Congress Allows Government Funding, for Now

 

Congress reached an agreement to fund the government, as most people have heard. Their idea of funding the government is a three-week stop-gap measure and not an actual budget. Reports told that DACA amnesty supporters were furious that the Democrats permitted funding without any guarantee of amnesty. In reality, it should be those supporters of the wall who should be disappointed with this so-called compromise. The DACA amnesty is not the main bone of contention when compared to building protection on the borders. We were wondering if anybody out there has kept count as to how many times the wall has been promised and then pushed off and never considered after gaining the promised prize of amnesty again. Does anybody remember when President Ronald Reagan exchanged amnesty for border security and a wall across the majority of feasible regions to be financed the next session of Congress? We fully expect at some point the Democrat leadership to offer holding a vote next year for funding building the border wall. This is the ruse used by before and even getting to the point of voting for funding initially but when the time was imminent for building, the funding was mysteriously diverted elsewhere. The Democrats have supported a border fence as stated by President Barack Obama in his speech in El Paso, Texas on May 10, 2011. Allow us to first quote the President and then show a picture of his completed fence for discussion. President Barack Obama stated fence along the border with Mexico is “now basically complete.” But he continued on to describe the whining he expected from Republicans over his wall stating,

“We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.”
“They’ll want want a higher fence. Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied. And I understand that. That’s politics.”

Jim DeMint wrote the response to President Obama stating, “Five years ago, legislation was passed to build a 700-mile double-layer border fence along the southwest border…This is a promise that has not been kept. Today, according to staff at the Department of Homeland Security, just 5 percent of the double-layer fencing is complete, only 36.3 miles.” So, was the fence completed as stated by President Obama or do the Republicans have an argument that the fence was not built as promised. Below is a picture of the fence near San Miguel, Arizona, part of the seven-hundred-mile fence described above.

 

Picture of the Fence near San Miguel, Arizona

 

The promised double fence, does this really appear to be what was promised? Granted, there are two different sized posts but does that make it a double fence? Then we are told that this fence is designed to stop vehicles from crossing the border. We are willing to bet that most of us were under the impression that the entire idea behind a double fence was to prevent people crossing, with or without a vehicle not to mention it is doubtful that most people crossing at this location are coming across on vehicles from dune buggies to recreational vehicles but rather they would probably be walking. We seriously doubt anybody thinks that this fence would prevent people walking across the border or matches the concept of a double fence by any rational concept of a double border fence designed and built to secure the border. Surprisingly, we actually believe a double fence requires two distinct and separate fences in relative close proximity equally difficult to traverse with an enforcement dirt track between them providing an area for ease of enforcement personnel patrolling in vehicles and responding to sensors and other alarms (see image below).

 

This is What We Believe a Border Fence Looks Like

 

Now we have cleared up the definition of a double fence, which is why we advise the members of Congress desiring a real double fence include pictures, diagrams and other necessities so there will be no confusion as to what they mean by a double fence. The coming debate over the fence and the DACA refugees who are, and never forget this part, illegal immigrants who face deportation for crossing the border illegally, granted not of their own choosing as their parents brought them when they crossed the border illegally. The pivotal word is illegally. All the claims to the DACA having Constitutional rights are a bogus argument meant to allow these illegal immigrants to get around enforcement by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents. Constitutional rights are for United States citizens which illegal immigrants are not. If the government was to dispatch ICE agents to one of the rallies supporting the DACA individuals and they were to arrest those announcing their being a, “proud child of an illegal immigrant whose parents brought them across the border,” to hold for a hearing and potential deporting, they would be well within legal rights to do so. Such has not been done nor have the ICE agents been ordered to even monitor these events. We guess that perhaps those enforcing the immigration laws are not the heartless beasts described in the media.

 

The DACA illegal immigrants should be treated with dignity and understanding with always in the background the fact that they are illegal perched over the proceedings. Those who were too young to have some say in their being smuggled into the United States should have that taken into account. If a DACA individual has no other criminal record should be permitted to stay once they have shown proficiency in English, United States Laws, the Constitution, and American Customs. But those with further felony convictions or several misdemeanor convictions, those should be deported. It will not be up to us to decide their fate, but they should be given a brief and defined period of time to come and apply for asylum, thus having a hearing on whether they deserve asylum or deportation. Those who do not voluntarily apply for a hearing should be deported as soon as possible after the grace period has passed. Providing hope and a fair and reasoned approach with the promise of fairness is what should be offered but making the grace period’s beginning dependent upon completion of the border fence would also be fair. Exchange of a period of a few weeks or months while requiring the completion of the border wall is only a fair and true offer which if refused would reveal whether or not the Democrats are being honest about the wall and remove their ability to later pull the funding by placing the grace period after the wall being completed. The grace for the DACA “children,” as most of them have grown into adulthood, must be placed as secondary to building the wall so as to finally guarantee the wall being constructed this time around. Time will tell.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Universities Where Students Major in Feelings

