Monthly Archives: March 2015

The Sons of Haven Monahan

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Reading the news these days is difficult because it so often reads like an old Lampoon gag. How many stories about boys being expelled for finger guns can you read before you start to think the schools are run by madmen?

This is one of those times when I’m left wondering if it is not some sort of elaborate gag.

Los Angeles police descended on Venice High School on Friday, arresting nine students in connection with a series of sex crimes that began more than a year ago and involved at least two female classmates.

All but one of the arrests were on campus; authorities were attempting to locate five other students. The investigation began after a parent reported the allegations on Tuesday.

As detectives investigated, they discovered at least one photograph showing sex acts, according to law enforcement sources. A photo that appears to show two teenagers engaged in a sex act has been circulated on social media. Allegations involved both consensual sexual acts between minors and coerced acts, which complicates the case, police said.

My first read registered “sex with minors” rather than “sex between minors.” Since the story is about arresting students, I went back and read it again, thinking I missed the part where the students were middle-aged men. Nope. They just arrested boys for having sex with their female classmates.

The alleged crimes include sexual assault and lewd acts with a minor. Although the incidents date back to 2013, Smith said, most occurred in the last two months — and as recently as this month. Sources said that several boys were present during at least some of the incidents.

Authorities provided few details about the allegations and declined to identify the boys who were arrested because they are minors, all between the ages of 14 and 17. Sources in law enforcement and at Venice High said some of the boys are members of the high school’s football and basketball program.

Someone better alert Steve Sailer. Haven Monahan has replicated and turned up in his local high school.

The allegations, they said, involved a group of male students working together to pressure girls into having sex. The boys were accused of making verbal threats and threatening the girls’ reputations, according to one of the sources.

In other words they just arrested boys for doing what boys have been doing for 50,000 years or more.

L.A. Unified Supt. Ramon Cortines said the students’ parents had been notified and crisis counselors were on campus to assist any other students.

“This is a painful moment for Venice High School and this district,” he said in a statement. “I want you to know that no sexual misconduct of any kind by students or staff will ever be tolerated in L.A. Unified.”

“We’re pouring all our resources over there today and for the next couple of weeks to make sure every child over there feels safe,” said school board member Steve Zimmer, who represents the Westside school. “Our crisis team and our psychiatric social workers are on site ready to provide services to every student who is affected by this, indirectly and directly.”

The fact that a school system has a “crisis team” and psychiatric social workers should be the place to start when historians dig through the rubble of our culture.

This will not end well.

Post-National America

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Another example of how the American ruling elite, endeavoring to break free from the constraints of national loyalty, is rendering citizenship pointless is in the area of foreign policy. In the American system, the President is tasked with negotiating treaties1. For those treaties to become law, they must be ratified by the Senate. In contract law, this is the same as a deal requiring board approval. The executives can sign what they like, but the contract is not enforceable until it is approved by the board.

The Founders recognized the dangers of giving the President sole discretion in treaty making. He could use this power to circumvent the power of the legislature by striking deals with other countries that trumped US law. Imagine Obama striking a deal with Mexico, giving Texas back, so their votes would not count in the next election.

It has always been a quarrelsome process and intentionally so. Treaties are the most important and dangerous activities performed by government. They start wars, end wars, start economies and end economies. They are not to be taken lightly so the American system has high hurdles built into the process. Presidents hate this, but they hate a lot of things that are safeguards against mischief.

The emerging Iran deal is revealing how the Obama administration is plotting to circumvent Congress and avoid submitting the matter to the Senate.

Major world powers have begun talks about a United Nations Security Council resolution to lift U.N. sanctions on Iran if a nuclear agreement is struck with Tehran, a step that could make it harder for the U.S. Congress to undo a deal, Western officials said.

The talks between Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — the five permanent members of the Security Council — plus Germany and Iran, are taking place ahead of difficult negotiations that resume next week over constricting Iran’s nuclear ability.

Some eight U.N. resolutions – four of them imposing sanctions – ban Iran from uranium enrichment and other sensitive atomic work and bar it from buying and selling atomic technology and anything linked to ballistic missiles. There is also a U.N. arms embargo.

