclave where up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in 1995” but do not even speculate as to the boy or his family being Muslims. It is all rather dutifully avoided. In another story, the AP doesn’t even use the word Muslim at all.

Even in the local press, like the Utah Desert News, the issue of his background is ignored or made entirely incidental. The Desert News, in fact, makes just one mention that the “family are Muslims from Bosnia who had lived in the vicinity of Sarajevo” in a rather lengthy and otherwise complete story of the incident.

Worse, the New York Times is making the wild assumption that it is “Bosnian immigrants”, not the rest of America, that should be afraid for their lives in theirs titled “Anti-Bosnian Backlash Feared in Utah”.
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Islam - Islamofascism - Patriotism - President - Religion - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

The Evil of Carter Strikes Again

February 16, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

With his ever spiraling downward reputation as a Jew hater, Jimmy Carter has done it again. This time, Brandeis University has seen its donors announce that they will no longer send their money to the University because they hosted a visit from the racist ex-president.

How much more will it take for people to slap their heads in realization that Carter is a wild-eyed, Jew hater and should be relegated to the same scrap heap of history his disastrous presidency was relegated to in 1980 when Ronald Reagan destroyed him at the polls?

The Brandeis campus is reeling in the wake of former President Jimmy Carter’s visit.

Major donors to Brandeis University have informed the school they will no longer give it money in retaliation for its decision last month to host former President Jimmy Carter, a strong critic of Israel.

The donors have notified the school in writing of their decisions — and specified Carter as the reason, said Stuart Eizenstat, a former aide to Carter during his presidency and a current trustee of Brandeis, one of the nation’s premier Jewish institutions of higher learning.

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00Publius Contributor - Education - Entertainment - History - Islam - Islamofascism - Media Bias - Military - Patriotism - Religion - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

TV Turns Soldiers Into Torturers

February 13, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston


The AP has found a new way to attack TV’s 24. They say that because of the depiction of character Jack Bauer’s, shall we say, short-cuts in interrogating prisoners his ways have now infected the US Military. Absurdly, the AP is advancing the case, in “Does Jack Bauer Influence Interrogators?”, that “there are indications that real-life American interrogators in Iraq are taking cues from what they see on television.”

Are they indeed? Says who?

Predictably the AP reports these claims are from the “advocacy group Human Rights First”.

No surprise there, eh?
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Family - Founders - History - President - Religion - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Martin Luther King, Jr., On Trial for Being a Communist

February 10, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

What was the first thing that ran through your head when you read that headline?

Did it confuse you? Maybe you were shocked? Perhaps you were even angered? I am sure a few even said something like “At last” or “about time”?

It is well known that MLK hung around Communists, even “card carrying” ones. It is also well known that he had some as his close advisors. It is not completely ascertainable if he, himself, was a believer in Communism.

But, in reality, it doesn’t matter a whit if he did because he did not openly speak out for Communism and did not base his position on the ideology of Communism.
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