Vox Popoli

Okay, this might not be a real priority where most people are concerned. I understand that. But one of my first orders of action would be to make full-season DVD wrapups available for every team’s past seasons, not just with highlights but abbreviated broadcasts of every game they played that season. Talk about a license to print money! There are few things I’d like better than to curl up with Space Bunny and watch an old Purple People Eaters’ season or see the 1972 Dolphins’ perfect year.

I don’t know how she’d manage to fall asleep during all the third quarters, but I’m sure she’d cope somehow.

Safesex wanted to know how I could explain Australia’s better educational results despite the fact that his country spent more money on education than the USA, which I have asserted is counterproductive where literacy is concerned. I haven’t looked up literacy rates and I’ll have more complete information soon, but I think I can answer his question about the apparent dichotomy now: there isn’t one. Australia spends less money per student.

According to the recently released OECD Education at a Glance 2004 report, the four countries which spend the most per student on education are:

1. The United States

2. Denmark

3. Norway

4. Switzerland

More later.

The Elder (of Fraters Libertas) draws our attention to the following post by JB Doubtless

:

Ooo life’s sweet right here in the passenger seat

yeah life’s so sweet

When I look to the left see his suntanned hands

His muddy river hair and his thousand acre plans

I’m all shook up like a quarter in a can

Ain’t life sweet?

In the passenger seat

The first time I heard this song, I didn’t think I was hearing properly. “Life’s so sweet from the passenger’s seat.” The passenger’s seat. Here we have three stunningly attractive lasses telling us that they prefer being in the passenger’s seat–letting their man run the show?

Hold on a minute. What about the triumph of feminism? Of “equality”? Of women wanting to act like men?

If we’re very, very lucky, in another 40 years we’ll hear songs by female pop stars demanding the limiting of suffrage to productive, property-owning men of a certain age. Of course, the depths to which we’ll have to sink in order for most people to realize how disastrous universal “democracy” has been for the nation will probably be more than a little unpleasant, and the chances that the masses will turn towards a dictatorial demagogue instead are probably, oh, around 666 to 1, but it’s still nice to contemplate a potential silver lining in the massive black cumulonimbus looming in our collective (and collectivist) future.

Number of Allied air sorties over Germany before June 6, 1944: 98,400

German aircraft production increase, 1942-1944: 279 percent

Japanese aircraft available for naval-based air raids in early 1942: 265

(That’s assuming the Kaga, Akagi and the Shokaku were available. Otherwise, if Malkin was referring to the Taiyo, the Unyo and the Ryujo, that number falls to 92, less than one-one thousandth the number required to utterly fail to reduce German aircraft production at all.)

The 8th Air Force during last week of February 1944 staged “Big Week”. For 7 days the 8th Air Force struck at Germany with its 3,800 B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers. They dropped nearly 10,000 t of bombs. The primary target was Germany’s aircraft industry. P-47 Thunderbolts using drop tanks flew escort. The Germans were able to rebuild damaged plants more quickly than anticipated…. The actual impact of the campaign was disappointing.

Big Week was estimated to have destroyed between 600 and 1,000 Luftwaffe planes. If it took 26,600 bombing sorties with heavy bombers to destroy 1,000 planes, how many could the Japanese have destroyed, if one assumes that fighters and carrier-launched dive-bombers are the equivalent of B-17s and B-24s? Rounding up, we can estimate that in a single raid from their three largest carriers, the Japanese could have been expected to destroy about 10 planes. Assuming they lost only the same number of planes in each raid that they did at Pearl Harbor – where they had the benefit of surprise – this Japanese raiding force could have been expected to destroy about 100 planes before running out of planes themselves. At 1942 production rates, it would have taken all of 18 hours for the USA to replace the planes lost.

UPDATE – Please keep in mind that the plans for the USA’s strategic bombing campaign were drawn up in June, 1941. The total ineffectiveness of this massive campaign could not have been known in early 1942, but the requirement for repeated sorties by a thousand-plus heavy bombers to have any noticeable effect on industrial production certainly was, as the small-scale British strategic campaign of 1939 was judged to have been “disastrous”.

JS copies me on an email to the FDR apologist:

As a fourth generation Japanese American I cry at the very thought that you would still try to box my family into this defenseless position.

I served in the USMC and am now part of the Republican Party. My grandfather died in Normandy. My uncles served in the 442nd. My family, having been in the US since 1905, was honored in our

community even after the attacks of P.H. and found it impossible to assume we should be imprisoned. My little old great-grandmother was as loyal an American as you could have asked for.

I sit here at my desk and weep at the thoughts of hatred that must run through you to say such things. If you can’t face the fact that it was done for two reasons: A) racism and B) money… you have lost touch with reality.

Look in the mirror. They would have happily have put you in the same camps… if they had a choice. Not because of your heart… but because of your skin. Shame will be in your heart/soul forever! Forever! Shame…..

If you have any honor you will answer Vox Day’s questions!!!!

Malkin has been content to ignore my questions, although they would appear to be simple to answer if I am as uninformed as she claims. It will be interesting to see if she’ll be able to continue ignoring them when they are posed to her by the descendants of those scapegoated and victimized by FDR. By the way, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to which JS refers, was one of the most decorated American military units of WWII.

On November 17 when the 442nd was finally relieved, the dead and the wounded outnumbered the living. The 442nd ended up at less than half its usual strength. K Company, which started out with 186 men had 17 left. I Company started out with 185. At the end, there were only 8.

During the six days the 442nd fought to rescue the Lost Battalion, 54 men were killed and many, many more were wounded and sent to hospitals. During the entire Vosges Campaign, 34 days of almost non-stop combat – liberating Bruyeres and Biffontaine, rescuing the 211 Texans, and nine more days of driving the Germans through the forest – the 442nd’s total casualties were 216 men dead and more than 856 wounded.

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.