WELCOME TO THE
CONTINUING COLLAPSE! 
 
 By Bruce N. Shortt, J.D., Ph.D

Exposing Government Schools: The Youth Ministry of the State Church of Secular Humanism 

November/December, 
Anno Domini 2010
  
 
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies."
(Groucho Marx) 
 
 
"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
H.L. Mencken
 
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered
And slanged I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
(Hilaire Belloc)
 


This Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday edition of TCC is a bit long. Unfortunately, the current information you need to have

 
"OUR SCHOOLS ARE DIFFERENT"
(The check is in the mail, too.)
 
 
The Continuing Collapse has long pointed out that Christian parents who do the government school "dump and run" are not only destroying their children spiritually and morally, they are also virtually assuring that their children will be the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" in the 21st Century global economy.
 
Unfortunately, suburban and rural parents all too often try to rationalize their government school habit by claiming that the academic problems in government school don't affect their "really different" suburban or rural school districts. The problems, you see, are all in those "urban districts."
 
In its never-ending quest to provide reality therapy to Christian parents and pastors, last month TCC linked you, Dear Reader, to John Stossel's Stupid In America and to some clips from Bob Compton's Two Million Minutes, which TCC hopes you shared with your pastor and Christian friends. 
 
Anyone who watches the Belgian students laughing about the academic performance of our suburban students from affluent families in New Jersey or the contrast in attitude and achievement between the Indian and Chinese students and their Carmel, Indiana, counterparts in Two Million Minutes would have a very difficult time trying to maintain the delusion that our "really good school districts are as good as any in the world". The truth is, they aren't. In fact, they aren't even close, and no amount of wishful thinking or "school reform" will make them so.
 
Now the Chinese have joined the international snarkfest. What follows is a video produced in China (with subtitles) that uses "Waiting For Superman" as an opportunity to heap some much deserved ridicule on the U.S, government school system.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrgpxoS8nzE&feature=fvwk
 

BUT THEY HAVE OUTSTANDING "SELF-ESTEEM"
 
For a very long time we have been assured that ever more lavish funding of government schools will bring about a veritable renaissance in U.S. education. The recently released results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, however, indicates that taxpayers ought to be demanding a refund.
 
Despite something approaching a trillion dollars a year being spent on government schools, the NAEP tells us that no dramatic improvement among twelfth-graders has occurred. 
 
For example, only 38% of twelfth-graders can read at or above a "proficient" level, which is another way of saying that fully 62% of our expensively institutionalized high school seniors can't read proficiently. This is slightly better than 2005, BUT not significantly different from prior years. In fact, reading scores were slightly higher in 1992 than 2009.    
http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2009/summary_g12.asp
 
 
In math, only 26% of our 12th-graders could perform at or above a proficient level. 74%, therefore, will need pictures on cash register keys if they are lucky enough to get a job at McDonald's.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/summary_g12.asp
 
Bear in mind, too, that these "magnificent" results exclude the 30% or more of students that the Manhattan Institute estimates have dropped out of school before graduation.
 
What else is the NAEP telling us? All that "school reform" money poured into the government schools and the latest multi-culti curricula haven't done anything to improve the education of blacks, and especially the education of black boys. 
 
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
 
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.
 
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
 
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
 
The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress...In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.
 
The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html?_r=2&ref=us
 
 
 
AS THE TOP 40 DJ'S USED TO SAY:  
"AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING"
 
Well, perhaps in this case, the "hits" are more like the hits Sam Huff or Lawrence Taylor used to lay on NFL quarterbacks.
 
More bad news for our highly trained education professionals? Yes, the results of the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) were recently released.
 
