Now, It All Makes Sense

Posted on 22/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

I found this article as a link on the stats page of my WordPress blog. Curious, I clicked it and found this article which very plainly explains the communist movement through history and especially in the USA. Although, I have lived through the many elements of communism, I didn’t recognize them as communist. What scares me is that many of the movements have snuck into our society as populist. “Make Love Not War” for instance was coined by a communist named Marcuse. Other communist inspired inventions are: Think Tanks, Political Correctness, Critical Theory, Sexual Liberation, and more. Read this essay to the end and you may concur with me.

The Origins of Political Correctness

February 5, 2000, Bill Lind, 216 Comments

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind. Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Conservative University at American University

If you enjoy this speech, keep up with political correctness and how it continues to emerge on college campuses by following our Faculty Lounge blog.

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.

Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.

So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the “latest thing.”

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he says, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1917, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”

Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”

The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.

One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

Filed under: Conservative, Education | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

How Many Ways Can You Go Blind?

Posted on 18/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

When I asked my friend and fellow Lion that question, Optometrist Dr. Smith replied, “Probably 500, but I’m guessing it’s more like 1000.” That gives us a huge opportunity to serve the blind. As the blind-and-deaf Helen Keller challenged us in 1926 to become Knights of the Blind, she gave us something to work on. Back then, she was so far ahead of us in this topic that it was scary.  Thankfully, the Lions Club International decided to adopt blindness as a pillar of service. We have been striving to help blind people ever since.

Statistically, there are over 12 million people over the age of 40 in America who are classified with visual impairment. Out of that 12 million, over 1 million are legally blind.

Lions have been supportive since Helen Keller presented her challenge to us. For instance, we invented guide dogs and the white cane.

The World Health Organization (WHO) cites five causes of vision impairment and blindness:

1. refractive errors

2. cataract

3. diabetic retinopathy

4. glaucoma

5. age-related macular degeneration

Many more reasons are apparent, like accidents and disease, but there are too many to discuss now.

I am proposing a new way to serve the blind to Lions Clubs. Many newly diagnosed blind people are above the age of sixty. When they are struck with the diagnosis, they are devastated as they would be if they heard they had cancer. Older people have trouble adapting to the condition. The loss of independence is devastating. The loss of mobility combined with losing independence makes living stressful. Yet, people adapt, but often with a significant loss of personal dignity.

About thirty years ago, a young couple from the south suburbs of Chicago, both blind, decided to do something positive with their lives and formed a support group they called OASIS. They worked hard to turn their handicap into something positive. They figured they could help people get back into life even with the lemon they were handed. They met with a handful of vision-impaired individuals and led them in prayer and discussions about handling things that were hard for them. They used their personal experiences as a positive motivation to lead others to do the same thing: leading everyday life as good one can lead without sight.

Five years ago, the Frankfort Lions became aware of OASIS through our neighboring Mokena Lions Club. Together, we joined them by sending money to help them with their work. Since then, Kim and Joe Kuster, the originators of OASIS, have retired and moved to Tennessee to be near their grandchildren. This left the two clubs with a more significant opportunity to keep the organization going and self-supportive. It has been a full year since the Kusters left, and we are still in business and are growing in numbers.

We have learned that people with visual impairment, especially older ones, enjoy the company of people with the same affinity. They feel comfortable with each other, knowing they are not standing out as being different.

OASIS brings together a community of people in similar situations. They come with someone who can drive them and sit around a table with people they can talk to and share experiences with. A facilitator leads them in prayer and motivates them with ways to overcome hardships. Often, they lead the group to share how they handle situations.  The leader introduces them to items that make life easier, like large print calendars, talking clocks, and magnifiers. Every meeting is different from the one before. Lions serve a snack and kibitz with the attendees. They clean up and assist with a game if one is played. A favorite is bingo.

I am telling you this because OASIS is an instrumental and helpful organization within this community. I am sure you also have many people within your realm who could benefit from a vision-impaired support group. We would be happy to help you start a chapter within your club. If you wish to help but are not ambitious enough to begin your own OASIS chapter, you may want to assist OASIS in several ways.  Our most urgent need is for volunteer drivers who can adopt a visually impaired person to take them to and from OASIS meetings once each month. Our second largest need is money to run the meetings and expand services.

 You can donate to OASIS (a not-for-profit 501c3 organization) by clicking the OASIS website link below.

