Someone Needs to Tighten Reins at Politico

Capital is what you have. Capitol is where they take it.

Obama tightens reins on capital

By MANU RAJU & MIKE ALLEN | 3/16/09 4:07 AM EDT

No longer will the president tread gingerly in his dealings with Congress and lose control of the message war.

Marking a new season in his young presidency, President Barack Obama and his allies around Washington are about to give the capital a bracing lesson in one-party rule.

I thought you guys were the professionals.

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A Sudden Discovery of the Obvious

While Dan Collins doesn't say it, a study showing that people incompetent in some area believe themselves highly skilled while the truly skilled think themselves less so shows two things.

1. Cognitive psychologists tend to overestimate the importance of their findings
   
   
2. Cognitive psychologists have proved that self-esteem is overrated

In war, as in chess, he who underestimates his enemy overestimates his life expectancy.

In addition to the foregoing, I feel compelled to note that this is a classic case of the difficulty of determining cause and effect. Do the unskilled overestimate their ability, or do people who think their skills are pretty good feel no need to improve them? Perhaps it's both.

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A Post Which Roils

One of the blogs I troll is called In Socrates' Wake, written by teachers about teaching, especially the teaching of philosophy. I'm not a teacher, except by the abhorrent personal habit of forcing my wisdom on others, unfettered by their acceptance or appreciation of same.

Usually, ISW is instructive, even enlightening, and always thoughtful.

This post, while instructive and enlightening, just made me want to scream.

Teaching Feminist and Race Theory: problematic assumptions and positive transformations

I teach feminist and race theory to five students, four of whom are white, none of whom are female. Yet, for all their lack of diversity, they understand the philosophical relevance of gender and race. Critical theory for them, however, was remarkably new when they began. While they began their studies with me in order to broaden their perspective in social and political philosophy, none of them had ever reflected on some of the contemporary social structures and implicit patterns of thought that are implicitly sexist and/or racist. None of the students were sexist or racist when they entered the course, and they would have been quite defensive about being labeled as such. Yet, on campus, and in other classes, this was the challenge they faced.

I dare you to read it all.

Instead of screaming, I wrote this:

The most interesting aspect of this is how self-absorbed and myopic is the entire field of feminist and race theory. I am critical both of your methods and your goals, either of which you may accept or reject.

Because while you complain to young learners how difficult life is for someone who is not white and male, millions of non-white non-males are out in the world ignoring, sidestepping, or overcoming the hurdles placed in front of all of us, striving, excelling, and winning.

With the assumption of systemic "oppression", you doom all who buy into your world view to a life of learned helplessness. All of their hopes and dreams must go into cheating the system which they have been told oppresses them, or into the ballot box, which is cheating by official means.

Because individuals are not bound by the nature or the common limitations of the groups to which they belong. It is profoundly racist or sexist to say that they do.

I was struck by your statement that the students coming in had a remarkable lack of diversity, listing as your only evidence that four of them were open-minded white males. That displays an amazing lack of introspection, even hypocrisy. Because I'm sure you would agree that people are not defined by their skin or gender.

On another level, by stating a priori that there is "systemic oppression", you as the authority in the classroom establish that principle as an inarguable tenet of the class. This puts the student on the defensive. That's great for establishing the power of the teacher in the classroom, but not great for actually learning anything other than that racism and sexism are bad, which your students already seem to have known coming in.

Further, it makes the students feel guilty for being who they are. If that is your goal, you're nothing but a jerk with a lectern.

So I will assume it is not your goal. But it appears to be your major accomplishment.

As I said, it's one of the blogs I troll.

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Teachers Union Stifles Obama Critics

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten told CNSNews.com that no one should criticize the decision of President-elect Barack Obama and his wife Michelle to send their children to private school.

According to CNSNews.com:

Democratic Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack echoed Weingarten’s comments at the conference, telling CNSNews.com that “it’s a very personal decision” that the president-elect and his wife need to make and the issue “should not be subject to criticism or comment.”

Weingarten said that since Obama loved his children, his choice was beyond criticism: "He loves those two children, and he’s going to make sure that they are properly educated."

Parents who send their children to the public schools in Washington, DC, do not love their children enough to see them educated properly.

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Has Bill Ayers Grant Money Dried Up?

