Houthis seized Bob-el Mandeb Strait. Even Saudis couldn't have stopped them. That's not particularly American election issue.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. That's not particularly American election issue.
8,650 karma · joined December 7, 2009
"Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme-collectivism." -Ayn Rand
"The dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood." -Vladimir Bukovsky
"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle." -P.J. O'Rourke
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -James Madison
"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." -George Orwell in 1984
"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell
"This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.
It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite." - Marco Rubio
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” – John F. Kennedy
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - President Ronald Reagan
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.” - Elon Musk
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken
“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.“ -Barry Goldwater
“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.” - Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men“
"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." - Thomas Sowell
“It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.” - H.L. Mencken
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world". - President Calvin Coolidge
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -Robert A. Heinlein
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." -George Orwell
"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence." -Friedrich Nietzsche
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." -Thomas Sowell
"If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." -Aristotle Onassis
"For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right." -Elon Musk
"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity." -Charlie Munger
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell in 1984
“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.” ― George Orwell
"Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume." - Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial." -Friedrich Nietzsche
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." -Paul Krugman (1998)
"But we’re very clear of our principles and our purpose, which is to be aligned with our Allies, understanding that — I mean, listen, guys, we’re talking about the potential for war in Europe." - US Vice President Kamala Harris, Munich, Germany February 20, 2022
Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. That's not particularly American election issue.
The PISA assesses student learning of 15-year-olds around the world every three to four years. While performance in most countries has declined since 2018, math scores in China have improved by an impressive 21 points (equivalent to roughly one year of learning) while those in the U.S. have fallen by 15 (three quarters of a year of learning).
As a result, the math skills gap between U.S. and China students has grown to the equivalent of more than seven years. Ponder that for a moment. While 8% of U.S. students rated “top performers” in math, 54% did in mainland China. Wonder why U.S. employers seek to hire high-skilled workers from abroad?
U.S. schools simply aren’t producing enough students with advanced engineering and math skills. A report last year from the University of California, San Diego, found that one in 12 freshmen had math skills below middle-school level.
The teachers’ union response to evidence of learning decline is always to spend more on public schools, but the gusher of federal K-12 spending during the pandemic didn’t improve performance. The PISA report notes that the relationship between a country’s wealth and test scores “is not linear and it flattens among those with relatively higher national incomes.”
Once cumulative spending per student from ages six to 15 exceeds roughly $85,000 per student—all U.S. states spend more than that—the relationship with student scores begins to “decouple.” “Higher spending per student does not automatically relate to higher performance scores,” the report says. Maybe because more spending rewards education failure, rather than success.
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
"Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.
The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species.
Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn. A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans from what they view as the plant’s rightful habitat."
"Consider the state’s response to crime and homelessness, which may have contributed to the fires. Last year’s Park Fire—the fourth largest in state history—was allegedly ignited by a man with two prior felony convictions who was on parole for a DUI. The Los Angeles Times reported in early 2021 that 24 fires on average were breaking out each day in the city’s homeless encampments. A fire in an encampment shut down an L.A. freeway last November, the second time that had happened in a little over a year.
Good Samaritans on Thursday detained a homeless man who they said used a flamethrower to incinerate Christmas trees and garbage cans, around the same time as a major fire erupted. Police arrested the vagrant on a felony probation violation—meaning he had been on parole for another felony—because they said they lacked probable cause to charge him with arson. The suspect reportedly claimed he was using a blowtorch to smoke marijuana."