9/09/2022
The Medlock Post Ep. 49: Fabulous Friday
ESG Investing: The Destroyer of Economies – and Democracies?
ESG Investing: The Destroyer of Economies – and Democracies?
ESG Investing Threatens Freedom?
Proud Ultra MAGA American
Study reveals strong link between parenthood and social conservatism
September 9, 2022
Study reveals strong link between parenthood and social conservatism
It turns out that even the notion of having skin in the game, in this case taken to mean having, raising, and sending children off into the world, prompts people to become more socially conservative. That was the conclusion reached in a scientific investigation published on September 7 in the biological journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society B," published by the Royal Society of the United Kingdom.
Dr. Nicholas Kerry, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and a team of over twenty other academics conducted four studies and surveys involving 2,610 adults.
Conservatism was defined for the purposes of this research as "a tendency to prefer safer, more traditional behaviours, social organizations and sources of moral guidance, alongside cultural ingroup preference and resistance to cultural change."
In the first of the studies undertaken, one group of participants was shown 12 pictures of cute young children. Each participant was then asked about what they imagined their own future child might look like. They were told to assign the imagined child a name and then describe a series of experiences they might have together.
Electric Cars Are Not ‘Zero-Emission Vehicles’
Electric Cars Are Not ‘Zero-Emission Vehicles’
While praising California’s decision to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, Governor Gavin Newsom declared that this will require “100% of new car sales in California to be zero-emission vehicles” like “electric cars.” In reality, electric cars emit substantial amounts of pollutants and may be more harmful to the environment than conventional cars.
Toxic Pollution
The notion that electric vehicles are “zero-emission” is rooted in a deceptive narrative that ignores all pollutants which don’t come out of a tailpipe. Assessing the environmental impacts of energy technologies requires measuring all forms of pollution they emit over their entire lives, not a narrow slice of them. To do this, researchers perform “life cycle assessments” or LCAs. As explained by the Environmental Protection Agency, LCAs allow for:
Biden Admin Deals Hefty Blow to American Industry - Trump-Era Solutions Get Smacked Down
Biden Admin Deals Hefty Blow to American Industry -
Trump-Era Solutions Get Smacked Down
The Biden administration signed an agreement Tuesday night to stop oil drilling that had been authorized under 113 permits in three Western states, Fox Business reported.
Remember that when President Joe Biden and his team say it’s the corrupt old oil companies that drag their feet on oil production because they want their profits and stuff and that means there’s not enough oil and that’s why gas costs so much and it’s not our fault and …
9/08/2022
How Orwell Became the Prophet Who Foresaw Our Future
How Orwell Became the Prophet Who Foresaw Our Future
There is something ghostly and ghastly about the resurrection of British author George Orwell in contemporary politics, especially in the reaction to the disruption and transformation of public policy now taking place.
Orwell was a mid-20th century journalist, essayist and novelist who was an early anti-fascist of the far left until the Spanish civil war of 1936-39 in which he fought on the anti-Franco side. During that period, living side by side with the defenders of the democratic Spanish republic, many of whom were radical anarchists and Stalinist communists, Orwell got to see the brutality of the far left up close, and so his passionate anti-fascism was augmented by growing anti-communist views as well.
During and after World War II, Orwell increasingly was alarmed by totalitarian Marxism, and wrote two iconic satiric novels depicting the consequences of Stalinist totalitarianism, 1984 and Animal Farm. Their themes of dictatorship and imposed political conformity were meant to expose Marxism in allegory, although the international far Left attempted to defuse the satire by trying to interpret 1984 in particular as a condemnation merely of modern technology.
Florida School Board Votes Down Recognizing LGBTQ+ Month
Florida School Board Votes Down Recognizing LGBTQ+ Month
The Miami-Dade School Board overwhelming decided against recognizing October as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History month which included a measure to teach 12th graders about two Supreme Court cases affecting the LGBTQ community.
Parents, teachers and students spoke for more than three hours Wednesday, with one group citing indoctrination of students and the other speaking about how Nazis ostracized gays and lesbians with a pink triangle. The board then voted 8-1 against the measure, which was proffered by board member Lucia Baez Geller.
Outside the school board's headquarters, where people waited to speak during the meeting, a group of Proud Boys got into a loud argument with someone hoisting a trans flag, the Miami Herald reported.
A 75-Year-Old Warning about Those Who Say ‘Listen to the Science’
A 75-Year-Old Warning about Those Who Say ‘Listen to the Science’
n his first day as president, Joe Biden, flanked by a portrait of Ben Franklin, called on the federal government to “advance environmental justice” and “be guided by the best science.”
In many ways, Biden’s words came as no surprise.
Throughout the 2020 campaign and after, Biden had often repeated the phrases “listen to the science” and “I believe in science,” presumably to contrast himself with his opponent.
Biden didn’t stop there, however. He included the mantra in one of the first executive orders he signed, noting that it would be his administration’s official policy to “listen to the science.”
The phrase seems harmless enough. The scientific method is highly trusted, and for good reason. It has been a boon to humanity and helped bring about many of the marvels of our modern world.
Yet distinguished thinkers new and old have warned us to proceed with caution when confronted with pleas to “listen to the science.”
The Man in the Arena (Full Speech)
Theodore Roosevelt delivered the speech entitled “Citizenship in a Republic” at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910. The speech is popularly known as “The Man in the Arena.” His statements at the Sorbonne were part of a larger trip to Europe that also included visits to Vienna, Budapest, and Oslo. On May 5, 1910, he gave his Nobel Prize speech. This trip came in the midst of Roosevelt's frustration with the Taft administration and followed his African safari with Kermit. After completing his tour of Europe, Roosevelt would make a triumphant return to the U.S.
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thralldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of medieval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisher folk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which were once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by the primeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.
9/07/2022
The Medlock Post Ep. 48: The Story of a Family Escaping Communist Hungary
The Medlock Post Ep. 48: The Story of a Family Escaping Communist Hungary
Any time people are able to escape a Communist country, there are many lessons to learn. Listen to the story and learn.
UC Berkeley Law dean slams ‘scourge’ of ‘originalist’ reading of Constitution in LA Times op-ed
Chemerinsky called the 'originalist philosophy' of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork 'nonsensical and dangerous'
In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, described the "originalist" interpretation of the U.S. Constitution by Supreme Court justices as a "scourge" which is in "ascendency" in the judicial branch.
Chemerinsky attributed the rise in this "scourge" to the conservative justices on the court who have a "cramped reading of history" and as such have done away with abortion rights, protected gun rights, etc.
The Berkeley Law dean opened his piece with an anecdote about a better time in American history when the "Senate resoundingly rejected the nomination of Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court because it found his originalist views unacceptable." Chemerinsky described Bork’s views, writing, "As a law professor, Bork argued that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted and can be changed only by amendment."
Here's the Left's latest Trump-manufactured psychodrama: Victor Davis Hanson
Here's the Left's latest Trump-manufactured psychodrama: Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson details how the Left creates diversion and division
The Secret Curriculum
The Secret Curriculum
School is starting, but don’t count on getting answers about what your child is being taught. School administrators commonly lie or give parents the runaround.
That explains the fireworks over Jeremy Boland, a Greenwich, Connecticut, elementary school assistant principal, bragging about how the school pushes kids to think in a “progressive” way that he hopes will make them Democratic voters.
The school’s hiring process, he explains in a video, is geared to accomplish indoctrination. Prospective teachers who are Catholics or over 30 are disqualified. They’re too set in their ways, he says. Catholics are unlikely to “acknowledge a child’s gender preferences” or go against parents. He says, “You don’t hire them.”
The Work of Virtue
The Work of Virtue
A free republic depends on citizens who can take their prosperity into their own hands.
Mark T. Mitchell has written a book that addresses the specter haunting our decayed and decaying American republic. The title of the book gives that specter an apt name: “plutocratic socialism.” This two-headed creature combines the worst of an imperious oligarchy with the illusions of a socialism that is at once paternalistic, woke, and despotic. The principles of our republic remain admirable and choice-worthy, to be sure, but their presence in our common life has become attenuated with each passing day. The soul of our great republic has become hollowed out, because we have lost touch with the virtues that animate responsible citizenship in a free society.
More fundamentally, we have lost an appreciation of self-government in the most capacious sense of the term. The plentiful rights guaranteed by our constitutional order (and by “Nature and Nature’s God”) too often degenerate into excuses for self-destructive hedonism, veering inconsistently between impulsive self-assertion and debilitating passivity. As Mitchell persuasively argues, rights must be accompanied by the self-limitation that makes political liberty—what Aristotle called “ruling and being ruled”—possible and sustainable. There can be no self-government in the political sense without the governance of the self, and some self-conscious effort to put order in the human soul. Here the classics, Christians, and the American founders have more in common than we sometimes realize. Despite their elevation of rights as the central political category, the founders never broke with the Great Tradition’s understanding that “statecraft is inescapably soulcraft,” to cite the old locution of a more conservative George F. Will.
The Great Regression
The Great Regression
All hail our globalist overlords.
A word of caution is needed about the pretentious and supposedly benign signature title of the Great Reset project. Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor. So often, the adjective “great” is a code word of supposed enlightened planners for radical attempts at reconstruction of a society that must be either misled or forced to accept a complete overhaul.
The Democrats’ Attack On Free Speech
The Democrats’ Attack On Free Speech
Generally, when Democrats disagree, they call people names instead of debating policy. This robs us of the opportunity to debate and come up with a reasonable conclusion. And perhaps we can even learn from each other. That is what American politics is supposed to be.
In recent years the venom from the Democrats has gotten worse. Their insults have gotten more vitriolic; they use less logic and push the idea that all Republicans, Conservatives, and/or Trump supporters are haters who think alike.
Families are facing inflation at record levels. Many economists predict a major food crisis coming in 2023. Agricultural production will cause food shortages as production will be way below expectations all over the planet in 2022, and there will be far less food to go around in 2023. The shortages will create higher inflation on food products. Instead of anticipating or fixing the problems, the Democrats are slandering their opponents, hoping they will back down into submission.
My Colleague Faye Higbee wrote at Conservative Firing Line:
High school students have a strong shot at success with career technical education: 'A win-win'
As the back-to-school season gets underway, one challenge that many parents and educators face each school year is keeping students of all kinds engaged in classroom learning.
One pathway to student engagement at the high school level is career technical education (CTE). It's what many people still think of as "vo-tech" or vocational-technical education. Today, CTE offers a whole world of opportunity, combining the ever-changing demands of today's top industries with the knowledge gained from classroom and on-the-ground training.
Tara Troester, a CTE content lead in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, works with both teachers and industries to create the substance of career tech programs in her area.
Why This East Coast State Is Becoming a Hub of Education Entrepreneurship
Why This East Coast State Is Becoming a Hub of Education Entrepreneurship
When Ben Ashfield and Tammy Tiranasar couldn’t find their preferred educational environment for their two younger children, they decided to build it. Ben works in advertising and Tammy is an artist, but first and foremost they are entrepreneurial parents who want the best for their children. Last fall, the couple took over a vacated classroom space in Mountainside, New Jersey, and created The Village Electric as a full-day, colearning center for local children ages two to twelve, open five days a week. They launched with 45 kids and several teachers.
This year, their program continues to thrive, but Ben and Tammy aren’t content with creating just one alternative learning model that satisfies their family’s needs. They want their space to become an incubator for many other entrepreneurial parents and teachers who wish to build microschools and colearning communities of their own.