Government Fails to Educate NJ Kids

Widower Van-Ness Crawford and a number of other parents have sued the State of New Jersey to demand the right to take their children out of failing schools and send them to the school of their choice.

Filed as Crawford v. Davy the suit aims to be a landmark case that establishes the right of parents to educate their children.

Obviously widower Crawford and his triplet 16-year-old sons that attend the failing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School in Newark have been selected by school choice activists as poster boys for school choice. But the point remains: why can New Jersey schools not educate children when they are spending $10,000 to $20,000 per year per student? What gives them the right to spend the money on Crawford’s sons rather than Crawford? If they are going to piss the money away on his kids why not give the money to him and let him piss the money away?

According to Kristen A. Graham, the activist groups backing the suit are “Alliance for School Choice, a Phoenix-based group; the Black Minister's Council of New Jersey; the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey; and Excellent Education for Everyone, a New Jersey group that supports school choice and vouchers.” The co-plaintiffs joining Crawford have been selected from around the state, as you might expect.

Leaving aside the church vs. state aspect of education, there is the basic nature of government. Government responds to problems and throws money at them. But government has no interest in solving problems. If ever a problem would be solved then the funding would go away. What would be the point of that?

Thus when school fail our kids the school lobby demands more money. Why don’t we say that if you fail to educate our kids then we are going to take the money away and give it to someone else?

"We Don't Want to Fight"

It’s not just me. It’s all the conservatives who are deploring the “cycle of violence” brigade. Here is Thomas Sowell writing that “Those who keep calling for an end to the "cycle of violence" are what make such violence more likely.”

Then there is Charles Krauthammer.

Amid the general wringing of hands over the seemingly endless and escalating Israel-Hezbollah fighting, everyone asks: Where will it end?

Or take Robert Tracinski. “What Part of War Don’t We Understand?” Because we are good guys we have to prove our goodness. “a Los Angeles Times op-ed demanded that Israel "has to be the most responsible party" by declaring an immediate ceasefire.”

Like I wrote earlier this week in It’s a War, Stupid. Syria and Iran base their foreign policy on the sponsorship of terrorism. Indeed without terrorism they would be nothing.

It’s time we disabused them of the idea that terrorism is a good idea for them.

NYT Clearing Throat Over Mideast "Conflict" And More

You know that when the cat gets its voice back at the New York Times that President Bush is going to be reprimanded for his intemperance in calling for the United Nations to get its, er, stuff together to stop Hamas and Hizbollah.

As all thoughtful people know, the crisis in the Middle East is much more nuanced than that. Until the Times can finish clearing its throat, at least they have Paul Krugman growling about “the same cast of characters” behind the Times Select wall.

But at OpinionJournal.com James Taranto had some interesting tidbits about the Mideast War. Key Arab governments (well Sunni ones) are blaming Hizbollah for the war, and worrying that it will put the whole region back by years.

But whatever they are saying at the Arab League summit or not saying at the New York Times, the words of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demand respect:

"Citizens of Israel, there are moments in the life of a nation, when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality and say: no more," he said.


"And I say to everyone: no more. Israel will not be held hostage - not by terror gangs or by a terrorist authority or by any sovereign state,"

You can’t say fairer than that.

Two Different Worlds

If you watch CNN you are no doubt worried about the “escalation of violence” in the Middle East, and the divided American families who are waiting for the US to evacuate their loved ones from Lebanon.

If you are reading the conservative online media you are experiencing something quite different.

In Frontpagemag.com David Horowitz tells of Hizbollah missiles that clearly come from China via Iran and need sophisticated trained crews to operate. From Strategic Forecasting he quotes:

We are now in the period preceding major conventional operations. Israel is
in the process of sealing the Lebanese coast. They have disrupted Lebanese
telecommunications, although they have not completely collapsed the
structure. Israeli aircraft are attacking Hezbollah's infrastructure and
road system. In the meantime, Hezbollah, aware it is going to be hit hard,
is in a use-it or-lose-it scenario, firing what projectiles it can into
Israel.

CNN reports the G-8 summit as a confused waffle. But in the New York Sun Eli Lake reports a diplomatic success for President Bush at the G-8 summit.

The final G-8 summit resolution marks a diplomatic victory for the president... [T]he resolution that emerged yesterday confirmed the president's view of the conflict, that Israel was fully justified in protecting itself against terrorist actions by Hezbollah and that instead of condemning Prime Minister Olmert, the root causes of the violence should be addressed, namely the continuing terrorist actions of Hezbollah.

