"Faith" or "Science" based education?

What kind of education is this, "faith-based" or "science-based"?

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons.

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.

"Playing with toys guns, saying 'I'm going to shoot you,' desensitizes them, so as they get older, it's easier for them to use a real gun," Hill said.

I'm sure that Principal Hill has good scientific evidence for this claim.

Not...

How Government Wrecked the Gas Can

I haven't bought a gas can in the last three years, so I was unaware that apparently, you can't, anymore. At least, not one that works...

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

Of course, this is a logical result of the utopian mindset that believes that we can establish a legislative framework that will bring about heaven on earth. And a statist mindset that believes that people should be protected from themselves by preventing their being allowed to do anything whatsoever that might possibly involve risk, no matter how small.

And I'm sure that no one set out to make gas cans unusable. Just like no one set out to destroy the private health care system. Or the family. Or the educational system. Or the banking system. No, it's just one little tweak at a time, one thing that, in someone's opinion, could be - should be - a little bit better, if only Uncle Sam can step in with his mighty power and stop all of the people doing it wrong from doing it wrong.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-- C.S. Lewis

Haven't bought a gas can for three years, and skeptical?  Click over to Home Depot's website and look at the cans.  And the reviews.  Preposterous, of course.  And apparently true...

Can liberals cure stupidity?

Over at Salon, Thomas Schaller wonders, Can liberals cure stupidity?

a confused public makes life difficult for liberal policymakers. The public grossly misunderstands who owns how much in America and who gets what from the U.S. government in ways that make liberal policy prescriptions harder to sell. Americans drastically underestimate wealth inequality in the country, undermining the case for raising higher-bracket income, inheritance or capital gains tax rates.

...

Such findings explain the paradoxical public preference for shrinking government spending even though, according to a YouGov/Economist survey last year, a majority of Americans only advocated less spending for one of 14 items polled — that dastardly 1-percenter: foreign aid.

...

to President Obama’s great chagrin and partially resulting from his own communication failures, Americans remain very confused about the provisions of the Affordable Care Act: what it does and doesn’t do, when certain provisions kick in, what the law will cost, and so on. Again, it’s hard to square the circle of a public evenly divided on the legislation overall despite the fact a plurality if not majority of polled respondents support every major provision of ACA except the very unpopular individual mandate.

Can liberals cure stupidity? Not until they can stop producing fantasyland analyses like this one and recognize that some options are mutually exclusive. The idea that because, for example, people like many of the individual components of Obamacare, they should like the whole thing, and it must be a communications failure that they don't is delusional. It assumes that you can have all of the good things you want at no cost and with no trade-offs, and that there won't be any negative repercussions as a result. The world doesn't work that way.  Most people recognize that.

Consider transportation. You can ask people if they want a stylish new car. You can ask if they want good gas mileage, lots of seating and cargo space, good performance on the highway, strong and safe construction, and a low price. Guess what - the answer to all of those will be "yes" from a strong majority. But they can't have them, because some of those things are mutually exclusive. The same thing is true of the health care bill. 

In the real world, people recognize that those trade-offs exist. In the cocoon of progressive fantasyland, it's just a communication problem.

"...paved with good intentions..."

Bloomberg Plans a Ban on Large Sugared Drinks

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.

The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.

The mayor is almost certainly correct in associating sugared drinks as a particularly potent contributor to the extensive evidences of obesity and its associated metabolic disorders and diseases in the United States.That said, it's an appalling abuse of the power of government to institute the kind of bans that he's proposing. Even if we suppose that this would reduce consumption rather than just increasing units sold (and increasing inconvenience and waste as a result), what right does Nanny Bloomberg have to decree what size soda or fruit juice anyone purchases? If it's not bad enough to ban outright, what purpose is served by having the government (i.e., we the people, banded together with guns and sovereign immunity) mandate the size of the packaging?

There are a lot of issues that this raises, and I don't have time right now. Expect a future post with more on this topic...

When Grizzly Bears Attack …

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help..."

A North Idaho man killed a grizzly bear that was threatening his family. Now he could face jail time if the Obama administration has its way.