Iran sees their removal as crucial as U.N. measures are a legal basis for more stringent U.S. and European Union measures to be enforced. The U.S. and EU often cite violations of the U.N. ban on enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work as justification for imposing additional penalties on Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress on Wednesday that an Iran nuclear deal would not be legally binding, meaning future U.S. presidents could decide not to implement it. That point was emphasized in an open letter by 47 Republican senators sent on Monday to Iran’s leaders asserting any deal could be discarded once President Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.

But a Security Council resolution on a nuclear deal with Iran could be legally binding, say Western diplomatic officials. That could complicate and possibly undercut future attempts by Republicans in Washington to unravel an agreement.

Now, the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that international law does not trump US law. That’s not an issue here. The issue here is that Obama is trying avoid the whole treaty process by getting the UN Security Council to order its member nations to abide by this deal. Failure to do so would, technically, be a violation of the UN Charter. The fact that Iran, for example, has been in violation of the UN Charter for decades, as are other nations, is not important.

What Obama is attempting to do is shift the focus from the law, which is against him, to a future political fight waged by the next president. If Jeb Bush rejects this deal, for example, he would have the added problem of dealing with the UN and, presumably, US allies. Even though he would be well within the law, the politics of taking on the UN would complicate things.

In the near term Obama would argue that the failure of the Senate to approve his deal with Iran is putting the US at odds with the “international community.” The word “community” is a magic word on the Left so that means all the left-wingers in the American media will be out in the streets ululating about how Republicans are committing treason.

It won’t result in approval, but it lets Obama and future presidents avoid compliance with the law in future treaty deals. Instead of going to Congress, they will go to the UN, giving France more say in these matters than the American people.

As we see with open borders, the end game is about rupturing the ties between the rulers and the ruled. In a nation, the rulers have a natural loyalty to their host nation and its people. Their success is the nation’s success. Citizenship, therefore, has value. Being an American, even if you were a field hand or factory laborer, had benefits just for being an American citizen.

In the post-national system our rulers are ushering in, citizenship has no value. Your elected representatives have no power as Congress (or parliament) becomes ornamental. The laws offer preferences to those that are not legal citizens in areas of employment and welfare benefits. Being a legal citizen becomes a sucker’s play. Once the people figure it out, the ruling classes are free to drop all pretense of loyalty to nation and citizenship.

The next phase is a world of cloud people, untethered from the ground below them. Like medieval lords, they extract rents to finance their lavish lifestyles, but unlike those lords they will have no sense of obligation to their subjects. In Brazil, the elite live in the hills, guarded by private armies. The rest are left to their own devices. What services provided by the elites are to mitigate against unrest.

The administrative class of the managerial elite will function as game keepers, making sure the people are fed and given minimal care. They will try to suppress violence and crime, but their main duty will be keeping the people in their pens.

Whether this will work is debatable. So far, human organization has been about scaling up the kin-tribe. The post-national cloud people look more like colonizers, which eventually ends with one side swinging from a noose. But, there was a time when no one thought a country could work.

1I Know that technically the Senate simply permits the President to ratify the treaty as part of its advice and consent authority.

Gambling on Iran

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The other day, John Derbyshire posted a column of questions he would like asked of prospective presidential candidates. One of them was about Iran.

Nuclear proliferation.  Pakistan, a dysfunctional kleptocracy maggoty with Muslim fanatics, has for nigh on 20 years had nuclear weapons, and now has missiles with which to deliver them.

North Korea, under the control of a Mafia-style gangster family utterly ruthless in maintenance of its power, is similarly equipped.

Fifty years ago, communist China, under the autocratic control of a megalomaniac who had just got through watching impassively while his policies caused 30 million of his countrymen to die of starvation, got the bomb, and is now a major nuclear power.

Deterrence has an excellent track record, even with regimes at the furthest extremes of craziness and cruelty. Should Americans be concerned about Iran going nuclear? Why?

I’ve been mulling that one over for a while and I don’t think I agree with what Derb is suggesting. Pakistan is a mess now, for sure, but it was not always this sort of a mess. The secular rulers have, even now, been able to keep the religious crazies from gaining control of the nukes. In other words, so far we have been lucky.

To say deterrence has any impact on Pakistan is simply wrong. The world has been lucky so far. Maybe the almost certain annihilation of the country that would come from India, if the Muslim crazies got hold of the nukes has made the secular elements more determined. That feels like a stretch to me. Dumb luck looks like the right answer here and who knows how long that holds.

