Skip to main content

Flag Burning and Our Schools

Recently on TV we've seen a number of young adults burning the flag, often in public places. To us old folks, we see this as rebellious youth or reprehensible or simply ungrateful.  We've seen the Eric Sheppard Challenge, which is to stomp on the flag as a sign of disrespect toward a symbol representing oppression, police brutality, or whatever else it the topic du jour.  This is disheartening for a person who for many years has loved that symbol of freedom for us and much of the world.

Is this the new force in America, to reshape it into some utopian vision of all together in a new and totally fair order, with true equality? Makes one think of Lenin, who announced the same goals. OK, this brings up my ages old sense of anti-communism.  Maybe they think this time they'll get it right.  It was a sign of worry, to me anyway. 

But then just by accident I saw on TV a recent flag burning where there was a protest by a number of folks disagreeing with the burning. These anti-police flag-burners were a bit besieged by the protestors, and remarkably needed police protection to be moved to another part of the park where they could demonstrate freely. Huh?  

A few flag-burners were interviewed.  Only with the comment from one of their leaders, "I am a Communist and an Anarchist", was I assured.  I now truly value our public schools.  Clearly this person had not read about either, not even the Cliff's notes versions, as Communism and Anarchy are substantially in conflict and even self-contradictory.  These demonstrators have neither the intellectual capacity nor the mental stamina to carry off anything close to a new movement.  They are capable of simple demonstrations for the evening news, and epithets (e.g. Tweets) of up to 140 characters to express their philosophy.  That's it; they are kinda stupid and certainly uneducated.  No movement will be forthcoming from our flag-burning citizens!

Thank you, American Public Schools.  :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

  Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality   1.       Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...

No Sympathy From Me

Suicide Coming Home Many years ago, a friend hung himself in his basement.  I was a pall-bearer at his funeral. I was shocked I was so asked.  I did this.  I did not understand why a good-looking fellow, intelligent, kindly, and true could do such a thing. He did. I do not.  His family suffered greatly.  Yet he left no issue.   Thankfully. To my mind Country singer Mindy McCready, 37, showed us the very height of personal selfishness by committing suicide.  By giving birth to two offspring, she accepted the responsibility to raise her newborn and six-year old son.  She abrogated it spectacularly.  (As did the father a month ago.)  Though she may have suffered depression for any number of reasons, she has little sympathy from me for leaving behind a legacy that is now lost, is now parent-less, and may drift into problems of their own in the future.    There is shame and heartbreak in all this, but blame should be...

Problem Solving - Murder

Abstract  Most certainly, a homicide investigation is a problem-solving event and requires tools and intelligence similar to most scientific research. A homicide investigation is the most rigorous application of the state’s police power. This paper examines the structural framework of these investigations, focusing on the psychological profile of the detective, the procedural utility of the "Murder Manual" and "Murder Book," and the taxonomy of investigative problems. This essay is about solving a murder, though by synthesizing these theories with the 2026 Nancy Guthrie abduction/presumptive homicide case in Arizona, it illustrates the shift from physical evidence to "digital and medical absence" as an essential tool for prosecution in "no-body" cases. Here is a table of contents for this essay. 1.      The Homicide Detective 2.      The Murder Book and Murder Manual 3.      The Complexity of Homicide 4.  ...