“Too many Americans are failing to civilize their children”.

February 14, 2023

Our Little Barbarians

By Selwyn Duke at American Thinker:

Recently, an establishment called Nettie’s House of Spaghetti in New Jersey announced they will no longer allow children under 10 to dine at their restaurant.

The move caused controversy, with some respondents applauding the policy and others accusing Nettie’s staff of being “child haters.” But the top commenter at MSN.com summed the issue up succinctly:

“We don’t hate your kids,” she wrote. “We hate your parenting.”

Congratulations, madam, you won the Internet today.

If this seems a tempest in a teapot, know that it has implications for our entire society, because it reflects a deadly modern problem:

Too many Americans are failing to civilize their children.

It should be obvious that no restaurant would take such a decision lightly, as you want as many customers as possible coming through your doors. But Nettie’s management explained on social media that while they love kids, because of the “noise levels, lack of space for high chairs, cleaning up crazy messes, and the liability of kids running around the restaurant, we have decided that it’s time to take control of the situation.”

O.K., a parenting pro tip: If your kids are running around a restaurant as if it’s a playground, you’re doing it wrong.

My parents took me to eateries for as long as I can remember. Yet it never occurred to me, ever, to bound about and treat the establishment like an amusement park. It’s not that I was a saint; in fact, I had a bit of a temper and a low threshold for frustration. But my mother (this was her domain) enforced discipline and behavior standards. So certain actions were just beyond consideration.

Speaking of which, consider the 2018 video below of a young boy, 10 to 12 years old, getting in a grown man’s face, refusing to relent, finally throwing punches at him and then — upon getting pushed to the ground when the victim finally defends himself — crying like a baby and acting aggrieved.

No well-raised child would even think in his wildest dreams about initiating violence with an adult stranger. What’s more, that the boy was so shocked at receiving a mild comeuppance indicates that consequences for misbehavior were alien to him. Why, he might even have gotten away with hitting his parent (I’m guessing there was no father around).

As should be obvious, I’m not criticizing the “youth” with a fuddy-duddy, “Kids today!” lament; in fact, many of the people responsible for their behavior are my age or older. The point is this:

If you’re wondering why our civilization is in steep decline, coming apart at the seams, with liberty imperiled, this is the reason.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin observed. “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Failing to recognize this truth is deadly. President Ronald Reagan once warned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”; focusing on freedom, however, as so many today do exclusively, is to put the cart before the horse. For Reagan’s statement is only true insofar as virtue is never more than one generation away from extinction.

“Virtue” is the word, too. No, this has nothing to do with “virtue-signaling,” an appealing but misguided term that simultaneously flatters leftists and demeans a noble, necessary and divine concept (so I instead say “value-signaling”). Leftists are opponents of “virtue,” which is defined as that set of “objectively good moral habits”; in reality, liberals have traditionally called their faux virtue “values,” though it actually is vice.

Now, babies are born little barbarians; some even describe them as tiny “sociopaths.” Regardless, parents’ job is to civilize them, make them the kind of people who can sustain civilization. This involves modeling virtue and cultivating it, the latter via moral teaching; incentivizing good behavior; and, yes, punishing misbehavior.

The last concept is especially unfashionable today (except when punishing politically disfavored people for politically incorrect “transgressions” {i.e., “hate” crimes}; then the punishment can’t be harsh enough). But there’s a reason why the Bible tells us, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”

The point is that if the above civilizing process is effected successfully, the child will have sound moral habits. Moreover, after being repeatedly compelled to act rightly, he will perhaps learn that it feels better to be good than bad — and then voluntarily choose to be good.  

Saving or Scuttling Civilization

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato spoke about this when saying that a child should ideally be raised in an atmosphere of nobility and grace (i.e., our modern culture’s antithesis) so that he can develop an “erotic” — as in emotional, not sexual — attachment to virtue. Once accomplished, he’ll be more likely to accept the dictates of reason upon reaching the age of reason.

