So Why Is Giuliani Leading the Pack

Everyone knows that Rudy Giuliani is too liberal for the Republican base.  There are his divorces, his support for abortion, and his support for gay marriage.  The theocratic party will never go for that.

Who is that “everyone” by the way?

Then why is Giuliani leading the GOP pack right now, by 31 percent to 26 percent for John McCain.  As John Podhoretz writes:

By the conventional wisdom, this isn’t even possible: The GOP is the party of the social conservatives, while Rudy Giuliani is - or so we’re told - "socially liberal."

 Maybe it’s because Republicans respect Giuliani as a leader.  And maybe something more.

Republicans not only like Rudy, they want to like him. Conservative Republicans want to like him. Socially conservative Republicans want to like him.

That’s quite something, isn’t it.  I guess you would call it curb appeal, or something.

That other chap, John McCain, has done his best to rile up the Republican base over the years.  And we haven’t forgotten.  So with McCain, the sentiment works in the other direction.  We don’t really want to have to vote for him.  Because we really don’t like him.

As Hugh Hewitt says of John McCain:  “Great American. Lousy senator. Terrible Republican.”

But Rudy, now.  Well that’s a different kettle of fish.

What Makes Public School Kids Excel in School

What’s the secret of success?  Specifically, how do public school students from modest homes compete against private school kids who have all the advantages, from educated parents, after-school tutoring, and computers and stuff at home.

Queena Lee-Chua, Filipino college instructor did some research.  Yes, she discovered, the private school kids have plenty of advantages, 

But according to our study, the families of our best public school students have more powerful strategies.

These are their secrets — discipline, goal-setting, self-reliance, strong family bonds and a conducive home environment.

Well, now, that’s a surprise! “You mean to say,” in the words of the immortal Mike Wallace, that positive self-esteem isn’t important?

Er, no. Not really. Here is more.

Ninety-nine percent of the families of public school achievers in the survey agree that “discipline is a responsibility of the parents and an act of love.”

There’s a shocker for you.  So what would the parent do if little Johnny doesn’t want to work hard?

He tells them about people in the community who ended up jobless because they took the easy way out and did not finish school — “Sumunod lang sa agos (They just went with the flow).”

Still want more?

Most of the families in our survey believe that success is achieved through hard work, not luck or fate. They believe in God, but they also know that God helps those who help themselves.

The children are patient, persistent and capable of delaying gratification.

Successful students believe that they can control their lives, while their less successful classmates are ruled by chance, malas (bad luck), or other factors.

This isn’t rocket science, of course.  Why should it be? 

Two Turning Points, says Michael Barone

Democrats, we know, have to play to their base.  And their base believes that violence never solves anything.  Republicans, of course, play to their base.  And that base tends to believe in the vision of the legendary Al Davis: Just Win Baby.  Thus the ongoing domestic conflict over Iraq and the war on terror.

So let us rise above all this and listen to the adult Michael Barone.  There have been, he asserts, two important turning points in the last year.

The first was the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006. This was intended to, and evidently did, spark an upsurge of sectarian violence -- Shias killing Sunnis and vice versa.

 The second was the Hezbollah war in Lebanon.

The Sunni Arab states viewed the Hezbollah attack -- undertaken without even the notification of the Lebanese government, yet putting Lebanon at grave risk -- as an Iranian offensive aimed at establishing something like hegemony over the greater Middle East.

So the question in the Middle East is no longer “winning” in Iraq.  It is, as it has always been since 1979, the problem of revolutionary Iran.

So now, belatedly, we are conducting a “surge” in Iraq which may have as its principal goal the reduction of Iranian influence in that war-torn country.  And there is also this.

Bush appointed an admiral to be the head of CentCom, the regional command in the area, and ordered a second aircraft carrier group sent to the Persian Gulf. This is a hugely significant move, signaling that if necessary we can bring overwhelming military force to bear against Iran, as we did in 1986-88.

Naturally the Democratic Party responded with weakness.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded by demanding that the administration not take action against Iran, and The New York Times condemned Bush for "bullying" poor, sweet little Iran.

