Pregnant girls, by guest blogger Lulu

There is a pregnancy epidemic right now at the high school where I used to run a girls’ group. All the time I am shocked and saddened to see another young girl with a growing belly or another with babe in arms.

There is no stigma at all. Whatever happened to shame or pressuring boys to “do the right thing”? Gone are the rumors, the marginalization, the “slut” comments, the judgment of others, the pressure of peers that encourage waiting and responsibility. There simply is no stigma. In fact, the boys strut like proud roosters with their girl. The girl basks in the attention of her friends as they swarm around the mommy to be and kiss her belly.

And thanks to enforced ‘tolerance” and a determination not to marginalize girls who get pregnant in high-school, there is no longer any shame in it at all. That stinks because I believe shame is a very important emotion and shaper of our behavior.

The boys need to feel ashamed of themselves for using girls like objects, impregnating them, and then thinking their role as father is to drop in and buy pampers once in a while. The girls should be ashamed for casually bringing life into the world for their own selfish reasons (someone to love me, etc) instead of waiting until they could create an environment for the child that could provide stability and proper care.

I am angry with the school for not enforcing its own dress code. The low cut tops. The short shorts. The spaghetti straps. These are against the rules, but no one says anything. No one insists the girls cover up with an old hideous shirt from the lost and found, or old gym shorts. But they should.

Where are the staff to stop the fondling and making out on steps in full view of everyone on campus? Boys and girls. Girls and girls. No boundaries. No values.

So sad.

One exercise I did with my girls’ group a month or so ago was designed to have them explore their values versus their behavior. I wrote on the board these words:

Marriage
Sex
Relationship
Love
Dating
Living together
Baby

I asked the girls to make two lists. One was to put the words in the order in which they thought they should take place according to their values, and the other was to put the words in the order that they saw people actually following. They were allowed to leave words off if necessary.

Without fail, and to my surprise, all the girls wrote that the order things should take place in was this:

Dating, love, relationship, marriage, sex, living together, baby.

This is a very traditional view and I hadn’t expected it.

The list of what was actually happening was less sunny:

“Dating”, sex, relationship (all admitted this stage sometimes did not occur), baby.

I pointed out to them that there was a huge discrepancy between their values and their behavior. I asked them why they thought that was. Some looked so sad as they described the pressures to perform sexually or to end up alone. (Of course, they were alone anyway as these “relationships” did not last).

Will these kids ever be able to have a healthy relationship? A sex life with a caring and loving partner? What about their children who will grow up in a world of single moms, with children from multiple dads, all with different last names?

I can’t help but look at this and want to scream at the faculty, at the entire educational institution, for failing these children so egregiously, for failing to teach any moral standards at all. These kids are steeped in political correctness. Lord knows, they’ve had tons of diversity education, safe sex talks, say no to drugs, global warming awareness, and Identity politics. But at home and at school, no one seems to be willing to provide moral standards. No one is willing to upset the darlings by reminding them that having a baby too young is grossly irresponsible and even tragic. Shouldn’t society put some peer pressure on them to remember that a baby is a human being and not a doll? It’s not a Paris Hilton Chihuahua status symbol to dress nicely and neglect. A baby is a human that requires immense amounts of time and energy to raise.

They forget that a baby doesn’t stay a baby for long. Soon it will become a child that will require discipline, education, supervision, guidance, a future. What kind of environment is best for raising this child? Would it be a fifteen year old girl, no longer with the baby’s father, leaving the bulk of child rearing to her own resentful mother, and bitter because she can’t do fun teenage activities any more, or a stable, committed, financially secure, adult couple?

No one has told them how a baby interferes with fun and parties. Young mommies either have to stay home and care for the baby or drag it along- but it hasn’t occurred to them that their friends won’t want a baby along screaming in McDonald’s or an arcade. Babies are demanding, not logical, and if young mommies or daddies scream and ht them will only cry more. Once a teen has a baby, life will never be the same again. Finishing school and achieving life goals are do-able mainly for those girls who have parents willing to care for the baby for them.

Maybe if pregnant girls were once again shuffled off campus to a pregnant girl school it would be less glamorous and rewarding. Maybe the dads could be instantly shuffled into family court to be forced to take responsibility. Maybe along with sex ed the kids could get some values. Maybe the church should rise to the challenge and let young men know that impregnating girls is not a sign of manhood. Having sperm is no great accomplishment. Waiting to make a baby until you are mature and self-sufficient, and creating a whole and intact family, however, is a sign of manhood and maturity. We need to return societal pressure and judgment. Kids are falling apart from a lack of boundaries and moral standards. And they will take society with them.

I have yet to meet parents who say they wish their daughter became pregnant in high school (or even middle school), or that their son became an absentee father.

A final thought. In the past, and not so very long ago, girls were expected to marry as virgins. OK, many didn’t make it, but many did. Fear of pregnancy, social stigma, and wanting to be a “good” rather than a “fast” girl had a lot to do with it. But beyond that, by withholding sex and making the guys work for it- earn it, really- by getting a job and by marriage, the girls were forcing the guys to become civilized. Sex is a huge human drive and guys will work very hard to get it, and if becoming a responsible man and provider is the way to get it, by golly, guys will do it.

Now there is no incentive to be civilized. All the sex a guy can get without even buying her a soda, getting girls pregnant is a notch on a guy’s studly belt (so to speak), and he really has no parenting or financial obligations. Hey, it’s optional. And everyone is degraded. The babies suffer because they are born to a child and a shadow.

Has this generation degenerated to the human equivalent of dogs humping?

So very very sad.

I will keep you posted. I, for one, plan to react and bring in a series of speakers, former teen moms, their moms, and so on, to bring the kids a taste of reality. How will they know, if no one teaches them?

Harvard reinstates ROTC

Forty-one years too late, but it’s finally happening:

Harvard University is welcoming the Reserve Officer Training Corps program back to campus this week, 41 years after banishing it amid dissent over the Vietnam War.

The Cambridge, Mass., school’s change in policy follows the decision by Congress in December to repeal the military ban on gays serving openly, an official familiar with the arrangement said Thursday.

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus on Friday are scheduled to sign an agreement that will recognize the Naval ROTC’s formal presence on campus, according to the official, who wasn’t allowed to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

Sex ed in school

Several friends sent me links to a story about a “sex ed” class at Northwestern University.  I was all set to write a post about the decline of Western standards, and the travesty that sees parents paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their kids to schools that do this kind of thing on the parents’ dime.  Then I saw that Ace beat me too it.  So, read Ace and then, if you like, pretend that I wrote something that good.

Public school teachers in a sick system

Mr. Bookworm loves Jon Stewart.  Most of his political views are shaped by Jon Stewart, except for those that get a helping hand from the New York Times.  I therefore ending up watching more Jon Stewart than I like.  What I’ve noticed about Stewart’s coverage on Wisconsin is that it’s very narrow in focus.  It asks just one question:  How dare conservatives beat up on teachers, who are nice people who care for our children?

You know what?  I agree that most (although not all) teachers are nice people who care about our children.  Many of these nice people are also dedicated, high quality educators.  Nevertheless, conservatives are doing the right thing.

Our public education system is sick, and we, the taxpayers, are funding that sick system.  How is it sick?  We pay public teachers more and more and more, both compared to salaries in the past and compared to similarly situated private school teachers, but we get less and less and less for that money.  Not only has public school education remained precisely the same in terms of outcome for decades now (long before the salary, pension and tenure boom), but those less well-paid private school teachers are doing a much better job.  Reason gives the details:

When you perform necessary surgery, you invariably injury healthy tissue even as you cut out or sew up the life-draining problem.  Right, the good teachers (as opposed to the screaming union goons) are feeling the heat.  Still, they are, sadly, the necessary fallout for fixing a terminally sick situation.

Bloggers matter

Bruce Kesler managed to burrow like a tick under the institutional skin of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors).  Hurrah!!!

Experts and the Temple of Orthodoxy

Most of us here in the Bookworm Room express a healthy skepticism of “experts” in general. Most of us revel in our ability to think and discourse critically for ourselves, while others lament that socially-anointed “experts” are not solemnly revered through incense, incantations and burnt offerings made before the Temple of Orthodoxy. Ah well.

Age plays a factor. As a student in the sciences, I revered all my profs until I learned to see through their intellectual facades. By graduate school, I was far more discriminating. Don’t get me wrong – I was privileged to be able to study and discourse with true intellectual giants.  I recognized that a common trait of these models and mentors was their ability to constantly question convention and reexamine their premises. They could also doubt themselves. I admire them to this day and I wanted someday to be like them. I am still trying.

However, there was also another group of intellectual wannabees, professors and classmates, for whom the sole objective of the id was the ego. Their entire sense of self revolved around a desperate need to be recognized for their “credentials”. This group was highly insecure and many were not particularly bright. I recall PhD students who were already penning their “expert” bestsellers before having completed their orals. Alas, such “scientists” were so intent on creating unwarranted reputations for themselves that they would cause great intellectual mischief in my professional field. Thus do I take any claim to self-proclaimed expertise  or consensus opinion with a healthy grain of salt.

The point I am making is that scientists are humans, subject to all the quirks, foibles and fallibilities of other humans. However, because of their credentials, it is too easy for lay people to accept uncritically what these scientists profess. Scientists, like all other people, can also fall prey to herd mentalities and egos too often pose insurmountable barriers to self-reflection. For many of us, as we get older, realism displaces idealism and teaches many of us the need to think for ourselves. It’s part of our journey into adulthood.

I bring all this up because, at No Frakken Consensus, there is a delightful book review on “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation”, by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.

The book is a historical record of the many, many times that scientific, political, historical and social thinking and consensus have been proven wrong…badly wrong. It’s an intellectual journey sprinkled with entertaining footnotes and guide posts to help one navigate beyond the intellectual facades of credentialed experts (one of my favorites: “funding and forecasting may be dependent variables”).

If you click on the image of the book, it takes you to the Amazon website, where you can peruse pages thereof.

It’s a fun read and I am sure that all critical-thinking Bookworm Room aficionados could have loads of fun for years to come in adding to the book’s list of defrocked orthodoxies (it was most recently republished in 1998). It certainly yields more-than enough holy water with which to give the Temple of Orthodoxy a thorough scrub.

John Tierney’s article about social psychologists

Three people (and thank you to them!) have sent me a link to John Tierney’s article in the New York Times, about the almost complete absence of conservatives from the psychology field:

It [this imbalance] was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

The article is right on the money, and reflects a broad problem with academia generally:  Outside of the hard sciences, liberals own our universities, which means that they own the next generation of the best and the brightest.

What one hopes is that the university bubble is about to burst.  Maybe, just maybe, with the government running out of money, and with parents running out of money too, the insanity that is higher education — $200,000 to teach young women herstory or young blacks about their perpetual servitude or young men about drinking — will finally run itself out.  Then, in the rubble, some real education might happen.

Strong Children

I was at my church this past weekend and was struck by the large number of college-graduate children that are now back living at home with their parents, out of work. The impression I have is that many of these kids still have no idea what they want to do with their lives. I get the sense that most pursued college degrees in either the soft social sciences (sociology, psychology, political science, environmental science), liberal arts (English, history) or hobby-arts (music, physical training), without any idea of what they planned to do with those degrees.

