Saturday, May 4, 2013

Current Events - May 4, 2013

How can President Obama speak about guns in Mexico with a straight face?
President Obama's Mexico trip has just taken a turn for the bizarre.This is what President Obama told Mexicans:

"...I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people. That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States. It's the right thing to do,...."  (RCP)

First, the Obama administration put 2,000 high powered weapons in the hands of Mexican cartels.  Did President Obama forget about that little tragic episode from his first term?  We hear that 200-plus Mexicans were killed by these weapons.  Why didn't President Obama apologize to the soldiers' families? Or the widows? Or the orphans?


Second, cartel leaders, or criminals in the US, will continue to have guns because outlaws always do.  Can someone remind President Obama of what is happening in Chicago? President Obama's hometown has very strict gun laws but Juarez is Disneyland compared to the killings in Chicago!


Third, all of these guns are already outlawed in Mexico and in the US. 


How do you say "The Twilight Zone" in Spanish?  I think that it's "La dimension desconocidad," i.e. the unknown dimension literally.


There is a "gun problem' and lots of cartel violence in Mexico.  However, it is one of those "perfect storm" problems that won't get fixed with a "hope and change" speech before university students.

Indeed, many guns come from the US.  They also come in from Central America.They come in because very "liquid" cartels buy weapons in a very big international gun black market.They come in because of corruption in Mexico. They come in because Mexico does not do a better job of protecting the southbound traffic on the border.

And 2,000 high powered weapons came in because of "Fast & Furious."

Honestly, there is one thing that we could do to curtail the cartel violence in Mexico: Stop consuming so many illegal drugs!  We are putting billions of dollars in the pockets of cartels by consuming these drugs.

The cartels will always have guns as long as we keep filling their pockets with cash.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/how_can_president_obama_speak_about_guns_in_mexico_with_a_straight_face.html#ixzz2SMzQSC9j

The Long, Racist History of Gun Control in America

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape.

Today, knowledge remains elusive to so many because the media does not allow for facts that run contrary to the narratives they favor. Nowhere is this more evident than in the narratives concerning gun control. Though our supposed betters in the media see no reason to share this with the American public, gun control, a sanitized term for the systemic restriction of rights, has its earliest origins in racism. The concept is simple enough: enable the selected group to remain armed while working to disarm the unselected group. In America, this has been mainly black, Hispanic and immigrant populations.

Long before gun control was touted as “common sense” measures, the concept was promoted as a means to keep ethnic populations in an unequal position while assuaging the fears of whites.

Recently, I appeared at a press conference with a dozen black ministers and other leading members of the black community to stand together and voice our support for our right to keep and bear arms. It was here that I discussed the longstanding history of racism behind gun control and discussed the infamous Dred Scott decision, where Chief Justice Taney asserted that the Court could not recognize the humanity of blacks. For if their humanity was fully recognized, they would be afforded Constitutional protections, including the protections offered by the Second Amendment.

After the Civil War, when blacks fought along whites to secure freedom for all, southern states enacted Black Codes, laws that restricted the civil rights and liberties of blacks. Central to the enforcement of these laws were the stiff penalties for blacks possessing firearms.

As these laws came under fire from federal authorities, extra-legal groups sprouted up to terrorize and enforce these laws if not by statute, by sheer intimidation. The most notorious, formed in Tennessee, and was the Ku Klux Klan.

In the turmoil after the Civil War, as America tried to mend itself, Southern Democrats aimed to disenfranchise black voters who voted overwhelmingly for Republicans, the Party of Lincoln. To do so required terrorism by the Klan and other similar groups. Their intimidation campaigns required a disarmed black population.

Over the years, the Black Codes faded away and were replaced with the racist Jim Crow laws that still sought to keep blacks as lesser citizens. And while the black communities were bridled with the shameful laws in the South, the North enacted laws to disarm their ethnic populations. The infamous Sullivan Act was enacted to keep the immigrant populations from carrying pistols and serves as the forefather of today’s modern “may issue” gun permit laws that allow unelected officials to decide who is and who is not upstanding enough to own a gun.

Today, gun control efforts are not only trying to disarm the black community; gun control efforts are creating victims in places where gun control measures are law. Criminals, who, by definition, do not abide by laws, remain armed having circumvented the legal means of obtaining firearms while law-abiding citizens remain defenseless from want of easy, legal means of obtaining guns with which to defend themselves, their families or their homes. While black Americans in urban centers may not be frequently terrorized by members of the Klan, we are terrorized by armed criminal elements that, like the Klan before them, know that the law-abiding have been disarmed for their convenience.

