Page 4 - Dinuba Sentinel 3-14-19 E-edition

Opinion
A4 | Thursday, March 14,, 2019
In My Opinion
SDocialism has never worked!
oes anyone reading this are espoused in really believe that the the new California government and its hundreds Healthy Youth
Fred Hall
Act, now include a regimen of LGBTQ-inclusive history standards. Beginning in 2017, California fourth graders are being taught that Sally Ride was
Fred Hall - Publisher Rick Curiel - Editor
of thousands of bureaucrats really
do a better job of managing anything than those in the private sector? How can they, when government creates nothing? When decisions are made, they do not put at risk their own money. The funds with which they play so fast and loose have all be co-opted from hard working taxpayers. Their primary construct is to keep the people of the country safe and they refuse to even recognize the crisis on our Southern border because of petty internal political infighting.
There was, once upon a time, a period when our military was the exception to government incompetency but it has become infected with political correctness, which brings
into question combat readiness. Our military is becoming one huge social experiment, which is contrary to my once being told that their job was to break things and win wars.
Now, they’re virtually required to get permission from a lawyer before they can even shoot anyone. Heaven only knows how much we love our soldiers but their missions are often clouded
by the corruption and malfeasance of their leadership. Funds appropriated by Congress for military preparedness are instead being used to pay for transgender services for young people as a method to get the government to pay for transgender operations.
Now that we’ve taken a cursory
look at how inefficient and wasteful our politicians are in Sacramento
and Washington, perhaps we need
to take a realistic look at the “bill of goods” being offered by the Socialist Democrat party when they want to put themselves in charge of everything! This new “woke” generation of Socialist Democrats wants to be in charge of everything Americans are allowed to do. Their pandering with fantastic new “entitlements” brings with it a precipitous reductions in our freedoms.
One of the best questions we could ask of ourselves is, how did we ever get to the point in America where socialism is now increasingly seen as an acceptable alternative to capitalism? For the most straight- forward answer to that question one has only to look at the education of the last three generations of young Americans who passed through our schools and university systems.
We can begin with one undeniable premise: SOCIALISMHASNEVER WORKED ANYWHERE IT HAS BEENTRIED! MargaretThatcher had it exactly right when she said that socialism was fine until you run out of other people’s money!
Everything we hear being espoused by the Democrat party today is so counter intuitive to the American system and the American way of thinking, which made this country as great as it is, leaving one to worry. We feel that the gravity of the situation being advanced by such misguided thinking has to be placed directly
at the door of our current system
of education which seems to have eschewed traditional teaching for their more “enlightened” methods.
Many of those new standards, which
Guest Column
NSever stop pushing elected o cials
ometimes we forget that 1. The movement the progressive movement’s itself must go inside political goal is not just to with those we elect,
the first female lesbian astronaut, Charley Parkhurst was a transgender stagecoach driver in the 1880’s and George Takei is a famous gay activist fighting for marriage equality. There appears to be no time to teach real history. The legacies involved in building this great country are not being passed down to new generations.
As shameful as the way our schools are failing to teach history, the story
of the failure with reading and math. National Assessment of Education Progress reports that 2/3’s of eighth graders were reported as ranked below proficient in both math and reading. The numbers which we reviewed indicate it gets even worse during
the high school years. By the time they graduate only about 4 in 10 high school seniors are proficient in reading and math. With that pitiful base limiting any possibility for success, we then send them off to college where a staff of propagandist professors snow them with a curriculum of political correctness.
Predictably, the diploma mill spits them out neither possessing the
talent nor skills to really make a living at much of anything. They have, however, been thoroughly marinated in correct political thought and are filled with misguided ideas of America, seenthroughacademiclenses. They are then driven to enter the world
of politics and are chomping at the bit to put all those wonderful ideas their professor provided into action. That’s especially dangerous because they know nothing of history and are unable to evaluate that which they are proposing.
That seems pretty much to me how we arrived at this ugly spot in history where the future of this Democratic society hangs in the balance thanks
to a wrong-headed approach by
a government full of bureaucrats
who wanted to be in charge of our educational system and the people our politicians put in charge of the asylum.
Yes, perhaps it seems simplistic, but we think the best way is to return control of our broken educational system to the people with most
at stake—the parents who have childreninthoseschools. Every
time government gets involved with programs like Common Core and The California Healthy Youth Act, one can bet things will go wrong. Government is systemically incapable of running anything, much less the education of our children.
