I listened recently to a milktoast expose of socialism by a 38-year old conservative who spoke to a crowd of elderly and well-off Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians.
They wanted to know how he became a conservative, considering that he went to Columbia. They wanted to replicate that in their own progressively indoctrinated grandchildren.
The speaker told them that he studied the classics when he started school in August 2001 and then 9/11 happened and he and his roommates had a front-row seat and perfect view of the Islamist terrorist attack from their dorm balcony. The unfolding terrorist attack by Saudi nationals, who had murdered 3,000 innocent Americans, he said, turned him into a conservative more than anything else.
I was thinking that, probably, some if not most of those in the audience had grandchildren going to the vaunted universities around the country on their trust funds probably set up when their progenies were born, not batting an eye at the cost of the tuition and at whatever the tenured progressive professors were indoctrinating their grandchildren with.
I corresponded back and forth with the organizer of the event, suggeting concrete ways to reverse the indoctrination that had taken place since Jimmy Carter decided to establish the Department of Education in 1979. Generations of teachers were trained themselves at Colleges of Education around the country in the fine points of socialism and communism, knowledge which they then imparted to the rapt audience of American children who looked up to their teachers as the arbiters of truth and knowledge.
These teachers were usually the worst students one could marshall to teach anybody - they scored constantly in the lower 50th percentile of any teacher education tests, including the National Teacher Exam.
The organizer of the event read my three emails and responded that, I was probably mistaken, things are not so bad and never will be. But we still have to do something about it.
My view of the world through personal experience, 30 years of teaching Economics and Foreign Languages, travel in Europe and North America, research, and living 20 years under communism.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
Saturday, May 18, 2019
Chernobyl
Wikipedia photo |
The HBO mini-series Chernobyl is very
intense. It is not just an expose of what has actually happened with the
nuclear reactor in the former Soviet Union in 1986, but an indictment of the reckless
communist rule that has brought to disaster many nations and their wonderful
people who allowed themselves to be bullied into the false promises of
collectivism and communism, the land of free milk and honey, of impossible equity
and equality.
The proletariat suffered greatly at the hands of activists
and apparatchiks with a low-grade education, useful idiots who helped implement
totalitarian communism, deprivation, and mass starvation. The Marxists,
Bolsheviks, Leninists, Stalinists, and Maoists had engineered and were
complicit in the death of 100 million people.
In episode 2, a nuclear physicist is trying to explain to the
communist secretary in charge of the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine, that he needs to evacuate the town and
he responds that there is no danger, the exposure is equal to one x-ray, a
bold, fat, and deliberate lie to the public who was kept in the dark during the
most essential time when they should have evacuated the residents of the town
located three miles from the nuclear reactor which melted down, scattering
radioactive graphite everywhere and blowing radioactive fumes and particles
into the atmosphere, raining down on unsuspected locals. The wind carried
radioactivity all over Germany, Nordic countries, and even to northern Romania.
Frustrated, the physicist tells him, I am sorry Comrade so and so
but before you were a local party secretary, you worked in a shoe factory.
His answer, delivered with a distasteful smirk born of ignorance
and self-importance, was, yes, but I am in charge here now, not you.
This is typical of the irresponsible comrades who ran the
communist countries, all the Soviet satellites - low on education and
intoxicated on power, not caring about the dangers that they put millions of
people in every day with their Marxist-based crushing rule and ill-informed
decisions.
A faithful Russian reader, wondered if the HBO series
mentioned that the tragedy was in fact, bound to happen. According to Slava, “Years
before the festive inauguration of the Chernobyl’s nuclear station, quite a few
inspectors were warning that the construction was done below any standards,
thanks to nearly all the contracts being gifted to the corrupt relatives or
friends of local party bosses. The general opinion of those brave and honest
experts was that, due to constant substitution of good building materials with
cheap trash, the future catastrophe would be simply inevitable. Naturally,
their written reports were at once gagged and hidden by the communist leadership
– you just couldn’t criticize the Party’s projects, especially the top-secret
atomic ones. The dreadful truth was declassified in the late nineties.”
