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Dumbing Down America
...In order to do so he analyzed the traditional curriculum that sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and found what he believed was the sustaining linchpin -- that is, the key element that held the entire system together: high literacy. To Dewey, the greatest obstacle to socialism was the private mind that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own private judgment and intellectual authority. High literacy gave the individual the means to seek knowledge independently. It gave individuals the means to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. This was detrimental to the "social spirit" needed to bring about a collectivist society. Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, published in 1916:

When knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.

When the social quaility of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent. intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else.

And he wrote in School and Society in 1899:

The tragic weakness of the present school is that it endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently wanting ...

The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of merely learning, there is no clear social gain in success threat....

Climate Depot: Time for Next Eco-Scare?! Obama follows lead of green movement and demotes global warming --UN now says case for saving species 'more powerful than climate change'
Formerly outspoken proponents of man-made climate fears are now openly admitting climate is not even the biggest environmental problem, let alone the biggest problem we face. See: Demoted: UN officially throws global warming under the bus: UN now says case for saving species 'more powerful than climate change' – May 21, 2010

The scientific claims made by proponents of man-made climate change were coming up short and the movement could not hold together. See: Special Report: A-Z Climate Reality Check -- 'The claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing'

Global warming will not go away as an environmental scare campaign, but it does appear likely that climate change will be rolled in to the larger issue of biodiversity. Below are but a few examples of how the UN and the environmental movement seems to be giving up on man-made global warming as their flagship environmental issue. AGW Demoted -- Again: Time Mag. warmist Bryan Walsh on global warming: 'It's not the only environmental problem — and it's not even the biggest one'

Obama Steers Clear on Global Warming: 'This year? The word 'climate' didn't even get a mention. Gone are the urgent statements warning of melting glaciers and rising sea levels'...

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NY Times Columnist: Glass-Steagall Wouldn't Have Prevented the JPMorgan Loss or the Financial Crisis
...A meme around Glass-Steagall has been created, repeated so often that it has almost become conventional wisdom: the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the financial crisis of 2008. And, the thinking goes, has become almost religious for some people, that if the law were reinstated, we would avoid the next crisis.

The facts — basic facts — just aren’t that convenient. While the repeal of Glass-Steagall has seemingly become the sine qua non of the financial crisis, it is pure historical revisionism. [...]

Glass-Steagall wouldn't have prevented the last financial crisis. And it probably wouldn't have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion-plus trading loss. The loss occurred on the commercial side of the bank, not at the investment bank. [...]

The first domino to nearly topple over in the financial crisis was Bear Stearns, an investment bank that had nothing to do with commercial banking. Glass-Steagall would have been irrelevant. Then came Lehman Brothers; it too was an investment bank with no commercial banking business and therefore wouldn't have been covered by Glass-Steagall either. After them, Merrill Lynch was next — and yep, it too was an investment bank that had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall.

Next in line was the American International Group, an insurance company that was also unrelated to Glass-Steagall. While we're at it, we should probably throw in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which similarly, had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall....

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Under Asset Forfeiture Law, Wisconsin Cops Confiscate Families' Bail Money
...The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It's a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair.

It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family's money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. "The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money," Williams says. "Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money."

Wisconsin is one of four states (along with Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon) that prohibits bail bondsmen. So bail must be paid either in cash, with a registered check, cashier's check or credit card. In fact, Donna Kuchler, a Wisconsin criminal defense attorney based in Waukesha, said police aren't allowed to insist on cash.

"I would be suspicious of why they would do that," Kuchler says. "I had a case last year in Fond du Lac County where they tried to say my client could only pay in cash. My guess is that they probably intended to do the same thing that happened here....

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Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe
...A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

The report summarized 10 years of research evaluating the capability of international institutions to deal with climate and other environmental issues, an assessment that found existing capabilities to effect change sorely lacking. The authors called for a “constitutional moment” at the upcoming 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio in June to reform world politics and government. Among the proposals: a call to replace the largely ineffective U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development with a council that reports to the U.N. General Assembly, at attempt to better handle emerging issues related to water, climate, energy and food security. The report advocates a similar revamping of other international environmental institutions.

Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

Behavioral economics and other forward-looking disciplines in the social sciences try to grapple with weighty questions. But they have never taken on a challenge of this scale, recruiting all seven billion of us to act in unison....

