Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Monday, February 27, 2017
Homeschoolers on DeVos
The educational establishment and its allies have made themselves well known on Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. But what about homeschoolers?
What Does the DeVos Appointment Mean for Homeschoolers?
What Does the DeVos Appointment Mean for Homeschoolers?
Not the only waste in Washington, though.
Reminder: the Pentagon is wasting at least $125 billion. Now, Trump wants to INCREASE unchecked war spending. https://t.co/YscYNJ0LJC
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) February 27, 2017
Pre-order my new book from Oxford U Press -- Amazon will ship on the first day possible at the lowest price possible https://t.co/0zaSe1Y8Hl
— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) February 25, 2017
Kunstler: A Hole in the Head.
Kunstler: A Hole in the Head.
We need a new civil war like we need a hole in the head. But that’s just it: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. It didn’t hold. It was the place where people of differing views could rely on each other to behave reasonably around a touchstone called the National Interest. That abandoned place is now cordoned off, a Chernobyl of the mind, where figures on each side of the political margin fear to even sojourn, let alone occupy, lest they go radioactive.
Anyway, the old parties at each side of the political transect, are melting down in equivalent fugues of delusion, rage, and impotence — as predicted here through the election year of 2016. They can’t make anything good happen in the National Interest. They can’t control the runaway rackets that they engineered in legislation, policy, and practice under the dominion of each party, by turns, going back to Lyndon B. Johnson, and so they have driven themselves and each other insane.
Trump and Hillary perfectly embodied the climactic stage of each party before their final mutual sprint to collapse. Both had more than a tinge of the psychopath. Trump is the bluff that the Republicans called on themselves, having jettisoned anything identifiable as coherent principles translatable to useful action. Hillary was an American Lady Macbeth attempting to pull off the ultimate inside job by any means necessary, her wickedness so plain to see that even the voters picked up on it. These two are the old parties’ revenge on each other, and on themselves, for decades of bad choices and bad faith.
The anti-intellectual Trump is, for the Right, the answer to the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots (IYIs) that Nassim Taleb has so ably identified as infesting the Left. It is a good guess that President Trump has not read a book since high school, and perhaps never in his entire life. But are you not amazed at how the IYIs of the Left have savaged the life-of-the-mind on campus, and out in the other precincts of culture where free inquiry once flourished? From the craven college presidents who pretend that race-segregated “safe spaces” represent “inclusiveness,” to The New York Times editors who pretend in headlines that illegal immigrants have done nothing illegal, the mendacity is awesome.
Something like this has happened before in US history and it may be cyclical. The former Princeton University professor and President, Woodrow Wilson, dragged America into the First World War, which killed over 53,000 Americans (as many as Vietnam) in only eighteen months. He promulgated the Red Scare, a bit of hysteria not unlike the Race and Gender Phobia Accusation Fest on the Left today. Professor Wilson was also responsible for creating the Federal Reserve and all the mischief it has entailed, especially the loss of over 90 percent of the dollar’s value since 1913. Wilson, the perfect IYI of that day.
The reaction to Wilson was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the hard-drinking, card-playing Ohio Main Street boob picked in the notorious “smoke-filled room” of the 1920 GOP convention. He invoked a return to “normalcy,” which was not even a word (try normality), and was laughed at as we now laugh at Trump for his idiotic utterances such as “win bigly” (or is that big league?). Harding is also known for confessing in a letter: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Yet, in his brief term (died in office, 1923), Harding navigated the country successfully through a fierce post-World War One depression simply by not resorting to government intervention.
Something like the same dynamic returned in 1952 when General Eisenhower took over from Harry Truman and the defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson quipped, “The New Dealers have been replaced by the car dealers.” Ha! If he only knew! After all, who was on board as Ike’s Veep? None other than Tricky Dick Nixon, soon to be cast as America’s quintessential used car salesman.
