Our Cosmic Impiety and The Slaughter of Innocents

"Well . . . I believe, when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties . . . they lead their country by a short route to chaos."Thomas More -A Man for All Seasons, Act I, sc.2.

Our cosmic impiety is the root cause of the monstrous events set in play by marginalized people like the twisted killer in Connecticut.  We are a democratic republic who decided in 1971 to consider an unborn child mere tissue.  If abortion can be as easily dismissed as a woman's 'health choice' and nothing more, what evil can we not not chalk up to legislated pre-packaged necessities like gun control, security monitors, cameras, or mandatory thought control training as levies to hold back the flood of insane acts and actors?

Perhaps, to be marginalized is now what we used to call disappointment.  Perhaps the marginalized shooter did not get what he really desired in the mistaken notion that desire is the same as need. Perhaps the marginalized person has been encouraged to expect what he could not obtain those outcomes and tossed the most horrific of tantrums.

We wring our hands about murder on Chicago streets, but immediately turn  to 'fact-based' artificial answers to root problems like codes of silence, systemic racism, wrongful convictions and corruption as a very moveable feast for fools. Verifiably satisfying outcomes is what Americans understand truth to be; they comprise new secular catechism.

The simple answer to why Chicago, and other cities, are plagued with gang/drug/black-on-black thuggery is that thuggery may, can and will.  A gang funeral can and will be the site of slaughter on church steps, because it may, can and will.  Prior to Roe v. Wade, American Progressives made sure God, in any manifestation was outlawed in the Republic - schools, public buildings, public gatherings and et cetera.    Once the Old Bearded myth was shunned any exercise of  public power at the local, state or federal level was justified and exercised beginning with conception. John Dewey, the ACLU, our courts and our universities have made it so -Fiat, caedem!

Yesterday's slaughter of full-term babies took place in a public school.  The killer of the babies is now being profiled as a lost soul with ironic name of Adam.  Adam Lanza grew up in John Dewey's Eden - a fact based, science-loaded secular laboratory. For the sake of argument, let's leave the religious issues aside and turn to Dewey's greatest critic - the piously agnostic Lord Bertrand Russell:

The main difference between Dr. Dewey and me is that he judges a belief by its effects, whereas I judge it by its causes where a past occurrence is concerned. I consider such a belief 'true', or as nearly 'true' as we can make it, when it has a certain kind of complicated relationship (sometimes very complicated) to its causes. Dr. Dewey holds that it has 'warranted assertibility' -- which he substitutes for 'true' -- if it has certain kinds of effects. This divergence is connected with a difference of outlook on the world. The past cannot be affected by what we do, and therefore, if truth is determined by what has happened, it is independent of past or future volitions; it represents, in logical form, the limitations of human power. But if truth, or rather 'warranted assertibility', depends on the future, then, in so far as it is in our power to alter the future, it is in our power to alter what should be asserted. This enlarges the sense of human power and freedom. Did Caesar cross the Rubicon? I should regard an affirmative answer as unalterably determined by a past event. Dr. Dewey would decide whether to say yes or no by an appraisal of future events, and there is no reason why those future events could not be arranged by human power so as to make a negative answer the more satisfactory.

If I find the belief that Caesar crossed the Rubicon very distasteful, I need not sit down in dull despair; I can, if I have sufficient skill and power, arrange a social environment in which the statement that he did not cross the Rubicon will have 'warranted assertibility.'

Throughout this book, I have sought, where possible, to connect philosophies within the social environment of the philosophers concerned. It has seemed to me that the belief in human power, and the unwillingness to accept 'stubborn facts', were connected with the hopefulness engendered by machine production and the scientific manipulation of our physical environment. This view is shared by many of Dr. Dewey's supporters. Thus George Raymond Geiger, in a laudatory essay, says that Dr. Dewey's method 'would mean a revolution in thought....'...
Dr. Dewey's world, it seems to me, is one in which human beings occupy the imagination; the cosmos of astronomy, though of course it is acknowledged to exist, is at most times ignored. His philosophy is a power philosophy, though not, like Nietzche's, a philosophy of individual power; it is the power of the community that is felt to be valuable. It is this element of social power that seems to me to make the philosophy of instrumentalism attractive to those who are more impressed by our new control over natural forces than by the limitations to which that control is still subject.

The attitude of man towards the non-human environment has differed profoundly at different times. The Greeks, with their dread of hubris and their belief in a Necessity or Fate superior even to Zeus, carefully avoided what to them would have seemed insolence towards the universe. The Middle Ages carried submission much further; humility towards God was a Christian's first duty. Initiative was cramped by this attitude, and great originality was scarcely possible. The Renaissance restored human pride, but carried it to the point where it led to anarchy and disaster. ... Man, formerly too humble, began to think of himself as almost a God...
In all of this I feel a great danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety.

The concept of 'truth' as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness -- the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.  From B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, "John Dewey", Ch. 30

Our society tears up and hugs after the slaughters of innocents in malls, theatres, college campuses and elementary schools, but there never seems to summon up the genuine will to examine the root causes of such monstrosities, because that would be the a necessary step in the right direction and a forthright challenge to pet projects and programs.

Adam of the Old Testament is denied by the disciples of Dewey, but Adam Lanza is as real as the guns and bullets he used to terminate the off-spring of parents who welcomed children into life, cherished and nurtured their every step, cry and giggle.  Adam Lanza is as real as Dr. Kermit Gosnell of the Philadelphia ' infant charnel house' where he and nine of his Planned Parenthood co-workers ensured fetal demise ( " . . .   late-term babies were delivered alive — fully intact and breathing — and then killed. Gosnell “called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’( The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ’snipping.’ Over the years, there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’ ’’)  for some sad little Julia.

This is the Hanukkah and Christmas season, let us remember the slaughter of the innocents by our Herods  and our Hitlers -two fine examples of Hegelian will and big government chaps.  Let's pray before the next marginalized, purposeless Adam, or sad little Julia act out.

Our public officials who have violated conscience for policy created the chaos that soaks the halls and playgrounds in Connecticut with the blood of innocents and the tears of anguished mothers and fathers. 

We are a mess and that is about the only verifiable fact on the table.  We might look elsewhere than programs and policies for answers to cleaning up our mess.

May God welcome the little hands and hearts taken from their parents by Adam and ease the collective pain of sad people with the very hard work of shaking off our cosmic impieties.

Fr. Bob Barron takes on the Cosmic Impiety of Our Times

Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the television pioneer holy man, wit, historian and priest, had it made - he spoke to very open ears and attentive minds.  For decades Bishop Sheen was welcomed into the homes of not only American Catholics on the tube ( Catholic Hour, Life is Worth Living and Fulton Sheen Program), but captured the hearts and minds of other Christians and Jews as well.  One of his major topics was the universal fight against Communism.  Like Satan, Communism managed to fool people that it never existed.  Families who lost sons at the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, the Chosin Reservoir and Pork Chop Hill in Korea, gradually became comfortable with Reds.

Here is a program from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen Program (1961-1968)  from 1968 -  on this taping the Bishop lays the economic, political, psychological and religious advantage of communist keeping non-Marxist nations at war: He nails it at 3:01

Joe Stalin croaked and avuncularly cartoonish shoe thumpers took his place. Americans no longer worried about Reds in academia, the State Department, or organized labor, because, like Joe Stalin, Senator Joe McCarthy croked.  However, Bishop Sheen continued to offer sermons warning against Communism and the devil's co-equal until advertisers to his national television program was limited to MagicKist carpet cleaning and American Catholics, Jews, and Christians became more interested in Laugh In and The Smothers Brothers and the return of Pete Seeger and his Red Banjo from America's basement. How dangerous could a skinny old geezer with a banjo strapped on be to anyone?

