WhirledView

Resolved: Down with Teddy Bears—and Flowers and Candlelight Vigils; Up with Good Gun Laws

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Teddy bears are sweet.  Flowers are always lovely.  Candlelight processions look good on TV news shows.  But all of them are worthless, folks, except to give survivors and observers a quick and easy feel-good experience. In short, all these photogenic gestures are a sentimental evasion of the real responsibility, a long overdue responsibility: forcing the U.S. Congress to pass the kind of gun regulations Australia passed after a mass murder some years ago. ( FYI: hunters still have access to guns Down Under, but the murder—and suicide—rate has plunged.)

Eventually the pile of teddy bears, wilting flowers and half-burnt candles is nothing but a heap of trash waiting for a garbage truck—but not, all too often, as in Newtown, before it becomes a place of pilgrimage aka gawkers’ delight, inviting more useless sentimentality.

So here’s my wish for our collective New Year.  Let’s really honor those dead children.   Let’s not continue to let ourselves be brainwashed, manipulated, bamboozled, misled, distracted, lied to, sweet-talked, bribed or blackmailed by the gun-producers’ front known as the National Rifle Association. 

And let's not forget the form of vote-stealing that is better known as vote-buying. Mere votes and ballots mean little when the NRA showers millions to counteract them.  We must do something about this, too.  It’s called organizing to defeat Representatives and Senators who let the NRA call the shots—so to speak.

This effort has to be a strong national campaign resulting in a law that holds for the whole country uniformly.  Why?  It’s too easy for the NRA and the arms industry to blackmail individual state legislatures into non-action.  In fact, post-Newtown, the blackmail is already being applied in Connecticut.  Imagine!  At the first sign of popular pressure to enact strict gun laws, the state-based weapons manufacturers threatened to punish the very state in which the massacre of the innocents occurred.  The pressure is on in other states and cities, too.  Regulate us?  Ha!  How many jobs do you want to lose?  How much tax base?  And for sure we’ll defeat any legislator who votes for the least infringement of our right to produce as many guns as we want and sell them to anyone anytime.  Is this shocking or what?    
 
Also deployed, over the years, have been some other, all-too-effective indirect ways of preventing sensible gun control. Above all, the arms industry masquerading as the National Rife Association hides behind the Constitution, flagrantly misrepresenting it in order to keep the camouflage-providing, more naive members on board.  Most everyone knows about the abuse of the archaic Second Amendment.  But there are other ways of manipulating people’s imperfect understanding the Constitution.

In a recent instance, the NRA managed to corral a treaty-killing majority of senators into signifying that they would to refuse to ratify an international treaty on arms-dealing.  In this case, as often, the specious argument (meaning lie) was that the treaty would impinge on U.S. sovereignty by overriding U.S. gun laws.  That, in fact, can’t happen.  Treaties, by law, never supercede U.S. law.  But all it takes is a little fear-mongering (“They’re going to take away your guns—and your freedom!”) and the oh-so-patriotic American  gun industry can continue to profit mightily (pardon the pun)  by putting lethal force into the hands of terrorists, oddball militias, private armies and other swarms of thieves, murderers and rapists in every lawless area of the globe—some of whom will eventually have to be put down by U.S. troops.  Not bad!  The arms-dealers get to profit from both sides!

And now they’re trying the same double-dipping at home.  Hey!  It won’t matter that every angry crazy guy in America has a semi-automatic (or two or three) plus more handguns than he has pockets for —if everyone else is armed to the teeth, too.

Wow!  These guys and their NRA front men are brilliant con artists—and the latest "helpful" proposal is one of the best yet.  The government should mandate armed guards in all schools, plus all teachers and principals should be armed—and Congress should pay for it!!!!  Glock-a-bye baby!  The new lullaby. 

