A story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reinforcing a growing, frightening trend in school systems around the country: students are not allowed to completely and utterly fail.

The concept, according to the article, is to “give kids a chance” to recover when they’ve screwed up for an entire grading period, giving them a grade no lower than 50 percent on any quiz, test or exam.  That means that they never are lower than 50 percent away from perfection, even if they answered the question, “What is Sacajawea?” with “A bag full of jawea.”  (I wish I could claim ownership of that joke, because it’s flippin’ hilarious, but I can’t.)  While giving kids a second chance is a good idea in theory, it’s a horrible, horrible idea in real life.

Now, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to want to lynch me here, but I believe in letting a child fail.  One of the most important skills a person can learn to prepare themself for adulthood is the ability to cope with failure.  Outside of chemical imbalances, I would bet my life that the number one cause of depression in teens is their inability to understand that screwing up happens, and the only way to fix the problem is to try harder.

The best analogy here is the U.S. automakers.  They’ve royally screwed up their standing in the world auto market by producing inferior products on the premise of “status quo is good enough.”  What ultimately happened is they produced crap long enough to allow Japanese makers to surpass them in quality and take a near-stranglehold on U.S. auto sales.  Now, they carry such a stigma of crap that they’re struggling to regain market share in an economy that is refusing to buy the overweight, fuel-consuming vehicles that have been a trademark of U.S. design for decades, even when the cars are now as good or better than their foreign counterparts.

But, rather than letting the companies fail or allowing one of the major manufacturers to purchase another, the U.S. government is proposing ways to bail them out.  In other words, the people who are supposed to be looking out for the better good of the U.S. are recommending we simply scold the problem child of the economy who broke the neighbor’s window, and then pay to replace the window with no consequence to the one(s) who created their own problems to begin with.  The only message that sends is, “we can’t fail, no matter how hard we try.”  And, in doing so, the government is in no way giving the automakers a reason to fix the disease of failure.

It works the same way with kids: if you coddle them while they can still be coddled, they won’t have a clue as to how to fix their real failures when they are adults and will be held fully accountable for their actions.  Under the sudden stress of failure, a situation in which they never found themselves as a child, I’d wager most of them will crack.

So, by telling a kid they will receive half-credit for no effort, we are setting them up to expect that.  If a recent high-school graduate gets his first job after receiving his diploma at a school where zero equals half, do you think that kid is going to put in a full day’s hard work?  Probably not, because they’ve been taught that “good enough is good enough.”  But, in the real world, there are no free rides (except for some shady people under the current, poorly managed welfare system, but that’s a different issue altogether).  Great gets you a promotion, good enough gets you a paycheck until someone better than you comes along, and expecting a second chance lands you in the unemployment line.  That’s how the real world works, and school is supposed to prepare us to handle the everyday challenges we will face in life.  This does exactly the opposite, and contributes to the sense of entitlement so many people have in the world today.

News flash: nobody owes you anything.  I don’t care if you are black or Native American looking for reparations.  I don’t care if you are earning an adequate wage with a merely adequate effort.  No one owes you a dime for what happened to your ancestors, and no one owes you a pat on the back for simply doing your job.  Heck, no one even owes you a promotion for going above and beyond; this is a free-enterprise economy, and if you don’t like your situation, you are responsible for making it better.  Not your boss, not your neighbor and certainly not Uncle Sam.  And in order to be prepared to improve your life, you need to be challenged in school, not pampered.

There’s another downside to this mountain-like issue, too: by flattening out failure, you are cheapening success.  If it isn’t as hard to succeed, people won’t give it the extra effort.  And, thanks to decades of caving to minority factions of the population who think giving a kid an F is harmful to his or her “fragile” ego and to those who believe that spanking lowers self esteem, we’ve spiraled rapidly into nearly unfightable crime and standings in math, science and language that are so low in the developed, modern world that it’s a wonder we’re still even considered a world power.  By attempting to bring up the average through artificial means, we’ve dumbed down the top end of the supply of intelligence.

Bottom line: the failures of those at the bottom end — and I say this with heartfelt apologies (but no remorse) even about the ones who give it an honest effort but still struggle — should not carry a bill that is paid for by those at the top end.  Those who excel should not be hindered by those who don’t.  Period.

I’ve been absent, but with reason: the football season is here, and The Steel Tradition has taken the vast majority of my free time for the last week or so.  But, this was too important to wait on.  No further introduction, just watch.

The Audacity of Hope?  More like Hopeless Audacity.

The two primary non-bashing talking points of the Obama campaign have been “change” and “youth.”  Barack Obama is 47 years old, and has used his age as a weapon to attack the McCain campaign.  Then he picked a 66-year-old senator as his running mate — a guy who is just six years younger than John McCain.  Youth?  Out the window.

