Presenting:

"Daddy, why does my head disappear so easily into the television set? Daddy?"

So, my recent thoughts have been spent on the importance of a stable, supportive home-front on educational outcome, but also on the question of how do those few schools with poor students and unmotivated parents do it?

To begin answering those questions, I think it’s important to understand a student’s world according to the greatest influences. I think of students as existing in two spheres, each having the ability to shape their development for better or for worse. Education can make people at any age flower into well adjusted, fully functioning individuals, but if a students shows up at the school door unprepared to take advantage of this opportunity, there is a limit to what the establishment can do to reach them. How receptive they are depends on the other, second sphere of everything else: family, peers, television, computers and other media, much of which today I believe we should consider a cultural wasteland.

My experience has convinced me that society would be a different and better place on the whole if parents showed more philanthropy to the development their children’s character rather than spoil them materially, set few limits, and consider them their “friends”. Most of the behavioral problems in the classroom –in my opinion the largest factor obstructing academic progress- would largely disappear if students were taught how to exibit self-control and respect for authority, starting in the home.

But the $20,ooo question is and shall remain: How do you effect change within communities where the generational ethos is selfishness and irresponsibility?

I think the first answer to that tough question is: by sheer necessity. People should be protected from harming themselves and others, namely their children, but they should also be found accountable for their behavior. Decisions are meaningless if there aren’t consequences, and if you shelter an individual from this truth, they will not learn it and ardently resist learning it later in life. I know this from personal experience –studying my own personal behavior- as well as from watching that of others very closely.

In a related way, too, a reevaluation of what is commonly considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior and norms (witness the ongoing culture wars) is necessary. But that isn’t a conversation this country (Europe is gone) is easily willing to assume since so much of what is considered virtuous or wicked is regulated to the authority of opinion and therefore is usually off the table for public debate.

So, I ask again with a slight modification, and with the understanding that I do so as a lonely voice in the wilderness: How do you effect change within communities where the generational ethos is selfishness and irresponsibility, knowing it is politically incorrect to attribute causation to cultural factors that largely lay outside public education?

Letting in the Sunshine

Jon Anderson and Steve Howe look like they’re straight out of a Tolkien work. This is quite possibly one of my most favorite pieces of enchanted music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7NlyzpGcnQ

Long distance runaround

Long time waiting to feel the sound

I still remember the dream there

I still remember the time you said goodbye

Did we really tell lies

Letting in the sunshine

Did we really count to one hundred

Cold summer listening

Hot colour melting the anger to stone

I still remember the dream there

I still remember the time you said goodbye

Did we really tell lies

Letting in the sunshine

Did we really count to one hundred

Human Shields

The above picture offers some valuable insight into the intellectual collusion of the far left and anti-Western movements. In contrast, here's some insight into the conflict in Lebanon during July of last year from Michael Totten:

http://michaeltotten.com/

I turned on my voice recorder. Alan translated.

“So you stayed in Ain Ebel through the whole war?”

I said. “Yes,”

Jad said. “At what point did Hezbollah come to the village and fire their missiles?”

I said. “During the war they took some uninhabited houses at the edge of our village and stayed there.”

“Uninhabited?” I said.

“Yes, uninhabited. Nobody was there, so they took them. They were eating in there, sleeping in there, and maybe doing some reconnaissance.”

“Did they ever go into houses where people were still living?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I wondered if Hezbollah deserved credit for not encroaching on people’s personal space, but Jad answered that question before I could ask it.

“They chose specific houses because nobody was living there and nobody would know.”

“Did they choose to come to this town for strategic or tactical reasons?” Noah said. “Or was it because it’s a Christian town?”

“Strategically, of course,” Jad said. “It’s a high peak. It is very good strategically. But they could have chosen these parts, these lands...”

He gestured with his arm toward the valley below, the place Alan promised to take us next.

“It would have been more protection for them than this village. So why did they come here? I think it’s because it’s a Christian village. They do this.”

“Did anybody who lives here try to get Hezbollah to leave the village?” I said.

“We don’t have any arms,” Jad said. “Hezbollah has arms. But there was this incident that happened. Next to a guy’s place they were firing Katyushas – you know, missiles. They were firing from the house. This guy went out and said Please, do not fire from our home, from in front of our house. My father is very ill and there are some children in the house. They came to him and said Shut up, go in your house, this is none of your business.”

A Battle for Global Values

Listen, I know that Blair is Bush's lap-dog, but let’s give him a chance and read his essay anyways:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070101faessay86106/tony-blair/a-battle-for-global-values.html

Listening and reading Blair makes one long for an articulate leader skilled at oration, something critical in times like these.

Suicide of a Christmas Tree

New York Times front page photo

And we give moral weight to the opinions of people who do things like this because?

And in the information war, the Bush administration seems asleep at the wheel because?

"Rambo"

I can't look away:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4EecWEFw_M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by5_8SpGX-E&NR

Change the Language to Change the Consciousness

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/061230/ids_photos_wl/r3560459222.jpg

Is there an attempt here in the caption to imply global warming is not a natural occurrence?

"Australia's crippling drought, which some lawmakers have called the worst for 1,000 years, is a natural occurrence and has no link to global warming, the country's top science organisation said on Thursday."

If so, then a trans-Siberian land bridge and the conditions that made it possible never existed, and the Americas became populated during some other source migration, according to Reuters, David Gray, and the country's unnamed top science organization. Geology 101 tells us the planet has undergone numerous ice ages in the past 100,000 years due to a warming and cooling of the earth, not to mention the giant epochs before this modern period.

When did we escape this? And who is Reuters to rewrite natural history?

New World Regime

Look who's taken over collective security. I bet if we could peek underneath every imperial helmet, we'd find the monstrous face of George Bush.

Brave New World

Good news everyone! I’ve decided to do the right thing concerning my bleak cultural heritage and interconnected benefits. It's the pragmatist in me: if it doesn't work, ditch it and move on to something else that does. That's why I’m going to move back into a pre-enlightenment state of nature. Yes, no longer will I reside in the realm of ideas; it will be enough to be a person who isn't engaged enough to do the critical thinking and is satisfied with being indignant instead.

Why the change you ask?

Simply put, I’ve grown so weary by the lack of progress this civilization has made in the last 400 years. We haven’t yet put an end to such things as human need, loss, and pain, and so, it must be considered a dismal failure, certainly nothing to honor or be thankful for. Besides, I’m so sick of being chased away from the polling stations by the political opposition armed with machetes that it’s no longer worth the struggle.

Won’t you join me?

Be honest: In order to maintain some sense of personal integrity, you should be willing to hold yourself accountable to your beliefs by actually disassociating yourself with a society so disgraceful and instead begin construction of your new world within your new unconstrained freedom.