In a similar vein, the current young and old American socialists are
running our country from Congress openly. Radical socialist Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez comes to mind, a former bartender, with no political or economic knowledge
of what it takes to run the largest economy on the planet, now makes
fundamental decisions for the future of our country, for our people, via the
Green New Deal, not just for 330 million of Americans today, but for
generations to come.
P.S. I watched episode three last night and was brought to tears. It was not only the sacrifice innocent Russians had made willingly and unwillingly to save their fellow Russians and the horrible deaths so many suffered.
It was also the reminder of my past life under the exact communist society, the drab surroundings, the police state everywhere, the lack of rights and self-determination, the bribery of medical personnel to do their jobs, and the sense of hopelessness that I personally had experienced in Romania; it all flooded back with gut-wrenching sobs.
I was never in Chernobyl, thank God, but I felt a sense of kinship with the suffering of fellow communist proletariat subjects who languished and died at the hands of useful idiot apparatchiks. They constantly watched, harassed, and arrested citizens with the all-mighty Security Police branch of oppression called KGB, just for asking questions to get to the truth.
P.S. I watched episode three last night and was brought to tears. It was not only the sacrifice innocent Russians had made willingly and unwillingly to save their fellow Russians and the horrible deaths so many suffered.
It was also the reminder of my past life under the exact communist society, the drab surroundings, the police state everywhere, the lack of rights and self-determination, the bribery of medical personnel to do their jobs, and the sense of hopelessness that I personally had experienced in Romania; it all flooded back with gut-wrenching sobs.
I was never in Chernobyl, thank God, but I felt a sense of kinship with the suffering of fellow communist proletariat subjects who languished and died at the hands of useful idiot apparatchiks. They constantly watched, harassed, and arrested citizens with the all-mighty Security Police branch of oppression called KGB, just for asking questions to get to the truth.
Thursday, May 16, 2019
The Magical Energy of the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal proposed by
radicals in Congress brought back best-forgotten memories of my life under the “paradise
of socialism.”
I am too old to live under socialism because I like
simple luxuries like soap, detergent, toilet paper, electricity, food, clean
water, and comfortable shoes, and being able to express my opinion in public
without severe retribution.
It sums up in a simplistic way the dreary
daily life of surviving under a socialist economy where the means of production
were owned by the incompetent state and each citizen was at the mercy of the
government centralized planners who would not know what supply and demand was
if it hit them in the face.
People brought these elementary-middle
school trained incompetents to power because all they’ve heard was free stuff,
equality, and fleece the rich, which they were. Those who were lucky, escaped
with their lives and lost everything they’ve worked hard to earn including ancestral
lands and private property. You see, the massive and forced confiscation was
sold to the useful idiots as “for the common good.”
I am also too old to live in stack-n-pack
prefab reinforced concrete apartments, sharing bathrooms and kitchens with
other families in a space no larger than the average hotel room.
Russians are demolishing many of the
Soviet era grey concrete high-rise buildings, admitting that the experiment to
offer “affordable housing” has failed miserably. But we are going full
steam ahead with it because the Wunderkind AOC of the U.S. House of
Representatives told us to – if we don’t, the planet will perish in 12 years.
I like my stellar healthcare, I do not
desire Medicare for all, meaning healthcare for none, once rationing ensues. Most
people don’t understand basic economics, including AOC, who is shouting in
microphones every chance she gets, promoting her global communism environmental
deal.
Sustainable Developers of the Green New Deal, the Agenda 2030 imposed on Americans,
promises all sorts of amenities to the population at large if we are just
willing to cram into high-rises and to adopt a walkability/bike life
style, living like sardines in a small can, assembling and disassembling
modular Bauhaus-style furniture, giving up our independence and mobility, cars, and everything that makes life fun and
worth living, all because it is not deemed sustainable by U.N. planners and it
is endangering the planet with global warming.
