Linkfests – Page 11 – third world county

…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

And about time! Cringely’s of my generation (well a little younger) and makes his point well about the chasm between technology use by different generations. While I may sometimes chuckle and wrying shake my head when my octogenarian father describes his (do note: successful) struggles to master his computer and make it a useful part of his lifestyle, my children, I’m sure, chuckle to themselves and wryly shake their heads at my abandonment of my cell phone and lack of any desire whatsoever to “text”.

But Cringely goes beyond the obvious divide in different generations’ integration of new technologies as genuinely useful parts of their lives and notes a specific impact of the effect on education.

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn’t the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Speaking about the shift from knowing stuff to Googling stuff–yeh, who hasn’t “put down” that eBook to do a quick search on “Albegensian” or whatever? *heh* I picked that because I already knew a bunch about that word’s historical implications from “old guy” stuff rattling around in my head… and still did a search on the term some months ago. Google is sometimes better than memory, you know–Cringely notes:

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained – a view that doesn’t work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we’re getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

Read the whole thing for a twist you might not see coming… 😉

h.t. Jerry Pournelle’s Mail. Drop by. Read. And wish Dr. Pournelle well.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

March 21, 2008

Who Needs School?

I’ve mentioned MITs OpenCourseware before (somewhere–I’m not looking for it right now). Such things are widely available all over the web. For example, THE work on systems analysis, Herman Kahn’s Techniques of Systems Analysis, is available as a free download from the Rand Corporation.

With such sites as Project Gutenberg and many other organizations and universities making literature and courses available for free, anyone with the mental horsepower, the desire and access to a computer or a public library (most have computers available now) can have not only the usual library resources available but a world of educational enrichment at their fingertips.

I used to haunt the public libraries where we lived when I was a kid. School libraries all the way through grad school , most definitely ALL the school libraries I could reach–collections varied. *heh* I needed “The Second Sex” for a research paper once and the ONLY copy available in five college libraries (and two public) consulted was Le Deuxieme Sexe. Right. In French. Thanks to a good French prof, that was OK. (Of course, it was also fun when the prof asked me to translate material I cited. *heh* What? Didn’t think I’d actually read the horrible book? Simone de Beauvoir was one kinky, twisted woman. Still, I’d probably have been less critical of the book had I not known her history.)

Anywho… off the rabbit trail, now and back on track. If you’ve not learned anything new today, you’ve wasted your time so far. Go. Learn. Grow.

(OK, I’ll admit that formal schooling has its uses, but the way public schools (AKA, “prisons for kids”) are going and the manner in which colleges and universities have become low-class diploma mills for sub- and illiterates, the value of such things is rapidly approaching large negative numbers. Trade schools and such like: great for training, not so much for education–and yes, the two are very different things.)

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

March 18, 2008March 17, 2008

Yet another vote against “upgrading” to Vista

*heh*

Installed Turbo-Tax on the Vista machine. The execrable Vista will not recognize any of my DVD drives as CD drives, and thus would not install; so I shared an XP drive, mapped to it on the Vista machine, and installed using a networked CD. Vista is not really ready for prime time, and nothing I can do will get it to believe that either a read only drive, or a perfectly good Plextor R/W drive, is also a CD drive. DO NOT “UPGRADE” your XP machine to Vista!!!!

Oh, yes. Every time I have to work on a client’s Vista machine I have to watch my BP. I’m glad (I think–I have annual B&Ms about TurboTax) Pournelle did get TT installed finally, but I understand his frustrations. ANd there are multiple reports that Vista SP-1 “breaks” apps that once worked with Vista pre-SP-1, along with driver issues continuing (and in some cases worse) from pre-SP-1.

But mind you (from Pournelle again) Apple’s iPhone has some issues. Here’s one:

If there is no service — when there really is service — this is potentially serious, is it not? I have no idea of what to do about it, except that if you get no service, try restarting the phone. Note that reboot is the usual remedy for many Windows problems. Is Apple learning from Microsoft? Stay tuned.

