Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

Immigration is one of those subjects that causes many people to fulminate into conniption fits.  In such an atmosphere, it’s like trying to reason with a drunk.  It’s better to just drop the subject.

That said, I’m in favor of a wall, as much of it as practical.  I support an end to chain immigration and the visa lottery, and back e-verify, merit-based priorities, and limits to the total numbers.  I don’t need Trump to tell me of their prudence.

Yet – and it’s a big “yet” – immigrants clearly add value to the country.  Not all, but a good number.  Call it new blood.

In previous posts, I have bewailed the decline of self-reliance.  There’s no better example of raw self-reliance than weathering the gauntlet of the cartels, coyotes (the human kind), child abuse, and the Sonoran Desert to get here.  Once here, they’ll take any job and work at it till near collapse.  Now that’s self-reliance of the resilient kind.  The scene cries for respect and admiration.

So, hurray for immigration … if it is managed and we can pick and choose.  At all times, any nation could benefit from an infusion of gritty determination.

RogerG

A thought came to mind as I was having a cup of coffee while observing the flag that I just put up to honor the 75th anniversary of D-Day.  It was in conjunction with the memory of ex-president Obama’s recent statements in Brazil about our gun laws – “… our gun laws don’t make much sense”.  His nonsensical comments are part of the long, twilight Progressives’ struggle against American self-reliance.

Here’s the clip of his remarks:

As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, and way back to my days in UC Santa Barbara’s grad school of Education 40 years ago, there’s been a persistent campaign to devalue the American value of self-reliance. It doesn’t end with our schools. It permeates the beliefs of most left-of-center sectarians like Obama. It’s at the heart of Progressivism since the days of Herbert Croly and John Dewey.

Back to Obama’s statements. He makes patently false contentions that Americans can buy “any” gun, including machine guns, and over the internet. Just to clarify, as anyone in the gun business knows, you can’t buy machine guns (It’s so difficult and expensive as to make it nearly impossible), buy a gun on the internet (It must go to a FFL dealer and undergo the requisite background check), and, as you probably guessed, heavy regulation makes the word “any” silly in relation to gun talk in America.

Why the promiscuous willingness to misspeak on the subject? People will say and believe even falsehoods if it will further the end that they seek. The progressive goal from the days of its birth in the 19th century is the reshaping of the human mind. Progressives have long wanted to make a “better” human being by replacing the individual with the group. That means individual accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance are suppressed in favor of a collectivist ethic.

It’s the main reason for the pedagogy of group learning and a curriculum infused with the carping about “buccaneer capitalism”, the worship of FDR, and the substitution of an American identity with a world one. The larger the collective, the better.

Your kids are taught to be world citizens with environmentalism principally as the catalyst.

Every incident of mayhem with a gun – like the one in Virginia Beach – becomes the opportunity to advance the ball. Now, Dem presidential contenders are open about gun confiscation, something not said in polite company just a year ago.

Will fewer guns in the possession of citizens reduce “gun violence”? Maybe, but not “violence”. Pressure cookers, fertilizer, and box cutters have proven to be quite lethal. I have great faith in human beings to adapt. If the desire for slaughter is present, and guns not available, knifings and anything cooked up in a garage will do just as well.

What’s at stake is the very nature of our American character. Americans not coddled in an urban mommy-government may recoil with horror at the prospect of dependence on an unionized government worker for the personal safety of themselves and their loved ones.

The debate about guns is really a debate about what it means to be an American. One the one hand is the belief that we are capable of taking care of our own. On the other is government dependency. It’s a choice between self-government and perpetual adolescence?

RogerG

Watch Gov. John Hickenlooper tell the California Democratic Party at their convention that socialism isn’t a winning campaign strategy.  Watch him get booed.

