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Being a Stranger in a very Strange Land Born again Cynic!

I found this, Why the Left likes to block roads, bridges, harass people….

I saw this article by Dennis Prager and here is the Article.  I cut and pasted it in its entirety.
It is a very good article and I was pleased to see someone that said the same thing that I have said.  The average leftist believe that they are superior due to their education, being “woke”, social standing and other factors and that we “normals” are subhuman, Nazi’s and other vile things.

When I was in graduate school, I learned a lot about the left.
One lesson was that while most liberals and conservatives abide by society’s rules of order and decency, most leftists do not feel bound to live by these same rules.
I watched the way leftist Vietnam War protesters treated fellow students and professors. I watched left-wing students make “nonnegotiable demands” of college administrations. I saw the Black Panthers engage in violence—including torture and murder—and be financially rewarded by leftists.
Today, we watch leftist mobs scream profanities at professors and deans, and shut down conservative and pro-Israel speakers at colleges.
We routinely witness left-wing protesters block highways and bridges, scream in front of the homes of conservative business and political leaders, and surround conservatives’ tables at restaurants while shouting and chanting at them.
Conservatives don’t do these things. They don’t close highways, yell obscenities at left-wing politicians, work to ban left-wing speakers at colleges, smash the windows of businesses, etc.
Why do leftists feel entitled do all these things? Because they have thoroughly rejected middle-class, bourgeois, and Judeo-Christian religious values.
Leftists are the only source of their values. Leftists not only believe they know what is right—conservatives, too, believe they are right—but they also believe they are morally superior to all others.
Leftists are Ubermenschen—people on such a high moral plane that they do not consider themselves bound by the normal conventions of civics and decency. Leftists don’t need such guidelines; only the non-left—the “deplorables”—need them.
In August 2017, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer in defense of middle-class values. She and her co-author cited a list of behavioral norms that, as Wax put it, “was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s.”
They were: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness.
Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
She later wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “The fact that the ‘bourgeois culture’ these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.”
For her left-wing colleagues at Penn Law School, this list was beyond the pale. About half of her fellow professors of law—33 of them—condemned her in an open letter. And Wax wrote in the Journal, “My law school dean recently asked me to take a leave of absence next year and to cease teaching a mandatory first-year course.”
The Pennsylvania chapter of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild condemned her for espousing bourgeois values and questioned “whether it is appropriate for her to continue to teach a required first-year course.”
As regards traditional Jewish and Christian codes of conduct, just read the left’s contempt for Vice President Mike Pence’s religiosity. They fear him more than President Donald Trump solely for that reason.
One would think that leftists, as sensitive as they are to sexual harassment of women, would admire Pence’s career-long policy of never dining alone with a woman other than his wife. On the contrary, they mock him for it.
With such high self-esteem and no middle-class, bourgeois, or Judeo-Christian values to guide them, many leftists are particularly vicious people.
The opening skit of “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend—Matt Damon’s mockery of Judge Brett Kavanaugh—provided a timely example.
It is unimaginable that a prominent conservative group or individual would feature a skit mocking Kavanaugh’s accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Indeed, Kavanaugh noted his 10-year-old daughter’s prayer for his accuser, and a political cartoonist promptly drew a cartoon with her praying that God forgive her “angry, lying, alcoholic father for sexually assaulting Dr. Ford.”
Is there an equally prominent conservative public figure on the right who has ever said “F— Obama!” on national television just as Robert De Niro shouted, “F— Trump!” at the recent Tony Awards?
Now, why would De Niro feel he could shout an obscenity at the president of the United States with millions of young people watching him? Because he is not constrained by middle-class or Judeo-Christian moral values.
In Nietzsche’s famous words, De Niro, like other leftists, is “beyond good and evil,” as Americans understood those terms until the 1960s.
In 2016, at a Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe, the butt of the jokes was Ann Coulter, not Lowe. They mostly mocked her looks, and if there is something crueler than publicly mocking a woman’s looks, it’s hard to identify. For example, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Pete Davidson said, “Ann Coulter, if you’re here, who’s scaring the crows away from our crops?”
There surely are mean conservatives—witness some of the vile comments by anonymous conservative commenters on the internet. And it is a moral scandal that Ford has received death threats.
The difference in left-wing meanness is the meanness of known—not anonymous—people on the left. They don’t hide behind anonymity because they do not feel bound by traditional notions of civility, for which they have contempt.
Now you can understand why the left hates Pence, a man who has, by all accounts, led a thoroughly honorable life. He—and other evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews—tries to live by a code that is higher than him.
That ethic is what Ubermenschen seek to destroy. They are succeeding

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All About Guns Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" Being a Stranger in a very Strange Land Born again Cynic! Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom Grumpy's hall of Shame

Just another reason Why I am a Happy RETIRED TEACHER

14-Year-Old Posts Picture of Airsoft Gun on Snapchat, School Suspends Him for 3 Weeks

The principal calls it “very, very serious” wrongdoing.

