The Tolerance Fuhrer

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Gone are the swastikas, the stalags, and the goose-steps. But in Germany today, at least one trace of the Third Reich remains–the Hitler-era law against homeschooling.

In defense of the ban, a German named Schmidt wrote a letter to Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Assn. here in the USA, dated Sept. 4. Herr Schmidt was sore about some of Farris’ opinion pieces attacking the German government–particularly its practice of seizing children whose Christian parents wish to give their children a Christian education: strictly verboten, under German law.

I don’t know who Herr Schmidt is. He sounds like some kind of obersturmbannfuhrer wannabe. I quote from his letter to Farris.

“The only thing… these so-called parents want is to prevent their children from a free and open minded view on the world.” [Make allowances: Herr Schmidt is writing in what is, for him, a foreign language.] “They want to force them into their own little world regardless of what the children want or not and only for religious reasons!

“From the very beginning theses so called parents drummed religious opinions into their poor children. They never had a chance to build up their own opinion. This can be called torture and if for sure harms the children in their development to free, tolerant and open-minded members of society. Only to please the parents and only to spread the parents strange ideas, disgusting.”

Get it? The dude is tolerant and open-minded. He concludes:

“For my opinion these parents should be imprisoned”–not strung up with piano wire?–“and they should not be released before all of their children have finished school. Anyone, regardless of the reasons who harms his children, in whatever respect, should be removed from them immediately. If it happens for religious reasons the person should be jailed.”

Is this man a nut, or does he represent the mainstream opinion among the German people? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

 

Show Us the Polls

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Our country’s leaders want a war with Syria, and they mean to have it. But as they drag us, kicking and screaming, into it, there’s a major element missing from the news reporting.

Where are the polls?

Usually by now we’d be up to our eyeballs in “news” stories about polls on this Syrian adventure. After all, it’s the easiest way to cover news–just talk about the polls. Whatever the issue, you’ll hear about polls taken by CNN, USA Today, Gallup, Roper, The New York Times, Washington Post, and all the rest. You could paper your walls with them. So why aren’t we being inundated with poll stories?

Funny things happen when Democrats run foreign policy. The anti-war movement disappears. Pacifists turn into hawks. WMDs that were imaginary when a Republican was in the White House suddenly become real. The GOP’s grovel reflex is activated.

And news stories about polls dry up to the vanishing point.

Oh, there are some polls around. There’s one on my computer’s home page: 80 oppose military intervention in Syria. Some Congressmen have reported 99 percent of their constituents opposed.

That’s the problem. The “news” media is an organ of the Democrat Party, the Democrats want war, and the polls, such as they are, just aren’t giving them the answer that they want to hear. So they don’t talk about polls.

Silly buggers. All they have to do, to get the results they want, is to tweak the poll questions a little more than usual. For instance:

“Are you in favor of helping the Syrian rebels militarily? If you say ‘no,’ the IRS will audit you until the day you die.” Or, “If I were to ask you whether you favored military action against Assad, and if you were inclined to answer in such a way that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ means no, would you not say ‘yes’?” They’ll get so lost trying to figure that one out, you can report any result you please.

It’s not like they’ve never done it before, is it?

 

5 Compelling Reasons for USA to Go to War in Syria

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I’m so tired of hearing that “companies” and “corporations” and “bankers” are slyly maneuvering the USA to war with Syria “so they can make money.” Please! That’s so 1960s. So Bob Dylan. Besides, there are other reasons every bit as compelling as that stale old conspiracy theory. Here are five of them.

5. It’s all just a movie. None of it’s really happening. We’ve just been made to think it’s real. I admit it’s unlikely; but if you wake up in a straitjacket and there’s no such place as Syria, you’ll remember that I told you so.

4. Global Warming. It causes everything else, so it’s probably pushing us into a war with Syria, too.

3. Homophobia works in very subtle ways. It makes your cigar burn unevenly, for instance. If only everyone would embrace and celebrate sodomy, we’d have world peace.

2. We want the good bloodthirsty savages to rule Syria, not the bad ones. How do you tell them apart? Search me. But it’s important that the right set of homicidal maniacs comes out on top.

1. Idiocy. Plain idiocy is always underrated; but as a motive force in human history, it’ second only to sin. Look at how our machinations in Egypt have turned out. If that’s not clear evidence of idiocy at work, I don’t know what is.

The next time someone goes all Buffy Ste. Marie on you, just trot out one of these.

Someone Has Tried to Scam Me

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

So my phone rings this morning, and an unfamiliar voice says, “Hello, Grandpa.” It’s a male voice, which makes me suspicious because my grandchildren are girls.

