Fourteen Years Is Evidently Too Long To Remember

The reason we have forgotten 9/11 is that someone decided it was too painful to remember. So children were not exposed to the stories and images. While their zealous teachers and professors have made sure they were shown every conspiracy and controversy laced version of 9/11, the images shot by French videographers who just happened to be a Ground Zero as the towers were hit and fell and hell started breaking loose, were banned from TV after just one showing. Someone decided we weren't strong enough. So now I teach high school seniors who have never seen the footage. They talk bravely of progressive issues and archly judge earlier administrations, clueless of what we as a nation went thought and heedless of why the actions taken after 9/11 were taken. They talk distastefully of war, ignoring that for a long time after 9/11, we were waiting for the next attack. That it has not happened on the scale of 9/11 is more in the nature of a happy accident than of real security. We have a current administration that is actively ignoring what happened 14 years ago. They label obvious acts of terrorism as "workplace violence" and roundly criticize anyone who echoes the fears we felt 14 years ago when we say we want to know who is in this country and we do not want people coming here from known terror sponsoring states. While those of us who remember still stay vigilant, too many others ignore the peril. And so it will happen again. I don't know where, I don't know when, and I pray it is not as bad as it could be, because with the allowances this administration has made for rogue nations in the Middle East, I fear it could be very bad indeed.

Those Who Don't Know History....

...are doomed to repeat it. I know that the luster has gone off Thomas Jefferson's star due to his history regarding slaves and slavery, but nevertheless, he was a powerful intellect and his views regarding government and freedom sound remarkably pertinent today. Read and learn. And while you are at it, consider the current situation our nation finds itself in, the actions being taken on our behalf by a Congress gone mad with spending and the imposition of nanny state legislation on the local, state and national levels. Jefferson saw these things as potential perils for our nation. How he could have looked so far into the future to see the how the nature of men to serve themselves first would warp our free government is truly amazing. It is so forward thinking when you consider many of these quote date from the late 1700's/early 1800's. Please note his subtle delineations between a "democracy" and a "republic." What Jefferson was striving for was a nation of independent state that cooperated on matters of common interest such as defense. So while he did support the idea of representation of the separate "republics" or states as independent entities. Also note the references to corporate greed overriding allegiance to nation for the purpose of money. I think with the cratering of the attempt at a "global economy" we are seeing that his words are not only legally important, but prescient. Also note his views on Second Amendment issues. For those who oppose personal guns, please recall that Switzerland mandates that all men spend two years in the military and that they keep a weapon on their premisis in case of attack.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.
Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government

of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
Thomas Jefferson

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
Thomas Jefferson

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
Thomas Jefferson

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson

One man with courage is a majority.
Thomas Jefferson

Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.
Thomas Jefferson

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
Thomas Jefferson

Never spend your money before you have earned it.
Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
Thomas Jefferson

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
Thomas Jefferson

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.
Thomas Jefferson

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.
Thomas Jefferson

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.
Thomas Jefferson

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thomas Jefferson

A Look at this Meltdown from Ground Zero

My husband was laid off.

For the first time in thirty years, he was involuntarily let go. Part of it is the bad economy, but the problems that drove this situation are many and varied. What they share at the core is greed with a capital G. First of all, he worked in a telecommunications company through that meltdown. As credit became cheap after 9/11, upper level managers and stockholders pushed for more and higher compensation. During a bullish market, you can do those things like providing country club memberships or golden parachutes. But when the economy of a company or nation is crumbling, sometimes the stockholders and managers have to take a hit. In the company where my husband worked for 22 years, the managers were busy lining their own nests and the stockholders just cashed their checks and didn't ask questions. What was happening to sales, distribution and manufacturing was quite a different story. Staffing was cut, but the same sales, manufacturing and distribution goals were in play. So less people did more work. Then they cut overtime. Then they laid off more people.

At this point, my husband changed to a manufacturer based in Obama's former backyard. It was sales working for a manufacturer that made key products for the communications industry. The dollar was undervalued in comparison to world currencies, so when the offer came to the owner and founder, he took the money and left the company in the hands of an international corporation.