In celebration of the 151st anniversary of Washington DC’s Emancipation Day, I joined several leaders of the black community to hold a Lincoln-Douglas debate to discuss the issues affecting our community. While Al Sharpton hailed gun control measures, he glossed over the long and continual efforts by legislators to disarm blacks. After the Civil War, Democrats still did not recognize the full humanity and maturity of blacks and crusaded to deny them the rights attached to citizenship- in particular, the right of armed self-defense.
Today, that mentality is still alive and serves as an underlying motivation of many Democrats (both white and black) to deny the right to self-protection in inner cities. We are still seeing this abhorrent effort to deny Constitutionally-protected rights in the numerous attempts to ban legal ownership of arms in federally subsidized public housing.

Today, just as it has always been, it is immoral to force a man to choose whether to become a criminal by obtaining the means to protect his family or to become a possible victim of violence.

Days after my press conference with the community leaders, I returned to the barber shop I frequent. This barbershop, decked with Obama pictures and other assorted liberal material, is owned by a black Democrat who I good-naturedly chide about his political leanings. He does the same to me. Though our politics are different, as I walked through the door, I was confronted with a mob of support from fellow black patrons and as the owner hugged me, he explained that he had had no idea about the history surrounding gun control. It was then that it hit me- people needed to know.

Understanding the long, sordid history of gun control in America is key to understanding the dangers of disarming. Free citizens of any race, any ethnicity or background must be wary of any government that claims, “Trust us; relinquish your means of defense.”

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/the-long-racist-history-of-gun-control-in-america/ 

7 Structural Problems That Are Destroying America

“And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state (which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler), they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure.” -- Niccolo Machiavelli
One of the biggest mistakes people make in politics is believing that if we can just "get the right people" in office, all of America's problems will disappear. Unfortunately, that's not the case because many of the biggest problems we have as a nation are structural and unless we start to address those underlying issues, we're not going to be able to get our country back on track for the long haul. So, yes, we should still keep trying to elect "the right people," but as the late, great Milton Friedman said, "The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing."
 
1) Demographics: You remember the hit our economy took when the Internet bubble and the housing bubble popped? Well, the biggest bubble of all is the baby bubble. The baby boom after WWII produced a massive population bubble that convinced politicians we could afford to be extremely generous with Medicare and Social Security benefits. In fact, we were so generous that the average person is paying less than a third of what he will get out of Medicare over his lifetime.

"Senator Tom Coburn (a physician in private life) has estimated that the average American couple contributes approximately $110,000 to Medicare over their working careers and receives over $330,000 of Medicare benefits. On Feb. 20, USA Today cited Urban Institute data pegging those same figures at $88,000 and $387,000, respectively."
We have been getting by with that because there were lots of workers paying in and comparatively few retirees, but as more and more Baby Boomers retire, workers are going to be forced to pay extravagant taxes that they will never get back in benefits to support the people who are already in the programs. The numbers are staggering.

"In 2010, there were 40 million Americans 65 and older. By 2020, that number is projected to be 55 million; by 2030, 72 million."
Incidentally, if you're wondering how much longer Medicare can continue onward without being reformed or facing massive cuts for beneficiaries, the answer is until about 2024.

2) A Dimmer American Dream for the Working Poor: At one time, labor in America was comparatively cheap and shipping costs were very high. Now, because of increased government regulations and a higher standard of living, labor is comparatively expensive while shipping costs have dropped tremendously because of technological advances, shipping containers, larger ships, etc. As a practical matter, what this means is that a lot of good jobs for men with limited skills and high school degrees have moved overseas to countries like India and China. This has put a lot of economic pressure on the working poor, which has been increased both by illegal immigration and by legal immigration, which doesn't give preference to more educated, more skilled immigrants as it should. This has stagnated wages for a lot of Americans.

"Real family income for families in the middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970-2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution."
The sad fact of the matter is that the world has just changed economically over the last few decades and we haven't fully adjusted to it as a society yet.

3) Debt: Despite the fact that we have a more than trillion dollar deficit, an almost 17 trillion dollar debt and roughly 100 trillion dollars in unfunded Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security liabilities, we seem incapable of slowing down our spending. Even the sequester, which is like taking a teaspoon out of a swimming pool of spending, seems to be too much for our politicians to bear. This is because we have no Balanced Budget Amendment to force our government to restrain spending and even outside market restraints aren't working well because we're printing massive amounts of money and loaning it to ourselves at a low interest rate. Politically, the momentum is ALWAYS on the side of spending more because ALMOST ANY CUTS produce a huge backlash while any spending reductions are so comparatively small that they tend to have minimal political benefits. Unless we can deal with this issue, it's going to bankrupt our country and it seems entirely possible that we could have a situation worse than the one Greece is facing on our hands in the next 5-20 years.