Well, those were the days, and those days are over. So much has gone wrong here in the past thirty years and the game of salugi being played by the Dems and the GOP is not helping any of it. And that is why the two parties are heading toward extinction. We’re in the phase of intra-party factional conflict for now. Each party has its own preliminary civil war going on. The election of Obama era Labor Secretary and party hack, Tom Perez, as DNC chair yesterday has set the Bernie Sanders Prog troops into paroxysms of animadversion. They’re calling out all up-and-down the Twitterverse for a new party of their own. Trump faces his own mutineers on the Right, and not just the two cheerleaders for World War Three, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Coming out of the Conservative CPAC meeting last week, just about his whole agenda was written off as (cough cough) politically impractical by the poobahs in attendance: reform-and-replacement of the Affordable Care Act, tax reform, the promised massive infrastructure-building stimulus orgy, the border wall, the trade blockages.
Anon, comes the expiration of the current debt ceiling, at around $20 trillion, in mid-March. Do you imagine that the two parties warring with each other in congress will be able to come to some resolution over that? Fuggeddabowdit. The Democrats have every incentive to let President Trump stew in this fatal brine like a Delancey Street corned beef. What it means, of course, is that the US Treasury runs out of ready cash in mid-summer and some invoices just don’t get paid, maybe even some bigly ones like social security checks and Medicare bills. Won’t that be a spectacle? That’s where Trump becomes a political quadriplegic and the voters start jumping off the dying parties like fleas off of two dead dogs.
By then, plenty of other mischief will be afoot in the world, including the fractious outcome of elections in France and the Netherlands, with the European Union spinning into its own event horizon, and currency instability like the world has never seen before. Enjoy the remaining weeks of normality.
We need a new civil war like we need a hole in the head. But that’s just it: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. It didn’t hold. It was the place where people of differing views could rely on each other to behave reasonably around a touchstone called the National Interest. That abandoned place is now cordoned off, a Chernobyl of the mind, where figures on each side of the political margin fear to even sojourn, let alone occupy, lest they go radioactive.
Anyway, the old parties at each side of the political transect, are melting down in equivalent fugues of delusion, rage, and impotence — as predicted here through the election year of 2016. They can’t make anything good happen in the National Interest. They can’t control the runaway rackets that they engineered in legislation, policy, and practice under the dominion of each party, by turns, going back to Lyndon B. Johnson, and so they have driven themselves and each other insane.
Trump and Hillary perfectly embodied the climactic stage of each party before their final mutual sprint to collapse. Both had more than a tinge of the psychopath. Trump is the bluff that the Republicans called on themselves, having jettisoned anything identifiable as coherent principles translatable to useful action. Hillary was an American Lady Macbeth attempting to pull off the ultimate inside job by any means necessary, her wickedness so plain to see that even the voters picked up on it. These two are the old parties’ revenge on each other, and on themselves, for decades of bad choices and bad faith.
The anti-intellectual Trump is, for the Right, the answer to the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots (IYIs) that Nassim Taleb has so ably identified as infesting the Left. It is a good guess that President Trump has not read a book since high school, and perhaps never in his entire life. But are you not amazed at how the IYIs of the Left have savaged the life-of-the-mind on campus, and out in the other precincts of culture where free inquiry once flourished? From the craven college presidents who pretend that race-segregated “safe spaces” represent “inclusiveness,” to The New York Times editors who pretend in headlines that illegal immigrants have done nothing illegal, the mendacity is awesome.
Something like this has happened before in US history and it may be cyclical. The former Princeton University professor and President, Woodrow Wilson, dragged America into the First World War, which killed over 53,000 Americans (as many as Vietnam) in only eighteen months. He promulgated the Red Scare, a bit of hysteria not unlike the Race and Gender Phobia Accusation Fest on the Left today. Professor Wilson was also responsible for creating the Federal Reserve and all the mischief it has entailed, especially the loss of over 90 percent of the dollar’s value since 1913. Wilson, the perfect IYI of that day.
