American Zoo

Once upon a time in Boston a colony of Russian-speaking Muslims assimilated a Colombian student.  Some of the young men planned to bomb a 4th of July event, but built their bomb quicker than expected.  You know the rest.

And why would that Colombian fellow choose to be an American anyway?  Well, yes, technically, he, like the younger Tsarnaev brother, had American citizenship, but quite obviously his heart was elsewhere.

The other day Drudge had a headline about “Redneck Day” in some educational establishment in Arizona:

When members of the student council at an Arizona high school organized a schoolwide “Redneck Day” and encouraged classmates to dress — and spoof — accordingly, they hoped to build school spirit leading up to prom week.

Instead, “Redneck Day” at Queen Creek High School has angered African-Americans and civil-rights leaders and touched off a debate about free speech, social stereotypes and good taste.

Drudge’s headline was about somebody being angry, and, I assumed it was the people who object to terms “redneck” and “white trash”.  The reason public schools no longer celebrate any meaningful holidays is because they bound to make somebody offended — or at least “not included”.  My daughter’s elementary school, for instance, doesn’t celebrate Christmas or Halloween.  Those are called — I kid you not — “winter festival” and “fall festival”, and the later has a whiff of Day of The Dead for a good measure.

Oddly enough, the school finds it possible to celebrate Chinese New Year.  At the party one of the teachers felt obliged to read a segment that sounded suspiciously like a Wikipedia entry.  She informed us that other countries have holidays at around that time too, like the Vietnamese Tet.  (She didn’t mention Purim which we celebrated the following day — tisk-tisk-tisk.)  Why should Chinese New Year get special treatment, I don’t know.  There is a very large Asian community in our town, but doubt a single town resident of Asian extraction lobbied the school district to celebrate Chinese New Year.  Plurality of Asian Americans are Christian, and there is no lack of churches around here that advertise services in Chinese or Korean.  And in any event, I noticed that Buddhists find it very easy to have Christmas trees in their houses.

Kindergarten students get exposed to several other holidays.  Since Fourth of July festivities take in summer, the school district is not obligated to deal with that.  Presidents’ Day hardly gets a mention.  Thanksgiving is the occasion to chastise the Pilgrims.  Martin Luther King looms large. Per their recollection, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s on-again, off-again mosque once praised the civil rights leader.  But MLK was not interesting enough to this hothead, and who can blame him?  While the preacher was an important historical figure, he’s hardly a foundational leader.  Plus, his non-violence (and there is place non-violence in this world) has limited appeal to boys.

Once all references to Christianity and patriotism are removed, the school builds “school spirit” with an array of inconsequential elective carnivals.  Children are encouraged to wear pink and red on Valentine’s day.  Then there was the dreaded pajamas day and a multicultural picnic, for which we, the foreign born moms, are expected to bring exotic dishes.  The only festivity we could get behind was the Read Across America Day that falls on Dr. Seuss’s Birthday.  We love Seuss, and reading is a worthy cause.  Apparently, the kindergarteners spontaneously engaged in some sort of Cat in A Hat game — how cool is that?  And how lucky was Dr. Seuss to be a liberal.  Had a conservative wrote the same poems (and a conservative could easily write most of them) he’d never get this kind of appreciation.

Our school is hardly most ridiculous.  A friend’s daughter is attending a public elementary school in Orange County.  There, the school district holds regular anti-drug theme days.  Children are encouraged to dress up in costumes and teachers lead discussions about why drugs are bad.  One of such theme was the 60′s.  No, really.

One of my pet peeves is absence of school uniforms.  In another recent news, Jared Marcum, a high school student in West Virginia was arrested and suspended for wearing an NRA t-shirt.  I sympathize with Jared’s cause, and an NRA t-shirt is far more innocent than, say, a band t-shirt because all band t-shirts refer to controlled substances and promiscuity inherent in rock-n-roll.  (Yes, my children will be allowed to wear band t-shirts).  Some schools, particularly the ones with gang problems, prohibit all writing on articles of clothes.  That’s a good start.  Day-to-day experience of grade schools students should be less about self-expression and current happenings and more about academic excellence.

