I was going to embed another YouTube video, but I get 500 errors on existing YouTube videos, and this icon came up:
Is this because YouTube is deliberately screwing with Project Veritas, or just an unrelated technical glitch? You make the call!
In the meantime: Open thread! Try to avoid blood libels, calls to violence, racism or sexism (the real kind, not the fake SJW kind).
Now a random assortment of Gifs:
This Quilette piece from a veteran high school teacher is a real eye-opener, and not in a good way, about the decay in several big city high schools:
As the weeks dragged painfully into months, it became apparent that the students wouldn’t learn anything. It was dumbfounding. It was all I could do to keep them quiet; that is, seated and talking among themselves. Sometimes I had to stop girls from grooming themselves or each other. A few brave souls tried to keep up with instruction. A particularly good history teacher once told me that she interrupted a conversation between two girls, asking them to pay attention to the lesson. One of them looked up at her scornfully and sneered, “I don’t talk to teachers,” turning her back to resume their chat. She told me that the best school she ever worked at was in Texas, where her principal managed not only to suspend the most disruptive students for long periods, he also made sure they were not admitted during that time to any other school in the district. It worked; they got good results.
This was unthinkable in New York, where “in-house suspension” was the only punitive measure. It would be “discriminatory” to keep the students at home. The appropriate paperwork being filed, the most outrageously disruptive students went for a day or two to a room with other serious offenders. The anti-discrimination laws under which we worked took all power away from the teachers and put it in the hands of the students.
Throughout Washington Irving there was an ethos of hostile resistance. Those who wanted to learn were prevented from doing so. Anyone who “cooperated with the system” was bullied. No homework was done. Students said they couldn’t do it because if textbooks were found in their backpacks, the offending students would be beaten up. This did not appear to be an idle threat. Too many students told their teachers the same thing. There were certainly precious few books being brought home.
I tried everything imaginable to overcome student resistance. Nothing worked. At one point I rearranged the seating to enable the students who wanted to engage to come to the front of the classroom. The principal was informed and I was reprimanded. This was “discriminatory.” The students went back to their chosen seats near their friends.
Snip.
Although the school was always on the verge of hysteria and violence, it had all the trappings of the typical American high school. There were class trips and talent shows, rings and year books—even caps and gowns and graduation. High school diplomas were among the trappings, handed out to countless 12th graders with, from my observation, a 7th grade education. The elementary schools had a better record. But everyone knew that once the kids hit puberty, it became virtually impossible under the laws in force to teach those who were steeped in ghetto and gangster culture, and those—the majority—who were bullied into succumbing to it.
Students came to school for their social life. The system had to be resisted. It was never made explicit that it was a “white” system that was being rejected, but it was implicit in oft-made remarks. Youngsters would say things like, “You can’t say that word, that be a WHITE word!” It did no good to remind students that some of the finest oratory in America came from black leaders like Martin Luther King and some of the best writing from authors like James Baldwin. I would tell them that there was nothing wrong with speaking one’s own dialect; dialects in whatever language tend to be colorful and expressive, but it was important to learn standard English as well. It opens minds and doors. Every new word learned adds to one’s wealth, and there’s nothing like grammar for organizing one’s thoughts.
It all fell on deaf ears. It was impossible to dispel the students’ delusions. Astonishingly, they believed that they would do just fine and have great futures once they got to college! They didn’t seem to know that they had very little chance of getting into anything but a community college, if that. Sadly, the kids were convinced of one thing: As one girl put it, “I don’t need an 85 average to get into Hunter; I’m black, I can get in with a 75.” They were actually encouraged to be intellectually lazy.
Snip.
It would be repetitive to go over the plentiful examples of the abuse teachers suffered at the hands of the students. Suffice it to say, it was Washington Irving all over again, but in miniature. The principal talked a good game, believing that giving “shout-outs” and being a pal to the students were accomplishing great things, but he actually had precious little control over them. What made matters worse, the teaching corps was a young, idealistic group, largely recruited from the non-profit Teach For America, not the leathery veterans who constituted a majority at the two previous schools. I was a weird anomaly to these youngsters. What? I didn’t feel pity for these poor children? I didn’t take it for granted that they would abuse us? The new teachers were fervent believers in the prevailing ideology that the students’ bad behavior was to be expected, and that we should educate them without question according to the hip attitudes reflected in the total absence of good literature or grammar, and a sense of history that emphasized grievance.
One example of the “literature” we were expected to teach was as racist as it was obscene. The main character was an obese, pregnant 14 year-old dropout. The argot in which it was written was probably not all that familiar to many of the students. Appalled, I asked an English teacher why the students had to read this rubbish. She was shocked at the question: we have to teach “literature the kids can relate to.” Why on earth did the school system believe that such a depraved environment as depicted in this book was representative of the very mixed group of families that inhabited the area, many of whom were led by middle-class professionals from the Caribbean? The “language arts” department (the word “English” was too Euro-centric) made one obligatory bow to Shakespeare—a version of “Romeo and Juliet” reduced to a few hundred words. It was common knowledge that the Bard was “overrated.”
Read the whole thing.
Missed this in December, but everyone’s favorite fake UK reporter does a fine job concisely and succinctly explaining why PM Theresa May’s Brexit agreement was such a horrible deal for anyone who voted Leave:
A hard, no-deal Brexit is infinitely preferable to the dog’s Brexit May cooked up.
If you want to know why the rise of Donald Trump (or someone like him) was all-but-inevitable, this Maureen Dowd piece about how Maureen Dowd was so very, very chummy with George H. W. Bush provides several clues. On the surface its a lighthearted memoir about how a Republican President and a New York Times reporter were fond of each other and stayed in touch even after Bush41 was out of office. But what it’s really about is how both came out of a stratified eastern coastal elite where everyone’s brother knew someone else’s cousin at Yale or Harvard, and everyone knew their place.
