"You differ with me."

Dennis, you do a wonderful job trying to get people to think with their minds rather than with their patellar tendons. This caller you just had, trying to shred you because you went to Columbia instead of joining the armed forces, is one of those non-thinkers. Obviously he's done most of his thinking with throwing adjectives and other acts of labeling things he doesn't like as "things I don't like."

Oh, well.

But for years I've been gnashing my teeth over the way you use the language of reaction and feeling when you're trying to get people to think. A few examples,

"When we come back I'll take your reactions to this." It should be replies or answers. People who "react" aren't thinking.

"I'd like to get your feelings on this issue." Sure, feelings are okay, but I'd rather hear their "responses".

"We differ on this." No, we disagree on this.

"You're the perfect candidate for what I recommend, taking a year off before college"

Dennis, reconsider this statement, please. That kid, if he's like most homeschoolers, spends two to three hours per day on his schoolwork. (Doesn't that say a lot about public school?) And unless his parents are monsters, he's out and around doing stuff the rest of the day. Most homeschoolers have a stay-at-home mom who drives the kids to scouts, karate lessons, community orchestra, activities at the Y, and field trips with other homeschooled friends to museums and the library. This takes place every day. If they're religious they volunteer at the church soup kitchen where they mix with adults every Thursday afternoon for several hours. They get jobs at Mcdonalds at 14 years of age or they muck stalls at the local race track. They really don't need the "life experience" that your Grand Tour* is meant to provide because they have grown up with "life" rather than putting it off.

Now, where this homeschooler is concerned, yes, a Grand Tour year off traveling the great cities of Europe will be a wonderful experience, but for homeschoolers, it's not exactly a needed one.

I assumed you know what the Victorian "Grand Tour" was, since that's where the "year off experiencing Real Life before you go to college" comes from, but I may have assumed incorrectly.

"Unlike the federal government, the state of New Jersey can't print money."

Amen to "that is the line of the year."

Sadly.

It's probably not the most important thing anyone could say, but it stands a good chance of becoming the best line spoken even though this is an election year, when many very intelligent things ought to be said about the rather foul stench emanating from Washington, D.C. these days.

Kudos to Governor Christie for having the nerve to say "no" to that whiny little teacher. I believe when Ann Coulter wrote that the one group of people in the country you can't criticize is teachers, she spoke a very harsh truth. Every American is expected to kowtow to the saintly icon floating over the holy altar of Education; speaking ill of them is blasphemy.

This teacher knew that and was trying to exploit it. You can't cut a saint's salary, you can't claim I don't do it for the love, you can't tell me I have to make do with a salary that's 40% higher than the national average--I am a college grad-yoo-ait!

"That's what she was taught at college"

Where have you been? I thought you talk to kids in high school, too.

You don't have to wait to learn garbage like "men are just women with hairy chests" and "there is no such thing as truth" and "a good society is an equality-based society"--all the garbage you keep insisting "you have to have gone to college to think a thing like that."

Dennis, I'm so sorry, but this is standard fare in high school and even in middle school. The teachers are the same people who "went to college and were taught these extremely stupid ideas" and then they went to teachers' college where they learned that their task was to enlighten their students and that "teaching skills" is a bad idea because it gets in the way of enlightening the children. In other words, their teachers' college gave them carte blanche to teach nothing and instead pour out their ideology for the purpose of enlightening the students.

A few months ago a woman called Rush's show to congratulate him on converting her. She hadn't listened to him very long before she realized that everything she had believed was a leftwing lie, but to her they were underlying premises for the Truth, that she just accepted leftism as true, and that she taught it to her students as a matter of passing on the truth to the next generation. Now she was busy trying to recant her old ideas in the classroom. The moral of the story is that teachers live in that liberal bubble you mention so often (much to your credit, because it's the truth) and feel authorized to teach their truth in their classrooms.

Please stop blaming it on colleges, because that's not where the problem starts. Our elementary and high school teachers are just as much to blame, and we need to keep them in mind as we fight this classroom-based propagandizing.

