Post Category → Dr Thomas Sowell

Question – Thought and 2 ANDs for the conclusion of 2015!

Question – Thought and 2 ANDs for the conclusion of 2015!
Good Thursday Morning and good riddens 2015!
1. Question – R U as glad as me that 2015 is gone? So what will I do in 2016? Perhaps I will Laugh – Think – and Cry every day? That’s one heck of a day if I can do all of that. And I think I’ll spend more time on Family, God & the ______ ______ ______! (See video for answers) Please watch video.
2. Thought – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuoVM9nm42E
3. AND: From Streams in the Desert by L.B. Cowman, Devotional – December 31st: Thus far has the Lord helped us. (1 Samuel 7:12) The words “thus far” are like a hand pointing in the direction of the past. It had been “a long time, twenty years in all” (v.2), but even if it had been seventy years, “thus far has the Lord helped”!
These words also point forward. Someone who comes to a certain point and writes the words “thus far” realizes he has not yet come to the end of the road and that he still has some distance to travel. There are still more trails, joys, temptations, battles, defeats, victories, prayers, answers, toils, and strength yet to come.
When the words “thus far” are read in heaven’s light, what glorious and miraculous prospects they reveal to our grateful eyes. (Charles H. Spurgeon)
4. AND: From Thomas Sowell – Insight December 29, 2015 Editorial – The year of the lie!

How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it?

It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction for America and for Western civilization.

This was the year when we essentially let the world know that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran — the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism — from getting a nuclear bomb. Surely it does not take much imagination to foresee what lies at the end of that road.

It will not matter if we have more nuclear bombs than they have, if they are willing to die and we are not. That can determine who surrenders. And ISIS and other terrorists have given us grisly demonstrations of what surrender would mean.

Putting aside, for the moment, the fateful question whether 2015 is a turning point, what do we see when we look back instead of looking forward? What characterizes the year that is now ending?

More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the big lie. There have been lies in other years, and some of them pretty big, but even so 2015 has set new highs — or new lows.

This is the year when we learned, from Hillary Clinton’s own e-mails, after three long years of stalling, stone-walling and evasions, that Secretary of State Clinton lied, and so did President Barack Obama and others under him, when they all told us in 2012 that the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three other Americans was not a terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got out of hand.

“What difference, at this point, does it make?” as Mrs. Clinton later melodramatically cried out, at a Congressional committee hearing investigating that episode.

First of all, it made enough of a difference for some of the highest officials of American government to concoct a false story that they knew at the time was false.

It mattered enough that, if the truth had come out, on the eve of a presidential election, it could have destroyed Barack Obama’s happy tale of how he had dealt a crippling blow to terrorists by killing Usama bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy’s SEALS).

Had Obama’s lies about his triumph over terrorism been exposed on the eve of the election, that could have ended his stay in the White House. And that could have spared us and the world many of Obama’s disasters in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. That is why it matters, and will continue to matter in the future.

Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is the growing acceptance of lying as “no big deal” by smug sophisticates, so long as these are lies that advance their political causes. Many in the media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clinton’s lies by admiring how well she handled herself.

Lies are a wall between us and reality — and being walled off from reality is the biggest deal of all. Reality does not disappear because we don’t see it. It just hits us like a ton of bricks when we least expect it.

The biggest lie of 2014 — “Hands up, don’t shoot” — had its repercussions in 2015, with the open advocacy of the killing of policemen, in marches across the country. But the ambush killings of policemen that followed aroused no such outrage in the media as any police use of force against thugs.

Nor has there been the same outrage as the murder rate shot up when the police pulled back, as they have in the past, in the wake of being scapegoated by politicians and the media. Most of the people murdered have been black. But apparently these particular black lives don’t matter much to activists and the media.

No one expects that lies will disappear from political rhetoric. If you took all the lies out of politics, how much would be left?