Tragically, though, far easier is “developing” (our fallen state makes this personal slouch toward Gomorrah natural) in children an erotic attachment to vice. In fact, our society, with its sexually, ideologically and morally corruptive schooling and entertainment, appears as if it’s designed to do just that. Then when the child reaches the age of reason, he’ll be quite unreasonable. He’ll have misbegotten emotional attachments that will — and this must be understood — correlate with evil ideologies. The consequence?

Well, if you want to know why leftists generally cannot be reasoned with — why you can marshal the facts and present an airtight argument and they’ll just dismiss it with an emotion-driven response — the aforementioned is the explanation. They have an emotional attachment to evil.

By the way, the “age of reason” is considered seven, and with good justification: “Show me a child at seven and I’ll show you the man,” the old Jesuit saying informs, expressing a developmental reality. Consequently, there isn’t much time to mold that little sociopath into a saint.

So take heed, because the brats running around in restaurants today will be running, and ruining, the country tomorrow — and those who’ve not mastered themselves will be mastered by tyrants.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com

American Beauty From YESTERDAY

The Disappearance Of The American Neighbor!

Civility In Minnesota’s Suburban Community:

Minneapolis used to be a wonderful American city…with sincere, caring neighbors, and civil leaders, well serving shops, and quiet. (After all, the city used to be settled by SCANDINAVIAN AND PROTESTANTS. Cleanliness and civility were important.

SUNDAY’S GOD EVEN MORE SO.

I was born in Gopherland’s older city; its Roman Catholic capital, St. Paul….when citizens were quiet, honest, friendly, married, mothering leading family, father hard working, folks religiously oriented…. WOMEN WERE FEMALE then, MOTHERS, CARING, FEEDING, PLANTING, AND NEIGHBORLY by design, religion, and habit.

Fathers sweated at their work, five or six days a week. Dad owned one of the thousands of Drug Stores that used to crowd the Twin Cities with ice cream malts, lunch, prescriptions, cameras, cigarettes, and five or more thousand pieces of popular public use.

When World War II reached America the human male from 17 to 35 disappeared into the War. A wonderful 18 year old German kid up our St. Paul, Eleanor St. block was killed on the European front in 1943. Most of our neighbors were Germanic, either Lutheran or Roman Catholic.

I was born Germanic by Mother and ancient American by Father. Think about this one: MY FATHER’S dad, Frank Ray, was born in Cherryfield, Maine before our American Civil War began in 1860…. His family, being wealthy, practiced primogeniture, dictating the oldest boy would receive the family’s wealth upon the death of the father. My grandfather, Frank Ray, was at least the third lad of his father’s sons….as I was remembered when being so told as a child.

When ‘of age’ at 17 my Grandfather Frank didn’t qualify for any family riches. Instead he received generously from his father’s 2,000 acres of land in North Dakota not too far from the young town of HOPE to organize his Christian life. Somewhere in my adult collections I have a postal picture of Grandpa Ray when he was sitting on his horse in Chillicothe, Ohio on his way to live on his land near HOPE. He sent it home to his Mother written so: “Mother, I’m fine. Frank”.

I’m about to be crowding 89 for my next birthday. I was born in St. Paul in summer, 1934…..dyslexic and never able to read a book beyond a few pages. I’ve collected and stored in my house more than 4,000 books in case I would need them, but I always forgot where they are in the three libraries I’ve created….but not in order.

I moved out from Mother and Dad when I was 20. I had to read a lot of newsprint connected with pictures to learn to accumulate knowledge. Lucky to be born curious about the world around me. Lucky to be born to teach schoolers how important it was, and is to accumulate knowledge…..to help appreciate every day of your life LEARNING MORE AND MORE EVEN WITHOUT KNOWING IT! I learned Russian and taught it in schools for years and spoke it fluently both times I was in the USSR.

If you can, dear reader, READ ALOT, EXPECIALLY VIEW PICTURES AS OFTEN AS YOU CAN ESPECIALLY WHEN Y0U’RE YOUNG!….THE NEWER AGE IN AMERICA HAS EDUCATED TO BE STUPID, LOST, ISOLATED, CONFUSED, SEXY, DEVIOUS, EMPTY OF PURPOSE IN LIFE AND GODLESS.

