Friday, May 30, 2014

"Political Correctness" or is it really "Political Cowardice"?

Speech by President of the Republic at the reception on the occasion of Independence Day of the State of Israel

Date: 26th 5th 2014
A google translation of Czech,
http://www.hrad.cz/cs/prezident-cr/soucasny-prezident-cr-milos-zeman/vybrane-projevy-a-rozhovory/581.shtml
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the invitation to celebrate Israel's Independence Day. Public holidays celebrating independence in the Czech Republic held annually tens. Some can be, some may not, but the only holiday of independence, which I can never leave out is the feast of the independence of the Jewish State of Israel. States are, with whom we share the same values, whether it's political horizon of freedom of choice or the market economy. But those States not threatening nobody deleted from the map. Nobody shoots at the border of the city, no one does not want the citizens of this State from leaving his country. There is a term called political correctness, and I this term as a euphemism for political cowardice, so let me not cowardly. should be clearly name the enemy of human civilization, and this enemy is international terrorism coupled with religious fundamentalism and religious intolerance. This fanaticism does not focus on a single state, as we have to record after September 11. Muslim fanatics in Nigeria recently captured 200 young Christian girls. A Flower in Europe in the heart of the European Union recently played abominable assassination of the Jewish Museum in Brussels. I will not be reassuring statements that it is only a small fringe groups, I believe, on the contrary, that this xenophobia and say that racism or anti-Semitism of the very nature of ideology, of which these fanatical groups are based.And let me give a proof of this assertion quoted one of the sacred texts, "Strom (tree) calls, hiding a Jew behind me, go and kill him. Stone calls, hiding a Jew behind me, go and kill him. "'d Criticized those who call for the killing of Arabs, but I do not know of any movement that called for massive slaughter of Arabs, while I know anticivilizačním movement that calls for massive murder Jews. Ultimately one article of the Statute of Hamas says, "Kill any Jew that you'll see." We want to really pretend that this is extreme? Do we really want to be politically correct and say that everyone is good and only a small portion of extremists and fundamentalists committing these crimes? One of my favorite essayists Michel de Montaigne once wrote: "It is terrible to think that the evil must necessarily come good. It may come in the other evil. "We started the Arab Spring, which became the Arab winter, and the fight against secular dictatorships have become battle, run by Al-Qaeda. Throw it against the political correctness and let's call a spade a spade. Yes, we have friends in the world who express solidarity, but this solidarity us nothing, because these friends are nothing and nobody threatened.actual sense of solidarity: solidarity with a friend who is in trouble and in danger, and that's why I'm here.  
      That is the most hardest, to be with some one that has troubles and in danger, and so risking your self, money, pride, time, energy, to put your own skin in the game, so endangering and troubling yourself, to learn and understand what are your principles and what price are they?
After the jump break is his response to his critics

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Che, some thoughts

“If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara, November 1962.)
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/humberto-fontova/fantasies-of-nuclear-war/)
“On Nov. 17 1962, J Edgar Hoovers’ FBI cracked a terrorist plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy’s Gimbel’s, Bloomindales and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba’s “Foreign Liberation Department” at the time.
A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2000 people, al-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day.”
(http://www.autentico.org/oa09924.php)
A true role model for a pope to follow.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Living with Laws