If there is anything that is bipartisan in Washington, it is lying. The most recent budget deal showed that Congressional Republicans lied wholesale when they said that they would defund Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, and other pet projects of the Democrats.

As for 2015, good riddance. We can only hope that people who vote in 2016 will have learned something from 2015’s disasters.

Thomas Sowell, a National Humanities Medal winner, is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Read more at http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell122915.php3#1vAJKQgBRCWKbIZc.99
Good Bye 2015! Thanks folks – you have inspired me to continue. 2016 will be 18th year of thoughts! Please read and honor God with your gifts next year!
AND – Laugh – Think & Go Steelers!
rem – I had no knowledge that I had no knowledge.
Question & Thought & ANDs.

Questions & Thought for November 6th, 2015!!!

Questions & Thought for November 6th, 2015!!!
Good Friday Morning! (If you like spy movies, if you like ‘Cold war’ stuff, if you like stories based on real history, if you like the U-2 plane, if you like Tom Hanks – go see Bridge of Spies! Hollywood can still make great movies.)
1. Question – Why do schools need to have cops? I wonder if other countries have cops in their schools? Can you imagine being a cop today? Have consequences disappeared from our society?
2. Thought – A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used “excessive force.”What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question, with more sweeping implications, is the role of disruptive students in schools.

Critics of charter schools have often pointed to those schools’ ability to expel uncooperative and disruptive students, far more readily than regular public schools can, as a reason for some charter schools’ far better educational outcomes, as shown on many tests.

The message of these critics is that it is “unfair” to compare regular public schools’ results with those of charter schools serving the same neighborhoods — and often in the same buildings. This criticism ignores the fact that schools do not exist to provide jobs for teachers or “fairness” to institutions, but to provide education for students.

“Fairness” is for human beings, not for institutions. Institutions that are not serving the needs of people should either be changed or phased out and replaced, when they persistently fail.

Despite the painfully bad educational outcomes in many public schools in ghettos across the country, there are also cases where charter schools in the very same ghettos turn out students whose test scores are not only far higher than those in other ghetto schools, but sometimes are comparable to the test scores in schools in upscale suburban communities, where children come from intact families with highly educated parents.

Charter schools with such achievements should be celebrated and imitated, not attacked by critics because of their “unfair” exemptions from some of the counterproductive rules of the education establishment. Maybe such rules should be changed for all.

If the critics are right, and getting rid of the influence of uncooperative or disruptive students contributes to better educational results, then the answer is not to prevent charter schools from expelling such students, but to allow other public schools to remove such students, when other students can benefit from getting a better education without them around.

This is especially important in low-income minority schools, where education is for many their only chance for a better life.

Back in the supposedly bad old days, before so many people became so politically correct, there were schools and other institutions that were basically dumping grounds for students who endangered the education — and often even the safety — of other children.

Yet a front-page story in the New York Times last week dealt with how Success Academy, a high-performing charter school network in New York City’s low-income and minority neighborhoods, has been accused of “weeding out weak or difficult students.”

The Times’ own story opens with an account of a child who was “not following directions,” who “threw tantrums,” was screaming, threw pencils and refused to go to another classroom for a timeout. Yet the headline declared that charter schools “Single Out Difficult Students.”

“Singled out” usually means treating someone differently from the way others are treated for doing the same things. Are convicted criminals “singled out” when they are sent to jail?

The principal of a Success Academy school in Harlem was accused of telling teachers “not to automatically send annual re-enrollment forms home to certain students, because the school did not want those students to come back.”

A mother in Brooklyn complained about her son’s being suspended repeatedly, and her being called repeatedly to come to school to pick him up early. She admitted that he was “hitting, kicking, biting and spitting at other children and adults.”

After he was transferred to another public school, “he was very happy and had not been suspended once.” How happy others were to have him in their midst was not reported.

