Well, the girls have instruments

... and the dogs don't like it.

They can bark their brains out about a squirrel, but trumpet or flute?  RUNAWAY!!!

Not looking forward to this...

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/09/08/14-million-refugees-make-the-levant-unmanageable/?singlepage=true

14 Million Refugees Make the Levant Unmanageable

September 8th, 2014 - 9:33 pm

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There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population). When I wrote about the region’s refugee disaster at Tablet in July (“Between the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep“) the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others.

That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian farmers already were living in tent camps around Syrian cities before the Syrian civil war began in April 2011. Israeli analysts knew this. In March 2011 Paul Rivlin of Tel Aviv University released a study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture, widely cited in Arab media but unmentioned in the English language press (except my essay on the topic). Most of what passes for political science treats peoples and politicians as if they were so many pieces on a fixed game board. This time the game board is shrinking and the pieces are falling off.

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.

*strong language warning for video*

That is also why ISIS is overrated. A terrorist organization that beheads Americans and posts the video needs to be annihilated, but it is not particularly difficult. The late Sam Kinison’s monologue on world hunger is to the point: they live in a desert. They may be hard to flush out of towns they occupy, but they cannot move from one town to another in open ground if warplanes are hunting them. That is what America and its allies should do.

More dangerous is Iran, as Henry Kissinger emphasized in a recent interview with National Public Radio. Iran’s backing for the Assad regime’s ethnic cleansing of Syrian Sunnis set the refugee crisis in motion, while the Iraqi Shi’ites’ alliance with Iran persuaded elements of Saddam Hussein’s military to fight for ISIS. Iran can make nuclear weapons and missiles; ISIS cannot. If we had had the foresight to neutralize Iran years ago, the crisis could have been managed without the unspeakable humanitarian cost.

We cannot do the killing ourselves, except, of course, from the air. We are too squeamish under the best of circumstances, and we are too corrupted by cultural relativism (remember George W. Bush’s claim that Islam is “a religion of peace”?) to recognize utterly evil nihilism when it stares us in the face. In practice, a great deal of the killing will be done by Iran and its allies: the Iraqi Shi’a, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria. It will be one of the most disgusting and disheartening episodes in modern history and there isn’t much we can do to prevent it.

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September 8th, 2014 - 9:33 pm

SVisualizing the growth of federal regulation since 1950

Sounds like a challenge, 1,000,000,000+ ways to get into trouble!



I'm going to be busy...

Lefties in my classes at CSUF were like this - and I beat them like a drum!

http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3050#.U-98w0iXvq3

COMMENTARIES
Our higher education system fails leftist students.

By Michael Munger

131 Comments

August 06, 2014

(Editor’s note: This article is based on the Milton Friedman Day talk given on July 31 in Wilmington, North Carolina, by Duke University professor Michael Munger.)

Too often, American college students face a one-question test, one based not on facts, but on ideology. The test: "Are you a liberal, or conservative?"  

The correct answer is, "I'm a liberal, and proud of it." That concerns me. 

However, the nature of my concern may surprise you. I'm not worried much about the students who get it wrong; for the most part, they actually get a pretty good education.   

I'm worried about those who get it right. The young people that our educational system is failing are the students on the left. They aren't being challenged, and don't learn to think.   

Students on the left should sue for breach of contract. We promise to educate them, and then merely pat them on the head for having memorized the "correct" answer! 

I was Chair of Political Science at Duke for ten years. At a meeting of department heads, we heard from the chair of one our Departments of Indignation Studies.  

(We have several departments named "Something-or-Other Studies." In most cases, they were constituted for the purpose of focusing indignation about the plight of a group that has suffered real and imagined slights and now needs an academic department to be indignant in.) 

At the meeting, the chair of one of those departments said, "I find that I don't really need to spend much time with the liberal students, because they already have it right. I spend most of my time arguing with the conservative students. That's how I spend my time in class." 

This woman was teaching conservative students how to think about arguments and evidence; how to make your arguments in a persuasive way. She was educating them. 

Her liberal students? They were given that one-question test. They were just certified as already "knowing what they need to know." 

It may have come as a shock to the parents of these liberal students that they had learned everything they needed to know…in high school! Having memorized a kind of secular leftist catechism, they were free to wander around the quads of Duke and enjoy themselves. 

Once we realize that the problem with our educational system is that we’re short-changing students on the left, denying them an education just because they happen to agree with the professor, then we have a path forward.   

