What a great Daddy!

Ok folks, this is by far the best thing your going to see on Twitter today

Yaayyyy for great #DADS 🥰❤️😂 pic.twitter.com/ZMbKcQt140

— 💜CORY💜 (@Cory__1077) September 27, 2019

"when the cops come to crush wrongthink, whose side should they use force and threat of imprisonment to champion?"

That is the question asked by Ace of Spades. Muslims are taking their children out of a school in England. Go here to read why.

Help us, Betsy!

Recently I spoke with a woman who retired about ten years ago from a career as a school psychologist. She told me she could never go back "the way things are going nowadays." I asked her what she meant. "If a child was confused about his or her gender, and wanted to be called by the name of the opposite sex, I could never do that."

Who is winning, folks? Education seems to be one area where conservatives are clearly not winning. Let's see if Betsy DeVos can make a difference. I think she can!

How can we educate children so they end up as adults, not snowflakes?

Fred on Everything notices that

Kids will learn what interests them. They won’t learn anything else. This is why hackers of fifteen years break into secured networks but do not know whether Columbus discovered America or the other way around.

So what is the point of school?

Far better would be perhaps junior high followed by vocational training in a field of interest to the student. In four years currently wasted on learning nothing, a kid could get a monumental head start on being an auto mechanic (look under the hood of your car and tell me it’s a job for dummies), electrician, paramedic, computer tech, accountant, dental technician, and so on. Or be phenomenally ready for med school. Such training of the very young would not in all fields amount to professional competence, but would produce dynamite candidates for further study.

This would serve the primary purpose of keeping them off the streets. Kids would be no less prepared to make momentous decisions of state–heaven help us–than current ones. They would also end up as adults, not Snowflakes.

Read more here.

Our educational system is actually working on all cylinders! We have a "civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide!"

Patrick Deneen writes at Front Porch Republic,

...We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, historyless free agents, and educational goals composed of contentless processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.” Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical). In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps. Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for “multi-culturalism” signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of “diversity” signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.

...Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

...Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.

Read more here.

Regulated sectors causing biggest price rises

What sectors of our economy are responsible for most of our rising costs? Healthcare, housing, education, and prescription drugs. All areas heavily regulated.


h/t Instapundit

Hungary's Prime Minister speaks out against the Left

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has told Swiss magazine die Weltwoche that the migrant invasion of Europe is part of a master plan of American Democrats and European elites.

The European Left and radical American Democrats have concocted a theory for this new world.

He said the elite, or ruling classes are only concerned with “[c]ute things like human rights, progress, peace, openness, tolerance… We are not talking about freedom, we are not talking about Christianity, we do not talk about the nation and we are not talking about the pride.”

“They see migration as an opportunity. The left-wing European intelligentsia was theoretically prepared. Now we are dealing with simplicity and power politics: All evidence and experience suggest that the overwhelming majority of these migrants will choose the political left once they are naturalised.

Raheem Kassam writes in Breitbart that Orban is

the first European leader to erect a strong and almost impenetrable border fence, has previously hit out at pro migrant invasion individuals and ideologues including Hungarian-American businessman George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations provide funding to almost every pro-migration activist and talking head in the English-speaking world.

Mr. Orban’s government very recently announced that it would be sending a 300-strong border patrol force to Greece, presumably because he believes the Greeks will not abide by their obligations to secure Europe’s borders.

He added, when asked if Greece should close its borders: “Yes, but the problem is that the Greeks do not want to do. For me it’s a great mystery why we accept this behaviour of the Greeks. Why do we not tell them: ‘Watch out, you are an EU member. We have helped you in your crisis, perhaps it wasn’t perfect, but we had the best intentions. You have a clear obligation, as far as you can. You have signed a contract called Schengen. Please do your job!'”

...European Union countries are deeply split over how to respond to the sudden and massive influx.

Slovenia began erecting a razor wire fence along parts of its border with Croatia on Wednesday, and Sweden ostensibly closed its borders on Thursday, November 13th.

Orban has said Hungary does not want Muslims in large numbers, and that migrants are coming to Europe not to flee danger but rather because they want “a German or perhaps a Swedish life”.

...And he repeated that the left dominates institutions across Europe: “…viewed from an intellectual point of view, the political right is still not as competitive as the left. We aren’t represented in the media, not strongly represented in the think tanks, universities and schools, i.e. where future generations are educated. This battle has been lost from our parents.”

