Just wow.
Sometimes I wonder if these guys listen to what they say. Do they read their own interviews? Do they watch the shows they’re on so they see what they say? Do they ever consider how ridiculous they are? Their hypocrisy is stunning, their lack of sense and sensibility staggering.
Let’s start here. Sean Penn is worth about 150 million dollars. Quentin Tarantino is worth about 100 million. Poor Michael Moore is only worth about 50 million. That’s about 300 million all together. They are not the downtrodden or the exploited, unless you want to count something like not getting the amount of millions per film they asked for as exploitation. I would be curious to see who their household help is, who their gardeners are; I’d be delighted to have them publish a complete list of their personnel and how much they are paid. I’d also like to see the amounts of money they have personally contributed to charity each year for the past five years. I don’t mean work they’ve done like making commercials and those sorts of things, but actual dollars donated from their own personal pockets. I’d also like to see the tax deductions they’ve taken for their charitable work. There’s talk that Mr. Penn used a good bit of his charity’s money for his own personal travel expenses.
Penn, Tarantino and Moore have exploited capitalism and continue to exploit the American public who goes to see their films. Furthermore, the first two have surely made some of the most violent and gory films ever. They can’t have it both ways. You can’t make your fortune promoting violence and then complain and even be a force advocating against the U.S. for its violent ways. You can’t be a capitalist and benefit from capitalism like they have and then go on to advocate against capitalism, specifically talking to its evils.
Want to see what a whore really is? Well that’s Mr. Tarantino and his speaking out against the police. Why did he do it? He did it for audience, nothing more. Then for him to be sorry (because the police are boycotting his film), what a pig.
Yes, America is the land of the free and at least so far we still have free speech. These guys can say what they want. But we don’t have to listen to them, we don’t have to give them media time and exposure, and we surely don’t have to support their films.
What we do have to do is learn from them and then apply what we learn from their examples to our politicians, especially the presidential hopefuls, those leaders who speak out of both sides of their mouths like they do.
And so it goes.
Continuing to bitch and moan at this president, if you can call him a president, is now pointless. Sad to say, he is a legend only in his own mind. His world is not our world, and his world will never be our world. He is a master of rhetoric, the living example of the power of words although sadly the sum effect of his words translates into the powerlessness of the United States. That, the weakening of the greatest and most benevolent country ever, no matter what you think of its politics and policies, is something not to be taken lightly. Actually, and in effect, the global consequences of a weak and ineffectual United States can be staggering, can potentially be devastating. Obama in his Obama-world could care less.
We should have known better. We should have been smarter than to elect a person simply because he is Black. But we haven’t seemed to learn anything from that type of thinking if Hillary Clinton is any indication. She wants us to elect her because she is a woman and isn’t it about time we had a woman president? That’s one of her arguments. With women as a large part of the voting electorate, that may be a likelihood. God help us!
The other day in his town hall, the Obama blamed the Republicans for the gun problems in America. He named them first and the NRA next, and in his most unbecoming way, he chided the NRA for not attending the town hall. The head of the NRA said they would have attended if they were allowed a real dialogue. But all they were offered was to present one pre-screened question, so they could not see the point of attending. This Obama, in his most characteristic way, would have bullied them while professing to abhor and wholeheartedly fight against bullying.
Yes. That is this Obama in a nutshell.
It began early on. Mrs. O, when working for that hospital in Chicago, advocated for treating the poor but fixed it so her hospital did not accept indigent patients. Then Mr. and Mrs. O voiced support for the school voucher program but fixed it so the school their kids went to did not accept kids on vouchers. Then, even before he was elected, the Obama said he would not monetize the debt. However, he did that in spades, and his finance department has been printing money non-stop for the past seven years. Now true to his blame-game strategy and his not-my-fault nature, he claims it’s the rich people’s faults (rich people being synonymous with Republicans) that the spread between rich and poor has so dramatically widened. The fact of the matter is that his money policy has been a major cause of the gap widening, not the Obama-created evil rich. Ask Nancy Pelosi how she’s done in this Obama zero-interest-rate stock market.
