Social Issues

Ah, But We Do Forget

Mark Noonan5 Comments

That song was done by the Boomtown Rats and was made in response to the school shooting carried out by Brenda Ann Spencer on January 29th, 1979 in San Diego, California. I admit that I had mentally lost track of it, but it always has been floating around in my head, re-emerging from time to time.  I was 14 years old and living in San Diego at the time.  The shooter was 16.  When asked why she had done it, she answered, “I don’t like Mondays”.

Two people were killed, and 9 injured, including 8 children.  It was a horrifically shocking event which, I’m sure, everyone at the time said they’d never forget.  Ok, so how many of you who were 14 or older in 1979 remember?  How many of you have heard that Boomtown Rats song and never knew what it was about?

We forget and we forget and we forget – and then comes the next massacre and we wring our hands and swear we won’t forget.  But, we do – and then repeat the process.  If we want it to stop, then we have to remember….and keep remembering and start thinking about how it happened.  How is it that prior to 1979 we never had someone pick up a gun and randomly shoot at a school for no identifiable reason?  To be sure, you can find long lists of people who were murdered at schools over the ages – but in each case there was an identifiable cause; some grievance against the school, or the school authorities, or some of the students.  Something you could logically connect to the crime…not because a bored person decided they didn’t like Mondays.

We’ve lost our morals, my friends – that is it.  Only a people increasingly lacking in basic, human decency can breed people who will just kill for no reason.  Until we get back to basic, human decency we won’t get anywhere.  Just more massacres and more memorial services and more (empty) pledges to never forget.

UPDATE:  Rush gets it:

I said, “Twenty-five years ago we were warning about what was going to happen if X kept happening and Y kept happening and if we didn’t stop Z.”  Well, now, we’re there.  We’re no longer talking about what will happen unless we do something about it.  We’re living it.  We’re living the collapse.  We’re living the implosion of our culture and our society.  Politically, morally, religiously, you name it, and it all stems from the fact that no one is allowed to have values.  Values are judgmental.  You have no right to impose values on people.

The death of our civilization is proceeding precisely as predicted in decades past – stodgy, boring, old conservatives (and a few wise liberals) pointed it out and pointed it out and explained with charts and diagrams that all this would happen if we didn’t change course.  We didn’t change course.  We just doubled down on doing it wrong – and now people pretend to be all shocked about it?  Astounding.

Get ready to start imposing the old morality (and, of course, all of us must start by imposing it on ourselves) or get ready for death.  Pick one.  There are no other choices.

Thoughts on the “Black Friday Strike”

Mark Noonan89 Comments

A lot of people are getting fed up with the way America’s retailers are forever pushing back the start of “black Friday” – that Friday after Thanksgiving which represents the largest retail sales day of the year.  Starting some years ago, retailers started opening up earlier and earlier on Friday morning, offering “door buster” deals for those people willing to get there at the crack of dawn.  Trouble is, each retailer tried to out-do the other – and now we have a lot of major retailers who are planning on opening on Thanksgiving Day, itself.

I’m not quite sure where this bright idea came from – given that I work in corporate America, my guess is a second-level corporate exec managed to produce some numbers which alleged that opening up an hour earlier you can grab some tiny percentage more of consumer’s disposable income – income which might be spent at other retailers if everyone opened up at the same time.  I highly doubt that this opening up earlier and earlier actually increases sales – more than likely it just spreads the sales out over a longer period of time.  At any rate, the corporate execs who thought it up are, likely, the  products of business schools who are rising to the top not based on skill or ability but simply on the fact that when they first were inserted in to junior management post-college they were befriended by someone a step higher on the corporate ladder and just rose along with them year by year (with only those entirely screwing up along the way losing their place on the ladder).  Essentially, they are just “managers” who don’t actually know what it is their troops do for a living (anyone who has worked long in corporate America is continually astounded by how executive decisions bear little connection to reality – but before any of you liberals out there consider this an indictment of the private sector, I point out that the level of senior obtuseness is vastly higher in government); most importantly, the corporate executives who are commanding their troops to give up their holiday for the sake of a 0.01% increase in gross sales won’t be there while the troops are at work – for the most part, they’ll be home with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving.

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Memo to Pro-Life Republicans

Mark Noonan37 Comments

If you believe there should not be a  rape exception for abortion and you get asked the question, “do you believe there should be a rape exception for abortion?” then your answer is as follows:

I believe all of us desire that we should be just and merciful in our actions and I just can’t see how justice or mercy are served by executing a child because her father is a rapist.

Thank you for your time and attention to this message.

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Can Democracy Survive?

