It's For the Children! Baloney!

By Rich Kozlovich

Whenever you hear the statement, "It's for the children", you had better start looking a lot deeper into the subject because that is an emotional trigger that is used to hide something. For decades I have heard that teachers are so grossly underpaid that we need to give them all raises; substantial raises! We are told they are so over worked that we need to reduce class sizes substantially. We are told that teachers gave up wonderful careers in business to teach our children, so they deserve so much more; which of course is a logical fallacy because they have no clue as to whether they would have even been able to hold down a job, let alone have a wonderfully successful career in business.

Whether they are lacking in getting the appropriate appreciation financially for the work they do needs debating, but one of the things that teachers don’t lack in is brass.

In an article by Tim Gantert entitled “Teacher upset she can’t retire at 47” he outlines how a teacher by the name of Terri List from Saginaw Township, Michigan “says she would tell her students not to become a teacher in Michigan.” Why? Because she is outraged that she won’t be able to retire at age 47 and earn $60,000 a year....for doing nothing. Furthermore that figure “would increase 3 percent a year and she would get health benefits when she retired at age 60”. It might be worth noting that with the three percent increases in her retirement package (assuming that percent of increase never changes) she will be receiving $85,545.65 a year and benefits...for doing nothing by age 60.

However, we need to understand the miracle of compound interest, of which the negotiators of these contracts were clearly totally and unforgivably ignorant. How much will she be receiving by age 80? This of course is presuming that she lives that long, and today that isn’t an unreasonable expectation. That $85,545.65 would skyrocket to $133,277.34 a year….plus benefits..... for doing nothing.

(Note: I calculated all the figures at $45.000, $60,000 and $90,000 since the higher figure was an earning expectation and the lower figure was a reasonable assumption of initial earnings based on what was stated, although that intital figure may have been even smaller making this whole scenario even worse, and the middle figure is what was stated as to what she would earn retired in her first year at age 47.)

Currently she earns (as an English teacher……you know....they ones who are supposed to teach our kids to read and write) “between $70,000 and $80,000 a year depending upon her level of education and it’s likely List would make more than $90,000 with 3% pay increases over the next 15 years. I think we can reasonable to assume she didn’t start out at this salary, and she probably didn’t start teaching until after college, or around the age of 22. If she were to retire at 47 she would have worked for the Saginaw Township system for 25 years. If she lives to be 80 she will collect from the system for 33 years. If she started out at 45,000 a year; (I chose $45,000 a year based on her statement that they could hire two teachers to replace her and save money) and worked her way to 90,000 a year, and the raises averaged around three percent that means she would have earned around $1,689.000,000 during her entire working career for the system.

If she lives to 80 she would be out of the system for 33 years and received 2,641,000.00, and benefits ….for doing nothing. She will receive a million dollars more out of the system retired than she earned working in the system. Would someone explain to me how that makes sense? I am almost 66 and yet I'm still working; I find that incredible.

To add insult to injury the article went on to say “that it is likely that List bought “years of service” because she said she would have 43 years of service by age 60. Van Beek said that practice is basically extinct in the private sector.” This is absolutely insane.

Once again; aren’t these the same people who have claimed for decades they are over worked, underpaid and unappreciated? I don’t know how everyone feels, but eventually earning ninety thousand dollars a year for nine months work seems like a darn good pay. Amazing!

For years we have been told that the reason schools were failing in their task of turning out kids that could read, write and do basic math problems is that the teachers were underpaid and the classes were too large. So what can we glean from that? We probably should assume that they are deliberately failing to do the job we are paying them to do. However; Americans bought into that because they want kids to have the tools to do well in life and were willing to pay for it. What happened? It got worse!

Apparently they weren’t deliberately failing to do the work they have been hired to do. They are incapable of doing that work they were hired to do. After all getting more money, which was their solution, turned out not to solve the problem we wanted solved after all. We wanted kids who could read, write and do basic math.

However, it did solve the “problem” they were really concerned about; more money, less work, better benefits with less accountability for how they act and what they do. They wanted tenure, then the wanted unions, and then they wanted to be protected from their failures. Now they blame the system, the parents and anyone else who wouldn’t buy into the propaganda they have been spewing out for decades for the failure of our educational systems. So now what do we have? They are failing our children for a whole lot more money and still we are told that they are grossly underpaid and horribly overworked because and the classrooms are still too large.