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Another round of updates to the mortgage meltdown article

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Power really does corrupt as scientists claim it's as addictive as cocaine More than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase 'power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' scientists claim the saying is biologically true. The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women. This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive. ...

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Senior climate scientist queries temperature data ‘adjustments’
...“And I must admit that those adjustments constituting virtually all of the warming signal in the last 40 years is disconcerting. When “global warming” only shows up after the data are adjusted, one can understand why so many people are suspicious of the adjustments,” he said in a blog post on the problem this week....

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Free fall: How government policies brought down the housing market
...The affordable housing goals imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992 were the major contributors to both the deterioration in underwriting standards between 1992 and 2008 and the growth of an unprecedented ten-year housing bubble that suppressed delinquencies and stimulated the growth of a private securitization market for subprime loans. But other government policies are also to blame for the deterioration in the US housing market, including the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, the mortgage interest tax deduction, the right to refinance without penalty, and the Community Reinvestment Act. Until Fannie and Freddie’s market dominance and the government’s role in the housing finance system are substantially reduced or eliminated, the United States will continue to have an inferior and unstable housing market....

...In 1995, expanding the idea in the Best Practices Initiative, HUD issued a policy statement titled “The National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream.” The first paragraph of chapter 1 leaves no doubt about what HUD had set out to do: “The purpose of the National Homeownership Strategy is to achieve an all-time high level of homeownership in America within the next 6 years through an unprecedented collaboration of public and private housing industry organizations.” The paper then made clear that reducing down payments would increase homeownership: “Lending institutions, secondary market investors, mortgage insurers, and other members of the partnership should work collaboratively to reduce homebuyer downpayment requirements. Mortgage financing with high loan-to-value ratios should generally be associated with enhanced homebuyer counseling and, where available, supplemental sources of downpayment assistance.”

HUD’s policy was successful. In 1989, only 1 in 230 homebuyers bought a home with a down payment of 3 percent or less, but by 2003, 1 in 7 buyers was providing a down payment at that level and by 2007, the number was less than 1 in 3.10 The program’s contribution to the reduction in home equity and the subsequent increase in leverage is obvious....

...In 1993, for example, shortly after the goals were adopted, the FHA began to increase the percentage of its loans that involved down payments of less than 3 percent; these went from 13 percent in 1992 to 28 percent in 1996. From there, they rose sharply to more than 50 percent in 2000, coinciding with another increase in the AH goals. After that, the FHA’s percentage of these risky loans began to decrease as the GSEs—which were off-budget enterprises—took on more of the risky loans necessary to meet the increasing AH goals....

...Thus, although there were strong incentives for making CRA-type loans, the actual numbers and their delinquency rates are hard to find. However, in its 10-K annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission for 2009, Bank of America made one of the few bank references to CRA loan quality: “At December 31, 2009, our CRA portfolio comprised six percent of the total residential mortgage balances, but comprised 17 percent of nonperforming residential mortgage loans. This portfolio also comprised 20 percent of residential net charge-offs during 2009.”...

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Undoing Glass-Steagall Did Not Cause Crisis
...There's no evidence any bank, including Citibank, got into trouble because of a securities or insurance affiliate. The banks that suffered subprime losses were engaged in activities — namely, mortgage lending — that were always permitted by Glass-Steagall. And none of them was affiliated at the time with the investment banks that got into trouble — namely, Lehman, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, which overinvested in subprime securities. And they did so after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a huge market for such investments in response to political pressure from HUD to meet affordable housing goals. Finally, Glass-Steagall deregulation had nothing to do with the gutting of traditional mortgage underwriting standards — the core cause of the crisis....

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The Population Control Holocaust
There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity. The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Following this pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of the capacity of human ingenuity to develop new resources, Malthus advocated oppressive policies that led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland....

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Oh my: Obama White House paying women employees less than men?
...Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.

According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000)....

Deputies force repo man to return detective's truck
...The wrecker driver says he pulled into a parking lot at the jail to call the sheriff’s office and report the repossession, a routine procedure. Seconds after he drove away, Huff said three cars pulled up alongside him, boxing in his wrecker. The cars were unmarked, the men in civilian clothes, but Huff says they all had guns pointing right at him.

“I really thought I was gonna get shot right then,” Huff told Davis. “I had my hands up here on the window so they could see them. The officer was yelling at me. He said, ‘That’s my wife’s truck.’”

