Clive Crook (March 28, 2008) - The dumbing of America

Clive Crook (March 28, 2008) - The dumbing of America

[T]he proportion of 25-34 year olds with at least a college degree has soared. (More than half of South Koreans, Japanese and Canadians in this age group have a college degree or better.) As a result, in that cohort, the US is ... 11th. At first sight, anyway, it is hard to see how US leadership in per capita incomes can be sustained in the face of this trend.

A college degree is the new high school diploma. Its now just an entry point into the working world, no longer a guarantee of a good job.

Colorado now ranks #49 among states in higher education funding. At this rate, our children will be looking for low paying jobs in other countries.

Parents didn't expect daughter to die during prayer

WKBT La Crosse: Parents didn't expect daughter to die during prayer

The mother of an 11-year-old rural Weston girl who died of untreated diabetes says she didn't know her daughter was terminally ill as she prayed for her to get better instead of taking her to the doctor.

California state appellate court says those who teach children in private must have a credential.

Ruling seen as a threat to many home-schooling families - Los Angeles Times

The removal of children from the public education system and the exposure to people of different races, creeds, and beliefs, is one of the scariest trends of modern society. Segregation, whether enforced by the government or self, will not be the answer to our growing intolerance as a society.

Stoking the Beast

It turns out that there is a direct correlation between taxes and the size of government. Cutting taxes without cutting spending actually INCREASES the size of government.

Stoking the Beast: "The conservative movement is in no position to accept or even acknowledge those implications, now that tax cutting has become the long pole in the Republican tent. Therein lies the element of tragedy. By turning a limited-government movement into an anti-tax movement, conservatism has effectively gone into business with the Big Government that it claims to oppose. It is not starving the beast. It is fueling the beast’s appetite. And the beast has a credit card.<"

Spitz Out

Spitz Out: "The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

Robert Reich's Blog: Are We Heading Toward Depression (Part 3)?

Robert Reich's Blog: Are We Heading Toward Depression (Part 3)?: "Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, noted this in his memoir 'Beckoning Frontiers':

'As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.'"

Burgeoning prison populations strain state budgets

Burgeoning prison populations strain state budgets: "Since 1987, spending on corrections outpaced that for higher education in every state except Alabama and Virginia."

There is something fundamentally wrong with our priorities when we are willing to spend more money on prisons than schools.

Jews Are The Genetic Brothers Of Palestinians, Syrians, And Lebanese

"Jewish men shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and these signatures diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of this region. Consequently, Jews and Arabs share a common ancestor and are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of the world."

Quote

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal