Inspiration Of the Day

Read this story about a man who broke into Auschwitz.  It’s inspiring.

(H/T: Radley Balko)

The post 9-11Antrax attacker was nuts.

A while back on one of the discussion topics someone brought up the Antrax attacks that happened after 9-11 as proof Bush and his administration had no iead what they are doing. Recently the DOJ colsed its probe on this case and while the MSM did its best to hide some of the more juicier things, those that seek shall find. I am not surprised to discover two things: this idiot was a super freak obsessed with “TheWon” and fearful of Darth Cheney. This guy was unhinged bigitme. And how insulting is it that he commited suicide by Tylenol overdose, when he screwed so many with his little Anthrax thing. I am not usually one to judge people on what they do in the privacy of their own home or bedroom, but it is interesting to me how many of the sickos out there seem to also be into real sick things.

Shaken Chile

Chile just got hit by an 8.8 earthquake, one nearly 800 times stronger than the one that hit Haiti, with tsunamis expected to go all the way across the Pacific.

While they will certainly need some help, the country remains functional and I predict that they will weather this far better than Haiti did.  I’ve been to Chile many times and been impressed by its people and its productivity.  Each time I have visited, new developments and business were going up.  Their government has privatized their social security system and is very pro-free trade (although they still have some issues with building roads that last more than ten seconds).

Draw your own conclusions about the difference between the awful kleptocracy that runs Haiti vs. the capitalist democracy that runs Chile and how that translates in the safety and survival of their respective peoples.

Update: Amazing pictures of the devastation in Concepcion.

The Best of Lee: Juror #6

I was just having a discussion with some immigrant friends of mine and remembered this wonderful post from our late resident genius.  Enjoy his revelation on a stint of jury duty.

I’ll tell you one thing, though.  As part of voir dire everyone had to give a basic personal history, including your name, where you live, your marital status, the occupation of you and your spouse, your children, and any occupation your children may have.  In the room were a number of immigrants—like any major city, LA is full of foreigners—and a number of minorities (blacks and Hispanics) who were probably not that well to do.  Most of these immigrants were from third world nations, Africa and Asia and the Middle East, but they were all citizens.

When they listed their jobs the immigrants listed the usual litany of immigrant-level work.  They were security guards or worked in catering at a hotel or did janitorial work, mostly unskilled labor, or had started as unskilled labor and moved into supervisory positions as they got experience.  Most of them were older than me, with grown children.  Almost without exception their kids were substantially better off than their parents, listing jobs like doctors or lawyers or nurses or graphic artists or software engineers, all highly-paid, educated, skilled labor.  A couple of them mentioned that their kids were enrolled in PhD programs.  And I thought, ‘What a great country America is.”

This is the American dream.  You’re not going to come to this country with no skills or education and make a million dollars (though that does occasionally happen).  The American dream is that you can come to this country with nothing and within one generation your kids can be solidly in the middle class.  There are very few societies where this is likely, or even possible.  In much of Europe this isn’t the case, immigrants end up ghettoized and isolated from mainstream society.  But not in America.

What a fantastic statement on what this country has to offer the world.

This will remain true, no matter what our politicians do.  It’s ingrained into our society to a depth that no political scrub brush can reach.

The Age of Whining

Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates why he’s my favorite liberal blogger. He’s talking about physically disciplining kids and throws out some wisdom that I think people of all political stripes can agree with.

This is hard for a lot of people to hear, but in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my community this is what part of what parenting meant. If you weren’t feeling the edge of the sword on your ass, then you were responding to the possibility of it. One thing I learned, while touring for my book, was that a lot of people consider this to be child abuse. It really was news to me and ultimately unthinkable. Almost everyone I’d ever known had come up the same way. My book editor would joke, while reading, the manuscript about his grandmother coming up from the South and making him go search for a switch. In Harlem.