Rachel Hill looked out her bedroom window on the evening of Mother’s Day and saw three grizzly bears attacking the children’s 4H club pigs’ pen. The Hill children had been outside practicing basketball a half hour earlier, so seeing the bears concerned her and her husband, Jeremy Hill. After calling for his kids and hearing no response, Jeremy grabbed his daughter’s rifle. After once more calling for the kids, fearing they were in danger, he shot at the closest grizzly bear, which was about 120 feet away.

The other two grizzlies fled while the wounded bear began to run off in the same direction, but then turned and came towards the house. Hill shot the bear a final time due to the danger a severely wounded grizzly bear posed to his family and others. Hill called two officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They came out, investigated, and unsuccessfully tried to capture the other two grizzly bears by placing bear traps on the property.

Regardless of the danger to Hill’s family, grizzly bears are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, thus the federal government is prosecuting him. If convicted, Hill could face up to one year in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Yup. Kill a grizzly. Save a woodpecker. Send your kids to school with a lunch. Leave a pocket-knife in an emergency kit in your glove compartment. Try to buy a cold medicine that works. It's all the same. Got to make a law, got to enforce a law, because that's the only way to legislatively enact Utopia.

Not new, of course. And it's been commented on before...

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on the guilt.

- Ayn Rand

As a general rule, there is no situation so bad, no condition so dire and desperate, that it cannot be made worse by those with a vision of an earthly Utopia...

"And God, please protect us from the well-intentioned..."

StrategyPage: America Gives China A Mineral Monopoly

Complaints from the Congo are growing about the U.S. legislation intended to stop illegal mineral sales. The Dodd-Frank bill (also called the Obama Law) has a clause that prohibits the sale of so-called conflict minerals may have been well-intentioned but it was not well-thought out. Rather than run the risk of buying any minerals that might have been smuggled from the Congo, many major mining companies are simply refusing to buy minerals from central Africa. The result is a de facto embargo. There are few buyers for Congo’s valuable minerals, [LB: I'm sure that makes everything better for the Congolese, right? Destroying the economic value of the resources that they do have?] especially tantalum and tungsten which have many hi-tech uses. This has damaged the Congo’s economy [LB: Shocker...], because the nation relies on mineral exports. According to some sources, China, which does not have to meet Dodd-Frank standards, is snapping up many minerals at very cheap prices.

Unintended Consequences. It's not just a good idea - it's the law...

What the well-intentioned "we know best" utopian leftists in America have done is a) damage the economy of the Congo b) to the benefit of Chinese companies c) and the detriment of US companies d) without improving the lives of the Congolese in any way. In other words, it was a lose-lose-lose-lose proposition!

But they meant well, so it doesn't matter...

Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises

You know that it had to have been horribly painful for the New York Times to print this...

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.

“I won’t say I’m not frustrated,” said Van Jones, an Oakland activist who served briefly as Mr. Obama’s green-jobs czar before resigning under fire after conservative critics said he had signed a petition accusing the Bush administration of deliberately allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a claim Mr. Jones denies.

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

Sigh.

In war, Helmuth von Moltke said that "no plan survives contact with the enemy." (Ok, that's a pithier Engish version of the actual German quote, but work with me, here.) That's the case for liberal economic plans and reality, too. Any plan, the success of which is dependent on people not responding to incentives and disincentives, and economic realities ceasing to function, is doomed to failure. And they don't care. Their intentions are good, so that's the important thing. They want to create "green jobs," and they're willing to spend other peoples' money on it, and therefore, the "green jobs" should materialize!

The world doesn't work that way.

"Nothing dear, you're not qualified"

One of the early scenes in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life depicts a hospital birth. The focus of the doctors and nurses and administrators all clustered around is on all of the fancy equipment and even the financing of said equipment ("we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way it comes under the monthly current budget, and not the capital account!"). What they're not particularly interested in is the young woman. Anyway, at one point, as the doctors are making sure that everyone knows his or her own part in the process, the woman on the gurney asks, "What should I do?" And the response is, "Nothing, dear - you're not qualified."

For some reason, I was reminded of that by this story¹ out of Chicago...

Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.

"Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?" the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.

Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: "We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!"

Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: "Do you see the situation?"