In math, 15 year-old students from 34 economically advanced countries took the test, and American students ranked 25th. In science American students ranked 17th.  http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/

 
AND NOW FOR THE REALLY BAD NEWS FROM PISA FOR THE "OUR SCHOOLS ARE DIFFERENT" CROWD:  
 
America's best students did worse than the best students from other countries, and the U.S. has more students than other developed countries performing at the lowest level according to ACHIEVE, a non-profit education reform organization.
http://www.achieve.org/pisa-results-demonstrate-importance-college-and-career-ready-agenda-all-us-students
 
As you look at the science and math scores, bear in mind that these are 15 year-olds, which means that most of them haven't really started a serious science curriculum, e.g. physics and chemistry. Why does this matter for understanding what is really happening?
 
Math is at the core of high school level science courses. The TIMSS has demonstrated that the longer a student is in government schools, the worse he does in math and science in relation to his international peers.
 
Consequently, PISA doesn't really reflect the end-game for achievement in science or math. Because American students perform very poorly in math, by 12th grade their science achievement in relation to other developed countries will drop significantly. The TIMSS has shown this in the past.
 
What does this mean in practical terms? When they reach 12th grade, the students who participated in PISA will probably be adept at discussing various methods of recycling, but lost when it comes to figuring out the rate of acceleration of a falling object.
 
One final comment on PISA: Shanghai posted by far the highest scores on the test. Don't believe it. The Mainland government is cooking the results to gain face in relation to Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Macau. An honest appraisal of the students in Shanghai would probably show strong performance, but the results would very likely be below Hong Kong.
 
 
THE COLLAPSE HAS COME TO DETROIT
(the collapse of the government school system, that is) 
 
 
 
Here is an article for the "school reformers" that discusses in some detail many of the factors that render government schools unreformable. Not surprisingly, the unions play a starring role.
 
In any event, the quite competent turn-around specialist, Mr. Bob Bobb, has thrown in the towel on his efforts to save the Detroit Public School System. Here is why:
 
A "multidimensional" crisis that's been unfolding for decades may finally be coming to a head in the Detroit Public Schools: The district is virtually bankrupt, the schools are unsafe and they generate the worst student achievement results in the nation. And now, Robert Bobb, the governor-appointed emergency financial manager, is waving the white flag, asking the state to borrow against future revenues to bail out the district. Doing so would be unfortunate for both students and state taxpayers.
 
The district is rife with dysfunctions — administrative mismanagement, rampant corruption and an inept school board, to name a few. But perhaps the worst is a suffocating collective bargaining contract and recalcitrant union leadership that prevent the district from taking advantage of what few resources it still has.
 
This is exemplified by a current issue related to substitute teachers. Apparently, the district had been using some of them to do something not explicitly permitted by the union contract: instruct students. To pressure the district to increase the pay of unionized substitutes, Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, issued a command for them to stop developing lesson plans, grading assignments, recording grades or attending parent-teacher conferences.
 
In his marching orders Johnson actually acknowledged that his tactic contradicts the district's primary purpose: "I truly regret the necessity to take this action because it is not in the best interest of our students."
 
The union boss has provided an excellent example of something Robert Bobb has often noted, that too often the district is run for the benefit of the adults, not the children it's supposed to educate.
 
This example of union obstructionism is hardly unique. The DFT vehemently opposed the creation of new public charter schools in the city and the use of high-quality teachers available through the "Teach for America" program.
 
Given all these dysfunctions, Bobb's capitulation on the fiscal front is understandable. Practically every reform he's tried has run into an iron wall erected by the union, armed with a 150-page contract that covers every action by every employee from "Art Therapists" to "Transition Specialists."
 
True, this contract was negotiated and signed by Bobb and the district management, so they are partially responsible. However, they did so hobbled by a state labor law that grossly tilts the negotiating table in ways that benefit unions, and an Emergency Financial Management statute that fails to give managers the authority they really need.
 