Oh please.  The fact is that we have been at war with Iran for nearly 30 years, ever since the Iranians violated the US embassy in 1979.

And as for the idea that violence never solves anything, what about the two civil wars that the US conducted in its teenage years: one against the Brits and one against the South?  That certainly solved something didn’t it?

When Women Rule the World

What with women now outnumbering men in higher education about 60:40, it certainly seems that the writing is on the wall for the patriarchal age.

So this report on mating customs in an island off Guinea-Bissau by Rukmini Callimachi has some salience, as the social scientists say.

On this remote island the women chose their mates.  Have done since the dawn of time.

In this archipelago of 50 islands off the western rim of Africa, it’s women, not men, who choose. They make their proposals public by offering their grooms-to-be a dish of distinctively prepared fish, marinated in red palm oil.

It’s unthinkable to refuse.  Anyway, why would you want to?  But the fish ritual certainly gives a renewed power to the old wives tale that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. 

Listen to this old codger.  Before his wife to be offered him a plate of fish,

"I had no feelings for her," said Nananghe, now 65. "Then when I ate this meal, it was like lightning. I wanted only her."

Well girls, what do you think of that? 

Bush's "Reading First" Is Working

Everyone is disappointed by the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act.  It was bushwhacked by Sen. Ted Kennedy and the vital school-choice reforms were ripped out.

But don’t forget the phonics reading program, "Reading First."  It is working, and just in the way intended.

In City Journal Sol Stern tells how in a tale of two school districts.

One of the districts, in Richmond, Virginia, is a classic inner-city disaster.

Until 2001, Richmond’s student test scores were among Virginia’s worst. Only five of the district’s 51 schools achieved the status of full state accreditation.

But in 2001, Richmond switched to a phonics-based reading program.

By the time Reading First funds were available in 2002, Richmond was already up and running with a phonics-based reading program called Voyager Universal Literacy. The district channeled the modest $450,000 Reading First grant into a handful of its lowest-performing schools. But the principles of scientific reading instruction took hold throughout the district.

The results were dramatic.  Since switching to a phonics-based reading program in 2001,   

Richmond’s test scores have skyrocketed. By 2003, the number of the district’s schools achieving full state accreditation had climbed to 22. The next year, it rose to 39 and has now reached 44.

 Next door to Richmond is the rich suburban Fairfax school district, but with black students who aren’t doing so well.  Well, who cares about them!  You’d be surprised.

Richmond’s third-grade reading scores are closing in on wealthy Fairfax’s scores for all its students, 79 percent of whom passed the third-grade reading test in 2005. Since enacting its reforms, Richmond has moved from 114th in the state in reading (out of 132 districts) to 50th, compared with Fairfax’s 36th.

Imagine!  The poor kids in Richmond are doing almost as well as the rich kids in Fairfax.  Why is that, do you think? 

Fairfax uses a "whole language" reading method, and people have noticed.  According to activists Maria Casby Allen and Rick Nelson:

“Richmond scores rose dramatically after schools adopted science-based reading programs four years ago,” whereas Fairfax “was eligible for federal and state Reading First funding but objected to the science-based reading component.”

Fairfax, you see, uses a reading instruction system that has absolutely no confirmation in science-based research and is damned if it is going to change its failing reading program for one that been tested in peer-reviewed scientific research.

This tale of two school districts has unfolded something like Reading First’s framers had hoped. One district implementing Reading First principles showed dramatic reading improvement in its low-performing schools. As the good news spread, some parents and teachers in another district wanted to know why their schools weren’t using the methods that were working magic elsewhere. Nelson and Allen failed to convince district officials, but they’re not giving up. “Parents everywhere should compare the performance on third-grade tests of Reading First schools and other schools “then publicize the results,” says Nelson. “Parents should also ask questions such as: ‘What are your state and locality doing to train teachers in science-based reading instruction?’ ”

All this is going on below the media radar, and maybe it’s just as well.  Meanwhile another generation of children is being flushed down the toilet.

A System of Patronage So Vast...

