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Coolidge: A Primer for obama
by Sydney Williams,
breitbart.com
March 11, 2013
“I am for economy. After that I am for more economy.”
Generations of Americans have been taught that it was a frugal, laissez-faire, “Silent Cal” who served as our 30th President. “Weaned on a pickle,” was the way Alice Roosevelt Longworth once impolitely described him.
Certainly Calvin Coolidge favored business, was careful with a dollar, and was equally careful (and short) in conversation, but there was much more to the man. Amity Shlaes has corrected that perception in her tersely titled biography, Coolidge, and provided an illuminating portrait of a President who was highly popular during his five and a half years in office. He ended America’s military expeditions in Central America and brought prosperity to millions at home. While the times are very different from that long-ago age, there was much in his beliefs and conduct that IS universal and timeless. Mr. Obama would be wise to read and study this book.
One of the more timely [....]
Intellectuals and Race
(4-Part Series; following here)
by Dr Thomas Sowell,
creators.com
March 12, 2013
There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels.
A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others.Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged "the gradual extinction of an inferior race."
It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading universities and were internationally renowned.
Presidents of Stanford University and of MIT were among the [....]
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/intellectuals-and-race.html
Intellectuals and Race (Part 2)
by Dr Thomas Sowell,
creators.com
March 12, 2013
Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance.Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, "We owe London to Rome" — an acknowledgement that Roman conquerors created Britain's most famous city, at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves.
No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire — one encompassing one fourth of the land area of the earth and one fourth of the human beings on the planet.
History has many dramatic examples of the rise and fall of peoples and nations, for a wide range of known and unknown reasons. What history does not have is [....]
Intellectuals and Race (Part 3)
by Dr Thomas Sowell,
creators.com
March 12, 2013
The desire of intellectuals for some grand theory that will explain complex patterns with some solitary and simple factor has produced many ideas that do not stand up under scrutiny, but which have nevertheless had widespread acceptance — and sometimes catastrophic consequences — in countries around the world.The theory of genetic determinism which dominated the early 20th century led to many harmful consequences, ranging from racial segregation and discrimination up to and including the Holocaust. The currently prevailing theory is that malice of one sort or another explains group differences in outcomes. Whether the lethal results of this theory would add up to as many murders as in the Holocaust is a question whose answer would require a detailed study of the history of lethal outbursts against groups hated for their success.
These would include murderous mob violence against the Jews in Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ibos in Nigeria, among others. Class-based mass slaughters of the successful would range from Stalin's extermination of the kulaks in the Soviet Union to Pol Pot's wiping out of at least a quarter of the population of Cambodia for the crime of being educated middle class people, as evidenced by even such tenuous signs as wearing glasses.
Minorities who have been more [....]
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/intellectuals-and-race-part-iii.html
Intellectuals and Race (Part 4)
by Dr Thomas Sowell,
creators.com
March 12, 2013
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.
Multiculturalism is a tempting quick fix for groups that lag by simply pronouncing their cultures to be equal, or "equally valid," in some vague and lofty sense. Cultural features are just different, not better or worse, according to this dogma.
Yet the borrowing of particular features from other cultures — such as Arabic numerals that replaced Roman numerals, even in Western cultures that derived from Rome — implies that some features are not simply different but better, including numbers. Some of the most advanced cultures in history have borrowed from other cultures, because no given collection of human beings has created the best answers to all the questions of life.
Nevertheless, since multiculturalists see all cultures as equal or "equally valid," they see no justification for [....]
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/intellectuals-and-race-part-iv.html
Sam's Smear
Preposterous history from The New Republic
by Ramesh Ponnuru; Jonah Goldberg,
nationalreview.com
March 12, 2013
‘Every contributor to this collection . . . blandly ignores the possibility that there could be any real issue of a rational kind in American politics today which would justify the existence of an opposition, and proceeds to a sociological-psychological analysis of the extraordinary fact that there is one.” Frank Meyer was writing more than 50 years ago, but the impulse he described is still at work. The explanation for conservatives’ opposition to President Obama and his agenda must be found not in our ideas but in our pathologies.
Thus many liberals seem to have convinced themselves that we resist Obama’s agenda because he is black. It is a theory that does not depend on evidence. Liberals read elaborations of the theory not to understand the world around them but to feel the warm glow of moral superiority.It is a glow that suffuses the long [....]
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/342411/sam-s-smear
Educational Rot
by Dr Walter E. Williams,
creators.com
March 11, 2013
American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there's enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who've become handmaidens for teachers unions. There's another education issue that's neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That's the low academic preparation of many teachers. That's an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we're to improve the quality of education. Let's look at it.
Schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, tend to represent the academic slums of most college campuses. They tend to be home to students who have the lowest academic achievement test scores when they enter college, such as SAT scores. They have the lowest scores when they graduate and choose to take postgraduate admissions tests — such as the GRE, the MCAT and the LSAT.
The California Basic Educational Skills Test, or CBEST, is mandatory for teacher certification in California. It's a joke. Here's a multiple-choice question on its practice math test: [....]
http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-williams/educational-rot.html
Part 3 MAY follow....
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