The Failure of Modern Public Education

THE PSYCHOPATHIC SCHOOL

John Taylor Gatto

He came to the conclusion that the government education system is broken, unfixable, and he was quitting.  He then wrote the book, The Underground History of American Education, a classic on the tragedy happening in American education.  He documents the takeover by socialist, centralized-government people who were not interested in honest education, but in mind-control.  (On that subject, see also two books by Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary?   and   NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education

link

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.

Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.
===============
Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

• Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self. 
• According to recent reports children watch 55 hours of television a week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.
• My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours.  

• During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. 

• That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours per week.

It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice.

But these activities are just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it.

Get The Book!

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto
For Gatto's superb The Underground History of American Education, call The Odysseus Group, in NYC, 212 529-9397.
Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson.

©Gene Zimmer 1999 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

===================================================================

Walking Targets

By B. K. Eakman

View this Author's Spotlight

eBook (PDF), 301 Pages 

     This item has not been rated yet

Preview

Price: $7.95

America gave up the three R's and got back the three I's: ignorance, illiteracy, and illegitimacy.

Parents of the postwar years wanted a “kinder and gentler nation.” Americans were vulnerable to the arguments of behavioral psychologists. These came at them through articles and books touting appealing but unworkable philosophies of child management that denounced adult guidance and leadership. These messages were later repeated through colleges of education in the form of courses in "educational psychology.''

Today’s schools promote success without achievement, ethics without religion, and character without morals. Clinical-sounding labels such as “emotionally handicapped” may make failure more palatable. They certainly make it more permanent.

"As you may be aware, data-mining is presented to the public as strictly for security purposes.  Not exactly:  These screening instruments, which I first exposed as “psychographics,” are calculated to predict attitudes through invasive surveys and questionnaires masquerading as “tests” and, if possible, to modify opinions early on via left-wing school curriculum, “enrichment” activities and textbooks.

  

"In 2003, the Education Department, among others, continued to deny that it was collecting, sharing and storing psychological (“politically sensitive”) data on schoolchildren and families.  Today, federal agencies actually brag about their data-collection activities — the same psychological evaluations and lesson plans I described in my 1998 book. With new legislation recently passed, there is nothing now to stop these assessments of political correctness, under the cover of "mental health," from landing on the desktops of company executives, law enforcement agencies or university admissions officers. This gives new meaning to the term "career screening," and it can prevent your child, whatever his or her grades, from aspiring to a position of leadership or influence."

"For the past decade students have had to plow through not only quasi-tests called "assessments," featuring all sorts of questions about their parents and home life, but a multitude of intimate and personal surveys, nearly all of them computerized, as part of their class work. Where do you think newspapers get statistics like "12% of students say they have had intercourse by age 15," or smoked a joint in the last 6 months, or dislike their parents?

"But, of course, these responses are anonymous, you say.

"Dream on. Surreptitious "slugging," "bar-coding," "sticky-labeling," and "embedding identifiers": All these techniques, and more, are described at length in the testing contracts and literature, should anyone bother to read them.

"Children have always been the consummate sources of data, notoriously undiscerning about the kinds of information they disclose. Like all computerized facts and figures, youngsters' responses can be cross-matched with everything from medical and health insurance records to credit card transactions. But no legislation or guidelines have emerged from our hallowed regulative bodies to sufficiently put the brakes on the tremendous upswing of such activity over the past two decades. The 80s and 90s were spent largely in denial. If anything, our leaders made it worse by swallowing malarkey about the supposed benefits of mental health profiling, personality inventories and behavioral screening - to identify potential troublemakers and ensure public safety. Society's reward? More Columbine-like atrocities - and a near-perfect political weapon, now neatly in place."
==========================================================================

Protect yourself and use secure communications with Pink Pagoda service.

WMD found in Iraq and kept Secret!!!

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/26/usa.iraq
Do you remember the WH Correspondent's Dinner when W played a video of him looking around the WH and the Oval Office under papers, desks and in drawers comically saying, "Nope, no weapons of mass destruction in here!" That sequence was very bizarre, and I couldn't understand why he would hold himself up to ridicule for such a controversial joke. The media and the left DID excoriate his joke after the horrors of the war, but it looks now like that was part of the effort to keep the actual discoveries top secret.
https://youtu.be/GvliUuXjbL4

1.)  The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons

"I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation to the United States despite requests from his commander.

Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “ 'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Banner&module=span-ab-top-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1


2.)    Saddam's stockpile 

The yellowcake was the last major stockpile from Saddam's nuclear efforts, but years of final cleanup is ahead for Tuwaitha and other smaller sites.

The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency plans to offer technical expertise.

Last month, a team of Iraqi nuclear experts completed training in the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat, which once housed the Chernobyl workers before the deadly meltdown in 1986, said an IAEA official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decontamination plan has not yet been publicly announced.

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/secret-us-mission-hauls-uranium-iraq/#.VtZrTvkrIUR

3.)  WMDs Were Found in Iraq…CIA Bought 400 Rockets Filled With Sarin Gas

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.

The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”

That led to more discoveries including one cache of 2600 rockets armed with chemical weapons.  At the time, Jarrod Lampier, a now retired Army major said that he was ordered to make a statement downplaying the find:

“’Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say.”

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2015/02/17/wmds-found-iraqcia-bought-400-rockets-filled-sarin-gas/

https://youtu.be/GvliUuXjbL4

Attachments area

does anyone here realize that the WMD's were actually found in Iraq and that fact was kept Top Secret by the military until they were mostly all accounted for and transported out of the region to safety in Canada and other friendly sites?

1.) http://www.nytimes.com/.../us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical...

2.) http://www.nbcnews.com/.../secret-us-mission-hauls.../...

3.) http://www.dcclothesline.com/.../wmds-found-iraqcia.../

Bush laughs at noPreview YouTube video Bush laughs at no WMD in Iraq

 WMD in Iraq

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/26/usa.iraq

Citizens United Wasn’t Really about Corporations as People

link

In the name of campaign finance reform, the United States government argued it could ban books.

===================================

This Friday, “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” will be released in theaters nationwide. The movie, based on the book “13 Hours” by Mitchell Zuckoff, is directed by Michael Bay and gives the public a chance to see one man’s take on what happened in Libya on September 11, 2012, when terrorists stormed our diplomatic compound and killed four Americans: Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, Ambassador Chris Stevens, and Tyrone Woods.

The decision to make this movie and release it so widely was likely unpopular with the Democratic political establishment. While the film focuses on the events on the ground in Benghazi, it is bound to generate interest about what was happening back in Washington and what President Obama and his secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, might have done to prevent the loss of American lives. ...

============================================

Some interesting background here on the Citizens United v. FEC case, which Democrat Party members are totally mis-characterizing as "corporations are people."    I did not know that Citizens United, a non-profit corp, had complained to the Federal Election Comm. about Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004.  The FEC dismissed their complaint.  So CU put out their own documentary bashing Hillary as unfit in 2008.  This time, the FEC changed their tune and tried to censor the CU movie.  A district judge agreed with them and thus it went to the S.Ct. who upheld the First Amendment 5 to 4.  It is about Free Speech, not corporations, or unions, or newspapers "electioneering" for a candidate.

We can see why Hillary hates this Free Speech affirmation, but why would Col. Sanders, Stuart Smalley, Tim Harken, Chuckie Schumer, et al. be so angry about it?    They said what was good for the goose was no good for the gander.   But tit for tat was more just, they learned.
--------------------------------------
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/daily-affirmation-movie-opening/n10706
------------------------------------
http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/14/thank-citizens-united-that-you-can-see-13-hours-this-weekend/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=da7ef07b3e-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-da7ef07b3e-83774053

At the oral argument on appeal, the Supreme Court justices probed the limits of the power the government claimed for itself, and questioned how it squared with the First Amendment. In one incredible back-and-forth, Chief Justice John Roberts asked Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart if there was “a 500-page book, and at the end it says, and so vote for X, the government could ban that?” Stewart’s response: yes.

“Well,” he explains, “if it says vote for X, it would be express advocacy and it would be covered by the pre-existing Federal Election Campaign Act provision.” In the name of campaign finance reform, the United States government argued it could ban books.

Dalton Trumbo, "Johnny Got His Gun [half-cocked]"

link

NOVEMBER 30, 2015|Bruce Cook, civil liberties, Dalton Trumbo, HUAC, Jay Roach, John McNamara, Johnny Got His Gun, Josef Stalin

Film the Legend

by RON CAPSHAW|2 Comments

On publicity junkets for Trumbo, star Bryan Cranston has repeated the line, “Everyone has the right to be wrong.” Cranston claims this quote came from Dalton Trumbo himself, and shows that the blacklisted screenwriter supported and defended everyone’s right to free speech.