I was so lucky to have been educated in the classrooms of may excellent teachers, God-fearing who learned knowledge and passed thinking on to me and others like me from 1938 through 1952 St. Paul Central . Over a hundred of us gathered together for our tenth year class gathering this last Summer. We are aged….many over 90 by today. We have become alone these days of isolated America.

OVER THE PAST TWENTY FIVE YEARS AMERICANS HAVE WITHDRAWN FROM FAMILY, NEIGHBOR, CHURCH AND FRIENDS….AND KNOWLEDGE! THEY APPEAR LONELY AND SO, ISOLATED. THEY KNOW NEARLY NOTHING ABOUT YESTERDAY, WHETHER ROME, EUROPE, AMERICA, CITY OR COUNTRY.

Are America’s Dem Fascists DICTATING THEIR COMMANDS?

After Ranked-Choice Voting Rigged Their Elections, Alaska Conservatives Fight To Reclaim Democracy

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD at the Federalist:

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

‘Alaskans are tired of being manipulated by rich people from outside [the state who] think they can tell us what to do,’ said Art Mathias.

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, out-of-state dark money poured into Alaska to hijack the state’s elections by tricking voters into implementing a ranked-choice voting system. Now, following a midterm election fraught with record-low turnout and confused voters, Alaska’s conservatives are fighting to take back control of their state’s electoral process.

Known as Alaskans for Honest Elections, the grassroots organization is leading a statewide signature-collecting effort to put an initiative on the 2024 ballot to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, which voters narrowly adopted in 2020. Last month, Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom certified the group’s application for a petition to repeal RCV, meaning the organization may now begin collecting signatures from voters across the state. The group must get nearly 27,000 valid signatures in order for the initiative to appear on the ballot for the 2024 contest.

“We’ve put together over 5,000 volunteers who will be gathering [signatures] all over the state,” Art Mathias, who’s helping spearhead the signature drive, told The Federalist. “We’re going to be at several outdoor shows, boating shows.” We have volunteers who will “go to their friends, to their churches, to the shopping malls. Wherever people come through, [they’ll] collect signatures.”

Under RCV, which critics call “rigged-choice voting,” voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. Such a process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

With RCV also comes the potential issue of ballot exhaustion, which occurs when a ballot is cast “but does not count toward the end election result.” This can occur when voters fail to rank all the candidates on the ballot, leading to the disenfranchisement of voters (as some studies have shown).

While the 2020 RCV initiative, known as Ballot Measure 2, was sold to Alaskans as an effort to keep outside dark money from influencing the state’s elections, it was out-of-state funding that helped push the initiative over the finish line. According to an October 2020 report by Breitbart News, for instance, Yes on 2 for Better Elections, a pro-RCV group, raised more funds from outside Alaska ($6,194,081) than from within the state ($20,000).

RCV “becomes an invitation for exceeding amounts of dark money to come in and put forth a candidate that nobody knows,” Mathias said. “Alaskans are tired of being manipulated by rich people from outside [the state who] think they can tell us what to do.”

During the 2022 midterms, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the race for Alaska’s at-large congressional district as a result of ranked-choice voting. The RCV system also made a difference in the state’s Senate race, where incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski fended off a challenge from Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Murkowski’s allies were heavily involved in the push for Alaska to adopt RCV as a way to bolster the incumbent senator’s reelection prospects.

Both Palin and Tshibaka have since come out in support of repealing RCV in Alaska, with Tshibaka recently forming Preserve Democracy, a nonprofit group dedicated to “fighting the spread of Ranked Choice Voting and increasing voter turnout.”

Legislative Efforts to Repeal RCV

Beyond the efforts among grassroots activists, Republican lawmakers in the Alaska legislature are also attempting to undo many of the changes enacted by Ballot Measure 2.

Under SB 2, which state Sen. Mike Shower introduced in the upper chamber, Alaska would repeal RCV and return to a closed primary system where only voters “registered as affiliated with a political party may vote that party’s ballot.”

