The Annihilator Adjective

In this Elder of Ziyon essay, The immorality of charging Israel of "genocide", I learned a new phrase:  incremental genocide.  What does that mean?  It truly does not matter.  The propaganda technique for today is what I call "the annihilator adjective."  It empties meaning out of the word being modified, allowing you to fill it back up with whatever meaning you like.

Suppose you want to call someone an asshole, but you can't just use the word straightforwardly because he may not be objectively an asshole and you would thus open yourself to criticism.  So, instead, you call him a "social asshole" or "decentered asshole" or "networked asshole".  Really, you could use any adjective you like, the weirder the better.  The adjective doesn't have to mean anything, it just has to sound like it might mean something (see:  "Jabberwocky").

Then, when challenged, you reply, "But, I am not calling him an asshole as you understand the concept.  What I mean by asshole is..." and you can proceed to bury your interlocutor in an avalanche of meaningless verbiage.  The avalanche of meaningless verbiage will leave no lasting impression on your interlocutor's mind because it is meaningless.  The enduring impression is that your victim is labelled an asshole and in your interlocutor's, simple and impressionable, mind is left the sense that you are one smart guy (you "know words").

Actually, you are the asshole.

The canonical use of the annihilator adjective is "social justice".  What's that?  We all  have some sense of "justice", worked out over long years of moral, legal, and literary development, and we associated strong, positive feelings with the concept.  We tend to know what it means and we tend to like it, a lot.  Socialists want to cloak themselves in the mantle of justice, but it is not easy for them to do that because socialism is not just.

Enter "social justice".  Oh, what's that?  And the socialists proceed to bury us in an avalanche of meaningless verbiage, leaving upon us the impression that they somehow inhabit a higher moral plane.  Actually, they just want to take your stuff.

It turns out that the socialist assholes (I use these words in their dictionary definitions, no annihilator adjectives for me, thanks) want to label Israel genocidal.  This is absurd on its face and they cannot do that straightforwardly.  Enter "incremental genocide".  What does that mean?  Of course, it does not mean anything.  It's just a way for the socialist assholes to associate the word genocide with Israel.

The Prime Directive

Ah, spring is in the air and a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of....Scratch that!  Actually, it's late August, school is about to start, and the newspapers are publishing their annual education articles.  Here is this year's WaPo entry, Whats wrong with U.S. schools: A multiple-choice exam with "no wrong answers",

The WaPo's is a clever article, mainly right, I think.  So, why am I unhappy with it?  Consider two questions raised by the article:

• What's wrong with teacher training, and 
• Why don't we know how children learn?

Good questions, and the WaPo raises a number of them.  But, these are the same questions that have been asked for nearly 100 years.  What the WaPo does not ask is why we do not already have some good answers for them.

Consider that schools of education have been around for more than 100 yrs.  Their faculties are doctors of education whose profession it is to research education.  How is it possible that after such a long time they do not have at least pretty good answers to basic questions?  BTW, here is a brilliant commentary on the subject, Reinventing the wheel of education, by Natalie Kramer  

But, why?  What's going on?  Are the Education Ayatollahs too busy to do the basic research (busy with what, exactly)?  Are they morons?  Or is something else going on?

After many, many years of its staring me hard in the face, it has become perfectly obvious what is going on in public education.  How could it be obvious if it took me so many years to recognize?  Here is a story about the English mathematician G.H. Hardy to explain.

Once upon a time, lecturing, Hardy was methodically working through a proof when, coming upon a key element he said, "Now, obviously..." and he paused and wondered aloud, "Is it obvious?"  He paced the blackboard.  He actually walked out of the lecture hall, lost in thought.  Quite some minutes later, he returned and exclaimed, "Yes!  It is obvious."

In the same way, I say it is obvious that the central organizing doctrine of American education, what I call "The Prime Directive", is:  Reduce The Gap!

You see, there is a chasm between academic high achievers and academic low achievers.  The provenance of this concern is, of course, marxist class warfare.  In the American context there is the additional frisson of race.  It is widely observed that high achievers are middle and upper class mainly White and Yellow, and low achievers are lower class mainly Black and Brown.
American educators are desperate to reduce this Gap in academic achievement.  Read the education literature, read their op-eds in the NY Times and the WaPo, listen to their public speeches and congressional testimonies, and you can see they think of nothing else.  Their every thought is bent upon solving this one problem.