Under current state law, Robert Bobb does not have the authority to void these contracts and negotiate reasonable ones. Until that changes, no one should expect any real improvement in Detroit schools. That's unfortunate, because it leaves just one entity that does have such power, and — absent irresponsible state borrowing to keep the wreck rolling for a couple more years — may soon have an opportunity to exercise it: A federal bankruptcy court.
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/14026
 
 
EDUCATION IS NEVER NEUTRAL
 
The effort made by Christian parents to ignore the fact that government schools are parochial schools for secular humanism never ceases to amaze The Continuing Collapse. Moreover, if our highly trained education professionals give some program with an obvious political and social agenda an impressive sounding name and tell parents that it is "world class" and will make their children wizards of smart, most parents will go for it like a big mouth bass hitting a spinner.
 
Here we have a story in which at least a few parents have figured out that the latest curricular innovation, the International Baccalaureate program, has an agenda.
 
NEW YORK, November 18 (C-FAM) A sign nailed to a tree trunk in a family's front yard reads, "NO IB, Stop Wasting Money, Keep the UN Out of Our Schools."  Across the Arizona town, a school board member criticizes a curriculum she says surrenders local control to a foreign organization that promotes world government.
 
The debate means one American community has awakened to the International Baccalaureate, a study program quietly embraced by nearly 1,000 U.S. campuses and 139 countries worldwide.  While found mostly in public high schools, the curriculum has touched middle and elementary schools, and even a number of Catholic schools.
 
"IB is the biggest educational scam perpetrated on American schools today," says Lisa McLoughlin, a Long Island mother and leading critic.  She says schools shouldn't spend tax dollars on the program...
 
"IB students learn diversity, multiculturalism, and international-mindedness, but can they do math?  Do they learn grammar?  Can they write a paper?" says McLoughlin.  
 
The IB comes from a non-profit educational foundation of the same name founded in Switzerland in 1968....
   
The baccalaureate foundation maintains close ties to the UN through its cultural and education agency, UNESCO.  It regularly participates in UNESCO meetings and comments on its proposals in education.  UNESCO still funds some IB projects, as does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
 
Despite its direct relationship with the UN, IB denies any UN influence on its curriculum.
 
But critics say IB is anti-American, undermines national sovereignty, and promotes radical environmentalism.  Until recently, IB endorsed the Earth Charter, which supports population control and socialism...  
 
Some also criticize IB's non-traditional curriculum and lack of transparency.  To discover the actual curriculum, outsiders must buy course guides from the foundation itself.  But even then the course guides are vague, McLoughlin says.  (See her website, www.truthaboutib.com) 
 
She says IB promotes moral relativism and undermines familial values.  An IB director, for example, said in a speech that questions about ethical obligations, human rights, beliefs, and moral responsibility have "no right or wrong answers." 
 
A document on IB's website contains a curriculum model that emphasizes "Sharing the planet."  It promotes world citizenship, and says students need a greater understanding of internationalism because of the "prevalence of discrimination, racism in all its forms . . . and environmental destruction." 
 
Whatever its official relationship to the UN, the IB's personal ties run deep. The foundation's chair is Carol Bellamy, who formerly led the United Nation's Children's Fund.  During her tenure, UNICEF promoted abortion rights, sex ed for children that encouraged promiscuity, and a radical feminist agenda... 
http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1737/pub_detail.asp
 
And then, we have our purely home grown leftist curriculum being smuggled into classrooms by our highly trained education professionals.  
 
Public school children are innocent victims of a radical "guerrilla warfare" being waged by the late professor Howard Zinn's Zinn Education Project (ZEP), Rethinking Schools Magazine, and Teaching for Change. ..
 
These anti-establishment educators' mission includes curriculum-subversion in order to radically transform schools into centers of social justice wherein  students are trained to become global citizen change agents. 
Perpetuating Zinn's revolutionary mission, his surviving business partners proclaimed: 

Howard Zinn, in honor of the marvelous victory of your life, we will act in defiance of all that is bad around us and attempt to spin the world towards justice. 
With the national spotlight on History Channel's "The People Speak" and its ZEP curriculum — parents, teachers, school boards and administrators should beware of the celebrity-opiate being dealt to their schoolchildren by way of Zinn-doctrination…
 
On Jan. 19, 2010, Harper Perennial Publications (HPP) and ZEP presented "Ask Howard: A Conversation with Howard Zinn on Teaching 'A People's History of the United States'" on Blog Talk Radio...
 