North Korea is not run by religious fanatics and the sanity of the ruling class is not in question. We may think it is nuts to operate as a hermit kingdom, but that’s a matter of taste, not fact. Otherwise, we are dealing with rational people who are pretty smart.Given their position in the world, they have managed to survive despite a lot of big enemies.

Has deterrence altered their behavior? We have no way of knowing.  We do know they have sold nuclear technology to Syria and missile technology to Iraq and Iran. If they have not been deterred from that, there no reason to think they will be deterred from selling a nuke. We can’t know these things, which means we can’t say deterrence has worked here.

China and the Soviet Union are the two good examples. Russia and China are old countries run by smart people. These are people with no history of messianic religious impulses. There’s nothing in the history of these people to think they are anxious to usher in the end times. Deterrence works with these countries for the same reason it works for the US. It’s not fear of destruction. It’s fear of blowing up the planet.

Iran is nothing like China or Russia. Persia is an old society, but there’s not a whole lot of Persia left. Genetically, Iranians are just Arabs. I’m sure the average guy walking the streets of Tehran is in no hurry to blow up the world, but we know a lot of them are tossing and turning every night dreaming of it.

Here I’ll share a story from an Iranian I knew in the 80’s. He was a conscript fighting against the Iraqis. His unit was in the Basra area as the Iranians threw everything they had at the city hoping to end the war. They were faced with a minefield and volunteers were called for to clear a path. A bunch of Revolutionary Guards volunteered. They cleared a path through the minefield by running through it, exploding the mines.

The point is Iran is not China or even Pakistan. The people in charge are messianic fanatics. A good portion of the population supports the leaders on religious grounds. Maybe they are not that serious about destroying Israel and ushering in the end times. Maybe it is just what they say to keep up appearances. We can’t know that.

I think if I was asked to pick the worst country on which to test the deterrence theory, I’d pick Iran. Even the Saudis seem to be more constrained in their actions and they may be the most thoroughly Muslim society on earth. Iran defines itself in opposition to the West and therefore seeks out ways to cause mayhem in the West. Deterrence does not seem to have had any effect so far.

There’s a tendency on the Dissident Right to blame American foreign policy for everything wrong in the world. The Paultards do this a lot. I think it is fair to say America has bungled a lot of things in this realm. When it comes to the Arabs, American has been stunningly incompetent. None of which changes the fact Iran is run by messianic fanatics who talk constantly about blowing up the world.

Of course, there’s good old fashioned indifference, which I find appealing, generally speaking. Iran is not going to nuke America. If they did, we could easily wipe them off the map. We would lose a city, but they would not exist. Iran is a problem of Europe, Israel and the Arabs. There’s an argument there, but it is not deterrence. It is indifference.

Regardless, It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is prepared to let the Iranians go nuclear. Who knows, maybe they will be right this time.

Obama’s War on White People

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Obama’s war on the pale faces continues to escalate. Now we have two more cops ambushed and shot.

Two police officers were shot during a protest outside Ferguson, Missouri, police headquarters early on Thursday, police said, just hours after the city’s police chief quit following a damning U.S. Justice Department report into his force.

The shooting of the officers, who were in serious condition at a hospital, was the latest incident in months of turmoil in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, which has been at the center of an intense national debate over police use of force, particularly against black men, since a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager there in August.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters early on Thursday that a 41-year-old officer from his department was struck in the shoulder and a 32-year-old officer from the nearby Webster Groves Police Department was hit in the face about midnight as the crowd was starting to break up.

“These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers,” Belmar said. “I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems.”

He said the officers, whom he did not identify, were both conscious and hospitalized. The department planned to release more information at 9 a.m. CDT (0800 DST).

An Obama administration spokesman said, “The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism. Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.”¹

As soon as you hear the word justice, just assume what is meant is revenge and you are  closer to the truth. That’s something people have always known, until the lunatics took over the west.

The violence grew out of a Wednesday night demonstration in which several dozen protesters gathered in front of the Ferguson police department, just hours after Police Chief Thomas Jackson resigned.

The night started peacefully but about two dozen officers clad in riot gear later faced off with the protesters. At least two people were taken into custody.