The problem is that nobody knows how to reduce The Gap, and they cause much harm in the effort.  Consider, any time you teach something real, you must create a Gap.  Eg, suppose in a high school algebra class you teach the quadratic equation with the serious expectation that your students learn the idea and can apply it to solve problems.  Well, some students will learn it quickly and easily, some students will learn it more slowly and imperfectly, and some students will not learn it, at all, no matter what you do.  Voila!  A Gap.

Of course, the educators are not against teaching the quadratic equation, or any other idea of intellectual substance.  But, all efforts must conform to The Prime Directive.  So, if you cannot teach the quadratic equation without generating a Gap, eliminate the quadratic equation.  And so it ramifies to every idea in every academic subject.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains almost everything about modern, American public education.

Donna Shalala and the Clinton Foundation

How interesting that Donna Shalala is president of the Clinton Foundation.

Shalala made a big impression on me some years ago when she was president of the University of Miami.  At that time, she made a big deal of how women in the sciences are not treated fairly Bias Is Hurting Women in Science.  How odd, I thought, that she was in a position to actually do something about that, but did nothing.

If it is true that women are not treated fairly in the sciences, this implies there is a large, untapped pool of scientific talent, out there.  Shalala said as much.  So, why not tap that talent?

The main business of university presidents is raising money.  Shalala could have raised some money and created, say, the Department of Female Chemistry.  Bring in some of that top scientific talent, run the department on principles favorable to women, and watch all that prolific research come rolling in.  They could even found their own "Journal of Female Chemistry".

Does that sound unusual to you?  It shouldn't.  That is exactly what many universities have done with women's studies, ethnic studies, "Africana" studies, and urban anthropology.  The feminists could not find a home in an existing department, so the made their own.  The ethnologists could not find a home in an existing department so they made their own, and so on.  I completely respect that.  They raised their own money, they funded their own departments, they publish their own journals.  What's the problem?

Donna Shalala did none of that.  All she did was monger grievances.  And now she is president of the Clinton Foundation.  I wonder what that says about the Clinton Foundation.

Depraved Indifference At The U.N.

The NY Times has a piece on the culpability of the UN in the cholera epidemic in post-earthquake Haiti, in 2010.  Do I really need to put this into perspective?  Oh, alright.

So, worldwide, THE central human problem is water.  Getting potable water in, putting sewage water out, floods, droughts, mosquitoes (vector for malaria), and other stuff.  Water problems are the single greatest reason, by far, why humans die premature, horrible deaths.  Especially children.

Waterborne diseases are central to the problem of water control.  There are so many different kinds we have to categorize them:  protozoan diseases, parasitic diseases, bacterial diseases, and viral disease.  Each disease more horrible than the one before.  Diseases that don't kill you by dehydration will kill you by malnutrition, skin infections, and organ damage.  I can't put it any plainer than the World Health Organization:  Waterborne Disease is World's Leading Killer.

Among the waterborne diseases, cholera is big one.  Drink water contaminated by Vibrio cholerae and you will quickly suffer an agony of profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, rapid heart rate, loss of skin elasticity, dry mucous membranes, low blood pressure, thirst, and muscle cramps leading soon to renal failure, coma, and shock.  Death can come in hours, and it can be a mercy.

Friends, you pay attention to cholera, OK?

So, it came to pass that a magnitude 7 (that's big!) earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, epicenter mere kilometers from Port-au-Prince, causing nearly 300,000 deaths and many times that suffering.  People around the world wanted to help.  The UN wanted to help.  In the effort to help, the UN imported peacekeepers from Nepal.

As it happens, at that time Nepal was suffering a cholera epidemic.  And yet, at the UN a bell rang in nobody's head.  The UN went ahead with importing the Nepalese, they were housed in a compound on the Meille River and their waste was flushed into the river.  A recipe for disaster.

In American parlance, the very kindest characterization of UN behavior is "depraved indifference."  As I have long argued, the UN is a depraved organization.  And they are antisemites.  It is astonishing the extent to which the two go together.