Government Has Made America Inept

http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2014/05/government_has_made_america_inept.html#comments
May 14th, 2014 at 10:00 am by David Farrar
Philip K. Howard writes:
In February 2011, during a winter storm, a tree fell into a creek in Franklin Township, New Jersey, and caused flooding. The town was about to send a tractor in to pull the tree out when someone, probably the town lawyer, helpfully pointed out that it was a “class C-1 creek” and required formal approvals before any natural condition was altered. The flooding continued while town officials spent 12 days and $12,000 to get a permit to do what was obvious: pull the tree out of the creek.
Government’s ineptitude is not news. But something else has happened in the last few decades. Government is making America inept. Other countries don’t have difficulty pulling a tree out of a creek. Other countries also have modern infrastructure, and schools that generally succeed, and better health care at little more than half the cost.
Reforms, often embodied in hundreds of pages of new regulations, are tried constantly. But they only seem to make the problems worse. Political debate is so predictable that it’s barely worth listening to, offering ideology without practicality—as if our only choice, as comedian Jon Stewart put it, is that “government must go away completely—or we must be run by an incompetent bureaucracy.”
The missing element in American government could hardly be more basic: No official has authority to make a decision. Law has crowded out the ability to be practical or fair. Mindless rigidity has descended upon the land, from the schoolhouse to the White House to, sometimes, your house. Nothing much works, because no one is free to make things work.
Automatic law causes public failure. A system of detailed dictates is supposed to make government work better. Instead it causes failure.
The simplest tasks often turn into bureaucratic ordeals. A teacher in Chicago who called the custodian to report a broken water fountain was chewed out because he didn’t follow “broken water fountain reporting procedures.” On the first day of school he was required to read to his students a list of disciplinary rules, including this one, just to start things off on the right foot: “You may be expelled for homicide.”
It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so sad.
Budgets are out of control because government executives lack flexibility to shave here and there to make ends meet. Soon after his election, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo thought he had found an easy way to save $50 million when he learned that a large juvenile detention center was empty, with no prospects of use anytime soon. There it was, sitting upstate, with several dozen employees—doing nothing but costing taxpayers millions of dollars. But no one had the authority to close it down, not even the governor. There’s a New York law that prohibits closing down any facility with union employees without at least one year’s notice. 
I look forward to Labour adopting this as policy!
Even matters of life and death are sometimes asked to yield to the rigid imperatives of a clear rule. In 2012, Florida lifeguard Tomas Lopez was fired for leaving his designated zone on the beach to rescue a drowning man just over the line. “On radio I heard Tommy saying ‘I’m going for a rescue but it’s out of our zone,’” said another lifeguard, who added that the “manager told him not to go and to call 911.” Lopez said he couldn’t just sit back, and was prepared to get fired, adding, “It wasn’t too much of an upset, because I had my morals intact.” After publicity about the incident, Lopez was offered his job back. He declined.
These are extreme examples, but they show why it is important to rely more on values and judgement than strict rules.
Let this be our motto: Just tell me the rules. In 2013, an elderly woman collapsed at an assisted living facility in Bakersfield, California, and a nurse called 911. The operator asked the nurse to try to revive the woman with CPR, but the nurse refused, saying it was against policy at that facility. “I understand if your boss is telling you, you can’t do it, but … as a human being … is there anybody that’s willing to help this lady and not let her die?” “Not at this time,” the nurse replied. During the seven-minute, sixteen-second call, the dispatcher continued to plead with the nurse: “Is there a gardener? Any staff, anyone who doesn’t work for you? Anywhere? Can we flag someone down in the street to help this lady? Can we flag a stranger down? I bet a stranger would help her.” By the time the ambulance arrived, the woman had died. The executive director of the facility defended the nurse on the basis that she had followed the rules: “In the event of a health emergency … our practice is to immediately call emergency medical personnel for assistance … That is the protocol we followed.”
Very sad.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/04/government-has-made-america-inept.html

