Post Scripts

Posted by Tina

Honesty is a virtue that Americans once regarded very highly.

Honesty was indicative of a person of strong moral fiber. Honesty was expected and cheating was considered a serious offense and a strong indicator of a flaw in ones character. But, according to Neal Kingston, the director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas, honesty is no longer a widely embraced virtue:

“The propensity to cheat on exams both through college and for licensure and certification exams seems to be increasing over time. People often don’t see it as something wrong.”

Another way to put that is that it is acceptable these days to fake it…to lie about achievement and ability. This unfortunate state of affairs has put another black mark on what was once considered a highly respectable and noble profession.

The cheating described in the following NBC News story rose to the level of a crime and involves Clarence Mumford Senior, an educator who is accused of fraud. He faces up to twenty years in jail if convicted:

It was a brazen and surprisingly long-lived scheme, authorities said, to help aspiring public school teachers cheat on the tests they must pass to prove they are qualified to lead their classrooms.

For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. — himself a longtime educator — to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said. Each time, Mumford received a fee of between $1,500 and $3,000 to send one of his test ringers with fake identification to the Praxis exam. In return, his customers got a passing grade and began their careers as cheaters, according to federal prosecutors in Memphis.

Authorities say the scheme affected hundreds — if not thousands — of public school students who ended up being taught by unqualified instructors.

Mumford faces more than 60 fraud and conspiracy charges that claim he created fake driver’s licenses with the information of a teacher or an aspiring teacher and attached the photograph of a test-taker. Prospective teachers are accused of giving Mumford their Social Security numbers for him to make the fake identities.

The biggest losers in this fifteen year scheme are the children whose teachers won certification by cheating with Mumford’s help. Parents and taxpayers lose too because they don’t get full value for their tax investment when students can’t get “a fair shot” at a good education.

Unfortunately the moral compass that once served as bellwether in the American people seems to have been discarded and lost in the exhaust of popular culture. I’m not sure there are enough honest people left in the country to make this story relevant. Do people care about honesty anymore? Can America survive if large swaths of the population are both ignorant and dishonest?

A Stanford University geneticist claims that people are getting dumber. (See Jacks article below) The geneticists theory is a bit controversial but if the problem of cheating persists at least he’s provided the guilty with a good, scientifically based defense.

Now…if there was just a way to cap and tax those dirty cheats.

by George Dvorsky

A new study published in Trends in Genetics is suggesting that humans are slowly but surely losing their intellectual and emotional capacities. According to Stanford University’s Gerald Crabtree, humanity peaked in intelligence about 2,000 years ago, and we’ve been heading downhill since then, owing to genetic mutations that aren’t being selected against.

As Crabtree notes, human intelligence is the result of thousands of different genes that arose during the course of our evolution. And indeed, human intelligence — from a genetic perspective — reached its current configuration some time during the Paleolithic era of our ancestry (about 6,000 years ago).

Continue reading “Humans are Getting Dumber” »

Posted by Jack

In 2011, Great Britain spent a total $57.8 million dollars for personal staffing, housing, flying and entertaining on the Royal family. . .

Question: In the same year how much did the taxpayers spend for personal staffing, housing, flying and entertaining for Barack Obama and his family?

a. $42.4 million b. $62.4 million c. $82.4 million d. $1.4 billion
Continue reading “Question of the Week” »

Posted by jack

Doctors who are interested in measuring life expectancy may now have a simple way to do it — researchers have discovered that walking speed can be a useful predictor of how long older adults live.

Those who walked 1 meter per second (about 2.25 mph) or faster consistently lived longer than others of their age and sex who walked more slowly, the study showed.

“We’re able to show that a person’s capacity to move strongly reflects vitality and health,” said study researcher Dr. Stephanie Studenski, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

However, the researchers also emphasized that the purpose of this study wasn’t to get people to walk faster in hopes of living longer.

“Your body chooses the walking speed that is best for you, and that is your speed, your health indicator,” Studenski said. “And that’s what it really is: an indicator. Going out and walking faster does not necessarily mean you will suddenly live longer. You still need to address the underlying health issues.”

Continue reading “How Fast You Walk Connects to Life Expectancy” »

Posted by Tina

Can you guess who said the following?

“We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success.”

The answer might surprise or at least intrigue you. I found it in a post election opinion piece. See if you agree with me that “Obama’s Soviet Mistake,” by Xavier Lerma – PRAVDA makes for interesting Sunday reading:

Putin in 2009 outlined his strategy for economic success. Alas, poor Obama did the opposite but nevertheless was re-elected. Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.

After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake. …

…Reading Putin’s speech without knowing the author, one would think it was written by Reagan or another conservative in America. The speech promotes smaller government and less taxes. It comes as no surprise to those who know Putin as a conservative.

Vladimir Putin went on to say:

“…we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses.

The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.

There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.

Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.

The liberal left in America will ignore this opinion piece as an inconvenience to their plans and the success of their current political idol. But the rest of America might want to consider the incredible opportunity to dominate on the economic world stage that the re-election of President Obama has given the Russians.

America, having adopted the old economic model of the soviets through the re-election of President Obama, will now see a further decline in our economy. Our recent election represents an act of stupidity that shocks a world once grandly inspired by the wisdom and common sense of President Ronald Reagan. Putin warned the American people: “During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself.”

