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Our granddaughter, Stella, is going to be a baker like her mommy!
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"There are two ways to conquer & enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." John Adams, 1826
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John Hawkins enunciates 15 lies that comprise the liberal message.
Yes,Hawkins is mostly right but his message no longer resonates and must be modified so that it can be sold and better received.
This is the task ahead for Conservatives and it will not be an easy one to re-craft as long as government is allowed to grow and transfer wealth. (See 1 and 1a below.)
As Noonan points out below the Senate's investigation of Benghazi was a farce and more specifically the republican effort failed for lack of co-ordination and the fact that when politicians go before camera they tend to act like peacocks.
Clinton played them like violins.
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Hillsdale College is a small Conservative College in Michigan. The first articles gives one an idea of how far, Yale at least, has gone off the deep end and engaged in debauchery under the guise of a liberal education.
The second article is a speech given by a professor praising Hillsdale for its traditional approach to education.
Many years ago Hillsdale was told by the government it would have to teach certain PC type courses because some of their students were receiving government student loans. They lost their case in the Supreme Court and raised enough funds to eliminate any student going to school on government money. Hillsdale now teaches what it wants. Go Hillsdale! (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Hillsdale College is a small Conservative College in Michigan. The first articles gives one an idea of how far, Yale at least, has gone off the deep end and engaged in debauchery under the guise of a liberal education.
The second article is a speech given by a professor praising Hillsdale for its traditional approach to education.
Many years ago Hillsdale was told by the government it would have to teach certain PC type courses because some of their students were receiving government student loans. They lost their case in the Supreme Court and raised enough funds to eliminate any student going to school on government money. Hillsdale now teaches what it wants. Go Hillsdale! (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) 15 Lies of Liberalism
1)Liberalism offers up a utopian vision of the world and then invites its practitioners to feel good about themselves for embracing it. Not only does this beautiful fantasy world never come to pass, liberalism fails to address the root causes of the problems it sets out to solve while creating whole new disasters in the process. In other words, it's a never ending circle. There's a problem, liberalism is offered up as the solution, it doesn't work and creates more problems, for which liberalism is offered up as the solution, etc., etc., etc. until you're starving, bankrupt, or your society is tearing itself apart at the seams.
Liberalism says that....
1) ...it's all about choice -- unless you want to choose which gun or lightbulb to use, which school your child will attend, or you’d prefer more freedom and smaller government.
2) ...it cares about the environment, when in practice, not only do liberals like Al Gore live some of the most resource-wasting and ostentatious lifestyles on the planet, but they hurt the environment by blocking environmentally friendly energy production here in favor of energy sources from nations that care little about pollution.
3) ...you can have lots of free government services and somebody else will pay for them. The trillion dollar deficit we're running every year that will have to be paid back says otherwise.
4) ...as long as you use birth control that someone else is forced to pay for, there are no consequences whatsoever to having lots and lots of sex.
5) .... "government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn." Do you know anyone with crabgrass on his lawn? DO YOU?
6) ...it's all about compassion and taking care of the less fortunate, unless liberals have their own money on the line, in which case they give less to charity than those stingy, greedy, heartless conservatives.
7) ...you shouldn't take your Christian faith seriously, that political correctness matters more than the Bible, and that mocking God has no consequences. Ever heard someone say, “Don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel?” Well, if liberals were smarter, they wouldn't be picking a fight with an omnipotent God who buys lightning bolts by the barrel and has a well earned reputation for getting fed up every once in awhile and dishing out "Old Testament style wrath" on His enemies.
8) ...how much our country spends can be dictated by our wants, as opposed to what we can afford. Of course, if the world really works this way, Greece would be fine, nobody would have ever heard of the word "bankruptcy," and the banks wouldn't even bother to write down your name when you borrow money from them.
9) ...liberals want unity and bipartisanship, which they apparently believe they can accomplish by spewing pure hatred and smearing, demonizing, threatening, and lying about anyone who disagrees with them.
10) ...it’s going to deliver equality of outcomes for everyone, which is true, if by "delivering equality of outcomes" you mean "make everyone poorer."
11) ...it cares about women -- unless they're conservative women, in which case liberals will insult them in the vilest of terms, attack their children, call them whores and laugh and hoot at the most grotesque sexist attacks against them. Every last insult ever hurled at someone like Sandra Fluke probably wouldn't amount to what women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter put up with on any given week with the full support of the same liberals who run off at the mouth about a "war on women."
