SAN FRANCISCO Board approves year extension for high schools' JROTC program Classes allowed to count for physical education credit
(12-11) 20:09 PST San Francisco -- The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps gets to stay in San Francisco high schools for one more year, the district's school board decided Tuesday night.
More than 100 students packed the meeting as the board voted 5 to 2 to extend the program through the 2008-2009 school year.
Board President Mark Sanchez and board member Eric Mar voted against the measure.
The board also decided to allow JROTC courses to continue to count toward up to two years of physical education courses, which is required for graduation.
Last November I posted a heartfelt rant about the SFUSD's decision to get rid of the JROTC. I even wrote a letter to Dan Kelly and the rest of the school board members who voted in favor of the ban. He was kind enough to reply to me, and we exchanged ideas for a while, until he quit replying anyhow. That's easier than admitting that you hate the military and are using your postion of power to end a popular military-related program evidently. It does not matter anyhow since Dr. Kelly did not get re-elected to the Board of Education last year. I'll sure miss him.
The board voted a year ago to eliminate the 90-year-old program at the end of this school year, with a majority of members then saying its connection with a discriminatory and homophobic military means it has no place in public education.
At the time of the vote, the board also required a task force to identify an alternative program to replace the popular leadership program that now serves 1,200 students in seven of the district's high schools.
That task force, however, didn't meet until April. This fall, the group - consisting of district staff as well as JROTC supporters and critics - requested an extension of JROTC at all the high schools, saying there wasn't enough time to develop an alternative by this fall.
I knew at the time that they would run into trouble when they actually had to come up with an alternative. How does one re-create a program that teaches responsibility, commitment, respect for authority and physical fitness; especially when those traits are anathema to the Board of Education's personal beliefs? Besides, a football program already exists. A year later, it is no surprise that the "task force" came up dry. This is just further proof that bitching and moaning is far easier than actually coming up with viable alternatives.
So the JROTC is safe for another year from the bloviations of our local anti-military/suicidal-pacifist nannies. I can't wait to see what really bitchin' alternative they offer next year. At least they won't be able to say they did not have enough time to come up with something.
No other holiday seems to polarize people quite like Christmas. Depending on your relationship with your family, your god and/or your neighbors, Christmas can be either a time of great joy, an inconvenience to be endured, a time of profound depression, or any combination thereof. My wife often feels steamrolled by Christmas since her birthday is just 10 days prior. Growing up, woe to the relative that decided to combine her birthday and Christmas present into one "big" gift. That still holds true today by the way.
Every year the same scrooges trot out the same grievances in an effort to give the rest of us the same case of the "bah-humbugs" from which they suffer. Atheists demand the removal of Nativity scenes lest they gaze upon one and singe their eyes. Anti-consumer groups point out the amount of money wasted on junky gifts for people we don't even like. Health officials highlight the dangers of overconsumption. The fact that Christmas has been commercialized to the point of self parody hardly needs to be mentioned; and the last minute rush to the stores is never enough to save the retail establishment from yet another mediocre shopping season.
John Steele Gordon opining in the Wall Street Journal last Friday points out that Christmas is actually a celebration of two distinct and separate occurrences:
Christmas famously "comes but once a year." In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Jingle Bells" is quite another.
But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking "the Christ out of Christmas," while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of "A Christmas Carol."
The Christmas of parties and presents is far older than the Nativity. Most ancient cultures celebrated the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its lowest point and begins to climb once more in the sky. In ancient Rome, this festival was called the Saturnalia and ran from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24. During that week, no work was done, and the time was spent in parties, games, gift giving and decorating the houses with evergreens. (Sound familiar?) It was, needless to say, a very popular holiday.
Proof that it was not all about skull crushing and raping and pillaging your neighbors during the Middle Ages:
By the high Middle Ages, Christmas was a rowdy, bawdy time, often inside the church as well as outside it. In France, many parishes celebrated the Feast of the Ass, supposedly honoring the donkey that had brought Mary to Bethlehem. Donkeys were brought into the church and the mass ended with priests and parishioners alike making donkey noises. In the so-called Feast of Fools, the lower clergy would elect a "bishop of fools" to temporarily run the diocese and make fun of church ceremonial and discipline. With this sort of thing going on inside the church to celebrate the Nativity, one can easily imagine the drunken and sexual revelries going on outside it to celebrate what was in all but name the Saturnalia.
Those looking to place blame on somebody for making Christmas a national holiday need look no further:
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill making the secular Christmas a civil holiday because its celebration had become universal in this country. It is now celebrated in countries all over the world, including many where Christians are few, such as Japan.
