The Razor

Posted at Dean’s World here.

Here’s a link to a story about Conservative cartoons (hat tip Instapundit), “Laughing at the Left”. The article goes beyond cartoons and makes some important points about the ideological divide. Take for instance this quote:

(Chris “Day By Day”) Muir’s girlfriend, the primary model for one of his characters, “is a total liberal.” As it happens, the same holds true for Mallard (Fillmore) creator (Bruce) Tinsley, whose wife is a civil rights lawyer. There’s perhaps a lesson here. “It’s a funny thing,” Tinsley says. “All her liberal friends are incredulous that our marriage works, but none of my conservative friends have any trouble with it at all. They understand you can think differently about things and still be civil to one another.”

One of my favorite quotes about civility comes from President Gerald Ford “We can disagree without being disagreeable.” It’s a value to live by – most of the time. I’m a firm believer that it only works when your opponent holds the same value: when he doesn’t you must roll up your sleeves and open up a can of Ann Coulter on their ass. That said, I too live in a “Matlin – Carville” marriage.

Part of it could be the old adage that “opposites attract” – or in New Age speak “my yang yearns for her yin” (hmm… that doesn’t read right). When we met 15 years ago she loved the Grateful Dead while I held them in complete Hardcore Punk contempt (and still do. If I ever end up in Guantanamo I expect I’ll hear “Wake Of the Flood” and “American Beauty” until I cracked – which I reckon would take all of 15 minutes). When Jerry Garcia died my first response was “How did they notice?”

There are serious benefits to a Liberal/Conservative marriage. First and foremost it keeps both of us from the extremes. If she comes home with some barking moonbat piece of tripe, I can usually shoot it down before she has wasted too much time on it or worse, come to believe it herself. Likewise I can sound an idea or an opinion off her and get her candid take on it before going public with it – thereby applying a level of rigor to what might otherwise have been a stupid idea or opinion. Secondly we can intellectually spar with one another, thereby keeping our ideas fresh and perhaps even (gasp) changing them. Finally, when we’re together we can handle issues and situations using our different perspectives. Because of her liberal nature she can be much more open with salesmen than I can be. If the salesman takes advanatage of her openness, I can step in and bitch-slap him into submission without any regard for his feelings or the validity of his opinions. Needless to say the “Good cop – Bad cop” routine comes in quite handy when dealing with disputes with retailers and service providers.

Then there’s parenting. Here the roles flip: I’m as free with money for The Kid as the Carter Administration was with taxpayer money for welfare moms. The Wife, on the other hand, is the motherly personification of the Graham-Rudman Act. Ever had to justify buying a $3 pack of Yu-gi-oh cards for a kid that already has hundreds? I have. With a Daddy Decision The Kid always knows there is the Mommy Court of Appeals – and she is all too happy to exercise her judicial perogative and overturn my decisions. Mommy establishes precedent and there is a strong stare decisis in The House. Daddy, being the liberal parent he is, has no sense of the importance of precedent so often finds himself overruled.

There is a definite positive dynamic in our family that is based on our differences and it works for us. I am sure all relationships don’t have to be of the “Matlin – Carville” type to be successful, but the article points out some interesting reasons why such relationships are more stable than you might expect. It also makes some important points about humor – but I’ll have to leave that for another time.

Posted at Dean’s World here.

Last night The Family watched Dirty Jobs – a show on the Discovery Channel that sends a guy out to do some of the nation’s dirtiest jobs. One of the jobs was sorting recyclable materials from trash at a recycling center. If memory serves, garbage trucks from the Bay Area carted recyclable materials to a center filled with conveyor belts that moved the stuff around as people sorted it into paper, plastic, glass, metal and trash. Mike Rowe, the host of the show, worked alongside one of the sorters, asking him all kinds of questions about the job. Paper was compacted into bales weighing a ton. The center produced 400 of these a day, and sold them for about $130-200 a bale.

“See why I nag you to sort the recycling first?” The Wife nudzhed me.

I remained silent, doing the math in my head. 400 x $200=$80,000/day for paper. Not too shabby on its own, but as I stared at the numerous lengthy conveyor belts that snaked their way through a large well-lit center filled with moving cranes and fork lifts and I began to wonder about the overhead costs – both economic and environmental.

