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WWU's Cuban Study ... (Gulag, Western Style)

11/27/2016

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     Far be it from WE to critique the eco-zealotry and cultural revolutionary teachings available here at WWU (subsidized on the public dime), but the passing of Fidel Castro does present a special opportunity.  Up on the hill, snowflakes can sign-up for a quarter of foreign study that will allow them to improve la raza language skills, soak up some Cubano sunshine, increase their appreciation of the joys of socialist sustainability, and even rub shoulders with "leaders and activists."  See the complete course brochure and syllabus for full details,

"FC-337—Winter Quarter 2017
The Cuban Experience: Socio Politico/Agro-Environmental Issues (14 credits)


Course Overview:
The course is designed to acquaint students to historical and contemporary issues impacting the Cuban state. Emphasis will be placed upon the evolution of the Cuban social and political system while examining its role as a contemporary leader and progenitor of environmental sustainability and agro-ecological food production. The course will also reflect upon the Cuban political relationship with the United States over the past two centuries as well as an examination of U.S./Cuban contemporary political relations during the “Special Period” and the Obama era."

     "In country travel to Cuba during the latter part of the course.  Learn/improve your Spanish with emphasis on Cuban dialect and idioms.  Study uniquely Cuban approaches to sustainable agriculture, organic farming and community food security.  Examine the history, culture, politics and foreign policy of Cuba and U.S./Cuban relations.  Explore women’s equity and health issues in Cuba.  Directly participate in service earning with Cuban organoponicos (urban food production cooperatives).  Lean about environmental conservation challenges and eco-tourism initiatives in rural areas such as Cojimar and Pinar Del Rio.  Seminars with Cuban leaders and activists."

La bomba!  Cool. And an easy 14 credits. What could be wrong with it?   To begin with it, this brochure doesn't explain what Canadian Macleans magazine does so well:
   "Any political activity outside the Communist Party of Cuba is a criminal offence. Political dissent of any kind is a criminal offence. Dissidents are spied on, harassed and roughed up by the Castros’ neighbourhood vigilante committees. Freedom of movement is non-existent. Last year, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) documented 8,616 cases of politically-motivated arbitrary arrest. For all our prime minister’s accolades about Cuba’s health care system, basic medicines are scarce to non-existent. For all the claims about high literacy rates, Cubans are allowed to read only what the Castro crime family allows.
   Raul Castro’s son Alejandro is the regime’s intelligence chief. His son-in-law, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas, runs the Cuban military’s business operations, which now account for 60 per cent of the Cuban economy. The Castro regime owns and control the Cuban news media, which is adept at keeping Cubans in the dark. It wasn’t until 1999, for instance, that Cubans were permitted to know the details of Fidel’s family life: five sons they’d never heard of, all in their 30s.
   Independent publications are classified as “enemy propaganda.” Citizen journalists are harassed and persecuted as American spies. Reporters Without Borders ranks Cuba at 171 out of 180 countries in press freedom, worse than Iran, worse than Saudi Arabia, worse than Zimbabwe.
   So fine, let’s overlook the 5,600 Cubans Fidel Castro executed by firing squad, the 1,200 known to have been liquidated in extrajudicial murders, the tens of thousands dispatched to forced labour camps, or the fifth of the Cuban population that was either driven into the sea or fled the country in terror."


Students getting out to study and see the world with an open mind is a good thing.  But indoctrination being sold as education is another thing.  The following timely article shines a bright light on the topic.  Read on.
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Gulag, Western Style
PJ Media, David Solway
November 22, 2016

​There are various ways of quashing social and political dissent, some more effective than others. The “Soviet method” practiced in stringently repressive regimes—torture, imprisonment, the ever-expanding Gulag, summary execution—works extremely well in the shorter historical timeframe, until a people rise up in revolt or such demonic societies collapse from their own internal contradictions. Of course, the truly Stygian regimes, closed to the world, indifferent to economic pressures, and under the heavy boot of unbroken military control, such as North Korea, may persist indefinitely or until defeated in war. But generally speaking, the tried-and-true methods of political oppression are sufficient to the task of keeping a population in a state of enslavement for a prolonged historical period.
 