Then the Obama campaign — and his “independent” supporters, the so-called unbiased media — had the audacity (you like how I worked that in, don’t you?) to rip into McCain’s vice-presidential selection of 44-year-old Sarah Palin, saying she was too young and inexperienced.  Well, age can’t be a problem, since the three-year difference between them would be, in statistical terms, inconsequential.  And to attack her experience?  Okay, so she hasn’t been in politics as long.  But she governed first over a town, then over a state.  What have you governed over, Mr. Obama?  A campaign?  Being a senator is hardly governing; in fact, you have no constituents, you merely have a region within a state whom you represent.  You have no power, no authority, beyond your meager vote in the senate.  And, when senate decisions are split almost entirely down party lines, your vote doesn’t mean crap.

Palin, on the other hand, has had to oversea an entire state, and to bear the brunt of any bad press that may befall the Alaskan government.  See, the beauty of being a senator or a representative is that you don’t have to be the face of a failure; you vote, move merrily on your way, and then blame the other party if things don’t go your way.  But, as a governor, Palin became the face of a state — a state that is no less than an equal to any other state, regardless of how many people reside there.  She put herself in harm’s way; she doesn’t have an army of fellow party members to laugh or cry with.

Okay, so the youth-and-experience is a pile of bull excrement.  What about change?  John McCain has 26 years of experience as a politician.  The Obama camp has attacked this fact, stating that their candidate hasn’t been in Washington very long, and hasn’t been in town long enough to have become a true politician.  Well, Mr. Obama, your votes are entirely along Democratic party lines.  Where, Barack, is the change?

Not convinced yet?  Okay, I’ve got more.  This man touting the fact that he hasn’t spent much time in Washington went ahead and picked a 36-year political veteran as his running mate.  And Joe Biden has made a career of toeing the party line, too.  Did great things for Delaware?  I lived there.  The state has been on the verge of bankruptcy for about two decades, if not longer.  And don’t get me started on the bunch of whack-jobs who have run the state for the last 12 years.  A foreign policy expert?  The same guy whose cries to bring the troops home only grew louder as the surge in Iraq began to show true dividends?  Don’t forget, Iraq was one of the main talking points during the primaries.  But things on the ground have stabilized — a sign that current strategy is becoming more and more successful — and the topic has suddenly falledn off the political radar.

Palin, on the other hand, has made a history (albeit a very short one) of standing up against traditional government beaurocracy.  Party lines be damned, she’s done what is best for her state.  She’s a maverick in the same mold as her partner in this election, but maintains her conservativism.  She is exactly what the Republican party needed to win in November.  The other party now knows that.

And now they have to find a whole different platform on which to stand.

Upon further review, the price of oil went up last year as a result of high demand overseas.  Unfortunately, the only explanation for this year's jump is greed — and not by the oil companies, most likely.

The actual price of a barrel of New York light sweet crude oil — down to the penny — is controlled by trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).  There are people there buying at higher prices on speculation that prices will rise.  They're doing this because of the perceived weakness of the dollar, but apparently don't realize that their pumping of money into oil is actually accelerating the weakness of the dollar.

See, one of the key factors in the value of a nation's currency is the level of inflation.  As oil prices artificially rise (more on that in a minute), so do the prices of nearly all other goods — after all, it costs more to make them and to ship them if oil is more expensive.  These prices are artificially high — the increase is not a result of supply versus demand.  So the rate of inflation increases.  As the dollar can buy less and less because of inflation, its worldwide value drops, making the whole thing entirely cyclical.

These speculators on Wall Street are simply in this to make a buck, and they are the only ones who stand to gain from oil prices going up (aside from Exxon-Mobil, BP-Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.).  And not just from speculation, either: remember, this is New York City.  There's a pretty good chance most of these guys actually live in NYC, so they never have to drive to work (or to a restaurant, or — GASP! — a gas station.  They don't care about the pain we feel at the pump, because they never feel it themselves.  And don't kid yourselves: most of these dollars going into oil are coming from hedge funds, and rarely is a hedge fund manager not a multi-millionaire.

Oh, about the supply/demand wackiness: a report out earlier this week (I wish I could still find the link) showed that gas consumption has been on a steady decline since about August of last year.  We have used approximately 8 billion fewer gallons of gasoline so far in 2008 compared to the same period in 2007.  And, yet, your price at the pump rises every day. 

Cutting demand will certainly cut gas prices.  But, unfortunately, the dent it will make will be small, and may even be covered by the jerks on Wall Street who don't drive anyway.

The boycotts don't work.