In American public schools juvenile self-absorption and ironic pop culture references loom large and cliques rule.  It’s a hard landscape for a foreigner to navigate, even if he wants to assimilate and is eager to learn English.  Many on the left ditch any discussion of assimilation; they take it as a given that American mass culture is omnipresent and will absorb everyone.  While there obviously exists a global market for blue jeans and increasingly moronic Hollywood cinema, the culture of this country can not be reduced to these.  And contemporary public school culture promotes cliquishness, including ethnic cliquishness.

Russian speakers like to describe American public schools as “zoos”, and we don’t have private schools in high regard either.  There is little wonder that Tamerlan Tsarnaev bragged about not having American friends (even if he had no problems making a white American woman his first bride).  Instead of figuring out how to bring more people into the country or how to pass naturalization certificates to those who came here illegally, we should figure out how to assimilate the new-comers already on track to citizenship.

Ill-Mannered Women Seldom Make History

I came out of my parenting funk last week to learn that Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest champions of freedom in our era, had passed away. Chihuahuas were barking mad, of course, but as Mark Steyn tells us, Lady Thatcher was the kind who’d savor the fury:

Mrs. Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs,” almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.

The whiniest of all chihuahuas Morrissey opposes Thatcher on animal welfare grounds or some such. He certainly aged… but the good news is that he’s still alive. Who knew?  Morrissey was one of those entertainers who were big in the West, but gained virtually no traction in the Soviet Union.  We preferred classic rock and heavy metal.

And here is another quote from the infinitely quotable late Prime Minister:

“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding,” she once said, “Because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

“They” certainly lost a lot of arguments.  Steyn summed up the legacy of Lady Thatcher’s domestic policies:

Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.

Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable? [Emphasis mine, -- ed.]

My grade school years coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.  The Soviet media vilified both of them ferociously, but to our family they were friends.  We had family members who were trying to leave the Soviet Union, and we appreciated the unwavering support both Thatcher and Reagan expressed for Soviet dissidents and refusniks.

Regardless of family background, my generation loved action flicks and coveted blue jeans and bootleg rock music.  But it was up to the political leaders to explain the value of freedom.  Back in the 80s, Western leaderships projected optimism and confidence.  They showed us why capitalism was successful, and why it was worth imitating.  Maggie, Ronny and rock-n-roll were the picture of the West that I grew up with.

Maggie’s opinion was valued.  My grandma, who always got her news from the Russian Services of the BBC and the Voice of America, was heartened when the BBC broadcasted the Iron Lady’s opinion of Gorbachev: he was the man she can do business with.  That was the seal of approval Eastern Europe craved.

The Iron Lady is greeted by Moscowites in 1987 at the beginning of Gorbachev’s short tenure

Here is Oleg Atbashian — who is a couple of years older than me and has a more mature recollection of that period — on listening to Maggie on shortwave radio (click on the link for a cool poster).  He tuned in for rock-n-roll and stayed for politics:

 One night — it had to be late 1982, when Margaret Thatcher was running for her first re-election — my shortwave radio caught a BBC broadcast of the Iron Lady’s campaign speech.

[...]
Listening to Thatcher speak confirmed everything the Soviet media was reporting about her, and more. In a deep, powerful voice, she accused her socialist opponents of destroying the British economy through nationalization and presented the proof of how privatizing it again was bringing the economy back to life. The free markets worked as expected, making Britain strong again. The diseased socialist welfare state had to go, to be replaced by a healthy competitive society.

To the average consumer of the Soviet state-run media, that didn’t make any sense. When exactly had Britain become a socialist welfare state? That part never passed the Soviet media filter.

[...]

The next logical question would be this: if Great Britain wasn’t yet as socialist as the Soviet Union, then didn’t it mean that whatever freedom, prosperity, and working economy it had left were directly related to having less socialism? And if less socialism meant a freer, more productive, and more prosperous nation, then wouldn’t it be beneficial to have as little socialism as possible? Or perhaps — here’s a scary thought — to just get rid of socialism altogether? [Emphasis mine, --ed.]