On a slight tangent, I just want to remind us of an insight I realized two decades ago, and which I mentioned a week or two ago: When a conservative imagines a liberal parent teaching his child liberal values, the conservative shrugs, thinks "poor kid", and adds, "It's the parent's right." When a liberal imagines a conservative parent teaching his child conservative values, the liberal says to himself, "We have to stop this atrocity!" and perhaps, "No parent should be allowed to indoctrinate his child that way!"

The doctrine of separating the children from their parents' values forms the foundation of modern public education.

"Hahaha! How many of my listeners know what 'icythyology' is?"

How many of your listeners care that the Italian title of "The Four Seasons" is "Le Quattro Stagioni" ?

How badly can you underestimate your audience?

May I smack you?

By the way, I know your boss forced you to abandon the 'due cornetti' you used to play but you need to inform that troglodyte that the majority of us still prefer it (or any other baroque or classical period music) to that unpleasant garbage from the Fifties you make us listen to nowadays.

I speak English better because my studies of several other languages taught me to

Did your studies of those other languages teach you to drop the "I spoke English since I'm a young boy" structure? Someone challenged you on that form once, because it's not good English. You replied you'd been using it all your life and it made you feel you were speaking in a "more immediate" sense, that you were more present in the setting of your past. And you continued resolutely using it, making my ears hurt every time you did. I'm willing to bet it was the product of some relative who grew up speaking Yiddish, perhaps your grandparents, or else you unconsciously imitated some adults you often saw as you were growing up.

I was unable to listen to you for a year, but when I found a radio station that carried you and I was able to start listening regularly, you had dropped that construction, so I don't know why you did, but I doubt it was learning another language that did it.

I have to tell you that I don't think I speak better English because of my knowing a six or ten* other languages. I think my English is good because of my extensive reading in works written before 1948.

_____________________

*Is it kosher to count languages I've forgotten?

"Sin is this taint that gets passed down"

Spoken by someone who doesn't understand original sin.

There are two things going on: one, Adam sinned and the world fell, beginning man's separation from God; and two, all of us share Adam's fleshly nature which is the thing that makes it impossible for us to live a perfet, sinless life. Sooner or later (virtually always so "sooner" as to be "immediate") something jumps up and grabs us by the heart and we do our own will rather than God's.

That's all.

As for wrestling with God, all I can say is that God has made it unnecessary to fight with him.

You need to read the epistle to the Hebrews, Dennis. It would appeal to your rational nature. It's my suspicion that if you have, you weren't paying a lot of attention. And put down the KJV, read the NIV thx.

We no longer teach character development in our country

And you can thank my generation for that. I would say "our generation" but I don't think you participated in the population segment I did. You're a few years older and had an opportunity to be a full-blown hippie but you were too busy being a decent person with critical thinking skills and a foundation to stand on. On the other hand, I was busy being a jerk and hanging around with the commie dopeheads, both as a teenager and inevitably later as a college student. You've heard it all, while I lived it all for a dozen years of nutty anti-social revolutionary anti-Americanism.

I wish you had had a deeper exposure to this America-undermining radicalism, since it was those kids who grew up to take over our teachers' colleges and schools of journalism and who now own the cultural monologue, and whose children are now trying to shove all the garbage their parents taught them down America's throat. You'd be less surprised than you are and might have a less diplomatic tone when referring to the destruction of the country. "We no longer teach character development" is directly descended from "Who's to say what's right and wrong, anyway? Everyone should decide what's right for theirself," (yes, "theirself" is a legitimate word thanks to them).

Somebody must be at fault and somebody must be blamed.

You left out the key word: "else".

Somebody ELSE must be at fault and somebody ELSE must be blamed.

When that young man said the woman asked him, "Well, it's their fault, isn't it?" and his answer in the negative prompted her to follow up with, "Then whose fault is it?" she wanted to hear that it was not her own fault, and certainly couldn't even accept "It's no one's fault, it was just an accident." She only wanted to hear that someone other than herself would have to pay for her dental work.

"One of America's disappearing values is a true hatred of evil"

What more is there to be said? Our society thinks George Bush is "worse than Hitler" and considers keeping a list of a trillion phone calls placed per month, and somewhere the phone calls you made are recorded as well, considers this to be a "serious loss of freedom". Then when they elect a leftwing democrat and he does exactly the same thing, it's no biggie.

How can you talk to people who think (I used the word loosely) like this?