Of course this goes on and on. In fact, it’s almost too easy to criticize this would-be president. Guns? Guns aren’t the problem. A gun doesn’t go off if you keep your fingers off the trigger. Gun crimes, despite Obama, have declined. The majority of gun crimes are committed by people with illegal guns and the availability of guns on the black market is a real problem. But enforcement of gun laws has dramatically decreased in Mr. O’s lack-of-Justice department, so he is in good part responsible for those illegal guns and for criminals and gang-youths not being afraid to have them or use them. I wonder if this wasn’t part of Eric Holder’s don’t prosecute blacks plan. Furthermore, Harry Reid’s and Mr. O’s cronies blocking Kate’s Law sent a perfect message to the criminals and all illegal gun possessors about just how okay it is for them to continue in their ways. Wasn’t that Eric Holder who let those guns get into the hands of the drug cartels?
You can’t much argue with Obama. He doesn’t know about anything, isn’t responsible for anything, and most scary, he doesn’t exist in the same world we live in. And you have to admit he has done what he said he would. He is the most transparent president ever. You can more clearly see his bigotry, hypocrisy and dishonesty than that in any other administration.
We seem to exist these days within a poverty of solutions, but we surely don’t have a poverty of ideas. Ideas seem plentiful. Unfortunately, however, many of them are reiterations of old ideas we already know don’t work. Solutions, however, those are hard to come by. They’re hard to come by for many reasons. A generally understated one is that our society is complex, the opposite of a homogeneous one. Perhaps in and of itself that says it best.
Still, even within our complex society, one would think we could find solutions to the problems which haunt us. Poverty, inequality, a failing educational system, a dysfunctional government, terrorism, huge national debt, unemployment: oh my. Why that’s like lions and tigers and bears. If only we could click our heels and return to Kansas.
I wonder how many people will not get that reference, and while I hope it’s not a lot, my gut tells me it is a whole generation of people, and maybe more than one generation. Surely the cell phone-video generation is a likely candidate.
In my last year of teaching high school, a fourteen year old freshman student stopped me in the midst of teaching a lesson and told me he didn’t need to learn what I was teaching. He went on to tell me what he wanted to learn. When an administrator not even half my age with not even a tenth of my teaching experience concurred with the youth, I knew it was time to retire, but more important, I knew I’d been clearly presented with a concrete illustration of why we live in the poverty of solutions.
Round about 2003, Mayor Bloomberg set about “reforming” the New York City school system. The idea was based upon sound pedagogical theory, that a smaller class size is preferable since the teacher-to-student ratio is higher. Of course nothing is that simple, but surely the research bears this out for at-risk students. For high achieving students, teacher-student ratio is much less important. A bit more than a decade later, the reform is a failure. They will tell you that the graduation rate is higher and will show you one of their tremendously successful schools every now and then. But they will neglect to remind you that the graduation requirements are much easier or that earning credits is vastly simplified. Moreover, they will rarely show you the many, many failing schools and the ones that have already fallen by the wayside. They won’t tell you that per-student spending is at record levels but we keep falling further and further behind in world standing in education.
The equation kind of goes like this. A bit ago, the powers that be, using another one of those entries from the treasure chest of ideas, decided that the scores on the SATs were too low and would be higher if they changed the scoring system. A really brilliant idea, to be sure. The end result is that now the national average score is 1500 out of 2400. Saying your score is 1500 sure sounds better than saying it’s 900. But what’s the meaning? I was a relatively average student. I got an 1150 out of 1600 on my first try and I never took them again because I knew that was enough for CUNY, which is where I knew I was going to college. Do the math. 1150 out of 1600 is 72% rounded up. 1500 out of 2400 is 63% rounded up. I’d rather have the higher percentage, no matter what the score sounds like.
The two examples above illustrate why we are living within the realm of the poverty of solutions. Appearance weighs more heavily than substance. Changing a school without doing anything with the clientele makes no sense. But it does look better. A 1500 looks better than a 900 or my 1150, but it’s meaningless if it does not represent real gain in overall percentage score. Spending more money per student than any other country sure looks great. So why do we keep slipping in world standings?
