Advice from Ben Carson, M. D.

THINK BIG – his recipe for success:

• Talent.
• Honesty – if you leave a clean and honest life, you don’t  have to worry about any skeletons in the closet.
• Insight – comes in part from listening to those people who have already been where you are trying to go.
• Nice – be nice to people. They’ll be nice to you. And you can get so much more done when people are being nice to you. You don’t have to compromise your standards or be politically correct.
  1. Take yourself [your ego] out of the equation.
  2. Try to look at the other person’s point of view.
  3. Just listen
  4. Put personal preference aside.
  5. Learn to love people.
  6. Do unto others…
• Knowledge – because with knowledge, wisdom, and understanding you can get all the gold, silver, rubies you want.
• Books.
• In-depth learning – learning for the sake of knowledge, and understanding as opposed to superficial learning.
• God

All of his points are great. My favorite is the Books point. Because I like to read.

PEERS- People Encouraging Errors, Rudeness, and Stupidity.

Ten Strategies for Improved Parenting:

1. Remember your own childhood. Remembering helps us emphasize. It can help us be more patient.
2. Let kids make the rules. He has found that when we let children have a voice in establishing expectations, we have a lot less trouble getting them to meet those expectations. He is not suggesting that children be in charge of the home.
3. Make certain your children experience consequences. Don’t always bail them out when they get themselves in trouble.
4. Parenting can be a group effort. He is not saying it takes a village to raise a kid, but a village can be of help.
5. Know your child.
6. Set high standards.
7. Make time together.
8. Talk is cheap…and invaluable. Let your kids express their feelings and thoughts openly. Listen to your kids.
9. Marry the right person.
10. Make parenting a true priority.

Just so you know, the doctor is married and has five children. Point 9 might be the hardest of his list to do.

Parents Lay the Foundation for Education for Your Kids:

1. Start rewarding and encouraging learning early in life—and don’t stop.
2. Do whatever you must to encourage reading.
3. Get involved in your children’s formal education—at home and at school.
4. Point your children to successful individuals who have been empowered by education.
5. Be an example yourself.

Good advice for parents. I concur completely. I want to add to his advice that grandparents, uncles and aunts can encourage reading too.

Source: The Big Picture. Getting Perspective on What’s Really Important in Life (1999) by Ben Carson, M. D. with Gregg Lewis.

The jihadi serial killer no one's talking about

From OneNewsNow.com (Aug. 22):

For two bloody months, an armed jihadist serial killer ran loose across the country. At least four innocent men died this spring and summer as acts of "vengeance" on behalf of aggrieved Muslims, the self-confessed murderer has now proclaimed. Have you heard about this horror? Probably not.

The usual suspects who decry hate crimes and gun violence haven't uttered a peep. Why? Like O.J.'s glove: If the narrative don't fit, you must acquit. The admitted killer will be cast as just another "lone wolf" whose familiar grievances and bloodthirsty Islamic invocations mean nothing.

I [Michelle Malkin] say: Enough with the whitewashing. Meet Ali Muhammad Brown. His homicidal Islamic terror spree took him from coast to coast. The 29-year-old career thug admitted to killing Leroy Henderson in Seattle in April; Ahmed Said and Dwone Anderson-Young in Seattle on June 1; and college student Brendan Tevlin, 19, in Essex County, New Jersey, on June 25. Tevlin was gunned down in his family Jeep on his way home from a friend's house. Ballistics and other evidence linked all the victims to Muhammad Brown. Police apprehended him last month hiding in an encampment near the Watchung Mountains of West Orange, New Jersey.

While he was on the run, he disguised himself in a Muslim keffiyeh. He carried a notebook with jihadist scribblings and advice on evading detection. I obtained the latest charging documents filed in Washington state, which detail the defiant domestic terrorist's motives. [read more]

I wonder if this guy had been a Christian you think the lame-stream-press would have reported this story? You bet. It would have been a front-page story. Or very close to a front-page story.