a number of interesting comments after the break

Racist Day fun in New Zealand

"Racist Day" Fun with Kim Dotcom
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/10036828/Racist-day-fun-with-Kim-Dotcom
Kim Dotcom took part in "racist day" and referred to his American crew as "my little n......" - giving them gollywogs while recording his album Good Times.
The Mana Party has said that Dotcom may help it win the Maori seat of Waiariki at the next election. However, the Internet Party founder failed to show on Saturday at a media opportunity in Rotorua where Annette Sykes was confirmed as Mana's Waiariki candidate.
Christchurch musician Aaron Tokona, who played guitar on Dotcom's album, said German-born Kim Schmitz, also known as Kim Tim Jim Vestor or Kimble, took part in "racist day" during the recording of his album last year at Auckland's Roundhead Studios.
"On racist day you were allowed to speak freely, make racist jokes and it was OK apparently," Tokona said yesterday.
"He could be called an evil Nazi and given the Hitler salute and he would call people ‘his little n......'."
Dotcom also had two gollywog dolls made for the American producers, including the musical director of the Black Eyed Peas, Printz Board, who worked on the album, Tokona said.
"He decided to play a prank so had two gollywog dolls made in their likeness and left them in the studio. A video was made of their reactions to walking into the studio and finding the gollywogs," Tokona said.
In a statement released to The Press by the Internet Party, Kim Dotcom said: "There was never any personal offence meant nor taken. It actually went to show that race wasn't an issue for any of us."
The statement also included comment from Roundhead Studios' sound engineer, Neil Baldock.
Baldock said that during the recording, artists working on the album would occasionally "trash talk" each other as a way of blowing off steam.
"This was something that had been brought to the studio by the African-American members of an international recording act working on the album, who said it was a tradition they had started some years previously to blow off steam during long and sometimes stressful periods in the recording studio.
"Everyone in the studio would rib each other on subjects normally considered taboo. These were never personal attacks and there was no malice. It was all closed-door fun."
Baldock described it as a "jokey" banter session.
"When the producer of an international band came to work on Good Times in our studio a couple of years ago, he told us that for years when the group toured the world they had a jokey kind of banter session," Baldock said.
"It was just a crazy, fun thing, and we joined in. It would go on for no more than five or 10 minutes during recording sessions that lasted hours and hours, so it was no big deal.
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"Whatever minority group or nationality might have been in the room was fair game and everyone dished it out equally. Nobody got offended. They got me for being white and freckled. Kim didn't actually know about it, but was in the studio one day and joined in. He copped it over his weight. He was there for a few sessions, then it kind of died out."
Tokona said he decided to talk about his experiences with Dotcom after receiving an email.
"Tom Scott of HomeBrew, with the help of musicians around New Zealand, was organising a series of concerts up and down the country called Vote, to get people motivated to take part in the election," Tokona said.
"But Kim Dotcom has directly stolen this idea and is doing the same thing."
- The Press

1984 article fore warning of today

Education and Race - an Alternative View



This article, which The Salisbury Review published in 1984, cost Ray Honeyford his job as a head teacher. For speaking the truth, he was subjected to a long, bitter campaign, including death threats and other forms of persecution, orchestrated by an assortment of vehement idealogues. Twenty-two years on, the Review says that it "salutes Mr Honeyford's courage and intellectual integrity, which has been so clearly vindicated by recent events". Here, with the magazine's permission, we exclusively republish Mr Honeyford's observations:
The issues and problems of our multi racial inner cities are frequently thrown into sharp relief for me. As the head teacher of a school in the middle of a predominantly Asian area, I am often witness to scenes which have the raw feel of reality and the recipient of vehement criticism, whenever I question some of the current educational orthodoxies connected with race.
It is very difficult to write honestly and openly of my experiences, and the reflections they evoke, since the race relations lobby is extremely powerful in the state education service. The propaganda generated by multi racial zealots is now augmented by a growing bureaucracy of race in local authorities. And this makes freedom of speech difficult to maintain.
By exploiting the enormous tolerance traditional in this country, the race lobby has so managed to induce and maintain feelings of guilt in the well disposed majority, that decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are uncertain even of their right to think those thoughts. They are intimidated not only by their fear of giving offence by voicing their own reasonable concerns about the inner cities, but by the necessity of conducting the debate in a language which is dishonest.
The term 'racism', for instance, functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought. It conflates prejudice and discrimination, and thereby denies a crucial conceptual distinction. It is the icon word of those committed to the race game. And they apply it with the same sort of mindless zeal as the inquisitors voiced 'heretic' or Senator McCarthy spat out 'Commie'.
The word 'black' has been perverted. Every non white is now, officially, 'black', be he Indian, Pakistani or Vietnamese. This gross and offensive dichotomy has an obvious purpose: the creation of an atmosphere of anti white solidarity. To suppress and distort the enormous variations within races which I every day observe by using language in this way is an outrage to all decent people whatever their skin colour.
And there are other distortions: race riots are described by the politically motivated as 'uprisings', and by a Lord of Appeal as a 'superb and healthy catalyst for the British people' and the police blamed for the behaviour of violent thugs; rather like the patient blaming the doctor because he has a cold in the head.
'Cultural enrichment' is the approved term for the West Indian's right to create an ear splitting cacophony for most of the night to the detriment of his neighbour's sanity, or for the Notting Hill Festival whose success or failure is judged by the level of street crime which accompanies it.
At the schools' level the term refers to such things as the Muslim parent's insistence on banning his daughter from drama, dance and sport, i.e. imposing a purdah mentality in schools committed to the principle of sexual equality; and the determined efforts of misguided radical teachers to place such as the following alongside the works of Shakespeare and Wordsworth:
Wi mek a lickle date
fi nineteen seventy eight
An wi fite and wi fite
An defeat di state.