Our leaders are scamming us. They are more concerned with making us believe they are solving our problems than they are in actually solving them. This has led us into the era of the poverty of solutions.
Happy New Year everyone. May it be a good one for you all. It certainly looks like it will be an interesting one.
As we come into the new year we find ourselves in the midst of a new-style political campaign, one many of our analysts and pundits can’t seem to get the handle on. We hear all kinds of things, mostly negative, mostly all designed as scare tactics. I see the quick electronic sound bites in my email boxes and some that family and friends re-post on my Facebook page. Wow!
Not too long ago I was reading about poverty in America. I do have an EdD and I do keep up with trends in education and what is otherwise going on there, which isn’t much to talk about, honestly. In that regard, the more the thrust of the research centers on catering to the “poor downtrodden,” whoever they are, and adjusting things to accommodate them, the further removed we become from actually educating them and making them prepared to make their way in today’s world of work. That’s it in a nutshell. Sorry for the cliché. Some of my colleagues and I would be happy to share what we know does work, but the forces out there have an alternative agenda, one that is designed to only make it appear as if they care and are doing something about the issue when in reality their true agenda has nothing to do with those in need, education-wise or poverty-wise. Not conspiracy theory. Reality. Telling them what works is talking to the wind. One must assume that those in power are smart, formidable, and know the real score. One must assume then that if it were in their best interests they could surely fix things. So why, then, are things not fixed and why do we not even see some real progress toward fixing things? One must assume they are working toward their best interests and, as said, those interests do not coincide with the interests of the “downtrodden.”
So as regards poverty, this all is linked, even intertwined. Many of the poor in America are children. In fact, an estimated 22 percent overall, and if that isn’t dramatic enough, the ranges by demographics and regions are even more staggering. How does this happen in America? How does this happen here?
The answers aren’t simple or easy. They are as complicated and as complex as our society. Worse, further obfuscating mattes is politics, the characterizations of the Democrats and the Republicans as drawn by each side, Democrats depicting Republicans as cold and heartless, Republicans depicting Democrats as fostering government dependency with handouts for the purpose of buying and maintaining a voter base. Then even more horrible, the candidates pander to these depictions and play upon them. There isn’t one presidential candidate on either side who is not guilty.
Since the war on poverty began, around 1965, we’ve thrown nearly twenty-two trillion dollars (in constant 2012 dollars) at the poverty problem and the poverty rate has not noticeably diminished. That’s beyond incredulity. If I were CEO of a company whose performance was so abysmal, I’d have been voted out forty-five years ago. Nevertheless here we are in the endless throes of the war between the heartless and those who would give away the store to stay in power.
Even in the movies, when the stuff hits the fan and things seem to be at the precipice, the internally opposing forces join together to fight the common enemy. So what’s going on here?
Two of the major factors involved in the poverty issue are ones that might not be first-obvious as considerations. They are single-parent families, since children born into single parent families are at much greater risk for living in poverty, and government handouts, since even when combined programs are at work, recipients of welfare tend to live in poverty and do not effectuate change in their status. The first one mentioned is pretty standard knowledge when checked against any poverty statistics, think-tank or government produced, and for the second one, check out Ron Haskins and the Brookings Institute, and don’t go at Haskins for political bent, but read the statistics he presents to the effects of what dependency does.
There it is: about poverty, about kids, about America and the people in charge and who want to be in charge. The more we indulge in excuses for the downtrodden and bail outs for them that keep them downtrodden, the less we do to find solutions to helping them climb out of being down. The more we cater to the feelings of those we perceive as downtrodden and shy away from the realities of what truly must be done to help them help themselves, the longer we will have this discourse because that is how long the problem will be around. The longer we have leaders whose interests are not aligned with fixing the poverty issue or the education issue, the more we approach an irreversible precipice.
Don’t give them fish, teach them to fish. Wasn’t that how it went?