During the broadcast: 
• Professor Zinn explicitly advised teachers: "Don't obey the rules… you have to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the establishment in which you try not to be fired… You have to depart from the curriculum… outside the lines that are set for us by the school administration, or the politicians." 
 
• Dr. Bigelow confirmed that ZEP's materials have been smuggled into classrooms throughout the country by teachers who astro-turf Zinn's "guerrilla warfare with the establishment." 
 
• Dr. Bigelow boasted: "Whether or not ZEP materials have been adopted by school districts formally or anything like that, we're not even going that route. We're going for a more grassroots approach."
 
• Prof. Zinn mocked as "antiquated thinking" the professionalism of teachers who comply with state Education Codes. He advocated his teachers "win over" peers to either look the other way, or join ZEP 'guerrilla warfare' against established, lawful curriculums.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/abaldwin/2010/02/03/howard-zinns-legacy-instructing-teachers-to-disobey-education-codes/
 
As you can see, many of our highly trained professionals are quite willing to ignore the law to advance their worldview. Most Christian parents and our ostensible Christian leaders and pastors, on the other hand, are unwilling to do WHAT IS LAWFUL to protect our children, families, churches, and culture from the agenda of the government education establishment. That is the power of the addiction to the middle-class welfare entitlement called "free public education."
 
HOW BAD IS IT?
TCC IS GLAD YOU ASKED.
 
Of course, those reluctant to admit that government schools are intellectually crippling our children sometimes try to argue that test scores and curricula don't necessarily (a weasel word, if ever there was one) translate into inferior "real world" performance.
 
Let us leave aside the rather elementary question of how students who can't read or do math proficiently are supposed to magically transcend these difficiencies and perform at reasonable levels merely by virtue of leaving school. Instead, let us attend to the "real world" findings of an employer that does not have unrealistically high standards: the U.S. military. From Bruce Deitrick Price:
 
 
Recently, a retired general wrote an article in the local paper that started this way: "Is our troubled educational system posing a threat to our national security? The Defense Department estimates that a shocking 75 percent of young Americans are not able to join the military --and one of the leading reasons is poor education."
 
His solution was that everyone should support the new Core Standards proposed by the Education Establishment.
 
But isn't it obvious that these are the same people responsible, in the first place, for rendering the majority of young Americans educationally unfit for military service? Why would we trust them?
 
Four years ago, another general published an article in the same paper, where he lamented the poor quality of the young people coming into the military. To be blunt, these recruits were largely ignorant and nearly illiterate; the military could hardly use them. The general optimistically explained his solution: the Army would establish a remedial Academy to compensate for the poor job done by the public schools.
 
I wasn't optimistic. I was sure that, to set up his Academy, the general would consult with so-called experts from Harvard and Teachers College (that is, high members of the Education Establishment, the very same people who created the mess in the first place). Even if they had the ability to help the general, would they? After all, any improvement among these recruits would put the public schools in even worse light.
 
Now consider this news story: "Army Basic-Skills Program Said Failing.
Washington--A five-year-old remedial-education program for Army recruits has largely failed to help soldiers improve their basic skills in reading and mathematics, and it has inadequately linked basic-skills objectives to job performance in the Army, according to a report by the General Accounting Office."
 
This report appeared in Education Week more than -- are you ready? -- 25 years ago! (This was roughly the same time when the Nation at Risk report famously concluded that our public schools seem to have been designed by a "hostile foreign power.")
 