Facts about Common Core

Even American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten—a Common Core supporter—acknowledges that top-down nature in which the standards were imposed on the states. “The public wasn’t involved,” she said to reporters in late 2013. “Parents weren’t involved. The districts weren’t involved.”

James Milgram [Stanford professor emeritus] and Sandra Stotsky’s [prof. of education emerita at the Univ. of Arkansas] research report showed that students who don’t have arrive on a college campus with a solid foundation in precalculus have much less chance of successfully obtaining a college degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). They said “Clearly, if this country [America] is seriously interested in 21st century mathematics and science, then there is even more reason to question Common Core’s mathematics standards.”

Even University of Arizona professor William McCallum, one of the lead writers of the math standards, admitted that they are not rigorous compared to other math-savvy countries.

A Reuters article explains how [standardized testing and data collecting from the tests] will supposedly work:

Does Johnny have trouble converting decimals to fractions? The database will have recorded that--and may have recorded as well that he finds textbooks boring, adores animation and plays baseball after school. Personalized learning software can use that data serve up a tailor-made math lesson, perhaps an animated game that uses baseball statistics to teach decimals.

Johnny’s teacher can watch his development on a “dashboard” that uses bright graphics to map each of her students’ progress on dozen, even hundreds of discrete skills. [read more]

A 2013 story from Smithsonian magazine explained how one New York company is proposing that we allow facial recognition software into the classroom:

Here’s how it would work. Using facial recognition software called EngageSense, computers would apply algorithms to what the cameras have recorded during a lecture of discussion to interpret how engaged the students have been. Were the kids’ eyes focused on the teacher? Or, were they looking everywhere but the front of the class? Were they smiling or frowning? Or did they just seem confused? Or bored? [read more]

One teacher interviewed for the story speculated that in five years this program will be used in classrooms all throughout the United States.

The Chicago Tribute also reports that students could soon be wearing “sensor bracelets” in the classroom to help track their engagement:

The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc., send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers emotional response to advertising.

Gates [Foundation] officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out. [read more]

Source: Conform.

As Pink Floyd might say, Welcome to the Machine.

No technology in the classroom will make up for a incompetent teacher. If the students aren’t motivated, curious, or even passionate they probably won’t  learn. And if the teacher is just there for a paycheck—no passion for what he/she is teaching—the student’s won’t be passionate for learning either. The students will pick up on that.

Public Education Going Mad

In 2009, the University of Minnesota announced a “Teacher Education Redesign Initiative” to alter admissions standards for its school of education. The proposal, designed, by the “Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group,” declared that teacher candidates “will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity,  heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”¹

The Task Group suggested that future teachers should:

• Fight for social justice even if it’s just in their classroom.²
• Understand resistance theory.
• Explain how institutional racism works in schools.

CREATE (Culturally Responsive Education for All: Training and Enhancement) Wisconsin is a state-sponsored initiative that ostensibly exists to help white teachers learn how to more effectively instruct minority students.³ The program costs taxpayers roughly $1 million per year.

Source: Conform. Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education (2014) by Glenn Beck with Kyle Olson.

¹ Where does the Left come up with these terms? Hegemonic masculinity? (I looked it up. Hint: It’s anti-male and a subset of Marxist theory.)  Heteronormativity? What?! How did I ever get through school without knowing that term? I feel so cheated.

² I guess good old arithmetic, spelling, and grammar is passé. Come on, who does that anymore.

³ Here’s an idea: What about effectively instructing all students regardless of what group they are in. You know, treat them as individuals.

As for a closing to this madness here’s an interesting quote about education from Albert Einstein:

Knowledge is dead; the school, however, serves the living. It should develop in the young individuals those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the commonwealth. But that does not mean that individuality should be destroyed and the individual become a mere tool of the community, like a bee or an ant. For a community of standardized individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development. On the contrary, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.

