Category Archives: culture

A School District Apologizing

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…for expecting a child to show respect for our country and its symbols of patriotism.

A Southern California school district will apologize to an 11-year-old atheist who says his teacher questioned him because he didn’t stand during the Pledge of Allegiance.

[The student] says he kept his seat during the morning pledge at Monte Vista Middle School in San Jacinto earlier this month because the words “under God” in it violate his beliefs.

He could have stood with his hand over his heart and remained silent. He could have stood and recited the pledge, remaining silent while the phrase was being spoken by his fellows.

The binding nature of the pledge is questionable with children of this age; they’re unable to make decisions on their own, both legally and nearly always from a practical/maturation perspective. But that’s why they’re in school—to learn. Besides, the simple rehearsal of the pledge would have had its own value.

The Pledge of Allegiance, after all, is about much more than just a phrase about God, a phrase whose role in the Pledge merely is an acknowledgment of our national heritage. The Pledge is all about patriotism and fidelity to our country and the liberty for all which our country defends. A liberty which includes the freedom to worship, or not to worship, as each of us pleases.

Here was an opportunity to teach the child something about respect, something about our country, something about patriotism.

Instead, San Jacinto’s school district is going to teach a lesson of an entirely different sort.

This is shameful.

Racism in Eric Holder’s “Justice”

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In Federal District Judge Thomas Schroeder’s Middle District of North Carolina court, where he heard a DoJ beef against that state’s voter ID law last July, US Attorney General Eric Holder’s witness, Charles Stewart, a political scientist, testified bluntly about the inability of America’s blacks to follow the voter registration process, especially when compared with their white counterparts. This…inability…is, supposedly, a result of North Carolina’s elimination of same day registration in that law [emphasis added].

…people who register to vote the closer and closer one gets to Election Day tend to be less sophisticated voters, tend to be less educated voters, tend to be voters who are less attuned to public affairs. That also tells me from the literature of political science that there are likely to be people who will end up not registering and not voting. People who correspond to those factors tend to be African Americans, and, therefore, that’s another vehicle through which African Americans would be disproportionately affected by this law.

And that’s because [emphasis added]

it’s less likely to imagine that these voters would—can figure out or would avail themselves of other forms of registering and voting.

Because, according to this witness, this Holder-selected witness, blacks are just too dumb to keep up. Because, according to this witness, this Holder-selected witness, blacks just aren’t as cultured or learned as their white counterparts. Or their Hispanic counterparts. Or their Asian counterparts. Or their Middle-eastern counterparts.

Here’s* President Woodrow Wilson in a similar vein to black journalist William Monroe Trotter.

[S]egregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.

Holder and his fellows plainly think blacks still need special protections.

That’s disgusting.

The full testimony can be accessed here; Stewart’s testimony is near the end.

 

*Quoted by Mary Beth Norton, Carol Sheriff, David M. Katzman, David W. Blight, Howard P. Chudacoff in A People And A Nation: A History of the United States, Since 1865

Disappointing

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An understatement. These indicators of the failure of our education system are via Three Percenter; the list of all 50 is here.

  • only 36% of all Americans can name the three branches of government
  • only 25% of all Americans know how long US Senators are elected for (6 years), and only 20% of all Americans know how many US senators there are
  • 1% of American young adults in the 18 to 34-year-old age bracket are currently living with their parents
  • 25% of all employees that have Internet access in the United States visit sex websites while they are at work
  • 30 million Americans are on antidepressants [that’s roughly 10% of our total population]
  • Americans account for about five% of the global population, but we buy more than 50% of the pharmaceutical drugs
  • 60 million Americans have a problem with alcohol addiction
  • small business ownership in the United States is at the lowest level that has ever been recorded
  • approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father
  • Americans in the 15 to 24-year-old age group account for about 50% of all new STD cases each year

Notice that: both children currently in our “education” system, and adults recently passed through it.

Hmm….

The Government and Privacy

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The government is continuing to misunderstand the import of the 4th Amendment’s stricture regarding searches, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and especially Warrants…particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, and of the major purpose of our Constitution generally.

Even accepting things like Edward Snowden’s leaks and the NSA’s overbroad and non-particular descriptions of things for which to be “searched” in our cell phone metadata as being aberrations, the existence of the aberration demonstrates the fragility of government handling of that much searching capacity.

I wrote nearby about the FBI’s dangerous zeal in demanding that cell phone operating system software be made vulnerable to government-desired searches. Following is another demonstration of the government’s misunderstanding.

“This sort of encryption creates a virtual sanctuary for criminals who are very determined and smart,” warned Ron Hosko, the former head of the FBI’s criminal division….

So does the 2nd Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms give criminals who are very determined and smart access to tools for supporting their efforts. So does the 1st Amendment’s acknowledgment of a range of freedoms give criminals who are very determined and smart access to tools for supporting their efforts.

That’s a risk we members of our social compact have agreed to accept in order to have a government with the strength otherwise to protect and enforce those freedoms. We’ve done nothing to alter those terms of our compact—our Constitution—since then.

Our Constitution was written the way it was, in fact, to limit our government’s powers as far as we could and still leave it the necessary strength with which to effect those protections. The powers of our government are, by design, few and defined. Our Constitution was, in fact, written to restrain our government, and to carry out that restraint before our government could act, not to attempt to redress a situation after government has acted. This relationship between us compact members, us citizens, and our government, furthermore, is neither symmetrical nor reciprocal.

We restrain our government before the fact; it does not engage in prior restraint of us. Yet, this government demand for ready and broad, non-particular access to the contents of our communications—the contents of our private speech—through a third party and not through us is exactly that attempt by our government to priorly restrain us, if only through the chilling of our speech through government snooping with its implied threat of subsequent harassment. Think IRS. Think Federal whistleblower treatment.

This final thought:

“I don’t think the legislative branch or the judicial branch can sit idly by while destruction comes,” said Hosko….

Neither can We the People sit idly by while the destruction of our inalienable rights comes.

Privacy and the Government

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This time, as represented by the FBI.

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged Silicon Valley Thursday to reverse course on encrypting phone data, suggesting the pendulum on privacy issues “has swung too far” against the government in the wake of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

No. It hasn’t swung far enough, as too many judges’ attitudes illustrate.

FBI Director James Comey added,

We also need a legislative and regulatory fix.

Again, no. We have too many laws on the books already; the government, including the FBI, aren’t capable of enforcing those existing. And this elides the premise that the government has made illegal and has outright criminalized too many things. Beyond that, we have far too many regulations already, every one of them written by Federal agencies and Cabinet departments that are only tenuously accountable to us citizens.

And

Mr. Comey’s speech [at the Brookings Institution] was another indication of how far apart the two sides remain. He denied they wanted a back door, saying that using a warrant to gather evidence is the equivalent of walking through the front door.

Say that’s true about the current government. There’s no guarantee any future administration would be as restrained with those “legislative and regulatory” fixes. Just look at the out of control regulation writing that’s already been going on for an example of how a tool, originally restrained in its use, gets more and more abusively used over time.

Moreover, beyond individual security and privacy, there’s this national security question, raised by the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian:

…weakening the security of systems to enable law enforcement access also makes them far more vulnerable to compromise by foreign governments and hackers. If anything, we should be doing more to secure our data.