Put the pope in prison

Unless you're a liberal in a constant state of secluded ejaculation over the recent takeover of American citizens' health, you've seen the scores of stories about how the Roman Catholic church's hierarchy has for decades (actually centuries) been covering up the rape and abuse of little Catholic boys and girls by its clergy all across the world.

Bishops, arch-bishops and cardinals have been "quietly" handling the abuse "in-house" to prevent scandal and to protect the church's reputation, ahem. The crack in the dam began in the 1990s with one man's brave public exposure of the abuse he suffered at the hands of one pernicious clergyman, who raped the boy consistently for years. (One Milwaukee reverend is accused of sexually abusing 200 deaf boys.) Since then, hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of others have come out of the Catholic closet to attest to the same tawdry acts by people they were supposed to trust.

In nearly every case, the Catholic hierarchy covered up, simply relocating the pedophiles or demoting them or quietly asking them to leave the church. This is criminal behavior and must be treated as such.

In the last few days, new information printed in The New York Times shows that the current pope himself, Joseph Ratzinger, was in charge of oversight operations for these types of sordid acts. In fact, he did not report the Milwaukee reverend to police, instead letting the egregious abuse slip quietly into the mystic night.

If a corporation were to be as dismissive and secretive about such abuse within its ranks, worldwide outrage would be deafening. Police, the FBI and governments everywhere would be dedicating immense resources to uncover the complicity. Denunciations would be pervasive. Computer files, documents and other evidence would be confiscated for prosecution.

Yet we hear very little from governments (themselves horribly corrupt). We hear no demands that the pope now turn himself over to police. We hear no threats to apprehend the pope and his robed minions across the globe.

The Vatican considers itself a sovereign nation -- and so did Iraq. But look what we did to Saddam Hussein, who wasn't even abusing our little boys. The United States must immediately send armed forces to apprehend the pope, try him in a court of law and, if convicted, put the execrable son-of-a-bitch in prison with the worst elements of American society.

Do it now -- before more young boys and girls suffer under the mystic cloud of medieval acts.

I had ADD, BBD, DCD, DBD, IFS, ETS, DFD, IBD

As a youthful student I had ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), BBD (Boners for Babes Disorder), DCD (Dreamy Classroom Disorder), DBD (Desperately Bored Disorder), IFS (Incessant Farting Syndrome), ETS (Excessive Talking Syndrome), DFD (Dreaming of Freedom Disorder) and IBD (Itchy Britches Disorder).

The one thing that characterizes all of the above syndromes and "disorders" is that they are NOT diseases. They are the consequence of bad parenting, bad diets and coercive government authoritarian control of the mental content of children via "public education" (well, except for BBS and IFS, ahem).

ADD is not a disease. Children are not born with "attention deficits." Attention deficits are created. They are created by enforced conscription of children into activities or situations that they do not wish to be in, supplanting their own values for others' values.

It is a consequence of being told, "You will sit in that uncomfortable, constricted chair for six hours each day of the week and listen to puke, pabulum and propaganda, whether you like it or not -- do you understand me?!"

It can also be the consequence of horrible eating, mostly way too much sugar and carbs, which turn the body into a hyperactive spasm of uncontrollable urges to MOVE, to MOVE ANYWHERE. I know. I was one of those kids brought up on cereal, lots of cereal, and milk, which my body couldn't digest and thereby turned milk protein into copious amounts of gas, which I embarrassingly exploded upon my nearby victims in every concentration-camp class I was forced to attend. (How many times did I hear from my fellow prisoners, "ELMORE?!!!!!!!!!!!!! God damn, not again!!!!!!!!"). That's not a legacy one can proudly wear. I did, however, save a few calculated explosions for the deans and the principals when sent to their office for discipline for excessive talking because of DBD and DFD.

The excessive sugar gave me IBD. The glacial pace of instruction gave me ETS, and so my report cards contained A's for classwork and lots and lots of bad-conduct capital letters to the side stating ominously: "Excessive Talking." Luckily, the only thing that the dictator, my dad, cared about was the A's. "I don't give a shit whether you talk too much as long as your grades are good."

So I talked. And talked. And talked. And got sent to the principal's office, where I farted. And farted. And farted. Until the noxious cloud precipitated a brief upbraiding and a quick dismissal back to a classroom of smiling friends and a miffed teacher.

I hated school. Let me repeat that. I HATED school. Loved meeting new people and having lots of friends. Hated being told when and what to learn. It was MY life. No it wasn't. Yes it was. No, it wasn't. All I could think of each day was babes (BBD) and looking up the dress of my buxomous 8th-grade World History teacher, who had a lovely tendency to wear VERY short skirts, jump up on her desk at the front of the classroom and slowly cross her legs, causing many male students to go to the nurse's office for strained necks and hurting crotches.

Yeah, OK, that was fun -- looking up Ms. So-and-so's dress at the pink/purple/black/red panties -- but that was one short (too short) class in a history of violence against the human mind and free will. Mostly, public school simply elicited rage from me and many others (mostly boys, it seemed). Whose life was it, anyway?! "I'm not going to use the fucking quadratic equation in my life, you boring sack of pig's testicles!" Thus DFD or another disorder/syndrome set in.