In the Jerusalem Post Edward N. Luttwak represents the Hizbollah/Hamas attacks on Israel as an attempt by Iran to unify the Arabs against a common foe and reject the western attempts to get it to stop its nuclearization. But Iran’s strategy has forced Hizbollah away from integration into Lebanese politics.

Hizbullah has thrown away its political position in Lebanon because it is obvious to all that it is bringing destruction upon the country.

In this view the question is how much damage Israel gets to create before Hizbollah and Hamas have to cry uncle.

In war it is very difficult for ordinary people watching the media to understand what is going on.

One thing it is not is a mindless “cycle of violence,” or “Crisis in the Middle East.” It is a war, stupid. It is a war to preserve the state of Israel.

The Flaws of the Famous, Then As Now

Hum. We think we are so modern and special, uniquely privileged and uniquely corrupt.

But back in the nineteenth century, preacher Henry Ward Beecher was both uniquely privileged as a great preacher and uniquely corrupted as a great adulterer. He was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and he is the subject of Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America.

Beecher’s fame could be put to good use. When the feminist Victoria Woodhull was criticized for her ideas,

Woodhull, a radical feminist and an advocate of free love, answered critics by proclaiming that her ideas on sexual freedom simply mirrored the advanced practices of Henry Ward Beecher, who, she said, preached every Sunday morning to a dozen of his mistresses.

Beecher was in at the creation of the Republican Party and a strong anti-slavery advocate. His father was Rev. Lyman Beecher, a leading light in the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the nineteenth century.

But what sort of a man was Beecher? That, according to George Marsden, we really do not get to find out in Applegate’s biography.

We do not get any sense of his interior life, his spirituality or his religious anxieties. What we have instead--as Ms. Applegate's title implies--is the engaging story of a celebrity.

It seems that Beecher’s humanity got submerged in his fame, much like another flawed moral leader, Martin Luther King, in the twentieth century.

How Important is a College Education?

Everybody knows that to compete in the job market these days you need a college education. Better still, get a master’s degree.

Then how come, asks Australian Mercurius Goldstein, that the most successful people in Australia come up short in the academic credentials department?

[T]hese Australians are "one in the eye" for the great middle-class myth that a university education is an essential ingredient for a fulfilling life.



Such people are living reminders that success often depends far more on hard work, inspired intuition, social skills and not a small measure of rat cunning. Whereas many anxious middle-class parents prefer to believe, and to inculcate in their children, the corrosive belief that once you have a degree, you've "got it made". Of course, none of this helps when all their middle-class mates grow up to possess identical qualifications. The reality is that when everybody has a degree, nobody has a degree; and any competitive advantage in the job market is lost.

So why do parents fork out so much money for college?

It is a bid by parents for more power, money or prestige.. It is to protect privilege and ensure that young Cassandra and Joel both get a bigger slice of the pie than their parents did.

The question is: Does it really help? The message of
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko is that parents have to be really careful doling out “economic outpatient care” to their children. They should only spend money on things that make their children more independent and motivated. Giving them cash just makes them used to supplementing their life styles with remittances.

But Stanley and Danko also suggest that it is a lot easier to live a comfortable life in a professional career than as an entrepreneur and risk taker.

Of course, maybe boys have already figured all this out. Maybe it’s why more girls go to college than boys. The boys do the math, and figure: what’s the point?

So that’s why the feminists want girls to excel and math and science.

Experts Rank Global Warming as Minor Problem

Everyone is concerned about global warming, even Republicans, writes Ryan Sager. But when it comes to prioritizing it as a major problem, “ Republicans ranked global warming 19th out of the 19 issues; Democrats ranked it 13th out of 19.”

In this, you might be surprised, the American people agree with the experts. Danish economist Bjorn Lomberg got 50 politicians to review monographs prepared by economists on major world problems. Then he asked them to rate the problems in order of importance. Wait a minute, they said. These are all No.1!

That’s the point, Lomberg told them. This exercise is intended to force you to choose. The result? Global warming rated way down the list.

Lomberg’s initiative is called the Copenhagen Consensus. The prioritized list is here.

Here are the highlights of the prioritized list of global initiatives rated in order of importance by the participants in the Copenhagen Consensus:

Challenge Opportunity 1 Communicable Diseases Scaled-up basic health services 2 Sanitation and Water Community-managed water supply and sanitation 3 Education Physical Expansion   ... ... 27 Climate Change Kyoto Protocol

What about global warming? You can see for yourself: Climate change: Kyoto, down at 27 out of 40.

So it seems that the experts and the people agree about global warming. Where does that leave Al Gore and his “Inconvenient Truth?”