My readers are welcome to dispute me, but I prefer Maggie to Ronny.  For one, the Iron Lady’s task of privatization was infinitely greater than anything Ronald Reagan had to face.  For another, I’m absolutely in awe of her speaking style.  Reagan was a great orator, full of passion, insights and spontaneity.  But Thatcher, ooow, her zingers were deadly.

I think it’s instructive that while the left talks incessantly about female empowerment, the actual great female leaders are conservative.  In part it’s because feminism is a false idol.  A non-Y-chromosomed Western politician too attached to the sisterhood is limiting herself.  The work of female emancipation now entails such all-important projects like providing already cheap birth control for free.  A woman with a vision, like Margaret Thatcher, has to have greater goals in mind.  Plus, if the story of Sarah Palin teaches us anything about the women’s movement, it’s that we, women, can be nasty and envious.

Since the second wave feminists taught women that personal is political, which really means that nothing is personal.  One’s choice of occupation, of clothing, of, notoriously, coital position, belongs to the sisterhood.  Feminism is a way of life, and as far as lifestyle advise goes, this one is highly questionable.  Per feminist bumper sticker wisdom, “Well-behaved women seldom make history”.  A now middle-aged death rocker we know has that one on her car.  There are plenty of obediently ridiculous women in the feminist movement, from raging grannies in pink to slut walks.  Is it worth it?

I’m sure it’s all very convenient in short term given how young ladies have all the rationale to party, but I pity the “girls” who will not, in a matter of year or two, grow to regret their participation.  The Ukrainian group Femen is selective high-end international version of slut walks.  I have to give it to them, they know how to get their egos massaged.  Occasionally, their protests have a kind of logic to it.  If one has to remove her bra for a cause, flash islamists.  Ultimately, though, they are dead-enders (via Leslie Lofties) destined to be a footnote to history.  If they get an honorable mention in history books, students struggling to figure out the narrative will wonder if they really need to know about partially naked women who once grabbed headlines.

Margaret Thatcher will get an entire chapter. I’m not sure she was “well-behaved”, certainly not by the standards of the socialist Left, but she was a lady, and as such she commanded attention and respect.  When the Meryl Streep film came out in 2011, Margaret Thatcher’s personal style became a popular topic of discussion, which is a bit silly.  It’s the women’s movement that’s about style, and the more outrageous, the better.  Morrissey is about style.  The Iron Lady was about substance.

Iconic Maggie, cheerful on the day she was elected, 4 May 1979.  Power, optimism, substance

A side note:  Margaret Thatcher had her twins when she was 28 — early by today’s standards.  She slowly developed her career and went on to be the most powerful woman in the world.  Had she waited another ten years to start her family, she’d spent her 40s carrying for young children, not moving up the Tory political ladder.  There is a lesson there.

And, oh, look how slender this mother of twins was — because she gave birth in her 20s?

Strangers

The night before the Boston bombing me and DH finished watching Zero Dark Thirty.  In one particularly over the top scene, Maya, the agent perusing UBL, is being told by her boss to follow home-grown terror threats because Bin Ladin is now isolated.  I’m glad Bin Ladin sleeps with fishes now, but Maya’s boss was right.

I hear people are impressed by patriotism of the uncle of the alleged bombers Ruslan Tsarni, but here is what he actually said:

He starts of by asserting that neither Islam nor his brother, the bombers’ dad, are in any way responsible for the atrocity.  Then he quickly distances himself from his brother — lovely family dynamic there.  After running all sorts of of interferences, Tsarni starts talking about shame (granted, the word appears to be given to him by the media).  The idea of shame is pretty foreign to us, Americans, these days.  Do my readers know any parents who shame their children?  Tsarni’s fiery defense of his adopted country might be heart-felt, but I find the man more than a little frightening.

Suspects’ dad is another frightening character.  Tsarni told us that Anzor Tsarnaev applied for [political] asylum in the US about ten years ago (probably after 9/11).  A few years ago he went back to Russia, the country where supposedly feared for his life and safety in the 90s.  The time-frame makes me suspect that Tsarnaev waited to become naturalized and quickly went back. I worked with immigrants, and I’ve heard of plenty of scams.  But there is a world of difference between getting American citizenship, returning to Russia, starting a software company and paying taxes in the United States and Anzor Tsarnaev.