Looking at the list of grants received by Bill Ayers in his published Curriclum Vitae, it looks like Ayers' funding took a steep drop on or about September 11, 2001.

Go figure.

Or maybe he just quit writing grants, retired, or quit bragging about it in his vitae.

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No more bailouts.

Writing at Redstate, Francis Cianfrocca analyzes the proposed (or wheedled) bailout of GM, saying a bunch of smart things, including this:

If I were handling this for the US Treasury, I’d insist on a total wipeout of GM’s shareholders and management, force them to liquidate assets over perhaps a two-year period, and take a slug of preferred stock with a very large annual interest rate. Because you know there will be no possibility of making money on this bailout. The auto industry has too much of the wrong kind of production capacity, and it needs to disappear.

If I were in charge of handling this for the Treasury, I'd either say "We don't do this, or I walk."

The government has to stop meddling in the economy. People argue that something must be done to keep the economy moving, and I say: No! We've been spoiled by 20 years of good economies, except for hiccups, to the point where we think we've figured it out.

We can't outlaw pain. Attempts to try are leading us to a situation in which the government, soon to be led by a Marxist, controls the strategic direction of our biggest industries.

I have no doubt that GM failing would have a ripple effect on the rest of the economy. I also have no doubt that some of that effect would be seen as positive, especially by those at Ford and Chrysler.

Something has to be done all right. Something needs to be done to turn around this notion that our elections are about the economy. Something needs to be done to separate government and business. Something needs to be done to return us to the understanding of success as the result of repeated failure, that learning from mistakes doesn't happen unless we are forced to deal with the consequences of those mistakes.

GM has become too big to move quickly in response to changing market conditions. Their union membership, including retirees, is so large as to be its own voting bloc, exercising inertia of its own. Some say they have become too big to fail; I say they have become too big to succeed.

Pluck the cancer? That's the wrong metaphor. The proper one is to let the students succeed or fail based on their abilities, not slip them answers to the test so they don't fail.

Because in the end, none will study as hard or pay attention at lecture if they know that the teacher will bail them out in the end.

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By Faith Are We Saved

In a 1995 interview, Barack Obama says:

EOB: I’m wondering if the ethnically-mixed couple of today, if when their child is thirty-four years old, if they’ll find it any easier to deal with these issues than you have found it?

Obama: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure. I think in some ways there’s less novelty to the idea of mixed couples. They’re not seen as lurid or perverse in ways that I think they were thirty years ago. I think that this country is inevitably going to be undergoing changes simply due to demographics. There’s been a lot of talk about the “browning of America” ...

EOB: I was just going to use that same phrase ...

Obama: ... and I think that is going to be happening. We can’t ignore it. I think whether or not my children or your children will have to struggle with these same issues depends on what we do, and whether we take some mutual responsibility for bridging the divisions that exist right now. And I really want to emphasize the word “responsibility.” I think that whether you are a white executive living out in the suburbs, who doesn’t want to pay taxes to inner-city children for them to go to school, or you’re an inner-city child who doesn’t want to take responsibility for keeping your street safe and clean, both of those groups have to take some responsibility if we’re going to get beyond the kinds of divisions that we face right now.

So in his world, whites must pay higher taxes to heal racial division.

Thug.

Transcript (pdf) of the interview.

(w/t Gateway Pundit)

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Yes, Nicole, You Are A Racist

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, commenter Nicole writes:

Today I referred to my hair as "brown" ("dark brown" to be exact). I then proceeded to say "I hate the color brown--it's not strong enough; it's boring."

Am I a racist?

The obligatory reply from Scott in OC:

Yes, Nicole, you are a racist. Not for hating the color brown, but because you used the word "dark" in a potentially insensitive manner that could incite hatred. Shame on you. The only way to absolve yourself from this unspeakable act is to dye your hair blue and vote for Obama.

But neither Nicole nor Scott fully plumb the depths of the PC pogrom which would take place in the event of an Obama Administration, enjoying majority support in both Houses of Congress.

Nicole used the word 'color' and even labeled something a particular color. Obviously racist.

Nicole noted that something being a particular color was not 'strong' enough. Truly racist.

Nicole said she hated something for being a particular color. Clearly racist.