4) Big Government: We live in a world where we have more choices in entertainment, activities, news and products than ever before while our government has become bigger, more intrusive, more centralized and gives us fewer choices than ever before. The cost of government regulations is growing ever higher, the difficulty of starting a business is getting ever harder and our choices about everything from what soda to drink to what light bulb to have in our house are slowly, but surely being taken away from us. In fact, there's probably no one reading this page who hasn't accidentally broken some federal law in the last week and it's entirely possible that lawmakers aren't aware of that since many of them don't even read the laws they pass anymore. The more government expands, the more freedom contracts and less vibrant and healthy our society becomes.

5) Gerrymandering and Increased Partisanship: The far left-wing took over the Democrat Party in the early seventies and conservatism became ascendant in the GOP when Reagan became President. That created a large ideological gulf between the two parties. Furthermore, although we loathe to admit it, most members of Congress have nothing to fear from general elections because the partisan make-up of their states or districts is such that someone from the opposing party can't defeat them even in a wave election. In other words, once these politicians get elected, they're in office for life barring some sort of major scandal OR a challenge from their own party. That means interest groups that are capable of funding a primary opponent are much more threatening to most politicians than the voters in their district. Nancy Pelosi could NEVER be beaten by a Republican, but if Planned Parenthood or United Auto Workers got angry at her, either could conceivably fund and support another Democrat who could beat her. What all this means in practice is that politicians in both parties are far apart ideologically and have a strong incentive (their job) not to cooperate with each other on anything that may upset a special interest. 

6) The Collapse of Traditional Marriage: Per Pat Buchanan,

"Half of all children born to women under 30 in America now are illegitimate. Three in 10 white children are born out of wedlock, as are 53 percent of Hispanic babies and 73 percent of black babies."
The illegitimacy rate in America has gone up 300% since the seventies. This might be a minor matter if children born outside of wedlock did just as well as children in two parent households. Unfortunately, that's not even remotely true.

According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, children from single-parent families account for 63 percent of all youth suicides, 70 percent of all teenage pregnancies, 71 percent of all adolescent chemical/substance abuse, 80 percent of all prison inmates, and 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children.
7) The Decline of Christianity: In 1963, 90% of Americans said they were Christian. Today, that number is closer to 70%. Meanwhile, the Christian church in America has gotten older, has become more timid and has become much less influential. As the power of the church has eroded, moral decay has set in and has started negatively impacting our society. In fact, the rot has gotten deep enough that we don't even like to hear people talk about "morals" because it reminds us how badly we've slipped in so many areas. But, we've actually dropped much farther and faster than most of us realize.

"If filmmakers in 1963 wanted the approval of the Production Code of Motion Picture Association of America, which almost all of them still did, the dialogue could not include any profanity stronger than hell or damn, and there had been dramatic justification even for them. Characters couldn’t take the name of the Lord in vain, or ridicule religion, or use any of form of obscenity — meaning just about anything related to the sex act….the plot couldn’t present sex outside of marriage as attractive or justified."
The degenerate and dishonest behavior of our politicians, school shootings, abortion, trashy reality TV, rudeness on the Internet, drug use, gang activity, gay marriage and children being born out of wedlock, among many, many other issues are deeply tied to morality. So as the Christian church declines, America will decline right along with it.

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2013/05/04/7-structural-problems-that-are-destroying-america-n1586899/page/full



Track Team Disqualified for Thanking God

A Texas high school track team was disqualified from competing in the state championships because one of the runners made a gesture thanking God after he crossed the finish line.

Derrick Hayes, the anchor of the Columbus High School 4×100 relay team had just crossed the finish line when he raised his finger to the sky – thanking the Lord for winning the race that would send them to the state finals.

But a judge with the University Interscholastic League, the governing body for high school athletics in Texas, ruled that the gesture was a violation of the taunting rule – and the Cardinals were stripped of their victory.
“I think it’s a travesty,” said K.C. Hayes, Derrick’s dad. “It’s a sad deal. Those kids worked hard.”

Robert O’Connor, the superintendent of the school district filed an appeal, but so far the UIL is standing by its rule.

“It’s a harsh consequence for what some people may deem a small gesture,” O’Connor told MyFoxHouston.com. “The rule states no celebratory gestures including raising your arms.”
The team was officially disqualified for “unsporting conduct.”

The UIL said they do not have a rule banning religious expression – it’s just a matter of where you express it.
“You can do whatever you want to in terms of prayer, kneeling or whatever you want to once you get out of the competition area. You just can’t do it in the competition area. It goes back to the taunting rule. I can’t taunt my opponent,” the superintendent told MyFoxHouston.com.