I largely blame their parents for this.

Meanwhile, I was at a professional meeting last week (I work in a technology-intensive industry) and heard over and over again, “we just can’t find any qualified new hires”). There are companies all over my industry looking to hire young talent. I had an executive with a large French company recently lament to me that he couldn’t find qualified American scientists, they were all from “China or India”.

I also watched a young adult professional give a PowerPoint presentation replete with misspellings and disconnected thoughts.
Where have we gone wrong in parenting and education in our society?

What do we need to do to build strong individuals and productive citizens?

Youth unemployment – where does it lead?

As we settle into the Obama Depression era, one thing that I and others have noticed is that many of the very youth that voted enthusiastically for Obama are the ones already feeling the consequence of his policies: they are unemployed. As one of my college-age kids put it, “our generation is so over Obama, today!”.

High youth unemployment is an inevitable consequence of socialism. In modern Europe, it has always been high. Here is an example of its pervasiveness in the U.K., for example:

http://anglo-americandebate.blogspot.com/2011/01/left-wing-policies-have-destroyed.html

In Europe, the problem has been exacerbated by extensive “social safety nets” that guarantee a pretty good lifestyle for the unemployed. Why work, when you can live comfortably on public assistance combined with the black market economy (dealing drugs, for example)? There are large swaths of the European population that, like people in our inner city projects, have no idea how to work. A young man in France with a finance degree recently reported to me that he was “happily unemployed”. Thanks to his government, he leads a comfortable existence. However, that, too, shall come to an end, for Europe faces the same economic collapse as the U.S.

I really do feel sorry for university students graduating today: for many, if not most, their degrees will be obsolete by the time the economy recovers (which could be a very long time). What employer would hire a student with, say, a business, philosophy, English, or whatever degree that has lain fallow for two, four or more years when they can hire a freshly minted graduate instead? These students’ parents, meanwhile, will often have drained hundreds of thousands of dollars from their retirement funds to fund such now worthless educations. I know of parents that have destroyed their retirement options in order to put their kids through university.

So, what happens when you have armies of unemployed young people with obsolete skills? I know that this has happened before, such as in the Great Depression. However, when economic recovery did come in the mid-to-late ’40s, workers with no education and technical skills could still find plenty of hands-on work opportunities. I don’t know that this holds true anymore in a modern economy. There’s only so many openings for baristas.
Any ideas?

Your Oregon tax dollars at work

The University of Oregon has created a new job title:  sustainability coordinator.  What’s that you ask?  It’s this:

The position exists to harmonize the efforts of various environmental groups on campus in much the same way the Multicultural Center director works with the university’s multicultural student unions.

This is a volunteer job for a student or faculty member dedicated to bringing order to group chaos, right?  Mais non!  It’s  a permanent paid position, and it pays a lot by Oregon standards:  $40,000 annually (which I assume doesn’t include the generous benefits a grateful citizenry funds with its taxes).  Yup.  Someone will get $40,000 (plus benefits) to make sure all the greenies aren’t fractious, duplicative and wasteful in their efforts.

By the way, in case you were wondering, that salary, without even considering the benefits, is far in excess of not only in-state tuition but also out-of-state tuition at the University:

$24,078 (Oregon resident tuition)
$30,000 (Nonresident tuition)

Do you get the feeling that the University, much like other American universities, is far more invested in advancing Progressive ideology than it is with actual education?  If that is indeed true, the University seems to have lost touch with its mission statement.

When will the taxpayers revolt?  Have we become so sheepled that nobody even questions the logic of hitting up taxpayers and students (or, rather, their parents) for soft-headed political action on an educational institution?

The Ivory Tower gets further sullied; and by the way, Sarah Palin was the victim of a blood libel

Ivory Tower used to be a compliment.  Now, just as ivory has degraded in social standing (the whole death of elephants thing), so too has the Ivory Tower’s star fallen (the whole death of logic, common sense, morality and actual education thing).  This morning, I posted about UC Berkeley’s buffoonish Chancellor (paid by taxpayers, both state and federal), who waded in on behalf of lunatics everywhere by opining that the insane, vaguely Leftist Loughner was a manifestation of the conservative movement.  Oh, yeah!

My friend Zombie now alerts me to the fact that — and this is true — since 2009, Berkeley has played host to a “scholarly,” taxpayer-funded, “academic” center that focuses on right wing movements.  No, really.  It’s true.  Really.

As Zombie says, “Students can now get a Bachelor’s degree in TEAPARTY=NAZI with a minor in OMGREDNECKS!”

What Zombie further discovered was that — no surprise here — one of the center’s scholars in residence has given his scholarly opinion (Did you get that?  This whole thing is scholarly, so you have to take it seriously) that the Tucson shooting is all the fault of American conservatives.  Zombie comments amusingly (as always) on the fact that this academic freely admits that there is no connection between Loughner and the right wing but, res ipsa loquitur, he still concludes that right wingery must be Loughner’s motivating force — because, after all, what else could be?  (Hint:  Loughner hears voices in his head.)

Aside from the rank intellectual dishonesty behind that scholarly conclusion (and that’s the nicest thing I can think to say), what really impressed me was the way in which it was written.  Since these opinings are the product of a modern academic, the writing is turgid, polemical, cant-filled, and barely intelligible:

Unlike in the case of Oklahoma City, where the perpetrator was explicit in his insurrectionary aim and managed to pull off his catastrophe, in Tucson there is enough ambiguity about the perpetrator that radicalism on the right is unlikely to feel the need to abate. In the absence of, as it were, a smoking gun—the perpetrator himself assuming responsibility in the name of the movement—the impact of Tucson is likely to be an amplification rather than any amelioration of the fierceness of our political climate.

This unintelligibility is, of course, the product of Leftist education. When I was at Berkeley 30 years ago, I drove my professors bonkers when I kept asking them to explain their Marxist claptrap. I was sufficient naive that, at the time, I didn’t know it was Marxist claptrap.  As a grammarian and lover of the English language, I simply knew that it was impossible to understand the arcane words, bizarre sentence structure and illogical ideas I routinely heard and read in my classes. You couldn’t parse those sentences for love or money.

So, respectfully, I kept asking them — teachers and fellow students — to explain. And they couldn’t. They couldn’t because (a) they had no idea what the phrases they were parroting meant and/or (b) they understand that there was no meaning behind those phrases.  (As for choice “a,” I will forever lovingly recall the desperate student who wrote, regarding The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Oscar Wilde’s descriptions of flowers throughout the text were “meant to represent the phallic symbolism of the female sexual organs.”  Ooo-rah!)

Just to show that I’m not making this up (or that I wasn’t too stupid to understand my teachers and their texts), here is an actual prize-winning example of bad writing from UC Professor Judith Butler:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Take that, oh ignorant Sarah Palin, who has the temerity to communicate using familiar words, organized in logical fashion, adding up to understandable ideas. How dare she?

And speaking of “how dare she?,” somehow all this ties into Palin’s newest (alleged) rhetorical crime, which consists of using the phrase “blood libel” to describe what the chattering classes aimed at her in the wake of the Tucson shooting. Many (well, make that the New York Times) are upset about this. The paper of anti-Israel record is horrified that one of the most philosemitic politicians in America would dare to use a phrase associated with Jews.

Color me limited (and Jewish), but it seems to me that she used the perfect phrase.  You see, a blood libel, such as the one aimed for centuries at Jews (still aimed, by the way) is a statement that, without any proof whatsoever, accuses someone of having  . . . yes, innocent blood on his or her hands.

In today’s news context, to savage Palin for accurately describing what was being done to her as a “blood libel” is the equivalent of a high tech lynching.  Whoops!  Did I use another metaphor that is only allowed for certain races?  Silly me.  I thought language in America was a vehicle for communicating ideas, not for isolating (or slicing and dicing) races, classes, and victims.

Our universities have a lot to answer for.  In the 1960s, craven administrators, embarrassed by their possible  complicity in racism, collapsed before the student revolts.  Worse, in the coming years, they took those students into the fold as academics themselves, nursing the viper to their collective breasts.  The result is a generation of Marxist, antisemitic, statist, incoherent people who use their academic credentials and bombastic, unintelligible writing to flim-flam the masses and, worse, to try to control the intellectual tone in this country.

What really irks me is that I, as a California taxpayer, pay this guy’s salary

I didn’t elect this guy.  I can’t get rid of this guy.  This guy is in charge of education for the roughly 33,000 students at UC Berkeley.  This guy gets a salary that 90% of America would envy and that I, as a California taxpayer, help pay.  This guy gets a taxpayer funded computer system to disseminate his messages.  And this guy says things of transcendent stupidity and viciousness:

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has come out swinging over the shooting spree that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people, linking it to Arizona’s “discrimination against undocumented persons” and a “climate in which demonization of others goes unchallenged and hateful speech is tolerated.”

In a campus-wide e-mail message, Birgeneau said: “It is not a coincidence that this calamity has occurred in a state which has legislated discrimination against undocumented persons.”

He added that “this same mean-spirited xenophobia played a major role in the defeat of the Dream Act by our legislators in Washington, leaving many exceptionally talented and deserving young people, including our undocumented students, painfully in limbo.”

You can read more about this taxpayer funded “educator” here.

DADT: Now what

1.  Bruce Kesler looks at the ramifications of the repeal of DADT.

2.  The Ivy Leagues say they’ll allow military recruiters back on campus (which at least ends their hypocrisy of taking federal feds but denying the feds access).  See here and here.  I wonder if that will have a measurable effect on future recruitment.

Challenging the notion that it’s beneficial to a society to have every citizen highly educated *UPDATED*

This is a somewhat random post, since I’m mushing an idea around in my mind, and would love to have your input.

The start for this post is my upbringing.  I was raised in a European household (although that household was located in America).  Both my parents came from the educated class, but both were comfortable with the European notion of trade schools.  In Europe, of course, this notion had been tied to class.  The upper class got the “no calluses” education of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic; the lower classes learned how to repair things.

Putting aside class considerations, I always thought that trade schools were a good thing.  It was obvious to me early on that not all people care about literary symbolism, nor are they lives improved by understanding photosynthesis.

For someone to be a master plumber is much better than to be a bored, angry, failed student.  The former results in a happy, productive member of society; the latter creates disaffected losers with serious inferiority complexes.  I never advocated the forced sorting that happened in Europe — based on tests administered to 11 year olds, kids were sorted between academic and trade schools — but I really liked the idea of honoring trade and making it a viable education path in the public school system.

My idealized education goals notwithstanding, the system we have is one that promises “free” education (i.e., taxpayer funded education) for all American children (plus a few illegals) through the age of 17 or 18.  The theory underlying that promise, obviously, is that an “educated” citizen is a better citizen. I don’t see this Kindergarten through 12th grade system changing anytime soon.

As it is, I do believe that every American should be able to read and write with basic competency, and should be able to do sufficient math to manage finances, whether for a household or a small business.  But again, does every American need to know calculus or Virginia Woolf?  Calculus is useful for scientific applications, so it probably has practical benefits, at least for some people.  Knowing Virginia Woolf, whole, while it might add to the mental furniture in the student’s mind, is not going to have any significant effect on America at large.

