Category Archives: News and Issues

News and issues of the day.

Goodbye, Blue Monday

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2013_05_20_Goodbye Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday.

Three Signs There’s a Cover-Up.  Excerpt:

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.”

The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved.

Astonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation that it had targeted tea-party groups and other organizations with “patriot” or “9/12” in their names. “Mistakes were made initially,” the official IRS statement on May 10 read, implying that the mistakes ended after a short “initial” period. We now know that the scandal and cover-up unfolded over a three-year period, and the IRS publicly acknowledged them only after the 2012 election was safely past.

This seems a little more than just second-term shenanigans, but it’s early yet.  What’s instructive is watching officials of the Obama Administration being grilled by Congress; just below is a rare piece of footage of one such session.

In the linked article above, one of the three signs (indeed, the first) is that “nobody seems to be able to name the players.”  We’re seeing a lot of that in Washington right now.

The IRS today.

The IRS today.

For instance, the IRS scandal:  We now know that President Obama met with the very IRS union chief days before the targeting of conservative political groups began.  What did they discuss?  We don’t know, but it’s hard to believe that the use of the IRS hammer on political opposition was not on the agenda.

It’s a long, long way to the 2014 elections, but it’s not unreasonable to think these things will have an impact.  How much?  We’ll see.

Rule Five Friday – Animal’s Manifesto, Part Seven

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2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (7)Part VII:  Animal House – Higher Education

In the last segment,  we mentioned the fact that not all children need to go to college.  In this segment, let’s talk about the ones that do.

Higher education is a system that is going through a catharsis.  The rise of on-line education will forever change the college experience, reducing the importance of traditional brick-and-mortar schools and allowing new models in which classes are taught not by full-time academics but by professionals who have real-world careers in the subjects they teach.

In the meantime, our college/university system is not performing as it should.  There are a number of ways we could improve the system, and quickly:

  • 2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (8)Institute a broad reform of degree programs.  It borders on fraud for institutions of higher learning to offer useless degrees.  “Minority Women’s Studies,” “Ethnic Studies” and so forth produce graduates fit only to do one of two things:  Remain in academia and perpetuate the fraud, or pursue a career that involves repeatedly asking “do you want fries with that?”  Working against such a reform (among other things) is the fact that a college or university charges the same tuition for a nonsense degree as for a degree in the hard sciences, engineering or business, and the latter degrees are certainly more expensive to teach.
  • Continue the decentralization of higher education begun by the rise of online universities.  New online models such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) as described in a recent paper by the libertarian Cato Institute not only provide alternatives to traditional universities, they also:
    • Provide cross-border opportunities to students in other parts of the world.
    • Eliminate the need for extensive travel, housing costs and so forth for students that would otherwise have to attend a college or university in another city or state.
    • Reduce the overall cost of higher education, perhaps dramatically so, by eliminating much of the overhead costs.
    • 2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (3)2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (2)Reduce, if not eliminate, the presence of the Imperial Federal government in higher education.  Not only is there no Constitutional provision for the Federal government to be involved in higher education – and I remind you that the Tenth Amendment specifically prohibits the Federal government from engaging in any activity not specifically allowed – such involvement has proved to be wasteful and counter-productive.  Let the states and private institutions handle college-level education, as was done throughout most of our nation’s history.
    • 2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (6)2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (5)Likewise, the Imperial Federal government should be removed from the financial aid process.  Again, states and private foundations could deliver financial assistance and counseling more efficiently, and it has been shown that an excess of easy financial aid actually serves to drive tuition costs up; this comes as no surprise to anyone who has studied economics, but apparently it is quite a surprise to the Federal government.

2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (1)Colleges and universities are tasked with producing a product.  Their customers are the students and the student’s parents.  The product should be a literate, functional adult with skills that are marketable in the private sector; the system must produce a graduate who can offer value to an employer.

College

A typical Occupy protester.