Like the Devil, Communism was no biggie.  The very same mindset of Aw-Shucks American hospitality and fair-play bumped science up in place of religious worship.

Now, decades after Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's return to Christ another witty and scholarly priest has stepped onto the American scene -Chicago's own Father Bob Barron, rector of St. Mary of Lake University in Mundelein, IL. Unlike, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Father Barron plays to a very hostile audience.

Like Bishop Sheen, Father Bob Barron has used the communications media (television, radio, print and the web) to engage the Devil and all of his works.  One of the best tools of evil is science.  Science has a huge altar and an enormous pulpit, as well as very talented and very bigoted voices shouting down people of faith who are no less schooled in the arcana of science, yet retain humbled before the author of the cosmos - God.

In the 19th Century, faith was eliminated from the discussion via the usual suspects - Hegel, Dewey and Marx.  Curricula K-20 offers no consideration of thought ( philosophy, science, history or literature) that does not consider culture except through the lens of Hegel, Dewey, or Marx.  American literature in high school text books practically dominates Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Garrison over any other consideration in order to valorize the subsequent identity-politics light weights who string out the canon.   In philosophy of education future teachers of American children receive an eye-dropper of Plato's thin broth redacted of course and feast upon Rousseau, Fichte, Mann, Dewey and now, comically sad but true, William Ayers.

As for science, there is no search for truth, only solutions to problems.  You can go to the moon, but you can not recall why we went there . . .to beat the Commies, Remember?  Commies are not a problem they are our bankers; therefore, cancel NASA shuttle flights.  We are tickled to death that we are getting great pictures from Mars, but why are we there?  What's the plan, there Hawking and Dawkins?


Father Barron chats with a priest scientist Father George Coyne:



Man built cathedrals that attempted to match to awe and majesty of God's love of man.  Man illuminated and preserved the works of Aristotle, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Empedocles and the plays of Aristophanes in beehive stone cells of monasteries far from the reach of savages in order to justify God's ways to Man. That is called piety.  The opposite of piety is pride and pride on steroids is hubris. Hubris is what the Greeks worried about - if man forgets God, Man is screwed.  We like to forget that.   We need Fulton J. Sheens and Bob Barrons.

In my opinion, Father Barron has a tougher row to hoe.  Bishop Sheen's foes, Satan and the Soviets, were much more understood by people during the American Golden Age ( 1945-1972).  I mark the end of WWII and Nixon's Trip to China and the very next year Nixon cleared the way for Roe v. Wade and the American Genocide*.   Once Tricky Dick ate egg-rolls with Mao and chatted realpolitik with Chou En Lai, Americans put on their eatin' pants too, burped away bad thoughts and watched the Tube and nodded that abortion was health care.

Father Barron offers a genuine consideration of modern hubris, or what Bertrand Russell called cosmic impiety, in an article from RealClear Politics.  Here is a salient passage:

 Though the sciences might be able to explain the chemical make-up of pages and ink, they will never be able to reveal the meaning of a book; and though they might make sense of the biology of the human body, they will never tell us why a human act is moral or immoral; and though they might disclose the cellular structure of oil and canvas, they will never determine why a painting is beautiful.And this is not because "science" is for the moment insufficiently developed, it is because the scientific method cannot, even in principle, explore such matters, which belong to a qualitatively different category of being than the proper subject matter of the sciences. The claim that "science" could ever provide a total understanding of reality as a whole overlooks the rather glaring fact that meaning, truth, beauty, morality, purpose, etc., are all ingredients in "the universe."
But as is usually the case with scientistic speculation, Carroll's thought is designed, above all, to eliminate God as a subject of serious intellectual discourse. The first and most fundamental problem is that, like Hawking, Dawkins and Dennett, Carroll doesn't seem to know what Biblical people mean by "God." With the advance of the modern physical sciences, he asserts, there remains less and less room for God to operate, and hence less and less need to appeal to him as an explanatory cause. This is a contemporary reiteration of Pierre-Simon Laplace's rejoinder when the Emperor Napoleon asked the famous astronomer how God fit into his mechanistic system: "I have no need of that hypothesis."
But God, as the classical Catholic intellectual tradition understands him, is not one cause, however great, among many; not one more item within the universe jockeying for position with other competing causes. Rather, God is, as Thomas Aquinas characterized him, ipsum esse, or the sheer act of to-be itself -- that power in and through which the universe in its totality exists. Once we grasp this, we see that no advance of the physical sciences could ever "eliminate" God or show that he is no longer required as an explaining cause, for the sciences can only explore objects and events within the finite cosmos.
To demonstrate the relationship between God and the universe more clearly, it would be worthwhile to explore the most fundamental argument for God's existence, namely the argument from contingency. You and I are contingent (dependent) in our being in the measure that we eat and drink, breathe, and had parents; a tree is contingent inasmuch as its being is derived from seed, sun, soil, water, etc.; the solar system is contingent because it depends upon gravity and events in the wider galaxy. To account for a contingent reality, by definition we have to appeal to an extrinsic cause. But if that cause is itself contingent, we have to proceed further. This process of appealing to contingent causes in order to explain a contingent effect cannot go on indefinitely, for then the effect is never adequately explained. 
Hence, we must finally come to some reality that is not contingent on anything else, some ground of being whose very nature is to-be. This is precisely what Catholic theology means by "God." Therefore, God is not one fussy cause within or alongside the universe; instead, he is the reason why there is a universe at all, why there is, as the famous formula has it, "something rather than nothing." To ask the sophomoric question, "Well, what caused God?" is simply to show that the poser of the question has not grasped the nettle of the argument.

No, Father, we have settled all that.  Science says "toss up those big-ass wind-turbines (NIMBY Rules apply of course) and all is well."  Go to Mars!  "Why?"  Because, there was water there billions and billions and billions of years ago! " And?"  There was water there billions and billions and billions of years ago. 

Keep at them, Father!

REV. ROBERT BARRON, M.A. (Phil), S.T.D., .

Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., Professor of Faith and Culture

M.A., Catholic University of America; S.T.B., M.Div., S.T.L., University of St. Mary of the Lake; S.T.D., Institut Catholique de Paris. Former Associate Pastor at St. Paul of the Cross Parish. A member of the Catholic Theology Society of America, G.K. Chesterton Society, Paul Tillich Society. Author of The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path, Creation as Discipleship, A Study of the DePotentia of Thomas Aquinas in Light of the Dogmatik of Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation, Heaven in Stone and Glass and Bridging the Great Divide and The Word on Fire: Proclaiming the Power of Christ and of the Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism. Articles on theology and the spiritual life have appeared in numerous journals.

*Planned Parenthood continues  to get one third( $ 345 Million dollars) of its funding to murder children from the Federal Government.
Forget Mars.  We got serious business here.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/622643main_FY%2013%20Budget%20Presentation.pdf

Power - Hegel, Fichte, Horace Mann, Compulsory Education -The Roots of Our Nanny and Ninny American Society

“Education should provide the means to destroy free will”.  -Fichte

I

Fichte and the powerful men (Emerson, Horace Mann and John Dewey) who have inherited his ideals, when they see children, think: 'Here is material that I can manipulate'... All this, to any person with natural affection for the young, is horrible; just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics... This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve (Russell 1938:251 - parenthetical my own).

