In the meantime, however, we’re seeing some hilariously Orwellian comments from the head of United Teachers Los Angeles. This is from the L.A. Times:

“This decision today is an attack on teachers, which is a socially acceptable way to attack children,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president-elect of the Los Angeles teachers union. Instead of providing for smaller classes or more counselors, “you attack teacher and student rights.”

Up is down, left is right, right is wrong, teachers=students.

Oh, my. George Orwell long ago predicted in his novel “1984” that political speech would become this outrageously manipulative — this baldly, weirdly dishonest.

George was right.

Remember, Alex Caputo-Pearl is the head of the United Teachers Los Angeles. This is the same CTA chapter that got the Los Angeles Unified School District to approve the rules that prevented Miramonte Elementary School teacher Mark Berndt from being immediately fired after evidence emerged that he had fed his students semen.

If attacking teachers is a way of attacking students, what is a teacher feeding semen to a student? A teacher who can’t immediately be fired for this? A teacher whom school district officials believe they can’t remove from the payroll unless they pay him $35,000 first?

If Alex Caputo-Pearl has a response, I’ll let everyone know.

Thirty years on, the 1984 Super Bowl best is remembered for Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial. It included references to Big Brother and Orwell’s “1984” novel, the repressive Soviet Union during a tense part of the Cold War and the approaching 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

But it mainly took aim at IBM, whose PC in 1981 had eclipsed the Apple II as the most popular personal computer. The commercial announced the Macintosh, the graphics-oriented PC that revolutionized computing, then and since.

The Mac ripped off technology developed by Xerox PARC. But Xerox by then was a lumbering, gigantic copier company that didn’t know what it had. And IBM was the global computing giant that seemed like a monolith.

IBM in the end itself couldn’t compete with such “IBM clone” competitors as Compaq and HP (since merged), Dell and others. IBM eventually sold its PC division to Lenovo, a company ironically in the land formerly run by top commie Mao Zedong, himself one of the biggest of the Big Brothers.

Big Big Brother

It also turned today the ultimate, Big Big Brother, with its “garden of pure ideology” and “information purification,” to quote the ad, ended up being the U.S. government.

And as in the novel “1984” and the “1984” Apple commercial, the U.S. government, as we learned last summer with the revelations about the NSA, spies on absolutely everything done by everybody. Ironically, its major snooping apparat is the very Internet that has done so much to free people’s thinking. The Fourth Amendment and privacy have been completely obliterated.

It’s also a little more than ironic that this occurred under the regime of President Obama, formerly a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. In his 2007 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” which I read, he even pledged to restore our civil rights after the depredations of the then regnant Bush administration.

Fortunately, unlike in “1984” the novel, the Internet now is so vast that Big Brother’s functionaries can’t keep track of every subversive thought. And it works both ways. The Internet lets us look back at Big Brother. To reuse a phrase I coined the other day:

“If the Government Abyss gazes long at you, you will gaze back at the Government Abyss.”

Our current politicians were youngsters before the age of social media. But that will change. We’ll be able to read Candidate X’s un-politically correct rantings in high school. And remember, what is P.C., by definition, changes by the year. So Candidate X, will discover that 15 years later he really was anti-P.C., and therefore will not be allowed to advance up the apparat ziggurat of Big Brother.

Won’t that be fun?

That’s why there’s great hope for the future. It’s why 2014 really didn’t turn out like “1984.”

“We shall prevail,” Big Brother proclaims in the TV ad. No they won’t.

Enjoy the Super Bowl.

It’s bad enough that Republicans, during the eight tyrannical years under Bush, imposed a police state on America. And that Democrats have continued and expanded it under Obama.

Now California Democrats, led by Big Brother Jerry, are perpetrating a new Orwellian assault on privacy:

The California Democratic Party unveiled a new tool in its kit of get-out-the-vote operations Monday: a first-of-its-kind Facebook application that sifts through a user’s friends list, matches it with the friends’ party registrations and voting histories and pops out a list people who vote Democratic but don’t regularly vote.

It then encourages users to tell their non-voting friends to cast a ballot Nov. 2….

With 15.4 million voting-age Facebookers in California, the party says the tool could be crucial to mobilizing hard-to-reach younger voters.

I’m registered “Decline to State,” but if some “friend” called me about my voting record, the budding fascist would get an earful.

Oct. 25, 2010