Archive for 2022
March 11, 2022
NOT FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE KIDS: Why Government Schooling Came to America.
Americans educated their children to a very high degree—indeed, to such a high degree that America had the highest literacy rates of any country in the world! European visitors to the United States were astonished by the levels of education achieved in the United States. In his National Education in the United States (1812) published forty years before the introduction of government schooling, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours expressed his astonishment at the extraordinary literacy rate he saw amongst ordinary Americans.
Likewise, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that the Americans were “the most enlightened people on earth.” Even on the frontier where schools and libraries were in short supply, Tocqueville noted that one-room cabins hidden deep in the woods typically contained a copy of the Bible and multiple newspapers.[1]
All of this was achieved without government schools.
And then, everything changed.
Plus:
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
To achieve these goals, the single most important task of the new government schooling was to disconnect the natural ties between children and their parents. No longer would parents determine in what, how, and by whom their children were to be taught. These functions would now be taken over by the government. Thus, the first steps in liberating children from the baneful influence of their parents could only be achieved by legislating compulsory attendance laws and mandating a common curriculum where all students would learn the same political ideology. . . .
Horace Mann, the 19th-century godfather of American government schooling, summed up the anti-parent premise of state-run education in these terms: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
Read the whole thing. He’s dead on. I’ve written about this myself.
Related: Half say government wields too much power in classrooms.
SELF-IMPOSED MISERY: Russian Economy in ‘Shock’ Due to Sanctions (But So Is Ours, Without Them).
BE PREPARED: Made in USA Can Opener. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
TEN MILLION HERE, TEN MILLION THERE, AND PRETTY SOON YOU’RE TALKING REAL MONEY: Federal Government Wasted $10 Million on COVID Tests That Didn’t Work, Watchdog Reveals.
PORK’S REVENGE: Congress brings back earmarks for first time in over a decade.
Braun, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, on Thursday proposed an amendment that would cut $8 billion in earmarks out of the omnibus bill. His amendment failed 64-35. Congress puts money aside for local projects.
This is the first time Congress has had earmarks since 2011, the Indiana Republican told Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon and co-host Amanda Head earlier that evening.
Braun stressed that the “even worse news” is that Congress still needs to pass $3 trillion for Medicare and Social Security.
He describes the $1.5 trillion spending bill as “2700 pages full of pork.”
“You think after all this money we spent, all of which we borrowed, that you would not need earmarks,” he said. Debt in the United States has increased quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic and currently sits at more than $30 trillion.
Anything that can’t go on forever will stop.
NOW OUT: Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education. #CommissionEarned
FLASHBACK: Biden’s Plan To Outsource The U.S. Oil And Gas Industry.
It is not a revelation to discover that the Biden administration intends to phase out the U.S. oil and gas industry. But it is astonishing to see how quickly it is moving to accomplish this, while sending production abroad to producers in Russia and Middle Eastern nations whose commitment to reduce greenhouse gases is at best questionable.
The most recent action, revealed on August 11, was to implore OPEC and fellow traveler Russia to increase their production as demand in fast recovering economies makes up the shortfalls caused by the pandemic. Polling data in the U.S. about inflation caused in no small part by rising gasoline prices undoubtedly is a prime mover behind the administration request. These are the same producers who just a few short months ago (in early 2020) flooded declining markets in an effort to destroy the economics of U.S. shale oil production. The Biden team also has given a boost to Russian gas production by backing off on attempts to derail the Nord Stream pipeline into Germany, which increases European dependence on the heavily polluting Russian extraction industry. U.S. liquified natural gas producers had hope and reasonable expectations of building capacity to supply European absent the deal with Russia.
The Biden team got off to a fast start in its assault on U.S. and North American oil production by blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline project, which would have contributed to jobs in the construction, refining and transportation sectors in the United States. The administration also has put any new Alaskan production on permanent hold and frozen any new exploration and development auctions in the lower 48 states and offshore.
As part of its most recent initiative, the White House also asked new Federal Trade Commission Chair Lena Khan to spring into action to “monitor industry prices, review merger and acquisitions … and investigate market manipulation and anticompetition practices…” in the U.S. oil industry. The implication of the White House directive is that the industry has nefariously raised gasoline prices above levels commensurate with crude prices.
But Putin!
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University censors student’s anti-censorship musical theatre project.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: This is how ‘Marxist working groups’ operate in higher education.
LOOTING THE TREASURY IS THE LAST ACT OF A FAILED STATE: “I know there’s a lot going on in the world today, but can we just take a moment to reflect on how crazy it is that the United States House of Representatives just passed a $1.5 TRILLION spending bill that no one has read?”
WELL, THEY’VE ALREADY DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES IN THAT FIELD: America’s Ruling Class Wants to Reduce Us to Incompetence.
FIGHT THE POWER: Yale University sued for shutting down Corporation petition process.
Two Yale alumni — Victor Ashe ’67 and Donald Glascoff Jr. ’67 — are suing Yale for breach of contract following the controversial termination of the petition process for election to the Yale Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.