In the sphere of the liberal West, however, there are other means of subjection to the will of increasingly centralized governments. Because they tend to function gradually and under the radar, these tactics are enormously efficient in their deadening effects, going unrecognized until it is often too late to mount significant resistance. They operate through a process of curricular distortions, social pressure and incremental legislation targeting speech habits, facets of normal behavior, assumptions of what counts as morally legitimate, and financial and job security.
 
A useful technique for anaesthetizing the individual citizen and rendering him compliant is the erasure of authentic historical knowledge. We’ve remarked the success of this approach in the U.S. with the “history from below” or “people’s history” movement, associated with Howard Zinn, and the foregrounding of a bowdlerized version of Islamic history in American schools. Canada is no different. Eric McGeer, author of Words of Valediction and Remembrance: Canadian Epitaphs of the Second World War, writes: “In my last years of high school teaching I was increasingly infuriated and disgusted at the portrayal of Canada in the history textbooks assigned for use in our courses. There was no sense of gratitude in the textbooks, no empathy with the people of the past or an attempt to see them in their own terms, no sense of the effort people made to create one of the few truly liveable societies on earth. You would have thought that this country was nothing more than a racist, bigoted, this or that-phobic hotbed. My first lesson involved taking the book and dropping it into the waste paper basket and advising the students to do the same.” (personal communication). The study of history, McGeer concludes, is nothing now but a progressive morality tale and a mechanism of social engineering. Sounds a lot like Title IX. Pride in one’s nation, its accomplishments and sacrifices, is contra-indicated. There is more than one way of burning the flag.
 
The center-right consensus that has characterized Western nations has been under attack for some considerable time as nation after nation in the once liberal West gravitates progressively leftward. Robert Conquest’s Second of his Three Laws of Politics states that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The consequence of Conquest’s Law is, inevitably, what Robert Michels in Political Parties called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which formulates how democratic institutions tend to succumb to the rule of an elite—in our day, a progressivist camarilla that controls government policy and media outlets, and harnesses the energies of dissenting associations and cabals. In many countries, the democratic process has become or is on the road to becoming a mere formality.
 
The oligarchic agenda can be detected in the disastrous nationalization of the health care system; the decadence of an academy which indoctrinates rather than educates; the rise of destructive feminism and the feminization of the culture; the transgendering of everyday life—in Canada, for example, Bill C-16 has been tabled, making “gender expression” a prohibited ground of discrimination and potentially mandating non-binary pronouns such as zhi or hir, as is already the case in New York City where astronomical fines are levied for contravention; the special status ascribed to the incursions of anti-democratic Islam; the “abolition of the family,” as Marx and Engels urged in The Communist Manifesto; and the regulatory strangling of the free market economy and the conjoint attrition of the middle class. Additionally, the leftist project is materially facilitated by the growing prevalence of kangaroo courts run by committed activists of every conceivable stripe and in which no provision whatsoever is made to assist those too often falsely accused of discrimination or being in violation of some obscure code or policy of sanctioned conduct. The judgments handed down against those who have offended the sensibilities of favored identity groups will often involve harshly punitive forms of retribution that may cost a defendant his employment and his livelihood.
 
A Romanian friend who suffered through Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in his home country tells me that in many ways the situation in the “freedom loving” West is actually worse. In Romania, as in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, most people knew that the regime was founded on lies and that the media were corrupt, time-serving institutions. Here, on the contrary, people tend to believe that the government is relatively, if not entirely, trustworthy, that the judiciary is impartial, and that the media actually report the news. Citizens are therefore susceptible to mission creep and are piecemeal deceived into a condition of indenture to socialist governance, an activist judiciary, a disinformative, hireling press corps, and left-wing institutions. People will vote massively for the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democrats in the U.S., not realizing they are voting themselves into bondage, penury and stagnation. The process operates insensibly and takes longer to embed itself into the cultural mainstream, but the result is alarmingly effective and durable. My friend has never read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or George Orwell’s 1984, but his layman’s insights and practical experience bear out Hayek’s scholarly analysis and Orwell’s dire warnings.
 
