Barack’s Intelligence

Various conversations I’ve had, as well as numerous media talking heads I’ve heard,  have made me realize that most Americans don’t understand that there is a difference between intelligent and well-educated. Barack is well-educated. That’s why he never had the time for a real job.

Just for the Record

Just for the record. If the Obamessiah does win the presidency, I predict a decades-old position of mine will be disproven. For over 30 years I have confidently stated that there will never be a worse president that Jimmy Carter. I expect Jimmy will be bumped to 2nd place all too soon unless Obama can be put on a short leash like Clinton was when the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994.

Public Education Must Die! #2

Reason Online once had an intriguing article by John Stossel on American education. He discusses an ABC Special Report that he did entitled “Stupid in America”.

As I’m sure that I’ve mentioned at some point, I’m a recovering public school teacher myself. A career that I committed myself to in a moment of altruistic weakness. I know, it’s a horrible thing for a individualistic, scientific, capitalistic, Objectivist, Age of Reason-loving man to do to himself. But after years of meeting and dealing with working teachers I began to feel a calling.

I realized that many of those kids probably went days at a time without hearing a rational voice, or without having their spirits and rational yearnings crushed, either by the teachers themselves of the pack animal-like mentality of their fellow students. I decided that I could make my contribution in that way.

Unfortunately, this was not to be so. When I started out I figured the easiest way to be a good teacher would be not to do all the stupid things my teachers did while I was growing up. All this accomplished was a greater appreciation of what my favorite teachers went through. It seems that half the stupid stuff my teachers said or did was district policy, the other half was state law. Maybe this is why administrators view innovation as equaling insurrection.

So we Americans pay more for education than any other nation on Earth and then get the following from Stossel’s article:

…we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids’ clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students “stupid.”

We didn’t pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey’s kids have test scores that are above average for America.

The American boy who got the highest score told me: “I’m shocked, ’cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.”

We start off with a reminder of a peculiarly American phenomenon. The more time American kids spend in school the less they seem to know.

At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This is a similar phenomenon to the one that Michael Barone wrote about in “Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future“. It famously asked how a nation that produces so many spectacularly incompetent 18 year-olds can simultaneously produce so many extraordinarily competent 30 year-olds. In a nutshell, Soft American coddles them until they are 18 or so, then dumps them unprepared into the clutches of Hard America which rapidly separates the wheat from the chaff. A civilian baptism of fire if you will.

I find it interesting that Barone chose those two ages to compare. They are 12 years apart; the same amount of time it takes to earn a high school diploma. One might say that students spend 12 years getting their diploma and 12 years getting over getting it.

I have personal experience with this. I was fortunate (unfortunate?) to be smart enough to skate through public school. I could learn by “osmosis” as some people say, or as I liked to call it, the sit and “soak method”. Except for math, I could passively absorb enough information to pass my tests. I was the kind of student who got an A on almost every test, but a zero on almost every homework assignment because I rarely turn any in. It usually averaged out to a C and I could keep concentrating on “important” things, usually the bosom on the girl sitting next to me.

Going to college was almost as easy–at first. My coursework as an underclassman was pretty breezy too. Then I hit my upper division classes and found myself losing the battle against organic chemistry. I completely lacked the self-discipline necessary to tackle that course. Up until that time I had considered having to study 2 or 3 hours a week to be an outrageous burden. Nowadays, when I’m taking classes, I feel guilty if I don’t study 2 or 3 hours a day

Stossel’s article puts the blame on a cause familiar to card-carrying capitalists the world over:

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

And I would suspect that union-dominated government monopolies, like public schools, are the worst of all.

The Memo Writers’s Observations on Life #2

Students at the Michael Moore Elementary School proudly display their winning entry in the Independence Day banner contest. By the way, God created dirty words so liberals wouldn’t be mute.

1. People shouldn’t drink and vote.
2. Voting for Democrats is nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you do it in the dark and wash your hands afterwards. (Apologies to Robert A. Heinlein.)
3. To liberals it will always be 1969.
4. Fifty-year-old men shouldn’t wear pony-tails.
5. Public schools have turned into giant under-staffed day care centers.
6. Left-wingers keep shrieking the same old tired talking points for the same reason that skydivers keep yanking on the ripcord of a parachute that has failed to open.
7. Why aren’t more open-border proponents studying Spanish and Arabic? They’re going to need it.
8. Liberals deeply resent the religionization of Christmas.
9. Feminists hate women.
10. Children don’t want freedom as much as they want parents.
11. Liberals think failure is a virtue.
12. Real life lesbians don’t look like the ones in the movies.
13. Most university professors have lost their key to the clue locker.
14. The concept of an objective reality makes liberals wake up screaming at night.
15. The French still think they’re significant.