That officer was Keith Winford, a Montgomery County Sheriff’s detective, who Local 2 confirmed, is married to Tammy Berkley. Winford was accompanied by three to four other deputies.

“He just grabbed me out, slammed me up against the truck right here,” said Huff....

Oceans Started Warming 135 Years Ago, Study Suggests
The world's oceans have been warming for more than 100 years, twice as long as previously believed, new research suggests....

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Hansen: Morality of fossil fuel emissions on par with slavery
...Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen....

Progressivism and the authoritarian impulse
...There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment....

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Four hard truths of health care reform
President Barack Obama promised over and over during the health care debate that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

It turns out that, for a lot of people, that isn’t true.

A Congressional Budget Office report issued this week says that 3 to 5 million people could move from employer-based health care plans to government-based programs as the Affordable Care Act takes effect. And in the worst-case scenario, it could be as many as 20 million.

For Obama, it’s an inconvenient truth at a really inconvenient time — coming less than two weeks before the Supreme Court begins oral arguments on the law and just as the administration touts the law’s early benefits on its second anniversary.

And it’s not the only hard truth Obama and the law’s supporters are facing. No matter what they said about rising health care costs, those costs aren’t actually going to go down under health care reform. The talk about the law paying for itself is just educated guesswork. And people aren’t actually liking the law more as they learn more about it — and some polls show they are just getting more confused.

But it’s Obama’s signature promise — “If you like it, you can keep it” — that’s most likely to get thrown back in his face. Here are the four hard truths of health care reform as the law approaches its March 23 anniversary:...

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Aussie government proposes unlimited speech regulation, names climate skeptics and Labor critics as targets
...Really? In a country that has no constitutional or statutory protection for speech, how are non-governmental “bodies and persons in the community” more than adequate to protect speech from a governmental body that is endowed with unlimited power to regulate speech?

The report explicitly calls for opinion to be regulated along with news (§11.64, p. 294) , and while low-readership blogs would possibly be exempted, Bolt notes that the suggested threshold for regulation would cover any blog that averaged even one reader a day, and even that would be at the complete discretion of the Council (§11.59, p. 293)....

...To an American, what is most striking about the Australian plan is the complete absence of any statement of negative rights, or freedom from restrictions on speech. Our entire concept of free speech is framed in negative terms: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” The Australians have no constitutional protection for speech, but it is still astounding to see how readily the left would overthrow this pillar of Western liberty in exchange for partisan advantage.

The same totalitarian ambitions are at work in America too. They face greater legal obstacles here, but key actors are powerfully placed. Obama’s “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein wants to use the system of “notice and takedown” from copyright law to shut down “conspiracy theories.” As an example, he wants to suppress claims that:

the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

If SOPA had passed then all of the necessary machinery would have been in place, ready to expand from copyright infringement to the suppression of conspiracy theories at the drop of a one-line rider on any bill....

Steven Greenhut: What's a little fraud to save the Earth?
..."Peter Gleick lied, but was it justified by the wider good?" asked James Garvey of the liberal British newspaper the Guardian. He compared Gleick's action to that of a man who lied to keep his friend from driving home drunk. "What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action," Garvey argued. "If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push skepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing.
... It depends on how this plays out."

In his view, anything that gets in the way of "consensus" – i.e., everyone agreeing with Garvey – is dangerous, so why not cheat, as long as it "has good effects"? Let's reserve judgment based on how it plays out.

What would these people argue if a conservative who argues that, say, public-sector unions are bankrupting the state, pulled a similar fraud to get his hands on documents from union officials? Would they be defending that? Of course not. These writers are advancing a Machiavellian political agenda, not advancing a consistent ethical principle.

When it comes to global warming, the ends apparently justify the means. People from all political persuasions do stupid things to advance their cause, but what bothers me most are respectable people who justify behavior they would never tolerate from their foes. That type of ideological fanaticism is corrosive of our democratic society....

Forget climate change, we must focus on the real issue
...Ultimately if it is not climate change it will be some other vehicle connected to ‘sustainability’ that will be used as a means of controlling the population and redistributing wealth from the industrialised world to the developing world in a way that enriches the corporates....

Why Alarmists Can’t Be Trusted
...I overlaid RSS satellite data on to the bogus graph. Temperatures peaked 14 years ago, and are cooler in 2012 than they were in 1980....