Don't Let the Shadow Spread

Remember This?

But that history was before January 6th when traitors/nazis/insurrectionists decided to go John Brown attacking Harper's Ferry and engage in an act of war against the USA by trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power to Biden by attacking the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. 

However, unlike the song Battle Hymn of the Republic which was a Union Army and abolitionist song about a militant pastor from Kansas who tried to start a slave insurrection against slave holding white people by attacking Harpers Ferry.  

He held the fort for a day before some US Marines led by Robert E. Lee (before the confederacy) caught him and then John Brown was tried for treason and hung.  Because back in the 1850's attacking a building or fort of the Federal Government with arms and weapons was considered an act of war and by the letter of the law of the constitution and the law John Brown was correctly tried and sentenced. 

Even though history has shown he was morally correct with his religious/militant stance against slavery and racist white people in pre civil war America. (like Robert E. Lee) 

 

Governor Schwarzenegger on Nazis and Hatred. He said this Years Ago.

 

Here is all 5 hours of these IVY League Presidents at Congress.

I don't expect anyone to actually watch all 5 hours of this committee hearing. But if someone to ask me if I was surprised by any of this?

I would say sadly no I am 0% surprised America has been infected with insane anti semitism views.  Just take "America First"

 History Lessons

Smithsonian (Opens on Youtube, but this is real life history and not a re run of watching the sci fi show "Man in the High Castle")

 Even the turn of phrase "Big Lie" which liberals use against Trump and January 6th comes from the biggest anti semite book of all time.  Hitler's best seller in Germany 100 years ago. 

From Safire's Political Dictionary.

Big Lie:  A falsehood of such magnitude and audacity that it is bound to have an effect on public opinion even if it is not given credence by a majority; a propaganda technique identified with Adolf Hitler. 

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: 

The size of the lie is a definite factor in casting it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.  The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy prey to a big lie then a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones...

something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned with the art of lying in this world know only too well, and hence they stop at nothing to achieve this end. 

...

Some experts in the mass communications field believe that the size of a requested opinion or behavior change is important in the degree of change effected.  Herbert Addison, of Opinion Research Corporation, observed:

"The more extreme the opinion change that the communicator asks for, the more actual change he is likely to get... communications that advocate a greater amount of change from an audience's view in fact produce a greater amount of change than communications that advocate a position that is not much different from the position the audience already holds." 

That is sort of how big lies work. 

My take on the last 10-15 years ago of College since I graduated in 2009 is that there has been massive changes through thousands of little lies that too many people have become too silent on. 

These Ivy Leaguers "got schooled" by these Republicans at the end.

So if you scroll through the committee hearing to see the part that got the most press, you can see how these women got Schooled by these Republicans.

They waited until hour 5 to start hitting them on the bullying and harassment code of conduct.  But even at hour 5 it was only about 30 minutes after an hour long recess so these Ivy League Presidents should have been prepared. 

But then you can see that some of the Republican Congressmen yielded their time to Congressman Stefanik who in her own right is crazy smart.  She is a graduate of Harvard in Government, went to grad school at the Naval War College, and helped prepare Paul Ryan for his VP Debate.  

She is no dummy to say it plainly. 

She also knows her audience and who she is asking questions to.  For example: she knows school administration (at every level not just the Ivy League) never have a binary answer to any question.  Higher Education and education in general is kind of like studying the art of metaphor and nuance instead of objectivity and fact and investigation.  

Just think of the classic hypothetical known as "The Prisoner's Dilemma" now this hypothetical has a messed up name to begin with, because neither of them are technically convicted of anything yet or in prison but let's just game out this metaphor. 

The metaphor is a cop arrests two different individuals for the same crime usually a burglary of some kind, (sometimes professors add in an extenuating circumstance of some kind like someone was in the home and got injured but didn't die, but who is to blame for the injury? the cops don't know, the law says both are.) 

The metaphor is based on the hypothetical that the cops don't have enough evidence to convict both of them unless one rats on the other.  For the cops and the public it is best if both confess to the crime so they convict both.  For the criminals it's best if they don't say anything and take their chances at trial because the evidence is weak against them, but they don't know that and the cops do. 

So then the professor asks the students "What would you do as a prisoner? or as a cop?" and then you discuss the psychology of game theory a little and you learn something along the way. 

This metaphor works in almost every department of a University.  They just change it up a bit. 

The economics professor might make it a single individual making a decision to buy something with some unknowns that happen.  For example, should you buy a new car after getting a raise? there is nothing wrong with yours now except that it is kind of old.  Society/Capitalism (the cops) sometimes makes you feel like you have to force a decision onto you sometimes to keep up with the Jonses who are all talking about your ugly old car.