It still comes down to this. Children are still being turned out into society who can’t read, can’t write, can’t spell, have no idea where anything is in the world, and are clueless when it comes to profoundly important historical characters and events. However, they absolutely know that Rachel Carson was an environmental saint and global warming is going to kill everyone if we don’t turn all power over to the United Nations….or Al Gore at the very least.

Apparently the teachers are capable of teaching them something....it is unfortunate that the something they are teaching them is nothing but radical socialism, multiculturalism and environmentalist propaganda that is sure to do nothing but destroy western advanced societies. Let’s face the facts. If these people were turning out nuts and bolts instead of supposedly educated children the purchasers would refuse them as defective.

The only fix to that is to start with the basics one step at a time. Let’s start with firing bad teachers. Let’s start with pay decreases for poor work and increases for good work. Let’s start with the elimination of tenure. Let’s start with an outline of what they are expected to teach. Most importantly; let’s start with local control; absolute total local control, starting with vouchers and help for those who wish to home school. When that happens the education system will start paying attention and start performing. After all, no one is more concerned about how the children are taught and what they are taught than the parents.

But most importantly; we have to understand that none of that can happen unless we start at the root of the problem. Ending union involvement in education! They represent the teachers and themselves, not the children. It has not now, nor has it ever been “For the Children”. We really do need to get that.


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Raw milk from Wilsonville farm sends three youngsters to hospital with E. coli

By Lynne Terry, The Oregonian

The latest outbreak associated with raw milk has put a toddler and two young teens from the Portland metro area in the hospital with E. coli poisoning, two with kidney failure. A fourth child -- also under 15 -- fell ill but was not hospitalized. All of them were sickened by E. coli O157:H7, one of the deadliest foodborne pathogens.

"There are laws that prohibit the retail sale (of raw milk) because this is not a safe product," Hedberg said. "People think there is a controversy. There is no controversy. People routinely used to get sick from raw milk." [in recent times] between 1993 and 2006 a total of 930 people fell ill after consuming raw milk…. 71 who were hospitalized…..641 were sickened [from raw milk cheese products] 131… were hospitalized. Two people died after eating raw milk cheese. To continue reading….

My Take - Children suffering acute kidney failure including the possibility of transplants, a paralyzed quadriplegic woman, the numbers that have been sickened are frightening, thousands of dollars in medical bills and yet we hear nothing from the activists who are so concerned about 'the children'!

We have lost our minds.

Does anyone really think they started pasteurizing milk for no reason? The risks are deadly serious, and the alleged benefits are in reality anecdotal, as are most the leftie, greenie, and organic crowd's claims.

I have a question. If one person suffered from one of these calamities from a pesticide application how long do you think it would take the activist to run into the streets frothing at the mouth in convulsive paroxysms of outrage demanding that pesticides be banned?

Yet there has not been one protest, not one comment or any condemnation from these insane groups. We often hear the activists say that some policy or other ‘must’ be adopted because it is ‘for the children'?   Yet when you look around the world we find that we need to be more concerned at what their policies will do ‘to the children’! Their silence on this matter is a classic example of how little they care ‘for the children’! RK

Editor's Note: This will appear in the page, Zone of Reality,  under Raw Milk.

This Week With Alan Caruba

By Rich Kozlovich

I have had the pleasure of reading Alan's work for years. I don't know how I stumbled on to his original site, but I have followed him ever since, not to mention that Alan has always been a strong advocate of our industry. I also can say that Alan and I are friends, although we have never met in person. Occasionally we disagree, as friends will, but it is rare. We also have mutual friends in the industry, and everyone standing against the green movements insane actions know Alan. Alan publishes daily and Warning Signs should be in everyone's 'favorites' section. It is my pleasure to link this week's articles. RK

The Environmental Terrorizing of Children
By Alan Caruba

In many ways, the worst aspect of environmentalism is why Greens not only feel free to terrorize children with doomsday scenarios, but feel compelled to do so. I have been reviewing books for some fifty years and with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 and books such as Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” have been offering scenarios intended to move people and governments to take action that, in retrospect, were based on bad “science” and absurd doomsday predictions. The same week I received “Our House is Round”, I also received “The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea” and “Earth-Friendly Buildings, Bridges, and More.” You could stack all the environmentally-themed children’s books I’ve seen and it would reach up several stories.