The Texas Tribune reports that Gov. Rick Perry has called for the UIL to investigate the incident and take whatever action is necessary to ensure religious freedom and expression is protected at competitions.
In his letter, Perry said he would “not tolerate the suppression of religious freedom anywhere.”

“It is unconscionable that a student athlete could be punished for an expression of religious faith or that an act of faith could disqualify an athlete in a UIL competition,” Perry told the newspaper.

http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/track-team-disqualified-for-thanking-god.html

Academic warmists celebrate book burning at San Jose State University

At the San Jose State University Meteorology Department, they'd rather burn books than read them, if their faith in the gospel of man-made global warming would be challenged by the contents. That is the message conveyed on the Department's own website (archived here) with the picture below which was published there along with this explanation:

This week we received a deluge of free books from the Heartland Institute {this or this }. The book is entitled "The Mad, Mad, Made World of Climatism". SHown above, Drs. Bridger and Clements test the flammability of the book.

Anthony Watts of Watt's Up with That documented the posting, calling it something "from the Fahrenheit 451 department."

When I first got the tip on this, I thought to myself "nobody can be this stupid to photograph themselves doing this" but, here they are.

Alison Bridger, on the left, is Department Chair of Meteorology at SJSU, while Craig Clements is an Associate Professor. These are persons of standing, not crazy grad students pulling a prank. No, they are making a profound statement about their intellectual methods. The Chancellor


These people with PhDs are indeed fools, made so by a fundamentalist faith that offers redemption from imagined hell fires (check out the fires burning on the wall behind them).



When you are going to save the world from the fires of hell, that gives meaning and purpose to your life. (It also keeps the research grants coming.) Anything which threatens the theology providing meaning and sustenance must be extinguished (even if the subsequent combustion produces carbon dioxide, the very Satan of their Manichean scheme).

Guantanamo Spends $900,000 Per Inmate Every Year

 The high-profile American prison camp in Cuba used to house what the U.S. government considers to be some of the world's most dangerous terrorists also happens to be the world's most expensive prison, as Reuters reports:
The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner. 
By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.
To a certain extent, this makes obvious sense. The U.S. government considers the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay far more dangerous than domestic prisoners at high-security prisons in the United States. But it's still a fairly shockingly large amount of money to spend on imprisoned terrorists. 

President Obama also cited the cost of Guantanamo as one reason he wants to shut it down. But remember, when he blames Congress for his own inability to shut down the terrorist prison camp, he's lying:

In fact, Obama’s “close GITMO” plan — if it had been adopted by Congress — would have done something worse than merely continue the camp’s defining injustice of indefinite detention. It would likely have expanded those powers by importing them into the U.S.
 http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2013/05/04/guantanamo-spends-900000-per-inmate-every-year-n1587109

Five Things Obamacare Won’t Do

When Obamacare was being sold to the public, the president and his supporters made big promises about the law. But three years later, it looks a lot more limited. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if we’re hearing more about what Obamacare won’t do as what it will. Here are five things we probably shouldn’t count on Obamacare to do:

It won’t control health costs. A few months after the health care law passed, former White House advisers touted the law’s cost controls: The law, they wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “puts into place virtually every cost-control reform proposed by physicians, economists, and health policy experts.” Apparently it wasn’t enough, even for the law's backers. A group of prominent liberal supporters of Obamacare recently launched a new effort to control health spending. The Washington Post reported that “While all support the Affordable Care Act, they tend to agree that additional legislation will be necessary to control health-care costs.”

It won’t lower premiums for everyone. During his first presidential campaign, Obama pitched his health care overhaul as a way to “lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.” But average family premiums have continued to rise since Obamacare passed, insurers and actuaries are warning that they’ll rise even higher as the law kicks in, and even Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius now says that some premiums will rise under the law. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also seems to think the law could cause premiums to spike.

It won’t reduce emergency room usage amongst the poor. One of the arguments for the law was that it would reduce emergency room utilization by giving low-income individuals Medicaid coverage that would allow them to see a doctor instead. But according to a study published this week, a randomized controlled trial found that giving individuals Medicaid does not reduce emergency room usage. 

It may not make low-income Medicaid beneficiaries healthier or happier. That same study found “no significant effect of Medicaid coverage” on any of the objective physical health markers it looked at. The study looked at a very poor, very sick population, and examined health markers that should have been some of the easiest to treat. The study’s authors also reported that they “did not detect a significant difference in the quality of life related to physical health or in self-reported levels of pain or happiness.” Roughly half of the law’s coverage expansion is projected to come via Medicaid.