Read more here.

Three ways to reduce poverty

Last February Glenn Reynolds wrote an article for the Indianapolis Star, suggesting three areas where Congress could take action to alleviate poverty. One was Education. Glenn writes,

...Yes, Obama's free community college program is a start. But if Republicans in Congress want to make hay, they should also require that every college receiving federal funds — which is pretty much all of them — accept community college credits 100 percent for purposes of transferring. This would substantially help lower-income students trying to get four-year degrees. On a further note, we could go national on something like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry's plan to make it possible to get a four-year college degree for $10,000. Already, 12 Texas colleges have signed on. (Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, have some additional ideas, too.) Meanwhile, at the K-12 level, we need to promote school choice, and alternatives such as online and home schooling, that can offer students better education than failing public schools, at lower cost. If education is a key to alleviating poverty and income inequality, then schools should be run for the benefit of students, not the benefit of teachers and administrators.

Immigration: Yes, we're a nation of immigrants. But it's also true that when you allow a lot of low-skilled immigrants in from Mexico and Central America, you push down wages for low-skilled American citizens. You want to help poor workers in America? Cut down on the number of people competing for their jobs. (The well-off understand the impact of competition, which is why nobody's talking about opening up immigration to unlimited numbers of foreign lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants or, God forbid, pundits. As Reihan Salam observed in Slate last week, the upper-middle-class is hyper-vigilant about protecting its turf from competition. Likewise, Silicon Valley firms are always trying to relax visas for tech workers so as to push American wages in that sector down, because that's what immigration does to wages.

Job licensing:...occupational licensing is touted as a protection for consumers, but in practice it mostly just protects the licensed from competition, protection for which they reward politicians with votes and donations.

The right to employment is protected by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, which also grants Congress the power to pass "appropriate legislation" to protect rights. Congress should act to make state licensing laws subject to strict judicial scrutiny, and should also require states to recognize each other's professional and occupational licenses so as to enhance mobility and opportunity.

Read more here.

Our trajectory

At PJ Media David Solway lists nine phenomena that may portend an American collapse.

Education. American pre-university education, with its inbred pedagogical and curricular decrepitude, has been further compromised by the entrenching of the Common Core program, characterized by coercive federal intrusion and string-attached funding, monopoly publishing and testing, elimination of pivotal American figures and historical events, a leftist disposition, and a powerful pro-Muslim bias.

Higher education is in no better shape. Standards have been lowered to admit those who are unfit for the rigors of post-secondary education; the curriculum has been both diluted and politicized; the campus has become a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment and activism; debate, argument and the free exchange of ideas are no longer part of its intellectual currency as a left consensus has shut down the expression of contrary views; feminist orthodoxy has exerted a castrating effect on university teaching and policy; trigger warnings prioritize feelings over knowledge, infantilizing a student body that must be spared the slightest twitch of emotional discomfort; and draconian language laws meant to combat expressions of “micro-aggression,” no matter how vanilla, have prohibited statements like “America is the land of opportunity” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” In short, the utopian ideal of “social justice” has snookered the pursuit of truth and the formation of inquiring minds.

...The university now graduates in ever increasing volume a class of sanctimonious and indoctrinated incompetents—a recipe for social calamity.

Gender Theory. ...Putting the stamp of legitimacy on the farce-in-progress, Obama has just signaled his approval of gender dysfunction in appointing the freakish transgender aspirant Raffi Freedman-Gurspan as director of outreach and recruitment for the White House personnel office.

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan in Washington, D.C.
National Center for Transgender Equality via AP

Such aberrations follow from and go hand in hand with a longstanding, aggressive and doctrinaire feminism that has infected every important social and professional institution, leading to the legal and societal deprivileging and even the feminization of men, who must not only endure institutional inequities but must continually apologize for their existence—another recipe for social and cultural catastrophe.

Immigration. Open-door immigration, a consequence of programmatic multiculturalism conceived as a social good and justified by the contentless mantra of “diversity,” is a surefire source of disorder, tension and sporadic episodes of violence. Indeed, the incursion of Islam into the West is nothing less than the latest installment of the millennial campaign to subvert and conquer the liberal democracies of the developed world. The Islamic doctrine of hijra or migration, emulating Mohammad’s journeys to Medina (originally Yathrib) and Abyssinia, is being re-enacted before our noses. The evidence is all around us and is so convincing that only the deluded, the cowed or the complicit can deny or cosmeticize or facilitate its progress.