Boteach's new book:

Renewal\

"Titled" vs. "Entitled"

Dennis started mentioning this issue years ago. People use the word "entitled" to mean that a certain article, book, movie, etc. bore a certain title. "This movie is entitled 'How to Lose a Man in Ten Days", or some such. Dennis said the proper word was "titled". His point is self-evident and easy to understand. But is he correct?

Personally, I like keeping the two separate. But to use the en- prefix on "titled" would seem to provide the sense of "provided" or "imbued". "Embedded" and "emblazoned" also use this prefix. It suggests that an item didn't start with a certain quality but was given it later on. Perhaps that's why so many people use "entitled" when they know the other meaning of "entitled".

I just want to say I was surprised, when reading Ben Franklin's Autobiography (one of those short biographies that Dennis loves so he should read it!), to come across Franklin's use of "entitled" several times. Now, editors have the bad taste to "correct" manuscripts wherever they want. Jane Austen's "chuse" and "ancle" are written "choose" and "ankle" in almost every edition of "Pride and Prejudice" currently available. This is, in my never-to-be-humble opinion, a desecration. Who can't figure out that "chuse" is an old spelling of "choose"? So one never knows whether Franklin actually used the word "entitled" or if some genius editor changed it out of her own ignorance. A friend of mine had a manuscript go to print and the nitwit who was editing for "errors" changed all her "uninterested"s to "disinterested"s. So who knows what violence was done to Franklin's language?

At any rate, Dennis, if it's proper enough for Franklin, it's proper enough for me.

"They think evolution explains everything"

This is a line from Friday's show.

Dennis said this with some sarcasm, indicating that it's a silly idea, or maybe a refutable idea, with which point I agree. But Dennis himself is among the sad, silly people who use evolution to explain men's fascination with pursuing a multiple number of women. Even looking at women other than the woman they're with is explained by evolution.

Dennis first brought this issue into his show when he read a book by some evolutionary psychologist whose name I can never remember. The book purported to explain every behavior we see in men today to some hypothetical gene that caused early man (I have never heard just how early the gene was supposed to have appeared, thus we have no idea what sort of technology or social system was in place at the time) caused early man to run around raping women, thus siring an enormous number of babies, thus increasing the likelihood of the rapist's genes being broadcast among the human population, moreso than genes from other men.

This theory doesn't tell us why so few men run around raping. Yes, there are plenty who do but compared to the general population, it is a small percentage. The theory is also stupid in its failure to take into account what happens to those babies after the mother is abandoned by her rapist.

If the rape occurred early enough in the evolution of human beings, early enough to have this behavior passed down to a significant portion of the population, we must be referring to a hunter-gatherer time in which one adult would have significant trouble feeding him or herself, and an even worse time supporting infants. That's why human beings paired up. That's why they formed social groups--to spread the labor out enough for the race to be able to add dependent, helpless organisms ("babies") that can be supported by the available labor. A man couldn't afford to take on and provide for multiple wives and their children, never mind the children of other men. So a man who raped and moved on, left a dead baby behind him.

By my thinking, evolutionary psychology goes a lot farther toward explaining monogamy than it does polygamy. It explains the roving eye not because men had so much ability to collect multiple women (again, long after there was technology to support cities and probably resulted from the excess number of women due to wars) but because first, men are the pursuers, and had to be able to see every woman as a potential mate, and second because the death in childbirth rate being pretty high, every man had to be prepared to take a new mate willing to rear the old children and add a couple of their own if necessary.

I don't have space nor energy to discuss this more fully. There is a wonderful article from Newsweek which I linked below. It doesn't mention my reasoned objections, but does spell out some of the statistical research that disproved this silly, earlier theory of evolutionary psychology a decade ago. Please read it, it's fascinating.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789

"I open up to you, why wouldn't you open up to me?"

Maybe because it isn't safe.

Liberals open up to me about their politics all the time. I know them well enough to know that with most of them, opening up to them about my politics is not only not welcome, it can be dangerous. They find themselves confronted with an idea they don't like, and they will either quietly hate you forever, or, more likely, tear into the opposition with all sorts of "shut up and get out" trump cards. You're a racist, you voted for HIM?, you're selfish, you aren't a good Christian, you only want what's good for you and you hate everyone who needs help, and the list of trump statements goes on and on and on.

