America’s Education Sucks

Oh noes!  American education sucks!  Kids are dropping out of high school by the millions!

I will give you three reasons why American public education sucks:

Why get a degree when you can live comfortably off someone else’s money?  The culture of the kids who are dropping out of school is one in which a high school education is not required.  All we need to do is pass legislation to require that a recipient of government welfare at any time in your life for any reason, including welfare, social security, and medicaid will not be paid to anyone over the age of 18 who does not have a high school diploma or a GED (or is actively pursuing a GED and is getting passing marks).  Drop out rates drop to 1% across the board.  But no.  This will never happen, because the chorus of “what about the poor single mother who works 2 jobs and blah blah blah blah blah”  Whiny empaths who want to have cake and eat it too will tug on your heartstrings and try to make it seem like these social parasites are instead heroes.  Did she spread her legs and pop a baby?  Say no more!  Here’s money.  We won’t let your baby starve, even though you dropped out of high school at age 15 to have your bastard baby.  Do you see how this misplaced compassion is counterintentional to keeping kids in school?

Parents have their way.  In suburban schools where 99% of the kids already graduate from school because they actually intend on growing up and contributing to society and paying taxes instead of taking as much from other people as they possibly can, this is a major problem.  All it took in my high school was a phone call from a parent to put a kid who had no business in an honors class in an honors class.  This necessarily lowers the bar for everyone, because teachers will be judged on how many of their students pass.  If half the class doesn’t belong in top track math, the teacher is not going to fail half the class because the principal will conclude that the teacher must suck at teaching if he was unable to teach students the material.  This trickles down to every level of the school system.  Schools are not allowed to be hard on kids because the parents are not hard on their kids, and the parents force their will on the teachers as well under threat of litigation, which of course the school district always loses, because of my next point…

The school system is overrun by totally spineless liberals.  This is the biggest problem.   The vast majority of educators are women who are predisposed to be liberal anyway, and the few men who in that environment have to wear liberal clothing even if they loathe everything liberalism stands for because the public shool system is a cult and if you don’t fit in with the other pinkos, you are ostercized and forced out.  Liberals live in an ideological fantasy world where concepts like “fairness” are more important than results.  They refuse to admit that children are smarter than others.  They also operate under some ridiculous pretense that if you throw smart kids in with stupid kids, the stupid kids will somehow absorb intelligence from the smart kids and become smarter.  After 30 or 40 years of this nonsense you’d think they would have learned after tests that actually realistically measure results like SATs have the same exact bell curves today that they did before they started implementing this fairness horse shit ad nauseum.  But no.

During my run in public schools, the school administrators brilliantly concluded that they should no longer track subjects like science, reading, writing, or history (preserving only tracked math, since math is impossible to fake because it’s objective).  So I got stuck in a classroom full of retards.  In furthering this ridiculous policy, teachers systemically would group a smart kid, like me, with a bunch of not so smart kids.  Again, presuming I would teach them.

I’m 10 years old.  I’m not interested in teaching anything to anyone.  That’s the teacher’s job.  I’m interested in getting a decent grade so my parents won’t give me a hard time about it.  So invariably, I do all the work, and have to share the credit with a bunch of lazy retards.  And of course, it’s easy as hell for me because the teacher is teaching to the middle of the bell curve and I’m way, way to the right of it.

In every group, a smart kid worked with a bunch of dumb kids, and it was the same story with them.  Smart kid does work, stupid kid doesn’t do anything, but still gets OK grade.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize why this fails on so many levels, and in fact has the exact opposite effect than intended.  Here are some of the results that I witnessed first hand:

1.  I learned very early on that not only are all men created vastly inequal, but that whenever a smart person gets stuck with stupid people, the smart person invariably carries everyone else.  This constant life experience from a very early age solidified my worldview as a conservative.  I find that as in public shool, this principal extends to the adult world as well: smart, talented, motivated, hard working people do everything, and everyone else is along for the ride.  The liberal indoctrination tried so desperately by teachers at every level had the exact opposite effect.

2.  My education was vastly diminished because I had everything so easy, being lumped in with the idiots.  I should have been challenged way more than I ever was, but I wasn’t.  Because of #1, neglecting your top performers hurts everyone, since they’re the ones who get things done.  Both Europe and Asia are keenly aware of this and go so far as to build separate high schools for smart kids.  Thus, the students we as Americans interact with, namely those who have creds and desire to get into America, were in top schools populated only with kids at their intellectual level.  Their work could be challenging and they’d still pass.