The real Trumbo didn’t. The movie is frank about his membership in the American Communist Party, but its makers (director Jay Roach, screenwriter John McNamara) give us not a hint of what that entailed, or how roundly contradicted is Trumbo-the-free-speech-avatar by Trumbo the actual person.

Trumbo celebrates the screenwriter’s battle against the blacklist. There is much to be said for his go-it-alone fight against the Hollywood producers, but the image of him as a New Deal liberal hero defending civil liberties against homegrown fascists crumbles when you look into what he said and did in the 1940s and 50s.

His daughter Nikola has said that being a communist in that period had “nothing to do with Russia” but was instead about the “rights of workers.” If so, Trumbo spent a great deal of “wasted” time defending Joseph Stalin. It is easy to confirm his zigs and zags in accord with the policy changes out of Moscow throughout much of his adult life.

When Stalin allied with Hitler in 1939, and announced that comrades should not support Great Britain’s military response to the Third Reich because it was an “imperialist war,” Trumbo followed suit. He wrote many vociferous attacks on the British during the nearly two years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, despite that they were almost alone in fighting Hitler. His novelJohnny Got His Gun (1939) carried the same pacifist message, for the same reason—a fact that those who celebrate it rarely discuss.

To help the non-interventionist cause, Trumbo even defended the Third Reich. In response to Hitler’s crackdown on France, the famous civil libertarian disputed reports of Nazi brutality coming out of France, declaring that “To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman.”

When the socialist motherland was invaded two years later, Trumbo suddenly and with equal passion switched to supporting the Allies’ war against Hitler. When asked how he could reconcile the pacifistic theme of Johnny Got His Gunwith his newfound bellicosity, Trumbo explained that the quadriplegic, blind, and deaf character he created would have supported the Progressive nature of the war.

The convolutions are breathtaking. The sudden ex-pacifist now found it necessary to denounce pacifists as fascists because they wouldn’t get into the effort to defeat the fascists. And an entity he had just gotten done lambasting as an American Gestapo, the FBI, was now worth helping. The famous civil libertarian encouraged the Bureau to arrest those who spoke out against the war (which, to be fair, did include some homegrown fascists).

After the war’s end, Trumbo’s thinking took a not very surprising turn back to peace as promoted by the Russians. He portrayed the Soviet regime in the manner it presented to the world: as a Progressive country that liberals could easily support. As Stalin swallowed up Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and repressed countries such as Poland, Trumbo amazingly penned a 1946 article asserting that the Soviet Union “had no colonies.” In 1949, a year after being blacklisted, he doubled down, declaring the Soviet Union had no anti-Semitism because it was forbidden by the Soviet constitution.

Uncle Joe needed to be protected not only from the supposed fascists who ran the U.S. government but by rival revolutionaries: the Trotskyists. Trumbo, the famous civil libertarian, bragged of enforcing his own blacklist by keeping such “reactionary and untrue” works as Leon Trotsky’s “so-called biography of Stalin” from making it to the big screen.

The FBI, by the way, was bad again. He denounced it during the Cold War as a “hateful shadow preying on the citizenry.” Meanwhile, as late as 1956, he was still asserting Stalin to be “one of the democratic leaders of the world.”

If the arrogant Trumbo felt a sense of entitlement, so did many of his comrades, for the World War II period was the high tide of communist influence in the film industry. Not only were those like Trumbo highly paid for cranking out screenplays (into which they tried, with only limited success, to insert their pro-Soviet and pro-collectivist point of view), they had a power that reached beyond the industry. John Howard Lawson, the autocratic head of the Hollywood Communist Party, penned the 1942 California Democratic State platform. Trumbo himself wrote speeches for Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.

At the point when Soviet crimes became hardest to deny, the 1956 speech by Nikita Khrushchev admitting that Stalin had killed thousands of innocent people during the Purge Trials of the 1930s, Trumbo again had a characteristically arrogant response. He wrote to a communist friend that he was “not surprised,” having read all the notable anticommunist writers like Arthur Koestler and Ignacio Silone—even Leon Trotsky! So he knew about the murderous policies of Stalin all the while that he publicly defended the dictator? Yes, if that statement is to be believed. (Another possibility is that he just said that in order not to look like a dupe, which would have offended his dignity greatly.)

He enjoyed his position as editor of the prestigious movie-industry journal, The Screenwriter, and it cut no ice with him at all when one anticommunist writer pressed him to publish, in the interest of freedom of expression, an article that Trumbo didn’t agree with. Trumbo, as he rejected the man’s submission, informed him that freedom of expression wasn’t an inalienable right, in fact was downright fascistic and had led to the Holocaust.

