Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Freedom | Tags: A Little Common Sense, Career Advice From An Expert, The Awful Truth About Work
From Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, a little advice about work:
Stop looking for the “right career,” and start looking for a job. Forget about what you like. Focus on what’s available. Get yourself hired. Show up early. Stay late. Volunteer for the scut work. Become indispensable. You can always quit later, and be no worse off than you are today. But don’t waste another year looking for a career that doesn’t exist. And most of all, stop worrying about your happiness. Happiness does not come from a job. It comes from knowing what you truly value, and behaving in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Education, Energy, Foreign Policy, Health Care, History, Humor, Immigration, National Security, Politics, Taxes | Tags: A Guide to Liberal Thought, Andrew Klavan on the Culture, Really-They Do Think This!
The common conservative response to a liberal pronouncement is “You’ve got to be kidding!” Can they possibly believe what they are saying? The real divisions between liberals and conservatives are deep and wide, but Andrew Klavan takes a shot at explaining what it is that liberals believe, and how liberals think. It may be helpful, but —It’s not pretty!
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Education, Law, Politics, Regulation | Tags: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Federal Court Slapdowns, Racial Bias
One of the big stories about the Obama administration is how often federal courts are overturning executive overreach. But last week’s slapdown of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was something special.
The EEOC had sued Kaplan, the for-profit education company, for using the same kind of background check that the EEOC itself uses. The EEOC has made a practice of suing private companies because it claims that credit and criminal background checks discriminate against minorities. In 2012 the agency issued “guidance” to get companies to take special care before using checks for criminal records, but stopped short for checking credit records.
The EEOC sued Kaplan for using credit checks, which the EEOC said had no business necessity and resulted in a “disparate impact” on blacks. A federal judge rejected the case, but the EEOC was so convinced of their virtue that it appealed. Mistake.
Judge Kethledge eviscerated the EEOC, writing that Kaplan had good reason to conduct credit checks on “applicants for positions that provide access to students’ financial-loan information because employees had “stolen payments” and “engaged in self-dealing.” As far as disparate racial impact was concerned, the Judge noted that the credit-check process is racially blind, the company does not report the applicant’s race with her other information.
The EEOC’s methodology left something to be desired. Raters were to look at drivers’ license pictures of applicants and if 4 out of 5 raters agreed on the race of the person, the applicant was classified by that race — and that was how you determined discrimination. As Judge Kethledge put it in closing”
We need not belabor the issue further. The EEOC brought this case on the basis of a homemade methodology, crafted by a witness with no particular expertise to craft it, administered by persons with no particular expertise to administer it, tested by no one, and accepted only by the witness himself.
And thus the bureaucracy grinds on, altering and illuminating the affairs of man. Isn’t it somewhat racist to assume that blacks would have more trouble with credit and criminal background checks, and thus checking such records is racist?
Filed under: Education, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, History, Junk Science, Media Bias, United Nations | Tags: Climate Change Panic Ends, The IPCC Is Over, We Can't Predict the Future
Mankind cannot predict the future. We attempt it constantly. Prediction has become a profession of sorts, with strategists, planners, futurists—and governmental agencies. We’re not always successful with our plans for tomorrow, which should teach us something about prediction, but hope springs eternal.
The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, is a prime example. Weather forecasters can predict the future pretty well for the rest of the week, but the IPCC attempts to do a “gigantic weather forecast for a century or more.”And they know that because they have computer programs the tell them so. The total absurdity of such predictions is clearly expressed by Christopher Booker in The Telegraph:
When future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and 1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.
That’s four-tenths of one percent! And the panic over that 0.4 percent of warming has become a religion, with ardent true believers who want to send “denialists” to prison. That 0.4 percent has drawn forth massive government investment in low-flush toilets, banning lightbulbs, massive wind farms, solar arrays, electric cars, ethanol, biofuels, and pages and pages of regulations. The stage of the panic can be partly measured by the list of things caused by global warming. The amount of money misapplied to preventing global warming, with no visible result, is immeasurable. The totals would be humiliating, and we will probably never know. Wasted. Completely wasted.
