Politicians Hypocrisy, Education Plummets, Nero Fiddles as Rome Burns
#38 2023 The Rowen Report
Dear Subscriber,
I generally don’t bring up politics on this page except for medicine and the environment. However, California has made waves in the alleged “green” movement regarding climate change, but now it seems our Progressive governor, Gavin Newsom, in the face of a fiscal crisis in the state, wants to back out of helping out mass transit, once touted as the savior of the private automobile craze led by the Golden State. Also note that California is doing all in its power to phase out gasoline powered cars in the next decade.
This is interesting to me. California is funding all kinds of things, like putting homeless in comfortable hotels, welcoming a totally dysfunctional southern border and illegal immigrants (which will use taxpayer funds for their medical care and other services). California has also become a state sanctuary for minors seeking gender identity affirmation as well as abortions, and paying for abortions.
We Californians are force fed “news”, literally daily, of climate change in our mass media. Yet in a strange twist of things, Newsom is cutting mass transit funding championing the “green” movement. I really don’t get the hypocrisy. He is desperate to cut California’s contribution to CO2, but will punish the mass transit riders who are helping the cause. To me, this is a fine example of the Progressive ideology. It just doesn’t make sense. San Francisco is in crisis. Crime is raging so bad that major retailers in the heart of the city are leaving, shuttering their facilities, fearing safety for their employees and customers. San Francisco is one of the lunatic cities with George Soros funded DAs that have decided that stealing from stores is an acceptable lifestyle, so chain stores and major retailers are simply abandoning the city, while the city leaders seemingly blame the retailers, claiming that the stores did not have a long-term commitment to the city.
I look at it differently. I say that the city did not have a long-term commitment to protect the stores from hoodlums and common law criminals. The businesses are also taxpayers. They have/had a right to expect protection and prosecution of those who would brazenly walk into their shops and steal. But theft is encouraged. If you steal less than $1000, you don’t get prosecuted. Videos are posted online of thieves just walking out with goods in plain view of shop owners. People don’t want to walk streets where there is human feces amongst the crowded and open drug users obstructing the sidewalks. You can expect your windows smashed and your car contents grabbed if you have anything visible in a parked car in the city.
How could the city expect them to stay? But the nature of those in that political ideology is to blame the other guy rather than look in the mirror, similar to the plight of modern chemical-based medicine’s failures.
I would say the ultimate cause is the voters who see their living conditions decline but allow themselves to be hoodwinked by a Leftist agenda and an all-powerful and malignant government ideology. I cannot understand how the voters in Washington and Oregon did not rise up and overthrow their Rulers in the last election after the lawlessness permitted in the summer infernos and riots sponsored by a corrupt communist run corporation with a fancy name, which has enriched its founders personally.
I went to medical school at University of California San Francisco from 1971 – 1975. It was my first time away from the east coast, and I was enthralled with the city. I simply loved it. I would not want to live there today, under any circumstances. I see it as a dying city, and I see the state on a course towards self-destruction, led largely by an electorate where more than 51% lives off the government teat, accelerating the demise of the concept of personal self-sufficiency which built this nation.
This is tied directly into medicine, where the average person is removed from taking responsibility for his/her own health but instead will place it in the hands of what the government or insurance company or state will pay for, which, generally, is a “genetic” inborn deficiency of some petrochemical pharmaceutical.
American governments were instituted to protect our rights. Those rights include from running a legitimate business safely, providing for ourselves and our families, and looking after our own bodies. In medicine, the government decides what diseases you are allowed to have (via coding) and the treatments (drugs/surgery) you are allowed for the diseases you are permitted to have. And after government and insurance depletes your wallet, how can you fend for yourself? Heck, its ok for Pharma/FDA approved therapies to addict you, but not for street sellers. The effect on you is largely the same, only the former gets to addict you without consequences.
Under our medical system, people financially collapse under that strain, as businesses have financially collapsed in San Francisco and elsewhere. When it comes full circle to transit, perhaps after we have no more automobiles and mass transit infrastructure crumbles, government will have what it wants – the citizenry kept in place, physically as well as mentally.
