Utopia, you are standing in it!

The biggest problems in New Zealand’s schooling system are poor literacy and numeracy. This results from factors such as too little direct instruction as compared to child-led learning, inadequate use of phonics, and “fads” such as modern learning environments. We also lack a knowledge-rich national curriculum that gives all New Zealand students a good educational start in life, and with this a basis for democracy and civil society. The evidence is that socio-economic background is the main determinant of differences between Māori and non-Māori educational achievement.

Given all this, it is surprising how much emphasis the Ministry of Education (MoE) is giving to race as a key variable in education. MoE seems more focused on promoting Māori racial and cultural identity than, for example, professional identities. “Māori succeeding as Māori” is a recurring trope. A wisely sardonic Māori kuia once said to me that New Zealand has too few Māori…

Last week Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence hosted the 10^th International Indigenous Research Conference. Dr Rhys Jones from Auckland University delivered the keynote address titled: “Indigenous climate justice: from decarbonisation to decolonisation and relational restoration.”

Dr Jones argued that “climate change is really just one manifestation of colonialism or an intensification of the environmental impacts of colonisation.” He stated that “modern colonial societies have really been built on the process of genocide and ecocide, and can only continue through ongoing genocide and ecocide.” He then said “we have got to think not just decarbonisation but decolonisation. What that really means is committing to upholding indigenous rights and restoring indigenous sovereignty.”

The relationship Dr Jones posits between colonisation and carbon emissions is not well supported statistically. The largest cumulative emissions since the industrial revolution have been from the US, China, Russia, Germany and…

The worst of all the  damage this government has done,  and is continuing to do, to the country is racial privilege and division.

Creating victims in the present and future because of what happened in the past, creates more problems for them and for the rest of us.

Compensation for  past wrongs is fair and just. Political and economic privilege for a few because of past wrongs is not.

Policies to help people must be based on what is needed now, not past injustices.

Casey Costello explains why we must all be treated equally and that the government has a role in  providing equal opportunity but not equal outcomes.

Interesting that this is on Australian television.

Would local broadcasters give air time to these views?

With the death of the childless Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, his nephew, Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York became the heir-general of King Edward III of England.

Richard Plantagenet’s mother was Anne Mortimer (born on December 27, 1388) the eldest of the four children of Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March (1374–1398), and Eleanor Holland (1370–1405).

Anne’s father was a grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second surviving son of King Edward III of England, an ancestry which made her father Roger Mortimer a potential heir to the throne during the reign of the childless King Richard II.

Upon Roger Mortimer’s death in 1398, his claim to the throne passed to his son and heir, Anne’s brother, Edmund, 5th Earl of March. In 1399, Richard II was deposed by Henry IV of the House of Lancaster, making Edmund Mortimer a dynastic threat to the new king, Henry IV…

Does the United States have a market-based health care system or a socialist health care system?

That’s not an easy question to answer.

Because of Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs, taxpayers directly finance about 50 percent of overall health expenditures. Does that mean we have a 50-percent socialist system?

Once again, there’s no easy answer.

On one hand, Uncle Sam does not operate the hospitals and employ the doctors and nurses (like we see – often with horrifying consequences – in the United Kingdom).

But on the other hand, policies in Washington (not just Medicare and Medicaid, but also the tax code’s exclusion for fringe benefits such as employer-provided health care) have replaced market forces with a massive third-party payer problem.

While there’s no easy answer, my back-of-the-envelope guess from back in 2013 is that the US health system is 79 percent government and 21 percent…

My thought when I saw the title of this economics piece:

MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good

MMT stands for Modern Monetary Theory and you’ve likely seen it pushed by Lefties in the last decade, including some commentators here.

It was never as smart as its proponents claimed, being merely an extension of Keynesian economics, except that with MMT the government simply blew created credit into an economy and then used increased tax rates to suck it back out when the economy grew too hot (meaning inflation) – as opposed to the rather mundane world of Keynes where the State simply runs budget deficits and piles up debt during a recession and then runs budget surpluses during economic expansion and uses those to pay down the debt.

New Zealand actually did this from the early 1990’s until recently under a succession of National and Labour governments…

By Brent Bozell and Tim Graham ~

On July 26, the news and documentary Emmy Award nominations were announced, and PBS topped the list with 45 nominations. CBS led the broadcast networks with 31 nods, followed by ABC with 20. CNN and HBO each received 22 nominations.

MSNBC had 5, Vice News had nine, Al-Jazeera International USA had five, and The New York Times (for videos!) had seven. Even the liberal website Vox had three.

The Fox News Channel, which leads in cable-news viewership year after year after year, had none. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

Given the liberal tilt of the news industry, did Fox News even submit its work for nominations by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences? Fox didn’t return comment when we asked. But there are plenty of reasons to be disgusted by what’s being nominated for excellence in 2017. It has nothing…

By Tim Graham ~

Chalk this up as 60 Minutes hosting the worst peddler of false knowledge since Dan Rather left the set.

CBS kicked off 2023 by touting “mass extinction” blather by Paul Ehrlich, the guy who’s been peddling radical and misanthropic eco-garbage since his book The Population Bomb in 1968.

That screed began: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

This may qualify as the drop-dead dumbest announcement of the Sixties and should have disqualified him from the status of Expert by the end of the 1970s. But the left-wing media never tire of him. They can’t get enough of this ecological self-loathing. The human race is always a pestilence on the planet.

Pelley led off the show with Ehrlich…