Also in The Telegraph, Charles Moore reviews The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall.
The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.
James Delingpole, another Brit, reports on the latest Climate Change Reconsidered report by the NIPCC — the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, an independent research body funded by the Heartland Institute:
The latest verdict is in on ‘climate change’— and the news is good. The planet is greening, the oceans are blooming, food production is up, animals are thriving and humans are doing better than ever; and all thanks to CO2 and global warming.
Mr. Delingpole summarizes the work of the NIPCC, and the scientific studies which support it. Nice to have a concise summary of where we stand. And the scientists and ordinary people who disagree with the true believers are not “deniers,” they are skeptics— skeptical that humans are causing a disruption in the climate of the earth, skeptical that computer programs based on a superficial understanding of climate and a lot of sheer guesses can predict the climate 50 to 100 years out, and very skeptical that we should be spending billions to attempt to change the climate.
Do read all three pieces. They’re not long, and they give a good picture of the real world of climate change.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Education, Heartwarming, Humor, Liberalism, Progressivism, Regulation, Statism, The United States | Tags: Nosy Nanny Government, The Dying Blue Model, The U.S. Department of Agriculture
This is something truly special. Our betters in the nation’s capitol—what I have called “the ruling class”— has taken advantage of the information age to engage in blogging. Who knew? This very remarkable blog is a project of the Department of Agriculture.
Grandkids are a grandparent’s greatest treasure. From time to time during grandchildren’s young lives, grandparents may have the pleasure of being their caregiver. Show them how to be healthy, including how to make healthy food choices—an important way grandparents show how much they love and care about their grandchildren.
As a proud grandmother, I can attest that grandkids learn by example! They mimic everything you do, so be a healthy role model by taking care of yourself and they will learn to value healthy habits. Use ChooseMyPlate.gov to guide your food choices and better understand the nutrition needs of young children in your life. Take your grandchildren shopping at a farmer’s market and the grocery store. Talk about the choices you are making—choosing the juicier oranges or the fresher vegetables. Help them learn cooking skills, which will benefit them throughout their lives. Encourage them to be active throughout the day. …
Spend time walking in the neighborhood, planting a vegetable garden, or shooting a few hoops. Dance, run, and play hopscotch or soccer with them when they’re full of energy—it’s fun and healthy for both of you!
Show your grandchild games, activity sheets and other fun ways to learn about good nutrition at MyPlateKids’Place. For a bedtime story, read The Two Bite Club. …
If this does not warm the cockles of your heart, read the whole thing,and if that doesn’t do it for you, do scroll down to the comments, because you will enjoy the comments! If you do not read the comments, you are missing the point of this whole post.
I don’t think I have ever seen a better example of the gap between left and right, or between the government and the people. The comments are a treasure. Click on all the links to see the extent of the sheer wonder of this post. Do go to the link and add your own comment. Or write your congressman and tell them to cut the budget of the Department of Agriculture to the bone.
Grandkids are a grandparent’s greatest treasure. From time to time during grandchildren’s young lives, grandparents may have the pleasure of being their caregiver. Show them how to be healthy, including how to make healthy food choices–an important way grandparents show how much they love and care about their grandchildren. – See more at: http://blogs.usda.gov/2014/03/31/grandparents-help-kids-develop-good-eating-habits/#sthash.yp104Y0x.dpufGrandkids are a grandparent’s greatest treasure. From time to time during grandchildren’s young lives, grandparents may have the pleasure of being their caregiver. Show them how to be healthy, including how to make healthy food choices–an important way grandparents show how much they love and care about their grandchildren. – See more at: http://blogs.usda.gov/2014/03/31/grandparents-help-kids-develop-good-eating-habits/#sthash.yp104Y0x.dpuf
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Education, Freedom, History, National Security, The United States | Tags: Accepting Human Nature, Facing Up to Hard Things, Honoring Committments
Walter Russell Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest, a man of the Left, but modestly so. In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, he gently chides the president for his ambitious foreign policy goals, but unusual parsimony in engaging with them. The president, he says, isn’t satisfied with he world as it is, and wants a world fundamentally different from the one we live in.