3.  Because my education was so easy during my formative years, I had a very hard time adapting to college because many college level course are appropriately challenging.  College is not nearly as forgiving – honors math classes are designed for 130+ IQs, and they have absolutely no second thoughts about failing kids who don’t cut it.  They aren’t bullied by parents.  I was totally unprepared to take difficult classes that required more than a pulse to pass with flying colors.  I had zero study skills because the public school system was so, so, so easy that the mere thought that I would have to actually try in a class blew my mind.  Thanks a lot, high school.

4.  On the other side of the spectrum, the dumb kids learned early to just suck off a smarter person and let them do everything.  Also, because on group projects grades are shared, dumb kids have their grades artificially inflated.  They get passed in classes they should otherwise fail on the work of others.  This is actually something the liberals seem to want since they seem very big on the idea of taking from the producers and giving to the nonproducers, so in this sense, they’re right on the money.  They’re raising a whole generation of very average people who expect the non-average people (who drive the economy) to help them when they become adults – help that typically involves us giving them money veiled in “tax refunds” so they can go on vacations, buy TVs, and enjoy a high standard of living they feel they deserve even though they have done nothing to deserve.

When we fix these problems with the American school system, we’ll be back on top.  But unfortunately, these will never get fixed.  The liberals have a strangehold on public education and they will never give it up.  There is no incentive for smart, conservative people to get into education because there’s no money in it and they’d have to fight with liberals every single day of their lives, and they’re vastly outnumbered, so what’s the point?

The only answer is private school, which I promise is going to become more and more popular every year that goes on.  This will inspire a great cry of angst from liberals everywhere as public schools continue to blow hardcore and have larger and larger dropout rates.  It will get to the point where top colleges will not accept anyone from public schools.  The chorus of “classism” will cover the New York Times (if it still exists), claiming that “rich” parents who put their children in private schools are villains.  No, they’re not villains.  They’ve just had enough of the failure that is the Department of Education.

Thanks, Jimmy Carter.  Malaise forever!

It’s Not Child Porn…

… if you take the picture yourself.

Part of me is astounded that cases like these can even be considered by any sane person, but part of me understands the motivation: if we, as a society, are going to convince teenage girls that they shouldn’t post self-shot nudes on the internet, the punishment for doing so has to be unnecessarily harsh.

Personally, I think the idea of charging a 14 year old girl with child porn charges and potentially locking her up and making her register as a sex offender because she took some mirror shots with her cellphone and posted them on the internet is ludicrous.  The entire idea behind the illegality of child porn is to prevent adult men from viewing girls who we, as a society, have deemed are too young to engage in sexual, romantic relationships with older men, as potential partners.  And, obviously, it’s to prevent seedy old men from convincing little girls (either by force or persuasion) to get naked so they can take pictures and/or rape them.

In the case of a pubescent teenage girl posting her own nude pics on the internet, I see any kind of legal action as protecting the former: not encouraging any man who might view these pictures to view these girls as potential sex partners.  But it’s an interesting dilemma because obviously if a girl is comfortable taking nude pictures of herself and posting them on the internet, doesn’t that kind of mean she sees herself as an object of sexual desire?  If she is competent to consent to taking off her clothes for the world to see, is she competent to consent to sex (with anyone she chooses?).

The final straw, though, is the issue of consent: we have decided that girls under ages that vary by state, but which is usually 16, are not allowed to consent.  So in this most recent headline, unless the girl lives in Pennsylvania (which, if I recall, is one of the few states where the age of consent is 14), she’s 14; she can’t consent to sex, and presumably, she can’t consent to taking pictures of herself.

The weird part about this is that when it comes to consent, the implication is that the girl is being asked for sex and she says yes – she is consenting.  When it comes to personal naked pictures voluntarily distributed on the internet, where’s the consent?  Nobody asked her to do it – she took the initiative herself to take the pictures and make them available to the internet.  Who did she consent to?  Herself?

If she’s not allowed to take nude pictures of herself, is she not allowed to masturbate?  Is it illegal for a girl to voluntarily masturbate in front of other people, who may or may not be over the age of 18?