Yesterday, a Cook County judge dismissed any and all charges against the Occupy/NATO protesters because the City of Chicago did not arrest Obama Victory Party celebrators in 2008.

If that makes perfect sense to you, then you fully understand the nature of the American Progressive Power and Education Collective.  There is no room for rugged individuals like cops in this America, this Illinois, Cook County and City of Chicago.  

The cops were praised universally in May when there was clear and present danger of great violence and mayhem resulting from the organized and orchestrated voices, fists, feet, buttocks, beer and pop bottles of the American Left starring Occupy, Anarchists International and the anti-NATO gangs.

Chicago Police under Superintendent Garry McCarthy were masterful routing the goofs and ninnies.. It is axiomatic that the American public praise not soldiers, cops, firemen and medics too long.

As in the case of the American National Memory following 9/11/01,  unified pride and determination must be extinguished in place of greater goals, agendas and satisfying outcomes - a return to the Nanny and Ninny State*
.
The Nanny State makes sure that American Individualism is shackled by governmentally legislated mandates limiting the free exercise of conscience -Gay Marriage is a natural and civil right, Abortion is Health Care, Sugar, fat and salt and is poison, obesity can be cured by law, the Middle Class must disappear, while believing that it is being strengthened, and opportunity can only come from the Federal Government.

The Ninny State complies to everything that comes from the Nanny State.

Like drunks and degenerate gamblers, we hold these truths to be self-evident, because we learned them in schools -public schools and practiced what was preached over many decades without ever challenging the roots of power itself.

Power is what it is all about.  The power to turn Labor into SEIU was exercised patiently and incrementally.  The power to eliminate individualism and piety from the culture.  America must transcend its identity and become a global component in a New World Order.

Great people must be diminished and obscured and replaced by a poster image.

 I have never met a great person, powerful, influential, celebrated and publicly recognized for achievement, who was not a very humble, grateful, giving person.   I met met many, far too many, public persons who grabbed or were handed authority, influence and celebrity, who were cowardly bullies, frauds, grifters, users and sneaks.  While they may wield power, far too long in most cases, they never do anything for anyone or anything that does not add to their personal and public agenda. For them it is all about power.

Some of the worst bullies, frauds, grifters, users and sneaks choose teaching as a path to power.    Whether it is a gym coach who flirts and eventually seduces and impregnates a cheerleader, a social science teacher who uses the essays of her students to publish her book on adolescent sexual awakenings and shares none of the royalties or credit with her 'ghost-writers,'   the unprepared lazy clown who gives silent reading periods seven preps a day,  five days a week, while taking classes for his Type-75 Certification from Big Community Mail or Phone It In University,  education, like politics, can be a very warm and welcoming home for the useless, lazy and mean. Private and Catholic schools have the luxury of getting rid of such mopes and the best of them do and quickly.

Power differs from authority.   I can fire up a boiler in the winter but I am not the best person to do so.  The custodian, or the school stationary engineer.  I 'pigeon-see-makee-workee' buttons and pumps and water tubes, it will go on, but if things go south . . .hold the  phone, Richard. In short, I am no authority. Though I am no proficient, let alone authority on boiler maintenance and operations, I was taught simple tasks necessary for a satisfying outcome.  I went to Catholic schools. My public school counterpart would have nothing to do with any task out of his  step, level and license.  Catholic educators multi-task - always have and always will. . .until outlawed by Federal Mandate.

I learned that if something needs to be done, even without full authority or license I am obligated to fire the the damn things up!  If I see an unconscious man on the sidewalk, I may not pass him by. Rather, I must apply the rudimentary CPR tasks and face the all too real possibility of having my ass sued by the person I helped.  It's that Catholic thing.  I coached, mentored, supervised and taught in Catholic schools and still do. 

I am very well schooled in the canons of British, American and some World Literatures. My areas of interest are not limited to my tastes.  I love Thackeray, admire Dickens, worship Milton and  Pope and delight in Shakespeare.  I prefer neo-classical, Augustan poetry over the much more popular Romantics; Jane Bronte over Jane Austin; Montaigne before Bacon always with essays; Seamus Heaney & Wallace Stevens top Yeats, Frost, T.S. and Chesterton is more than equal to GB Shaw.  That stuff can not unplug a sewer line, nor can it bend electrical pipe.

My authority lies solely in my study and training as a teacher.  That authority did not include offering a National Honor Society insurance policy along with the syllabus for AP English Literature.  I did not give "extra credit" and neither would set of Michelin 59/80R63 XDR tires satisfy the semester essay requirements; nor, did it include the license to organize students as an agenda collective.

The idea  that one should develop as woman or man is repellent to schools of education, especially American education. The concept of Free Will lies at the core of Catholic teaching and task of each person is to recognize obligation to family, faith and nation within the individual's cosmic duty to the Creator.  Catholic education was established in America in Baltimore during the 1850's in reaction to evangelizing of citizens under the Hegelian Prussian models advocated by the likes of  Horace Mann a Unitarian minister.  Horace Mann visited Prussia in 1843 and returned with doctrine of universal compulsory education -

It was Mann and his like-minded comrades in the Massachusetts elite, who imagined education as a tool of an emerging republic to develop its human resources and direct that development. They saw themselves as the best and the brightest, so who better than they to say what education should be for everyone else.

Thus the advent of the Nanny State and Ninny State that America has become.  Students are compelled to track into niche and absorb all manner of nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with " the examined life."

Progressive icon Emma Goldman railed against the individual -rugged and otherwise - in favor of collectivism and Americans eat this up!

'rugged individualism'... is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire

Individualism during the harsh Medieval times turned hostelers into Archbishops, like Thomas Becket, through the scholastic gradus.


Beggers can't be kings, but under the American collectivist education, buggers can be Dads. Power and compulsory education make it so.  Social engineering comes through schools.  As always, those born to the purple have education suited to their rank and privilege.


Where gentleman farmers and leading burghers attended the American but less feudal incubators of Groton, Phillips-Andover, Trinity & Harvard and Yale elite private schools, the rustics and immigrant  huddled masses were compelled to attend government schools founded by  Unitarian established doctrines and systems to mold workers, clerks and soldiers and their places in the Unitarian scheme.  The wealthy went to the elite schools:

Tier one would be our elite private prep schools and elite private (and top public) universities that, though they are not completely limited to our society’s social elite, are still generally bastions of the most privileged in our country, including many of our top political leadership. Lefty Parent

 These private educational institutions, colloquially known as "prep schools" in the United States, can be boarding or day schools, affiliated with a particular faith or completely secular. At the high end of the spectrum, they're known for ultra-competitive admissions, high tuition and top-notch facilities. Their aim is to provide students with education that funnels them into the very best universities.. . . These institutions all offer high-caliber instruction and uniquely valuable experiences to their students. But in a world where education is so competitive and expensive, and where the name of your high school can open doors for life, it's worth measuring the best of the best. Forbes

* Tier two would be the best of our public K-12 schools, located mostly in more prosperous neighborhoods, which have the resources to assist the most academically inclined of the children of the middle class to put them on the programmed path to get their degrees and then get good jobs as doctors and lawyers and other “knowledge workers”, our contemporary “apparatchiks”. Lefty Parent

These schools are the ones like a New Trier in Winnetka - home to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and funded by a wildly affluent. They are no pay prep schools. Likewise, CPS has created Magnet Schools which operate in most exclusive manner with regard to acceptance, yet remain linked by taxes to the universal compulsory model despite all of bells and whistles found in Naperville, Winnetka and Lake Forest public schools.