He wants a world in which poverty is on the wane, international law is respected, and the U.S., if it must lead, can do so on the cheap, and from behind.
To get to this world, Mr. Obama wants nuclear proliferation stopped, new arms-control agreements ratified, and the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. He wants a tough global climate treaty that will keep carbon emissions at levels low enough to prevent further global warming. He wants the Arab-Israeli dispute settled and a new relationship with Iran. He wants terrorism to be contained and Afghanistan to be stable when the Americans leave. He wants to reassert U.S. power in the Pacific, and to see China accept the territorial status quo. He wants democracy advanced, human rights protected, poverty reduced, women empowered, and lesbians and gays treated better world-wide.
Professor Mead suggested that this paradox arises from Obama’s channeling the voters who want to eliminate the budget deficit without cutting the programs they favor, and a more peaceful world without so much effort on our part.
We also hear this week about American University students who couldn’t manage to name one senator, and were clueless about how many senators there are.
Makes you yearn for a poll-test. You don’t get to vote unless you know a few basic facts. But that is the job of candidates and political parties, to inform voters before they go to the polls. Yes I know that’s absurd as well. Civilization is messy at best. We are multitudes who have trouble getting along with members of our own family. let alone the guy across the street, and creating a more felicitous state of the world. Some of us are very smart, which doesn’t necessarily mean we know much about many subjects.
Our schools are failing our kids, not because we don’t want good schools, but because the goals of others trump educational excellence. Our colleges attract students from all over the world, yet our graduates can’t name a single senator, can’t locate Florida, and are unqualified to work in today’s world.
The free market recognizes the failures of individuals and companies, but relies on the wisdom of the multitudes, who, of course, can be easily swayed by glamour or charisma, bad information, and conspiracy theories.
Americans, however, have a sort of genius for muddling through. We make dreadful mistakes, and then turn around and try to fix them. Americans all, in one generation or another, gave up everything known in their home country packed up their belongings and set out for an unknown new world. There’s a kind of fearlessness there, that seems to be an inherited characteristic, a genius for risk-taking and adapting that has served our country well for almost 500 years. Mr. Mead says:
Mr. Obama came into office telling voters what they badly wanted to hear, which was that on foreign policy, they could have it all. No risks to be run, no adversarial great powers to oppose, and no boots on the ground. Now he must tell them that he, and they, were wrong, and he must choose. Does he give up on some of his dreams for improving the world, or does he begin to urge the country to pay a higher price and run greater risks to make the world better and safer?
The truth is that he—and we—will have to do some of both. As a country we are going to be working harder than we wanted in a world that is more frustrating than we hoped.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Health Care, Junk Science, Politics, Progressivism, Regulation | Tags: Arbitrary And Political, Childhood Obesity Epidemic, Is Not And Never Was!
Do you find yourself wondering these days just what you can believe? When they are not just plain lying to you for political purposes, they are exaggerating, or making false claims, or insisting that you ignore what you know to be true. I’m at the point where I don’t want to hear any of those innocuous public service announcements from some federal agency and the ad council, and I’m irritated at the ad council for participating.
Take, for example, the Childhood Obesity Epidemic, please. It seems now, there is not and never was any childhood obesity epidemic. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported on a study that indicates that obesity rates among two to five-year olds have plunged over the past decade.
The prevalence of obesity in two to five-year olds declined by an estimated 39.6 percent between 2003-04 and 2011-12 from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent. According to the same study, it declined by 23 percent between 2003-04 and 2005-06 and then rose by 19.8 percent between 2007-08 and 2009-10. Huh?
Childhood obesity is a brand-new concept, invented a few years ago for essentially political reasons. It is arbitrary. They took the 95th percentile of the height-weight chart from the 60′s and 70′s and treated that as a definition of childhood obesity. Besides that, it was based on a deeply flawed Body-Mass Index height-weight ratio (BMI) that inflates the obesity rate. And it was self-reported!
The United States at the present time has an enormous weight loss industry. Stop and think about a day’s accumulation of messages about diet or weight control on the radio, in magazines, online (“Eat this one weird food”), weight-loss programs, diet foods, diet programs, health clubs, fashion models, latest fashions, and so on. Fat is big business. Some of that enthusiasm was bound to overflow to the kids.