*heh* “Is Apple learning from Microsoft?” Very funny.

In other OS news, Kubuntu 7.10 has a few more wrinkles to iron out and hoops to jump through than plain vanilla Ubuntu 7.10, but I like the interface better, so I put up with it. Still, installing WINE is a snap in either, and using my Windows version of Portable Opera (on a Memorex TravelDrive) is transparent. Oh, a minor puzzle for the Portable Opera under WINE: for some reason all web pages display in a non-proportional, seriffed font that is NOT the way it dosplays in Windows–nor does the Linux version of Opera on the same machine display that way. I’ll puzzle that one out later.

(Duh. The fonts specified under Windows aren’t available. Simply had to specify fonts that were installed on this box. Shoulda remembered that. Oh, I can make the Windows fonts available to WINE, but it’s just easier for now to use the fonts already installed.)

For the proverbial Aunt Tilly, I believe plain vanilla Ubuntu 7.10 is really about ready for prime time, but Kubuntu 7.10 is for folks who are just a little more ready to dig into the thing and do some of the scut work of getting it set up juuuust so. “Out of the box”–so to speak–plain vanilla Ybuntu 7.10 is a easier for a non-techie to tweak–the Synaptic installer is easier to use than the Adept Package Manager (and much easier for non-command line folks than apt-get *heh*).

I like either.

But for ease of setup and just using the computer, PCBSD 1.5 is just about as good as it gets, IMO. From bare drive on an old 1.3 Ghz compute to installed and up and running in about 20 minutes? Yes. Installing apps is easy-peasy, too. Easily passes the “Aunt Tilly” test. And yes, you can give it all the eye candy of Windows Vista or OSX, if you really want to. With less hardware overhead.

Interesting times.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

March 17, 2008March 17, 2008

When is a “right” not a right?

When it’s licensed, restricted and controlled by the government. When those strictures are applied, “rights” are simply privileges granted by the state, not truly rights.

This thought was, of course, spurred by the upcoming Supreme Court case concerning Washington D.C.’s handgun ban. The specific comment in the recent WaPo article that turned my crank was,

“But even fundamental rights are subject to government restrictions… ”

Yep. That’s so. Suppose your pastor were to make comments from the pulpit about the record of a political candidate revealing that person to be unfit for government service because of specific biblical references to the nature, scope and limits of civil government. In fact, such arguments are completely religious, spiritual and proper from a Christian pulpit, and past generations of Americans would have easily recognized that fact (largely because past generations of Americans–whether they were Christians or not–were far more literate than contemporary Americans and well-versed, even the most anti-christian among them, with the Bible). Today, we have bought the communist-socialist (hence, ACLU dogma) lie that such comments are disallowed by the First Amendment.

Poppycock! Only an illiterate (or lying) person could in any way, shape, fashion of form misread that amendment to get such a result.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof… ”

And yet, Congress has passed laws into effect and empowered government agencies to do exactly that. You are free to practice your religion only so far as it does not impinge itself directly upon the practice of politics in any meaningful way.

And what of the other, enumerated, rights of citizens found in the Constitution?

All “subject to government restrictions” of course, because they are no longer recognized as rights but privileges granted by the PTB.

Or, twisted to meaninglessness by liars, poltroons and fools to match up with their own agendas. Just take the First Amendment for example. It was specifically drafted to prevent the federal government from interfering in any way with the practice of individuals in matters of religious conscience, speech and behavior. (For now I’m going to sidestep the abortion of Constitutional precepts embedded in the 14th Amendment.) And what else does it deal with?

POLITICAL speech (read the Framers before you try to argue with me on that one).

The PEOPLE’s rights to assemble peaceably and to seek redress for federal government oppression/mistreatment (wanna join a march for freedom from IRS bullying? Right. I thought not. Don’t want your name on THAT list *sigh*).