12) ....it'll help the poor -- and it does. Liberalism helps poor Americans live in ghettos with just enough food and money to survive so they can stay dependent on liberals. It's the same sort of help a farmer gives a chicken while he harvests its eggs and waits for the right time to wring its neck and toss it in the frying pan.
13) ...liberals are the only people who care about black Americans and want to help, which doesn't seem to square with the fact that just about anywhere and everywhere liberals have been in charge for decades, like Detroit or New Orleans, most black Americans are in dire straits.
14) ...small business owners were able to build their businesses because they were lucky. But of course, if that's true, why do we have such a high unemployment rate? Why doesn't everyone who loses his job just set up his business and grab that easy money? Since bankers don't deserve the big salaries they make, why doesn't the Occupy movement set up its own bank and show the "banksters" how it's done?
15) ...you can fix crime by taking away guns, but by definition, the people who will voluntarily give up guns are law abiding citizens who have no intention of committing a crime in the first place. Besides, if that can work, why doesn't Barack Obama set the example by asking his Secret Service agents to disarm?
1a)Noonan: Lessons Conservatives Need to Learn
Obama is a formidable foe. He means to change the country and crush the GOP.
Two lessons on how conservatives and Republicans might approach the future, and a look at the meaning of Barack Obama.
Lesson one: Golf star Phil Mickelson this week complained about taxes—"I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state"—and suggested he may leave California. Before anyone could jump down his throat, he abjectly apologized: He didn't mean to hurt anyone, he shouldn't have said it, taxes are a "personal" issue.
Actually they're pretty public. The American Revolution started as a tax revolt. It is not remarkable that a man might protest a 50% to 60% tax rate that means he has to work from January through July or August for the government, and only gets to keep for himself and his family what he earns from then through December.
Most fans would rather see Mr. Mickelson hit a ball with a stick than hear his economic analysis, and talking about tax burdens when you're making up to $50 million a year sounds like . . . well, a pretty high-class problem.
But his complaint came as kind of a relief. It was politically incorrect. It was based on actual numbers and facts and not grounded in abstractions, as most of our public pronouncements are. And it was unusual. Most people in his position are clever enough not to sound aggrieved.
Conservatives and Republicans feel a bit under siege these days because their views are not officially in style. But the Cringe is not the way to deal with it. If you take a stand, take a stand and take the blows. Many people would think that paying more than half your salary in city, state, county and federal taxes is unjust. Mr. Mickelson is not alone.
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Lesson two came from Republicans on Capitol Hill. Conservatives on the ground are angry with them after the Benghazi hearings. Members of the Senate and the House have huffed and puffed for months: "It's worse than Watergate, Americans died." Just wait till they question the secretary of state, they'll get to the bottom of it.
Wednesday they questioned Hillary Clinton. It was a dud.
The senators weren't organized or focused, they didn't coordinate questions, follow up, have any coherent or discernible strategy. The only senator who really tried to bore in was Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who asked a pointed question that was never answered: If you wanted to find out what happened when the consulate was attacked, why didn't you pick up the phone the next day and call those who'd been there? John McCcain made a spirited, scattered speech—really, it was just like him—that couldn't find the energy to end in serious questions.
Some conservatives are saying Mrs. Clinton looked unhinged, angry. In their dreams. She came across as human and indignant, and emerged untouched. What air there was in the Benghazi balloon leaked out. Someday we'll find out what happened when somebody good writes a book.
All this looked like another example of the mindless personal entrepreneurialism of the Republicans on the Hill: They're all in business for themselves. They make their speech, ask their question, and it's not connected to anyone else's speech or question. They aren't part of something that moves and makes progress.
Minority parties can't act like this, in such a slobby, un-unified way.
Hill Republicans continue not to understand that they are the face of the party when the cameras are trained on Washington. They don't understand how they look, which is like ants on a sugar cube.
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Finally, it became obvious this week that the Republican Party top to bottom has to start taking Barack Obama seriously. All the famous criticisms of him are true: He has no talent for or interest in sustained, good-faith negotiations, he has no real sense of alarm about the great issue of the day, America's debt. He's a chill presence in a warm-blooded profession.