 The smart money is to ignore what other people say, do absolutely nothing, don't talk to the car dealer anymore, save for your kids college fund and put money towards your retirement. Which is the equivalent of the suspects saying nothing to the cops to the joy of defense attorneys everywhere. 

But sadly, the probability is that people crack and make the wrong decision.  Usually a suspect takes a plea deal or talks too much to the police and gets themselves in trouble long term. 

Usually people buy the new car to keep up with the Jonses and are stuck with a higher car bill, insurance, gas, and debt.  

And in the long term that Porsche 911 is in the garage collecting dust while the Jonses have moved out of town, the wife ran off because you got too much into debt, and the kids are eating ramen at some state school instead of an Ivy League school because well...

You didn't listen to that college economics professor who drove 30 year old car to class making $50,000 a year rambling about some metaphorical prisoner dilemma because you were too busy thinking about the sorority party that Friday night. And that 15 year old Porsche is worth about a tenth of what you paid for it before interest.

(The metaphor works kind of like that.  But literally that's all college is, you learn metaphors with the hope that one day they make sense and make us make better and more informed decisions in life.)

So basically.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik used simple everyday words that everyone understands, and asked as simple no brainer question in a binary yes or no kind of way..

And these Ivy League Women's brains just couldn't quite handle it, and they short circuited into a "context dependent" answer which sounded really fucking stupid to every single American who watched only the last 10 minutes of a 4 hour long committee hearing. 

Like I said...

They got schooled by these Republicans in this committee. 

Here is a simplistic answer to a yes or no simple question about a not simple issue like anti semitism. 

"Congresswoman, if one student group such as a pro Palestinian student organization calls for the genocide of another student group such as the jewish student organization, that would probably violate our codes of conduct of bullying and harassment. Each of those cases are handled on an individual basis, however, at a University everything is in some kind of context.  For example a professor teaching history and the horrors of the holocaust showing a clip of Hitler or an excerpt of nazi propaganda from the 1930's that called for the genocide of jews, would not be a violation and would a type of speech within a context that is appropriate in combating anti semitism. One of the lessons we can learn from Holocaust is that there are not simplistic answers to very complicated questions and all any of us have to do to learn that lesson is walk down the mall to the Holocaust museum and the WW II Memorial."

Rich Eisen Said it Best

My Middle/High School/College Experience 

I graduated High School in 2004 and received my undergraduate degree in government from Sacramento State in 2009 after attending Solano Community College from 2005-2007.

I received a very good public education from the tax payers of California.  I thought I would share a brief story. 

Having been raised by a single father on a teacher's salary it was impossible for me to never be at school even when I was home.  HIs random ramblings on history, random questions on topics far above my grade all eventually rubbed off on me, plus I've been surrounded by hundreds of books and art my entire life from a family library and random paintings my Dad has collected over the years.  Education is life for me in many ways.  On one hand it's completely unexpected of me that I have become a writer/artist I thought I would be something else when I was younger.

On the other hand.... being a writer/artist is sort of the logical progression of my education slash life.  or Ed/Life if you will. 

In middle school I moved to Fairfield CA from Sonoma CA and as a new kid in school it took a little while to get my bearings and make friends. My fellow peers had known each other since kindergarten in some cases, and back when I was 13, 7 years might as well have been 40 years. 

To pass the time I began reading John Grisham novels in 7th and 8th grade, it also helped that my middle school was the lowest performing school in the district my 7th grade year.  During my 8th grade year the entire staff up and down was hell bent on turning my school into the best in town.  They basically retaught us all how to read and write the entire year.  And by the end of the year my school scored the highest among all middle schools.  Instead of closing the school and giving up on it, the district decided to renovate it and give it a new office and gym.  The school still there. 

But I don't want you to think that this was an honest account of my middle school years.  My school was kind of like that movie Dangerous Minds but as a middle school instead of a High School and in Northern California instead of Los Angeles. 

Were there probably guns brought to my school? yes.

Was there fights at the school? every day there was a skirmish of some kind and someone getting suspended. 

Did teachers catch middle school kids having sex on campus? Yes.

Did I witness a student get thrown down to ground by a cop (back when it was okay to have a full time cop on campus) and arrested? Yes... but that's what happens when you are selling drugs at school and become delusional thinking that taking multiple swings at a cop is going to end well.  Those actions get you sent to juvenile hall and expelled. 

But by the end of 1999 I was reading at a 12th grade level. 

Then I went to Fairfield High School beginning in 2000. People now call it "The Naughty Oughts" as a time of an odd sexualization of society.  It was kind of like walking into a real life version Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Revenge of the Nerds and Porky's.  It actually was like that as a Freshman.  

I recall the following be a real life request from the administration and teachers of my school as a Freshman. 