If control is not soon returned to
the parents, we can expect another generation of wrong-headed politicians with unworkable schemes.
But, as always, that’s only one man’s opinion.
Fred Hall is publisher of the Dinuba Sentinel.
Guest Column
Most would agree, we must avoid nuclear war at all cost
I
authorization. In a matter of minutes, millions of lives would be lost, and millions of futures halted permanently.
Not content with our already outsized nuclear arsenal, the United States has put the first so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons into production as well. Misleadingly named, these weapons contain the destructive power of thousands of tons of TNT. To an adversary, they would be visually indistinguishable from high-yield submarine-launched warheads.
n a matter of minutes, as easily as sending a tweet, a sitting U.S. president could decide to launch a nuclear attack, without anyone else’s approval or
At my organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility, we believe that we must prevent what we can’t cure. And there’s no cure for a nuclear war.
No nation on earth, including the United States, would have an adequate emergency response in the event of
a nuclear exchange. Most Americans don’t want us to ever engage in a nuclear war, and the vast majority of us certainly don’t want the United States to be the ones to start a nuclear war.
The United States, like every other nation, has a vested interest in avoiding a nuclear conflict.
Yet unlike other countries, we currently have no policy against starting a nuclear war — or what experts call a “No First Use” policy.
This opens the door to a possible preemptive nuclear strike. That weakens our national security, and it puts all our health and safety at risk — for a nuclear war no one wants.
Luckily, some people in Congress are looking to change the reckless status quo. This year, Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would establish a “No First Use” policy for nuclear weapons in the United States.
“Our current nuclear strategy is not just outdated — it is dangerous,” said Smith and Warren. “By making clear that deterrence is the sole purpose of our arsenal, this bill would reduce the chances of a nuclear miscalculation and help us maintain our moral and diplomatic leadership in the world.”
No First Use is all the more critical now that vital multilateral arms treaties, like the landmark Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between U.S. and Russia, are being ditched in favor of “out-innovating” everybody else, as Trump put it in his last State of the Union address.
Olivia Alperstein
If it sounds like a James Bond villain is hard at work manufacturing an absolute worst-
case scenario, you’re not far off. But in the real world, we won’t be able to rely on a martini-sipping spy to save the day.
So much is at stake here — not least for young people like me, who didn’t grow up practicing “duck and cover” drills during the Cold War, as if hiding under a school desk would protect any of us in the event of a nuclear attack.
Young people like me didn’t jumpstart a nuclear arms race, but we’ll still pay the price. Our future is still ahead of us. We shouldn’t have to inherit a world threatened by nuclear weapons — or by the sheer expense of them.
A 2017 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that it would cost $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to update, sustain, and modernize existing nuclear forces. That’s money that could fund vital infrastructure, health care, jobs, housing, and education programs, and much more — money we’re wasting on weapons that would destroy our future.
No one wins a nuclear war. Everyone loses. The United States can and must lead by committing to an official policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons— for all our health’s sake.
Olivia Alperstein is the Media Relations Manager at Physicians for Social Responsibility. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
elect good officials, but to enact good public policy.
From my eight-year experience as Texas agriculture commissioner years ago, I can attest that the second goal doesn’t necessarily follow the first.
One major pledge of my campaign, for example, was to reduce pesticide poisonings of people and the environment. On taking office, though, I was swarmed by chemical lobbyists, governors, legislators,
and other intimidating forces of the ag-poison complex, demanding that I “move to the middle of the road.”
This onslaught was daunting,
and my resolve wobbled... until farmworker advocates and environmentalists confronted me.
A farmer friend scoffed: “Hell, Hightower, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
That perked me up. We rallied, pushed ahead, and delivered on my campaign promise.
I see three distinct steps for getting good policies from officials who mean well but might back away under pressure:
Jim Hightower
providing aggressive public support
to shore up the progressive agenda that lobbyists and big donors will pressure our new officials to water down.
2. We must confront our electeds when they drift, prodding them privately and publicly to be as bold as their promises.
3. We must ride the momentum of our election victories to push — from inside and out — additional proposals for long-term structural changes to democratize America’s economic, social, and political systems.
Election Day ends the process for choosing good officials, but the next day starts the democratic process for gaining progressive policies. To “win,” we must keep doing what brought
us this far: Organizing, harmonizing, and mobilizing at the grassroots level.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
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