I’d suggest an amendment to that bill.  Any law mandating armed guards to protect against mass killings in schools or any other public venue should include the mandatory collection of a hefty tax to pay the salaries of those gun toters.  The tax should also bring in enough revenue to pay for the victims’ hospital or burial costs—and, yes, it should top up the salaries of first responders.  And, come to think of it, how about a provision to assuage, financially, the mental anguish on the part of survivors?  So Congress, if the NRA toadies among you think that armed guards and teachers are the solution to the proliferation of slaughter in the U.S., add a big fat sales tax to the bill.  Add 25% to the cost of every weapon purchased in the U.S. (and, to take care of the loophole problem, a 25% tariff on imported guns, too).

Better yet, let’s outlaw the sale of semi-automatics (all of them, now, without loopholes), then allocate federal money to mop up such privately-held weapons (at cost plus 10%, as the Aussies did) within three months or so.  (So much for the gruesome gun-ghouls who went on a gun-buying binge after Newtown!)  Let’s institute purchase or transfer registration that applies to everyone all the time (including freebie gifts to relatives and friends) for all weapons that remain legal.  And let’s also tell the gun industry that the Pentagon won’t buy guns from companies that move off shore.

Or something like that.  I’m not about to write the legislation.  Senator Diane Feinstein can do it— and hopefully she’ll produce a stronger bill this time around.  VP Joe Biden will support it, for sure.   The big question is whether our ever-compromising president has the courage to campaign for and sign such a bill. 

Meanwhile, given the great power of ridicule,  we should start making fun of the NRA, its absurd scare campaigns, its weird notions of sportsmanship, its twisted notions of patriotism. 

How many people should die—murdered or as suicides—so some guys can shoot a lot of clay pigeons without going through the boredom of reloading? 

Is it really sport if the deer or elk hasn’t a chance to get away?

And remember this: the NRA wants us to play with teddy bears.  The NRA loves votive candles.  The gun industry is all in favor of flowers.  What they don’t want is sane, effective gun control.

 

In the Keep of Yorkshire

By John Charles Dyer, UK Correspondent   

In the silence of the keep

one forgets time,

even who one is.

Romance gallops as sunlit dust swirls

in search of glory 

among the clouds.

(Left, Castle Keep. Photo by John C. Dyer)

But this was a real castle with a real history, the Neville’s Raby Castle near Durham, County Durham. One of post Conquest Britain’s early seats of great power, Raby rises with surprising majesty above Yorkshire’s bucolic rolling green fields.

 

 

 

 

(Above, left to right, Raby Castle, Stable Entrance to Gardens, Raby Castle Gardens. Below, left to right, View from a Gun, Deer in Castle Park, Raby Castle 2. All photos by John C. Dyer)

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Left, Within the Keep, photo by John C. Dyer)

We came to Raby at the request of friends from the States.    

This trip was a reunion of sorts. I had missed my college reunion.  The couple we accompanied to Raby attended the same small college modeled on Oxford.

The Education/Immigration Conundrum

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In his column on Sunday September 9, Tom Friedman points out the chicken and egg relationship between education and employment.  The more education an American has, the more likely he – or she – will have a job.  Case in point:  Only 4.4 percent of American college graduates are currently unemployed. Conversely, 12 percent of high school dropouts are out of work.  Yet fewer Americans – especially young men – are graduating from college than before likely because of escalating costs of higher education.

The employment-education ratio is straightforward and linear: the higher one’s education, the better one’s potential for finding and holding a job.

While one can quibble that money does not buy happiness, most societies including America’s, value work.

Put it down to the Protestant work ethic – or whatever – but lazing around on the family couch or playing Angry Birds ad infinitum on a laptop or i-phone is not a socially valued attribute. Not for long anyway.

This is why Friedman – as did Bill Clinton in his brilliant Democratic National Convention speech - argues that if the US ever sets aside more economic stimulus money it needs to be invested in community colleges, Pell grants and vocational training classes.

Furthermore, Friedman argues, education in the Internet Age – or the age of Globalization and Technological Innovation - is about the continual reinvention of the self which means a never-ending race to update one’s knowledge and skills. Resting on one’s laurels after completing college or less is a recipe for failure in this knowledge-based hyper-competitive world.  