In the looming Obama Administration, no mention of color, except perhaps in the abstract, will be acceptable. A notable exception to this will be teaching preschoolers the names for all the colors, which will be seen as the fulfillment of a basic human right to be maintained by a Children's Administration, with a Cabinet-level Secretary of the Child.

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What Year Is It In Your World?

For months, we've hear everyone from Rush Limbaugh to CNN talk about the supposed "Bradley Effect", in which people tell pollsters they'll vote for a candidate of color, then don't.

We've heard questions put more directly: will Americans vote for a black man for President?

We've heard Barack Obama claim not to look like other candidates, not to look like the guys on the money.

We've heard Barack Obama warn us that other people would tell us that he's black.

The white Americans I know are sick of talk about people's skin color, especially when that talk is designed to make us feel as though it's still 1958 and the intervening 50 years never happened.

Look, white America is largely over the race thing. We got it a long time ago: people are people, some looking one way, some looking another. But still the Obamas of the world drag race into every discussion as if Governor Wallace (D-AL) were still standing in the doorway of the schoolhouse.

As for the Bradley Effect, I think it's a more general question of Ouija polling: the pollster asks the question and gets the desired answer.

But what do I know -- I think it's 2008 already.

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Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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Voting For Economic Self-Interest

Benjamin Franklin said"When the people find they can vote themselves money,
that will herald the end of the republic."

Commentators are astonished that middle-class conservatives seem to vote against their economic self-interest by voting for Republicans. Let's break it down.

First, we believe that, as the cliche goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The economy is not, as Marxists believe, a zero-sum game, in which some get rich only when others get poor. More often, either everyone prospers or no one does.

Suppose two people acquire wealth at different rates, one becoming only a little better off while another becomes filthy rich. The social justice crowd would have us believe that the people who are only a little better off are actually worse off, because their envy blinds them to reality. The gap has widened, which they take as conclusive evidence of injustice.

If you have no car, and someone sells you his clunker at a bargain price, you are happy. Then, when the former owner of your clunker drives up in a Certified Pre-owned Lexus, you're envious: you have a clunker, and he has a Certified Pre-owned Lexus. When is your car going to break down? Yet before you had to walk to work in the snow and rain, and now you can drive. You're not driving a Certified Pre-Owned Lexus, but you're not driving Certified Pre-Owned Nikes, either. You're better off, not worse off, and the circumstances of that other fellow are irrelevant except to your own envy.

And thus is it in general.

But back to voting: a person's vote indicates his mindset: is he voting for what's best for him, or is she voting for what's best for her country? To the extent that a single vote matters, a person ought to cast it in favor of something larger than his own petty interests, if that is defined as what the government is going to give him.

We have public schools. They should be teaching that Franklin quote, and from it the principle it conveys, which is as old as democracy. Perhaps then the people would know that their vote is an important choice between the health of the Republic the satisfaction of their own envy.

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Obama is Embarrassed by Americans

There's a reason people in Europe a multilingual. They're Europeans. They don't have a common language, except English.

And they're having a very difficult time becoming a European nation because of it.

I understand the value of learning other languages. I've learned a smattering of Spanish, French, Japanese, Latin, and Ancient Greek, though the latter two not conversationally. But learning these languages forces one to see a different map on reality, and helps in learning one's own language better.

But I understand even more the importance of language to culture. When I can walk into any restaurant, shop, or business and know that I can communicate without trouble with the people there, it makes my life easier. It makes it easier for me to succeed, and easier to trust my neighbors.

I want the people who are my countrymen to share my culture, ideas, and beliefs. That is why having a common language is important. In America, for better or worse, we speak English. Those who immigrate here should learn the language so they can fit in, rather than insisting that everyone else adjust to them.

Everyone the world over wants to learn English. They don't want to learn French. French is a pretty language, sure, prettier than English. But still, people clamor to learn the language of freedom.

Go figure.

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No Child Left Below Average

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute takes on the Federal Government's No Child Left Behind law, showing it to be the failure of wishful thinking and faulty dogma of the education establishment that it is.

We are not talking about a political speech or a campaign promise. The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.

Read the whole thing. You will not be smarter afterward, but you will be more free.

w/t Steve Burton at WWWW

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A pound of prevention barely worth an ounce of cure

Michael F. Cannon has a blog post at Cato.org about preventive medicine.