Open Letter to September 10th People

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”

Now that the Left, now virtually synonymous with the Democratic Party, has finally regained control of Congress, I find it amusing that they have suddenly discovered bipartisanship, civil discourse, and rational debate. The situation reminds me of my childhood when certain relatives and neighborhood hangers-on were such sticklers for rules and good sportsmanship–when they were “it”, or had the ball. Otherwise, it was a Darwinian dog-eat-dog world. Naturally, being Leftists, you think everyone but yourselves are too stupid to know whats going on. That being, of course, that now that you’re back on top you’ll be wanting to resume pretending to accept our values so that you can use them against us.

I will say only two things about your victory in the off-year elections. One, congratulations. Two, don’t make the mistake of wallowing in hubris and believing that the electorate mandated your philosophies or agendas. Our people got brutally spanked for the sin of “going native”. In other words, they started acting like you. I give you this advice only because I know you’ll never take it.

As you’ve probably noticed, you aren’t getting many takers. That’s because we have long since realized that being civil and trying to engage the Left in rational debate is the intellectual and political equivalent of bringing a dull rusty butter knife to a gunfight. Yes, grim necessity requires that we sink to your level. Sad, but necessary.

Obviously, I don’t speak for every Vast Right Wing Conspirator, but I do speak for quite a few, and we are sick of pretending that you guys aren’t idiots. Or insane, Or insane idiots. Insanity has been occasionally defined as doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome. This behavior is very nearly the Democratic Party’s perennial platform. No matter how many times your ideas fail, you are always ready to slap a fresh coat of paint on the same old disasters, give it a new name, and proclaim it to be some kind of innovation. You never seem to suspect that the only ones you’re fooling are yourselves. You remind us of the old joke about the dim-witted person who constantly beats his head against a brick wall because it feels so good when he stops.

It’s Not Racism—It’s a Software Problem

It’s a pity that we don’t teach rhetoric in school anymore. Not too long ago it was considered one of the 7 constituents of a good classical education. These days not much is left of that curriculum and what is left has been bled dry of substance by pseudo-enlightened teaching methods.

I’ve taken a course on rhetoric, which was helpful, but I’ve learned the most about it by countless hours of pondering mind-bendingly inane pronouncements trumpeted by people who should have known better, and the enthusiastic and unbelievably uncritical acceptance by all the nodding heads in attendance.

The best working definition of rhetoric that I’ve come across is as follows: The art and science of persuasion. Note that word: persuasion. This has nothing to do with logic or logical argument whereby, if properly done, one arrives at a correct conclusion. Rhetoric is convincing someone that some conclusion is the correct one whether it is or not. Considerable rhetoric has been expended talking teenage girls out of their virginity in the backseats of cars. Just about any abandoned single mother struggling to get her life back on track will tell you that going along wasn’t the correct conclusion.

It’s been a long road for me, but I’ve figured out our adversaries well enough that I can spot the flaws in the reasoning and their rhetorical legerdemain fairly easily. However, I see many good folks around me struggling with the Left’s tricky arguments, then shrugging their shoulders and going on, leaving the asinine pronouncements unchallenged. For all our good qualities, American’s lack of ambition toward intellectual rigor is a serious national flaw. One that scares me more than a little.

Leaving the jargon aside for the time being, I’ve noticed two things that people on the Right/Conservative/Libertarian side need to watch out for. First are false dichotomies, or taking something that has to be considered as a whole and splitting it into parts that can’t stand on their own so as to knock them down more easily. Second is the flip-side of the first. Taking separate elements and deliberately conflating them so as to use valid (maybe) criticisms of one to drag down the other. All of which brings me to my point. Racism, culturalism, nationalism, and any other number of –isms are frequently entirely separate issues that need to be considered, debated, and accepted or rejected as separate entities.

Conflating racism and culturalism is one of the biggest problems today and a current favorite rhetorical tap dance of the Left. The Left insists on treating these as two sides of the same coin making it impossible to condemn one without condemning the other. This, of course is insane in general, and never more insane than when it is applied to the United States.

Racism against Hispanics? Hispanics are not a race. The word itself has traditionally meant Spanish-speaking, thereby referring to a linguistic group as opposed to a genetically similar group of people. A conveniently forgotten fact is that Spain, the source of Spanish, is a Western European country, further west than England, the source of the “Gringo” language. Spaniards are Caucasians.

What about Latinos, as in Latin America? Well, what about it” In Latin America ethnicities range from pure Caucasian (who are the elites that run the show and own just about everything), through pure Amerindians, through Mestizos (mixed race people) to black folks. Besides, I’m not so sure we should call it “Latin” America. After all, for the Amerindians, they didn’t pursue anything Latin, it came and conquered them.

What about Islam? The same principal applies. Racially, Muslims range from the whitest of Caucasians in Eastern Europe, a relic of Islamic imperial conquest, to the darkest of Africans on that continent. Islam is not a race; it is a fascist ideology masquerading as a religion.

When I try to explain the difference to someone, I usually use a computer analogy. Culture is to race as software is to hardware. Despite what poverty pimps and professional grievance-mongers may tell you, racism is all but beaten and progress is still made everyday. If the Republican Party is the Party of hate and the status quo, why are so many of them begging a black woman to be their presidential candidate in 2008? Why did Walter Williams, a famous and distinguished black economist, go on the radio and announce to white liberals, “You’re forgiven, you can stop acting stupid now”?

You would have to have been living under a rock to avoid people of minority persuasions that have long since disproved the “hardware” theory of racism. I have met people of all races who are significantly smarter than I am, and I dwell on the lonely fringes of the right side of the bell curve.

So what is the crucial difference? Software. Or as it applies to human beings—culture. Millions of people want to immigrate to the United States to partake in its freedoms, material wealth, and opportunities. Sadly, many of these folks no longer want to assimilate. In fact, they consider it an outrage that they would be expected to do so. Rather the existing culture is expected to change to accommodate their presence. In essence they expect this country to load their cultural “software” over our own. All this reminds me very much of my experience teaching in a rural school. Frequently, parents would move there hoping to get their children away from the bad big city influences. More often than not, those children were the big city influences. I recall one girl in particular who lasted only 4 days before being arrested for dealing cocaine.

So, what does this all mean? I suppose somebody has to have the guts to say it, so I will. Mexicans, your hardware is fine, just as good as anybody else. Your software, on the other hand, sucks. When you come here, legally of course, check your cultural baggage at the door.

There’s an old saying that says something like, “If the people knew what it was that they wanted, they wouldn’t want it.” The same applies here. If American culture is swamped and displaced by Mexican culture, or just about any other for that matter, in 10 years this country will be a “has-been” like France. In 20 years it would be a Third World nation. Then who would the rest of the world “borrow” money from then?

Democractic Party Solutions Applied to Everyday Situations

• Effective immediately all Caucasians and successful minorities will be required to practice the “open garage” policy. Garage doors must be left open at all times. The inner door must be unlocked as well. After all, trespassers just want a cold beer and to watch some TV, just like everybody else.
• Due to government concerns about the health of the petroleum transfer industry, gas station attendants will be paid $5 per gallon not to pump your gas, if they don’t pump 10 gallons or more they get double trading stamps.
• Universities will immediately desist from the discriminatory practice of limiting the number of students that can register for a given class and thus oppressing the punctuality-challenged. All interested students must be allowed to enroll. In an unrelated matter universities will be fined $10,000 per student per semester for each instance of insufficient seating.
• To prevent the undue hardship of a disconnection, delinquent utility bills will be paid by the neighbors living on either side of the financially distressed person.
• All accelerated and advanced placement courses in public schools are hereby canceled. Students with higher aptitude will be required to tutor remedial students. After all, it’s only fair. They won in life’s lottery. Failure to comply will result in the forfeiture of any future student grants and loans.
• The concept of the checkout counter “Leave a penny, take a penny” dish has proven so popular that the legislature has passed a bill applying the principle to the pockets of people standing next to you in line. Despite the name, the law permits any denomination to be taken. Participation is compulsory.
• In order to comply with health regulations restaurants and grocery stores are henceforth required to give a sponge bath to any homeless person that may wander into the building.
• Newspaper boys are required to charge their subscribers on a sliding scale determined by means testing. If the subscriber is illiterate, the paper boy is required to read it to the subscriber. To insure good service to the underprivileged, stiff penalties will be assessed for late delivery.
• In order to put a stop to the scourge of racial profiling, identification cards will no longer be required to cash a check, buy cigarettes or alcohol, buy guns or ammunition, attend adult movies, sign a contract, or pick up children from any daycare facility.

Public Education Must Die!

But why must public education die you might ask. Because we’ve reached a point where there is no hope for it. Much like the last days of the Roman Empire or the last weeks of the Third Reich, things would have to get much worse before they could get any better. Undoubtedly, I’m not the foremost expert but I do have empirical first-hand experience. A few years ago I felt an unfamiliar sensation that I didn’t recognize. In retrospect I think it was an altruistic impulse. Nevertheless, I did a mid-life career switch, went to graduate school and got certified in three scientific areas. Over a four year period I worked in three school districts and came out convinced that we desperately need vouchers and/or to have the public education system completely dismantled.