It's the same with emotional opening up. You may threaten someone with your statements and their first resort is steamrolling, name-calling, absolutism, poisoning the well, withdrawal, or even abandonment. All my life I've met people who deal with their families and friends with these bad techniques. People don't feel comfortable opening up to them. It's safest to hold your tongue. The exceptional person is someone like you, who can filter out these trump-card bulldozer statements and actually but in and hold a conversation with them. The rest of us don't deal well with this kind of bullying and we avoid these people.

"One of the only ones"

Joe Lieberman wasn't "one of the only liberals in the Democratic Party." He had to be either "one of the few" or "the only liberal" but "one of the only liberals" is impossible.

As for whether it is "demagogue-ic" or "demagojic": I would stick with "demagojic" because with "demagogue-ic" you'll have a problem with "demagog-ical", which is easier to pronounce "demagojical".

Do other conservatives prefer the fifty-year-old spellings I do? Like, "catalogue", which once was the only correct spelling, but then we got too lazy to put those last two letters on the end and dropped them on the excuse that they were unnecessary. I suppose it's just as easily read without the "-ue" but I don't like it. I also prefer "queue" because "que" is a different word from a different language and reads differently (if you're literate) and "cue" is a different word altogether besides being insufferable. I suspect that hating this kind of transition-cue-to-laziness is one of the symptoms of my underlying conservatism. But then, I didn't like it even when I was eagerly liberal, either.

One thing about the left is the throwing around of names and labels

Partly they do it because they don't have real arguments to use in opposition to the opposition. Mostly it's because they don't even want to bother with making arguments supporting a thesis, it's so much more effective to tar the other side. That way "no one" will listen to conservative positions--because the arguments are formed in the minds and issue from the mouths of evil, racist, Nazi, fascist, demonic, demonic, diabolic subhuman demons. Cutting off the argument works so much better than actually engaging the reasons supporting the conclusion. Any idiot can do it, and that's why the left invest so heavily in their name-calling and labeling. That way all the idiots in the country will vote democrat, or so they reason, and the idiots who know nothing about issues beyond "hope", "change", "racist", "oppressive", "exploitative" and all the other leftist terms, do tend to fall in line with the democrat party.

"I don't care who started it!" Nothing else matters!

I guess you've never had two children of similar age in your home. You hear them punching and kicking and screaming and crying in their bedroom and you have to go in there and separate them before they hurt each other. I know some parents who think "Let them settle their own fights" is a great thing to do, but I don't think that's a good idea. I know other times it has been argued that "They only fight to get your attention" and I know that's true from time to time but not every time. Someone who doesn't want to limit this to "sometimes" but wants to apply it to their every argument, without exception, is smoking something. Or has found out that their kids don't really hurt each other, in contradistinction (woo, I'm eddicated when I can use that word...) to my kids, who seriously drew blood and created scars.

So anyway, you go into their room to stop the battle, and immediately they're both pointing at each other and howling, "He did it!" And then you've been pulled into an argument. You're expected to be jury, judge, referee, and executioner. You're supposed to stand there and listen to who said what and who did what. Their two stories vary terribly, and eventually you'll learn that one person said something, the other did something, each of them stepped on the other's boundaries and tried to act justified in doing it, and the two of them participated equally in elevating the hostilities.

Either one of them is lying, or both of them are lying, or both are telling the truth with a completely different point of view, and if you try to judge who was the bad kid you end up standing there listening to their stories, watching them accuse one another, listening to them work themselves up into a new fury as they relive the argument. There's no wonderful solution unless the kids aren't very angry in the first place.

If your mom yelled, "I don't care who started it!" she was putting up her own boundaries and keeping herself out of your argument. Sadly, the kids don't understand how justified she is in her demand that they not involve her. It's probably not the best solution but it's her idea of how to keep you kids from tying her up in their argument.

Let me know if you have a better idea.

I just don't know

"If you've only seen the Grand Canyon, you've seen nothing."

Sorry, Dennis, but the Grand Canyon is a whole lot of something. You should have said, "If you've only seen the Grand Canyon, you've barely scratched the surface," or words to that effect.

