This last little blast of winter did force me to make the trip to our town's public works department to fill up a couple of buckets with sand, something we use to ensure there will be enough traction on our driveway for Deb to make it out with her car. Hopefully this will be the last time I'll have to make that trip until next November or December.
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This is something I could have added during yesterday's post, using it to illustrate just how often the 'ideal' progressive state deteriorates into a brutal dictatorship requiring gulags to 'house' and 're-educate' those citizens who see the truth about what their country has become.Of course many of our own progressives keep telling us that won't happen here even as their brethren are working diligently to silence their critics and leach away one right after another until we have none left.
Think they aren't? Then how do you explain away this little bit of PC indoctrination right out of Huxley's Brave New World?
(H/T Instapundit)
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I've noticed this, too.From Thomas Sowell comes this observation:
Academics often defend tenure, despite its many negative consequences, on grounds that it allows academic freedom for independent minds. Yet there are few places in America with more taboos and intellectual intolerance than academic campuses. The young are indoctrinated with demographic "diversity" that contrasts with a squelching of diversity of ideas on social issues.When they start talking about “diversity” and “inclusiveness” they usually mean just the opposite. I think just about anyone paying attention has noticed that both of these concepts usually mean excluding and/or silencing certain groups, and white heterosexual male college students in particular. It's even worse if they are conservative white heterosexual male college students. And it's even worse if they are conservative white homosexual male college students because they are seen a traitors by the diverse and inclusive college crowd.
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And yet another observation by Sowell:It is remarkable how the Internal Revenue Service has been "losing" e-mails that Congressional investigators want to see and how "global warming" researchers have been "losing" the raw data on which their dire predictions have been based.I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to see a pattern here from these “losers”.
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Our town had its elections this past Tuesday. It was the second session of our town meeting, where folks voted on the election of town officials as well as the various warrant articles that defined the town and school budgets, capital equipment purchases, funding of outside social agencies, and some zoning ordinance changes, amongst other things. (The first session was held last month – the deliberative session – where all of the warrant articles were presented and discussed, and if needed, amended.)The most controversial warrant article had nothing to do with budgets, spending, funding, or zoning changes. It was the most discussed warrant article, both at the first town meeting session and around town prior to the voting during the second session. The topic of this controversial warrant article?
Fireworks.
A few folks decided they didn't like the idea of anyone being able to set off legally obtained fireworks in our town, so they filed a petition warrant article that would have banned fireworks for anyone but licensed professionals. (Fireworks are legal in New Hampshire.) The ban would have included such Fourth of July staples like sparklers.
Fortunately the warrant article failed to pass, being defeated with 296 'Yes' votes versus 689 'No' votes.
Ain't small town democracy a great thing?
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David Starr reports on town meeting in his home town, located somewhat farther north of here.***************
From Pam Gellar comes this: “More women fly F-16 in Israel than drive cars in Saudi Arabia.”The youngest WP Sister has spent quite a bit of time in Israel on business and contrasts it to other places in the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, saying simply she'd rather go to Israel than any of the other of the places she has gone because it is, quite frankly, better.
It's telling that so many Israeli Arabs would much rather be Israeli than Palestinian or Lebanese or Jordanian.
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Why didn't anyone tell these folks that raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would have such negative consequences? Oh, wait, they were. They just chose to ignore the warnings.Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law goes into effect on April 1, 2015. As that date approaches, restaurants across the city are making the financial decision to close shop.Artificially raising the cost of labor always has negative consequences, something amply demonstrated when San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $11 a few years back. A lot of jobs disappeared. Just recently the voters there approved raising it to $15 by 2018 where I expect even more jobs will go away. One San Francisco business has already announced that it will close its doors because it cannot afford the new wage rate.
Of course, restaurants close for a variety of reasons. But, according to Seattle Magazine, the “impending minimum wage hike to $15 per hour” is playing a “major factor.” That’s not surprising, considering “about 36% of restaurant earnings go to paying labor costs.”
Seattle is learning the same lesson as San Francisco: The Law of Unintended Consequences always wins in the end.
(H/T Pirate's Cove)
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As if we need yet another reason why our public schools should stay as far away from Common Core as possible, there's this plum from my home state of New Hampshire.It appears one of the scholars who helped craft the Common Core standards for the state admits he crafted them in order to “knock white people down a few pegs in the Granite State.”
So rather than creating standards that are supposed to 'help' our kids get a better education (doubtful, in my opinion) they've been turned into a political tool by one of our self-anointed “betters” to cripple our public school system all in the name of some misguided effort to be fair?
[T]his is yet another example of how our schools are used for extremist, left-wing social engineering instead of education. “Teachers” like [Dr. David] Pook want to use our schools as a means to indoctrinate kids with anti-American, left-wing garbage. And don’t be fooled. This guy may be one of the few who openly admits that Common Core is meant to undermine the US, but he isn’t alone in that goal.Is it any wonder parents are pulling their kids out of public schools and sending them to private schools or home-schooling them? They want their kids educated, not indoctrinated and unprepared for the real world.
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Are people mistakenly calling Scott Walker the next Reagan when, in fact, he might actually be the next Calvin Coolidge?The two most successful Republican presidents in the last century were Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. A serious look at the two of them sheds light on the current question of Walker’s viability as a presidential candidate.Walker echoes both of them and has the ability to communicate with the voters. Like them he also doesn't require public opinion polls before he makes a decision, something that certainly been lacking in the White House since the Reagan administration. And unlike some of the other GOP presidential hopefuls, Walker has street cred when it comes to dealing with intransigent public servants, just as Coolidge did in 1919 and Reagan did in 1981, in Walker's case with the public employee unions attempt to ouster him through a recall election after he reduced their political influence through legislation that broke their stranglehold on labor contracts with the state and municipalities and on the rank-and-file members of the unions.
Different as Coolidge and Reagan were in looks and personality, there were striking similarities between these two men and their presidencies. Success for both was marked by significant reductions in income taxes and domestic spending, strong economic growth in the private sector, reelection by huge margins, and the trust and affection of the American people.
Contemporaries often dismissed the New England puritan and the Hollywood B-grade actor as intellectual lightweights. Howard Dean’s recent sneers at Walker’s lack of academic credentials were reminiscent of the attacks on Coolidge and Reagan.
They were equally convinced of the creative power of individual initiative. Coolidge explained, “I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom.” Similarly, Reagan famously admonished, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
More power to him.