NewRuskinCollege.com           May 17,2015

Lecture Notes

I posted that music, films, television, books, talking books, internet all were available on my Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 with Dolby Stereo for only a few hundred dollars in a 13oz package.

Then Krauthammer posted about a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC with the note that tickets were not likely available.

Was Krauthammer responding to my post?

It does not matter.

The point is made whether it was intentional or coincidental.

 Dr. Charles Krauthammer M.D. is an elitist.  He is posting on Twitter a performance that was probably sold out, was in any case available only to those living near the Kennedy Center and interested in a specific kind of music and willing to pay $44 for a night’s entertainment.

But Twitter is a mass platform!  Had Dr. Krauthammer wanted to share his enjoyment that would have been one thing but his post was put forward as a notice of an upcoming show.  Get your tickets!  If you can.

My post was not an elitist post.  Anyone can afford a Fire HDX 8.9 (5 easy payment of $75 for qualified buyers) and having acquired it there are 

no limits to what can be done.

Millions of songs, books, and with Bluetooth keyboard and headphones you can literally take it anywhere and do what you like.

The difference is  my post was a populist post on a mass platform open to everyone and  Krauthammer’s was an elitist post open only to a few.

Krauthammer is not alone; the American Conservative Movement is riven with elitists. And it shows in their policies or rather in their lack of policy initiatives.     

It is a statistical fact that support for conservative positions increases with college attendance yet it was not a Conservative but the Liberal President Barak Obama who declared that two years of college shall now be the “norm” in America.

George H. W. Bush supported vouchers but only if they could be used at Phillips Academy and Philips Exeter Academy etc., as well as the inner city.  When his son W held the levers of power he somehow just couldn’t seem to get vouchers or charter schools embedded in the national educational system.

So today Baltimore City Schools get $15,000 per student or $450,000 for a class of 30.  For those who are scheming these pages perhaps we should break that number down. The teacher gets less than $100k salary, insurance, and retirement. Office space in Baltimore City is less than $2.50 a square foot and we would expect that by now the schools would have been paid for, but no matter lets allow, $75,000 rent, no nothing is too good for our kids, $100k, furnished.  So that leaves us $250,000 for books and supplies, and what else?  Security?  Administration!  The head master gets $250k per classroom per year?

I think the point is made; there is plenty of money for the classroom.  This is how charter schools can operate even when only given a fraction of what the public schools are given.   

Previously I wrote (see letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren) that we control sufficient levers of power to force cities to change their exclusionary building and zoning codes to allow the construction of more housing and thus lower rents. Pro Bono Publico.

So here also the Federal Government controls sufficient funding to direct urban inner city schools to allow charter schools or vouchers to meet the needs of the students. Pro Bono Bublico.

It is not a good excuse to claim that the Liberals have and have had control of these schools and cities for generations, it is time Conservatives rolled up their sleeves, stopped being so damned elitist and got some work done, for the good of the people.

Very truly yours,

Plinio Designori.