*** Readers know my position on our country’s teachers’ unions. They are the documented scourge to education and America’s youth. Now two more examples of these rotten organizations are making headlines in selected news media (forget the lamestream). In Louisiana the state’s second largest teachers’ union is suing the state for a new law that allows parents to use vouchers to send their children to functioning schools. Vowing to use ‘whatever means necessary’, the unions would rather see kids in perennially failing schools than having them being taught to read, write, and reckon by non-union teachers (more here).
In New York ‘Teachers Unions Go to Bat for Sexual Predators’ writes Campbell Brown. As long as the teachers faithfully pay their union dues, they enjoy a wink-wink and nod from the unions even if they explicitly solicit oral sex from their female students. It goes down from there. And yet the unions’ acolytes unabashedly argue (even on these pages) the absolute necessity for such organizations that have now destroyed two, going on three, generations of education for America’s young people.
*** I am a longtime witness to my Christian faith being whitewashed out of American culture. Unfortunately, my brethren in the comfort Christian community have no such worries or apprehensions. As long as their local social club pays its non-specific obeisances to the Lord, and does a modicum of good work in the community, then all is well. Theological pursuits are frowned upon as being a potential death knell to their dominant kumbayah philosophical underpinnings. Even more excluded are any considerations of the worldwide assault on Christianity.
Ben Cohen and Keith Roderick in the 30jul12 WSJ point out that over 100 million Christians worldwide live in extreme persecution by their ruling regimes and neighbors of other faiths. As Sharansky championed Soviet jewry and Mandela fought South African racism, so does Youcef Nadarkhani champion persecuted Christians from an Iranian jail cell where he is under a death sentence for apostasy. Sharansky and Mandela received constant support from the lamestream and friendly NGOs until they prevailed. Nadarkhani’s mission and plight are mentioned nowhere in the proceedings of the Vatican, national religious conferences, down to the Christian churches on the corner.
Today all faiths can be championed save Christianity. It is clear why the lamestream ignores Nadarkhani. But as their numbers understandably shrink, why do America’s Christians also turn their backs?
*** Finally, if you ever want to see what years of progressivism will do to a vibrant economy, well-educated workforce, and a productive society located in arguably the best geography available on God’s green earth, then look no further than our own California. RR has sought to alert its readers to the tragedy that is raining down on the once Golden State. The Left sees none of this, and keeps voting in politicians selected from a mind boggling cadre of the most ignorant and pernicious.
The tipping point among the state’s electorate was passed long ago. Today California is in the bag for all collectivist causes, and guaranteed to stay there by voters making up more than one third of the nation’s population on the dole. These people are undereducated beyond belief, and vote strictly on the basis of race or who promises them the biggest ice cream cone.
A more comprehensive description of the state’s downfall and status is given by Victor Davis Hanson in his 29jul12 piece ‘California: The Road Warrior is Here’. This is what awaits any population that accepts the precepts of socialism, and uses them to fashion public policies that punish individual effort and liberty. It is a must read for all who are still in doubt as to what has happened here in the last decades. (H/T to Russ Steele for beating me to this essay on his blog.)
Comment streams below my posts about other topics often develop threads about Second Amendment rights and, yes, gun control. This has been a hot thread the last few days in the comments under ‘Obama is a Self-Declared Marxist’. No doubt the recent murderous rampage in Aurora, Colorado has piqued the national interest in the topic.
In the blogosphere, where straight talk and unabashed opinions abound, the Left has again manned the ramparts of the state as the only legitimate seat of power, control, and violence. Its adherents dust off the age-old arguments that even precede progressivism in their provenance – the elite and their henchmen should be the only possessors of instruments of deadly force. Anyone from the lower castes having such possession is immediately suspect of planning mayhem or sedition.