Then, of course the compelled helots and huddled masses of urban and rural America - real Mike Klonsky and Bill Ayers Annenberg Challenged children are warehoused, as they always have been in the Horace Mann, John Dewey Worker Beehives of Tier Three Schools.

* Tier three would be the rest of our public schools, mainly in the inner cities and poor rural areas, generally under resourced and failing (by design as it is argued by some). Though there are the occasional exceptions of schools or individual students that rise above these circumstances into the second tier, which perpetuate the myth that anyone can succeed, many of our youth in these schools have the odds of success heavily stacked against them. From these ranks many of our lower-paid worker-bees come, including many of the enlisted soldiers in our volunteer army. Lefty Parent

The Tier Three schools are the horrific barns parents of limited income must send their children. There they are housed until such time as they may reap the benefits doled to them.  The only chance these children have of becoming rugged individuals who contribute while they save what they earn is catholic schools.  I group all denominations under this small c rubric.  Roman Catholic schools reject the Horace Mann compulsory  second and third tier models.  Catholic schools like their medieval rooted schools teach free will, humility, commitment to  God and the scholastic gradus* - One must move up the steps once one has mastered the skills and the understanding of each level of progress and proficiency.  Other Christian Faiths adopted the Catholic system of education -parochial school.

In our Nanny & Ninny State, rugged individuals need not apply until they take the required univeral and compulsory anti-individual, racist, sugar eating, carbon foot-printing, pan-homophobia, breeder happy counsel and licensing.


N.B. Much of what sparked my rather gabby post above was sparked by a posting from a blog entitled Lefty Parent which I link below. Thanks, Lefty!

*The Trivium consisted of:

• Grammar

• Rhetoric

• Logic

The Quadrivium consisted of:

• Arithmetic -- Number in itself

• Geometry -- Number in space

• Music, Harmonics, or Tuning Theory -- Number in time

• Astronomy or Cosmology -- Number in space and time

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-grant-park-arrests-judge-0928-20120928,0,3817020.story
http://www.leftyparent.com/blog/2011/10/15/napoleon-prussia-the-u-s-education-system/

Real Power Has No Public Face , Nor Wants One. Chicago Magazine Notwithstanding - These Eight Determine the State

Judge Richard Posner is easily my pick as the most powerful person . . .anywhere around here. Numero Uno! El Jefe!

"Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment, including the behavior of other entities."

"Power is not alluring to pure minds."
Thomas Jefferson

"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"If any place breeds power, it’s Chicago. “Clout” and the city have gone together since the early 1900s, when our Irish Catholic forefathers clapped a stranglehold on the levers of authority that they have been loath to relinquish in modern times." -Chicago Magazine

Christ have mercy! Who wrote this? Ald. Dick Simpson? Well, he says the same thing in his latest prouncement on Corruption . . .Bad.
Chicago Magazine listed series of people believed be the most powerful in Chicago and the Illinois hinterlands. It is a vanity piece.

Only one face of the 100 persons in the article is what I would call powerful and that is # 67 Federal Judge Richard Posner. He should be # 1. - the most powerful single individual in the Federal Northern District. Judge Posner is the force in business, moral and legal policy. Everyone else is a piker.

Judge Posner scares the breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner out of every Black Robe, and I don't mean Jesuit, within a tankful of Premium of Lake Michigan.

Judge Posner overturns any other judge's ruling ( the sentencing of Eddie Vrdolyak e.g.) with a call to the editorial boards of our great metropolitan newspapers.

Absent as well are the Progressive Political Machine* that have so thoroughly dismantled the Democratic Political Machine that most people think snitching nickels is corruption. Policy, Law and of Course Wealth is power.

Along with Judge Richard Posner at # 1,


These folks should be in the magazine's top ten and are my Huge Hickey Eight.

2. Terry Cosgrove - The President of Personal PAC commands the political muscle and money of Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ Activists and owns Governor Quinn.



3. Dr. Quentin Young - Progressive leader of Hyde Park and Health Policy foundation architect of Obama Care



4. Arthur Loevy - Leftist Labor and the architect of Police Abuse Lawsuit Policy - Loevey made the marriage of left-wing public labor and politics a reality


5. G. Flint Taylor- Peoples Law Office - From Fred Hampton to tommorrow's Burge Headline this lawsuit lootery lawyer has helped bankrupt Cook County and Chicago, but has undermined any and all public faith in law enforcement and law itself.




6. Abner Mikva - The Progressive King of Policy and Progressive Government - if Mikva gives no imprimatur it does not happen - Abner Mikva is Michael Shakman's Chinaman - Now THAT is clout. No one in Cook County can ever say, " I'll call my guy!" " My Guy, or any Guy" is now an exhibit at the Field Museum.



7. Dawn Clark Netsch -from the ERA to Personal PAC every piece of legislation that has been an unfunded mandate on education, health and labor begins and ends with DCN>



8. Tie Fred Eychaner
and John Rogers -
Money Talks and now owns the TelaPrompter - Ariel Capital Management and Fred Eychnaer created Congressman Mike Quigley, CTA's Forrest Claypool, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama, as well as powerful GLBTQ political operatives - Debs Mell & Shore and Greg Harris, yet only Rogers' Ex gets the props in Chicago Magazine? Desiree , for real?

Whether it is the fees we pay, how safe we are from thugs, what our kids learn and not learn in public schools, our ability to petition for redress of grievances from government, who gets elected and our very freedom to worship is determined, not by Irish Catholic whitemen, or Swedes.

The Democratic Party exists in name only. Illinois, Cook County and Chicago are corrupt, or really wonderful places to live, because of eight powerful people

"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another." John Dewey

They have the power.



Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_dewey.html#ixzz1mSMSjv1I
*Throughout the twentieth century, middle-class progressives embraced visions of democracy rooted in their relatively privileged life experiences. Progressive educators developed pedagogies designed to nurture the individual voice within egalitarian classrooms, assuming that collective action in the public realm could be modeled on the relatively safe small-group interactions they were familiar with in their families, schools, and associations. Partly as a result, they remained blind to (and often denigrated) the democratic aspects of working-class organizations, such as unions and community action groups, which found strength in solidarity. In this article Aaron Schutz argues that progressives must integrate into their models the often brutal lessons about power learned by those with less privilege. Until they do so, their approaches to democratic education will continue to have limited capacity to support social transformation and empowerment in the world as it is.
from POWER AND TRUST IN THE PUBLIC REALM: JOHN DEWEY, SAUL ALINSKY, AND THE LIMITS OF PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION
Aaron Schutz*

Gimlet Eye on “Chicago Way” - Joel Kotkin Excoriates The City that Shirks

Blago got 14 years. He got fourteen years, because he is a goof and was a very easy target for Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzy does not harpoon Moby Dick; he nets smelt: Rezko, Blago and other ham sammich indictees.

The core of Chicago Style Corruption lies not with the guy asking his precinct captain to go to bat for his kid. Chicago Style Corruption* is not a cop telling you that, "You were travelling $35 over the posted speed limit." Chicago Style Corruption is not some mopey kid sleeping off a hang-over in the back of a Water Department Truct awakened by Dane Placko, Pam Zekman.

