Aug 6, 2013 | Education
From Matt Damon: where did it all go right for the leftwing activist, devoted dad and intelligent action star? | Film | The Guardian
A father of four (three daughters, aged seven, five and three, and a stepdaughter, 15), this summer he is moving his family from New York to Los Angeles, and the challenge of giving them a childhood that remotely resembles the one he enjoyed is about to get even harder.Choosing a school has already presented a major moral dilemma. "Sending our kids in my family to private school was a big, big, big deal. And it was a giant family discussion. But it was a circular conversation, really, because ultimately we don't have a choice. I mean, I pay for a private education and I'm trying to get the one that most matches the public education that I had, but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system. It's unfair." Damon has campaigned against teachers' pay being pegged to children's test results: "So we agitate about those things, and try to change them, and try to change the policy, but you know, it's a tough one."
Comments John Nolte:
Actor Matt Damon is a strong supporter of America's public schools. Just two years ago, the star spoke passionately about the importance of public schools at a Washington DC "Save our Schools" rally. In fact, the actor is so impressed with public school teachers that he has demanded they receive a pay raise. That passion and conviction, however, does not apply to Damon's own children, who will not be enrolled into the Los Angeles public school system.[...]This would probably mark the first time anyone has ever complained that America's public schools, especially in Los Angeles, aren't left-wing enough. [Matt Damon Refuses to Enroll Kids in Los Angeles Public Schools]
Aug 5, 2013 | Culture
Writes Glenn Garvin at MiamiHerald.comThere is no war on black men, at least not by white men. Last year, the Scripps-Howard News Service studied half a million homicide reports and found that killings of black victims by white attackers have actually dropped over the past 30 years, from 4,745 during the 1980s to 4,380 during the first decade of the 2000s. There were nearly twice as many white victims killed by black assailants: 8,503 in the 1980s, and 8,530 in the 2000s. [Zimmerman Trial: Trayvon Martin was not Emmett Till]
According to findings from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National CrimeVictimization Survey (NCVS) and the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), Supplementary Homicide Reports:Blacks were victims of an estimated 805,000 nonfatalviolent crimes and of about 8,000 homicides in 2005. While blacks accounted for 13% of the U.S. population in 2005, they were victims in 15% of all nonfatal violent crimes and nearly half of all homicides. [...]
In 2005 nearly half of all homicide victims were black Blacks accounted for 49% of all homicide victims in 2005, according to the FBI's UCR.Black males accounted for about 52% (or 6,800) of the nearly 13,000 male homicide victims in 2005. Black females made up 35% (or 1,200) of the nearly 3,500 female homicide victims.[...] In 2005 most homicides involving one victim and one offender were intraracial. About 93% of black homicide victims and 85% of white victims in single victim and single offender homicides were murdered by someone of their race. [Black Victims of Violent Crime]
You got that? In the United States, 93% of the black people who were murdered in 2005 were murdered by other people in their beloved "Black community."Perhaps this is what prompted Jesse Jackson to say:
"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating." [Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in "Crime: New Frontier - Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue" by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times (ellipsis in original).]
So much for "racial profiling." From an editorial in the
Baltimore Sun:
Jesse Jackson has been taking an unusual amount of heat from his fellow African-Americans recently because he has identified black-on-black crime as a major problem in poor communities. The reaction reminds us of the incredulity that greeted the little boy's observations concerning the emperor's new clothes. Isn't it obvious that blacks are the primary victims of crime in poor neighborhoods, and that the brunt of the suffering inflicted by black criminals is borne by other blacks?In a society with a less troubled racial history than ours, these would be self-evident statements. Because criminality has so often been used in the past to paint all blacks in a negative light, however, frank discussion of the problem has always been an extremely touchy subject. Mr. Jackson has been accused of fueling racist stereotypes.
