Archive for the ‘education’ Category

Don’t be afraid

by baldilocks

When it’s over, it will be great.

I will miss the quietness, however.

My residential street runs parallel to a nearby busy boulevard and it makes a great short-cut to avoid heavy traffic

But there are no speedbumps on my street and, as a result, drivers fly down it on their way to and from work. There are lots of near misses, if the amount of horn-honking is any indication.  And I’m not a little surprised that there hasn’t been any trading of lead-encased propellants in the five years that I’ve lived here. This is Los Angeles, after all.

However, other than the speeders, my very racially integrated neighborhood is quite peaceful and the near shutdown of the city due to COVID-19 has given it surrealism. It’s almost like living in the country.

No one is in a rush to go to work because so few are even allowed to go. The schools and colleges are shut down.

It’s certain, however, that much work and education is being conducted via digital means and when the shutdown ends, it will be interesting to see how these things will be transformed by the revelation that more stuff gets done when employees and students stay home.

Back to my nearly traffic-free street: I mentioned on Twitter that I had prayed for a long time that drivers would stop speeding down my street and in the last few days it has happened! Of course, I didn’t pray that it would come from a citywide quarantine, but I do know that God is a multitasker. Also, it is far from the first time that He has answered a prayer of mine in a way that I didn’t expect.

The moral of the story is obvious: be careful what you pray for.

However, I will continue to pray for the physical, financial, and spiritual healing of our country. And I’ll wager that it will shock the world in how it comes to pass.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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A couple of nights ago the word came that CNN has just made a settlement with the Covington High School Kids that they painted as a bunch of racists on the network. Fortunately for the MSM the Iran “attack” gave them a reason to ignore it.

Alas for Resa Aslin the MSM pretending it didn’t happen didn’t keep things from moving along as he, along with several “friends” were now served with suits as well.

The real comedy? It was only then after it cost CNN eight figures and he was served that he deleted his tweet from a year ago suggesting the joy that would come from assaulting a young man who did nothing wrong, as it a year later it would make things all OK.

How Quaint


One of the things that makes both nostalgia and children so quaint is are the innocent assumptions involved here are a few examples:

Jeffrey Toobin in Impeachment:

The House inexplicably refused to seek to compel key impeachment witnesses in court, burning months in which it could have secured not just key decisions in its favor but actual testimony. Indeed, a year ago, I appeared before the Judiciary Committee and encouraged it not only to hold a vote on impeachment but to go to court to force the testimony of figures such as former White House counsel Don McGahn. While refusing to trigger its impeachment powers with such a vote, it did take McGahn to court. It won that case shortly before its impeachment vote. The case will be heard by the appellate court this week, even without being expedited for the impeachment investigation.

When faced with the embarrassing timing of the McGahn ruling after the hurried impeachment vote, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff insisted there was no time to waste in getting the case to the Senate and that “it has taken us eight months to get a lower court ruling” to compel McGahn to testify. He was wrong on both points. After key members claimed there was a “crime spree in progress” and no time to delay a Senate trial, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi immediately blocked any submission to the Senate to demand the witnesses that the House unwisely omitted in its investigation. It seems time is no longer of the essence.

How quaint of Toobin to think that the point of impeachment was to secure a conviction rather than to appease a base for political reasons.


Our next contestant in our quaint exercise in innocence comes from Erick Erickson who is responding to those who ridiculed the VP for pointing out Iran’s & Soleimani 9/11 connection:

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Mr. Erickson is sincere in being offended which is in a sense so cute, as if in 2020 and the years prior the foes of this administration actually still considered obtaining facts and evidence over the possibility of scoring a political point over a hated foe, when in reality as John Adams reminded a young journalist over 200 years earlier that this has ever been the norm.


I really laughed when I saw this one from the Tulsi Gabbard campaign

Just when you thought that Democrats couldn’t possibly play it any dirtier they prove that they are, in fact, capable of just that. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the so-called progressive left is really labeling their fellow party members Russian stooges… and that’s only because those fellow Democrats have the audacity to disagree with the foreign policy establishment. “Roving journalist” Michael Tracey reports on Twitter that Tulsi Gabbard volunteers claim they have found “dozens of signs around New Hampshire defaced with a hammer-and-sickle logo.”

Here is a twitter image

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Is there anything more quaint than the idea that there is still at least one Democrat candidate who thinks being associated with the hammer & sickle might be considered an insult to them. I suppose it’s a mark in Gabbard’s favor that she doesn’t want to be associated with the murderous philosophy responsible for the murder of over 100 million people in the previous century and the enslavement of millions more.

But how naive can one be to think that when running for the Democrat nomination for president in the Year of Our Lord 2020 that there is the slightest possibility that an association with communism would not be considered a great incentive for the current party base to pledge their undying support.