 

College just ain’t what it used to be unless your major field is one of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. These courses, for obvious reasons, still require students to know how to reason, problem solve and prove their work with complete documentation on how they arrived at their answer. The STEM curriculum is as strict and thorough as it ever was. Outside of STEM is an entirely different world where feelings are examined and every answer is valid and no proof is ever required as long as your position is correct. The reality of the problem is covered very neatly in the fact that at the United States’ largest university system, California State Universities, nearly 40% of incoming freshmen require remedial math and English courses after failing the entrance competency tests. That is 40% failing both math and English, the individual numbers are difficult to come by but if we remember correctly the numbers approached 60% needing remedial English and over 75% required remedial math after failing the entrance exams nation wide if one leaves out students enrolling in STEM course majors. What is even more disturbing is what follows once they begin to take actual college courses, for some starting in their second year, that the courses are watered down and grades often inflated in order to not deter the students from continuing to pay the outrageous tuitions and also allow the universities to collect Federal monies provided by the department of education to cover costs of required courses in politically correct course work with such courses stressing identity-politics emphasizing racial, sexual and religious fault lines and newthink definitions where words mean what you wish them to mean and not necessarily what your parents knew them to mean.

 

STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

 

The reality is that students currently owe over one-trillion dollars in student loan debt, and hold diplomas in subjects so weak and leaving them completely unprepared for the workplace as they were for college upon arrival taking competency exams which remanded the majority to taking remedial courses just to achieve a minimal entrance level of competence. Many major employers have been required to hire teachers very often from STEM courses to provide remedial education for entrance level positions due to the lack of qualified entrance personnel. So, students graduate high school and gain entrance to a college, often their state university system as they are required by statute to accept every high school graduate with a grade point average above 2.0 or possibly as low as 1.5 or as high as 2.5 depending on the state. These students grades were inflated in high school and upon reaching college require remedial classes in order to be capable of even doing freshman basic courses. They then graduate college and apply for a job and many major employers are required to give college graduates remedial education such that they can perform entrance level jobs. Is it just us or does this indicate a problem somewhere in the education system from the very beginning to the very highest levels?

 

When there are reports of teachers in grade school teaching about alternative sexual identities and how the students should question their sexual identities, as they may not actually be the gender their chromosomes forced upon them, this is a problem. Having condoms available for the asking in elementary schools is a problem. Allowing students to arrange for an abortion through the school without parental consent or even parental notification even after the fact is a problem. Teaching sexuality and sexual positions in junior high schools is a problem. Having teachers and counselors having prescriptions for psychotropic drugs such as Prozac and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat ADHD or antidepressants is a problem. These are not medical professionals and the physicians who proscribe such drugs largely on the recommendation of teachers and counselors is simply dangerous and can seriously harm these young students irrevocably. That is dangerously wrong. When teachers in any level of public schools tell their students that their parents should not be permitted to ground them and that restricting their rights such as the right to use a phone, watch television, listen to music, watch whatever shows they wish, send them to their room or any form of punishment and that any student who is suppressed by their parents in such a manner can simply tell the teacher and they will see to it that the situation is remedied such that their parents will be counselled and will never try to harm them again, that is a problem. When the school tries to replace the parents in raising the children and use the power of child protective services to threaten parents with the loss of their child, that is seriously wrong. These are things which either we or people we have spoken with have experienced with public schools in the suburbs of some of the major cities in the United States. Perhaps the increasing numbers of children being home-schooled is a direct result of the degrading of the education in the public schools where instead of an education students are receiving indoctrination and instead of being taught to think, they are being instructed what to think.

 

Where we once had the three R’s; Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic, the schools have replaced them with the three new’s; newthink, newspeak, and newfacts. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and even Albert Camus would understand the new school systems, and that is far from being a good thing because these are three authors the students will never be recommended to read by their school. These are too precocious and controversial plus they are the wrong gender, race, religion and simply unacceptable. Most public schools no longer give assignments which require students to read literature, to read books, instead they receive handouts which are mostly political opinions and always environmentally sensitive and gender sensitive not to mention politically correct through and through. Often these handouts are to be left at schools and not taken home as that might arouse a nosy parent to read the handout and maybe become concerned. The schools do not want concerned parents, they like the parent to remain unworried and when they have parent-teacher conference they usually talk about the behavior of the child and the concerns of the teacher and the schools and possibly they will have a counselor to add their expertise. The really unfortunate parent is the one who asks too many questions as they will need to be reminded who the child belongs to, which is the school. The school must not be questioned and students who have their education augmented at home and will ask questions when what the school teaches does not quite match what the child was taught at home, well, that is when the real problems begin. That child is labeled disruptive and the parent is warned that the child has been displaying an unhealthy attitude in class and questions authority. Children must never question the school’s authority, only the parent’s authority is questionable. Lucky is the parent who has their children’s trust and whose children believe them over the schools.