“A voter registered as nonpartisan or undeclared rather than as affiliated with a particular political party may vote the political party ballot of the voter’s choice unless prohibited from doing so under AS 15.25.015,” the bill reads. “A voter registered as affiliated with a political party may not vote the ballot of a different political party unless” state law permits them to do so.

While speaking with The Federalist, Shower described the feedback he’s received from his constituents over Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, noting how “about 90 percent or more” of the people at his first town hall event for this year’s legislative session “were like, ‘Ditch this thing we hate.’”

“This rhetoric you’re hearing from Alaskans for Better Elections, from certain legislators in Alaska, and others [shows they] are living in the dream world that they have created for themselves; that they want to believe that [RCV is] this glowing example and that the public supports it,” Shower said. “I truly believe if [Alaska] held a vote tomorrow to repeal ranked-choice voting that it would pass.”

Shower went on to note how RCV often disenfranchises segments of voters that left-wing election groups often classify as marginalized, such as racial minorities and non-English speakers. Studies analyzing voting patterns in U.S. cities that utilize ranked-choice voting have shown this to be true.

According to a report from the Alaska Policy Forum, for example, after San Francisco, California, implemented an RCV system, voter turnout decreased among black and white voters, as well as those who were younger or didn’t have a high school education. Similar trends were also present in Minneapolis and Oakland, where “voters in predominately minority precincts were less likely to fully utilize their ballots, making ballot exhaustion more likely.”

A companion bill to SB 2 (known as HB 1) has also been introduced in the state’s House of Representatives by GOP Reps. George Rauscher, Kevin McCabe, and Sarah Vance.

Challenges Ahead

Despite being a reliably Republican jurisdiction, Alaska’s current political dynamics — particularly in the state Senate — make advancing any meaningful election-integrity legislation somewhat difficult.

While Republicans outnumber Democrats in the upper chamber (11-9), eight GOP senators have abandoned their more conservative colleagues to form a majority coalition with the body’s nine Democrats. According to Alaska Public Media, the Senate’s leadership is composed of GOP Majority Leader Cathy Giessel and Senate President Gary Stevens, as well as Democrat Sen. Bill Wielechowski, who is chairman of the Rules Committee and coordinates with Stevens about “which bills are voted upon.”

During an interview with The Federalist, Shower, who didn’t join the ruling coalition, noted how opposition to RCV doesn’t fall along party lines and that “not all of the Democrats support ranked-choice voting.”

“There’s some [Democrats] that are kind of in the middle, and then there’s actually a few Republicans that are in on it,” he said. “A couple of the [GOP senators] that are going to tell you it’s great and they love it got [elected] because of ranked-choice voting. If there had been a normal primary, they would not have won, and they know that. So they’re going to support ranked-choice voting because to them it’s a political advantage.

“It’s not about philosophical positions or the positions of a party platform. This is about personal power,” he added.

While SB 2’s prospects for passage in the upper chamber remain in question, Stevens has publicly indicated support for keeping RCV in place for the time being, telling the Anchorage Daily News last month he “think[s] it worked fine” and that the state “should give it a chance to see if it works in the future.”

Legislators should be “very cautious and skeptical of efforts to install ranked-choice voting into [their] state because it actually does suppress the votes of very vulnerable groups,” Shower said. “All is not well here [in Alaska], and they should be advised of that.”

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington.

‘“Where is Pete Buttigieg?” tweeted Rep. Maya Flores (R-Texas).’

Buttigieg Bemoans Lack of Racial Diversity in Construction, Fails to Mention Ohio Train Disaster

By Debra Heine at American Greatness:

February 13, 2023

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has still not mentioned the massive train derailment that rocked East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this month, even though environmental disaster has potentially sparked an ecological/health crisis impacting more than 300,000 people in the area.

Some members of Congress are demanding a response from the secretary, who appeared at a conference on Monday, but failed to address the situation.

“Time to call in @PeteButtigieg for questioning for what is happened to the great people of Ohio train derailment & toxic chemical spill!” wrote Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.)

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“Where is Pete Buttigieg?” tweeted Rep. Maya Flores (R-Texas).