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago's West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

"Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," Carmona said. "It's about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception."

I suppose we should be grateful that they even make exceptions for medical issues and allergies, but I don't see why we'd assume that will remain the case. After all, if the school is omniscient enough to provide for the children without problems better than the parents can, how much longer will it be before they decide that they can care for the parents with problems better than parents can?

One more itsy-bitsy step on the road to totalitarianism. We've gone from schooling for those who can afford it -> schools for everyone who wants to go -> mandatory schooling for all. We've gone from schools not feeding kids -> schools making lunch available to kids -> schools making "free" lunch available to kids -> schools making lunch mandatory for kids. (Thinking about following the history of school health -> sex ed -> condoms -> ??? to a similar and logical conclusion is ... unsettling...)

"If we can just put the right programs in place," cry the Utopians, "we can perfect the human condition, and make a heaven of the earth!" But they don't know what they don't know, and are likely - very likely - to do far more harm than good². Even in the exceptionally unlikely event that the school were to actually serve a lunch that was both a) nutritionally sound and b) tasty enough that the kids would eat it, that does not come close to justifying the infringement on parental rights and responsibilities that this mandate represents. It is appalling.

Every overstep of government power begins this way. "Her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices." Of course it is. It's trite and cliche to say that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," but it's certainly true that the road to totalitarian government is. Every encroachment on freedom and liberty starts with someone wielding political power in pursuit of some greater good. And it may do some good for some population, but it almost invariably does some unintended harm to some other population at the same time. And, in the process, it enables the next bit of power transfer from individuals to government. It doesn't go all at once, just a little bit at a time, and the causes are always "good ones." It's "for the children" or "for women" or "for minorities" or "for the elderly." And they never even consider the possibility that they might be, you know, WRONG. "Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," says the principal. Well, that's almost certainly true for some of the students, but it's equally almost certainly false for others. But it's obviously too expensive to treat everyone as an individual, so everyone gets the same. Better, worse, more appropriate, less appropriate, none of that matters - everyone gets the same.

FDR didn't set out to sell a program for transferring massive wealth from grandchildren to their grandparents, but that's what Social Security is. LBJ didn't (at least nominally) set out to destroy the black family, but that's been one of the significant end results of the "Great Society" programs which incentivize out-of-wedlock births and essentially punish marriage. Those programs were started with noble intentions ("taking care of the elderly" and "support for women with infant children") but the damage from the unintended consequences have dwarfed any good that they might have done.

And that's going to be the case in Chicago's school lunch mandate, too...


¹Hat tip to Tom Naughton for the link to the story...

²Everything that the Federal government knows about nutrition and promotes about nutrition is wrong. Everything that we've been told about how to eat is wrong. The food pyramid is upside down.

"Just one more law will fix it..."

Remember that C.S. Lewis quote from yesterday? Go ahead and read it again, refresh your memory of what it says.

Then read this story on the Cost of Meth Prohibition by Megan McCardle:

If you've been following drug laws at all, you'll know that you can no longer buy cold medicine with pseudoephedrine without getting a clerk to get it for you from behind the counter, and signing for it. That's because pseudoephedrine is an ingredient in the most popular amateur syntheses of methamphetamine. By making it hard to get, authorities hoped that they could fatally damage the meth trade.

It's long been an article of faith among libertarians that this was simply going to push manufacture to Mexican gangs, but now Keith Humphreys tells me that it hasn't even done that. Instead, armies of "smurfers" are getting around the sudafed purchase limits; a box of pseudoephedrine-laden pills purchased for $7 to $8 can bring $40 to $50 from meth dealers. So meth use is back up...

...what we're effectively talking about is making it impossible for people to unplug a stuffy nose without going to a doctor. Which in turn means either that we're going to spend $50 to $100 per cold (obviously, much more expensive than even a bunch of really terrible meth lab fires) or that people are going to go without treatment.

So I'm going to quote myself again.