A press unencumbered by federal restraints.

But as you well know, freedom of speech is now applied in ways the Framers would find inexplicable, abhorrent, stupid. Trivializing freedom of speech is useful to those who want to restrict the freedom of political speech, and such as McCain-Feingold is but one result.

Heck, the only part of the First Amendment still standing nowadays is freedom of the press, and that’s likely because the press is almost all on the side of tearing down real freedom and replacing it with Orwell’s 1984.

So, as the monkeys on the SCOTUS consider what the Second amendment means, follow along and allegorically apply the G.K Chesterton quote in my right sidebar:

“Though drinking may be a caprice, it is a caprice that cannot be forbidden to a citizen, but can be forbidden to a slave.” G.K. Chesterton

Since the federal government seeks to make slaves of us with its unconscionable prying into our lives on serious matters (like restricting the ennumerated rights in the Bill of Rights that the document says the federal government can NOT), just watch all the other rights we have eaten away as they are deemed either capricious or dangerous by TPTB.

Chattel slavery wasn’t the only thing that was formally ended at Appomattox:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Remember,

“Though drinking may be a caprice, it is a caprice that cannot be forbidden to a citizen, but can be forbidden to a slave.”

I’m just waiting for the SCOTUS to deem “keep[ing] and bear[ing] arms” a caprice that’s no longer necessary (or a right that is too dangerous) for citizens to retain.

Headed down the road to slavery. Not chattel slavery, exactly, but worse in some ways.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

March 13, 2008March 15, 2008

Respecting Islam

Some people with poor reading and reasoning skills might assume from my previous comments on the subject of Islam that I do not respect Islam or Muslims. Silly. I very much respect Islam and Muslims, just as I would respect a pack of rabid dogs.

(Quick aside: anyone accusing me in comments of Islamophobia or racism will be banned as too stupid for words. Islam is not a “race” [update, for the idiot who missed the point: “Muslim” is not a race either] and a phobia is an irrational fear. Besides, “fear” isn’t the word to describe the feelings that result from a rational examination of Islam. Disgust, disdain, revulsion: those are good words to describe rational reactions to Islam.)

Here’s a YouTube video found at The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, that almost captures a completely rational response to Islam. “Almost” because the commenter makes the multi-culti mistake of assuming there are such things as “moderate Muslims” when such a term is a self-contradiction. (Read the damned Koran before you argue against that remark. And yes, I used the word “damned” in its non-profane, theological sense.)

THIS is an open trackbacks post, open Thursday through Sunday. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

Trackposted to Allie is Wired, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, A Newt One, Tilting At Windmill Farms, Conservative Cat, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Continue reading “Respecting Islam”

March 7, 2008

Comparisons

I love the web. Chesterton sprang to mind today and I found and downloaded another couple of his books. Along the way, I ran across

Comparisons
G.K. Chesterton

If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.

Indeed.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

March 5, 2008

More from “The Underground History of American Education”

Reading the book yet? Here’s another teaser:

Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary.¹

Think about it. “Reading specialists” throughout our nation’s prisons for kids have a vested interest in making the art of teaching reading as arcane and difficult as possible. There are those, however, who have had universal success with a program that essentially lets kids teach themselves.

Storm the “bastilles’ of public education! Rescue the children! Save our future as a nation!

Those are not too strong. If anything, all those exclamation points are too few, too weak.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

March 4, 2008

Thought for Today

From John Taylor Gatto’s, The Underground History of American Education,

I’ve yet to meet a parent in public school who ever stopped to calculate the heavy, sometimes lifelong price their children pay for the privilege of being rude and ill-mannered at school. I haven’t met a public school parent yet who was properly suspicious of the state’s endless forgiveness of bad behavior for which the future will be merciless.