(From 'Inglan is a Bitch', Linton Kwesi Johnson)
No one, of course, is allowed to describe first generation black or coloured immigrants as 'immigrants' though no other collective noun exists. In the courts it has been revealed that we now have laws on the statute book which insist that Sikhism is a race, which, as three distinguished lords of appeal were able to demonstrate, contradicts the best available dictionary definitions.
We have, therefore, officially perverted words to such a degree that it would be perfectly reasonable in law to describe a member of the Church of England or the Labour Party as a member of an ethnic group, a manifest absurdity. (It is worth noting that in his judgement of this case, Lord Justice Kerr commented of The Commission for Racial Equality, 'The commission seemed to have created discord where there had been none before,' a view, I suspect, which is shared by the vast majority of the public with regard to most of the C.R.E.'s activities.)
We in the schools are also enjoined to believe that creole, pidgin and other non standard variants have the same power, subtlety and capacity for expressing five shades of meaning, and for tolerating uncertainty, ambiguity and irony as standard English. A generation of cultural relativists in the field of linguistics has managed to impose on the schools the mindless slogan 'All languages are equally good' - a myth recently and convincingly demolished by Professor John Honey in The Language Trap, a monograph published by the National Council for Educational Standards.
Those of us working in Asian areas are encouraged, officially, to 'celebrate linguistic diversity', ie applaud the rapidly mounting linguistic confusion in those growing number of inner city schools in which British born Asian children begin their mastery of English by being taught in Urdu.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Thru the Decades = Mastery Learning to Outcome Based Educaton to National Assessment of Educational Progress to Common Core

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By Leo Hohmann
http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/education-no-its-about-data-mining/
The Obama administration, shortly after taking control of the federal bureaucracy, changed student privacy laws so that government can track their progress from “cradle to career,” monitoring everything from math and reading skills to values, opinions and attitudes.
More and more people don’t like that. And they are just saying “no” to the government.
It is the amount of student data being collected that ballooned under the new Common Core national education standards, fueled fears of abuse and sparked a growing backlash against the testing system used to scoop up highly personal information.
The “opt out” movement in which parents opt their children out of the standardized tests has spread in recent weeks from New York to Georgia to Alabama.
The cost of resisting, however, can be steep.
Meg Norris was forced out of her job as a Hall County, Ga., teacher last year after she ran afoul of mandatory testing for Common Core.
“We were one of the first counties in the nation to implement Common Core, and at first the teachers felt like we were special, we were all excited. I drank the Kool-Aid,” said Norris. “But after teaching Common Core in my class for about 18 months, I started seeing a lot of behaviors in my students that I hadn’t seen before. They started becoming extremely frustrated and at that age, 12 years old, they can’t verbalize why they couldn’t ‘get it.’”
The frustration, she believes, came from Georgia’s adoption of a set of unproven educational standards and then constantly testing students against those standards. Some schools administer up to a dozen or more high-stakes tests in a single school year.
“I had some kids that were cutting themselves, some were crying, some would stab themselves in the legs with their pencils,” Norris said.
One of the complaints about Common Core standards voiced by Norris and other teachers is that they require pre-teens to learn abstract concepts their brains aren’t yet able to grasp.
One day a student came up to Norris and asked, “Do we have to take the test?”
“No, you don’t have to do anything your parents don’t want you to do,” Norris responded.
That was when the school district opened a secretive internal investigation on its wayward teacher and she resigned.
Will Estrada, director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association, said the assessments tied to Common Core collect more than 400 points of data on every child.
“It’s their likes and dislikes, grade-point average all the way through school, their home situation, health questions,” he said. “It’s an incredibly invasive collection of information that they are trying to collect in what they call P-20, or pre-K through workforce.”
The idea behind opting out is to “starve the beast,” a reference to the corporations and nonprofits that feed on the $8 billion student assessment industry. They analyze the test data, come up with recommendations on how to “remediate” the students’ weaknesses, then sell that information back to the school districts at a profit.
This type of student data mining by private contractors was made possible only after the Obama administration moved unilaterally to dilute privacy restrictions in the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. The new rules took effect in January 2012 without congressional approval.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Find the Gun Facts