This is in tandem with the 2017 get-together flipping off Pres. Trump, led by then-chair John Burton to the cheers and participation of the audience.  Do we need any further evidence that the Party had gone off the rails?  And remember, California is a one-party state, not unlike Cuba (in more ways than one).  Just think, these people are piloting a state of 40 million people.

They have made California into a campaign slogan.  For anyone not caught up in the mania, the state is synonymous for what to avoid.  Anyone running for office in any other part of the country can simply say, “Do you want to end up like them?”  The word “California” is now toxic.

Hosannas to John Hickenlooper for making the obvious obvious.

RogerG

Kids have a simplistic view of the world. Surprised?  What about adults who talk like kids?  Maybe, maybe not.

Read about Kirsten Gillibrand’s latest giveaway.  She couples free community college with community service (?) – more of the latter and more of the former.  Then, she throws in the word “Investment” as some kind of loopy justification for the scheme.  (See here)

Some adults become kids as soon as they step into a race for high political office.  Many in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes have been unrestrained in their use of the word “free”.  The “free” word is copiously used in front all manner of things: college, student loans/debt, health care, racial reparations, etc.  To a kid, all things are free.  Kids and Democratic politicos either don’t know or don’t care that it ain’t free for mom and dad and the taxpayer, the equivalent of mom and dad in the budgetary calculus.

Then, the adult power-hungry status seekers combine the “free” word with “investment” somewhere further along in the demagoguery.  Do the words go together?  No.  The one contradicts the other. Understand “investment” to mean that someone is being forced to pay, therefore the dispatching of “free”.  Thus, the reality: somebody gets skinned so somebody else gets a goodie.

Why we elect people who talk like 5-year-olds is a mystery to me.

RogerG

“Crashing Fences” is from G.K. Chesterton’s The Thing.  The piece presents a word of caution to reformers before they start smashing traditions, institutions, and norms.

Parents beware.  The curriculum in our schools is replete with all manner of “reform”, or the crashing of fences.  It’s in the Science Departments in the form of climate change and the haranguing about humanity as the pillager of nature, the eco craze.  It’s in the Math Departments as new means are concocted to make girls more comfortable with numbers and to further the mania to make everyone feel better about coming up with the wrong answer.  It’s in the English Departments in the attempt to erase the cultural hallmarks of western civilization.  It’s in the Social Studies Departments’ staff training and textbooks as they beatify the new secular saints of “experts”, FDR, and everything that can be forced into the tent of civil rights.  In short, it’s everywhere.

The kiddies are in a finishing school to manufacture Progressives.  Progressivism is all about surrendering to faculty lounges and government – a ripe source for their future employment – the power to decide what is to be done. No more is life to be left to the old and “stodgy” and the “chaos” of free markets and citizen republics.  Omniscient technocrats will lead the way.

Adolescents are trained to crash fences … or accept the transfer of power to those who will do the crashing.

Most bothersome is the certainty in which all this is presented.  One can’t question this or that tenet of Darwin or the UN’s IPCC without being indicted for war crimes against “science”.

I’m reminded of the ideological pestering about any of the chic calls to change our ways. “Gender fluidity” is a demand to repeal chromosomes.  “Climate change” is an exorcism to drive out the last vestiges of limited government. Say goodbye to the Constitution.  “Social justice” is the seizure of an older term for the purposes of smashing nearly any unevenness in human relations.  In an earlier time (19th century), “social justice” was the restraints exercised by civil society to control anti-social behavior.  No more.  The nomenclature for crashing fences is almost endless.

This isn’t education.  It’s propaganda.  Along the way the kiddies get a little knowledge, but it’s wrapped in the garb of a constant revolution.  Few in Russia, October 1917, knew that they were embarking on the descent into death pits and concentration camps.  Fewer still knew that after breaking a few eggs to make the utopian omelet the hell would persist for 80 years, and not a shining collectivist heaven at the end of the long dark tunnel.

The words attributed to Jesus on the cross in the Gospel of Luke (23:34) have much relevance for today: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

RogerG