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A Maryland eighth grader was suspended for three weeks and did not get to graduate with his class in June. This was his punishment for appearing in the background of a friend’s video in which said friend held a disabled airsoft gun. The eighth grader also posed for a photo with the friend, who held him in a headlock with the fake gun pointing at his head. The picture was shared with 13 other friends on Snapchat.

Are you silently giving thanks that social media didn’t exist when you were a middle schooler? Me too. The 14-year-old boy later admitted he was trying to look like a “badass.”

On Monday his dad—David Bernstein, a nonprofit director—wrote a piece about the incident for The Washington Post. He said he had asked the private Silver Spring school to reconsider the punishment. After all, his son did not threaten anyone with a gun. He did not own a gun. He did not say anything about wanting to kill students, or take his own life, or do anything violent. He was, his dad wrote, just being a “knucklehead.”

But the school insisted the incident was “very, very serious” and therefore warranted suspension through the end of the year.

I’m just not sure how serious it is to be in a photo or video that is stupid but ultimately unthreatening and harmless. But anyway, in an email to me, Bernstein added that this was not the first time he was dismayed by the administration’s take on things.

“I first realized something was amiss at the school when I received a call earlier in the year about another ‘very serious’ incident,” said Bernstein. “My son had told a friend that he observed a teacher texting while driving. He was then hauled into the principal’s office and asked to apologize to the teacher, which he only did reluctantly. ‘The teacher was very hurt,’ the principal stated. ‘And [your son] didn’t seem to care.’ Confused about the ‘crime,’ I asked the principal what if my son was telling the truth. ‘That’s beside the point,’ she said. ‘He violated our community values by hurting the teacher’s feelings.'”

You don’t have to be John Grisham to sense something is a little off here. On the one hand, a child is punished for reporting an actual danger: a texting driver. On the other hand, the same child is punished for participating in a video and photo that did not represent an actual danger.

Clearly the school is very worried about feelings and not so worried about reality. It worried that the teacher accused of texting would feel hurt. And it worried that students might feel “anxiety” if they heard about or saw the video or snap.

In this way, the school is tutoring its students in safetyism—the word Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff use in The Coddling of the American Mind to describe the demand for pointless safety measures. The students are being taught to believe that they are literally unsafe when actually they are just uncomfortable—and that the administration is required to respond.

Note that responding doesn’t actually make kids any safer, because they were not in any real danger to begin with.

As for the three-week suspension, it seems to mirror the criminal justice system’s obsession with longer and longer sentences. Seems like any kid who is told to “reflect” on his actions for three days has done enough reflecting. “Indeed,” Bernstein noted in his piece, “multiple studies show that long-term suspensions make for worse, not better behavior.”

But of course, Bernstein is dealing with reality. The school is not.

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Born again Cynic! Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom

Sad but true about the Western World

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Born again Cynic! Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom

The Dark Side of the race to the moon from Gun Free Zone

The reality of the Soviet space program

Yesterday, I wrote a post about The New York Times’ praise of the Soviet space program because they launched the first woman into space, and that was more important than the fact that the Soviet Union was a mass-murdering tyrannical police state.
While everyone who reads The New York Times knows that the Soviets put the first man and first woman into space, not many of them know why the Soviets never made it to the moon.
I found an article on NPR that really illustrates, in a heartbreaking way, the reality of the Soviet space program.
Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’
So there’s a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he’s on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.
The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”
In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.
The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships.
The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.
The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
He’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.
The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”
Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn’t do that to his friend. “That’s Yura,” the book quotes him saying, “and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears.
Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn’t open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day’s launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov’s chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast.
All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn’t make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov’s wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying.
When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence “picked up [Komarov’s] cries of rage as he plunged to his death.”
This is the picture accompanying the article (you’ve been warned):
Vladimir Komarov’s remains in an open casket
Imagine that happening in the United States under NASA.
Engineers at Kennedy finding over 200 potentially fatal defects and letting the flight go because they were afraid the FBI would arrest them because the President wanted the flight to happen.
Yes, there was a cultural issue at NASA the lead to the Challenger Disaster in 1986, but nobody the Challenger went up certain in the knowledge that they were going up to die on a poorly built deathtrap, launched to appease a politician.
A casual disregard for human life was a hallmark of Soviet design.  Everything from the design of their tanks which make the crews expendable for the survivability of the weapon platform, to the submarines which occasionally sink, leak radiation, or catch fire without warning killing some or all of the crew.
The Soviets proved several times that they could strap a human being to a rocket and put him just outside the reach of the earth’s atmosphere, and usually bring him home alive.  The 250,000 mile trip to the moon was a technical challenge that the Soviets were never able to surmount, and they knew it.
So when The New York Times writes “How the Soviets won the space race for equality” what the really mean is “How the Soviets also treated a woman like expendable objects to be launched into space on faulty garbage.”  I guess there is equality in known that a tyrannical government treats both men and women as disposable, but I have a feeling that’s not the type of equality that most Americans like to think about.
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Born again Cynic! Darwin would of approved of this!