Tongue in cheek? No matter…it’s absolutely true! No thinking person would want to repeat the economic failures of the communist economic system or the stubbornness the Soviet leaders clung to for decades. But the American progressives has shown himself to be a very slow learner. They repeatedly fail when it comes to learning the economic lessons of history…even when they hear it from the horses mouth!

Mr. Putin is a sly fox. Given the weakness shown in Obama’s open mike assurances the Russian president is likely poised to play Obama like a balalaika over the next four years.

As Mr. Lerma laments, “Bye, Bye American Pie”.

Whooo-wheee, Whittle hits it out of the park again! Thanks for sharing RHT447!

By Tina Grazier

It saddens me to say this on Thanksgiving evening…it saddens me to say, that every day and in some way Americans are encouraged to be takers!

Do you support an America that would deny basic guarantees of freedom and property to members of our citizenry?

President Obama met with business leaders after his re-election. His message was as expected:

The president wants to find “a balanced solution to our deficit challenges” and a way to move the economy forward, the official said. …Obama insisted in his re-election campaign that the wealthy should pay more as part of any fiscal deal, and has said his victory at the polls is an endorsement of that view.

This message does reflect his mindset as well as his proposals going forward:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own…

The people who built this nation, individual, creative, industrious people, were dedicated to savings and hard work. They sacrificed, persevered and endured hardship. We are the descendents of those who braved the oceans, the unknown, and the cruel hardships of settling in a wilderness for religious liberty. As such we have inherited the values of individual effort and reward. We have inherited the ideal that one can improve his life by his own efforts in a free country. But we are rejecting those ideals as too hard for some people…impossible for some “folks” to duplicate in their lives.

I disagree. I think the problem isn’t that some people aren’t capable but that they have been taught to think of themselves as incapable. they have been taught to think that some of their fellow Americans will always work against them. They have been taught that diversity makes America strong…when in truth it is our liberty! These people have been trained to be divisive and needy, a lesson in defiance of their heritage

The alternative to liberty has been pressed on the American people for the last six or seven decades It is the socialists idea of sharing…an idea that was rejected by the Pilgrims when they discovered that it leads to less prosperity…and even death. History has shown that the socialist model always leads to the same blunted state of increasing poverty, less abundance, largess invested in government and wealth in the hands of the few. President Obama has shown us in four short years how to accelerate toward doom.

Now that he’s won a second term, the single biggest proposal President Obama has suggested is to take money from productive people. He calls this “making everyone pay their fair share,” a statement so absurd it defies logic.

We have witnessed this thinking as a gathering storm for many decades. Half of America now holds successful people in disdain and believes that wealth should be confiscated by government even though they can plainly see the debt, the waste, the oppression that follows when government gets too big and has promised too much.

When our paychecks fall short of expenses we notice, and it hurts…but we don’t seem to notice the horrendous harm we are forced to endure. We don’t seem to care that more money from the wealthy will not begin to decrease the unsustainable expense required to keep big government operating. Our leaders pit us against each other and as we bend to the lie we fail to notice how government has been the cruel task master and robber of our potential.

Friedrich von Hayek:

“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which the individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

If you won’t read the book, at least read and absorb the quotes here!

The book is also available online in PDF format from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

by Tina Grazier

The Pilgrims came to this land because they wanted freedom. They knew the journey would be long and their fate uncertain but their desire for freedom of conscience overwhelmed whatever fears they may have had. These brave souls faced danger risking everything so that they might worship as they pleased. Near the end of their journey it seemed they would perish in a stormy sea as their wooden ships dashed against the rocks:

“Landing of the Pilgrims,” by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

The breaking waves dashed high,
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed;
And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and waters o’er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore…

The Pilgrims were hearty folk that endured many hardships that colored and defined what would become their legacy and our freedom. Do we appreciate what has been bequeathed to us…lessons of perseverance and hard work, the traditions of self-reliance and charity, the values of thankfulness, honesty, and respect for others, and most of all our free republic!

Today a great number of Americans seem not to have learned the value of freedom. In the year 2012 America exists as a country weakened by neediness and indifference. It is a nation disfigured by transformational forces that would supplant liberty with collective dependence on the perceived superiority of an authoritative government. This represents a powerful change in the people; a storm that threatens to bash the good ship America against the rocks and put a fateful end to our nation as we have loved her.

The irony of the situation cannot be denied.

Continue reading “Big Storm Coming – <em>Will Freedom Be Dashed Against the Rocks?</em>” »

By KAREEM FAHIM

November 21, 2012, CAIRO — A senior Libyan security official was assassinated outside his home in the eastern city of Benghazi, officials said on Wednesday. His death was the latest in a series of mysterious killings that have raised fears about the country’s precarious postwar security.

The official, Faraj Mohammed al-Drissi, who had held the post of Benghazi’s security director for only a few weeks, was shot to death late Tuesday night as he was returning from work, according to Wanis al-Sharif, a local Interior Ministry official.

About 10 p.m., a Mitsubishi Lancer pulled up on Mr. Drissi’s street. Three men got out and opened fire, Mr. Sharif said, adding that the motive for the killing was unknown.

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What I want to know is, was Mr. Drissi about to go to Washington to testify before Congress and were the asassins wearing Re-elect Obama buttons? Just curious.