The Failure of Tulsa, Oklahoma Public High Schools

I graduated from Tulsa's Memorial High School in 1965.  I have a number of family members who still live in the Tulsa Metro Area.  I just looked up an evaluation website to see what the Tulsa Public School system was providing as an "education" at the high school level.

Let me start with my own high school.  Memorial High School students are 10 to 14% proficient in math and 10 - 14% proficient in reading.  This is about what most of the 18 public high schools in Tulsa are accomplishing in the way of an "education."  The best of the bunch are Tulsa Met High School (math proficiency <50%, Reading < 50%) and Booker T. Washington High School (Math 38%, Reading 53%).  Next is Dove Science Academy Tulsa High School (math 30 - 39%, reading 30-39%) where it is apparently thought that science can be performed without math and without being able to read.  Union High School, ranked fourth best of 18, boasts a 29% math proficiency and a 34% reading proficiency.  The fifth best is Tulsa Honor Academy High School (a charter school) proudly proclaiming the Honor in having a 25- 29% math proficiency and a 30 - 34% reading proficiency.  The Thomas Edison Preparatory High School is math 18% and reading 45%.  This cannot be preparation for college.  Perhaps it is preparation to enter a decent middle school somewhere else in the USA.

Of the remaining public high schools in Tulsa, not one of them has a math proficiency score as high as 20%.  Two of those schools have Sciences in their name and one of those has a math proficiency of 5% or less.  Four of the high schools have math proficiencies of 5% or less.

Nine of the Tulsa high schools have reading proficiencies of less than 20%.  Five of the high schools have reading proficiency for 10% or less of their students.

Why do the people of Tulsa pay for high schools and teachers at all, if this is viewed as anything close to an acceptable educational outcome?  Is it just so they can have high school football?  Tulsans are mad about football.  I love football.  But one can have both football and an education.  In my graduating class of about 250 individuals, two of our starters on our conference-winning football team went to The U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  One of them and another starting offensive lineman became MDs.  At least another two of my classmates became MDs.  One became a professor of economics at Northwestern University.  Numerous others became engineers, dentists, and lawyers.  The Tulsa public schools system has clearly destroyed my high school, along with many others.

Or do Tulsans pay taxes for useless high schools because the politicians and the teachers unions have completely bamboozled them? 

It is morally wrong to force children to attend failing high schools.  Among those Tulsa children forced to attend a useless high school, there are many whose time is being wasted.  Some would learn useful skills if they were allowed to work.  Others would teach themselves more than these useless schools are teaching them.  Parents have an obligation to educate their children.  Others do not have an obligation to educate the children of others.  What individuals must do morally for the children of others, is to not act to prevent them from getting an education.  When voters elect government officials who force children to waste their time in useless high schools, this is a case in which those voters are acting to prevent children from learning.  The Tulsa high schools are a moral abomination.

They are not alone.  The public schools of America are generally an abomination from elementary schools through the universities.  The complete system of American education needs to be torn down and restarted on rational principles.  Few young Americans are proficient in math and reading.  Few know enough science, civics, history, and economics/business practices to function as well as they ought to in an advanced capitalist economy and civilization.

It is a sad result that AI will actually be easily able to replace many of our uneducated people before long.  This should be a much harder task for AI to accomplish, but people who know nothing have also never learned how to know much of anything.  Mankind's primary means of survival is the mind.  If you will not train and optimize your mind, you will not thrive and you may well not survive.  Parents need to live up to their obligations and everyone else must at least not be roadblocks preventing a child who wants to learn and develop his mind from doing so.

Remote Learning By Ethnic Classification

The New York Times reports that: 

In March, half of Black and Hispanic children, and two-thirds of Asian-American children, were enrolled in remote school, compared with 20 percent of white students, according to the latest federal data.

There are numerous factors behind this.  Among them are: 

• The Black and Hispanic populations are often large in major cities and such cities due to Democrat Party control and high density populations have been more likely to have schools closed or to require greater social distancing.  The increased social distancing necessitates having fewer students in school classrooms.
• Black, Hispanic, and Asian American parents appear to be more fearful of the Covid-19 disease.  They do have higher morbidity rates.
• Black and Hispanic households tend to have lower incomes than white families do.  This encourages their older children to take on jobs to help their families out, since they are out of school anyway.  In other cases, the older children are impressed into babysitting duties for younger children as the parent(s) work.
• Black and Hispanic parents are more likely to have lost jobs or to have down-graded jobs due to business closures and reduced business operating hours during the pandemic.  This has put more pressure on older children to take on jobs to help support their families.
• When older children take on jobs to help support their families, it is harder to get them to graduate from high school.
• Fewer Black and Hispanic children have high-grade computer capabilities at home for remote learning purposes.  Their parents are less likely to be able to help them with computer issues.
• A child on remote learning has greater needs for parental educational support.
• Fewer Black and Hispanic children are in private schools.  A higher percentage are in government-run schools, which are run by a coalition of Democrat Socialist politicians and the socialist teachers unions.  Such government schools are more likely to be shutdown or operating in very reduced modes, thanks to fear of Covid-19.

Most American children have suffered horribly in their educations as a result of an inadequate primarily government-run education system in the first place.  The Covid-19 pandemic and the over-reaction to it has caused massive further harm to our children across the board.  We already had an education system in which our so-called Black and Hispanic children were operating at lower skill levels than our so-called White and Asian children.  The pandemic-induced harm has further exacerbated the differential lag of our Black and Hispanic children.

A substantial portion of the pandemic harm was the result of bad political and bad educational choices.  Fewer bad choices would have been made had the media, academia, and government health organizations encouraged, rather than discouraged, an honest and scientific discussion of Covid-19.  The suppression of that discussion suppressed the formation of non-vaccine weapons against the disease.  It fostered a suspicion among many that the Covid-19 government policies were often based on lies and cared little for their welfare.  Realizing this was the case, many developed unreasonable fears that their children were in much greater danger from Covid-19 than they were being told they were.  Even Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor believed that 100,000 American children had been made seriously ill by the disease.  What can we expect that many Black and Hispanic parents believed about the danger to their children?

Some of the short-comings of our mostly government-run school education system have been bared by the Covid-19 pandemic.  More Americans will address those short-comings by opting for more school choice, with tax money following children into private schools.  There has been an increase in home-schooling and that will remain a more popular option than it had been prior to the pandemic.  We have also been exposed to the naked lust for teacher union power pushing for excessive school closings, mask mandates, and excess distancing requirements.  We have seen how feckless Democrat politicians have been in counteracting the teachers unions excessive power, because those same Democrats are highly dependent upon teacher union support for their election to office.

I will write in the future about government employee unions and why they should be outlawed.  Until they are outlawed, they should at least not be allowed to participate in elections for political offices.

Black Education Tragedy is New - Walter E. Williams

 If you believe that the atrocious inner city educations that many black Americans receive today is due to the legacy of black slavery or due to systemic racial discrimination, then how do you explain the much greater success of inner city black schools of the past compared to today's government holding pens for blacks?  Read Prof. Walter E. Williams article Black Education Tragedy is New and gain a more rational perspective.

