A Voice for Freedom

To mark my two hundredth post (and nine thousandth visitor), something totally pointless: the hilarious story of a power outage in Alaska caused by an eagle carrying a deer head.

Apparently, the eagle found the deer head in a landfill and failed to clear a power line as it flew away. 10,000 Juneau residents were without power for forty-five minutes. The eagle was described as "overly ambitious" by Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light and Power employee who also said, "You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario."

Amazing. In a year and a half, I'm going to be moving from a place where we have to have special shopping carts because of the wind to a place where a national symbol carries away bits of other animals and brings down power lines.

Turns out the new multicultural Britain has more than one problem facing it; a recent study has shown that radicalism is on the rise among British Muslims. The study found that forty percent of Muslims aged 16-24 in the UK would prefer to live under Islamic sharia law in Britain, compared to 17% of those over 55. One in eight young Muslims said that they admired groups like al-Qa'eda, over a third said that Muslims who convert to another religion should be punished by death, three quarters would prefer that Muslim women "choose to wear the veil or hijab", and 40% said they would want their children to attend Islamic schools. 58% said that the world's problems are "a result of arrogant Western attitudes", but most did not display much actual knowledge of current events.

The mosaic ideal is all well and good most of the time, but the line needs to be drawn at creating a society in which militant fundamentalism is tolerated. Dozens of other cultural minorities in Britain manage to retain their own cultures without hating the people around them, but then again, they are not being confronted every day with divisive messages about holy wars and the like. And for that reason, acceptance needs to have limits. People need to be aware that certain things just can't be accepted - like supporting groups whose only goal in life is to destroy the place you live and everyone in it.

We in North America can learn from this. It is clear from this study that British Muslims who grew up in a different type of acceptance - that of inclusion rather than pluralism - have retained their own culture and still grown to respect the culture and laws of the place in which they now live; multiculturalism as an "anything goes" mentality, however, seems to foster more dangerous attitudes. This is what leftists in the US would have us move toward, claiming that we have no right to force our own values on immigrants. I would submit that if someone chooses to move to a country, they have implicitly agreed to insert themselves into the culture of that country to some degree, and that we have every right to expect that they will at least respect our people and our laws. That's all I'm asking for - not for immigrants to lose everything they are, but simply for them to respect the people around them as we are expected to respect them.

I'd be interested to see the results of a study like this in the US; my guess is that the numbers it reported would be much more encouraging. Then again, I wouldn't have guessed the numbers would be so bad in the UK either. I guess I'm just too darned optimistic.

Six girls at a rural Tennessee high school have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder in regard to a list of some three hundred people they commented they would like to kill - a list which included the school's athletes, a few teachers, Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey, and the Energizer Bunny.

Administrators apparently thought at first that this was a joke, but began thinking it was serious when they found the girls' MySpace pages - because that just changes everything, apparently. The inclusion of the Energizer Bunny on the list does not seem to have diminished the seriousness of the whole debacle, and the inclusion of Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey has not gathered support to the girls' cause the way I would have thought it would.

The local police chief admits that there is no evidence an attack was imminent, and the girls are not known to have been in possession of any weapons, but they have still been charged with homicide conspiracy.

The Energizer Bunny has not made himself available for comment; however, friends Coca Cola Bear and Arby's Oven Mitt said they were not concerned for the rabbit's safety. The Jolly Green Giant, commenting on the police department in question, used the word "harebrained".

Check this out; it may help you understand why I support the UK Independence Party. It turns out the European Union has hidden bureaucrats.

The European Commission claims that it has 25,000 employees; the British government's estimate is 37,000; but the true number, according to a new study by think tank Open Europe, is 54,000. In other words, the EU has 29,000 stealth employees. That's more than eighteen times the number of people currently employed by MI6 (at least, according to the most reliable numbers I know of; the Secret Intelligence Service doesn't actually publish its staff complement). 29,000 secret paper-pushers to keep the wheels of red tape grinding as slowly as possible throughout Europe, and 1600 secret service officers to defend British interests worldwide. This seems a bit unbalanced. Which, of course, is a word which perfectly describes Brussels in general.