Trumbo sidesteps such compromising matters. Clearly they would jeopardize the portrayal of Trumbo as civil libertarian extraordinare. The most criticism the movie allows in is that 1) Trumbo was a limousine communist who craved all the creature comforts of capitalism, and 2) he behaved autocratically toward his wife and children. The movie opts for a breezy, light approach at times (director Roach also made Meet the Parents in 2000 and the Austin Powers movies). But its “screwball comedy” tone halts when it comes to lauding Trumbo as a civil libertarian.

McNamara has said that he did “an enormous amount of research” to write the script, but that his chief source material was Bruce Cook’s 1977 biography of Dalton Trumbo. The Cook biography has been rereleased in conjunction with the film, and in fact Cook is listed as cowriter in the film credits. What is notable about this 1977 work is that it is a kind of time-capsule document of the attempted rehabilitation of Reds in the context of an anticommunism that was being blamed for the carnage of Vietnam.

In the era of the antiwar movement and Watergate, the countercultural Left was in the ascendant, and one sign that they were feeling their oats was their eagerness to promote the rehabilitation of the Hollywood communists of old. For Cook, and many other journalists, biographers, screenwriters, and novelists from E.L. Doctorow to Arthur Laurents (whose novel was the basis for the Robert Redford-Barbara Streisand pro-Popular Front movie, The Way We Were {1973}), the robotic Stalinoids among their elders were now airbrushed into heroic civil libertarians.

And now the time capsule has been removed from its cask and given the imprimatur of accuracy, with the movie following the biography in retaining in every detail Trumbo’s claims about himself as he sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Early in the biography, the reader is helpfully alerted to a certain bias. Cook calls himself an “advocate” for his subject. Indeed he bases his account on interviews only with Trumbo’s admirers, such as his wife, his comrades in the Party, and fellow travelers including Cary McWilliams, editor of the Nation. No adversaries are heard from.

Ronald Reagan, for example, would have been instructive. Reagan went head to head with Trumbo and the other leading Hollywood Reds during the fight for communist control of the Screen Actors Guild in 1946. He recalled Trumbo’s defending the Soviet constitution as more democratic than the American one.

Cook tiptoes so cautiously around these aspects of his subject that Trumbo himself has to bring up the question of his Party membership. The biographer swallows whole the screenwriter’s explanation for joining in 1943—that he had long been allied with the Reds ideologically but now foresaw trouble ahead for the Party from anticommunists. Supposedly he signed on as a way of supporting, in their time of need, those alongside whom he had fought the good fight.

It would be no defense to say the compromising material alluded to above was not available in 1977. Trumbo’s defenses of Stalin, and (as unearthed by writer Allan Ryskind) of North Korea during the Korean War—along with the chilling statements about who, in Trumbo’s judgment, deserved to have his civil liberties respected and who didn’t, have been available in Trumbo’s papers donated to the University of Wisconsin repository since the 1960s.

Indeed one gets a sense throughout the film that McNamara knows Trumbo’s politics were hardly democratic. Other characters do call him a “swimming pool Stalinist.” But most such comments come from the hardline Right, whose representatives in the film are presented as the destroyers of civil liberties. McNamara has Trumbo land comfortably (and falsely) in the sensible center by ranging horrible people to his right, while contrasting him, on the other end of the spectrum, with Arlen Hird, a more hardline comrade played by Louis C.K. In response to Hird’s wish that everyone earn the same salary, McNamara has Trumbo reply urbanely that that would make for “a dull world.”

McNamara does allow that Trumbo was one to dismiss political arguments with frothy spin. Criticized by Hird for “talking like a radical while living like a rich guy,” Trumbo hastily improvises by reasoning that “a radical can fight with the purity of Jesus, but a rich man wins with the subtlety of Satan.” “Please shut up,” replies his comrade.

It’s a pity that this is the only moment in the film when a bullshit detector is applied to Trumbo. For, if one accepts that he did know what was really going on in the Soviet Union, he peddled his own brand of it albeit in a witty manner. The rest ofTrumbo lets its hero present to a credulous world, as if it were real, the hollow image of a supposed defender of everyone’s right to be wrong.

Ron Capshaw

Historian Ron Capshaw is a writer in Midlothian, Virginia.

