A three-year-old boy called Adolf Hitler Campbell has been refused a birthday cake with his name on it by a New Jersey supermarket.

Heath Campbell, 35, and his wife, Deborah, 25, say they are upset at the decision made by their local ShopRite not to write “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” across the cake, and that people needed to move forward.

I seriously couldn’t stop laughing when I read this. 2 reasons:

1) How stupid can the parents be? Take a look at the other kids’ names, I honestly and genuinely feel bad for them. Just thinking of their annual Christmas newsletter had me in tears.

2) I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through the workers in the bakery’s head. “Who in the world wants to celebrate Hitler’s birthday with a cake?”

Of course, someone did bake their cake for them, Walmart.

⇒ Little Adolf Hitler’s unhappy birthday | News | guardian.co.uk (Guardian.co.uk via The Plank.)

Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.

Barack Obama, in taking up the part of regenerative healer, is the latest panacea. As a society, Mr. Obama says, we are hurting. Our schools are “crumbling.” There are “lines in the emergency rooms” of the hospitals, and our corporate culture is “rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.” He points to the millions of Americans who, in struggling with life’s difficulties (“high gas bills, insufficient health insurance and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable”), have become bitter and unhappy. Mr. Obama finds a scapegoat for the present discontents in politics—a politics, he argues, that breeds “division, and conflict, and cynicism” and that has become a “dead zone” in which “narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth.”

The solution, he says, lies in a political reformation. Unless we “begin the process of changing politics and our civic life,” we will bequeath to our children “a weaker and more fractured America” than the one we inherited. Hence his mantra, “Change we can believe in.” Like the Nicene Creed, Obama’s doctrine begins in belief. Credo. Once we believe in the possibility of a transformative politics, “the perfection begins.” The selfish politics of the present yields to the selfless politics of the future. We discover that “this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.” So believing, we can replace a politics that breeds division, conflict and cynicism with a politics that fosters unity and peace. In Mr. Obama’s “project of national renewal,” government can become an expression of “our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity.” …

The danger of Mr. Obama’s charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Mr. Obama’s conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoyevsky attributed to the 19th-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, “all men will become righteous in one instant.” The perfection would begin.

An extremely extremely well written piece taking a look at Obama’s rise to fame, and the underlying philosophy behind his “Change We Can Believe In” mantra.

While the Wall Street Journal is a conservative newspaper and is constantly gunning against Obama, this piece brings up a valid point about politics and government in general. With all the rhetoric about change and reformation, we can get caught up in the very dangerous idea that with the right people and enough power, the government can solve all our problems:

The very strength of America’s religious ideal of redemption has restrained, though it has not entirely forestalled, the development of alternative secular ideals of redemption. A religiously inspired belief in original sin has made Americans wary of succumbing to the Pelagian notion that a mere mortal, however charismatic, can build the New Jerusalem out of purely secular materials. The country’s constitutional system, itself founded on the theory of original sin, has created a perpetual conflict of factions and interests that so far has prevented any single party from imposing a monolithic unity from above, such as Europe’s collectivists were able to do.

So go ahead and read this piece, and take a good look at how you view our government and what you believe their role is in this day and age.

⇒ Barack Obama, Shaman (Wall Street Journal)

Attending the awards ceremony in the spring at our high school (not TJ) for example, the Asian students carried off a huge number of the awards in nearly all subjects and completely flattened everyone else in math and science.

It’s so unfair. These Asian students, some of whom only arrived in this country within the last 10 years, combine natural ability with prodigious work habits. As Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom reported in their book “No Excuses,” “Only a quarter of white students in middle school spend more than an hour daily on homework, but half of all Asian-American children do so.” The authors quote an Asian immigrant child as explaining, “Every day [our parents] tell us ‘Obey your teachers. Do your schoolwork. Stay out of trouble. You’re there to learn, not to fight. Keep trying harder. Keep pushing yourself. Do your homework. After you have done that you can watch TV.’ ”

And how does America reward these hard-working students? We’ve erected barriers to their advancement. At every level of higher education, informal quotas keep the number of Asian students down.

While I do not think that affirmative action is necessary much longer, I do think that we could still still use quotas. Not so much in race as much as in socio-economic class.

These days, the barriers are not whether kids are block or white or asian, but it’s whether these kids have good teachers or parents that value education. And if you look at the numbers, kids in the lower socio-economic classes tend to have parents (or usually, 1 parent) that doesn’t value education as much, or just doesn’t have time to help their kids learn since they need to work 2-3 jobs to support their children. And generally, the schools where these kids end up going have teachers who don’t really care about their students b/c they aren’t paid enough to care.

Read this article by the New York Times Magazine for more on what I’m talking about.

⇒ Nonaffirmative inaction (Washington Times)

Although I lived and worked in New York City, this woman–I’ll call her Heather–was one of the few Americans I interacted with during the course of a typical workday. While in law school, I had applied for an internship at the Israeli U.N. Mission. Instead, despite not even being Israeli, I was offered a full-time job as the Mission’s speechwriter. I spent my evenings in law school, my nights frequenting bars with my American friends, my weekends playing softball in Central Park–and my days engaged in diplomatic warfare with half of the Arab world.

