There are many examples of the failed philosophy of neo (new) conservatism, such as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute , the Project for New American Century, and last but not least, financial ‘innovation’ in the economy. You can argue until you are blue in the face about philosophy and theory, but some evidence is empirical. It just can’t be argued. The outcome, or the results, of particular programs and policies in action speak for themselves, similar to how if you mix water, milk, eggs, and Bisquick just right you get pancakes.
The WPRI was a group that had advocated for school choice vouchers in Milwaukee. After the program was instituted and studied, they issued this report which said, among other things:
“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper’s first sentence.
On the same topic of vouchers but not from the same report, I spent a day in Jefferson City speaking with a local Republican State Representative at the time named Jim Lembke. It was a very cordial conversation on education policy in the Missouri. However, the conversation ended quite abruptly after I said to him:
My grandfather was a conservative. (I like to call him an Eisenhower conservative.) And as I understand it, in his day, they believed that public tax dollars should not be used for private purposes. In relation to vouchers, what ever happened to that conservative ideal?
Then there is The Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank formed during the Clinton Administration and whose membership included the likes of Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, William J. Bennett, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Richard L. Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, “Scooter” Libby, Dan Quayle, and more. They penned a letter that said some of the following (keep in mind, this was before 9/11 and a few years before W. was ever elected POTUS):
“That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”
“Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction”
“Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.”
“a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard…”
“…removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”
“…If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.
Of course, we know how all of that worked out. $150 a barrel for oil, $10 billion a month in Iraq Afghanistan, oh, and no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Notice how almost all of the people mentioned in the letter to President Clinton seen here ended up in the Bush Administration.
The phrase that freaks me out the most from the Project for a New American Century is an excerpt from the following paper:
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.
And last but not least, the financial market. So far, we have talked about two of the items that the conservatives are traditionally given credit for as their strength. Taxes, Defense, and now Finance. It is clear that their strength in these areas is nothing more than a myth, and a very damaging myth at that. Here is the latest from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:
“One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be,” the Fed chairman said today in a speech at the central bank’s community affairs conference in Washington. “The damage from this turn in the credit cycle — in terms of lost wealth, lost homes, and blemished credit histories — is likely to be long-lasting.”
This sums up what appears to be a heavy video day on DaddyHogwash.com…This is a good one. Nothing new for those who follow this closely, but it is a good video nonetheless…
I haven’t paid much attention to these Tea Parties; however, I was so embarrassed for these people, I had to post this. There once was a time when we actually wanted intelligent people running this country…I wonder what the Constitution Party guy has to say about African Americans being counted as 3/5’s of a person…
Thirteen-year-old Adam Diehl will be the first to tell you he wasn’t always such a good student.
"It stated in second grade, that’s when I started getting good at the academic stuff," said Diehl. "In first grade I couldn’t even spell orange."
But those days are behind him, and this year Diehl began his seventh grade Missouri Assessment Program or "MAP" test with a streak of several years of advanced scores.
"It was multiple choice, so it wasn’t that hard," he said. "All the other answers matched up anyway."
All the answers but one, in the math section, near the end of the test.
"I got my answer and it didn’t match any of the choices on there, so I double-checked it," and triple-checked it, he said, and still, no match. He finished the test convinced there was a mistake.
"It was like, come on, where’s the right answer," said Diehl.
War is a broad term. World War. Cold War. War on Drugs. Turf War. Of all of the different type of wars, this has to be my favorite. The War on “Brain Drain”…
This is why I was so heartened recently when I met my friend Bob Jaffe, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He told me about a remarkable experiment in Pakistan that he is a part of, in which a unique combination of private money, government support and intellectual leadership is helping to build the first private research school for science and engineering in that country, the School of Science and Engineering (SSE), part of the Lahore University of Management Sciences.Developments so far have been encouraging. More than $53 million in support has come in from individuals, government and industry - and world-class faculty are returning to Pakistan to participate in the new institution. Admission is merit-based and open to all, independent of gender and social or religious background, providing opportunities to outstanding students who need financial aid to make a new life.As Jaffe says in a brochure about the new institution: "Access to world-class education opens the door to economic prosperity and personal creativity. Our vision is to bring transformational science and engineering education to Pakistan. Our goal is to ignite development at a fundamental level by educating the most promising young people of all backgrounds. We hope to end Pakistan’s disastrous "brain drain" by expanding the national market for superbly trained scientists and engineers. SSE will seek out the best-prepared, most motivated students from all social and economic backgrounds. We will educate them and provide them the skills and experience to succeed in the world… We believe that this is the most effective and positive way we can impact Pakistan’s economic future."
After the results of the latest American Religious Identification Survey, Christian Science Monitor appears to blame evangelical Christianity on the reduction of believers nation-wide.
One interesting tidbit here is that strong proponents of the Separation of Church and State are strong proponents for two reasons. 1. They want the church to stay out of the government business, and 2. They want the government to stay out of church business.
1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap ofbelieving in a cause more than a faith.
Update: The videos are slow to load at the moment…
The songs are not as catchy, but the message is perfect and easy to understand. I found this originally on Consumerist.com, which was recently purchased by Consumers Union, the non-profit that runs the popular Consumer Reports magazine.
If you have been awake for five minutes over the last couple of years, you have probably heard those catchy tunes from FreeCreditReport.com. (Don’t go there!) While they will give you your credit report for free, you very well may get trapped in to ongoing fees related to credit report updates.
