Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 04-23-25_WEDNESDAY_7AM
Episode Date: April 24, 2025State Senator Noah Robinson and we talk state issues, the repeal of the wildfire mapping bill, what is coming next, education issues, too. Some open phones follow....
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The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling.
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More likely in cooling down Friday.
13 minutes after seven, state Senator Noble Robinson will join me.
We'll kind of get an update from the Marble Nuthouse as the legislative session
continues to grind on.
You know, I was talking to someone yesterday, you know, every time. Oh, it was Herman. I was talking to someone yesterday, you know every time
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at the state legislature I just kind of I try not to get depressed I just kind of
put my head down and just okay this too shall pass. Okay what will pass though
before it all passes into sine die I don't know. We'll talk with Noel about
that here in just a moment.
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KMED. Here's Bill Meyer.
I want to thank Bob Shan. Bob Shan sends me a Craigslist ad for an 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit.
The Rabbit pickup that we were talking about with Eric Peters.
I guess there's one for sale up in Eugene for $8,500.
Someone else is saying, hey, I got one that could be a project.
I'll deliver it.
No title.
If I need another project, I'll be in touch with you.
Gosh, that's what we need.
Anyway, 18 minutes after 7.
Great to have you here this morning and also great to have State Senator Noah Robinson
from Josephine County on the program.
Good morning, Noah.
Welcome back.
Good morning.
Good morning.
It's wonderful to be on.
Thank you.
I understand, and I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but someone told me the other
day that you had a remonstrance in which any legislator can get up on the floor and then talk about whatever's on their mind
for what is it two or three minutes? Isn't that right?
Two minutes.
Okay, two minutes. So you have two minutes in which you can talk about
practically anything that you wanted. And you were talking on the Senate floor,
Noam Robinson, about the periodic table, the table of the elements in our world?
Yes, exactly. I was because I'm trying to teach them a little bit of science.
We've had some bills up here, which have not been very high profile,
but there's one about the chemicals used in firefighting foul and some current concerns that some of them might be
carcinogenic and so forth. And of course the immediate thing is we will look good by making a state law.
Well, the firefighting departments are already going to chemicals they think are better.
And the bill covered a class of chemicals that was just thousands of industrial chemicals
that could never be used in firefighting foe.
And this, of course, stifles innovation in the future, probably hurt firefighters down
the road.
You just don't ban endless chemicals just because you're afraid of...
Basically, I was trying to explain that there was a difference between one molecule and
another and that fluorine was a perfectly good element.
And just in general, trying to explain what atoms were because there's a real lack of
knowledge up here.
So you end up trying to do a science lesson for the state legislature, and I'm kind of
curious, did most of them skip out on class or what?
How did that work out?
Well, I got some nice comments on that one.
I don't know how much attention they were paying, but it's not the only one.
I've been giving lectures on the scientific basis for the claims that CO2 is going to destroy the
earth.
And of course, there's a lot of very solid data showing that this isn't true.
And so I've been, and that's a big issue because the whole state policy is we're going to go
green, we're going to make your electric bills, electric bills are going through the roof.
And part of that is all that's focused on expensive forms of power and ignoring cheap
and inexpensive forms because we're afraid that they're going to heat up the earth.
You know, it's kind of funny when you think about it here, Senator, is they want to cool
the planet.
This is the whole thing.
The left, the political left, really seems to want a cooler planet, even though a cooler
planet has tended to not grow as much food and have all sorts of other problems.
But you know, we'll set that aside at this point.
Is there any chance that you could convince them to reopen, let's say, the Boardman coal
plant?
Because that way, you just take the scrubbers off of it and then you'll have sulfur dioxide
put out into the atmosphere.
And then that could be a planet cooler.
Now I'm only half kidding about this, but at the same time they're wanting us to go
green because we're going to die, we have people like the Bill Gates
of the world that are actually trying to do all sorts of things to inject sulfur
dioxide and other climate cooling agents into the sky. You know it's it's kind of
a weird place we find ourselves right now almost working at cross-purposes
wouldn't you think?
Yes.
There's been calculations actually showing that you could actually, and the problem with
it, one of the problems with this debate is that the assumption that CO2, which is an
extremely weak greenhouse gas, they only get these things with really complicated computer
models that don't fit reality.