My first clue came while attending a mandatory “training” meeting. After a few minutes I said to myself, “My God! These people think the problem is the solution.” The second clue when I asked my fellow teachers why they got into the profession. Few of them said educating the young and none of them mentioned their subject areas. Virtually all of them mentioned such things as: helping them to be a better person, guide them to the right path, teach them how to think, nurture their self-esteem, et cetera. All of which sounds noble until you remember these are the same people that hand out condoms to underage kids. I’ve decided the name of the Major should be changed from Education to Social Engineering.

It would be unfair, however, to paint all teachers with this brush, or even the teacher’s bane—principals. Many are excellent at what they do and they’ll get right to it as some as the finish all the non-educational busy work mandated by various governments. Does April work for you? Good teachers get buried under big bureaucracies concerned primarily with self-preservation. Of course, the reason those bureaucracies are so concerned is the fear that parents will deliver a hammer blow lawsuit to their heads. Parents believe that as taxpayers they have a right to say how public schools are run which is true enough I suppose. The problem is that parents that have received the Earned Income Credit every year since its creation consider themselves taxpayers instead of tax spenders.

Who do I blame? Sorry, it you parents. I know you feel ganged up on and were hoping for something else, but not liking the truth won’t make it go away. The thing that discouraged me enough to give up teaching and give up that idiotic altruistic impulse was the sad realization that, for you guys, schools are just vast day care centers. During the summers how often do you hear a mother say that she wishes school would start she’s worried that Johnny is forgetting his Algebra? Don’t be silly, you never hear that. But I have heard mothers say, “I can’t wait until school starts so I can get these damn brats out of my hair.”

Let’s face it. It’s a wonderful country but it has a strong and unfortunate anti-intellectual streak in it. People are suspicious of people who are “too smart” and occasionally even discriminate against them. Isaac Asimov referred to this as lacking a “good wholesome American stupidity”. That being so, why do people tolerate the public education system? After all, people with no children are heavily taxed to support them. If you are subject to a levy on your home and don’t pay it you can lose your house. In effect the public education system is extorting money from you.

Apologists for this system have traditionally claimed that educated workers and consumers benefit everyone. Tell this to any employer that has hired a recent high school graduate who can’t read, write, add, subtract, multiply, or divide and expects at least twice what the job actually pays.

In the end, the dirty little secret that almost no one has the guts to say out loud is this: People support the public education system because it provides free (to them) child care and tax-supported sports teams to root for. Pretty much nothing else. Even better it provides them with the chance to claim it’s all for the children. Are you looking for a fight sometime? Try to tell somebody otherwise.

Manifest American Exceptionalism

This is why foreign scientists refuse to use American mice in their experiments.

John Galt: Still Making Them Wet Their Pants After All These Years

I’ve been very negligent. I let the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged slide by unnoticed, by me anyway. I hereby do my richly deserved, and probably lengthy, penance.

Like everyone else I have a biological mother, but like a more select group I also have a spiritual mother: Ayn Rand. A woman whose work reached into the drain I was swirling around and pulled me out, even though she had gone to her grave. She confirmed to me what some of us had long suspected: Intellectually and philosophically, the landscape of the 20th Century was a few islands of sanity in an ocean of the barking mad.

My only regret? Not getting to her sooner. I had been given a chance by a beloved high school teacher who recommended the novel in the strongest terms. I put it on my to-do list, but was far more interested in getting wasted and becoming a teen-aged father.

Years later, in my early 20s, when I had been driven to the brink myself, she died. I learned of it in a surprisingly sympathetic editorial in my hometown’s far-left rag of a newspaper. Purely to keep my long ago promise, I walked down to the bookstore to buy the book. I was appalled at the sheer size of the novel, so I decided to substitute her smallest, Anthem, instead. I read the slim volume in less than two hours, and with a sense of building excitement, I walked back to the bookstore and bought, “The Virtue of Selfishness”. I spent the rest of the day and most of that night finishing it. All the while saying to myself, “This is it!, This is it!”

The next morning I walked down to the bookstore once again and purchased everything they had and spent the next few months devouring them. I felt the pall of gloom lift from me. Mostly because I finally realized that I was not alone, and because I realized that sometimes, no matter what your angry relatives tell you, the rest of the world is wrong and you’re right.