Gunshots rang out about midnight turning a scene of relative quiet into pandemonium. Many of the remaining few dozen demonstrators fled, some screaming.

The line of police scrambled, with many taking defensive positions drawing their weapons and some huddling behind riot shields, according to a video published online.

Belmar said the shooter was among the demonstrators standing across from the officers.

“I don’t know who did the shooting, to be honest with you right now, but somehow they were embedded in that group of folks,” he said.

Protesters at the scene, however, said on social media that the shots did not come from where they were standing.

“The shooter was not with the protesters. The shooter was atop the hill,” activist DeRay McKesson said on Twitter.

“I was here. I saw the officer fall. The shot came from at least 500 feet away from the officers,” he said.

I’m thinking DeRay was there, knows who did the shooting and is a member of the vibrant community. Just a guess.

 

Clintonian Decline

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Watching the Clinton e-mail scandal unfold, I can’t help but think about the old Southern Methodist football scandal. For my non-American readers, this was a scandal surrounding the football (American football) program at Southern Methodist University in 70’s and 80’s. The people running the program broke every rule on the books at least once and most several times. They seemed to relish their outlaw status so no amount of warnings deterred them.

Finally, the governing body of college sports, along with their envious competitors brought the hammer down on them. For the first and only time, the “death penalty” was handed down and the program was shuttered for two years. The program never recovered and has been an afterthought ever since. A UK analog would be Chelsea being shutdown for two years and then relegated to second division permanently.

The intent of the punishment was to stand as a warning to others. If you did not respect the rules, the punishments would be severe. If you kept breaking the rules, the punishments would be draconian. The funny thing is, the results were something entirely different than expected. The fallout so frightened all of the other football playing universities, they decided that punishment should never again be used.

The result over the last thirty years is a decreasing ability of the sports playing universities to police themselves. The punishments have become ornamental and the investigations take so long no one remembers why they are on-going most of the time. The University of North Carolina, for example, was found to be faking classes and grades to keep players eligible. That was five years ago and nothing has come of it. the investigation is “on-going.”

Now, what does this have to do with the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics?

In the American system, impeachment and removal from office is the political death penalty. A judge, Secretary or executive that is deemed unacceptable by the legislature can be removed from office. In the 1970’s, the Liberal Democrats were prepared to use impeachment to remove Nixon. He resigned before it got to that point, but only because he knew he could not win at trial. The die was cast so he resigned.

The fallout was not what was expected. The Liberal Democrats were sure the Republican party would collapse. Instead, the party surged to majority status over the next two decades and the Liberal Democrats have never fully recovered. The Republicans, for their part, discovered a similar lesson twenty years later when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. They stopped short, claiming to have made their point.

The point, however, was that the death penalty, so to speak, was forever off the table. By refusing to resign, Clinton exposed what everyone suspected, but preferred not to admit. That is, the American Congress no longer had the will or ability to enforce the rules on the executive. In one of life’s great ironies, the Nixon impeachment was about reigning in the imperial president. That led to the Clinton impeachment, which solidified the imperial presidency.

Like the SMU scandal I started with, attempts to enforce the rules ended up exposing the deep rot within the system those rules were supposed to protect. The greatest irony of all is that Hillary Clinton worked on the House Watergate committee as a young attorney and was fired for unethical behavior. What she learned, it seems, is that Nixon should have fought a little harder as there was simply no stomach in the ruling class for enforcing their rules.

The 1990’s will be looked upon as a seminal period in American history. The Clinton’s willingness and ability to corrupt the political system and their brazen disregard of the rules set a dangerous precedent. Obama is now issuing edicts as if he is emperor. Meanwhile, the Congress cowers in fear. This e-mail scandal shows quite clearly that the political class is broken.

If you doubt it, look at the facts. Clinton had this private e-mail system setup. It is against the law to mishandle government documents and the mere existence of this private e-mail system is more than enough to suggest that happened and happened deliberately and with malice of forethought.

The Congress can issue a subpoena for the physical server, all written documents related to it or having originated from it, all of the people who had access to it, etc. E-mail is a two-way street so all they need is one e-mail from the government to this domain to justify their actions. That would take a competent tech about an hour to find. The claim of destroyed hard drives could easily be proof of improper use of confidential information.