In 2021, former senior trustee of the Yale Corporation Cappy Bond Hill GRD ’85 announced that the Corporation would be ending the petition process by which alumni could be nominated to the board, making official nomination the only path to trusteeship. Ashe and Glascoff allege that in doing so, the University breached its obligations to its alumni as outlined in the Connecticut state charter. Ashe sought a seat on the Yale board through the alumni petition process in 2021, but was ultimately unsuccessful in gaining a seat on the board.
“Yale’s attitude towards the alumni is that we want your money, but we don’t want your vote,” Ashe told the News. “We have a choice between two handpick candidates by the Yale Alumni Association who will not tell you what they believe in.”
The complaint alleges that the Corporation is engaging in voter suppression and is denying the rights of free expression of opinion that have been granted to Yale alumni since 1872.
There were previously two paths onto the Yale Corporation ballot. One was by nomination from the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, made up of a group of alumni and administrators. The other was by gaining the requisite number of signatures as a petition candidate.
“By this action, the plaintiffs seek to enjoin the unilateral termination of the petition process and otherwise prevent Yale from violating the Charter and to protect alumni rights originally granted by the Connecticut General Assembly and now in the Charter,” Ashe and Glascoff wrote in the complaint.
University spokesperson Karen Peart could not provide comment on Thursday night.
The Yale Charter was amended in 1872 by the Connecticut General Assembly to replace the six senators from the general assembly who sat on the Yale Corporation with six alumni of the University. The text of the 1872 Amendment grants alumni the right to vote for any eligible graduate of the University that they want and to put themselves up for a vote as a candidate, the plaintiffs argue.
They further claim that the Amendment does not give the University the right to alter the process for electing alumni to the board.
Well, it’s a living document, you understand, meant to grow and change with the times. I hope the lawsuit succeeds.
Related: Yale’s move to rig board elections reveals the bankruptcy of US elites.
I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB: DeSantis Got Pressured by a Major Corporation and Told Them No.
Related: Ron DeSantis has emerged as America’s awesome ‘shadow president.’
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Hate Crime Hoax Criminal Smollett Gets a Slap On the Wrist. “The reason that Smollett keeps lying is that he knows that hate-crime hoaxes barely get punished. An integral part of the leftist smear campaign against conservatives is the staging of ‘hate crimes.’ It’s gotten to be so routine with the lefties that you’re pretty safe assuming that a ‘hate crime’ that’s being reported widely by the mainstream media isn’t real.”
I’M NOT A TAX LAWYER, BUT I PLAY ONE ON INSTAPUNDIT: JustTheNews.com is reporting that a bill making its way through the California legislature would allow a nonprofit organization’s tax-exempt status to be revoked if the state’s Attorney General determines the organization has “actively engaged in, or incited the active engagement in, acts or conspiracies defined as criminal under specified federal law.”
The “No Tax Exemption for Insurrection Act” is a reaction to the January 6 riots in D.C. When I read the text of the bill, it seems to me that if passed in its present form, it would be a sitting duck for constitutional challenge. For one thing the geniuses in California don’t seem to realize that under U.S. tax law, there are several kinds of “tax-exempt” status. Some, like 501(c) 3 organizations are already prohibited from being involved in political activities. But others, like political organizations registered as 501(c)4, 5, or 6 charities may legally be both tax-exempt and involved in political activity.
The problem as I see it, is that the California bill, by overbroadly using the phrase “tax-exempt” rather than specifying which kind of text-exempt organization” most likely fails to pass constitutional scrutiny under the 14th Amendment by treating entities differently based on their political stance, and “void for vagueness” under Supreme Court rulings such as Grayned v. City of Rockford:
“It is a basic principle of due process that an enactment is void for vagueness if its prohibitions are not clearly defined. Vague laws offend several important values. First, because we assume that man is free to steer between lawful and unlawful conduct, we insist that laws give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited, so that he may act accordingly. Vague laws may trap the innocent by not providing fair warning. Second, if arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement is to be prevented, laws must provide explicit standards for those who apply them. […] Third, but related, where a vague statute “abut[s] upon sensitive areas of basic First Amendment freedoms, it “operates to inhibit the exercise of those freedoms.” Uncertain meanings inevitably lead citizens to ” `steer far wider of the unlawful zone’ . . . than if the boundaries of the forbidden areas were clearly marked.”
Here’s a fun fact: Although it is anticipated that such a bill would target conservative groups, ironically, it could just as easily be used to strip liberal advocacy groups of the same rights. A cursory search indicates that at least eight Planned Parenthood entities operate in California under 501(c)4, a category that allows legislative advocacy.
For now at least.
IF THAT’S WHAT IT’S GONNA TAKE, THEY’RE SCREWED: DCCC advice to Dems for the midterms: Don’t ‘sound like a jerk.’
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: An Academic Coda on Kyle Rittenhouse. “First, it is possible that the authors have not shifted their position at all. Rather, they have just changed their tack or tactics, if only to avoid their being defendants in a defamation action brought by Rittenhouse. In other words, their opinion of Rittenhouse has not changed. If so, their lack of transparency and directness with the reader, would seem to undermine some of the worthiness for publication.”
THE OTHER HALF ARE WRONG: Half say government wields too much power in classrooms.