Open Europe said that many EU agencies took months to respond to the request to disclose their staff numbers, and one repeatedly refused outright. The think tank also found that the EU has twice as many bureaucrats earning over £54,000 ($106,000 US) as the British government - almost ten thousand.

Tory MP Michael Gove said: "We know that the EU has a system of allocating jobs that is more about giving jobs to the boys in favoured member states, and not about spending taxpayers' money efficiently. It's pork-barrel politics."

Brilliant, isn't it? We add more and more levels of government and they waste more and more money and then, just when you think they've gotten as bad as they possibly could, someone finds out they've been hiding extra staff from the common sense raids, no doubt in hidden basements behind wine racks. Or maybe they've got some kind of nifty active camouflage suits. They'd be ahead of MI6 there too.

North Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing

Hmmm...but I suppose the "Axis of Evil" still doesn't exist, right libs?

I was in an education class today when, lo and behold, someone said something stupid.

It was my professor, detailing her thoughts on a student in a previous class who maintained that the primary issue of the War Between the States was not slavery. As one of our resident history people, I made it quite clear that this person had been correct, that states' rights were really the central area of contention, but of course, I was silenced both by the fact that nobody was really interested in talking about it and by the fact that we didn't have the time in any case. So I got incensed and decided I should write something here.

As I will try to make my students understand in the future, every issue and event in history is more complex than it looks at first glance. As much as people would like to believe that they can, one truly cannot describe anything in a single word, be that word "slavery", "freedom", "right", "wrong", "evil", "good", "antitransubstantiationalist", or "antidisestablishmentarianism".

The War Between the States was all about slavery, they say. Explain a few things to me, then.

First, how is it that, for this five-year period in American history, Congress and the Senate were somehow filled with apolitical idealogues who impossibly managed to maintain their positions of power based entirely on one issue, an issue which far fewer northerners than we are led to believe really, truly cared about?

Second, why is it that this issue came to a head so suddenly with the election of Abraham Lincoln, chosen for the Republican ticket because his views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of contenders William Seward and Salmon Chase?

Third, why did Lincoln "free" only those slaves living in states which had seceded, allowing the four slave states remaining in the Union - Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky - to keep their slaveholding laws?

Fourth, why is it that the abolition of slavery was only stated as a goal in the second year of the war, and civil and voting rights for blacks were not stated goals of the Union government until the time of the Reconstruction?

Fifth, and finally, why is it that, if the Union's stance was based on compassion, it was Union generals who made a point of attacking civilian industries and civilian populations in order to destroy the Confederacy's ability and will to fight, while Confederate generals were more restrained in their strategies and generally fought a war to protect themselves from northern military aggression and territorial encroachment rather than to harm the Union's citizens and society?

Simplification is, as always, the antithesis of understanding.

Now, I'll say this one more time: I'm for gay marriage, but that issue is, to me, less important than the ideal that, in a democracy, the government must follow the will of the people. It is not for politicians to guide our moral development. That's why the current situation in Massachusetts (which apparently I still can't spell without help) so interests me. A petition came forward from the citizenry of that state last year to amend the state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. The legislature is, by the provisions already laid out in that same constitution, required to vote on any such petition, but they managed to adjourn without doing so. In one of his last acts as governor, Republican Mitt Romney managed to force the issue, and the vote finally happened early this month. Now, here's where I think Massachusetts is really on track: the state constitution declares that an amendment proposed by petition from the public only needs to be supported by 25% of the state's legislators in order to make it to a plebiscite. The amendment received 62 of 200 votes, and therefore will be on the ballot in the next Massachusetts general election. Whichever way it goes, this is a victory for democracy. Whatever brilliant persons wrote the Massachusetts state constitution are probably dead by now, but just in case their spirits are in the habit of browsing the blogosphere, I'd like to offer my thanks and congratulations for forcing Massachusetts' system of government to remain true to democratic principles, even if the government proper is against them.

From More Ramblin's:

The following is the winning entry from an annual contest calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term.

This year's term: Political Correctness.

'Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.'