 

The major question is when will this system collapse in from lack of integral support? Industries are requiring better-trained employees and the major universities are turning out protestors and snowflakes who cannot even take a discouraging word, let alone rebuke. The universities are so busy providing safe spaces and trigger warnings and addressing micro-aggressions that they have no time for actual education. There are legions of professors and indoctrinated “sensitive” students ready to react should, heavens forbid (and do not mention the concept of heaven at one of these universities, too Christian), a speaker get invited who lacks the proper temperament, attitude, world view, politics or anything which might sound adverse to the propaganda taught in their classes, there will be an upheaval to prevent their polluting these butterflies delicate minds which are as fragile as are their wings on which they have yet to learn to fly. They are told only the political correct, ecologically friendly, earth preserving, liberated views which must be preserved and protected from contrary truths as the students are taught that the ideas and views they are presented in their gentle classes is the only truth and all else which does not agree with the university leftist teachings are evil and monstrous and require being shouted down and never permitted to gain traction as once that occurs their entire world will collapse.

 

That actually might be the single truth they are being told, that once reality breaks through the painted glass windows on which the drawings of butterflies, kittens and puppies are drawn for their protection, that will start the end of their safe and warm little world and the truth that they have been robbed of an education will tear their world apart leaving these fragile adult-children shaken and bruised. They will hopefully feel rage filled form of anger that will drive them to self-teach those things they should have been taught so far back in their education that it is scary. One thing that will rip holes in their lives is when they realize they were never taught to read, only to recognize the words that their educators desired they know. Being taught whole word recognition is not learning to read, it is being indoctrinated and denied the ability to learn on your own. The learning will begin there, with the painful path of learning to read all over again, this time by simply saying the letters of each word together faster and faster until it sounds like a word you have possibly heard in a song or on a television show. Then the lights start to go on and education will finally start for real. Slowly at first, the words come and then reading becomes easier and a pleasure and then one can read the forbidden works. May we recommend the gentlemen we named earlier, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Albert Camus. For George Orwell we recommend Animal Farm and 1984 where in the second you will recognize some of your educational indoctrination and understand newspeak, which is nothing but whole word recognition and political correctness. And for Aldous Huxley we recommend Brave New World where you may recognize the betas of the society and begin to feel deeply for the savages and one in particular as well as his mother who sought her heaven in little blue pills and became a Soma version of a Snowblind Friend (Steppenwolf, song below). Albert Camus is a bit more difficult to recommend as he has written so much worth reading in philosophy, novels, short stories, but perhaps starting with collections of essays such as “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death,” then move on to short novels such as “The Stranger” and “The Silent Men.” From here, the classics are fair game such as “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, which is a great adventure and “Last of the Mohicans” by James Fennimore Cooper and our last recommendation will be “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. For those more into love stories or relations there are numerous novels such as “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens and for science fiction there is Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and lastly, for the macabre there is always anything by Edgar Allen Poe. On a side note about Poe, one of the most beautiful love poems ever written is his Annabel Lee.

 

 

Also read newspapers including ones your professors warned you were evil, new ideas cannot actually hurt you, only ignorance can be dangerous. Seek out information and then reason what you read and hear and come to your own conclusions. Once you get a basis, return to school, take STEM courses, and learn skills that cannot be replaced by a robot in five to ten years. The education the university likely gave you would not even get you a job cleaning up behind a robot, which would be performed by a robot anyway. The age where robots take over jobs that do not require free thought is coming at us very quickly and when you and others out of university before you realize some truths and demand the minimum wage be increased to fifteen dollars an hour, then we will see robots all the faster as robots are a relatively high initial investment but then pay for themselves within a decade and then they keep working with minimal complaints making profits and not demanding promotions or higher pay or even a coffee break or lunch hour or overtime and work twenty-four seven with only brief downtime for upgrades and periodic maintenance. It really is no wonder that increasing the minimum wage will price workers right out of their jobs, and that is not a joke but a reality. Education, a proper and real true education is priceless and knowledge is the one commodity for which employers are willing to pay. Skills are the other commodity that will get you a position that pays well. Repairing robots will be a decent paying job, actually a profession. The only problem is within the next twenty or so years there will be robots which repair robots including repairing any malfunctioning repair robot. Then only Einstein types will have jobs and the robots will keep the more entertaining from amongst us as pets and the rest, well, that is something we had best hope the robots are programmed to care for us and like us or we will soon become extinct after inventing our replacement. Can anybody say Cylons?