The reaction to Wilson was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the hard-drinking, card-playing Ohio Main Street boob picked in the notorious “smoke-filled room” of the 1920 GOP convention. He invoked a return to “normalcy,” which was not even a word (try normality), and was laughed at as we now laugh at Trump for his idiotic utterances such as “win bigly” (or is that big league?). Harding is also known for confessing in a letter: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Yet, in his brief term (died in office, 1923), Harding navigated the country successfully through a fierce post-World War One depression simply by not resorting to government intervention.
Something like the same dynamic returned in 1952 when General Eisenhower took over from Harry Truman and the defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson quipped, “The New Dealers have been replaced by the car dealers.” Ha! If he only knew! After all, who was on board as Ike’s Veep? None other than Tricky Dick Nixon, soon to be cast as America’s quintessential used car salesman.
Well, those were the days, and those days are over. So much has gone wrong here in the past thirty years and the game of salugi being played by the Dems and the GOP is not helping any of it. And that is why the two parties are heading toward extinction. We’re in the phase of intra-party factional conflict for now. Each party has its own preliminary civil war going on. The election of Obama era Labor Secretary and party hack, Tom Perez, as DNC chair yesterday has set the Bernie Sanders Prog troops into paroxysms of animadversion. They’re calling out all up-and-down the Twitterverse for a new party of their own. Trump faces his own mutineers on the Right, and not just the two cheerleaders for World War Three, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Coming out of the Conservative CPAC meeting last week, just about his whole agenda was written off as (cough cough) politically impractical by the poobahs in attendance: reform-and-replacement of the Affordable Care Act, tax reform, the promised massive infrastructure-building stimulus orgy, the border wall, the trade blockages.
Anon, comes the expiration of the current debt ceiling, at around $20 trillion, in mid-March. Do you imagine that the two parties warring with each other in congress will be able to come to some resolution over that? Fuggeddabowdit. The Democrats have every incentive to let President Trump stew in this fatal brine like a Delancey Street corned beef. What it means, of course, is that the US Treasury runs out of ready cash in mid-summer and some invoices just don’t get paid, maybe even some bigly ones like social security checks and Medicare bills. Won’t that be a spectacle? That’s where Trump becomes a political quadriplegic and the voters start jumping off the dying parties like fleas off of two dead dogs.
By then, plenty of other mischief will be afoot in the world, including the fractious outcome of elections in France and the Netherlands, with the European Union spinning into its own event horizon, and currency instability like the world has never seen before. Enjoy the remaining weeks of normality.
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Rick Santorum, Still Around
So, according to Twitter, Rick Santorum was on CNN today opining on health care, in particular, people with pre-existing conditions and how they "scam" the system. Such an assertion naturally aroused righteous indignation:
Most pols and pundits are on Twitter and Santorum was no exception.
The self-described "Grateful husband, blessed dad of eight" works in "waste-energy & cyber security." Chair @Patriot_Voices Co-chair @USAEnergy Sr Political Commentator @CNN
USA Energy, aka Americans for Energy Security & Innovation, is a non-profit set up to promote ethanol and other biofuels. According to Ethanol Producer magazine: "The organization will target its efforts on expanding support of the renewable fuel standard (RFS), said Jim Talent, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, who will serve as AESI chair. The group will be made up of biofuels producers and investors across the United States, Talent said.
"Talent declined to name the producers and investors, but characterized them as people who are familiar with the RFS and want to ensure its continuation, not only for business reasons, but because they believe biofuels, such as ethanol, reduce the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil."
A congratulatory press release from USA Energy just after Trump's electoral victory congratulating Trump on his electoral victory.
“This November, voters across the heartland helped elect a candidate who championed American strength, a robust manufacturing sector, and renewed job creation. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and ethanol are central to achieving those goals, and Mr. Trump’s support for the RFS was stated with clarity and conviction. We congratulate Mr. Trump on his victory, as well as candidates across the country who stood up for American energy. Homegrown biofuels are putting the U.S. on the path to true, lasting energy security, and last night’s election demonstrates that voters understand the importance of supporting a robust biofuel sector here at home."
