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I’ve noticed that whenever you write a column that is anything less than a whole-hearted endorsement of the sodomite lifestyle, you get deluged with email from people who accuse you of being gay and claim your antipathy is merely a symptom of your being deeply in the closet.

Assuming for the moment that there might be a nugget of truth in this premise, then doesn’t this imply that the most rabid Bush-haters on the left secretly adore him?

Ergo, instead of replying with matching hostility, shouldn’t Republicans be asking their opponents, “So, which is it? Is it just that you find supply-side economics strangely compelling, or do you secretly envision the President slipping into your bedroom in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but tight-whities, cowboy boots, and a smirk?”

Fat chance of it ever happening, but I’d sure like to see the look on some Code Pink tw*t’s face after that question.

Safesex brings up a pertinent point:

Countries like my own are supposedly further down the socialist drain. We have such horrendous things as universal health care, we were the first country to let women vote, one of the first to give the vote to undeserving lower classes etc. Why is it then that literacy (ie. functional literacy) has continuosly improved in Australia for the last thrity or forty ytears?

Australia funds it’s public education system much more generously than America does.

The short answer is: I don’t know. I know nothing about the Australian educational system, but I can do a little poking around. However, the USA is the leader in global education, in the sense that educational programs and policies begin in the United States and gradually spread out from there around the globe. I was reading a Swiss web site a few months ago, and it was interesting to see that Swiss literacy rates were dropping, while the solutions being proposed were the same sort pushed by the NEA twenty years ago.

When I was in Italy, I noticed that everything was significantly less PC than in the US, but as Umberto Eco has noted, the PC movement has begun to rear its ugly head there as well. For example, the UN’s international baccalaureate program is being widely pushed worldwide, and is essentially a US-style program. So, if you were to press me for an explanation despite my general ignorance on the global education scene, I would say that despite its government funding, Australian public schools still retain vestiges of traditional approaches to learning that have been eliminated from the US schools.

But, as I said, that’s just a possibility.

Not a bad start for Week One. Ahman and Daunte scored more points apiece than my Week 2 opponent and I put down Chokechain with no trouble at all, 41-22. I see no need for changes next week, except to start The SOD* over Duce Staley assuming he’s not suspended yet. By the way, Denver fans, is Watts still projected to get the start over Lelie soon? It didn’t look that way the other night.

The Prestige Alliance didn’t fare quite as well, as Cleveland’s upset of Baltimore messed up our 14-point game and Chokechain switched to Chicago on our 8-point game at the last moment without telling me. Denver’s win hurt too. But our total of 94 points was respectable, keeping us in the top third and within two games of the leader at 116.

This is a marathon, not a sprint, but the White Buffalo can’t have been too happy about his initial 69-point performance, which saw him one point ahead of someone named Annabella. Never a good sign.

*The Steal of the Draft, Onterrio Smith

SR sends in notes from a teacher’s conference workshop:

70% of kids who enter Kindergarten able to read or do math, will lose that ability before they leave Kindergarten, generally within 6 weeks. This has to do with the child’s desire and need to please their teacher, by meeting – and not exceeding – her expectations; and wanting to fit in with his or her peers.

This surprises me, but it makes a degree of sense when you think about it. I have no idea if it is true or not, however, it does have ominous implications for even the best-prepared child’s academic future.

Richard writes:

BTW all this talk about how I was trained for this and that, and I could kill you with a punch to the head, or blow out your kidney, blah blah blah. That sounds a little childish guys. My dojo this, and my dojo that. Did’nt you guys ever watch Kung Fu? Did Kane ever talk about how bad he was? Did he ever say, “I can kill you all in a matter on seconds.” ?

No…………Why? Because people who are confident in thier abilities to defend themselves and those around them don’t talk about it. It’s just another thing with them. Real men don’t brag.

I don’t know how to break this to you, Richard, but Kung Fu was a television show and Kane is imaginary. Intimidation and psychology are a very important part of the martial arts. If you consider movies to be evidence, you’ll note that there’s nary an Asian martial arts movie which does not involve copious pre-combat display designed to intimidate the opponent. As for childish, you seem to have mistaken my point. I was asserting that any reasonably trained man knows numerous lethal techniques, there’s nothing secret about the weak points on the human body and it’s not rocket science.

And martial artists are far from silent about their favorite subject, as they talk about almost nothing else among themselves. They don’t talk about it a lot around other people for the same reason that mechanics don’t talk about engines around others… because no one else is really that interested. (I think the WWII thread has clearly demonstrated that I know no such constraints on this blog). A group of them can be very annoying to be around, in fact, since the younger ones are almost always throwing kicks at one another’s heads, putting the dog in a leglock or whatever.

As for wrestling, it is a martial art. Most of the kicking schools don’t adequately train for it; our sensei, on the other hand, was a champion high school wrestler and he regularly brought in boxers, wrestlers, Muy Thai fighters, Tae Kwon Do kickers, Judo practitioners and others to show us that there were many, many ways to approach the issue. Wrestlers are harder to deal with than most, but there are plenty of weaknesses in their style that can be exploited, as there are in all styles.