In other words, the Congress has a lot of power and they could come down on Clinton if they are inclined to do so. If Clinton refuses to comply, the Constitution gives Congress the power to arrest her and bring her in to testify. If she refuses, she can be imprisoned in the Capitol jail. In other words, this whole charade could be settled by the middle of summer and it would be the last time someone tried a similar stunt.

Of course, that’s not possible. The political class is paralyzed, incapable of enforcing its own rules. That leaves the field open for rogues and criminals. In another time, Congress would have been shuttered and its members executed as the most powerful political clans closed ranks. Today, we just have the current chaos.

There is a Faulkner quality to this. The grubby, grasping Clintons are the Snopes clan, slowly subverting the Compsons, in this case the American Republic. I would like to say that Obama is Benji, but the analogy really does not work, even though it makes me laugh.

 

Forever Young

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My plan to live forever was pretty simple. I sat for a painting of myself and then set off on a life of hedonism. It looks like I was not the only guy working on this. Google is pouring money in the quest to defeat death.

Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.

“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.

This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”

Unsurprisingly, I’m skeptical. Since the great leap forward in medicine and diet, particularly for the treatment of infections, life expectancy has crept up slowly. In 1930, the typical white male lived to 62. Today the typical white male lives to 79. That’s a nice increase, but it has been a slow steady increase. It suggest the big increases in health and longevity have been realized.

That’s not to say there’s not some great leaps coming soon. Genetics offers up some opportunities to understand aging. There may be some ways to slow the process and extend lifespan. Cancer treatments, oddly enough, are adding greatly to our understanding of how cells age and die. Some cancer drugs are slowing aging in mice so there may be some quality of life things coming shortly.

Of course, this is being driven by the Boomer generation. Twenty years ago the rush was on to fix baldness and limp noodles. Now the rush is on to fix decrepitude. It’s not just Google pouring money into it. All of the big pharma companies are rushing to find the next big drug and that drug will be to ameliorate the effects of aging. If you were thinking the boomers were about to start dying off, you may be disappointed.

I’m not sure how I feel about living to 500. Men in my family live into their 90’s and in good shape until the end. I don’t recall any of them wishing they had more time, but I have no way of knowing what they thought in their last blinks. I suspect they missed their friends who had all gone before them.

That’s a big part of it. If I was going to live to 500, I don’t want to be the only 500 year old. That could have some advantages, but it would also be lonely. I find talking to someone half my age a chore and that’s decades. Imagine have a few centuries of experience on everyone else. I’d probably be the world’s biggest asshole.

NRx @ NRO

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For a while now I have been skimming the posts at National Review Online under the blog Post-Modern Conservative. I don’t know how long it has been running, but it is not new, just new to me. I see the phrase “post-modern” and I assume that what is behind it is awful. Post-modern is weird for the sake of being weird. It’s also an abuse of language.

There are two people posting there, neither of whom are familiar to me. I’ve learned with the modern media to research the credentials of writers as they are often just actors. Economic “experts” are journalism majors with no business experience. Legal experts are reporters who got a JD at night school between jobs, but never bothered to take the bar. It’s all a big show. Carl Eric Scott is a mystery, but Peter Augustine Lawler is a college professor and a regular at conservative publications.

I hesitate to call them neo-reactionary only because I hate the term and it seems to cover just about everyone not on red team or blue team. Putting John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer in the same bucket as Jayman and Nick Land looks like a category error to me. This map always struck me as a great way to map the stars outside of conventional thinking. The change I would make is to put the modes of modern thought in the center in relation to one another and have the Dark Enlightenment guys surrounding the core, sort of like an asteroid belt or debris field.

I must admit that I could never get through Mencius Moldbug’s series of posts. The opaque style never did it for me. Plus, I think you need to get to the point in blog posts. People are reading this at lunch or on break. They don’t have all day to look up obscure references and contemplate the use of language. Having gone to Jesuit schools where writing is taught to be a utilitarian task, I guess I have no appreciation for the aesthetics of the DE. It is that aesthetic that I see on the NRO blog. The posts are long winded and plaintive, as if they were written by men on death row.

There’s an age thing here as well. I’ve always got the sense that Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land spend way too much time working on their Frodo costumes. It is not that they wish to roll back the enlightenment and return to feudalism. They wish to roll back time and return to their childhood, reading Tolkien and dreaming of life in Middle Earth. There’s a graphic comic book quality to their writing that I find a bit off-putting.