Please think about what has happened at the hands of government in the last 100 years in the USA.
Regarding the mental control, we are seeing it in action with our children in the news of even today. Here, we see a continuing plunge in math and reading scores in our children: https://www.axios.com/2023/06/21/schools-students-reading-math-test-scores-decline. In the meantime, children are not taught basic American history, but instead get a totally twisted historical perspective of what our nation is about, and indoctrination into New Age human sexuality instead, which, I believe, should have no place in schools. (See post script regarding the plunging scores).
While this may seem like a smorgasbord of comments, I do think there are a lot of dots to connect here, that the “sheeple” have missed. I do think that “Nero is fiddling while Rome burns”. Nero is reference to our political Rulers and Rome is reference to our communities.
I think our community of readers of these posts can and do see into the deliberately created haze. We might have one last opportunity to gain control of the rudder of the wayward ship in November 2024.
To Your Excellent Health,
Robert Jay Rowen, MD
PS Here is really need to know information from the axios site mentioned above. What future does this nation have if our youth don’t know its history or reason for existence?
………..
American students' test scores in math and reading got significantly worse last year — continuing a decade-long freefall.
Driving the news: The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to newly released federal data.
Details: The findings come from a test known as "The Nation's Report Card" — a continuous, national assessment of 13-year-old students. Results were distributed by the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department.
By the numbers: Math and reading scores began declining in 2012, and average scores are now lower than they were before the pandemic.
The average math score for 13 year olds declined 9 points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years.
The average reading score for 13 year olds declined 4 points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years.
About 8,700 students took the assessments at about 460 schools across the country.
The lowest-performing students scored at levels last recorded in the 1970s, when the assessment began.
Scores declined among all racial and ethnic groups, and among both male and female students, and across urban, suburban and rural areas.
Enrollment in algebra dropped from 34% of 13 year olds in 2012 to 24% in 2023.
And fewer students said they frequently read for fun, which is associated with higher achievement.
What they're saying: Post-pandemic academic recovery should be addressed holistically, including students' mental health, basic skills and teacher absenteeism, said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner for assessment for the National Center for Education Statistics.
"Students' basic skills were disrupted in a way that we would not have thought before," Carr said. "These data are clear on that point."
What we're watching: Test results from earlier this year showed that U.S. history scores among middle schoolers are also falling — dropping to the lowest levels ever recorded since the assessment began in 1994.
Reading and math scores of elementary school students also plummeted, demonstrating the far-reaching effects of education changes during the pandemic.
When the Left's policies prove worthless (at best) and corrosive to human dignity, they blame the victims of those policies. This is true for white male heterosexuals, for middle-income taxpayers, for trans kids who grew to regret their decisions, for women competing against "trans" men in sports, just to name a few of the bees flying around in my bonnet.
You make the claim that "American governments were instituted to protect our rights", but I'm not sure that's what government's main role is. "Governing" is a limiting principle in both civics and mechanics. A governor installed on a car engine keeps that car from going over a certain speed. Agricultural and industrial motors have governors to "regulate" their speed to keep them efficient under varying load conditions.
Sure, our forefathers created a Constitution with a Bill of Rights, but looking to the Government to protect those rights shouldn't be our first course of action. That is OUR job - it's why we (ostensibly) have the right to petition our government for a redress of grievances. It's why we have a Second Amendment and why the Constitution talks about militias. The government should be protecting our borders against invasion from foreign lands - that's more closely aligned with the type of "protection" they're supposed to do - not "throttling down" the citizens and the economy with over-"regulation".
Maybe I'm playing with words too much here.. But think of how "regulations" only seem to apply to the "lawful" people. No matter how many guns we take away from responsible gun owners, criminals always seem to have plenty - and the people who gave up their guns now have nothing with which to defend themselves. We see different tiers of law being applied to the elites from those applied to the rest of us - that's not part of our Constitution.
Boy, Robert, when you opened up that smorgasbord, look at what happens.. ; )
It's the APOCALYPSE.
Or maybe not.
"You can vote your way into Communism, but you have to shoot your way out."