My feelings regarding Christmas are pretty simple: if you don't like it, don't celebrate it. If you are really, truly offended by all things Christmas, consider a vacation to Saudi Arabia this time of year. I bet you won't hear Jingle Bells even once. Most of all, don't use Christmas as an excuse to feign some grievance in an attempt to advance your own agenda; whatever it may be. It's also probably not wise to do what these Kiwis recently did as you may end up in jail.
If there's one thing that we can all agree upon it's that jail is no place to spend Christmas.
Victor Davis Hanson chronicles our past military blunders and determines that most of the wars the U.S has been involved in since our nation's inception started under dubious circumstances, involved bad intelligence and were fought by ill-equipped troops in the beginning.
...what is missing from the national debate over the "worst" (Iraq) war in our history is any appreciation of past American military errors—political, strategic, technological, intelligence, tactical—that nearly cost us victory in far more important conflicts. Nor do we accept the savage irony of war that only through errors, tragic though they may be, do successful armies adjust in time to discover winning strategies, tactics, and generals.
Here's a fun exercise: Try to note the shift in language being employed by those who are desperately trying to jam their grand social engineering experiment disguised as reverent regard for the sacred environment down our throats. Increasingly, it seems that "climate change" is being substituted for "global warming." You see, with climate change any outcome is possible; even cooling in the Antarctic, snow in Buenos Aires and a decrease in hurricane activity.
Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.
South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.
Since any outcome is possible, it means one can never be wrong, which means never having to apologize for anything. It's a good thing too, because that means we do not have to be concerned with this report from the U.N. Bali Climate conference:
The air-conditioning system installed to keep more than 10,000 delegates cool used highly damaging refrigerant gases - as lethal to the atmosphere as 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and nearly the equivalent of the emissions of all aircraft used to fly delegates to Indonesia.
Staff from Australia's Natural Refrigerants Transition Board and the London- and Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency noticed the stockpiled cylinders of hydrochlorofluorocarbons - a refrigerant likely to be phased out over the next few years because it devours ozone in the upper atmosphere.
In addition, the refrigerant is a potent greenhouse gas, with each kilogram at least as damaging as 1.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Investigators at the Balinese resort complex at Nusa Dua counted 700 cylinders of the gas, each of them weighing 13.5 kilograms, and the system was visibly leaking.
Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, says carbon rationing is the only way to ensure that the world avoids the worst effects of climate change. And he says that the problems caused by burning fossil fuels are so serious that governments might have to implement rationing against the will of the people.
"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."
I'd like to see the army made up of listless, Birkenstock-clad, overly idealistic, cocksure soldiers marching arm-in-arm with the limo-lib/Hollywood elite "special forces" Dr. Hillman would raise to impose his carbon rationing policy on us infidels. At least he's honest in revealing that fighting global warming, sorry, I mean fighting climate change, is really just warmed-over nihilistic Marxism.
I was first introduced to Camille Paglia by a girl I used to work with during the summers back in my college days. While waiting for our turn in the rotation for the privilege of serving the unwashed masses of the greater Narragansett Bay area all-you-can-eat clam cakes and chowder, we would do a lot of reading. Sometimes we would read each other's books; and that is how I happened to pick up Paglia's Sexual Personae. I'll never forget that it was the first book I ever read for pleasure that required me to keep a dictionary on hand.
One of my biggest beefs with the left these days is that there are woefully few outspoken members who are not stricken with Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS). For example, they would prefer to see us leave Iraq defeated and humiliated--regardless of the consequences-- because any other outcome might possibly make Bush look good. They do not see the difference between being an outspoken member of the loyal opposition (which they're not) and indirectly or directly supporting those who wish to destroy our civilization (more often the case). While I do not agree with everything she says, I do not think that Camille Paglia is one of these shrill BDS suffers; and it is why I respect her. It is also why those who lay claim to the leftist-progressive megaphone shun her like a drug-addled aunt at Thanksgiving.
In this Salon piece, she touches on a point I made in a previous post about how cultural secularism is destroying our society.
Religion is becoming an endless political distraction -- but cultural secularism is not the answer.
...I agree with him (Mitt Romney) that the founders of the U.S. social experiment were Christians (even if many were intellectual deists) and that our separation of church and state entails the rejection of an official, government-sanctioned creed rather than the obligatory erasure of references to God in civic life.
This is something that those who wish to wipe "In God We Trust" off of our currency, for example, and stamp out all references to God in civic life either fail to grasp or willfully ignore. Regardless of the number of times history is revised by those who do not like its outcome, the United States of America will always be a nation founded by men of faith; and their indelible stamp will remain.
But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of secularism"? The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young. Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.
Here she acknowledges humanity's need to believe in something beyond the, "if it feels good do it" frame of mind that defines secular humanism.