I’ll just keep on posting these teasers every now and then until y’all start reading the book. *heh*

Hmmm, maybe I should do the same with this book…

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

February 29, 2008February 29, 2008

RCOB-health tip

“RCOB”–“red curtain of blood”–is a term I was first exposed to by Kim duToit referring to a spike in BP (near berserker rage? :-)) usually brought about by exposure to obscene assaults on liberty by statist goons (mostly leftist statist goons, to be sure).

I’ve been trying to avoid confronting such things for the past month or so.

But, there are other things that can bring the RCOB about that are even less pleasant in some ways. This monster cold I’ve been fighting has robbed me of much sleep and exacerbated my tinnitus, a sure sign that my BP has been negatively affected as well. This a.m., upon waking, the ringing in my ears was a shapr “pinging” such that with every step or movement, a sharp stab of sound was impinging on my hearing.

Not good. Sure enough, BP was stratospheric.

Took a page from relaxation techniques of years gone by: slow breathing for about 15 minutes. By “slow breathing” I mean just under two full breaths per minute.

Sure enough, by the end of 15 minutes, I was back down into prehypertension range on the systolic and normal range (OK, high normal) on the diastolic.

Most folks may only be able to handle going as low as 6-7 breaths per minute, but the next time you feel a RCOB moment coming on, try concentrating on your breathing for a minute.

I may have to do that for about 15 minutes an hour come Fall, though, if things like this keep going on…

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

February 26, 2008February 27, 2008

DUI… sorta

Driving under the influence… of cough syrup and the Founders.

Made for an interesting mini-confrontation with a cop who had NO idea what the First Amendment guarantees. (Hint: criticizing government, government officials, petty bureaucrats, etc., is specifically the point of “Free Speech”.)

Apparently, when I went out for an errand last night, while my headlights and all other normal nighttime safety freatures were working, my tail lights were not.

Stopped. Fine. Appreciated the information (no tail lights at night can tempt some idiot driving beyond HIS headlights to run up my butt). Told ’em so, warmly.

Apparently, though, two heavily-armed LEOs felt “threatened” when I offered to check my tail lights to see if there were a loose primary and to check my fuse box (under the hood). Oooo! He wants to Get Out Of The Car!

For THEIR “safety” (remember: two armed officers, one Olde Pharte) I was “instructed” (with a grab and push on my door) to stay inside.

Told the one with his own ZIP code he was acting like a portion of his anatomy he beggared a third world country to cover and… he threatened to cite me for “interfering with a police officer in the course of his duty.”

“Why, officer?”

“Because you called me a _______.”

“Liar. I did no such thing and I’ll demonstrate it.” (Quoted back to him my exact words which did no such thing. Of course, I did specifically say he was acting that way.) He huffed off. Came back. Told me to go ahead and check my tail lights if I wanted to. I demurred with, “No thank you officer. I don’t want you to feel threatened.”

Partner came back and told me no ticket, just get ’em fixed. Offered to hold a light for me while I checked in back. Again, I demurred. Armed ~~thugs~~ (OK, maybe only one was) LEOs behind me in the dark. Right. I like that option.

I know there are police officers who aren’t full of themselves to the point that being criticized for acting like an ass doesn’t set them off, but frankly, I think the profession draws way, way too many petty tyrants who are too full of themselves for any good. Sure, maybe the cough syrup loosened my tongue a tad, but that makes not one single solitary difference: playing the petty tyrant card to attempt shutting me up when he didn’t like what I observed and opined about his behavior revealed that cop as an ass.

Not just acting like one.

Sam Adams woulda shoved him on his big fat Pillsbury Doughboy.

And Jefferson and the other guys woulda held Sam’s coat.

Me? I just refused to take his B.S.

mini-micro-update: was a bad tail light blowing a fuse. Not burned out tail light: base was loose causing increased impedence.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

Category: Linkfests

“…ready to dump our schools…”

Who Needs School?

Yet another vote against “upgrading” to Vista

When is a “right” not a right?

Respecting Islam

Comparisons

More from “The Underground History of American Education”

Thought for Today

RCOB-health tip

DUI… sorta