President Obama’s SOTU was a total snoozer — I had all I could do to keep from falling asleep. Paul Ryan’s and Michele Bachmann’s responses were underwhelming, and yes, you read that right — I’m not joining the congo line of lamestream conservative sheeple in thinking of them as examples of great oratory. The only reason they seemed to be any good is that Obama didn’t exactly set the bar that high.
The mixed seating was a flop, if the Democrats’ intention was to psychologically dilute the Republican majority. It was obvious which party was louder when it wanted to applause. And because Obama is the type whose oratory energy depends on the energy of his audience and his present sympathetic company, because the Democrats weren’t revved up, he was flat in his delivery and energy.
I’m not going to respond to everything Obama, Ryan and Bachmann said, because I don’t have all night.
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Obama:
Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.
Used to be that proper liberals argued (rightly) that the stock market and corporate profits weren’t good indicators of the economic health of the country as felt by its working middle classes.
They’re right. The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there’s an Internet connection.
This is emblematic of his many words about “innovation” and “technology.” But it’s time for your blogmeister to sit you, the reading public, down on my knees and tell you about the hard facts of life.
I can and do discuss matters such as racial differences in intelligence and IQ in this medium, and I regularly read other media, such as AR, that does the same. But the hard facts of the matter is that, just as commentators said last night that most political debate, discussion and public policy takes place between the 40-yard lines, most people, regardless of race, are of average intelligence.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the mean IQ of white Americans is 100, black Americans 85 the standard deviation for both is 15, that there are 200 million whites, 40 million blacks, and 75% of both populations are working age. Assume also that the IQ distribution almost matches the perfect statistical bell curve. In a perfect bell curve, 68.26% of the field lies between one standard deviation below and one above the mean. This also means that half of that, 34.13%, lies between the mean and one SD below the mean, and the same percentage between the mean and one SD above the mean. This means 200 million times 0.3413 times 0.75 yields 51.2 million white people who are both of working age and with IQs in the “lowish-average” range for whites, 85-100. Do the same for the black population and you’ll find 10.2 million working-age people have the same IQ range, 85-100, though in their case it’s the “highish-average” range because that range is the one SD above the mean for them. Assume Hispanics have a mean IQ halfway between the white and black means and the same SD, and assume for discussion 40 million of them — Because the 85-100 range for Hispanics lies between 0.5 SD below and 0.5 SD above their mean, the math is slightly different — About 38.3% of a perfect distribution lies within that range, so 40 million times 0.383 times 0.75 makes about 11.5 million working age Hispanics IQ 85-100. Add the whites, blacks and Hispanics, and you have 72.9 million people in this country who are of working age and between 85 and 100 in IQ.
Now, people with an IQ in the upper 80s or 90s can do a lot of good things for society, and given the right societal conditions, can actually have a good standard of living and see it improve over their own lives and across generations of their own, if we ditch this Glow-BULL Economy bullshit and dedicate ourselves to real value-added manufacturing and heavy industry combined with a robust and dedicated organized labor movement. As long as they do their part, i.e. do their “seemingly menial” jobs well and obey the law relatively well.
But I can assure you this one thing — Not a one of them will invent a cure for cancer, the capability to do manned interstellar space travel, or a quantum computer for every desktop and in every pocket smartphone.
To take President Obama at his word, though, we should condemn those 72.9 million people to the ash heap of history and to permanent poverty and peasanthood simply because he, most members of his party, most Republicans, and almost all of the ruling class in DC and the country at large are happy with what used to be known as the United States merely being an upscale “innovative” province of the global economic superstate, and as such, the very kind of work which their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did to create the most prosperous working middle class in world history should be outsourced to China and India for the sake of cheap docile labor.
We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook.
What about computers in homes, on every desktop and now in every pocket? (A smartphone is a true Turing Machine, FYI). Obama didn’t say that. That’s because if it were up to people like Obama and his ilk, we would never have had home computers. His mentality, as part of the big government-big business axis based around the northeastern DC-to-Boston mega-SLOP-olis, could not have perceived that an individual person would want a computer in his or her own house on their desk or in their pocket. It took what used to be a right-libertarian atomistic individualist mentality prevalent in this country west of the Rockies and east of the Pacific Ocean to birth that idea into this world. An observation (not that original on my part) that I have made in this space before.
Now, science labs in high schools have to be severely restricted because too many white students use them. AP tests where not enough approved minorities (read: black and Hispanic) are taking them are being eliminated.
Think about it. Over the next 10 years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school education.
Remember when a high school education used to mean something? That was before Obama’s party et al. dumbed it down so that more blacks and Hispanics could pass. Now, a HS diploma is a meaningless piece of paper.
Take a school like Bruce Randolph in Denver. Three years ago, it was rated one of the worst schools in Colorado — located on turf between two rival gangs. But last May, 97 percent of the seniors received their diploma. Most will be the first in their families to go to college. And after the first year of the school’s transformation, the principal who made it possible wiped away tears when a student said, “Thank you, Ms. Waters, for showing that we are smart and we can make it.”