It’s the ability and willingness to learn complex tasks and the latest computer programs over and over and over again.   So far so good: keeping the brain active also helps keep it healthy. And, Friedman also points out that in this globalized age, low skilled jobs are melting away like Arctic icebergs in the Global Warming sun.  My analogy, not his, but I think you understand the meaning.

So where does the immigration impediment come in? What’s the connection?

Here’s the issue:  the more highly skilled jobs that are made available to foreigners determined by visa quotas set by the federal government, the less investment an American company needs to put into training America’s own.  Let’s face it: importing skilled foreign workers in large quantities is a cheap yet, in my view, socially counterproductive way to conduct business in these United States.

Nevertheless, hence the continual pressure from the private sector on the US government to increase the quota of visas for skilled workers from abroad. Companies claim they can’t find them in the US. They may well be right.  But why?  What about investing more in the people who are already here rather than contributing to an ever high unemployment rate that contributes to an ever larger permanent under-class?  Better education for Americans is not necessarily a “quick fix” to the problem – but it would benefit the country and the community in the long run.

On the Edge

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I saw the Gaultier exhibit at San Francisco’s De Young Museum last week.  Jean Paul Gaultier is one of the edgiest designers around although the exhibit is primly entitled “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier.”  The De Young is in one of this country’s edgiest cities.  The exhibit was crowded but not overbooked; the fashions on display dated from Gaultier’s earliest days – he was born in 1952 – to just a few years ago and almost all were designed for androgynist shows on the runway, not the street. (Photo of man's tartan suit by PHKushlis August 8, 2012)

 The talking mannequins were, for me at least, the highlights: their eyes blinked, rolled and winked and their lips moved in synch with their words.  These near androids were themselves worth the price of admission.  But then, I don’t have a Madonnaesque figure or personality, bras that resemble upside down ice cream cones make me uncomfortable and six inch heels – according to a recent Vogue article – are not just bad for the feet but also the back.  

I hadn’t been in California since 2008. 

Since then the Golden State has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and three of its cities went belly-up in the past month.  At least three more major ones – San Jose, Los Angeles and Fresno – are on the brink – or so I was told by people who know what they’re talking about.  Money is being moved from Peter to pay Paul and expenditures on quality of life items – like education, the arts and the roads disappear like Aladdin’s genie shrinking back into his lamp. 

Road beds are a disaster:  they remind me of Manila days when the only axel-safe vehicles were the Pajeros:  sturdy and high enough chassed SUVs to survive the city’s cavernous potholes during a typhoon.  

California prices, too, are off the charts.  Gas was $1.00 higher per gallon than in New Mexico.  Souvenir bottles of California wines were on sale for an average – or so it seemed – of $100 per bottle (not per case) at the Oakland International Airport where most flights service these United States.  Tickets to special museum exhibits approached New York’s MOMA and the facsimiles of Gaultier’s teddy bear were “on special” for $99 plus tax ruling out all but the affluent or the privileged.

Drive 80 miles to the east and the brown rolling hills give way to the Central Valley, this country’s most fertile farm land.  Irrigation ditches – or acequias as they’re called in the Sunshine State – transport the water from the Sierra-Nevadas to the valley's fields.  Water is the state’s real gold and the ill-effects of global warming play havoc with the precipitation and snow pack in the mountains.  Hence our food supply.

Centuries ago these trenches were a gift from Middle Eastern Arabs where water was also scarce.  Then they - bringing this innovative technological knowhow with them - dashed across North Africa and into Spain.  The Romans brought us roads; the Muslims brought us acequias. Both remain as indispensable as this century's information highway - courtesy of the US government.

Oh What a Web We Weave as Friends Take Care of Friends with Public Funds

By John C. Dyer, UK Correspondent 

On 8 Dec 2010, the Department of Education confirmed the award of up to £2 million in public funds to Community Security Trust (CST) for “the extra measure of security guards at 39 Jewish voluntary-aided faith schools across England.”  The announcement described CST as a charity working to secure the safety and security of the Jewish community in the UK, a description consistent with CST’s own.     