It won’t get rid of “uncompensated care.” This is a little bit technical—but it’s important. Related to the argument about emergency room usage, Obamacare supporters said the expense of the law could be justified in part by the way it would reduce uncompensated care—the “free” care hospitals give to those without insurance. The federal government was already paying hospitals for that care, the argument went, so why not just use that money to pay for insurance instead? President Obama claimed that the cost of uncompensated care was raising insurance prices nby an average of $1,000. Now it looks like the Obama administration believes that uncompensated care costs won’t go down any time soon. The president implicitly admitted this when he proposed adding $360 million to a fund that pays hospitals for uncompensated care, a bump that would effectively get rid of the cuts the health law was supposed to enable.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/03/five-things-obamacare-wont-do

Studied Ignorance

Once again, with the atrocity in Boston, we see our government officials at all levels - the president, the administration, the judiciary - feigning ignorance as to the provenance and motivation of the bombers.

Keep in mind that the people feigning ignorance about the hatred of Islam militants for America are not themselves nice people. These are not some pastoral tribe who cannot believe evil about anyone. The Dem/Left is vitriolic about...Republicans. They have characterized the Tea Party, as well-behaved and understandably motivated (balanced budget - free markets - limited government) a group of people as have ever graced politics as a radical racist insurgency.  


So, the Dem/Left is perfectly capable of hatred and vitriol.  Just not toward our enemies.  Why is this?

This is a tapestry with many threads, but the most important is that if the threat to our way of life presented by Islam militant were recognized, then the entire menagerie of the Left would be forced to concede that the historical actions of dead white men (DWM) were, in fact, reasonable responses to threats they faced in the past.  That there is no feminist solution to somebody who wants to rape you and slit your throat; there is no multi-culti solution to barbarity; there is no people of color approach to an enemy that escaped DWM in the past.  If someone is coming for you and your family, then either you survive or they do.  There is no New Age answer, no millenarian answer to that problem - it is a problem of the human condition, addressed by human beings in the past.


If that is true then the wellspring of rage that motivates the Left is a rage against...the human condition.  That there is nothing evil about Western culture; it is successful because it harnesses the creativity and energy of all its people and best serves the needs of its citizens.
 

In order to maintain the Left's world order, it must pretend that the threat we face, the enmity that our simple existence generates in the heart of an evil philosophy, is not true or else the Left is no better than the people who built this country and who are vilified in the hearts of radicals.  The Left would cease to be the midwives of history and have to go out and...sell insurance, work in a supermarket or undertake some other activity of value to their fellow man.  Better to have atrocities visited on us and our fellow citizens (scroll down to picture 38) than acknowledge the enemy and destroy a world view.

The Great Education Power-Grab

Did you know that reformers intent on implementing the Core Curriculum (National Standards) have invaded public education?  They do not care about kids or about individuals.  Armed with statistics and vast software systems, their intent is to establish one-size-fits-all curricula and success parameters in public education nationwide.  The scope of their ambitions leads this educator to the conclusion that their underlying impulse is totalitarian.


These reformers are driving toward the six- or seven-class-a-day high school teaching load, the 9-5 schedule for the schools (or longer), school provided free and compulsory for ages 2 to 22 (or 26), the six- or seven-day school week, and the 12-month school year (with two- or three-week vacation breaks scattered throughout the school year), all controlled by a vast bureaucracy nationwide and justified by the implementation of "national standards."  A database of answers to 400 questions by all U.S. students K-20 will be compiled and maintained at a tremendous cost to the public.  Forty-six states are already on board.
 This 20-plus years of control and indoctrination will, if implemented, become a cornerstone of statist control.mic


Who's doing it?  These reforms are led by Bill Ayers, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City.  They are also led by educational publishers such as Cengage, Pearson, McGraw Hill, and McDougal Littel.  They have a host of supporters including, but not limited to, the Coalition of Essential Schools, New Visions, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and other NGOs that want to bring equality and progress [sic] to institutions supposedly failing to their very core.  These "reformers" are being abetted by their so-called adversaries, the education unions: UFT, AFT, NEA, and NYSUT.  Claiming to object to some of the teacher hostility expressed by the "reformers," these unions actually are 100% in tune with the political and social agenda of those reformers.  Why?  Because the movement toward "national standards" by these reformers means increased membership and dues for the unions, consolidation of power, and national promotion of their left-wing agenda.  The education unions become junior partners in one of the greatest power plays in the history of this country.


