Is the G.O.P at the End of the Line?
I am sick and tired of hearing
Republican politicians attempting to justify their positions. I urge you to go back to the final item on
the posting of October 10, 2013 on this blog, and read about the underlying
principal that rules the Republican Party and governs everything it does. I
cannot see why anyone who is not extremely wealthy would want to vote
Republican.
And now for this week’s latest news about the G.O.P’s lowlife fringe
which calls the shots for that Party, and which shut down the government
earlier this month and had no qualms (and still doesn’t) about almost pushing
the country into financial default …
Some veterans are Democrats, some veterans are
Republicans, some veterans are Independents … but there is no party affiliation
which automatically attaches itself to veterans. That is, until about two weeks ago when a
veterans group, ostensibly in Washington to protest the government shutdown
which closed the World War Two Memorial, manifested a distinctly Tea Party
Republican tone. Right wing stalwarts
such as Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Mike
Lee and Larry Klayman, a purveyor of sedition whose ideas would land him
in jail in any country but ours, joined on the platform to turn a protest against
the Memorial’s closure into a vicious, anti-Democratic, anti-Obama rally. It
was shameful. The closure, of course, was entirely blamed on President Obama by
these charlatans despite the fact that it
is an indisputable fact that the government shutdown was directly caused by Senator Cruz in a
effort to force the government to defund the Affordable Care Act. He has repeatedly said as much.
Lee and Cruz, whose lack of integrity
defies belief, should be shunned by their fellow Senators. (Normally, I
would suggest that Ted Cruz run for dog catcher somewhere or other when his
term is up, but that would be an insult to the integrity of the many hardworking dog catchers in this country.)
Try to comprehend how the people of Alaska
actually elected Palin as their Governor, how the G.O.P. ever gave her the
Vice-Presidential nomination in 2008 and how Cruz and Lee were able to be
elected Senators from Texas and Utah respectively. It's hard to understand. The only answer is that the voters in these
elections were beyond being “gullible” and fall into a still more reprehensible
category, which I leave to others to define. How does this happen? The answer,
sad to say, rests with the First Amendment of our Constitution, which
guarantees freedom of speech and of the press.
If you listen to “talk radio,” where you can hear
the likes of Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Larry Elder, Mike
Gallagher, Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Laura Ingraham, Joyce Kaufman, Mark
Levin, G. Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Steve Malzberg and Michael Savage
on a daily basis, some locally, but many syndicated nationwide, you will
quickly understand why there are enough foolish people in this country to elect
scoundrels like Palin, Bachmann, Cruz and Lee to public office. Limbaugh, for one, refers to his loyal
followers and listeners as “dittoheads.”
Limbaugh and Beck conning the ultra-gullible
Most of them are too naive to comprehend how insulting this expression is and the contempt with which Rush uses it, making their inability to think for themselves into a virtue. Can we call this the “Seig Heil” phenomenon?
Limbaugh and Beck conning the ultra-gullible
Most of them are too naive to comprehend how insulting this expression is and the contempt with which Rush uses it, making their inability to think for themselves into a virtue. Can we call this the “Seig Heil” phenomenon?
If they hear things on the radio day after day, they
must be true, they think. These are the same people who lined up at county
fairs a century or so ago to buy snake oil from a travelling pitchman, and who
you see on the streets of major cities being swindled in games of three card
monte. They followed Father Coughlin during the 1930's and some were even convinced to join the Klan. Unfortunately, these grossly
misinformed people vote, and the Republican Party has grown to depend on
them.
Sooner or later, however, the
G.O.P. will realize that in order to survive, it must jettison its extreme
right wing so the rest of the party, where some sanity still reigns, can say “Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish” and start rebuilding. Otherwise, the Grand Old Party may have reached the end of the line.
Jack
Lippman
An Educational
Philosophy from a Non-Educator
There
are frequent articles in newspapers and magazines pointing out how children in
America’s schools are increasingly ranked behind those from many other
countries in reading and mathematical skills.
One of the reasons for this decline in the ranking of our schools is the
heterogeneity in the makeup of our elementary and secondary student bodies. We
are not like countries with homogenous populations such as Finland which is
consistently ranked above the United States but whose students all speak the
same language and come from similar backgrounds. Our student populations are tremendously
varied, posing a challenge to our educators.
This
problem must be addressed, but it goes deeper than that. To compete in today’s world, our country’s
education structure must take giant steps forward to educate students in the scientific,
technical, engineering and mathematic areas frequently referred to as “STEM,”
even at the elementary and high school levels.
A lab is more than a breed of dog.
In these vital areas, many of those at the very top of our college and university classes and even those doing graduate work here are students whose elementary and secondary educations were received outside of the United States. We must be doing something wrong in our elementary and high schools. Our educators know how to solve these problems, and they can best do it if our politicians keep their hands off of it, other than providing funds to address the problem.
Beyond
elementary and secondary schools, however, we have giant problems at the
college level. Whereas institutions
throughout the world are directed at providing STEM education, ours are mired
in the luxuries of half a century ago, when it was permissible to invest an
inordinate amount of resources on the liberal arts, the social sciences and
athletics. Liberal arts and social
sciences are important, but in this century their role must be secondary today
to educating students in the STEM areas.