For his part, when he was a Senator, Talent supported this facility that would "turn turkey feces and carcasses into crude oil."
More later.
I WISH my stage 3 breast cancer was a scam you sack of shit. https://t.co/rTrA2NfXRz
— Duchess of Umbrage (@IBlame) February 26, 2017
Most pols and pundits are on Twitter and Santorum was no exception.
The self-described "Grateful husband, blessed dad of eight" works in "waste-energy & cyber security." Chair @Patriot_Voices Co-chair @USAEnergy Sr Political Commentator @CNN
USA Energy, aka Americans for Energy Security & Innovation, is a non-profit set up to promote ethanol and other biofuels. According to Ethanol Producer magazine: "The organization will target its efforts on expanding support of the renewable fuel standard (RFS), said Jim Talent, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, who will serve as AESI chair. The group will be made up of biofuels producers and investors across the United States, Talent said.
"Talent declined to name the producers and investors, but characterized them as people who are familiar with the RFS and want to ensure its continuation, not only for business reasons, but because they believe biofuels, such as ethanol, reduce the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil."
A congratulatory press release from USA Energy just after Trump's electoral victory congratulating Trump on his electoral victory.
“This November, voters across the heartland helped elect a candidate who championed American strength, a robust manufacturing sector, and renewed job creation. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and ethanol are central to achieving those goals, and Mr. Trump’s support for the RFS was stated with clarity and conviction. We congratulate Mr. Trump on his victory, as well as candidates across the country who stood up for American energy. Homegrown biofuels are putting the U.S. on the path to true, lasting energy security, and last night’s election demonstrates that voters understand the importance of supporting a robust biofuel sector here at home."
For his part, when he was a Senator, Talent supported this facility that would "turn turkey feces and carcasses into crude oil."
More later.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Richard Heinberg Speaks
When Rex Tillerson spoke at @WPI's commencement, angry students invited me to give an alternate address. Here it is: https://t.co/QE9KluGO46
— Richard Heinberg (@richardheinberg) February 2, 2017
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Alan Colmes
Very sad to hear of @AlanColmes' death. A voice of reason who often gave me a platform to answer virulent RW attacks when others wouldn't.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 23, 2017
-----------
I've never heard of the guy who wrote this poison-pen obituary of Colmes, but it seems to me that if you're going to trash a dead man, at least you should spell his name correctly.
My obituary for Alan Clomes, for @Slate: https://t.co/umlH15YHp9
— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) February 23, 2017
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Shopping Carts
I finished the column last night. Now there's other work to do. A quick browsing of Twitter I find this (via @AngryBlackLady):
Some people have way too much time on their hands, or, more accurately, they waste their time on trivial things. But now I wonder if shopping carts were smaller, and these so-called cuck carts are actually the norm, historically.
Prezi.com: "The Evolution of the Shopping Cart."
More here.
The first prototype was constructed from a folding chair. It utilized two wire hand baskets to carry merchandise. When not in use the carriers were folded and stored against the wall while the hand baskets were stacked to conserve space. Sylvan Goldman founded a company to manufacture his new idea and called it Folding Carrier Basket Company after the design of the first cart.
thought I'd check in on /pol/ after milo's disgrace and I see they are, as always, focused on the issues that matter pic.twitter.com/Xvmtx0N8Mm
— Eleanor Robertson (@marrowing) February 22, 2017
Some people have way too much time on their hands, or, more accurately, they waste their time on trivial things. But now I wonder if shopping carts were smaller, and these so-called cuck carts are actually the norm, historically.
Prezi.com: "The Evolution of the Shopping Cart."
More here.
The first prototype was constructed from a folding chair. It utilized two wire hand baskets to carry merchandise. When not in use the carriers were folded and stored against the wall while the hand baskets were stacked to conserve space. Sylvan Goldman founded a company to manufacture his new idea and called it Folding Carrier Basket Company after the design of the first cart.
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