....Blogging about cabbages and kings since 2005.

Amazon has changed affiliate rules for free books:

YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks

I don’t think I ever have met the first criteria, but I assume that I do the 2nd. But I didn’t think Amazon was paying me anything for the free books anyway, so I am not sure I understand the issue. I’m also wondering if the use of the conjunction ‘and’ instead of ‘or’ between the two clauses doesn’t mean this has nothing to do with me.

I used to really enjoy watching mysteries,  but there are two things about them I’ve noticed that seemed to me to reflect the downward trend in reasoning skills. Years ago when watching some of the better mystery shows, ‘whodunnit’ was part of the pleasure of watching- there was a puzzle to figure out. Now, it’s pretty obvious on all these shows who dunnit, and in many cases they don’t even attempt to be tricky about it. And, in an apparent attempt to cut back on the amount of dialogue and plot detail required of the writers, an increasing number of television shows use up air time by including what amounts to an MTV music video for part of each episode.

I get the appeal. It’s evocative. It’s far easier to trigger an emotional response from viewers if you grab them with a series of images overlaid with a good song. It hits all the right buttons and requires little in the way of plot construction and nothing in the way of dialogue scripting. The viewer is not required to think, only to feel.

And since an increasing number of us can’t think, that’s another reason to go the music video route for a few minutes of every episode.

Loss of language among the younger population — that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought — is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between “there” and “their” may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not.

What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought — and losing thought means losing much more.

This lack of reasoning ability can be seen in many areas.

There is a curious reluctance to think about the nature of things, maybe as a result of decades of teaching that there is no such nature apart from what one wants them to be. Rather, students increasingly see the world phenomenologically — as a haphazard arrangement of “stuff” and of events informed by the sensory impressions of their own experience but devoid of any structure.

Surveys show that the average American receives some 5,000 external stimuli per day and spends more than eight hours a day in front of screens — television, computer monitors, cellphones, gaming consoles, and so on. Where in earlier ages people worked in their gardens, played an instrument, went fishing, read books, entertained guests, or engaged in conversation with family or friends, they have become passive and speechless consumers of canned content. These screens help produce a people that is losing its language. But more importantly, these people no longer see structures in their world but rather a bewildering juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events. Vicarious living and proxy experiences are the deeper problem with our students’ loss of language.

I saw another example of this recently in an online discussion of the cost of Obama’s health care program. Whatever you think of it, there should be some rational understanding of the fact that no Congressional program in history has ever cost less than Congressional estimates, that the cost estimates require ignoring certain factors- like the way businesses will find it cheaper to dump their employees’ health care on to the government, and yet there are people who still insist that the program will save money and cost no more than Congress projected it would.

In order to think critically, one must be able to keep causes apart from effects, fact from interpretation, belief from knowledge, definitions from explanations, and much more. Critical thought requires determining the range of alternatives and applying to them a clear and consistent standard of evaluation.

But not only is such standard often amiss after years of indoctrination in relativism, even the range of alternatives is not clear. Understanding what scholastic philosophers have called the status quaestionis has become a challenge. Students often simply do not understand the nature (and grammar) of the question and match it with a fitting answer format. It is a problem of losing language and the ability to work with it logically, creatively, and yes, critically.

And during the course of the CPSIA debacle we saw example after example of how public schools have failed citizens in helping them to understand the difference between belief and knowledge, kept them from any acquaintance with critical thought and defrauded them of a civics education to the point where hundreds of sweet Etsy artisans seriously believed that Obama was just going to overturn the CPSIA- even though his party wrote the bill, he never voted against it when in the Senate, and he couldn’t overturn the law even if he wanted to.

In our society, the power of language has declined. How are students to understand the world of the Bible if curses, blessings, or vows are no longer understood as performative speech acts that have (often immediate) efficacy? How are they to deal with the Catholic view of sacraments, according to which the saying is a doing and brings about an ontological change in the world? How can they relate to the Word (Logos) not referring to or being a name for Christ but being God (Jn 1:1)? How can the greeting, “Peace to this house!” be such a “big deal” that it actually brings about peace (Lk 10:5-6)? How can students still appreciate classical pieces of literature that have protagonists who offer their lives for a promise made?

I remember a sweet friend of ours thinking Sense and Sensibility was really just a waste of time, and she couldn’t understand why Eleanor made such a fuss about things instead of just telling Marianne that Edward was engaged to another girl. We would say, “But she promised not to tell,” and our friend would look blankly at us and say, “So? It was her sister,” as though promises were nothing.

The blame does not lie with students (although a bit of personal effort might surely be expected). It lies largely with two or more generations of indulgent and misguided educators and with the political guardians of education. Too often the “it’s like” phenomenon has been shrugged off. If educators, who are meant to carry the torch of literacy and learning, do not regard these developments as calls to action but dismiss them as a necessary by-product of benign cultural change — “You know, I’m not sure I could do it myself” — we suffer from a major dislocation. Our education then no longer has standards to which we educate, or if it does, they are not about outcomes measured in knowledge or skills. And it reveals rhetoric about “liberal education” as nothing but hot air.

