The one word that best characterizes Islamic totalitarian regimes...

...is "boring".

Why not "repressive"?

Well, I'm guessing that though we all know how restrictive of thought and action these regimes are, most of us might survive the misery of being restricted in thought, word, and deed; but considering the other word, "boring", we would have to subtract far more activites from our lives because the Islamic fascists had decided they were also anti-Islamic.

Russia never told its citizens what they had to wear, nor threatened to flog them or stone them to death for being "immodest", unless maybe by "immodest" you mean "out in public while nude."

They also restrict what you are allowed to read, to hear, to know, to say, probably to smell, I'm sure if you ate a dog they'd stone you, not for the preciousness of the dog but because you had defiled yourself. No unclean people in our society, you dirty filthy so and so. The music you listen to, restricted. The movies you're allowed to see, restricted. No nightclubs, no alcohol, no dancing. Noisy celebrations are for men only. Dating is probably out in most places. Engaged couples only, sanctioned by both families.

Meanwhile, women are turned into faceless, characterless blobs. Do you know what "thinging" someone means? It's the act of turning human people into "things", the way the Nazis turned Jews and Poles and Hungarians into things so that arresting them, relocating them, experimenting on them, killing them, would be easy. No one gives a crap about a "thing". And so these Muslim tyrannies turn women into things, and treat them like things.

For that matter, most men are things, too. No, you can't gamble, not even rolling dice in the street. No, you can't play cards, not even an innocent game like Bridge. Things have no rights.

Just say no.

Would the FDA approve aspirin today?

No. It causes birth defects in white rats, and though its use has never demonstrated a connection to fetal birth defects, it would never get the chance to be demonstrated to be safe in pregnant humans as we do not experiment or test drugs on pregnant humans.

Prager also mentioned other side effects. One of them is Reye Syndrome among children. This fact would knock the dentures out of all the FDA examiners and would send them running for the ban hammer, never mind the more common, less severe side effects. The rat birth defects alone would be sufficient to block any further testing in the approval process.

"If you can't reward excellence, you get less excellence."

Can you tell me why this oh-so-obvious statement remains a mystery to the Left? They can't accept it, and in fact deny it by their preferences, which means they still believe that the lousy teacher and the excellent teacher should be paid exactly the same.

I think one of their worries in this matter is that sooner or later some individual's preference or opinion or personal choice will come into the evaluation of the teachers, and that arbitrariness will enter the equation, and then chaos will ensue.

I'll concede that someone's opinion will enter into it. I'll concede that sooner or later someone will not receive as much as they think they deserve and will bring up charges of favoritism.

I won't concede that chaos will ensue. A hundred years ago someone preferred the older geezer teacher to the callow young pretty teacher and kept him on even though the younger teacher was much beloved by her students. People shrugged and life went on, and the young teacher found herself a job a year later in another town. See how that works?

I strongly recommend reading Marva Collins' Way. The TV movie was striking but as you'd expect, it says a lot less. There is so much to learn from her experiences as a Chicago school teacher. Reading this book taught me a lot about teaching, and I repeat her stories to other people all the time.

Return to Excellence in Education&Quality in our Classrooms Marva Collins Way

Here is a link to the book I believe I'm thinking of:



Sowell is a fascinating writer; I've enjoyed all the books by him that I've read. Applied Economics is probably the next one.

"You've got to have friends"

Not all of us know how to do that.

Jewish caller: "[Our parents] had a gentle way of reminding us that "whatever we went through it wasn't as bad as what they had gone through."

And don't forget that we were the softer generation, in contrast to our WW2-generation parents, so it wasn't just annoying, it was threatening to our spoilt selves, threatening and superior and bragadocious and demanding of sympathy (which we didn't want to give) and fifty other horrible things.

"I'll just react to what he said."

"Respond". When you "react" you are jerking your knee.

The new language of politics;: A dictionary of catchwords, slogans, and political usage,Safire's Usage Dictionary

"We should be pushing our values everywhere"

And of course we don't. We used to, with Radio Free Europe, for example, we talked frequently about the greatness of our country and our society, and we broadcast news from OUR point of view so that the local populace could see there were other ways to look at issues.

Here is a link to the Radio Free Europe home page:
http://www.rferl.org/

And if anyone can find where they let you donate, please post it here.

Here is a book on this subject:
America's Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty

America's other voice: The story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty

Prager on leave

He's sick.

Get well soon, Mister Prager.

UN elects Iran to Women's Rights board

Nuff said, I think. There is no insanity that is too insane for a leftist to support.

Most People Don't Know About Communist Holocausts

Caller: David
YAF President 22 years ago at CSUN

Prager remembers the lecture he gave then, and it is available at his website. Prager said there was a good turnout, but arguments presented back then are the same as those that are presented even now.

David gives us an example of the worst and dumbest: all of the brutal murdering regimes haven't been pure communist and if they had been replaced by pure communists there wouldn't have been the bloodshed we have seen so far.

160,000,000 people dead at the designing hands of communist regimes. How does that compare to the Inquisition, which killed three thousand in its long history?

Prager, I'm pretty sure that number is wrong. Walter Martin's research committee came up with a figure that showed the Inquisition killed about a thousand people per year. Considering their original business was to purge the Iberian peninsula of Moslems, I would guess they had a pretty easy row to hoe from the very beginning.

We still have college students bouncing around in crowds shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" Would they chant what is exactly the same, "Ay, Ay, Adolf Hitler!" ? Would their parents smack them across the chops if they caught their children chanting this? You bet they would! And rightly so. So let the world know about the communist holocausts.

"There is no secular reason why every human life is precious."

Hogwash, Prager. When secularists want to do away with God's morals as having come from God, but want to keep the morals anyway, they often resort to evolution. "It's the preservation of the herd," they reason, "it's in our genes to protect every member of the human population so the next generation of humans can continue."

That's about it. Seems like a valid reason to me, if you're careful not to look too deep.

"They don't want to hurt the country"

Only because to them, making half the people in the country dependant upon welfare isn't hurting. As Prager said, it's a blessing when more and more people are dependant. It's a choice, and all choices are equal. That precludes that some choices may damage the chooser, or his family, or his social circle, or his society, or his country. All choices are up to the individual and no chioce can be judged by its consequences or by its motivations, never mind by lack of information or by depth of thought.

This is why our education establishment is so opposed to dispensing information or training depth of thought in the classroom. They look to some magical response to come out of "social maturity" (in vogue twenty years ago) or "Social IQ" (which captured the imaginations of teachers ten years ago).

The motivations of liberals are complex, but when you dissect the underlying assumptions and the mid-level therefores and the top-level results, you'll find that all the layers involve being good, wishing good, presuming the ideas to be good, and then executing good.

You start with the trend toward spreading the wealth. You begin with Jesus' advice to the rich young ruler, "Give away all your money." Never mind the context of this advice. Never mind that Jesus never once said that everyone must give away all their money. Jesus was poor, his disciples were poor (except that poor people don't have a guy who handles the money, do they), the leftist thinks right-wingers should be poor by giving away all their money to poor people. The poor people deserve the money because the evil capitalist system exploited them, not because of any choice of their own. Capitalism has been labeled evil for so long it's impossible to show its good points to any leftist in any discussion in any situation. They know they want poor people to have money, they ignore what's inside themselves (the urge to keep their own money--I don't know a single left winger who has given away more than a tiny fraction of their own money to support the poor) and that movement to force other people to give away their own money makes them good. They are nearly saints in their own eyes, very Jesus-like in demanding that conservatives give away their own money and make themselves poor.