There are myriad reasons why I am voting for Donald Trump

The principal question politically is which candidate is likely to perform better as a protector of my many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, freedom of contract, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom to trade, freedom to defend myself from violence, and freedom to my privacy.  I want to be allowed to choose my own values and to be allowed to manage my own life in accordance with my self-chosen values.  I find that present governments are the main threat to my exercise of my rights and the main source of violence and the threat of violence to keep me from rationally managing my own life.  This is not to say that I oppose government in principle.  I do believe that government is necessary to the protection of my individual rights and to a civilized society that will allow me to flourish as the manager of my own life.  However, the federal government and at least almost every state government have taken on many functions that violate my rights and those of others and that do not allow us to rationally manage our own lives.  The governments of the United States of America are badly in need of a massive reduction of their powers.

Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden (Kamala Harris) will provide a legitimate and proper government.  Given the preferences of most Americans, that would be impossible even if one of them were so inclined.  However, there are leagues and leagues of distance between these candidates respecting the exercise of governmental power and the resulting range over which its threats of violence will roam in the lives of the American people.  

The President will bring with him a party, from which he will draw advisors and managers for the exceedingly powerful Executive Branch of the government.  The Democratic Party is the party of greater racism, corruption, demagoguery, contempt for the American citizen, pessimism and fear, anti-business hatred, distrust in freedom of speech and conscience, and lust for power.  It was the party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK, of opposition to ending school segregation, the greater number who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, highly inadequate public schools in the inner cities, inadequate police protection in the inner cities, claims that Black Americans can neither achieve educational success nor financial success in the free market, advocates group identity politics with all of its divisiveness, and has over and over implied that any Black American who is independent minded is not Black and is a sell-out.  The Democrats have long been the kings of voter fraud, violators of the rule of law, more inclined to govern for the sake of special interests, the associates of union thugs who are usually either Mafia or Communists, and the most willing to seek further powers to shake down the American people.  The Democrats think most so-called Blacks and Latinos are incompetent to manage their own lives and that all so-called whites but the college educated are rednecks, or even that every white person is a racist.  The Democrat Party is the party that does not admit that the best way to raise everyone's standard of living is to allow the free market to function and raise our productivity so that the economy grows with a compounded higher growth rate.  It is the party that has the greater fear of every chemical, disease, or human act that has any effect upon the environment, to the point that it has become anti-human in its suppression of our efforts to be productive.  It is the party that has the broader and more intense distrust of businesses and the freedom of association of the free market.  It has become the party most inclined to suppress freedom of speech, as witness its control of college campuses, the elderly media, the Silicon Valley Internet businesses, and the regulations it has imposed on businesses.  It has systematically interfered with individual's freedom of religion by shutting down church operations during the pandemic and with requirements that people support abortions and contraceptives against their will and religious beliefs.

Biden was never very smart to begin with.  He is clearly losing mental capability.  He does not know whether is he is running for the President or the Senate.  He does not know what state he is in.  He is campaigning against someone named George, we do not know whether that George is HW or W.  He cannot remember that thing, you know, who gave us our individual rights according to the Declaration of Independence.  When he retained some cogency years ago, he claimed the Declaration of Independence was not a part of our laws.  This is expected from Democrats, who do not want our Constitution to have a philosophical basis in political governance.  Without that, the Constitution is more malleable.  Biden stops work in the morning, not having the energy to go on.  Some Democrats will not mind replacing him with Kamala Harris, a decidedly socialist Senators.  However, Sen. Harris could not get very far in her own presidential campaign and dropped out early since she could not perform well in even her home state of California.  President Trump was smarter to begin with and has retained his intelligence and energy.

Biden is an inveterate liar.  Yes, Trump exaggerates.  But Trump has never told a whopper of the size that Biden did when Biden claims over and over that all of the people who died because of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus were killed by Trump.  They were actually killed by the virus with help from the Chinese Communist Party and some Democratic governors who put sick people in elderly care facilities.  Biden plagiarized a paper in law school.  He claimed he was the best political science student, when he was far from it.  He claimed he was first in his law class when he was not even average.  He claimed that his life was that of Neil Kinnoch, the British Labor Leader in a heavily plagiarized speech Biden gave in his first presidential campaign.

Biden is not a nice man.  He likes to tell his audiences that he is brighter than any of them, though that is often unlikely.  When challenged on an issue, he is inclined to invite a man to meet him behind the gym for a fight.  Or he may just call you a "lying dog-faced pony soldier."  Biden claims he is the Democratic Party.  Apparently all other Democrats do not count.  He has claimed that his mentor in the Senate was Robert Byrd, the segregationist.  Indeed, Delaware was one of the segregationist states sued in Brown v. Board of Education, that ended public school segregation under the Eisenhower administration.  By the way, Gen. Eisenhower pushed hard for the desegregation of the Army during WWII and continued to push it when he was President.  Senator Biden came along too late to play a role in the segregationist policies of Delaware, but he was opposed to busing and was clearly sympathetic with the old segregationist members of the Democratic Party.  Opposition to busing was often justified, but there is today no tolerance for that opposition in the socialist Democratic Party.

Biden runs a family based crime syndicate, which is a bit less sophisticated than that run by the Clintons.  He and his family are paid huge sums of money by evil foreigners, especially oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Chinese Communist Party.  It is wrong to do business with such people and I am quite sure that they have their hooks deep into his depraved soul.  With Russia and China very much opposed to the well-being of the USA, he would be a seriously compromised President.  His past policies with respect to both Russia and China were much too accommodating to them.

The Democratic Party has its power base in the education establishment, the media, the labor unions, and in some ethnic groups that have tended to vote heavily for the Democrats very contrary to their actual rational interest.  Perhaps the most broadly important of these power bases is the control of the education system as a result of a largely government run school and university education system.  Even private schools are heavily controlled by government in their curricula, financing of students, operational requirements beyond teaching, and as a source for grant money.  In at least most government-run schools, the teachers are not professional managers of 20 to 30 students at a time, but merely blue collar workers incapable of management functions and of negotiating their own salaries and working conditions by their choice of socialist labor union representation.  The schools are operated primarily for the purpose of indoctrinating youth to want expanded government as the solution to every problem and for the benefit of the socialist labor union.  Such an education system does not equip students with the knowledge and independent thinking skills they need to become the watchdogs of their individual rights and the opponents of excessive, illegitimate government.  In most cases these students do not receive an adequate education in writing, reading, math, science, history, economics, civics, and philosophy.  Joe Biden strongly supports the limited and twisted education that government and socialist labor unions are willing to provide.  President Trump recognizes such a education as a terrible problem and wants to provide everyone with school choice.

