44 thoughts on “$ 4 Clunkers”

  4. In other words, when I moved back to the US I wanted to buy a good used car but if you could find one, it would not be bought on the cheap.

    Government programs that destroy wealth are not good for a people.

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    1. It is becoming more and more apparent to all who have eyes to see that leftist programs are not meant to be good for anyone, other than possibly leftists, and maybe not even for them.

      Biden’s poll numbers are tanking more and more every day.

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  5. Simon, I totally sympathize with your frustrations about American stupidity, but when I look around, I cannot find a country where the people are smarter. Is there one? I am thinking, maybe, Israel? Switzerland? I am not even sure about that, though. Most other countries have surrendered their guns. Americans at least have the sense not to do that.

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      1. That is where they cane people for littering, right?

        Your use of a question mark does not inspire confidence in Singapore, lol 🙂

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      2. We may see whether or not that city-state has the will to standbup to ChiComs.

        It seems China is not yet ready to openly provoke Singapore.

        Is China’s Army trying to send blue water combatant ships to near our Hawaiian Islands?

        Liked by 1 person

    2. America rarely even ranks in the top 20 in academic testing. I believe we were pretty much always in the top 5 if not first across the board from at least the Vietnam era of my uncles through the time my peers were graduating from high school.

      What happened to our public educators?
      Open borders don’t push up the average IQ neither btw krap

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      1. I am not so much worried about academic testing. Europeans test much higher than we do, but what good has that done them? Obviously, our school system is a disaster, but people with high IQs are the ones who created it 😦

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      3. I would rather live in a country with people of average IQ who have basic common sense than in a place like Europe, which is filled to the brim with high IQ people who have been totally indoctrinated. Homeschooling is the best form of education from every angle. If I had kids, I would do it, but high academic scores wouldn’t be my number one reason. Preventing my children from being indoctrinated would be my number one reason.

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      5. I don’t get it. But, at least in America, homeschooling is an option, and it is becoming more popular all the time. In most countries, it isn’t even allowed. That is another really good thing about America 🙂

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      7. Studies are proving that wrong more and more all the time. Home schooled kids do better in every possible way. More and more people are starting to realize this.

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      9. Homeschooled children are socialized by a complete network of other like minded homeschoolers.

        I and others even escorted a co-ed group of homeschooled kids on a whale watching boat out of Honolulu when I was stationed on Oahu.

        Most of the kids were well behaved. Others mysteriously kept falling overboard until receiving the message.

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      11. Homeschooling is allowed as an option, but not accepted on a resume, or college-entrance application, in many jurisdictions, JaC. They’re trying like all get-out to discourage or eliminate it – or even get a place of it (PA CyberSchool Program, for instance.) Tough going for some. I admire those who persevere and succeed – past and present. Back to hiring governesses and tutors at home.

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      12. I recently read NRO that teachers’ benefits are the biggest line item out of the tax bite for public education. How can that in a just world be?

        …yet still no voucher for homeschoolers {99.99%?} of whom pay property taxes in multiple jurisdictions.

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      13. Agree completely. The landscape has changed since my paternal grandparents and an aunt – and even my dad – were teaching, Back then, you viewed it as a calling. You did it for love not money.

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      14. My paternal grandfather had taught in high school or something during the Great Depression. He once showed me a test he gave his students (I think it was math but don’t hold me to it) and it would have required all of my calculus to pass. I was a uni-student at the time.

        Now, it is 24/7/11 indoctrination with no education.
        America is too stupid and lazy to live.

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      15. Had an uncle teaching high school chemistry who got drafted into the Viet Nam era army. Think he said at the time if he were married he might have been able to get a deferral.
        Then shortly after he got out of the US Army, his youngest brother also got drafted into the Army. This uncle told me some interesting stories about drugs and fights in the open squad bays where they all bunked together back in the draft days.

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      16. My opinions of high IQ Europeans are based on what I know about my in laws and Robin’s friends. Two of Robin’s relatives-both highly intelligent and well educated- informed us that 50% of Americans work for the military. Nothing Robin said could convince them that the 50% figure was not accurate. Neither of them had ever even been to America; Robin had been living here for over a decade, but they were convinced that they understood America far better than he did. All of the high IQ people we encountered in Scotland attempted to inform us of what life is like in America, even though none of them had ever been here. I am certain that all of them test very well, but no common sense at all.

        I will take American stupidity over European intelligence every single time. Copyright! 🙂

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      17. We did encounter at least two Trump supporters in Scotland: one was a plumber, the other, a taxi cab driver. There are people with common sense in Scotland, but from what I can tell, most of them are not highly educated.

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      19. And they are all fools who aspire to be European!

        Robin could spot those types from a mile away, and he couldn’t stand them. Being from Europe was a huge advantage for Robin when he was doing high end home improvement sales in New England. He would go into the homes of these lefties, and because he was from Europe, they would fall all over him, and he would just totally work it, and laugh all the way to the bank. But, he was not impressed with them at all. He railed against those types of people when he commented at the New York Times, and he was always asking me why, if these people thought Europe was so great, then why wouldn’t they just move there?

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      20. Yes, the same Omega who community organized across America the BLM when guilt ridden suburban white women re-elected one of the least righteous black men on the planet.