The sheer number of difficult, weird questions that arise from cases like this is why I’m not surprised that the courts quite frankly don’t know what to do with them.  On one hand, every father wants to keep his daughter’s privates off the internet, and we, as adults, pretty much all agree that allowing girls to post nude pictures of themselves, or encouraging it by total punitive indifference to it, is probably not a very good idea.  Very few, if any, adults want to encourage young girls to behave in real or virtual sluttiness, because we know what the consequences for them, their partners, and their families are.

On the other hand, should these girls be sent to prison?  I don’t think so.  To me, this boils down to a very long talk between the girl and her parents, and possibly the unavailability of internet and digitial devices at home.  I feel like the heavy hand of the legal system is inappropriate in cases like these.  I understand that we can’t trust all parents to properly handle situations like these, but in my opinion, if a parent is too apathetic or inept to stop his daughter from behaving in this way, we might as well let her.

Behind the Times

A senator – one from my state no less – is proposing to allow newspapers to claim tax-exempt status in an effort to keep them from going bankrupt.

We are losing our newspaper industry,” said Cardin. “The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy.”

Typical liberal democrat attitude.  Something is failing, so it’s up to everyone else to preserve it.  Why should we preserve an industry that is too incompetent to sell a product that people want to buy?

Cardin, again like most liberals, forgets the fact that newspapers are not making money because people aren’t buying them, so advertisers are not advertising in them.  The direct result is bankruptcy for a large number of newspapers.  If newspapers are so “critically important” as he puts it, why isn’t anyone buying them?

BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS THEM.

This is the kind of supply and demand understanding one would expect from an 11 year old.  It is astounding that a United States senator has trouble connecting these dots.  It’s even more astounding that year after year, the American people elect mentally retarded people to create laws and spend their tax money.

Ben Cardin, if you’re reading this: I am 26 years old and I have never in my life purchased a newspaper, nor will I ever.  There’s this amazing thing called the internet that gives me all the news I want, from as many different cities, countries, and sources I want, for free.  I also get it instantly, don’t have to fold it, my hands don’t smell like ink after I’m done, I don’t have to worry about where I dispose of my news, I don’t have to sift through full page ads, and best of all, I don’t have to financially support institutions that have proven themselves time and again to stand for causes that I don’t support.

Newspapers, if anything, are holding back amazing new technologies that can change the world, such as e-Paper.  If newspapers were not staffed by dinosaurs in Mr. Cardin’s generation who don’t understand the new world that is sprouting up around them, they would be heavily investing in e-Paper technology.

Imagine a world where you buy a subscription to a news source, like the Times, Fox, CNN, BBC, whatever – and with your subscription comes a free ePaper reader with WiFi access.  Your ePaper connects to WiFi hubs installed in the most common places people read newspapers – like train stations and metro cars themselves, for one.  These hubs were of course paid for and installed by a coalition of media companies who agreed to share the cost of installation and maintenance.  When you sit down on the subway, unroll your ePaper and turn it on (it requires very little electricity – about as much as a few soloar powered calculators, and even has a few thin solar strips on the top to power it) – you are given a quick menu of which media sources are available in your location – the free ones, and the ones you’ve subscribed to.  You press a button and it displays the front page of that source.  It looks just like a newspaper (except maybe without full color images).  But the front page isn’t quite the same, because it’s more like a webpage – you press headlines to be shown the article.  Each time you press an article, your ePaper displays some user-specific ad that is relevant to you.  The newspaper company knows about you because you filled out a brief survey about your demographics and your interests, so it shows you targetted ads.

As this technology evolves it’s not just news sources you have accesss to, it’s also your e-mail, your social networking sites, the internet at large – everything.  People who normally would drive to work choose to take the train even though it’s less convenient (they’ll have to transfer from train to bus to get to work) because they can spend a whole hour catching up on news on their commute instead of sitting in traffic.  We are willing to pay $15 a month to our favorite news company to help subsidize their costs of bringing us this service.

The world I just described is only years away, and it would be like this already if it weren’t for archaic newspapers and their unwillingness to evolve and capture opportunities.  Newspapers are holding us back.  They are the problem, not the solution.