In my experience, the socialist utopia
radicals in this country are promoting, was made worse in the socialist
republic run by the Communist Party, by ardent apparatchiks with no formal
education but the gift of gab, loquacious enough to appeal to the lowest common
denominator who brought them to power in the first place (think Venezuela,
Cuba, Soviet Union, North Korea, and all the Iron Curtain Soviet satellite dictatorships).
A cartoon from the Soviet Union with
the following caption under one solitary brown boot in an otherwise empty
display case read, “we have received a
new shipment, come see the boot,” aptly describes our shopping reality and
the existence of the black market and bartering in order to survive.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortes wants America to
dispose of cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes. In twelve years, her “magic energy” will
replace all the dirty fossil fuel energy that is destroying the planet we
inhabit.
The Green New Deal is placing solar
panels on our roofs, which is a good move in the long run if taxpayers’
subsidies are paying for the installation and the panels. When the sun is out,
good ole fossil fuels must supply the energy.
Let’s not mention wind turbines which
are so expensive and inefficient to operate and run that they seldom provide enough
energy in their lifetime to offset the cost of producing and maintaining them.
When the wind dies down, the turbines move but precious little energy is
produced.
How is the rest of the largest economy
on the planet going to be supplied with energy? How will trucks transport our
food, medicine, parts, cars, mail, and other necessities we take for granted
daily? Who is going to move people when cars are gone? Buses? Trains? What is
going to replace millions and millions of jobs lost? How are these people going
to make a living? What is going to replace the ships and recreational boats? How
are we going to cross rivers and oceans? By fast train and buses? Perhaps that IS
the idea, keeping the population immobile in one large and crowded area, under
the control of our all-knowing government.
How is energy going to be produced? AEI's Mark Perry explained,
“Despite a huge workforce of almost
400,000 solar workers (about 20 percent of electric power payrolls in 2016),
that sector produced an insignificant share, less than 1 percent, of the
electric power generated in the U.S. last year. And that’s a lot of solar workers:
about the same as the combined number of employees working at Exxon Mobil,
Chevron, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Ford and P&G.
https://www.aei.org/publication/inconvenient-energy-fact-it-takes-79-solar-workers-to-produce-same-amount-of-electric-power-as-one-coal-worker/print/
In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent. And with only 160,000 coal workers (less than half the number of workers in either solar or gas), that sector produced nearly one-third (almost as much as gas) of U.S. electricity last year.
In 2016, the coal sector generated an average of 7,745 megawatt hours of electric power per worker, more than twice the 3,812 megawatt hours of electricity generated per natural gas worker, and 79 times more electric power per worker than the solar industry, which produced only 98 megawatt hours of electricity per worker. Therefore, to produce the same amount of electric power as just one coal worker would require two natural gas workers and an amazingly-high 79 solar workers.” It does not seem that AOC thought this out before she read her TelePrompTer about the Green New Deal.
In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent. And with only 160,000 coal workers (less than half the number of workers in either solar or gas), that sector produced nearly one-third (almost as much as gas) of U.S. electricity last year.
In 2016, the coal sector generated an average of 7,745 megawatt hours of electric power per worker, more than twice the 3,812 megawatt hours of electricity generated per natural gas worker, and 79 times more electric power per worker than the solar industry, which produced only 98 megawatt hours of electricity per worker. Therefore, to produce the same amount of electric power as just one coal worker would require two natural gas workers and an amazingly-high 79 solar workers.” It does not seem that AOC thought this out before she read her TelePrompTer about the Green New Deal.
In Virginia, Spotsylvania,
Chesterfield, Accomack and now Culpeper, solar providers have set up shop with
help from generous subsidies. The proposed solar facility in Culpeper, operated
by Cricket Solar of California, will install panels on 800 acres of agricultural
land and provide 80 megawatts of power. Who will produce our food each time
agricultural land is taken out of commission for solar panels and wind turbines?
