Author: Redactor

Categories
Thought

John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Categories
ideological culture

The Wild Punch

Who hasn’t wanted to punch a politician?

But a fracas in Athens, Greece, yesterday, demonstrates that punching people, not to mention threatening them with firearms, is a bad idea, and too often apt to harm the wrong people.

In this case, the pugilist, Giorgos Germenis, was himself something of a “wrong person.” He’s one of 18 lawmakers in the Greek parliament representing the Golden Dawn Party, which is often described as “neo-Nazi” for its ugly nationalist, anti-foreigner sentiment — and for an awfully suspicious party logo.

Germenis had been part of a charitable effort held in Syntagma Square to hand out free food . . . but only to Greek natives! The government shut down the giveaway, and the scuffle, hours later, was part of the fallout. Reportedly blocked from reaching for his gun by security, Germenis threw a punch at Athens’s mayor, Giorgos Kaminis.

He missed the mayor, but hit a young girl.

Bruised, but not seriously hurt, the 12-year old did manage to escape becoming the centerpiece of the showdown between the anti-foreigner activists and the Athens City government.

Greece’s troubles don’t really have much to do with foreigners. Greek troubles, instead, have everything to do with Greek politicians, and the sad, once politically attractive but now quite bankrupt (fiscally and morally) habit of trying to live at the expense of everyone else.

Blaming foreigners is the wrong way out. (Here in America, too.)

Germenis’s group should have been allowed to give only to natives, but a hallmark of civilization is the respect for strangers, traders, wanderers. The Golden Dawners don’t have their hearts in the right place.

Which is shown by the wild punch and who it hit. An innocent. As usual.

This Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Comparable Worth?

The federal government encourages a certain “spin” regarding wages and salaries. Both taxation and regulation enforce a kind of accounting fraud in nearly all wage contracts. Employees receive a statement when they get paid, but that statement is not complete. Only half of an employee’s Social Security contributions are listed, for example — though, from the employers’ point of view, that unlisted “employer’s contribution” is just as much a part of a workers’ wage as the amount written on the check.

Most folks don’t see a full dollar-value listing of their benefit package at time of payment, either.

Of course, some things just can’t be accounted for in money terms.

In charming, smaller towns — like, say, Traverse City, Michigan, or Port Townsend, Washington — folks have been known to explain those towns’ somewhat depressed wage rates with a rhyme: “The view of the bay is part of your pay.”

And then there’s job security.

In a 2012 report comparing private sector jobs to federal government jobs, the benefit of public sector job security went unacknowledged. Naturally enough.

What we learn is that government employees tend to make a bit more that private sector employees, but, when you include benefit packages, their rates of remuneration are much higher — 16 percent higher.

But then, if to prove that the government really is all about equality, it’s not at the top end that government workers prove wildly overpaid; it’s at the less-credentialed “low end.” These job pay 36 percent more than comparable private sector jobs.

What is often not addressed in the wage and benefit debate is the fact that lower-skilled private sector workers are also disproportionately harmed by federal regulation, subsidies and other misguided policies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Daniel B. Klein

Government is a unique player in society, and rules and norms have emerged that recognize that uniqueness. We tolerate governmental coercion that we would not tolerate from private parties, and not only because the government is more resolute and better armed.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling

Arrested Development

Former Atlanta schools superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other school employees, including high-level administrators, principals and teachers, were recently booked in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail after being indicted on 65 criminal counts. The charges included racketeering, theft, conspiracy, making false statements and witness tampering.

Just four years ago, Hall was the National Superintendent of the Year. Now, she faces 45 years in prison for having allegedly snagged almost $600,000 in bonus income for higher test scores achieved through fraudulently changing students’ test answers.

And this, the nation’s largest-ever cheating scandal, may prove only the highest shard of a proverbial large floating mass of frozen water.

But instead of condemnation, some of the nation’s leading “education experts” seem bent on excusing the cheaters.

“What we do know,” Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss pointed out, “is that these cheating scandals have been a result of test-obsessed school reform.”

Dr. Christopher Emdin of Columbia University Teachers College reminded readers at the end of a recent Huffington Post column, “I am not saying that educators and school officials who cheat on tests or conspire to cover up cheating should not be reprimanded.”

Just “reprimanded”?

Award-winning teacher Steven Lin explained  that “environments such as that alleged in Atlanta present the classic sociological phenomenon of ‘diffusion of responsibility,’ along with a host of other flaws regarding the compartmentalization of job descriptions within bureaucracies.”

You mean they suffer from “peer pressure”?

Nevertheless, I still think it’s more than sorta bad to cheat.

And I agree wholeheartedly with the “controversial” remark by George Washington University Dean Michael Feuer: “It’s not the test that made them cheat.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Daniel B. Klein

Government is a unique player in society, and rules and norms have emerged that recognize that uniqueness. We tolerate governmental coercion that we would not tolerate from private parties, and not only because the government is more resolute and better armed.

Categories
media and media people

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?

Some folks have all the subtlety of a whoopee cushion.

In a Washington Post column about the influence of freshman Senator Ted Cruz, Dana Milbank remarked that Cruz “is the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate.”

The reader is supposed to recognize in natal form a dangerous McCarthyesque demagoguery in Cruz, who is a vigorous and no doubt sometimes wrongheaded polemicist. Milbank offers no substantive comparison of the two men. He just let slip a hit-and-run innuendo, then raced away.

Why? I can’t read Milbank’s mind. Typically, though, smear artists defame a person in hopes that others will reel back in horror or contempt, thus diverted from relevant considerations of fact. Perhaps the smear-wielder also wants the target to be cowed into silence.

Turnabout is fair play and underscores the silliness here. After the Instapundit blog linked to Milbank’s rapier-like thrust, readers gave reciprocity a try. Christopher Arfaa came up with: “Dana Milbank will turn 45 next week, the same age as Walter Duranty was in 1929, when he secured an exclusive interview with Josef Stalin.” Jay Brinker proposed: “John Kerry is 69, the same age as Neville Chamberlin when he signed the Munich Agreement.” You get the idea.

Sounds easy to get caught in such a net.

I may as well admit it: I too am of a certain age — the same age at which any number of disreputable persons perpetrated some enormity or another.

All my known associates have regular birthdays as well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Daniel B. Klein

True social decency does not dwell on, pity, or patronize someone’s weakness or disadvantage, real or supposed. It does not rescue when rescue has not been sought. It does not judge or even draw attention to. It proceeds on the assumption that the individual is conducting his affairs as he sees fit, no matter how mad the method may seem.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Sleep Rules?

Getting kids to go to bed at night, and to stay there till morning, and not get up, again and again, is possibly life’s greatest challenge. When I had young children, I was willing to do whatever it took.

Drink of water? Sure. Okay. No more.

Drone strike? Well, as tempting as that sounds . . . no.

But according to The Washington Post, Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni man, testified before the United States Senate that some parents in his country have taken to threatening their children at bedtime, “Go to sleep or I will call the planes.”

Pretty funny. Until it dawned on me that our USA is now scarier than the monster hiding underneath the bed.

“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village,” Muslimi warned, “one drone strike accomplished in an instant: There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”

Georgetown University Law Professor Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon advisor, testified: “Every individual detained, targeted, and killed by the U.S. government may well deserve his fate. But when a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”

Anything that undermines the rule of law, undermines the United States of America.

It’s long past time we put the lawlessness of the killer drone program to bed . . . and not just till morning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.