Let all the newspapers go out of business.  Our children will laugh at us when we tell them stories about how people used to have to buy printed, fixed news on stinky grey paper from little stands in train stations.  Hell, I’m practically laughing.  It’s a brave new world, and newspapers have no place in it whatsoever.

Lack of Faith

I really believe that a lot of liberals desperately lack faith in themselves.

I say this because it is one of the few ways I can fathom why they would be interested in creating an environment where successful people are so egregiously, inappropriately, and inordinately punished not in spite of, but because of their success.  What could possibly drive a person to think that the fairest system is one where the more successful a citizen is, the more of the result of that success (money) is taken away from that citizen and funneled to less successful people?

These people congeal into lynch mobs to take away AIG bonuses.  Yes, paid with tax payer money.  But what about the other things paid with tax payer money on the other side of the spectrum, like drugs, unregistered handguns, used Cadillacs, and rims that cost more than the car they’re on?  Could it possibly be that the million dollar lifestyles afforded by million dollar bonuses are scorned not because we the people funded them, but because of simple, childish jealousy?

I’m starting to think that many liberals are in favor of screwing the rich so hard because they have no faith that they will ever themselves be targetted by the same policies they now promote.  In other words, they are certain they will never be rich, so it is okay to screw everyone who is.

I am not rich.  I am solidly middle-class.  However, I am also young, and I hope to one day be wealthy – and I have faith in myself.  I believe that I can and will one day be wealthy because I am smart, talented, and motivated.  I have invested in myself and so far I have done everything right.  I am also not afraid.

When it comes down to it, screwing the rich to better your own condition is not only theft, but the fact that it’s rather transparently motivated by jealousy makes it extremely trite.  The only reason society lets this nonsense continue and doesn’t call every single one of them out is that there are simply so many of them.

And also, they disguise their motives with grandiose visions like “the great society” and “the war on poverty.”  Based on my observations of the typical person, I have observed that he is far too narcissistic to empathize even with the people he interacts with on a daily basis let alone abstract entities and ego masses like “the poor” with whom he has never, nor will ever interact.  “It’s better for all of us” is just a strawman facade for “it’s better for me.”  We let our friends and neighbors get away with lies like this because we know that once words like that exit a person’s mouth, we might as well write them off as a lost cause. 

 If you’re over the age of 21 and believe this nonsense, there’s no hope for you for at least 15 or 20 years.  Everyone becomes more conservative as they age because they have a lifetime of experiences to reflect upon and to realize that not only were all of their liberal ideals just fantasy, not a single one of their great causes ever came to fruition because liberal ideals completely ignore human nature.

There May Be Hope Yet…

Even if the Pelosi congress is willing to trample the constitution, at least Obama isn’t.  Apparently he has intonated that he will veto any bill passing a punitive tax on bonus recipients at AIG.

At least he’s gotten one thing right so far.

Ex Post Facto

I have strongly begun to doubt Western democracy.

Democracy only works when people are themselves fair and just.  If we, as a people, don’t vote justly, we will not elect just men.  Our government will therefore become unjust and immoral, and we need look no further for proof of this sad state of affairs than the AIG witch hunt.

And that’s what this is.  A witch hunt.

Americans are furious that tax payers are going to create multimillionaires out of people whose company we rely on and who wittingly or unwittingly drove it to its knees.  Intentionally or unintentionally doesn’t matter.  Anyone on AIG’s payroll above a certain paygrade is guilty and we will not hold a trial.  Instead, we will strip them of wealth derived from we the people, in blantant breach of the U.S. Constitution, done so by the very people we elected to uphold the Constitution of this country.

Congressmen can’t be trusted to vote in breach of what they perceive their constituents want even, apparently, if it means upholding  a text we once held sacred.  What a shame.

So many people have fought and died for the ideas on that piece of paper, and yet, a few Americans have been whipped into a frenzy over less than 0.0001% of a spending bill their new Messiah signed before its ink was dry, and that frenzy alone is enough to ignore everything in it.

The constitution protects against a government body doing what Congress is now attempting to do to AIG bonus recipients.  Unless the Supreme Court steps in, this spectacle will one day be looked upon as a low point in government – that is, if we are ever able to ascend out of this pit we’ve dug ourselves.

When the country is blinded by emotion and ignorance, all the loftiest of ideas don’t mean a thing.  The Constitution certainly doesn’t.  Not any more.