From W F Deedes in the Daily Telegraph, an interesting story of life in MI5, and the first time I have encountered the name Hermione in relation to a real person:

My sister Hermione Phipps, who died this week, had spent all her professional life, including the war years, in MI5, tactfully described in the family circle as 'the Foreign Office'.

I have no idea what she did, for, in a long and happy association, we never discussed her work.

There was a day in the 1950s when I was a junior minister in the Home Office, and we were called on to decide whether or not to admit a certain individual to this country.

I was advised to consult MI5. The voice that responded to our telephone call was my sister's. We never subsequently talked about even this minor coincidence. She belonged to an age in which the confidential business of the state remained confidential.

There probably aren't a lot of people outside of Georgia who've heard about the hubbub over Milton County - or, more specifically, the lack thereof. This area was merged into the adjoining Fulton County during the Depression, and has remained so ever since; now, people are saying they want their county back. Folks in the northern area of Fulton County - that which used to be Milton County - are saying that currently, there are too many people under one municipal government, their government is too far from its people, and they don't have enough say in what's done with their tax money. Makes sense, right? Local governance, democracy, all that stuff? Well, yeah, but leave it to liberals to turn the issue into something it isn't; it's being portrayed as a racial issue, because northern Fulton County is predominantly white and southern Fulton County is predominantly black.

The current county has a population greater than each of the six smallest states, and even the would-be Milton County has a population of 300,000 - more than double the population of the hundred smallest counties in the United States combined. It seems to me that there is a genuine need here for more local, more responsive government, but the Democrats and much of the media are saying it's all about race. They're worried that the move would make Atlanta look "less progressive" to businesses around the country and people around the world, and that the loss of tax revenue from the northern area of the county - which contains 29% of Fulton County's population but provides 42% of its property taxes - would harm social programs in the poorer, predominantly black area to the south.

Again, it's the Democrats who dredge up a racial issue and attempt to beat everyone around the head with it until people are too ashamed and embarrassed to vote for what is really a perfectly reasonable proposition. Hopefully it won't work this time, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

By the way, the mainstream media are just as much to blame. Want to know what Yahoo's title for their article on the subject was? "White Atlanta suburbs push for secession". It's almost comical.

Liberals always think it's ethnocentric and hubristic to believe that western democracies are better than other countries, but when something like this happens, how can we come to any other conclusion?

Kamalnath Patel, a farmer from central India, during his trial for rape, offered to marry the victim. She accepted. They had a temple ceremony attended by the girl's family, and prosecutors are saying that the marriage may mitigate Patel's sentence.

Rape is generally considered the fault of the victim in India, and tends to sully the victim's reputation far more than the attacker's; as a result, family members on both sides were in favor of this particular marriage. Apparently, it's better for the girl to marry the man who assaulted her than to be thought unclean.

Okay, so Donald Trump can be a bit of a fruit loop sometimes, but today, I'm on his side. This article, which I ironically found in the Daily Telegraph (a London newspaper), describes how Trump is being fined over $1200 a day because the flagpole at his waterfront club in Palm Beach is too tall and the Stars and Stripes flying on it is too large. Trump has refused to pay, and is instead suing the town for $12 million, claiming that Palm Beach is selectively enforcing its regulations and that flying the flag is a constitutionally-protected exercise of free speech. "They're fining me for putting up the American flag. This is probably a first in United States history," he said. "They want me to pay a daily fee for the privilege to fly the American flag, or preferably they want me to rip it down. I'm just not going to do it." He promised that if he wins the law suit, the money awarded will go to servicemen returning from Iraq.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel commented that if Palm Beach officials "think there is ever a time the American flag is not appropriate, perhaps they should all go back to whatever country they came from".

Tony Senecal, Trump's Palm Beach butler, humorously commented that the flag is probably visible "halfway from Cuba"; it is 25' by 15', the same size as the flag at the Capitol building. The flagpole is 80 feet tall, and Palm Beach officials claim that it is unsafe, despite its having been designed to withstand hurricane winds of up to 150 miles per hour.

