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John Kerry’s Hypocrisy at the African Summit

This week, at the African Summit in Washington DC, John (“Jet-Set”) Kerry lectured us and African leaders on CO2 — saying specifically that building new farms to feed African people will cause too much pollution, and that therefore these farms should therefore not be built.

You won’t believe it till you see it:




John Kerry, however, imposes no such restriction upon himself:

In winter, he [Kerry] goes helicopter skiing while staying at his wife’s Idaho retreat, a 15th-century farmhouse transported from England and reassembled on the banks of the Big Wood River in Sun Valley. In summer, he windsurfs and sails off the coast of Nantucket, where she has another home. The couple have an 18th-century town house in Boston where the kitchen is two stories high. There is a 23-room town house in Washington, an 88-acre Pittsburgh area estate, a private Gulfstream jet and a personal staff of six, including caretakers and a cook.

(Link)



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Best First Sentence Winner

It was another difficult decision over which I heartached for one week.

Here, in no particular order, were the finalists:

She sat down exhausted.

— Shannon Murray

After a lifetime of incubation, she now carried the fatal disease.

— Scott

She stepped into darkness, and the sickening crunch of dried bones made her cringe.

— Bethany

But the winner was Dave Zoby, whose entry reads thus:

Macon, Ga–The Ark of the Covenant was a flimsy, earth-worm colored thrill ride that lifted a rattling chain of cars above the lid of fall foliage, flinty hills to the west, glimpse of river like a wet snake; Laura sat beside her husband, Reverend Doug Brown, as the cars trundled upward link by link, and said to herself that when this was over she was leaving him and her idiot children once and for all, his forthcoming pleas and death threats be damned.

— Dave Zoby

Congratulations, Dave.

And my thanks to you all.





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4th of July and the True Nature of Independence

Sumerian symbol which many believe to be the first written expression of liberty.
Sumerian symbol which many believe to be the first written expression of liberty.


Independence is autonomy. It’s the freedom to govern yourself and to rely upon your own independent judgment.

Independence is freedom.

But what, finally, is freedom?

Freedom, in its most fundamental form, really has only one meaning: it is the omission of force.

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

It simply means that you are left alone.

The thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Freedom is one of those things that virtually everyone believes in — that is, until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. And then almost no one believes in it.

The hard thing for people to accept about freedom is that it doesn’t actually guarantee much of anything. It doesn’t guarantee success or happiness, or shelter, or a certain income, or food, or healthcare, or a level playing field or a level training field, or anything else that must ultimately derive from the production or labor of others. Freedom means only that you are free to pursue these things and that if you achieve them, they are yours unalienably, which in turns means: they cannot be taken, transferred, revoked, or made alien.

“The legitimate functions of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Here, he’s speaking of — and against — the initiation of force.

Around the same time Thomas Jefferson was writing those words, another erudite fellow, a German named Wilhelm von Humboldt, independently came to much the same conclusion:

“Any state interference into private affairs, where there is no reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned” (The Limits of State Action, 1791).

That — the absence of violence, the omission of force — is finally what Independence Day is all about.

Happy 4th of July.





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Hobby Lobby Opponents: Intellectually Stunning

For anyone who, like me, believes an employer should not be forced to pay for his or her employee’s abortifacient, see what you’re up against (i.e. not much):

But you already knew that.

I am, for the record, pro-choice in the literal sense — literally pro-choice — which means: I believe fully in the pregnant woman’s right to choose abortion or choose to give birth, as she and she alone decide —  just as I fully in an employer’s right to choose to pay or not pay for his or her employee’s abortifacient, according to the employers conscience and convictions. Or to put that another way: employees do not work for an employer by right but by contractual agreement and therefore have absolutely no right over their employer’s conscience or personal beliefs or personal convictions.  The employees in such a scenario are deprived of no legitimate rights of they own. They are free to quit at any time. They are free to pursue employment elsewhere.

There is no right to have your birth control paid for.

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One Hundred Dollars for the Best First Sentence

Journal Pulp is offering a $100.00 cash prize for the following:

Best first sentence for a novel about a monomaniacal archeologist who discovers for certain the actual resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, and who resolves that, despite its being so heavily guarded, she will open the golden lid of the Ark — or die trying.