In recent years we have seen the rise and decline of the unfortunate “Occupy” movement, many member of which were seen waving signs decrying their student loan debt and their difficulty finding jobs.   (See columnist Zombie’s coverage over at Pajamas Media.)  Among other things, one could see signs demanding forgiveness of student debt and elimination of tuition – yes, at least one protester demanded that “knowledge should be free.”

Well, knowledge is free – you can get all you want at your local public library – but a college or university cannot be free.  Educators and administrative personnel have to be paid.  Buildings cost money, as does maintenance and utilities for same.  But that money must be earned, and to do so colleges and universities have an important task: To produce graduates capable of taking a productive place in society.

At the present they aren’t doing a very good job.

2013_05_17_Rule Five Friday (4)

Animal’s Daily News

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Not a Good SignBenghazi, IRS auditing of right-of-center activists, Federal taps on Associated Press phone lines – scandalous, yes?

Are things coming apart for the Obama Administration, or is it just a bad case of second-term blues?  Look at some of the reporting from the normally-friendly media:

Benghazi, IRS: Son of Watergate?

Top Democrat Calls For Public Testimony on Benghazi.

IRS Head Steven Miller:  “Mistakes Were Made.”  (No shit.)

Gov’t Probe Obtains Wide Swath of AP Phone Records.

Scandal Politics Sweep Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, as President Obama’s signature legislative achievement is being implemented, it comes to light that the package Congress had to pass to find out what’s in it isn’t so hot, now that we’re finding out; insurance premiums are now predicted to rise by 100% to 400%.

Exercise of Caution

There is a good reason why the party that holds the White House almost never does it for more than two terms; Presidential overreach is almost a cliché for second terms.  Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, George W. Bush oversaw the largest expansion in the Federal government since Lyndon Johnson.  (The current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has doubled down on that and then some.)

It remains to be seen whether these serial scandals will damage the President and his administration beyond recovery.  But at the moment, the Oval Office looks like a pretty uncomfortable place to be.

Goodbye, Blue Monday

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2013_05_13_Goodbye Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday

First of all – thanks to The Other McCain and The Daley Gator for the Rule Five linkage.  Check out their extensive Rule Five catologs at the links.

This just in from the arena of paleoanthropology:  Who’re You Calling a Neanderthal?  Excerpt:

The “Neanderthals are inferior” attitude traces back to their earliest descriptions in the mid-1800s when the first Neanderthal was labeled as “freak” or an “idiot” or “incapable of moral and religious conception.” For many, the discoveries after 1865 confirmed these labels. Even the majority of human paleontologists supported this view.

But in the last 10 years there has been a major reassessment of the Neanderthals, and it turns out they share a lot of the behavior and capabilities of people in Europe today. This revolution in the way academics think about Neanderthals arises from discoveries in archeology, re-evaluations of their anatomy and revelations about their genetic makeup.

Neanderthaler1856Maedchen[1]It’s easy to think that primitive people were stupid, simply because they were primitive.  You see a variation of that attitude today in all too many people of urban and suburban attitude who decry “stupid rednecks” because rural people talk funny and like to hunt and fish.

But just as running a farm requires a great deal of planning, knowledge of crops and weather, capability with equipment and so on, survival in a howling Ice Age wilderness required a lot of brain power.  The Neandertal (the correct spelling is actually -tal) had that savvy and more.  They survived not just one but several ice ages, occupied Europe from Spain to the Levant, and hung around for over 300,000 years.  By Neanderthaler1856Maedchen4[1]comparison, our own species of human has been around for about 140,000 years.

What’s more, while our ancestors seem to have been jack-of-all-trades generalists, hunting and gathering everything available, the Neandertal were big-game hunters.  They were known to have hunted mammoth, the biggest creature extant in their Ice Age environs, and to have subsisted almost entirely on meat.

Granted our own generalist approach proved the successful one in the end, but remnants of the Neandertal hang on even now – if you are of northern European ancestry, roughly 4% of your genetic material is likely Neandertal.