The goal of the corporations was NOT to make a good product, or to offer good customer service, or to sell more. Its goal was simply to make money. And to make money at any cost is what they did. First of all, the British corporation that owned bought out all competing manufacturers. That gave them a virtual corner on their product's portion of the market. Then came the job cuts. They closed factories in Utah and Colorado. Sales forces were narrowed, but target goals remained high. Then, as manufacturing was brought into an already overburdened factory, supplies became short. Salesmen would get contracts that could not be fulfilled for weeks, sometimes months. Customers started looking for other suppliers-mostly overseas.

At this point, my husband left this job to work for a smaller sales company. But even in this situation, the men running it were far more interested in getting money out of the company than in putting time into building up a clientele and following. My husband was laid off from that job. It's been two months now. I hear all this talk about public works programs a la WPA, but seriously, where are the middle class jobs that have gone away? I hear the media and politicians complaining that Americans won't work, but I know several middle aged, middle class males who are more than willing to take ANY job. But no jobs are to be had for middle class workers. We have become extraneous. The needs of the poor and those here illegally carry far more weight with the incoming administration.

And what is worse, the left has been very vocal about bringing home the troops. Sure, I don't want any American in harms way, but if they bring home the troops and muster them out, where are these guys and gals going to work? Where are they going to live? I truly don't think this administration has all the answers. What scares me more is that they think they do.

Four Bad Bears- Not a Bedtime Story

If you feel the need to get any more depressed over our current economic fiasco, feel free to meander to the linked blog and take a gander at the graph. I am at the point that I am planning to build an ark because if it rains any more like this, there's gonna be a flood.

Obama is Just Scary

And just what, pray tell Mr. Obama, is the mission of the "civilian force" you propose? Are you going to enforce your socialist liberal values upon those who chose to oppose you? Will knocks at the door in the night signal your opponents precipitous demise? Frankly, having read history, this sounds like a little group that terrorized German Jews in the 1930's. So is that the kind of starry future you propose? I used to think at least that you were reasonable, but it has become obvious that the hubris from public acclaim and the money of those who want to control the United States from behind the scenes has led to into a very dark place indeed. Be afraid, America, be VERY afraid.

This is SO INCREDIBLY DEPRESSING.....

I am sick. I am so mad that people vote based on shallow assumption rather than substance. And the stupid way that the Republicans have allowed themselves to be manipulated by the media and by the broadbased bias that being a former minister makes you a paragon of management is simply naive. So here we are. Romney is the last bastion against an appeasement layer of pseudo-conservatism and he was brokered out of the West Virginia delegates by a slick move on the part of McCain operatives. This dog in the manger attitude that allowed the third place supporters to vote simply to keep Romney from winning is typical of this man's campaign. I think that the many many true conservatives who supported the likes of Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson will find a McCain candidacy a hard pill to swallow. As for Huckabee, and his supporters, you are political fools. You were never in the running and all Huckabee became was a shill for McCain preventing consolidation of the conservative base. While those who are evangelicals are dazzled by his former position as a Baptist minister, I have one question-

IF THE MINISTRY IS A POSITION TO WHICH YOU ARE CALLED BY GOD, THEN WHY DID MIKE HUCKABEE QUIT?

Face it evangelicals, you are doing the same thing that you did back when Perot was running. You are forcing a single issue platform that WILL NOT WIN. And you are, in addition, supporting a candidate whose views are not in line with most evangelical thinking. Do you really think it's okay to allow illegal immigrant in-state status for college tuition and scholarships? That is insulting to every single parent and student who works themselves to death to pay for a college education. And when these people are allowed that seemingly legal status, by their low income level, they will end up with scholarships. What about the rest of us who have paid into the government till for our whole lives? Your vote for this man was a slap in the face.

I am sorry, I simply cannot contain my frustration with the way this campaign has evolved. It seems like we were forced to accept a candidate not of our own choosing by forces that do not have our best interests at heart. I am beside myself. I don't know what I will do during the Texas primary on March 4th. The only good thing to come out of this mess is that now the Texas primary will garner us some political favors and I hope the state parties are smart enough to arm-twist a boat load of favored status programs in return for delivering the state's delegates. I may cross over to mess with the Democrats. I may vote for a Communist. I may pick Mickey Mouse, Mickey Rourke or Mickey the guy down the street. But I sure know that I won't be pulling the lever, marking the ballot or sending one red cent to the RNC if McCain-Huckabee is the ticket in November. And you can carve those words in stone.


