Want to send an email to Vladimir Putin to thank him for his efforts to keep the US out of an unnecessary, immoral war? Unfortunately, I didn’t see a place to CC King Putz. *heh*
Let’s Think That Through, Shall We?
Went to Lowe’s to buy another $40 gallon of paint and maybe a new paint sprayer (long story on the old one ;-)). Bought neither one. Did buy a new paint brush, though.
Got home. Rechecked the paint. Glad I held off, because I almost bought another can of trim instead of the color I needed for the walls. Back tomorrow (well, today now that it’s the wee hours) for the right color (and taking the paint can, not just the label from what I thought was the right paint can pasted in my notebook. Yep. I referenced the wrong paint label to the sales clerk. Oops. *heh*).
Still not getting the paint sprayer, because the can label says “Nope. Don’t do it. You’ll be sorrrrrrry!” Or words to that effect. *heh*
Send THIS Video to Your Congresscritter Before He Votes on US “Intervention” (WAR) in/on Syria
I’m not a big fan of Glen Beck (or O’Reilly or Limbaugh or any other talking head), but this needs to spread and be in your congresscritter’s inbox. Many times.
Wandering Around in “Blue Sky” Territory
Here’s a wild and crazy idea for one arrow to add to the “educational reform quiver”:
Vouchers for home schooling. . . with a twist.
Preconditions: pubschools have achievement testing at end of year for EVERY GRADE, no exceptions, no excuses. Period. Kids pass to the next grade based on test scores. No exceptions, no excuses.
Vouchers provided parents who wish to homeschool equivalent to whatever the district spends per pupil for ALL expenses. BUT, the vouchers cannot be redeemed unless the student for whom they are issued passes, IN A FORMALLY PROCTORED SETTING, the SAME achievement test as their pubschool counterparts must pass.
In other words, equivalent expenditure of public funds for what must be assumed to be an equivalent public good, except that homeschooled kids wouldn’t be spending most of their childhood in a prison environment.
At least it wouldn’t provide an incentive for those lame brains who count the daily trip to WallyWorld as a “field trip” for their (fake) “homeschooled” kids. . . unless they required the kids to read and (intelligently) discuss nutrition labels, do math to determine “best buys” and be quizzed on geography based on place of manufacture of different goods, etc.. *heh*
Here’s the post that spurred the thought:
Pubschool=Prisons for Kids?
[UPDATE: See, “Last Thursday, I Lied”. be sure to Read the Whole Thing®.]
[Note: I have family members who are REAL teachers and know at least a few more REAL teachers. Heck, I have even known three–THREE–pubschool administrators who were actually worthwhile uses of the oxygen they consumed. Really! Still. . . ]
Pubschool isn’t entirely “prison for kids”. . . but it’s usually the next worst thing. Pubschool certainly was no picnic for me. People kept interrupting my learning to “teach” me things that were on THEIR schedule. . . *heh*
From a Salon article, School is a prison — and damaging our kids:
“. . .the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.”
Well, especially for boys, for whom pubschool is often a kind of prison camp designed to make them into girls 1, or ANY kid who’s in the second standard deviation above the norm or better on any standard IQ test. “Odds” of all kinds find pubschool to me mind-numbing torture as they are REQUIRED to fit into the box. . . and find the box to be far, far too small.
But. . . the problem is this, though: how can a society educate 2 its population in such a way as to maximize the number of useful, productive citizens? Assembly line “prisons for kids” has been the answer for many years, though good teachers–REAL teachers–do everything they can to minimize the “prison” and “assembly line” aspects and encourage real learning. Oh, but that’s another problem: where does one find REAL teachers in numbers great enough to overcome the disadvantages of the system itself, the “millstones” of pubschool administrators *gag* and the plethora of remote-educrat-meddling they implement?
Education 2 ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. . .
1Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys. From a review:
“Sommers, a philosopher by education and a mother of two boys, shows that the trend she identified in the late 1990s to see boys as defective girls and therefore somehow in need of retooling has continued, and its effects have spread.”
2“Educate” has come to mean, more and more, simply “propagandize, brainwash.” Real education leads from darkness to light. What is created by the system of remote educrats promulgating rules for pubschool administrators to use cutting oxygen from the brains of teachers and students alike being implemented in a system of regimentation, indistinguishable from a prison regime, INTENDED (see Dewey, et al) to turn children into useful little cogs in an industrial machine is a kind of software lobotomization that seems to be designed by a conspiracy of dunces to make the lowest common denominator universal. *sigh* I am in awe of teachers–REAL teachers–who can do battle against this monstrosity day in and day out–actually bringing light to some students!–without going out of their everlovin’ gourds. Such people are amazing.
Check Different Angles Out, First
I occasionally see/hear frustrated people writing/muttering (or louder) about revolution as the solution the “feddle gummint” seems to be pushing its citizens subjects towards.
Better think long and hard on that, is my first council. We’re a loooooong way from needing a “solution” that, urm, revolutionary. Besides, as a “Dwarven Rifleman” (interesting fictional character) observed,
“It may seem a fine thing in song or story to be ankle-deep in the blood of your enemies but in reality it’s slippery, smells bad and is nearly impossible to get out of your socks afterwards.”