But the problem is that you ignore the fact that the climate
does fluctuate. The temperature has been rising sort of steadily for
the last couple hundred years. It's been known to fluctuate a lot in the past and
it could get very hot, it could get very cold, and if it should get extremely hot,
I mean actually the calculations do show you could put dust way up in the air and
reflect some of the sunlight if
you wanted to, but actually every indication is we're probably better off warmer than colder,
and there's just no indication whatever that the climate is going to run out of control because
we increased the CO2 concentration a little bit. If we go down very far in the CO2 concentration,
everybody dies. It's required for life. Exactly. You end up, in fact, there is talk that the human-based CO2, which came about
due to the Industrial Revolution, probably ended up saving plant life because we were
getting very close, according to Gregory Redstone, a geologist friend of mine who was on the
show every now and then. And he talked about how we were not all that far away from the death level of CO2 in which green plants
would not really function that well
or would not grow that well and food would not grow that well.
And you go back to the 15, 16, 1700s,
and it was getting very low at that point.
Yes, no, we're better off,
no, there's no question about that.
It isn't that much below where we were 100 years ago. And there's very good data showing how much the growth
rate of plants increases as the CO2 level rises. It is easier to grow food now. There's
a lot of very good soil experiments on this which we can go into, but it is easier to
grow food, it is easier to grow plants, everything is growing better because we've gone from about, we were about 300 parts per million and now we're about 425. It's not
that big a rise, but it's actually a lot safer than risking going down.
Indeed. Hey, I wanted to ask you about the wildfire map bill has been repealed in the
Senate. And was that kind of a unanimous thing? Did anybody vote against this?
No, it was 29 yeses and unfortunately one of the Democrat senators died a few days ago.
Everyone there voted yes.
This moves forward. Now, is there any part about Senate Bill 762 which has been
left untouched or is it just repealing the map? What does this actually
accomplish, if anything at all, in your view? Yeah, so what it does is it repeals the wildfire maps
and all the associated requirements, hardening requirements, all the state requirements of
things you would have to do on your property. Just to go back, 762 had established some committees, it had some money for smoke
cameras and things like that, which I can't believe they're not helpful.
I haven't seen the data, but I'm sure it's useful.
It had various programs for suppressing fires.
And then it had the central part of it was all the wildfire maps and the invasion of
private property that goes with it, basically all
these rules.
So I had put in a bill, 678, just a repeat of my dad's bill, just repeal the whole
thing, and our view was, hey, let's just repeal all of it and then look at what worked
and put that in another legislation.
And obviously there wasn't much appetite for going that route, more rational route.
So we amended our bill
to just be a complete repeal very carefully went through everything and
there's politics around which bill you use which I don't care so it's Senate
Bill 83 basically took that amendment with some additional tweaks as they went
and and transfer that all the way over to Senate 83, and that I have gone over carefully.
That clinic gets every vestige of the wildfire maps and everything requiring home hardening
and basically state control of your property out.
There are left, the state can come up with suggested hardening requirements, which I'm
not terribly thrilled about because even though
it's suggested, counties can pick it up as state recommendations and try to force them
on their decisions of the counties, but at least at the county level, the voters can
talk to their commissioners and have a discussion about it.
At any rate, there's no state requirements that you do any of this.
One of the reasons why Senate Bill 762 and the wildfire map, I think, was brought into
existence in the first place though, was that ultimately the push was to assess property.
Was that not the whole idea was to assess a wildfire prone property, let's say, in
order to help pay for the cost of fighting wildfires
in the state of Oregon.
Has anything changed with that?
Well, the purpose of it was, so the purpose of it was the claims for the wildfire map.
The claim purpose of the wildfire map was to assess every single piece of property in
the entire state, figure out what your
risk level was for fire in case the fire comes along, and then to force you to do things
on your property to try to mitigate that risk.
In order to allow, let's say, the BLM or the US Forest Service to not care for their
forest, then it burns into your land and then you resist it, right?
That's essentially what it was, right?
Exactly the wrong place to start because with what's going on in the forest, we've closed the roads, it's hard to fight the fires, we don't clean out the brush.