The Final Moments Of A North American Idiot In It’s Natural Habitat

idiot

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Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" Being a Stranger in a very Strange Land Born again Cynic!

Poor France!

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All About Guns Allies Born again Cynic!

An Article for Your Non-Gun Owning Friends: Is Gun Ownership Right for Me? by MARK KAKKURI

While the right to keep and bear arms is a right recognized by the Second Amendment, it’s not a right all will choose to exercise. Despite the recent wave of interest in Second Amendment, self-defense, and guns as a means toward the protection of life, many are still on the fence as to whether to become a gun owner. Not sure if you’re ready? Here are some ways to determine whether gun ownership is right for you.

The answer is “no” if you simply cannot or will not be comfortable owning a gun. But let’s explore why that’s currently the case. Your reluctance is due to something: maybe the result of limited experience with guns; a bad experience with guns; the complexity of paperwork and/or gear required to purchase, own, or carry a gun; or the myriad negative media reports about guns.
Limited experience with guns?

It’s okay to admit you have limited experience with guns. At some point, we all were in that condition. But a gun is only as dangerous as the person handling it. In other words, proper training and professionally-guided introductory experiences can bring a level of understanding and comfort to gun ownership and use.
Bad experience with guns?

A bad experience with, well, anything certainly can affect your view of and approach to it, and understandably so. But one way to overcome the anxiety of a bad experience is to replace it with a healthy experience. Also, a bad experience with a gun usually requires someone breaking one of the rules of gun safety or breaking the law. This doesn’t detract from the difficulty of the experience but there may be some comfort in knowing and appreciating that bad experiences are the exception, not the rule.
Complexity of purchase, ownership, carry?
Background checks, permits to purchase, and long-form applications add significant complexity to gun purchases—and these can vary from state to state. Add the sometimes conflicting laws or statutes about gun storage, transport, and private sales and the level of complexity just goes up.
Finally, buying a gun usually includes needing a secure means of storage or transport, a wide range of ammunition choices, cleaning gear, and on and on. These things may seem to make gun ownership so complex that it just doesn’t seem worth it. But it’s not insurmountable. Yes, it requires care and yes it is complex. But lots of resources exist to help navigate all of these things.
Myriad negative media reports?
Anecdotally, people often say they can’t read the news without reading about another shooting. The key here is simply to make sure you are getting a truly balanced reporting of gun news. Moreover, your responsible ownership and safe use of a gun actually contribute to a safer society. Do a bit of research on gun ownership in the U.S., the number of firearms-related accidents and/or crime, and make some sound judgments about what is actually the problem. And consider how you can be a part of the solution!
Ready to Buy?

You can find new and used Smith & Wesson revolvers like this model 686 on GunsAmerica.

Let’s say you’re ready to buy your first gun—a handgun you intend to keep in your home for basic self-defense. You don’t intend to carry it concealed (at least not yet) but want something reliable, simple to use, and affordable. A great first gun that meets these criteria would a revolver chambered in .38 Special.
Reliable. Depending on the manufacturer, revolvers are some of the most reliable handguns made. Yep, they look “old school” and yet they’ve been around for a long time; and reliability is one of the main reasons for that. Compared to other handguns, they also require minimal care and cleaning to maintain peak operating capability.
Simple to Use. While virtually all police and military handguns are auto-loading pistols, these types of guns are also more complex to operate. They require additional skills for managing magazines and reloading, slide functions and clearing, and some may have external safeties to contend with. All skills that can be practiced and mastered, yes. Just more complex. If simplicity is your goal, it’s hard to beat a revolver. To shoot a loaded double action revolver, just squeeze the trigger. To keep shooting, just keep squeezing. Don’t want it to fire? Don’t put your finger on the trigger.
Affordable. You can find used revolvers in excellent condition at your local gun stores or on GunsAmerica. Also, .38 Special target ammunition is relatively inexpensive. And since a revolver likely holds five or six rounds (some hold seven or even eight), requiring you to stop and reload, you can stretch your time on the range.

Another solid option for first-time buyers is this hammerless Ruger LCRX. Listings on GunsAmerica have them priced between $350-$550.

 
A couple other notes about that first handgun: Revolvers have varying barrel lengths. A three- or four-inch barrel is a good compromise between a six inch or longer barrel (more suitable for hunting or target shooting) and a two inch or snub-nosed barrel (more suitable for concealed carry).
You’ll get very good accuracy from a four-inch barreled revolver if you do your part in aiming. Revolvers also come in a variety of calibers. .38 Special is a good medium-duty cartridge. If it’s too much for you to handle, you can downsize to lesser rounds. The key is to find a caliber you can shoot very well and most people can handle the .38.
____________________________________ Or maybe be just maybe you should just  leave your friends out of it?  In that they are within their rights to be left alone. Grumpy

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Born again Cynic! Cops

Good question!

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Born again Cynic! Useful Shit Well I thought it was funny! Well I thought it was neat!

One of the Few Public Services that I will gladly perform for you!

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Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" Being a Stranger in a very Strange Land Born again Cynic!

Something to ponder upon!

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