There was the cost of electricity to run the conveyor belts, lights and other machines. The electricity most likely came from a powerplant burning fossil fuels. Then there was the cost of the diesel used by the fork lifts and garbage trucks. Diesels aren’t the cleanest engines on the planet (yet – although I’ve read they are much improved). I imagined them driving around the Bay Area collecting recycling while spewing pollution into the air. That struck me as a bit nonsensical.

They didn’t mention glass. The materials for glass making are some of the most abundant on earth, and recycling glass takes a lot of water and energy to do. When you look at the entire lifecycle, does recycling a glass bottle make sense rather than making a new one?

Here’s an in-depth rticle that discusses just that. It’s conclusion: If you are concerned about the environment, recycling doesn’t help. There’s only one solution: Use less.

It’s important in a marriage to choose your battles carefully. It will take me years to convince the Wife that if she wants to help the environment she should read the Sunday paper online, avoid glass bottles and when she can’t – throw them away in the trash. She was indoctrinated at the University of California to believe that recycling is good for the environment ie An environmental group said it. I believe it. That settles it. It is a dogma that she hasn’t questioned much over the years, and honestly, I wasn’t up to rocking her world on a Tuesday night after a long day in the NICU.

But the fact remains: Recycling is bad for the environment. Using less is good. So the mainstream media (MSM) isn’t just biased and elitist: it’s bad for the environment too.

Who said Conservatives weren’t green?

A writer always treads in dangerous territory when he or she writes about pets. Your dog may seem quite interesting to you, but the moment you start putting down your thoughts about her things just slowly come apart. Why? Because most pet stories are boring. So I will do my best to avoid that tendency over the next few paragraphs.

Yesterday the Wife and I put one of our 4 cats to sleep. “Chalupa” was a scrawny feral cat that took up residence in our backyard starting about 6 years ago. We fed her outside for about a year until we were socked in by a snow storm and the Kid noticed that her paw was bloody. The 8 inches of snow and injured paw slowed her down enough for me to catch her and get her to the vet. After another year she lived in our house but always ran away from people. Finally, after about 2 years she escaped outside, was trapped by a neighbor and taken to the Humane Society where I found her. Taking her back home she was suddenly the sweetest and most affectionate of all our cats. For the remaining four years of her life she was an integral part of our household.

Over the past year she became bloated with ascites – fluid in her belly. At first we thought she was pregnant (which would have been a miracle considering she was spayed) and an x-ray confirmed she was not. We fed her diuretics and tapped her belly but nothing could keep her from slowly wasting away carrying a softball sized belly of fluid. In the end she stopped eating, and I knew the time had come.

So what did that scrawny little cat teach me?
1. Never rule out change. From feral to affectionate this cat reminded me that change is possible for those that allow it.

2. Don’t care what other people think. Chalupa never made friends with the other cats. There was something in her mannerisms that turned off the others and made them bully her. But she never seemed to care. She did her thing no matter what the others thought.

3. History doesn’t matter. Chalupa was a street cat but you would have thought that she had been raised her entire life amongst humans.

4. Don’t whine. She bore her illness with quiet dignity, never crying out or calling attention to herself.

5. Never give up. Up until the last day she tried to jump up on the bed with her belly full of fluid. She would have lived a few more days through sheer will had we not stepped in and said “that’s enough”.

She spent her last day in the arms of the Wife and died while being caressed surrounded by people who cared about her.

It was a good death.

Here are a few of my recent posts at Dean’s World which you might want to check out:

Beatniks and Rednecks (a DW Best Submission!)
Moral Equivalence and Koran Abuse
I Choose Not To Drink
Steven Den Beste – Godfather of Bloggers
Sick of Star Wars (and George Lucas)

Originally posted at Dean’s World: A Best Submission!

I’m not much into lifestyles anymore. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more family-focused, and group-identity is down there with “paint the basement walls” in terms of priorities. But one group that I’ve always liked were the Beatniks of the 40s and 50s.

I still have the copy of “On the Road” that I read in high school, took to college, then to Japan, Africa and finally to middle age in Suburbia. Opening the book today it is hard not to feel the rush, the flight into the unknown, the celebration of living and breathing and “being” that Kerouac captured in that work. “On the Road” is a long trip across America and through the human spirit, and even as I live in the same house I’ve lived in for years, the book still tempts me to grab the Wife, the Kid and the Pets and just start driving West – job, mortgage and credit card debt be damned.