The truth is, if the other person is intimidated by you, that’s 9/10ths of the battle right there. Intimidation was the purpose of the recent Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq and it is also the secret behind government dominance of the public.

I almost forgot. If anyone is looking to larn a kid how to read, there’s a set of Powerpoint slideshows over at voxday.net that you may find useful. Click on Dayload and you’ll see what’s there. Remember that you’ll need to download a Greek font if you don’t already have one on your machine and you want to use the Greek alphabets.

I highly recommend the Bob Books for beginning readers who know their basic 26 phonics. Get to know Sam and Mac. Raise an eyebrow as they repeatedly “sit” on each other. Pity the sad cat. Marvel as the pig digs. It’s all the excitement young minds, (and some not-so-young minds), can handle!

From Debka:

Why is the government in Moscow lying? they ask, certain that the correct number of school siege deaths is closer to 600 than the 335 officially admitted. And in fact around 200 of the more than 1,200 hostages are missing and 90 bodies removed from the ravaged school lie unclaimed in the Vladikavkaz morgue.

Furthermore, there is a growing discrepancy between official statements coming from Moscow and survivors’ testimony. While Russian ministers asserted that some of the 32 hostage-takers were Arab, survivors affirm that they spoke fluent Russian. At any rate, the failure of the Russian authorities to confirm their nationalities has left grieving Beslan parents threatening revenge against Ingoshetia. Military checkpoints have closed the North Ossetia-Ingushe border. The suspicions entertained by the Russian Orthodox North Ossetians that their Muslim neighbors were involved in the slaughter of their children will hardly be allayed by the official announcement by President Vladimir Putin of sweeping changes to Russia’s political system to promote the fight against terrorism.

The terrorists who ravaged the school and community of Beslan came from a direction startling enough to jolt Russian president Vladimir Putin into taking a hard look at the Islamic terror now rampant outside Chechnya – in at least two additional Caucasian republics.

The 32 hostage takers were not Chechens but members of al Qaeda cells, Arabs and natives, known locally as “Wahhabis” (after the austere state religion of Saudi Arabia), from a place whose name is even less recognizable than were the battle arenas of Afghanistan and the Balkans: Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, northwest of North Ossetia.

So, it’s quite possible that the school atrocity didn’t have anything to do with Chechnya at all. Didn’t see that one, I have to admit. It is, however, a warning that there is no integrated solution to the problem posed by Islamic extremists. The USA won’t do anything, of course, as the Bush administration can’t even bother to look up the millions of illegal aliens already here, but I note that European nations have never shown much hesitation to crack down without restraint on those they consider troublesome minorities. Here’s hoping that they merely resort to mass deportations.

TG laces his prose with contempt:

I was a certified high school teacher of French. I lasted one year. Couldn’t stand the water-tightless logic of innumerable mad hatters applying the teachings of John Dewey and school-of-education propaganda. I am now a university adjunct teaching composition I courses. I have to teach things to my students that they should have learned in 7th grade. The only solution is to disenfranchise all schools of education. In reality, teacher certification laws have one main purpose: full employment for education professors who otherwise are well suited to be door greeters at Wal Mart.

Indeed.

JM sends in an interesting tidbit from strategypage.com:

Home Schooled Kids Can’t Hack It

September 12, 2004: Discipline can be learned, and it must be practiced. That’s the findings of a recent Department of Defense study of whether kids who graduated from “alternative” high schools, or were home schooled, did as well in military service as graduates from traditional high schools. Turns out that the home schooled and alternative high school students did not last in the service as well as high school grads. One thing you learn by finishing traditional high school, is how to get along in a group, discipline yourself to get things done in a group, and to persevere as a group.

In fact, kids who spent four years in high school, but did not pass all their final exams, did better. The Pentagon did not release the percentage differences, but is advising recruiters to take these factors into account when deciding which prospective recruits to spend their time on.

It’s hard to see this as an indictment of homeschool. I don’t know many parents who cherish dreams of raising a herd animal with a prediliction for groupthink.

MG writes of her 4-year old:

We looked at several elementary schools. After visiting one public kindergarten where the kids were learning what the letter B looked like, I asked the principal what they did with kids who could already read. His answer: “We’ve found that kids who are advanced in one area like reading or math are often behind their peers in other areas, like social skills. So we would focus on that.” Hmmm, smart kids are awkward geeks; one cannot TOLERATE that, not in California.

What most parents don’t realize is that the social skills of which the principal is speaking tend to revolve around the ability to properly bully and be bullied, to put condoms on bananas and perform oral sex on command. And yes, children whose parents care enough about them to teach them reading, writing and arithmetic usually don’t have highly refined development in those areas.

If you’re concerned about your homeschooled child having the social skills to survive and thrive in the midst of his public schooled peers, the answer is very simple. Start them in the martial arts at five; the ability to ruthlessly beat the living hell out of another child is universally respected in the public school jungle.