The key to their vision, if one can call this Brave New World and 1984 nightmare a "vision," is to bring in a whole new class of school administrators.  These administrators do not have teaching experience.  Teaching experience tends to breed respect for the individual.  Instead, the drive of national standards is to collectivize, to standardize, and to establish one-size-fits-all educational benchmarks, goals, and curricula.  The new mandarins of education are people in their twenties or early thirties who are to come in and uproot the supposed garbage of the past.  Likewise, pressures are being brought to bear on older teachers and experienced administrators to get out of the way of the "agenda of change."


A few years ago, this writer attended a meeting to recruit teachers into the New York City Department of Education Leadership Academy for prospective principals, and the sophisticated and attractive hostess of the program was asked, "When reviewing applications to the program, do you take into account whether the applicant has written and published any articles of books?"  Without hesitation, the woman answered firmly that she does not.  Connection with the world of books is not part of leadership in education.  On another occasion, this writer even heard one principal in the New York City Department of Education say that he is not interested in having libraries where books just gather a lot of dust; rather, he wants to replace all books with much cheaper and less space-consuming CDs.  He added that students do not need literature in high school; they need only skill-sets for proper English usage.  Under the Common Core, literature is being de-emphasized in favor of nonfiction, and excerpts will replace the reading of entire texts.


The thrust during Bloomberg's years as mayor of New York City has been to recruit people with little or no experience in education to teach and to run the schools.  This supposedly is to refresh a profession that has been too insulated from accountability and new ideas for too long. We saw this in Chicago, when Arne Duncan was the head of the schools.  He had only had a little tutoring experience, but his goal was to renovate and revamp the failing system.  As far as anyone knows, the system there is still failing.  


What, then, do we find?  From top to bottom, the NYC Dept. of Education is replete with administrators with little  teaching experience.  Often selected because they are inexperienced and willing to be as insensitive as a cactus in order to please their superiors, they come to impose themselves as "leaders" on those who are already making great sacrifices as teachers. 


Then there are teaching fellows and other "career change" types who have decided they want to begin a new career path in education.  They soon learn the realities of life in the schools, and many leave.  Many teaching fellows are also brilliant and idealistic, and they come into education to make a difference in the lives of individuals and society as a whole.  However, they find that they not only have to deal with incredibly complex and difficult classroom and building situations, but many times are being badgered by clueless administrators who are the "new breed" as described above.  This author recently heard a highly regarded principal of a New York City high school say that he considered "classroom management" overestimated in importance.  Right.  Who needs an attentive, orderly classroom?  Let students have a watered down curriculum, let them talk during class, and then give them inflated grades to support their self-esteem.  This is to be the new formula for national "progress."


We find people coming into education from facilities management, the petroleum industry, pharmaceutical sales, and lobster wholesaling and delivery backgrounds.  This writer has met these people, and the likelihood that they read even one book a year is remote.  Are non-readers and non-teachers suited to be educational leaders?


Many, be it for money, security, ideals, or some combination of the above seek administrative positions that they are not ready for.  Why aren't they ready?  They are not ready because they have not been mentored and inculcated with core educational values that include, but are not limited to, focus on service and on educational values such as curricular innovation, creativity, knowledge, teacher morale, school tone, the family of man, student character-building, and caring/love of all for all (said list can be summed up as "the pursuit of happiness").


The above changes are gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) being implemented in various school districts throughout the country, but  national standards (Core Curriculum) are the connecting mechanism whereby the philosophy of education outlined above can be managed at the federal level.  The rationale for this is that students in China, Japan, and Singapore regularly do better than U.S. students on international tests of math and science.  Therefore, a more comprehensive approach (standards) needs to be taken if we are to remain competitive in the world economy.


Even accepting the highly dubious assumption that we are falling behind those countries, should our schools become as authoritarian as those schools?  Are not the Judeo-Christian ideals of love and compassion still valid?  Do we want the drones we find in these other cultures?


About 46 states have already signed onto "national standards."  There is movement in that direction.  There are not many articles in the conservative media and blogs challenging this direction.  Nevertheless, the danger to culture, to rationality (substituting what to think for how to think), to individuality, and to the tried and true is palpable.


My question to the reader: Do you want American public education to become even more of an ideological monolith than it is at present?

Foreign Aid is Immoral

Why are so many people against Western aid being sent to Third World or to African countries? Is it because they are "mean-spirited" or "don't like black and brown people," as the pious liberal-left would have it?

No. It may well be because people don't like taxpayers' money going into the bank accounts of the rich elites of Third World countries. Because they don't like corrupt regimes spending this money on palaces and race courses for the rich. Because they don't like it going on 'development projects' that are more to do with Western developers getting some of the cash and the rulers indulging in projects that have no practical value (other than to spend it on themselves or to boost their egos).