I got to thinking about the Beats at a parish carnival the Family visited Saturday night. The parish was in a working class part of town where liquor stores and gas stations compete with one another for prime space along the main boulevard before it ends at the Interstate. The Wife noticed that the people in the crowd seemed to wear their tax brackets on their faces, prematurely aged from a life of hard work, hard living, and hard playing. Cigarettes were ubiquitous, and it was impossible to get away from the smoke. Hip-Hop culture dominated the predominantly white crowd, but there were a large number of mixed-race families and a few Latinos, one wearing a silk-screen of the black Virgin Mary with the words “La Raza Unida” printed underneath. Was the shirt racist? I asked to the Wife. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she wisely replied.

I felt like an outsider, but I usually do in large crowds which is why I do my best to avoid them. But the Kid loves carnivals and being a Parent trumps personal likes or dislikes, so we had gone together. As I stood in line, watching the Ferris Wheel “Carny” work the ride, I noticed that unlike the board expressions shown by the other Carnies, the man seemed to enjoy his job. He was polite to the riders and even joked with them as he manned the throttle, locked the pipe railing, and warned each rider to mind the latch.

The Beatniks came from working-class backgrounds for the most part, but they were intellectuals too. Some of them had served in World War 2 – Kerouac in the Merchant Marine which during the War wasn’t exactly the safest job – and others, like Allen Ginsberg, came from academia. Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s muse for their early works, even came from a hard-scrabble background of a drunk and abusive father.

They were not elitist – or at least they didn’t start out to be. The Beats celebrated the Working Man. They appreciated the artistry and skill shown by workers doing their jobs, a concept which connected them spiritually to Zen Buddhism as exemplified by the poetry of Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photographer Robert Frank’s landmark work, The Americans, shows slices of everyday American life and manages to convey the beauty and perpetual motion of its land and people in a way missed by the Look and Life photographers of the era.

I’m speaking in generalizations somewhat here, which happens whenever you talk about groups of people – especially those counting “loners” like Kerouac and “socialites” like Ginsberg as members. But it struck me as I walked through the crowd that the Beats were the last counter-culture group that weren’t elitist. Ever since the Beats evolved into the Hippies of the ‘60s and the Hippies found themselves at odds with the “common people”, the counter-culture has been elitist and when that counterculture became “pop” culture, that elitism came too.

Today’s pop culture sneers at what it calls “Red States” or the “Nascar Crowd” – yet the Red States continue to swell with immigrants from other states and NASCAR remains the fastest growing sport in America. Green Day may make a killing on calling them “American Idiots” yet the same people that buy their records continue to enlist in the military. I wandered through the crowd and realized that this was the America that remains undefeatable. It was a crowd that wouldn’t be losing any sleep over the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo and probably cared as much about America’s image abroad as they did about Michael Moore’s grooming habits or lack thereof.

And I realized that the elites come and go, but these people will always be here. They might have a few more piercings and tattoos than their predecessors, but they will remain solid and steadfast, constituting – dare I say? – the bedrock of American society.

Originally posted at Dean’s World

I first discovered Dean’s World through Instapundit linking to a cry for help from Rosemary over Dean’s drinking problem. Although the link piqued my curiosity, I am not one who normally tries to intervene in people’s affairs. My family has its own problems and I’m too busy trying to earn a living, being a decent parent and husband, and keeping the organization I founded, the ITPAA, going than to poke my nose where it really doesn’t belong. People are complex, and their problems are complex; to think that you can help without spending a lot of time getting to the root of the problems is a bit of self-conceit if you ask me.

But I know addiction. I know how good a cigarette tastes after a meal and how uncontrolled your thoughts become when you haven’t had one in a day or three. I know how wonderful a glass of Mondavi red smells, and also the smell of vomit and cold fear while searching my darkened memory, wondering how I made it home from a party. I kicked cigarettes cold turkey 9 1/2 years ago when I got tired of the Wife nagging me, and I kicked the booze 5 years later when she gave me the choice between keeping the bottle or my family. I chose my family, and it’s a decision I have never regretted but one that hasn’t been easy.