Keep that in mind next time you’re fishing for an insult.

Rule Five Friday – Animal’s Manifesto, Part Six

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2013_05_10_Rule Five Friday (1)Part VI:  Hot for Teacher:  Education

For the purposes of this section, we will discuss K-12 education.  Higher education will be taken on in a later section.

One can sum up the single most important change we need to make in American education in two words:  Competition and choice.  The performance of our public schools is spotty at best.  Some public schools are quite good, while others, especially in our major cities, are awful.  The stock response by the education establishment seems to consistently involve demands for more funds, but there is no demonstrated correlation between spending and education quality; for example, the Washington D.C. schools receive some of the most generous funding in the nation, and they are among the worst when it comes to producing literate, productive graduates.

To reform the current education system:

  • 2013_05_10_Rule Five Friday (2)Remove the Imperial Federal government from education altogether.  Eliminate the Federal Department of Education completely, close the doors, RIF the bureaucrats.  There is no Constitutional justification for its existence.  (In that respect, add it to a long list.)  In our current system, public schools are managed primarily by municipal and county governments.  That’s a better system; all the Imperial Federal government seems to be able to do is add a layer of bureaucracy and waste more tax dollars.
    • 2013_05_10_Rule Five Friday (3)The issue of educational standards frequently comes up when discussing Federal involvement.  The main answer to this is simple:  It’s not working.  The Federal Department of Education sets standards, the states set standards, and our kids aren’t learning.  It’s time to try something else.
  • Establish a voucher system at the various state levels.  Parents would have the choice to use the voucher to send their children to a traditional public school or to one of the myriad non-traditional private schools that would follow as surely as flowers follow rain.
    • 2013_05_10_Rule Five Friday (4)Another issue that frequently crops up here:  In a voucher system, should parents be allowed to use their voucher to send their children to a religious school?  Yes, with qualifications:  There is no First Amendment issue involved if the voucher system treats all religious institutions equally.  However, there would inevitably be exceptions; for example, an Islamic madrassa that promotes violence should not only be ineligible, it should be shut down.
  • Ideally, remove government from education entirely.  Eliminate the taxes that support public schools (mostly property taxes) and place responsibility for education back where it ultimately belongs, with the parents.
    • Will some parents neglect their responsibilities?  Probably.  Will there be consequences of their bad decisions?  Yes.  Is it the responsibility of productive members of society to shield them from the consequences of their bad decisions?  No.
  • Renew emphasis on trades.  We need to move away from the “every child should go to college” paradigm.  Every child does not and should not go to college.  Every nation needs carpenters, mechanics, welders, pipefitters and other skilled trades.  The trades are honorable professions that can earn the skilled tradesman a very good living.  Start with middle school and high school shop classes and proceed from there.
  • 2013_05_10_Rule Five Friday (5)Reform the teachers unions.  At all levels, the education unions are concerned with only one goal:  To increase pay and benefits for their members and reduce their accountability to their employers – the taxpayers.  This is a small part of a larger issue, in fact.  Public sector unions are problematic at best.  They negotiate their contracts with the very politicians whose campaigns they support, a fundamental conflict of interest on both sides, the result of which is that the public sector employees are not accountable to their actual employers – the taxpayers.  Ideally public sector employees should be ineligible for collective bargaining.

2013_05_10_Rule Five Friday (6)A recent study by the libertarian Cato Institute revealed that “The amount we spend on education has increased dramatically and consistently over the past century, with a 25 percent increase in per-pupil expenditures, in constant dollars, between 1995 and 2005.”  Have educational standards improved?  Are high school graduates more literate, more informed, more capable of critical thinking than they were a generation ago?  (Note:  “Critical Thinking” as taught in the schools today all too often translates to “you’ll think as I damn well tell you to think.”)  Are students better prepared for higher education or the workforce than they were a generation ago?

You need only read any Internet message board frequented by the younger generation to see the answer to that.

2013_05_10_Rule Five Bonus