Prager University: Are People Born Good?

One of my favorite adages from ancient civilization is “There is neither good, nor bad. Only thinking makes it so”.

Therein lies the rub with the human animal.

We are born neutral. Being good, responsible, moral, generous, honest, kind, tolerant, knowledgeable arrives, if it arrives at all, comes to us by observing, copying, and training.

Nature is filled with mistakes. My world is primarily in the plant world. If nature were perfect, there would be no change. Errors happen as a habit of existence.

And here we are, AD 2014, homeo sapens running around the globe in many shapes and sizes depending much on our ancestry, that is, where we have been running around….closer to sunnier days, or huddling where the winters are dark and miserable? Isolated or in the lanes of human traffic?

With the exception of recent American presidential elections, we are thinking animals, whose males have imagined, explored, built, discovered, created unbelievable expressions of human invention for thousands of years……to survive as a species, and to satisfy the powerful drive of its human male to be curious, to wonder, to accomplish and defend.

COGNITO, ERGO SUM!

Prager University offers an assortment of tremendously valuable chunks of knowledge, discussion and thought. I have chosen the following ‘lesson’ as one of my favorites.

Learning knowledge and understanding regarding our and the world’s past, the world of science in nearly every form, particularly in the plant world, has become either incidental in educating our young or has disappeared altogether. Our cultural way of life is in trouble.

Ignorance is often married to violence.

Please open the following lesson titled, ARE PEOPLE BORN GOOD?

Have you ever had a discussion about crime, politics or child-rearing, only to hear this generalization: “Well, people are basically good.” This is a common idea, but is it true?

In this week’s video, “Are People Born Good?” Dennis Prager explains how your answer to this fundamental question about human nature shapes your worldview on crime, poverty, and the existence of evil. Watch the video here, and then forward it to someone you know. It can be the spark that ignites an interesting discussion at your next get-together with friends and family.

http://www.prageruniversity.com/Political-Science/Are-People-Born-Good.html#.Uzmz-_ldV8E

Reviewing Obama’s Marxism…..”the defining challenge of our time”

Thoughts on Income Inequality

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

With President Obama calling inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” much of our political discourse of late has focused on income distribution in the United States. But what most Americans understand about inequality is based on three false assumptions: that inequality is inherently unjust, that it is bad for the economy and that government redistribution is the best remedy. Based on these assumptions, advocates for greater equality push for tax increases and minimum wage hikes in order to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the working classes, say researchers with the American Enterprise Institute.

•Research on income inequality often varies because there is no common definition of “income,” says American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar Aparna Mathur. Some researchers use pre-tax income data, for example, failing to account for transfer payments such as food stamps or Medicare. Instead, living standards is the better metric. Are people’s lives today better than they were yesterday? Yes. Mathur says that Americans at all income levels have access to more material goods than in the 1980s, and the gap between high- and low-income earners in terms of the ownership of these possessions has shrunk.
•American Enterprise Institute Fellow Jonah Goldberg explains that liberals, in general, view inequality as a systemic problem — that income is a sort of common good that should be distributed evenly. If it is not, the government or the system messed up. The right, he says, tend to see inequality as a symptom: if the poor are falling behind, it could be the result of poor job creation or stagnating wages. But Goldberg notes that inequality can largely be driven by non-economic issues. Family structure and values, he says, are much more strongly correlated with economic mobility than is income inequality.
•If Obama has called income inequality the “defining challenge” of our time, James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute says that it is instructive to look at all the things that President Obama sees as less important than income inequality: chronically weak economic growth, an employment rate that has barely moved from recession lows, and the breakdown of the traditional family unit (as research on both sides of the aisle confirms that the children of intact, nuclear families fare better educationally, emotionally and financially than others). There is little evidence that higher top-end inequality has slowed economic growth, hurt middle class incomes, or reduced mobility.
In fact, while income differences are inevitable, they are not a problem as long as the opportunity to succeed and move up the income ladder is available to everyone. The free market is not a zero-sum game.

Source: Kevin A. Hassett et al., “Opportunity for All: How to Think about Income Inequality,” American Enterprise Institute, March 19, 2014.

State Education Funding Doesn’t Teach Knowledge!!!

No Link between Spending and Academic Performance
March 26, 2014

from the National Committee for Policy Analysis:

New data demonstrates that there is no link between state education spending and student outcomes, says Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

Comparing academic performance with state spending is an incredibly valuable way to measure the efficacy of education policies. Looking at academic performance on a national scale, the results are not good. Seventeen year olds’ performance has been stagnant since 1970 across all subjects, despite K-12 education costs tripling.

Unfortunately, similar data at the state level has been very difficult to come by. Spending data exists for the last 50 years, but it is scattered across various publications. Academic data, on the other hand, is even more difficult to find, as it is either unavailable prior to 1990 or involves an unrepresentative sample.

