Author Archives: Jeffrey

Parents Increasingly Fight for Control

Bad policies from school boards have had at least one unintended good effect.

Lately, parents have become more active in the debate around what and how their children should be taught in public schools. Parents are weighing in on curriculum about “systemic racism,” policies about vaccinating children without parental consent, and the front-and-center debate of whether a child needs to wear a mask for the school day. The Left may be pushing wrong policies, but more parental involvement is a good thing.

The political Left teaches that America is racist because it was founded through oppression, prejudice, and white privilege. Kids are being taught how to affix blame using racism, not how to prevent it. Whether it’s called Critical Race Theory (CRT) or some other clever name used to camouflage activism, this indoctrination has been exposed, causing many states to ban the passing on of this mindset. Continue reading

How Nixon and FDR Used “Crises” to Destroy the Dollar’s Links to Gold

Since August 15, 1971, the US dollar has been completely severed from gold. President Richard Nixon suspended the most important component of the Bretton Woods system, which had been in effect since the end of World War II. Nixon announced that the US would no longer redeem dollars for gold for the last remaining entities that could: foreign governments. Gold redemption had been made illegal for everybody else, so this action finally ended any semblance of a gold standard for the US dollar.

In Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs showed how in the twentieth century the US government grew in size and scope primarily during crisis periods like wars or economic depressions. The powers gained during those periods were often advertised as “temporary,” but history shows that governments rarely relinquish powers. This “ratchet effect” applies to the way Nixon “temporarily” suspended gold redemption in 1971 – the resulting regime of unbacked fiat dollars remains in effect today. Continue reading

Charles Dickens, America & The Civil War

If you look at lists or letters or diaries mentioning reading material from the mid-19th Century in America, you’ll likely find a book or two by British author Charles Dickens – if that reader enjoyed novels. Popular on both sides of the Atlantic, Charles Dickens penned numerous short tales, serialized stories, and novels during his life, many delivering commentary on social struggles, reform movements, and life’s dark side through entertaining stories.

I’d always wondered about Dickens’s tales, had read an excerpt or short story here and there in high school and college classes, and realized his stories were popular during the Civil War with soldiers and civilians. However, it wasn’t until 2016 when I had a book-signing at Riverside Dickens Literature Festival that I got brave and started really exploring these stories. I wasn’t disappointed… So far, I’ve enjoyed reading or listening to several unabridged stories by Dickens – including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, and (currently) A Tale of Two Cities. Film adaptions have introduced me to Our Mutual Friend and David Copperfield, and I hope to enjoy those books in the future too.

This year, as I was preparing for another year at Dickens Festival, I wondered what Charles Dickens thought about the American Civil War and his views on the American struggle for abolition and social reforms. Continue reading

The History We Do NOT Wish to Revisit!

“I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history.

If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching.

“We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls.

She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers.

“Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.”

Not so… Continue reading

PLEASE… Get your kids out of this mess – NOW!

The System has reached the end of it’s purpose…

Oregon Quietly Passes Bill Removing Reading and Math Requirements for Graduation

Oregon Governor Brown

From the story: Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744 on July 14, and the measure, which was approved by lawmakers in June, was not added into the state’s legislative database until more than two weeks later on July 29, an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation. (Washington Examiner).

Shockingly, the governor’s spokesperson insulted minorities, saying they are the reason for the lack of standards. From Jazz Shaw: As to the delay in updating the database, there was at least an answer provided to the media.
Continue reading

Virginia County School Board Votes Against Implementing State’s Required Transgender Policies

A Virginia county school board elected not to enact transgender policies mandated by the state that looked to “address common issues regarding transgender students.”

The Augusta County School Board called a special meeting Thursday to vote on whether it would change its policies in order to reflect transgender policies required by the Virginia Department of Education. The DOE’s policies state how educators should refer to and accommodate transgender students. Continue reading

A High School Diploma… For NOTHING!

Would you want to hire someone who couldn’t read, couldn’t write, and couldn’t do math? If so, Oregon’s public high schools will soon have graduates who fill the bill!

Late last month the Oregon legislature and governor passed a law that, in its own words, “prohibits the State Board of Education from requiring for a high school diploma that student show proficiency in any academic content area if student successfully completed credit requirements”.

In other words, as long as the student actually showed up for class and sat there at his desk all year, he doesn’t have to have learned anything to get a diploma. Continue reading

A Fight for the History Books

Ever since parents began sounding the alarm about critical race theory, the woke Left has denied that schools were teaching CRT.

“We oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project,” the National Education Association (NEA) said in a resolution late last week. At its 2021 annual meeting, America’s largest teachers’ union — and largest union of any kind — passed a slew of pro-CRT resolutions. They also approved “an already-created, in-depth study that critiques white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy … capitalism … and other forms of power and oppression.” The resolutions amounted to a declaration of war on parent organizations that have sprouted up as sentinels against encroaching wokeness. The victor will determine the path of education for America’s children and — by extension — our country’s future. Finally, the battle lines are drawn clearly.

Ever since parents began sounding the alarm about critical race theory, the woke Left has denied that schools were teaching CRT. “Critical race theory is not taught before law school,” said MSNBC guest host Alicia Menendez. Continue reading

Teacher Takes Radical Leftists to Court

This is the sad state that our education system is in. Biden and Dems are trying to further divide the nation with Critical Race Theory. Luckily some red-state leaders are taking action and are protecting kids from the toxic theory. But the rest of the country is not so lucky and they are seeing just how poisonous the theory is.