Which isn’t to say I, or people who came up like me, are without a critique. I smacked my son’s hand until he was four. And then spanked him until he was seven. Most of this was about him sucking his teeth at his mother, or some such. We’re done with that now, and at least in my presence, he doesn’t exhibit that kind of disrespect.  When he’s staying with my people in Baltimore he doesn’t earn any immunity, and he’s subject to the same threat of the sword as his cousins. I get the argument against corporal punishment. But there’s something elemental in me, that recoils at modern parenting. I was on the train the other day and watched a kid repeatedly say to his father, “Daddy, you’re a jerk.” Wow. I confess that my immediate thought was, “that kid need his ass whipped.”

Read the whole thing, which talks about his relationship with his father.  Ta-Nehisi is making the important point that it’s far more important for your kids to respect you than to like you.  And that respect has to be earned; it doesn’t just magically appear.

I’ve said this many times, but I do feel we’ve gone too far on the sensitivity side in this country.  Corporal punishment (which a recent study has show is likely beneficial to younger children) is just one example.  There’s also the repugnant self-esteem movement, which is producing legions of kids who are ignorant and lazy, but feel good about it.  And far too many parents and teachers are concerned with their charges’ opinions and feelings than their morals, their knowledge and their discipline.

We’ve talked about all that before, of course.  But I’m going to riff on this in a different direction. It is my opinion that this molly-coddling is one of the reasons our political culture has become so diseased.  We have generations of Americans, including me, who have rarely seen real evil, who have never really experienced bad times. Their schools have told them how wonderful they are no matter how lazy or stupid they get. And their parents aren’t willing to smack them when they starting whining and complaining.

The result?  Anytime something bad happens, we completely lose our shit.  As Gregg Easterbrook notes:

The Haiti earthquake, all too real as a crisis, ought to remind us how often the word “crisis,” and its synonyms, are overused. “Obama Takes Oath, and Nation in Crisis Embraces the Moment,” read the 48-point-type New York Times headline on the morning of the 2009 presidential inauguration. Crisis? America’s current problems are quite moderate by the standards of history, including of recent economic history—things were worse in the late 1970s. “The nation faces a calamity,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said last winter. “We are on the verge of complete collapse,” David Obey, chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, said last year. The United States faces “an economic crisis, a health care crisis and an environmental crisis,” prominent columnist Paul Krugman declared last spring. Environmental crisis? In the United States, except for greenhouse gas emissions, all environmental trends are positive. The United States faces “catastrophe,” Obama said not long after taking office. In his first State of the Union address, Obama used the word “crisis” 11 times; Bill Clinton used this word an average of once per State of the Union address. America faces “an unprecedented crisis, the worst in our history,” Minnesota senator Al Franken said last year. Worse than the Depression? Worse than the Civil War? The word “crisis” has been so trivialized that a recent Times head read, “Crisis Stings Britons in France and Spain.” The “crisis” was that British citizens who own vacation homes in France are being inconvenienced by the pound-Euro exchange rate.

Liberals are, of course, the masters of “crisis” mentality.  But conservatives aren’t exempt.  The past year has seen Obama’s standard and stale liberal platform, the likes of which we’ve been seeing for forty years, greeted with hysterical claims about socialism, terrorism and fascism from the Right.  Maybe, now that the GOP has drawn a little blood in an election, the rhetoric will calm down.  Cooler heads need to prevail if we’re going to fix our nation’s problems.

The good news is that I feel like we’re turning the corner, culturally.  Attitudes like Ta-Nehisi’s are far more common among my generation and the subsequent ones.  I have had several long nights with fellow parents arguing about raising kids.  Typically, the ones who favor more discipline and less coddling were the younger ones.  And during the recession, I’ve noticed that people—of all ages—were a lot less scared and panicky than the media and our politicians.

I increasingly feel—and maybe I’m deluding myself—like we’ve passed the peak of the Age of Whining that started in the 70’s.  I don’t know if this will translate to politics, which always trails the culture and has never, in any age, been the domain of calm disciplined people.  But it’s possible that the constant sense of CRISIS and OUTRAGE that has characterized our political system is in a slow retreat.