Biden and the Democrats want to kill the Right to Work Laws throughout the nation by federal law.  The very idea that anyone has to allow someone else to represent him in his negotiations with management for the sale of his labor is an abomination.  That he then has to pay union dues to the agent that usurped his right to sell his own labor makes this still worse.  Most Americans, even most in the states without Right to Work, favor Right to Work legislation.  The Democrats favor rules that do not even allow most workers at a business to vote on whether they will be represented by a union or not.  They favor rapid elections that do not allow workers or management in opposition to effectively make their argument.  They support union votes that are not based on secret ballots.  They support union exceptions that allow union thugs to intimate and even beat up workers who do not want to join a union or who oppose union aims.  Trump has no such desire to give labor unions this kind of control over our lives.

Biden wants to have the USA rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which will have a devastating effect on a booming energy export business for Americans based on the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  They claim that doing so is based on science, which is a blatant lie.  The global computer models are now in the 6th generation and they have always made wrong predictions and they have not even shown signs of improvement.  The reason is because the physics input into the models is wrong, as I have shown on this blog repeatedly.  But you do not even have to know enough physics to understand my arguments.  All you have to know is that any theory that makes wrong predictions is wrong.  This is a basic principle of the scientific method.  One cannot claim that catastrophic man-made global warming is consensus science when it is not science at all.  In addition, carbon dioxide is a very beneficial plant fertilizer and a 1.5K increase in temperature would cause more good than harm, contrary to the heated claims of the U.N. and others.  Trump has enough sense not to believe in the claims and to see that the Paris Climate Accord will do more harm than good to Americans.

Biden wants to transition the energy sector away from coal, oil, and gas, claiming they are polluting and destructive because they result in carbon dioxide emissions.  He says he will make them net-zero emitters of carbon dioxide in four years, by 2025.  To do that, he has to make their operations vastly more expensive.  In doing so, he is willing to put millions of Americans out of work, cause the cost of energy to skyrocket for both residential and commercial use, cause our transportation costs to go up greatly, force the use of expensive, light frame, short-range vehicles loaded with heavy batteries with short life-times and inconvenient recharging schedules, and force a crash program to build massive farms of wind generators and solar panels which produce unreliable and expensive energy.  The alternative energy developments will rely on government using force to make the costs of coal, oil, and gas become much greater by making them pay to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The wind generators will kill ever greater numbers of birds and bats, require incredible amounts of concrete to anchor them whose production emits massive loads carbon dioxide, and require massive mining projects to obtain the required rare earth elements, copper, iron for steel production, plastic resin for the carbon fiber blades, and lithium for backup storage batteries.  The solar panels will require massive plants to make the photovoltaic materials, many of which are highly toxic, and the mining of much silver and copper.  Oh, and by the way, the Democrats really hate mining and toxic chemicals, so as the required massive production gets underway, they will put on the brakes, leaving us with much less power from coal, oil, and gas and not nearly enough energy to replace their lost production with.

Biden wants to increase our taxes and the burden of taxes on everyone.  Yes, he says he will only increase taxes on those making over $400,000 per year and on businesses.  I suspect that his rationale for saying this is that the Trump tax cut for individuals is going to expire and he is going to see to it that it is not extended.  So, he will not raise your taxes, because the the Democrats already insured that the Trump tax cut for individuals had an expiration date.  So, everyone who paid more taxes prior to the Trump tax cut, will pay more soon again.  Then additional taxes will be piled on people making over $400,000 a year and on corporations.  Many people who pay over $400,000 in taxes do so because their business income is taxed on their personal income tax.  The more money taken by government from businesses, the less money businesses have to expand, improve their productivity, train their employees, hire new employees, pay state and local taxes, pay their employees better, and work to raise our standard of living.  Meanwhile, government will take this money and pay its expanded well-paid bureaucracy, hire contractors with good government connections, force the contractors to use union labor, apply the money to political advantage, and deliver a product of low quality.  Basically, a tax on any of us, is a tax on all of us, except for a favored few who will make out like bandits.  The cost of living will rise with far too little to show for it.  Trump would like to lower our taxes and most definitely to extend the individual tax rate cut.

Consistent with the fearful and the anti-business mentalities that dominate the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and the Democrats want to keep business, the schools, and other functions in which people congregate such as churches shut down until the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus somehow disappears.  They have little regard for how many businesses are destroyed, how many workers become unemployed, how many children and young people fall behind in their education, how religious freedom is curtailed, how many people do not go to doctors when they need to do so, how many people become severely depressed, how many people commit suicide, become alcoholics, or use other harmful drugs.  Their fear, fed by the media and the socialist education system, dominates all.  President Trump understands that most people, excepting some elderly and some people with other medical problems, generally need to return to normal productive activities.

In the name of group identity politics and the designation of some groups as inherently racist, as the Democrats now often claim all white people are, the Democratic Party has readily welcomed demonstrations in the streets, even as they have shut down or tried to shut down almost all other gatherings of Americans.  Going beyond this, they generally tolerated actual violence for a long while, until it became clear that most Americans were repulsed by the violence and the Democrats began to fear the effects of this on their fate in the upcoming 2020 elections.  It has been Trump who has been far more concerned with the effects of the violence on personal security and property destruction, much of which was especially hurting many small business owners, many of whom were in poorer areas of cities.  In every case, such violence and property destruction drive up the costs of business operation, increase prices, and result in less employment in cities where this is very harmful to many inhabitants.

The Democrats and Biden effectively want to cripple the people's ability to defend themselves from the violence that Democrat controlled government does not want to protect them from.  They are strongly determined to constrict or even to squash our 2nd Amendment rights.  Trump stands firm on this constitutional right to have the means to defend oneself and one's family.

Biden is advocating a massive infrastructure expenditure geared to create union jobs.  He wants to pay for more zero-emission mass transit in every American city with 100,000 or more inhabitants.  Even traditional mass transit has always lost money in astounding amounts in American cities.  He wants to build more bicycle paths.  He will have the government build a network of electric vehicle recharging stations, apparently so you can get halfway there and spend a few hours recharging and then get back on the road again.  Somehow or other, he will have us building electric vehicles in this program too.  He is going to spend money on the energy infrastructure itself, which apparently means the government will own the energy infrastructure.  What could go wrong with that?  He is somehow going to upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes.  He will install more energy efficient windows and appliances.  He is going to build 1.5 million sustainable homes.  He will have a program for environmental justice, whatever that is.  Except, the money to do these things will really come out of your pocket, some way or the other, and mean that you cannot use that money to do what you wanted to do with it.

Biden shows his economic ignorance, or is it willingness to do great harm to many in his pursuit of demagogic influence upon the economically ignorant, in advocating a $15/hour national minimum wage.  There should not be a minimum wage established by any level of government.  That is an interference with everyone's freedom of association and freedom to earn a living.  The fact that one would have difficulty having one job and being the soul worker in a family of four and living on a wage of less than $15/hour is irrelevant.  It is especially young people who are under-educated who need a chance to prove they can be a reliable worker and are willing to learn on the job who need jobs that pay less than what a worker who has a family to support would need to earn.  Minimum wages hurt those who most need to work, but have the lowest skills to offer.  Minimum wage laws are especially loved by labor unions who want to exclude competing workers from the market by using the force of government.  After all, those union workers have to earn more so they can pay a large sum to the labor union bosses, who in turn need to use much of it to buy off the Democrat politicians who give great power to the union bosses.  Yet while minimum wage laws are always harmful, they are especially harmful at the national level.  A minimum wage of $15/hour is less harmful in New York City or San Francisco than it is in Muddy Gap, Wyoming, Magnolia, Mississippi, or Loco Hills, New Mexico.  Of course, Democrats are very happy to destroy these low cost of living small towns.  Trump cares about the rural areas, the small towns, and the low cost of living areas much more than does Biden.

