The future of America...

People used to say that South Africa was 20 years behind the rest of the Western world. Television, for example, came late to South Africa (but so did pornography and the gay* rights movement).

Today, however, South Africa may be the grim model of the future Western world, for events in America reveals trends chillingly similar to those that destroyed our country.

America's structures are Western. Your Congress, your lobbying groups, your free speech, and the way ordinary Americans either get involved or ignore politics are peculiarly Western, not the way most of the world operates. But the fact that only about a third of Americans deem it important to vote is horrifying in light of how close you are to losing your Western character.

...

A Warning for Americans: A Message from a South African by Robbie Noel

The jobs myth...

Don't fall for the big lie about "new" jobs.

From WhiteHouse.gov:

The
economy created 211,000 jobs in March and has created about 2.1 million
jobs over the past 12 months - and more than 5.1 million since August
2003.

From Census.gov:

	2005	2000	1990
Population	296,410,404	281,421,906	248,709,873

Let's do some math, shall we?

296,410,404 - 281,421,906 = 14,988,498 total population increase between 2000 and 2005

14,988,498/5 = 2,997,699 population increase each year, on average

2,997,699/12 = 249,808 population increase each month, on average

211,000 "new" jobs in March 2006 - 249,808 population increase in March = -38,808 ACTUAL jobs created last month

2,100,000 "new" jobs created in the last year - 2,997,699 population
increase in the last year = -897,699 ACTUAL jobs created in the past
year

Yea, a truly great economy. Negative savings rates, huge
trade deficits, enormous federal budget deficits, and an inconceivably
large federal debt.

The fall of the dollar...

China should stop buying U.S. Treasuries and take steps to reduce its holdings in those bonds, a Hong Kong newspaper on Tuesday quoted a high-ranking Chinese official as saying.

Chinese Official: Don't Buy U.S. Bonds

Government schools don't work...

Two great articles making clear why many parents don't even consider sending their children to government schools.

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why by John Taylor Gatto

It was May 2000, and the guy at Al Gore’s polling firm seemed baffled. A Yale political-science major, I’d already walked away from a high-paying consulting job a few weeks earlier, and now I was walking away from a job working on a presidential campaign to do . . . what?

How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million by Joshua Kaplowitz