Socialist co-operatives here or China? https://freebeacon.com/issues/virginias-push-for-solar-panels-offers-few-rays-of-hope/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=0af9d2d776-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_05_08_19_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-0af9d2d776-45619005
There is no other country in the world
where I can seek the best health care right now, go to a hospital and be
treated the same day, have medical tests relatively quickly, buy what I want to
eat right now, cooked or uncooked, find a pharmacy open that would fill the
prescription I need, walk into an abundant grocery store at all hours of the
day and night and find what I want to buy without standing in line and fighting
other shoppers for the last potato. There are myriads of choices provided by capitalist
supply and demand, by freedom, by mobility, by entrepreneurship, and by the much-maligned
fossil fuels which brought us out of the dark ages of poverty, want, and disease
and into a successful western civilization that everyone envies and risks life
and limb to get here.
But we should not let reality and
truth stand in the way of corrupt politics. Every time AOC opens her mouth to
speak, more pearls of communist wisdom roll out onto the floor. They spread in all
corners of the country and disappear, never to be found again. Her socialist
ardent supporters just hear “free, free, free for all.”
Monday, May 13, 2019
Virginia, Fairfax County, Education, and Trailers
Virginia is
an interesting educational and political study in how to destroy a formerly
well-off state with tolerance and multi-culturalism dictated by politicians
from Richmond and Washington, D.C. It is a microcosm of the civilization
suicide that is taking place in Europe.
Virginia is
not very far behind the Seattle School District that sent a letter recently to
teachers asking them to bless Muslim students in Arabic during Ramadan. Virginia
obsesses over accommodating those who will not give an inch in their quest to
be a specially protected class.
The Guardian
wrote that “Virginia students learn in trailers while the state offers Amazon
huge tax breaks.” And the unhappy teachers went on strike in January 2019 to
express their dissatisfaction with what they saw as low pay, $9,000 less than
the national average, while the state of Virginia was so generous to Amazon. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/27/virginia-teachers-strike-amazon-tax-breaks?CMP=share_btn_fb
The Washington Post published data from the National Education Association that
the average K-12 teacher earned $58,353 in 2016-2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/03/05/how-much-or-little-teachers-earn-state-by-state/?noredirect=on
According to
the Guardian, “more than 22,000 students in Fairfax county [the third richest
county in America] receive their education in cheaply constructed plywood trailers,
often with visible signs of green mold, like those parked next to the baseball
fields next to McClean High School.”
McClean is a
rich area in NOVA where the average homes cost over a million dollars. The property
tax base to help fund public schools is thus very large.
Quoting
school board member Ryan McElveen, the Guardian wrote, “Our staff often likes
to say that Fairfax Public schools is the largest trailer dealer on the east
coast. We own 820 trailers, more than any other entity on the entire east coast.”
Gov. Ralph Northam
proposed to increase the education budget by approximately $270 million. Teachers
objected to Northam’s proposed $750 million expenditure to lure Amazon to build
its second HQ in Virginia, while classrooms were overcrowded, necessitating the
use of trailers.
Why is there
such an overcrowding in northern Virginia’s schools? It is certainly not because Americans are
having more babies, far from it, it is because illegal aliens have so many anchor
babies that we are educating for free.
Educators
are the first to push the liberal agenda of flooding the country with illegals whose
children must be educated in their own native language, often dialects that
require financial investing in specialized translators, teachers, textbooks, classes,
and special tutoring, at the expense of American children who must learn in
trailers and make do with less.
These new illegal
arrivals must be also be fed at taxpayers’ expense and illegal families must be
sheltered in welfare housing and provided with everything they may need to
survive, including free and expensive healthcare.
Some teachers
believe that giving tax breaks to Amazon is wrong when they could teach so many
more illegal aliens’ children instead and house their families at the expense
of the Virginian taxpayers.
Local and
very vocal liberals in Fairfax county, who push for more school funding, argue
that “building new schools could actually create more jobs than bringing in
Amazon.” More schools mean more teachers and a lower teacher-to-student ratio
argues Lee Carter, a Democrat Socialist state delegate from Manassas.
Northern
Virginia (NOVA) with its progressive and corrupt political atmosphere is the
reason why the entire state of Virginia is turning socialist. Republicans barely
control the House of Delegates by only one delegate and the Senate by two
Senators.