These are small criticisms and mostly about style. I think their view of the managerial state as a fusion of class and religion is pretty close to my view of the modern West. The other difference here is I don’t pretend to have invented a philosophical school around this observation. Paleocons like Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried were writing about this stuff when Moldbug was in diapers. James Burnham was working out the details of the managerial elite before the managerial elite existed.

Getting back to that NRO blog, it is much more of a paleo thing than a DE thing, in that they don’t get into the LoTR stuff or call for a return to feudalism. Unlike the paleos, they are assiduously avoiding the elephant in the room, which is race.  Lawler is a college professor so he has spent a life being cautious about the ever changing list of proscribed topics. Instead, they seem to be focused on the shape and direction of a post-liberal world where 18th century ideas of liberty are no longer relevant.

What’s interesting to me is NR purged all of its paleocons a decade ago. The last few holdouts were purged within the last decade. John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg were the last two from the paleocon tribe. NR bringing back a sort of paleocon-lite is a curious development. It suggest that maybe Conservative Inc recognizes they are in an intellectual cul-de-sac. They can’t come out and say Pat Buchanan was right about the Bush family after all, but maybe the wheels are finally turning with the professional Right. They are noticing that the cage door is now closed, not locked yet, but closed.

National Review started as a rejection of the accommodations made by the Old Right, in reaction to the growing excesses of the Left. Here we are at the end of another Great Liberal Awakening, in which the conventional Right has been defenestrated, and National Review is showing some signs of grasping in the dark, so to speak, for a new reason to exist. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. I’m skeptical as long as they avoid biology, which remains the elephant in the room of Rousseau-ism. But, it bears watching.

Skoolz are Brokin

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I don’t have a lot of interest in the education. I think humans are born with a degree of natural intelligence. We are also born with certain broad personality traits. Both are inherited from our ancestors. The witch’s brew of DNA is that makes us what we are is set in the womb and there’s not a whole lot we (or anyone else) can do about it. With regards to education, kids will learn what kids want to learn to the level their abilities will allow. No system will change that.

Americans of the modern age reject the above as crime-think. Everyone is sure that the right schools, the right teachers and the right methods can make everyone above average, as George Bush put it. A lot of this is bound up in anti-racism, which is almost a religion all its own these days. By focusing on the schools and the methods, it allows everyone to ignore the students walking through the schoolroom door. Disparities in test scores become proof that everyone must redouble their efforts to “fix” the schools.

Anyway, this was in my twitter feed the other day. It is a long description of a private school by a public school teacher who has decided the public schools are not for his kid. The tone suggest the author is racked with guilt and searching for some reason why the private schools are so much better than the public school. Well, a reason that does not touch on the taboos that make frank discussion of education impossible. As a public school teacher, the author is required to promote all the whack-a-doodle ideas that define public education in America, but he loves his kid so he is in a tough spot.

The comments are hilarious as you see all the lunacy on display, with regards to education. This article was also in my twitter feed. It must be education week on twitter. The general thrust is that we need more data to come up with the perfect solution to education. This strikes me as another way to avoid the rushing reality of the classroom.  We have mountains of data and everyone pretty much knows the truth, but mokita. The comment from Aida McAuly is why education policy is a dog’s breakfast of crackpottery.

The whole premise of this article is wrong. School should not be about
“content”, that which can be measured with tests. Rather, it should be
about inspiring curiosity, building empathy (which can be done with
mixed age, race, ethnicity and ability classrooms) and encouraging
exploration and collaboration. Those elements are the essence of what
determine the quality of a human being’s life. I’m sorry to deflate
Wired’s fascination with everything technological, but unless we begin
to look at education from a developmental perspective, which takes into
account not just our brain, but our 5 senses, our need for movement,
choice in what we learn and when we learn it, being able to make genuine
contributions to a learning community through purposeful work, we’ll
continue to chase our tails. Any by the way, if you are curious about
what type of education offers engagement in all of these…go visit an
authentic Montessori classroom today. To the dismay of many of the
“data advocates” reading this article, you won’t find screens but you
will see very happy, engaged children concentrating at extremely high
levels for long periods of time.