Yet one of Mr. Jackson's roles is that of iconoclast. And [Jackson] has performed valuable service by jettisoning the taboo against black leaders talking about black-on-black crime. He knows that the "root causes" of much crime are to be found in poverty, broken families, hopelessness. And his audiences, who are overwhelmingly black, know he is not talking about them when he speaks of the "bad black brothers" who deal drugs, rob and kill. They just want help getting criminals off their streets.Critics have lambasted Mr. Jackson's claim that black-on-black violence is the nation's "number one civil rights problem." They point out that black criminals don't target their victims because of their color but because they are vulnerable and close at hand. So how can such crimes possibly be considered a "civil rights" matter? Yet when services -- including police protection -- in poor black neighborhoods are stretched to the breaking point, when good schools, businesses and jobs are virtually non-existent, when all the elements that make a community viable are lacking, surely that is a human rights issue.
Apparently it is OK to rob, rape and murder someone -- just so long as you don't do it because of their skin color? This is context-dropping "compartmentalization" on steroids. This the result of so-called "civil rights" advocates who deny individual rights.Ironically, many of Mr. Jackson's detractors are the same people who subscribe to various theories of a massive white conspiracy to keep blacks down. Perhaps they fear his ideas may deprive them of a convenient scapegoat. Mr. Jackson, however, speaks to the concerns of all decent people, black and white, when he suggests the same moral force that sustained the civil rights movement of the 1960s must now be applied to task of ridding poor communities of lawlessness and terror. If that seems like a revolutionary message in the 1990s, it is only because it has the ring of truth. [Jesse Jackson On Black Crime | Jesse Jackson on crime - Baltimore Sun]
The above was written in 1993. My how have things changed today under the Presidential "leadership" of the great divider.Aug 5, 2013 | Politics
From Job seeker Vicky Harrison commits suicide after she was rejected for 200 jobs | Mail Online:A bright 21-year-old killed herself after more than 200 unsuccessful job applications.Vicky Harrison had dreamed of a career as a teacher or a television producer, but gave up hope for the future, her family said yesterday. A day after her latest rejection, and on the eve of her fortnightly trip to sign on, she wrote heartbreaking notes to her parents and boyfriend saying 'I don't want to be me any more' and took a huge drug overdose.
[...] Mr Harrison added: 'I think she was upset that she had no money and she felt she was losing touch with her friends because she couldn't go
out. She never wanted any charity and that is why she was so desperate for work.
'What upsets us so much is that there are obviously so many other people in a similar position.'
[...] Critics say Labour policies are creating a 'lost generation' of school leavers unable to find employment.
Comments Carl Svanberg:This tragic story really breaks my heart. Unfortunately, the case of Vicky Harrison is far from unique.
Unemployment tends to make people anxious and depressed. I would, therefore, argue that Vicky Harrison is, in this respect, yet another... casualty of the welfare state.
Why? Because the welfare state is the *primary* cause of unemployment. In part, because of all the high taxes required to finance the welfare state. In part, because of minimum wage laws, pushing out the least productive, and laws granting the unions the power to enforce *de facto* minimum wages, pushing out the more productive.
Since these, and other welfare state policies, create unemployment, they also drive desperate, anxious and depressed people into suicide.
If we want a more humane society, a society where people are free to pursue their own lives and happiness, where the government doesn't stop people from offering and taking jobs, then the welfare state has got to go.
Aug 5, 2013 | Business, Politics
India's Walmart of Heart Surgery Cuts the Cost by 98% - Businessweek
Devi Shetty keeps photographs of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi on his desk, and he’s obsessed with making cardiac surgery affordable for millions of Indians. But these two facts are not connected. Shetty’s a heart surgeon-turned-businessman who founded a chain of 21 medical centers around India. Every bit the capitalist, he has trimmed costs by buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning and other efficiencies. That’s helped cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,555)—half of what it was 20 years ago. He wants to get it down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.“It shows that costs can be substantially contained,” says Srinath Reddy, president of the Geneva-based World Heart Federation. “It’s possible to deliver very high-quality cardiac care at a relatively low cost.”Medical experts like Reddy are watching closely to see if Shetty’s severe cost-cutting can serve as a model for making life-saving heart operations more profitable and more accessible to patients in India and other emerging nations. “The current price of everything that you see in health care is predominantly opportunistic pricing and the outcome of inefficiency,” says Shetty, who opened his flagship hospital, Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City, in Bangalore in 2001.