 

Cylons Both Original and the Newer Version

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Are You Truly Pro-Choice?

 

One of the most misleading labels in all of American politics is the “Pro-Choice” label. These people are often the least in favor of you making any choice in your life ever. They are the people, especially the politicians, who demand to make almost every decision facing an individual in their life, and especially the most important decisions. Broadly defined, they believe that you and everybody like you without an Ivy League education and a doctorate in an “approved major field” which again is another example of taking away your choice of colleges down to less than two dozen and your choice of majors to the social and other soft sciences, are far too stupid and unaware of the world and how everything works to be permitted the right to decide for yourself. Heavens forbid you get to make any rational choice from your view point; you would most definitely damage yourself and society and upset their ability to sculpt that perfect world they are constantly attempting to carve out of our society.

 

Oh, you would like some examples. First, we define these Pro-Choice politicians and people as the supporters of Planned Parenthood and abortions on demand any-time, any-place, any-where, and for any-reason or even no reason and that is their big claim to being Pro-Choice. Well, here it comes as you asked for it. Let us look at the choice of how to best protect your home, family and everything you hold dear. Can you, according to the Pro-Choice politicians purchase a firearm, a rifle or handgun or even a scary-looking semi-automatic rifle which resembles some military styled weapon? Of course not and that is why all the red tape, forms and everything else including waiting periods and the occasional threat of being outed as owning a firearm in a public posting often by one of those from the Pro-Choice groups of people. So we now know you may not purchase a firearm to protect your house though it is legal thanks to the Constitution but don’t mention at the weekend services in many congregations that you own firearms as that could make you into some kind of pariah. The professed Pro-Choice class which is all knowing will inform you that you should buy a good alarm system and if it should sound that your house had been breached, then you should dial 911 and hide in a closet until a nice officer finds you to tell you all is clear or the intruder finds you and ends all that ails you after possible tortures such as, well, we will let you imagine the what, just realize it would be cruel, unusual and designed to be physically or mentally hurtful or both. The Pro-Choice will add that for an additional fee you can have the alarm system hooked up to a monitoring service who will call you and if you do not answer or use a code-word they will call the police presumably cutting down on your wait time. The Pro-Choice might even inform you of a service which hooks your alarm directly up to the police and this gets the fastest response but places the onus on you to prove there was a trespass or you can be charged a heavy fine for the false alarm response making this a less than perfect system. Hey, they are wealthy recipients of a doctoral degree from an Ivy League college which you should have found some way of achieving so you could be like them. You see they have a monitoring service with all the most high tech alarm systems and other means of detecting and even spotlighting, literal spotlights, the intruder as soon as they step across their property line. Also, their service includes anywhere from one to a platoon of well-trained and highly-armed professionals who will torture the intruder until you arrive to identify if this was a real trespass or just the neighbor kid trying to toss a few pebbles at your daughter’s window. Wait, to the Pro-Choice group that would be a trespass. They will point out incessantly how it is they see no need for guns in the house except in the hands of trained professionals and even if you are one of these trained professionals you may not have your firearm from your work kept in your house as there is safety in the fact that at their house you are monitored while at home you might go crazy because in unsupervised areas guns cause forms of insanity. If I ever get desperate and hold-up a convenience store, I will plea to the judge that the gun dragged me from bed to pull-off the heist which was why I was dressed in my pajamas.

 

 

Moving on to the next choice you might think of taking. Let us say your industrious pre-teen child decides to do simple gardening and lawn mowing and charges rates which come to less than the minimum hourly wage. As this is not a professional and recognized area such as waitpersons in restaurants, then the minimum wage laws apply without exceptions. This would mean that your child would be required to raise the charges for his services despite their selling them for a fair price and exactly what they believe their efforts are worth. You are not permitted to estimate for yourself what your efforts are worth nor may you charge less than your competition who is charging the minimum wage set and thus gain additional business. Even more important, your pre-teen is not permitted to even fathom such an enterprise as they are not even old enough to receive a work permit with your signature permitting them to work before reaching eighteen as they are not fifteen or sixteen depending on the location. There is an exception for family farms and other recognized family businesses where the child may be permitted to work at any age and may even not receive any wages if the parent does not desire to pay the minor child, and that is more fair than them working on their own for less than the minimum wage, free choice and all that you know.