I have a small modicum of expertise in little kids and fat. Many years of Red-Cross swim lessons and you see a lot of small bodies. Some little kids are naturally and healthily — skinny. Really skinny. Other kids of the same age are naturally and healthily — stocky, not fat, but stocky. I don’t know what they were measuring, but it wasn’t real kids.
I assume with the best of intentions, Michelle Obama set out to cope with the epidemic of childhood obesity. (Naturally with reports of the decline, Ms. Obama is being credited with the improvement) Not so.
Michelle Obama’s well-intentioned National School Lunch Program has not gone well. There has been a sharp decline in participation, a total of 1,086,000 students stopped buying school lunch. 321 districts left the National School Lunch Program altogether, many citing the new standards as a factor. (Translation: The kids hated the meals.) The waste problem was huge, kids threw out the healthy fruits and vegetables. Lunchroom costs went up because schools needed additional kitchen equipment to comply with the new lunch requirements.
Calorie counts were specified for each age group, but kids in athletic programs weren’t getting enough to eat. This is not a small problem. The National School Lunch Program served more than 31 million children in fiscal 2012, with $11.6 billion in federal support. In many cases schools had to raise the price of meals to cope with increased requirements, an estimated $3.2 billion overall for school districts to come up with. Participation dropped even more in 2012-2013.
Reformers believe that the kids will get used to the “healthy food” and eventually get to like it. Students discarded roughly 60 to 75 percent of the vegetables and 40 percent of the fruit. Some nutritionists say that fruit is simply sugar anyway. I don’t know. I saw a menu a while back, and I thought it was pretty gross.
Undeterred, Ms. Obama is proposing a ban on marketing junk food and sodas in schools, and an expansion of food service to free breakfast and lunch. She is also pushing new food nutrition labels for grocery store products to make them easier to read and easier for people to understand. If you are wondering who elected…, and where does the authority… nevermind. If you are pondering the similarities between this boondoggle and ObamaCare, it’s all in the family, isn’t it.
As for the nutrition labeling program (do they not have any understanding of the costs this kind of thing imposes on business or what it does to the cost of food? Of course not.) A. Barton Hinkle takes that program on in a piece entitled “Big Government Will Help You Eat Right.” Funny! Do read the whole thing, you will need the laugh.
Americans so dumb. Not know how to do basic stuff, like eat. Or read. Or math. Dumber than sack of hammers, really. Take labels on boxes and cans of food.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Education, Freedom, History, Law, The United States | Tags: "President's Day", Studying American History, What We Don't Know Hurts
I dislike President’s Day, which is a mixture of Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday, supposedly honoring both of our most important presidents, but mostly an occasion for a three-day weekend and special sales. I liked it better when little kids cut out pictures of log cabins and cherry trees and axes, which at least indicated the possibility that schools might actually be talking about President Lincoln and President Washington, albeit with faulty symbols.
The warfare between President Obama’s Democratic Party and the Republican-led House over the budget, the national debt, entitlements and regulation represents an historic chasm over the size and scope of the federal government. Understanding accurately just what is at stake in the struggle requires knowledge of American History. That is the very subject that today’s liberal education is denying to today’s college students.
The Constitution begins “We the People of the United States , In Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Note that We the People is in great big letters for a reason.
A recent report from the National Association of Scholars (NAS) “Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?” clearly demonstrates that our colleges and universities are doing a bad job. History departments promote a distorted vision of America by concentrating on the teaching of race, class, and gender at the expense of nearly everything else. Universities usually avoid transparency and accountability, so it’s hard to determine what is actually being taught in their classrooms.