This is a problem of utopianism. So many of the issues that we, as a country, face right now are the result of people who believe, really, truly believe, in the perfectability of the human condition. And the driving mindset is the delusional belief that if we could just, somehow, someway, pass the right laws, institute the right government programs, then everything would be perfect. The nonsensical belief that we can do away with violence, hunger, disease, thirst, war, accidents, illiteracy, animal attacks, dandruff, undercooked burritos, global warming, hemorrhoids and the heartbreak of psoriasis if only we could institute the right government programs. There are no inherent problems with humanity that lead to problems, at least none that can't be legislated away, and with enough of the right kind of laws, humanity can achieve perfection, where everyone is smart and educated, has equal wealth and no disputes with his neighbors, a Lake Wobegone world where everyone's above average.

It's public policy from the John Lennon ("imagine all the people living life in peace") school, and it requires government policies from the Vladimir Lenin school. Because you can't perfect human behavior in a free society. (You can't perfect it in a totalitarian society, either, but there are always going to be some who believe that, if they only had a little more control, if the could only institute a few more restrictions, they could make everything perfect.)

Quote

As with so many things I think, and say, C.S. Lewis said it first and better...

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- C. S. Lewis in The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, Res Judicatae (June 1953)

Legislating morality

I got a note from a friend last night, in which she asked whether two talking heads thought "that one can legislate morality?" In particular, did these pundits think that the right set of laws would have prevented the mass-murder in Tucson last week? And the answer is, probably they do. As I've written before, one of the markers of the American left is the utopian belief in the "perfectability of the human condition," if only we can put the right laws in place. Naïve, of course, but there it is.

But what I want to address this morning is the phrase "legislating morality." It is the keystone of one standard piece of American rhetoric, that "you can't legislate morality." It's one of those things that many people will agree with eagerly, and with which others will generally acquiesce. After all, none of us wants our own particular morality legislated away. We don't want our vices or pleasures (which are so often the same thing) taken away because some, or many, or most of our fellow citizens don't share them, or approve of them.

In actuality, the objection to "legislating morality" turns out to be, much like the current call for "civil discourse," not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right. It isn't "legislating morality" that the left is opposed to, it's "legislating morality" with which they don't agree. Restrictions on sexual behavior or personal conduct with regards to drugs are the kind of "legislating morality" that are abhorrent to them. Other things, well, not so much. Many of them are all for "legislating morality" when it comes to guns or speech.

It turns out, moreover, that when you exam it philosophically, the whole facade of objection to "legislating morality" crumbles. The fact is, we legislate nothing but morality. What is a budget other than a moral statement? It is a statement that we, the people, believe that the work and wealth of some citizens are best used by the state for purposes which the state wishes but the citizens wouldn't necessarily support voluntarily. It is easy to see that laws against adultery or drug use are "legislating morality." But what about restrictions on access to guns? What about civil rights legislation? Child labor laws? How are the National Endowment for the Arts or National Public Radio or the National Park System not statements of morality? When has there been a bigger legislation of morality than the "Affordable Care Act" (Obamacare), in which it was determined that it was practical or efficient or praiseworthy or desirable, i.e., right, for the government to take away from some (many) and coerce many others in order to provide benefits for a few?

All politicians couch all legislation in moral terms. They want support for doing the "right" thing. Sometimes because they believe that it's the right thing, sometimes because they merely think that it will benefit them politically. In either case, you never see someone pushing legislation which cannot be supported as the "right," i.e., moral, thing to do. And that goes equally for politicians politicians on the left pushing for gun restrictions and on the right pushing for abortion restrictions. It goes for tax increases and tax decreases, welfare programs and welfare reform, funding for the arts and cuts to funding for the arts. Yet somehow, the cries to avoid "legislating morality" tend to be aimed only at those on the right. It tends not to be a good-faith criticism, and when someone uses it, he ought to be challenged to point to a single law that doesn't "legislate morality." He won't be able to...

Utopianist idiocy

Because obviously this would have prevented the Tucson tragedy...

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, is planning to introduce legislation that would make it illegal to bring a gun within 1,000 feet of a government official, according to a person familiar with the congressman's intentions.

Now it's possible that this information is not correct. I hope, for Congressman King's sake, that that's the case. But if it isn't, well, he's an idiot. I'm sorry, I don't know how else to put it. The idea that this law, if in place, would have done ANYTHING to prevent the incident which has provoked, or that it would prevent any other lunatic from attacking any other government official, is sub-moronic.