The management of the forest has been terrible for the last several decades and that if you were worrying about where to clean up, you'd start there. But instead, they decided to put this on property owners.
The maps themselves were just wildly inaccurate.
And everyone could see that.
I talked to the fire scientist who designed them.
And it's just an impossible...
It's like the CO2 computer models.
It's just an impossible situation.
You can't take the broad data they started from and zero in to a property level classification.
It just doesn't work. And that was one problem. They tried once, they tried again.
The map designations just did not make sense.
So I can't help but think that the only way that a Senator Golden or any of the other Democrats
that voted for this would have gone for this is if there is some poison pill in it or there's some
other plan to do what Senate Bill 762's fire map was going to do in the first place through another
method. Are you aware of anything like that?
You have to excuse me Senator, I'm just not trusting of the state legislature these days.
That is very well justified and I would say that most of the among the Democrats that the comments
I've heard is that they the map was inaccurate everyone realizes the map mapping simply didn't
work. My biggest concern, and
I know for property owners, because I've talked to many, many of them, it was the intrusion
on private property. So you have two things. You had the wildfire maps for wrong, and even
if they were correct, it wasn't right to tell property owners, you have to do it this
way. Now to give them suggestions is a different matter because there are things you can do to increase your chances of a fire comes along. So suggestions are great, but
once you have state mandates, you've intruded on private property, and then the state's
decisions aren't going to be your decisions. You might decide, hey, you like that tree
next to your house, you're willing to take a little more risk. So this is a situation
that should be left up to the property owners and of course with their insurance companies. Some
insurance companies may say, hey we'll give you a lower rate if you do this and
this and this. But still ultimately the goal was to try to get rural home owners
to pay more of the heavy lift on firefighting, right? Wasn't that part of
it? Because the state legislature doesn't want to have wildfire fighting in the regular general fund. They want an assessment
of some sort. Is that gone or is it being done in a different way?
Well, the discussions of how to fund fighting wildfire are still ongoing.
Okay.
So this had to do entirely with the maps and home hardening requirements. It didn't
have to do with assessments on private property. And of course, there's discussions about taking
the kicker for that. There's an insatiable appetite for money up here. I think we need
to be looking more closely at how we fight the fires, how we're spending the money, how
can we detect them as quickly as possible and put them out, and then how we can clean up the forest. And it starts with very simple things like if we open up
the roads, then when a fire starts, we might be able to get it out more quickly. What will we have
to do to do this? Because it would sound like a federal government policy issue with a BLM and
US Forest Service, wouldn't that be the case? That is correct. Part of the problem is from the federal government. But really, I have
no problem with the state taking bulldozer up. The roads exist. To clean the roads, the
federal government's not going to fund it, but I don't see any reason why the state shouldn't.
It's in the state of Oregon. It's federal land, I think we need to open up the roads. And if there are federal laws that prevent you
from even taking a bulldozer up and cleaning a road,
then we need to be making a fuss about that.
State Senator Noah Robinson with me.
I appreciate your update on this.
So, guardily optimistic,
this will likely pass through the House, right?
And no problem getting it passed.
I imagine Governor Kotech will sign it, right?
Yeah, that's sort of,
everyone understands that that will happen.
Of course, keep your fingers crossed till it does happen
because this is the legislature,
but everyone is pretty sure
that this is a very high probability of getting through.
Yesterday, Senator, I was talking with a woman
from National Taxpayer Union
and she's a former pediatric nurse.
Her name was Leah Vukmer.
She was talking about a medical issue, a medical bill which is going on in the state of Oregon
right now that it's in the Senate.
It's called Senate Bill 533.
Are you familiar with that?
I know there are thousands if not hundreds at least of bills that have been in play. Are you familiar with that? I know there are thousands, if not hundreds at least, of bills
that have been in play. Are you familiar with 533 by chance? I don't know if it's in your
committee or not. I'm not super familiar with it. Okay. I was wondering if maybe you could take a
look at that because what she is concerned about is that it has to do with the federal 340B program
supposed to help patients and not help... Yeah, this has to do with the... So, this has to do with the way they
assess drugs. Yes. And the medical system, just to back up, the medical
system is incredibly complicated. If you go to the emergency room, they
will charge you a thousand dollars just to take your temperature and send you
home. Indeed. And this is not because they're just price gouging everyone, it is
because they're saying well we have to charge you that because we don't charge
other people, we do all this work for free and and so forth, and then you wind
up with all these deals on the drugs, and the result is you could get up,
you wind up with this very complicated system and nobody understands it.
