George Rebane

RIP Lavabit.  Lavabit has demonstrably been one of the most secure email services on the internet.  It is now closing its doors much to the consternation of the feds who have not been able to hack into Lavabit’s emails and servers.  And this story is worth a consideration to all Americans who pay lip service to maintaining our freedoms.  According to the report in Xato.net Lavabit’s founder and CEO Ladar Levinson refuses to play along with the feds in opening up his email service to government spying.  The exact nature of the government threat has yet to emerge, but the high hard one is clear –  “The message here is that US courts can force a business to subvert their own security measures and lie to their customers, deliberately giving them a false sense of security.” (H/T to RR reader)

The damage by teachers unions is more severe than even I had anticipated.  This especially in California where the CTA has f&*#ed over the young people of the state for some decades now.  California teachers get paid at the highest rates in the country, and they produce students that rank among the lowest in literacy and numeracy in the nation.  But the story doesn’t end there,  as academic Jonathan Jacobs writes ‘As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture’ in the 16sep13 WSJ.  He strongly underlines and extends the message that Charles Murray (Coming Apart) has delivered (covered much in these pages with more to come).

The bottom line is that we’re turning out millions of 2x4s with faces painted on them.  These students can neither read, write, cypher, nor reason.  And it all comes together in the workplace where “… employers attest, as college instructors will too if they’re being frank, that many college graduates can barely construct a coherent paragraph and many have precious little knowledge of the world—the natural world, the social world, the historical world, or the cultural world. That is a tragedy for the graduates, but also for society: Civic life suffers when people have severely limited knowledge of the world to bring to political or moral discussions.”

Liberal history book guts second amendment. 
As a footnote to the above, leftwing academics continue to do their
share in supplying students a distinctly ‘progressive’ perspective of
what went on before that got us to where we are (more here).

Played out daily in the public round is the truth of ‘a nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  (Thomas Jefferson)

Bush2 ended the financial crisis before Obama took office.  As pointed out by an RR reader (here), let’s circle that barn again and take a careful look at what happened before that cold, garbage strewn January 2009 morning in Washington.  Stanford professors Keith Hennessey and Edward Lazear give a succinct accounting of the events and their aftermath (here).  But as we now know, this was a crisis too good to waste in advancing the American socialists’ agenda and fundamentally transforming the nation.

Ending on a high note and a conundrum for collectivist ideology, it turns out that long ago humans evolved brains built for charity.  This has been obvious to the celebrants of American exceptionalism for a couple of centuries or more, now science weighs in with some clinical evidence.  ‘Hard-wired for Giving’ presents the research story (here), but the bigger thrust is that we really don’t need the government gun to make us care for our neighbors and countrymen.  We did it before socialism, and we can do it again if the feds would back off a mite on their forced redistribution programs.  But that is not the progressive view, and the sheeple (see above) are quickly receding out of the reach of reason.

Finally, a little ‘pojetry’ –

The time has come, progressives say
    to speak of many things.
No not of Obama, the here and now,
    or what the future brings.
But of the past, the then and there,
    of Reagan’s sins and Bush laid bare,
    and the shape of Clinton’s wings.

[19sep13 update] … and a little food for thought.

We are told NOT to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of more than a few Islamic lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.  Makes you wonder …