Biden does not believe our legislators need to read a bill before they vote on it.  He was happy to go along with the ObamaCare atrocity that made us buy insurance we did not want or need.  He was went along with the lie that ObamaCare did not have a tax in it, but then it did when the Supreme Court torturously ruled it constitutional because it had a tax in it.  He went along with the lie that you could keep your insurance if you wanted and keep your doctor if you wanted.  Then there was the lie that ObamaCare would save a family of four $2500 a year.  Under ObamaCare health care cost have doubled.  In many areas of the country, there is one and only one plan available, but that is of no concern to the Democrats who rule the cities where that is not true.  It is only Republican rural areas with totally monopoly ObamaCare.

Biden intends to set up a Blue Panel Committee to provide him with cover to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.  Biden and the Democrats believe the courts should be free to set policy, abrogating the constitutional responsibility of the Congress to do that.  Trump, on the other hand has appointed three Supreme Court Justices who recognize the division of powers in the Constitution and know that the function of the federal courts is to see that the rule of the laws of Congress duly instituted is to be enforced in the justice system.  Amy Coney Barrett may be his crowning appointment.

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.  It had the largest government apparatus to corrupt.  It had a bureaucracy that was composed of well over 90% Democrats operating in Washington, DC where any government employee crime had to be tried before a court whose jury was sure to be 95% composed of Democrats, who would never find any Democrat guilty of any crime that was aiding the Democratic Party.  But, Republicans beware the DC justice system.

The Obama/Biden administration supplied drug lords with weapons.  They rewarded Senator John Kerry with the State Department after he used his Senate seat power to threaten drug companies and other companies with harmful legislation if they did not pay him off.  He used insider information to make investments that paid him very well.  Following his time in the State Department, they gave the position to Sen. Hillary Clinton, who used her position to fill the Clinton Foundation with money, much of which was used for family expenses.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to heavily discriminate against Tea Party and limited government organizations that applied for tax exempt status, greatly suppressing their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  No one was ever prosecuted for this, despite one official responsible having had many meetings with Obama, which were surely due to his coordinating the effort.

Under the Obama/Biden administration the NSA very widely spied on Americans, contrary to the law.  The head of the NSA lied to Congress about this.  The administration promulgated the lie that the riot and attack against the American ambassador in Benghazi, Libya was because some guy in America had shown a video on the Internet.  They claimed they could not rescue the Ambassador and the CIA and State Dept. men protecting him, when they really acted with such negligence and indecision that they could not then provide a rescue.  This was a dark moment in U.S. history.

The Obama/Biden administration pursued the most dastardly agendas in U.S. history in trying to prevent the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  They used the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and numerous Democrats in the Department of Justice to frame people in the Trump campaign as collaborators with the Russians.  They lied to the FISA courts in order to spy on the Trump campaign and then on his transition team.  This was far worse than Watergate.  For three years they used Russian collaboration claims to distract the Trump administration and to discredit it in the eyes of many Americans who could not see through the lies of the Democrats and the elderly, obsolete media, academia, and their fellow travelers.  Yet, it was long ago clear that it was Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Obama/Biden administration that were in league with the Russian disinformation apparatus.  It was the Democrats who undermined the federal government in the interest of Russia and very much to the harm of the American people.  When the Russia hoax fell apart, they then created the Ukraine hoax for the impeachment of Trump.  This also fell apart, but served as a huge distraction and to create much disharmony among Americans.

Many libertarians fault Donald Trump for not entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, though he has since entered into a number of bilateral trade deals with other nations who were in that proposed trade deal.  Not every trade deal is advantageous.  Others criticize him for ending NAFTA and negotiating a new deal with Mexico and Canada.  The new deal has some advantages for Americans, having fixed some problems with NAFTA.  But there is also some protectionism in the new deal also.  All of this is a mixed bag.  However, the alterations in the China trade agreements really did need to be done.  We were doing too much trade with China and there were many ways in which they were taking advantage of their Most Favored Nation and WTO status, given to them by Obama/Biden.  China is out to control the world and it is using the investments of Capitalists to get in position to hang Capitalists.  It has been stealing our intellectual property and our capital investments in China left and right.  This is a nation that uses slave labor, harvests organs, violates religious freedom, violated the treaty over its governance of Hong Kong, and is expansionist in the South China Sea and in the Himalayan Mountains, having previously invaded Tibet.  China is ruled by very evil people who appear to have Biden in their pocket.  We need to trade much less with this rogue nation.

Biden and Obama were convinced that manufacturing in the U.S. was essentially a matter of business raping Gaia.  They viewed it as environmentally bad.  They were happy to export our manufacturing capability to China.  This was very much to China's advantage militarily and in terms of world economic influence and power.  The pandemic helped to show how absurdly dependent we have become on China's manufacturing and how they are happy to use that to their advantage.

The Democrats like to claim that Trump has hurt us with our allies.  Yet, our ally Germany was pledged to spend 2% of its GDP on defense as a NATO ally.  Instead, Germany had long taken advantage of us by spending only 1.2% of its GDP, giving it an economic advantage.  By November 2019, Germany had increased its defense spending to 1.38% of GDP, after much complaining about pressure from Trump.  By October 2020, German spending was up to 1.57%.  Back in 2014, only three countries in NATO spent as much as 2% of GDP.  By October 2020, ten NATO nations spent at least 2%.  Of course, some of these nations did not like being pressured to meet their pledges.  Trump was quite right in pressuring them to do so.  Obama/Biden had not applied much pressure on this, so the nations of NATO were very accustomed to allowing the U.S. to protect them with little of their help.

One of the most important things Trump has done is to cut back on the excesses of the regulatory bureaucracy, as well as putting pressure on Congress not to give the regulatory agencies more power.  Regulatory compliance is estimated to cost $1.9 trillion a year.  Regulations are primarily directed at businesses and they are especially costly for small businesses.  Big business often supports more regulation to reduce the ability of smaller businesses to challenge them in the marketplace.  Big business can more readily hire experts to put them in compliance and they can often control the agencies that regulate them.  By law, any new regulation costing over $100 million in compliance costs, must have a cost-benefit analysis performed.  The Obama/Biden administration very commonly ignored this law.  When they did do a cost-benefit analysis, they commonly greatly underestimated the cost and over-stated the benefits.  They used regulations and changes in the interpretation of regulations to damage or destroy whole industries.  The coal industry was very much one such example.  Out of work coal miners, railroad and barge workers, and coal-fired power plant workers can thank these heartless souls, Obama and Biden, for the loss of many such jobs.  Yes, natural gas from fracking was going to cause some significant switching from coal to natural gas, but the government had no business putting its heavy foot on the scale on the side of natural gas.