A teacher from Illinois has and she was so repulsed by it that she filed a suit against her school district in hopes of saving the children. Continue reading

Why Johnny Can’t THINK!

If it seems that young people these days believe absurd things, that they utterly lack both the ability and the inclination to reason logically – well, it’s not your imagination. Today’s college graduates can’t think, or at least don’t think, because they’re not being taught to.

This sad reality, though long suspected, became clear in 2011, with the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. After a four-year study of more than 2300 undergraduates at selective universities across the country, they concluded that a sizeable percentage of them improved little if at all as critical thinkers. Continue reading

A Teacher’s Union is Suing a Mother For Repeated Attempts to Know What Her Kindergartener is Learning

When it comes to legal battles over Critical Race Theory (CRT), teacher’s unions are not merely willing to defend themselves from lawsuits, they’re filing them as well. On Monday, Nicole Solas, a Rhode Island mom whose daughter will be going into kindergarten, was sued by chapters of the National Education Association (NEA) for submitting multiple requests to find out what her daughter was learning when it comes to lesson plans on concepts such as transgenderism and Critical Race Theory (CRT)

The National Education Association Rhode Island (NEARI) and NEA South Kingstown (NEASK) filed a complaint in Rhode Island Superior Court to prohibit the disclosure of the requested records and “protect teachers’ privacy rights” when it comes to records that Solas was requesting access to. Continue reading

Loudon: The Critical Brain Theory is Desperately Needed to Erase the Critical Race Theory

If it were not for human beings, and their brains, the world would not be the same. A great example of that was the world of the dinosaurs. In millions of years, the dinosaur’s ability to think changed very little. In return, their lifestyle, safety, convenience, diet, travel, comfort, diet, protection, exploration, and innovation changed very little.

Then the Homosapien came along. Except for the bible, pyramids, and some other unexplained phenomena, the intelligence of man slowly progressed. An example of learning is that more information and research at the present time can be found in one day than what took a whole year in the 1600s. Intelligence is expanding today faster than the universe is moving outward. Several factors are involved with our astonishing knowledge and information explosion. In fact, according to Moore’s law, computer power, which is one small information source, has been doubling every two years for more than 20 years. The observation of Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, was that the computer was the springboard for intelligence, innovation, free-thinking, and the technological explosion in the 20th and 21st centuries. Continue reading

The New Deal Program That Rewrote America

In the thirties, the government paid unemployed writers, artists, and journalists to produce a series of guidebooks for the country. What story did they tell?

The Federal Writers’ Project thrived under the unlikely leadership of the rumpled, melancholic journalist Henry Alsberg, who had deep roots in literary and political bohemia.Photograph by Harris & Ewing ~ Courtesy Library of Congress

For a long time now, the New Deal has been our best—sometimes it seems like our only – model for an American government that sets aside obeisance to unfettered capitalism and comes to the aid of its people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made no apologies for this approach, but he did try to explain it. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” he said in 1936, accepting his party’s renomination, “than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” The New Deal, he argued, had to counter “the privileged princes” – a small class that had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” Americans weren’t used to this kind of language from the White House, nor to the kind of direct interventions that went with it. And yet, today, there’s a hunger for precisely this sort of soberly optimistic, crisis-induced collectivism. Bernie Sanders, in his broadsides against economic inequality, often sounds like Roosevelt at his most class-conscious. The architects of a plan to link jobs to federal investment in alternative energy dubbed it the Green New Deal… Continue reading

They thought they had a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence…

Turns out it’s even more special!

Archivists at the American Philosophical Society suspected the rare engraving may have been more than a “cheap Victorian facsimile,” but it took quite a while to make sure.

American Philosophical Society’s head of conservation Anne Downey (left) and Patrick Spero, director of the library, open their copy of the original Declaration of Independence ordered up by President John Quincy Adams in 1820, but not completed until 1823. ~ TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

The archive of the American Philosophical Society, consisting of an ever-expanding universe of 13 million manuscripts and 350,000 bound volumes and periodicals, with images and audiotapes proliferating on a daily basis, has reached the point where it is its own universe.

So it should be no surprise that APS, founded in 1743, has discovered that it possesses an exceedingly rare engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence ordered up by John Quincy Adams two centuries ago, and given to the society in 1842 by Daniel Webster. The society has just announced the discovery. Continue reading

Thomas Sowell on Black History MYTHS Promoted by the Left

I wish you were my father Sowell. As a young black man living in the ghettos of north America I’m surrounded by black people who blame everyone but themselves. I wish we had real role models here, people who valued hard work and critical thinking. its all so tiresome, always being called white washed for reading books outside of school. ~ G.S.

When you think about it: Centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the black family, but one generation of the welfare state did. ~ T.D. Pearce

When I was working in KCMO in the late 1990’s one of my accounts was the city of KCMO because they couldn’t get good help. The manager there was white and he had been there forever. He told me that because of welfare they were on the third generation of people that had no work ethic and didn’t even know how to push a broom. He stated that he was constantly having to tell them what to do next because they would do only what they were told until it was done and then just stand around. Welfare has ruined the American dream for so many Americans. ~ J. Lichtenberger

This man is more intelligent than our entire congress put together. ~ Chelle