Chicago Style Corruption is Lab School. Shakman Decrees were the starting blocks. When political hiring was targeted as the strawman, elected officials danced around its bonfire. No longer would an elected official be required to attend wakes, go church repasts, attend Knights of Columbus Tootsie Roll Drives, chat up soft-ball Moms, or actually do something for other people. Shakman freed political powerhouses to shake of the pests with a stentorian, "I'll look into it."

Instead, Policy was crafted to deny, shirk, ignore and dismiss. "Jesus, Guido, can't help you. Shakman. What can I do? Don't forget to pull a straight ticket, Guid. Here's some tickets to my golf outing - there a Hundo each."

Nope. Policy was crafted at University of Chicago, Northwestern, or imported by a 1960's hippie crime expert. The BGA took care of the whistle-blowers. The Media took care of the rest -ignoring policy wrought real estate scams that funneled Housing dollars into the pockets of IVI lawyers turned moguls and their kids. Policy established boards and placed cranks, loudmouths and do-gooders over the street patrolmen.

Blago got fourteen years. George Ryan got six. Rezko got ten and change. Shakman got millions. Pat Quinn got to be Governor, Rahm Mayor and Dawn Clark Netsch a comfy seat on the Ethics panel. Illinois got screwed, blued and tatooed.

John Dewey, not Paddy Bauler, invented our Chicago Style Corruption. Eddie Burke, Eddie Vrdolyk and Mike Madigan are pikers compared to the Judson Miner/Allison Davis ( who can forget Sun Times investigator Tim Novak's incisive reports on Allison Davis and his son Cullen's real estate triumphs and the tragic death of a child?) crowd. Steve Preckwinkle? No relation to Toni's hubby Zeus? Outrageous, to ask such a question. Michael Shakman defending a hot property boon-doggle?Shack them jowls in indignation!!!

Chicago Style Corruption is a co-operative, a coalition of elected officials, academics, real estate players, agenda rangers ( SEIU, Planned Parenthood,LGBTQ,)lawyers and the media. I'll take nickel snitcher anytime. A thief will leave something - even fingerprints. No body steals like Progressive Reformer, because the editorial nodders bleach the crime scenes - unless, you are a Blago.

Chicago and its Daley dictatorship has been much celebrated in the media – particularly after Obama’s election in everything from the liberal New Yorker to Fast Company, which named Chicago “city of the year” in 2008. The following year, the Windy City was deemed the best city for men by Askmen.com, for offering what it claimed was “the perfect balance between cosmopolitan and comfortable, combining all of the culture, entertainment and sophistication of an internationally renowned destination with an affordable lifestyle and down-to-earth work hard/play hard character.”

Well, you can make that case, unless you happen to be searching for a job. Over the past decade, “the Chicago way” has proven more adept at getting good coverage than creating employment for its residents. In Forbes’ last cities rankings greater Chicago ranked 41st out of the 51 largest metropolitan areas. Between 2001 and 2011 it actually lost jobs. Since 2007 the region has lost more jobs than Detroit, and more than twice as many as New York. It has lost about as many jobs – 250,000 – as up and comer Houston has gained. In Forbes recent survey of high-tech performance, the Chicago region stood at a dismal 47th among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas.

Blago is going to the join and the Goo-goo's are going to the bank for a very, very, very long time.

* E.G. - Read the great Anne Leary today on the Triumph of the Policy Pirates

http://backyardconservative.blogspot.com/2011/12/ayers-on-platter-dohrn-with-fork.html

Les Soeurs Baiser - A Tale of Halloween Deception

Men sholde nat knowe of goddes pryvetee [God's private affairs].
Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed [unlearned] man
That noght but oonly his bileve kan! [who knows nothing except the Creed]
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales


Thanks to John Dewey, too many Americans have been duped. Lord Bertrand Russell, the father of Logical Positivism, and a celebrated agnostic, was a contemprary of the Father of American Public Education, who took a dim view of Dewey's dim philospophy of Education - Inquiry is Truth. Well it is not, Jasper.

Lord Russell tagged Dewey's will to power, via fundamentally unsound pedogogy, to be a "cosmic impiety." Because one insisits that 'it just is' does not determine an end.

Here is a seasonal object lesson that deconstructs Dewey's Inquiry, that I recently heard from Vietnam Hero and California Yeoman Iron Mike McQuade.


"A cabbie picks up a Nun. She gets into the cab, and notices that the
VERY handsome cabdriver won't stop staring at her. She asks him why he is staring..

He replies: "I have a question to ask, but I don't want to offend you"

She answers, " My son, you cannot offend me. When have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I' m sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive."

"Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me."

She responds, "Well, let's see what we can do about that -
1) you have to be single and
2) you must be Catholic."

The cab driver is very excited and says, "Yes, I'm single and Catholic!"

"OK" the nun says. "Pull into the next alley."

The nun fulfills his fantasy with a kiss that would make a hooker blush.

But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.

"My dear child," said the nun, why are you crying?"

"Forgive me but I've sinned. I lied and I must confess, I'm married and I'm a Unitarian."

The nun says, "That's OK. My name is Steve and I'm going to a Halloween party!"

Quod erat Demonstrandum.

John Dewey - The Father of Stupidity in Education

The Lab School at the University of Chicago is prestigious and pricey, but I would send my kids to Moses Montefiore, before I'd send them there. As I sent them through Catholic schools the point is as moot as it is root. Nothing against the good folks at the Lab School who come armed to instruct with degrees and certifications that would make the founder's moustache quiver with delight. More so, I would hazard a guess that most of the staff of Baronet Moses Montefiore,Kt ( British Jewish Financier.Philanthropist and Sheriff of London 1784-1885) High School on Ashland Ave. were trained in the methods and philosophy of John Dewey. That said, all American public schools are fostered in Dewey/Hegelian non-sense.

As I have posted many times, John Dewey bullied his way into American Education by dint of his intellectual gifts and membership in the American Brahmin Class. Dewey clicked with good old American contrarian ways and means. Dewey made inquiry and not the pursuit of truth the core of American public education. The Lab School at University of Chicago mandates inquiry as play and play as power. You can arrive at any pre-conceived outcome so long as that outcome fully agrees with the point that inquiry begins. e.g. All police officers are brutal agents of systemic racism - Alpha and Omega. President Obama is the greatest President Ever! Our Economy is Better Now Than Under George W. Bush. The Debt Debate is a crisis leading to the aversion of the crisis created by the the very crisis itself. A family consists of any human beings. The Act of Sex is a Civil Right. The New York Times said it and that settles it. More Tax Dollars Poured into Public Education Will Save Tax Dollars.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is sending his kids to Chicago Lab School and they will follow the intellectual and professional paths of Arne Duncan, the Obama kids, and Valerie Jarrett. They will be fine. Their self-esteem, personal growth and life-long associations will blossom.

Founded in 1896 by pre-eminent American educator John Dewey, the Lab Schools are known as one of the most diverse of the nation's elite private institutions; about 35 percent of its students are people of color. It's also known as one of the best: its high school is one of the top feeders in the country to America's elite colleges and universities, and its extracurriculars, from newspaper and yearbook to Model U.N., are regular winners of regional and national awards.

Such prestige doesn't come cheap: the lower school costs $21,060 per year, while the upper school is just shy of $25,000 annually. That means that the Emanuels will be forking over more than $60,000 each year for their three kids' tuitions.