But primary and secondary education, which should provide an entree to great art and thought, has declined into trivialities and narcissistic exercises in self-esteem. Popular culture, once emotionally vibrant and collective in impact (from Hollywood movies to rock music), has waned into flashy, transient niche entertainment. The young, who are masters of ever-evolving personal technology, are besieged by the siren call of materialism. In this climate, it is selfish and shortsighted for liberals to automatically define religion as a social problem that needs suppression or eradication. Without spirituality in some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs -- including the tranquilizers that seem near universal among the status-addled professional class of the Northeastern elite.
Europe, which has settled into a comfortable secularism, is no model for the future. The great era of European achievement in arts and letters seems to be over. There are local luminaries but no towering figures any longer of the stature of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Ingmar Bergman. Europe is becoming a museum and tourist trap, as people from all over the world flock to see the remnants of Europe's royal and religious past -- the conservative prelude, in other words, to today's slack liberalism.
Europe as a "tourist trap"--just like our own Fisherman's Wharf. Though with the Euro trading where it is lately, I'll stick to visiting Fisherman's Wharf.
Regarding education:
There was an excellent Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week about the urgent national need for technical education -- which has been a recurrent theme in my Salon columns for a decade. Walt Gardner, who taught public school for 28 years in Los Angeles, calls for a "shift in our attitude to grant career and technical education the same recognition, respect and value that we reflexively accord academic education."
Gardner predicts severe dislocations for the college-educated middle class over the next two decades: "Auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians will be earning a comfortable living and deriving deep satisfaction from their work, while many graduates from marquee-name colleges will find themselves unemployed when their jobs are off-shored."
Exactly! And as a career college teacher, I want to insist yet again that the general education offered by American public high schools and even elite colleges and universities has become blatantly mediocre and not worth the price. Soaring tuition costs are a national scandal that the presidential candidates have failed to systematically address. Families and students themselves have incurred monstrous debts in their deluded search for brand-name cachet, which only marginally relates to a quality education. The college admissions race in the United States is a gigantic marketing scam that most mainstream journalists, desperate to get their kids into the overrated Ivy League, have shamefully neglected.
Whenever somebody asks me if I've started a college fund for my 10 month old daughter (yes I have), I often reply, "well now I'm not so sure she's college material." I am joking, but only half-joking. Prof. Paglia makes another point I touch on from time to time: college in its current dumbed-down form isn't necessarily worth the price; and a good technical education is underrated.
Al Gore got the Nobel Prize this week for his role as chief propagandist in spreading global warming hysteria into every nook and cranny of credulous minds. I expect that this baseless panic, like all fads, will evaporate when apocalypse doesn't arrive on schedule. Meanwhile let's focus on legitimate practical issues -- such as the grotesque volume of pollution belched by big-rig trucks, which in the absence of an efficient interstate rail system in the U.S. are absurdly carrying freight for thousands of miles from coast to coast. Exhaust from family SUVs is nothing compared to the environmental damage wrought by trucks, whose massive weight and deadline-driven high speeds also constitute an unacceptable risk to passenger vehicles on the highway... Nature is not our victim but an awesome, uncontrollable force.
I'd like to see the study that helped formed her opinion regarding the relative costs and benefits of rail versus truck transportation, but she puts an arrow right through the hubristic heart of the Eco-vangelists with that last line.
Something that continues to confound my logic is this: how is it that so many people who confess to be secular liberals can march arm and arm with Islamofascists who have openly declared that it is their intention to destroy the West and it's secular liberal values?
Spengler, writing in the Asian Times last week, skillfully sketches the connection between what draws fundamental religious zealots and secular leftist atheists into each other's arms.
It is easy to change what we think, but very hard to change how we think. Contrary to superficial impressions, Islam is much closer in character to atheism than to Christianity or Judaism. Although the "what" of Muslim and atheistic thinking of course are very different, I shall endeavor below to prove that the "how" is very similar.
Secular liberalism, the official ideology of almost all the nations of Western Europe, offers hedonism, sexual license, anomie, demoralization and gradual depopulation. Muslims do not want this. In Africa, Christian missionaries go to Muslims and offer them God's love and the hope of eternal life. But I am aware of no Christian missionaries active in the Muslim banlieue (outskirts) of the Paris suburbs or the Turkish quarters of Berlin.
A major reason this secular liberal mindset is pervasive in western pop-culture today results from the increasingly popular belief that college is a "right" to be had rather than a "privilege" to be earned. As such, there are more people attending college than ever before. On the face of it, a more educated population is preferable to a less educated population. But if one peaks behind the curtain, one may be surprised to see numerous examples of political grievances turned into college majors being taught by professors who are not shy about sharing and propagating their political dogma. This liberalism--hedonism, sexual license, etc.--so entrenched in the never, never land of our universities can only be characterized as childish; it is certainly not the underpinning of an education that should prepare one to be a productive and critical thinking member of society. That's all fine and well when one is young, the problem arises when this mindset endures outside the halls of academia where it becomes a corrosive cancer on society. Anomie, demoralization and depopulation are predictable symptoms of this cancer.