Fast forward to 27 Jan 2012. 

On 27 Jan 2012, the Guardian published an article concerning this award. The Guardian reported that Educational Secretary Michael Gove had personally made the decision to award the £2 million despite the fact that Gove has been a member of CST’s advisory board since 2007. Not only that, Gove has personally “taken credit” for securing the funds in correspondence with CST’s CEO.

The Guardian went on to recount criticism levied by David Miller of Spinwatch. Miller criticized Gove’s participation in the process under these circumstances as a conflict of interest.  Miller then urged clearing up the “murky” world of charity funding and relationships.

The Guardian acknowledged that Secretary Gove had a long history of clear opposition to anti-semitism, but it was clear at least in context that the Guardian questioned Gove’s role in taking an active part in the funding decision.

It was not on the surface an obvious “hit piece.”  Yes, it is well known that The Guardian is not terribly fond of the Coalition in general or Michael Gove in particular.  But the Guardian was careful in its reporting. The Guardian characterized Spinwatch as a “pressure group.”  The Guardian reported the criticism as Miller’s.  The Guardian also included the response of the Department of Education to the effect that the permanent secretary (highest civil servant) had been aware of Secretary Gove’s advisory role at the time of the award and did not then or now consider it to have been a conflict of interest. 

The Guardian article prompted an immediate raft of angry reaction from numerous sources, including CST, attacking the Guardian as well as Miller for the timing of the article in relation to Holocaust Memorial Day.  According to the Jewish Chronicle, a source close to Gove said, “It is unbelievable to attack any politician for funding the protection of Jewish children. It is even more extraordinary, and frankly offensive, to do it on Holocaust Memorial Day.” ¹  

One article defended the Guardian, characterizing the reaction as an overreaction to an article focused on questions about a public official’s conduct in office not on the ethnic ties of the organization receiving the funds.  

Most main stream media did not handle the story at all. I watch Channel 4 and BBC daily and from time to time Sky News for a third view. If they covered it I missed it. Perhaps the lack of coverage was due to the events unfolding over the weekend rather than a decision to ignore this emotionally charged hot potato.

30 January the Guardian apologized, admitting the article ill timed. But this apology was not good enough for those it had offended, who pointed out that the Guardian apologized only for the timing, not for the implications concerning Secretary Gove’s participation in the decision.

As I note above, the Guardian piece was hardly an obvious “hit piece.” Its focus did seem to be, as asserted by the one article that defended the Guardian, the Secretary’s conduct in office, not the ethnic ties of the organization receiving the funds.  Yet it was clearly taken as the latter by a number of organizations and persons, for example Backspin Honestreporting.  Reading this example one can immediately see the level of emotion.

Who came so vociferously to the Secretary’s defence?

The critics included the Jewish Chronicle editor Steven Pollard. I have already previously explored Pollard’s connections with Friends of Israel, Michael Gove, and the Henry Jackson Society in a piece in which I questioned whether these connections might not have something to do with the disappearance from radar screen of the conduct of Atlantic Bridge, Liam Fox, and Adam Werity. 

Another was Toby Young, an associate of Secretary Gove.  The rush funding of Young’s private school by the Education Department had already prompted an earlier Guardian inquiry into the Secretary's conduct of his office.

Then there was Spitton Heresy by Khalid Richards, who asked if the Guardian’s editorial policy was now expressly anti-Semitic. According to Powerbase, Spitton is a hard-to-trace anti-Islamic neoconserviative organization.

Education for a New Age: Why Finns Succeed and Americans, Brits and Norwegians Don’t

By Patricia H. Kushlis

If you haven’t watched Sir Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” yet, take the next few minutes to do so.   It’s well worth the investment.

The video is entertaining. It’s shorter than a coffee break or recess - that is if American schools still have recesses.  And whether intentional or not, Robinson’s video of how education should be perceived in the US and the UK reinforces the Finnish approach to public education as described in Lynnell Hancock’s article “A+ For Finland” in the Smithsonian Magazine’s September 2011 issue.