Aug 4, 2013 | Business, Politics, Sci-Tech
Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) has published flow charts (also referred to as “Sankey Diagrams”) of energy use. This allows energy to be "visualized as it flows from resources (Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, etc.), through transformations (electricity generation) to end uses (Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Transportation)."
Walter Hickey over at Business Insider makes a few poignant observations:- Renewables — Hydro, geothermal, wind and solar — are still absurdly tiny in the grand scheme of things, despite significant investment and recent growth.
- The amount of rejected energy — that's energy lost in transportation — should make every American wince. It's just shocking how much energy is lost due to grid inefficiencies, heat waste, and exhaust.
- Petroleum runs cars and industry, but nowhere near as much electrical generation as one might expect.
- Natural Gas use has grown, driven almost entirely by use in electrical generation. Coal use has demonstrably shrunk.
- Nuclear power declined since 2011, which is disappointing due to how inexpensive it is.
Also of interest are "Carbon Flows":
Aug 3, 2013 | Education
From War On Words: NYC Dept. Of Education Wants 50 ‘Forbidden’ Words Banned From Standardized Tests « CBS New York:
The New York City Department of Education is waging a war on words of sorts, and is seeking to have words they deem upsetting removed from standardized tests. Fearing that certain words and topics can make students feel unpleasant, officials are requesting 50 or so words be removed from city-issued tests.
The word “dinosaur” made the hit list because dinosaurs suggest evolution which creationists might not like, WCBS 880′s Marla Diamond reported. “Halloween” is targeted because it suggests paganism; a “birthday” might not be happy to all because it isn’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses.[...]Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the DOE is simply giving guidance to the test developers. “So we’re not an outlier in being politically correct. This is just making sure that test makers are sensitive in the development of their tests,” Walcott said Monday. [...] There are banned words currently in school districts nationwide. Walcott said New York City’s list is longer because its student body is so diverse.
The words to be possibly banned include:
- Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
- Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
- Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
- Bodily functions
- Cancer (and other diseases)
- Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
- Celebrities
- Children dealing with serious issues
- Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
- Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
- Crime
- Death and disease
- Divorce
- Evolution
- Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
- Gambling involving money
- Halloween
- Homelessness
- Homes with swimming pools
- Hunting
- Junk food
- In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
- Loss of employment
- Nuclear weapons
- Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
- Parapsychology
- Politics
- Pornography
- Poverty
- Rap Music
- Religion
- Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
- Rock-and-Roll music
- Running away
- Sex
- Slavery
- Terrorism
- Television and video games (excessive use)
- Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
- Vermin (rats and roaches)
- Violence
- War and bloodshed
- Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
- Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.
Aug 3, 2013 | Politics
Sound advice from Heike Larson at LePort Schools:
Does a parent have to choose between learning and fun?We don’t think so. In our view, the learning vs. fun trade-off is a false alternative, and in practice the most profoundly joyous childhood environment is precisely the one which best satisfies a child’s cognitive needs.Children by nature are curious about the world. They are capable of an astounding amount of early learning when given the freedom to explore to their heart’s content, particularly in an environment of carefully prepared engaging, meaningful explorative activities. In such a setting, learning so-called academic skills, such as handwriting or arithmetic, is experienced as a playful, enjoyable activity. The pleasure and deep satisfaction of such concentrated engagement is natural and to-be-expected because it is consistent with the actual needs of the child. Psychologically, the satisfaction derived is exactly the satisfaction that comes from play. As Maria Montessori put it, “play is the child’s work.” [Play vs. Work: A Wrong Alternative]
Aug 3, 2013 | Politics
Writes Walter Williams at Capitalism Magazine on Black Self-Sabotage:
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites. I’d like for the president, the civil rights establishment, white liberals and the news media, who spent massive resources protesting the George Zimmerman trial’s verdict, to tell the nation whether they believe that the major murder problem blacks face is murder by whites. There are no such protests against the thousands of black murders.