If you feel that AIG executives should give back their bonuses, I want you to consider that you’re asking the Congress of the United States to selectively target individuals for what is tantamount to theft because of a national opinion poll.  Remember that the recipients of these bonuses had established contracts defining these bonuses before the government got involved in AIG’s finances.  Retroactively nullifying a contract has been illegal in English common law for hundreds of years.  But don’t let that stop you – that’s tax payer money!

What is AIG today could be your company tomorrow.  Where does it stop?   Have we lost our minds?

I’m going to ask you all a big favor, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative:  do not reelect any current member of the government at any level.  Even if it means voting against your own party – do not vote for an incumbent.  Both sides of the aisle have demonstrated an abject lack of ability to govern this country.

Of course, that will probably be futile, too.  Politicians are more or less interchangeable these days.

I hope to God the last gasp of these disasterous incompetents known as Baby Boomers don’t drive this country off a cliff before they do their children a favor and retire.  But I am not optimistic.  The idiots in my generation are not any better.  Stupidity begets stupidity, it seems.

We are doomed.

America is Not Different, Not Free, and Strays

I saw a brief blurb about how the Obama administration will back a UN declaration (proposed by the French, of course) to “decriminalize homosexuality across the globe.”

In other words, a global pronouncement of disdain for the culture of Iran.

I don’t have a problem with this resolution per se.  I suspect most Americans would agree – even those that don’t support gay marriage – that gay people should not be made criminals for having sex with who they want to have sex with.

But here’s the problem.  America was founded by a bunch of people who wanted to live their lives in a way other than the majority of England did at the time.  And at the time, in England, their ways were illegal.  The pilgrims got on a boat, traveled for months on a ship to get far, far away from England, and found a new place to live how they wanted to live.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of anyone being stoned to death for any reason, let alone doing what is natural to them.  But I very strongly do like the idea that we let a group of people – a culture – live how they want to live.

Let’s take Iran, for example.  Their culture keeps homosexuality in the closet under punishment of rather strict sentences, up to and including death.  I do believe in the majority’s right to define everything – economies, laws, traditions, culture – even at the expense of a minority – with one caveat.  The caveat is freedom of movement.  If you happen to be a gay person in Iran, you are at odds with your culture.  Through no fault of your own, but life isn’t fair.  We don’t get to choose who we are or where we’re born.  If your culture has a problem with you, they owe it to you to let you leave and find a culture that does work for you.

In America we have gone through extraordinary lengths to accomodate everyone.  Our attitude, when this country was founded, was vastly different.  I believe we told a few million Native Americans, “hey, if you don’t like it, find someplace else to go.”  Unfortunately for them, early Americans decided that the east coast wasn’t enough.  Then the Louisiana territories weren’t enough.  Then the midwest wasn’t enough.  Then it wasn’t enough until we had everything.  A lot of Native Americans ran out of places to run to and died as a reuslt.

America – and the “democratic world” – is a giant contradiction.  On one hand, we espouse freedom and inclusivity, but any group that wishes to be exclusive is instantly demonized.  In a strange sense, America is inclusive of everyone as long as they are inclusive too.  America has no tolerance for cultures of exclusivity, and that’s a real shame.

Why is it a shame?  Because human beings are exclusive by nature.  Think about virtues like patriotism or political affiliation or even rooting for a particular sports team.  We define ourselves by the groups we belong to, and these groups are not open to anyone.  You can’t be a democrat if you don’t believe in their values.  You can’t be a Ravens fan if you’re a Redskins fan.  You can’t be Jewish if you’re a Christian.  You can’t be in Boy Scouts if you’re gay.  You can’t be black if you’re white.  You can’t be American if you want to exclude anyone from anything ever.

This resolution has two consequences.  First, we are essentially dictating to the entire planet that they must adopt our culture stance on homosexuality.  This is just one more bullet point on the growing list of cultural mandates that Western Civilization is hoisting on to the rest of the world.  From a purely objective stand point, it isn’t our place to enforce our cultural standards on other cultures for no reason other than to win some political clout.

Second, and more importantly, these global cultural mandates are extremely frightening because anyone who disagrees with them has no place to go.  The people who founded America had the luxury of an entire continent in which to practice democracy.  Suppose a different group wanted the right to practice fascism, or socialism, or marxism, or theocratism.  Where would they go to do it?