In America the Left has adopted a flanking strategy on the Second Amendment, having tried and failed with a frontal assault as being too obvious. Perusing their nostrums for “preventing mass murders in the movies”, we read of all kinds of next baby steps toward disarming the American public. That the Colorado killer had amassed a few thousand rounds of ammo now immediately directs these sharp intellects toward slowing down the legal purchase of ammunition. It will not be surprising if the Left will introduce legislation making the ownership of more than so many rounds to be illegal. Never mind that not even a deranged mass murderer can use more than a miniscule fraction of such a stockpile for the most meticulously planned dastardly deed.
But such stores of ammunition among the public do present a clear and present danger to a tyrannical state. And therein lies the missed point of all the gun control discussions circling the notions of ‘what does he need a large capacity magazine for duck hunting, for target practice, for self protection, … ?’ or ‘… only drug cartels and other criminals require assault rifles for their dirty work, not law abiding citizens.’
One of the telltale signs that gives away a progressive is that he can’t give you a maximum tax share of your income. In his mind there is no end to the size of government, and therefore no end to the amount of the national wealth that it should appropriate.
And, of course, the more ‘services’ that the government assumes – e.g. single payer healthcare – the more it is everyone’s business what you do, because if you do it wrong, then the cost of your error burdens us all. Therefore, you should not be free to do all those things that can possibly go wrong. Oh yes, by tomorrow we will have discovered more things that you should not be able to do. And it only makes sense that we have to hire more people to consider all such things, and then even more people to make sure that you don’t do them and catch you if you do. And that all costs money, so how is it possible to say when your taxes are high enough?
Our Great Lying Divider-in-Chief has been calling for the ‘rich’ to pay their ‘fair share’, as he tells everyone that such people don’t play on a ‘level playing field by the same rules', and they pay less taxes than hardworking secretaries and factory hands. Their behavior is even more reprehensible since they claim to have started, built, and worked enterprises which were really the handy work of the masses under the benevolent guidance of an all-wise government. And the legions of local acolytes echo their Messiah’s message into every corner of this land - e.g. see friend Bob Crabb's contribution.
The lies are easy enough to refute with people who think and/or climb out of the muddy lamestream once in a while. The Congressional Budget Office makes the data in the nearby graphic freely available to anyone willing to take a break from class warfare. And Ari Fleischer has written an excellent short piece in the 23jul12 WSJ that fills in some historical data on what the ‘rich’ have been contributing to our national weal – ‘The Latest News on Tax Fairness’.
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 20 July 2012.]
The economy’s downward spiral goes on while the lamestream media continues to paper over the fiscal bombs that explode daily. The latest report is about the disastrous year that Calpers just finished in June. You recall that Calpers is the retirement fund manager for California’s public employees – it invests monies from local jurisdictions like cities and counties for their public service employee pensions. As the country’s biggest retirement fund manager, it is also one of the worst performing.
Right now it has $223B under management. Unfortunately this is still an estimated 55 to 80% underfunded. That, according to a Stanford study, is the amount that California’s taxpayers will have to make up, so that the retired government employees will get the monies that their unions negotiated for them with the help of some very ignorant and cooperative politicians who were supposed to represent the taxpayers.
With a nod and a wink from Sacramento, Calpers told us not to worry a couple of years ago in the depth of the recession. It claimed that its investments would earn 7.75% annually into the indefinite future, and that would make everything alright. Compare that insane number with interest paid by corporate and government bonds which were less than half that rate. The public demand for some reality in projecting future Calpers earnings caused their investment mavens to relent – they relented all the way down to using 7.5% to project future portfolio earnings.
You see, as the Enlightenment fades, so will its diamond shaped social structure – dominated by a large and vigorous middle class. That pattern fostered vibrancy and creativity, but also brittle flightiness. The kitschy culture and fickle habits that infested your forever-adolescent America. … That kind of social order is unstable. Too dependent on high levels of education, civility, confidence, and shared sense of purpose. As in ancient Athens and Florence, it’s simple to incite the bourgeoisie to bicker over trivial matters. Just get them overreacting to one exaggerated threat, while ignoring others. … As Plato taught, stable governance requires a broad base that narrows steeply to a small but superqualified ruling class, born and raised for leadership. The mode that postagricultural civilizations adopt, ninety-nine percent of the time. Even under so-called Soviet Communism, power soon consolidated in a few hundred families of the nomenklatura caste – a classic feudal society, despite all its superficial egalitarian rhetoric. [from a conversation in David Brin’s Existence (2012)]
George Rebane
Barack Hussein Obama now owns the title of being the most inexperienced, ineffective, secretive, ideological, and divisive leader America has had in the last hundred years, perhaps ever. He also promises to go forward as our most destructive President if the looming disasters - in defense, healthcare, entitlements, and taxes - of January 2013 come to pass. But let’s bring our focus to the here and now in how the man is conducting his desperate campaign for re-election.