Rules and guidelines:

No outrageous run-ons. You can submit anonymously or under your real name, it doesn’t matter.

No minimum length requirement.

Submit as many separate entries as you’d like.

Leave your sentence(s) here.

The winner will be selected by the Journal Pulp.

The contest will be open for two weeks from today: June 18, 2014, through July, 2014, at midnight.

Submit here.



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Three Reasons the Organic Foods Industry is a Scam

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The organic food industry has, in the last decade, exploded beyond all sensible proportion so that now, worldwide, the industry is worth roughly $65 billion dollars.

Astonishing as that figure is, though, it becomes all the more so when you realize that this entire industry is predicated upon one giant myth after another.

In March of 2010, for instance, I wrote about a Los Angeles Times article that said, among other things:

Since 1989, when organic-food activists raised a [bunked] nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by organic food producers and their allies.

Indeed, organic food activists are increasingly open about their specific agenda. Organic Valley Marketing Director Theresa Marquez, for instance, laid out, in no uncertain terms, her strategy of falsifying data to dupe the masses into thinking organics are worth their premium price:

“We think it’s important that people pay more for food,” she said. “The question is: ‘Will consumers pay more for that?’ and ‘How can we convince them to do that?’”

And yet: “Organic food has no higher nutritional value compared to conventional food,” says Nutrition and Diet Professor Tom Sanders, of Kings College London.

Despite the fact that this information is widely known and readily available, the organic food cult continues to grow.

Here are three of the biggest myths concerning organic foods:

Myth Number 3: Organic Foods are Healthier

There has never been one legitimate study that has confirmed this, and two of the most recent and systematic studies, one from Stanford University and the other from the United Kingdom, said, in no uncertain terms, the diametric opposite:

“There is no evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or lead to better health-related outcomes for consumers” (source).

Myth Number 2: Organic Foods are Better for the Planet

The very word “organic” has been commandeered by a great many quacks and phonies, so that the term, which was once legitimate, has now become a conceptual void. Quoting the erudite R.I. Throckmorton, Dean of Kansas State Agricultural College, who does not like the organic craze:

This cult has sought to appropriate a good word — ‘organic’ — and has twisted its meaning to cover a whole crazy doctrine. The facts are that organic matter in its true sense IS an important component of the soil — but soil fertility and the kind of crops you grow on a soil are not determined by humus alone. Soil fertility is determined by the amount of active organic matter, the amount of available mineral nutrients, the activities of soil organisms, chemical activities in the soil solution and the physical condition of the soil. Ever since we have had soil scientists, they have recognized the values of organic matter. The loss of soil humus through cultivation has long been a matter of concern. So the faddists have nothing new to offer on that score.

Organic matter is often called ‘the life of the soil’ because it supplies most of the food needs of the soil organisms which aid in changing nonavailable plant food materials into forms-that are available to the plants, and contains small quantities of practically all plant nutrients…. The antichemical-fertilizer doctrine makes a great point of the fact that plant food in organic matter is in a ‘natural’ form, while in chemical form fertilizer it is ‘unnatural’ and thus supposedly is harmful, if not downright poisonous. The logic of this escapes me. Science completely disproved the conclusion.

The facts are that any plant foods, whether from organic matter, or from a bag of commercial fertilizer, necessarily came from Nature in the first place. Why is one more ‘natural’ than another? A Plant takes in a given nutrient in the same chemical form whether it came from organic matter, or from a bag of commercial fertilizer. The facts are that practically all plant-food elements carried by organic matter are not used in their organic form; they are changed by microorganisms to the simple chemical forms which the plants can use — the same form in which these elements become available to plants when applied as chemical fertilizers. For example, it is foolish to say that nitrogen in commercial fertilizer is “poisonous” while nitrogen from organic matter is beneficial. The basic nitrogen is the same in either case (“The Organic Farming Myths,” R.I. Throckmorton).

Muck soil, as it’s called, holds as much as 50 percent organic matter — “organic” in the real sense of the word — and yet, according to organic pseudoscience, ‘You could do little to improve such soils.’

Commenting on the extensive report on his popular podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Novella had some blunt words for the organic industry.

