Author: VD

JohnR writes: I would like to make a suggestion for a posting topic. WHAT IS EDUCATION? I think many times WB, Jamsco, RC et.al. and the rest of us are talking past one another. Maybe if we tried to define our terms the discussion may be more fruitful. If the purpose of education is to get a good job then it is mere training. If it is to live a good and moral life and make the the best possible choices then perhaps it is education.

Education, in the educrat’s view, is the subsumption of the individual. In other words, the socialization of the individual to extinguish his individuality and transfer his identification to the collective. This is why even the most intelligent and fiery personalities who have passed through the system tend to be individuals who readily and unquestioningly accept the word of any authority accepted as such by the masses.

After 12 years of this subsumption they may be okay, on the whole, but they are nevertheless intellectually maimed and it will take them years to recover their ability to think critically, if they ever do. Being classroom-educated myself, I still find it necessary to consciously resist the urge to unthinkingly accept information that I am given by an “authority”. It is far more important for the public school child to learn how to stand in line, refrain from asking questions and do as he is told than for him to learn how to think critically; it should surprise no one that public school children are far better at the former than the latter.

My definition of education, on the other hand, is preparing a child for adulthood by giving them the tools and knowledge that will allow them to develop the fullness of their intellectual ability. Public school can, and does, accomplish the educratic definition. It doesn’t even begin to come anywhere close to accomplishing mine, nor can it ever do so.

JPJ writes: I ran across the following today while studying for my Course 2actuarial exam:”…to keep the unemployment rate below the natural rate requires an increasing expansionary stimulus and a continuously-rising inflation rate….If the public is well-informed about the economic structure, economic conditions, and policy goals, it will be able to forecast the inflation rate. That makes it impossible to set a policy that makes the unemployment rate differ systematically from the natural rate….Only by systematically fooling the public can policy-makers force the unemployment rate to deviate from the natural equilibrium.”_Macroeconomics_ by Paul Wachtel; pp. 91, 93. (1997: the Society of Actuaries)

It was chilling to have my rising suspicions about our current over-the-barrel state confirmed by a seven-year-old monograph in basic macro theory! Yet more justification for the belief that our “leaders” have leveraged their political capital – in the form of artificially low unemployment rates – on the backs of my children.

Sure, you can believe the official inflation and unemployment figures. And while you’re at it, you might as well believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and really hot women who pursue unsuspecting men and initiate sex with them out of the blue. Okay, this is bit of a tangent, but have you ever noticed that women do all the pursuing and initiating in modern literature? This is contrary to classic literature where men actually pursue women, not to mention every real nightclub scene I’ve ever seen.

In a tense scene captured in exclusive Associated Press Television News footage, soldiers jumped behind concrete barricades and sent a yellow robot to hand scissors to the 16-year-old boy so he could cut off the vest. They then ordered him to strip to his underwear. Experts later detonated the bomb, and there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident. The teenager’s family in Nablus identified him as Hussam Abdo, and his brother, Hosni, said “he has the intelligence of a 12-year-old.”

Although neighbors identified Abdo as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant group, his family said he did not belong to any militant group, but went to demonstrations held by all of them. The incident was the latest in a series of what Israel says are foiled militant attacks involving young Palestinians.

Two things. First, why should Israel hesitate to kill Palestinian men, when those same men are willing to send their own children to die fighting in their stead? Second, this abomination of sending a retarded boy to his death is actually a good sign that the terrorists are clearly on the run, as Debka commented yesterday. Hamas is in disarray, not only because its leader is dead, but because its operatives have been targeted for weeks. Surprise, surprise, that killing the enemy should be the way to win the war. As General Patton said, the purpose of war is not to die for your country, it’s to make the other son of a bitch die for his. Eventually, as almost every defeated nation has learned, you start running out of soldiers. That’s when the white flags start flying.

PPI at .6 percent in January. It’s not quite as easy to disguise producer’s prices as it is to exclude “volatile food and energy prices”, and when they show up in the CPI, it’s in significantly reduced form. But that’s a rate of 7.2 percent inflation, which means that money market funds will soon be openly inverted if the Fed doesn’t raise interest rates soon. Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley is already calling for an increase of three percent; imagine what that will do to all those idiots who, at a time of all-time record low interest rates, opted for an adjustable-rate mortgage. I’ve read that as many as 25 percent of mortgages are now ARMs, which is just another way that the mortgage banks are setting their clients up for some serious financial raping and pillaging.

Gold never quite touched its 200-DMA, but it got close – 390.50 on March 3 with a 200-DMA of 385 – before jumping back up to 420. Silver is still snorting and stamping and moving up, while the Economist’s dollar-based index of commodities is up 28 percent on the year. Given housing prices, I daresay that’s a lot closer to the true dollar inflation than the fictitious CPI.

As usual, Mogambo’s on the case, this time ripping the hot-and-heavy home-buying crowd:

1) Prices are at historical highs, and are also at the end of a long series of setting new records.