The NOVA population
is composed mostly of federal government workers from Washington, D.C. and an
ever-growing and very large contingent of illegal and legal aliens who vote Democrat
as a block because they want to turn Virginia into the socialist paradise they’ve
fled from.
Fairfax
County Public School has adopted highly controversial curricula on sex
education, sidestepping the important role of parents to teach their own children
about human sexuality. FCPS agenda was transgenderism
and co-ed bathrooms.
The state education
budget and local property taxes fund the public schools but is the money being
used judiciously?
FCPS, with
its budget of $3 billion annually, focuses more on globalism, with graduates
who have “…attributes of Communicator, Collaborator, Ethical and Global
Citizen, Creative and Critical Thinker, and Goal-Directed and Resilient Individual.”
Next year’s
proposed budget increase of $117 million will “provide excellence and equity, hiring
more staff to teach 1,000 fewer students.” According to Arthur Purves, “FCPS has
a Chief Equity Officer but not much equity.” https://thebullelephant.com/Fairfax-county-public-schools-excellence-for-a-few/
Friday, May 3, 2019
Bicycles and The Great Leap Backwards
Photo: Wikipedia, Danish female bike |
Americans hold constitutional
elections in order to choose, among many positions in government, the local
mayor. But a non-governmental organization (NGO), Bycs, which created the bicycle mayors’ program, wants to change
that. How can an unelected ‘mayor’ be constitutional? “It is nice to have one,
centralized voice,” … “And, honestly especially in the U.S., it’s so much
easier to do as a party of one, than a committee, meeting, month to month. It’s
a great way to speed things up. We have to catch up, to provide alternative
transportation.” I’ve heard that ‘party of one’ tune before under
totalitarian communism. https://bycs.org/
The
nonprofit Bycs “wants to use the
network to aim for an ambitious goal of moving half of all local trips to bikes
by 2030 as a way to address climate change, air pollution, health, and other
urban challenges.” https://www.technocracy.news/sustainable-mobility-half-of-all-city-trips-by-bicycle-by-2030/
Adam
Stones, strategy and communications director for Bycs, advocates to use the Dutch bike control experiment around the
world by 2030 in line with the 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals of U.N.’s
Agenda 2030.
The
Dutch who already have a bike-obsessed culture, have chosen in 2016 a “bicycle
mayor – a person who serves as a connecting point between city departments,
nonprofits, and other bike advocates in order to make Amsterdam even more bikeable.”
The
NGO Bycs wants to bring “bike mayors
to 200 cities by the end of 2019. And they are already in nearly 30 cities,
from São Paulo to Istanbul.”
Can you not envision thousands
of people biking to work on the busy interstates that crisscross our nation’s
capital and its surrounding suburbs? And these bikers would try to take their
children to school, “bike-pooling,” lugging sacks of groceries on a bike, carrying
everything else home on a bike, including perhaps perishables such as ice
cream?
It would be so much fun
biking in snow and on ice, especially for people with prosthetics, artificial
knees, and other handicaps. It is indeed fun to have the option to bike in some
picturesque areas, but the bike lanes are springing up all over the nation to
the tune of billions of dollars, yet I see scarce few actually riding a bike on
them because Americans love their cars and the freedom of mobility it affords.
Bikers can only travel
so far, maybe 15 miles, if they are in good physical shape and young, before
collapsing from the effort. Perhaps the idea is to keep people close to home so
that the land can be re-wilded and protected from the encroaching humans.
The millennials who helped
push this bike craze are actually driving alone to work in their expensive electric
cars with a smug look on their faces and no idea where the electricity that
powers their vehicles is coming from other than recharging stations popping up
like mushrooms overnight, taking up parking spaces for the handicapped. They just
know that they are saving the planet from an impending manufactured climate doom
caused by the greedy humanity itself.
On the other hand, if
they are unable to bike, humanity should move into the U.N. planned high-rise,
walkability-designed urban areas, where everyone would be neatly stacked and
packed in high-rises within five minutes walking or public transportation distance
from home, work, shopping, and entertainment. Such a shrunken megalopolis would
be a dream for globalists to control the population. To me, it will be The
Great Leap Backward, the American version of China’s failed Great Leap Forward
to total global control of the population.