• He does everything to avoid disclosing, discussing, and debating his record as President; all for the obvious reasons as outlined in these pages over his term of office. • He has revealed his talents for chronic and pathological lying about what his administration has done to alleviate this recession, and more recently to shift focus to a fabricated record of Romney at Bain and governing Massachusetts. Even the prestigious Annenberg Foundation (supports journalism education) has called out his lies. (see also 8aug12 update below) • He counts heavily on the independents and the ignorant to believe his economic theories which begin and end with the thesis that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior. But they do affect voting behavior, hence the reprise of keeping the Bush tax cuts for one year after the election. • He accepts responsibility for nothing, and takes credit for everything. • He legislates in the dark of night and in lame duck sessions laws that reveal themselves bit by piece for doing the opposite from the advertized. • He hides the congressionally requested records of his Justice Department, and rogue agencies like the EPA. • He hides his record and writings when he was teaching Constitutional law at Harvard. • He hides his scholastic records in toto – no one knows how he got into his schools and what he did during his academic years save some photos of him in high school doing drugs. • He continues to hide the records of his birth. Sheriff Arpaio’s investigation reveals that Hawaii’s Attorney General’s office even refuses “to verify that the PDF of Obama’s birth certificate released by the White House is in fact an exact copy of the document released to the President’s attorneys.” • He instead doubles down on Marxist rhetoric to claim that the nation’s creative entrepreneurs and private sector did not build their companies and create the wealth that continues to sustain America. It was all done by the broad based proletariat collective. • He is in every sense of the word our first post-American president who sees his presidency as a stepping stone to higher office.
And he is also the most beguiling politician to come along since Ronald Reagan charmed America. Except that Reagan charmed those who worked to build up the country, and Obama charms those who cannot consume the country fast enough.
Against this we have the Republicans’ Mitt Romney who appears to be running the most ineffective campaign since McGovern, and miraculously still continues to poll about even with Obama. Romney is not taking the battle to the ground that he can dominate, but is keeping to Obama’s back alleys where Romney has neither the experience nor the stomach for the fight.
Romney fashions further anchors for himself to drag around by not releasing his tax returns, thereby giving Obama even more ammunition to detract the emotionally challenged electorate with charges of ‘offshore investments’ and ‘Swiss bank accounts’. Romney should know that if there’s a ‘bomb’ in his tax records, he should detonate it sooner than later, especially if it’s big enough to blow him out of this election. There is no reasonable basis for holding it back, and every reason to release it and then demand reciprocity from Obama’s racist dirtbag Attorney General.
In a fight between a clever and beguiling weasel and an inept hare in the headlights, the weasel wins.
[8aug12 update] One of Obama's long time whoppers is his claim, here on video, that his father was a WW2 veteran. At under ten years of age, this would have made him one of the youngest soldiers in the conflict. Somehow the lamestream again missed that one. H/T to RR reader.
Since Obama opened his mouth during his 2008 candidacy, RR has maintained that the man is a Marxist. There is little surprise in that conclusion when we consider his grandparents, parents, school years, Chicago brethren, his own words, and deeds as President. But last Friday in Roanoke, VA he dispelled all residual doubt in a speech that laid it all out.
There Obama channeled one of his own fellow travelers and former administration officials, Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Communism’s Marxist basis admits no individual merit from individual enterprise. All success in pre-collective social orders is suspect, and attributed to the successful having become so on the backs of the oppressed people. The Marxists' constant theme is that government, as the organizer of the collective, makes every success possible, as opposed to the vision, tolerance for risk, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit of those who start and build businesses.
