{"id":212,"date":"2016-09-03T23:37:37","date_gmt":"2016-09-04T03:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/?p=212"},"modified":"2016-09-03T23:42:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-04T03:42:21","slug":"facts-are-stubborn-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/?p=212","title":{"rendered":"Facts are stubborn things"},"content":{"rendered":"

Famously uttered by John Adams in his defense of the British soldiers who participated in the Boston Massacre the entire quote admonishes that “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.<\/em>” \u00a0I would say that this remains an exceedingly sound admonishment for ourselves and our progeny. \u00a0I wonder, however, if we truly understand the profound nature of the observation as it pertains to our lives as well as the situation in our nation and the world around us.\u00a0 I believe that far too many of our children and our countrymen have lost their grip on the boundaries of reality.\u00a0 We seem to have become very much a society ruled by the \u201cdictates of our passions\u201d even in the face of facts to the contrary.\u00a0 Our nation follows passion at the expense of truth plunging further and further down the road to destruction and doing so with wild abandon.<\/p>\n

Our leaders tell us that a major part of the American dream is home ownership.\u00a0 Those leaders then instruct financial institutions to grant loans to borrowers regardless of their actual creditworthiness.\u00a0 This, they tell us, is necessary to insure an equal share in the American dream for all members of society.\u00a0 People pick up the cry and let us know that they are passionate about this issue and agree that we must do this because for far too long these deserving contributors to our nation have been denied their just reward.\u00a0 The people granting the loans, our leaders and many of us know that this is a bad idea but passion prevails and voila you\u2019ve got yourself a massive real estate bubble that our leaders blame on private industry.\u00a0 There is no doubt in my mind that the banks and the loan institutions share blame in this but how can we blame them wholly when it is their regulatory overlords who required that the loans be made in the first place?<\/p>\n

Passion 1 \u2013 Common Sense 0!<\/p>\n

Our forefathers were educated in one room buildings and small schools with no computers and limited resources.\u00a0 Despite these supposed handicaps they routinely completed their primary education in their mid-teens with knowledge of classical literature, important historical documents such as the Magna Carta and Hammurabi\u2019s code as well as the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and more.\u00a0 Our forefathers were well versed in the Bible and a variety of socially and spiritually important texts as well as a strong awareness of the happenings of the time.\u00a0 Even without the internet, Facebook, common core and endless government funds our ancestors knew what was happening in their town, their state and their nation.\u00a0 Today we are routinely chastised for not putting enough investment (read taxes) into our schools and our students (read teachers unions).\u00a0 The United States of America spends in excess of $10,000.00 per child on an annual basis for education.\u00a0 We are paying exorbitant sums of money to our education system and continually getting less for our children and their future.\u00a0 This is an extremely passionate issue that pulls on everyone\u2019s heart strings because \u201cit\u2019s for the children\u201d.\u00a0 As with other issues we buy the claims of our leaders who remind us ad nauseam that we only need to put more money into our children\u2019s education to achieve the desired results.\u00a0 Every piece of evidence worth viewing tells us that the simple truth is that the amount of money we spend has neither a corollary nor a causal relationship to the quality of our children\u2019s education.\u00a0 Still, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary we continue to dodge the truth and let passion win the day.\u00a0 Our nation gets poorer, our children remain ignorant, our young adults get indoctrinated and our liberty slides further down the path to oblivion.<\/p>\n

Passion 2 \u2013 Common Sense 0!<\/p>\n

I cannot hope to enumerate all of the asinine propositions we continually fall prey to in the guise of fairness, social justice, equality and saving our children.\u00a0 We buy it every time and not once do we make the pathetic liars that propagate the lies pay for their pathological insincerity.\u00a0 From Climate change to government control of our air, water, soil, forests, minerals, animals, oceans, beaches, parks and on and on and\u2026<\/p>\n

Passion Wins with a shutout!<\/p>\n

My friends if we can\u2019t bring ourselves to vote the unresponsive, pocket stuffing fat cats out of office and we can\u2019t shut down government programs then we are truly doomed.\u00a0 We cannot select the same leadership year after year and experience continued failure without at some point blaming ourselves and our selected leaders for the failure.<\/p>\n

As Mr. Adams said \u201cfacts are stubborn things\u201d!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Famously uttered by John Adams in his defense of the British soldiers who participated in the Boston Massacre the entire quote admonishes that “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” \u00a0I would say that this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,52,50,49],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political","tag-crash","tag-decline","tag-education","tag-stubborn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecommonpatriot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}