After the election of 2016, manufacturing began to recover in the U.S.  Manufacturers are my laboratory's primary customers and my business increased steadily and strongly after the election until the CCP coronavirus caught up with us.  When manufacturers could not see regulatory and legal stability and faced the world's highest tax rates, as was the case under Obama/Biden, there were many reasons to manufacture in other countries and that is where their efforts went.  Not only did we lose the manufacturing capability, but we began losing the design, technology, and general engineering capability that were tied to the nations where the manufacturing was performed.  As a result, my laboratory was in a depression that lasted from 2009 through 2016. Fortunately, under the Trump presidency, huge increases in work and income followed in 2017 and then in 2018 and 2019.

Frankly, I have run out of time to write about the many reasons why President Trump is vastly superior to Joe Biden as our President.  There is absolutely no contest here in terms of a rational assessment of who will do the better job of protecting the rights of the individual, allowing the market to recover from the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus, and allowing productive people to raise our future standard of living.  The socialist Biden would be a disaster, as is his entire party.

I was wrong about the Democratic Party #walkaway

A friend, Tom Wright, directed my attention to a very interesting video of one young woman's story of the toxic culture experienced by a Teach for America teacher in a government-run school and then as a registered nurse in Los Angeles, CA. She had been brought up a Democrat and had long believed that conservatives were simply bad people. She learned that the progressive Democrat program maintained, rather than solved problems. She realized that many Democrats had so identified themselves as heroes fighting the problems of society, whether racism, women's rights, and homophobia, that they could not actually allow the problems to be solved because then their hero status would disappear. Policies that proved ineffective or catastrophic were continued, despite their clear failure.

She realized that many of the Democrats attitudes were grounded on a belief that some minorities simply were incapable of having the character expected of other Americans. In other words, they were bigoted. She came to realize that the main stream media cherry picked facts, dropped the context of events, told stories in a way to misdirect people, and simply ignored stories they could not present in a manner to misdirect their listeners. For some time, she found herself understanding that the Democrat agenda was very bad for people, but she still had a hard time examining the ideas of conservatives. In time she managed to overcome the barrier that she had long believed that Republicans and conservatives were not the evil people the Democrats had portrayed them to be.

The story of her evolution in the development of an independent mind is very fascinating. It is well worth listening to. See Georgia's great video about how she developed an independent mind -- a beautiful mind.

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Reality is far more complicated, but agenda-pushing activists don’t want to discuss it

David Wojick

The screaming headline said "Black Americans 2.5X more likely than whites to be killed by police." The statement is false. It is the kind of assertion that is used to claim police are systemically racist. It leads to fewer police, fewer arrests, more crime, more racial discord, and more innocent black deaths.

Accurate, honest statistics show just the opposite. When police must use deadly force, whites are more likely to be killed than blacks. But we rarely see these statistics, because they do not support claims of systemic, systematic racism against blacks. The statistics we do see are too often agenda-driven.

The sad reality is that, as a percentage of their total American population, black deaths by police are around 2.5 times white deaths. But this has nothing to do with likelihood, because the vast majority of people of both races have near-zero likelihood of being killed by police.

In fact, up to 88% of people killed by police were armed and being arrested at the time of their deaths. Such people are indeed at greater risk of being killed. However, racism has nothing to do with it.

On a per-arrest basis, the data say whites are much more likely to be killed by police than blacks. If so, the police are clearly not racist. Indeed, they seem to be deliberately trying not to kill blacks. Another study found that 36% of officer-involved shootings were “suicide by cop,” 16% of whom were blacks.

Statistical reality must begin with the fact that black males represent 6.5% of the US population – but according to FBI data they constitute 54% of arrests for robbery and 53% of arrests for murder. Far worse, nationally syndicated talk show host Larry Elder points out, in 2018 there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of America’s total homicides, and nearly all were murdered by other blacks. (Have Black Lives Matter or NFL-NBA-MLB athletes ever acknowledged any of this?)

Those are the real reasons blacks outnumber whites in the nation’s prisons – the real reasons more blacks are likely to be killed during arrests and other confrontations with police.

Even more telling, when we look at the issue that motivates and infuriates Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its allies – unarmed blacks killed by police – we learn that the Mapping Police Violence database tabulates “just” 25 such police killings in 2019, resulting from shootings, tasers, beatings, chokeholds and vehicles.  (A Washington Post database records only police shootings.) And then we read this:

“A wave of gun violence swept through the nation over the [July Fourth 2020] holiday weekend, leaving dozens dead from coast-to-coast – with children as young as 5 among the casualties,” the New York Post despaired. In Chicago, the article continued, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen [of those shot] were children caught in the crossfire. The vast majority were black.

Think about that. In one weekend, in one city, we had three-fourths the number of deaths that BLM is raging about, for the entire nation, over the course of an entire year. Or consider this awful news:

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community” and “97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted. New York City witnessed a 204% increase in shooting victims over the past 28 days, compared to the same period in 2019, he added.

Meanwhile, Darrius Sutton participated in at least three drive-by shootings after he was released from NYC jails without bail on attempted murder charges – a far too frequent occurrence in Di Blasio Town. Again, no comments, no outrage from BLM.

What about law enforcement officers like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood? What about Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and too many other Black children gunned down by their fellow blacks? Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was playing with other children in Chicago over this year’s Fourth of July weekend, when thugs leapt from a car and sprayed gunfire into a crowd, killing her.

Why don’t their black lives matter to Black Lives Matter, its often violent supporters, and its corporate, Hollywood and pro athlete funding sources? Does anyone really think the solution is “defunding” or “reimagining” police forces – perhaps replacing thousands of police officers with social workers?

The victims’ families certainly don’t. Natalia’s father told local news media he wants more police, not fewer. Her aunt said, “We talk about Black Lives Matter, but at the end of the day, we’re killing each other off. We’re killing our babies.”

“The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, such as car accidents and drownings,” Larry Elder notes. “The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man.” How depressing.

Police have to deal with way too many criminals, attacks, confrontations and murders, especially in poor and minority areas of our cities. They never know who will pull a gun, even during a routine intervention, traffic stop or domestic disturbance – or which incident might be a setup, an ambush. That’s part of the reason some officers are jumpy or feel they must use potentially deadly force when they would much prefer not to. But racist tendencies, much less systemic racism, have nothing to do with it.

The United States once had systemic, government-decreed racism. This is no longer the case, and elevating individual, thankfully now pretty rare cases of racism into something systemic gets us nowhere.

It is much more likely that what is happening today is the result of too many black boys being raised fatherless, by gangs, amid street violence – and to their not attending school, and thus growing up with no education, skills or future. They likewise receive no grounding in civics, humanity, morality or religion, and have few scruples and little remorse over murdering someone to settle a score or perceived insult.