Doesn't everyone see the pattern? No improvement ever occurs.
The Education Establishment has created mediocre public schools; and we are supposed to accept that. My analysis is that these elite educators got sidetracked by ideological (read: collectivist) considerations. What these people care about is social engineering. They don't know how to run good schools because it's not something they value. If you ask them for help in setting up remedial programs, they won't do a good job. If you ask them for help in writing new Standards, they won't do a good job. When did they ever do a good job? All of their innovations, all of their much-touted theories and methods, turn out to be counterproductive. (For education, that is. For social engineering, they work just fine.)...
http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/Memo-to-PENTAGON--Subject-EDUCATION--Status-HIGHEST.aspx
 
 
Does the military's discontent with the results of expensively institutionalizing children in government schools convince you that educational malpractice by our highly trained education professionals is producing ugly "real world" consequences?
If not, below we have a mother asking a fundamental question, shockingly, in a fashionably liberal magazine. Unfortunately, she fails to realize that if her high school son isn't reading in his A.P English class and doesn't know the days of the week it is less a "media" problem than a problem of the ideology of those she allowed to control her son's education. Pay close attention to her colloquy with education professors.
Is It Just Us, Or Are Kids Getting Really Stupid?
They don't read. They can't spell. They spend all their time playing computer games and texting and hanging out with one another on Facebook. But the problem is much worse than you think, because the way your kids live now is rewiring their brains...
 
Two autumns ago, in my son Jake's junior year of high school, he took an AP English course. Junior year was bad for him and me — we never seemed to have anything nice to say to one another. But Jake did like to read, and it occurred to me at some point that perhaps I could use his AP English course to connect with him. Surely I'd read the same books he was reading, since the high-school reading list was carved in stone sometime in the early 1950s. So I asked him: What are you reading in AP English?
 
"The Great Gatsby," he said.
 
"Do you … like it?" I asked delicately, thrilled to be having what was almost a conversation with my teenage son.
 
"I don't really like the actor who plays Gatsby," he said. "He's got these weird bumps on his face that keep distracting me."
 
"The actor?"
 
"We're not actually reading the book," Jake informed me. "We haven't read a book all semester. We watch the movies instead."...
 
Reading and writing scores both fell on the 2008 SATs. Not long ago, a high-school teacher in California handed out an assignment that required students to use a ruler — and discovered not a single one of them knew how....
 
Kids today are assailed by such a constant stream of input that they can't even remember what they see. Viewers of TV screens crowded with crawls and graphics are significantly less able to recall the facts of news stories than viewers of simpler screens. "The larger the cognitive load, the harder it is to process information to any depth," says Chatterjee. Our brains need time to mull over what's presented to us, to decide what's worth shifting from short-term memory into long-term storage. We may have an infinite amount of information at our fingertips, Chatterjee says, but "we don't actually ingest that information in such a way that it gets deeply encoded." And that explains why my son doesn't know the days of the week. (N.B. You would have to be delusional to believe that "media" is the reason. Perhaps it makes her feel better.)

Call me old-fashioned, but the fact that he doesn't concerns me. There are certain things my kid — any kid — should know by the time he's a high-school grad — that Wednesday follows Tuesday, and his nine-times tables, say. 
 
Now, two of the highly trained education professionals who train teachers and teachers of teachers explain to our liberal suburban mother why she shouldn't be concerned that her AP course taking, high school graduate son doesn't know the days of the week. In the process these paragons of pedagogy reveal that they view the mission of the government schools as political - as in, inculcating in students the worldview of the education establishment.
 
 ELLIOT WEINBAUM, a professor at Penn's Graduate School of Education, thinks I'm worrying unnecessarily. "Is your son's school on a six-day calendar?" he asks, as we sit at a table in a conference room with a handful of his colleagues, munching sandwiches and chips. 

I look at him in surprise. As a matter of fact, it is. Weinbaum shrugs. "He doesn't know the days of the week because he doesn't need to know them," he says matter-of-factly. "What he needs to know is, is it day two or day three?"...
 