2) Prices are a record-setting multiple of the buyer’s incomes.

3) This is at a time when interest rates are insanely, abnormally, fraudulently low, manipulated to negative real, inflation-adjusted rates

4) There are record deficits in almost every layer of government in the country, thus state and local taxes are sure to be raised.

5) Real-inflation-adjusted incomes are still falling after decades of declining real incomes. And if you also adjust for the increase in total taxes paid to all the different layers of tax-levying authorities, the real, net-of-taxes, inflation-adjusted and cost-of-government adjusted-incomes are hitting the bottom of the barrel.

6) We are at the tail-end end of a long, long series of booms, most of which have not busted yet.

If you’re looking to sell your house, this is inarguably a good time, and quite possibly a great time. If you’re looking to buy, think about renting for a year or two and buying when prices are lower. But if you must buy now and want to take advantage of the low-rates, whatever you do, get a fixed-rate mortgage. But even if Greenspan and company can pull one last boom out of their hat, so what? The point isn’t to get off the ride at the peak, it’s to get off safely and profitably.

Like Hugh Hewitt, I share a bit of anticipation of Mr. Franken’s radio debut. When it starts, someone will have to email me the call-in number; I’ll post it here and everyone who’s interested in seeing the War of the Wings can call in and demand an answer from him on a specific day. The chances are slim that anyone will actually get on the air, but at least we’ll send him a message.

And who knows? The guy is just nuts enough that he might go for it. There’s a lot of rage inside that little man and given that he outweighs me by more than thirty pounds, he’s got a chance. Oh, who am I kidding. I can bench him at least 20 times; even though I’m much lighter I rather doubt he can do the same. While he may have been a wrestler, that was a long time ago and it’s a lot harder to take someone down when they’re looking at you.

U.S. officials said Tuesday the Social Security system is not financially self-sustainable. The Medicare and Social Security trustees made the assessment in releasing their annual report on the entitlement program. Each year, the trustees look at the financial condition of both Social Security and Medicare, and Treasury Secretary John Snow told reporters Social Security “continues to be seriously underfunded,” with a $3.7 trillion benefit obligation, for which trustees predicted it will not have the money. Snow said the program’s cash flow will be in the red in 2018 and the program’s money will be exhausted in 38 years and “neither of those dates have changed since last year’s report. Part of the growing problem is the 76 million baby boomers who will be retire and file for Social Security in the next couple of decades.

Ponzi schemes always fail over time, what else is new. But maybe if we print a lot of money, we’ll be able to meet all of the program’s obligations. Alternatively, we could import a lot of third-world guest workers. That seems to be working really well for Europe.

Space Bunny shares: A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock,will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers “Sure. Why not?” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQLdatabase through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says: “You have exactly 1586 sheep.””That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep.” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks onamused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the shepherd says to the young man “Hey, if I can tell you Exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says,”Okay, why not?” “You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd. “That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required,” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don’t know crap about my business…

Now give me back my dog.”

Jamsco replies: Again, having something in common with socialists doesn’t make you a socialist. I assume that communists hold meeting to make decisions. Does that make meetings communistic?

That’s true, but only at the most superficial level. We’re all human oxygen-breathers, for example. However, having something general in common with socialists and advocating the tenth pillar of the Communist manifesto – “10. Free education for all children in public schools” – are two very substantively different matters. So, yes, supporting free education for all children in public schools is at the very least communistic, just as supporting “abolition of property in land” would be.

And compared the ludicrous stretch of imagination involved in equating the average right-wing Republican with a member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, it would be most reasonable to label a supporter of public schooling a communist. I wouldn’t and I don’t, since most people have given no more thought to the nature of public schooling than they have to the Labor Theory of value, but I have no problem labling the NEA and its activists as such. If someone was advocating lebensraum and a second Endlosung, I doubt Jamsco would have any problem labling them a Nazi. So, what is the difference here? And how many of those ten pillars need one actively support before it is appropriate to label them a socialist or communist?

Keep in mind that public schooling is as necessary a component of modern totalitarian rule as gun control. It is very difficult to engineer a society without control of the children. They are, to paraphrase Lenin, the high ground. That is precisely why the homeschooling movement terrifies the NEA, as it strikes at the heart of their power.

Jamsco writes: Vox says: Home Schooled Students do much better than PS Students

Debater says: My kids are in public schools and they are doing fine or better than HS students.

Vox actually says, anecdotal evidence. 49 percent of all public school students are doing better than the average, so what? Are they developing to their intellectual potential or not? That’s the question, and one Debater is unlikely to be able to answer in the affirmative.

Vox says: But you don’t know how your kids are being indoctrinated.

Debater is aware of what his kids are being taught and says: My kids aren’t being indoctrinated.

Vox says: I’ve got these condemning quotes Dewey and Harris that show that public schools were created to indoctrinate

Debater points out that these quotes are a century old and suggests that things are different now.