Again, the logic of bad laws:

Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.

Idiocy. This would be a classic demonstration of the Utopian impulse that inevitably leads to increased government authority over the citizenry - "if we just pass the right laws, bad things will stop happening." It's idiocy, and anyone pushing it is, in this case, an idiot.

Silent Spring Dead

Q: What's more silent than a Silent Spring?
A: The millions of dead human beings who have succumbed to malaria, dengue and other mosquito-borne illnesses over the nearly forty years since DDT was outlawed.

Outbreak of Dengue Fever Is Reported in Florida

Dengue fever, a growing scourge in the tropics, has established itself in a popular American tourist destination, federal health officials reported last week...Dengue — a mosquito-borne virus that causes joint pain so severe it is nicknamed “break-bone fever” in Latin America and Asia. According to last week’s report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida health authorities have since found 27 more cases, all in Key West, the last in April. Most victims had a fever and pain in the head, body and eyes, and some had a rash.

The C.D.C. advised doctors to consider a dengue diagnosis in patients with similar symptoms who have been to subtropical parts of the United States. Although there have been outbreaks along the Texas-Mexico border since 1980, the disease had not been seen in Florida since 1934.

Unlike malaria, which is caused by a parasite, dengue is a virus, and there is no cure.

Rachel Carson was not available for comment...


Every action has consequences. Rachel Carson's classic environmentalist screed, Silent Spring, was the kind of hysterical misinformation which led to the demise of DDT, the single best means of controlling the mosquito population ever invented. As a result, millions of people have gotten sick and died of malaria, dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases over the last forty years, most of them the equatorial poor. In other words, Rachel Carson is the classic liberal success story, fighting for the birds and fish at the expense of poor human beings. Celebrated for the acknowledged positive results, while the much more serious negative ramifications are unacknowledged and ignored. A hero to utopian do-gooders everywhere!

"The New Currency Is Obedience"

Wonderful imagery here, and very accurate.

Doctor Zero:

Obama Democrats worship central planning. They have repeatedly expressed the belief that only powerful, maternal government can be trusted to allocate the most essential resources, or manage vital industries. The free market is a playpen, filled with the stuff that isn’t serious enough to merit direct control by the Mother State. When a particular toy causes the children of the electorate to scream, it is quickly snatched out of the pen. The free market can’t even be trusted to deal with airline fees for carry-on luggage… which turned out to be a market response to previous government action. You are expected to sit quietly and swallow your tears if Mother State chooses to beat you over the head with one of your toys.

Central planning is useless if nobody follows the central plans. Where the free market is persuasive, organizing resources by responding to demand and exploiting opportunity, central planning is coercive. It must compel obedience to its designs, and compulsion is always necessary. If people were eager to follow those designs of their own free will, there would be no need for central planning in the first place.

Just an excellent analogy, summarizing the viewpoint and the problem with it...

People change, humanity doesn't

I started writing, saying things that I wanted to say about our government and our society, but I ran across a quote that interested me, and tracking it to the source material, I found that someone had already written what I wanted to write. I was beaten to the punch, but here are some of the things that happen to a prosperous society:

To those who had easily endured toils, dangers, and doubtful and difficult circumstances, ease and wealth, the objects of desire to others, became a burden and a trouble. At first the love of money, and then that of power, began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil. For avarice subverted honesty, integrity, and other honorable principles, and, in their stead, inculcated pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion, and general venality. Ambition prompted many to become deceitful; to keep one thing concealed in the breast, and another ready on the tongue; to estimate friendships and enmities, not by their worth, but according to interest; and to carry rather a specious countenance than an honest heart. These vices at first advanced but slowly, and were sometimes restrained by correction; but afterwards, when their infection had spread like a pestilence, the state was entirely changed, and the government, from being the most equitable and praiseworthy, became rapacious and insupportable.

...

From the influence of riches, accordingly, luxury, avarice, and pride prevailed among the youth; they grew at once rapacious and prodigal; they undervalued what was their own, and coveted what was another’s; they set at naught modesty and continence; they lost all distinction between sacred and profane, and threw off all consideration and self-restraint.

