Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Bad Math Baltimore

Baltimore, schools, education, school choice, mathematics

You may have thought it couldn’t get this bad. 

“Not one student at 13 high schools in Baltimore City, Maryland, achieved proficiency in math,” informs the city’s Fox 45 News, “as indicated by state math exams.”

That’s 40 percent of the city’s high schools and we’re talking not a single soul managed to come in at “proficiency.” Not mastery, mind you. 

“Among those 13 high schools,” the report continued, “a total of 1,736 students participated in the test with 74.5% of them achieving the lowest possible score of one out of four.”

Okay, okay, but what about the city’s best schools?

Well, a Fox 45 News follow-​up found that only “11.4% of students” even at “Baltimore’s five top-​performing high schools” are “proficient in math.” 

Adding, “In fact, not one high school student in the entire city, last school year, achieved a top level of math proficiency.”

Jason Rodriguez, with People Empowered by the Struggle, an edgily named Baltimore nonprofit, calls it “educational homicide.”

“It’s not a funding issue,” says Rodriguez. “We’re getting plenty of funding.” He thinks “accountability is the issue” and has “been calling for the resignation of the school CEO.”

Young people in Baltimore can learn mathematics just as well as young people anywhere. That we know. But they also need functional families as well as functional schools. The government, plausibly the chief cause of the dysfunction of both, has only official responsibility for the latter.

Sure, it sounds like time to lop off the top brass. But also past time to give every parent of a school-​age child in Baltimore (and everywhere) a choice about where to go to school — purchased with the tax dollars that taxpayers are already providing.

Currently, to no avail. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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general freedom ideological culture political challengers

Two Libertarians, North and South

Milei, Rectenwald

Two scholars have entered politics: Javier Milei in Argentina and Michael Rectenwald in the U.S. The latter’s work has been discussed before in these pages, but the former’s has not. 

Michael Rectenwald, an erstwhile Marxist who began criticizing woke leftism and found his way to libertarianism, spurred by his cruel rejection by the leftist academy and also by reading the work of Ludwig von Mises, is now running for the U.S. presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party.

Javier Milei was a footballer and rock-​n-​roll musician before becoming an economist and a politician. The Argentine with the wild hair spoke clearly and rationally to Tucker Carlson days ago in Buenos Aires, defending what he called “liberalism” (and opposing socialism in all its forms). Mr. Carlson identified Milei as a libertarian, claiming that the popular economist may become, next month, the next president of his country. At the ten-​minute mark Milei explains that “liberalism” means something different in Argentina than in the U.S. He makes it clear he means freedom under a rule of law.

Michael Rectenwald formally introduced his campaign on comedian Dave Smith’s podcast Part of the Problem on Saturday. Rectenwald explains that his main goal is to speak the Truth. “The conclusion I’ve come to is effectively that the means that these elites use are actually the ends that they seek.” In short, those in power didn’t cook up lockdowns and mask mandates and jabs to fight a pandemic, but to extend their power.

Milei, in one popular video, takes a similarly dark view: “You can’t negotiate with leftards. You don’t negotiate with trash because they will end you!”

This politics stuff isn’t so easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Expulsion of the Sick

covid, college, quarantine, masks, lock down, hysteria

Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure. 

We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.” 

The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale. 

Never. 

Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.

“Students who test positive for COVID-​19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.” 

That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.

“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-​19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”

But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.

So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.

Doesn’t make sense. 

I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Don’t Tread on Jaiden

Gadsden Flag, freedom, slavery, snake, snek

The Gadsden Flag: “Don’t Tread on Me” — it is many an American’s favorite flag, for it expresses a sentiment, the most American of political sentiments: resistance to tyranny.

Other flags, including the Stars and Stripes, are symbolic without being explicit.

What American could be against it? To oppose the Gadsden Flag is to oppose liberty!

But, these days, there are a lot of people who try to impugn the flag and the concept as being, I kid you not, “white supremacist” and “pro-​slavery.”