Vox actually says, no, Debater, you have no clue. The primary purpose for public schooling is to control the social development of children and cripple their intellectual independence. This is the basic goal of education – the subsumption of the individual – and nothing has changed since it was first articulated. There are older quotes and newer quotes, and the base purpose remains the same. Most people are not capable of recognizing systematic indoctrination anyhow. It’s not usually quite as obvious as in the Soviet Union.

Vox pulls out the big guns and suggests that he read Gatto, a more recent source.

Debater does and sees that the book is rhetoric and propaganda from a bitter former employer

Propaganda serving what purpose? Why would a highly honored employee be bitter about the institution which rewarded and lionized him?

Vox says: It’s not propaganda, that’s how the schools are now run.

Debater 2, a PS teacher with 20 years experience says: No, that’s not how schools are run. Debater 2 is not surprised that there are some former employees who are bitter with PSs.

Most teachers have little idea of the purpose of their grand enterprise, nor do they understand the significance of their own actions. This is not surprising, as teachers generally hail from the dregs of the educated classes. One would not expect second lieutenants to have any real notion of what is going on in the high strategic circles. Furthermore, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from a plethora of sources supporting Gatto’s description of how and why schools are run as they are.

Vox pulls out the bigger guns and says: But Public School Systems were crucial to the Social Models of the last century.

Debater 2 says: American Public schools have different goals than the Nazi party.

Vox says – No they don’t. Look at the Education Union Websites.

Debater 2 does and isn’t bother by what he sees there, largely because his politics aren’t the same as Vox’s

The fact that Debater 2 is sympathetic to the societal goals of the historical National Socialist party hardly disproves my point. That alone should suffice to wake up ignorant public school advocates, who have no idea that socialist societal engineering is what they are signing their children up for when they put them in Debater 2’s hands. Furthermore, Debater’s I and II make statements that only indicate their lack of ability to see and understand what is happening right in front of them. This doesn’t surprise me in the least, as most people fail to recognize the obvious, let alone that which is intentionally kept out of the public eye as much as is reasonably possible.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press has been chronicling the trials and travails of one Ruby, who is single and not looking very likely to find a mate any time soon. Why not is not much of a mystery, as she is about as clueless about the opposite sex as I’m guessing she is about plate tectonics. In this week’s episode, the poor darling tries speed-dating:



I was a little nervous and a lot curious as I walked into a large room at a sports bar that looked like a log cabin on steroids. Right away I noticed several well-dressed, average-looking men. The women, fulfilling the social standard, were generally better looking. While everyone waited for the session to start, I began chatting with two young women who, based on another friend’s recommendation, also were trying speed dating for the first time.

Women, for some reason, are almost completely incapable of accurately judging attractiveness as men see it. This is why a woman can look at Marisa Miller and say “I don’t think she’s pretty at all” then turn around and tell you that their obese friend with stringy hair is gorgeous because she has a nice smile. Note that she thinks the women were better-looking, on the whole, and keep this in mind in light of what she writes later. The Perfect Aryan Male attended one of these events in the same city and he said that out of the 30 women that were there on the night he participated, there was only one woman who was actually pretty, although he discovered that she was built like the Great Pyramid of Giza when she stood up. And this is a guy who is so obviously a catch that he can’t go to a strip club without getting asked out by the dancers.

Of the 30 guys I met, I marked yes to three. One was Hot Matt, who was still in college and obviously too young for me. (Logic played no role in that decision.) I wished I was attracted to a few more, but the sparks just weren’t flying. I wrestled with the idea that I might become attracted to more of them if I got to know them better, which is surely possible, but with me, that rarely happens. Plus, I didn’t take very good notes, and most of the guys darted for the exit afterwards instead of mingling, which the service encourages.

Two things. First, if the women were actually more attractive than the men, then why did most of the men bolt? That doesn’t describe the normal behavior of a guy who finds himself in the company of more attractive women who he knows are available in my experience. Second, note that the failure of “sparks” to fly in three minutes is reason enough to disqualify an otherwise acceptable man and that despite her long record of dating failure, logic still plays a backseat role to mindless optimism. Thirty-something ladies, if you want to get married, it helps to stop panting after the handsome college boys, take a good look in the mirror and give the guys who are on your level – or close to it – a chance. Even if you’re uncommonly well-preserved, the college boy isn’t going to marry you and you’ll have blown another few months. And as for expectations, well, the White Buffalo and I were talking last night, and concluded that no one in our extended circle, with one or two exceptions, was with the kind of person that they, or anyone else, would have imagined themselves to marry.

My dear friend Chatterbox told me recently that she had tons more dates than any other woman she knew when she was living in New York City because her attitude was that if a guy asked her out, any guy, then she was going out. Now, she definitely has some strange-looking friends, but a lot of great stories too. And with an attitude like that, it’s no surprise that she’s happily married despite the handicap of her MBA. First get real with yourself, then be real with others. A little practicality goes a surprisingly long way in the dating game.