Quotulatiousness

December 29, 2011

Even his detractors admit that Ron Paul raises questions for the GOP that need to be answered

Filed under: Economics, Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Jonathan Kay, no fan of Ron Paul, points out that his campaign is forcing some otherwise unexamined bits of Republican belief to be hauled out into the light and re-examined:

None of this is particularly surprising given what we already knew about Ron Paul and his oddball views on metal coinage, Pearl Harbor, the Federal Reserve, and a dozen other subjects. The guy is basically your classic American crank. If he hadn’t gotten fixated on Austrian-School laissez-faire economics, Ron Paul probably would be spending his free time studying the Zapruder film frame by frame, or writing letters to local newspapers about water fluoridation.

Yet, for all his weirdness, Ron Paul deserves credit for at least one very real and crucial insight. Of all the Republican candidates, he alone has called out the fundamental contradiction between the GOP’s two dominant obsessions: (a) small government, and (b) American “greatness” (or, as Mitt Romney recently put it, America’s status as “the greatest nation in the history of the earth”). Critics dismiss Paul as an isolationist. But at least he understands that superpowers can’t maintain 11 carrier battle groups, win Afghanistan, protect Israel, take on Iran, out-educate China, and run a humane society, all while disemboweling government.

On many domestic issues, Paul’s views aren’t that much out of step with the his GOP rivals. Paul wants to shut down the Department of Education. So does Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Paul wants to close down the EPA. So does Bachmann and Newt Gingrich (and Herman Cain, too, if anyone still cares). Paul, like Gingrich, wants to privatize the Post Office. Paul also opposes abortion, supports the repeal of Obamacare, rejects the idea of man-made global warming, champions English as America’s national language, and strenuously opposes illegal immigration. His only major dissents on social issues are the war on drugs (end it), and gay marriage, which he thinks should be left up to the states (as opposed to being pre-empted outright at the federal level).

[. . .]

What Ron Paul is doing, for those who can ignore his crankish ramblings about the gold standard and Letters of Marque and Reprisal, is creating a debate about the fundamental meaning of American greatness. Personally, I believe that his ideas about foreign policy are unrealistic and unsettling. But at least he is doing something that neither Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich nor Rick Perry has the courage to do: Acknowledge that American global leadership carries a price tag that, ultimately, must be paid with higher taxes and bigger government.

Alternatives to ordinary houses: former missile silos

Filed under: History, Military, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:16

A former US Air Force missile silo (with a house and other buildings on the land above) was put on the market earlier this month at a low-low price of only $750,000:

Boing Boing has come across a cozy little place that any future super-villain would be happy to call home on Sotheby’s International Realty website. Situated in the scenic Adirondack Mountains of New York, this silo and air park were operational for a short time in 1961. Hundreds of these Atlas F missile silos were built across the U.S. in the 1960’s in anticipation of attacks on the country.

As if the promise of moving into your very own missile silo isn’t tempting enough, Sotheby’s has recently dropped the price from $4.6 million USD to a mere $750,000. Not a bad deal if you’re looking to save money on your lair so you can splurge on that death ray you’ve always wanted.

In addition to the house perched atop the missile, you may also be interested in the adjoining air craft hanger, seven buildings spread out over neighbouring acres of land and an additional log cabin with runway access. To get the whole package, it’ll cost you $1.76 million USD.

The article also linked to this related video:

Girls from single-parent homes “more resilient” at school than boys

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:55

An article in the Guardian summarizes a recent study’s findings:

Girls appear to be more resilient than boys in preventing problems at home from affecting their behaviour in school, according to a study which aims to explain the educational achievement gap between the genders.

The tendency for girls to perform better in the later years of school has become increasingly pronounced in the UK in the past two decades. In 2011 the percentage point gap between the proportion of girls gaining A* or A grades in GCSE subjects and that for boys hit a record 6.7, up from just 1.5 percentage points in 1989.

Educational researchers have sought to explain the difference through a variety of factors connected to both physiology and environment, including theorising that boys are inherently more resistant to a formal educational system.

But the new study, based on detailed data from 20,000 US children over a decade, found no particular evidence of school-based factors being significant. Instead, it discovered that boys raised outside a traditional two-parent family were more likely to display behavioural and self-control problems in school and were suspended more often. The data ended when the children were about 14, but suspensions are seen as a strong indicator of subsequent poorer educational performance.

This finding, if validated by other studies, implies that the gender gap will continue to widen as more children are being raised in single-parent households now than ever before. Girls’ increasing share of university entrance will continue to grow — although the system will still likely consider girls and young women “more vulnerable” and in need of more systemic support.

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