It's not transparent and it's impacting the process.
The way Leah related it to me was that 340B was of course supposed to help the end user,
we the people, and that we were supposed to get good discounts on certain drugs in the
formulary.
There were supposed to be discounts passed along there.
And what happens is that the discount gets passed along and then either the pharmacy
benefit manager ends up, you know, selling it, still billing for the same cost, or the
hospital will charge more for it, etc., etc.
And the discounts never make it to the people that it was supposed to help, mostly poor
people, from what I understand
Yeah, except my understanding is you get the discounts if you go to a far an ordinary pharmacy and they want those too
So it's a it's basically a grab for a drug discount, right? Yeah, and it's
What can I say I I have done
Several speeches or monsterances against this. We need to simplify
the medical system not to do that. I am not in favor of grabbing the discounts from...
I mean, it's crazy.
Yeah. Well, what Leah was saying was that what Senate Bill 533, according to her, would
do was that it would not really help on discounts, but it would cement some of the worst parts
of the discount. In other words words the grifting organizations in the medical
world. You know that kind of thing? Yeah, that's correct. Of course they will say
they're not grifting, they're just trying to find a way to fund the hospitals
because everything's offensive and yeah and yes no no that's my understanding of
it as well. The details of it, I try to avoid.
It's just so arcane.
And of course, I will look at it.
So it would even make you, the scientist, make your eyes glaze over, is what you're
telling me.
Yes, because it is complicated and boring and makes absolutely no sense at all.
I don't understand why a
doctor's office in a hospital can't charge you what it costs to do business
when you walk in like every other business in the state. Imagine what
would happen, I did a remorsement on this one, well imagine what would happen if
they decided that we're going to pay for food for poor people in the state. So
when you go to the grocery store, we're going to cost shift everything, and a cart of groceries will cost you something like $10,000. We'll
make the choices very limited. We'll have food insurance. We'll make it... Everyone
who walks in the grocery store, if you're not insured, you won't be able to afford
it and the prices will be out of sight and you only have very limited selection. You
do that, it would be just a total nightmare, but that's exactly what they've done to medicine. When you go to the doctor, you ought to be charged
what it costs to deliver the medicine. And then to the extent we're helping poor people,
you can pay for it like we do with food stamps. But the system as it is, and I know because
I've been mixed up in it a little bit, it's harmful to the patients because it's very
hard to get tests. There's waiting, waits, there's approvals.
Everything is cookie cutter.
It's the same from one hospital to the next.
There's no room for innovation.
This medical system is killing people because of the way it's set up.
I really don't like it.
Well, if you could look into Senate Bill 533 and maybe tell me what your thoughts are on
it if you can at some point.
All right.
Would this be a no vote?
I'll look into it.
I know something about it, but I'm just hesitant to go into tremendous detail on it because
it's not my area of it.
I will look into it and get back to you.
If you could.
In other words, I know what Leah at National Taxpayers Union thinks about it.
I'm kind of thinking, wanting to know what you, as a more conservative,
sensible person, might be thinking about that too.
OK, well I can get back on with you whenever you like.
All right, I appreciate that. By the way though, I'm not concerned about the state of Oregon
any longer because I ended up getting a press release from the Senate Democrats yesterday.
Did you see that press release by chance? Just curious.
Which one?
Oh, this is what... I'll read a little bit of it. Maybe you can comment on this.
Ninety days into the 2025 legislative session, Oregon Senate Democrats have momentum on measures
to ease family budgets, improve access to health care, drive down the cost of housing,
and defend the rights of Oregonians
Unless you like those pesky second amendment rights. Pardon me. I just interjected in that
Against a backdrop of federal government dysfunction and brutality
Leaders here continue to focus on making Oregon the best place to live work and raise a family
This is coming from the Senate Majority Leader, Casey Jamma, from East Portland.
Halfway through this session, we're already covering a lot of ground protecting health
care access, investing in childhood literacy, and moving ahead on measures to increase housing
production.