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Roughly 50 cars—many of them containing hazardous chemicals—derailed off of a Norfolk Southern freight train on February 3, causing a fire with smoke so thick it could reportedly be seen on the weather radar.

Local authorities conducted a controlled release of the dangerous chemicals to mitigate the risk of an explosion last week, and all residents within one mile of the crash site were evacuated.

The controlled burn “sent phosgene, a highly poisonous gas used as a weapon in World War I, into the surrounding area,” Fox News reported.

Residents were allowed to return to their homes on February 8, although many in the community believe the area is still unsafe due to the toxic chemicals potentially still present in the area.

Scott Deutsch of the Norfolk Southern Railway however said he was “very pleased” with the result of the controlled burn. “The detonation went perfect and we’re already to a point where the cars are safe,” Deutsch said. “They were not safe prior to this (controlled release).”

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official James Justice said the agency’s air-monitoring tests did not show any toxic threats.

According to a list of the chemicals released by the EPA, five of the cars contained vinyl chloride, a carcinogen; one car contained ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, a highly combustible liquid; one car contained isobutylene, a flammable gas, one car contained ethylhexyl acrylate, a combustible liquid; one care contained butyl acrylates, a highly flammable clear liquid, and two cars contained benzene, another highly flammable chemical.

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The cars containing vinyl chloride leaked boiling liquid into the ground and spewed poisonous gas into the atmosphere, according to an engineer who studies industrial accidents.  The expert said a biproduct of vinyl chloride burning is hydrogen chloride—which can turn into hydrochloric acid and be extremely toxic to humans.

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University of Toledo environmental engineering professor Ashok Kumar told ABC News that inhaling vinyl chloride fumes “can induce dizziness, nausea, headache, and breathing complications.”

Long term, the chemical can cause cancer of the liver and other organs, said Professor Kevin Crist, the director of Ohio University’s Air Quality Center.

“Being exposed to vinyl chloride can affect a person’s liver, kidney, lung, spleen, nervous system and blood,” Crist told ABC. “People exposed to [extremely high] levels … may have an increased risk of miscarriage and birth defects. Damage to male sperm-producing organs has occurred in laboratory animals.”

Residents report that their pets and livestock are getting sick and dying in the area. There are also reports that dead fish have been observed in bodies of water near the site.

Contaminants have reportedly reached the Ohio River and are dispersing to other parts of the country, although officials say they don’t anticipate any danger to local residents.

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“Based on the current data, we do not believe the spill on the Ohio River in northeast Ohio poses a risk to the quality of our drinking water,” the Louisville Water Co. said in a statement. “Your water is safe to drink.”

“Our best friend is the river itself,” said Chris Bobay, water quality manager for Louisville Water Co., during a news conference on Monday. Bobay added that the river tends to “handle its own problems,” and that chemicals will be heavily diluted by the time they make their way to Louisville’s banks.

This comes after Norfolk Southern allegedly helped convince government officials to repeal brake rules and corporate lobbyists fought for watered down hazmat safety regulations, the Lever reported. The train had 141 cars total, and was nearly 1.8 miles long.

In a speech before the National Association of Counties Conference Monday morning,  Buttigieg failed to mention the train derailment, although he did address an alleged lack of racial diversity in the construction business.

“We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color, that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood,” Buttigieg said.

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Buttigieg did tell the audience that it is “an exciting time for transportation,” with challenges like “container shipping to airline cancellations, now we got balloons.”

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While there appears to be no interest in investigating the toxic train derailment in Ohio, the U.S. Department of Transportation  announced on Thursday “it is investigating Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink over the potentially illegal movement of hazardous pathogens,” NBC News reported.

A Department of Transportation spokesperson told Reuters about the probe after the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-welfare advocacy group, wrote to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg earlier on Thursday to alert it of records it obtained on the matter.

PCRM said it obtained emails and other documents that suggest unsafe packaging and movement of implants removed from the brains of monkeys. These implants may have carried infectious diseases in violation of federal law, PCRM said.

A DoT spokesperson said the agency takes the allegations “very seriously.”