From Russia Tsarnaev appealed to his surviving son, whom he believes to be innocent:

Give up. Give up. You have a bright future ahead of you. Come home to Russia[.]

So now this refugee identifies Russia as his home.   I want to see the soap story he fed the immigration services to get his green card. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s mom, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, believes the brothers were set up by the FBI:

Oh, so maybe they should ask for asylum in Russia.  Cue in the aunt, a Toronto resident:

“I’m a lawyer back home. Give me evidence. I participated in court sessions, where I had to prove the guilt of others,” said Maret Tsarnaev from outside her Etobicoke apartment. “Do the same here, show me evidence, give me more than a photo. But to be convinced that my nephews committed to these atrocities, convince me. Then come back and get my reaction and ask me how I feel.”

Tsarnaeva said she believes her nephews are being set up and that the photos of the young men at the site of the Boston Marathon bombing may have been set up, though she stopped short of saying who could be framing them.

I gather Russian criminal justice system, in which auntie is an expert, is flawless.  And, mmm, how hard it is to ask for political asylum in Canada?

Meanwhile, the younger bombing suspects’ friends don’t understand how come he doesn’t fit the profile of a mental white gunman:

Steven Owens told ABC News, “I met him when I was in seventh grade and he was just a great kid. He was fun to be around. Very studious, very smart. I don’t remember a time when he was ever having trouble in school. He was a great athlete. Great to be around.”

Owens said Tsarnaev “always had a positive attitude,” but had expressed some political opinions in school.

Really?

“He always thought the war [Iraq, Afghanistan] was stupid[.]“

Another former classmate:

“He never seemed out of the ordinary at all,” high school classmate Sierra Schwartz told “Good Morning America” today. “This is not someone who seemed troubled in high school or shy. He was just one of us. It’s very weird.”

Prejudice against shy people is absolutely PC.

Meanwhile Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechen “President”, a former terrorist turned Kremlin puppet, opined:

Tragic events have taken place in Boston. As a result of the blast people were killed. Previously, we expressed out condolences to the people of the city, and the people of America. Today, as reported by the media, during his arrest attempt, a Tsarnaev was killed. It would be logical, for him to be detained and investigated, and all the circumstances and degrees of his guilt uncovered. Apparently, the special services needed a result at any cost to calm down society. Any attempts to make a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs, even if they are guilty, are in vain. They grew up in the United States, their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of their evil inside America. The whole world should fight terrorism. We know this better than anyone else. We wish a recovery to all the victims and share the Americans’ sense of sorrow.

There is a bit of truth there.  How does a man manage to grow up in the United States without becoming American?  If you need root causes, that’s your root causes.  And why do we think that Chechen terrorism, which showed itself to be so deadly in Russia, will not manifest itself here?

The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was described as an outgoing person who was a champion boxer, a “decent” pianist, drove a Mercedes and liked the movie “Borat.” But in captions on an undated boxing photo album operated by photographer Johannes Hirn, Tamerlan Tsarnaev said, “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.”

That sentiment appears to be mutual.

UPDATE: Turns out, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was married to an American woman whose family issued a statement.  Here is an excerpt:

We cannot begin to comprehend how this horrible tragedy occurred. In the aftermath of the Patriot’s Day horror, we know that we never really knew Tamerlane Tsarnaev. (via Legal Insurrection).

UPDARE 2: Welcome Legal Insurrection readers!

Why This Blogger Doesn’t Believe Boston Bombing Was The Work of #Occupy

Not that anyone is suggesting otherwise.  A certain guy from Barack Obama’s old Chicago neighborhood might have built bombs filled with shrapnel, and I’m not sure what the Anarchist Cookbook advises on this matter.  But that was baby boomer radicalism.

Bill Ayers might have been a rich brat, but the brats of his era grew up playing cowboys and Indians with gangs of friends and siblings.  Around the time of puberty they got jobs at fast food joints and bought cars. They were the risk takers.  I’m not saying they were good at making bombs; they weren’t.  They were mostly blowing up each other.