This is either liberalism or bureaucracy run amok, and I'm honestly not sure which. Now, to be frank, I've always considered Americans a little too obsessed with their flag, certainly far more so than any other country I've visited or lived in (although I also think the Brits could stand to go in for overt displays of patriotism a little more than they do). But if Trump wants to spend god knows how much on this giant expression of love for his country, what exactly is the problem with it? Are we considering it inflammatory to be a patriot these days? Who exactly is this flag going to offend - the tens of thousands of people who cross the Florida Straits every year to reach freedom in the United States?

London, despite the associations it may bring up in the minds of many foreigners - tea and crumpets and Big Ben and all that - is today perhaps the world's most multicultural city. "Multicultural", of course, is a somewhat nebulous and malleable term; in this case, it means that London, in my experience at least, is a city where multiple cultures exist side-by-side, maintained not by government policy but by their own internal momentum. And for the most part, London's multicultural nature serves as proof that Trudeau was wrong: multiple cultures can exist without being in opposition to one another.

Still, as great as all that sounds, and as wonderful as it is to live in a place where you can find three pubs, a fish & chip shop, two Indian restaurants, and an amazing pizzeria within walking distance (damn, I'm making myself hungry now), London's transition from heart of the British Empire to microcosm of the world hasn't been without its problems. In fact, the only thing that's really stayed the same is that it's still the center of the universe.

Considering how much time we spend talking about diversity in schools in the US, imagine what it's like in Britain these days. People are always talking about respecting the rights of minorities in schools. But a recent government report is attempting to draw attention to the fact that white students face discrimination in schools as well. The report found that white children in mixed-race communities are facing "labelling and discrimination", leading them to question their own ideas of being British. "They can feel beleaguered and marginalised," it said, "finding their own identities under threat as much as minority ethnic children might not have theirs recognised." Sir Keith Ajegbo, author of the report, says there is no point in "creating confidence in minority ethnic pupils if it leaves white pupils feeling disenfranchised and resentful." One specific example is that of a student who, after a discussion in which other pupils in the class said that they came from Congo, Portugal, Trinidad and Poland, said that she "came from nowhere". We've all likely heard similar things; I know I've seen many an instance in various classes in which someone said they "had no heritage".

Former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith said it was about time that the government woke up to this issue, and added that "for some white working-class boys, it appears to them that everybody else but them has somebody who worries about them. They feel they are at the bottom."

Again, I say: thank God for British common sense.

As an afterthought, I'd like to point out the requirements for British citizenship courses. Under the curriculum, pupils should be taught to:

Think about topical political, spiritual, moral, social and cultural issues, problems and events

Justify an opinion about issues, problems or events

Contribute to group discussions

Take part in school and community-based activities

You'll notice that nowhere in there is there anything about teaching students what to think, or to follow their teachers' notions of "social justice". Intriguing.

The report itself can be found in full here. I encourage you to check out the summary pages, but I wouldn't suggest reading the whole thing - it's 126 pages long.

You know, the idea that people are totally incapable of helping themselves without "expert" assistance doesn't just come from government. Case in point: medicine. Psychiatry, specifically.

I won't go into the nitty gritty details of my medical history, but suffice to say there was a six-year period of serious confusion, during which no doctor I saw actually had any answers - not that they admitted it, of course. Their attempts to make it look like they knew what they were talking about reached a peak when one, an allergist who had known me by this time for about half an hour, suggested that my health problems were psychosomatic and sent me to a psychiatrist, who, when I met her, gave me a series of questionnaires which apparently determined that I had low self-esteem and issues with separating from my family. I pointed out that I was sixteen and in the process of applying to an Ivy League university three thousand miles from home, and cancelled our next appointment.

What I'm driving at with all this - I know, I'm being a bit roundabout with it - is the idea that we can medicate for personality. Scared of something? Take a pill. Got a hyperactive kid? That's not normal, certainly - give him ritalin, a drug not far removed from cocaine. Can't sleep? Well, there can't be a reason for that beyond a chemical imbalance; grab a prescription. Dealing with post-traumatic stress? Surely the human mind can't be capable of handling that without medication. We've got drugs for stabilizing and controlling moods, compulsiveness, disorganized thinking, and anxiety, not to mention hallucinations and delusions and other things that, three hundred years ago, would have made someone saintly instead of crazy. And maybe paranoid schizophrenia is something that can and needs to be treated, but how many people in the world are taking pills to deal with real emotions that humans are supposed to feel?