“People buy organic because they think it’s better for the environment; it’s not. It’s safer; it’s not. It tastes better; it doesn’t. It’s more nutritious; it isn’t. And these are all misconceptions that have been deliberately promoted — according to these authors — by organic farmers and organic proponents despite the fact that scientific evidence doesn’t support any of these claims.”

Myth Number 1: Organic Foods Don’t Use Pesticides

This is the most widespread myth of them all. In fact, a recent poll found that 69% of consumers believe it to be true that organic foods (so-called) don’t use pesticides. “Among those who regularly purchase organic food, the notion is even more prevalent. A survey from the Soil Association found that as many as 95% of organic consumers in the UK buy organic to ‘avoid pesticides.'”

But organic farms and farmers do use pesticides — perforce. The only difference is that those pesticides aren’t synthetic. That may sound like a major advantage, but in fact it is not. Just the opposite:

“A pesticide, whether it’s natural or not, is a chemical with the purpose of killing insects (or warding off animals, or destroying weeds, or mitigating any other kind of pest, as our watchful commenters have correctly pointed out). Sadly, however, “natural” pesticides aren’t as effective, so organic farmers actually end up using more of them!

“Moreover, we actually know less about the effects of ‘natural’ pesticides. Conventional ‘synthetic’ pesticides are highly regulated and have been for some time. We know that any remaining pesticide residues on both conventional and organic produce aren’t harmful to consumers. But, writes agricultural technologist Steve Savage, ‘we still have no real data about the most likely pesticide residues that occur on organic crops and we are unlikely to get any.’

“Scientists can examine pesticides before they are sprayed on fields, however. And what do these analyses show?

“‘Organic pesticides that are studied have been found to be as toxic as synthetic pesticides,’ Steven Novella, president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society, recently wrote.

“Organic foods are no safer than conventional foods. Even Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade Association (OTA), recognizes this as fact. An “organic label does not promise a necessarily safer product,” she once remarked.

(Hat tip: RealClearScience)





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Tiananmen Square: Twenty-Five Year Anniversary — But Do You Know About Chengdu?

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Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was twenty-five years ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-fifth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

It isn’t known exactly how many people died altogether in these Chinese protests, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600 for Tiananmen Square alone, a number which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.

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The Zen of Allen Ginsberg

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Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3rd, 1926, and died April 5th, 1997.

Today is his 88th birthday.

Ginsberg, along with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, is a preeminent figure in the 1950’s Beat Generation counterculture — i.e. the Beatniks — and if you’ve ever wondered what, precisely, these women and men stood for, it is really just the garden-variety, hippy-dippy, neo-Marxist’s dogma. Indeed, the following and more famous 1960’s hippy movement was a direct outgrowth of the Beats:

They opposed capitalism — or what they called “economic materialism” — sexual repression, military force, and all the other usual suspects.

In 1956, Ginsberg, already semi-famous, was catapulted into the international limelight, when his wildly popular poem “Howl” first appeared.

“Howl” is a long, sprawling, loose, baggy monster, only partly intelligible, in which Ginsberg bemoans, among other things, “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”

“Howl” is essentially a protracted denunciation of what Allen Ginsberg saw as the “destructive forces of capitalism” in the good old United States of America.

There is also the undeniable theme of non-conformity running throughout his most famous poem, and, for that matter, his entire oeuvre.

But the Ginsberg line I’ve always enjoyed most — and have quoted it here before — isn’t from “Howl” or any of his other poems. It’s from a 1986 interview he gave to the Newark Review. I trust you will find it as edifying as I do:

“We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re going to fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tell one’s friends about that?”

(Listen to him read this excerpt)

Happy Birthday, Irwin Allen Ginsberg, R.I.P.





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Rebel MD

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There are several factors that contribute to the absurd costs of healthcare in America today — and all those factors are, without exception, a result of government intervention, in one form or another. But one factor alone stands out above all others. That one factor is the third-party payment system.

It doesn’t matter if the third party is an insurance company, or if that third part is a government bureau: by placing a middle-man between patient and doctor, you create this nightmarish scenario of $20,000.00 emergency room visits for an elbow injury.