We had public transportation
under communism, only the elites had cars, and we never got to travel very far,
only as far as our biking, walking, buses, or the train took us, if we could
afford the tickets that were already subsidized by the government. The salaries
were so low and equal, that things had to be subsidized by the communist
government for people to afford basics such as transport, shelter, and food.
The bike “craze” began
with United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals, specifically number
11, Sustainable Cities and Communities. https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-global-goals-and-the-2030-Agenda-for-sustainable-development/goal-11-sustainable-cities-and-communities/
If your roads are
narrower, bike paths are springing up alongside roads, and parking lots have
been taken out of existence, it is owed to the work of the “civil society” of
the United Nations and its NGOs staffed by Americans who just know what is
better for the planning of your community, where you live, where you go to school,
what you study, where you go for recreation, and how you live your life in general
and do business.
United Nation’s NGOs comprise
a shadow government by proxy, unelected, but nevertheless quite powerful. Their
Visioning Committees are working around the country to change your local and
state governments and their zoning laws.
The 17 Sustainable Development
(SD) goals were adopted at the U.N. Summit on September 25, 2015, committing
the signatory countries to a world of “sustainable and equitable future” as
part of U.N. Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. It is a multi-faceted,
well-moneyed effort to globalize the world for better control and
redistribution of wealth under the aegis of the United Nations. https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-global-goals-and-the-2030-Agenda-for-sustainable-development/
The SD
brainwashing encompasses everything around you. In April 2019 National
Geographic dedicated an entire special edition to walkable Cities of the Future,
sustainable land, rethinking cities (whose vision?), and Urban Hubs. “In a
densely developed hub, sustainable land use within and outside its borders helps
people thrive by providing water, food, and recreation. High-capacity transit
reduces emissions and speeds commute times.”
The progressive
argument is that an urban area is a good and safe place to raise a family. Is a
large metropolis a nice place to raise children and a better place for them to
live? As a parent, my answer is NO. I prefer country living and suburbia, much
maligned by the progressive left as “suburban sprawl.”
Hong
Kong, pictured in the Nat Geo next to the verdant Victoria Park, with its other
vast and undeveloped land areas while people live-in high-rise spaces the size
of cages like animals, is certainly no urban model to emulate.
Susan
Goldberg questioned in National Geographic, “Should we live in dense urban
areas with public transit and walkable amenities? In sprawling suburbs created
by our infatuation with the car? In high rises like those envisioned by Le Corbusier,
now dotting urban districts across China?” Some of these buildings, malls, and
towns in China are still empty.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le
Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect and Bauhaus urban planner, considered the
pioneer of modernism, argued in 1925 that everything on the right bank of the
river Seine in Paris should be demolished – statues, homes, monuments, streets,
and identical glass towers, 650 feet tall, should be built instead. A quarter
of a mile apart, these towers would be surrounded by grass for pedestrians and
elevated highways for automobiles.
Referring
to his perceived war between “lovers of antiquities” and “progressive thinkers,”
he allegedly stated that “progress is achieved through experimentation; the
decision will be awarded on the field of battle of the ‘new.’” https://www.famous-architects.org/le-corbusier/
If we
look at the amount of money and effort, mass indoctrination, including the most
recent video, spent by the United Nations, academia, public schools, mass
media, Hollywood, environmentalists, and “civil society” (I am still not sure
to this day who the members of this ‘civil society’ are, although I have a
pretty good guess – the globalist elite who know better what is good for us,
like a kind and benevolent dictator.) to bring about world-wide compliance with
its 1992 Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030, it seems that we are at war
with the United Nation’s progressive plan called Agenda 2030. This new “social contract” with 17 SD goals
that no American citizen has voted on, “is good for us,” assures us Jeffrey
Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. https://youtu.be/ElJDadfkhEo
The
stakes are high – will we be able to keep our much envied “antiquated” American
way of life, our very freedom and mobility which defines who we are?
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