Texas mandates that undergraduates in the public universities take two courses in American history, and that faculty member’s backgrounds, research interests, course assignments be easily available.At the University of Texas, 78 percent of the courses through which students could satisfy the American history requirement devoted half or more of their readings to issues of race, class and gender. At Texas A&M 50 percent of the courses did the same. Key documents of American history were rarely assigned. In 2010 not one qualifying course for the history requirement asked students to read the Mayflower Compact or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
I took little history in College, largely because my history professor was a date freak. His concept of history was ordered by dates rather than understanding of how events followed each other. He was big on snap-quizzes on Saturday mornings at 8:00 a.m. in which he would ask us to enumerate what happened between 1872 and 1893, for example. That turned me off of history for several years, until I discovered that not all historians approached history in that way, and learned that history could be fascinating. Many universities do not require any American history.
Last week we learned that according to a study of 2,200 people by the National Science Foundation, one in four Americans do not know the Earth orbits the Sun, and fewer than half know that humans evolved from earlier species. The survey is conducted every two years and is reported to the President and Congress. The president believes that sending more Americans to college is the answer to economic growth. Andrew Cuomo has just announced that he wants to send the people incarcerated in New York prisons to college. Where apparently, studies in race, class and gender will make them employable in the 21st century. At least they couldn’t cut class.
If we are to retain our liberty, we must have some understanding of our own history and some understanding of how the country is supposed to operate. When a president takes it upon himself to revise laws, change laws in direct contradiction to his oath of office under the Constitution, why would those who have never read the whole Constitution nor learned about past struggles to preserve our adherence to the Constitution think it is a big deal?
“The clear lesson of history is that individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.” (Walter Wriston) Will the people who don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun understand what is important about the preservation of individual liberty and why? Sending more kids to college to study race, class and gender isn’t going to do it.
Filed under: Education, History, Science/Technology | Tags: A Mammoth Tusk, A Seattle Construction Site, Ten Thousand Years Ago
Local news: A tusk, believed to be from an Ice Age mammoth, was found Tuesday at a South Lake Union construction project. The tusk was found on private property, so the landowner will decide what to do with it, but the Burke Museum paleontologists are very interested in excavating it. It’s a good way to learn a little more about what is under Seattle’s fabled seven hills and the bluest skies bit. (both are fables—there were bits of blue today and the temperature hit 58°). The Seattle Times said:
Mammoths and their ancient elephant elephant relative, mastodons, inhabited the ice-free lands of North America. Mammoths arrived from Asia about 2 million years ago, while mastodons lived in North America from about 15 million to 9,000 years ago. Both became extinct as the glaciers started receding at the end of the Ice Age, between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago.
Some mammoths grew to 12 feet at the shoulder, their tusks curved down from the face and then upwards at the ends. They chewed grass with large, flat teeth similar to elephant’s teeth.
Mammoth fossils have been found in various locations around the Pacific Northwest. Seattle, for those unfamiliar with the area, borders on Puget Sound to the West, and lies between the Sound and Lake Washington on the East which borders Bellevue on the West, then Lake Sammamish on the East. Lake Union is a smaller affair, connecting the Sound and Lake Washington with locks and canals.
(photo: Jeff Estep/Transit Plumbing)
Filed under: Education, Economy, Democrat Corruption, Taxes, Capitalism, The United States, Regulation | Tags: Gangster Government, Chicago Politics, President Obama's Economics
One of the problems is that President Obama learned his economics from Saul Alinsky, I guess. We are not allowed to see his transcripts, so no one knows if he ever had a course in economics. He was reported to be the best student of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals ever.
Andy McCarthy summed up the Alinsky approach in his excellent book, The Grand Jihad.
Alinskyites, though, are more sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, taking on the appearance and argot of the heartland. Their single, animating goal is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialistic, etc. Everything else — including the cultivation of like-minded Islamists — is negotiable. They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. Transform it into what, they haven’t worked out in great detail — except that it will be perfect, communal, equal and just.
Filed under: Education, Freedom, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Lack of Common Sense, The American Schoolhouse, Zero Tolerance Policies
Liberty Pen has assembled recent examples of the zero tolerance policies of our schools. It’s time for a zero tolerance policy for over-zealous principals who do damage to our children because they themselves cannot distinguish between absurd levels of political correctness and a real threat.
In the meantime, the acts of violence prevented by their zealotry — zero. Loss of respect for a school’s overzealous pursuit of a useless zero tolerance policy — immeasurable.
I’m for the kids. They have more sense.