As I was absorbing the lessons of Objectivism, I felt something I had never felt before. The urge to proselytize. I finally understood all of the annoying missionaries who had come to my door. They didn’t intend to annoy me. They just had found something that gave meaning and hope to their lives and wanted to share it. So I set out to bring up the subject whenever it could reasonably be worked in to a conversation.

I discovered a horrifying thing. Lots of people were aware of this—and had rejected it. In fact, most of those that were aware of it assumed it to be so obnoxious that no decent person would even mention it. Even those that were unaware of it cringed in horror and disgust at learning even the first few most basic principles. As for me? I was filled with rage at how many people I knew that had known of this and not shared it with me. Even my own mother, when she saw me reading one of the books, rolled her eyes and said, “Oh dear God! Please tell me you’re not getting into that!” I still love her, but I’ve never forgiven her.

I’ve applied what I’ve learned to my own life. I almost never let an absurd statement pass unchallenged, especially if an impressionable audience is present. When I’m told everybody knows something, I demand to know who everybody is, much to the speakers chagrin. If some collectivist low-life throws out some reason-evading buzzword, I demand that he define exactly what is meant by the term, and then that they defend it. Most of all, I demand to know by what right they think that they can reach into another’s wallet and confiscate the fruits of his labor. They’ll hate you for it, of course. Because you force them to face the fact that they live their lives by substandard values that they’ve passively absorbed from the environment, and don’t even understand.

Ayn is frequently condemned for being a polarizing figure, as if that were a sin in and of itself. She could never help but be such a figure. A person who refuses to live her life in the gray between right and wrong is a terrifying threat to those who do. I miss her.

Ten Reasons Why Democrats Fear Education Reform

1. Literate constituents might read the legislation they’re sponsoring.
2. Voters who can properly cast a ballot will remove the main pretense for recounts.
3. People with basic math skills scare the hell out of the budget committee.
4. Can’t take the risk that civics students will be exposed to the constitution.
5. Social Studies might be dropped and reality-based subjects like Geography and History reinstated.
6. People who read books are just freakin’ weird.
7. There are still copies of the Federalist Papers unaccounted for.
8. They believe that reading the n-word in Huckleberry Finn will cause students to spontaneously combust.
9. Feminists terrified that girls will like Home Ec. and Family Development.
10. Reinstating vocational education might make students employable and thus apathetic toward the welfare state.

Amplifying Anecdote

After posting the Public Education memorandum, I was reminded of an incident from my own education that speaks volumes about the mindset and biases of public school teachers as alluded to in Item 3. The scene: Marquette Senior High School; the place: Marquette, Michigan; the time: the late 1970s; and starring: Mr. Perlberg, one of my history teachers, and long-haired hippy me.

Submitted for your approval:

Hippy me: Mr. Perlberg? Why don’t we ever study these presidents? (I indicate the mostly bearded presidents after Lincoln and ending just before Woodrow Wilson.)

Mr. Perlberg: Them? We’re going to skip them. We call them the do-nothing presidents.

Hippy me: Why would you call them that?

Mr. Perlberg: Because back in those days things were going so well for the country that they didn’t have to do anything and were just along for the ride.

Hippy me: (After pondering this for a moment) How do we know that things weren’t going so well because they weren’t doing anything?

Mr. Perlberg: (His normally smiling face scowling) You’re a god-damned Republican aren’t you?

Cue Twilight Zone music and light Rod Serling’s cigarette.

Public Education

Memorandum

From: The Memo Writer
Topic: Public Education

It has come to my attention that many Americans are confused by our schools move toward more public and less education. My research indicates this is because some retrograde Americans don’t understand the Wink-Nudge Function.

Definition: The Wink-Nudge Function is the product of a neural network of the insecurity lobe, gullibility node, suppressed self-interest gyrus, and psychobabble ganglion. This vital function allows people who subconsciously know that something is objectively false to convince their conscious minds that it is objectively true in order to obtain maximum social acceptance.

Using the latest high tech dewinknudgificator the following facts become apparent:

Item 1: Most American parents send their kids to public school for the free daycare. As an example, compare the number of parents who say, ” I can’t wait till school starts so I can get these brats out of my hair!” to those who say I can’t wait for school to start again because my kids math skills are starting to slip. (They last statement had no quotes because I was unable to track down any parent who had ever actually said this.)

Item 2: Most American communities tolerate public schools because that’s the only way to get tax-supported sports teams. The citizenry are generally willing to pay the most odious property taxes to keep getting them for free.

Item 3: Most teachers and all teacher education institutions support public education in order to get to the children before the parents can poison their minds with reactionary values.