Huffington Post - The Hollywood Squares of Journalism

Hey, Catholic schools are diverse. Leo High School for example in the heart of Gresham has 90.9% persons of color and a growing number of Mexican kids and now several white ethnic Catholics from Canaryville. There is greater diversity, to be sure, at Mount Carmel, De LaSalle, St. Rita and Marist, but Leo is a very happy campus.

One thing is certain, the kids at south side, west side and north side Catholic schools come from very homogeneous financial backgrounds - Mom, Dad, Auntie, Gramma and Alumni are President Obama's working stiffs: cops, firemen, nurses, public school teachers, skilled tradesmen, industrial workers, Unlike the Lab young 'uns, these kids will not have the path of inquiry festooned with placement, nor will they have the grease and juice backing their play necessary to waltz into Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Oberlin. Catholic kids will scratch their way into those same schools by dint of achievement. Lab School kids get cache with a diploma.

Cache is okay, but core values are much better. Here is a recent commentary by an American Academic and covert to Islam. The guy knows that Dewey is as dangerous to his Faith as it is to Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Unitarians and Wiccans. In writing about the idiotic neologism THE ARAB SPRING coined by New York Times Dewey-boy Thomas Friedman

Truth, however, cannot exist in a culture with an educational system that denies the possibility of its very existence. Without truth and justice, there is no such thing as a moral disaster. The root cause of most of the injustices in the world, however, is the moral disaster of secular utilitarianism. The wielders of financial and political influence in America have imposed this utilitarian philosophy as a paradigmatic monopoly in the American educational system and with it infected the entire world.


In a compartmentalized system of education, where there is no coherence in anything, the products of this system necessarily are too narrow to value knowledge exogenous to their field of expertise or even to sense that a system of morality can even exist.

The spread of this moral disaster has been going on within the American educational establishment for more than a century, especially since John Dewey. Dewey was born before the American Civil War and set the standard for modern education in America and throughout the world a hundred years ago in his many books, perhaps especially in his Depression-Era book, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Dewey invented the school of “philosophical pragmatism” which is associated originally with John Stuart Mill, but was further developed at Harvard by others who defined all meaning in life and all morality as the maximization of net utility based on pain versus pleasure. Avoid whatever gives one pain, and embrace whatever gives pleasure, which, in turn, is associated with the philosophy of hedonism. One can argue with this approach pro and con, but the major distinction is that in modern secular education there is no truth and no justice, because even the concepts of truth and justice are thought to restrict rather than maximize human freedom.

Dr. Robert D. Crane*

Back at you, Doc!

*DR ROBERT D. CRANE Chairman, Center for Understanding Islam, and President, The Center for Policy Research. Earned a doctorate (J.D.) at Harvard Law School (1959) in international investment and comparative legal systems. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates (1981). Principal da’ii (religious instructor) at the Islamic Center, Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. (l983-86). Director of Publications, International Institute of Islamic Thought (1986-88). Founding member of The American Muslim Council and Director of its Legal Division, 1992-1994. He has published 10 books and 50 professional articles on comparative legal systems, global strategy, and information management. Languages include English, German, Russian, Spanish, French and Arabic.

History? Just a Bunch of Stuff That Already Happened - American Education Fails Fabulously!

Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. Of History -Lord Bertrand Russell

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Life without even a basic understanding of the past has been accomplished by John Dewey the Progressive Hegelian Father of American Public Education. Sadly, even some Catholic schools and far too many universities ape Public Education and have cashed in classical learning for Dewey's shell game.

Here are the results of Mr. Tests & Measurements' handiwork:

The overall lackluster performance is certain to revive the debate about whether history and other subjects, such as science and art, are being pushed out of the curriculum because of the focus on math and reading demanded under the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The federal law mandates that students be tested in math and reading.

Sue Blanchette, president-elect of the National Council for Social Studies, a national association of K-12 and college social-studies teachers, called the results disheartening and said history education has been marginalized in the last decade.

"Everyone is going to participate in civic life by paying taxes, protesting against paying taxes, voting, and we must teach our children how to think critically about these issues," she said. "Clearly, we are not doing that."

Click my post title for the Wall Street Journal's report on the American social studies shame.

Sue Blanchette is 'disheartened' that is Progressive speak for "more tax dollars."

Here is a critical thought, Sue, how about teaching civics and history. Here is another gem from Johnny Dewey - "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." John Dewey and Jane Addams and Mary McDowell and other turn of the 20th Century Hegelian's bullied educational methods into place that eroded public education and murdered America's sense of History.

The History Channel is a monument to John Dewey. History is series of Nostradamus, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, Swamp People, American Pickers ( "Fabulous Bric-a Brac!") Larry the Cable Guy and UFO's. Reality TV as History.

The American public school classroom is no different. A coach (of whatever sport is necessary) pops in a disc of Glory and accepts a paper posing the question of why they didn't use flame-throwers or call in airstrikes. No teacher would consider recording the Sunday Morning lectures from the Pritzker Military Library on every Sunday on cable, because the lectures might be too boring.

Dewey demanded that education be play! He built the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago upon that very dictum.

Education is preparation and our students are unprepared.

Teaching should be harder than learning and learning is everything that it is cracked up to be.

History was written by 'Dead White Men' we are told by Educators. White Guys like Berossus of Babylonia which is now called Iraq, St. Augustine the Bishop of Hippo, a suburb of Carthage which is in North Africa; Ban Zhao of the Han Dynasty - not the Swedish Zhaos mind you. There were a few skirts too, like Mary Bonaventure Browne, Poor Clare 16th Century Irish historian.

How many Chicagoans could tell you why Comiskey Park was built on Shields Ave*.? That is a leading question. All good teaching is leading. Education comes from a Dead Language - educere - to lead away from . . .that would be from ignorance. John Dewey encourage education to be contrarian -that is Progressive: No exceptionalism!

Here, in essence, is American Eduction ala John Dewey:


I'm not kidding.

Ignorance is temporary but stupid is forever. It seems Education in America is Dewey forever. We can do and have done much better, but that would require a sense of history and John Dewey helped kill that with a great deal of help.

* James Shields Elementary School in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood is named for Senator/General james J. Shields the only American to be elected a United States Senator from three states ( Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri), who nearly fought a dual with Abraham Lincoln, was a hero of the Mexican American War and the only Union General to defeat Confederate General Thomas Stonewall Jackson in the field at 1st Battle of Kernstown in 1862. Likewise Shields Ave. is named for the same man. Charles Comiskey's father served in the Union Army and prior to that was a member of the Shields Guards Militia which partly formed the 23rd Illinois Irish Brigade. History is a big deal made of very small things.

Update from Mr. Dan Kelley, historian/journalist/attorney

Honest John Comiskey was also a Chicago alderman. His son was tipped to the fact that street car lines were going to be routed towards the area where the ballpark was eventually erected (on the site of a former dump) and this was a valuable consideration for the site of the Baseball Palace of the World.

Oddly enough, the same architect worked on both Comiskey Park and Weegham Park (later remodeled and renamed Wrigley Field), but Charles Comiskey scaled back on Zachary Taylor Davis' plans and cut expenditures whereas the Northside Park was built on a more liberal basis.

Sun Times's Steve Huntley Calls Out the Radicals Who Crafted "Islamaphobia"

American Progressives ( Saul Alinsky said, Use Progressive rather than Socialist) get their thoughts and opinions from the Shape-shifters. Talking points! Hot buttons! Hardballs! Soft brains.

The Shape-shifters employ the intelectual constructs developed by John Dewey who cut-and-pasted his thoughts from Hegel.

