Pursuing Holiness

Two Words: In. Sane.  When President Obama was asked during the campaign why he would raise a tax even though that tax increase had been shown in the past to decrease overall government revenue, he replied that he’d raise it in the interest of fairness.

Liberals are every bit as interested in equality as conservatives are.  The difference is, they don’t want equality of opportunity.  They want equality of outcome.  And yes, some will evidently sacrifice their children on the altar of that god.  At Moonbattery – a letter by one Doug Van Gorder, which was published in the Boston Globe:

Current school security procedures lock down school populations in the event of armed assault. Some advocate abandoning this practice as it holds everyone in place, allowing a shooter easily to find victims.

An alternative to lockdown is immediate exodus via announcement. Although this removes potential hostages and makes it nearly impossible for the shooter to acquire preselected targets, it unfairly rewards resourceful children who move to safety off-site more shrewdly and efficiently than others.

I’d like to know how that’s unfair.  And I’d also like to know why progressives, who typically are big Darwin fans, aren’t supporting his “survival of the fittest” concept.

But I’ll tell you – based on a quick Google search, including this defense of the Ft. Hood terrorist by Mr. Van Gorder, I think this guy is a moby working against the left.  At least, I sincerely hope he is… because the alternative is he really means this stuff.  Good Lord.

Oh, I admit it.  I’ve got an avatar at Second Life, and I still do log in occasionally, though less than I used to.  My husband teases me – calls it Barbie for grownups – and there’s something to that.  You get to create a character and make it look and dress the way you want.  You get to navigate around a fantastically detailed virtual world.  I’ve had drinks in an Irish pub, taken online classes, and shopped for designer clothes – something I’d never do in real life.  And I love, love, love the Star Trek role-playing areas at Second Life.  Yes, I really am that nerdy.  But this… this is just mind blowing.

A Korean couple was so involved in Second Life they’d go to internet cafes for twelve hours a day, raising their virtual reality daughter online… while their actual reality 3 month old baby daughter starved to death at home.  I can imagine one person being so deranged as to immerse themselves into virtual reality at the expense of real life.  But two people?  And no people in their real life who could intervene?

Over 120 protests in 33 states are scheduled today as students and their professors “challenge administrators and state lawmakers to ante up.”  At the heart of their grievance are the budget cuts states are making in taxpayer-funded colleges and universities.  Classes are canceled, waiting lists are growing, students are taking loans, jobs and sitting out semesters in order to pay for their educations.

“I want people to question where the priorities are — to see people getting together to accomplish a goal, by creating awareness for something as simple and as basic as the right to be educated,” Keller said.

Miss Keller is wrong.  There is no “right to be educated.”  She is entitled to seek out an education, but not to have taxpayers deliver one to her, even in part.  States are cutting budgets in many areas, and there is no reason why tertiary education should not feel some of that pain along with roads, entitlements, elementary and secondary education, and pretty much every other area of life.  If colleges are finally weaned off the government teat, perhaps they’ll make a real effort to reduce costs, which have risen four times faster than the rate of inflation, to levels students can better afford.

I agree that now would be a good time to for people to question their priorities.   More and more people are concluding that our taxpayer-funded colleges lack accountability, common sense, and are a bad bargain.  For example, Fort Hays University in Kansas used stimulus money to pay students to earn C or better grades.  A lot of parents are tired of paying top dollar to give leftist, race baiting, anti-American, plagiarizing nut jobs the privilege of indoctrinating their children.

Not everyone should go to college, and not everyone should go to college right out of high school.  There are many benefits to learning a trade and then going to college later on in life.  In my husband’s case, he started as an electrical helper, worked his way up to licensed electrician, and went to night school in his thirties to get an electrical/electronics engineering degree.  He practiced values that millennials have largely avoided – delaying gratification and being self-supporting.  He wonders why – having paid for his own higher education – he should pay for someone else’s.  After all, this is schooling they are voluntarily undertaking and from which they’ll benefit by higher lifetime earnings.  The fact that college students have the audacity to protest – and in some cases, protest violently – at being required to pay for it illustrates that they badly need an education.  Just not the one they’ll receive from a university.

I tend to put things in my Amazon cart and then leave them there for a while, gradually building up a large enough order to get free shipping.  Current cart contents?

• I See Rude People: One woman’s battle to beat some manners into impolite society
• Potassium Chloride
• Set 3 Ninja Stealth Silver Throwing Knives with Nylon Case
• The Zombie Combat Manual: A Guide to Fighting the Living Dead

Nothing to be worried about.  Those items are absolutely unrelated.