Within a year or two, we’ll find out that Bruce Randolph HS has been the host to either massive cheating, or that they had high and strictly adhered-to admissions standards, or a little of both. UPDATE 1/30: We have already found out that it has a blissful state of semi-autonomy from its host school district, the Denver Public Schools. So while that doesn’t prove that it has admissions standards, it probably does prove that the Bruce Randolph MS/HS (grades 6-12, as it turns out) has private school-like ability to bounce out troublemakers barely after the first “t.”
We have to do better. America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the Interstate Highway System. The jobs created by these projects didn’t just come from laying down track or pavement. They came from businesses that opened near a town’s new train station or the new off-ramp.
Have you ever seen the bureaucratic flowchart that is necessary to build a brand new stretch of freeway-grade road that is destined to become part of the interstate highway system? It’s worse than the ObamaCare labyrinth. And it’s been that way since at least 1970 — Thanks to anti-freeway and pro-environmental activism of the era. (Not that some of it wasn’t justified, IMHO). The trend over time has been to make it even harder and more bureaucratically complicated to get an infrastructure project done. If any endangered snail darter is in the way, Obama’s EPA will put an immediate stop to Obama’s infrastructure plans.
So over the last two years, we’ve begun rebuilding for the 21st century, a project that has meant thousands of good jobs for the hard-hit construction industry. And tonight, I’m proposing that we redouble those efforts.
Except that when the feminists found out that a goodly percentage of ARRA (“Stimulus”) was going to go to construction projects which would hire mainly men, they bitched and moaned and made you back down. Of course, they didn’t realize that it was mostly men, mostly working middle class, and mostly white, that were the victims of the recession to begin with. UPDATE 1/27: And they’re bitching again.
Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying — without the pat-down.
Don’t like the airport pat-downs, Obama? You can end them with one stroke of an ink pen. BTW, there are at least two newly-minted Republican Governors who are canceling high speed rail projects in their state because of the high cost and lackluster benefits. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is one, putting the kibosh on a Milwaukee-Madison HSR link.
Within the next five years, we’ll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans.
Too bad it’ll be expensive as hell.
To help businesses sell more products abroad, we set a goal of doubling our exports by 2014 — because the more we export, the more jobs we create here at home. Already, our exports are up. Recently, we signed agreements with India and China that will support more than 250,000 jobs here in the United States. And last month, we finalized a trade agreement with South Korea that will support at least 70,000 American jobs. This agreement has unprecedented support from business and labor, Democrats and Republicans — and I ask this Congress to pass it as soon as possible.
We export our raw materials so they can manufacture goods to sell back to us, the massive profits are split about evenly between big box retailers in America and their home country’s war machines and/or kleptocracies.
Then there’s my favorite example: The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.
As someone quipped on Twitter last night, Obama’s ideal future is that we all eat smoked salmon while riding on high speed bullet trains that are staffed by young illegal aliens.
In the coming months, my administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America.
Reinventing government. Didn’t the inventor of the internet, Al Gore, try that?
And we saw that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.
Really? All that seems to be happening in Tunisia and now Egypt is a little bit stronger version of the Tea Party Movement, and you and your ilk can’t wait to get rid of that.
Our troops come from every corner of this country — they’re black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American. They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay. Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love.
However, white Christian heterosexual men will still be doing most of the combat-level fighting and make up the lion’s share of the elite units in the Armed Forces. I’m saying this as someone who supported the repeal of DADT.
Ironically, Obama’s White House supported and argued for DADT while it was being heard in the Federal judiciary, right up to the moment that the DADT repeal bill hit Obama’s desk.
That dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working-class kid from Scranton can sit behind me. (Laughter and applause.) That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth. (Applause.)
I noticed Obama, Biden and Boehner were all wearing blue ties, and red was the in-color for last night’s prom. Was there like a pre-determined dress code? Boehner had all he could do to keep from crying, and if not for that, he looked as bored as a stick.
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Ryan:
Some people will back away from this challenge. But I see this challenge as an opportunity to rebuild what Lincoln called the “central ideas” of the Republic.
We believe a renewed commitment to limited government will unshackle our economy and create millions of new jobs and opportunities for all people, of every background, to succeed and prosper. Under this approach, the spirit of initiative – not political clout – determines who succeeds.
Invoking Lincoln and opposing big government at the same time? Tsk tsk.
I didn’t blockquote it above, but Obama re-hashed the stupid and false “proposition/credal nation” bullshit in his part.
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Bachmann:
I want to thank the Tea Party Express and Tea Party HD for inviting me to speak this evening. I’m here at their request and not to compete with the official Republican remarks. The Tea Party is a dynamic force for good in our national conversation, and it’s an honor for me to speak with you.
She’s denying today that her alternate response is indicative of any schism in the House GOP caucus. Maybe she’s right, but I also don’t think she’s not that Machiavellian. She does have ulterior motives for this highly publicized alternate response. (True, most Congressmen and Senators have short responses of their own, but they’re mainly confined to limited and interested parties.) I think her motivation is to fire a shot across Boehner’s bough, to remind him that she could bolt with 90-100 House members at any time and form a real Tea Party, there by taking the Gavel away from him and giving it back to Pelosi.
We need to start making things again in this country, and we can do that by reducing the tax and regulatory burdens on job creators. America will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Think about that. Look no further to see why jobs are moving overseas.
Sorry, Michele. That has more to do with the labor being a hell of a lot more cheaper and docile overseas.
Before you crown her as our next President, read this.
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