The parents of #Occupy alumni glued corner guards to coffee tables once babies started to crawl and shuttled their progeny from one activity to another in [improperly installed] car seats. Instead of mowing neighbors’ lawns future occupiers spent their adolescence on social media.  The only thing they thought of doing once college diplomas were placed into their hands is to demand cancellation of student loans.  And sure, they’d like to be dangerous, and from time to time #Occupy grads do get caught with explosives, one occupier was sentenced just a few days ago.  But that’s the thing: they get caught.

Radicals of the crawling helmet generation. Unlikely to be capable of much, including much evil

Whoever planted the bomb at Boston marathon (and like all normal people I suspect Islamists) was a deliberate sadist. The bombs were created to inflict maximum damage, and were placed at a location where relief effort would be difficult.  The Left today is incapable of such forethought.  They thought of targeting an iconic event that has little symbolic importance to the left.  The right, for that matter, is also not interested in the Boston marathon, but, nasty fantasies of progressives aside, most of the political violence in this country comes from the left.

Next Year in Jerusalem

Gorod(City) was one of my favorite Russian underground songs.  It’s simple, serene and mysterious, and I fell in love with it when I first heard it, in my early teens.  That version was performed by a group called Aquarium, and most Russians still attribute the authorship to the lead singer Boris Grebenshchikov (nicknamed BG).  I don’t think he still claims it, but at some point he probably did.

Appropriately enough, Gorod’s origin is shrouded by mystery.  In the late 80s a girlfriend of mine told me that BG stole it from some singer songwriter, altering the lyrics.  She said that the original version used quotes from the Bible which BG bastardized.  I knew about the accusations of plagiarism when I was getting married, fifteen years later, but I loved the song so much, I chose the Aquarim version of the song for the father-daughter dance.  I didn’t know where to find the original, plus, plagiarism or not, I loved BG’s execution, which always took me back to my teens — it’s very Soviet Union in the 80s.

Zeev Heizel did a thorough investigation of the origin of the song, and concluded that the melody was created by an amateur Russian lute player Vladimir Vavilov in the late 1960s, and that it was inspired by Italian Renaissance composer Francesco da Milano.  Poet Anri Volohonsky wrote the lyrics in 1972, and Aquarium recorded their hit in the 80s.

English translation of the Aquarium version is following:

Under the blue sky
Is a city of gold
With translucent gates
And a bright star
And in that city is a garden
Of grass and flowers
Animals of unseen beauty
Stroll there
One is a lion with a mane of fire
Another is an ox with stupendous eyes
With them is the golden celestial eagle
Whose look of light is unforgettable

But in the blue sky
Shines a star
She is yours oh my angel
She is yours forever
One who loves is beloved
One who shines is a saint
Let the star lead you
To the miraculous garden
To meet the lion with a mane of fire
And the ox with stupendous eyes
With them is the golden celestial eagle
Whose look of light is unforgettable

Ever since my bff told me that the lyrics were based on Biblical verses, I thought that the song was about Jerusalem.  And maybe the text was based on the scriptures, only in the original version the city was not “under”, but “over” the blue sky, the heavenly Jerusalem.  Anyhow, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate Passover with the Hebrew version of Gorod, with a very thick Russian accent, performed by Zeev Heizel:

Happy Passover and happy Easter to my Christian friends.

“Bang!” The Ban

Before I start this post, let me explain the title.  I wrote a bit about the plastic grocery bag bans sweeping California towns, and in the process discovered an excellent website that accumulates resources for the opposition; it’s called bag the ban.  I doubt any of my readers came across the website.  So why did I choose a title referencing a website my readers know nothing about?  Because I’m crazy, that’s why!

Which brings me to this.  Leslie Eastman noted that in California, the state uses its power to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens using the most tenuous mental health reasons (spending money we don’t have in the process):

Just last week, the California Senate approved a $24 million funding bill to expedite the process of collecting guns from owners in the state who legally acquired them but have since become disqualified due to felony convictions or mental illness.

