The New Jersey disconnect

MetLife Stadium is in New Jersey, the state Democrats are trying to say the won in the 2021 gubernatorial election.  Meanwhile at a recent soccer match, the entire MetLife stadium did this (warning, language):

The whole stadium was chanting, or at least nearly so. There's a disconnect between counted votes and the reality on the ground.  Make no mistake, "found ballots" will always be enough to put Democrats over the top in some states, but there is an emergent disconnect between winners and reality.

They're not even denying it any more

They don't care about the disconnect, they don't care that you know, which means they don't care about you.

Where does that leave you?  If you don't care about this, you will become a slave to the state.  If you do care about this and don't do anything, you will become a slave to the state.  If you care and you do something and it isn't enough, you will become a slave to the state.

The only way out of this, the only way, is to do something and help others to see and have them do something too, alongside you.

WHCD a disconnect with America

The president as pointed out by critics on the right, was full of 'others-deprecating' humor as usual at the latest iteration of the WHCD (White House Correspondents Dinner).  The tradition of self-deprecating humor was paid an ever-so-brief nod before the president started skewering everyone else, particularly his political foes.  There are plenty of examples to choose from, but there is more reason to not care.

Politico had a couple of articles about the WHCD, one of which points out the partisan opportunity the president sees the dinner as presenting.  Keeping in mind he's playing to a predominantly liberal media gathering, the receptive crowd would play into the notion that the direction the president is taking the dinner is okay.

Obama is much more likely to reserve his sharpest flashes of wit for his adversaries, antagonists and even (in a kind of throwback Henny Youngmanesque style) for the wife he invariably portrays as hectoring...

Obama generally eschews the kind of deadly self-directed stinger George W. Bush delivered at his first Gridiron Club dinner in 2001, when he allowed: “Those stories about my intellectual capacity do get under my skin. You know for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, ‘Intelligence Briefing.’” And near the end of his tenure, Bush said he was considering “something really fun and creative” for his memoirs, “You know, maybe a pop-up book.”

The other Politico article, even goes so far as to bring up New York Times Magazine National Correspondent Mark Leibovich, who complains about the WHCD as an abomination.

"I think that it’s morphed into this extravaganza of more than two dozen pre-parties and after parties, and we have to ask ourselves, what are we celebrating exactly?" he said on ABC's "This Week."

"This is a classic case of the bubble world and the unselfawareness of spending however millions of dollars over a number of days to celebrate ourselves and again I ask, why?" he said.

Leibovich makes a valid point, particularly when it comes to the bubble world. That bubble is the inside the beltway political class and the media cabal that lives in it`s own atmosphere, unaware of how they look from the outside.  Therein lies the reason to not care.  The more into the bubble the beltway folks go, the further the disconnect, and the less relevant their opinions become to America at large.

CNN, which recently made it clear it would like to become less of a news channel and more of a news magazine style channel played the WHCD like it was the Oscars.  Whether it was part of that re-branding effort, an attempt by the liberal media to allow the president the opportunity to skewer the right in a seemingly lighthearted manner or a bit of both is not clear.   But the red-carpeting of the event was clearly a disconnect with the mean-spirited monologue of the president.

Even those who seemed to appreciate the dinner itself were down on CNN's SuperBowlesque dedication to the event.

CNN dedicated no less than six hours to its White House Correspondents’ Dinner coverage on Saturday night, and the reviews weren’t a whole lot better than the network’s widely-panned MH370 coverage. Primetime anchor Don Lemon led the coverage with important anecdotes about how he had a hard time recognizing who was who at the event, showing off the cue cards he was using to identify celebrities during CNN’s extensive red-carpet coverage. The network bizarrely brought on actor Michael Torpey, most recognizable from Chase Freedom’s ads, and former conservative speechwriter (and current boring curmudgeon) Ben Stein to help interpret the evening’s best jokes. (Spoiler: Stein thought they were mean, unfunny, and uncomfortable. We’d mostly disagree.)