Europe is disintegrating before our eyes, the Commonwealth nations are gradually being destabilized, and the United States now finds itself saddled not only with a growing and restive Islamic community but with dubious Muslim officials embedded in the highest levels of its administration and a president who has modified the oath of allegiance so that immigrants [read: Muslims] need not “bear arms on behalf of the United States.”

Add to this the unstanchable deluge of illegal migrants pouring across the southern border, abetted by the current government, swollen by anchor baby, “birth tourism,” and antiquated chain migration law, and encouraged by the existence of so-called sanctuary cities. As a result, we have a country losing its national character and exposing itself to mounting domestic turbulence.

Religion. ...As G.K. Chesterton is reputed to have said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

...One becomes a social justice warrior or a warrior for Islam or some other substitute for what has been relinquished.

...Aside from the robust evangelical community, the U.S., like Europe, is turning away from its religious foundations, with the attendant loss of civil coherence.

Replacement Ratio. When a nation ceases to reproduce itself, the prognosis for long-term survival is patently negative. Every liberal democracy, with the exception of Israel, has fallen dramatically beneath the replacement ratio of 2.1, including the United States (reaching an historic low in 2013, according to Forbes ). This is a palpable sign of impending ruination that cannot be ignored.


...As Western cultures grow increasingly hedonistic , concentrating on pleasure and entertainment rather than living productive and reproductive lives—Iain Bamforth remarks in A Doctor’s Dictionary how “hedonism has turned into a kind of militancy”— as marriage becomes a failing social institution, and as pro-choice abortion is now virtually unlimited, it is only a matter of time before the regenerative mortgage forecloses.

Anti-Semitism. Although anti-Semitism and its cognate, anti-Zionism, are by no means a significant social depravity in the U.S., they flourish in three major constituencies: the elite leftist segment of the population, the Democratic Party, and, most tellingly, the administration of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy is demonstrably anti-Israel and pro-Muslim, in particular pro-Iranian. Throwing his support behind the Muslim Brotherhood while playing Doctor Faustus to a diabolical ayatollah, he has, in fact, surrendered the Middle East to prolonged Muslim insurgency, thus endangering the survival of Israel, America’s traditional and loyal ally. Former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s recent book Ally, despite its measured tones, makes this act of treachery amply clear. Similarly, “if Obama has his way,” observes James Lewis in a short but compendious article for American Thinker, “Israel will be the first national victim.”

Race. Race relations in the U.S. have markedly deteriorated under the suzerainty of the present administration, in some places resembling guerilla warfare as black-on-white violence proliferates and race riots are becoming an almost regular occurrence. Victor Davis Hanson in an article for PJ Media aptly titled “The Tragic and Complete Collapse of Racial Relations” indicates that “a small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty—no more than 3-4% of the general population—is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed.” The racial divide is widening rather than closing and the prospect for civil upheaval metastasizes alarmingly.

The Economy. The American economy under the statist and regulatory dispensation of the present administration is plainly on the verge of implosion. Massive unemployment, the piling on of astronomical debt, the collapse of the housing market, the insensate printing of fiat money, the downgrading of the nation’s credit rating, the high cost of the carbon conspiracy fostered by the false hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, a crushing trade deficit, and the precarious status of the reserve currency all point to a looming and unprecedented fiscal cataclysm in the making.

Obama. Anyone who doubts that Barack Hussein Obama, to quote James Lewis once again, is a “false messiah” and “a cancer on the body politic,” a Marxist-trained and Alinsky-inspired radical, an Islamic sympathizer, a nuclearizing agent for Iran (thus fulfilling Carter’s legacy), a congenital liar and frivolous narcissist, a contemptible dispenser of apologies for a country that has been—or had been—a force for good in a maleficent world, and the worst and most dangerous president in American history by an order of magnitude—anyone who doubts this has not been listening or looking or is himself dedicated to America’s destruction.