But he means business. He means to change America in fundamental ways and along the lines of justice as he sees it. The proper response to such a man is not—was not—that he's a Muslim, he's a Kenyan, he's working out his feelings about colonialism. Those charges were meant to marginalize him, but they didn't hurt him. They damaged Republicans, who came to see him as easy to defeat.
He doesn't care if you like him—he'd just as soon you did, but it's not necessary for him. He is certain he is right in what he's doing, which is changing the economic balance between rich and poor. The rich are going to be made less rich, and those who are needy or request help are going to get more in government services, which the rich will pay for. He'd just as soon the middle class not get lost in the shuffle, but if they wind up marginally less middle class he won't be up nights. The point is redistribution.
The great long-term question is the effect the change in mood he seeks to institute will have on what used to be called the national character. Eight years is almost half a generation. Don't you change people when you tell them they have an absolute right to government support regardless of their efforts? Don't you encourage dependence, and a bitter sense of entitlement? What about the wearing down of taxpayers? Some, especially those who are younger, do not fully understand that what is supporting them is actually coming from other people. To them it seems to come from "the government," the big marble machine far away that prints money.
There is no sign, absolutely none, that any of this is on Mr. Obama's mind. His emphasis is always on what one abstract group owes another in the service of a larger concept. "You didn't build that" are the defining words of his presidency.
He is not going to negotiate, compromise, cajole. Absent those efforts his only path to primacy in Congress is to kill the Republican Party, to pulverize it, as John Dickerson noted this week in Slate, to "attempt to annihilate the Republican Party," as Speaker John Boehner said in a remarkably candid speech to the Ripon Society.
Mr. Obama is not, as has been said, the left's Ronald Reagan. Reagan won over, Mr. Obama just wins. What Mr. Obama really is is Franklin D. Roosevelt without the landslides. He has the same seriousness of intent but nothing like the base of support.
In 1932, FDR won the presidency with 58% of the vote to Herbert Hoover's 40%. In 1936 it was even better: Roosevelt won 61% of the vote to Alf Landon's 36.5%.
In 2008, Mr. Obama beat John McCain solidly, 53% to 46%. But last year, against a woebegone GOP candidate, he won just 51% of the vote, to Mitt Romney's 47%. (Yes: ironic.)
Mr. Obama received 66 million votes in 2012—but four years earlier he received 69.5 million.
His support went down, not up.
He is moving forward as if he has FDR's mandate and attempting to crush his enemy every bit as ruthlessly as FDR, who was one ruthless patrician.
It will take guts and unity to fight him. Can the GOP, just in Washington, for now, develop those things?
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2)Man, Sex, God, and Yale
By Nathan Harden
NATHAN HARDEN is editor of The College Fix, a higher education news website, and blogs about higher education for National Review Online. A 2009 graduate of Yale, he has written for numerous publications, including National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The New York Post, and The Washington Times. He was a 2011 Robert Novak Fellow at the Phillips Foundation, a 2010 Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and is author of the recent book Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2012.
Jason Barney
2)Man, Sex, God, and Yale
By Nathan Harden
NATHAN HARDEN is editor of The College Fix, a higher education news website, and blogs about higher education for National Review Online. A 2009 graduate of Yale, he has written for numerous publications, including National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The New York Post, and The Washington Times. He was a 2011 Robert Novak Fellow at the Phillips Foundation, a 2010 Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and is author of the recent book Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2012.
IN 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr., a graduate of Yale the year before, published his first book, God & Man at Yale. In the preface, he described two ideas that he had brought with him to Yale and that governed his view of the world:
"I had always been taught, and experience had fortified the teachings, that an active faith in God and a rigid adherence to Christian principles are the most powerful influences toward the good life. I also believed, with only a scanty knowledge of economics, that free enterprise and limited government had served this country well and would probably continue to do so in the future."
The body of the book provided evidence that the academic agenda at Yale was openly antagonistic to those two ideas—that Buckley had encountered a teaching and a culture that were hostile to religious faith and that promoted collectivism over free market individualism. Rather than functioning as an open forum for ideas, his book argued, Yale was waging open war upon the faith and principles of its alumni and parents.
Liberal bias at American colleges and universities is something we hear a lot about today. At the time, however, Buckley’s exposé was something new, and it stirred national controversy. The university counterattacked, and Yale trustee Frank Ashburn lambasted Buckley and his book in the pages of Saturday Review magazine.
Whether God & Man at Yale had any effect on Yale’s curriculum is debatable, but its impact on American political history is indisputable. It argued for a connection between the cause of religious faith on the one hand, and the cause of free market economics on the other. In a passage whose precise wording was later acknowledged to have been the work of Buckley’s mentor Willmoore Kendall—a conservative political scientist who was driven out of Yale a few years later—Buckley wrote:
"I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."
This idea, later promoted as “fusionism” in Buckley’s influential magazine National Review, would become the germ of the Reagan coalition that united social conservatives and free market libertarians—a once-winning coalition that has been lately unraveling.
I graduated from Yale in 2009, fifty-nine years after Buckley. I had a chance to meet him a couple of years before his death, at a small gathering at the home of a professor. Little did I know at the time that I would write a book of my own that would serve, in some ways, as a continuation of his famous critique.
My book—which I entitled Sex and God at Yale—shows that Yale’s liberals are still actively working to refashion American politics and culture. But the devil is in the details, and it’s safe to say that there are things happening at Yale today that Buckley could scarcely have even imagined in 1951. While the Yale of Buckley’s book marginalized or undermined religious faith in the classroom, my book tells of a classmate who was given approval to create an art object out of what she claimed was blood and tissue from self-induced abortions. And while the Yale of Buckley’s book was promoting socialist ideas in its economics department, my book chronicles Yale’s recent employment of a professor who publicly praised terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
My, how times have changed!
There is clearly a radical sexual agenda at work at Yale today. Professors and administrators who came of age during the sexual revolution are busily indoctrinating students into a culture of promiscuity. In fact, Yale pioneered the hosting of a campus “Sex Week”—a festival of sleaze, porn, and debauchery, dressed up as sex education. I encountered this tawdry tradition as an undergrad, and my book documents the events of Sex Week, including the screening in classrooms of hard-core pornography and the giving of permission to sex toy manufacturers and porn production companies to market their products to students.
In one classroom, a porn star stripped down to bare breasts, attached pinching and binding devices to herself as a lesson in sadomasochism, and led a student around the room in handcuffs. On other occasions, female students competed in a porn star look-alike contest judged by a male porn producer, and a porn film showing a woman bound and beaten was screened in the context of “instruction” on how students might engage in relationships of their own.
And again, these things happened with the full knowledge and approval of Yale’s senior administrators.
As might be expected, many Yale students were offended by Sex Week, but university officials defended it in the name of “academic freedom”—a sign of how far this noble idea, originally meant to protect the pursuit of truth, has fallen. And the fact that Yale as an institution no longer understands the substantive meaning of academic freedom—which requires the ability to distinguish art from pornography, not to mention right from wrong—is a sign of its enslavement to the ideology of moral relativism, which denies any objective truth (except, of course, for the truth that there is no truth).
Under the dictates of moral relativism, no view is any more valid than any other view, and no book is any greater or more worth reading than any other book. Thus the old idea of a liberal education—that each student would study the greatest books, books organized into a canon based on objective criteria that identify them as valuable—has given way to a hodgepodge of new disciplines—African-American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies—based on the assumption that there is no single way to describe the world that all serious and open-minded students can comprehend.
Indeed, Yale administrators have taken their allegiance to cultural relativism so far that they invited a sworn enemy of America to be a student, admitting Sayed Rahmatulla Hashemi—a former diplomat-at-large for the Taliban—in 2005. Talk about diversity!
Sitting for my final exam in International Relations, I found myself next to Hashemi, whose comrades were fighting and killing my fellow citizens in the mountains of Afghanistan at that very moment. The fact that the Taliban publicly executes homosexuals and infidels, and denies girls and women the right to go to school, gave no pause to the same Yale administrators who pride themselves on their commitment to gay rights, feminism, and academic freedom. In an interview, Hashemi boasted to the New York Times: “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead, I ended up at Yale.”
It’s hard to overlook the paradox:
By enrolling Hashemi in the name of diversity, Yale abandoned the principle of human rights—the very principle that allows diverse individuals, including those of different faiths, to coexist peacefully.