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Filed under: Education, family, health care, Lions Club | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Recipe for Disaster

Posted on 08/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

I am reposting this article by Daniel Greenfield because it is a recipe for disaster we are headed toward. Remember to vote for Harris Walz in November if you want your kid to underperform.

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Daniel Greenfield

Visit DanielGreenfield.org

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow and the Executive Vice President of Programs at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left,tells the story of the Left’s 200 Year War Against America.
Gov. Walz’s Legacy is That Majority of Students Can No Longer Read

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Sat, 7 Sep 2024 10:17 PM PST by Daniel Greenfield
Test scores in Minnesota hit a 30 year low under the former high school teacher.

(Note to Subscribers: After the mailing list service I was using shut down, I was forced to switch to a new service. That’s why this is the first email in a week. I’ve been trying my best to get this right, but if there are any issues with the email, please let me know.)

Gov. Tim Walz has made much of being a former high school teacher in his political campaigns. The DNC brought out former students of his on stage and the media has rolled out adulatory stories claiming that Walz’s time as a teacher will help him shape America’s education policy.

The recent release of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) test scores for 2024 by Education Commissioner Willie Jett, a Walz appointee, were described by the Minnesota Star Tribune as “stagnant with only about half of students meeting or beating grade-level standards in math and reading.” The paper struggled to describe an empty glass as half-full.

The actual numbers showed that 49.9% of Minnesota students reached grade-level proficiency standards in reading, only 45.5% did so in math and only 39.6% managed it in science: a more accurate description would be that well less than half of Walz’s school students are proficient.

The educational glass in Minnesota isn’t half full, it’s more than half empty.

A majority of Minnesota students aren’t proficient in math or science and a little less than half can read at grade level. These are catastrophic numbers that show a school system that has failed at its most fundamental function despite billions of dollars in runaway spending.

The already terrible 2024 test scores are much worse when viewed in historical context.

In 2017, the year before the election that put Walz in charge of Minnesota, solid majorities of students were proficient in reading and math, and even science scores in the state were passable. Walz however ran as an educator and promised that he could do better.

In 2017, 59% of Minnesota students tested as proficient in math. By 2024, that number had dropped catastrophically by more than 13% down to 45.5%.

In 2017, 60% of students had tested as proficient at grade level in reading. Under Gov. Walz, those numbers have fallen to 49.9%.

In 2017, 54% of students met or exceeded test scores in science. By 2024, only 39.6% did for a decline of 14%.

The respective double digit education declines of 13%, 10% and 14% under Gov. Walz have taken test scores to some of the worst numbers in the state in thirty years.

And these numbers don’t tell the whole story of how bad things are in Minnesota. One analysis found that there were 19 schools in the state where not a single student was proficient in math.

Some of this can be attributed to Gov. Walz’s decision to pander to his teachers’ union allies in EM by shutting down schools and curtailing the education of a generation, but not all of it.

Pre-pandemic test scores were already showing declines and Gov. Walz has had years to turn around pandemic educational failures, but the former teacher who ran twice on fixing education failed to lay out any practical vision for turning around the failed public school system.

Test scores have been consistently falling since Walz took office. Math scores only improved by 1% since the pandemic and reading scores have been in freefall, declining year by year even since the pandemic and last year fell for the first time underwater below the halfway mark.

While Gov. Walz’s decision to close schools was disastrous, but things have gotten worse since. In his 2022 race, he ran on promises to further increase education spending. His campaign featured a commercial claiming that “as a former teacher, Governor Walz does what’s right for our kids.” But doing right meant throwing more money at political allies running a failed system.

The massive $2.2 billion education spending bill passed by Minnesota Democrats last year officially brought up spending to $7,281 per pupil, but not only is there little evidence that the per pupil spending ratio leads to improved education outcomes with some schools in the state that have been spending as much as $31,000 per student producing zero percent proficiency, but much of the money actually went to putting more of Education Minnesota (EM) teachers’ union members along with more administrators, school nurses and social workers on the payroll, and enacting a controversial “ethnic studies” program that critics say brings racism into schools.

A year later, most Minnesota students still can’t handle math, science or reading.

“My messages to families, to students, to teachers, to support staff is, ‘This is the budget for many of us who taught for decades,’ this is the budget we’re waiting for,” Gov. Walz bragged “This is the transformational moment.” It was transformational for everyone except students.