I do have a great-grandson, and I wouldn’t recognize his voice on the phone, and it’s just possible that this might be him. He goes on to tell me he’s out in Las Vegas for a wedding, and he had a bit too much to drink and got in a car accident and some woman and her little child were badly injured and the breathalyzer said he was over the limit, and the judge says he’s gonna have to go to jail… oh, and would I please send bail money?

No sooner had the words, “Sorry, but I don’t have the money to bail you out,” left my lips than the caller hung up.  Of course, if I did have a grandson, he would have known that asking me for bail money would be like asking me for money for a sex-change operation. Ain’t gonna happen, sonny.

And so a word of caution: this is a very common scam, folks. Please don’t fall for it. If you get a phone call from a grandson or granddaughter claiming to be in serious trouble, please send money–don’t. Or at least check it out before you do anything. Ask to speak to the police, for instance. Find out if he really is in a police station. Don’t be a sucker.

A few weeks ago I got an email from someone I know, a minister, saying he’s stuck in the Philippines because he got mugged and they took all his money, and would all his friends please wire him some dough so he can come home… It was fake. The real minister found out about it because someone told him about the email.

If you really must send money to someone you don’t know–hey, send it to me.

Happy Labor Day

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Today we celebrate a national holiday dedicated to the labor movement–something that was once good, but is now way, way bad; something that was once necessary, but has become an extravagance that America can no longer afford.

I come from a union family. My grandfather published a union newspaper. He once put up his house as security to bail out a couple of women who had been jailed for trying to organize their co-workers. (Family tradition has it that my grandmother was not amused.) He would not have done these things if he hadn’t thought they were both necessary and right.

Today public employee unions are strangling local, county, and state economies. The primary function of unions today is to launder money for the Democrat party. Unions have driven many companies out of business, thus totally failing in their stated mission to protect “the workers” and their jobs.

Labor Day is also the last holiday before public school starts a new year of corrupting children and indoctrinating them into wickedness and folly.

So what’s so happy about it?

Hey, a holiday’s a holiday. If there were no Labor Day, there would still be unions on America’s back like the Old Man of the Sea, and lousy schools. So we ought to enjoy any and every holiday we get!

Have a family picnic, a cook-out, or just enjoy some well-earned rest and relaxation. Enjoy every good thing that the Lord puts on your table, and give Him thanks for it. Amen, amen!

 

My Favorite Sunday Color Comics

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After coming home from church or Sunday school, for most of my childhood, one of my favorite Sunday pastimes was to read the color comics in the newspaper. Here are a few of my all-time favorites.

1. Prince Valiant by Hal Foster, launched in 1937 and continued to this day by Foster’s successors (he died in 1982). Was there ever more gorgeous artwork in any newspaper or magazine? I loved just to look at this strip; reading it was almost an afterthought.

2. Mark Trail, by Ed Dodd and his successors, first appeared in 1946. The Sunday version took a break from the weekly story-line to educate readers about wildlife, helped along by beautiful color illustrations.  Boy, could you learn a lot about wildlife by reading this! It helped instill in me a lifelong fascination for wild animals.

3. Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, ran from 1950 to 2000. In its time it was the most famous and widely-read cartoon on earth. Charlie Brown’s perpetually futile efforts to kick the football continue to symbolize all sorts of real-life tribulations for all sorts of people. But I think the strips from the 50s and early 60s, before “Peanuts” became a global phenomenon, were the funniest and most creative.

4. Mandrake the Magician, by Lee Falk, who also gave us The Phantom, first appeared in 1934 and is still being produced by Falk’s followers. Who can forget that dramatic phrase, “Mandrake gestures hypnotically…”? Don’t you wish you could do that! (Well, you can–but nothing much will happen except to make people think you’re a kook.)

5. The Teenie Weenies was cranked out every Sunday by William Donahey from 1914 to 1970–a good run! You’ve gotta love the idea of these little tiny people living just out of sight: a whole little world, with everything that that entails. Imagine what they could get up to today, if they had access to our computers while we were asleep.

I could go on, but I’d rather let you, faithful readers, expound on some of your favorites. To be nine years old, and spread the color comics section on the floor, and lie down to revel in it for an hour–it’s hard to beat those simple pleasures.

C.S. Lewis on the Untold Narnia Story

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I’ve been reading a book on the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion’s World, by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. I’ll be writing a full review later on. Meanwhile, this book has surprised and delighted me, so far. And I had spent years thinking Archbishop Williams was just another politically correct chucklehead… But he has said some wise things in this book. So far.

