Reticulator

Banality of evil

 Brave New World  No Responses »
Sep 282007
 

Here at Suicide of the West you can find photos of evildoers getting in a little R&R:

What is most monstrous about these photographs is that they depict no monsters. No spaced-out, khat-chewing raiders ripping around in technical trucks. No rampaging, machete-wielding mobs caught up in the vortex of spontaneous violence. One is struck here by the sheer ordinariness of the happy people smiling back at the camera, people who at those very moments were willing, even enthusiastic accessories to the most horrific crime in human history. They were functionaries, bureaucrats, administering the machinery of genocide with professional detachment and absolute moral disinterest.  Clock in and kill the Jews. Clock out and catch a movie with the wife. And, unlike the rest of the German nation, the people in these photographs lacked even the false excuse, “We never really knew.” To the contrary, these were the accountants who worked the numbers, the stockmen who inventoried the gold teeth and shoes, the musclemen who slammed and locked shut the doors to the showers and the crematoria. These people knew full well, and still they drank wine and poked at volleyballs, kissed their kids goodnight and made love to their wives.

It’s scary to see this, but it’s important that we do.   These aren’t ranting maniacs (though there were a few of those in Nazi Germany.)  These are people not that different from us.    Evil is not something out there in an alternate universe.

It’s something I think about when working on my Black Hawk Slept Here history at hawkroost.com and spokesrider.com.  I can identify with the Euro-American settlers.   I can take pride with them in their accomplishments and in the communities they built.   Yet they were also participants in evil done to the Native Americans whose land they took.   And the evil is not marked with spooky music, dark hats, bad hair and bad complexions like in the movies.   It’s very ordinary.

School buses, again

 School decentralization, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 272007
 

Buckle up on buses?  The Kalamazoo Gazette asks whether Michigan should require seat belts on school buses.

A better question would be why we have such abominations as school buses in the first place?  Someday people are going to look back like we now do on child labor in factories, asking what kind of brutish people those were who could make their own children waste hundreds of hours of their childhoods on those things.

I wish I had back all the time I spent on school buses during my high school days.  (For most of my elementary school, I usually walked to school — a quick walk across a hay field in good weather, maybe a little longer if I had to go round by the road.)  I wish we had never had to put our own kids on those things.   I still remember the first day our oldest got on a bus to go to a pre-school class.  It was probably more traumatic for us than for her, but those things don’t do anyone any good.

How will kids get to school without buses?  Well, we sometimes put some extra CO2 in the atmosphere to drive our kids to school instead of making them take the bus.  But the real solution is to break up large school districts in favor of neighborhood schools closer to homes.   If we put kids on buses, the least we can do is keep the time spent there as short as possible.   It will do until an enlightened age comes that does away with them altogether.

Apology in lieu of fines

 Bash the Messenger  1 Response »
Sep 272007
 

Quote of the day.

MoveOn.org is going to send the Times a check for $77,000. The Times has apologized, which is sweet, but normally the FEC does not accept apologies in lieu of fines. –George Will

Thanks to The Main Adversary for pointing this one out to me. Normally I would have got it from Townhall.com, but I’ve somehow managed not to look at that site for a couple of days.

Jury duty and second-hand television

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Sep 262007
 

I got called in for jury duty today, and was sent home after a morning in the jury assembly room.   Hopefully that will be the extent of my duty this time.

I didn’t exactly spend my time in that room, though.   I walked out when the television was turned on — presumably to pacify us while we waited.   I couldn’t walk far enough to get completely away from the idiot noise that came out of the box — they don’t want potential jurors mingling with people involved in the cases.  But at least I could stand out there and read a book without being made dumber for every minute that I would have spent in the same room with the idiots on the tube.

Why is it that we’re not allowed to bring cell phones and communications devices into the building, yet they’re allowed to assault us with television?   And they don’t allow smoking.  They try to protect us from second-hand smoke, but what’s the point when we have second-hand teevee idiocy around us?

The least they could do is provide a separate non-TV room where those of us who don’t want to listen to second-hand idiots could go?   Eventually, people will realize this tv crap is a greater threat to health than smoking, and all public places will be made teevee free.     (Don’t get me started about hospital waiting rooms.)

Elián González and Rudolf Nureyev

 Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 242007
 

One of the most despicable acts of the Clinton administration was the way it turned an innocent young boy over to the murderous dictator Fidel Castro.   A lot of people pretended to uphold parental discretion in this matter, saying it should be up to the father where the kid should go.    Of course, this is probably the only time in their lives that these people ever favored parental custody.  When it comes to abortion, or sex education, school choice, or health care — they are usually in favor of the government’s prerogative over parental control.

There were also a few gullible conservatives who actually bought this line about parental rights, too.  In their case, they probably thought they were being consistent in upholding their principles.

The problem is, we don’t have any way of knowing what Elián’s father really wanted.  The Clinton administration took pains not to find out.

Here’s an example of how parents are not allowed to be parents when they live under the thumb of Fidel’s soulmates:

The KBG’s long war against Rudolf Nureyev

The KGB, however, wanted him back. His celebrated teacher, Alexander Pushkin, and his devoted student friend, Tamara Zakrzhevskaya, were ordered to write pleading letters; his father, a loyal communist, was pressed to fetch him; and Soviet sympathisers in Paris tried to destroy his confidence by pelting him with missiles and catcalls on stage.

When these efforts failed, the KGB made other plans, one of which was to break his legs. He was tried in his absence and sentenced to seven years in prison as a traitor.

Next, the KGB turned to his friends. Pushkin was repeatedly questioned, and suffered a heart attack.