The Real Gun Violence Issue
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=228984
Take away the astroturf games like the so-called grassroots organization(s) that sprung up (by magic!) out of Newtown and you wind up with a truly ugly truth when it comes to gun violence in this country: Most of it is gang-related, most of the gangs are in our inner cities, and our President, along with the rest of the so-called "mainstream media", simply refuses to address any of it.
Take a recent shooting in Chicago.  The media pictures of both shooter and victim are radically inaccurate measured against their own social media postings.
The truth about that particular shooting?  The gun, originally claimed to be stolenwasn't.  It instead passed through a number of hands, at least one of them on probation and a second person who allegedly took the weapon to the shooter knowing it was going to be used to commit violence, a 30ish old aunt who allegedly went for the show (seriously!) someone who unjammed the gun after it malfunctioned and gave it back to the girl who had just tried to murder the victim but the weapon failed to fire.
Nor is that all.  We have another case where a "cute little charter-school graduate" (as presented by the family and the media) appears to have a bunch of social-media postings of her bearing weapons of all sorts, including a rather-large revolver that looks right out of a Clint Eastwood movie and a pump-action shotgun.  Oh, and this angel apparently capped at least two people before being killed herself.  She was 17.
Are we ever going to address this instead of playing Astroturf games with kids who are drugged up on various psychotropic meds and then go insane -- a rare but obviously far-too-common event?
Probably not.
Why not?
Because our Black President won't talk about it.  Our liberal media won't talk about it.  And we won't talk about it either, nor will we bring to the forefront the fact that we have essentially invented this problem out of whole cloth by generating a welfare and police state that empowers gangs by giving them the fuel (money) on which they rely.
And how did we do that?  We declared various self-destructive behaviors among and between consenting adults unlawful, generating an entire second economic system under the carpet that was then used to justify a "war" that we ourselves created and then declared.
The result has not only been a monstrously-high prison population it has also been an explosion of violence, without which we would be far down the list when it comes to the abuse of guns and property crimes.
Instead of admitting our stupidity in this regard just as is the case with the medical industry and its monopolist scams in the general case we have instead grown an entire industry around arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning huge numbers of people, most of them minorities.
What's worse is that we are also watching them murder each other with wild abandon, while we sit in our chairs and refuse to talk about thestatistical facts.
Indeed, if you take out black-on-black homicide in the major cities from our so-called "blood-red streets" that Bloomberg and others claim as our emblem of "endemic gun violence" you find that something like three quarters of all gun murders disappear.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Knuckled down





Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege

http://theprincetontory.com/main/checking-my-privilege-character-as-the-basis-of-privilege/


east pyne
There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.
I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.
But they can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton. Even that is too extreme. So to find out what they are saying, I decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend. I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.
Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.
Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.
Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.
Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential.Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still conquering them now.
The truth is, though, that I have been exceptionally privileged in my life, albeit not in the way any detractors would have it.
It has been my distinct privilege that my grandparents came to America. First, that there was a place at all that would take them from the ruins of Europe. And second, that such a place was one where they could legally enter, learn the language, and acclimate to a society that ultimately allowed them to flourish.
It was their privilege to come to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.
It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.
But far more important for me than his attributes was the legacy he sought to pass along, which forms the basis of what detractors call my “privilege,” but which actually should be praised as one of altruism and self-sacrifice. Those who came before us suffered for the sake of giving us a better life. When we similarly sacrifice for our descendents by caring for the planet, it’s called “environmentalism,” and is applauded. But when we do it by passing along property and a set of values, it’s called “privilege.” (And when we do it by raising questions about our crippling national debt, we’re called Tea Party radicals.) Such sacrifice of any form shouldn’t be scorned, but admired.
My exploration did yield some results. I recognize that it was my parents’ privilege and now my own that there is such a thing as an American dream which is attainable even for a penniless Jewish immigrant.
I am privileged that values like faith and education were passed along to me. My grandparents played an active role in my parents’ education, and some of my earliest memories included learning the Hebrew alphabet with my Dad. It’s been made clear to me that education begins in the home, and the importance of parents’ involvement with their kids’ education—from mathematics to morality—cannot be overstated. It’s not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates “privilege.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color. My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting. While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life. But that is a legacy I am proud of.
I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.
Tal Fortgang is a freshman from New Rochelle, NY. He plans to major in either History or Politics. He can be reached at talf@princeton.edu.