The entire world is claimed.  There is no room for breakaway cultures left.  Even the tiniest, most remote, most uninhabitable little island someplace belongs to someone and is used as a nuclear test site.

All you need to do is look at Israel.  Palestine’s population was tiny and the geography of Israel sucks.  It’s not exactly the first choice for a place people want to live.  The Jews showed up and decided to create a Jewish state.  They were a breakaway culture and they needed some place to do it.  60 years later, we’re still fighting over the territorial rights to that tiny little portion of the world.

From a biological standpoint, genetic diversity is extremely important to the survival of the species.  If our genetics become to similar, all it takes is one nasty virus to exploit some flaw in the one gene we all share to wipe out the entire population of humans.

From a cultural standpoint, diversity is equally important.  People are not the same.  No matter which culture a person is born into, he may have traits that make him incompatible with it, for example, a gay man born in Iran.  A pair of conservative parents who love Nascar and deer hunting can churn out a vegetarian homosexual child whose only dream in life is to win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating.  In this country, our conservative deer hunters are likely to live in a red state like Texas and their figure skating child is likely to move to Maine or Vermont as soon as they can possibly escape the parents they hate.  The fact that we have Texas and Maine is a very good thing.

In an effort to make the world “fair” for everyone, we are sacrficing cultural diversity and humanity’s right to create their own cultures – and that is the ultimate injustice.  The world is finite and exhausted.  We can’t tell groups of people with “exclusive” attitudes about things like religion, homosexuality, or race to leave because they have no where to go.

If you want to be truly open minded, you have to be open minded even to close minded folks.  And that includes Iranians, who stone gays to death.  A UN resolution won’t change Iran.  It will only give us an excuse to sanction them when footage of the stoning of a homosexual man in a public square for crimes none other than being gay is aired in prime time on CNN.

If we want to keep the world united, we have to respect the fact that our cultural ideals of fairness and inclusivity is only one of many possible ways to live.  We need to suppress our instincts to spread our culture to everyone.  Our policy of inclusivity is an declaration that we know this instinct is bad, yet we can’t seem to take a step back and realize that we are forcing our cultural attitude on the world in the name of not forcing cultural attitudes on people.

Even as I say all this, a big part of me can’t help but ask the question: wouldn’t it be better for them if we did?

It’s not very easy to ask an Iranian to leave his family, his country, his culture just because he’s gay – and certainly, I do think the American culture is the best in the world, even though there are large parts of it I don’t like.  But here’s the catch – I also realize that most people believe their cultures are the best in the world.  All you have to do is look at North Korea, objectively one of the worst places in the world.  Yet 20,000,000 of them love their country and their culture by orders of magnitude more than we love ours, and ours is a paradise by comparison.

I also acknowledge that our culture is not perfect.  We are certainly more fair, just, and moral than the majority of cultures, but does that make them better?  I am not sure.  I say yes, but I believe it is extremely dangerous to start this kind of judging at this point in history.  We could get away with it in the past because there was always some place to escape to.  But today that isn’t the case.  If the culture becomes global, we’re in real trouble.  Who will get to judge a global culture?

Jack Cafferty: Everything Wrong with Politics

RE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/10/cafferty.republicans/index.html

Where to start?

I’d be lying if I said a lot of editorials authored by liberal sycophants didn’t anger me greatly, but few have perturbed me in recent months as much as this piece of shit by Jack Cafferty.  I have to give props to Tim Weaver who wrote almost exactly the same thing a few days ago.  They say great minds think alike.  I am certain that the corrolary is also true.  For those liberal arts majors who don’t know what a corrolary is, it means this: not so great minds think alike, too.

This man evidently judges his opposition on 3 issues: questionable grammar, extremely obscure taxation rules, and Rush Limbaugh.