PS. What really galls me is that for my two oldest kids, this is there first big election. I hate it that they are seeing the seamy underbelly of the system rather than the better lights. I can actually understand the support for Obama because although I don't like his political stands, I would much rather have him over for dinner than Hillary or McCain. What a stinking shame.

Those Who Do Not Learn History....

The story that is linked in the headline is one that interests me because it states some ideas that I have expressed in my classroom and to family and friends. There are those in our society who like the idea that history is dead. They see no reason to learn history, to know history or to take away any lessons from history. I think that's a huge mistake.

And there must be some credence to this because every successful military academy includes a history of war and battles that includes studying the tactics of the ancient Romans, the medieval Turks and the modern Japanese. What bothers me is that in the general population we have children and ADULTS that do not know their own nation's history, nor do they have anything other than a shallow grasp of the history of man. These same people can quote chapter and verse on the latest showing of "Heroes" or tell you the entire genealogy of the kids in "Gossip Girl", but they have no knowledge or interest in obtaining knowledge about the measures that created our modern society.

Historical Misconceptions

Since I teach Art History, which like it sounds is Art AND History, I thought I should enlighten some people about some serious misconceptions. Right now in our esteemed institutions of higher learning, there are some folks that want us to believe that the civilization of Ancient Greece was a peaceful bucolic sort of existence. Having just taught that unit, I can assure you nothing is further from the truth. All those Greek tragedies, so loved by literary types, have their core stories based in the sad, tragic stuff of reality, not legend. In reality, the Greeks were a bloody band of loosely aligned city states that believed men were born for two purposes-to fight in battles and to compete in athletics. When you look at contemporary American society, and the worshipful way we approach all things athletic, can you really say we have advance much at all? While my class was looking at slides of the Parthenon, Erechthion and Knossos, they were puzzled at how we are creating our own iconography of our civilization. It seems that rather than gods and goddesses, we have athletes and celebrities. We honor them daily in our TV and movie viewing. We put their images on our computer screens and busses and billboards. I am sure we all like to think that civilization has advanced in over 3000 years, but except for a few technological aids, we are the same pagan, brutal, mindless folks that wandered and ravaged lands from Persia to China. There's a great deal we can learn from history. Unfortunately, ancient scholars often were faced with death for their deviation from the norm. Today we revel in deviation and scorn the norm. I wonder what sort of future that sets up for our society.

Is This Our Future?

We in Dallas are suffering through yet another demanding professional sports team's whining about facilities. So in response, rather than having the actual team, which is a BUSINESS, build their own facility, voters bought into a rather tenuous arguement that building a Temple to The Dallas Cowboys would bring wealth to their cities. Just prior to the election, a professor at a local university came out with studies proving that such facilities don't improve the local economy, but instead often depress is due to the burden of local taxes that must be used to pay off the building bonds. In looking at this, I considered what the impact would be when this facility opens. First of all, there are only a finite number of pro games, Super Bowls and college games that any facility can reasonably hold during the year. And you won't get a Super Bowl or ProBowl but about one time out of ten. Although the projections were that for a Super Bowl the amount of money that could be put in the local economy might range as high as $100,000, 000-that isn't all going to be heading to the town where the facility is located. Most of that money will stay in Dallas or Ft. Worth in the form of hotels/motels, car rentals and restaurants. There are also side issue which haven't yet been discussed. Unlike facilities in Chicago, Boston, New York or LA, the facility being built in Arlington for the Cowboys has no public transportation. That forces people to pay to park and further constricts an already tight traffic corridor. Unless the state or federal government come up with cash to wide and improve highways, trying to make it to the game will be a logisitic nightmare. Add to that the location of the stadium far away from the wealthiest fan bases. The Rangers have already experienced the lack of attendance during the week due to a combination of late starts and long travel times, and although the Cowboys play on Sunday usually, there will be traffic issues forced upon the local governments. All this comes down to money. And currently parking is $8, beer is $3, and a hotdog is $3 at the current facility. That is going to have to go up exponentially in order to cover the overhead. I personally consider going to most of the professional sports events as too costly, I can't even imagine how high prices will go. So I wonder, will we continue to have people who claim to have no money to pay for their kids education spending upwards of $200 a week to take the family to a sporting event? And as with the Romans in the linked article, will we start to see even more of the cultural tiering based on status? We already have the luxury boxes, is it too far away for Jerry Jones and his fellow owners to don the purple of empire and give a thumbs up or thumbs down? I'm just asking.........