You're Generalizing!!!!

Yup. Everyone generalizes all the time. You're only criticized for it because they disagree with what you said and that's when they notice you generalized. There are two things going on, one that they know you're speaking the truth, and two, they don't want to hear it. Everyone knows a conservative who supports the UN, so they try to shut you up about how [most] conservatives don't support the UN.

What you probably don't realize is how many times people have been told that generalizing is wrong. Starting in fifth or sixth grades their teachers have been drumming that into their students' heads, scolding them for making a generalization in class, or lowering a grade for turning in a paper with any generalization on it.

Here's the distinction, though. They don't notice the generalizations that they like. If, for example, you said, "Mean people suck!!!" which is most certainly a generalization since surely 90% of the mean people in the world do indeed suck, they don't even notice. I've never heard one person complain about that generalization. There are some mean people who don't suck, you know; often we end up calling them "leaders". Sometimes we call them "Sarge". We would expect a large number of parents to be called "mean" by their children while the kids are growing up, or while they're learning to drive. So this generalization, like every generalization, isn't always true, but the haters of generalizations don't notice it.

How many generalizations have I made so far?

Now comes the real problem: talking to a liberal about this. Critical thinking is not what liberals care much about. Breaking through the crust and trying to show them where they go wrong is often very difficult, which we've seen as people call Dennis on his show to argue with him that making generalizations is wrong. Dennis should point out to them that what they just did was make a generalization, which by their thinking isn't valid, which means that they can't make that generalization.

We call this a self-referentially incoherent statement. To put it more plainly, it negates itself.

"She can choose an abortion for herself but you won't give her a choice about going to Arizona?"

The left never look at themselves to see their own motives or understand their own thinking.

On a politics forum elsewhere, they were arguing about conservatives' desperation to impose their will on everyone else. I posted something about "You point at us? Look at yourselves. Here's one example." And told a story I had heard on All Things Considered, in which a medical official in some country in Africa complained she could always tell when she was in an American-hosted medical clinic because the shelves were always fully stocked with boxes and boxes of condoms. "Our children need vitamins, vaccinations, and antibiotics to keep them from dying from diarrhea, and all the Americans want us to have is condoms." I posted other stories as well, but I quote this one because of the replies it got.

Not one person addressed the possibility that this story and the others reflected a truth, that in almost every area the Left want to impose their rules on the rest of us. Instead they jumped right over that concept and into the affirmation that "We're better than you are, and this is why we're right." The reply that stands out to me was, "You don't get it. Condoms are so important, and they don't know any better."

The story of their lives. The Left, that is.

"For the Left, communist China is far more preferable to send children to than Arizona"

...because apparently they have BAD ideas in Arizona and no Leftist wants children exposed to ANY idea the Leftist doesn't like.

As a former leftist I looked back on my old leftist friends and I realized something else about the difference between liberals and conservatives:

When a conservative thinks of a liberal parent teaching her values and ideas to her children, the conservative thinks, "Well, she's the parent; that's her right."

But when a liberal thinks of the conservative parent teaching her values to her kids, he is horrified that such evil is being perpetrated. He begins to seek out ways to rescue all children from having these narrow-minded, fascistic, demonic ideas imposed on them.

This will inevitably lead to an examination in the role of the schools in the child's life so I'm going to stop here.

SCHWARTS UH NEG UR

Please, Dennis, I don't know where you got this odd pronunciation of "Schwarze" for "Schwartz" but since you live in California you should know better. You're making my ears curl every time you say the name this way.

"We've given Mexico a great gift in providing them a place for their unemployed to come"

Dennis, Mexicans leave jobs in Mexico to come here. The jobs they leave pay so poorly they can't feed themselves but here they not only feed themselves but they mail most of their money home, and some of them have a wad of money to get drunk on Friday night as well.

Here's the story: I had a friend named Alice, who owned ten acres in Malibu where she actually had crops (mostly trees) and farmed her produce and sold it. She did this as a hobby because she actually had plenty of money. Well, she needed help so she drove into town, found a guy standing on the corner, picked him up and took him to her little ranch and set him to work. This fellow seemed personable enough and Alice always got to know the people who worked with her, so she chatted with him whenever she had the opportunity. What he told her, and she told me, was how in Mexico he had a job where he moved rocks for 12 hours a day. I don't remember whether she said they were large rocks or gravel rocks, but either way it's going to be heavy manual work and he's got to be exhausted at the end of every day.