A considerable sector of the American public is surely aware, dimly or acutely, of several, many or all of the nine signs of approaching national collapse assembled here, even though these portents are almost universally censored or deliberately misrepresented by the liberal elite, by government and academia, and by mainstream press and TV coverage. These entities operate under the aegis of what has come to be known as political correctness, the assault upon truth, honesty and candid expression that taints and devitalizes the culture. It serves a triple function, namely, to suppress anything that opposes orthodox opinion or is felt as unpleasant, no matter how crucial to our wellbeing, to flatter our exalted sense of ourselves, and to promote a political agenda by masking its underlying purpose. As George Orwell famously observed and history has abundantly demonstrated, the perversion of language is a tried and tested facet of totalitarian strategy, which seeks to destroy the ability of a subject population to think lucidly and to make reasoned judgments.

... Can the desired election of a responsible and patriotic conservative administration undo the damage and turn back the tide of devastation? Can America return to its foundations? The future, like science, is not settled. Chance—or miracle—may intervene to alter a trajectory.

Read more here.

Keep trying, Katie

As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation?

Victor Davis Hanson writes about how California has led the nation in a downhill spiral:

California taught the nation that taxes can skyrocket – the state has the highest basket of income, sales, and gasoline taxes in the nation – even as infrastructure, government services, and schools erode. It established the national precedent of opposing new infrastructure projects and then enjoying them once the planners and builders who were criticized finished them. California equated a Silicon Valley smartphone in the hand with knowledge in the head – and the nation at large soon produced the most electronically wired and least knowledgeable generation in memory.

Read more here.

What are the best ways to combat inequality?

Richard Epstein writes at Hoover's Defining Ideas blog,

The critical political struggle of the 2016 presidential election may well be the redistribution of wealth. How that issue plays out is likely to depend on whether it is cast in terms of economic growth or income inequality. If the Republicans successfully push the growth agenda, then the Democrats will be on the defensive. If the Democrats drive home the theme of income inequality, then the Republicans will squirm. This is a contest that the Republicans should win if they play their cards correctly.

...Put simply, it is an intellectual fantasy to think that it is possible to address questions of inequality without taking into account any productivity losses that these proposals may take. Those difficulties do not arise if the first emphasis is placed instead upon the creation of wealth. Indeed it is altogether possible to improve the position of the worst off in society by a set of productive measures that widen the income gap between rich and poor.

Assume that we have just two groups in society, one of whose members all have wealth at the level of 10 and the second, far smaller, have wealth at the level of 1,000. A change in legal position that increases the wealth of the bottom group from 10 to 15 and the top group from 1,000 to 1,200 will increase absolute inequality even as it improves the position of the people at the bottom. Ironically, it will also give larger percentage increases to those at the bottom. Indeed, many social changes do produce gains across the board. But it is typically beyond the capacity of any social planner to steer productive activity in ways that ensure that whatever growth does take place will result in a reduction of any income gap by any system of state taxation and regulation.

This line of reasoning has not, of course, stopped the champions of income equality in the Democratic Party from pushing its front-running candidate, Hillary Clinton, into putting the inequality issue front and center during the current campaign.

...But it is a much harder position to think of how best to provide those “robust services” to get children out of poverty. On this score, the standard progressive line is to favor stronger unions within the framework of an overall public school system. But that system works for the benefits of the unions, and not for the benefit of the children who are denied access to charter schools, which provide better education to the children that they teach than ordinary public schools.

...Sensible policies to combat inequality follow from a consistent classical liberal position, which seeks to promote competition in the private market and in the provision of public education. The rest of the egalitarian program is counterproductive insofar as it keeps the poor worse while leaving the rich worse off as well. That is a strategy for dual ruin that will only deepen the current economic malaise.

Read more here.

"We are sliding very fast toward fascism"

(credit: Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)

Comedian Rob Schneider speaks out:

“Democracies don’t end well. We are sliding very fast towards fascism.

“There’s a polarization that’s happening…I do think you look can look at government and go, ‘Wow, it is out of control now,’ and if you do criticize or tend to be not directly along a liberal stand, you can get murdered,” Schneider commented.

“There’s not one segment of business under the Obama administration that hasn’t been hurt…he attacks for-profit schools, which is totally an elitist thing from a guy that went to Harvard. I think for free, by the way,” Schneider said.

He was also critical of the media for being overly influenced by the government and not standing up for the American people.

“We don’t really have freedom of the press. It’s owned by about eight different companies, and it doesn’t really express or help the average American,” Schneider stated.