As Dr. Jeffery Singer (MD) recently explained:

Last week, researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth released a report estimating that health care costs will continue to grow faster than the economy for at least the next two decades. This is a tremendous burden on average Americans, who already spend nearly a fifth of their average annual pre-tax income on health care.

Why can’t Obamacare stop this trend? Because the law doubles down on one of the biggest contributing factors to the high price of medical care: Health insurance.

Health insurance is a complicated system that serves patients’ needs last. It introduces a third party into the doctor-patient relationship. This can be a private company—such as modern insurance companies—or the government—such as in Medicare and Medicaid.

“Obamacare’s architects expanded a health insurance system that artificially increases costs and decreases choice.”

Third party entities don’t spend money like you and I do. We care about two things when we buy a product: quality and affordability. Insurance providers aren’t overly concerned about either. Affordability isn’t their biggest concern because they’re spending someone else’s money—their members’ premiums. They’re also not concerned as much about quality because they’re spending that money on someone other than themselves—the patients receiving treatment.

This is a basic reflection of human nature.

The failure to understand this has been a fatal chink in all Republican arguments against ObamaCare:

You can’t denounce one form of third-party payment only to favor another, since any form will invariably drive up costs.

Remember: what we call “health insurance” in America today is not actual insurance. It’s pre-paid healthcare. Insurance is something you buy in the unlikely event of an emergency. Actual insurance, free from government regulation, is legitimate.

All of which I mention because if there’s any good thing that’s come out of the whole ObamaCare dog-and-pony show, it’s that it’s brought many of these issues to the forefront — and people are beginning to realize exactly what’s at issue here.

It’s also spawned (at last) a number of doctors to become more forceful and philosophical in the defense of their own lives and labor, which, incidentally, is the fundamental and inarguable principle at stake in all questions of socialized medicine:

Do doctors and nurses possess the right to their own life and labor, or do they not?

Rebel MD is the most recent website I’ve come across the defends, forcefully though somewhat inconsistently, the principle of individual rights in medicine.





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Animal Farm and the Krystal Ball

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MNSBC host and self-described “Democratic political strategist” Krystal Ball was recently discussing Thomas Piketty’s latest book — the subject of which is income inequality — when she foolishly introduced into her dithyrabmic George Orwell’s famous book Animal Farm.

“Even the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells [Piketty] to read Animal Farm,” Krystal Ball said. “Animal Farm, hmm. Isn’t that Orwell’s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they’re the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged?”

No, it is not.

George Orwell was a soft socialist all his adult life and did not believe in laissez-faire, but that hardly means Animal Farm is an anti-capitalist novel. Even the most liberal reading of Animal Farm could not possibly conclude that it’s anything other than an indictment — an utter indictment — of Soviet Russia and totalitarianism in general, which, incidentally, was what George Orwell himself said:

“Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution” (source).

For those of you who haven’t read Animal Farm, every significant scene apes an actual event from Soviet history — including the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky fleeing the country, and Joseph Stalin’s Obama–like cult of personality.

As CJ Ciaramella recently put it:

“At the end of the book the once-egalitarian farm has devolved into a dictatorship where the animals toil harder, longer, and for less food than they did under the yoke of human masters before the revolution.

“So Animal Farm might be the worst analogy for the problems of late capitalism. A better example might be that our system has produced someone with the critical reading skills of a potato, and then allowed her to rise to the position of a national TV news host, mostly by virtue of her membership in the entrenched political class.”

(Link)

Back to the books, Krystal Ball.





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Chomsky Redux: Former Israeli First Sergeant Gives His Opinion Of Noam Chomsky

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A reader sent me the following audio clip — presumably because the Noam Chomsky post I myself wrote some time ago states several of the things this (much-more-learned) fellow does.

Dr. Yaron Brook, with whom I’m only passingly familiar, is, according to his website, a former professor of finance, a columnist for Forbes magazine, whose articles have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor’s Business Daily, and many other such publications.

He was born and raised in Israel and fought for the Israeli military, where he served as First Sergeant in the intelligence department.

He also has a degree in Civil Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.

He is evidently no Republican-Conservative — a fact for which we can all be grateful, I think.

Please click through and listen to his very brief reply to the same question I was once asked:

To YB: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky?




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‘WHY MY DAUGHTER DOESN’T RECYCLE’: AN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR’S LETTER TO HIS CHILD’S TEACHER

Economist Steven Landsburg
Steve Landsburg


Recycling, as you know, is one of the principle tenants of the Religion of Environmentalism.

Criticize recycling, even on scientific grounds, and you’re a candidate for crucifixion, as I’ve learned firsthand.

But of course all the dogma in the world and of course all the adherents to that dogma do not, in the end, alter facts.

Steven Landsburg, an economics professor at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York, included the following as part of a longer essay (that longer essay is entitled “Why I’m not an Environmentalist,” and it’s well worth reading), in which he calls environmentalism a “coercive ideology” targeting children, the better to inculcate their young brains with apocalyptic propaganda.

Here is part of what he wrote his daughter’s teacher:

We do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights.

After my daughter progressed from preschool to kindergarten her teachers taught her to conserve resources by rinsing out her paper cup instead of discarding it. I explained to her that time is also a valuable resource and it might be worth sacrificing some cups to save time…

Here’s the full letter:

Dear Rebecca:

When we lived in Colorado, Cayley was the only Jewish child in her class. There were also a few Moslems. Occasionally, and especially around Christmas time, the teachers forgot about this diversity and made remarks that were appropriate only for the Christian children. These remarks came rarely, and were easily counteracted at home with explanations that different people believe different things, so we chose not to say anything at first. We changed our minds when we overheard a teacher telling a group of children that if Santa didn’t come to your house, it meant you were a very bad child; this was within earshot of an Islamic child who certainly was not going to get a visit from Santa. At that point, we decided to share our concerns with the teachers. They were genuinely apologetic and there were no more incidents. I have no doubt that the teachers were good and honest people who had no intent to indoctrinate, only a certain naïveté derived from a provincial upbringing.

Perhaps that same sort of honest naïveté is what underlies the problems we’ve had at the JCC this year. Just as Cayley’s teachers in Colorado were honestly oblivious to the fact that there is diversity in religion, it may be that her teachers at the JCC have been honestly oblivious that there is diversity in politics.

Let me then make that diversity clear. We are not environmentalists. We ardently oppose environmentalists. We consider environmentalism a form of mass hysteria akin to Islamic fundamentalism or the War on Drugs. We do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights.

The preceding paragraph is intended to serve the same purpose as announcing to Cayley’s Colorado teachers that we are not Christians. Some of them had never been aware of knowing anybody who was not a Christian, but they adjusted pretty quickly.

Once the Colorado teachers understood that we and a few other families did not subscribe to the beliefs that they were propagating, they instantly apologized and stopped. Nobody asked me what exactly it was about Christianity that I disagreed with; they simply recognized that they were unlikely to change our views on the subject, and certainly had no business inculcating our child with opposite views.

I contrast this with your reaction when I confronted you at the preschool graduation. You wanted to know my specific disagreements with what you had taught my child to say. I reject your right to ask that question. The entire program of environmentalism is as foreign to us as the doctrine of Christianity. I was not about to engage in detailed theological debate with Cayley’s Colorado teachers and they would not have had the audacity to ask me to. I simply asked them to lay off the subject completely, they recognized the legitimacy of the request, and the subject was closed.

I view the current situation as far more serious than what we encountered in Colorado for several reasons. First, in Colorado we were dealing with a few isolated remarks here and there, whereas at the JCC we have been dealing with a systematic attempt to inculcate a doctrine and to quite literally put words in children’s mouths. Second, I do not sense on your part any acknowledgment that there may be people in the world who do not share your views. Third, I am frankly a lot more worried about my daughter’s becoming an environmentalist than about her becoming a Christian. Fourth, we face no current threat of having Christianity imposed on us by petty tyrants; the same can not be said of environmentalism. My county government never tried to send me a New Testament, but it did send me a recycling bin.

Although I have vowed not to get into a discussion on the issues, let me respond to the one question you seemed to think was very important in our discussion: Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their “responsibilities” are almost always up to no good. I tell my daughter to be wary of such people — even when they are preschool teachers who have otherwise earned a lot of love.

Sincerely,

Steven Landsburg

To my knowledge, the teacher did not reply.