Gov. Walz and his party chose to spend $6 million on ethnic studies while students were struggling with basic skills. $135 million was spent paying ‘unemployment’ for workers off for the summer. Rather than funding schools, much of the new money funded social services, free meals, family social workers and even drug overdose prevention medications on site.

Minnesota Democrats have camouflaged social welfare spending and benefits for union members as educational spending, but there’s no sign that students have benefited from it.

The state’s powerful educational unions have claimed that Democrats are better for education, but test scores in reading hit a high of 74% and math scores hit a high of 64.7% under former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, and have been declining ever since.

Gov. Walz was following the policies of a party that took reading test scores down from 74% to 49.4% and math test scores from 64.7% down to 45.5%.

Behind the numbers is the reality that 3 out of 4 students used to be proficient in reading, now less than 2 in 4 are, and 6 out of 10 students could count, now only 4 out of 10 still can.

What will happen to those two illiterate students and those six students who can’t count?

The Walz campaign claimed that he wanted to make “Minnesota the best state in the country for kids.” But in his second term in office, the kids of Minnesota can’t read, count or do anything.

The governor inherited majority proficiency rates in education in Minnesota and brought them down to less than half. That record may have more bearing on his education policy than his past working as a teacher.

Gov. Walz’s actual educational legacy is that a majority of students can no longer read.

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That result is exactly what we are looking for. We can’t beat China with our best students, so let’s go the other way and try using the underperformers to give it a go!

Filed under: Conservative, Education, Election | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

A Pain In the Nose

Posted on 30/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

This afternoon, after my visit for physical therapy, I came home to read my e-mails. My glasses caused a sharp pain on the bridge of my nose. I pulled the dang things off my face to learn that one of the nose pads was missing, and the metal thingy that holds the nose pad was sticking its sharp edges into my skin. Darn! That means a trip to the eye doctor to get it fixed. No, wait, I’m an engineer. I can fix it.

The first thing I did was to look into the glass case for clues. There in the case was the nose pad, but the screw that holds it on was missing. I looked further into the case but could not find the screw. It is a small thing, too tiny to estimate its size. My mind went into high gear to design a workable solution. I did not have any replacement that small, so I thought I would wire it together with a single strand of copper wire. I pondered a bit longer and went to the Amazon site to find a replacement screw. I didn’t realize there were so many options available. I finally picked one that looked like mine and bought it for $4.95. There are enough pads and screws to fix five pairs of glasses, and it comes with a miniature screw driver that fits the screw. Delivery is free, and they will arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll suffer a bit while I wait for delivery of said parts.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Education | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Who Needs A Car, and for What?

Posted on 16/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

This article. is from the blog “Sultan of Knish”

by Daniel Greenfield

No Cars for the Working Class

The electric streets of La La Land are full of Teslas, Rivians, Mercedes EQS’ and even pricier offerings from the rare earth mines of China. Here a Tesla Cybertruck, looking like a ramp some sportier vehicle will jump, passes Bentleys, canary yellow Lamborghinis and ice blue McLarens.
In the posher parts of California, from Beverly Hills to the Bay Area, the green revolution has come. The ubiquitous EVs charging in the driveways of seven figure mansions are shadowed by solar panels on the roof and sit side by side with signs declaring, “Hate has no home here.”

Neither does affordability.

The vast majority of electric cars, approaching 1 million, can be found in California. Compare that to the paltry 5,000 EVs in Arkansas or even the under 50,000 in a sizable wealthy blue state like Massachusetts. The entire industry of sleek shiny cars that run on batteries only exists because California taxed other car buyers to subsidize Tesla and its emerging counterparts.

California’s heavy subsidies and mild weather, its wealthy cities and conspicuously virtue signaling elites, made EVs possible, and made it impossible for them to evolve outside its warm leftist ecosystem. The vast majority of Californians (like most Americans) can’t afford, can’t use and won’t drive electric cars, but like so much else, the Newsom elites don’t tend to notice.

Electric car owners in California live in “communities with mostly white and Asian, college-educated and high-income residents” who are mostly “concentrated in Silicon Valley cities and affluent coastal areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties.” That’s why most electric cars are luxury SUVs marketed to very exclusive groups in very exclusive areas.

Outside of these enclaves, there isn’t much of an EV industry and there never will be one. Electric cars are not an emerging product, but a niche one as subsidized toys for the rich.