Deputizing America

From FEE.org (Aug. 18):

It’s an old Western movie trope. The harassed sheriff needs help against Desperado D. Blackhat and his gang of gunslingers. He goes into the saloon, finds the gambler who was once the most feared crack shot this side of the Pecos, and makes him his deputy. Together, they run Blackhat and his gang out of town. If you thought that type of quick-and-dirty deputizing died with the Wild West, think again.  Government is deputizing people all over the country to do its law-enforcement work. But unlike that gambler, they don’t get the chance to say no.

Take, for instance, FedEx. The delivery company has been indicted by federal prosecutors for not doing the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) job for it. The DEA alleges that FedEx knowingly shipped pharmaceuticals for online pharmacies that were based on invalid prescriptions, because it should have known “the principals, company names, shipping addresses and billing addresses that were initially connected to” a network of pharmacies closed down by the DEA in 2003. As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial summarized:

Translation: FedEx employees should have connected the dots. But if it's so easy, why didn't the DEA do it? The truth is that unmasking the bad guys would have required an extensive metadata analysis of customer data that is not FedEx's job.

The DEA also alleges that FedEx should have known its orders were based on fraudulent prescriptions from visiting the pharmacies’ facilities for inspection. That’s not something a shipping company is set up to do. It is something a law enforcement agency is set up to do, but the DEA didn’t do it. So by its indictment of FedEx, the feds are telling all other delivery firms that they are now forcibly deputized to do the DEA’s job in the War on Drugs. If they don’t play along, they need to show up in court.

Banking regulators have been playing a similar game. Under a campaign known as Operation Choke Point, they have been telling banks that if they don’t investigate their customers for “high-risk” activity, they will be subject to subpoenas and everything that implies. As a result, banks have simply been cutting off links to potentially risky customers on the simple basis of what business they are in. As Department of Justice documents show (which I document extensively in my recent report on the operation), the motivation for Choke Point was the feds’ lack of manpower to investigate the risky businesses themselves. So they deputized the banks to do their job for them. [read more]

Either the gov’t agencies are just plain lazy or they are abusing their power. Or both. Like the author of the article said if this practice is not put in check we might be all deputized. After all if a gov’t agency can do this to a business why not an individual? Welcome to the Collective.

Progressive Thought Throughout Time

Arne Naess (1912-2009):

• Mankind forms one part of a fragile ecosystem.
• Human action is causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem.
• Shallow ecology holds that current economic and social structures can be adapted to solve environmental problems.
• Deep ecology holds that profound social and political change is needed to avert an environmental crisis.

John Rawls (1921-2002):

• The key to a fairs society is a just social contract between the state and individuals.
• For a social contract to be just, the needs of all individuals party to it must be treated equally.
• To ensure equal treatment, social institutions must be just, they must be accessible to all and redistribute where necessary.
• Only just institutions can produce a fair society.
• Therefore, justice is the first virtue of social institutions.

Noam Chomsky (1928-present):

• Dominant institutions in society, such as the media and banks, are controlled by a wealthy minority.
• This minority runs the institutions in a way that favors its interests.
• Any attempts at reform lead to a drying up of investment, which ruins the economy.
• To keep the economy healthy, everyone, even the poor, must support a system that is run in the interests of the rich.
• Thus, everybody has to make sure that the rich folk are happy.

Robert Pape (1960-present): Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation.

Source: The Politics Book.

Naess could have been a founder of the global warming movement. The middle Leftists are just class envy radicals which is most of the Left. I wonder if Chomsky includes Big Labor, and Big Gov’t in his count? Probably not.  As for Pape. What he said is just plain stupid. If he knew anything of Islam he would know that suicide terrorism is part of the religion. America didn’t occupy any country when Thomas Jefferson was president and yet the Islamists attacked our ships. Why? Because it said to do that in the Koran. Go back even further. You know why the Knights of Templar were formed? They were formed to protect the early Christians from being assaulted by the early Islamists during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And guess what? America wasn’t even a country back then.