That`s why it does not matter. The inadvertently us-and-them event has been paraded out as an in-your-face-America spectacle. Should those within an industry be allowed to celebrate their achievements?  Of course.  But what is the harm in keeping that celebration private?  This is NOT the Oscars (despite all the stars in attendance, another problem with the event).  The pomp and circumstance is especially inappropriate given the high unemployment rate, the historically terrible labor participation rate and the declining median income in America.

More importantly, this is not going to going to make anyone like president Obama any more or any less.  Those opinions have already been set and are already firmed up.  The WHCD comes across as more mean-spirited than it would in good times.  So the sniping at the GOP is irrelevant. There's no reason to care because the disconnect of these people with the rest of the country makes their case that much harder to make.

For those of you on the left, particularly those who identify with the 99% movement, how do you reconcile your agenda with this?  When the likes of Van Jones are in attendance, clearly there is a big disconnect between the liberal elite agenda and your own.

A generational cause - school vouchers

Let's start with the disconnect. Though many liberal progressives would have you believe otherwise, the American education system is in decline.

Though spending per pupil has more than doubled since 1970 after allowing for inflation, students continue to rank low in international comparisons; dropout rates are high; scores on SATs and the like have fallen and remain flat. Simple literacy, let alone functional literacy, in the United States is almost surely lower at the beginning of the 21st century than it was a century earlier. And all this is despite a major increase in real spending per student since "A Nation at Risk" was published.

Yet America despite this issue, America has generally prospered over the same period of time. Science has continued to drive innovation but education is failing our society. How is that possible?  There is the disconnect that allows liberals to claim that public education must clearly be doing something right.  But the education system is the problem. The (temporary) solution has come from somewhere else, as Dr. Michio Kaku explains:

The fix Dr.Kaku describes, has clearly started to outlive it's maximum efficiency. Those who learn no longer stay in America - they return home.  America is diffusing it's technological advantages because they've tried to replace domestic educational greatness with the 'magnet effect'.  It worked, but it will not continue to work. Another solution must be constructed. So if the problem is that education system in America is not enough to create a sufficient American pipeline of genius and thus innovation, what then is the solution? The answer isn't anything new. Milton Friedman had the answer decades ago (for a terrific, more detailed explanation, see here).

The principal argument comes between 0:33 and 1:08.  It's simple.  The alternative to his solution is perhaps not a catastrophic decline but a slow painful death of American prosperity that is already underway.  The migration of higher education will continue towards a greater and greater percentage of higher education going to foreign nationals, aided by their growing prosperity.  As that happens the American ability to compete will decline as these learnings are brought  back to other nations and used to improve everything from education, to manufacturing to innovation.  America is effectively exporting its competitive advantage.  What that means over time, is an economic decline, followed by a financial decline and a military decline and any other type of decline that you can imagine.  

I've argued in the past that politically, conservatives have to make whatever inroads they can, be they  small or large.  Some RINOs may be a necessary evil for example.  The reason that I believe this is that when it comes to America's accelerating slip into the abyss, it is being aided and abetted by an unwitting populace, placated by the never-fulfilled promise of an easy path to "hope".  As a result, anything that can be done to halt the decline of America, must be done - even if it means slowing the decline in some ways rather than being a purist and sticking to an all or nothing mentality.  With all or nothing, you can end up with nothing.  The world cannot afford a void in place of America.  With conservative impurities, you can build towards fixing the problem in a better way later, you are just buying yourself more time to make the right fixes.

A solution to America's problem, one as simply and eloquently stated by Milton Friedman decades ago, does not happen overnight even if you need it to be overnight.  A redefining of H1Bs may be a temporary fix., but the real fix is fixing what happens here in America.  School vouchers would do that.  That is a major paradigm shift that requires a growing understanding among the electorate which in turn requires a more balanced media, outreach programs to explain the idea to the disenfranchised and not least of all, an opportunity to move in that direction, which requires more Republicans in power.