To the communist, businesses are rogue enterprises in society that must be absorbed into the collective as quickly as possible, and those that started and operated such businesses must be exposed for the pariahs they are and punished. We can see it all coming together in what Obama is now getting ready to loosen on the nation during his second term. From Obama’s speech last Friday –
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. (emphasis added, full text here, and a related comment below)
This is Lenin in the months before the Bolshevik revolution in 1918. Both leaders maintain it is classes of people, marshaled by a correct government, that are the engines of wealth creation. The enterprising individuals are the thieves and blood-suckers who claim the lion’s share of what they didn’t create and what never belonged to them.
WSJ’s Daniel Henninger recently wrote about Obama's newly revealing economics –
There is no theory anywhere in non-Marxist economics that says growth's primary engine is a social class. A middle class is the result of growth, not its cause. Barack Obama not only believes in class-based growth but has built his whole growth strategy around it. … One word appears nowhere in the 53-minute Obama speech on economic growth: "capital." Human, financial, whatever. Capital dare not speak its name. … Most revealing is that the phrases "my plan" and "I have a plan" appear 13 times. A central role for planning often appears in emerging, underdeveloped economies, not in an advanced economy like ours in which the discovery and diffusion of productive new ideas is spontaneous, rapid and unpredictable.
In The Road to Serfdom nobelist F.A. Hayek wrote of where such central planning has taken us in the past, and where it will take us in the future. (You can order an abridged version of this classic from the Heritage Foundation.)
But you may say that Obama is just one machine politician with no understanding of or experience in the private sector. However, what gives this Marxist his power is the 'dumbth' that pervades the land. Half of the electorate have no resources with which to critique his ideology, and see such statements as benign and possessing of a certain logic - the bitter fruits of a progressive public education.
[Re The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. Bullcrap!
The Internet was developed primarily through the work of multiple universities, private contractors, and government agencies here and overseas. What we call the Internet first came together as the ARPANET that was developed with DARPA funding to set up a rapid communication network among scientists and engineers working in academe, government, and private industry. The first ARPANET link was established between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute on 29 October 1969. Government had neither clue nor intent to commercialize any of this technology.
The Internet was effectively commercialized with advent of the Worldwide Web (WWW) in the mid-1990s, again through the mostly happenstance multi-national development efforts of academe, government agencies, and private enterprises. The WWW that we daily use resides on the Internet as a service based on such software innovations as hypertext protocols and the ubiquotous browser first developed at the University of Illinois. The successful commercialization of the Internet has been brought about by private enterprise, and has happened because of governments' absence, a 'shortcoming' which the Left has been trying to rectify ever since with various degrees of 'success'.]
[Addendum] H/T to RR reader.
[23jul12 update] Gordon Crovitz writing in 23jul12 WSJ has a more detailed report on the development of the Internet - 'Who Really Invented the Internet?'.
Last week my son-in-law sent me David Brin’s latest great sci-fi novel, Existence. I couldn’t help but immediately put it into my reading stack. Like most of you who frequent RR, I read several books concurrently, and Brin’s description of the state of the world in mid-century was something I had to know sooner than later. As a geo-politics, philosophy, and machine intelligence junkie, I was not disappointed as this page-turner immediately grabbed me.
I’m a third through the tome and hope to report more on it later. But Brin’s world of about 2050 is a very plausible one for those who have agreed with my prognostications here on RR, and those of George Friedman on Stratfor. America has fragmented into a loose federation of semi-sovereign states and regions that still calls itself United States. Global warming has caused the sea level to rise precipitously, apparently from the sudden loosening of massive ancient freshwater lakes underneath the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. And the social order is more stratified than ever with various “estates” of people having even a wider range of wealth, belief systems, and various affinities for technology.