His pay? One chicken, he said.

That's why they're here.

I could talk for a while about Mexico's aristocracy and the way their "system" (whatever it is) treats their serfs, er, I mean, peons. Same thing, but they might as well be slaves.

"The left are bullies"

I certainly agree. You're a pretty big guy that not many people would try to bully. And you have a presence that probably commands respect even from would-be bullies.

And there are people like me. I have a sign over my head that anyone fluent in bullyese can read as, "Terrific target, cares more about your feelings than she does about her own. Very vulnerable to attack." I've had many opportunities to sit in on conversations with leftists. Let me elaborate.

In high school and college I was very liberal. It was, you know, the Good Thing to be, the Right Attitude to take, the Way Jesus wants us all to follow (though I wasn't religious at the time, I had a respect for the image of Jesus that I couldn't shake). More later today

Dictionary dot com and the pronunciation of words

I'm not very fond of dictionary dot com. Sure, they're here on the computer, where I usually am. I can't afford to buy a new dictionary and I wouldn't even if I had the money. Somewhere in Los Angeles a certain very dishonorable man has my old Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, the 1967 edition. Back then this dictionary was a prescriptive dictionary, which means they will inform you what the rules of the language and usage should be, and whether the way we use this particular word follows that rule. They would even give you wrong words or the wrong usage and why they considered it to be the wrong usage.

This is all gone now. The dictionaries used by dictionary.com are for the most part descriptive dictionaries, which means they only tell you how we supposedly use our language today. If enough uneducated people make the same mistake, that's our language. Thus, mispronunciations that obscure the meaning of an original word and make it into a new but meaningless word are acceptable. Bad grammar is acceptable. New meanings for words just get reported, no matter how mistaken the user is.

Now, I'm aware that some words once meant this, and over the years have evolved to mean that. I even had to write a paper on this for an English class. And as a reader (however incompetently) of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Middle Dutch, and early Modern English, I'm pretty much aware of changing meanings and grammar. But every language has a structure that helps us communicate with one another. If you've ever tried to make sense out of a sentence spoken by someone who didn't have a care in the world what form our language follows, you will understand why we have this structure and why our language OUGHT to follow it.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/puerile

Today I went to dictionary dot come because Dennis said a word which I thought was mispronounced. They have a sound option that lets you hear what they think is the proper pronunciation, available for most words. You just click the microphone.

I was looking at "puerile", which used to be a two-syllable word when I was a kid. Apparently now it's a four-syllable word. Does anyone remember this word as "pwer ul"? The Pronunciation Voice says it's now "pyoo-ur-ee-ul".

"Being on the Left means never having to say you're sorry"

Boy, you got that right, Dennis. Years ago I decided "Being on the Left means never having to say you're wrong." But this covers everything beyond that as well. Once in a blue moon you can show a statistic or datum or some other factoid that proves the leftist was quoting a liar, and instead of backing up, realizing he was wrong, letting go of the lie he so fondly believed, and admitting he was repeating and disseminating this lie (thus compounding it), he will turn it into a good thing that he believed, he will spin it some way to make it the truth, or show you how you still have to believe what he believes if you ever want to be a good person.

It boggles the mind.

"Why not one month after his birth?"

Because he's visible, Dennis. That is exactly the reason. That is why they get so hysterical when protesters show pictures of six-month-old fetuses, it makes them visible too.

They will argue that it's because the child is inside the woman's body but we see how that all falls apart when they argue against protecting a baby who survived an abortion. The goal is to get that baby dead, period.

The male-female hour

I've had a deep disagreement with Dennis over his "evolutionary psychology" for a long time. I'll discuss that later.

High school love.

Never underestimate the power of puppy love. Both his sons are deeply in love with wonderful girls. I don't assume this love is different from the love a thirty-year-old has for another thirty-year-old. What is your attitude toward this young love, do you recommend or advise against or for it?