I saw an ad on TV the other day for a new anti-depressant which listed among its side-effects the possibility of increasing thoughts of suicide in children and teens. Our society actually accepts the sale of a drug whose producer admits that it may contribute to suicides. What kind of world are we living in when artificially alleviating sadness is worth sacrificing lives? When the hope that a pill can take your pain away is worth playing Russian Roulette? I don't know about you, but I really have no interest in anyone or anything that purports to be able to protect me from life. To quote the great Eric Matthews: "Life's tough - get a helmet."

Regular readers may have noticed that I make quite a hobby of quote collecting, so much so that there are at least ten or twenty new ones in the "quote of the moment" roster every month. In compiling my latest update, I went on a bit of a "famous-dictator" trip. I'm not sure why, to be honest, but it happened and I went with it. It's fascinating to see that people can be cold, cruel, inhuman, wise, poignant, and brilliant all at once...fascinating and terrifying. Check out the top of the quotes list page for the update. Here's a sample, and definitely my favorite of the newest bunch:

"For there is one thing we must never forget: the majority can never replace the man. And no more than a hundred empty heads make one wise man will an heroic decision arise from a hundred cowards."
-Adolf Hitler

This quote brings us to an intriguing aspect of human nature: horror is temporally relative. Tourists flock to the pyramids of Egypt and have no problem calling them amazing and impressive, and don't think much about the fact that they were built by thousands of slave laborers. The ancient Roman leaders? Some of them were brutal, to put it mildly, but nobody really cares. Genghis Khan killed millions - perhaps tens of millions - yet was hardly lacking in intelligence or eloquence, and in some parts of the world is thought of as a great leader to this day. The Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades are thought of more as distasteful historical anecdotes than anything we should have an emotional reaction to. Louis XIV and Napoleon? Well, if you happen to meet someone who knows what they were all about, they might balk at Louis's brutality and Napoleon's imperialism, but our legal system is still based on the Napoleonic Code. So what is it that happens when we arrive at the twentieth century? What makes the more modern monsters worse in our minds than their predecessors? Is it because their atrocities were better calculated, more efficiently presented, and more deftly used by our modern historians, media, and politicians? Because we may remember talking to people who lived through those days? Perhaps. But what does that mean to our impressions of these people and what they have left us? Do we relegate anything they might have said to the mists of obscurity until future generations are ready to deal with it all? Do we publish their speeches and writings and say that they are evil, because they came from the minds of evil people? Or do we take them as evidence that, just as a wrong man need not be evil, an evil man need not always be wrong?

In browsing ElephantMan's blog recently, I noticed a button for something called "Blogshares". "What's this?" I wondered, so I clicked it, and found that it is a "fantasy stock market" for blogs. It values blogs based on incoming link volume, tracks each blog's "market share", sets virtual "share prices" for blogs...a fascinating system, all in all. I was mildly intrigued, until I found that my own blog was listed - then I was, to put it as eloquently as possible, freaked. A company that, until yesterday, I had never heard of has been collecting data on my blog since I made my first post on 25 September, 2004. Two and a half years ago.

"So what?" you might ask? Why does it matter that a website somewhere displays to anyone who bothers to look data about my blog, so long as it isn't personal information? Well, here's your answer: Blogshares logs incoming and outgoing links, which, in essence, means that it tracks bloggers' online social networks. This is personal information. Maybe to the average person, an online persona - if they even have one, which is unlikely - is just a mask, a tool, and so the social networks one creates online are not particularly important. To a blogger, though, an online persona is an important part of a person, something like a journalist's pseudonym; it is through that persona that we can write with relative impunity, and that we create social circles totally apart from that of our "real lives". I am no more comfortable with a company tracking my online friendships than I would be with them tracking my offline ones.