Mark Noonan45 Comments

First we begin with a bit of a quote:

…There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man…
– G. K. Chesterton, “What I Saw in America”, 1922

There are some words to infuriate our liberals – and even some of our libertarians:  “dogma” and “divine”!  Did he really just say that if we want to have democracy we must have divine dogmas?  You bet I did, because it is true.

When it comes down to it – as Thomas Jefferson, Deist though he was, clearly saw – if our rights are not given to us by God then they are not rights.  If we are not all created equal then there is no justification for democracy because democracy’s justification is the moral equivalence of all people.  It is the only equality there is or can be – because it is obvious that we are not physically and mentally equal to each other.

It there were nothing but blind evolution which accounts for our being here – if there is no God, that is – then any assertion of an absolute human right is absurd.  It will fall victim to the first person who comes along and says “I don’t agree” and who has the power to enforce it.  If you want to be free the first thing you must do – hard as it will be for many – is believe in God.  Don’t believe in God and, eventually, you won’t be free simply because you’ll have no defense against someone who doesn’t want freedom to exist for whatever reason.  Whether it is a national socialist who wants to base  things upon race or an international socialist who wants to base things upon class is a matter of perfect indifference:  you cannot say that the national or international socialist (and they come in all sorts of different guises) is wrong unless you have an absolute truth – God – to point to.

That right there is enough to stick in any liberal (and most libertarian) craw – but I’m about to get much worse about it.

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What America Really Needs: An Anti-Stupidity Movement

Mark Noonan79 Comments

While running through the Facebook thread, I came across the following quote:

To be beautiful means to be yourself.  You don’t need to be accepted by others, you need to accept yourself. – Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich, as it turns out, is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has gained some vogue in the West – probably initially from the fact that he was one of those dimwits during the Vietnam War who figured that if the United States would just leave and the war just “end” then everything would be just swell.  How anyone by the 1960’s could think that a communist regime would (a) seek cooperation with non-communists or (b) be anything less than hideously brutal once triumphant is beyond my understanding.  But, of course, Thich wasn’t alone – around the world literal tens of millions thought the same way.  In other words, they thought stupidly.  But no one ever called them that.  Reading the quote listed above, though, got me thinking that we who refuse to be stupid have to be a bit more forceful lest stupidity overwhelm us.

Because someone would only post a quote like that if they thought it wasn’t stupid.  You only post something like that if you think it wise.  But, my goodness, what a vapid bunch of pantheist nonsense is wrapped up in that short quote!  To be beautiful means to be be yourself?  What if yourself is a drug addict?  Or a thief?  Or a lazy bum?  It is, indeed, true that you don’t need to be accepted by others but before you go accepting yourself isn’t it rather important to determine if  yourself is worthy of respect?  Suppose you’re a hooker or a con artist – are you supposed to accept that yourself?

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War on Poverty, Fail

Mark Noonan71 Comments

From the AP:

…The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965…

The AP, being an MSM outfit, naturally puts part of the blame on a “fraying social safety net”, totally ignoring the fact that in real dollar terms we are spending vastly more on social programs than we ever did before.

Be that as it may, this is the final proof that Big Government welfare programs don’t work.  Of course, this has been easily demonstrable for several decades, now, but I don’t see how liberals can escape (save by flat out lying) the bald fact that their programs have failed.  This is it.  Its done.  Welfare doesn’t work.  No argument can be made that people would actually be worse off if we never started the War on Poverty, while plenty of arguments can still be made that we will be better off once we start dismantling this Big Government monstrosity.

Massacre, Redux

Mark Noonan151 Comments

A little later today the President of the United States will give a speech a little like this one or, perhaps, like that one.  The point is that the President will express his shock and grief over the shootings in Aurora, Colorado.

For the next few days we’ll have all sorts of reports about the massacre – we’ll learn about the shooter and about the least details of his sorry life.  We’ll learn if this was just some sort of crazed attack or (less likely) some sort of terrorist attack.  If it was a terrorist attack then it will be swiftly played down by government and MSM because confronting actual terrorism is forbidden right now (too busy with electoral matters – if it was some sort of terrorist attack, the reaction will be akin to the reaction to the Cole incident in 2000).  More than likely, though, this massacre is just another crazed attack in a long line of them – both in the United States and around the world.  Zero Hedge put together a handy list of the major mass shootings of the past 20 years.  Makes for depressing reading – but not so much because of the shootings, but because of our blindness on what it all means.