The way to think of this comes from John Stuart Mill, who argued that we should regard our overall approach to education as collision with error. He wrote:

[The] peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. 

So, the absence, in many departments, of dissenting voices is harmful. Not so much harmful to those who would agree with the dissenting voice, but those who are denied the chance to collide with error.   

It's as if we asked students to play chess, but only taught them one-move openings. They think that pawn to king four is a better move than pawn to king's rook four, but that’s simply a matter of faith. 

Conservative students, by contrast, actually learn to play chess. They study the whole game, not just the first move. They learn countermoves, they consider the advantages of different approaches. They search out empirical arguments, and they read articles and white papers.  

Mill summarizes the difference brilliantly:  

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. …if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. (Emphasis added). 

What happens when a leftist student confronts arguments he or she disagrees with? After all, they sometimes hear views that contradict their own. The problem is that they have always been rewarded for facile rejoinders, the equivalent of one-move chess games.  

There is a ceremony that goes with this, something one of my colleagues calls "The Women's Studies Nod." When someone makes a ridiculously extreme, empirically unfounded but ideologically correct argument, everyone else must nod vigorously.  

Not just a, "Yes, that's correct," nod, but "Yes, you are correct, you are one of us, we are one spirit and one great collective shared mind" nod. 

What if someone withholds the Nod?   

Since the children of the left have never actually had to play a full chess game of argument, they need a response. Their responses are two: "You are an idiot; no one important believes that," or "You are evil; no good person could possibly believe that." 

At this point, leftist faculty teach the left students several different moves. Let's consider a few.  

Suppose I claim that rent control is a primary reason why there is such a shortage of affordable housing in New York and San Francisco. Here are the responses I have gotten from students:

1.  Micro-aggression!

2.  Check your privilege! (If they had a mic, they'd drop it, because this is supposed to be so devastating).

3.  You must take money from the Koch Foundation.

4.  Economists don't understand the real world.  

5.  Prices don't measure values. Values are about people. You don't care about people. 

Not one of those responses actually responds to, or even tries to understand, the argument that rent controls harm the populations that politicians claim they want to help.   

The point is that if you cared about poor people, actually cared about consequences for poor people, you would oppose rent controls. But that's not how the logic of the left works. Instead of caring about the poor, they want to be seen as caring about the poor.   

Our colleagues on the left could choose to educate their liberal students, but since education requires "collision with error," that is no longer possible. That’s because the faculty on the left were themselves educated by neglect, never confronting counterarguments, in a now self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance and ideological bigotry. 

We honor and remember Milton Friedman here today. What might Professor Friedman have thought of the problem that I raise? He would probably have said that the answer is competition and empowering consumers to make their own best choices.   

The problem is that education is a difficult arena for this argument, because students don't know what they don't know, and so it's hard for them to know what they should want to know. 

Nonetheless, our best hope lies in competition. A consumer-driven revolution in education will change, and in some ways has already changed, the dominance of the left in the academy. 

Education is a consumer-driven business, in spite of what college faculty think. No other industry blames failure on its customers. Not even General Motors claimed that car-buyers were too stupid to appreciate their genius.   

That is what many traditional colleges have been doing: Our students fail, we don't. Students, however, are coming to see through that. Many of them, perhaps especially those on the left, recognize that they are being patronized rather than educated.  

They want more. They want to hear the best arguments from the other side. It's more interesting to play against the first team. A young person's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never shrinks back to its original dimension. 

Lots of people on the left actually care about education. We have friends we don't recognize. The issue is not ideology, but commitment to education. 

I shudder when I see people on our side who want to solve the problem of political correctness simply by reversing the polarity. Conservatives who don't understand liberal arguments are just as brain dead as the worst graduates being produced by our most craven Departments of Indignation Studies.   

Education requires collision with error. If our side makes arguments respectfully, intellectually, insisting on balance first in our own classrooms, then we can change education in this country. 

Humans Need Not Apply

No need to be perfect - just better than humans.

Not a high bar to pass...

The Sheik: Help Me Stay Rich Colorado

I love supporting Jihad... NOT. Stop importing and let them choke on their oil soaked sand...

What Obama Said About Taking Vacations in 2008 Almost Made the Internet ...

Grow balls or go golfing... Oh, sorry, how about right after you do your 401st fundraiser?  After Martha's Vineyard... OK.