No, please

Don’t think that just because Finland is a small, wealthy country with a homogeneous, largely middle class, blond, blue-eyed and majority Lutheran population all marching to the same beat that therefore, Finnish kids should, ipso facto, consistently excel on the internationally recognized PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exams. That myth of the stereotypical Finn is simply not true - although they speak an incredibly difficult language for non-Finno-Ugric speakers to learn and Finland’s immigrant population numbers only 4% of the total.

In comparison, Finland’s northernmost Nordic neighbor, Norway, has PISA results similar to America’s own. Norway also follows the US educational, corporatist, super-competitive model too so, let’s see: This might suggest that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this approach – as Robinson and Hancock both suggest – and that a new educational paradigm is desperately needed.   

Why is it that year after year Finnish students perform far better than American, British and Norwegian students on those pesky exams -all three groups of whom remain stuck somewhere in the PISA middle? It's not just money.  Finland spends “about 30 percent less per student than in the US.” 

One of the most interesting aspects in Hancock’s article about the Finnish system is that the Finnish approach to K-12 education works in some of the poorest and ethnically diverse immigrant neighborhoods as well as with the children of the country’s middle and wealthy classes.  Not only do all the kids perform extremely well in a comparative sense, but 93% of Finnish high school students graduate as compared with 75.5% in the US and 66% go on to higher education – the highest in the EU.   

As Hancock tells us, Finnish kids are not subjected to the current American mania of “No Child Left Behind” teach-to-the-test competitive education which – among other things - seems to have produced wholesale cheating by certain teachers in certain school districts who surreptitiously changed answers to raise their students’ test scores. This, of course has neither improved the quality nor image of US public education. 

The Obama administration’s reforms that basically make teachers accountable for their kids test scores doesn’t seem to have helped much either but since they've hardly had time to take effect it may be too soon to say.

Regardless, “teaching to the test” seems, in my view, to have primarily benefitted the standardized testing companies whose markets suddenly expanded exponentially under “No Child Left Behind.”

Why do Finnish schools leave others in the dust?

Here are a few things that Hancock discovered (supplemented by some recollections of my own):

Most Finnish K-12 teachers are professionals who have been “selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s (university) graduates to earn a required degree in education.” 

The current system was begun forty years ago at a time when the country decided that to become globally economically competitive all Finnish children needed strong basic education from the very beginning.   

Most Finnish schools are small and the teachers know every student.  “If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else” and as many as 30% of Finnish children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.  

Educational credentials are worth a lot - just read the stats

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Why should anyone in this country even consider questioning the conventional wisdom about the value of higher education?  No I don’t mean education for the sake of knowledge – as high minded as that is – but the value of a college degree – or higher – in dollars and cents terms - simply for the sake of staying off the dole and, oh my gosh, making a wage that leads to a pleasant style of life.

Yet the suggestion – that a university degree is worthless for young people wishing to pursue any one of a variety of professions beyond apparently bricklayer - seems to be making the rounds of the so-called “advice” givers over the past several months.  I’ve seen it recommended for young people aspiring to enter the high tech community to – the latest - wanna-be musicians. 

Wrong, educational credentials are worth a lot - read the stats and think again

Please.  Let’s get it straight.  Extremely few people are likely to become the next Bill Gates – with or without a university degree for a myriad of reasons.  They are also equally unlikely to become the next Amy Winehouse - dead this week at the age of 27 in London.

Like it or not, educational credentials mean a lot in this country and abroad and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise should have his or her head examined.  Furthermore, anyone who claims that there is only one way (the most expensive) to a higher degree and therefore unattainable without going into hock for the rest of one’s life is likewise off-the-wall and out-to-lunch. 

The higher the degree, the larger the salary and smaller chance of being unemployed

In a July 24, 2011 article in the Sunday New York Times by Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, there’s a very simple graphic which demonstrates in colored ink the relative worth of various educational levels and degrees in terms of an individual’s annual median salary and employment potential using official 2010 data for Americans between the ages of 25 to 64.  The unmistakable bottom line:  the higher the degree, the larger the salary and the smaller chance of those who hold it being among the ranks of the unemployed. 

