There's not really a lot new to report from here. I don't start teaching until next month, but there are still things to do--faculty meetings, orientation, class preparation, etc. It's going to be a little different teaching history to students to whom English is their second language. And, I'll be teaching freshman. They must pass an English proficiency test before they are allowed into this Missouri State program, so they won't be complete novices. But, it will take some adjustment.
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There's not much newsworthy, or at least that I want to comment on. The economy in the U.S. remains the big news, and the stock market remains on a yo-yo. President Obama continues to flounder, looking for some explanation for the sour economy. This week he blamed the Arab spring uprisings, the Japanese tsunami, and the European bank mess as part of the reason the American economy is tanking. Frankly, I thought that was pretty sorry of him--and ridiculous--but obviously he's got to find some excuse for the poor economic performance under his administration, and he's certainly not going to admit that his polices are at fault--which they are. There are rumors that he wants to unleash another "stimulus" plan, much bigger than the first one. The Republicans won't go for it, and that will give Obama a chance to condemn the "obstructionist" Republican party. He did that a lot in the first two years of his administration when the Democrats had decided majorities in both houses of Congress and could have passed anything they wanted to and the Republicans couldn't have done a thing about it. Obama is also preaching the usual Democratic sermon of taxing the rich, let them pay their fair share (though they never say how much their "fair share" is). "Close the tax loopholes." Well, ok, close them, that's not going to solve anything. I read the other day that if the government took every single dime of every American making over $10,000,000 (or it may have been $100,000, 000), it would amount to about $230 billion. That wouldn't pay off the debt, of course, wouldn't even make a dent, and would utterly destroy the economy. If I were $2,000,000 in debt and my employer gave me a $5 a month raise, that wouldn't solve the problem. It's a spending problem, not a revenue problem, but "tax the rich" plays to the ignorant. Nobody in America is undertaxed. I did see a headline yesterday where Obama told some agencies to cut their budgets. I didn't read the story so I don't know if he's demanding a real cut (spending less money than they did this year), or if it's a politician's cut, i.e., cutting the projected raise from next year's budget. In other words, instead of getting a 10% budget increase, agency X will only get a 5% increase. Politicians call that cutting the budget. And I'm not joking about that.
I'm not even sure why I keep writing about this stuff, I've already made it plain that I think the whole situation is hopeless. There are too many American enslaved to the government, and the Democratic party especially is going to keep it that way (that's where their votes come from, them and the hate Christianity crowd) until they utterly destroy the American economy. The Republicans couldn't do anything about it if they wanted to, which most of them don't. But I guess as long as people read what I write, I'll keep posting.