Do you agree?
I think that I have a very different take on what's going on.
I'm on the education committee.
The one that really bugs me is the education.
As we know, the public schools are doing a very poor job.
And the system, when they talk about early access to education, improving educational
outcomes, they have an idea that we're going to give more control to the Department of early access to education, improving educational outcomes.
They have an idea that we're going to give more control to the Department of Education
and they promise to do it right this time.
That's what comes down.
Oh, after decades of screwing it up, in other words.
That's right.
After messing it up all this time, they're finally going to get it right.
And they have their accountability bill, which I voted against. I'm not against
accountability, but it's not going to fix the system. The idea is that the Department
of Education is going to get more control over all the schools. They're going to oversee
the teachers. They're going to have experts to give the teachers advice and try to teach
them a little bit better about how to do their jobs if their schools aren't performing adequately.
And it basically blames the schools and centralizes control in the Department of Education.
It's not going to work.
They don't know what they're doing.
They don't know what is wrong with the schools.
And fundamentally, it is very easy to teach students.
So if a teacher can't teach a student, it's something...
I mean, there's bad teachers, but for the most part, a teacher working in a reasonable
system with good educational materials should have zero problem teaching a child. So if
it's not working, it's something wrong with the system. It's not the teachers. And yet
the focus is on working to educate the teachers, and they do not even know what's wrong in the classrooms. I asked the head of the
Department of Education and the committee, she's testifying on their bill, what she considered
the primary problems in the school classrooms that were leading to poor outcomes.
And she had zero response. She didn't know.
So how are you going to fix a problem which you don't even know why it's broken now?
That's exactly my point. You build this bureaucracy. We have this huge bureaucracy, this whole system.
I do like it that they're going to look at the test a little more closely and report back to the legislature.
They're making a lot of noise. And some of those things, I mean, I can't say you shouldn't do that,
but it becomes a substitute for actual action. And when you don't
know, and it's not that I know there's a lot of schools, a lot of districts, a lot of classrooms,
I wasn't trying to get her to provide a list of what's wrong in every classroom, but if you don't
have some general idea of what's wrong, you cannot fix the problem. And I don't think they can this
way. I, of course, am advocating for local control. Just get the state completely out of it. Close the Department of Education.
But it sounds though, it sounds though that if the state legislature has its way,
the local school board will almost become irrelevant from the sounds of it.
That's correct. And the local school board is already largely irrelevant. They have some control.
But it's actually very harmful
because the school boards will tell you, we can't change the curriculum. We have all these
restrictions on us, so therefore it's hard for us to do our jobs. And we can't keep the porno books
out of the library. We can't do that. The Senate Bill 1098, which we fought hard against and which got through the Senate,
actually protects the material in the books.
It's incredible.
It isn't just that the process becomes very complicated and hard to travel through.
It is that the way it is written, if you look carefully at the underlying statutes, these
books and the content will be protected
by state law.
So if they follow the law, none of that can be removed, and in fact, you can put all you
want in.
You know, there might be one saving grace coming up here.
Yesterday there was the Supreme Court hearing on this very issue of opting out, in which
Maryland, I think the state of Maryland,
had removed the opt-out for essentially the porno and the island of misfit human
agenda being pushed to kids in the government classrooms. Depending on how
that goes, that would more or less countermand what the state of Oregon's
trying to do, would it not?
To opt out of... I don't understand. So the state of... if you could opt out...
Well, okay, the state of Maryland essentially, you know, used to have opt-outs for all the
all the porno, all the anti-religious, island of misfit humans, LGBTQ, transgender ideology
stuff being pushed in the government classrooms, all right? Used to have it. Now, and then
they took away the opt-out. Now I don't know what
the state of Oregon has. What's that now? So the opt-out required the students to be
exposed to it. No, the opt-out means that students could be removed from it,
that they could be, that parents had the right. Maryland removed the right to be
able to say no to it, and it sounds like the state of Oregon is removing the right to be able to say no to it. So maybe this Supreme
Court case may have some bearing in Oregon, possibly.