My wandering ruminations aren’t completely meaningless.  One of the Left’s explicitly stated goals is to make entirely taxpayer funded education available at the college/university level too.  In this regard, the Leftists are chasing after the European model.  They are undeterred in this regard by the fact that the European model is collapsing.

The hardcore Left wants universal university education because that’s the breeding ground for future Leftists.  The soft Left, however, wants universal university education just because of mealy-mouthed platitudes such as “everyone should have an education,” or “it’s only fair,” or “it’s good for America if everyone is educated.”

The Left keeps challenging us to ask “How rich is too rich?” and conservatives should say that this question should never be answered by the government.  (Apologies if the link is behind a pay wall.  William McGurn looks at Bernie Saunder’s speech as a starting point for Leftist money grabs from those the Left deems “too rich.”)  However, as citizens, because we’re called upon to pay for public education (a completely different notion from citizens being forced to give their wealth to a collectivist government), it’s entirely reasonable for us to ask “How educated is too educated?”  At what point should the taxpayer be off the hook when it comes to public education?  When are the vast majority of Americans sufficiently educated to contribute to day-to-day American functionality, without further gilding the educational lily?

I promised you an incoherent post and I delivered on my promise.  I would love it if you could add your thoughts about higher education, public education, trade schools, etc.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

UPDATE:  This, about the CBO’s war against technical colleges, seems apropos.

The morality of education and the DREAM Act

I don’t see Harry Reid having the political umph to pass the DREAM Act, but I also never imagined back in 2007 that Barack Obama would be President, so what do I know?

I do know that I have a problem with the DREAM Act, and that’s despite the fact that there are some very pragmatic reasons to pass it.  Michael Gerson articulates them well:

The legislation would create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children. Applicants must have graduated from high school or have gotten a GED. They would be given a conditional legal status for six years, in which they must complete two years of college or serve at least two years in the military.

It would be difficult to define a more sympathetic group of potential Americans. They must demonstrate that they are law-abiding and education-oriented. Some seek to defend the country they hope to join. The Defense Department supports the Dream Act as a source of quality volunteers. Business groups welcome a supply of college-educated workers. The Department of Homeland Security endorses the legislation so it can focus on other, more threatening, groups of illegal immigrants.

Critics counter that the law would be a reward for illegal behavior and an incentive for future lawbreaking. But these immigrants, categorized as illegal, have done nothing illegal.

You can read the rest here.  Many of his points are good.  And it certainly would be good for the GOP to integrate more with the Hispanic community which has core values much more consistent with conservatives than with Progressives.  But….  There’s always a but….

Before I get to my “but,” though, let me clarify one thing.  I would be entirely for the DREAM Act if it was limited to young people who serve in America’s armed forces.  That service is an entirely giving thing — giving to ones chosen country — although I do think those who serve take something away too, in terms of skills, discipline, and self-respect.  If you’re willing to risk dying for this country, something I, fortunate enough to be born here, was not willing to do, you deserve citizenship.

My sticking point is the education thing.  Yes, it’s nice to have an educated population, although it’s useful to remember that education lately has little to do with the three “Rs” and a whole lot to do with politically correct thinking that’s often extremely hostile to America.  (Indeed, it seems that those pushing hardest for the DREAM Act are the ones most hostile to America and her values, and the ones who feel much more strongly affiliated with Latin America and Leftism.)  Still, even the meanest school teaches some minimal form of literacy and math . . . maybe.  However, the primary beneficiary of education is the student.  This student has a better chance of success in our world, and it’s nice to have successful people.

Also, I disagree with Gerson’s conclusion that adding yet another incentive to the pile of incentives we already offer to illegal aliens won’t have an effect on the decision-making process some poverty-stricken soul, living in the failed state of Mexico, makes as he looks at his growing family.  After all, it’s a great deal:  Sneak over the border, and your kids get a better life.  I’d do it for my kids if I was in those shoes.  But it’s not a great deal for us.  In California, for example, the children of illegal immigrants get first dibs on university slots over out-of-state students who are legally in America.  (It’s also not a good deal for the Mexicans who remain behind, since their government uses the money sent back by illegal immigrants, and the safety-valve of the emigration itself, as a way to prop up a government that is overwhelmingly dysfunctional, not to mention dangerous.)

If education is an incentive, imagine how great an incentive education plus citizenship would be?  So it’s foolish for people to say that “the kids are already here.”  Yes, they are here.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Enact the DREAM Act and tomorrow more and more kids will be here, as we create one more incentive for the suffering of Mexico to disregard our border laws.

As for the argument that “they’re only children and it’s not fair that they suffer,” that’s a camel’s nose that, once allowed in the tent, brings in the whole camel.  You see, the sad fact is that it’s always the children who suffer.  Dad’s committed a crime?  We don’t let the fact that it will destroy the family stop us from convicting him and sending him to jail — unless, of course, Dad’s crime was sneaking over the border.  Mom’s an alcoholic or a narcissist or a histrionic personality who is turning her children into front-of-the-line candidates for a psychiatrist’s couch?  As long as she can take care of them in a basic way, they have to suffer.  For some, life is pain.

It is a cruel fact of life that we cannot right all wrongs parents do to their children.  Further, as in the case of children whose parents are “ordinary,” as opposed to politically correct, criminals, we make no effort to protect the children from the effects of their parents’ wrongdoings.  The best thing we can do is enforce the law as written, so that parents don’t subject their children to this suffering in the first place.  After all, they knew when they came here that they were consigning their children to a shadow world.

Yes, I know I sound heartless.  I am heartless.  My children are lucky enough to be in a stable, loving, legal home, and I am grateful for that fact.  I am terribly sad for those children who are not similarly situated, but I am also sufficiently invested in my own children that I have no desire to turn our whole society upside down and, possibly, destroy it, to remedy a wrong that can never really be righted.  I know that I shouldn’t malevolently visit the sins of the father on the child, but the fact remains that not all sins can be avoided, without enormous destruction flowing from that avoidance.

So far, as I hope you’ve all surmised, I’ve been speaking of obvious ills flowing from giving a free pass to illegal immigrants.  Those ills are more illegal immigrants, with all the attendant economic, social and national security risks.

There’s a more subtle ill, though, that flows from rewarding an illegal act, and that’s the lesson we teach our children:  Cheating pays, especially when it comes to education.  This is not an inconsequential lesson.  You see, if the illegals can cheat — and win — everybody should be able to cheat and win, an approach that pretty much destroys education as we know it (not to mention just about anything else we can think of). 

I blogged a few weeks ago about a New York Times publication for children that commented on the prevalence of plagiarism thanks to the internet (although the writer could not make himself offer any opinion about the immorality of that cheating).  It turns out that this rot runs much deeper than “blocking and copying” someone’s paragraph off of the internet (although that is bad enough).  A recent edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education has a very disturbing article detailing the shadowy world of college level papers — including doctoral theses — written by people who are virtually illiterate.  As the writer, who publishes anonymously, explains, he’s produced a lot of product, and he’s only one of many offering the same services:

In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

The article is rightly written as a scathing indictment of the education system, one that churns out illiterate, ill-informed youngsters, and teachers who cannot, or will not recognize the chasm between the unintelligible, illiterate youngster in their presence and the polished paper that same youngster offers as his own work.  It’s also a scathing indictment, however, of a moral system that says cheating is fine.  Sure, if you’re caught blatantly cheating, you might get in trouble, but the fact remains that the illegal alien sitting next to you is also cheating, but he (or she) still gets welfare, health care, public education, preferential college admission and tuition, etc.  If some cheaters not only prosper, but do say blatantly with government encouragement, it’s reasonable for all of us to abandon our stuff propriety and give dishonesty a try.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

It’s the end of the world as we know it

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the decline in our culture.  Bruce Kesler perfectly illustrates what it’s like to be a child raised in this declining culture.

Our de-aspirational society; or, a society aiming for victimization and tawdriness

More than a hundred years ago, writing in a deeply religious era, Robert Browning observed “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  Perhaps it’s no surprise that today, in a society with a pop and media culture dominated by secularists who have abandoned entirely the notion of heaven, our young people are encouraged, not to reach for the stars, but to engage in base behavior, bounded by the lowest possible common denominator of victim identification.

Any0ne over thirty (or, maybe, forty) will no doubt agree with me that our popular culture has changed dramatically in terms of the goals it sets for young people.  Certainly there is nothing today that compares to The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conservation, a guidebook written by Jesuit scholars back in the late 16th century that George Washington  studied with regularity and reverence.  Fast forward approximately one and a half centuries, and you have Harry Truman, reading over and over again a book entitled Great Men and Famous Women.  These were aspirational books that had as their purpose teaching young people to abide by moral principles and to think big, whether in personal interactions or in lifetime goals.

Literature generally, right up until my childhood, aimed high.  Every American child, myself included, must have read Parson Weems’ highly fictionalized The Life of Washington.  If you read that, you knew that you too could be president if you were incredibly hard-working, brave and honest.

In the 19th Century, young boys were nourished on a steady diet of Horatio Alger books.  While Horatio Alger’s private predilections may have been unsavory (there were strong indications that he was a little too fond of young boys), none of that came through in his popular works.  Instead, in book after book after book, young boys were told that if they were honest, hard-working, good-natured, and brave, they could slowly, but surely, ascend America’s social and economic ladder.  Girls got exactly the same message from Louisa May Alcott’s delightful works.

Whether in works by these iconic authors, both of whom dominated American popular culture for decades, or in books by all the other writers targeting American children, for the better part of a century the goal was always the same:  children should aspire, not necessarily to fame or fortune, but to a rock-solid middle class lifestyle, marked by a high moral tone.  The message was remarkably egalitarian:  all who embraced America’s moral and work ethics could achieve this goal.

These works were by no means great literature.  Indeed, Horatio Alger is a dreadful writer, but there’s something charmingly earnest and inspiring about his plots.  In the 20th century, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, for example, were churned out by the dozens using a factory scheme, but the message never varied:  diligence, bravery, good cheer and honesty were the tickets to success.

Books nowadays are another story entirely.  Every week, after a trip to the library, I sort through the books my 13 year old daughter wants to check out, and am horrified by what our nice suburban library has on the teen shelf.  The most innocuous books merely give the teenage protagonists permission to be whiny, self-absorbed and manipulative.  No matter the issue, the answer is “feelings, nothing more than feelings….”  The more troubling books seek to inform the children’s sexuality, whether by encouraging early sexual behavior or by messing with gender constructs.  And while there are a few uplifting books hidden amongst this pile of dreck, the vast majority of offerings are remarkably self-involved and devoid of any antiquated notions such as generosity of spirit, self-sacrifice, bravery, or core moral absolutes.

One sees precisely the same pattern with non-print media.  When it came to early and mid-twentieth century movies and TV shows, there was certainly a lot of stuff that had no moral message at all, but the available family fare didn’t carry a bad message either.  Children who watched I Love Lucy may not have been thinking in terms of diligence or self-sacrifice, but they also weren’t mastering the arts of snark and disrespect.  Those shows aimed specifically at children during the thirty year period from the 1950s through the 1970s, while admittedly bland or foolish, were innocuous or tried in an entertaining way to enforce core societal values.  Watching the Brady Bunch or Leave It To Beaver taught me about honesty, reliability, and respect for my elders.  The tone towards adults was always respectful.