Wow.  Okay Jack.  I’ll address you point by point:

First, I got perfect scores on the GRE in the writing and math sections, and a 710 on the verbal section, and the sentence “I’m certainly not nearly as good of a speaker as Obama” does not raise any red flags to me.  I suppose Jack is implying that the correct form is probably “I’m certainly not neary as good a speaker as Obama”, but give me a fucking break.  If you believe standardized test scores then I am better at this than 96% of the population and I didn’t find anything wrong with that sentence.  Note to Jack: grammar evolves.  If a particular construction is vernacular enough for 99% of the population to not only understand the meaning perfectly but not be able to identify what’s wrong with it, it doesn’t deserve criticism, and it certainly doesn’t qualify as 8th grade grammar.  Apparently Jacky boy hsa been spending too much time at CNN and not enough time in inner city schools to know what’s 8th grade grammar and what isn’t.

You’re either living in a glass house, are blind, or are dishonest. Jack, to call out a completely irrelevant political figure like Sarah Palin 6 months after she lost on something like billing taxpayers on sums in the 5 digits when the man you elected just billed the tax payers for 12 digits.  Have you ever heard the expression “piss in the ocean?”  And while we’re at it, if you really want to draw attention to Palin and her failure to pay some taxes, doesn’t that mean we should be rushing to nominate her for Obama’s cabinet?  Geithner.  Daschle.  Richardson.  Need I go on?

I want to draw attention to the way he phrased something: “Another tawdry grab at a few dollars that didn’t belong to her.”  Note the operative word: few.  Also note the fact that evidently, in Jack Cafferty’s world, your money never belongs to you.  It belongs to the government, and only whatever Big Brother doesn’t want or by its grace decides to give you belongs to you.  That’s a pretty fucked up worldview, don’t you think?

Yes.  I know technically money is property of the US government.  Let’s all drown in insignificant details, shouldn’t we?

Oh no!  Michael Steele apologized to Rush!  By the way: no democratic politican has ever acquiesced anything for any reason to any leftist pundit like Jack Cafferty or Keith Olbermann, or to each other.  Apparently the primary season of ’08 is already long forgotten by the likes of Cafferty.  Every two minutes Obama was apologizing to Hillary for sexist remarks made on toe coattails of an apology from the Hillary camp from calling a spade a spade.

Is this even remotely relevant?  News flash, Jack: Americans are losing money every single time Barack Obama opens his mouth.  Every time Obama signs legilsation, the stock market falls.

I seem to recall hearing the expression “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” used ad naeuseum as a Republican tactic to justify a war.

I seem to keep forgetting that when George Bush implies that terrorists are going to kill us unless we kill them first he’s a fear monger, but when Barack Obama implies that every single American will lose their jobs and their homes unless we go along with a spending plan costing more than the New Deal, the Marshal Plan, and the Vietnam war combined he’s espousing hope and change.

Apparently, Jack thinks Bush “sold out the principles of the Republican Party in favor of huge deficits, a doubling of the national debt, and a growing intrusion of the federal government into people’s private lives.”

I agree.  Bush and the republican lawmakers in charge from 2000 to 2006 spent like liberals.

Clearly, the solution to the doubling of the national debt in favor of huge deficits must be to oust the republicans who spent like democrats, elect some actual democrats who spend like democrats, and double the national debt a second time.

Are you fucking kidding me?  Are there actually people who can criticize the Bush regime for spending a lot of money in one breath and then praise Obama for spending even more in the next one?  Are there actually people who think that grape genetic research and a community center in Montana is more important than deposing hostile regimes and keeping the oil flowing?

Jack seems to think the Republican Party is marching double time down the road to irrelevance and we don’t even know it.

You’re right, Jack.  We lost an election.  Our last president didn’t stem the tide on this recession long enough for it to happen squarely in 2009 or 2010, which would have happened anyway.  The housing bubble would have burst no matter what any politician did, chiefly because the only measures a politician could have taken to stop it would prevent the politician from getting reelected, and all politicians on both sides of the aisle are more interested in their own futures than the country’s.  As if that isn’t obvious by now.

Yes, Jack, we lost an election.  Apparently, the president of the United States get to take all of the blame for everything that ever goes wrong.  There weren’t 3 or 400 democrats in congress in 2006 who could have acted to do something.  Or even mention it.  Sure, Bush used his veto power.  Not as often as Bill Clinton did, but he used it.  Bush was not our greatest president, but he still comes out ahead of Jimmy Carter.

When Jimmy Carter ran this country into the ground and Ronald Reagan – an irrelevant republican – won in the biggest electoral landslides ever in 1980 and again in 1984 – did you write a column about how the democratic party was marching double time down the road to irrelevance?