And, being a Maureen Dowd piece, it’s mostly about Maureen Dowd.
Note how Dowd’s memoir is filled with praise for the same Bush patrician qualities the media so savagely attacked when actual elections were on the line. “The most polite man who ever lived” of Dowd’s gauzy memories is the one the media dubbed “wimp” and “waffle” back before he was safely out of office.
There’s really only one quality our Democrat Media Complex really respects in any Republicans: Being a gracious loser.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
As a public service, I am once again offering up this video of William Shatner showing you how not to fry a Turkey:
Happy eating, and stay safe!
Happy Halloween pic.twitter.com/jIgTaIMzep
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 31, 2018
Happy Halloween, everyone!
If you read only one story today, read this swell Michael J. Mooney profile of Stephen Willeford, the man who stopped the Sutherland Springs shooter with his own AR-15, one year after the incident.
As he approached the old white chapel, he screamed as loud as he could, “Hey!” To this day, he’s not sure why—he knows that giving away your position is foolish, tactically—but friends inside the church later told him that when the gunman heard Willeford’s cry, he stopped shooting and headed for the front door. “It was the Holy Spirit calling the demon out of the church,” he tells people.
Just as Willeford reached the front yard of Fred and Kathleen Curnow, whose house faces the church entrance, a man wearing black body armor and a helmet with a visor emerged from the church. Willeford scrambled behind the front tire of Fred’s Dodge Ram. The gunman raised his pistol and fired three times. One bullet hit the truck. One hit the Dodge Challenger parked behind him. One hit the house.
Willeford propped his AR-15 on the pickup’s hood and peered through the sight. He could see a holographic red dot on the man’s chest. He fired twice. He wasn’t sure he’d hit him, though he was later told that the man had contusions on his chest and abdomen consistent with getting shot while wearing body armor. Regardless, the gunman stopped shooting and ran for a white Ford Explorer that was idling outside the chapel, roughly twenty yards from where Willeford had positioned himself.
As the shooter rounded the front of the Explorer, Willeford noticed that the man’s vest didn’t cover the sides of his torso. Willeford fired twice more, striking the man once beneath the arm—in an unprotected spot—and once in the thigh.
The man leaped into the vehicle, slammed the door, and fired twice through the driver’s side window. Willeford aimed for where he thought his target’s head would be and pulled the trigger, shattering the driver’s side window completely. The Explorer sped away, turning north onto FM 539, and Willeford ran into the street and got off another shot, this time shattering the SUV’s rear window.
Snip.
Willeford believes that what happened that day was a battle between good and evil. He says he was terrified, but he thinks the calm he experienced was the Holy Spirit taking over. He tells people he thinks it was the Lord’s hand shielding him as the man doing evil fired over and over again in his direction. And looking back now, he feels like God had been shaping him every day of his life, carving him into the perfect tool for that day.
He grew up with a deeply rooted love for his community, a devotion that was instilled in him by previous generations. During the Depression, his great-grandfather started a trade route between Sutherland Springs and Seguin, bolstering business and helping farmers and shopkeepers in both towns stay afloat through hard times. Growing up, Willeford worked at a local dairy owned by his family. “I squeezed more tits before I was eight than you will your whole life,” he likes to joke.
He started shooting when he was 5 years old. His father had him aiming a bolt-action .22 rifle at Coke cans in the backyard. As he grew older, he was drawn to competition shooting. By his mid-thirties, he could hit the string of a moving balloon from a hundred yards away. With his instruction, all three of his kids, who range in age from 23 to 28, were expert pistol shooters by the time they turned 9. For years, his family’s Church of Christ Bible study group met at a local gun range, gathering each week to shoot for a few hours before going over Scripture.
He’d even had discussions with a police officer friend, long before his encounter with the gunman, about where to aim on a moving target wearing body armor: the side, the hip, the leg. More preparation from God, he believes.
There was a stretch in his life, starting in 1993, when he felt like the Old Testament character Job. On the day before Willeford’s thirty-first birthday, his parents were both killed by a drunk driver. They’d been out for a Labor Day motorcycle ride when a man with four prior DWIs collided with them head-on. The accident was on FM 539, not far from where he and Langendorff concluded their chase. A few weeks later, an arsonist burned down his parents’ house—before he’d had time to sort through his childhood memories.
The day after his parents’ funeral, he and Pam learned she was pregnant. But during a second-trimester checkup, there was no heartbeat. And not long after that, Willeford lost his job. “We maintained our faith through all of it, though,” he says.
So Willeford is “no stranger to pain,” he says, but he remembers crying more the first week after the shooting than he had the rest of his life combined. The first time came on the side of the road, when he was talking to officers. Everything was just so overwhelming.
He was at the scene for four hours, answering questions from various agencies. Because the chase had crossed county lines and because officers from several different jurisdictions responded, Willeford had to tell his story to representatives from three county sheriffs.Then there was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And then the Texas Rangers. (Later that night, he’d have to repeat it all over again to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.)
Snip.
All he ever prayed for was a simple life. He wanted only to be a faithful man, a good husband and father, an upstanding member of the rural community where his family has resided for seven generations. He finds it strange to be constantly thanked for—and reminded of—one of the most painful experiences of his life. He says he can’t wait for a whole day to pass when it never comes up. He doesn’t consider himself a hero. The word makes him uncomfortable.
“If you’re breaking it down into heroes and survivors, I’d rather be with the survivors,” he says. “I got shot at too.”
Read the whole thing.