The Founders of Islam

Muhammad (570 –632 CE)

• Islam is a peaceful religion and all Muslims wish to live in peace.
• But even believers in Islam need to defend themselves against invasion…
• …and attack the unbelievers who threaten their peace and religion.
• Therefore, fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you.

Al-Farabi (c. 870-950):

• A model state, which does not yet exist, would ensure that its people live virtuously.
• To achieve this, it would need virtuous rulers.
• But people do not understand that true happiness comes from living a virtuous life.
• Instead they prefer to seek wealth and pleasure, and live in ignorant, perverted, or mistaken societies.
• Thus, the people refuse the rule of virtuous men.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406):

• The unity of a political society comes from the community spirit.
• This is the basis for government and prevents injustice.
• As a society advances, social cohesion decreases and its government becomes lax…
• …exploiting its citizens for its own advantage, causing injustice.
• Eventually, another government emerges to take the place of the decadent regime.
• Therefore, government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself.

Abul Ala Maududi (1903-1979):

• Islam is not just a religion, it is a revolutionary program of life.
• Muslims must carry out its revolutionary program.
• Jihad is the revolutionary struggle that the Islamic party uses to achieve its goal.
• Thus, Islam’s purpose is an Islamic state, and the destruction of states that oppose this.

Source: The Politics Book.

The philosophy of Maududi is what I believe most Islamic fanatics follow. At least it appears that way.

TSA checkpoints have a terrifying 'backdoor'

From Komando.com (Aug. 9):

Two tools used by the TSA to protect flights and passengers have dangerous security flaws. Security researcher Billy Rios found the problems and shared the details at Black Hat last Wednesday. This is scary stuff because it could help terrorists sneak weapons onto planes.

The Morpho Detection Itemiser 3 trace-explosives and residue system and the Kronos 4500 time clock system both have major issues. Both come with default backdoor passwords from the manufacturers. That makes them vulnerable because if a hacker figures out the default password, it's no longer safe.

Rios says the Itemiser he tested also came with a backdoor password. Exploiting that,   he was able to alter the configuration of the Itemiser system, which could allow an attacker to prevent the system from detecting explosive residue, for example.

"Once you have access to the software, it's game over," he says.

If hackers crack the password, they could change the machines to stop detecting bomb residue. Morpho says the TSA now uses an upgraded Inemiser DX, but Rios said it could still have backdoor password problems.  [read more]

Yea, that is kind of unnerving. Backdoor passwords are used for testing purposes. The password in this case either needs to be changed to a long random password or removed all together.

The Terror Business

From FEE.org (Aug. 7):

Headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who holds a Ph.D. from the Islamic University in Baghdad, IS is run like a firm. Similar to traditional firms, IS issues what The Economist refers to as a corporate report, a document detailing IS's attacks throughout the past year. Within IS, the “group’s leaders had been meticulously chosen,” and the management even keeps a detailed accounting of the group's war effort. “They had itemized everything,” according to The Guardian’s source. IS also provides services that the Iraqi government struggled to provide effectively: It directs traffic, fights crime, and issues receipts for taxes collected.

Many who understand how markets and incentives promote prosperity through bottom-up entrepreneurship fail to apply the same logic of incentives and decentralized actors to foreign affairs. Destructive entrepreneurship is a decentralized process of searching for opportunities—which is exactly how IS formed. As an intelligence official speaking to The Guardian put it, “There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known. They don't need one.”  [read more]

So, IS is run like an organized crime syndicate. I wonder if they have a code of silence too like the mob. Both employ similar terroristic tactics. But the motives are different. The mob killed purely for money. IS kills for religion or ideology. 

From The Blaze.com (Aug. 8): Militant Websites: Islamic State Leader to Declare ‘Jihad Against America’  What else is new.