Thus!
Choice means killing an unwanted child
Torture is only committed by Americans, their allies and Chicago Police
Racism means Whitey is bad
Whitey can be a Jew, a Catholic, an Asian, or a Black Supreme Court Justice
Woman can not be a homemaker who does not cotton to the idea of killing her
children
Fairness means only what is crafted by MSNBC, CBS,ABC,NYT, or NPR

Americans do not hate Muslims. Americans are not afraid of Muslims. Muslims are not Islamist Scumbags.




Imam Rauf and his Dragon Lady Burka-less wife Daisy sure look and smell like Islamist Thugs as do the whole Cordoba House crowd.



Chicago Sun Times Steve Huntley calls out the radical dopes and ninnies.

Well done, Steve!

There is no dispute that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has a constitutional right to build a mosque at the Lower Manhattan location. Still, he displayed an extraordinarily tin ear to the tenor of the nation in not realizing that strong objections were bound to arise to locating it so near ground Americans consider hallowed. His rationale for staying the course is that relocation would strengthen radicalism, fuel terrorism and put Americans "under attack in the Muslim world."

First, fear of violence from the Muslim street keeps the Danish cartoons out of a book about the Danish cartoons. And President Obama cites Muslim opinion as a reason to close the Guantanamo detention center. Now Rauf warns us -- it's not a threat, he insists, but a warning -- that it's his way on the mosque or America faces new trouble. If that reasoning prevails, what will be the next national decision dictated by intimidation from our Islamist enemy?

ACORN, The Faux Hegelian Crooks and Academic Posers and the Political Oafs of Illinois

Since morality is an experiment analogous to the scientific method, Dewey rejects any a priori moral limits on action; moral knowledge can only come in the process of experience. Dewey calls his method “naturalistic empiricism” (EN, 1a), and describes proper experimentalism as providing “a map of the road that has been traveled” (EN, 29). Dewey acknowledges as problematic that the retrospective method of traditional empiricism tends to accept the facts of past experience as given: “British empiricism, with its appeal to what has been in the past is, after all, only a kind of apriorism. For it lays down a fixed rule for future intelligence to follow.”26Instead of a purely retrospective empiricism, Dewey goes to great lengths to outline a dialectical experimentalism as opposed to a one-sided empiricism.27Always concerned

http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/7/4/0/pages67408/p67408-11.php

I watched a bit of ACORN free-fall while channel surfing the Cable, during my laundry rituals this morning and amused myself with the always pie-eyed loudmouth, hip-hop Academic Michael Eric Dyson on Morning Joe. Dyson scatted loudly about race and the nuanced "Oh,No You Didn't" race machine-gunning of all manner of topic.

This dope was given an academic posting at the PC Self-Conscious DePaul University, a Sun Times column that was mercifully short-lived and launched himself on to the national scene at Georgetown University and gigs on CNN and the MSNBC Took-Shed ( staffed by more Tools than True Value Hardware.

Dyson went all Mumia on Morning Joe and Mika with 'You gotta understand' litanies that support failed President Jimmy Carter's moronic assertion that any opposition to President Obama is intrinsically racist and reaction against the election of America's first black President. Race is place for the helpful Hegelian Man Dyson.

Dyson and most extreme leftist Academics float on the clouds of Faux Hegelianism.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a 19th Century German Philosopher who developed the system of ideas that 'pump up' the State. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tojo, Tito, Castro, Hugo Chavez, John Dewey, Roger Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, and Michael Eric Dyson are Hegelians, or at least faux Hegelians.
Hegel was the granddaddy of Totalitarian schemers and the polar opposite of liberal thinkers. Thus:

The worship of power is an old religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end if whatever conquers in the end is the good.
– George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, I

In fact, so powerful was Hegel's system of thought that the entire philosophical foundation of the University of Chicago is Germanic Hegelianism and most rooted in Hegel was the man who screwed up American Public Education John Dewey. Hegel influenced Marx and Marx tried to stop Adam Smith style free market thought through Hegel's The State as Absolute Truth. All a priori truths -ethics morals and religious conviction are excised by John Dewey in his mad rush and crush on 'free inquiry.' Everything is absorbed by Hegel's Absolute -The State.

Hegelianism is at the core of what we call modern American Progressives ( Emma Goldman, Roger Baldwin & etc.) Progressives seek to ensure that every human thought, activity and inclination be absorbed into the One Absolute -The State ( Government -witness the great 1919 Progressive Victory Prohibition and its children State controlled Vice -Gaming, Smoking, Banking, Industry, Health, Sex, Abortion, Eugenics, Voting, Education, ad infinitum!) Thus,. . .

Perhaps one of the most influential parts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerns his analysis of the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy. On the one hand, Hegel agreed with Adam Smith that the interlinking of productive activities allowed by the modern market meant that “subjective selfishness” turned into a “contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else.” But this did not mean that he accepted Smith's idea that this “general plenty” produced thereby diffused (or “trickled down” ) though the rest of society. From within the type of consciousness generated within civil society, in which individuals are grasped as “bearers of rights” abstracted from the particular concrete relationships to which they belong, Smithean optimism may seem justified. But this simply attests to the one-sidedness of this type of abstract thought, and the need for it to be mediated by the type of consciousness based in the family in which individuals are grasped in terms of the way they belong to the social body. In fact, the unfettered operations of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Starting from this analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of Hegel's “civil society” and socialise the means of production. Hegel, however, did not draw this conclusion. His conception of the exchange contract as a form of recognition that played an essential role within the state's capacity to provide the conditions for the existence of rational and free-willing subjects would certainly prevent such a move. Rather, the economy was to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist state intervention

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/

Hegel defies common sense and the true sense of the human community. Progressives have done more to vanish the Humanities than any 3rd Century Vandal could have dreamed of doing. Why burn a library when you can burn away the Human Voice! " You Lie!" No, I don't!

That is why faux Hegelians like Dyson find such warmth in Hegel's illogical blanket. If it deifies sense -hey it works. The eye is valuable, but it is not intrinsically essential in and of its self. The eye is good for seeing stuff, but take the eye out of the human being and it is useless. A Hegelian like Dyson takes something that might have value and turns it into an absolute. Racism is valuable to racists whether they are leading the Aryan Nation, or commenting loudly on Morning Joe.

Hegelians love ACORN. Hell they founded it. According to Hegel the only things that matters is the complete subjugation of everything needed to help feed its appetite for Power an that Power's ability to feed the State is absolute. Hookers, Pimps and sex-slave traffickers have a place under the Mighty Oak. Until the last two weeks anyway.

Federal Funding to ACORN was dumped. More on the way.

Our two Illinois Senators voted to stand with ACORN. Makes perfect Hegelian sense.

Dick Durbin* is a Hegelian's Dream Candidate - everything and anything fits Durbin handsomely, but common sense. Senator Roland Burris . . .that says it all.

ACORN lost its funding after years of being a haven for 60's radicals and a money laundering operation that benefits elected officials.

When the Faith, Patriotism, Decency and Honesty of American citizens can be tagged as essentially and absolutely racist in all matters, Hegelian thought is afoot.



*

Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment to the HUD and Transportation appropriation bill to strip ACORN of all federal funding. A week ago, Johanns wouldn’t have gotten the amendment to the floor. Today, however, after three straight days of BigGovernment.com’s video exposés of ACORN offices in Washington DC, New York City, and Baltimore offering assistance to pimping, tax evasion, and trafficking in underage Salvadorean girls, Johanns not only got his vote — but he got an impressive bipartisan showing. The Senate passed the Johanns amendment 83-7.