Dean isn’t a big fan of AA. He’s leveled some serious criticisms at the group which I understand and relate to. However AA isn’t one “group” or organization; it’s more of a collective of individuals having one thing in common: a desire to quit drinking. There is no central authority; no dictates from above that you must subscribe to. Instead what you have are a lot of people sitting in church basements. Some are desperate to stay sober; other’s aren’t. Some talk; others stay completely silent. Some groups are fun; others are boring, and still others are downright wastes of time. How do you know which is which? You don’t until you go.

How did I quit? It was a combination of the Wife, my own will or conscience, Zen Buddhism and a loud elderly man by the name of John B.

If you want compassion, don’t talk to John B. If you want to wallow in self-pity, then you really don’t want to call John B. Why? Because John will give you an earful, tell you to stop thinking about yourself. He’ll tell you that you choose to drink, and maybe it’s time to make a different choice. He’ll tell you to start by going to AA meetings to see what works for people. Then in the end, he says, if you think drinking works for you then by all means go for it.

John taught me drinking or giving in to any addiction is a choice and choice, as anyone living in our society where stores stock 150+ types of breakfast cereal knows can be a heavy burden to bear. When faced with a choice, people often take the easy way out to avoid it. For addicts that often means using, but addicts are not robots. Junkies have not lost free will. Drunks aren’t victims of the bottle. Drunks drink because they choose to drink; I don’t drink because I choose not to drink.

And there is power in that choice. There is strength in taking control of your life – and that’s what John B. was trying to show me and which Dean tried to show in this post. It’s about personal responsibility; I am not a victim of this disease because I choose not to be a victim. I like power too much, and beating addictions make you powerful.

While I was wondering what my higher power was I began reading Zen. The great thing about Zen is that it is a philosophy of action not thought. If you are thinking about Zen, then you really don’t get it. “Chop wood, carry water.” Focus 100% on your task to the exclusion of all else. There is no goal. There is no reason. There is no thought – just action.

For a recovering addict it is crucial to think about anything BUT yourself. Addiction is a selfish behavior. After all, a cigarette makes you feel good, not anyone else. Ditto a shot of vodka. Feeding that addiction makes one become even more selfish. Your drive to the liquor store costs you time with your children. Your “sanity (smoke) breaks” outside are borne by your employer or by your family (in cases where you are docked for the time). For some, that selfishness leads to the collapse of the personality into what I consider a psychological black-hole: the narcissist. These people are incapable of thinking about anyone other than themselves. Worse, like a black hole they will suck you into them and use your energy if you get too close to them. Harlan Ellison once described them as emotional vampires. That’s too nice a description since Anne Rice’s romantic vampires were set free to roam our imaginations at the term.

Addicts are collapsing personalities. Addiction deflates your spirit and makes it increasingly two dimensional. Quitting halts that process, and selflessness reverses it.

John B. said that it takes at least 2 years of sobriety to get your marbles back; I’ve gotten mine and am now doing everything in my power to keep them. For me that means helping others when I can, ignoring them when I can’t, and working hard at learning the difference.

If that sounds like the Serenity Prayer it should.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

That prayer sits at the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous and no matter how you feel about it, or whether it’s right for you, AA has taught me the beauty, power, and friggin’ frustration in achieving what that little 3 line prayer sets out. For that reason I owe AA, and while I don’t go to meetings much anymore, I’m glad they are around.

The ideas behind the 12 Steps are extremely complex and life changing yet they are stated simply, almost too simply. In fact I found an interpretation of the 12 Steps from a Buddhist perspective that may be easier for some who get caught up in the “God Language”. Here is the essence of the first three steps as I see it:

1. I’ve got an addiction and can’t fix it on my own.
2. There is help out there beyond me.
3. I choose to use this external help along with all my inner resources to control my addiction.

If anyone can do better, let me know. The bottom line is that they have helped me help myself – and that is what they are all about. God isn’t going to save me. He’s not going to send an angel stop me from going to a bar and tying one on – but my higher power is going to help me choose not to do such a stupid thing.

Originally posted at Dean’s World

Recently Glenn Reynolds mentioned the folks at the Surviving Grady baseball blog have published a book, and he also added that he thinks it’s time that Steven Den Beste did the same. I wholeheartedly agree. Some of you may not be familiar with the name, since Den Beste stopped blogging about current events over a year and a half ago. However the retired engineer from San Diego was one of the godfathers of the blogosphere – along with Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and a handful of
others. While the history of the blogosphere is still being blogged the writing of Den Beste stands as a milestone in the development of "New Media" and its challenge to the Mainstream Media (MSM).