This Bedford Ohio company has interviewed 3600 people and found 47 who can read and do math at a ninth grade level.

My husband has a coffee mug that says, “You just can’t fix stupid.” That explains a lot.  Unfortunately.  We no longer believe we have a moral obligation to use  our brains.

I’m not even sure the majority of Americans are sure about the meaning of the words ‘moral,’ and ‘obligation.’  Thinking has become a burden, and I think this is at least largely due to our diminished vocabulary.

Thinking requires language, and our language has been diminished.

We pay $700 million to see how long shrimp run on a treadmill, but Obama thinks we need to cut air traffic controllers if his sequestration plan hits. there are other areas the bloated federal budget could be cut as well:

Many of us have to deal with tightening the budget. Our family isn’t the only one that hasn’t gotten cost of living adjustments for years, while inflation causes prices to rise nearly 2% a year. That forces us all to make small adjustments, just like the tiny 2% adjustment the federal government is being asked to make this year. Why is the federal government unable to make adjustments we all make every year?

Remember the promise that if you have a healthcare plan you like, you can keep it?  Not so much:

Universal Orlando plans to stop offering medical insurance to part-time employees beginning next year, a move the resort says has been forced by the federal government’s health-care overhaul.

The giant theme-park resort, which generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue, began informing employees this month that it will offer health-insurance to part-timers “only until December 31, 2013.”

The reason: Universal currently offers part-time workers a limited insurance plan that has low premiums but also caps the payout of benefits. For instance, Universal’s plan costs about $18 a week for employee-only coverage but covers only a maximum of $5,000 a year toward hospital stays. There are similar caps for other services.

Those types of insurance plans — sometimes referred to as “mini-med” plans — will no longer be permitted under the federal Affordable Care Act. Beginning in 2014, the law will prohibit insurance plans that impose annual monetary limits on essential medical care such, as hospitalization, or on overall spending.

As ever, the media puts it big, ugly “thumb on the scale” when reporting for Obama:

Chris Cilizza and Aaron Blake at the Washington Post say Republicans are losing the spending argument:

While Obama’s numbers aren’t stellar on that same spending question — 52 percent disapproval — he is in considerably stronger shape than his Republican adversaries as Washington braces for the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts known as the sequester to take effect on Friday.

Where to start?

First, the idea that “$1.2 trillion in automatic cuts” is going to “take effect Friday” is bold spin, and that’s being very kind. That’s $1.2 trillion over ten years, and I bet you a year’s salary it will never ever happen. This year’s chunk is an $85 billion “cut” that is not really a cut but an increase in spending over last year — just $85 billion less than their request — a request that one assumes was inflated to begin with, since the Administration knew automatic cuts were coming. Yet the press uncritically reports it as a cut, and uncritically reports the parade of horribles that Obama says is totally unavoidable. Illegal immigrants are released, and we are promised that flight delays and uninspected meat are on the horizon.

Charles Krauthammer:

After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.

Because of this year’s payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’ fees.

The problem with sequestration, of course, is that the cuts are across the board and do not allow money to move between accounts. It’s dumb because it doesn’t discriminate.

Fine. Then change the law. That’s why we have a Congress. Discriminate. Prioritize. That’s why we have budgets. Except that the Democratic Senate hasn’t passed one in four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first place, had 18 months to establish rational priorities among accounts — and did nothing.

When the GOP House passed an alternative that cut where the real money is — entitlement spending — President Obama threatened a veto. Meaning, he would have insisted that the sequester go into effect — the very same sequester he now tells us will bring on Armageddon.

Good grief. The entire sequester would have reduced last year’s deficit from $1.33 trillion to $1.24 trillion. A fraction of a fraction. Nonetheless, insists Obama, such a cut is intolerable. It has to be “balanced” — i.e., largely replaced — by yet more taxes.

Operation Walk Back begins:

Meanwhile, Americans have seen our biggest income drop in 20 years.

Obama does have a plan. He hasn’t publicized it much, and of course, the  press isn’t going to do that for him, because his plan is an embarrassment:

Obama’s “balanced” plan actually counts hundreds of billions of new revenues from taxes, fees and rebates as “spending reductions.” Examples:

• His plan to “strengthen” unemployment insurance is labeled as a cut, but it’s really a $50 billion tax hike.

• The $35 billion from the federal worker retirement programs involves boosting worker contributions.

• Most of the $35 billion in Medicare savings comes from charging wealthy seniors more.

• The $140 billion in “reduced payments to drug companies” are in fact rebates Obama wants drugmakers to pay Uncle Sam for selling drugs to poor seniors.

• Then there’s the $45 billion in spectrum fees and asset sales that Obama lists as spending reductions.

Viewed correctly, it turns out that more than $300 billion — about a third — of Obama’s proposed “spending cuts” are actually revenue increases.

Very interesting- Google (‘don’t be evil’) has a cash stash of 48 billion dollars.

Google also donated:

$25,000 to honor the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission while the company was under investigation by the agency for antitrust violations