That’s a problem because the Biden administration, like a lot of Democrat states, is moving to ban cars by 2035. It’s one thing for California’s elites to once again disregard over 90% of the state on the assumption that a one-party system and aggressive ballot harvesting can overcome most obstacles, but the car bans have also extended to Maryland (46,060 EVs with 0.91%), Massachusetts (49,440 EVs and 0.91%), Connecticut (22,030 EVs and 0.75%), Oregon (46,980 EVs and 1.24%) and New York (84,670 EVs and 0.75%) among other blue states.

How do you get from those numbers to total adoption in a little over a decade? You don’t.

The assumption that most car owners would drink the Electric Vehicle Kool Aid and jump on board ignored the basic realities of energy, engineering and economics. There isn’t enough power, materials or money to make 2035 anything other than a political four-car pileup.

GM and Ford have lost billions trying to push electric cars. GM promised to sell 1 million EVs by 2025. In the first quarter of 20244, it sold 16,425 EVs. A year from now, it will need to have sold 250,000 of them. How is GM planning to get from 16,425 to 250,000 EVs sold? GM is bragging about the Cadillac LYRIQ. Last December, GM shut down production of the Chevy Bolt which ran to $26,000 and, unlike the LYRIQ, was too affordable and therefore not actually profitable.

GM is hoping that the Cadillac LYRIQ will tap into the same luxury EV market that Tesla, Mercedes and every EV SUV is already aimed at, but as usual it may be too late to the party Even liberal millionaires who care so much about the planet that they fly private jets to Tahiti to reconnect with nature at their second or third homes only need so many green cars.

Or as Edmunds’ Director of Insights Ivan Drury put it, most of those concerned about internal-combustion engines’ impact on the planet already bought electric vehicles.

The latest Gallup poll shows that the number of electric car owners slowly grew, but that those people are wealthy and most already have their cars. 7% of Americans now own an EV, only 9% would consider buying and 48% or half the country would not buy.

Who are these electric refusniks who won’t drink the electric kool-aid? The working class.

14% of EV owners are upper income while only 2% are working class. 61% of working class Americans won’t buy an electric car.

Lefties who can see income inequality and disproportionate impact everywhere carefully refuse to see it in their policies which would bar the majority of the country and most minorities from car ownership. A 2020 survey found that 87% of EV owners are white. In a 2023 survey, black people were the most likely of any group to say that they would not get an EV.

After decades of lecturing everyone about systemic racism, capitalism and the evils of white men, a group of rich white people have decided to make it impossible for minorities and the poor to buy new cars. But what’s a little systemic racism when it means enriching China to save the planet from the threat of cars whose components can actually be made in America?

While Secretary of Transportation in Absentia Pete Buttigieg scolds the “racist highways”, his administration is pulling off the single great example of disproportionate impact in generations. The average price of an EV is $53,469 and the average black household income is $41,500 while the average white household income is $68,000. You can still get a perfectly good family car for only $20,000, but good luck finding an EV that isn’t actively on fire in that price range.

A policy of no cars for the working class or minorities may be a little bit awkward, but in the electric kool-aid world, much like the Mercedes EQS and the Chevy Bolt, not all people or cars are created equal, and not all people should be allowed to own cars. Most actually shouldn’t.

Environmentalism ushers in a neo-feudalism in which things have to be taken away from us to save the planet. And the people most likely to feel the loss are those at the bottom.

Hike the price of cars by $15,000 and the ones most likely to notice are those for whom that isn’t a monthly paycheck, but much of their annual income. Raise the price of airline tickets to compensate for carbon footprints and it’s the poor who won’t be able to visit grandma. Nickel and dime everything from supermarket bags to soda bottles and it’s a regressive green tax.

Much of the green nickel and diming is invisible. Prices just go up a little bit on everything. But lefties have put the working class on a collision course with mobility, employment and independence. A car ban is not like a lightbulb ban or even a gas stove ban.

Americans used to love cars because they were freedom on wheels. Decades of regulations and cheap imports from Asia have turned the driving experience for most Americans into a series of warning beeps, government tracking devices, and warnings not to do this and that, while slowly inching along in one of several semi-identical white, black or dark black boxes.

And now even that is on the verge of disappearing.

A car ban means most Americans will not be able to own, they will lease. American car ownership, like free speech and every other form of freedom, will become a distant memory.

Unless the drivers of America outrun the EV banners of the Biden administration leaving them behind like Sheriff Buford T. Justice or Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane eating their non-green dust.

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