His writings have influenced a complete generation of bloggers. Before LGF. Before Powerline. Before INDC Journal and even Dean’s World, there was USS Clueless. I began blogging as a way of expressing myself in the weeks after 9-11. I remember the helplessness that I can only express using the title of one of Harlan Ellison’s best works:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. For a month I was silent, stunned as I reexamined my beliefs, some of which crumbled to expose others that lay like bedrock underneath. During that time I discovered that web logs, which had seemed yet another example of navel gazing in an overly narcissistic culture, had changed into what they are today: another medium for news and analysis. And no one’s analysis was better than Steven Den Beste’s.

What we’re doing is right and it is necessary. Awful things are going to happen, and we’re going to do some of them. But worse things would have happened if we had not done this, and that’s all that matters. – Oct
10, 2001

Before Den Beste, it was extremely difficult to find well written and thought out pieces anywhere on the web. Such work was the domain of the MSM. Depending on your flavor of politics one had the New Republic or National Review. For Science essays there was Stephen Jay Gould writing for Natural History and the occasional piece in Wired or Scientific American.

However Den Beste was a master synthesizer in the mold of James Burke and could take two seemingly unconnected events and weave them together into a whole that was much greater than the sum of its parts. How did the Burgess Shale fossils relate to World War 3? Click here to find out. He had a patience for his readership that has been lost by many modern writers. He could walk you through his argument showing why life is rare in the Universe without leaving you behind or losing you in digressions. He recognized and labeled trends such as the divide between Wilsonians – those supporting a trans-nationalist idealism – and Jacksonians – those rooted in a populist based conservativism.

While some of his best writing in my opinion is that touching upon his experiences in Engineering (my old blog, The Razor, isn’t indexed so I can’t find these posts. Besides, it would take
too much time since a good part of my early writings often included phrases like "Read the entire thing" with hyperlinks to a Den Beste post), his philosophical musings are what really hit home to me at an extremely critical time in my intellectual development.

After 9-11 I realized that I had previously been indoctrinated in moral and cultural relativism. During the weeks that followed I began to examine (and uproot in most cases but not all) these beliefs and attitudes that I had held unquestioningly since my college days at that bastion of PC indoctrination: the UC system in California. One post in particular by Den Beste made me realize the folly in my thinking:

If our attackers are automatons with no moral responsibility, then they are mad dogs, and so we should fight back, for if we don’t they will surely attack us again.. If, on the other hand, they have free will, then we are justified by their acts in visiting punishment on them — and killing them anyway. Neither point of view justifies pacifism on our part.


And if they are responding to things we did, then would we not in turn be responding to things they did? If they are not culpable for attacking us, how would we be culpable for responding in kind? If their attack on us was ethically neutral because they were responding to things we did to them, then our counterattack will equally be ethically neutral because we will in turn be responding to things they did. Ultimately no-one is responsible for anything, and ethics again becomes a null-set.

Deep down this theory assumes that we are not the same as them. We really can think, we really can make decisions, but they ultimately are stupid creatures who merely respond to their environment. It is deeply chauvinistic. It is only by assuming a gargantuan moral inequivalency that this argument stands. (Oct 4, 2001 )

This article, along with an article by Francis Beckwith titled "Philosophical Problems With Moral Relativism" influenced my intellectual growth in a way that hadn’t happened since the Jesuits had their hooks in me in high school. Accompanied by a new-found sobriety this growth has made my writing better. It has sharpened my intellect and allowed
me to ride through some pretty tough times. In the past books have had this power, but in 2001-2 it was Steven Den Beste’s writing at USS Clueless.

Den Beste stopped writing about current events for a variety of reasons including his health and dealing with nutjobs. He still writes about anime and slips in the odd event at Chizumatic. However I would love nothing better than to read a book of his previous work and maybe even a new piece or two.

For those of you who weren’t around back then, Den Beste has a page of what he thinks are his best posts. However he has culled out too much, so it wouldn’t hurt to read the entire thing; it just would be easier to read it in a book.