The careers of Leonid Romankov and his twin sister Liuba, scientists whose interest in literature and art had stimulated Nureyev, were blighted because of their friendship with him. Tamara Zakrzhevskaya was expelled from university, and forbidden to travel even to Eastern Europe for 30 years, for the crime of knowing him.

and

In the weeks after his defection, Nureyev was lonely and depressed. He telephoned home: his father refused to speak to him, but his mother tugged at his heart-strings, with the KGB keenly listening in.

He called East Berlin to speak to the handsome German student, Teja Kremke, with whom he had had an affair in Leningrad. This time the Stasi were listening.

I suspect that many of those on the left knew very well that they were partners in a similar action against Elián.   They certainly tried very hard not to show any glimmer of understanding when things such as this were described to them.

 

Bicycles, a cure for boredom on the road

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 232007
 

Joseph B. White at the Wall Street Journal says new car sales are down because cars are boring:

New-car sales are sagging in America and car makers are blaming the housing slump or the credit crunch. I suspect something else. I suspect boredom. Face it. A lot of the cars sold in America are just dull.

Whose heart leaps at the thought of firing up a Toyota Corolla? If you took away the logos, who could discern a significant difference among the interiors of any five $35,000 luxury cars? Black plastic, faux wood grain, even “metallic look” plastics — clichés all. Sport utility vehicles and crossovers? Ho hum.

Well, of course cars are boring. They’ve been boring since the 1970s. They’re commodity items now. And the safety and efficiency people have taken everything of interest out of the main roads. Bridges are just slab-sided affairs that keep you from seeing the scenery you’re crossing. Local safety people cut down the trees that used to provide arbors over country roads, and have cut and filled to provide good lines of sight, and incidentally to disconnect the roads from the world of which they once was a part. And, as White points out, there is the traffic.

White, being a journalist, blames the state of affairs on government. No, not because of governmental meddling. He thinks there hasn’t been enough government meddling. Ho, hum. Dog bites man; journalist wants more government. All the things he wants may make cars more efficient, but they will not make driving less boring.

If you want the open road to be exciting, get a bicycle. In my role as The Spokesrider I get more memories of scenery and road experiences in any day of riding than I do in years’ worth of driving.

Even now, I can review in my mind details of a week-long tour I did eleven years ago. I sometimes surprise myself with what I recall when I try to review the whole ride in my mind, from beginning to end. The closest I come to that in a car was a drive to Canada’s Arctic some years ago — but even there I can’t remember all the little details that I do of bike rides to podunk towns in the Midwest. Bicyling is a multi-sensory experience — with sight, smells, touch, sounds. Sometimes it’s even a tasty experience, as when riding late in the day and insects come out.

Cars, on the other hand, are designed to insulate you from sensation. Get a bicycle.

One-handed fight against terrorism

 Checks and balances, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 222007
 

From The Economist:

To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

Exactly so.  But we’ve spent many decades getting used to the idea that there really are no limits on what government can do.    The General Welfare clause tells us that anything goes, they say, no matter that the Constitution says no.   Interstate Commerce is defined to include much more than interstate commerce.   So how are we going to all of a sudden ask our government accept the limits of the Bill of Rights when it comes to spying on citizens?

A time for bragging

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Sep 212007
 

I learned about this Civics quiz over at SCSU scholars.

I took the quiz while watching RTR Planeta for the first time in months.   Hmmm.  Now that channel features ads, it looks like.  Or is it a program about TV ads?   Hard to say when I can only understand 10 percent of the words.

Scored 60 out of 60 on the civics quiz.

I was a bit shaky on the question about bond purchases by the Federal Reserve, and also on the one, “Which author’s view of society is presented correctly?”   But I’m one of those people whose ability to answer multiple choice questions often exceeds his knowledge of the subject.

Slippery Slope Eudemon

 Brave New World, Schools, Social controls  No Responses »
Sep 212007
 

The Daily Eudemon talks about the slippery slope:

New hero: A 72-year-old man with a wine purchase refuses to produce proof that he’s 21 years old. I understand the policy: “If we don’t card everyone, we end up on a slippery slope. Do we not card the 40-year-old? The 30-year-old? Eventually, we’ll end up making judgment calls and offending people. We might even discriminate!”

Well, deal with it in a rational manner. What the slippery slope chanters don’t realize is, everything is a slippery slope: Anything not reigned in with moderation can go too far. What the haters of discrimination don’t realize is, everyday life is full of discrimination: judgment calls, nuanced calls, irrational calls, emotional calls, reflex calls. People make simple decisions that are so complex in their formulation that we couldn’t flowchart them on movie screen, and 99% of people make these decisions just fine. The other 1% are the mentally addled, and they can’t hold down a job. If a person is mentally normal enough to hold down a job, he ought to be given the discretion to decide that a 72-year-old man is over age 20.

This reminds me of how school boards get all bureaucratic about behavior control. They come up with bureaucratic rules to apply district wide about “1st offense we do this, 2nd offense we do that,” or they come up with a zero tolerance policy about inappropriate touching and end up sending seventh graders off to jail for butt-swapping.

It seems that’s what we get when our schools too large and centralized. We can no longer trust teachers and principals to use their good judgment because they are beyond the social controls of the local communities. So we have no choice but to get all bureaucratic and formulaistic in the way we run the places.

As for the situation in the U.K., I blame it on the welfare-police state, for similar reasons. And I agree with the Daily Eudemon — the resistor is a hero.

Where to find rich, stupid investors

 Bash the Messenger, Clinton scandals  No Responses »
Sep 212007
 

Another way to explain the latest revelations on the Hsu scandal:

Hsu was looking for people a) with lots of money to invest in his Ponzi schemes, and b) stupid enough and greedy enough to fall for them.

So where did he spread all of his bait? Among Hillary Democrats. He must not have expected that any Republicans would meet those criteria.

Maybe he needed to get out more.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries