The Bush Tax Cuts vs History

The Trophy Wife is currently reading The Road from Versailles by Munro Price. Subtitled, in case you're a completist, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the Fall of the French Monarchy - you know, the French Revolution. We read stuff like that: her more than me, to be honest, but there you are. It's important to understand history.

Let me just quote a little from the first two pages of Chapter 3 (typed in with my own bleeding fingers, I'll have you know).

The monarchy that Louis XVI embodied at the opening session of the Estates was still a grand if somewhat dilapidated edifice...

Below the king and the royal family, French society, like that of all continental old regimes, was divided into a hierarchy of orders, known as estates. Each one was legally defined, and had its own rights and duties. The clergy ranked as the first estate... they were not taxed directly, but instead voted a don gratuit, or "free gift," to the crown at their five-yearly assemblies.

The nobility, too, the second estate, were subjects of the king... True, the nobility were exempt from the main direct tax, the taille, but from 1695 onwards, they had been subjected, along with everyone else, to a succession of income-based contributions...

Below the clergy and nobility stretched the third estate, composed of all lay commoners... the bulk of its members comprised the urban working class and, above all, the peasantry, who made up fully 80% of the French population. Socially, politically and economically, it was the third estate that paid the price of the unspoken bargain between the monarchy and the privileged orders. Its members bore the brunt of taxation...

Can we talk about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the millionaires now?

Cooling down the hotbeds

"Every word is a prejudice,"

said Nietzsche. That's why one man's pillar of probity is another man's "hotbed" of heresy.

"you know these colleges are hotbeds of Liberalism!"

said the man across the table.

"These kids just aren't old enough to be able to tell what they're being taught from the truth. They're not teaching both sides."

He's got an interesting point. High levels of education in our country do seem to be associated with high levels of free thinking and pragmatism and therefore must be caused by it as proved by the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- and whereas that's obviously bad and according to the divine doctrine of judging truth by what the less educated are comfortable with, it's therefore quite obvious that opposing viewpoints in other fields this Republican might be ignorant of disagree with are not being given equal or preferred classroom time or assigned reading: the voice of the people isn't being heard at Harvard.

Disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, engineering and medicine? they only teach one side and that's elitist. Everything has two equal and opposite sides, the right side being, by definition -- right. You know all those things are best left to folksy opinion, anonymous blog commenters and to websites run and funded by Republicans who hold forth from country club and yacht club dinner tables all over America.

In history classes, we can be sure courses are not being taught about the secret liberal cabal ruining the world from its headquarters in Kenya, about the danger of subjecting corporations to the law rather than letting them write it, or that those poor women in Salem really were agents of Satan and why universal suffrage doomed the country to Divine wrath. Why, even Pythagoras and Newton and Einstein are treated as relatively established authorities and one hardly hears of the four elements or phlogiston or the aether or divine creation as acceptable differences of opinion at those hotbeds any more. And what of alternative cosmologies and opposing views in the sciences and history and literary criticism? Well, in fact they are being talked about and constantly tested, but we do have the other conservative doctrines of "if I don't know, nobody knows" and the inapplicability of past experience to the present time -- and that, dear reader, is that. It's a hotbed.

No, what they should be doing at Columbia or The London School of Economics and Political Science and other centers of Liberal propaganda and academic honesty, is reciting the catechism which includes such credos as: tax cuts pay for themselves and never, ever cause recessions; that massive concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a tenth of one percent of the population make for "freedom" and that like a driverless car, the markets will always stay on the road -- and so government should stay out of business practices and move into the pulpit; as God and the Founding Fathers intended.

Face it; universities, public and private are hotbeds and that's cold comfort. Hell, why don't we do as that great Capitalist prophet, Mao Zedong did and simply close them down? The people know best!

Kick a Jew Day

I hesitate to make more of this than it really is. Middle School students aren't deep thinkers, if they're thinkers at all and if some idiot kid in a Naples, Florida school thought "Kick a Jew Day" would be a blast, it doesn't necessarily mean that they've even heard of anti-Semitism or that their parents are Aryan Nation followers. The misbegotten event wherein Jewish kids were subject to being kicked last week was a "funny" take-off on "Kick a Ginger Day," which in turn derived from the supremely idiotic "South Park," the show that features a talking turd as part of the cast.

I think it may be a bit much at this point, to tie it to some sinister neo-Nazi or other anti-Semitic group. Still, some boys and girls were kicked and at that age, when peer approval is everything, the humiliation can be expected to matter a lot in their lives.

Although Fox News did comment on the kicking of red heads, I haven't seen any mention of the Naples story so far and so it's not fair and balanced to comment on what they might use the story for. I'm sure that there are people who will haul out the old PC straw man and grumble about Jews looking for pity and I'm more sure that some Jewish parents will overreact and call for more than the one-day suspension handed out to 10pre -teens. For my part, I think the Jewish kids have learned a valuable lesson about living in a self-styled Christian Nation: Kick Back!

I had some idle thoughts about printing up some T-shirts and sending them over to Naples, but it's been done.

Mail order science

One might think that I would be on the side of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in opposing Texas House Bill 2800. It's effect would be to exempt any private non-profit institution from the need to be accredited by and receive a certificate of authority from the state. The entire idea is of course to establish "universities" that give science degrees without any requirement to study science. Normally attempts to Push the Christianist agenda by equating legend with science earn my contemptuous wrath and of course so does this one to a degree, but wait, there's more.

If, as would happen should this act of insanity be passed, one could simply dream up any curriculum and award degrees of any sort, the value of any Texas institution's degree program not funded by the State would be suspect. Of course the Libertarian in me might be inclined to ask why Acme Bible College shouldn't be able to confer a Doctor of Divinity on anyone they please according to their organized delusions, but not Bachelor, or Master or Doctor of Science. Thinking back to the mid 19th century however, when one could attend Acme Medical College with an unregulated, unexamined course of study and emerge with black bag and scalpel to treat the unsuspecting populace, I have to take pause.

What would the result really be if any charlatan could establish a school and anoint its graduates with advanced degrees in science with no other education but a literal interpretation of Bible Stories for Children? An extra headache for those institutions and companies hiring physicists, geologists and such perhaps. An opportunity for me.

Fogg University of Christian Knowledge. It has a certain acronymical appeal, you have to admit, although Fogg U would be shorter and easier to remember for the kind of students it might attract. Prerequisites? What are you, some kind of Commieliberal intrusive government type?

Let market forces determine the value of unaccredited education, but for you, if you call in the next ten minutes, you can call yourself a Master of Science for $49.95 plus shipping, handling and framing charges. But wait, there's more -- the first 50 callers get a free Sham-Wow with the logo of our sham university on it. You getting this, camera guy?