Just as in medicine, getting the diagnosis wrong can be much worse than useless. Trying to blame or cure systemic white racism or supposedly widespread individual white racism will only make matters worse. Blaming people for things they are not doing just makes them angry. Intimidating them into silence over these accusations just makes them angry and resentful.

Honest, probing social science, media coverage and debate could help us find solutions. Name calling, guilt trips and false assertions of systemic racism will make the situation worse. That people are being told everything is due to racism is tearing us apart, instead of pulling us together in search of solutions. It is a political trick that is causing horrific, widespread social upheaval, whether by accident or design.

Marching, screaming, burning, looting and simplistic, deceptive slogans are not solutions. They are not even calls for constructive action. They are certainly not calls to ponder the points presented here and in countless other articles and reports – or to reexamine some of the well-intended but woefully misguided government programs that helped get us where we are today.

Angrily demanding that “things have to change” is not a step forward. It may even be a step backward, if it leads to more confusion, and more stupid or useless programs. Promoting racial division and discord will ensure that the real causes of crime, violence and murder in our black and other minority communities are never addressed

These issues cry out for attention they are not getting. Perhaps after the elections, after the insanity and riots are over, we can have honest, no-holds-barred conversations about this, without being shouted down and canceled out. We must hope so. Otherwise, our nation’s future is bleak indeed.

David Wojick, PhD is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. He writes regularly about climate change, energy and social issues.

My Comments:

Many violent young men in black communities were forced to attend government-run schools that were little more than holding pens.  They received extremely inadequate educations, despite the fact that the school systems often cost taxpayers very high ratios of money per student.  It is extremely frustrating to be forced to spend your time in a boring environment for many hours a day.  It also does not help that the mostly government education establishment in the name of feminism decries males as brutish and chauvinist suppressors of women, thereby depriving males of their role as protectors and providers of women and children.  This is hardly conducive in convincing young men to behave responsibly, to care for the women they have sex with, and to care for the children who may result.  Being so poorly educated, taking on such responsibilities becomes much harder.  So more children wind up without a father at home.  In these poorly educated communities, most of the people are not knowledgeable enough to vote intelligently.  It is common for them to cast 90% of their votes for the Democratic Party, which was almost always responsible for their extremely inadequate educations and for providing less policing than is needed to make their neighborhoods more secure. The lack of security and Democratic barriers to business formation, make it more expensive to live in their neighborhoods and result in few job opportunities.

A very vicious cycle has been set up in many black communities, especially those where there has long been Democratic Party control of the local government.  That party fights hard to prevent educational choice by suppressing non-government schools, it provides poor teachers, a poor school curriculum, and surprisingly poor school facilities and safety given the education budgets.  The Democrat Party is especially likely to create many barriers to starting businesses and causes business expenses to be much greater than they should be.  That party also underfunds police who are much needed to make these black communities safe enough to raise families in them and to operate businesses that provide needed services and jobs.

The systematic racism that does exist is that perpetrated by the Democratic Party.  It is hardly surprising that this is the same party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK (including President Woodrow Wilson and Senator Robert Byrd, who Joe Biden said was his Senate mentor), and the party that provided many more of the votes against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Republicans who voted for it with much higher percentages in both the House and the Senate.

If you want a society in which every life is valued, then you should understand that such a society is one that believes that every individual has many broad rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  These rights include the right to pursue an education, to pursue a livelihood, freedom of contract, freedom of privacy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association.  None of these rights require that anyone else has to serve you or provide for you, but they certainly do require that no one initiate the use of force to prevent you as an individual from pursuing your values and managing your own life while enjoying these individual rights.  In our society, as in many, it is the government which is the main initiator of the use of force to prevent individuals from exercising their individual rights.  None of these individual rights is neither enhanced, nor diminished by virtue of one's ethnicity or skin color.  These are not collective, block, or faction rights.  They are the rights of each and every individual human being and must be honored for every citizen of the United States of America.  For that matter, every government and every society around the world should be doing the same.

The Otherworldly Mind of Poor, Lost Joe Biden and Implications for Black Americans

This is a satire with a mix of the facts as Joe Biden sees things and real world facts.  Be intelligent enough to take it as such.  I have observed far too much emotion unguided by reason of late.

Joe Biden, the Democrat who would be President, has said that 150 million Americans have died by gun violence.  More recently, he said that 120 million Americans have died from the "novel coronavirus", to use the flimsy name for the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus preferred by the Democrats and other socialists.

In 2017, 52% of homicide victims were black.  The percentage of the American population who are black is 13.4% and the American population is thought to be 329 million by normal people, though it is clearly much less in Joe Biden's world of mass deaths.  Doing the math, normal people would conclude there are 44 million black Americans.

If 52% of homicide victims are black and Biden's 150 million deaths by gun violence is true, then 78 million black Americans died by gun violence or by equally violent means.  Oddly enough, 88% of their killers were other blacks, so Joe must think that of the 78 million black Americans he thinks were killed by gun violence, nearly 69 million were killed by other blacks.  The Democrats' response to this unbelievable black self-extermination is to defund the police.  The Democrats' agenda does not include the preservation of black lives.

The man who would be President, says 120 million Americans have died of the coronavirus.  He and his socialist party have complained that black Americans are dying from the coronavirus in disproportionate numbers.  Black Americans are dying from the virus at rates several times that of white Americans, though the data on black deaths from this cause is not at all complete.  Nonetheless, it is likely not far from the case that about half of all coronavirus deaths are those of black Americans.  Then using the deaths due to coronavirus according to the man who would be President, Joe Biden, about 60 million black Americans have died from this virus.

The man who would be president and the socialist party that so lusts for power to rule the American people that they have in desperation put forth Biden as their knight in tarnished armor, apparently think that 78 million black Americans died from gun violence and another 60 million died from the "novel coronavirus", for a total of 138 million black American deaths.  Without an overwhelming percentage of the black vote, Joe Biden cannot ascend to the presidency, so he must be extremely worried about the upcoming 2020 presidential election.  According to Joe, from his bunker in his basement, there are no longer any black Americans left to vote for him.  In Joe's otherworldly mind, all 138 million out of 44 million black Americans have recently died from either gun violence or the "novel coronavirus."

Fortunately, Joe and his basement bunker, appear to be in another dimension and not in that of normal people.  As bad as gun violence is among black Americans and as bad as the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus has been for the health of black Americans, there are still many millions of black Americans ready to vote for poor Joe.  Despite the fact that Democrats insist on the poorest public education for black communities, despite their refusal to provide adequate police protection in those communities, and despite the anti-business policies of Democrats which suppress jobs in the communities they rule, millions of black Americans will vote for Joe, the one-time segregationist, the present searcher for his lost marbles, and the future numb-minded pawn of the socialists.  If American blacks placed a high value on their own lives, they certainly would not vote for poor, lost Joe and his Democrat socialist handlers.