All this is made even more creepy by the fact that I run A Voice for Freedom under a sort of "half-anonymity"; except for my profile photo, there's no personal data about me anywhere on the blog, but nearly anyone who knows my real name can find out with great ease that I am its author. If other bloggers I know operate the same way, imagine the personal data that Blogshares could allow others to collect.

I checked out Bloshares' privacy policy. Here are a couple of the more interesting passages:

We automatically log personal data by means such as programming or we link information automatically logged by such means with personal data about specific individuals.

There are no national laws or self-regulatory schemes applicable to our website or organization.

There are no global or regional regulatory or self-regulatory schemes applicable to our website or organization.

Obviously these folks have next to no respect for people's privacy. It's that last bit which frightens me most, though - where are the legislators on this? They can pass hundreds of pages of laws about eggs every year, but ask them to protect their citizens' privacy, and they get lax about it. Amazing. It all goes back to the first rule of government: the more worthwhile it is, the less likely they are to do it.

You'll notice a Blogshares button on my blog now. Why? Because as far as I can tell, there's no way for the writer of a blog to request that it be removed from their system. Because if they're going to be tracking me, I feel better being in on it. And because I'd like to keep watch on the data they're collecting.

Well, that's it for today. If you'll excuse me now, I'm going to go re-read John Twelve Hawks' The Traveller, cut up my social security card, and start paying for everything in cash.

EDIT, 27 Jan 2007: I seem to have misunderstood the nature of the data collected by Blogshares; if I understand correctly now, it logs only the number of links on a page, not the actual use thereof. Still, the nature of their privacy policy and the fact that they collect data without the page author's knowledge continue to disturb me somewhat.

For all we hear about the horrors of the aftermath of Katrina, perhaps the worst tragedy is that we never hear about things like this - a frozen embryo, rescued along with 1400 others from New Orleans' Lakeland Hospital, became a baby boy by the name of Noah who was born yesterday in Covington, Louisiana.

The more our society puts politics into everything, the more we take humanity out.

Every year, Harris Interactive does a poll to measure the level of trust the average American has in a variety of professions. My dad - known to the blogging world as "Boot" - has written a good column relating the latest Harris poll to the increasing lack of trustworthiness demonstrated by our government in recent decades. For my part, I'd like to present another angle.

The poll can be found here. Take a look near the middle of the chart, and you'll find a category called "ordinary man or woman". This means that the majority of respondents would trust the professions above this row more than a stranger whose occupation they were unaware of, and those below less. So, who do we trust less than "ordinary" people? The usual suspects: lawyers, trade union leaders, pollsters (an ironic bit of data for a poll to collect!), journalists, politicians, civil servants...one wonders why a poll was needed to determine any of this, really. Now, who do we trust more? Doctors, scientists, cops, religious and military leaders, judges...no surprises there. But teachers and professors also made the cut. And that, my friends, is dangerous.

Teachers were the second-most trusted profession, following only doctors, and professors were fifth on the list. At least they're in the correct order; personally, I trust teachers, on the whole, to tell the truth. Not the whole truth - consciously or unconsciously, teachers tend to skew their lessons toward their own point of view - but the majority of teachers, I think, can generally be trusted not to engage in the outright deception of their pupils. Professors, on the other hand, are more likely than not to have political agendas and to attempt to indoctrinate their students. Some university programs make it impossible - through interference or concrete regulations - to graduate without either turning liberal or pretending to so do. When it comes to professors I have trusted absolutely to always be honest with students, I think I've had perhaps three. The fact that people apparently trust academics so easily makes the university community's deceptive nature all the more insidious.