As with the books, the values in these shows were also egalitarian.  No matter who you were, if you behaved the Brady way, or the Beaver Cleaver way, you’d do okay.  (And if you behaved the Gilligan way, i.e. foolishly, you end up wet and pummeled by coconuts.)  It was all very clear.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we get a remarkably different pop culture vision for children’s moral and social development.  Whether one thinks of books or television shows or movies, the message is always the same:  being disrespectful to your peers and to adults is attractive; adults are buffoons; men are useless; clever manipulation often trumps honesty; and, at the end of the day, what really counts is your feelings.  If any given episode of Miley Cyrus or I Carly or Suite Life of Zack and Cody actually carries a so-called moral, that moral isn’t that a specific behavior is wrong, but that the bad behavior might hurt someone else’s feelings.  In other words, in the world our media hands to our children, all ethical questions are resolved by a quick glance at ones own navel.

Aside from a moral vacuum, today’s media also offers an aspirational vacuum.  The heroes it sells to our children are athletes or movie stars.  While I may appreciate an athlete’s skills or a movie star’s pleasant screen persona, neither has distinguished himself (or herself) by willingly making a huge sacrifice, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice, on behalf of someone else.  A-Rod may show superb self-discipline when it comes to honing his skills, but he’s doing it to be rich and famous (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that), not for the betterment of mankind.  This is not a hero by any traditional standard.

Sleazy behavior is also normative.  As any parent of a little girl can tell you, Miley Cyrus morphed from snarkily wholesome to unutterably sleazy.  That’s bad enough, but what’s even worse is the excuse pop culture offers her:  she’s just growing up.  In this moral vacuum, growing up doesn’t mean taking on responsibility or displaying elan, class and sophistication.  Instead, the only thing growing up means is to engage in tawdry acts of public sexuality.  As a mother, it’s a great challenge to explain to ones children that becoming a sleaze-monger is not the normative external sign of maturity.

Worse, when the media is confronted by real heroes — by people who willingly put their safety and even their own lives at stake to advance a cause greater than themselves — it assiduously ignores those people.  I’m speaking, of course, of our troops.  As often as not, when the media pays attention to a service person, it is someone who, in an almost passive way, suffered horrific injuries.  I don’t mean to denigrate these men.  Merely by enlisting, they showed a rare moral courage, and their bravery in coping with terrible injuries is always inspiring. Still, they are only one side of the warrior equation.

The other side, the side the media ignores, is the men who actively leap into the breach.  Outside of the military press and the conservative blogosphere, you’ll be hard pressed to find stories celebrating the truly heroic exploits of such men as Sal Giunta, Bradley Kasal, Marco Martinez, Michael Murphy, Michael Mansoor or Marcus Luttrell.  If the media notes them at all, these stores are forced upon them by the fact that some of those men, whether dead or alive, have had the Medal of Honor bestowed upon them.  As a parent and a patriot, I resent that the media ignores people who triumph over their enemies and focuses only on those who triumph only over their own injuries.  Both should be celebrated, not just the latter.

If the materials made available to American children do tell stories of people actively triumphing over circumstances, those triumphs are very identity specific, and are tightly tied to someone’s victim status.  Thus, in contrast to the egalitarian message of old, that saw all hard working, brave, moral people rise up in the world, my white children are exposed to an endless stream of stories that, with few extremes, trumpet the triumphs only of those people who fall within PC victim parameters.

The problem with these stories is that the emphasis isn’t on virtuous behavior, but on victim status.  Whether in textbooks, required reading, “news” magazines, or movies shown in classrooms, the “value” being advanced is is being black, or being gay, or being Hispanic, or being female. These presentations then go on to say, almost coincidentally, that if one digs deep into the life story of these carefully classified people, one will find some abstract, overarching virtues as well. “He’s gay and — wow! — he’s brave, too.” “She’s black and — this is so cool — she’s compassionate.”

Well, I’m sorry, but being black is not a value. Being Hispanic is not a virtue. Being gay is not an ethic. Each of these is simply a label to help classify a person, because classification seems to be an innate human — and certainly and innate Leftist — need. None of these labels, however, touch upon conduct, morals, goals, bravery or any of the other abstract virtues that can reside in all people.

I’m happy to hear about heroic, brilliant, compassionate, important blacks, gays, women, Hispanics, etc., and I want my children to hear about them too. The focus, though, should be on the “heroic, brilliant, compassionate” parts, which are universal values we want to see all children learn. Only then should we go to the subset idea, which is that, no matter the label you give yourself (or that is given to you), you can aspire to these over-arching values, virtues and ethics.

The ne plus ultra of our de-aspirational society is our President, of course.  Although he’s almost exactly my age, because he grew up as a child of the Left, while I had a steady diet of virtue, he had an equally steady diet of cultural denigration.  Small wonder than that he travels the world, rigorously applying often imaginary virtues to cultures based upon their otherness, with no regard whatsoever for the abstract values that should define all moral societies.  And small wonder, too, that, to the extent he can periodically rouse himself to say something nice about America, that niceness is always tied to the elevation of some victim group.

Our youth can succeed only if they are taught that there is something beyond self-involvement, victim identity, and sex.  Because our popular culture refuses to recognize the abstract virtues of honor, bravery, patriotism, respect, honesty, etc., it is up to us to celebrate those virtues and to tell our children the tales of those who embody them.

Cross-posted in Right Wing News

Entitlement protests in England

When I studied in England, I did so using money I’d saved from a decade of work (starting when I was ten).  I took care of neighbor’s houses, mowed their lawns, babysat their kids, cleaned their cars, etc.  I had a goal and I worked to pay for it.

I was taken completely aback by the fact that all of the students I met in England had government subsidies for their education.  The working class students were completely subsidized.  The upper class were partially subsidized.  All had running overdrafts at their banks, meaning none had to live within a budget.  Each told me earnestly that this was to ensure that everyone had equal access to education.  Considering how class stratified England still was 30 years ago, that made a kind of weird sense to me.  Universities weren’t about education or hard work, they were about breaking the class barriers.  I got it.  (Or at least, I thought I got it.)

This week, we learned that certain Brits think that education is about breaking more than class barriers:  it’s about breaking budgets, windows, heads, etc.  As it happens, the outsized violence of the protests against tuition increases is not coincidental.  The leaders of the protests, the ones who took it from a march of spoiled children to a mob of violent anarchists, had far left ideology as their drummer.

Nowadays, wherever there’s bloodshed and violence, you can be virtually assured that one of two forces is behind it:  Islam or Leftism.

Our intelligent, racially representative military *UPDATED*

In my liberal corner of the world, I periodically have people tell me, quite earnestly, that the military preys on the poor and ill-educated.  I’ve countered these fact-free statements with the study from the Heritage Foundation study demonstrating the higher than average social-economic status one sees in the military.  I can now add Mark Seavey’s debunking, too.

Let me throw one more thing into the mix:  Even if one assumes solely for the sake of argument that these earnest liberals are correct and that the military does attract — nay, even prey upon — a disproportionate number of poor, ill-educated people, so what?

Our military is not a charnel house.  I’m going to assume, and you can throw statistics back at me to tell me I’m wrong, that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of military personnel do not die while on duty.  Heck, I don’t even have to stop with assuming.  I have facts!  Active duty military right now is about 1.4 million men and women.  The number who have died since the invasion in Iraq is, according to two websites I looked at, 5,555.  My math is dreadful, but even I can figure out that the total number of casualties is a small percentage of those who serve (thank God).

Likewise, while there are many more battle injuries than deaths, I’m also comfortable assuming that the vast, vast, vast, vast number do not have their lives destroyed by those injuries.  I might have magical thinking on this, because my Dad survived 5 years in North Africa and Southern Europe during WWII without a scratch (El Alamein, Crete, etc.), but I know for a fact that it’s possible to go to war and come back home again.

So what we’ve got is a whole bunch of people in the military who come home whole.  Nope.  That’s wrong.  I’d argue that a significant number — maybe the vast majority — come home better than whole.  They come home more disciplined, skilled and mature than they were when they left.  In other words, the military didn’t just take, it gave.  Accepting as true the liberal contention that the military took in a bunch of helpless rubes, it served them well by releasing them as more highly functioning members of society who, post-enlistment, are more, rather than less, likely to make it in America.

UPDATED:  This Onion News report, which Sadie sent me, seems like a nice wrap-up to a post about the military’s virtues, since it looks at those who don’t care enough to enter the military (or do anything at all, for that matter).  (Foul language warning.)

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don’t Give A Shit?

The next generation — and why their brains will resemble, and be as useful as, overcooked oatmeal

Just a reminder that Zombie has been writing all week about the horrible state of American public school education, which has been multiculturalized and politicized into meaninglessness.  The most recent installment is here.  (At the top of the article, you’ll see links to the previous three chapters in this depressing book.)

Presidential Education

We have enjoyed spirited discussions on these pages with Book’s question about universities and the values thereof.

A recurring theme that I hear among Liberals is one of educational snobbery. I heard this with regard to G.W. Bush (despite his Harvard MBA) and now we hear it about Sarah Palin and other conservative candidates that may one day run for President.  Educational credentials will be an issue. Should they?

To lay my own opinions right out on the table, I admire Sarah Palin and do hope she runs – to me, she embodies many of the qualities that I always admired about American women when looking at my country from an overseas (expat) perspective. Those qualities include strength, “can do” practicality and a self-assuredness that looks adversity straight in the face. Plus, she can shoot straight. She was one of Alaska’s all-time most effective governors in just 2-1/2 years. Her autobiography on those years describes someone with exceptional tenacity and people management skills.

Her qualities, however, are the product of her life experiences. The fact that she was expected by her parents to go to university and pay 100% of her expenses and did so at various institutions is a major plus, not a negative. For me, her real life practical accomplishments say far more than her limited educational experience. And, for the sake of Book’s daughter, her (not Alaskan but North Central states) accent is no more a barrier to me than Gov. Christie’s New Jersey accent, JFK’s Boston accent or Bush’s Texan accent…I love accents!). To me, it is practical real-world experience that counts, not formal education. If anything, formal education is a barrier.

So, just how important is education for U.S. presidents? I note that some of our greatest presidents had little or no advanced education. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Harry S. Truman never went to university. Ronald Reagan got an undergraduate degree in economics from tiny Eureka College in the middle of the corn and soybean fields of Illinois. By contrast, our worst presidents were some of our best educated: Woodrow Wilson (Ph.D. professor), Jimmy Carter (nuclear engineer), Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) and, now, Barack Obama (Ivy League elitist lawyer).

So, how important is formal education to being a good President? What are the Presidential qualities that a university can or cannot impart? How do we best counter these arguments from the Liberal /Left…not for the sake of the Lefties (whose egos remain immune to reason) but for the sake of all others trying to make up their minds on this issue?