Many comments follow and just took a sample of  them that interested me. Probably when time will see if I can get those copied to paste up better

Denmark's Freedom Sacrifice Memorial

Hedegaard Reflects on Danish Resistance to Nazi Totalitarianism & Acquiescence to Totalitarian Islam

May 5th, 2014 (40 seconds ago) · No Comments · Essays

LarsHedegaardtal.jpg.pagespeed.ic.tH6jkysx_c









Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish historian and journalist, who was nearly assassinated last year by a jihadist (who was just recently apprehended), gave an impassioned speech yesterday (5/4/14), commemorating Denmark’s Day of Liberation from the World War II-era Nazi occupation.
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[W] e are told that this ideology of conquest is an enrichment and if something is an enrichment, you cannot get enough of it. Consequently our political and spiritual masters see to it that Islam’s influence grows by the day and fall over each other to comply with every demand raised by the prophet’s strongmen. While doing this, our masters accuse everyone who refuses to toe the line of being racists and Fascists. Why don’t we – all of us common people – turn our backs on political parties, politicians, intellectual icons, journalists and priests who endeavor to destroy our country? So far we are not in a situation similar to the one faced by our comrades in the anti-Nazi Resistance. We can still speak our minds. We don’t have to vote for parties that open a door to evil and thus hand over their compatriots to foreign oppressors. We can stop buying newspapers that fill us with lies and propaganda. And if our priest agitates for an ideology he has promised to oppose, we can attend another church. We can refuse to give money to the erection of our enemies’ barracks and command and control centers.
The prophet’s followers certainly do not lack for passion or singleness of purpose. How about the rest of us?
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Remember our glorious forebears – and reflect
On Denmark’s Day of Liberation, May 4, Dispatch International’s Editor-in-Chief Lars Hedegaard spoke at Copenhagen’s Grove of Commemoration for the patriots who gave their lives as members of the Danish Resistance against the Nazi occupation 1940-1945.
Lars Hedegaard
At Stadsgraven between Christianshavn and Amager there is a monument for 76 men and women from the Copenhagen district of Amager who gave their lives fighting the German occupation during the World War II. The monument carries an inscription by the poet Otto Gelsted:
“You wanderer who stops at this spot
remember those
who gave their lives for freedom and right
and our common home
and when again you hurry to your day’s work
then remember
that you are still standing in a freedom front”
Otto Gelsted was a Communist and it may sound strange that he would talk about our common home.
But there was a time when Danes almost regardless of their political persuasion were certain that we had something in common – something worth protecting and keeping.
It was so important that thousands were willing to risk their lives to defend the inalienable gift that is Denmark and the freedom without which nothing matters. Today hardly anybody talks about Denmark as our common home and even fewer can imagine being part of a freedom front. That is very strange for the enemies of freedom who have entered our country and gained powerful allies among our ruling elites certainly do not lack for determination. They know what they want – which is to replace our man-made laws and democratic order that are the results of a thousand-year history with a law they claim has been handed down by a god and therefore cannot be changed.
It is a god who says that the entire world belongs to him and that it is the duty of every believer to engage in holy war until there is not a single human being who has not accepted his tyranny. This god’s prophet has created an ideology that has left a trail of blood through 1400 years of history and compared to which Nazism and Communism were like ripples on history’s surface. A few decades ago this ideology – and the project of conquest for which it stands – gained a foothold in our country. And here it will have the same consequences as in any other place to which it has spread. There is no reason to enumerate these consequences. Anyone with eyes to see will notice them or can read about them.
Nonetheless we are told that this ideology of conquest is an enrichment and if something is an enrichment, you cannot get enough of it. Consequently our political and spiritual masters see to it that Islam’s influence grows by the day and fall over each other to comply with every demand raised by the prophet’s strongmen. While doing this, our masters accuse everyone who refuses to toe the line of being racists and Fascists.