Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition

KevinLeave a comment

From his NRO piece Statist Delusions:

Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game “Pass the Parcel,” in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Match Report – Bowling Pins 12/11

KevinLeave a comment

Well, my plans for Revolver Domination didn’t pan out too well.

It was a chilly morning, but at least this time it wasn’t raining.  Ten people showed up, four of us with revolvers, all but one with .22’s.  A bunch of regulars didn’t make it, but several new shooters did, and one couple, the lovely and talented Capitalist Pig and his wife Mz. VRWC drove down from Phoenix to make the match.  Once again, EUropellet shooters outnumbered those of us who prefer God’s Pistol Caliber as designed by John Moses Browning (PBUH).  And, once again, we had a variety of winners.

John Higgins once again took Minor with his EAA Witness.  His son Travis took Revolver with his Python and unerring aim.  (I have to work on the “unerring aim” part.  Eight shots don’t help if four of them are misses.)  I took .22 rimfire again with my MkII Target, and Jim Burnett with his Clark Custom 1911 pin gun took Major and then beat John Higgins with his Witness to be overall match winner.  9mm is not always faster!

Capitalist Pig and Mz. VRWC shot some video, so I might get a chance to post that in a day or so.

The match started on time at 0820, and we were all finished by 1100.  I think it’s safe to say that everyone had a good time.  A big thanks to everyone who helped to set pins and tear down after the match.

Safety Tip of the Day: Electricity and Acetylene do not Mix

KevinLeave a comment

Found this via a trade publication:  How to Turn Your FJ Inside Out

The story:

So my time almost came to an end this morning… im very lucky to be alive.

First of all, GO HUG YOUR WIFE/HUBBY and tell them you love them.

i had an acetylene bottle in my truck, the valve was bumped so slightly and over night the truck filled with the gas. i noticed the smell, and opened the doors to air out the truck. i drove the truck out of the garage to get some more air movement. i went to roll the pass side window down and as soon as i touched the power windows. BAM. with me in the truck. i lost all hearing out of my right ear and got a scratch on the back of my head. all things considering, im alive.

so now ive got the question out to toyota about a 2012 TT. 125 to canada only, 15 in standard. i want a standard…

pictures tell 1000 words.

dont take any minutes or seconds you have for granted… it may be your last…

peace everyone,

Apparently he lost the ability to use the SHIFT key, too.  More (and bigger) pictures at the link.

Just, DAMN!

Remember “Anagnorisis and Peripeteia”?

KevinLeave a comment

That’s the post I wrote about Mike Rowe’s TED speech about his work on Dirty Jobs.  Mike discussed in that video one of the Dirty Jobs episodes in which he worked on a farm castrating lambs.  It’s a relatively graphic, funny, and interesting video, but the key part was where he talked about castrating lambs . . . with his teeth.

Turns out, that might not be such a great idea.

Weird what you stumble across on the web…

Edumacation, We Don’t Haz It

KevinLeave a comment

I stumbled across this post at Pithy Title Goes Here, and had to explore further. It seems that an adult took a standardized test for 10th graders, and failed miserably. What was at fault? Why, the test, of course!

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Wow, a multi-degreed professional couldn’t do 10th grade math!

I guess I shouldn’t snark so much about “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader.”

Who was this highly credentialed person?

The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.

—

Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years.

(My emphasis.)  Surely it must be the test!

I’d certainly like to see the questions.  Let me quote once again from The George Orwell Daycare Center:

“There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” – Thomas Sowell

—

“It is only from a special point of view that ‘education’ is a failure. As to its own purposes, it is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for legions of not especially able or talented people. As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are lenient, entry is easy, and job security is pretty good…in fact, the system is perfect, except for one little detail. We must find a way to get the children out of it.”—Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian.

As Glenn Reynolds puts it, “Credentialed, not educated.”

I’m not discounting the possibility that the questions themselves are ridiculous, after all, I’ve had some experience with “new math” myself.  Again from George Owell Daycare Center:

In 1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four fifths the price. What is his profit?

In 1970: (traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 80% of the price. What is his profit in dollars?

In 1970: (new math): A logger exchanges set L of lumber for set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1. Make 100 dots representing the elements of set M. The set C of costs contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent set C as a subset of set M, and answer the following question: What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

In 1980: A logger sells a truckload of wood for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

In 1990: (Outcome-Based Education): By cutting down beautiful forest trees, a logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class discussion: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

In 2000: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Andersen determine that his profit margin is $60?

In 2010: El hachero vende un camion carga por $100. La cuesta de productiones…

So I want to see the questions.  But somehow I don’t think that would explain the whole problem.

And I really wonder how Mr. Roach would do on the American Civics Literacy Quiz.

Fast & Felonious

KevinLeave a comment

I haven’t said much about the federal government’s “Fast & Furious” program.  Scanning the archives, I think there are only three posts wherein I mention it, and one of them is congratulating David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh for getting acknowledged as real live authorized journalists for their truly outstanding work in exposing the crimes.  Most of what I’m going to say here is mere repetition of what David and Mike have been reporting all along, but I want some recording of these crimes on this blog.

And it was criminal.

The vast majority of news coverage still calls it a “botched operation” where weapons “slipped across” the border and were “lost,” but the fact is the weapons were intentionally allowed across the border with no expectation of tracking them until they were recovered at crime scenes, and there is evidence that tax dollars paid for at least some of them.