And why should we aid countries run by juntas, dictatorships and whatnot? When there are no democratic pressures on such people, then the economic benefits from these developments projects are rarely going to amount to much anyway.

This isn't just the view of "free market fundamentalists" or people who are "tight-fisted about aid". The peoples of these poor countries often agree with these analyses of the situation in their countries. For example, this is what one Cameroonian citizen had to say on the issue:
"The government tells us there is no money. But there is plenty of money coming from the World Bank and from France and Britain and America -- but they put it in their pockets. They do not spend it on the roads."
Of course there is corruption and self-serving people in the UK and in all other capitalist countries too. However, in a democracy there is a whole stack of things which will put a stop to the kinds of behavior which happens all the time in aided countries. We have laws and regulations. Corruption and waste are discussed in the assemblies and in the media. Not everything is solved or rectified, of course, but at least there are systems in place to keep a fairly tight lid on things. Not so in most aid countries.

The Aid Industry & Where the Money is Spent

The biggest industries in the third world are often aid industries. The biggest capitalists are aid capitalists. Aid, and development projects, etc. are thriving businesses but often the only people who benefit are Western aid-capitalists and third-world elites -- who may well sometimes conspire together. The Western aid-capitalists aggrandize their pious egos and the elites line their pockets (as the aid-capitalist often do as well).

For example, donor agencies -- both tied to the aiding country and to the aided country -- often actually require expensive aid-projects because the money they are given quite simply has to be spent. If it's not spent that wouldn't look too good. In fact if they didn't spend all of the aid-money, they probably wouldn't get any more. Thus they spend all of it as a matter of necessity. This results in that money being spent on useless projects or projects which are simply too costly for what they actually offer.

What is the lot of many countries that receive aid? Often the government steals the aid for itself -- that's after stealing money from its own people in the form of high taxes or even in more direct ways. Why aid a regime which rules over extreme waste and regulations that are not there to help the workers but are there as a way of rationalizing various systems of bribes? ('You don't need to follow this rule if you pay me 100 pounds per month.')

In a corrupt and/or repressive regime, no one really monitors the aid-money that is spent. The bigwigs and their friends both spend the money and benefit from the spending. If money is spent on education, for instance, staff are not recruited or paid on their merit, but on the rulers' friends and relations. It follows, then, that if no one keeps an eye on the ruling class and the friends-who-spend, then there will be massive waste and much money will also be spent on various white elephants (i.e., Third World versions of Victorian follies in the form of massive hotels, stadiums, government buildings, etc.).

If we forget about the self-serving nature of the aid industry on our side, it can also be the case that Western development projects are commissioned by people with no genuine interest in them. What they are interested in are the bribes and the career advancements which can often be the result of such projects.

Why aid Ethiopia, for example, when a businessman in that country could only start a business there after paying four years' worth of his salary in order to get an official notice in the government's various newspapers? That has now changed. When such corruption was partly rectified, by the 'evil' World Bank, business registrations rocketed by around 50% straight away. Now they may be ready for aid.

Why the Aid in the First Place?

Take a hypothetical case of a businessman attempting to start a business in some poor African country.
This small businessman is considering an investment of $1000 in his new business. He's expecting to make $100 a year on this investment. However, the leader of his country will take half of that $100 in tax, which will result in only a 5% profit on his initial $1000.

Take the actual case of Cameroon.

In 2009 the World Bank made some inquiries into the situation for prospective small businesses in Cameroon.

It discovered that in order to set up a small business, an entrepreneur must spend six months' wages on "official fees" in order to do so. On top of that was the problem of getting the Cameroon courts to make people pay their so-far unpaid invoices -- something that can take more than two years. However, the business has to pay the courts to render this service and that will cost him half the invoices' value. On top of all that are the additional 43 separate legal and technical procedures; as well as the standard -- in Cameroon -- bribes.

All this red tape will discourage all new businessmen in the Cameroon and elsewhere. And the slow court procedures, when existent at all, will dissuade many people from investing and building because they know they won't be protected very well -- if at all -- by the courts.

And precisely because of all this red tape, the waste, the regulations and the slow court procedures, bribes are often the only solution to get things moving in the small business worlds of the Cameroon and beyond.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/foreign_aid_is_immoral.html#ixzz2SN2Yayil

Condemning Capitalism and Freedom

The relentless assaults on American capitalism continue unabated. This week such an attack even appeared on the Wall Street Journal's website, Market Watch. Columnist Paul B. Farrell penned a column titled, "Capitalism is killing our morals, our future." Not only is the article devoid of any logic, but it demonstrates a shocking lack of understanding of economics and the nature of the American economy. 