Even if the attack turns out to be terrorism, the list is still depressing and still so because of our unwillingness to confront reality.  Once upon a time, there weren’t mass shootings.  Not that there were fewer:  there were none.  Crazed lunatics with access to repeating rifles did not go on murderous rampages in the 1880’s.  Crazed lunatics with access to the Thompson sub-machine gun (a fully automatic weapon firing a murderous .45 ACP round at 600 rounds per minute…and anyone could buy it in the 20’s or 30’s…didn’t even need a permit) did not go on murderous rampages in the 1930’s.  Crazed lunatics who have to jump through government hoops to obtain semi-automatic weapons do go on murderous rampages, today.  What has changed?  I mean, other than the fact that it is harder to obtain less effective murder weapons than were available in the 1930’s?

Morality has changed.

Back in the past we didn’t have a society where the family was half collapsed.  We didn’t have a society where lies were officially designated as “politically correct” and thus not to be questioned.  Where the government nanny-State has replaced men in a quarter of all households.  Where violence is glorified in “cool” movies, television shows and video games.  Where obscene and/or anti-social behavior is not a matter for concern (until, that is, the obscene or anti-social person picks up a gun and starts shooting).   The problem we have – the reason people go on shooting rampages – is because we are an immoral society.  Until we become, once again, a moral society this will not change – all you’ll get is ever more shootings and, likely, ever worse shootings.

Until we brace ourselves to the task of rebuilding the family, denouncing the politically correct lies, dismantling the welfare State and start censoring what goes on in our popular culture, none of this will improve.  It will, indeed, only get worse.  Carp and complain about what I just wrote all you want – shriek to high heaven about how I just advocated censorship…but if you don’t agree with me, then you are part of the problem.  Your head is stuck firmly in the sand (though a much more vulgar suggestion of where it is would be more accurate).  You are ignoring reality in favor of one politically correct lie or another.   This is what it is – our collapse in morality leads to mass shootings.  Just as our collapse in morality has led to increased illegitimacy, divorce, cross-generational government dependence, rape, adultery/fornication, child abuse/neglect/abandonment, massively widespread sexually transmitted disease, increased child poverty, crime of all sorts, decayed cities…

Want to end all that?  Then start insisting upon the enforcement of morality.  If you don’t then nothing else you do will work and you’ll just see more and more of this…

UPDATE:  Roger L. Simon gets on the right track:

From Oliver Stone to Quentin Tarantino to Clint Eastwood, many of our best known filmmakers have trafficked in extreme, sometimes even gratuitous, violence. It has long been their contention, and those of others, that violence in film does not beget violence in life.

As the mass murder in Colorado has shown, they were wrong. Yes, normal people are able to separate illusion from reality, but for the criminally insane like James Holmes, it is quite clear that ultra-violent films can act as an inspiration for unspeakable acts.

Given the horrifying death toll, rare as the likes of Holmes may be, we have to account for the similarly deranged and aberrant. We owe that to the dead of Colorado and elsewhere. Moreover, we should not encourage these events, wittingly or unwittingly. And by we I mean the people who make films (which includes me)…

But he doesn’t go far enough – he eschews censorship.  But censorship of films, television, radio and video games (especially) is a necessary act in bringing to an end these horrendous massacres.  It is simple calculation:  what is more important, human lives of the ability of entertainment people to make an easy buck?  It is my view that because we have allowed popular culture to become a cesspit that it has not only become soaked in violence and sex but that it has also become lousy – actors are worse, direction is worse, writing is worse than it was in the glory days of Hollywood.  This is because acting in the manner of Spencer Tracy, directing in the manner of John Ford and writing with the style and grace of Charles Brackett (Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, The King and I, etc.) takes hard work as well as talent – much easier to just grind out movies with spectacular special effects, a few flashed boobs, some cuss words and a couple catch-phrases.

Do not, I pray you, try to sell me the utter garbage that censoring violence and sex out of popular culture attacks freedom.  Men and women did not fight and die for the “freedom” to put out disgusting filth and charge $8 to see it.  The heroes of America’s past fought and died so that we could worship God, speak our minds and live our lives without let or hindrance from others.  If the only way you can feel free is when your watching someone be disemboweled in an action flick, then you are a complete slave, so pound sand and get out of this debate and allow the adults to take over.

UPDATE II:  Naturally, the left is trying to blame the TEA Party and the larger conservative movement for this.  They’ll never take aim at the purveyors of popular filth.  Oh, no – that would mean a drying up of invites to the cool parties as well as a drop off in donations…

UPDATE III:  Its not just me thinking along these lines.

How to Deal With the “Bus Monitor Bullies”

Mark Noonan59 Comments

I’m sure you’ve all heard the story and, of course, the rather astounding news that the bus monitor has been lavished with donations from the general public.  But there is a bit of a debate on what to do with the kids who did the bullying.  So let’s debate – choose one of the following options:

1.  Carefully tell them that it was mean to do that and that they shouldn’t do it again.

2.  Give them detention so they’ll think about what they did.

3.  Send them to jail so they can learn to be first-rate criminal barbarians.

4.  Give them psychological counseling so they’ll learn that their bad behavior is someone else’s fault.

5.  Spend $100 billion on anti-bullying PSAs.

6.  Flog them.

I tend to think that a child, faced with the prospect of having his back laid open with a whip, might decide to behave himself.  But, then again, maybe the earnest entreaty by a caring psychologist will get the kid to do the right thing.  I mean, after all, we’ve been using the caring, psychological model for 40 years or so now and its turned our schools from places where the biggest problems were chewing gum and running the halls to places where you have to be on guard against rape and murder, so we can see how well child psychology works out as a palliative.  I mean, let’s get real here – the bus monitor wasn’t physically assaulted, so the bullies in a sense are right up there as honor students, relatively speaking.

When we add in the rest of the benefits of public schools – illiteracy, teen pregnancy and a lot of self-esteem – it just might be that a larger dose of what we’ve given will work.  You never can tell with these things…just one more anti-bullying public service announcement might be all it takes to turn these kids around.

The Results of Race Baiting

Mark Noonan68 Comments

From Bob Owens over at Pajamas Media:

The assaults on a pair of Virginian-Pilot reporters in Norfolk, VA, two weeks ago at the hands of 30 black youths, reported for the first time Tuesday, are the latest in a series of attacks driven by a warped sense of racial vigilantism hiding behind calls of “Justice for Trayvon.” At least 15 mostly isolated whites have been beaten not just with fists, but with potentially deadly weapons including hammers and lengths of chain. Many of the victims have been hospitalized, some may never fully recover, and one lingers on the verge of death.

David Forster and Marjon Rostami are just the latest victims of brutal beatings tied to the Trayvon Martin shooting, and some Virginians are outraged that the newspaper did not report the attack for “politically correct reasons.” The attack was revealed not as news, but in an opinion piece…

While none of us – not a single person who has spoken or written about the Martin case – knows all the facts, the evidence we do have clearly goes against the narrative which was created about the case:  the accusation that Zimmerman stalked and killed Martin because Martin was black.  That is clearly false.  Whether or not Zimmerman is guilty of a crime remains to be seen – that will be decided by a trial.  But in spite of the easily ascertainable facts showing that whatever else happened, the shooting was not racially motivated, we still got a story of racial motivation.  How?  My theory from just a few days after the case came to national attention was “grandstanding lawyers”.

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How Much Nonsense Do You Believe?

Mark Noonan95 Comments

Just a little test here, folks – a challenge, if you will.  It is my contention that most of us believe a series of falsehoods which distort our ability to make rational decisions.  This is far more prevalent on the left than on the right, but all of us are immersed in a sea of lies and thus even when we’re trying to get it right, we can often get it wrong because some facet of our action is motivated by a lie.  So, here’s something to think about – how many times have you heard the phrase, “believe in yourself”?  Ten thousand times?  A million?  I’ll bet that 100% of us have heard it and that 99% of us believe it.  If you just believe in yourself, you can get on.  Just this past Saturday morning I was watching the TV for a few minutes and there was Donald Trump saying “I believe in myself”.  But, is there anything to it?  A quote:

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world.  Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.  The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.”(the name of a lunatic asylum – ed.)  I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?  For I can tell you.  I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.  I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success.  I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”  He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them.  That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.  If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay.  It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself.  Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote:  the man who has it has  ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.”  And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, “Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?”  After a long pause I replied, “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.” This is the book that I have written in answer to it. – G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac

Kind of puts a new perspective on it, doesn’t it?  The phrase “believe in yourself” has been entirely ingrained in your existence (I speak here to the 99% who currently believe in the notion – if you are of the 1% who saw through it all along, then you may skip this).  It is just part of your mental make-up…it is a dogma you not only don’t question, but don’t even see a reason to question.   If you bother to read the rest  of the book, you’ll find the answer to what you should believe in instead of yourself:  God.   If you believe in God then you’ve taken that first step to wisdom (and if you maintain a genuine belief in God while you believed that you should “believe in yourself” then you avoided the worst errors attendant upon believing in yourself).  To believe in yourself is a form of idolatry – it is part of the first lie of hell (“you shall be as gods”).  And it leads to all sorts of errors – like, just for one in ten thousand examples, the man who will leave his wife and children so that he can pursue some dream or other…breaking his word and destroying a family because he “believes in himself”.

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