        Come on man!

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    1. I hear what you are saying about the decline in education, from when your Grandfather taught high school. One thing to consider: 1940 was the first year that half of Americans graduated from high school. In the years preceding that, many Americans didn’t even attend high school, never mind graduate from it. In those days, of course, most people worked either on farms on in factories doing manual labor. Education was not viewed as imperative to making a living. That is probably a big part of the reason why they were more honest and hard nosed back then.

      Now that education is seen as imperative to making a living, grade inflation, lowered standards, and passing kids on to the next grade whether they know anything or not has become the norm. But, I don’t think there was ever a time when most Americans understood calculus. High school used to be far more demanding than it is now, partly because far fewer people attended, and fewer than that graduated. My Dad never graduated from high school, and he was brilliant, but in those days, a high school diploma was not seen as such a big deal.

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    2. I never asked my Dad why he dropped out of high school. He never volunteered that information, and it just didn’t feel right to ask him about it. He really was brilliant: whatever his reasons, I am certain that it had nothing to do with lack of academic ability. I am not sure of the time line, but he would have dropped out for one of two reasons: in order to enlist to fight in WWII, or in order to get a job to help support his family for a little while before he enlisted to fight in WWII.

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      2. Yup. My Dad was, is, and always will be, totally awesome. And when he returned home, he didn’t go back to school on the GI bill because he immediately became the primary breadwinner for his family. My grandfather died while my dad was in the Pacific, and my dad was the oldest kid, and practically the only one who was even old enough to work at that time.

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      3. I am not clear on how old my Dad was when he dropped out of school, and there is no one left to ask about it: they have all passed on. I always just naturally assumed that he dropped out at age 16 or afterward, because in my time, that was how people did it, but in the old days, it is very possible that he dropped out even younger than that. His family was very poor. Given that it was the depression, his parents would not necessarily have objected to him dropping out at a very young age in order to get a job.

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      5. I will ask. I am thinking she may not know either. There was a great deal even she didn’t know until my Dad died, and we never would have known if it hadn’t been for the funeral director. The funeral director looked up my Dad’s military records, and wrote the obit: my Mom never knew anything about my Dad’s military record until the funeral director educated us. But, I will ask her.

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      6. Learning all kinds of things about people whom I close to after they die seems to be a recurring thing in my life, and it isn’t just my Dad. One of my aunts had a PhD in nursing education. She lived a couple of hours away in Boston, a totally different world, and she told us that she was a college professor, which she was, but we learned after she died that she was far more than just a college professor. She sat on the board of a hospital, and was recognized as an expert in the treatment of, if I remember correctly, diabetes. She would travel around the country giving speeches about it. She was far more successful than she ever told us.

        Robin is another one: I found out after he died that he knew how to speak Arabic! He never said anything to me about knowing any foreign language, other than a few swear words in Polish, but according to the guy who owns our local convenience store (the guy comes from Egypt) Robin spoke Arabic pretty well. He never spoke one word of it when I was around, but apparently he and this guy would have conversations in Arabic when I wasn’t around.

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      7. My Dad was never one to speak much about the past, and I always felt weird asking him about it. A few months before he died, I did try to ask him a little bit about Peleliu, but he gave me a story that I later found out was made up. He told me that he spent a few days patrolling a beach on Peleliu and then was sent back to the ship because of dysentery. Not true, and I know it is not true because of my Mom. He never told her much either, but she was with him on one occasion when he told another veteran that he had been in Peleliu. This veteran asked him if he had been on the mountain, and he said yes. ” You are very lucky that you got off that mountain.” the veteran said to my Dad, and that is the truth.

        My Dad never said anything to me about being on the mountain. For those who don’t know, TPTB thought it would be very easy to take Peleliu. They didn’t realize that the Japanese had spent months fortifying a mountain on the island, which was full of caves which were filled with Japanese soldiers. Peleiu was one of the bloodiest campaigns in the war: according to what I have read, the only real reason people don’t know about it the way they know about Iwo Jima is because Peleliu was embarrassing to the TPTB. It is not all at clear that the battle of Peleliu was ever really necessary, and they didn’t want to call attention to it.

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    3. A distant cousin whom I had never met before stopped by my Mom’s place and spent the afternoon a month or so ago. She is doing family genealogy, and wanted to speak with my Mom, who proved to be an invaluable resource for her, but I also learned some things from this cousin. One of my uncles did not initially want to go to college. There was a foundry in his town, which paid very well, and he figured that he could make a good living if he spent his life working at this foundry. Several of his older male relatives actually did spend their lives working at that foundry, and they decided that they would not allow him to do it. He got hired, but his male relative co workers made life such hell for him that he felt he had no choice but to quit and enroll in college. Which was exactly what they wanted.

      The foundry paid well, but from the way my cousin described it, it was beyond hellish. That was back in the day when there no health or safety requirements or anything like that. Much of the negativity towards people who don’t go to college actually started with the kinds of guys who forced my uncle to go to college, and they did it with the best of intentions. They went through sheer and utter hell in that foundry, and they just didn’t want their sons and nephews to live that way, so if you didn’t go to college, you were an idiot, no woman should ever look at you, etc….: they were pretty harsh, but they had their reasons. They were not coming from a place of snobbishness.

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