About the Author

 The Crisis of Our Universities Is a Crisis of Left-Liberalism

Delegation and Polarization 

Is the European Project Falsifiable?

link

"... I’ve developed the habit of asking proponents of the European project what would have to happen for them to stop adhering to it. Is there anything that might cause them to doubt their belief in the merger of European countries? The question is inspired by Karl Popper, who saw in the ability to answer this question the ultimate proof of a rational, scientific approach. He called this principle falsifiability: those defending a position – for example that European integration is important and necessary – should be able to say what would have to happen for them to abandon it. If they are unable to do so, their convictions are not rational or scientific, but ideological or religious...."

Popper introduced this question into the most important debate of his time and used it to expose Marxism. For it is impossible to falsify the view of history as a class struggle that will ultimately result in world revolution. It is a closed theory, based on a vision of the past (‘oppression’) and a vision of the future (‘revolution’), and nothing can possibly refute or prove it wrong. Marxism has an explanation for every possible event. If the workers revolt that is a confirmation of Marxist theory. If the workers do not revolt, then that is also a confirmation of Marxist theory, because failure to revolt is proof of their continued oppression. Whatever happens, we’re never to doubt Karl Marx’s prophecy.

The quasi-argumentation that currently justifies the European project is analogous in significant respects to the type of reasoning once employed by Marxist ideologues. Therefore, when I ask its supporters what would have to happen, or what would have to be proven, to make them change their mind, I never get an answer. Instead, a ritual-like repetition of the EU party line is rattled off, starting with the credo that ‘in the past, Europe waged war’ and that ‘unification brings peace’. The terrorist attacks in Paris, or indeed any other catastrophe (such as the eurocrisis), could never change that fundamental belief – because, so they’ll say, it’s a historical fact. Upon the suggestion that NATO’s role be included in our understanding of the peace we’ve witnessed since 1945, as well as the emergence of the Cold War, the rebirth of Germany as a democratic nation, the rise of the welfare state, the nuclear deterrent and a declining demography (all of which having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the EU), the europhile won’t argue with you (lest he might be forced to concede). Instead, he’ll shift the subject and say: “But the EU brings prosperity.”

If one then explains that free trade is perfectly possible without Brussels’ centralized management of the economy, that countries outside the EU do perfectly fine, and the euro currency has driven several member states to the edge of economic abyss, the Europhile counters that, actually, the real purpose of the EU is to form a ‘block’ against emerging powers such as China and Brazil. To the objections, then brought forward, that the EU undermines the real and unique strength of Europe – its political, legal, and cultural diversity – and that all decisive breakthroughs in European history, including the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, oversees exploration, technological innovation and economic competition, were possible precisely – and only – because of its decentralization, the true believer’s response is to remind you that Europe has enjoyed sixty years of peace. And so the argument comes full circle.

When people voice objections to further expansion of EU powers in referendums or opinion polls the conclusion is always: ‘We need to explain it better’. When its concocted schemes break down, as in the case of the euro, the answer is: ‘It was introduced too soon’. And when the open borders lead to enormous immigration problems and terrorist attacks, they call for a European army! Should you then point out, finally, that the Scandinavian countries and Britain will never agree to be ruled from Brussels by a federal government and an integrated army, the europhile generously suggests a ‘Europe of two speeds’.

Yes, why not have a two-speed Europe? It suggests an open worldview – tolerant and welcoming. Prudent. But what it really means, indeed, what is actually implied in the term, is that we are all on the same track – with the same destination. Some countries are going faster, others more slowly, but we’re all moving in the same direction. The Europhile simply can’t imagine two destinations. There’s only one destination, history moves towards one goal only. Some of us are pulling ahead (at full speed) while others are lagging behind (at a lower speed). But there can be no doubt about the final dot on the horizon.

Overwhelmingly, Europeans do not want the EU’s usurpation of their democratic rights of self government. Southern European economies are on the verge of collapse. Open borders have led to an immigration explosion and now terrorist attacks. A Weimar scenario is unfolding in Greece and Portugal. The Europhile draws only one conclusion: ‘We need more Europe’. His worldview is as hermetically sealed as that of the Marxist, and reality has absolutely no bearing on him. Over sixty-five years after the publication of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, the poverty of historicism is still with us, alive and well, and shared by the overwhelming majority of our hopeless elite.

Thierry Baudet

Thierry Baudet is the author of The Significance of Borders. Why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States, and he is the founding director of the independent thinktank Forum for Democracy.