Sometimes I wonder just where my brain is wired backwards. Here I am, libertarian to the core, and I choose education and anthropology as my majors. To paraphrase something I said in class the other day, I might as well walk into a rifle range and shout "I love Hillary". Everyone out there, I'm sure, knows that most teachers, and all teachers' unions, are these days liberal in the extreme. What some of you may not be aware of is the fact that anthropology is an even more left-leaning field, chock-full of "post-modernists", or, as one of my professors recently put it, people who "believe that all points of view are equally valid, as long as you agree with them". Sounds like every Democrat, really, at least at first - but these folks are worse. Today, while browsing a journal called "Anthropology & Education Quarterly" - which I thought would be a perfect synthesis of my two fields but turned out in fact to be a perfect synthesis of insanity and inanity - I came across this gem of a passage:

Today Indigenous peoples worldwide are deconstructing Western paradigms, including the classic constructs of literacy connected to alphabet systems, and articulating and constructing their own distinct paradigms based on Indigenous epistemologies and rooted in self-determination and social justice.

This was the beginning of a paper that, seemingly impossibly, got only worse as it went on. It seems the height of irony for someone to be writing a paper about literacy who seems to be challenged in that area herself. For a start, I don't think she has grasped the fact that "indigenous", as a non-proper adjective, does not require capitalization unless used at the beginning of a sentence. What's next? Picking up my Heavy backpack on my way out to my Gas-Guzzling jeep to drive to school in the Cold weather?

The most impressive irony of the whole thing, however, is the fact that the author doesn't seem to understand the meaning of "literacy". "Literate", in the meaning appropriate to this context, means "able to read and write", and is descended through Middle English from a Latin word meaning "letter". Knowing this, the idea that, to be literate, one must be familiar and conversant with a writing system (ie, letters) should not be an unreachable peak of reasoning, but apparently it eludes at least one scholar. I'm sure there are other, "more valid" points of view out there, but to me, it stands to reason that, when creating literature on the subject of literacy, it would make us seem more literary if we were to stick to a literal, literate usage of words like "literacy" and "literate", and not allow liberal lunacy to litigate our lexicography. Wow, that was fun to write.

Now, I don't support marginalizing or judging languages - heck, language maintenance and revitalization is my primary interest in anthropology. I realize that languages without writing systems are not inherently inferior, though they do tend to create some nasty consequences for the cultures that use them. But this latest attempt to manipulate our language for the purpose of making other languages seem to have qualities they do not is about the six thousandth bridge too far for political correctness. I guess for some people, George Orwell's "Newspeak" is less an interesting idea and more a paragon worthy of pursuit.

Stem cell research. It's been becoming a major partisan political issue in the United States in recent years, and the divide has essentially been this: Republicans (generally) have espoused the belief that harvesting cells from the unborn is immoral, while Democrats (generally) have said that research which can save lives must be done, and fetuses (feti?) are not alive, so it doesn't matter that their lives would be lost for the said research. I've been torn on this issue, as both a pro-lifer and a strong believer in the necessity of advancing science. Now, though, a new study has shown that stem cells from amniotic fluid are just as useful as embryonic stem cells. This is an enormous development. Amniotic stem cells can, of course, be harvested without harming the baby, which essentially nullifies the arguments that have previously taken up so much campaigning time. There no longer has to be a debate about the rights of the baby versus the advancement of medicine.

And yet, Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, intends to introduce legislation to increase federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. As The Bethie Bee points out, the Democrats seem more interested in getting the populace comfortable with killing unborn children than with promoting the advancement of medical science.

This could be good for the Republicans. If they can show the voters that this no longer needs to be an issue - that we can now have the best of both worlds - they can take the Democrats' "Look, the GOP are anti-advancement reactionary fundamentalists" argument down.

Yet more news from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, but this time, it's some of the best news I've heard in months: back in June, the president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) announced that it would drop the recommendation that schools demand their students show a commitment to "social justice". This will obviously have to wait until the next time NCATE publishes new accreditation standards, but just knowing that it is (supposedly) going to happen is a great feeling - not because it affects me, as I'll still have to finish my program under the current requirements, but because it means that the next generation of teachers may not have to have their political dispositions assessed before they can graduate.

Individual universities still have jurisdiction over their graduation requirements, of course, but there will hopefully soon be a choice for future educators to go to a college that does not require them to hold certain beliefs in order to become teachers.

I can't express how happy this development has made me. My children may actually get to go to a school where the teachers have a variety of viewpoints and students can develop their own ideas and ideals rather than having their minds filled with propaganda. We can but hope.