The seven Senators supporting ACORN:

Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Roland Burris (D-IL)
Robert Casey (D-PA)
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

http://www.cdobs.com/archive/featured/durbin-burris-vote-to-continue-funding-acorn,65681

Steve Huntley - Sun Times' Last Man Standing for Balance

whalen wrote:
Boo hoo, Steve. The Neanderthals lost the elections in 2008, remember? Pardon our dust as we rush past the Cro-Magnon years to enact much-belated initiatives before it is too late for all of us!

Well, Whalen - the last time Progressives had such a 'Pardon Our Dust' victory was the advent of Prohibition. From 1919 until its Repeal, America was set-back on its heels, Whalen.

Sorry, I can be prickly . . .Whalen , or as some Progressive might opine. without the adverbial ending there. With John Dewey*-esque devotion to 'inquiry' over fact, a Progressive Whalen responded to Chicago Sun Times columnist Steve Huntley - The Last Man Standing - over his revelatory column on Progressive Force-feeding of the Government Goose.

John Dewey is the father of radical progressive thought in America and the beauty who's views on education slaughtered Public Education**. Let it be pointed out -Oh, do - that John Dewey established a Lab School for the elites, while the unwashed masses could serve as lab-rats in an educational philosophy that pushed Public Education to eliminate the guts of education.

The study of how the American Government ( local,state and federal) has all but vanished; the canon of American Literature and British Literature has been diluted to a watery and sugary and under-nourishing swill; that for the Dewey Public Schools "inquiry" is the ethic - child should do as opposed to learn and they do not learn. With each new Hegelian/Marxist doctoral thesis comes a further murder of thought and history.

For Dewey and Progressives 'Inquiry' upon which an a priori goal - Gay Studies, Identity Politics in general, Group Thought is achieved and put in place. If you do not know a Concordat from a Magna Carta, a Peace of Wesphalia from a Piece of the Pie, then it is a fair chance that you are Public School Alum of the last forty years.

In that case,let's take this slowly - John Dewey was a philospher of education, society, and psycholgy at the University of Chicago, who was heavily influeced by the German thinker Hegel. who is actually the granddaddy of Marxist thought. John Dewey believed that 'inquiry' is the most important thing in life so long as the outcomes agree with that inquiry. Thus, if we inquire into poverty as rooted in Racism; all poverty results from racism. If failure results from poverty. racism caused failure & etc. Progressive inquiry arrives at a Pre-Determined outcome.

Gay Marriage is good; all opposition to Gay Marriage is evil; Gay Marriage is good.

Abortion is Women's Reproductive Health, Uterine Cancer is a Woman's Reproductive Health Issue; Uterine Cancer . . . Hey, get me a good Nuancer over here!

Dewey made the Artificial, Natural.

Take a look at the Media which offers a "Let's Look at Race Relations!" series.

The outcome is fixed - Systemic Racism, Imperialism, Class ism is always the conclusion. Whites are always bad and people of color are always good. Hence, no Race Crime can be committed by a person of color. Why? Don't matter just is and that is Dewey. Dewey Agree!

Dewey had clout ( Roger Baldwin, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman,I.F.Stone W.E.B. DuBois & etc.). Radical Progressive clout saw Dewey's Philosophy as a burglar bar with which to loot American History and geld American Education. Inquiry is not method it is a goal in Dewey Education.

Steve Huntley represents a mind-set that is valued by most Americans. The old Benthamite view of 'the most good for the most people.' Common Sense.

In Steve Huntley's June 26, 2009, he outlines the Progressive Agenda and the force feeding by the Democratic Leadership in the Congress at the direction of President Obama's White House:

Congress, driven by President Obama's ambitious political agenda, is out to be a jack of all trades. Just look at its to-do list for this year -- health-care reform, clean energy legislation, overhaul of financial regulation, a rewrite of immigration law, stimulus spending to prod the economy toward recovery. Whew! And with six months left in 2009, who knows what else might be added?

That list doesn't include such major business as considering a new U.S. Supreme Court nominee or a host of less sweeping but still significant bills, like a just-passed measure giving an overburdened Food and Drug Administration the duty of regulating tobacco. . . .
With Democrats in total control of the House and close to it in the Senate, fierce partisanship, long-cherished liberal goals and the pent-up energy of the Democratic left are driving the transformational agenda. There's no argument many of the bills address problems needing a fix, but that's best achieved with at least a degree of bipartisan support. Yet we're being force-fed a liberal prescription. A crowded agenda controlled by Democrats and a White House push for quick action crowd out competing views.

Regrettably, the major national media have been compliant. For example, this week ABC News offered an hour in prime time for Obama to monopolize the national discussion on health care.

Yet polls consistently show public discomfort with the implications of greater government control of medical services, worry about the costs and a high-level of satisfaction with their current health care among the majority with insurance. Recent news reminds us a public insurance option would open a new avenue for abuse of the taxpayer. Republican Rep. Peter Roskam of the northwest suburbs has started a "medi-fraud blog" tracking corruption and waste in Medicare and Medicaid. His latest entries note that in just the last week prosecutors broke up schemes in Detroit and Miami to defraud Medicare of $150 million.

Another issue is energy. Some of us think the emphasis should be more on energy security than green goals. Yes, we all want a cleaner planet, but our national security and economic future require the exploitation of abundant fossil fuels such as domestic coal and offshore oil as well as expansion of nuclear energy while we develop solar, wind and geothermal for the long term.

Similarly, the economic meltdown naturally leads to new regulation. Yet remember the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002, after the accounting scandals, saddled business with expensive and complex regulations making U.S. enterprises less competitive.

The focus on regulation ignores government's role in the housing collapse. The Wall Street Journal reports Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who encouraged the mortgage excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is at it again, urging the agencies to lower lending standards for condo buyers. Sounds like another dose of the easy credit that wrecked home values.

Obama and Democrats insist Congress works for the good of America in taking on so many projects. But the jack of all trades, as you may recall, is the master of none. Is that how you want the future of your health care or energy supply to be determined?

Columnist Steve Huntley, investigative journalist Tim Novak and Pultizer Prize winning cartoonist Jack Higgins maintain some semblance of thoughtful inquiry for Chicago, because they know that inquiry is not a goal upon which people are forced to agree.

Winning an election is only the beginning of government. The end of government is the preservation of the American Republic. Democrats and Republicans have been doing just that, until these last few months, it seems to me. Dewey has replaced the Founders Fathers for the Progressives. For now.

History has a way of Repealing itself!

*

Dewey is “attractive to those how are more impressed by our new control over natural forces than by the limitations to which that control is subject,” finding that Dewey’s philosophy “is in harmony with the age of industrialism and collective enterprise.” But it is Dewey’s underlying hubris that Russell singles out as “the greatest danger in our time” because “it is increasing the danger of a vast social disaster,” however unintentionally.

Russell’s fears, at least in part, have been realized. There are many who would, without hesitation, describe public education, in combination with other social, economic and political forces, a “vast social disaster.” There are, of course, many more that disagree.

http://home.earthlink.net/~fheapblog/id28.html

**

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.

I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature. . . I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move. ( emphasis my own)

I believe that when society once recognizes the possibilities in this direction, and the obligations which these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and money which will be put at the disposal of the educator.

I believe that it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.