Of course, the solution is obvious.

A couple of years ago I had in my class a Haitian student, a middle aged man.  How he knew I am Jewish I cannot say, but he made a point of telling me---as if I deserve some credit (I live only in reflected glory)---that many Haitians are keenly aware, and profoundly grateful, that after the earthquake the very first relief agents on the ground were these fantastic, highly mobile Israeli field hospitals.  They appeared over night, as if by magic.  No hoopla, no klieg lights, no press corp.  Quietly, they went about the business of saving lives, one after another after another,

No One But The Israelis Have Come To Help

In the words of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest (who probably never spoke these exact words, but the sentiment is absolutely right), the Israelis Got there firstest with the mostest.

So, the solution to the UN depravity?  Tens of thousands of sick and dead Haitians attest to the rightness of this assertion:  All UN relief efforts must be run by Jews.

Oh, you don't think that's ever going to happen?  Neither do I.  Too bad, because a lot of people are going to die who do not need to die.

Why We Hate You

Here is the July, 2016 issue of "Dabiq", the magazine of ISIS, containing the article, "Why We Hate You".  They give six reasons,

1. First and foremost because you are disbelievers;
2. Because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted;
3. We hate atheists;
4. Because you mock Islam, insult Muhammad, burn the koran, and reject sharia;
5. Because you kill Muslims;
6. Because you invade Muslim lands.

They sum it up,

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.

Now do you understand why the incomparable Wafa Sultan entitle her book, "A God Who Hates"?

Fyvush Finkel, May His Memory Be A Blessing

As the Quakers are wont to say, "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop," and when my father retired, he got ideas.  One of those ideas was that he would not pay the mortgage on his house.

"What do you mean, you're not paying the mortgage?" my mother remonstrated, but my father was adamant.  In the end, my mother divorced my father solely to extract the mortgage payments out of him.

My mother got much more in the divorce because my father was not well represented.  He was outraged when his lawyer asked for money.  "All he did was talk," my father complained.  As a doctor, I think he expected some kind of laying on of hands---not to be forthcoming from a lawyer.

No matter because nothing changed.  My parents divorced and they continued living together, my father paying rent to my mother.  Does that seem odd to you?  Truthfully, it seemed a bit odd to me, but in the Grand Scheme of things, how could I complain?  Other people's parents commit crimes, go to jail, etc.  Really serious shit.  My father paid rent to my mother.  So what?  I was pretty sure, however, that my family was unique in this matter.

Until one day, I turned on the TV and saw Fyvush Finkel singing I Was A Border By My Wife, and my head exploded.  There is a song about this?!  That can only mean other people do this, too.  Who are these other people?  Do the goyim do this, or only Jews?  Can you imagine the waves of relief and amazement that came over me?

Fyvush Finkel increased the sum of human happiness in his lifetime.  As his life was already a blessing, his memory certainly will be one, as well.

Environmental Love At The Rio Olympics

When I told my dad, way back in the 20th century, that my wife and I were travelling to Rio de Janeiro, he remembered reading about Rio, in his Romanian high school, as the most beautiful city in the world.  And it was easy to see why.

The geological setting is magical.  The colonial architecture of the old city is charming.  Together they made for an exquisite city.  There was much else to love about the place.

Of course, by the time we got there, Rio had long outgrown its original boundaries.  People have to live, after all, and there was a lot of modern construction.  Not as charming as the colonial architecture, but not terrible.  That was some years ago.  So these days, with all the reportage on the Olympic Games, it is with some personal pain that I read about the filth of Rio,
Rio's Terrible Pollution
Sewage In The Water

I am saddened but not surprised.  You see, from January, 2003 to January 2011, the president of Brazil was Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, a communist.  He was succeeded to the presidency by his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, a communist.  It goes without saying that the economic miracle of Brazil, this past decade, was all smoke and mirrors that is now rapidly dissolving into poverty and social unrest.  But the issue for now is the horrific pollution.

"C'mon, Ed," you say, "socialists love the environment."  G-d save us from such love.  Some of the greatest environmental catastrophes of the modern world were precipitated by socialists.