While universities outside of the country stress turning out physics,
mathematics and chemistry majors, we are still producing too many graduates
with degrees in political science, history, sociology, marketing, psychology,
literature, foreign languages or communications to name a few majors. There always must be students concentrating
in these areas, but not so many that their education is provided by using
resources which would be better directed toward the STEM disciplines, in which
the United States is in competition with the rest of the world.
And
even then, the fruits of the inadequate resources devoted to STEM courses in
this country are often wasted when our immigration laws encourage those who
have come here from overseas to study to go back, equipped with the education
they received here, to their native lands.
Athletics? We have gone too far. Big time intercollegiate athletics have no
place in our colleges and universities in the twenty-first century. They take up too much of the time and energy
students should be devoting to “learning.”
The only sports activities colleges should have should be at the “club”
level, and chiefly there for recreational purposes. We have plenty of professional teams for
people to root for. The comprehensive sports facilities and stadiums at many of
our colleges and universities should be sold off to newly formed “sports organizations,”
funded by our professional sports industry, where talented high school athletes
can be hired, develop their skills and be paid out of the gate receipts. These organizations’
football games, for example, would be at the same level as is major college
football today, but there would be no such thing as “student athletes” on the
field. They all would be paid, and none of them would be enrolled in a college.
Eventually, the best players at this
level would end up in the established professional leagues, as do the best
college players today, many of whom barely masquerade as students. Who is
kidding whom?
A
few years ago, Rutgers University had a very promising and talented quarterback who didn’t
quite pan out and there was some conflict between him and the coach. So after two years, he transferred out to
the University of Arizona which had noted his talents and was willing to try
him. While "sitting out" a mandatory season because of the switch, he left Arizona too, because of a coaching change there. He still had some college eligibility remaining though and I suppose that’s why Tom
Savage is presently the starting quarterback at the University of Pittsburgh.
Savage runs and passes well
Someday he will make it big in the NFL. I hope so. But as I said earlier, “who is kidding whom?” What has this got to do with higher education in the United States?
Savage runs and passes well
Someday he will make it big in the NFL. I hope so. But as I said earlier, “who is kidding whom?” What has this got to do with higher education in the United States?
Some
say that big time college sports fund the entire physical education program at
many schools and are thereby justified. This
money could be initially replaced by an ongoing flow of the money received from
the sale of the stadiums and training facilities to the new “sports
organizations,” which a college’s alumni might even informally adopt. They might even have the same colors and a team
name suggestive of the college or university which originally owned the
stadium, but they would have nothing to do with that institution any longer. Sounds pretty radical? But we have to do it if we are to compete
with countries where there is no Big 10 or SEC, no bowl games and the primary
mission of all students is to study.
What
about those not suited for college STEM curriculums or without the prowess
to be hired by the proposed athletic organizations mentioned above? That’s where community colleges and technical
schools, coupled with apprenticeships in business and industry, can play a
great role. This is being done today in
countries like Germany where well paying, lifetime jobs in industry are made available
to promising secondary school students who then serve a paid apprenticeship
after completing school. And this also
can be a back door to higher education, again in the STEM area, which such a
student may not have qualified for a few years earlier.
Jack Lippman
BULLYING
Sid
Bolotin (10-16-13)
In today’s news two
girls, one fourteen, the other twelve were arrested and charged with bullying
that caused another twelve year-old girl to commit suicide by jumping off a
silo. The bullying was both physical and via social media. One of the
tormenters is alleged to have posted on her Facebook page an admission to the
bullying along with a callous, unremorseful comment that she didn’t give a
fuck.
Upon learning of this
my memory train began clickety-clacking back along the rails of my own
experiences of being bullied when I was a youngster. Unlike today’s
technology-prevalent world I was saved the intensity of bullying via the
Internet. Even so, the pains of the memories caused me to have a visceral empathy
with the victim’s torment that caused her to leap to her death at twelve-years
old.
Physical bullying,
emotional taunting, and insults written on school bathroom stalls are bad
enough, I can only imagine the horror of exposure on the Internet to a world-wide
audience that can post successive barbs. For the victim it must have been like
a death by a thousand cuts.
All of us come into
the world as blank slates, blobs of flesh needing to be taught personhood by
our parents and the culture we happen to be born into. However each of us does
contain an innate “something” that is our personal, unique, spiritual armature
upon which the above teachings are hung…ala the wire armature upon which a
sculptor hangs and shapes clay.
This was clearly
evidenced to me by the recent birthing of thirteen puppies by my son’s Golden
Retriever. At their birth they were virtually identical, moist, tiny,
sightless, deaf blobs. Their only interest was survival via the struggle to get
to one of mama’s ten teats. That meant that three were always left out. Their
innate, individual determination combined with my son’s interventions evened
out the sharing. Now that they’re five weeks old, their individual nature is
clearly visible. Some are aggressive, some meek, some are bullies, and some are
bullied.
And so it seems for
humans too. We all know of biters in pre-school. We have all been witness to
angry tots screaming “No! Mine!” when they’re clearly not the owner. How else
to explain the senseless assaulting by the stronger upon the weaker? The well
known book and film “Lord of the Flies” is a vivid example of this in children.
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