The Singularity has not yet arrived, however robots and very intelligent machines dominate all areas of human activity. The web has multiplied into several levels of extremely broadband nets, and sensors are deployed everywhere, looking at and listening to everything. Everyone is plugged in through various implants and headgear that superimpose layers of information and data into the visual and aural fields as people go about their business. However, society is at a potential breaking point, having suffered several short but intensive global catastrophes and political calamities between now and then. There are layers of visible and corrupt invisible layers of power with the main contention being between the ultra-rich (trillionaires) and the religionists – one group seeking stability, the other a revolution to a new world order.
And then Earth is contacted by what is clearly an established galactic society.
[This is the submitted form of my regular Union column which was published in the newspaper’s 14jul12 print and online editions.]
Every morning we wake up to reports of yet more of Europe’s countries foundering on socialist shoals. Hollande, France’s new president, got into office by promising self-levitating growth, something he has no idea about how to accomplish beyond raising taxes and unfunded spending. And a few weeks after his election the stark reality is that France will already break its pledge to reduce deficits, and enter a new cycle of accelerating debt.
Readers may recall that France, along with Germany, were the main economic bulwarks against the falling dominoes of the European Union. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, …, all of them are being taken down by the unserviceable debts run up by the their socialist programs of wealth redistribution. They are now running out of wealth to redistribute, and the printing press beckons.
In America, our Washington progressives have long taught their acolytes that Europe and its profligate social policies are the answer to our own economic problems. But our problem is that we already redistribute so much wealth so poorly that our government borrows and encumbers our children with 40 cents of debt for every dollar it spends today. And the only solution being applied is more lies about spending and tax increases.
The biggest lie came wrapped in Obamacare (aka the cynically named Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, PPACA). Obamacare itself was forged secretly and passed in the dark of night by Democrats who had not read the bill. Their leaders’ response to the national protest was that Obamacare would reveal the power and glory of socializing healthcare after the bill became law. In a statement inaugurating Congress’ new and fundamentally transformed process of legislation, House Speaker Pelosi informed us that it was only after passage that we would find out all the new stuff that had been written into it.
Well folks, Scranton’s bankruptcy may have been the cognitive tipping point for the nation, but because of the lamestream cover-up we can’t be certain. Following yesterday’s announcement by San Bernardino, the Pennsylvania city is now the 12th municipality filing Chapter 9, with 27 more jurisdictions standing in line to be next. And the cause of these financial calamities is the same – paying for public service pensions has broken the back of every one of them.
RR has reported on and predicted this trail of tears for the last five years when Mike McDaniel and I co-authored an SESF position paper alerting Nevada County to the problem and putting it into a national context. The Board of Supervisors gave us a polite listen and then dismissed the matter with a papered over version that everything was going well behind the curtain. Now we know that our unfunded pension liabilities are over $119M, and that is computed with a la-la land discount rate. During the entire time the local leftie chorus has denied that public service pensions would cause any fiscal failures, and that its reporting was all a rightwing scare tactic in their overall policy promoting the ideas of fiscal responsibility and smaller government. Where are those useful idiots now?
Before returning to how to handle these national disasters, let’s take a look at America’s tax situation. Obama, in his eternal avoidance of his track record on the economy, is now shifting focus to tax fairness. In his opening round, he has thrown out a placebo by urging Congress to exempt households earning less than $250K from the planned ‘Taxmageddon’ scheduled to hit next January. And he’s going to exempt them for a full year – my, my! – before he shoves it to them in 2014. BTW, don’t think he’s exempting them from all the other tax increases that will be popping out like corks out of champagne bottles next New Year’s Day. What a guy!
Obama’s big message of the week has been ‘tax fairness’, and that the ‘rich’ are still not paying their fair share. So what are the so-called rich paying now, and what should they pay? Look at the table below.
In this sector of RR we dedicate our efforts to the eternal pursuit and understanding of the liberal mind. Awakened this morning by NPR’s segment on the November election, and Obama’s strategy for victory, jogged a stream of thought that may shed light on another important aspect of how our ideological opposites cope with the realworld. That radio segment with correspondents Mara Liasson and Cokie Roberts emphasized that Obama’s electoral fate will depend on the vote of the Hispanics and blacks, and that today only 10% of the electorate remains uncommitted.