"Look guys, we as a faculty and staff understand this is High School, and you are all teenagers, and are hormonal all the time.  Or in other words, we understand you people are horny all the time and can't concentrate.  However, that is no excuse to sexually harass us as a staff and faculty during the passing periods between classes.  It's seven minutes to get from class to class not seven minutes of heaven between classes.  Don't just make out and dry hump for six and half minutes and then run to class out of breath adjusting your clothes and show up late to class.  Keep that kind of behavior outside of the school and in private and make sure to use condoms.  The point being is that everyone who works at this school as a job has had enough, we have banned French kissing on campus and don't want to be sexually harassed by having to witness all of the kissing. So cool it."

By the time I became a Senior most of this behavior ended. But that Freshman year was something.  

My Junior Year of high school I got into a Pre Advanced Placement English Honors class.  This was in 2002 just before "No Child Left Behind" passed Congress.  Summer reading was still acceptable, and the first day of school I had already read two books and turned in a 20 page paper.  This class was probably the most intense class I ever had in High School or College.  On the first day of class this is what Mr. Como said to us. 

"You gals and guys have the unique class of being my very last class I will teach at this school, I have a sixth period prep so fifth period the last day of this school year is going to be my last because I will be retiring.  But this is the first day of class and I always share the story of this class.  This probably is the last year any teacher will get away with teaching a curriculum like this.  

First I've been teaching this class since 1979 so it's been, oh roughly 25 years of teaching this class this way.  I began teaching at this school in my twenties when it opened in 1976 and I was just a regular English Teacher.  The man who taught the honors class was in his last years of teaching back when this school opened in 1976. 

He began teaching about 25-30 years before that in the early 1950's or late 1940's.  He taught English at various different prep schools on the East Coast and Midwest.  He developed a classic curriculum that was good enough for some prestigious private schools.  He ended up here in Fairfield because he was having a home built in Napa or Sonoma somewhere in wine country where he was going to retire to.  But he needed something to do the last few years before he retired for good so he got a job teaching here.  

So he retired, and he suggested I take over the class.  He left all of his notes, questions, reading list, everything to me when I took it over.  I figured if the curriculum was good enough for prep schools on the East Coast it would work as an Honors Class in public school in California."

Any way it was an intense class and in true prep school fashion everything related to the grade I got in that class was because I had put in the work of reading and writing.  There was no multiple choice or short answer, every test was essay, and the grade was weighted in an annoying way that forced you as a student to do the reading which was about 50-60 pages per night, and it was impossible to fall behind. 

By the end of that year I had read somewhere between 45-50 different books/plays and wrote about 150-200 pages of typed essays.  Here are some of the books I had to read that year, I still remember some of them even after 20 years. 

Great Gatsby, Rain of Gold, Seventh Seal, Oedipus, Antigone, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Crime and Punishment, Cat's Cradle, Frankenstein, Scarlett Letter,  Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Crucible, The Metamorphosis, The Death of a Salesman, Streetcar Named Desire, Gulliver's Travels, and more.  

I think I'm missing another Jane Austin novel in there but they are all the same, some woman is in love in Victorian England but can't marry the man because he's British and has some Victorian era family expectation thrown at him, just go watch Downton Abbey and act as if you read every Jane Austin novel. 

So after High School I enrolled in my local Community College and began taking government classes.  I enrolled in Professor Burton's class in the Fall of 2004.

Professor Burton was a conservative professor and made no apologies for it.  He was from Orange County and was a mayor or something.  He had a long career as a government man in California and picked up a masters degree along the way.  He retired and moved to Solano County because he wanted to fish in the delta and drive around wine country on the weekends which is a decent plan for a retirement.  But this is what he said that first day, and this almost all he said that first day of class.

"I'm professor Burton, I'm retried, and I'm conservative.  I moved here to fish, and enjoy wine country a little.  But after a few trips to some wineries, and a couple weeks of fishing everyday I got a little bored and started watching the news.  Then I kept getting angry at the news, and then my wife began getting irritated at me.  So she suggested I spend some time teaching these young Bay Area politically correct kids some government stuff at the local community college instead of just sitting around watching the news and getting upset.  So I have a few classes and teach part time and fish whenever I can."

Then he taught me and my class one of the best lessons anyone could learn about government and politics. 

He asked us two simple and easy questions. 

"Get out your blue books, if you don't have one, use paper, but don't show up to class again without one. I want you to write what you believe happened in the 2000 election."

So then we got to writing, and my classmates began writing more and more.  I wrote a few sentences about what I believed about the 2000 election.  But I also felt like I was a psychic because the night before having been excited to take my first "Political science class" and being way too much of a nerd I looked up online the history and story of the 2000 election just to get myself in a good mood for the first day of class.  So I had remembered and learned a lot of facts about the election which kind of changed how I believed about it overnight.  So when he asked that question I sorta did not have that much to write about. 