The article begins with the predictable attacks against the wealthy, decrying the fact that the number of billionaires in the world has quadrupled in the past 12 years. Evidently, Mr. Farrell does not understand that the amount of money in the world is not finite; every time you earn a dollar and put it in the bank, it does not mean that there is one less dollar available for someone else to earn. No one on Earth is poor because someone else is rich.

Mr. Farrell then tells us, "For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: a billion live on less than two dollars a day." First of all, "the rest of the world" does not live in capitalist society; in fact, neither do we here in America, but more on that later. As for the billion souls who live on 2 bucks a day, they live in socialist countries such as China, North Korea, and Cuba, or have state-run economies like Mexico and India. Most of the remainder live in dysfunctional African dictatorships, or in the rain forests of South America. Their governments are the reason why they are poor -- not because greedy rich people are stealing their money.

The rest of the piece is dedicated to the gibberish peddled by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, who claims capitalism has undermined American values. Sandel writes,
Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost everything is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values, non-market values."
What Farrell and Sandel fail to recognize is that all values are market values. Like it or not, everything among free men is traded value for value. In the economy, we trade money for services or things we want, e.g. money in exchange for groceries or a haircut. In societal relationships we trade respect, admiration, friendship, and love for the things we value in others; integrity, honesty, kindness, skill, patience, reliability, loyalty etc...

The article never makes clear exactly what "values" are up for sale that shouldn't be, just that, "our new dominating capitalist mind-set is crowding out 'nonmarket values worth caring about.'"Farrell quotes Sandel's core message as,
The good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question -- health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones.
The collectivist mentality is here on full display: "we" do not have to decide how to value anything; I will decide for myself and Professor Sandel can decide for himself. That is not only the essence of capitalism -- it is the essence of human liberty.

Farrell repeats Sandel's complete mischaracterization of economics,
...A market economy is a tool ... for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
A market economy is not a tool for organizing production; authoritarian government, command-and-control economic planning, regulation, and manipulative tax codes are tools for organizing production. Economics is not merely the study of business, markets, and monetary matters, but also how individuals make decisions. Risk and reward calculations are made not simply in financial decisions but in all sorts of social situations; where to socialize, whom to choose as friends, or whom to date or marry.

What Farrell and Professor Sandel miss entirely is that the United States does not have a free market capitalist economy. Sandel says, "The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently." President Obama and his cabal made great use of the 2008 financial meltdown to condemn capitalism and tighten their grip on the nation's economy. Anyone who cares to investigate knows that the crisis was created by government interference in the home mortgage marketplace. Our federal masters dictate every single aspect of our economy from how cars are built and what gas mileage they will get, to how much workers are paid, who will get hired and fired, how many toilets must be on hand per worker, how many hours you can work, where production facilities can be built, what materials can be used and from whom they will be purchased, which industries will get tax breaks and government loans, right down to how much water our toilets and showerheads can use. The Russians -- who created the first socialist state and suffered under its tyranny for seven decades -- know socialism when they see it. The newspaper Pravda, formerly the official mouthpiece of the Soviet regime, wrote in 2009 that, ."...the American descent onto Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed..."

Yet according to Sandel, our country has a "new dominating capitalist mind-set." If Americans have such a capitalist attitude, how does he explain the past two presidential elections, where Barack Obama promised to "spread the wealth around" and "make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills"? How does he explain the existence of the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, OSHA, the EPA, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Commerce, the Federal Trade Commission, the FAA, FCC, FDA, and hundreds of other federal, state, and local agencies that micromanage every aspect of our economy?

What collectivists like Mr. Farrell and Professor Sandel are really saying when they condemn capitalism is that individual freedom is immoral. They believe that everything is the province of the state to decide -- even our personal moral values. They believe that you do not have the right to hold your own values; "We" will decide. And by "We," they mean the state.

Economic and political liberty are inseparable. The right to free expression and trial by jury is of little value to someone who is told what to do or what products he can buy with his money. The word "capitalism" did not even exist when America was founded; in 1776, it was simply called "freedom." The term capitalism, as employed by authoritarian collectivists, is simply a pejorative term for freedom. Professor Sandel knows America is not a free-market society, and he is advocating for not only total state control of the economy, but for every core belief of individual citizens to be dictated by the state -- deceptively referred to as "we."

The Founders bequeathed to us the greatest society in human history; not because we became prosperous and powerful -- but because we were free. Prosperity and power were the result of human potential being released for the first time, taking mankind from millennia of disease, ignorance, and grueling subsistence, to electricity, indoor plumbing, organ transplants, and space flight in less than 200 years.

"We" are never going to decide what my values are, and I have no interest in dictating the values of others. I wish only to see America return to the only value upon which all honest men and women can agree; freedom.

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