Such was recently the case for one woman, who had been in the hospital voluntarily for mental illness last year that she says was due to medication she was taking. Lynette Phillips of Upland, Calif., told TheBlaze in a phone interview Monday she had purchased a gun years ago for her husband, David, as a present. That gun, as well as two others registered to her law-abiding husband (who does not have a history of felonies or mental illness), were seized last Tuesday.

“My husband is upset that they took the right from us that should never have been taken, Phillips told TheBlaze.

But according to the state of California, that doesn’t matter.

“The prohibited person can’t have access to a firearm” regardless of who the registered owner is, Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, told to Bloomberg News.

What’s “crazy” anyway?  In the 90s, the lawyer for the Unibomber was talking about the insanity defense.  In the Soviet Union, dissidents were shipped off to mental wards.  The GOP, I hear, can use less “nutters”.

The perpetrator of the Sydney Hook massacre, the massacre that caused the latest round of anti-gun hysteria, is said to have had Asperger’s.  Maybe he could had been diagnosed with something else, or perhaps he’s just evil, but arguably, Asperger’s is a form of normal male behavior, often revered throughout history — Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, for instance, was probably modeled on a person with autistic traits.  Today, 1 in 54 boys is diagnosed with autism, most of them have mild symptoms, and quite a few will outgrow their diagnosis.  How many “crazies” (and their relations) are we prepared to disarm?

A politically insane individual like myself is weary of denying the “crazy” their Second Amendment rights.  Sure, there are people out there, very obviously scary people, like the perpetrator of the Aurora mass shooting, who should not had been able to have access to firearms.  The problem with people like him is larger than possession of weapons.  The man should have been involuntarily hospitalized, and we do need to have laws for that.  In his case, a mental health checks to buy a gun would be like putting a band aid on a wound that cuts to the bone.  It does not address the underlying problem, and does not prevent him from, say, picking up a hammer and cracking a few people’s heads.  Furthermore, many people obviously in need of mandatory psychiatric treatment (take a walk in downtown San Francisco) are not violent or at least not capable of actually getting themselves to a sporting goods store and not freaking out the clerk.  What would gun checks do for them?

It’s very much possible that the Sandy Hook murderer would slip through the cracks and not be hospitalized.  But no system is perfect and life is full of unpredictability and danger.  And yet, despite the impression we get from the evening news, mass shootings are rare.  Parents of the Sandy Hook first graders can be consoled by the fact that their beautiful children died in an extraordinarily rare event, but it was an extraordinary rare event.

Lets look at the mass shooting in perspective.  The same people that are rallying against the Second Amendment are typically environmentalists, also rallying for grocery bag bans.  In San Francisco such ban is linked to a 46% increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses.   According to CDC estimates, 3000 people died of foodborne diseases across the United States in 2011.  If we are to implement a similar plastic bag ban on federal level, we should for 1380 dirty bag deaths — and I hope the turtles are worth it.  Sixteen mass shootings were perpetrated in the US in 2012, leaving 88 people dead, meaning that grocery bag bans are quite likely to be nearly 16 times deadlier than mass shootings.

“Oh, that’s just mass shootings,” my readers may say.  “But what about the murders committed with ‘assault’ rifles?”  Actually my readers would never ask a question that stupid.  They know that according to the FBI, in 2011 323 people were shot to death with rifles.   This means that grocery bag bans are probably more than 4 times deadlier than bad guys with rifles.

Clearly, some residents of “reality-based community” need to have their priorities straightened out.  Or else, their political convictions are more about identity, about sticking it to the bitter clingers, and not so much about saving life.  Or else they prefer to return to “natural” pre-industrial living, the one characterized by high birth rate and low life expectancy.  That’s totally sane.  And get this, if we actually subsidize birth control and stop breading, the Earth will be returned to the animals.  In this case nobody will be shooting those AR-15s.

So, dear friends, support life and liberty, our Second Amendment rights and oppose government’s intrusion into personal matters!  (Crazy, I know.)

UPDATE: Related: anti-vaxxers kill. (Via Instapundit.)