Less mentioned are the allegations that “Fast & Furious” was not an exceptional program, that there were other, similar programs operated out of Texas and Florida, with the Florida operation moving weapons to MS-13 in Honduras called “Operation Castaway.”  Even less mentioned is the allegation that the U.S. State Dept., through its “direct commercial sales” program – the same program that is used to provide weapons and materiel to friendly governments like Mexico – provided military weapons directly to the Zetas cartel with no straw-purchase middlemen whatsoever.

And now it is reported that over the three years of Obama’s first term, “direct commercial sales” to the Mexican government have increased significantly from the Bush era, some ten times greater in 2009 over 2006, and that a significant portion of those weapons have ended up “diverted” into cartel hands.

How significant?

Well “Fast & Furious” was responsible for something on the close order of 2,500 weapons. The (admitted) “direct commercial sales” diversions are on the order of 9,000 weapons.

And the .gov hasn’t released information on how many weapons ostensibly went to the Mexican government through the “direct commercial sales” route in 2010 and so far this year.

In one of the few posts I did on F&F, I quoted an op-ed from the local alt.weekly that postulated:

A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel has testified that his organization received from U.S. and Mexican authorities guarantees of immunity and all the weapons it would need to crush its competitors — an ongoing initiative that’s resulted in an incredible escalation of violence in Mexico over the past few years.

It’s quite possible that “Fast and Furious” was not a sting at all, but was intended to aid the Sinaloans in their efforts to recapture the quieter “good ol’ days” when they enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

And now we have email evidence that the massive multiple-sales of arms to known straw-purchasers by Arizona gun dealers at the encouragement of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives were to be used as an excuse for more gun control regulations.

As one commenter put it,

The more the news reveals about Fast & Furious (& Handgrenades!) the more that I think: Chicago Way. The corruption is so thick you can’t flush enough toilets to get it down to the gulf of Mexico.

In high-level politics, there’s never just one reason anything happens, there are layers.  Heads need to (figuratively) roll over this.  Enough across the border have already done so.  But there need to be many high .gov officials in prison cells over this.

Of course there won’t be.  Just like Rod Blagojevich won’t spend 14 years in prison.  After November, 2012, I doubt you’ll hear another peep about Fast & Furious from the legacy media.  It’ll be as though it never happened.  Eric Holder might – might – not be Attorney General, but that’s the most that will happen.

It’s a Meme!

KevinLeave a comment

First Mike Rowe, then John Ratzenberger, then Jay Leno, now City Journal has an in-depth look at the lack of skilled workers in industry. Pullquote:

“The ability to make things in America is at risk,” says Jeannine Kunz, director of professional development for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in Dearborn, Michigan. If the skilled-labor shortage persists, she fears, “hundreds of thousands of jobs will go unfilled by 2021.”

The shortage of industrial skills points to a wide gap between the American education system and the demands of the world economy. For decades, Americans have been told that the future lies in high-end services, such as law, and “creative” professions, such as software-writing and systems design. This has led many pundits to think that the only real way to improve opportunities for the country’s middle class is to increase its access to higher education.

That attitude is a relic of the post–World War II era, a time when a college education almost guaranteed you a good job. These days, the returns on higher education, particularly on higher education gained outside the elite schools, are declining, as they have been for about a decade.

I ran across something in the archives a couple of days ago that I want to repeat here. It was an excerpt from a 1974 interview by Eric Sevareid of Leo Rosten on the topic of “higher education.” Remember, this was 1974, considerably longer than a mere decade ago:

We’re practically using the colleges as a dump into which to put youngsters we do not know what to do with. There are today 45 million people between the age of roughly 7 and 24. Their parents don’t know what to do with them. They want them to go to college and they often think that they’re being trained for jobs. But they’re not getting training for useful employment.

Someone has said that education is what remains after everything you’ve learned is forgotten. The purpose of educating young people is not only to illuminate their spirit and enrich their memory bank but to teach them the pleasures of thinking and reading. How do you use the mind? As a teacher, I always was astonished by the number of people in the classroom who wanted to learn as against those who just wanted to pass. I took pride in my ability to communicate. Generally “communicate” meant one thing. Now the young think “communicate” means “Agree with me!”

The student rebellions of the 1960’s exposed the fact that our entire educational system has forgotten the most important thing it can do prior to college: indoctrinate. I believe in the indoctrination of moral values. There’s a lot to be said for being good and kind and decent. You owe a duty to those who have taken care of you. You owe a duty to whatever it is that God or fate gave you – to use your brain or your heart. It’s senseless to whine, to blame society for every grievance, or to assume that the presence of a hammer means you have to go out to smash things.

The young want everything. They think they an get everything swiftly and painlessly. They are far too confident. They don’t know what their problems are, not really. They talk too much. They demand too much. Their ideas have not been tempered by the hard facts of reality. They’re idealists, but they don’t sense that it’s the easiest thing in the world to be an idealist. It doesn’t take any brains. This was said by Aristotle 2,300 years ago. Mencken once said that an idealist is someone who, upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, assumes that it will also make better soup.

Hell, most of ’em can’t make soup if it doesn’t come out of a can.  But they can make drum circles in public parks!

Bowling Pin Match, Sunday December 11

KevinLeave a comment

Usual place, the Tucson Rifle Club action range.

Time: 8:00 AM sign-up, first rounds downrange about 8:20

Handguns only: .22 rimfire, centerfire revolver (.38 caliber minimum), semi-autos (9mm minimum). Single-shots, if you’re a masochist.

You’re welcome to shoot your revolver against the semi-auto crowd, but we think it’s more fun to shoot wheelgun-vs.-wheelgun.

Cost: $10 for the first gun, $5 for any additional guns. Bring about 100 rounds for each. You probably won’t need ’em all unless you’re really good at missing fast, but 50 probably won’t be enough.