The Rationale

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

-Perhaps the Swedes should read the latest poll results from Rasmussen, Gallop, Pew, and pretty much everyone else...the US is becoming pretty darn disillusioned.

-Fascinating: must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority. Do they truly pretend to know what the majority of the world thinks? What a standard? I would be disappointed if my 6th graders failed to see the logical consequences of such a paradigm. Lets think...at one time the majority of the world thought slavery was ok; at another time most people advocated monarchies; perhaps it wasn't quite the majority of the world, but certainly the majority of the world as the Aztecs knew it thought human sacrifice was advisable--so they did follow the standard of doing what was popular with the greatest number of people.

I side with Pope Benedict the XVI, who recently stated that it is the creative minority that most often influences history and changes the world.

Let's get creative...

Current Headlines

There are so many dandy headlines I have come across today!  This post will simply be a list of rewards for best and worst headlines.

1. The award for, No Real Surprise There goes to the Clevelandleader.com who has, honestly I presume, discovered that the late Ted Kennedy actually came clean about much of his disordered life while dictating his autobiography to a ghost writer.  Fortunately for his legacy, the late Senator's family prevented this material from making it into the final version, which is to be published.  http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/11555  Ted Kennedy Claimed to Have Slept with over 1,000 Women  One of the highlights is as follows: The source added that Kennedy even admitted to having planned to seduce Kopechne the night his car plunged off the road in Chappaquiddick.  He even admits to paying out $10 Million to keep things mum.  And to think that a Cardinal opted to honor this man at a Catholic Mass...SCANDALOUS! 

2. The award for, Humor goes to realclearpolitics.com and their following short headline: Ethics Panel Widens Rangel Probe  

3. The award for, You Have Got To Be Kidding Me goes to the Swedes who saw fit to award Oh, Bama the Nobel Peace Prize.  One colleague declared that he is truly offended by these racist Swedes.  Obama has published multiple books and is on his way to curing all that ills the American Health system.  There is no excuse for them to have overlooked Obama for the Nobel prizes in literature and medicine!  Clearly this was a race-based "oversight."  

and

4. The award for, Well That Just #*sses Me Right Off goes to Harry Reid and all his fellow frauds.  He actually found a way to get Nevada, and three other states, off the hook of paying for their own states' required expansion of Medicare as required by the Baucus Bill.  To think that thoroughly bankrupt states like California and Ohio will have to pick up the tab for Nevadans, who don't even have to pay any state income taxes just ticks me right off.  Especially because everyone else, but Alaska--as far as I know, has to pay a state-income tax to build their roads and what not, but Nevada gets that covered by their dividends from the gambling industry...which, incidentally, mostly comes from the residents of other states already.      

Public Schools...a monster's metamorphosis

A cousin recently made a facebook comment on my facebook page, expressing her desire to reform education in our home state of California.  I replied with the following comment: 

Oh I have plans for education! Let me ask you this? What would be the worst possible system of education??? I posit that a system that is governed by large numbers of far away bureaucrats, with schools that are meant to house thousands of students at once, with 20+ students per teacher, with teachers that must pass the latest pop-psychology courses and be trained in theories of education but not required to truly master a specific discipline, all while providing a minimal amount of supervision between classes and, further more, not allowing even a conversation of objective, absolute values may be the most preposterous debacle ever to be evolved.

I would like to add a few more thoughts.

1. Bishop Sheen warned years ago, when massive public funding of schools began, that if private schools did not share in that funding then Catholic schools would soon collapse.  I'm not certain if he foresaw the collapse of their mission or just the collapse of their finances.  

2. How is it ethical for the state, federal and local, to confiscate a parents' income to subsidize public education; an education the parents might find immoral and dangerous.  When public schools are rife crime and bullying.  When the parents are opting to save nothing in order to put their children through a private school which receives no, or almost no, financial assistance from the money the state took to educate their kids.   

3. I once read that all but one of the founding fathers of the US could speak or read Latin and Greek.  Why does the public, and typical Catholic, school omit our heritage?  

4. The US public schools did fine, initially...but like all things that are grounded with/in a false premise...it failed in the long run.  

5. Many in the Reagan administration wanted to dissolve the Federal Department of Education...Bill Bennett, former Sec. of Education says Reagan told him he simply couldn't do it at that time, but needed Bennett to at least make sense of the thing.  I don't think any one in a major office, at present, has the guts to take on this one.

6. Did anyone else think that the video of children singing the Obama kumbaya song smacked of scenes from the Hitler Youth...when the young were instructed to sing and praise and thank the political leader that made all things possible?