George Rebane
Dan Henninger’s ‘Dumb and Dumber’ is a corroborating essay on the relentless growth of ‘dumbth’ in America. As technology accelerates, the failures of government unionized schools grow more impactive on our social order in everything from understanding governance to finding a job. President Obama, the Left’s penultimate liar (now overshadowed by HRC) continues to trumpet his faux successes in education by citing higher graduation rates. But he doesn’t mention that those graduating don’t measure up to the country’s needs, especially in the job markets.
No better source of information exists on this than employers, especially manufacturers, who say U.S. schools, notwithstanding claims of improved “graduation” rates, are not producing sufficient numbers of workers able to perform at the level they need for the realities of the 21st century workplace. Apparently the universal skill of being able to manipulate a cellphone to take a selfie isn’t enough.
In today’s (22oct16) Union Bob Hren writes an excellent rebuttal – ‘Yes, It’s Time to Put Country Over Party’ – to a recent piece by the very progressive Nancy Eubanks. Ms Eubanks takes Republicans to task for opposing Hillary, who in liberal eyes is the country’s political paragon of prudence and virtue. Mr Hren destroys her one-sided call by citing the public record of HRC’s dismal career of bamboozling the information resistant voters she claims to champion. What the Hren/Eubanks essays illustrate is how remarkably one-sided is the lamestream in its selective omission of reporting facts, events, and writings/quotes that do not support their one-world collectivist agenda. Even in these pages otherwise learned readers have admonished us by citing the moral high ground occupied by Hillary since she has not yet had to wear ‘correctional orange’. It’s as if such folks really restrict their reading to the narrowest of information sources.
Predictably the Iranian mullahs have taken two more American hostages and sentenced them each to ten years in prison. Obama’s carefully denied, yet obvious to the world, ransom payments to buy the last group’s release was bound to motivate the ragheads to repeat their thuggery – we all knew it, well almost all save for the functional idiots still running things from 1600 Pennsylvania. Now Hillary is busy concocting the next excuse for delivering pallets of cash to Tehran to free the hostages and fund Iran’s clients spreading Islamic terror all over the globe.
Nowhere is Democrat big city corporatism as visible as in the Big Apple. Governor Cuomo signed a bill prohibiting Airbnb from advertising apartment sharing in the city. Why? well, it cuts into the margins of established hotels staffed by union workers – both hoteliers and union bosses are big contributors to ‘Tammany Hall’. Never mind that demand for rooms exceeds supply, and people renting out their temporarily unused domiciles to visitors brings in needed cash to pay rents. The little people be damned as long as the big contributors’ margins are maximized with 100% occupancy rates. Additional rooms will be made available only when the contributors decide that such new developments of theirs will not cause them to lose economies of scale. In short, the Democrats’ policies continue to favor neither residents nor visitors, only those who can afford to pay for the competition crushing government gun. (more here)
In these trying times we conclude with a public service bagatelle from Gracian #38 –
Say farewell to luck when winning: it is the way of the gamblers of reputation: quite as important as a gallant advance is a well-planned retreat, wherefore lock up your winnings when they are enough, or when great. Continuous luck is always suspect; more secure is that which changes, and which, half bitter and half sweet, is more satisfying even to the taste: the more luck pyramids, the greater the danger of slip, and of collapse: for luck always compensates her intensity by her brevity. Fortune wearies of carrying anyone long upon her shoulders.
[update] Hillary on SCOTUS is either profoundly ignorant or simply evil when she demagogued that she will work for a Supreme Court that “will represent all of us.” First, there is no possible selection of justices that can represent all of us in a country as terminally split as ours (Arrow’s theorem and all that). And second, SCOTUS is the one branch of government that has no constitutional charter to represent anyone. Their job is to interpret the constitutionality of the elected officials’ actions starting with the Legislative and Executive branches and then working down the judicial system to the federalized states. Trump understands this when he proposed his list of candidates whose job will be “to interpret the Constitution.” The media omits this little detail when they report on the difference between the candidates’ stance on the court.
[23oct16 update] No on Measure B. Corrsepondent Ms Claudia Taylor writes –
“These are the times that try men’s souls . . .” said Thomas Paine and say many of us. We need common sense governance—including in our local school districts. The essence of a good education is imparting knowledge that is applied with common sense and practical application. It is not an attitude of ‘if we only had . . . the students would learn more or the teachers would want to work here.’ Children of the 18th century and even earlier learned far more with far, far less than what school managers say and much of our uninvolved society think we need now. That thinking is more an indication of how dependent our society has become on external influences (which cost lots of money) rather than internal fortitude to advance ourselves in the educational arena. In these trying times (especially economically), fiscal responsibility must be a large part of the solution in all governance matters . . . yes, even in regard to our local schools. A $47 million bond is not the only solution. No on B will necessitate looking at other solutions and be a step in the direction of sound fiscal management.
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