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The World About Me
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There are several things in the world about me that I have observed to be bad and out of order and require change. Since I have only about 35 or 40 more years of active political life ahead of me and all of you are young and chipper I decided to tell you wherein I find problems and trust that you will fix them right away. These things are:
The Corruption and Stupidity Of Academia
This above all needs fixin’. Since the eleventh Day of September in the year 2001 I have been more and more convinced that Academia is unamerican and doesn’t even like America. I am not sure why they are of that persuasion but it is obvious from their actions and from what I observe.
One helpful action would be to eliminate academic tenure. For the one or two of you addressed who may not know what tenure is I shall explain. When a faculty member of a university reaches a certain stage in his/her career they may be submitted to a "tenure committee" or in some cases a vote of the tenured faculty and be accepted into the botherhood/sisterhood of the tenured. Thereafter unless they can be proven to have violated some list of sacred acts like raping the provost’s daughter/son in the university cafeteria at high noon they cannot be fired or otherwise disciplined. Children, all of us need the goad of accountability in order to make us proper servants of our employer I know of no other profession on earth that has such a protective cloak thrown about them. Usually tenured professors can elect their own class schedule and believe me it is possible to get a BA from a university today and never have a class under a tenured professor. They will scramble around looking for a grant from some government agency to write a book or do research and their vaunted intellect is not to be wasted upon students who are usually taught by instructors or assistant professors at the undergraduate level. If the tenured are so great that they should be considered un-firable then why in heavens name do we shield them from the hordes of students who come to get an education—and many of whom will not stay in college until they reach graduate level where a few of the courses are taught by tenured professors. No wonder the cost of a college education is rising. The colleges and universities have about a thirty percent personnel deadwood from whom neither the college nor the student gets any use.
Secondly is the concept of "academic freedom" which holds that a college professor can teach or say anything he/she wishes without fear of retribution or job loss. In other words once hired a professor is not accountable for what he/she teaches your sons and daughters.; There is a professor (two of them in fact) in my alma mater that openly advocates the return of the Southwest portion of the US (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California) to the Republic of Mexico by either peaceful or warlike means. There is a professor at the University of Michigan who openly advocates that all laws forbidding the sexual abuse of children be struck down by the Supreme Court and that children need sexual activity to "learn and develop". The rampant and ridiculous assertions of our learned professors abound these days and most of you would be surprised at what they teach in their classes—but they can’t be touched—that would be a violation of "academic freedom". They have just about removed any reference or deference to religion from the centers of higher learning and are introducing political philosophies that would curdle your brain–and there is no one to make them stop.
Federal Control Of Education
Most of you might not even know that there was a time within my memory when there was no —absolutely NONE control of public education by the federal government nor did the federal government contribute ANY money to the support of public schools in any state. We had no federal department of Education, no Secretary of Education on the President’s cabinet. All public schools were controlled by their local school boards who hired, fired, managed and monitored all public school employees and faculty and determined what would be taught. In my humble opinion (I am noted for the humility of my opinions) our public schools (at least the 26 I attended) were far superior both in personnel and what they taught than they are now and much more rigorous. I have been much embarrassed on several occasions recently by several high school graduates who couldn’t make change after a purchase. There were 640 students in my graduating high school class and I will venture without fear of being wrong that there was not one–NOT ONE who couldn’t make change after a purchase. How did I know the cashiers were high school graduates? I asked them if they were not taught how to make change in school and they said that they were not. I’ll bet they do not know the capitol of South Carolina either. Our public school system has gone to pot. I am ashamed to admit that we rank far far down the scale of school systems when compared to European and even Asian school systems. I don’t like that.
I think that part of the reason for that lies in the existence of public school teacher’s unions which assures that unqualified and unmotivated teachers remain on the faculty of our public schools whether they are capable of teaching or not. When I taught high school I refused to join a teacher’s union and received a lot of pressure from some of the worst teachers because I did not..
Go fix our schools—they have gone to pot. Throw out the courses in basket weaving and folklore of the Central African Uplift and teach those kids how to make change and what the capitol of South Carolina is.