A totalitarian regime will control its citizens through propaganda, censorship, and outright violence, modes of oppression that are at least publicly demonstrable, evident to most. But knowing that the enchainment of the spirit is ultimately more reliable than the enchainment of the flesh, a democratic polity veering towards oligarchy will focus on propaganda and censorship as well, but in a far more subtle form. It will function mainly through public shaming rituals, social ostracism, rigid speech codes, Orwellian disinformation, and legal or quasi-legal assault. It does not need to depend on physical violence.
 
Fear of social rejection, the lure of groupthink, the pestilence of political correctness controlling what one may say and think, public apathy, historical ignorance, and especially the Damoclean sword of selective hiring, job dismissal, and financial reprisal go a long way to subdue a people to the will of its masters and consign them to a Gulag that may be less observable a such, but one that is nonetheless socially and economically crippling to individuals, families and businesses.
 
In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political pottage.

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Double Standard in Right To Choose?  Apparently

11/24/2016

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    While many of the illiberal left in Whatcom County are wailing bitterly about their fears that diversity is at risk during this post-election period, WE see that "right to choose" in Washington State is under direct, frontal attack from our own government.  (Remember the 2013 "Sweet Cakes by Melissa" case in Oregon?)  There's an immense difference between "discretion" and "discrimination." Acts of conscience and conscientious objection appear be losing their place in our free and just society, and some seem to have been conditioned to believe that double standards are just fine.
     Here's an opinion piece about the Washington florist who was targeted for prosecution by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson because she chose not to provide floral services for a gay wedding.  A person might think that "right to choose" to enter into (or pass up on) a private contract is a fundamental tenet of justice under the laws of a free country.  Ferguson, who was just re-elected handily, doesn't see the world that way. (There's prosecution and partisan persecution...)
​     Read this opinion piece that describes what's at risk if the trend continues.  It's chilling to think that the state Supreme Court may decide that some citizens should be compelled to serve against their will and conscience when others are not.
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OPINION (Op Ed), Seattle Times
When do ‘state messages’ trump free speech?
​
Kristen Waggoner and Rory Gray, Attorneys*
November 21, 2016

FREE speech is the First Amendment’s “majestic guarantee.” Popular votes and the outcomes of elections, for example, cannot strip away the right of each one of us to think differently from our neighbors and express our views — no matter how unpopular — without fear of punishment. That is why, in our country, citizens unhappy about the outcome of the presidential election are at liberty to peacefully protest in the streets, and artists like elite fashion designer Sophie Theallet, who has often dressed first lady Michelle Obama, are free to refuse to associate with the incoming first lady, Melania Trump.

Some would call Theallet’s rejection of Melania Trump “discrimination.” Laws certainly exist in our nation that would seek to block her choice. But as Theallet recently explained in an open letter, her fashion designs are “an expression of [her] artistic and philosophical ideas.” Her family-owned business is “not just about money.” So she took public measures to protect her constitutionally protected “artistic freedom” and to protest ideas with which she disagreed.
​
Barronelle Stutzman did the same when she kindly referred a request for artistic flower arrangements celebrating a longtime friend and customer’s same-sex wedding to three of the many other floral design artists in the area. Stutzman designed custom floral arrangements for the two men for nearly a decade, including Valentine’s days and anniversaries. That would not have happened had she desired to discriminate against those who identify as gay. But the conviction of her heart is that marriage is between one man and one woman, so Stutzman stood up for her artistic and religious freedom and politely declined to celebrate a marriage ceremony with which she disagreed.
Rather than receive the public acclaim reserved for members of the liberal elite, Stutzman was taken to court by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who threatened to take away everything she owns — not just her business (her livelihood) but her retirement savings and even her home. He did so while freely acknowledging that Stutzman’s living botanical sculptures are protected speech just like other abstract art. So the state’s message is clear: Dissenting views about marriage will not be tolerated. If that means kicking a 72-year-old grandmother out on the street, so be it.
 
Stutzman’s case should be deeply troubling to all of us. If the government can punish Stutzman for her artistic choices, it can punish Theallet for hers as well. The attorney general made that clear in a court hearing just a few days ago. When justices of the Washington State Supreme Court asked Ferguson whether it would make any difference if Stutzman had been asked to spell out “God bless this marriage” in flowers or if she had been selling custom poetry celebrating weddings instead, his answer was firmly “no.” As in the old Soviet Union, even poets have to toe the line to preach the state’s message.
 