How (and Why) Obama has Impeded Recovery
By Alan Caruba

During and after his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was hailed as the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. History records that Roosevelt presided over the Great Depression, begun in the previous administration of Herbert Hoover who got most of the blame. Roosevelt’s policies extended it well beyond the normal recovery from a recession.

News Note: AmericanThinker.com Article Quotes Caruba
I am accustomed to quoting other people so it is very nice when I find myself quoted today in an AmericanThinker.com article about "Fakegate", the effort to silence The Heartland Institute by trickery. The Institute has been a leader in exposing the lies about global warming. Regular readers of this blog know they read about it here first.

The Utter Desperation of Global Warmists
By Alan Caruba

In the “glory years” of the global warming hoax, you had Al Gore picking up Oscars and Nobel Prizes (shared with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and government employees like James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies were picking up wads of cash as awards, speech fees, and grants.

Passover 2012
By Alan Caruba

If you want to understand what Israelis and most Diaspora Jews think about the threats made against Israel, ask any Holocaust survivor. They will tell you, “When somebody says they want to kill you, you should believe them.” Below are two excerpts from a March 30 Jerusalem Post article by Martin Sherman:

Fakegate: The War on Science
By Alan Caruba

Generations of Americans have been raised to venerate science and those who have enhanced and extended our lives through its application. The rise of environmentalism, however, has generated a war on science, first by distorting it, and then by propagandizing the “findings”, “studies” and resulting claims based on them. Science hoaxes have been around a long time, most famously, the “Piltdown Man”, a paleontological fraud that began in 1912, claiming to be the “missing link” between man and ape when a fake skill was discovered in a gravel pit in England. In 1869, a fake “giant petrified human body” of a ten foot tall man. Carved out of gypsum, it was quickly debunked, but the public loved the story.

In more recent times, in the 1970s, there was the claim of a discovery of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines. This was followed by “crop circles” and, in 1999, the Archaeorapter, an archaeological fake claimed to be the link between birds and dinosaurs, debunked by 2002.

The Queen and I
By Alan Caruba
I have known Queen Elizabeth my entire life. Not personally, mind you, but she was always in the news via the early newsreels one saw at a Saturday matinee between movies and then on television since the 1950s. Newspapers, magazines, and tabloids have provided ample coverage over the years.


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Guest Post By Joanne Nova: On climate change, the wrong choice kills people either way

Here’s a topic close to my heart. Before I became involved in climate change and currencies, my hot topic-of-choice for years was medical research and health. In my honours degree I worked to get a tiny step closer to treating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. When I saw that The Australian Government was threatening to cut medical research, I wanted to put a razor fine point on just what muddy thinking costs us. This article I wrote is published in The Weekend Australian today. We can’t afford to get the decision wrong on climate change. We must fight the battles that matter, not build fortresses against imaginary foes. Joanne Nova

Joanne’s website “JoNova” originates in Australia. This article appeared on her website here! RK)

Wasting money on climate change betrays sick
By Joanne Nova

LOST opportunities are invisible but deadly. On climate change, the call to buy insurance by pricing carbon is a cop-out. Where is the cost-benefit analysis? We’re thinking of axing Australian medical research yet we’re supporting solar panel manufacturers in China. It doesn’t have to be this way.

All the money spent employing green police, subsidizing solar or researching how to pump carbon dioxide underground is money not spent on medical research. Opportunity cost is a killer. The path not taken could be lined with happier, longer lives. Only the best evidence and real debate have a chance of helping us see through the fog to pick the better road.

While most scientists agree CO2 causes some warming, there is great debate about just how much. If CO2 has only a minor effect on temperature then spending, say, $1 billion on inefficient roof-top solar panels is not just wasted money, it’s a choice that will kill people. We won’t be able to say exactly who it will kill but we can virtually guarantee that some people will die in the future who could have been saved.

Why? Solar energy costs us more than five times what coal-powered energy does. So instead of spending $1bn on solar panels, we could have spent $200 million on cheap electricity and used the other $800m to double our medical research budget.

Fabíola and Julio Licinio in 1964.
She died of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma
a few weeks later.

Right now, the government is planning to cut $133 million from our $800m annual medical research budget. The Australian government has spent or will spend $3.8 billion dollars to combat climate change across four years. (The US government was spending about $7bn a year at last count.) When Julia Gillard spends money on climate-related work instead of medical research, she is making a choice about the net benefits and it’s supposedly based on science. It’s true sooner or later medical research will get the answers right, but for someone who is sick with a deadly disease, sooner makes a life-and-death difference.