Allah is everywhere doing everything at all times. He sets the spin on every electron, measures the jump of every flea, the frequency of every sneeze. That notion of a god who accepts no limitation, not even the limit of laws of nature that he created, characterizes mainstream Muslim thought since the 11th century. St Thomas Aquinas wrote of its deficiency, drawing on the critique of the 12th-century Jewish theologian and philosopher Moses Maimonides.
It is a commonplace observation that Islam is "fatalistic". Muslims typically conclude any statement about the future, eg, "I'll see you at work tomorrow morning," with the qualifier, "Insha'Allah", "God willing". Because God is everywhere and in every action, acting without intermediate causes, the Judeo-Christian concept of divine providence is inconceivable in Muslim terms. If Allah refuses to be entangled by intermediate causes, no divine plan could possibly exist that humankind cannot understand directly, but works itself out through God's intermediaries. Rather than providence, Islam believes in the old pagan fate, the summation of the innumerable capricious acts that Allah in his absolute transcendence performs at every instant.
Allah is everywhere, which is to say that Allah is nowhere in particular. Allah's world is indistinguishable from the primeval world of paganism, in which the "colorfully contending pantheon" of nature-gods arranges a chaotic and incomprehensible show at every moment. The world without Allah would look not much different; if Allah acts in a whimsical manner without the constraint of laws of nature, we cannot tell the difference between Allah's actions and chaos.
The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.
Muslims, in their fatalistic world view, believe that everything that happens is a result of Allah's will. The result is chaos. Secular liberals, in their ultimately nihilistic world view, deny that God exists. The result is chaos.
Different causes, same effect; each enabling the other.
I am officially calling a market top on global warming hysteria. As evidence, I submit the following list of headlines compiled by Wretchard and a few of the commenters at the Belmont Club.
Consider that if everybody who believes that global warming is the greatest threat to mankind would simply hold their breath for 15 minutes, we would not have a global warming problem.
Lenin is attributed with saying, "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth."
Knowingly or not, Lenin was referring to what today is known as Proof by Assertion which is defined as, "a logical fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted argumentum ad nauseam. In other cases its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies."
There are numerous examples of this phenomenon in what passes for conventional wisdom today. The most popular example in my opinion is when one asserts that "Bush lied" about WMDs in Iraq. A lie, by definition, implies that the one doing the lying knows the truth. So in order for Bush to have lied about WMDs, he would have had to have known that they did not exist in the first place. Since they did not exist, he would know for certain that none would be found after the invasion, at which point he would be exposed as a liar. Even the biggest idiot in the world, a label that seems to stick quite well on our president, would know that being exposed as a liar during one's first term in office is not the best path to a second term.
Consider the following:
What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism? That's the question that was asked in this opinion piece in the WSJ yesterday.
The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his (Nobel) medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in man-made global warming as a crisis.
How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.
Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.
In addition to Lenin's sage wisdom as quoted above, Mark Twain best summarized the attitude that has seized the collective imagination of the whole global warming doomsday crowd when he said, "the average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and slavishly adopt it."
Seems like Mr. Twain defined "availability bias" over 100 years before Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky.
Consequences be damned! It seems the solution to the increasing number of mortgage defaults by people who should not have mortgages in the first place is to place a 5 year freeze on their "teaser" rates which will give the banks time to "renegotiate" the terms of the loan and work through their increasing inventory of foreclosed homes.
The financial services industry applauded the administration for negotiating a plan that will allow free-market forces to operate. The hope is that the five-year freeze will buy time for the housing industry to work down record levels of unsold homes and for sales and prices to start rising again.
The financial services industry has chosen an interesting definition of "free-market forces." If they are to be believed, the free market only works when prices are rising. Obviously, all the money being spent on K Street lobbying is starting to reap dividends. Though technically this is not a tax payer-funded bailout (not yet at least), due to the amount of government intervention involved, I will chalk this up as another one of the increasing number of federal subsidy programs currently in existence.
Back in the days when one would save enough money for a 20% down payment then go down to the local bank to take out a mortgage from a loan officer who knew they were going to keep the loan in their books--and thus be motivated to do their due diligence--working to renegotiate the terms of a mortgage with a homeowner who had fallen on hard times was in the best interests of all involved. However, in the current era where mortgages are tranched up and sold off as Wall St. structured derivative products, it is hard not to view this or any other mortgage "bailout" scheme as a ruse for delaying all of the afflicted their castor oil moment.
As my friend Tony summed it up perfectly last night, "I wish I was dumb enough to have taken out a mortgage I couldn't afford."