There’s simply no way to include crazy people in the discussion without getting batshit crazy results, which is why our pubic schools are a dumpster fire.

 

 

 

 

Oh, I Think I Know The Answer

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This headline is one of those questions that answers itself. “The Apple Watch: Is it a gadget or a fashion statement?” I’m fond of pointing out that the correlation between the mobility of an Apple product and its popularity. The great innovation of the iPod was not the technology. It was the marketing. Having an iPod made you hip, youthful and edgy. Don Imus spent a year asking every guest what they had on their iPod as part of his act. The iPod quickly became a fashion statement.

Apple CEO Tim Cook summed up the problem during a conversation with sales staff at a London Apple Store: “We’ve never sold anything as a company that people could try on before.”

With the expected launch next month of the Apple Watch, the company’s first new product in five years, Apple will be stepping into new territory.

To conquer the marketplace, the watch will have to appeal not only as a gadget but as a fashion statement, a fact tacitly acknowledged by Apple’s decision to launch its advertising campaign with a 12-page insert in the March issue of Vogue.

The company isn’t talking about plans for marketing the Apple Watch in advance of it’s much-touted “Spring Forward” event on Monday, but it clearly intends to keep a tight grip on initial sales and distribution, leaving many retailers guessing about when — or if — they’ll be able to sell it.

Sources with direct knowledge of the matter said that Best Buy Co Inc, one of the largest sellers of Apple products, may not get the watch at launch time, though the company wouldn’t comment on the situation.

Other large retailers, including Macy’s, Saks 5th Avenue, Bloomingdales and Barney’s said they had no immediate plans to carry the watch. Target and Nordstrom,along with all the major phone carriers, declined to comment on their plans, though a source with knowledge of the situation said Nordstrom has engaged in discussions with Apple.

“Apple is being cautious. There are too many unknowns around how this product will perform,” said Van Baker, research vice-president, technology research firm Gartner Inc.

Another one of my themes is the fact that the big returns from the communications revolution have been realized. What’s left is marginal stuff like making the phone smaller or giving it a snazzier exterior. Turning it into a watch is another example. This is a device with no practical application so it has to be a fashion item. Apple is about to become ironic.

The reports I’ve read suggest the response may not be as expected. Even diehard Apple users have to be wondering why they need a smart watch. Most probably gave up wearing a watch a long time ago. Putting their current apps on a watch makes little sense. Apple has been humping this thing as a fitness tool, but that space is pretty crowded. A bunch of these things that sync with cloud apps to track anything you want to track already exist and are popular. All of which is a waste of time, by the way. Unless you’re an elite professional athlete, you have no need for these things, but for $100 they are fine toys.

That leaves fashion statement.

Some Good Advice

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Avoid hanging around people with names like Dreekius Oricko Johnson.

Dreekius Oricko Johnson

Former New York Jets and Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson is in stable condition after being shot in the shoulder during a drive-by shooting that occurred at 4 a.m. Sunday at an intersection in Orlando, Florida, according to police.

The driver of the vehicle, Dreekius Oricko Johnson, 28, was killed by gunfire, according to the Orange County sheriff’s department.

Johnson and Reggie Johnson, 29, were passengers in the Jeep, per the sheriff’s office. The latter Johnson suffered gunshot wounds to his shoulder, hand and leg. He, too, is in stable condition.

No arrests have been made in what police are calling a homicide investigation.

According to a police report, deputies arrived at the scene to find a Jeep with one deceased man and two others with gunshot wounds on the sidewalk. The victims said an unknown vehicle pulled up beside them at a red light and opened fire.

The sheriff’s office said no further information will be released at this time.

A a general rule, if the first result on Google for your name is a link to mugshots.com, you have made some bad decisions. Of course, frivolous ninnies like Alex Tabarrok blame it on excessive parking violations, but there’s a reason no one, including a university, lets guys like Alex Tabarrok have any responsibilities. To paraphrase a commenter there, libertarian chatterboxes can afford the luxury of maintaining an adolescent worldview well into adult life.

For those of us in the real world, a good rule of thumb is to avoid spending time around guys with names like Dreekius Oricko Johnson. His mother would have done better by him if she named him Food Stamp or Government Cheese. At least then he could pass himself off as the child of dope smoking artists. instead he came into this world with a ghetto name and left this life in a ghetto fashion.