Of course, Gaius Sallustius Crispus was writing about 1st century AD Rome, and Augustine was quoting him in The City of God, but I don't see anything there that isn't relevant to early 21st century America.


If I might descend, briefly, into "partisanship," passages like this are among the things that are relevant to a discussion of "conservatives" and "liberals" (as those terms are currently in use). I've written, many times, of the dangers of utopianism as a governing philosophy. How far have we come in the last 2000 years? Technologically, we've advanced tremendously, but people are still people, with all of the inherent flaws that the Romans had. Lord Acton wrote that "power corrupts" over 100 years ago, Sallust wrote about the corruption of power 1800 years before that, David slept with Bathsheba and had Uriah the Hittite killed 1000 years before that, and the Lord rained down fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah 1000 years before that.

The names change; the lessons remain the same. Human beings are inherently flawed. You cannot build a perfect entity from flawed parts.

The idea that the human condition is perfect-able is lovely but it's fantastic, not realistic, and any program or policy instituted with that idea as an underlying assumption or premise is doomed before it starts. And anyone who believes that he can order society so as to render it perfect has to, in the end, become a tyrant, because a free people will always have the freedom to make bad choices.

Lying with facts - Taunton school edition

Here is a followup to Tuesday's story, about the boy from Taunton who drew the crucifix, that demonstrates how easy it is to lie without actually giving any false facts.

Although reporters regionally and nationally jumped on a story about a 9-year-old boy supposedly suspended for drawing a stick-figure Jesus on the cross, it now appears the tale was overblown.

Contrary to news reports -- including a story on ParentDish -- the boy was never suspended. He and his classmates at Maxham Elementary School in Taunton, Mass. (40 miles south of Boston), were never given an assignment to draw pictures that reminded them of Christmas.

Lie number 1: "The boy was never suspended." According to the boy's father, and, as far as I know, neither addressed nor contradicted by anyone in the school department, he was told that he could not return to school until he had gone through a psychological evaluation. Was he removed from class before the school day was over? Were his parents called to come get him? Were they told that they couldn't come back until he'd been evaluated?

After being removed from the school on Wednesday, he finished that evaluation on Monday, and returned to school either that afternoon or the following morning. Assuming that this is true, he may not have received a nominal suspension, but he certainly received a de facto suspension.


Lie number 2: "He and his classmates...were never given an assignment to draw pictures that reminded them of Christmas." According to the father, they were given the assignment, two days after their Thanksgiving break, of drawing something that reminded them of their Thanksgiving holiday, which had just finished. And the boy had visited the La Salette shrine with his family over the holiday weekend.


In other words, this news report attempts to debunk the story without actually contradicting anything the father said. Given how careful the Superintendent is being with the words she's using, I assume that the father is right. They aren't saying that the boy wasn't given an assignment to draw a picture about their holiday, only that he wasn't given an assignment to draw something about "Christmas or any religious holiday." They aren't saying that he wasn't banned from the school until after an evaluation, only that he wasn't "suspended." Those are weasel words. Rather than debunking the story, they tend to confirm it. I believed it the other day when I posted it - the officials in the Taunton school system have, thus far, strengthed my belief.

Reason number ... why we homeschool

I've lost count, but it's a big number...

Taunton second-grader suspended over drawing of Jesus

A Taunton father is outraged after his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation after drawing a stick-figure picture of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The father said he got a call earlier this month from Maxham Elementary School informing him that his son, a second-grade student, had created a violent drawing. The image in question depicted a crucified Jesus with Xs covering his eyes to signify that he had died on the cross.

Insane. Just insane. As I said recently, "God, spare me from well-meaning liberals." Look at that picture - what kind of demented mind looks at that from a second grader and sees a need for a psychological evaluation? This is child abuse. Someone should lose his or her job over this, because it is completely, totally unacceptable. No one will, of course, but someone should...

"Ungovernable" America

Matthew Yglesias has a revelation:

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

The funny thing is, I read that comment and think, "I've heard that before." Glenn Reynolds notes that he, back in September, expect the stories of White House incompetence "to play out in thumbsucker columns on whether America is ‘ungovernable,’" and he was certainly right. But why did he use that word, and where have I heard it before?