 

There is an ever lengthening list of professions one may not freely choose. Presumably, in a totally free society anybody may choose any profession they desire and if they perform well people will pay them accordingly and if they fail they are free to try something more their style and fitting their ability or fail until they luck into such a profession. Nobody would pay a hairstylist whose only style is a crewcut unless that is what they desired and they were inexpensive. But to be a hairstylist today one must take courses and then apprentice and finally get a license. The claim is to protect the public from health hazards. Truth be told, individual demands of decent ability in their choice of hairstylists would take care of such a problem just as well. The problem is by allowing the public to control such through the demand of the market would take away thousands of bureaucratic jobs, put an end to most of the beauty schools which are more diploma mills teaching the average student all stuff they probably already knew simple by styling their hair and their friends’ hair growing up. It would also take away the licensing fees for running a beauty salon and that is additional yearly funds for the government and another level of government control taking away your free choice. This also applies to cab drivers only to a much higher degree as this has become a protection racket between government and the existing cab companies and thus the big furor over Uber and other Internet ride-share apps. There are quite a number of ways around the government using apps and the Internet which is one of the reasons that government desires control over the Internet and thus these types of free enterprises which circumvents the government assisting with your free choice. Government licensing is but one limitation of your free choice but is supported heavily by the Pro-Choice people, especially the Pro-Choice politicians.

 

Taxes are another idea which the Pro-Choice politicians and, as long as they are heavily progressive and only on salaries. Many Pro-Choice individuals think taxes are a necessity and often require taxes to be raised on some and lowered on others or eliminated altogether on a select group who are determined not to earn sufficient amounts to contribute to the functioning of the government. These Pro-Choice individuals also support giving refunds to people who did not actually pay any taxes and refunds of more than what was paid in for select others. These are done all in the name of equality and altruism. Altruism used to be voluntary as was charity of giving of your funds to the less fortunate. Taxes doing this for you are another stolen choice from your long list of choices. Further, the government chooses which charitable organizations it will support and which ones it will not and the amount for each. Chalk up another stolen free choice. But the government was just getting started; there are so many more choices the government has removed from the public square in the name of your own safety. Some argue that it also weakens the gene pool as it allows idiots to proliferate. Such limits would require motorcycle riders wear helmets, car passengers wear seat-belts, natural gas include a chemical giving it its odor, toilets to flush exact or less amounts of water per flush and many other things even one which does help, it enforces the standardized measures and sizes in tools and fasteners and of course money.

 

Children’s education is probably the most regimented and least Pro-Choice industry in the United States. This is sad as education would appear to be one industry which could benefit most from competition and a great variety in opportunities and different paths leading to different results. The current public schools system is dictated from Washington D.C. with requirements such as multi-cultural sensitivity, sexual education and a plethora of the latest educational theories including but not limited to new math, whole word recognition (a theory which was first proposed as a means of limiting the words included in people’s vocabularies by removing phonics making new words impossible to “sound out” as had been taught for the last centuries to great success), racially sensitive history, and dropped little things such as civics requirement, spelling as a requirement claiming that each student be permitted the freedom to use alternate spelling (whatever that is), and math such that attempts are more important than the correct answer (no wonder many students require remedial writing, reading and mathematics when entering college with some wasting their first semester and others their entire first year learning what should have been taught adequately in the public school system). While most of the Pro-Choice use private schools and claim that if you are unsatisfied with the public school system you can also send your child to a private school. Of course these same Pro-Choice people and politicians work to limit or exclude charter schools despite their having proven often to produce superior children with a far better and broader educational experience and they are working to strangle home-schooling with regulations and requirements making the home-schooled children and their families under greater stresses and heavy burdens forcing them in some locations into using the public school curriculum including the educational requirements often from Washington D.C. and also the exact reasons the families demand their right to educate their own child as they see fit. Apparently the one size fits all education of the public school system despite it failing in every testable means simply now is claiming that testing produces stresses which rob the child of self-esteem and thus should be limited or eradicated completely.

 

These are but a select few of the limitations the Pro-Choice elite have placed upon your lives, often without anybody realizing this as they are too busy attempting to survive and make a living while not going out of their minds every April filing forms which make no sense even to the IRS as if you call for assistance and do not like the result, wait and call ten hours later and get a different person who will likely give you an entirely different set of directions and then choose which one you like the best. Well, maybe there is some Pro-Choice in the government after all and in the least suspected place possible. Imagine that.

 

Beyond the Cusp