Also, from The Blaze.com (Aug. 8): “[W]e will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”

Collectivistic Thought Throughout Time

Legalism (280 – 233 BCE). Chinese thinkers such as Shang Yang (390-338 BCE), Shen Dao (c. 350-275 BCE), and Shen Buhai (died 337 BCE) advocated a much more authoritian approach to government, which became known as Legalism. The only way that people could be controlled, the Legalists argued, was by a system that emphasized the well-being of the state over the rights of the individual, with strict laws to punish undesirable behavior.

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872):

• The pursuit of individual rights is insufficient for the social good…
• …because not everyone is able to exercise their rights.
• …because the pursuit of individual interests leads to greed and conflict.
• Individual rights should be subsumed under the duty to one’s country.
• Therefore, say not I, but we.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865):  Property is theft.

Karl Marx (1818-1883):

• Capitalism and private property make labor into a commodity.
• This alienates workers from what they produce, from their work, from their human identity, and from their fellow humans.
• Communism abolishes private property and brings the end of alienation.
• Thus, communism is the riddle of history solved.

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932):

• Socialists  expected capitalism to produce poverty.
• Yet capitalism has increased the wealth of workers.
• Capitalism has proved to be a stable secure system.
• This means that workers accept capitalism.
• We have to take working men as they are.
• Therefore, socialists should argue for piecemeal reforms under capitalism.

Beatrice Webb (1858-1943): Argued for a welfare state that would provide protection against unemployment and illness. She and her husband argued that social problems could be solved by benevolent planners, administering society in the best interests of all.

Rosa Luxemberg (1871-1919):

• Inequality and oppression exist in a capitalist society.
• The oppressed workers do not need external leaders…
• …since they will rise up spontaneously to throw off their oppressors.
• Thus, the mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability.

Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944):

• The law and the will of the nation take precedence over individual will.
• All human and spiritual values lie within the state.
• All individual action serves to preserve and expand the state.
• Thus, the fascists conception of the state is all-embracing.

Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953):

• The wealthy farmers are an exploitative class.
• They control others because they control food production.
• They resist collectivization.
• They are the carriers of capitalism.
• Therefore, the wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence.

Mao Zedong (1893-1976):

• China is an agrarian rather than an industrial society.
• Therefore peasants are China’s proletariat class.
• Peasants have no power against armed capitalist exploiters.
• In order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.
• Thus, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Source: The Politics Book.

Eduard Bernstein thoughts are interesting. First, he acknowledges that capitalism is stable and actually does help workers. Then later on he says capitalism should be gradually changed. Well, if it is stable and beneficial why change it at all? Answer: socialism = religion or if you prefer socialism = dogma. It doesn’t matter if socialism works or not—it is a matter of belief.

Joseph Stalin’s attitude toward the wealthy farmers is not much different than Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews who he considered wealthy and who he thought were controlling the economy. Both scapegoated groups died in the end.

Conservative Thought Throughout Time

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804):

• Happiness is gained and felt in different ways by different people.
• This means that it cannot be used to generate fixed principles that are equally applicable to everyone.
• Since laws must be agreed as applicable to all and reflections of the common will…
• …no generally valid principles of legislation can be based on happiness.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797):

• Government is a human invention to oversee human needs in society.
• But some human needs and desires conflict with those of other people.
• Government must judge between conflicting wants to produce the fairest outcome.
• Therefore, the individual’s passions must be subjected to the government’s laws.

August Comte (1798-1857): The tendency to attack “the family” is a symptom of social chaos. The family is the true social unit. It is on the basis of families that society is constructed.A

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859):

• Socialism ignores the highest human virtues.
• Socialism undermines private property.
• Socialism stifles the individual.
• Thus, socialism is a new system of serfdom.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965):

• An appeaser believes he is not powerful enough to defeat a tyrant.
• Therefore he makes concessions in order to avoid going to war.
• His concessions make him weaker and the tyrant stronger.

Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990):

• Parliamentary institutions grew out of the practical are of governing.
• Rationalist positions is based on ideology and abstract notions.
• They have existed for generations and govern based on experience and history.
• Rationalist politics engages in destruction and the creation of a new order.
• Thus, parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system.

Source: The Politics Book.

You might say the philosopher Immanuel Kant was a conservative? I don’t know that for sure. But his idea about happiness is correct. It is defined differently among individuals. The state cannot define it for everyone. That is why in the Declaration of Independence it says “the pursuit of happiness” and not the “guarantee of happiness.” It is ultimately up to everyone to pursue their own happiness.

Newt Gingrich in his 2013 book Breakout made an interesting comment about Winston Churchill. He said while Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty he invented the tank after realizing that the combination of the internal combustion engine and treads could be a solution to the problems of trench warfare. No one in the army had thought of this.

Here are more conservative thinkers that are not in The Politics Book:

• “The Ten Cannots” by William John Henry Boetcker (1873–1962)
• “But—I'm a Conservative!”  by Peter Viereck (1916 – 2006)
• “The Essence of Conservatism” by Russell Kirk (1918–1994).  In this article he talks about his canons of conservatism.

Political Thought in Age of Reason

Francisco de Vitoria:

• All humans share the same nature.
• They therefore have the same rights.
• No people has dominion over another because…
• …in the beginning everything was common to all.

Jean Bodin:

• Competing power and structures lead to civil war and chaos…
• …so there must be a single sovereign answerable only to God.
• For a sovereign’s power to be absolute, it must be perpetual and not granted by others or limited in time.
• Therefore, sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth.

Johannes Althusius:

• Humans associate in groups at different levels, families, organizations, cities, provinces, and states.
• The purpose of the state is to protect members of its associations and their communications.
• Elected state representatives must reflect the many views of these differing associations.
• Thus, politics is the art of associating men.

Hugo Grotus:

• Life and property are natural rights of all individuals.
• People have the power to claim these rights.
• The state has no legitimate power to take these liberties away.
• Therefore, liberty is the power we have over ourselves.

Thomas Hobbes:

• Left ungoverned, men will terrorize each other in a state of nature…
• …in which individuals will stop at nothing to ensure their own self-preservation or self-promotion.
• In the state of nature, the condition of man is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
• To avert a descent into the state of nature, men must enter into a social contract submitting to the authority and protection of a sovereign.
• The sovereign must be an absolute ruler, with indivisible and unlimited power, to prevent factional strife and chaos.
• If a sovereign fails in their duty, the social contract is broken and individuals may take action, leading back to a state of nature.

John Locke:

• Humans are rational, independent agents with natural rights.
• They join political society to be protected by the rule of law.
• Thus, the end of law should be to preserve and enlarge freedom.

Montesquieu:

• A government’s administration duties should be split between three powers…
• …an executive branch, responsible for enforcing the laws of a state.
• …a legislative branch, responsible for passing and amending the laws of a state.
• …a judicial branch, responsible for interpreting the laws of a state.
• Therefore, since these power are separate from and dependent on one another, the influence of any one power cannot exceed that of the other two.

Ben Franklin:

• The health of a nation depends on the virtue of its citizens.
• Aristocrats are conservative and unproductive.
• Independent entrepreneurs are useful, industrious, and thrifty.
• Thus, independent entrepreneurs make good citizens.

Source: The Politics Book.

Except for Hobbes and Bodin all are good ideas. What Bobin wants is a monarchy. But unless the ruler has direct contact with God and prove his communication there is no way to prove what God is instructing him to do. As for Hobbes his idea won’t work because if everyone is a beast then what’s to prevent the ruler from being a beast? I mean he’s a person too. So, the sovereign will eventually fail in his duty.

Like I stated before, Locke and Montesquieu were widely read by the Founders. That’s where we got the Constitution. Especially, Montesquieu.

And then there is Benjamin Franklin. My favorite Founder. You gotta love him.