Why I argue with my husband about the virtues of four years at an American University *UPDATED*

My husband and I frequently debate the virtue of sending our children off to a costly four year university (assuming, of course, that they are admitted).  I’m agin’ it, because I think it’s insane to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars so that ones child can listen to this type of gobbledygook:

American Digest, from whence this link came, properly characterizes Donna Haraway’s two and half minutes of video fame as “bitter, intellectually insane blather.”  While I never had Haraway (who is, unsurprisingly, a professor at the tax payer supported, but always loopy, UC Santa Cruz), I had plenty of UC Berkeley professors who easily gave her a run for her money when it came to spouting meaningless academic jargon, wrapped in unintelligible elliptical phrases.

My current goal, one with which my husband strongly disagrees, is to have the children spend their first two years out of high school at a strong community college, which will see them getting the basics, cheap.  My husband points out, quite correctly, that the caliber of fellow students at the Ivies, or the more prestigious public colleges is much higher than at the community colleges, so my plan will deny the children the benefit of smart peers.  I point out, correctly, that, at least in the liberal arts and soft sciences, the caliber of teachers sinks in direct proportion to the college’s or university’s prestige level.  My husband can’t see his way to acknowledging this one, which makes sense, since it is a subjective conclusion.

UPDATE:  The perfect video to wrap up this post:

All About Money

One of the things that I try to understand is the Great Divide between today’s Liberals and conservatives that has left us talking past one another on policy issues. Frankly, I have concluded that discussion with Liberals is often futile because we attribute different meanings to words and concepts.

One of those concepts, I suspect, has to do with “money”.  Let me throw the following proposition on the table for discussion:

Liberal /Lefties view “money” as a fixed, tangible quantity with intrinsic value, like gold coins, for example. Thus, the value of money is intrinsic to the lucre itself, be it coins or dollar notes. Conservatives, on the other hand, see “money” more abstractly as representing “created value”…as scrip or IOU on value created or received. As economists put it, money is a “medium of exchange” for value. So, for liberals, “money” is something tangible to that must be amassed by taking from someone else’s stash. For conservatives, “money” is something more abstract that must to be created (i.e. goods or services) directly (e.g., wages) or indirectly (e.g., inheritance) through the creation of “value”.

How might this color our perceptions of one another?

1) When people like Bill Gates amass a large quantity of money by creating products that many people wish to purchase, conservatives view Gates’ money as a reflection of the value that he created and contributed others. No hard feelings there – it’s a fair exchange. A Liberal/Lefty, however, sees only Gate’s amassed pot of lucre that appears disproportionately high compared to the lucre stored in other peoples’ pots. They see this imbalance as patently unfair, especially since this lucre was transferred from other peoples’ modest stashes into Bill Gates’ already whopping big stash: Bill has more, all of his customers have less.

2) When money is needed to achieve a desirable social or governmental goal, a conservative recognizes that such money needs to be generated somewhere to pay for this goal. This can only be done by either drawing down existing value (confiscating peoples’ lucre) or by creating new  ‘value” that can be taxed (i.e., growing the economy). A Liberal/Lefty doesn’t make this connection – they see the process simply as one of either redistributing the existing lucre from other peoples’ pots or creating new lucre by printing more money. The problem of printing new lucre, of course, is that it is still underwritten by a fixed quantity of value – expanding money supply representing a fixed value means that each dollar is worth less. We call that inflation.

I can’t tell you how many times Liberals have looked at me with puzzlement when I have asked where they expect to get the money for their favored social programs.

3) De-linking “money” from the process of wealth creation makes it easy for Liberal/Lefties to confuse using tax money to pay for unemployment checks, dance troupes or road repair as “economic stimulus”. You are, after all, taking lucre sitting idle in some peoples’ pots and putting that lucre into other peoples’ pockets to spend on purchases. Unfortunately, the fact is that such activities do not in themselves create new value. This cannot therefore “grow” the economy.

What do you think? Am I onto something? And, if so, what other aspects of the Great Divide does this help to explain? Does this help or hinder us in discussing our differences with the Liberal /Left?

A challenge to us all to renew the philosemitic paradigm in America

Stand With Us is an extraordinarily important organization.  I cannot emphasize that enough.  Its goal is to counter the calumnies that an unholy union of Leftists and Islamists spread against Israel, especially on college campuses.

The Stand With Us founders realized something that American Jews and other friends of Israel had missed completely:  while most kids, Jewish and non-Jewish, go to college to get educated and have fun (not necessarily in that order), a certain sector of Muslim students goes to college, not for education and fun, but to delegitimize the State of Israel.

Delegitimization is not a sideline or a hobby.  This is the main goal.  On college campuses, the vehicle for this goal, usually, is the Muslim Student Union (“MSU”).  Outside of college, CAIR dedicates itself to the same full-time principle.

Here’s a useful analogy, especially if you’ve lived through teenagers.  You are a busy person.  You have a job, a household to run, obligations to your community, and children to raise.  Your teenager is not a busy person.  Oh, sure, he or she attends school and has some extracurricular activities, but they’re just side issues to the teenager’s main goal:  getting what he or she wants.

So if your teenager wants a new pair of ridiculously expensive shoes, that is what will occupy your teenager’s every waking thought.  And your teenager will let you know that.  You will never hear the end of the shoes.  While you’re trying to finish a major project, run errands, cook dinner, clean house and manage the carpools, all that your teenager is saying is “I want those shoes.  I want those shoes.  I want those shoes.”

Those Muslims dedicated to Israel’s destruction are precisely the same — they eat, sleep, live and breath destroying Israel.  They are completely dedicated and well-funded.  (We’ll just guess where that money comes from, right?)  And for about 30 years, they’ve been the only voice heard, especially in the higher education world.  When they set up their tables on campus malls, Jewish kids and other friends of Israel walked by them in disgust, but pretty much ignored them.  They were pernicious, but who really cared, right?  After all, there are final exams next week and parties this week.

But just as a drop of water can wear away a rock, the relentless anti-Israel messaging has had an effect on those who know nothing about Israel.  The know-nothings are the vacuums that the MSU and CAIR has been filling.

Filling this vacuum has been especially easy on campus because college professors are so often Marxists, and the Marxists have made common cause with the Islamists.  Each for their own reasons wants Israel and traditional Western values gone.  When they’ve achieved that goal, then they’ll fight over the spoils.  This means that college students — young, uninformed, malleable, and encouraged to be open to new ideas — are being filled with anti-Israel bile, within the classroom, on the campus plazas, and inside of the meeting rooms and dormitories.

As for whether the anti-Israel bile shades into old-fashioned antisemitism, look at what the MSU, CAIR, and their allies, both Muslim and Leftist say, and you will see, over and over and over, the signs of antisemitism that Natan Sharansky has helpfully spelled out:  demonization, delegitimization, and double-standards.  Those factors appear on every campus, in every Leftist march, and at every U.N. gathering.

Which brings me back to Stand With Us:  This organization aims to fill that 30 year old vacuum.  By providing students from all over the world with pro-Israel facts, by training them to stand up to a fact-devoid but hate-filled argument, and by giving them mountains of attractive, easy-to-read, and fact-filled written materials, Stand With Us is fighting back.

If you believe in Israel’s legitimacy, and her right to survive as a nation among nations, then you should donate to Stand With Us.  (You’ll find contact information here.)  If you believe that Israel’s and America’s fates are tied together, not because of some nefarious Jewish lobby, but because both are truly the last bulwarks in the world of true democracy and individual liberty against onslaughts by Leftism and Islamism, then you should donate to Stand With Us.  If you believe that freedom of speech means that the truth should be heard, then you should donate to Stand With Us.

But I have another challenge for you, one that isn’t just about giving money to what has become the premier organization in the world for countering anti-Israel slanders.  I want you to help me change the American zeitgeist, which has become very hostile to Jews.  This means, of course, changing America’s popular culture.  I’ve written before about the fact that I came of age in the post-WWII era when Jews were admired.  Israelis were seen as plucky Davids, and Jews at home were seen as wise, funny and principled.

That’s changed so much.  Israel is now seen as a rapacious, repressive, apartheid-style, genocidal nation.  And Jews — well, Jews support that regime, so how good can they be?

Worse than that, the Jews we see in popular culture, the Jews that Hollywood promotes, are not nice people.  Larry David is truly a brilliant comic mind, but his show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, presents an extraordinarily loathsome individual:  self-centered, insensitive, demanding, cheap, malicious, etc.

David is not an anomaly.  The most popular Jewish comedienne, and another one with her own show, is Sarah Silverman:  vindictive, vicious, anti-Christian, and neurotic.  Oh, and how about Jon Stewart?  He’s neurotic, anti-Christian, hostile to traditional American values, exceptionally foul-mouthed, etc.

These are the Jews that the mid-West sees.  No more long-suffering, wise and kind George Burns; no more silly Milton Berle; no more wildly talented Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, or Jerome Kern; no more hapless Jack Benny.

I’m not asking you all to become movie stars.  I am thinking, however, about the fact that the next generation, my kids’ generation, gets the world through entertainment media.  To change the paradigm for that generation, how about a rockin’ song that manages to interweave Israel’s 3,000 year old connection to Jerusalem?  How about an awesome video game, a la Call of Duty, that has IDF soldiers hunting down Ahmadinejad?  How about a warm-fuzzy comedy, which has an old-fashioned Hollywood Jew, wise and funny, rather than neurotic and mean-spirited?

Adam Sandler was on the right track when he did You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, a movie about a wildly talented Israeli Special Forces fighter who really wanted to be a hairdresser, but it was too gross to gain enough traction.  So far the only other thing Hollywood has managed to do recently about Israeli goals and fighters was Munich, in which Spielberg managed to make Israel look evil for bringing mass murderers to justice.  Spielberg gets great kudos for his Holocaust work, but it’s pretty clear that his interest in Jewish well-being ends with 1945.

So, if you have any type of talent, or if you know someone who does (I don’t, and I don’t), Israel needs your help.  It’s not enough to educate the people in the vacuum aware of the facts.  We need to make them care about the facts — and that’s done by changing the pop culture paradigm.  So, to borrow a perfect pop culture phrase:  JUST DO IT.

Where it goes wrong – by guest blogger Danny Lemieux

I spoke with a fellow parishioner today about our children. This well-meaning, socially aware good fellow (an attorney) was extolling how well his son was progressing in his Ivy League undergraduate education. And, I asked, what was he studying? Environmental sciences. Ah, I said…that’s an interesting and certainly timely field of study: had he been of a technical or scientific bent in high school? Not really. Did he enjoy studying the sciences? Not really. Was he taking any scientific courses, like physics, biology or chemistry? Not really. In fact, he really wasn’t very interested in “hard” sciences at all and did not plan on studying any of them. So…what did he plan to do with an “environmental sciences” degree? Go to law school. He wanted to make policy, you understand. He was going to make the world a better place.

So, in an age where everything involving the environment demands a basic scientific knowledge, whether it be understanding the engineering challenges of alternative energy; the underlying geophysics, chemistry and biology of climate change; or the physics, engineering and biology needed to address the Gulf oil spill disaster, the term “environmental sciences” has now been degraded at the Ivy League level to a hack policy-making discipline where know-nothings can expound their ideologies free from the tyranny of facts. It is, in fact, the divorce of science and reason from sound environmental management. There was a time when “environmental science” was a noble field…an applied science that drew from many hard disciplines. No more, apparently.

