Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Wild turkey, shot with a musket and hand-plucked.

Dried maize; no corn-on-the-cob.

Ample, overflowing servings of lobster. (The Pilgrims considered lobster tasteless and complained in their diaries of having to eat it so often.)

Seal meat.

Hard apple cider. (Till the early 1800s or so, hard cider was in rural North America considered the only totally safe beverage, because the alcohol killed waterborne pathogens; children often drank diluted hard cider and went through the day slightly tipsy.)

For dessert: plums, grapes and stewed pumpkin. (There is no chance the Pilgrims ate pie at the first Thanksgiving, because they had no refined sugar. Until the 1800s, most Americans rarely tasted anything containing refined sugar.)

As you dig into your turkey, stuffing and pecan pie, washed down with a $10 bottle of wine superior in quality to any wine available to the 17th-century kings of France, remember how hard your ancestors worked, and how they sacrificed, in the dream that someday their descendants would be warm, well-fed and secure against nature.

"Translation services for parents of public school students are essential in New York City," Yassky said. "How can a parent be involved in their children's education when they can't understand what the teacher is sending home?"

Yassky announced the introduction of The Educational Equity Act. The legislation would require all Department of Education (DOE) Schools to provide timely interpretation services for parents or guardians with limited English proficiency at parent-teacher conferences, PTA gatherings, and other meetings between DOE employees and parents. It would also require the translation of all notices and report cards sent to parents. The program would translate those documents and events into the nine most commonly spoken languages among parents with limited English skills.

Both wings of the Democratic Party seem blissfully unaware that (1) once translations are provided for nine languages, the pressure will only increase to provide translation services in all 167 languages; (2) languages like Spanish and Chinese have more than one oral dialect while the various Creoles have no written form; and (3) coddling today's immigrants goes over quite poorly with children of previous generations of immigrants who recall their parents struggling with an English workbook after a full day's hard labor.

The sexual revolution has already left married women deeply fearful of being dumped for a younger woman. (A female friend calls it "every woman's nightmare.") The advent of social acceptance of gay marriage (and thus of homosexual behavior itself) would mean that married women would now have to fear the competition of both other women and other men in a society where anything goes.

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira states:

Data available from DCorps' post-election survey make it possible to compare white married voters by gender with their counterparts in 2000. This comparison shows Bush's margin among white married men staying about the same across elections and actually shrinking a bit among white unmarried men. But among white married women, his margin increases from 9 to 18 points and, among white unmarried women, he actually achieves a tie, compared to a 15 deficit in 2000.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Decades of multiculturalist educational policies have left large immigrant populations educated in their native languages and ignorant of British history, civic traditions and anything else needed to help them become part of civil society. Once again, the deliberate abandonment of assimilation reinforces the lesson that of democracy, immigration and multiculturalism, we must pick from any two.

Friday, November 12, 2004

[W]e're seeing that this isn't really a group at all -- it's a diverse community with an array of different interests and political leanings. For the purposes of thinking about political marketing, however, there is a certain unity to the estimated 4-5 percent of the electorate that's "Spanish-dominant" and the additional 2 percent or so that, while English-dominant, also consumes Spanish-language media. The presence of linguistic differentiation provides a rather unique opportunity for candidates to target their message quite narrowly at the Spanish-speaking population.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004