If our government-funded climate establishment makes the wrong guess about what humidity does in a warmer world, CO2 emissions become trivial and inconsequential. But the money diverted or delayed from better causes leaves a trail of destruction that cannot be repaired. Money can always be replaced, but lives lost are gone for good.

Julio Licinio, director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, put together a passionate, disturbing advertisement two weeks ago, a plea to stop cuts to medical research funding. His sister died aged four from a disease that is treatable today.

Which four-year-old in 2018 will die because Gillard introduced a carbon tax instead of increasing medical research funding? Which father will die in 2022 who would have lived if we had doubled our funding for medical research? It is for people such as four-year-old Fabiola that we should keep fighting for rational debate. Bad science makes for bad policy. Poor reasoning is deadly.

Medical research is blossoming at a phenomenal, historic pace

The exponential curve in gene therapy, telomerase research, genomics and glycobiology is barely beginning. Four significant breakthroughs were made in medical research in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000. These were the kinds of breakthroughs people had worked for decades to make, and some were not predicted even a few years beforehand. The human genome project was finished five years ahead of schedule and for a fraction of the expected price.

Right now, a year of medical research really does make a difference. These are the areas where we will be left behind and it will hurt. These are the industries where we need to stay at the head of the pack, not just to save lives but to save the economy as well. Access Economics estimated in 2003 that every dollar invested in the Australian health research and development sector returned at least $5 in national economic development.

When government-funded Australian researchers discover treatments, we own vital intellectual property. We not only export products the world wants, we avoid being beholden to foreign patent holders. Some effective cancer drugs cost $2000 a week. Isn’t that the kind of research we want to own?

If we lead the world in medicine, the world is our oyster. If it turns out clean carbon technology is useful, we can buy it with the spare change from the profits of medical research. We know we need a cure for cancer. We don’t know if the rest of the world will want to pump CO2 underground 10 years from now.

When we lead the world in putting inefficient solar panels on roofs, we only help Chinese manufacturers and we win a race no one wants to win. You can’t export second-hand solar panels or resell old pink batts.

Can we start looking at the cost benefits of all our policies instead of reasoning by fallacy? The precautionary principle is no principle of science: it’s a blind tool that works for both sides of any debate.

To quote Licinio:

“In 1964 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma of childhood was 100 per cent fatal. Now the cure rate is over 80 per cent, thanks to medical research. When Fabiola died I was so upset that it took me decades to recover. From protracted mourning to survivor guilt, the impact of that death shaped my life. For someone like myself who suffered tremendously due to a disease [that] was incurable and whose cure has been subsequently achieved through medical research, the proposed cuts to the NHRMC [National Health and Medical Research Council] budget are unconscionable.

“On a very positive note, my mother, Aurea, lost her own mother early on. My grandmother died at age 47 due to malignant hypertension, which was out of control, and sky-high blood pressures. My mother suffered enormously because of that death; and she knew that she had the exact same disease. Later in life, my mother also developed breast cancer. However, medical research always caught up with her and her blood pressure was always well controlled. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer she had state-of-the-art treatment, guided by medical research. My mother died in 2007 neither from hypertension nor from breast cancer. Medical research gave my mother 40 years of active, happy and highly productive life.”

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Joanne Nova is a commentator and the author of The Skeptic’s Handbook. She is a former associate lecturer in science communication at the Australian National University. See the original post for other links.

I wish to thank Jo for allowing me to republish her work. Of all the insanities perpetrated by the green movement on the human race this is one that never really sunk in to me, although Bjorn Lomborg has stated things similar to this for some time. Billions wasted on this international fraud to fix a non-problem when there are so many fixable problems where this money could have been used effectively. But when you think of all the money wasted that could have gone to research that could have saved lives, especially children's lives it is a heart breaker.

The greenies always toot the horn -"it's for the children" - when they want to push some irrational legislation that would remove life saving pesticides off the market, and yet this, as in all else they do, kills children. We have to stop ceding the moral high ground to this movement and openly say that we are the ones who are saving children’s lives; not modern environmentalism, which has morphed into a secular neo-pagan religion.

I would like for someone to tell me who has caused the unnecessary deaths of more children in the last hundred years than these adherents of environmentalism. I would like for someone to tell me who is responsible for more unnecessary illness, poverty, squalor, suffering and death in children today than the green movement. Dystopia follows the green movement like the Black Death followed rats. RK

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