If we are left to wonder why the government is so absolutely inept at dealing with real-life disasters, perhaps it is because “policy” has become politics divorced from material reality. It has become lazy: it’s so much easy to huff and puff utopian ideals and solutions when one need not trifle with facts and consequences. Solutions appear so much simpler when distilled down to simplistic “just plug that d*mn hole!” rhetoric and blithe “solar and wind power” propositions. We live in a hyper-complex age that demands the breadth and depth of Renaissance thinkers and solution providers. Instead, we are left to draw upon the talents of shallow social policy makers and academic rent seekers. It was Sir Isaac Newton who observed with humility that “I was able to see further because I was standing on the shoulder of giants”. Today’s crop of philosopher-king wannabes suffer no such humility: they slouch on the shoulders of dwarves. And they will lead us to disaster.

Iowahawk on the Harvard factor

The language is blue, but don’t let that stop you.  Read it.  Read it all.

My favorite line, incidentally, is this one:

Despite her underprivileged background Professor Kagan rose to the challenge and graduated magna cum laude, an honor reserved for the top 89% of Harvard Law alumni.

Right there is one of the dirty little secrets of the America’s top private universities back in the 1980s, when Elena Kagan (and Barack Obama) attended.  I don’t know if it’s true know, but I know it was true then.

It was in 1988 that a Stanford math professor explained to me how the system worked back then:

People paid a whole lot to get their little darlings into Stanford (or Harvard, or Yale, or whatever other prestigious school you can think of).  And coming in, there was no doubt but that their little darlings were the best of the best back at the hometown prep schools and high schools.

Each of those incoming students suddenly found himself in a Garrison Keillor situation, with all “all of the kids . . . above average.”  Once they were all packed into that little brilliant pond together, logic would dictate that a bell curve would come into play, with some of those above average kids showing academic skills ahead of or, sadly, behind the pack.

It turned out, though, that Mummy and Daddy got upset when their darling, who was class valedictorian at her fancy New York prep school, proved to be less capable than her college classmates.  After all, why would Mummy and Daddy pay Stanford $50,000 a year so that their baby could bring home a C or, worse, fail?  The answer was for the school to say that, because everyone was brilliant, regardless of actual classroom performance, everyone should therefore get a good grade.  Or failing that, students who could not possibly satisfy even the minimal grade requirement for a given class should be asked, quite politely, to leave that class, with no record and no repercussions. Net result:  Students happy, parents happy, school happy.  Future employers . . . well, not so happy.

What the Stanford professor told me wasn’t anomalous.  When I was a law student down in Texas, also in the 1980s, I knew a lot of employers, employers at big, fancy, well-paying Texas firms, who wouldn’t hire Boalt grads.  They still hired Harvard grads, because they couldn’t make themselves back away from the cachet (which is a big deal in Texas), but they drew the line at Boalt.  They told me that Boalt’s grading system was so “student friendly,” they had no idea if they were getting someone who was solidly in the middle of the bell curve, or the kid who couldn’t be bothered to show up to any classes.  Texas, by the way, graded on a very strict bell curve.

So read and enjoy Iowahawk but know that, despite the tongue in cheek, every word of it is true!

The “patriotism” they’re teaching our school children — or, let’s talk about shallow thinking

I was at my child’s school the other day, and happened to glance at the daily handout the children receive.  It had the usual special announcements and ended with “Today’s Patriotic Quotation.”  I was rather pleased to see that there was a patriotic quotation included (on a daily basis, yet).  Reading the quotation, though, just depressed me.  As far as I could tell, it had nothing whatsoever to do with patriotism.

Patriotism means support of or pride in ones country.  A patriotic quotation, therefore, would laud something distinctly American.  I’ve been happily awash in patriotic quotations lately, since I signed up for daily emails from The Patriot Post.  Every day, as part of the material this organization sends to me, I get a quotation from the Founders reminding me of America’s exceptionalism.  Here are just a few examples:

“Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Wilson Nicholas, 1803

“No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was every more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm.” –George Washington, letter to James Madison, 1786

“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” –James Madison, Federalist No. 57

“I trust that the proposed Constitution afford a genuine specimen of representative government and republican government; and that it will answer, in an eminent degree, all the beneficial purposes of society.” –Alexander Hamilton, speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 1788

I admit that many of the Founder’s quotations are more intellectually sophisticated than the average 11 year old can comprehend, but there are other truly patriotic quotations floating around, highlighting the wonders of the American system and the fundamental goodness of the American people.  (And I would be delighted if you would send your favorite patriotic quotations to the comments section in my blog.)

The day I visited the school, though, the “Patriotic Quotation” had nothing whatsoever to do with America.  Instead, it was this, from Eleanor Roosevelt:

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Am I missing something when I read that, or am I correct that it is entirely unrelated to America?  Instead, it’s the standard pabulum of the Left, waffling on about the wonders of peace.

Believe it or not, despite the fact that I’m a conservative, I’m all for peace.  But peace is only worthwhile if it stands for something.  As my regular readers know, I’m extremely fond of quoting Tacitus, who spoke of Roman military victories thusly:  “They make a desert and call it peace.”

Totalitarian countries are very peaceful.  There are no barroom brawls, no street protests, no euphoric rock concerts, no wacky TV shows, and no political debates.  All is quiet.  If citizens follow the myriad rules, if they keep their heads down and worship at the government’s shrine, all is peaceful.  The residents in such countries work at peace daily in their continual efforts to stay alive.

You’ll pardon me for being condescending here, but I cannot escape the feeling that the liberal approach to war and peace is extraordinarily shallow.  They attach labels to appearances, and then try to derive deep meanings from those labels.  (Hardly surprising, I guess, from a political orientation that rotates around the hardcore labeling that is identity politics.)

Here are the familiar liberal tropes, the behavior labels, if you will:  “War is bad.”  “Peace is good.”  “Small armed groups rising up against a large military are good.”

But what if the War is the Civil War, which broke the back of the institution of slavery?  (It also severely damaged states’ rights, which I understand, but I’m focusing on slavery here, a genuine evil that Progressives surely would want to see destroyed.)  Or how about if the War is World War II, which defeated Nazi Germany?

I don’t need to re-hash my peace shtick, set out above.  Peace is good only when it’s allied with freedom.  Peace alone can easily be the quiet of the grave.

As for the “small armed uprisings,” you know that I’m thinking of all the Progressives who compare Al Qaeda or Hamas to the American Revolution.  At the shallow strata that constitutes Progressive thinking, if you’re big, you must be the oppressor, and if you’re small, you must be the oppressed.

I actually wrote about this precise point some years ago in an American Thinker article regarding Leftist — or, as I called it, Marxist — morality, a post triggered by my watching an acclaimed movie called Maria Full of Grace, which was a sympathetic portrait of a drug smuggling illegal alien.  Marxist morality is a distinct creature from our more traditional Biblical morality.  Rather than reinvent the wheel, let me quote myself:

This ethical paradigm [i.e., Marxist morality] isn’t premised on right and wrong.  It is, instead, concerned with oppressor and oppressed. We all know, of course, that Marxism orders the world by oppressors and oppressed.  I always saw this hierarchical standard, however, as ex post facto retrofitting explaining, not why someone was right to do as he did, but why he shouldn’t be punished.  This Marxist approach was an explanation for things that had already happened (a la the Officer Krupke song), not a moral justification for determining future conduct.

[snip]

If you haven’t seen the movie, the plot precis is that a poor, unemployed, pregnant Columbian girl gets herself a job as a mule, running cocaine into America.  The San Francisco Chronicle, in its review, introduced the movie as follows:

A “Bonnie and Clyde” moment — when you find yourself rooting for the outlaw over the authorities — comes a third of the way into “Maria Full of Grace,” a revelatory independent film whose moments of incredible sadness are offset by the same state of grace that blesses its astonishing title character.

Given that the lead character is an unwed pregnant woman engaged in illegal conduct, I naively assumed that the “state of grace” to which the review refers was the moment in which Maria suddenly realizes that she is engaged in evil, immoral conduct; repents; and works to undo the wrongs in which she was involved.  Had I begun by reading the Roger Ebert review, I never would have made this silly mistake.  Thus, Ebert has this to say, in relevant part:

Long—stemmed roses must come from somewhere, but I never gave the matter much thought until I saw “Maria Full of Grace,” which opens with Maria working an assembly line in Colombia, preparing the roses for shipment overseas. I guess I thought the florist picked them early every morning, while mockingbirds trilled. Maria is young and pretty and filled with fire, and when she finds she’s pregnant, she isn’t much impressed by the attitude of Juan, her loser boyfriend. She dumps her job and gets a ride to Bogota with a man who tells her she could make some nice money as a mule — a courier flying to New York with dozens of little Baggies of cocaine in her stomach. [….]

Maria is a victim of economic pressures, but she doesn’t think like a victim. She has spunk and intelligence and can think on her feet, and the movie wisely avoids the usual cliches about the drug cartel and instead shows us a fairly shabby importing operation, run by people more slack—jawed than evil. Here is a drug movie with no machineguns and no chases. It focuses on its human story, and in Catalina Sandino Moreno, finds a bright—eyed, charismatic actress who engages our sympathy.

By writing the above, Ebert unwittingly defines the second part of Leftist morals, the part that states that, if you are on the bottom of the Marxist hierarchy, your status preemptively sanctifies any conduct in which you engage, provided that it is directed against oppression (however you define that oppression, or whoever creates that oppression).  In other words, morals aren’t just about feelings, anymore.  Instead, they can be determined relative to a person’s status on the economic ladder. “Maria is a victim of economic pressures.”  Given her situation, she cannot make immoral choices.  All of her choices are virtuous responses to her degraded situation.

[snip]

I might have spent several days brooding over the movie’s complete immorality, and the critics’ swoons over that same movie, if I hadn’t heard the next day a laudatory review on NPR  about the new Battlestar Galactica series. In that science fiction show, cyborgs have conquered humans living on a distant colony, and the humans are struggling to deal with the situation and to overthrow the cyborgs.  The critic interviewed in the NPR spot said that, to him, the show worked to make the viewer understand the insurgents in Iraq by showing us that they have an “oppressed minority fighting against conquering majority” viewpoint. In other words, it makes the Iraqi insurgents sympathetic.

Frankly, I have a hard time being sympathetic to people who back regimes that murder millions of its own people; who enjoy beheading innocents; and who would like to impose a relentlessly grim religious rule that requires death sentences for eating ice cream, singing, playing tennis, or putting on a clown show for children. These are not good people whether they’re in power or are seeking power.

In the Leftist moral view, however, just as all workers are exploited and should be praised for taking the initiative by engaging in utterly immoral, illegal activity, so too are all underdogs virtuous. If you’re in charge, you’re bad; if you’re struggling to overthrow those in charge, you’re good. It doesn’t seem to occur to Leftist moralists to examine the motives of those involved in any given struggle.

There’s more of the same in the rest of my article, here, but I think you get the point.

And so I’m right back at the quotation they served at my child’s school as an example of patriotism.  It had nothing to do with America, and everything to do with a conviction that some abstract peace is the highest goal.  Having read that, I sincerely wonder what yesterday’s patriotic quotation was, and what tomorrow’s will be.  Does the school ever praise our country, or does it just use famous Democrats and Leftists as mouthpieces for shallow and abstract ruminations about facile and meaningless goals?  I hope that the day I was there was just a one-off, since our children our vulnerable, and their schools’ indoctrination affects them strongly.

