Category: No More Bullshit!

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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.

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USPS Changing Its Name?

Is “USPS” beginning to mean, “United States Postal Screw-you”? I mean, hours cut (including, at our local PO, an hour SHUT DOWN in the middle of the day and NOTHING past 10:00 on Saturday), packages “lost” and 1/10 of employees NOT surly, petty tyrants.

In recent weeks/months my Wonder Woman has had a rash of things ordered online, sent but NOT delivered by USPS. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems more and more USPS packages are “going missing” (*cough* stolen by postal workers *cough*) in recent times. . .

Whenever I can I specify either UPS or Fedex delivery. At least that way whatever it is has a chance of getting here in a timely fashion. . . or even just getting here at all.

Hey, USPS! Screw you.

Continue reading “USPS Changing Its Name?”

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“Don’t Know Much About History”: One of the Reasons the US is Getting a “Swirly” from Reality

Victor Davis Hanson beats a drum often heard here at twc:

“Our geographically and historically challenged leaders are emblematic of disturbing trends in American education that include a similar erosion in grammar, English composition, and basic math skills.”

Remember third world county‘s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom:

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

And remember also that “literacy” is not just being able to decode the written word, either facilely or laboriously. It’s being able to do that AND having a goodly store of useful knowledge gained thereby. Anything less and one is simply either a useful idiot fit for deploying in the service of evil or a completely useless idiot, good for nothing in particular.

Sadly, somewhere near 75-80% of Americans seem to be one or the other of those two idiot alternatives.

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Answer: Yes, But Only Just. . .

. . . and not with the kind of score I’ve been used to being able to score on academic tests over the years, just about whenever I really wanted to. . . and also only because of grandparents and parents who were well-read and encouraged reading well-written, high-information books. Oh, and a really rigorous (for the times) 8th grade biology teacher and a few others who didn’t rigorously stifle independent study (yeh, that was a problem even back in those days of yore. . . ). But I was one of the lucky ones for my generation:

Century-old 8th-grade exam: Can you pass a 1912 test?

By contrast, the “sample questions” for the 12th Grade history section for the 2010 NAEP are relatively simplistic, and cover very little of a nature of questions that my generation of 8th-graders would not have been able to ace. *shrugs* Of course, my acing, now, of the five sample questions is no test. But considering that some serious scholarship has demonstrated that college grads generally are barely better informed on American history/civics than high school grads, the chart below is at least somewhat interesting.

12th-grade-US-history

Continue reading “Answer: Yes, But Only Just. . .”

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Obama Suggests He Will Increases His Support Al-Qaeda: Fixates on Unused Repugncan’t Jock Straps

Syrian factions vie for control of chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda, and Obama Steps Up Military Aid To Syrian Rebels

Personally, I think Syria stored Iraq’s WMD in the unused jockstraps of ball-less, go-along-to-get-along, bend over and say, “Please may I have another” cowardly country club Repugnican’ts who have sucked up to traitorous Dhimmicraps for decades, and The Zero just wants to be in on the jock strap raid, but what do I know?

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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.

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We Are All “Ham Sandwiches”

You’re familiar with the old saw that a prosecutor (persecutor, more like nowadays) can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if he wants. Yeh, law enfarcement really is about that bad.

More than a few years ago, a client (who shortly thereafter moved with his family to an undisclosed rural, off-the-grid location–really) warned me to be careful what I said in phone calls, because the feds were listening in. I didn’t dispute his warning, because it didn’t matter. No matter how innocent one’s actions or speech may be, there are so many laws and regulations on the books now, that we are all “ham sandwiches”–open to be indicted for “crimes” thought up by our overlords any time they wish to have our blood.

Yeh, the “feddle gummint” has you by the short and curlies any time it wants to hang you. So? All one can do is live as best one can, as morally and ethically as possible, and let the chips fall where they may. *meh* Oh death, where is thy sting and all that.

Hell awaits law enFARCEment and bureaucraps who abuse their power. I wish them the joy of their final destination.

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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.