One of the things about the far left is that when you give them power they invariably take it regardless of what you think. Nothing is more illustrative of this than this story out of California:

I’m not sure how I feel about this,” said anchor Jessica Holmes to her co-anchors. “You’re not going to be allowed to shower and do a load of laundry in the same day.”

While that may sound insane, what California Attorney Richard Lee breaks down the hypothetical figures.

“Doing a load of laundry takes about 40 to 50 gallons of water. Taking a shower for about eight minutes uses about 17 gallons of water. Well, there’s a limitation of your daily use of water, 55 gallons per day. So that means if you’re taking a shower and doing a load of laundry, you can’t do both without being in violation of the law.”

How quaint. the News media have been an ally of the left forever and now they are finally discovering that this left isn’t just interested in turning places like Venezuelan into 3rd world hellholes they are interested in importing third world conditions, complete with blackouts and water shortages to America so that folks coming from the 3rd world can feel right at home.

Oh and a note to KTLA, taking down the video doesn’t end the law.


If the Democrats / Media had treated Donald Trump like both a regular candidate, and a regular president right from the start, they would not be in the pickle or the bubble they are in today.

Thinking of the rise of Islam in general and the London stabbing in particular, you have to go to the mid 30’s to find European governments in general and England in particular so wedded to the idea of appeasement in the face of a foe willing to supplement or destroy them.

The social costs of the normalization and/or legalization of Pot were as obvious as the social costs the normalization of porn which were, in my opinion, a feature rather than a bug to those who have pushed these results.

When I look at Universities taking big money from those who have made it their mission to bring down American society and destroy education I understand the old communist saying about capitalists selling them the ropes to hang them.

Finally, the most amazing thing about the New England Patriots record this season is that, thanks to Nick Folk emergency surgery, as of today they have field twice as many different kickers this season (4) as they have from 1996 till last year (2).

Blogger next to Berlin Wall slab at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in 2018

By John Ruberry

Saturday was the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most profound events of the 20th century, the fall of the Berlin Wall. What began as a bureaucratic slip became a people power moment as oppressed East Germans stormed the wall checkpoints and with the help of West Berliners, literally began hacking away on what Winston Churchill called “the wall of shame.”

It was also a wall of failure. The smartest and most gifted people of communist East Germany were more likely to seek freedom and prosperity in the West. The brain drain threatened the stability of East Germany, so after receiving permission from his fellow dictator, the USSR’s Nikita Krushchev, Walter Ulbricht ordered construction of the wall in the summer of 1961.

Just a few days ago Dennis Prager explained on his show that there is a difference between a dictatorship and a totalitarian state. Augosto Pinochet’s Chile was a brutal nation in the 1970s, but if you didn’t like it, you could leave Chile. Not so in the USSR, until its final days, where my wife was born, or in the absurdly-named German Democratic Republic. East Germans who tried to escape to West Berlin would have to conquer not just the wall, but also beds of nails, attack dogs, and barbed wire, as well as avoid sharpshooters in watch towers. The number of people killed attempting to escape in the 28-year existence of the wall is disputed–about 200 is a common estimate.

Of growing up in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, Mrs. Marathon Pundit told me this morning when I was discussing this post, “We were slaves, really.”

Meanwhile, a YouGov poll released last week shows that over one-third of millennials approve of communism, which betrays the failure of our schools and universities that seem much more interested promoting the 56 genders and waving their fingers at guys like me over “white privilege.” Oh, the founders of the communist movement, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were white dudes. As were the earliest communists in power, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. All five of them came from middle class or wealthy backgrounds. They had white privilege.

OK, millennials!

The lessons of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the evils of Nazism obviously should never be forgotten. But what is overlooked by schools and society are the murderous regimes of Stalin (20 million killed, maybe more), Mao Zedong (65 million killed, maybe more). and Cambodia’s Pol Pot (1.5 million killed and perhaps more, roughly 20 percent of that nation’s population).

Another 30th anniversary involving a repressive communist regime passed this summer–the Tianammen Square protests in China that ended in the slaughter of pro-democracy activists. For 24 straight weeks there have been pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong. The more things change…

Ulbricht and his successors’ East Germany didn’t have the high death count, but it excelled in mental torture. Its KGB was the Ministry of State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, whose goal was to “know everything about everyone.” Two movies are essential viewing for millennials–actually for everyone–to learn more about East Germany. Both of them are available on Netflix, Karl Marx City, a documentary, and The Lives of Others, an Academy Award winner for Best International Feature Film. Fittingly, The Lives of Others is set in the year 1984.

Apologists for communism regularly point out that the reason these Marxist regimes failed is that the wrong people were in charge and “real communism” has never been tried. It is they who are wrong. People in power, for the most part, have one thing in common. They want even more power.

There are exceptions of course. King George III asked an American what George Washington would do now that he had defeated the British Empire. When told that the general would return to his farm, the king replied, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Is that lesson being taught in many American schools? I doubt it.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.