If everyone in America boycotted gassing up their cars for a single day, it wouldn't so much as cause a hiccup.  Why?  Because you still have to gas up the next day.  In the end, all you do is put on a show with no real plot.  But, because we live in a me-first-right-now society, we expect that short-term gains can be achieved in everything we do.  Unfortunately, prices of commodities don't work that way.  They skyrocket upward on speculation, but only fall back down based on proven trends of supply versus demand.  There's only one sure-fire way to bring gas prices back down, and we've all heard it over and over again.  We just don't practice it: reduce overall consumption.  Lower demand, lower prices.

Americans are wasteful.  Horribly, horribly wasteful.  I'm as guilty as anyone, too.  We search for instant convenience at the cost of some far-off comfort we can't fathom right now.  If we had thought about — and accepted as fact — the long-term ramifications of buying gas-guzzling SUVs for no reason other than to say we had the biggest, heaviest, most luxurious vehicle, chances are we'd be driving the smallest vehicles possible while still managing to shuttle our families around.  But, as it stands, we're standing in our own gasoline-soaked grave right now.  Our dependence on fossil fuels has never been higher, and it's getting worse by the day.

Now, don't buy into the liberal hype that our government's domestic and foreign policy is to blame.  As I said a few days ago, the war in Iraq has had, at most, about a 25-cent impact on the price of gasoline, and the highest gas taxes in the country are around 55 cents.  In reality, the cause of the rapid rise in price is something we, as private citizens of the U.S., have little control over: the emergence of both China and India as major economic players.  As their economies improve, their citizens' wealth increases; as people get wealthier, they desire greater luxuries, and in previously under-developed nations, the greatest bang-for-your-buck luxury is an automobile. 

Granted, we in the U.S. still use three times as much oil as China, even though their population is four times what ours is. That's due partly to the established road infrastructure we've developed in over 100 years, and the spread of wealth in this country relative to other nations.  But that's not an excuse; it's an indictment.  We are a top-ten oil-producing nation, but we consume drastically more than we produce, and we do it with such a flippant attitude that it's no wonder we're viewed as arrogant around the world.  All it takes is a little common sense, and we — the most powerful nation in the history of mankind — can begin to sway the price of oil over time.

But it will take time.

Can you cut one mile out of your average daily drive?  That's seven miles per week, people.  It's not asking much.  At an estimated 200 million drivers in the U.S. (a low estimate, considering that statistic comes from 2004), if we cut our driving by one mile per day, we would eliminate 73 billion miles driven per year.  At a rough national average of about 20 miles per gallon (+/- 1 mpg), that comes to 3.65 billion gallons of gasoline saved in a single year.  At 19.2 gallons of gasoline for every 42-gallon barrel of oil, we would save over 190 million barrels of oil, or 520,834 barrels per day.  That's 2.5 percent of this country's daily consumption.  While that doesn't seem like a big deal, it is, and here's why: it's 0.5 percent higher than the average rate of growth in consumption in the U.S.  If achieved globally rather than just domestically, it would be a mere 0.2 percent lower than the expected rate of growth in global demand through 2030.  So, yes, it's a ver, very big deal.

It's beyond possible: it's very achievable.  All it takes is a small amount of discipline, some forethought, and a simple understanding that the best things in life are a result of the patience you put into them and your steadfast belief that it will work.

The judicial branch has gone too far.

People can argue that the executive branch of the U.S. government has become substantially more powerful than the other branches since George W. Bush became our president.  Maybe, maybe not.  But the judicial branch's state-level courts have begun to weild a far greater power.

You can claim that George Bush has stomped on your civil liberties by instituting warrantless wiretaps.  That's an argument for another time, although I can tell you right now that it's not as big a power as the media would have you believe.  But now the courts are forcing ambiguity on individual citizens, and it's starting in San Francisco.

In the U.S., we have the freedom of religion.  We have the freedom of speech.  We have the freedom of peaceful protest.  But apparently we do not have the freedom to choose our roommates using sexual orientation as a criteria.  I, as a conservative Christian, believe that to be of critical importance.  You can call me a bigot all you want; I'm not out plastering the city with anti-homosexuality posters or holding Straight Power rallies in the streets (although they would likely be barred from happening in this modern United States).

This angst comes from a story out of (where else?) San Francisco: Reuters is reporting that a San Francisco court has ruled that Roommates.com cannot ask a registrant's sexual orientation.  The argument made by the judge is that, "not only does Roommate ask these questions, Roommate makes answering the discriminatory questions a condition of doing business."  Okay, maybe that's true, but they are not discriminating based on it.  They are classifying a person based on the answer they give to help those seeking roommates weed out orientations they may not be comfortable with.  Roommates.com is not denying gays or lesbians, and therefore cannot be subject to a discrimination lawsuit.