It strikes me that this was a standard complaint the last time we had a Democrat in office, trying to accomplish things "for the children" that the electorate was too stupid to accept didn't want. Here's Jonathan Rauch from the NY Times in September of 1994¹, as the Clinton administration has failed to get health care passed and the Republicans are about to take control of the House of Representatives for the first time in two generations:

The Government is well on its way to a crisis of legitimacy. A June Gallup poll indicated that only 17 percent of Americans trust the Government to do what is right most or all of the time...politicians are more careful about appearances than ever; they get prosecuted or denounced these days for everything short of parking in the wrong space. So why does Washington seem to perform so much worse today than in the past?

...

Multiply this kind of growing "grass-roots" sophistication by the burgeoning number of groups, and the result is pluralism spinning out of control and making the country ungovernable.

As I thought - it's exactly the same complaint, fifteen years ago. Rauch blames lobbyists rather than Republicans, but it doesn't really change anything.

It may be that someone wrote something similar when the Democrats were obstructing George W. Bush on Social Security reform, but I don't remember it, so I don't want to go too far overboard on this. But it strikes me as yet one more difference between the right and the left, how they view Government, what it's for, what it's capable of and what it's limitations are. Think back a few months to Thomas Friedman's lament that Obama didn't have the authority of the Chinese dictators to get things done. Again, evidence of an "ungovernable" America.

Well, they're exactly right. America is "ungovernable." With one caveat. They're using the word "ungovernable" but the idea that they're implying is "unruleable." Because they don't want to govern - they want to rule. They don't want to work with Republicans, deal with grass-roots movements, compromise to improve things. No, they want to impose their rules by fiat. Because, you see, they're smarter and they know better. They are superior human beings and, to get back to a hobby horse I've been flogging recently, they believe that they can impose perfection on the human condition. Utopia is within our grasp if those pesky right-wingers would just get out of the way and let St. Barack engage in his beneficient rule. If you know that you can make things perfect if only given the authority to do so, you're bound to be impatient at any obstacles that might prevent, or even slow, the achievement of that perfection.

That's why we don't see these pieces with Republicans in the White House. Conservatives are not utopians. They understand the limits of government power and government authority and don't want anyone ruling from Washington. And none of the details bother the liberal utopianists when there is a Republican in the White House. If a George Bush has his agenda obstructed by Democrats, that's not evidence of "ungovernability," it's just good work by the obstructors. Because a George Bush shouldn't be "governing" anyway - he's not a good person, not like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were, not like Barack Obama is.


¹ - Rauch, Jonathan. (1994, September 30). Starve Lobbyists, Not Congress :[Op-Ed]. New York Times (Late Edition (east Coast)), p. A.31. Retrieved December 12, 2009, from Banking Information Source. (Document ID: 968311171).

Quoting myself. Again.

Me, a year and a half ago:

Democrats apparently believe that government can, and support programs intended to, create a utopia on earth. They envision a government that ensures that everyone is cared for, fed, clothed, housed and entertained, that problems of any kind resulting from human frailty are ameliorated or eliminated.

Me, two months ago:

So many of the issues that we, as a country, face right now are the result of people who believe, really, truly believe, in the perfectability of the human condition.

Barack Obama, accepting his completely unwarranted, undeserved and bogus Nobel Peace Prize:

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected.

He's delusional. Utterly delusional. He's either hopelessly naive (a mere naif of a Chicago Politician?), blatantly lying or clinically insane. In any event, there's no way that he should be making decisions for anyone, never mind for everyone...

"Nanny state" used to be figurative. Not any more, apparently...

Great Britain was a more-or-less free country at one point, right?

A council has banned parents from supervising their children in public playgrounds until they have undergone criminal record checks.

Adults have been excluded from two adventure play areas in Watford, apart from a handful of council-vetted 'play rangers' who will assist youngsters, it emerged today.

Parents will be forced to watch their children from outside the perimeter fence.

I say again, Please, God, spare me from well-meaning liberals. Protect me from those who want to take from all to help my kids. Spare me the cries of "it's for the children..."