I’ll come back to this report in a moment, but first let me offer the latest proposition to 'The Liberal Mind' – liberals don’t do well with conditional contingencies. Specifically, most left-leaning (and those already toppled) thinkers seem to have a cognitive block differentiating between the likelihood (probability) of X being true, given that Y is true; and the likelihood (probability) Y being true, given that X is true. In shorthand these probabilities are written P(X|Y) and P(Y|X) respectively. And the conundrum that liberals, in the aggregate, suffer from is that they believe P(X|Y) = P(Y|X). The comment streams on these pages are full of propositions, counters, arguments, and observations by our liberal readers that attest to this assertion. Moreover, the media ‘airwaves’ covering our public forum debates contribute a daily torrent of supporting evidence based on that erroneous equality.
[I fear that this posting will be of little interest to most RR readers. It is memorialized here as part of my personal record of thought that I am willing to share with those few whose interest might be piqued by such subjects.]
Religions in general and Christianity in particular are suffering an assault of reason that has reached a zenith through the ascendancy and promulgation of secular humanism (q.v.) that is now touted as the all-explaining worldview held by the educated in every land. Christianity has been on the wane in developed countries – in Europe it is mostly extinct as a belief system – enjoying gains only among the pre-educated in less developed nations. Staying its current course, Christianity may expect a similar fate in those countries when they too become developed.
In my extended study of this phenomenon, the fundamental reason for the retreat of Christianity is that its adherents and protagonists continue to teach the faith through promotion of tenets that are easily rejected in this age of accessible mega-information. What is taught from the pulpit on Sunday does not match the encountered reality during the rest of the week. And when the supplicants and/or prospects present these dichotomies to Christianity’s purveyors, their counter to reason is ‘You must believe more strongly in the teachings, and then your questions and questioning will disappear.’
Most people answer that they don’t want to become a person in whom such patently reasonable inquiries are no longer possible. They see it as undergoing a form of intellectual lobotomy, which, at a minimum, will destroy the salutary parts of the image they have of themselves. And they turn away, proclaiming to other potential seekers the details of their frustrated attempts to understand.
As some previous posts have revealed, I am among those Christians who hold that Christianity is a most plausible and simple system (see Occam) of belief, one that lays the intellectual foundation for our cosmology and provides the most satisfying answers to the deepest teleological questions (the whys) about our existence and fate. One can even argue that there exist perspectives from which Christianity is falsifiable. However, such arguments cannot be made from what we may label as the commonly taught ‘everyday Christianity’.
To all this, I believe, there is a powerful yet little known alternative interpretation that can lay to rest the standard litany of doubts about the scriptural history and expression of the faith. One of the most compelling conundrums for the questioning seeker can be summarized by, 'Does God Watch Paint Dry?'. This is the title of a little apology I have composed for those who would still like to discover whether for them Christianity can serve as an illuminated path between intellect and faith. Perhaps it will be of help.
Reading this morning’s Union I couldn’t help but notice the front page piece (paywalled here) on Sierra Roots and the Common Ground Homeless Garden. The project is the handiwork of former Nevada City mayor Reinette Senum. Its objective is to help down and out people in the county to have “a safe place for some of Nevada County’s homeless people, especially veterans, to sleep, grow food, hone skills and learn about healthy living while receiving guidance and resources to rebuild their lives.”
Reinette told me about her idea for launching this project almost two years ago over coffee. And this morning’s report is testimony for her having stuck with the project and getting it out the gate. The Union piece is a little scattered on the progress and benefits generated to date, but the overall sense one gets is that things are on their way toward the outlined objective. I want to congratulate Reinette in her persistence and for her hard work. This beats some of her other attempts at getting enterprises like community banking into our county.
My only lingering concern is that she has a solid plan forward for Sierra Roots that outlines realistic operations and long-lasting sources of cash, whether from government, charity, private donors, and/or generated revenues. The project will have legs only if early on it is recognized for what it is. In any event, no one wants to see Sierra Roots become an attractant for the homeless, drawing more indigents from far and wide with promises of a lifestyle that cannot be delivered.