About the Author

MSLSD!

link


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSRlRR_sA98

Jonah Gldberg had this to say about the rather revealing sentiments expressed by Melissa Harris-Perry in an MSNBC “Lean Forward” clip:

Before we get to all that, a word about the ad campaign itself. In one sense these ads are like the question, “You want extra?” from the masseuse at a shady Vietnamese massage parlor — proof that all pretense at propriety is exactly that, pretense. This is supposed to be a news network. Moreover, it is supposed to be a news network that constantly boasts of its professional and philosophical superiority to Fox News (and it’s true; except for ratings, influence, quality, and profit MSNBC kicks Fox’s butt). And yet, they run testimonials to state power with a frequency that rivals North Korean TV.

But in another sense these ads are the “extra” itself — a rather sad and perfunctory attempt to satisfy urges that barely rise above the masturbatory. The self-love oozes from the screen as the hosts’ inner-15-year-olds realize this is their chance to prove they’re as great as their favorite social-studies teacher told them they were!

Thanks to the magic of Hollywood, they preen for the cameras with an almost post-coital glow as they deliver their little sermonettes that amount to pointless verbal onanism. Hey, look. There’s no-necked Ed Schultz at a diner, looking like he’s having one last cup of coffee before he has to work up a sweat burying the corpse of a dissident union official still moldering in the trunk of his ten-year-old Coupe de Ville. And there’s Rachel Maddow (looking a bit like that aforementioned dead union official) trying to give her Stakhanovite commitment to infrastructure projects a romantic hue.

All Your Children Belong to Us

And now there’s Melissa Harris-Perry. By now you’ve heard of or seen the ad, but just in case here it is. In short, she thinks the idea that your kids are, well, yours is outdated and counterproductive.

Rich Lowry, praise be upon him, offers a fine summary of what Harris-Perry is getting at here. Actually, no disrespect to the guy who signs my paycheck (who is not only a powerful man, but a handsome one) but Harris-Perry herself was more than clear enough about what she’s after. The thing is only 30 seconds long, very highly produced, and straight to the point.

This is important because Harris-Perry is now simultaneously insisting she won’t apologize and insisting that she didn’t say what she so obviously said. In the ad she’s talking about the role of government, government investments, and ridiculing the idea of “private” ownership of kids. “We have to break through,” she urged, “our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.” Now she claims she was talking about civil society and voluntarism?

As the guy who took Obama to his first stable said when the president was about to step in some equine feces, “Oh, that’s horses***.”

No President has ever made a long-term arms control agreement on his own authority.

link
"... this deal may represent the single worst policy outcome of all of Obama’s illegalities.

Mike Ramsey has set forth the case that the Iranian deal is unconstitutional both under the original meaning and under modern law.  Under the original meaning, the Constitution’s provides the way to make major international agreements – through supermajority approval in the Senate, as set forth in Article II, Section 2.  Moreover:

Making major international agreements in the way the text prescribes is not just an eighteenth-century relic; it is the usual course for the United States today (subject to some exceptions noted below).  And the usual course is that if an agreement cannot get two-thirds approval in the Senate, there is no agreement.

What then are the possible justifications for it?  First, the “deal is an executive agreement, done on the President’s independent authority.”  But under the original meaning, there is a strong argument that executive agreements must relate to temporary and minor matters.  Moreover, a similar result obtains under modern law:

the agreements made by prior Presidents under this power have been minor and typically limited to settlements of claims, arrangement of military affairs, diplomatic recognition, and other matters within the President’s military and recognition powers.  No President has ever made a long-term arms control agreement on his own authority.

Second, “The deal is a nonbinding “political commitment” rather than a treaty.  Ramsey claims such nonbinding actions are legitimate under both the original meaning and modern law.  But the Iran deal:

doesn’t look like a nonbinding agreement.  Iran appears to understand it as a binding agreement.  And at least some of its terms appear to (purportedly) constrain U.S. action in the future, beyond the end of President Obama’s term.  It’s likely that a vocal defense of the agreement as nonbinding would substantially undermine the deal.

Finally, Congress will approve the deal.  While the original meaning does not allow a majority of each house of Congress to approve a treaty, in modern times sometimes Congress has done so.  But Congress is very unlikely to approve the deal.

Not only is the deal unconstitutional, its unconstitutionality is essential to it occurring.  If the President had to secure two thirds of the Senate or a majority of both houses, this deal almost certainly would not be approved.

Thus, once again, this President is taking illegal action to make an end run around the Congress to do things that are extremely problematic.  But this time, I fear, the consequences of his action may be worse than in the other cases.  The Iran deal is dangerous."