Aug 2, 2013 | Culture
From Zimmerman Trial: Trayvon Martin was not Emmett Till - Glenn Garvin - MiamiHerald.com
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/29/3530067/zimmerman-trial-trayvon-martin.html#storylink=cpy
[...] The most nauseatingly overheated rhetoric has been the comparisons of Martin to Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old black kid from Chicago who, in the summer of 1955, went to visit relatives in a tiny Mississippi Delta town called Money. He either whistled at or flirted with (accounts vary) a white woman at the counter of a grocery store.A few nights later, her husband and brother-in-law (and perhaps some of their neighbors, though that’s uncertain) dragged Till from his home, beat him to an unholy pulp, shot him in the head, tied a 70-pount weight to him with barbed wire and dumped him in a river.When his body was fished out of the water three days later, the photos — published in Ebony magazine — made America vomit. Well, that part of America outside Money, Mississippi, where the men who killed Till were acquitted by jurors who deliberated just over an hour and confessed it wouldn’t have taken that long if they hadn’t paused to have a soda.The murderers, once they were safely protected by the constitutional sanction against double jeopardy, boasted of their own guilt. And several jurors admitted they voted for acquittal because they didn’t believe killing black people was a jailable offense.In what conceivable way does that story resemble the Trayvon Martin case? Zimmerman didn’t know Martin, has no history of racism and, when he called police to report what he thought was a suspicious character in his neighborhood, wasn’t even sure the person was black. Martin wasn’t dragged from his home by a mob but was killed during an altercation in which Zimmerman says he feared for his life and there was little evidence to contradict him.And in post-verdict interviews, the Zimmerman jurors have come across not as flippant racists but thoughtful citizens who were agonized by their decision but did their best to enforce the law as they understood it. You may think they got it wrong. But that doesn’t mean they were a lynch mob, or that 2013 America is 1955 Mississippi.
Aug 2, 2013 | Politics
Attorney Thomas Bowden draws some interesting parallels between the Apple antitrust persecution and the persecution of Rearden Metal in Ayn Rand's epic best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged:
In Rand’s novel, the particular law that necessitated a Washington-installed monitor was designed to control sales of a brand-new metal, demand for which far outstripped supply. The law mandated that each customer receive a “fair share” of the popular metal. What’s a “fair share?” The law didn’t say—and so a monitor (nicknamed the “Wet Nurse”) was sent to the factory, to substitute his dictates for the owners’ decisions. Here’s a passage from the novel:
Nobody had known how to determine what constituted a fair share of what amount. Then a bright young boy just out of college had been sent to him from Washington, as Deputy Director of Distribution. After many telephone conferences with the capital, the boy announced that customers would get five hundred tons of the Metal each, in the order of the dates of their applications. Nobody had argued against his figure. There was no way to form an argument; the figure could have been one pound or one million tons, with the same validity. The boy had established an office at the Rearden mills, where four girls took applications for shares of Rearden Metal. At the present rate of the mills’ production, the applications extended well into the next century.
Read the rest of In Apple antitrust case, life imitates Atlas Shrugged.
Jul 30, 2013 | Politics
Commenting on the George Zimmerman trial, America's first half-black President, Obama stated:On the other hand, if we're sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there's a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we'd like to see?And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these "stand your ground" laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?
Obama also stated:I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African-American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it – and that context is being denied.And that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
Or it might not have.Meet Christopher Cervini killed by two gun shots.
Meet Roderick Scott the man who killed him:
YNN Rochester reports on the verdict:Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April. [
Jury Finds Roderick Scott Not Guilty:]
Mr. Obama's speech-writer clearly has not been doing his homework.
"I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it's still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over."As deliberations dragged on over two days and the jury asked for testimony to be read back, Scott admits he didn't know how it would all turn out."I was nervous of course,” he said. “You never know what direction this whole thing is going to turn, so I have no idea. But it worked out and I feel that justice (was) served today."Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner."The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."Scott says he acted in self defense when he confronted Cervini and two others saying they were stealing from neighbors cars. He told them he had a gun and ordered them to freeze and wait for police.