In the past Reinette has described this enterprise as becoming a going concern that will raise and sell its produce locally at prices which provide a “living wage” to the people who will live and work there. I’m not sure what set of numbers will demonstrate that level of agricultural production in Nevada County, but starting out with county funded commuting for bringing in day labor doesn’t speak well for sustainability.
In any case, these are hopefully temporary accommodations that will be worked out. Reinette is an energetic, good-hearted, and dedicated woman who has demonstrated her ability to inspire people to launch into many kinds of community projects. Let’s wish her every success as she goes on to build Sierra Roots into what we all would like to see as a movable feast that can be replicated in other places to give a hand up for the country’s homeless.
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 6 July 2012.]
The amount of federal student loans outstanding today stands at over one trillion dollars – that’s with twelve zeros, or a million million. And yet we keep pouring taxpayer money into government programs operating under the wrongheaded philosophy that everyone with a college education is automatically on track to have a better economic future, achieve the American Dream, and contribute needed skills to society. The truth is far from this commonly purveyed propaganda.
Those who have studied the federal government’s efforts in designing and funding educational and training programs know that this record is dismal in all areas save one – and that is military training and the GI bill. The educational and training programs of the US military are still unmatched in the world. However, there are ongoing progressive efforts to bring that quality into line with what has long been wreaked on our civilian population. For an overview of that damage, one need only read the studies done by the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. (also see Addendum)
But tonight I want to talk about the latest area of federal blundering in education – the student loan programs. First and foremost to keep in mind is that decades of increased spending on education have yet to show any significant increase in student performance. With this reminder I want to bring to your attention some unintended consequences of the federal student aid programs that were recently presented by Professor Richard Vedder in a talk at Hillsdale College. Vedder is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
There’s plenty of reason for celebrating the pretty good likelihood that the Higgs boson has finally been observed by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. That massive boson fills in a long-empty part of our understanding how the universe is composed and works. To be sure, there is a lot more work to be done on the Standard Model in which the Higgs has a dominant place – for example, the model is silent on a pretty important force field we know as gravity. But as a junior physicist and philosopher, I have trouble with the entire Standard Model and have continued to grumble about it for years. Why? Because it’s not pretty, and Nature (or God’s handiwork) in its elements and fundamentals ought to be pretty.
The SM is a hodgepodge of sub-nucleonic particles with a hodgepodge of properties described by a hodgepodge of numbers. It is not elegant in any mathematical or esthetic sense of the word. And the anticipated extension to the SM is the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) which piles on to the hodgepodge more particles with more numbers. The SM and MSSM remind one of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, full of ad hoc epicycles upon epicycles. I am among the philistines who would feel much better about the direction of enquiry if the path via a Grand Unification Theory on the way to the Theory of Everything took us through ever simpler and elegant models and their related mathematics that would be something akin to Maxwell’s equations, or Einstein’s field equation, or quantum’s Schrödinger equation, or … . (grumble, mumble, smurglemurf!).
On this most important and meaningful of our national holidays, I am reminded of the liberties, now gone, that we had last year at this time, and those we will no longer have when we next hang the annual bunting on our porch railing. Perhaps we can spend some moments in meditation on these words –
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the constant approval of their own conscience. (Anonymous)
The 'Liberal Mind' segment of RR is dedicated to the analysis and illustration of how fundamentally different are the highways and byways of reason in the liberal (progressive) mind that give rise to their heartfelt and fervent efforts to create what to the rest of us often seems like a perverted and insane world. In these pages we have another confirmation of this which is so clear and compelling that it needs its own posting.
I began ‘Ruminations – 29jun12’ with a segment on another instance in which the Left seeks to summarily shut down and eliminate media voices with which it cannot compete in ideas and new reporting. Specifically, I reported on the latest of longstanding efforts by the Soros funded Media Matters to shut down Fox News, a media channel that has eaten alive the competing left-leaning lamestream outlets in news and commentary offerings. I argue that such tactics are totally asymmetrical from the polarized political poles.