Another example of how liberals teach our children — even when they’re unclear on the concepts themselves

Readers of my blog know that one of my personal bête noires is liberal indoctrination in public schools.  I blog about it frequently.  My last outing on that subject was here, and I’ll get back to that in a little bit.  First, though, I’d like you to see how one public school teacher saw fit to educate American children about America’s involvement in WWII, as well as the response of one politely appalled man who was actually involved in the historic moment at issue.

Not only is this kind of indoctrination par for the course, it’s produced at least one generation of people who can throw out conclusions to their heart’s content, but are incapable of backing them up with common sense or actual knowledge.  And that’s how we wrap around to that post of mine that I mentioned earlier.  If you link over to it, you’ll see that I spoke with my daughter about a teacher’s facile and ill-educated assertion that “all civilized countries” have socialized medicine.

I carefully led my daughter through a few fairly uncomplicated facts.  A lot of uncivilized countries (North Korea, Cuba, the former Soviet Union) have socialized medicine.  I also pointed out what is undoubtedly true, which is that those countries with socialized medicine cannot maintain them.  They work well initially when a big chunk of taxpayer money is poured into them, but that they then go downhill:  they don’t generate revenue themselves and, since they suck up wealth, they leave the taxpayer pool less wealthy and therefore less able to pay for them.  This isn’t rocket science and, more importantly, it’s not ivory tower theory — it’s actual real world fact, as proven by real world, actual events.

What’s interesting is what happened with my post when it got picked up on a liberal thread at reddit.com (the thread is entitled “libertarian” but it’s clearly not, as the tenor of the comments indicates).  The liberals are very angry at what I wrote, but they don’t have substance to back up their anger.  Lots of insults, lots of conclusions, but no facts and no coherent, sustained argument.  Here are a few comments, plus my replies:

Wow, there is actually book that describes why the mother is an idiot, it is called Economics 101 – look in to it.  [Insult, conclusion; no argument.]

Also, dear mother: You do realize you already pay for the uninsured, right? You just pay 20 times as much as you should. Why is this not considered a tax?  [Boy is s/he unclear on free market concepts.  If the market wasn’t stultified by thousands of government regulations, not to mention the perverse incentives of mass buying by employers, there shouldn’t be uninsured.  Also, I don’t think I should be for the 30% of uninsured who are illegal aliens under any circumstances.]

***

Unfortunately, this kind of overly simplistic thinking is exactly why the tea party has no credibility. As cutesy as the exchange is, “Momma” didn’t address the fact that universal health care is working in many countries in Europe (not that it’s sustainable, but that’s not that point).  [I’m delighted this person thinks I’m cute, but the fact is that if universal health care is unsustainable, it’s not working in Europe, no matter how much you wish it was.  As it sucks money out of the economy, the initial benefit vanishes, with the health care system in Britain the perfect example.   You don’t need a Harvard PhD to figure that one out.]

Not only that, but the link that was posted at the end about the girl getting the abortion:

a) has absolutely nothing to do with the exchange about health care. b) I don’t see why the girl should be forced to tell her parents…we should be expanding the rights of the youth, not restricting them.  [Had the person read my post, s/he would have realized that it was relevant, as I explained, because it goes to the way in which public high schools indoctrinate students, right to the point where they bypass parents entirely when it comes to political hot topics such as abortion.]

tl;dr? As a hardcore libertarian, I think this article reeks of sensationalist neocon.  [Uh, I don’t read hardcore libertarian here.  I read Progressive troll.]

***

That was a lot of stupid in one place. Too bad the teacher did not point out that the CBO said that the bill saves money, not costs money. [Where to begin.  Here, perhaps.  The person also doesn’t understand that the CBO was forced to work with the numbers that Congress used as predicates for the bill, rather than actual real world costs.  Even with that, as Paul Ryan carefully explained, the bill is affordable only because of accounting jiggery-pokery and because of deferred costs.] Perhaps they are wrong, but that mom had better go over the figures and say where they are wrong. Then the teacher could point out how the bill helps small businesses get health care for employees. Then there was that deep dishonesty that North Korea having universal health care, both false and distracting from Europe and Canada and all that.  [All communist countries have universal health care because they have no private enterprise.  To the extent there is any health care, it comes from the government.  Of course, perhaps what this person meant is that North Korea has no health care at all, because the government has run out of money and the people are eating dirt.]

Insults, conclusions, false facts, ignorance — what are they teaching young people nowadays?

UPDATE:  If you’ve come this far in the post, you’ll know that the history teacher who put a unique spin on WWII history had edited the iconic Iwo Jima photograph to turn the flag into a McDonald’s arch with Arabic writing.  Perhaps that teacher was educated at the same schools as our president who managed, in his Easter message, to edit Jesus Christ out entirely, including the part in which he quoted from a WWII pastor.  (See also Flopping Aces, which tipped me off to this one, and which adds some more information.)

I understand that the president of a multicultural United States must be careful not to speak in such overtly religious terms that he sounds more as if he’s giving a sermon, than a speech.  One cannot avoid, however, the fact that Easter is a Christ centered religion.  (Unless, of course, Obama is actually celebrating the Pagan rite of spring which involved fertility goddesses and suchlike.)  For Obama, who professes to be a Christian to edit Christ out entirely from a message that should, in theory, resonate personally with Obama, is somewhat surprising.

Educating the indoctrinated public school child *UPDATED*

My daughter’s history teacher, when pressed by her students about Sunday’s health care vote, couldn’t keep her mouth shut.  (Keeping her mouth shut would have involved saying, “This is a history class, not a politics class.  You should ask your parents these questions.”)  Instead, she blithely opined that “all civilized societies have universal health care.”

Fortunately, despite years in the public school system, my daughter is still amenable to logic.  In the face of her teacher’s certitude, I challenged my daughter with a few facts and asked a few questions.

Her: We live in a really rich place, don’t we. [I should add here that our family doesn’t live in great wealth, but, living in Marin, we are definitely part of a very wealthy community.]

Me: Yes, we do, but I’m not sure how long it’s going to stay wealthy.

Her: Why?

Me: Because that new health care plan has to be paid for. How do you think they’ll pay for it?

Her: They’ll get money from somewhere.

Me: Yeah, but where will they get the money?

Her: [Blank silence.]

Me: Taxes. They have to tax people. And look around you — these are the people they’re going to tax. Also, they’re going to tax these people’s businesses. So here’s a question for you. If the government takes more money from a business in the form of taxes, that means the business has less money, right?

Her: Right.

Me: And what happens when a business has less money?

Her: It can’t pay people.

Me: Bingo. And people who don’t get paid, don’t pay taxes — so you have to tax the reach rich people and businesses even more, since they’re the ones that still have money. But you tax them enough, and they stop having money too.

Her: Oh. I hope we don’t become poor.

Me: I hope so too. By the way, your teacher said “all civilized countries” have this kind of universal health care, right?

Her:  Yes.

Me:  Did she mention some of the countries that have it?

Her:  No.

Me:  Did she tell you about North Korea?

Her:  No.

Me:  North Korea is possibly the most repressive country on earth.  They have universal health care because everything comes from the government.  Also, do you remember when Daddy and I told you about Cuba, a country that’s like an island prison?  People get on rafts on shark-invested oceans to escape it.  Cuba has universal health care.  So did the Soviet Union, another country that was a giant prison that people tried to escape.  Under their universal health care, doctors were at the bottom of the pecking order.  Patients were in rooms with 20 or 30 other patients.  The beds were filthy and had no sheets.  People’s relatives had to bring linens and clean and take care of them.  That was also universal health care.

Her:  I didn’t know that.

Me:  I bet your teacher didn’t either.  In Canada, it’s not so bad. They have clean beds and good medical practices. The problem is the waiting. Take a hip replacement (which her grandmother had, twice). In America, once they decide you need one, you can have the operation in a few weeks. In Canada, it can take years. Also, if someone is really old, even though that person is in good health, like your grandmother, they might be refused the operation entirely, because it’s a “waste” to do it on an old person.

Her: That’s so unfair.

Me: Well, that’s the kind of decision a government has to make when it has to provide health care for everyone, and the citizens are running out of tax dollars. Right now, a lot of Canadians have been coming to America for these operations, because they can’t or don’t want to wait.

Her: Oh.

Me: In England, they also have “universal health care.” They also have one of the highest cancer death rates in the Western world, endless waits, hospitals that are death traps, and a pretty unhealthy population that the government keeps trying to bully when it comes to eating and exercise (since the government is paying for everyone’s health care). Healthy people don’t mind the system, because they don’t use it. People with emergencies sometimes get good care and sometimes get bad care, so they’re kind of neutral. Sick and old people, the ones who get told by the government that they are using up too many resources, hate it.

Her: That’s awful. How can they do that?

Me: Let me ask you yet another question:  If you get bad service at Nordstrom, what do you do?

Her:  Go to Target.

Me:  That’s right.  Or you go to Macy’s or Gap, or a hundred other stores.  Here’s the next question:  If you get bad service from the government, what to do you do?

Her:  Nothing.  There’s no place to go.

Me:  Right.  And if the government is the only provider of something, and has no competition, do you think it has an incentive to do a good job?

Her:  No.

Me:  Do you think it’s its employees have an incentive to try hard or give you good service?

Her:  No.

Me:  Okay, here’s another question:  Do you think people spend years and years, and work incredibly hard, go hugely into debt at medical school to make lots of money or little money?

Her:  Lots of money.

Me:  What do you think is going to happen if the government says “We’re not going to allow you to make lots of money?”

Her:  People won’t become doctors.

Me:  Right.

Her:  Stupid Obama!

UPDATE:  This story, of a public high school arranging for a girl’s abortion entirely behind her mother’s back, seems entirely appropriate for the above post.  Also, I’m not the only one struggling to stem the indoctrination tide.

Fortunately, despite years in the public school system, my daughter is still amenable to logic.  I mentioned a few facts and asked a few questions.

Me:  Your teacher said all civilized countries have this kind of universal health care, right?
Her:  Yes.
Me:  Did she mention some of the countries that have it?
Her:  No.
Me:  Did she tell you about North Korea?
Her:  No.
Me:  North Korea is possibly the most repressive country on earth.  They have universal health care because everything comes from the government.  Also, do you remember when Daddy and I told you about Cuba, a country that’s like an island prison?  People get on rafts on shark-invested oceans to escape it.  Cuba has universal health care.  So did the Soviet Union.  Under their universal health care, doctors were at the bottom of the pecking order.  Patients were in rooms with 20 or 30 other patients.  The beds were filthy and had no sheets.  People’s relatives had to bring linens and clean and take care of them.  That was also universal health care.
Her:  I didn’t know that.
Me:  I bet your teacher didn’t either.  Let me ask you a different question:  If you get bad service at Nordstrom, what do you do?
Her:  Go to Target.
Me:  That’s right.  Or you go to Macy’s or Gap, or a hundred other stores.  Here’s the next question:  If you get bad service from the government, which is the only provider around, what to do you do?
Her:  Nothing.  There’s no place to go.
Me:  Right.  And if the government is the only provider, and has no competition, do you think it has an incentive to do a good job?
Her:  No.
Me:  Do you think it’s employees have an incentive to try hard or give you good service?
Her:  No.
Me:  Let me ask you another question:  Do you think people spend years and years, and work incredibly hard, at medical school to make lots of money or little money?
Her:  Lots of money.
Me:  What do you think is going to happen if the government says “We’re not going to allow you to make lots of money?”
Her:  People won’t become doctors.
Me:  Right.
Her:  Stupid Obama.