"Adults have always been afraid of their culture being lost," Penn's Sharon Ravitch declares. "Okay, so classical music may be lost, but what about the broader array of music I'm exposed to? We fear we're losing the moral base. But the postmodern view is that the moral base didn't resonate with a lot of kids. We have this mythological notion of what people used to know, but that's male, white, Western-based knowledge. What is teaching? What is learning? What is the political basis of schools?"...
 http://www.phillymag.com/articles/feature_is_it_just_us_or_are_kids_getting_really_stupid/page1

By the way, for the "our schools are different crowd", try to bear in mind that the son in question is not attending one of the horror-show  inner-city public schools in Philadelphia. 
 
 
 
 So, You Have Your Child in a Government School
and You Think You are a Responsible Parent....

 
Suppose The Continuing Collapse came to you and told you to send your child to TCC's really swell day camp. Of course, you would be told that TCC may or may not vet its counselors carefully or maintain safe facilities. Moreover, TCC would also tell you that because TCC has friends in high places there is almost no way you could hold TCC's camp liable if something dreadful happens to your child.
 
Even if TCC's camp were free, you would probably not-so-politely decline TCC's offer. Yet, any parent rendering his child to a "public school" really has no basis for declining TCC's invitation. 
 
Do you doubt TCC? Here is a story in which the parents discovered too late that government schools, like TCC's camp, are "above" being responsible.
 
 
A 14-year-old boy who allegedly was sexually molested by a female guidance counselor can't sue his school even if it was negligent in hiring and supervising her, a state appeals court has ruled.
 
Friday's decision by the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles might surprise parents who have been assured that schools are legally responsible for their kids' safety.
 
But it's only a step beyond the state Supreme Court's 1989 ruling that threw out a suit against the Oakland Unified School District by a junior high student who said his teacher molested him during a school-sponsored work session at the teacher's apartment.
 
The school isn't responsible for the teacher's conduct, the court said back then, because what he did was so far outside the scope of his job. In last week's ruling, the appeals court said there's no state law under which the youngster could sue the school district either for the counselor's misconduct or for the district's alleged failure to prevent it.
 
The youth, identified as C.A., claimed the counselor at Golden Valley High School in Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County) sexually harassed and molested him many times between January and September 2007. She met with him in her office with the door closed, drove him in her car and had him perform various sexual acts on her at her home, his suit said.
 
The suit also claimed that the William S. Hart High School District knew the counselor had done similar things with other minors, should have seen what was happening to C.A., and should be held responsible for failing to take reasonable steps to protect the student.
The suit was filed four months after the same counselor, Roselyn Hubbell, was arrested at a motel with another youth. She pleaded no contest in February 2009 to a misdemeanor molestation charge and was placed on probation, according to the district attorney's office.
 
The school district put Hubbell on leave when the allegations surfaced. The district's lawyer in C.A.'s case, Stephen Harber, denied any negligence, saying Hubbell was "appropriately hired and appropriately supervised."
 
The appeals court, in a 2-1 ruling, said that was beside the point because no state law authorizes a damage claim against a school district for negligently hiring, supervising or training an employee...
 
"Kids have a mandatory duty to go to school," Finaldi said. "What this ruling says is that if they happen to be sexually abused by a teacher or counselor ... and they knew or should have known what was going on, you can't sue the school."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=76674#ixzz151PZ7Buf
 
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=76674&tsp=1

If you think that this is a problem only in California, check your state law and then get back to TCC.
 
 
 
 
That's a wrap for this edition of The Continuing Collapse. So, TCC bids you a fond adieu and asks you to:

REMEMBER:

 
1. Feel free to circulate The Continuing Collapse. 
 
2. If you aren't hearing about at least some these government school problems from your pastor, why is he your pastor?
 
3. FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS. 
 
"I had a motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political." (Aldous Huxley [evolutionist, leftist, and grandson of T.H. Huxley, known as "Darwin's bulldog"]: Ends and Means, pp. 270 ff. )