Dennis, that's not a great question. You yourself admitted there are many stories in which this sort of thing worked out, and many stories for which it did not. Who can predict whether a particular pair of people, or for that matter either of the individuals in that pair, fits the stereotype? Who can predict whether this particular relationship will or won't work out?

Find a statistic--"Eighty percent of young love relationships work out" or don't work out, whichever is the case--and then you can recommend all day. But find forty separate anecdotes and all you've found it forty interesting stories.

Anecdotal evidence is good for giving insights into certain situations. It's worthless for general informaion or for informing an opinion about the generality of such situations.

"Conservatives and conservatism have been complicit in the stereotype..."

Dennis's guest in the first hour discusses why he dislikes the image that conservatives are only interested in holding on to the status quo and only care about big business.

Me, I think there isn't that "perception" except among people who want to believe it and are willing to interrupt any discussion on politics with throwing this propaganditto out as their trump card.

I agree, we do not have little catch phrases that we pass around and repeat and which can trump any conversation that disagrees with us. We need to get on this.

Global warming succeeded as an ideology why? The leftist mentality is a mentality of anxiety, wereas conservative mentality is moe to celebrate people's achievements

Leftist thought is emotional, conservative thought is issues based.

Leftists ask, can the problem be fixed by governent, while conservatives are more skeptical of the govt fix.

What is this movement toward emotion and the hysterical fix? That was so non-American in the past. We're moving more toward the emotional, says the guest. Conservs are not able to present their ideas in one little emotional soundbite.

Emotional utopianism started in the Sixties

The book: "Conservatism Redefined" professor Gary?

Conservatives want to give everyone an education to allow them the maximum number of opportunities.

To hispanics: we welcome you, we want you to come. We support the role of religion, of families, we want you to come here, legally, and if you do we're not worried about what kind of society you will bring, you could only strengthen us.

Back to global warming, emotional, anxiety, government intervention.

The left is more prone to anxiety: as soon as they hear a scare, they agree with it.

We have a government that only gives money to the scaremongers.

Point made in the book: You will do far better if you don't see yourselves as victims.

While I'm fighting with this virus...

I hate even mentioning this thing but I want to make it known that my computer has good moments and bad moments, good days and bad days. On bad days I can't get to this server and make posts. I've made notes during the show and had trouble posting comments after the show. On the worst days I couldn't even get to the server that hosts his radio show. Bear with me please as I try to fix this problem.

"Half her courses seemed to be 'Film'"

Thirty years ago I was a temporary office worker at Westlake School, one of the snootiest schools in the Los Angeles area. (It has since merged with Harvard School, which was an Episcopalian boys' school, and is now one of two campuses of Harvard-Westlake School, THE snootiest school in the Los Angeles area.)

I just would like to mention that the English Department at that time had been turned into a Hollywood Studies Department. If these girls were taught anything in their four years of High School, it certainly didn't include grammar, literature apart from movie scripts, and structured composition.

This sort of junk came early on in a modern-day movement that pushed teachers to adopt a philosophy of "never give the kids what they're not already interested in." I could write about the stupidity of this philosophy for hours, but here I only want to mention my contempt for the idea of approaching the student where he is NOW and never giving him anything new to ponder, no new ideas to pierce his skull, and never expanding his horizons--three things that education was specifically geared to do, and which is now stripped from it. Why should we bother "educating" our kids any more? If we never give them anything new to think of, never ask them to look beyond their innately narrow world, never ask them to ponder anything they didn't come by on their own, then let's give them a break and quit forcing them to stay in school till the age of 18.

I have been hijacked by a virus

Saturday a virus took over my computer, threatening me with a dozen "viruses" it claimed to have found. It disabled my task manager and opened up my fire wall (I guess by poking a hole in my router?) and started talking to the outside world and downloading all sorts of malware.

The computer has been barely usable since the several jury-rigged attempts we made at fixing it. When trying to open pages I get re-routed to a search results page or just get blocked outright.

Here at blogger I spent two days trying to log in, and kept getting re-routed to anywhere else. I've been all over the interweb universe. I'd destroy my drive if I could and start from scratch but I don't have another drive to move to.

Here I just got a message saying, "Autosave failed". I know what that means but what's going on behind the visible page? Autosaves are failing repeatedly. Well, I will keep plugging on and do the best I can.

Wish me luck.