Well, I hope so because there's two problems with it. This has to do
specifically when you're talking about what's in the school libraries. There's
the material itself. And of course,
arguments were being made, hey, you don't have to read everything on the library shelf. We're
talking about children. And so the children, the parents are worried about what their children are
exposed to. So one, their children are being exposed to things that they don't think they
should be exposed to, violation of parental rights, obvious things that are inappropriate
for children. But the other problem is that we have a severe difficulty getting children to read fluently.
And the way you get a young child to read is to teach them at a young age.
It shouldn't take years.
A home school is doing it in about six months.
Teach them with phonics, teach them to read, and then encourage them to read.
And not all families have a lot of books at home, and you want the parents to be
encouraging their children to go to the school library and read as many books
as possible. Yeah, and you don't want to think that you have to be concerned
about what they're going to read when you send them, rightly, to learn how to
read better and to enjoy reading by going to the school library. There needs
to be adult supervision of what we give to kids. Yeah, if you have to
tell your child, I'm going to work, by the way, I'm going to have to screen the
books from the school library. Don't get this one, don't get that one. Maybe you go
to the library yourself. First, you immerse the child in the whole idea
that there's a bunch of books that they're gonna be very curious about. Why
does the parent not want to see them? But second, you're just going to cut down on a parental encouragement of children to
read.
It is well known that families that may pay more attention to their children's education
that encourage them, that the children do better, even the public school system.
And this is going to be harmful.
It's going to reduce reading proficiency, and it will expose children to things that their
parents just don't want them exposed to.
So of course, more parents will homeschool, which I highly encourage.
They'll go to private schools when they can, but the fact is there's a lot of children
that are going to be damaged by it because their parents don't feel they have any alternatives.
All right.
State Senator Noah Robinson, I appreciate you being on the show here.
We'll have you back and I know you got to get on the floor here pretty shortly,
but thanks for the talk. Okay. Really appreciate it.
Thank you very much. It's been wonderful.
746. Ran a little long with this, but you know, you have a good conversation,
you let it roll. You know, this is the Bill Meyer show.
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Hi, I'm Corey with Patriot Electric Electric and I'm on KMED. 751, a little bit of open phone time, 7705633.
I don't know if you had any thoughts on the conversation yesterday with Nick Card,
Medford City Councilor who was in studio and we were talking about the potential for getting the Eugene emeralds to come in
Of course, I've been very noisy
I guess about my opinion that I'm concerned that I'm not a big fan of
sports ball socialism does not but
You know, is there a possibility maybe we could make this work if as Nick was talking about they do something in which the activity the economic
activity spun off is taxed in order to pay for something like that.
So I thought, yeah, okay, maybe. I would be guardedly okay, but if we're going to go down the same kind of path that we have in the past, like with Rogue X, that we're just going to raise taxes.
And I know you can just say, well, it's a utility fee, it's not a tax.
Well, try not paying it and we'll find out how voluntary it is, whether it's a voluntary
tax or not.
Try not paying your parks and utility fee and see what happens.
So these are things that these are hard costs.
These would be, once again, raising of the permanent cost of living here in Southern
Oregon.
And I'm going to have no problem with the Eugene Emeralds wanting to come here, but
I'm also be much happier if they buy their own damn stadium.
That's the way I tend to look at things.
Nobody sits around here and says, you know, Bill, we'd like to have you expand your studio
and have a bigger studio and maybe even open up other talk radio shows here in Southern Oregon and let's float a bun to
the Medford taxpayers and see if we can make that happen. People would laugh at
us but yet they don't even think about it. Wow, oh sports team because we have
been so inculcated into sports ball socialism. I just wish to be very
careful. I really do. But maybe I shouldn't be so worried.
But what do you think? 7705633770KMEDA. We can talk about that various other things going on this morning.
We also talked about earlier the Trump administration is floating or at least just thinking about this idea of paying married women
an extra $5,000 little baby bonus if they have a child. And it's all about demographics and trying to get the birth rate up here in southern Oregon.
Hey, someone's going to have to pay those social security taxes.
You know, it's really upside down demographically right now.
All sorts of things in the in the air, so to speak.
Hi, good morning. This is Bill, who's this?
Hey Bill, it's Will Salmon.
Steve, what are you thinking?
Well, Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin
had a lot to say about these issues.