Connecticut and Other States with Unhappy Residents and Population Loss

Russell Blair wrote an article for the Hartford Courant about the residents' views about living in Connecticut that makes it clear that the high tax and Democrat-controlled state is poorly governed. 

The Connecticut Economic Resource Center surveyed state residents and found that 47% of them said they plan to leave the state within the next five years!  It also revealed that only 44% agreed that Connecticut was a good place to live and raise a family.

A Gallup poll in 2016 had found that 46% of Connecticut residents said they would like to leave the state given the opportunity.  At that time, the state was tied with the high-tax state of New Jersey in that statistic as the state with the most residents desirous of exodus.

The U.S. Census Bureau believes the state lost 1,215 residents in the year following 1 July 2017.  It was one of 9 states with a population loss in that one-year period.  The other population losers were New York, Illinois, West Virginia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Mississippi, Alaska, and Wyoming.  Puerto Rico was another loser.  Note that this period was one of general excellent economic growth in the United States.

A state report from May 2017 says that Connecticut residents have been leaving the state in accelerating numbers since the Great Recession.  A poll in October 2017 noted that the percentage of people with incomes above $150,000 a year considering a move to another state was much higher than the that from the population as a whole.

Connecticut has recovered only 80.8% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, making it one of a very few states which has not recovered all of the jobs lost.

West Virginia and Wyoming lost many jobs thanks to the anti-coal policies of the Obama administration.  The refusal to allow oil and gas developments on federally owned lands made it impossible for many new jobs in that industry to be developed in Wyoming and Alaska.  The Obama policies suppressing the construction of pipelines hurt both West Virginia and Wyoming as potential oil and gas producers.  Wyoming and Alaska are hurt by excessive federal land ownership.  Anti-mining rulings by the federal government have prevented much mining activity in Alaska.

The status of freedom in the states is another big factor in economic growth of a state and in the general happiness of state residents.  The Cato Institute Ranking of Freedom in the States ranks Connecticut #33, New York #50, Illinois #35, New Jersey #47, West Virginia #34, Louisiana #30, Mississippi #40, Wyoming #38, Alaska #15, and Hawaii #49.  Only the Alaska rating suggests that a lack of freedom in the state and local governments in that state is not a factor in its loss of population.

Another factor that hurts a state in population retention and growth is the quality of K-12 education adjusted for student hetergeneity and expenditures adjusted for the cost of living, which people have not been able to look-up until recently, but they do sense it.  A Cato Institute Policy Analysis of 13 November 2018 by Liebowitz and Kelly has provided such an analysis recently, though it is little known.  In their ranking of the 50 states and DC, Connecticut ranks 38.

Consider the other recent population losers and their rankings in the Cato Institute K-12 education analysis:  New York ranks 46, Illinois ranks 40, West Virginia is 51, Louisiana is 47, Hawaii is 11, Mississippi is 25, Alaska is 48, and Wyoming is 37.  An expensive and poor job of educating children in a state will have a strong job suppression effect and make a state a poor place for a family to raise children.  Of the states losing population, only Hawaii is doing a good job of educating children. Mississippi is very average, but it has a bad reputation as a result of irrational ratings with widespread use such as the U.S. News & World Report rating.  When a state does a poor and inefficient job of educating children, it is likely to do a poor and inefficient job of all other aspects of governance.

The lesson for Connecticut and the other population losers is that poor governance has a very significant effect on people in pursuit of their happiness.  High taxes, poor education for children, excessive and abusive business regulation, the general state of freedom, and high rates of violence and theft are very effective in creating an unhappy populace.

The Brainwashing of a Nation by Daniel Greenfield

Subtitled:
From campus identity politics cults to the media, brainwashing is bigger than ever.

Greenfield says:

The human mind, like the human body, adapts to a crisis with a fight-or-flight response. Brainwashing forces the mind into a flight response. Once in flight mode, the mind can rationalize a new belief as a protective behavior that will keep it safe. Even when, as in the case of the suspect, the new belief will actually destroy his life. Fight or flight mode inhibits long term thinking. In panic mode, destructive and suicidal behaviors seem like solutions because they offer an escape from unbearable chemical stresses.
There’s a good biological reason for that. Our minds stop us from thinking too much in a crisis so that we can take urgent action, like running into a fire or at a gunman, that our rational minds might not allow us to do. But that same function can be ‘hacked’ by artificially putting people into fight-or-flight mode to break them down and shortcut their higher reasoning functions. Decisions reached subconsciously in fight-or-flight mode will then be rationalized and internalized after the initial crisis has passed.

Cults, abusive relationships and totalitarian movements maintain ‘total crisis’, shutting down higher reasoning, creating a permanent state of stress by triggering fight-or-flight responses unpredictably. This leads to Stockholm Syndrome, where the captive tries to control their fate through total emotional identification with their captor, pack behavior, loss of identity and will, and eventually suicide or death.

Total crisis leads to burnout, emotional exhaustion, detachment from friends and family, and violence.
How do you brainwash a nation?
Control the national environment, force a crisis on the country, and tap into their fear and guilt. And then you can outlaw planes, cows, skyscrapers, straws, plastic bags and the rest of the Green New Deal.
The environmental crisis is just one example of how leftist movements can brainwash a nation.
The growing number of millennials who say that they will not have children because of environmental panic is an example of how brainwashing can make suicidal behavior seem like self-preservation.

Since the Left still lacks total control over the United States, it relies on repetition, itself a form of control and stress, to create fear and panic. It makes up for its lack of physical control by bombarding Americans with messages meant to inspire fear, love, hate and guilt through the media, through the educational system, through entertainment and through every possible messaging channel.


Global Warming panic is one of a succession of manufactured leftist crises in America that began with a class crisis. transitioned to a racial crisis, and then to an environmental crisis.

He also says "Human beings don't behave rationally." Most people do behave relatively rationally in certain compartments of their life, but largely irrationally in other compartments. Unfortunately, moral philosophy is about the most irrational compartment of most peoples lives.

I do not think intelligence itself makes you more vulnerable to brainwashing, expect insofar as unintelligent people seem much less likely to give thought at all to moral philosophy and they are usually only captured by the education system for about 12 years, not 16 years or more. It is the amateurs of moral philosophy who spend 16 or more years trying to please nearly universally leftist teachers and professors who are most likely to fall victim to the Left. A social metaphysician in the hands of leftist educators for 16 years is a goner.

Before the education system played this role, it was largely religions that played it. However irrational the religion, one of them was usually able to secure a monopoly on moral philosophy over a substantial region of the earth, demonstrating that most people are social metaphysicians.

With these qualifications, much of what Greenfield says is correct. In 1965 when I was a freshman at Brown University, I had many moral and political discussions with very committed leftist products of the nation's finest private schools. Over and over, I had the experience that someone would reluctantly concede that I was right about my limited government and generally libertarian individualist philosophy on an issue. The next day they were still spouting the belief they had conceded was wrong the day before as though we had never had our discussion. The same thing happens now when I explain why catastrophic man-made global warming is a failed hypothesis.