The gauntlet, to revealingly argue the other side, has most prominently been picked up by Mr Steven Frisch, a long-time reader and welcome (when being civil) antagonist of RR. Mr Frisch is CEO of the Sierra Business Council, and is also a leading regional progressive intellectual and apologist for collectivist causes who has repeatedly denied any such biases and resents leftwing appellations as "name calling". Its name notwithstanding, SBC is a regional NGO that promotes liberal policies and is funded by public and foundation grant monies.
The following comment stream from the cited Ruminations post is repeated here in my continued effort to illuminate the liberal mindset. An unfortunate artifact of the progressive debate on these issues is the progressive penchant for reducing the arguments to the address and critique of specific individuals. Their ability to generalize and to embrace an ideological issue per se is often limited. The exchange in the relevant comment thread follows -
Ruminations – 30jul12
George Rebane
*** Readers know my position on our country’s teachers’ unions. They are the documented scourge to education and America’s youth. Now two more examples of these rotten organizations are making headlines in selected news media (forget the lamestream). In Louisiana the state’s second largest teachers’ union is suing the state for a new law that allows parents to use vouchers to send their children to functioning schools. Vowing to use ‘whatever means necessary’, the unions would rather see kids in perennially failing schools than having them being taught to read, write, and reckon by non-union teachers (more here).
In New York ‘Teachers Unions Go to Bat for Sexual Predators’ writes Campbell Brown. As long as the teachers faithfully pay their union dues, they enjoy a wink-wink and nod from the unions even if they explicitly solicit oral sex from their female students. It goes down from there. And yet the unions’ acolytes unabashedly argue (even on these pages) the absolute necessity for such organizations that have now destroyed two, going on three, generations of education for America’s young people.
*** I am a longtime witness to my Christian faith being whitewashed out of American culture. Unfortunately, my brethren in the comfort Christian community have no such worries or apprehensions. As long as their local social club pays its non-specific obeisances to the Lord, and does a modicum of good work in the community, then all is well. Theological pursuits are frowned upon as being a potential death knell to their dominant kumbayah philosophical underpinnings. Even more excluded are any considerations of the worldwide assault on Christianity.
Ben Cohen and Keith Roderick in the 30jul12 WSJ point out that over 100 million Christians worldwide live in extreme persecution by their ruling regimes and neighbors of other faiths. As Sharansky championed Soviet jewry and Mandela fought South African racism, so does Youcef Nadarkhani champion persecuted Christians from an Iranian jail cell where he is under a death sentence for apostasy. Sharansky and Mandela received constant support from the lamestream and friendly NGOs until they prevailed. Nadarkhani’s mission and plight are mentioned nowhere in the proceedings of the Vatican, national religious conferences, down to the Christian churches on the corner.
Today all faiths can be championed save Christianity. It is clear why the lamestream ignores Nadarkhani. But as their numbers understandably shrink, why do America’s Christians also turn their backs?
*** Finally, if you ever want to see what years of progressivism will do to a vibrant economy, well-educated workforce, and a productive society located in arguably the best geography available on God’s green earth, then look no further than our own California. RR has sought to alert its readers to the tragedy that is raining down on the once Golden State. The Left sees none of this, and keeps voting in politicians selected from a mind boggling cadre of the most ignorant and pernicious.
The tipping point among the state’s electorate was passed long ago. Today California is in the bag for all collectivist causes, and guaranteed to stay there by voters making up more than one third of the nation’s population on the dole. These people are undereducated beyond belief, and vote strictly on the basis of race or who promises them the biggest ice cream cone.
A more comprehensive description of the state’s downfall and status is given by Victor Davis Hanson in his 29jul12 piece ‘California: The Road Warrior is Here’. This is what awaits any population that accepts the precepts of socialism, and uses them to fashion public policies that punish individual effort and liberty. It is a must read for all who are still in doubt as to what has happened here in the last decades. (H/T to Russ Steele for beating me to this essay on his blog.)
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