The Doctrine Of Eminent Domain
There is a legal doctrine in the United States adopted from English Common Law that holds that the government (city , state or federal) can exercise its right of eminent domain and take any land in the nation if it is "for the common good" The government which takes the privately owned land must pay a fair market value for it to the owner but can take it. If the government needs to build an army training facility out here on my farm and I don’t want to sell my farm I am just out of luck because the government has the right of eminent domain. This right by the government has been exercised many times in the history of our nation by cities, counties, states and by the federal government itself BUT only if the government condemning the land was going to use it for a public purpose. Lately there has been a condemnation and taking of land by a city in Connecticut which was not for a public purpose and the Supreme Court of the US has held the condemnation to be valid. The land was condemned and sold to a private developer to build a shopping mall and condos which the city wanted so that they could charge more property taxes.
This action attacks the very core of democratic theory and the sanctity of private ownership of property. If allowed to stand this action very simply means that any private ownership of land is not final and if anyone can convince a regional or federal government that another owner can support a higher tax base on the land it can be condemned under the doctrine of eminent domain. This is for the birds! Fix it!
The Tenth Amendment
The tenth amendment to the constitution of the US says (and I quote) "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.". English was the native tongue of the writers of the constitution and they used it well in the document in my opinion. What that says to me is that the federal government gets ONLY the specific powers the constitution grants to it and NO MORE. But this amendment to the constitution has been roundly ignored. And every day the Federal Government takes a little more power away from the states and becomes more and more absolute and omnipotent In my childhood murder was not a federal offense–it was adjudicated by state law and every state had a law against murder. But Timothy McVeigh was not convicted of murder under state law but rather under the federal law against killing a federal officer–of which there were several in the building. Why this accretion of power and new law at the federal level?
McVeigh would be just as dead if sentenced under state law. There are thousands , literally thousands of ways in which the federal government grabs more power each year at the expense of the states. It worries me.
The Ills Of Free Trade
In the last few days there has been a violent reaction in the country when it found out that the operational control of six major ports in the US had been placed in the hands of a United Arab Emirates based company. Sounds sorta like sending the fox to guard the henhouse, doesn’t it?
But that is not the only ill of free trade. Consider the fact that the US is rapidly losing its ability to be a major producing country. We are losing our manufacturing base . If ten years from now we are attacked by a foreign power of considerable strength—and we will be eventually—we will not have the engineers, scientists, mechanics, welders, chemical processors , tool makers, die makers, molders, metallurgists, painters, riveters, shipwrights, gear cutters, machine tool manufacturers and many other skills that we would need to sustain a long war to protect our way of life. The best machine tools are now being made in Japan. Put on your glasses sometime and walk down an aisle in WalMart and pick up every item and read where it was made—that is why you need the glasses–it is in small print but it is there. The US was the greatest industrial power in the world when WWII ended. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen were capable, valiant and well led but a significant contribution to winning that war was the vast "arsenal for Democracy" that the US came to be in a miraculously short period of time. I am not sure that we could do it again and in ten years more of present trends I feel sure that we could not. Our ability to be an "arsenal for democracy" has been sacrificed on the altar of "Free trade" and "educate the foreigner". There is another troubling aspect of free trade that bothers me. The US has always been a producing country of "robust design". That term is difficult to define but it expresses that the engineer who designed the consumer item did not skimpo on materials or dimensions. I bought some clothes pins at WalMart tother day because I like the smell of clothes dried out in the sun. They were cheap–I bought about a hundred of them. They were the old style wooden pins where two halves are held together by a galvanized wire spring. I hung out my clothes and in a sprightly Texas breeze about half of them blew off the line which was a new experience to me. I noticed that in every case where the clothes blew off the line there was a failure of the little spring to hold the two halves clamped on the clothes. By careful measurement I found that if the wire that made the spring was 1/16th inch longer on each end it wouldn’t blow off Of course 1/16th inch of wire times a million pins runs into money—but if it had been an American engineer that designed it
there would have beren another 1/’8 inch of pin spring so that there was a little leeway or allowance for side thrust on the pin. The clothes pins were made and designed in China. They look good.
Now there are a few things for you to fix up . When you get them done report back to me and I will assign you a few more.
Love
dad,granpa,et al
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