Only 2% of holders of doctorates, for instance, are unemployed. Only 1.8% of holders of professional degrees are unemployed and even the unemployment rate for those with only B.A.s is only 4.9%.  In comparison, the overall US unemployment rate in 2010 was 9.2%.  So where are the unemployed in terms of educational attainment?  At the bottom of the educational heap.  Americans with only high school diplomas have an unemployment rate of 9.6% and high school dropouts have a whopping 14.2% unemployment rate.  These numbers alone speak volumes.

The UK May election results: settling in or a bumpy ride ahead?

By John Dyer, Guest Contributor

(John Dyer is an American dual citizen who relocated permanently to the UK in retirement from public life in the US.  He now lives in Lytham St. Annes on England's West Coast.)

In advance of the 5 May, 2011 UK elections, pundits and politicians alike billed it as a bell weather of the British electorate’s feelings toward the Coalition currently administering central government for the country. 

The UK has been governed by a Coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats  who have run the government since Gordon Brown and the Labour Party were booted out of office in May 2010.  At formation, the new coalition partners received 59% of the vote.   That will become an important statistic later.

In advance of the 5 May election, the British electorate was known to be reeling from the “austerity programme” introduced by the Coalition since taking power.  This “austerity programme” is also sometimes called the “European Plan” after the measures the IMF required of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal in return for their Bailouts. It consists of draconian public service cuts and reinvention of how government delivers services through greater privatization. 

As the Coalition took office, the UK was under significant pressure from the IMF, its own manufacturing sector, financial markets, allies, the Chinese, and Rupport Murdoch, among others, to reduce its significant budgetary deficit.  Spin abounds as to how significant the deficit was/is, but the crucial point for this post is the fact that the Coalition decided to eliminate the budget deficit over the course of the Parliament (e,g, by 2015) largely through serious cuts to public expenditure.  Compare that with current US proposals.

The Two Most Controversial Measures – Higher Education and National Health

The austerity measures included some of high controversy.  Among them, the two most powerful to date have been changes to the financing of higher education and an overhaul of the National Health Service. 

The Coalition shifted the cost of financing higher education from the government to the student in the form of loans, with the government carrying the paper.  They also doubled the basic cap for tuition fees and tripled the maximum cap.  While the government said it expected the new maximum cap of £9,000 a year ($14,580 at today's exchange rate) would be the exception, in the weeks that followed it proved very much the rule. 

Last fall and winter, the streets of London literally ran riot in reaction to this proposal.   Importantly, Liberal Democrats and its leader, Nick Clegg, had pledged never to agree to a rise in tuition fees.  A great deal of their support during the election came from students and University related faculty and staff.

From “Competition” to “Choice” – Translation “Privatization”  

The Conservatives went back on a pledge of their own, although they will argue they did not.  They pledged to leave the National Health Service alone. Instead they have proposed a radical overhaul, introducing measures first described as “competition” then as “choice” but which everyone else translates as “privatization.”  They have also proposed eliminating the current administrative structure in favour of consortiums of general practitioners, The Royal College of Physicians, the GPs and the College of Nursing have all loudly condemned the proposals.  

The economy slowed to zero net growth over the past six months. The Coalition also raised VAT to very high levels.  They countenanced major bank bonuses (although they did tax them).    Labour’s cry became, “It’s hurting but it isn’t working.” That cry appeared to resonate, especially in the North, which has always been the “step child” of “The City.”

Initial Result: The economy slowed to zero net growth over the past 6 months. 

Ink spilled in torrents as the pundits sought to predict outcomes and the politicians manage expectations   In the end, the election was less revolt and more reestablishing pre-Blair political loyalties.  It was also a reaffirmation of the practical political wisdom that the electorate is more engaged, if at all, by self- interest than by rarefied ideas.