While I've always thought that prevention of disease would be less costly than treatment, that is only true, when we stop to ponder it, when the total cost per person treated with some preventive measure is less than the savings in cure costs. That means that the total cost per person treated or per preventive measure would have to be lower than the difference between the cure expenditure with and without prevention. Furthermore, those costs have three categories: direct costs, indirect costs, and abstract costs.

You there at the back! Please don't yawn unless you've got enough for the rest of us.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The direct costs are the costs of shots, educational materials, and so on.

The indirect costs include the time off work going to get some preventive treatment, the loss of efficiency when some supposed safety control is implemented, and the added bureaucratic sludge that happens whenever we try to prevent something bad by changing the behavior of everyone.

Abstract costs include the loss of freedom for the individuals who are given the prevention.

Nestled invisibly between the indirect and abstract costs of preventative medicine is what it does to people's opinion. Much of preventative medicine consists of "raising awareness" of the problem, so that people can avoid stepping into open pits and so forth.

But if told too many times about an open pit, or a hot stove, or dangerous intersection, people will be filled with thoughts only of safety and precaution, aftraid to risk opening their eyes lest ultraviolet radiation damage their unprotected corneas. They exist only to be safe.

Alternatively, the more preventive measures we implement, the more jaded the people become and the more difficult it becomes to raise their awareness to a preventive level.

But the key problem is that for prevention to work, the pool of those treated with the preventive measure must be larger than the number cured, in many cases far larger. Taken together, and since prevention must be applied to the wider pool while remediation only to those affected, the cost of the prevention must be very low, and its effectiveness very high, for prevention to make sense.

Depending on the depth of the pit and the type of snakes at the bottom, it may be more cost-effective and indeed more humane to wait for someone to step into the pit and throw them a rope. Put a sign on the pit perhaps, but don't develop a slick ad campaign to tell people to avoid the pit, which will likely draw more people to it anyway.

This all yields the best quote ever on socialized medicine:

The point of the medical-care system is to serve people. It is not the point of people to serve the medical-care system.
-- Louise B. Russell

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Unlimited Government

We decided as part of the Civil War that there was a hard limit on the freedom of the individual: we cannot sell ourselves into slavery. Similarly, there is a hard limit on the sovereign public, that no matter how great the majority it cannot dictate certain things to the minority.

Among the things the majority cannot dictate are its religion, its opinion, and whether or not a person may own and carry a gun.

And yet the government schools try, to varying degree of effort and success, to do all three.

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Education

Ironically, I do not believe that I have ever in the halls of the Academy touched on the topic of education, that is, what the government proffers as such.

For it is galling that the State should be a provider of education at all.

We have in the free world in general and the United States in particular a fine tradition of the free press, which institution generally operates as a check against government excess. If there is a hint of the personal peccadilloes of an elected official or if someone claims that the single most nationally unifying event in the last 50 years was the product of a government conspiracy of absurd design and dubious motivation, our faithful media are there to report it.

But the media have shown themselves completely unable to fulfill this function in one key aspect. While the press do jealously guard their own sacred cows in the First Amendment, they fail miserably as guardians of the others. Pointedly, they fail to question the legitimacy of government involvement in new ventures as they come along. They regard their role as ensuring proper government function and spreading truth, yet they disregard the fundamental truth of our republic, that government should only be allowed to interfere in certain matters, but no others. While they seem to understand particular limits on government, the more general concept of a limited government eludes them.

And I place the blame for this failure at the feet of government-run education. Whatever else a government school teaches, the superiority of private education is not it. Rather, the goal of public education is to socialize, to create a population that is not wary of government intrusion but accepting and welcoming, even demanding of it.

The schools should teach basic skills in letters and numbers, literature, the sciences, and mathematics. They should provide knowledge about our history and that of the wider world. And they should teach critical thinking skills such as logical analysis and the spotting of demagoguery. But there ought to be a wild diversity of political, religious, social views taught, and none to the exclusion of the others. When the State hires the teatchers and the State mandates not just what is to be taught but how, no doctrine which is contrary to its expansion can long expect currency.

So the problem isn't merely, or precisely, that the media is full of liberal hacks, which it incontrovertibly is. The problem is that thanks to years of government training, it's full of closed-minded liberal hacks.

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