Spring Cleaning

This is a post inspired by a recent Washington Post series of commentaries called “10 Things to Toss Out”. Among the things that various commentator’s mentioned tossing out were: West Point, NAACP, Tenure, the White House Press Corps, “Muslim World” as a term. See a synopsis of the reasoning below the fold.

Me, I’d throw out the following:
1) Self-serve. Let’s put service back in capitalism and give people honest work to do.
2) Customer loyalty cards and rebates: Give everyone a good deal and they’ll come back. I don’t feel clubby just because I have your loyalty card. I’m not loyal. You either have the best deal in town, or you are the only one in town. I am not interested in saving 2% or getting CVS bucks to spend on your website. And skip rebates. Either give me the sale or don’t. Rebates are a dishonest discount where they company is hoping you will get too busy to put
3) Fox News: Fair and balanced my ass. Nothing more than a propaganda outlet for blowhards.
4) Pharmaceutical advertisements: This is turning what was once considered part of the normal human condition into a disease. If you get heartburn, take Tums or drink vinegar. You don’t need a $50 pill or a 4 hour erection. And if your kid likes to play and move around, she doesn’t have ADD. If your kid has no talent, that doesn’t mean he has a learning disability, maybe he just dumb or you are just too lazy to deal with him.
5) Built In obsolescence. I don’t need to buy a new computer every 2 years, a new stereo every 3 years, or a new TV for every room of my house. And just because you think you have “improved” something doesn’t mean you have.
6) The gun lobby: It’s based on a total misconception of constitutional law, and like most lobby groups, is too ideological and reactionary for its own good.
7) Credit rating agencies. Corrupted thus useless.
8) Wars on anything other than countries: War on Terror, War on Drugs; War on poverty . . . all failures. All never ending. All justifications for very poor pubic policies, and all meant to score political points at the expense of real improvement.
9) Female Genital mutilation and all forms of sexual abuse.
10) Fundraisers for public schools: Public schools are public. Fund them properly. Ensure their quality. Turning our little children into peddlers so they can get a PE teacher is exploitation.

What would the Citizens get rid of? Start your lists!

1:West Point (Thomas Ricks) “After covering the U.S. Military for nearly 2 decades, I’ve concluded that graduates of the Services academies don’t stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them us more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools.”

2: The NAACP (Jonetta Rose Barras): “The Organization is as anachronistic as colored-only water fountains and white-only bathrooms. It racial focus perpetuates the evils it claims it want to eradicate, and its audiovisual rendering of America as ‘tem vs. Us’ abets the nation’s balkanization . . . it could expand its definition of ‘colored’ to more than just blacks.” Or it could help the black community to address its own self-defeating attitudes.

3.Tenure (Francis Fukuyama:: “The rational for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. . . . the system also hamstrings younger untenured professors, making them fearful of taking intellectual risks and causing to write in jargon aimed only at those in their narrow subdiscipline . . .” He goes on to say that there should be some form of mandatory retirement in academia as well as an end to tenure. “Academic freedom can thrive in thiank takes and research institutions.” And he points to the lack of tenure in places like the U.K. and Australia.

4. White House Press Corps (Anna Marie Cox): “too often the White House briefing room is where news goes to die.” She points out that most major stories that have broken as far back as Watergate have come from outside the White House Press Corps. White House Press corp have released the following over the last few months, “Pocket Squares are back! The president is popular in Europe. Vegetable garden! Joe Biden occasionally says things he probably regrets. Puppy!” “Let the beleaguered journalism business prove its worth by providing something you can’t get by watching the White House’s YouTube Channel.”

5: “Muslim World” (Parag Khanna): “Just as there has not been any meaningful ‘Christian World’ since the Holy Roman Empire, there ahs been no unified “Islamic World” since the Middle Ages. . . . By using the term ‘Muslim world’, we only elevate the likes of Mullah Omar or Osama bin laden, whose rhetoric turns archaic Islamist fantasies into self-fulfilling prophecies. Speaking to all Muslims is speaking to none of them.”