Of couse not.  You must not have even known it.

But, as it turns out, 20 years later you’re still around and you’re still winning elections from time to time.  I’m sure Jack would like nothing more than unopposed elections just like our good friends the DPRK staged last month.  Oh, what a pleasant fantasy that would be!  No pesky republicans with their pesky way of looking at things to stop Chairman Obama and Secretary Obama from enacting a Great Leap Forward.

I swear.  If I hear one more liberal gloat over a slim 53-47 margin of victory in 2008, I won’t be able to stop myself from rubbing it in when 2012 rolls in and we’re looking at a DOW at 3,000 thanks to Obama’s great plan for America and a republican – any republican – with no possible chance of losing the election.  If things keep going the way they’re going, we could probably put a convicted child rapist on the ticket and he’d beat out The One.

Wars are Inevitable

My heritage is eastern European.  On my father’s side, I come from a place not far from where Vlad Dracula and his ilk battled Persian invaders.

I have often wondered about this, but never once have I interacted with a person – particularly males – of Persian descent who I didn’t instantly loathe.

I have honestly hated every personality characteristic about them.  For a long time I’ve tried to define exactly what it is about each of them I haven’t liked, and the only tangible personality trait they seem to share is abject dishonesty.  They are always the kind of people who act like they’re your best friend, but you can’t help but shake the feeling that if it would benefit them in some way, even a minor one, they’d stab you in the back and enjoy it.

I am anxiously hoping I one day meet a Persian from whom I do not get this vibe, but so far not a single one.

I am also not the only one who thinks this way.  I never mentioned this particular aversion I have toward Persians to my fiancee, but she independently brought it up once, and she had exactly the same observation.  Maybe that’s why we’re getting married?

She’s a quarter greek, from her mother’s side.

I am beginning to believe that conflict between certain cultural groups is inevitable – and I think it may be more than that.  Why do cultures evolve the way they do?  When you group enough people with the same genetic traits together, I believe certain cultural features will naturally emerge as a direct result of genetically linked personality traits.  I also believe that there are cultural features that are simply incompatible.  No amount of diplomacy is going to make diametrically oppossed cultures get along.

This is a small set of data points, but both my girl and I have independently observed the fact that Persians just plain rub us the wrong way, and both of us have genetics derived from cultural groups who have historically fought wars with Persians.

Coincidence?  You decide.

Or, you can just call me a Persian-hating bigot and forget you ever read this.  That’s probably the most open-minded, well-balanced reaction to a post that might suggest a culture has traits someone like me or you could dislike without wanting to ethnically cleanse them from the planet.

Even If I Knew…

Even if I knew definitively that at least half of every dollar I put toward my 401k is going to be obliterated by an economic disaster right around the time I need to start living off my investments, I’d still invest money anyway. 

Well, okay.  If knew definitively, I’d put it in CD’s, bonds, or resources like gold.  Let’s say my odds are 50-50.  I’d invest.

The primary reason I would do so is because the thought of squandering every spare penny I have on frivolous luxuries my entire life and then hoping I don’t put myself into a situation where I’m eating dog food or sucking off my family or my government is repulsive.  Even if it costs me two dollars for every one that I get to spend, it’s worth the investment.

The second reason is that investing money – even if it is possible, even if it’s likely that I might lose all my money – contributes to society in a way that is far more palettable to me than pisisng it away on some welfare case who will use the money for drugs or booze.  When I buy stock I’m helping some company grow its business.  This is a worthwhile venture in my opinion, even if it might result in a personal loss.  The stock market has and always will be a form of gambling.

My parents have saved their entire lives.  On the cusp of retirement they’ve seen their retirement money halve, at least until this economy improves.

My parents’ best friends spent their entire lives.  They lived an upper middle class lifestyle their entire lives.  They have one son in college and a daughter in high school.  They might foreclose on their house (which they have zero equity in because they refinanced to cash out every time it went up in value, so they could buy luxury cars and go on expensive vacations).  Pay for college?  Forget it!

My parents, who saved, set me off into adulthood with zero debt.

No matter how badly they got screwed by this economy (and they did – situations like this primarily punish the people who saved to begin with) – they are still better off than the people who didn’t.

I haven’t adjusted my 401k contributions.