The cronies of coercive education and their conspiratorial counterparts in psychology have developed an acronym alphabet soup to attend to the natural effects of extreme boredom, extreme coercion, extreme diets and extreme devastation of one's own personal interests at a youthful age. These professorial posers would like you to think that all the fucked-up kids have somehow contracted a genetic disease. But the posers have one major problem in their diagnosis: They have ADD.

Their attention deficit is philosophical. They do not attend to the exigencies of philosophical inquiry, thereby causing them to misunderstand cause and effect: When you pummel free will, you get disorder. When you coerce thinking, you get non-thinking. When you combine the two you get alphabet soups of lost generations. Those are inconvenient truths for parasites on the public teat.

End "public schooling" now. Save the children (for once the cliche applies). Let's take the capital letters out of "ADD" and put them back in math -- not "new" math.

Let the kids be free to enjoy their individual rights to self-determination and productive and creative lives -- and their BBD in their teenage years.

Here's looking at you, babes!

What you say and HOW you say it

Kids are walking "bullshit" detectors. They can smell anxiety, dishonesty, cowardice, awkwardness, trepidation and weakness in adults (or other kids) from across the yard or room or street -- probably even the heavens! Their brains are ravenous and alert and mostly (or completely) pristine, giving their bullshit radar-detectors a polished sheen, so that when the bullshit flies around them, it sticks clearly to their mental screens. They often consciously know what's happening, but, if not, they tap into it subconsciously and act accordingly to the person they are around, whether adult or other child.

For their subconscious mind, the other person's words and actions represent themselves generally as "Is this person truly confident about his rectitude?" or "Are this person's actions and words as hard as the big rock in the back yard, as hard as the reality around me, as sure as the cause and effect in the world?"

"Confidence" is a tangible intangible. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things in other people. Even the smooth shyster's subtle bluster reveals itself ever so slightly to a kid and to adults as sort of fake confidence via melodrama or shifty eyes or stentorian style or lack of ease in expression.

Being primal animals that are also rational, children are constantly searching for things that break, testing boundaries for weakness that can be exploited. It is a natural thing for them with the world around them, and it is used on the people in their lives. When weakness is found, it is exploited. It is survival -- survival of the fittest. It takes a confident, sure hand in a parent to guide the child in such situations, when necessary, to ensure the the exploitation is moral or that it shouldn't occur for objective reasons. This is one of the primary responsibilities of parents until the burgeoning rationality of the child learns to live in a society of people by objective standards, by objective principles that foster self-esteem and efficacy.

It is also necessary for parents to attempt to be objective all the time and correct any of their own irrationality immediately upon seeing it or upon getting a sense (feeling) that irrationality may be involved. It is, of course, necessary primarily for the adult to be happy, but the secondary benefit is being able to raise a happy, confident child that will be a beloved confidant for the years to come.

If you try to act confident but aren't, you're in trouble deep. The bullshit detector will sniff it out in an instant, and then the labyrinthine battle for power positioning will begin -- and the child will eventually win because you are out of control and will revert to further irrationalities to buttress the original irrationality in an attempt to regain control. I've seen this countless times with friends and acquaintances and their kids. It is horrifying to watch the vicious circle they get trapped in. It is upsetting to see the raw emotions aimed at a loved one with designs of hurting. It is depressing to see a child subconsciously understand that his parent hasn't a clue, and the child must attempt to tackle a big, complex, often-dangerous and cruel world all by himself. He often doesn't know this consciously, but he feels it, and the anxiety is palpable and visible to the rest of us.

As Objectivists know, the only way to be confident is to learn how to be rational all the time, to have a thorough understanding of how your mind works, to integrate a rigorous morality, to stay focused on values each hour of the day, and to universally implement all of the above in every minute of your life. Then, what you say and HOW you say it will tell your child, any child, any adult, that you are confident about reality, you mean business, you understand your business, you can explain your business, you are rigid but benevolent, you are strict but fair, and you are a moral hard rock of existence that cannot be broken, and therefore you are trustworthy and a person with whom your child can share thoughts, emotions and life without worry of retribution, senseless violence or putdowns, confusion, or any kind of injustice.

Any other method or path is woefully lacking -- and will lead to unhappiness in your life and your poor child's life, too. If you don't live by rational absolutes, many things will go absolutely wrong. If you achieve absolute certainty about what is right and live it, things will be just fine -- very fine indeed.

Schooling and the death of childhood learning

HERE is a terrific piece by Daniel Quinn on the history of "public education" and the motives behind it, as well as an affirmation of the natural curiosity of children -- who do NOT need motivation to learn. It is a testament to unschooling.

Here's a quote from the speech:

"What sells most people on the idea of school is the fact that the unschooled child learns what it wants to learn when it wants to learn it. This is intolerable to them, because they're convinced that children don't want to learn anything at all - and they point to school children to prove it. What they fail to recognize is that the learning curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain - but quickly levels off when they enter school.

"By the third or fourth grade it's completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a boring, painful experience they'd love to be able to avoid if they could. But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it. They won't all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a poem! Some of them will never learn to parse a sentence or write a theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn how a bill passes Congress!

"Well, of course, this is too horrible to imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of these students will never read another poem or another play by Shakespeare in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to parse another sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they studied. It doesn't matter that 90% never have any use for whatever knowledge they were supposed to gain from dissecting a frog. It doesn't matter that 90% graduate without having the vaguest idea how a bill passes Congress. All that matters is that they've gone through it!"