However, there is a genuine and legitimate free credit report website, and it is called AnnualCreditReport.com. At some point, the government required Experian, Equifax, and Transunion (the three credit reporting agencies) to provide Americans with a free credit report once a year. AnnualCreditReport.com is their joint project to make that happen.
I would do three things:
1. I would watch these videos. They are entertaining enough to watch and share.
2. Visit consumerist.com on a regular basis for great consumer tips.
3. Visit AnnualCreditReport.com once a year to get your latest credit information and verify that it is correct.
I certainly am a doodler during meetings. If I am not careful, I will fill up the entire meeting agenda with useless scribbling. Now I come to find out that this may be helping me pay attention. The logic is that it prevents you from all out daydreaming, which takes up more brain resources than the simple act of doodling. When I find myself scratching around, I generally stop out of fear that the speaker may think that I am not listening or that I may be distracting someone in the meeting with me. Maybe I will happily doodle along from now on.
Good news, doodlers: What your colleagues consider a distracting, time-wasting habit may actually give you a leg up on them by helping you pay attention.
Asked to remember names they’d heard on a recording, people who doodled while listening had better recall than those who didn’t. This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander.
"People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate," said study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist. "We might not be aware that we’re doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream."
This is a great video from Jonathan Jarvis explaining the credit crises and the role of the investor in the market crash. Its only shortcomings that I can see are that it does not delve in to how the credit default swaps came in to existence, nor does he speak to the faulty risk formula Wall Street used starting in 2001 to assess the risk of these securities. Perhaps they require videos of their own. Regardless, here you go:
This is an excerpt from a letter to the editor I wrote to a local newspaper called Call Newspapers after the inauguration of Barack Obama. Click here, or on the link below to read it in its entirety.
My 6-year old son Joey and I were at the inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. Actually, that is only half true. The truth is we were on the D.C. Metro rail heading back to the parking lot about 20 miles south of D.C. when Obama was sworn in. As many have heard by now, various logistical failures on that 5-degree-wind-chill morning prevented many ticket-holders from witnessing the event firsthand. As I rode back with Joey in my arms, I was most disappointed about him not witnessing something he likely would have told stories about for the rest of his life. It made me sad.
I can think of at least three birthdays that should be celebrated in schools (K-12) across the country on an annual basis. Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. I am sure there are more, but it would blunt the effect to have too many.
To qualify for school birthday celebrations, there should be at least four criteria:
1. The person verifiably existed beyond all reasonable doubt.
2. They made at least one contribution to humanity that has withstood the test of time.
3. They must portray the value of “obtainable intelligence.” That knowledge is an essential part of any value system.
4. Textbooks should already thoroughly cover their acheivements.
The purpose of the birthday celebrations should be more than just eating cupcakes. Age appropriate curriculum should be built around the events to humanize the men or women behind their accomplishments, accentuating that they achieved what they did through hard work and persistence, not just brute intelligence.
Perhaps the over-riding goal should be to show that everyone, barring some type of disability, has the ability to be knowledgable, and even with most disabilities, children and adults alike can almost always learn more than they already know. (It would be a great way to introduce Carol Dweck’s work at Stanford into school curriculum.)
For instance, I always tell my sons, “Smart is not what you know, it is what you learn and how hard you try.”
This Johns Hopkins School of Public Health study shows that not only are ‘Virginity (abstinence) pledges’ ineffective, but they also lead to substantially lower usage of condoms and other forms of birth control. Other studies have shown that ‘abstinence only’ programs in schools have been ineffective and pointless over the long term.
The obvious medical problem is that with the lack of use of condoms and other forms of birth control, teens are at higher risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. (And according to the Population Council, abortion rates increase with the non-usage condoms and other forms of birth control.)
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”
I had originally posted this on another blog of mine back in January, but since it is one of my favorite education/parenting articles, I thought I would share it with Daddy Hogwash readers as well.
Scientific American: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids The Secret to Raising Smart Kids Hint: Dont tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life
By Carol S. Dweck
A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan who is a composite drawn from several children. Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless. Click here to read the rest of this article by Carol Dweck…
Barack Obama continues to dedicate his administration to science and the quest for knowledge and understanding. I often compare George W. Bush’s administration to the Roman Catholic’s denial of factual evidence of a heliocentric solar system in the time of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo. It was not until 1993 that the Catholic church finally officially recognized the validity of Galileo’s work.
Obama’s organization of his science team is akin to freeing Galileo from the isolation forced upon him by the Roman Catholic Inquisition.
I think scientist Brian Greene best explained the relationship of science and religion when he said, “There is room for both. Science explains the how, but can never explain the why.”
(CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama named his science and technology team Saturday with a pledge to ensure that “facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”
“It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology,” he said in his Saturday radio address, in an offhand swipe at President Bush.
“It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient,” Obama said, adding that government support had been essential for the greatest scientific breakthroughs of recent history, like the development of the Internet. “Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us.”
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I can think of at least three birthdays that should be celebrated in schools (K-12) across the country on an annual basis. Sir ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5213efa1-de3e-471f-9da9-5889e9b26607)
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(CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama named his science and technology team Saturday with a pledge to ensure that “facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=17fdac74-2eee-40a5-951d-5de69a442e0b)
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