George Rebane

Liberal Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has been delving into the availability of housing in Nevada County.  Today (13oct18 here) he reports that we don’t have enough "affordable housing" in these parts to attract low income families and wage earners, and also make the county more attractive and welcoming to our already large homeless population – “paths to affordable housing must be provided (the homeless) as well as others wishing to live here.”  A good part of the blame he puts on those stupid developers who can’t figure out where the profits are, and “continue to place emphasis on single-family homes for what has been termed the ‘nuclear family’” of which there are precious few left in the country, and apparently of which we already have too many in Nevada County.  He either doesn’t understand the notion of low-cost housing viz affordable housing, and/or the regulatory and cost hurdles that developers must negotiate to build anything in our county.  But, in spite of these problems, Mr Berkheimer does think that the county should become proactive in going after developers in the attempt to convince them to plow through the process anyway, and take the risk in building marginally profitable (if that) affordable housing.  The wonders of a progressive mind at work making Nevada County safe for San Francisco values.

Ms Heather MacDonald, political analyst and author at the Manhattan Institute, was interviewed (13oct18 WSJ) regarding her new book The Diversity Delusion.  Ms MacDonald is one of those refreshingly independent thinkers who, after law school at Stanford, had to wend her way to epiphany by spending her early professional years through clerking for Justice Stephen Reinhardt, volunteering for the Natural Resources Council, and working at the EPA.  She laments what the progressives and other flavors of the Left have done to demolish undergraduate education, especially in the fields of western civilization.  Specifically, she highlights the bloom of lowered standards and newly established majors “focused on identity and oppression” with freshly minted majors, like ‘Social Justice’, coming in the burgeoning field of neo-Marxism.  She sees all of this as leading to a final national confrontation – “One of the great achievements of Western European civilization was to move beyond tribalism, to nation-states, to concepts of citizenship that transcend tribal identity, and we’ve been playing with fire for the last 40 years in thinking we can keep this ethnic warfare thing at a low simmer rather than a hot boil.”

The Union’s Editorial Board advises every franchised citizen to ‘Get educated and vote’ (13oct18) – “everyone who can legally vote should.”  What the good souls at The Union don’t help the reader with is how to get educated in a manner that enables critical thinking about the diametrically opposite prescriptions and policies offered by today's strong ideologues, some obviously tinged and others in more subtle ways.  As many scholars and thinkers (see previous entry) now tell us, the ability to think critically is no longer taught nor even possible by graduates from most of our colleges and almost all of our high schools, simply because they no longer have to learn the knowledge base which enables such thought should even the tools for it be available.

Nevada County’s high school test scores are a disaster.  Only our local liberal contingent is satisfied, since generating generations of such graduates over the last 40 years is just the planned grist for their voting mill.  When others lament this educational deficit, the local liberals point to the Ghidotti Early College High School which ranked #1 in the state tests – why? Because they have a total of only 163 self-selected smart students of which 44 took the cited test.  For the rest we have dropping scores that reveal one of three students is below grade level in reading, and more than two thirds are below grade level in math.  And believe it or not, statewide Nevada County is above average.  Talk about California leading the nation – to where?

[17oct18 update]  What’s happening to destroy STEM and STEM-related education and research in America is even worse than I have been tracking over the recent years.  NSA and NIH, originally launched by Congress to keep us in the lead in physical and health sciences, have now become institutes of identity equalization to satisfy the progressives social justice goals.  H/T to Russ Steele (see his 506pm comment below) for pointing out the latest report on this disaster-in-progress as reported in the City Journal (here).