Here's the real kicker: the people who may or may not "discriminate" against others based on this information are the roommate seekers.  A roommate relationship is not a business relationship.  I have every right to disallow someone from living under my roof based on any criteria I choose, and I'll be damned if this overtly liberal government we're forced to live under right now is going to tell me different.  And if you give a damn about your civil liberties, then you should be up in arms too.  Because this is a much further reaching issue than Bush's warrantless wiretaps — but, while that one spends day after day in the spotlight, this one won't get more than 24 hours' worth of headlines.  I guarantee it.

Mike,making an argument in favor of shipping jobs "across the pond?"  Absolutely, if it's the right thing to do.

I'm a Republican.  I'm a purist conservative.  I believe in what the Republican Party was originally based on: smaller government, less spending, lower taxes, minimized meddling in the affairs of the people, and leaving most decision-making to the state and municipal governments, among many other things.  But we also see the need for strong domestic businesses and a simple economy that desires healthy, legal competition and fair prices.  Unfortunately, the "conservative base" has been left behind by the Republican politicians.  Man, do I ever hate politicians.

I'm driving to a point here: Boeing recently lost a military contract to develop a new line of refueling aircraft to a conglomerate known as EADS — which includes French company Airbus (they, of the Airbus 380 double-decker luxury airliner fame).  Hoo-boy, was the "political right" up in arms about that one.  And so were the Democrats.  To them, it was the equivalent of outsourcing jobs for pennies on the dollar.

This is where the politics come in to play: people looked at the 35,000-foot view (given that this is about aircraft, I swear that was an unintended pun) of the situation: a French company would be building U.S. military aircraft.  How rude.  How cruel.  How Un-American.  How soooo not-apple-pie.

But for the people with their heads on ground-level, and facing the right direction, this was the right thing to do.  First of all, this isn't about shipping jobs overseas; in fact, EADS has promised to build the aircraft, or at least large portions, in a plant they agreed to build in Alabama as part of the contract.  The contract is actually listed under Northrop-Grumman, a long-time defense contractor who will likely be providing a majority of the avionics.  Guess where N.G. is based?  Yup, here in the states.  In fact, the only thing Airbus is providing, as best as I can tell, is the airframe — the "body," basically.

The reasons go beyond this, though.  For one thing, Airbus has, as of late, built a higher-quality aircraft at a more-bang-for-your-tax-dollar price.  On top of that, Boeing won the original contract in a no-bid situation that ultimately led to the dismissal of several top executives who got in deep, steaming crap for conflicts of interest — basically, they did things to win the contract essentially just to line their own pockets.  When all this came to light, several in Washington successfully had the contract nullified and the bidding was re-opened, this time with Airbus allowed to play the game.

Here's where the Democrats had a field day: People working for John McCain, the Republican nominee for the Presidential election this fall, were in the group lobbying to have the contract re-opened.  By picking and choosing their facts, they made it sound as if McCain had lobbied to outsource the program.  In reality, his people lobbied in 2004 to have the Boeing contract overturned because of the impropriety of the entire situation.  He wasn't lobbying in favor of a foreign company, he was lobbying against unfair business practices.  And I don't care who you are; you should be ashamed to call yourself a Republican — or a Democrat, or an American, for that matter — if you can actively and openly support unfair business activities.  We built this nation on fair, open trade and markets and healthy competition for customers, even if that customer is the nation itself.

And here's my final point on the matter: Boeing has had a strong upperhand in military contracts for a long time now, ever since N.G. was purchased by EADS.  They have dominated the U.S. airliner market because of the relatively low cost of aircraft in comparison to overseas competitors due to a weakening dollar and other economic factors.  They have become complacent, and quality has begun to suffer.  Ingenuity has fallen by the wayside, the victim of such large dominance in domestic markets.  If you want another example of this, look to Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft has supplied inferior products for years, simply because they are so ingrained in our American culture that the cost of replacing them in the infrastructure is prohibitive.  When competition is severely crippled, and you have the luxury of forced customer "loyalty," quality is generally the first victim.  By awarding the contract to Airbus, the U.S. government has — intentionally or not — quietly but sternly told Boeing that they now have to earn their contracts on quality, not past reputation and "friends in high places."

I don't care what side of the political fence you are on; if you can't see the good in this situation after examining the facts, you simply don't understand the original goal of our founding fathers to create a fair, free nation, free from political squabbling.  And it's the blurred vision we've developed toward that original concept that is now hindering this nation locally and abroad.   It's time to get back to basics, to understand that Capitalism is only good and successful when it is executed fairly, without underhanded favors.