Then he asked question #2.

"Some of you are still writing, but if you have finished I want you to write about what you know about the 2000 election."

This was when I began writing a lot.  But it was only because of some freak lucky chance of me googling things the night before.  All those names, facts, dates, were fresh in my head. So I filled up with the blue book. 

We turned in the bluebooks and left, when I turned mine in professor Burton said to me "I noticed you had more to write on question two then question one. Your classmates were the opposite"

On Day 2 he taught us the actual lesson on Politics. 

which is that political beliefs are like psychological beliefs and come from everywhere and are in some ways misguided and often times based on less than the most factual information available.  For example: a political belief could come from our parents, who inherited it from their parents, or it could come from some newspaper article that was more persuasive then it was factual, or they could come from peer pressure from our friends someone says something to us that more or less sounds acceptable and it sticks. 

Hardly ever do political beliefs come from researching a topic and forming a belief based on the factual information we learn from deliberately researching something and reading unbiased opinions on a topic. 

People may have a lot of opinions about politics. 

But not that much knowledge of the facts or history the politics happen in.  And it's the facts and history that provide the context in which the politics occur and as "political scientists" we should always be trying to view politics within the history it happened in based on the facts available to the people of that given time.  

As opposed to just arguing opinions and beliefs that come from random places like liberal social scientists do. 

Like I said he was a conservative professor and pretty much disliked every other political science professor in every college in America because he assumed they were all bleeding hearted liberals who cared way too much about how people feel.

Then a few hours later I was in his International Politics class trying to figure out Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's book as an 18 year old Freshman.  I found out later from a Professor at Sacramento State that textbook is usually assigned to grad students.  But some of it was useful to know early in my college career. 

The main problem with that book as I recall is that he enjoys making some kind of historical hypothetical and then applying some economic model or game theoretical math to international politics as some kind of predictive thing.  

1. You can't change history even if it is hypothetical.

2. predicting politics can be fun and entertaining and a clever parlor trick but in politics you can't really know for sure what will happen next. 

3. These models don't account for common things like misinformation or deliberately misleading people.  Massive amounts of "fake news" can throw off the preferences of the theoretical players in a theoretical game theory game, which messes up every infinite iteration of the game resulting in cooperation based on poor information.  

I also don't need a masters degree in math or economics to know that the real world of politics is not done in a math equation but with people talking to each other or not talking to each other and either making decisions to do something or not do something.  And no matter how fun it can be to intellectually study the mathematical models that exist in the nuances of that basic principle... At the end of the day.... 

Political Shit Happens that can't be accounted for by math.

So then I did a couple of years of intercollegiate debate at Solano Community College before going to Sacramento State and finishing my degree in Government. 

It's a degree in Government and not "Political Science" because the dean of Sacramento State at the time wanted a qualitative approach to studying politics as opposed to a quantitative approach, which is a more classic way of teaching the subject. 

The professors taught their classes in much the same way as my English class my junior year of High School. 

The dean also went to Harvard in the late 1970's early 1980's (if I remember right) and they give out "Government" degrees instead of political science ones.  

I had some incredible professors at Sacramento State University, I even had one that would now be considered a "DEI" type of class.  It was the "Politics of the Underrepresented" and the professor had a stammer but was also a former member of the Black Panthers.

What I remember of that class is that he taught us about every minority ethnic group that has been mistreated by USA government over the years.  He also taught us about the white abolitionist movement that began during the Revolution and the odd hidden history of lynching in CA during the pre Civil War era of Mexicans and Asians by racist southerners who came to CA. His Black Panther stories were also kind of not what you would expect. 

He once said "The public or people tend to think of the Black Panthers as a militant group who spent all their time trying to figure out a way to be militant against the police or white people or something.  But as a former member who lived in Oakland in the 1970's it wasn't like that all the time.  90-95% of the time a "Black Panther Meeting" it was just people hanging out having some beers talking about music, movies, sports, or whatever like you guys do on a Friday night."

I don't recall having a single lecture on feminism or the patriarchy in 5 years of higher education in Northern California. But I sometimes remember that professor telling the story about what a Black Panther meeting was when I here feminists complain about "the patriarchy"

Guys don't have meetings of "The Patriarchy" as some kind of secret society where they just spend all day and night plotting the extermination of every chance of success for every woman on earth. 

Maybe there were some guys who had a poker game who would decide to higher a man instead of a woman and had no problems being sexual harassing towards their secretaries.  Those guys may have had jobs and poker nights back in the 1970's but like the Black Panthers they sort of retired or gone off to do something else. 

95-99%% of the time guys are busy having beers, listening to music, watching sports on the couch, fiddling around with their car or home DIY project or something, and hardly ever are guys having meetings and plotting the complete destruction of womanhood like the Animaniacs character Pinky and the Brain.