Scott says he shot Cervini twice when the victim charged toward him yelling he was going to get Scott."How can this happen to a beautiful, sweet child like that?” asked Cervini’s aunt Carol Cervini. “All he wanted to do was go home. And then for them to say, he was saying, 'Please don't kill me. I'm just a kid,' and he just kept on shooting him."
Comments T.Kevin Whiteman at
Liberty Unyielding:
[...] It was verified during Scott’s murder trial that he called 911 before the bloody confrontation took place. It was also determined that he opened fire with his legally owned firearm only as a last resort when he reasonably believed his life was in danger.Still another similarity between the two cases was Scott’s testimony that there had been a rash of break-ins in the area. Scott testified that on the morning of the fatal encounter he observed Cervini and two other youths breaking into a neighbor’s vehicle. Scott says he ordered the suspects to freeze and wait for the arrival of the police.He insists that he opened fire on Cervini only when the teen “charged” him and was screaming that he was going to get Scott.After Scott was acquitted, family members of the deceased child claimed that justice had not been served by the verdict. They shared their belief that their son’s killer had taken it upon himself to act as judge, jury, and executioner.But this is where the similarities between the two cases end. There were no marches, no vigils, no mobs crying “No justice, no peace.” There were no riots or revenge beatings of lone black men by gangs of white teens. There was also no statement by the president — whose named coincidentally was Barack Obama — or other efforts to inject his personal biases into the outcome of the trial. ["Obama’s double standard on race challenged by the 2009 shooting death of a white teen by a black adult"]
For the record the Scott decision, like the Zimmerman decision, was the correct one.However, like Dana Loesch, we are wondering: where is the outrage from the "progressive" racial bigotry machine?Outrage peddlers are silent because this story doesn’t fit the narrative of racial strife. Al Sharpton can’t Tweet about his photo ops with Jay Z and Beyonce over instances of justice like this.So do Sharpton, NAACP, Piers Morgan, Stevie Wonder, etc, etc, all believe that Roderick Scott is a murderer? That he should have been denied his ability to defend himself? Are they really wanting to reintroduce Reconstruction-era suppression on the ability and right to self defense? [The Double Standard On The Zimmerman-Martin Case | RedState]
Perhaps this is because the Zimmerman case, unlike the Roderick case, distracts attention from the nihilist in chief's attacks on the American Republic, capitalism, and freedom.Jul 30, 2013 | Politics
Adams Morgan hate crime was motivated by Zimmerman verdict, police say - The Washington Post
A Bethesda man was beaten and robbed early Saturday morning in Adams Morgan by three men who yelled, “This is for Trayvon Martin,” before attacking him, police said.
Jul 30, 2013 | Politics
FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps, JFK the Peace Corps and Bill Clinton, AmeriCorps, Bush set about creating USA Freedom Corps (concerned with eveything except freedom to pursue your own happiness).Ariana Huffington in National Service: The Ultimate Shovel-Ready Infrastructure Project, quotes John Bridgeland, the former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President George W. Bush:
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson expressed our right to the pursuit of happiness. But he was not simply referring to the right to pursue personal, momentary pleasure fueled by a culture of material goods. The happiness to which he was referring was the right to build a prosperous life within a strong and vibrant community. The happiness of which he wrote was the public happiness. [!!!]
She goes on...
The Founders, writes Bridgeland, "understood that such sacrifices and work were necessary to bind the country together, as well as unleash a market of talent and compassion to address social needs and keep society functioning." So it was the act of giving back, of service, of civic engagement that literally helped build and unite this huge new experiment of a country of disparate parts and races and languages. And, correspondingly, it's the diminution of that spirit that's behind the feeling so many have that the country is coming apart, hopelessly polarized and no longer indivisible.
[...] "Our generation wants to push and dream for something big," Matthew Segal, co-founder of Our Time, a national advocacy group for young people, told Amanda Terkel, "and few policies make more sense than allowing idealistic young Americans to serve their country via nursing, teaching, disaster relief, park restoration, and infrastructure repair." It's about both a very necessary paycheck and a sense of purpose in life.
Walter Hickey over at 