It’s absurd, of course. Slaves were tread upon. Those who demand not to be tread upon object to their own slavery. And, by extension, others’.

Tell that to the woke mob. 

And to public school administrators.

On Monday, a likely lad named Jaiden was removed from his class at Vanguard Elementary in Colorado Springs. He triggered his teacher with a patch on his backpack featuring the Gadsden. When his mother confronted the charter school’s administrator, recording the chat, the administrator defended the action on the usual woke grounds: its alleged “origins with slavery.” 

Oddly, not even the school rules gave grounds to remove him for it — even if it were “about slavery.” (To repeat: it’s about slavery’s opposite.)

I smell the stink of partisanship. Many teachers and administrators so object to some people who like the flag that they distort facts to enforce ideological conformity on students.

The story has a happy ending, though. Jaiden was exonerated, walking into school with the patch still visible.

To make the story better, however, the teachers and administrators who thought they could tread upon Jaiden should be severely reprimanded, if not fired outright. For violating his rights.

And for not knowing history.

Flunk ’em!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture property rights

Shrink Shrank Shrunk

shoplifters, private property, civilization

“Shrinkage.” A big problem.

I’m not talking about the delicate issue identified in the classic Seinfeld episode, “The Hamptons.” I refer, instead, to the business lingo for theft.

It’s rampant and taking a sad toll. 

Dick’s Sporting Goods is the first major retailer to blame declining profits on the “shrink” of its inventory because of mass theft. “The sporting goods and athletic clothing seller reported second-​quarter results Tuesday morning that included a 23% drop in profit, despite sales that rose 3.6% in the period,” CNN explains. 

But it’s not just a Dick’s problem. “Retailers large and small say they are struggling to contain an escalation in store crimes — from petty shoplifting to organized sprees of large-​scale theft that clear entire shelves of products. Target warned earlier this year that it was bracing to lose half a billion dollars because of rising theft.”

The cause?

No mystery.

Leftists have long been uncomfortable with private property. Their socialism seeks to replace private property with public property and private control over the means of production with governmental control. No wonder they often excuse private thievery as something like a revolutionary act.

When Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon put the idea boldly onto paper in 1840, that private property is itself theft, he really meant landed property, not personal property. Today’s leftists, unburdened by subtlety, keep coming back to opposing what is the core institution of civilization: respect for other people’s things.

Which allows for everything from privacy to progress.

Encouraging petty theft, as the left has knowingly, and organized theft, as the left has unwittingly (I hope) is not without consequences.

Our wealth, our liberties, our peace — they shrink.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs media and media people

Unspoken Contract

tiger chair, communism, torture

“After the Tiananmen massacre,” explained Washington Post editorial board member, Keith Richburg, “China’s rulers adopted an unspoken social compact with the population: The Communist Party offers them boundless economic growth, the opportunity to get rich and some expanded personal freedoms in exchange for its continued right to rule.”

Mr. Richburg doesn’t bother to name any of these “expanded personal freedoms” to which he refers. I’m sure the Chinese people are wondering as well. 

Richburg is certainly not alone in his delusion; one regularly hears this inane idea suggesting some sort of political legitimacy and justification for the CCP’s totalitarian state. In fact, in this same Post feature assessing China’s current economic woes, columnist Catherine Rampell likewise declared, “For generations, the Chinese Communist Party has held on to power partly through an implicit bargain with its citizenry: Sacrifice your freedoms, and, in exchange, we’ll guarantee ever-​rising living standards.”

But there simply is no such bargain. No contract. No political compact between the Chinazi rulers and the Chinese people. That’s a figment of fuzzy Western elitist — and Rousseauvian — fantasy. 

The CCP doesn’t hold power via demonstrated public support. Their power flows from the barrel of a gun, as notorious mass-​murderer Chairman Mao acknowledged long ago. Not to mention fear of today’s Tiger chair. 

Pretending otherwise only enables the tyranny.

Know your enemy. And if you know the Chinese state, you know it is your enemy and an enemy of the Chinese people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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