Ferguson even went so far as to say that a voice-over actor could be forced to use his voice in a political ad promoting a candidate’s stance on marriage. In the real world, what that means is that an atheist singer could be forced to perform at an Easter worship service and a Muslim graphic designer could be compelled to design a website for a Jewish “friends of Israel” group. Astounding.
 
This position is no less than the end of free speech as we know it. Artists do not lose their First Amendment freedoms merely because they go into business to support their families. Free expression is not just for the rich who create art at leisure, nor is it reserved for liberal icons like Theallet. Free speech is for all of us, including Stutzman.
 
All those who care about individual liberty and artistic freedom should support her, while there is still free speech left to save.

*Kristen Waggoner and Rory Gray are attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom who represent Barronelle Stutzman. Waggoner argued before the Washington Supreme Court on Nov. 15.

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Charity:  Sponsor a Millennial Today

11/23/2016

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WE are a warmhearted, charitable lot.  Tis the season to open your wallet (or give it up entirely) to the downtrodden.
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Safe Space for Christians?  Progressive Bigotry Backfires

11/17/2016

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For all the bitter angst at WWU and protests through the streets of Bellingham  about the outcome of the presidential election, WE think the left-wing needs to do some serious reflecting and soul-searching about their own ability to respect and be inclusive, to walk their talk about diversity and liberty where it comes to "people of faith" (the Christian faith).   Good article, this:
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Progressives’ Anti-Christian Bigotry
Helped Make Trump President


David French, Attorney
National Review - November 17, 2016
(Dreamstime Image:  Theodor38)

They have only themselves to blame for driving away millions of Evangelicals.
 
Last week, my friends and former colleagues at the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The facts of the case aren’t terribly exciting: The university, like many universities, has a mandatory “service learning” program that requires students to perform 30 hours of community service, and it uses the program as a thinly disguised means of astroturfing student activism. The program specifically encourages students to work with “public interest” organizations, political campaigns, “environmental action” groups, and other nonprofits — but it doesn’t grant credit to students for promoting “religious doctrine” or “proselytizing.” In other words, students can and do promote ideological, cultural, or political causes, but they cannot promote their religious faith.

Two students who’d performed dozens of hours of service at Catholic parishes, teaching children about the basics of the Catholic faith, church history, and morality filed suit, noting that they would have received credit for the same services if performed in a non-religious context. The case is now pending in federal court.
 
It’s easy to identify the few lawsuits that get media attention, but there are dozens — even hundreds — of others across the country that go unnoticed. There is a pervasive feeling among American Christians that secular progressives will actively seek out new and creative ways to persecute and marginalize them.
 
Millions of American Christians understand that if you work for a state or local governments — or even for private companies — publicly vocalizing traditional Christian views of sexual morality can cost you your job, even as outspoken support for radically new sexual morality is lauded. If you start a Christian group on campus, administrators by the hundreds will deem you “discriminatory” and “bigoted” for daring to assert that it should be run by Christians. Meanwhile, liberal activist groups operate with impunity, often coordinating their well-funded efforts with university administrators and faculty. If you attend a Christian college, secular-progressive academic regulators may well pressure your university to break with Christian orthodoxy as a condition of receiving state funds or even of maintaining accreditation.
 
If you’re a Christian who runs a business, you’re exactly one decision or one statement away not just from vicious social-media shame campaigns and boycotts but also from vengeful state action that could close your store and bankrupt your family. If you’re a Christian applying for a job in higher education, you can expect doors to be slammed in your face, less-qualified candidates to enjoy greater opportunities, and hostile faculties and administrations to sometimes ask probing or even illegal questions about your “bigotry.”

If you’re a church pastor, you must wonder which of your ministries could be attacked by local activists, and whether the very act of serving the poorest and most vulnerable citizens is perversely opening your church to legal attack.

In short, orthodox Christians feel as if they’re under cultural and legal siege because they are. Sixteen years ago, when I first starting defending religious liberty and free speech on college campuses, I would speak at churches and describe a mindset in which campus administrators and activists actively compared faithful-Christian student groups to the Ku Klux Klan. Audiences shook their heads in disbelief. They couldn’t imagine such a hysterical onslaught, and it felt distant, removed from their daily lives. No one shakes their head now. And with all the social pressures on the left driving Democratic politicians to ever-more-vicious acts of religious persecution, the election of 2016 presented conservative Christians with nothing but terrible options: Vote for an immoral man who might help, vote for an immoral woman who will try to hurt, or vote for someone decent who can’t win.
 