Consider the Aral Sea.  Once-upon-a-time one of the four largest lakes in the world, grand irrigation schemes under the Soviet Union diverted the feeder rivers, and the eastern basin of the Aral Sea is now the Aralkum Desert,
Before and After Satellite Images
High And Dry
Then, Chernobyl.  And other disasters.

Looking elsewhere, here is to laugh:  that Left-wing rag, The Daily Kos reports that China suffers massive, Unrepairable ecological disasters.
Of course, there is more, much more,
7 of the 10 most air polluted cities in the world are in China
and so on.

When I hear of socialists taking power, I first tremble for the people, as with Venezuela most recently.  But if I give any thought to it, I know environmental disasters cannot be far behind.

Henny Youngman and the Theory of No Voter Fraud

Experts, mainly of the leftist variety, tell us there is very little voter fraud and we should not worry our pretty little heads about it.  Can this be true?

One way to think about this is to ask the question:  is a vote valuable?  The question practically answers itself.  Of course a vote is valuable.  How do we know this?  Because contenders for public office spend huge sums of money to get votes.

Many local elections, like civil court judge in NYC, cost tens of thousands of dollars.  Statewide races typically cost several million dollars.  In anticipation of the 2016 elections, Charles Schumer, the senior U.S. senator, already has a war chest of nearly $24 million.  The 2016 presidential race will almost certainly cost more than $3 BBBillion.

Oh, of course your vote is not terribly valuable and nobody is going to pay you a lot of money for it.  But to conclude that all votes together  are not valuable is like saying money is not valuable because a $1 bill is only worth, well, $1.  Many people would not cross the street to pick up a $1 bill off the sidewalk, but it would be absurd to conclude that money is not valuable.  In the same way, one vote may mean little, but all votes together are worth a whole lot, and people spend a lot of money to get them.

Valuable things are susceptible of being stolen.  You would not leave your wallet in some open public place, unattended.  You do not leave your car or house unlocked.  In most places, you wouldn't even leave your bicycle unlocked.  And if your money is not safely locked away in a bank, you have at least carefully hidden it in a mattress or some other safe place.

Why all the care with valuable things?  Because somebody is likely to steal them, if he can.  Valuable things get stolen, if you are not careful.  That's the way the world works.

So, to suggest that votes are not susceptible of being stolen is like saying that the laws of thermodynamics apply everywhere in the known universe, except Washington, D.C.  It is to suggest that all valuable things are susceptible of being stolen, except votes.  Well, why does that make sense?

One of the reasons votes are valuable is because they exist in the confluence of money and power.  People spend a lot of money to get votes because votes are the key to enormous power, and more money.  Just how do you think the Clintons made $34 million on government salaries?  And, it has long been observed that people who are greedy for political power are more avaricious and less scrupulous than people who are greedy merely for financial power.

Consequently, to suppose there is no voter fraud is to believe that, unlike all other human beings, especially unscrupulous people who are greedy for political power are less likely to steal valuable things.  I think not.

Ah, but where's the proof people, especially leftists, will ask.  There does seem to be little proof of voter fraud.  This, too, is easy to understand.  The people who are responsible for guarding the vote are the people who are already winners inside the existing system.  Like the fox who guards the hen house, they have no incentive to find and stop voter fraud since they are the beneficiaries.  Voter fraud is working just fine for them, thanks.  Of course you will not find proof of voter fraud if you are not looking for it.

Perhaps you think I am being rather closed-minded about this, since I continue to believe in voter fraud despite a paucity (certainly not a complete absence) of proof.  Guilty as charged.  I put the idea of no voter fraud into the class of ideas I call "Henny Youngman Hypotheses."

Henny Youngman had a routine in which he would rush out on stage breathing heavily, he would mop his brow, and say, "I just flew in from Chicago, and boy!  Are my arms tired." And people laughed.

Why did people laugh?  Youngman was implying that he could flap his arms and fly like a bird.  What's so funny about that?  What if that were true?  The possibility of a man flying like a bird is so remote, nobody in his right mind is going to spend even a minute investigating the claim.  Some ideas are just not worth exploring.

That is just how I feel about the assertion that the vote does not need to be protected.  You would have to be some kind of gullible fool, or a Democrat, to take that seriously.