My Kitchen — My Rules

What I love about Victor Davis Hanson is the breadth of his knowledge.  In his recent column Hanson described the emerging medieval social and political organization of California (via Leslie Eastman).  This structure rests on a “medieval” Pacific Coast state of mind, with environmentalism being one of the key orthodoxies of the increasingly unenlightened Golden State.

I have the misfortune to watch the environmentalist indoctrination in making.  The recent grocery bag ban enacted by the Alameda County is the most recent sour spot.  The ban, designed to eventually supplant all “single use” grocery bags, stirs residents of our counties (actually many municipalities in our state are heading this way) towards the use of grocery totes.  Considering that the practice creates a public safety hazard, the fact that the now illegal plastic bags are probably more environmentally sound than any alternatives looks like a minor point.  But the most egregious aspect of the prohibition is the effect on individual liberty.  All of a sudden, what I do in the privacy of my own kitchen becomes everyone’s business.

Scratch that.  Not “all of a sudden”.  Personal has long been political, and our kitchens have been sniffed out by the PC police for quite some time.  The government on all levels throws its weight around in favor of particular classes of appliances.  American law requires food labeling, and these requirements are becoming increasingly more extensive.  Considering the amount of social pressure to buy local and/or organic products, and the political outlook of the individuals who put this pressure on each other, a law prescribing the sale of politically correct groceries will be cheered on by a large segment of the California population.  Just as well.  We, California women, bought into the personal is political doctrine, so we have to reconcile with the political in our personal.  The kitchens, traditionally a personal domain of women, are now invaded by the PC police.

If a mom is not careful, her kids might act as an arm of the PC police — kind of like the kosher police.  An essentially secular in-law of mine enrolled her son in an Hasidim-run Jewish school with the reputation for academic excellency.  In a short time the boy took to inspecting her pots and giving her advise on how to run her kitchen.  Although she resented it then, towards the end of her life the auntie turned pretty religious and started keeping kosher.  Now, environmentalism is unlike a religion in that the older we get the less likely we are to accept it.  And so mothers of students enrolled in public schools might find themselves going through some dead-end nagging.  But, because unlike religion, environmentalism does not create a sense of connection with the past, mothers should feel in no way compelled to accept the dogma pushed on family kitchens through the educational establishment.

My daughter’s kindergarten class were once  subject to a f propaganda barrage connected with the bag ban.  And now I read about a posh local elementary that was visited by representatives of a local environmentalist group, who, I gather, gave them a talk on pros and cons of the ban.  All students of this posh elementary are above grade level, and all parents are the low level California aristocracy.  Don’t tell them you don’t shop at Whole Foods.

The fifth-graders were so impressed by the talk, they spontaneously decided to write letters to the newspaper to argue pros and cons of the bag ban.  For some not at all obvious reason, the overwhelming majority of letters were in support of the law.  The minority opinion was mostly concerned with relative advantages of recycling various material (the online version of the paper didn’t include the minority student voice at all).  Either we are so far gone here that there is no hope for us, or the students know something that they hesitated to put on paper.  With their names attached to it.  For everyone to see.  Forever.  Or perhaps what I saw in the paper is only representative of the children of the aristocracy.  Black people don’t care much for environmentally correct practices, and Hispanics think that since the white people ruined the Earth, environmentalism is for the Caucasians.  Well, maybe not all Hispanics, just the ones at UC Berkeley.  Viva la Raza!

As far as I can tell, the fifth graders that weighed in on the ban are well on their way to Berkeley.  For instance, one eager soul writes:

Many people are against it, but I think it’s the best thing that has happened to the county for a while.

Ask your mama if the ban is better than the reelection of Barack Obama.  And check out this budding statist:

The bag ban is amazing — a perfect way to motivate us to use reusable bags. It’s a great way to make a cleaner and greener world. So keep the bag ban up and running.

I wonder if they discuss, in their “social studies” class, what the Founders would think of the government motivating we, the people, to transport our groceries in a specific manner.

We tell our kids that we expect them to learn math, reading and writing at school, and that everything else is just someone’s opinion.  I will take responsibility for introducing them to great literature, science and history.  I just hope their teacher doesn’t press them into a letter writing campaign.