Every three months the excellent Theodore Dalrymple reports on the utter waste and degradation of the welfare state in Britain.  And in the Winter 2007 edition of City Journal he explains how it really works.  For he asks: How is it possible for the welfare state to sustain failure on such a massive scale?

It is simple, really.  Failure is the whole point.  It is failure that justifies the whole system, the pyramid of patronage we call the welfare state.

At the bottom of the heap is the failed underclass. Their failure justifies the vast social service bureaucracy; their continued failure justifies a bigger social service bureaucracy.

But that is just the start.  For the failure concept works inside the bureaucracy.  in his book Wasting Police Time, policeman

[David] Copperfield recounts how, in 1999, a police officer said to a black motorist, who did not answer a question, “Okay, so you’re deaf as well as black.” The report of the official inquiry into the subsequent complaint had 62 pages of attachments, 20 pages of witness statements, and 172 pages of interview transcripts. Legal and disciplinary proceedings took 19 months to complete.

Do you see the beauty of this?  Think of the jobs, the promotions, the careers in that official inquiry.  Think of the jobs, the promotions, the careers spawned by it in programs to combat the crisis of “institutional racism” in the police force.  What’s the point of actually doing policing?  Much better to be doing nice safe internal investigations.

There’s the mystery of why the government education system in both Britain and the United States have insisted on using the ineffective “whole language”" reading system for over a century instead of the proven “phonics.”

It’s simple really.  What is the point of using a system like phonics that teaches children to read in six weeks?  Where are the jobs, the pensions in that?  Much better to use a failed method that requires remedial programs and studies and more funding to compensate for the expensive failures.

Higher up the food chain are the expensive consultants and their massive project failures.

[In] management consultant David Craig’s recent book, Plundering the Public Sector. Craig catalogs what at first sight seems the almost incredible incompetence of the British government in its efforts to “modernize” the public administration.

They have spent $60 billion (yes, billion) on an IT system for the National Health Service that doesn’t work.  But that is not the real source of waste.

Projects routinely get canceled after $400— $500 million has been spent on them. Modernization in Britain’s public sector means delay and inefficiency procured at colossal expense.

But that’s the point, you see.  What does it matter if the system is wasteful and expensive and the system gets canceled.  It all greases the patronage system.  The consultants still get paid, and demonstrate their appreciation in the traditional way.

This is all so obvious, that we should ask ourselves how come it took so long to figure it all out. In the immortal words of fictional silent screen star Lina Lamont: Are We Dumb or Something?  Of course the whole thing is a big patronage system.  That is what politicians do to get elected.  Always have, always will.

The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

 That is a long paragraph.  So let us shorten it.  When you think of the welfare state don’t think of the caring and the compassion.  That is just window dressing.  Think of the power and the patronage.  Then everything starts to make sense.

Climate Change: Government Scientists vs. Deniers

Who are you gonna believe, the government-funded scientists on the UN’s IPCC and their fourth assessment of climate change.  Or is it still possible that the Sun did it?  New York Times reporters Elisabeth Rosenthal and Andrew C. Revkin give us the bad news:

In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate change scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

Well, that sounds like it is all over.  Except for one thing.  Should we respond to climate change by adapting to the new climate or should we try to arrest the change?

The international conspiracy of venture socialists are all agreed.  We should sacrifice and change our ways.  But they are the same people who advertise their devotion to science and the adaptive process of natural selection.

But let us give us climate deniers our moment.  Writes Jack Kelly:

Leaks of the IPCC report coincided with publication of two books which link climate change to a long, moderate solar cycle.

What’s he talking about?  Just this:

In "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years," Fred Singer and Dennis Avery present evidence of 600 moderate warmings in the last million years.

In "The Chilling Stars," Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder discuss how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s irradiance, creating 1-2 degree Centigrade cycles in temperatures on earth.

Then there is the fact that sunspots are running at a 1,000 year high. Remember, they were at a  “Maunder minimum” during the Little Ice Age that the Earth enjoyed for much of the last half millennium.

Who are you gonna believe?