Make no mistake, Donald Trump is president-elect in part because Evangelicals gave him their votes by a record margin. In an election this close, you can’t pin victory or defeat on any one group, but there is little doubt that had wavering Evangelicals not gone for Trump, his path to victory would have grown much narrower. The lesson here is clear: When the Left comprehensively and enthusiastically attacks millions of Americans, it forfeits any and all ability to reach those Americans for any purpose, much less to earn their votes.
 
Ironically enough, however, the short-term result of the election is likely to be an increase in religious persecution. While the Obama administration was hostile to religious liberty, the overwhelming majority of lawless acts occur in the deep-blue urban and cultural centers that are most enraged by the Trump win and are responding with sheer panic and fury. While some thoughtful leftists are opening their hearts to the need for greater tolerance and understanding, others are busy comparing Trump voters to lynch mobs, doing their best to poison a new generation of Americans against the church.

There is no easy way out of this escalating culture war. To the secular left, Trump’s election proves that Evangelicals don’t mean what they say about character, sexual morality, and love for their neighbors. The distraught Evangelical voter responds that liberal bigotry forced him to vote for Trump, despite his many manifest failings. I may believe that Christians had better options, but I know that my own friends and neighbors disagreed. They in good faith believed that a vote for Trump was the only rational way to protect life and liberty. So, yes, leftist radicals are right when they say that “hate” helped turn the 2016 election. But it was their own malice and intolerance that proved decisive. They chant that “love trumps hate,” but in reality their hate sunk Hillary.

They say a bigot is in the White House, but their own bigotry helped put him there.
 
— David French is an attorney, and a staff writer at National Review.

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PC-Buzzkill Dept:  Beach Boys Criticized for "Beach Privilege"

11/3/2016

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The joyless neuroticism of political correctness reaches a new low...
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Music Critic Slams the Beach Boys for
'Beach Privilege,' Is Serious
​

Katherine Timpf
National Review Online
November 3, 2016


In a piece for the New York Review of Books, critic Ben Ratliff discusses how the blatant “beach privilege” displayed in the Beach Boys’ most popular songs makes the band kind of problematic.
 
Yes — “beach privilege.”
 
According to Ratliff, the issue is “not that they didn’t make some albums still eminently worth hearing,” but “a kind of philosophical problem.”
 
“[T]ime and social change have been rough on the Beach Boys,” Ratliff writes in a piece titled “Looking for the Beach Boys.” “Their best-known hits (say, ‘California Girls,’ ‘Help Me, Rhonda,’ ‘I Get Around’) are poems of unenlightened straight-male privilege, white privilege, beach privilege.”
 
“It is hard to imagine that they helped anyone toward self-determination or achieving their social rights,” he continues.
 
Okay. First of all, what the hell is “beach privilege”? Seriously, on what planet could that be a thing? Definitely not on this one, because here, pretty much everyone — regardless of class or social status — has been to a beach or at least had the opportunity to go to one. I’m sure there might be some exceptions to this, but to say that hanging out on a beach makes you some sort of fancy blueblood is perhaps one of the most absurdly incorrect things I’ve ever heard.
 
Second of all, why does the music of the Beach Boys have to have “helped anyone toward self-determination or achieving their social rights?” Sure, it is true that the Beach Boys didn’t discuss the problems of the world in their songs; they were all about fun and being happy and the beach and hooray. But here’s the thing: People listen to The Beach Boys because their songs are about fun and being happy and the beach and hooray. That’s the whole point. Songs about the problems of the world have a place in our society, but so do songs that allow people to forget about them. After all, nobody wants to have a margarita and dance around in the sunshine to songs about bigotry and hunger and death and disease. Helping people with “achieving their social rights” is good, but do you know what else is good? Fun. In fact, fun is a thing that often helps people with problems forget about those problems, which allows them to be, you know, happy — and (correct me if I’m wrong!) but I’ve always thought that making people happy is actually a pretty great thing to do.
 
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online. 

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