Seeking information about the prevalence of illegal immigration propaganda in America’s classrooms

Back in January, I blogged about the fact that my daughter’s Spanish class sat through La Misma Luna — which is a movie that uses the travails of a charming and pathetic little boy to make the case that our laws against illegal immigrants are cruel. That’s not just my opinion.  Here’s a piece of a review from an immigration action website promoting the movie:

The story, in which a mother must leave her son in her native Mexico to try to build him a better life in the United States, is not mere fantasy, but is based on the countless true stories in which people risk their lives to cross a border that not only separates Mexico from the U.S., but, poverty from prosperity.

The propaganda in this movie (which was funded in part by the Mexican government) is so crude and obvious that even the New York Times derides it.

I’ve since received emails from other parents telling me that their children have also seen this film in school.  I’m curious now how prevalent this movie is becoming in the American curriculum.  After all, it was released in the U.S. only in 2008, so it hasn’t even had the chance to be around long enough to be called a “classic.”  So, if you wouldn’t mind, please take my little poll, and asked your friends to as well.

http://www.blogpolls.com/poll/62429.js
Blog Polls

San Francisco School Board cuts academic programs to fund gay rights at school

Two days ago, I brought to your attention the fact that the San Francisco School Board — despite facing a $113 million dollar budget shortfall over the next two years, despite its admission that it will be cutting summer school and academic programs, and despite the fact that there has not been a sudden outbreak of extreme prejudice against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) students in San Francisco’s public schools — was seriously contemplating putting into place a whole new program aimed at tracking discrimination against the GLBT crowd and at educating the San Francisco student population to drop words such as “dyke,” “fag” and “queer” from its insult lexicon (although I’ll just note here that all those words are very “in” with the Queer activist crowd).

I was careful to point out that this program was simply the subject of debate at the Board meeting.  To be honest, I thought it would die on the vine, because even San Francisco politicians can’t be so crazy that they’ll openly undermine academic programs during a budget shortfall while simultaneously creating a whole new layer of costly victim class bureaucracy.  But as Mencken should have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating Progressives’ pathological need to tax the public to obtain reparations for self-defined PC victim groups.”  And so, in a turn of events that appears to have surprised even the SF Chronicle‘s reporter, the San Francisco School Board turned its back on the academic needs of the majority of the students trapped in San Francisco’s mediocre public schools, and pandered:

The San Francisco school board added to the district’s massive $113 million shortfall over the next two years by voting Tuesday night to fund a substantial increase in instruction and services related to gay and lesbian issues.

Though the district is facing layoffs and significant program cuts, board members unanimously agreed that the estimated $120,000 annual price tag was worth it to support gay and lesbian students – children who are more likely to experience bullying and skip school because they are afraid.

The resolution calls for adding a district position to manage “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning” youth issues. It also requires the district to keep tabs on harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation and distribute educational packets every year to parents encouraging them to discuss sexuality, gender identity and safety with their children.

The measure, sponsored by the city’s Youth Commission and Human Rights Commission and the district’s Student Advisory Council, requires district staff to seek outside funding to cover the costs, but guarantees at least a half-time position and other services regardless.

About 13 percent of San Francisco’s middle school students and 11 percent of high school students self-identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, according to a district survey.

Read the rest here.

(As an aside, the last paragraph I quoted has a very high level of self-identification compared to national numbers.  One reason there might be such a high level of self-identification is that GLBT kids in SF do feel fairly safe, despite the fact that they are bullied more than their peers — or, at least, safe enough to explore and recognize their sexuality.  It could also be that gay parents raise gay children, something that does not answer the nature/nature debate about gayness, but that seems to happen fairly often to the extent I’ve observed gay parents.  San Francisco, of course, has a lot of gay — and, I might add, loving and wonderful — parents.  It could also be because the constant focus on gay sex in San Francisco’s schools and streets affects youngsters’ sexuality, pushing them in experimental directions they might sublimate, happily or not, in a slightly more repressive environment. )

But even with a high 13% GLBT self-identification, and even accepting that these kids are less happy than your average teenager (who is often plenty unhappy), and even accepting that GLBT youth are the subject of greater bullying, it strikes me as unconscionable to for a School Board, which is tasked with the well-being of all students in the district, to engage in this type of touchy-feelie programing when the district as a whole is going broke. The fact is that bullying should be unacceptable regardless of the nature of victim.  Heck, I got bullied unmercifully at some rough schools because I was short and wore glasses.  The solution is to de-rough the schools, many of which are worn out and gang-ridden, rather than to focus on a specifically identified victim group.  This is a weird version of the Left’s obsession with equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity.  Rather than making a better, safer environment for all, the Progressives are trying to ensure that GLBT students are picked on at precisely the same statistical rate as their non-GLBT peers.

As I pointed out the other day, San Francisco isn’t alone in this desire to appease minority sensibilities at the expense of the majority.  Berkeley, right across the Bay, garnered significant headlines when its school district proposed cutting science programs (that is, solidly academic programs) because not enough minorities were signing up for them.  After an uproar from parents who care more about their children’s education than parading them as sacrificial lambs to Progressive politics, the school district has backed off the plan, at least for now.

Fundamentally, this isn’t about GLBT safety, no matter how the School Board dresses it up.  This is simply the Progressive mindset at work:  minorities are victims; victims need reparations; within the context of public education, reparations come in the form of denying academic opp0rtunities to all students (including, of course, the victims themselves).

San Francisco mulls expanding gay rights program at expense of academic programs *UPDATED*

[UPDATE:  The school board stopped mulling and decided to act.]

Last week, I wrote a long, ruminative post questioning how far a democracy must go to protect its minorities.  Stepping in, right on cue, the San Francisco School District, which is facing a disastrous budget shortfall, is considering a huge expansion in a program aimed and supporting the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth within the school district.  Put simply, the City is seriously contemplating further destroying academic opportunities for the many in order to engage in statistics and psychobabble for the few:

With everything from art classes, summer school and jobs on the chopping block this year, the San Francisco school board will decide this week whether to greatly expand school services, support and instruction on issues of sexual orientation.

The decision could cost the school district, which is facing a $113 million budget shortfall over the next two years, at least $120,000 a year – enough cash to cover the salaries of two classroom teachers.

The school board is expected to vote Tuesday on the fiscally controversial resolution calling for San Francisco Unified to add a new full-time staffer to manage “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning” youth issues in the district’s Student Support Services Department.

It also would require the district to track harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation and distribute an educational packet to parents, encouraging them to discuss “the issues of sexuality, gender identity and safety” with their children.

That commitment probably would cost about $90,000 a year for the staffer and maybe another $30,000 for the rest.

Read the rest here.  It is worth remembering at this point that, even by generous estimates, those gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students constitute only a very small portion of the San Francisco student population:

Various estimates of percentage of US population that is gay:

Average guess by polled Americans: 21% of men, 22% of women

Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: 10%

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: 3% to 8%

The Family Research Report: 2% to 3% of men, 2% of women

The 2000 US Census Bureau: less than 1%

It’s also worth thinking about how San Francisco’s school system currently ranks (and this ranking is before the projected cuts to academics have gone into effect).  Out of 752 school districts in California, San Francisco comes in at 382 — a little over halfway to the bottom. It could certainly be worse, but considering San Francisco’s prestige and sophistication, that’s a pretty pathetic showing.

Of course, San Francisco isn’t alone in this desire to appease minority sensibilities at the expense of the majority.  Berkeley, right across the Bay, garnered significant headlines when its school district proposed cutting science programs (that is, solidly academic programs) because not enough minorities were signing up for them.  After an uproar from parents who care more about their children’s education than parading them as sacrificial lambs to Progressive politics, the school district has backed off the plan, at least for now.

What’s so fascinating about these Progressive initiatives is that they are not being put in place to address manifest wrongs.  That is, I don’t see any argument that black and Hispanic students are being discouraged from taking science classes in Berkeley, or that they are the subjects of rank discrimination.  Likewise, the San Francisco school district isn’t using an epidemic of anti-gay violence to justify redirecting funds from academics to a designated victim group.  Instead, this is simply the Progressive mindset at work:  minorities are victims; victims need reparations; within the context of public education, reparations come in the form of denying academic opp0rtunities to all students (including, of course, the victims themselves).

I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but I’m beginning to think that, provided Obama doesn’t bankrupt us or Iran bomb us, Obama’s election may be a blessing in disguise.  Progressives outside of power managed to convince vast swathes of America that Progressives were interested only in the good of all, while inherently evil conservatives were dedicated to the destruction of everyone but white males (plus a few pro-Life pseudo-females).

The election, however, has gone to the Progressives’ heads.  They are revealing themselves in all their ugliness.  When it comes to education, their goal isn’t to educate children, but to indoctrinate them in an anti-American, anti-Israel curriculum that elevates victim status over academics.  On abortion, they’re not pro-Choice, but pro-Death.  On national security, their anti-Bush diatribes proved to be rooted in an affinity with the terrorists over the interests and security of Americans.  Their ostensible concern about the economy is merely an umbrella to transfer all wealth to the government.

You can add to this list, ’cause you know where I’m going.  Before the election, we saw the eternally pure and youthful Dorian Gray; now we see the picture in which reposes all the actual ugliness and evil.

Thursday quick picks *UPDATED*

I’m working on a post, but thought you all would find this interesting in the meantime:

From AJ Strata, something that’s not just interesting, but is also terrifying:  the terrorists are out there and, having gotten the measure of our new president and his administration, they are massing for war.

If you needed a reminder that today’s progressives are warmed over versions of yesterday’s fascists, Rhymes with Right traces the history of the despicable anti-free speech law Obama is now praising in his support for fascists.

Here’s another one of those matched sets I like so much:  An article about the violent and sordid history of yet another Chicago Democratic pol (h/t Danny Lemieux) and Michael Barone’s optimistic prediction for Republicans based upon the Illinois primaries. (Should I remind you here that Obama selected and emerged from this Chicago political cesspool?)

And lastly, an enjoyable 3 minute video about education and young minds.

Telling a lie with a straight face is an art.  Telling nine lies about George Bush in three paragraphs is a Democratic art.  Watch Randall Hoven destroy those lies.  The only sad thing is that most of the people who read the lies won’t be reading Hoven later.

UPDATED:  I love a good mystery, but what happened to Jim Treacher is too unpleasant to be counted as good.  He was cross a street on a “walk” light, got hit by a speeding SUV driver that then left him lying in the street, broke his knee, got a ticket from the D.C. cops for jaywalking, and got told by witnesses that the SUV looked like a Secret Service vehicle.  Just what is going on here?  To mangle Shakespeare, “Something is rotten in the District of Columbia.”  (Here’s Jim’s own account of what happened.)