One of the perks of being a U.N. “diplomat” was free lunchtime language lessons, and I elected to take Arabic. I chose it simply because it seemed interesting, and at the time I was naïve enough not to anticipate that someone from the Israeli delegation taking Arabic classes at the U.N. might encounter some awkwardness. When the course started, I found that–save a couple of Scandinavians and Heather–everyone else served on delegations that refused to speak to Israel: Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran.

A very good short story on personal interactions can make all the difference in politics.

⇒ School Ties (New Republic)

I was especially struck to hear some inmates more or less praise the new policy. Pacing down the cellblock and picking one integrated cell at random, I encountered a pair of cellmates — white and Latino — who were openly enthusiastic about the change. “I was a skinhead for years,” said Bryon Fields, 42, giving a friendly nod to Jorge Luis Gonzalez, 39. “I never could’ve lived with somebody like this before, and at first I had issues with it. But after three weeks of living with this guy, right here, he’s taught me a lot, and I’ve taught him a lot. … This guy is probably one of the best guys I’ve ever lived with.” Both men have at various times been offered a chance to switching cells and roommates, but have preferred to stay where they are.

It seems, based on the peaceful rollout so far, that the Supreme Court has been vindicated, at least at Sierra’s SNY unit. Under the old policy of deferring to racial fault lines, California’s correctional system had most likely been doing just what the court feared: reinforcing existing divisions and possibly making things worse. Now, under the new policy, far from feeling resentful at being “forced” to get along, many inmates apparently are relieved. I felt that the CDCR was on balance doing the right thing for the Level III inmates I met.

⇒ Inmates and integration (Los Angeles Times)

For the first time, children as young as 5 have been shown to understand issues regarding integration and separation. The research confirms that the ethnic composition of primary schools has a direct impact on children’s attitudes towards those in other ethnic groups and on their ability to get on with their peers.

Hmmm. While I find this somewhat surprising, deep down I think I may have known it all along. I guess it means we’re going to start breaking down the ethnic make-up of our pre-schools now?

⇒ Diversity In Primary Schools Promotes Harmony, Study Finds (ScienceDaily, via A Blog Around the Clock.)

But the eruption of the angry youth has been even more disconcerting to those interested in furthering democracy. By age and education, Tang and his peers inherit a long legacy of activism that stretches from 1919, when nationalist demonstrators demanded “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science,” to 1989, when students flooded Tiananmen Square, challenging the government and erecting a sculpture inspired by the Statue of Liberty. Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of that movement, but the events of this spring suggest that prosperity, computers, and Westernization have not driven China’s young élite toward tolerance but, rather, persuaded more than a few of them to postpone idealism as long as life keeps improving. The students in 1989 were rebelling against corruption and abuses of power. “Nowadays, these issues haven’t disappeared but have worsened,” Li Datong, an outspoken newspaper editor and reform advocate, told me. “However, the current young generation turns a blind eye to it. I’ve never seen them respond to those major domestic issues. Rather, they take a utilitarian, opportunistic approach.”

A stimulating read on how the new “angry youth” in China are turning from the movement of their Tiananmen Square predecessors back towards Chinese Nationalism.

⇒ Letter from China: Angry Youth

Yes, white kids listen to hip-hop and black boys rock Polo shirts, but race has not yet reached the point of being a non-issue. The elephant is still very much in the room. It certainly was for me when I made a request to ban one boy from simply speaking his mind. N-bomb notwithstanding, I understand his position and can only hope he understands mine. Ours is a time of abundance— plenty of color and plenty of confusion.

So, please—Gen X, Baby Boomers, all you generations before, after and in-between—stop dubbing us as the colorblind generation. We see race. We may reference it more without truly understanding it. We may color outside the lines. But we do see. Our eyes are open, and our vision is clear. It’s us that is blurry.

⇒ Gen Y and the Colorblind Lie

Did you know “black hole” is now a racist term?

I didn’t and neither, apparently, did Dallas County Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield. He told colleagues this month that the traffic ticket collection office had become a black hole, because so much paperwork was getting lost. Two black officials took offense. One retorted that the office had become a “white hole.”

Houston Chronicle blogger Eric Berger (“SciGuy”) was quick to point out that it’s a good thing the traffic center hadn’t literally become a white hole – “a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in.”

Call it the political correctness space race.

Taking offense at an astronomy term may sound ludicrous, but it’s merely an outgrowth of the widespread belief that the English language – along with its countless metaphors and figures of speech – is racially biased and therefore must be defanged.

English Language: 1 Political correctness: 0

⇒ Is ‘black hole’ really a racist term?

AS USUAL I HAVE assigned way too much reading. Even though we begin class discussion with references to three essays required for today, our conversation drifts quickly to “Who Can Say Nigger?” and plants itself there. We talk about the word, who can say it, who won’t say it, who wants to say it, and why. There are 11 students in the class. All of them are white.

A stimulating memoir by an African-American lit professor and her experiences teaching white college students about race and language.

⇒ Teaching the N-word