Yeh. Think long and hard before electing to pursue a course that would likely ruin every pair of socks you own. . . Just reconsider, mmK?
Memo to The Zero: Put up or shut up
Rep Stockman requests subpoena of NSA’s White House, IRS phone logs
“Obama assures the public he only collected this information to uncover wrongdoing and protect civil liberties. Clearly he would want us to use it to investigate this case, because otherwise he’d be lying,” said Stockman.
“If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear,” said Stockman.
About time at least one Republican located a workable testosterone therapy.
Did Edward Snowden Break the Law in Revealing the Depth and Breadth of the NSA’s Surveillance of Citizens?
For those excoriating Edward Snowden for “breaking the law” I’ll say this: I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t know, because I haven’t–and probably won’t–research the relevant laws, because I do not care whether he broke any in revealing the NSA’s surveillance of ordinary citizens.
Here’s why that is: ANY time a citizen shed’s light on government mistreatment of its citizens’ rights it is a Good Thing, no matter what his motivation, no matter what laws he breaks to do so. Any laws that even ALLOW the government to cover abuses are anathema to me, and should be to every citizen who lives; they are nothing short of being bad faith with the social contract the Founders recognized which establishes that government exists to protect our rights, not abuse or deny to us the free exercise of them. ANY law or regulation that provides cover for government abuse of citizens’ rights is illegitimate and has no moral force whatsoever, no excuse for existence save for the vile, reprehensible, utterly abhorrent excuse of defending that abuse of power, and that’s a raison d’être that in itself gives adequate cause to sneer at and openly flout disobedience to any such law or regulation.
Apparatchiks in the same party that gave us the death toll of Fast and Furious and Benghazi, the trampling of the First and Fourth Amendments in the AP scandal and the blatant IRS abuses of power have talked with relative comfort about disappearing Snowden. Yeh, what’s a little banana republic terrorist tactic between friends, eh? In the toxic atmosphere of an overweening, anarcho-tyrannist “feddle gummint bureaucrappy” that views everything with an US (the “gummint”) vs Them (former citizens, now subjects) it becomes obvious to anyone who’s not dumber than a sack of Shiite that the “feddle gummint” is cast adrift from a constitutionally-informed social contract designed to protect the rights of citizens and not the turf of politicians *gag-spew* and “bureaucraps” *gagamaggot*.
In such an environment, as I said, ANYONE who for ANY REASON brings government abuses of power into the light of day has done right, no matter what their motivation, no matter what any CYA laws or regulations say.
Doing the right thing, even for wrong reasons, is doing the right thing, no matter what.
One last thing: Edward Snowden may be weird. He may be distasteful in his personal habits, lifestyle or morality. I don’t know and I don’t care. I have seen hints about such things written by people condemning him, though hints only, as I skip over and simply note another ad hominem attack designed to discredit him in the eyes of stupid people. I don’t know Edward Snowden, and I do not particularly care to; not only that, I do not have to know ANYTHING about him apart from the fact that the information he revealed has so far checked out and that it reveals massive abuse of power by the federal government. THAT is ALL that matters in this brouhaha. Period.
Swamp Their Inboxes
Overwhelm your congresscritters’ and state reps’ inboxes with calls to completely shut down the IRS and salt the legislative and bureaucrappic ground it rests on.
When you’re finished with that, besiege their inboxes with calls for special prosecutors for Fast and Furious, Benghazi and the NSA. Add links wherever possible. Here’s one for NSA crimes against humanity (and make no mistake: NSA’s “Boundless Informant” is just that):
Focusing public attention on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues
Issue Pulled from Comments
I pulled this from a comment I made in answer to another commenter on a post shortly after last Tuesday’s hijacking of the election.
I cannot count the number of, well, not conversations exactly but whatever passes for one with leftards that all had the same dynamic:
Leftard spouts Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind/Dhimmicrappic talking points as though they were graven in stone and delivered by a secular humanist commie bastard Moses.
I present verifiable facts.
Leftard calls said facts lies, because they do not match his talking points.
Therein lies the central disconnect, IMO. Leftards are delusional (or deliberate, witting liars. It’s often quite difficult to tell which is which), while the REAL reality-based folks are left wondering who screwed up the leftards’ p-sych meds, whenever they encounter one or more of them…
The political “middle” is now composed of
1. The stupid, gullible and ignorant: sheeple who are the natural “base” of the Dhimmicrappic Party.
2. The greedy, which is of two classes. a. Those who just want the government to give them “free cake”. b. Those who are busy bilking the public purse with massive fraud (at best).
3. The unconscious, those who wander the earth from one prodding stimulus to the next.
Moving to “the middle” is societal suicide. Waking the unconscious, excoriating the corrupt and weaning the “free cakers” is the only way to save society.
This is, of course, an extremely simplistic (and hence “wrong” on detail) model, but it’s roughly true, for all its shortcomings.