Adam Smith, the theory of moral sentiments,
theorized that the invisible hand of success
led to better outcomes in almost anything,
even schools.
So the more control that you have by the state, the less competition you have, and you end
up with a one-size-fits-all, which inevitably doesn't work.
The way that modern public education was
originally designed, if I recall correctly, I'm going back to, gosh there's
a book that I still have tucked away in my library here, it's just huge, but
remember Charlotte Iserbeach, The Dumbing Down of America education? Yes. Yeah. And I
remember going through that it is so, in fact, I'm almost thinking about
re-buying it so I could get it on a PDF or something because it's just so huge
that it's like an old phone book. It's so big to go through. But the part that
struck me about the way American education degraded over the life of our
republic here so far was that really what we know as public education now was designed to make pliable factory drones in for lack of a
better term I mean would you agree with me on that the way public education was
designed? Yes and it was done from the top down. There's no competition in
the industry of education.
And, you know, Benjamin Franklin had the famous quote
of if you give up a little bit of freedom.
For a little bit of security.
With neither.
Yeah, you get neither, yeah.
But you could change that very easily
to if you give up responsibility for a little safety.
That would apply to cars as well as
education.
I mean, those are universal truths.
And in fact, they both, in a certain way, are talking about universal truths.
The things that are true that we all know, because it's built into us, are taken away
by the state well the government forcing well even government safety standards for cars
I really it used to be that you would purchase a car because well
Remember Volvo when I was a kid you would buy a Volvo because yeah, it looked like a
avocado colored
Refrigerator box going down the road, right? You know? But they made their bones, at least earlier, on being a safer,
more crash resistant vehicle. And people who had that concern went and bought
them. And if people who are looking for a more economical vehicle, well they bought
the 71 Pinto like my mom and dad.
Well remember the Volkswagen Golf that came out?
Yes, I had one.
I had an 85 Golf for a number of years.
That was almost an accident.
A couple of people at the factory wanted a small car.
Of course, they were designed for Europe, but a lot of people bought them here.
I was working with a guy whose kids bought a Volkswagen Golf Diesel, and they lived in
Portland, and they were getting 50 miles to a gallon.
This was around 1980, I think.
They were bragging about this thing, so they decided they were going to fly somewhere.
It cost so much to fly from Portland to San Francisco that they were going to drive down
there.
They took their Volkswagen Golf Diesel, and they put suitcases in a rack on top of
it and it went from 50 miles to a gallon to 30 miles to a gallon.
And because in those days to get diesel you had to go to a truck stop and it screwed the
whole trip up.
Oh man.
Now the point being though, where you're going from this original call here, the purpose
of this is really we have offshored or offloaded responsibility.
I don't know if we offloaded responsibility or if the responsibility was taken away from
us either to ensure our own safety and also to educate our own children, Steve. Well, yes, absolutely.
And it was done surreptitiously for the purpose of the Margaret Sanger Deal.
They want to cut down on the population of everybody, but they look at certain people
as less value.
But our kids don't get educated. There isn't a, you know, young people
today are talking about fur babies. Yeah. You ask them if they have kids and they
want to have fur babies. Well, the dogs aren't going to...
Gee, where do you think they got inculcated with that? With that kind of attitude.
I have no idea. Well, they have the natural instinct. They need to care for things.
Well, here's another example. Have you heard the term crotch droppings, Steve?
No.
If you go into progressive circles, you will find people that actually refer to children,
the next generation of children, as crotch droppings and why they will never have them.
Don't tell me that the inculcation of a sick culture doesn't have influence with these people.
Yeah, it absolutely does. C.S. Lewis wrote a book about that horrific strength, which doesn't make any sense,
but he was talking about the built-in need for families.
And as much as I love my cats, I do not consider them family as I would my daughter and son.
But yeah, continue to fight for the...
Okay, I'm sorry, we're talking over each other.
I'll give you a final say.
Okay, it's different when you're older. It's young people that need to buy into the family thing.
And I think Trump is sort of right in that.
But, you know, we've got to get the economy going to the extent that young people can buy into the economy.
And feel like they have a future, that there's some skin in the game that they can actually bring to the next generation and I'll agree with
you on that part I appreciate the call there Steve thank you
sure all right continue to fight for truth and beauty because we need more
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