Like some of you, I’ve long thought there was a Narnia story yet to be written (see “The Missing Chronicle of Narnia,” March 13, 2013). Like many of you, I was shocked when Susan, one of the original Kings and Queens of Narnia at Caer Paravel, is left out at the end–despite the fact that Aslan himself made her a queen and declared, “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia.”

Among the gems stored in Archbishop Williams’ little book is this excerpt from a letter from C.S. Lewis to one of his young readers, written in 1960, just three years before his death:

“Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?”

As I felt sure must have been the case, Lewis did know there was a story he had not yet written. It seems he just wasn’t ready to write it: hadn’t quite decided how he ought to write it: knew what he didn’t want, but couldn’t yet see how he would have made it the kind of story that he wanted.

I wonder if he left it to each of us to write it for ourselves.

P.S.–I now understand that Lewis mentioned the eventual redemption of Susan in other letters, too.

Don’t Their Parents Care?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This week on News With Views I published a column, “This Best Book is the Worst” ( http://www.newswithviews.com/Duigon/lee215.htm ), about a book called Boy Meets Boy that was chosen Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Assn. A brief descriptive blurb will suffice: “Paul’s simple high-school life is confused by his desire for another boy who seems unattainable, until Paul’s friends help him find the courage to pursue him.”

I thought that was pretty sickening. But a reader from New Zealand has alerted me to an even filthier book that also won a big award, the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year. This is a book about teenagers at a boarding school, boys having sex with their male teachers and with each other, taking a whole lot of drugs, cursing and getting cursed at… I mean, what’s not to like? It’s called Into the River–which is possibly the best place to toss it.

This is Young Adult fiction, these days: a boiling cauldron of filth. Earlier in my lifetime, anyone who tried to purvey to minors the kind of stuff that gets Best Book honors today, would have been arrested and thrown into jail.

And my question is, simply, this: Don’t the parents care? Are you guys all right with your 14-year-old sons reading this stuff? You seem to be all right with your children being “educated” by persons who think this garbage belongs on a students’ recommended reading list. Is this what you want being pumped into your children’s minds?

Oh, we care! We care plenty! But we continue to send our kids, five days a week, to schools where Boy Meets Boy and Into the River are on the reading lists, on the shelves of the school library with golden stickers on their covers, and deeply imbedded in the ideology of our children’s “educators.”

It just doesn’t look like caring.

What Is Truth?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

If something was right yesterday, but wrong today, which is the more unstable–our standards, or ourselves?

If we change our minds because we are shown, and can see, that our opinion was based on wrong or incomplete information–as when we look at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle and think it’s going to be a merry-go-round, but the finished picture turns out to be a bandstand–we are being reasonable, using our brains as God intended.

But if a lot of college professors, movie stars, and politicians tell us, authoritatively, repeatedly, that the finished picture is not a bandstand after all, but a cageful of monkeys; and that if we continue to see it as a bandstand, we are wrong, hateful, stupid, and deserving of some penalty: what are we, if we wind up believing them and not our eyes?

Properly trained Americans, I guess.

Suppose the completed picture of the bandstand has been on display for thousands of years, and looks exactly like every bandstand that we’ve ever seen; but then today a federal judge rules that it’s not a bandstand. Suppose we are bombarded with media messages endorsing the judge’s ruling, every night and every day on television. How long will it take us to concede that it’s a picture of a monkey cage? And what does that make us, when we do?

There is no freedom without truth. Just a little point to ponder.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

If you want to see a sterling illustration of why the “pro-family” side never, never comes out on top in any struggle with the anti-family Left, visit townhall.com today and read Rebecca Hagelin’s column, “Culture Challenge of the Week: Public School Culture.”

After using three-quarters of her space to prove that public schools today are in the business of actively promoting homosexuality to children, she goes on to suggest a plan to keep your own children from being brainwashed. Here it is, in brief.

1. Warn your children about the propaganda which they’ll be fed at school; and after every school day, de-program them.

2. Make sure the school’s teachers and administrators know your concerns. And, when they pick themselves up off the floor after laughing hysterically and rolling around with tears in their eyes,

3. “Educate teachers… about the religious and speech rights of all students.”

I’ll have more to say about this in next week’s Newswithviews column. But in the meantime, could I please have a sip of whatever joy-juice it is that Ms. Hagelin is drinking? It must be powerful stuff!

With all due respect (she seems like a nice lady) to Ms. Hagelin, you have hopelessly, totally failed to understand the nature of your enemy. You couldn’t be more wrong if you wanted to be.

Do you think you’re dealing with honest, fair-minded people who play by the rules and respect other points of view? Well, you ain’t!

The only way to protect children from the public schools is not to put them in the public schools. Period.