It would be wonderful if we could develop ways to educate all students, despite whatever kinds of attitudes and behavior they had. But how many generations of other youngsters are we prepared to sacrifice to this hope that has never yet been fulfilled? (Thomas Sowell, editorial November 3rd)

​”​How many generations of other youngsters are we prepared to sacrifice to this hope that has never yet been fulfilled?” (Thomas Sowell)


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rem – I had no knowledge that I had no knowledge.
Question & Thought & ANDs.

Question & Thought for October 21st, 2015!!!

Question & Thought for October 21st, 2015!!!

Good Econ 101 Wednesday Morning!

1. Question – This week, watch our politicians as they speak about the rich and the wealthy. (After all, rich and wealthy do mean the same thing, right?) Just what concept are we accepting when our leaders say  “the rich” need to pay their undefined “fair share?”

2. Thought –

Wealth, Poverty and Politics

     Dr. Thomas Sowell, my colleague and friend, told me several years ago that he wasn’t going to write any more books, but that was two books ago, and now he has just published his 45th.  The man writes with both hands, as can be seen from his website (http://tsowell.com), which lists his 45 books, 19 journal articles, 71 essays in periodicals and books, 34 book reviews, and occasional columns written in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Star, Newsweek, The Times (Britain) et al.  Plus, he writes a semiweekly column for Creators Syndicate.

     “Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective” is a true gem in terms of exposing the demagoguery and sheer ignorance of politicians and intellectuals in their claims about wealth and poverty.  Sowell discusses a number of factors that help explain wealth and income differences among people and nations around the world.  They include geographical, cultural, social and political factors, which Sowell explains in individual chapters.  Readers will benefit immensely from the facts and explanations laid out in those chapters, but here I want to focus on what I think is his most important chapter, “Implications and Prospects.”

     How many times have we been told that the rich are prospering at the expense of the poor?  Sowell points out that most households in the bottom 20 percent in income have no one working.  How can someone who isn’t producing anything have something taken from him?

     What about the supposed “paradox of poverty” in a rich society such as ours?  Sowell says that this is a paradox only to those who start out with a preconception of an egalitarian world in defiance of history and have a disregard for the arbitrariness of government definitions of poverty.  Poverty occurs automatically and has been mankind’s standard fare throughout its entire history.  It is high productivity and affluence that are rare in mankind’s history and require an explanation.  Government definitions of poverty make talking about income gaps and disparities meaningless.  If everyone’s income doubled or even tripled, poverty would certainly be reduced, but income gaps and disparities would widen.

     One of the biggest problems in analyzing poverty is the vision that the poor are permanently poor.  A University of Michigan study followed specific working Americans from 1975 to 1991.  It found that particular individuals who were in the bottom 20 percent in terms of income saw their real incomes rise at a much higher rate than those in the top 20 percent.  An IRS study, covering the period from 1996 to 2005, found a similar result.  Workers whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent saw their incomes rise by 91 percent.  Over the same span, those in the top 1 percent saw their incomes fall by 26 percent.  The outcomes of both studies give lie to the claim that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”

    

Sowell argues that another source of confusion in discussions of economic differences is the failure to distinguish between income and wealth. 

 

The use of the term “the rich” to describe people in higher income brackets is just one sign of confusion.  Being rich means having an accumulation of wealth rather than having a high income in a given year.  This distinction is not just a matter of semantics.  Calls for raising income tax rates to make “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” are an exercise in futility because income taxes do not touch wealth.  Higher income taxes are a tax on people trying to accumulate wealth.

    

 There are many other tidbits of information in “Wealth, Poverty and Politics,” such as the impact of age on income.  For example, only 13 percent of households headed by a 25-year-old have been in the top 20 percent, whereas 73 percent of households headed by someone 60 or older have been.

    

Dr. Sowell’s new book tosses a monkey wrench into most of the things said about income by politicians, intellectuals and assorted hustlers, plus it’s a fun read.

 

​I often wonder if schools teach economics from Dr. Sowell’s books?????​

 

rem – I had no knowledge that I had no knowledge.
Question & Thought & ANDs.