Thanks for the warning ... as a veteran of the the mindless rhetoric wars I am largely immune to insult ... I have a number of soft insults that I use when I'm under heavy fire. The problem today is largely that very few actually learn how to think and reason instead they learn how to be emotional and mindless ... the reason? well ... check this out for example: Common Core bringing you mindlessly indoctrinated children.

http://politicalbrambles.blogspot.com/2013/05/this-is-not-education-it-is.html

T***h trumps stupidity or more politely wishful thinking. Most of what passes for thought on the left is wishful thinking. They advance programs and strategies that have failed wherever they have been tried and act like doing it again would yield a different result. That amounts to Einstein's definition of insanity. So when one claims that liberals are insane one has at least one advocate.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein

Well I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean other than the implication that it's a slam. I have a lot of life experience to make my judgments and I call'em as I see'em.

I don't know who Roy Schneider is because I don't spend a lot of time glued in front of the television or wherever he might be seen.

If you disagree perhaps you'd provide something substantive. Of course if you're a liberal you likely can't do that.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40544897/ns/us_news-life/t/wake-up-call-us-students-trail-global-leaders/#.UZwG-MpamB4
"Out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math."

Since I've taught college algebra to freshmen who have already had two years of algebra and done it quite a few times I can tell you that after two years of high school algebra fully a third of our incoming freshmen could not test out of algebra. That meant they had to take it and they were terrible because they also didn't have adequate pr********n for it.

A third of my students could not write cursive. At least that many had difficulty writing grammatical sentences or even knowing when a sentence was a sentence and when it was not.

Direct experience is not conservative or liberal ... it's just he facts as Sgt. Joe Friday used to say. (hint: D**gnet)

Thank you Tasine ... I agree. It's quite evident that the folks that stirred up all the left wing trouble in the 1960s then got involved in the universities as teachers. There is that old adage that those that can do and those that can't teach. It's a bit unfair to teachers, but I think it captures the l*****t crowd.

I just finished my fourth career which was to be a college professor teaching math and computer science and did that for 10 years rounding out a career of fifty years from about 1962 to 2012.

I've watched as the schools have been dumbed down to an incredible degree, how serious history of the origins of the United States has been neglected in preference for such things as sex education. Cursive writing is rarely taught and mathematics, especially arithmetic has become 'calculator' so that the kids entering collect can't take notes in many cases, can't do basic arithmetic without a calculator, and mostly know almost nothing about English grammar. There are lots of exceptions but a large percentage fit this profile.

Most education has become indoctrination and so what you get are little s***es that want to be told how to do everything and are resentful if they followed directions but didn't get the right answer because they quit rather than following through.

It's all very sad. I know one teacher who left the profession because she was so disheartened by the attitude the students had that they were entitled to grades if they worked hard (said they worked hard) even if they could not do the material.

These are the kinds of citizens that are easily led by the left collectivists who seek to turn the United States from a country of free citizens to a country of slavish "workers" who take orders well and can be 'managed.'

We stop it now or we go down to Sheol. I think it is that serious.

It is sad and fundamentally immoral as well ... it may account for the fact that the schools have been dumbed down to the point that no-one any longer knows what morals are. That would be teaching religion they tend to say ... odd since that would imply that only religious people can be moral, which is untrue but a measure of the stupidity passing these days for sense.

Those who expect government to care for their every need must contend with the problem that government produces nothing and so can only provide to someone what they take from another. That makes government pursuing such a strategy a "Cosmic Robin Hood" and hence a thief and a brigand however well intended and romantic.

This process extended produces poverty and misery in the long run. As Maggie Thatcher said "Socialism work until you run out of other people's money." Unfortunately by that time you've impoverished the nation and ens***ed the people as well as destroyed their initiative so that recovery is painful and long delayed.

Thanks for the welcome Dutchman. I finally signed on after looking at the forum for a number of days as it popped into my email box. I personally think we have our work cut out for us. We need to return to a system motivated by principles and virtue and not by power, control, and corruption.

I don't really care what party someone is affiliated with so much as whether they truly value freedom and liberty and the vision of the Founders of America. We seem to me to be on track to loose the republic and join Athens and Rome in the list of great political experiments that ultimately failed. Time to push back hard because anything less will likely fail.

My name is Ray Schneider. I'm a four career person now retired: 1) U.S. Navy scientist 1962-1977, 2) Sperry Defense Systems Division (1977-1989), 3) Director of Engineering of small instrument company (1989-2001), 4) Full Time professor of computer science and information technology 2001-2012 ... now retired.

http://politicalbrambles.blogspot.com/ is my blog (well one of the many) and the only fundamentally political one. I'm a conservative small government Founding Father's vision kind of person. I don't have much use for low information v**ers and liberals (I know that's redundant).