Greenfield is right about this: "That is why the Left cannot be defeated through policy debates and intellectual abstractions. It is a belief system. Though it traffics in seeming abstractions, these are a language, but not the meaning. The esoteric languages of policy and pop culture in which it speaks are vehicles for a deeper language of primal emotions. Behind the theories and manifestos is a great darkness of fear and terror, of love and hate, of emotional instability and vulnerability on which its lies and propaganda are built."

The only way to defeat this brainwashing is to be there constantly throughout children's and young people's lives encouraging them to apply reason to every problem and every situation. Without that encouragement, few children and young people are able to make that commitment to reason. Being there does require having the rational arguments to defeat the leftist belief system and making those argument over and over throughout a child's upbringing. One needs to take care that children really do understand the basis of rational individualism and that they do not just adopt it as a religion themselves.

I remember literally making a compact with myself when I was 5 years old to always put reason first. I did not always succeed, but I did put a lot of effort into that commitment. I realized even then that many adults, teachers, and, later, authors were wrong about many things. Whatever they said had to be subjected to critical evaluation before it was believed. I sorted what I learned into three categories: This I have evaluated and is true, this I have evaluated and is false, and this I have not yet evaluated so its truth is unknown.

Unfortunately, few people at any age make such a commitment to reason and far too many accept the word of authorities all too readily. Most students simply try to remember all they are told and assume it must be true. This often makes then "fast learners", which is interpreted as intelligence. That sort of false intelligence does make such people very much more likely victims of brainwashing.

Progressive Experts are Superior to Parents in Raising Children -- So They Claim

The 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection under the Hoover administration claimed that progressive experts were superior to parents in raising children in the Progressive Age because "it is beyond the capacity of an individual parent to train her child to fit into the intricate, interwoven, and interdependent social and economic system we have developed."

Do not wonder why the public schools to which parents are forced to send their children are so disdainful of parents and their values and their attempts to play an important role in the education of their own children.  If individual parents were incapable of performing these roles in 1930 because society and our economic system was so complex, then in 2018 parents must be vastly less capable.  Indeed, that job is a hard one.  Yet, I have seen no evidence that Progressive Experts are better able to handle that difficult task.  Indeed, they have proven themselves to be unusually blind to the reality of our society and of our economic system.  If the average parent is wanting in this task, it does not follow that the Progressive Expert is not vastly more wanting in the job of raising children.

The public schools are used as a wedge between parents and their children.  Many parents are inclined to forfeit much of their role as parents to the schools and in some cases to government agencies other than the schools.  In effect, the government becomes a force that diminishes the role of parents and substitutes its one-size-fits-all ideas for raising children.  This control over children allows them to form children as willing subjects of ever-increasing government incursions against individuality, independent and rational thinking, and individual rights in favor of collectivism and a willingness to accept the authority of government officials.

But since the Progressive Experts (Elitists) have declared the parents incompetent in the raising of their own children, this is all done for the good of the child.  The parents have been designated the Deplorables since at least 1930 by the Progressive Elitists.  Actually, they were so designated by some socialists in America about 100 years before that.  Never mind the wondrous claim that these Progressive Experts implicitly make that they do not even have to know any more about your child than will fit into a simple classification system.  Every child is a stereotype of that simple classification system.  What decent parent can tolerate this treatment of our children?  We, unlike the Progressive Elitist Education Experts, at least know our children as individuals.  What could be more important than that knowledge in educating children and preparing them for adulthood?

Excellent Article on Effects of Vouchers and Education Choice

James Agresti, a rare Brown University graduate who appears to have thwarted Brown's concerted efforts to mold all of its graduates into Progressive Elitist tribalists, has written an excellent article on the effects of vouchers and education choice.  The article is published on the Foundation for Economic Education website and called DeVos Confirmed: Everything they said about her is false.

Reforming our government-run and controlled education system is one of the most important requirements for developing a civil society with a properly limited government, a broad respect for and protection of individual rights, and the freedom for individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives within a richly diverse and cooperative private sector.  These reforms also have the beneficial effect of reducing the political power of the teachers labor unions.  Both government-run schools and teachers labor unions are ham-handed supporters of big, awfully big government, collectivism, and the splintering of the American people into countless tribes at war with one another.

Labor Union Membership, Right to Work, and Education

Labor unions have been having a tough time competing in the private sector for a long time and now are even shrinking as a percentage of government workers.  In 2015, union workers were 11.1% of the work force.  This fell to 10.7% in 2016 with a loss of 240,000 union members.  Only 6.4% of private sector workers are now union members.  The mainstay of the unions is in the government sector with 29.6% of state government employees being union members and 40.3% of local government employees being members.  The local government union membership is much inflated by the many teachers who pretend to manage 25 or 30 people in the classroom, but are really blue-collar workers unable to negotiate their own work compensation as individuals.  The high percentage of government workers in unions has more recently been falling so that the percentages above are 15-year lows.

Within the last year, West Virginia and Kentucky have become Right to Work states, increasing the number of Right to Work states to 27.  There is a good chance that Missouri will soon become a Right to Work state.  In the 2016 election, a Republican who championed Right to Work hard won the governorship in Missouri despite the unions supplying the Democrat who opposed Right to Work with more than $10 million of campaign funds and other support.  Missouri voters returned every one of the state legislators to office who supported Right to Work.  Missouri, like other states with forced union dues collection, has been losing jobs to states with Right to Work laws.  The bordering states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky all have Right to Work laws.  Only the basket case state of Illinois still maintains forced unionization on its borders.

You would not know it based on the recent campaign rhetoric, but manufacturing jobs increased by 236,000 in 2016.  Despite that overall growth in manufacturing jobs, union membership decreased by 74,000.  The growth in manufacturing jobs has been in Right to Work states.  In 2016, union membership in the 25 states that were Right to Work states for the full year decreased by 290,000, falling from 7.1% to 6.5%.  Membership in forced unionization states increased by 50,000, making it clear how dependent labor unions are on forced unionization.  Union membership increased in only one-quarter of the states with Right to Work laws, while increasing in 60% of those with forced unionization.  The percentage of Michigan workers in labor unions has fallen by 2.2% since Michigan became a Right to Work state in 2013.  Government worker unions lost their privileged powers in Wisconsin in 2011 and since then union membership has fallen by 136,000 workers or by 40%!

The loss of union power over the school systems in Wisconsin since 2011 and the freeing of school systems to pay teachers on their individual merit, is improving education in those school systems that have moved to the individual merit evaluation and compensation of teachers.  A Stanford University researcher, Barbara Biasi, has found that the school systems that have chosen to stick with union-favored seniority compensation programs rather than individual merit programs are falling behind the individual merit school systems.  Governor Scott Walker's Act 10 collective bargaining reform has allowed the thinking school systems to improve.  Who would think that evaluating and rewarding individual teaching ability would improve education?  Clearly the Democrats who claimed this would undermine the government-run school system would not allow this possibility.  How surprising it is that there is a correlation between being a capable teacher and classroom manager and being capable of negotiating your own working conditions and compensation!