I haven’t posted anything for the past two weeks because Dean Esmay invited me to post 2 articles a day Mon & Tues over at Dean’s World. Check out the following essays:

Raising Boys – Time For A Change?
Internet Haganah
Magnificent Wastes of Time
Children Are NOT Adults

I haven’t given up on The Razor; I’ve just focused more of my energy on the Dean’s World essays. Why? Because I get read over there.

Also, the arms race between comment spammers and bloggers has escalated. They’ve somehow managed to hack my filter, so I need to clean them up.

Originally posted at Dean’s World:

I am not a Luddite – quite the opposite really. In my house I have no less than two modern wirelessly networked computers, one of which I built myself. I also have two ancient but working ones, plus an original 1977 Atari 2600 “Heavy Sixer” manufactured in Sunnyvale CA. a couple of PDAs and a PS2. I received my first computer in 1982 – a TI99-4A that taught me Basic, my first computer language. Since then I have taught myself a few more and finally made computers a full-time profession in 1997. I am old school. I have never forgotten DOS and trust it more than Windows, jumping to the command line to do things more often than the younger generation does, if they do such a thing at all (psst! Under XP it’s Run->CMD).

Hopefully this will reassure you when I say that I for the most part computers are a wonderful and expensive waste of time. If you want to boost your productivity by purchasing a computer for anything other than using a database (the best reason to use a computer IMO), then you might want to consider doing something else with your money – like buying a good day planner.

I posit this based on the following:

First, I work mostly with Microsoft products. Some will inevitably say that’s the problem, but in the private sector one doesn’t have much choice. I have used MS Word and Excel for over 12 years and am continually amazed at how much time I have to spend getting my spreadsheets and documents to look right. I spend more time formatting my documents than actually writing them – which defeats the purpose of using these programs. As a result I often find myself composing in Dreamweaver – a web publishing program – because the simple choices afforded by HTML keep me focused on what I’m writing, not how it looks. In fact, that’s where this article originated. Formatting does not make better writing or more accurate spreadsheets – so the output remains the same while the time spent on that output increases.

Second, I spend more time maintaining the programs on my PC than ever. Because of the increasing security threats on the web posed by viruses, spyware, DNS poisoning, and other malware I have to keep not only my OS up to date (XP – which updates itself automatically) but also my anti-spyware and anti-virus programs. PC Magazine recently dedicated a cover story to security, and according to that I’m not even doing enough. New Scientist has an article this week that discusses the threat posed by DNS cache poisoning, so even when I’m doing everything to protect my PC at work, I could still be at risk. If I add this time to that spent on my writing, I’m increasingly less productive. That’s not including the trouble I have with existing programs failing to work after upgrading another program or adding another piece of hardware. I tried to burn the Kid a CD of his favorite songs last night, and I found that I had to send the disk image across the LAN and burn it on the other PC because Nero couldn’t recognize my CD burner anymore. Add yet another thing to my “to-do” list that doesn’t produce essays, business process documentation or The Kid’s music CDs.

Third, I like to think I know a thing or two about computers, but I often run into problems that simply baffle me and resist all attempts at resolution without burning up serious amounts of time. If I can blow three hours on a problem, just imagine how long it would take the average person who doesn’t devote his career to them.

For the past two decades government statisticians have been looking for the productivity boost brought about through technology, but so far they haven’ t found it. When you have bosses spending hours deciding between Arial and Verdana in a Powerpoint presentation (as one of my friends recently mentioned to me) it’s obvious where that productivity has gone: out the Windows.

Children are not miniature adults.

I begin with this reminder because it is apparent that many in our society have forgotten this fact. Children are incapable of making rational decisions, don’t know what is good for them, and have no concept of delayed gratification as they live in the never-ending “now”. As a parent I struggle with this fact on a daily basis – from explaining what a word means in terms my child understands to making sure he receives the proper nutrition to stay healthy.

For parents, that’s just common sense, right?

In my house, the Cartoon Network vies with Fox News and the Discovery Channel for dominance of the TV. Being a kid at heart, I enjoy cartoons and anime and find that most of the stuff around today is of much higher quality than the Hannah-Barbera stuff I grew up with in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately the commercials are far worse though. During breaks between cartoons you will see ads in which adults – especially fathers – are portrayed as complete morons, with the kids sassing back with a witty – at least to a kid – remark. You’ll also see an advertisement for a CD of pop songs sung by children. Most pop songs are about love – and the CD mirrors that subject.

