Category Archives: America

Is The Economist Bewailing That America Is Becoming A Minority-Majority Country?

America, Argument, Conflict, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism

The transatlantic relations are worth fighting for, laments the Economist, a progressive news magazine. Europe and America must work to stop their relationship from unraveling.

Just about in every issue, the same progressives (excellent journalists, for sure) celebrate that America is on its way to becoming a minority-majority country.

It’s inexplicable, then, that the economist proceeds to bitterly bewail the fact that, “America is becoming less European. A century ago more than 80% of its foreign-born population came from Europe; now the figure is only 10%. Surging economies in Asia are tugging America’s attention away.”

AND,

Europe inevitably counts for less in American eyes than it once did. The generation that formed bonds fighting side-by-side in the second world war is passing away and even the cold war is becoming a distant memory.

READ: “Europe and America must work to stop their relationship unraveling.”

Trump is certainly not retarding the trend:

UPDATED (4/28): Grad Inflation: American Kids Are Dumbest In Developed World, Yet Graduation Rates Keep Rising

Affirmative Action, America, Culture, Education, Kids

American school kids, in aggregate, are the dumbest in the developed world, yet their high-school graduation rates keep rising. Looks puffed-up. The Economist explains how grad inflation is carried out:

…. Nationally, high-school graduation rates have increased at a steady clip even while other measures of learning and achievement—international exams, state-mandated standardised tests, college-admissions test scores—have been flat or even slightly negative. That could be because children are doing better, or because schools are lowering standards.

An ever-present element in these stories is the reliance on online credit-recovery classes. These are remedial courses delivered via computer that students can take if they fail a class, rather than attending summer school or being forced to repeat a grade. Jeremy Noonan, a former science teacher in Douglas County, Georgia, was assigned to supervise a credit-recovery course in 2016. Mr Noonan says a colleague told him that his responsibility was to manage the course so that students received an average grade of 80 or higher, which would enable them to graduate even if they failed the end-of-term exams.

The computer programme doing the teaching allowed students to retake exams they failed, with many of the same questions. “I realised right away it was all about manipulating the system,” he says. “Most teachers just gave the students the answers without bothering to explain the course content,” says Ayde Davis, a former public-school teacher in Del Rio, Texas, who reported violations to the state education agency. “Students could finish their courses at accelerated rates, the administration was happy, and credit-recovery teachers who co-operated were feted.”

Students completed exams at unreasonably fast speeds—one finished a physics exam in four minutes and earned an 80% score, according to records she saved. In the 2015-16 school year, 144 credits were given for recovery courses completed in less than ten hours, Ms Davis’s documents show. According to the makers of credit-recovery software, each course has between 60 and 75 hours of instruction.

It is not possible to know how many credit-recovery programmes are being used as diploma mills. But these courses are now widespread. The Fordham Institute, an education think-tank, estimates that 69% of all high schools in America use them. Some high schools have more than half of their students enrolled in credit-recovery programmes. They are especially popular in urban high schools attended by poor and minority students—in other words, precisely the places where graduation rates have risen fastest.

READ: “Grad inflation: The rise in American high-school graduation rates looks puffed-up. Online credit-recovery classes have been implicated in many school scandals.”

UPDATE (4/28):

And folks think their kids are so smart for flicking through mindless content.

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Tucker Touches On The Orchestrated Consumerism And Voracious Corporatism Destroying American Lives

America, Business, Culture, Economy, Ethics, Globalism, Multiculturalism, Nationhood

More forbidden topics, touched upon by the Tucker Carlson treasure. Some of the highlights of his  editorial, delivered on his Fox News show some days back:

Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became fantastically rich doing this. Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country. …

…

The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.

The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.

But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.

One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this …

Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow, they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories. …

“They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children.”

HERE is the underwhelming title: “Tucker Carlson: Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating.”

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‘Deaths Of Despair’: The Most Suicidal Populations Are Amerindians And American Whites

America, Economy, Healthcare, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Psychiatry, Race, Russia, The West, The Zeitgeist, Welfare

Suicide rates are declining everywhere except for the big exception: America, where it is 12.8 per 100,000, “well above China’s current rate of seven.”

And, in particular, among white Americans and native Americans.

“There are parallels between the rise in suicide in post-Soviet Russia and the ‘deaths of despair’ in America identified by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton University,” observes The Economist.

Suicide rates among white Americans are higher, and have risen faster since 2000, than among any other group except native Americans (see chart). The same trend can be seen among the middle-aged. At the turn of the century, older people were much more likely to kill themselves than those in their 50s, but that is no longer true. Rates among people in rural areas are higher, and have been increasing faster, than those among people in towns and cities.

The Economist is slightly more candid than the likes of the neocons and lite libertarians mentioned in the post, “Immigration: A Look-Away Issue For Neocons & Lite Libertarians“:

For working-class misery, neoconservatives and lite libertarians [economic reductionist all] blame everything BUT mass immigration, diversity, loss of community and sense of place. Anything but the truth …

MORE: “Defeating despair: Suicide is declining almost everywhere …”