It was my aim in writing Sex and God at Yale to bring accountability to Yale’s leaders in hopes of reform. Yale has educated three of the last four presidents, and two of the last three justices appointed to the Supreme Court. What kind of leaders will it be supplying in ten years, given its current direction?
Unfortunately, what’s happening at Yale is indicative of what is occurring at colleges and universities across the country. Sex Week, for example, is being replicated at Harvard, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin. Nor would it suffice to demand an end to Sex Weeks on America’s college campuses. Those events are, after all, only symptoms of a deeper emptiness in modern academia. Our universities have lost touch with the purpose of liberal arts education, the pursuit of truth. In abandoning that mission—indeed, by denying its possibility—our institutions of higher learning are afflicted to the core.
The political freedom that makes a liberal arts education possible requires an ongoing and active defense of liberty. Try exercising academic freedom in a place like Tehran or Kabul! Here in the U.S., we take our liberty far too much for granted. To the extent that Yale and schools like it succeed in producing leaders who subscribe to the ideology of moral relativism—and who thus see no moral distinction between America and its enemies—we will likely be disabused of this false sense of security all too soon.
“We live in a culture of Peter Pans”
Jason Barney
Latin Teacher, Clapham School
EACH FALL, Hillsdale College awards the Salvatori Prize for Excellence in Teaching to a teacher at a private or charter K-12 school that offers a classical education in keeping with the guidelines of Hillsdale’s Charter School Initiative and of Hillsdale Academy, the College’s private K-12 school. The 2012 Salvatori Prize was awarded to Jason Barney, a Latin teacher at Clapham School in Wheaton, Illinois, who accepted the prize and a $25,000 check for his school at a ceremony at Hillsdale College on November 12, 2012. The following is adapted from his acceptance remarks.
I AM HONORED to receive the Salvatori Prize on behalf of my school, and grateful for the good work and generosity of Hillsdale College and Hillsdale Academy in supporting educational reform that reaches back to the best of our tradition. My own young school, founded only seven years ago, has drawn inspiration and resources from Hillsdale, which has paved the way in retrieving much that has been forgotten or abandoned. Without your support and example, we would be years behind in our growth as a school.
The great Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote: Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. “Not to know what happened before you were born, that is to be always a boy, to be forever a child.”
In a sense, historical understanding—knowledge of what happened before you were born—is primary to all realms of knowledge. Science is the study of the great discoveries of the past in our knowledge of the natural world. Literature is the study of the great writings of past cultures that embody human experience in the form of story and poem. Mathematics is the study of how great minds of the past have ordered for us the use of abstract numbers and symbols in relation to the physical world. The arts are the studies of the varied and diverse cultural creations of the past. Historical understanding in all these areas humanizes, matures, and uplifts the soul.
Too many citizens of our country today are, in Cicero’s terms, forever children. If knowledge of the past matures the soul, it is not something we can afford to marginalize or sideline. Unfortunately, the hard work of gaining knowledge, eloquence, and wisdom is all too often skirted by teacher and student alike. Because we have neglected knowledge of the past and the great tradition of historical understanding, we live in a culture of Peter Pans, flying free in Neverland with no past and no future, only the ever-present game, the mock battle against pirates or Indians. Wendy’s stories, with their plot of real challenges to be overcome, only reveal to us our immaturity, the fact that we are forever children who won’t grow up.
In my short professional tenure as a teacher, I have had the privilege of seeing students mature through coming to know the past. After numerous classroom discussions about the virtues and vices of historical figures, making charts and lists on the board as my students came up with ideas, they have written profoundly of their desire to mature in their own lives, discerning their own weaknesses and taking steps to improve. After discussing and chuckling at the social dynamics of Jane Austen’s Emma—expressing distaste for Mrs. Elton’s haughty manner, admiration for Mr. Knightley’s gentleness, good-natured exasperation at Emma’s silly lack of self-awareness—I have witnessed the change in my students’ relationships with one another: a more mature thoughtfulness, a deeper sensitivity. Nothing is more satisfying for a teacher than seeing how interaction with the stories of the past matures the souls of his students.
As G.K. Chesterton said in another context, the great tradition has not been tried and found wanting; it has been tried, found difficult, and duly abandoned. Hillsdale Academy is a model to schools across the nation, including my own, of taking the difficult path, rediscovering the great tradition, and finding in the wisdom of the past a deep well of life-giving water.
Thank you.
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