It’s just plain creepy to hear adolescents singing love songs originally sung by adults. I mean we are not talking girls in their late teens – but ten and eleven year olds pining away.

Similarly I attended The Kid’s school talent contest last week and saw a handful of all-girl acts sing and dance on stage. While the song choices were innocuous for the most part, I raised an eyebrow over way that some of the girls danced and the way they were semi-dressed. In a high school I would have thought that the suggestive dancing and dance costumes would be inappropriate, but we are talking about primary school – girls in the second and third grades.

Have I become a prude – or have some parents completely lost their minds?

It’s hard to say “no”. I struggle with this word myself – especially when facing an adversary like The Kid who is completely reliant upon me to provide him with everything. He will use any and every tactic to make me fulfill each and every whim that passes through his mind. He is a child and must manipulate; I am a parent and must control. This is a constant battle between two powerful forces yet the stakes are high: the raising of a creative, independent, intelligent human being.

Gil Reavil has written a book called ” Smut: A Sex-Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough is Enough”. It is excerpted here at NRO. He writes:

“But we also have left unfulfilled our function as guardians of their cultural environment. The boundaries of their world have been repeatedly breached, many times by people interested in making money and dismissive of all other considerations. All too often, our children are exposed to the loud, frenzied, garish spectacle of adult sexuality. They get their faces rubbed in it.”

Consumption lies at the heart of our society – not sexual liberation. The only reason why sex pervades our culture is because it sells. If prayer moved product you could bet that our TVs would be filled chanting monks and bowed heads, but it doesn’t. Britney Spears doesn’t bump and grind on stage for fun – she does it for cold hard cash. Take that away and she would disappear.

Instead of falling into the liberal trap of debating morality, let’s talk about the underlying reason for our society’s obsession with sex: pure commerce. People get rich by appealing to our basest instinct, yet this doesn’t bother Leftists at all. It must be the only means of getting rich that the Left supports.

Republicans and the Right aren’t blameless either. The Right has played into the hands of liberals by falling for the morality-trap, and the laissez-faire pro-business supporters of Republicans must recognize that their “hands off” idealism supports this unique sales tool. As Dean Esmay has often said, corporations are not “natural” – they are contrivances of the state. Republicans need to recognize that corporations are amoral and need to be controlled to a great degree. We wouldn’t allow a company to sell products to Iran, yet we allow thousands of them to pitch products using sex. Both are threats to our national interests.

Raising children has never been easy, but we chose to be parents. We owe it to our children to make sure that we provide for them, protect them and fight for them at all times. While we may tire, we must never, ever surrender.

Originally Posted at Dean’s World

When did medicating boys become popular and why aren’t more people questioning this practice?

I’m the parent of a boy, and I’ve noted that several of his friends are on various meds “to help him focus”, “it’s better for his grades” and “the teacher says he couldn’t sit still in class”. Meanwhile there is debate about ending recess in schools for various reasons, including improving test scores, saving money (teachers are demanding to be paid to supervise recess) and even protection (it’s easier to keep kids away from predators in a building).

I hate to tell those of you who believe in the complete equality of the sexes, but boys are not girls. They are absolute bundles of energy. “Snips, snails and puppy-dog tails” goes the saying and one thing that “puppy-dog tails” never do is sit still. Boys must move. They have evolved for that very purpose, and forcing them to sit in one place for a long period of time isn’t just wrong – it’s unethical and sexual discrimination of the highest order.

I believe that it is time to consider a whole new way of teaching boys. Boys can focus to a degree that is amazing to adults. Just ask one about his Pokemon or Yu-gi-oh strategy and be prepared for a detailed analysis of the game that would make a Pentagon planner feel like a generalist. However they can do so only between periods of activity. Think of it as teaching science, math and English in a gymnasium with lectures punctuated by games of Dodgeball and Hoops. Instead of relegating PE to 40 mins a week (as is the case at my kid’s school) regular classes would be integrated into PE to the point where a separate PE class would be unnecessary.

Medicating boys is the easy solution, but it makes as much sense as pumping girls full of speed and steroids to perform better at sports. No one is calling for that, and if anyone did there would be charges of child abuse levelled – and rightly so. Yet millions of boys are on medication today and people are comfortable with this.