To produce the type of data needed to evaluate education policies effectively, Coulson took state SAT score averages and adjusted them by participation rate and student demographics (factors known to affect outcomes). He then compared the results with recent state-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, producing SAT score trends from 1972 to present day.

What did he find?

•For all 50 states, the correlation between spending and academic performance was 0.075. Correlations are measured on a scale that reaches from 0 to 1 — anything below 0.3 or 0.4 is considered a very weak correlation, and the closer the figure is to 1, the higher the correlation.
•A correlation of 0.075 suggests that there is absolutely no link between education spending and student performance at the end of high school. While spending has exploded, performance has stagnated or simply declined.
•And the states that did see substantial spending declines over certain periods saw no declines in SAT scores.
In short — academic performance and test scores across the 50 states appear to have no connection whatsoever with the amount of state education funding.

In nearly every other field in the United States, productivity has risen between 1970 and present day, especially as a result of new technologies. It is time to ask what in our approach to education is preventing it from demonstrating a similar level of success and growth.

Source: Andrew J. Coulson, “State Education Trends,” Cato Institute, March 18, 2014.

What Black Racists Don’t Get……Capital Punishment will Reduce Black Deaths

WHEN WILL BLACK RACISTS UNDERSTAND THAT RELATIVE TO ITS NUMBERS IN POPULATION, AMERICA’S MURDERING CLASS IS BLACK.

The following article by Jamelle Bouie out of Slate, is standard among the black racists leading the 95% of the black voting population which re-elected Barack Hussein Obama November 2012.

Every American should read these firetraps to understand the greatest threat to American democratic institutions in its history……the rise of the leftwing racists led mostly by know-nothings graduating from Black Racist Studies at your neighborhood university and college.

There is no interest in pursuing truth by these racist Democrats…..only in emoting to blame whites for the collapse of black culture over the past 50 years…. despite the payment of trillions of dollars spent overwhelmingly by the American white tax payer since World War II to assist its Negro population in finding its way into the broader American culture. The money went to cronyism nearly universally within the Democrat Party as the new plantation boss and wound up destroying the black family structure and its culture.

These black racists know no history, no truths, no reality and understanding of the rise of the criminal culture which now overwhelms its urban communities from coast to coast for the past generation.

When I attended my mixed race urban high school, school crime didn’t exist. There was barely a dimes worth of difference among racial crime rates…..and murder was almost non-existent. Fathers and mothers raised children.

Ignorance as displayed in the article below causes consequences……I cannot imagine any of them good….except that they need to be expressed to be exposed.

WHY WHITES SUPPORT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

by Jamelle Bouie

Nearly twice as many whites as blacks favor the death penalty. There is a simple, and disturbing, reason why.

The relationship between capital punishment and racial control has a long history.

We hear a lot about the racial disparity in death penalty sentencing, namely, that black Americans are dramatically overrepresented on death row.

Less remarked on is the disparity in death penalty support, as revealed in a new Pew Research Center survey. Overall, 55 percent of Americans support capital punishment, and 37 percent are opposed. Among whites, however, support for the death penalty jumps to 63 percent, compared to 40 percent for Hispanics and 36 percent for blacks.

Religion—or at least, Protestantism—seems to increase the divide. At 67 percent in favor, white evangelical Protestants are more likely than any other group to support the death penalty, followed closely by white mainline Protestants (64 percent). Catholics are the least likely among religious whites to support capital punishment, though 59 percent are still in favor. On the other end, religious blacks and Latinos are even less likely than their peers to support the death penalty.

Please continue reading:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/pew_research_death_penalty_poll_why_whites_support_capital_punishment_more.html

Hi Glenn,
This post made me cringe. Are you really trying to argue that violence is predetermined only by the color of your skin? That’s a pretty easy statement to make as a privileged white male…
Perhaps we should consider what in our society is maintaining the racial divide that pushes the minority to acts of desperation. You mention christianity–I’m pretty sure Jesus never preached about loving your brothers except for the black ones.

I received the above note from Cheryl Walker….and thank her for her response. Unfortunately with the collapse of the ‘normal’ human family among America’s black population, the absence of marriage, the absence of concerned, responsible fathers, the rise of racism and gangsterism related to drugs and other ‘evils’, civilized adult behavior here has been profoundly compromised in these urban crime centers over the past half century. Its cultural collapse was caused by Liberal largesse during the 1960s and 1970s which wound up sabotaging marriage and the presence of fathers, for due to government handouts, it was more profitable for mothers to skip husbands, fathers and become or remain unmarried, being rewarded financially with financial support from Washington via ADC funding.

Worse, education, law and order collapsed in these inner city black plantations run by Democrat political bosses, both black and white.