I've mentioned the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education a couple of times recently; today, I've got a real corker (or whatever the non-British word for that would be) of a story straight from their website.

Several months ago, a student at Johns Hopkins University posted an advertisement on Facebook (I'll assume most of my readers know what that is) for a "Halloween in the Hood" party being held by his fraternity. Besides the egregious omission of the apostrophe in the word "Hallowe'en" - when will this demolition of the Queen's English end? - no reasonable person will find anything wrong with this. Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins thought that a "hood" themed party was racist. The student in question was charged with and found guilty of several violations of university policy. What do you suppose the punishment was? Something minor, probably; perhaps similar to that for an infraction of a university alcohol policy (attending a meeting or somesuch)? Well, if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Here's what the student got:

Suspension from the university until January 2008 (fourteen months from the date of the "offense").

300 hours of community service.

An assignment to read twelve books and write a paper on each.

Mandatory attendance at a seminar on diversity and race relations.

FIRE used the word "draconian" to describe these punishments, and I have to say they're right. An appeal has recently come through, and though the student has not publicized the details of its outcome, he has stated that it was "satisfactory". Still, the fact that an appeal was even necessary is, well, disgusting.

I would like to introduce everyone to the best non-fiction book I have read in years: The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, by Mark W Smith. If you are a proud conservative, libertarian, or anything similar, I'll make this simple: buy this book. It goes through twenty-six key issues in the United States, including taxes, big government, affirmative action, school choice, gun control, and the death penalty, to name a few of my favorites. Filled with quotes, great arguments, fast facts, and "VRWC talking points", this book is entirely readable and at times laugh-out-loud funny. The following are just a few of the fascinating facts I encountered while reading this book which I had not previously been aware of....

Though we are currently defenseless against incoming ICBMs, over half of Americans believe that this is not the case.

The top 1 percent of American income earners pay 34% of taxes in this country. The top 5% pay 54%; the top 10% pay 66%; the top 25% pay 84%.

In 2001, a report by Senator Fred Thompson found that the federal government wastes (by fraud, waste, and mismanagement) $35 billion a year.

Medicare has paid millions of dollars to "patients" it knew were dead.

The IRS admits that it has no idea how much it collects in Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Regulations cost each American household $8000 every year.

Jerry Ralph Curry, former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says that more people have been killed by the federal government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards than died in Vietnam.

Child abuse has increased since Roe v. Wade, which supposedly did away with "unwanted children".

Women - who are, according to feminists, still second-class citizens in America - constitute 52 percent of the country's population, make up over half the students at American post-secondary institutions and over half the applicants to medical and law schools, and hold more than half the wealth in the US.

Americans who receive free healthcare enjoy hospital admission rates 30-50 percent higher than those encountered by paying patients.

A poll conducted in 2000 by the Center for Education Reform found that 70 percent of black parents earning under $15,000 a year support school choice.

More children under five drown in water buckets than children under ten die from accidental gunshots.

After the right-to-carry law went into effect in Texas in 1996, the state murder rate dropped by 60% in four years. When a similar law was enacted in Florida in 1987, the homicide rate fell 23% in five years.

.015% (that's 15 in 100,000) guns in the United States are involved in deaths each year.

The "Cost of Government Day" is the date in the calendar year when the average American has earned enough gross income to pay his share of the government's spending. In 2004 and 2005, this day was July 4 (slightly more than halfway through the year).

The "Handbook" also includes a test to determine the reader's "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy rating"; the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Survival Kit" (which includes things like buckshot, an SUV, and Toby Keith CDs) and the contrasting "Liberal Survival Kit" (which includes things like the complete lyrics to "Kumbayah", a hybrid car, and Dixie Chicks CDs); and a list of important people and organizations who contribute to the conservative cause, including a favorite organization of mine, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org).

This book definitely belongs on your shelf, right between The 110 People Who Are Screwing Up America and Becoming Jefferson's People. If nothing else, check it out from your local library (yeah, right) and have a browse. This guy's as good as Ann Coulter, but actually gives you some information that might make the odd liberal stop and think.