Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Once again, a break from education quotes and a new one from House of Eratosthenes:

What is The Truth that people figure out? That some 30 percent of us already know, and that more and more of us learn as we debate back and forth on the latest “gimme”? Simply this: That the government doesn’t really have money; it spends only what it has taken from others, plus what it borrows on the credit of others. Which naturally means that one man’s “right” is another man’s burden. That when we debate these proposals, we aren’t debating how to make life more secure, we are in fact debating how to make our country less free.

Which is why there is such urgency to pass massive spending bills without debate, review, or even reading them – because they have to get it done before too many people figure out this Truth, and get massively PISSED OFF.

Hell, I Was THERE

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Hell, I Was THERE!

Well, three miles across the Indian River from Launch Complex 39A, anyway.

I was seven years old.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5722827024646179220&hl=en&fs=true
The launch of a Saturn V rocket is the single most awe-inspiring thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen twelve of them – Apollo 6 through the launch of Skylab (Apollo 7, testing only the newly redesigned Apollo capsule and Command Module in Earth orbit used the smaller Saturn IB). I’ve never seen a shuttle launch in person, and it looks as if that program will end before I get a chance to.

But forty years ago, I witnessed the pinnacle of human achievement. We went to another world.

That’s NEXT Month’s Price

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That’s NEXT Month’s Price!

Seems a man bought a pack of cigarettes with his credit card. He had a little trouble with the bill, though.

He was charged $23,148,855,308,184,500 – twenty-three quadrillion, one hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars.

Obama’s just trying to pay off the deficit and the national debt with “sin taxes,” I guess.

Either that, or Bank of America is trying to compensate for all of its defaulting credit-card holders in one fell swoop.

Quote of the Day

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The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. Your librarian should be able to locate a copy for you without much trouble. In it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent following: “Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media….the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School…. People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.” Social Control revolutionized the discipline of sociology and had powerful effects on the other human sciences: in social science it guided the direction of political science, economics, and psychology; in biology it influenced genetics, eugenics, and psychobiology. It played a critical role in the conception and design of molecular biology.

There you have it in a nutshell. The whole problem with modern schooling. It rests on a nest of false premises. People are not little plastic lumps of dough. They are not blank tablets as John Locke said they were, they are not machines as de La Mettrie hoped, not vegetables as Friedrich Froebel, inventor of kindergartens, hypothesized, not organic mechanisms as Wilhelm Wundt taught every psychology department in America at the turn of the century, nor are they repertoires of behaviors as Watson and Skinner wanted. They are not, as the new crop of systems thinkers would have it, mystically harmonious microsystems interlocking with grand macrosystems in a dance of atomic forces. I don’t want to be crazy about this; locked in a lecture hall or a bull session there’s probably no more harm in these theories than reading too many Italian sonnets all at one sitting. But when each of these suppositions is sprung free to serve as a foundation for school experiments, it leads to frightfully oppressive practices.

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

How Can People Still Believe This

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How Can People Still Believe This?

The levels of delusion that people are able to achieve still astound me. The piece I wrote a bit back, How’s that Gun Control Working Out for You? got linked at an online gamer’s forum. Apparently one member there is virulently anti-gun. Well, someone found another thread at the site, and linked to the piece again – but here’s the part of that thread – written by said anti-gunner – that inspired this post:

The UK has strict gun control and our last schoolyard shooting was Dunblane in 1996.
Australia has strict gun control and their last spree shooting was Port Arthur – also in 1996. Both of those incidents were followed by the introduction of draconian legislation to stop such incidents completely. It would be absurd to claim that there will never be another such incident. But 23 years without a repeat indicates quite a high barrier to the aspirations of would-be spree killers.

I think it works like this:

(1) Make it very hard to buy unnecessary firearms.
(2) Offer amnesties to get the existing toxic pool of unnecessary firearms out of drawers and cupboards throughout the nation
(3) Now it is very hard for low-level housebreakers to pick up an untraceable gun
(4) Now there are very few gun-dealers, so the police can take time to investigate ‘break-ins’ by which their guns are passed to criminals.
(5) Now, there is a very restricted market for bullets – it’s possible to trace the bullets used in a crime back to the shop and back to the purchaser. Arms dealers get more cautious about who they sell bullets to.
(6) Now its hard to shoot someone dead on impulse – so your murder rate is dropping
(7) and the chaotic, unstable criminals at the bottom of your society can’t get a gun at all.
(8) You drop the insane, vindictive multi-lifetime jail sentences for crimes against property – so it makes logical sense for a thief to surrender instead of trying to kill all witnesses or die attempting to get away.
(9) So the more ‘professional’ criminals don’t need guns for self-defense. And they don’t want the extra jail time they get for carrying a lethal weapon.

Result: A low level of guns in your society and a low level of gun crime. It’s not a zero crime rate. But about 8,000 fewer Americans will be shot dead each year.

Why do I think this would work ? Because, if you look at the top 25 developed nations, you’ll see that it is the US of A which has an unhealthy love affair with hand guns. And a demonization of ‘the criminals’ who are given 99 year sentences which they don’t have the life-span to serve.

And the US of A has three times the murder rate of those other developed nations. Doesn’t look that mysterious an issue to me.

So . . . draconian gun control has prevented another Dunblane or Port Arthur. OK, I can understand that reasoning, even if I disagree with it. It’s the same logic that says the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have prevented any more 9/11-like suicide attacks on U.S. soil.

Correlation ≠ Causation, but I understand the idea.

Now, let’s look at the rest of “Grungekitty’s” assertions.

(1) Make it very hard to buy unnecessary firearms.
Hard for whom? For the law-abiding, obviously, since pretty much anything you want is available on the streets in the UK for the right price.

(2) Offer amnesties to get the existing toxic pool of unnecessary firearms out of drawers and cupboards throughout the nation
Yes, they’ve been doing that for quite a while now in the UK – a place where all legally possessed firearms have been registered with the government. However, a 2003 amnesty brought in a lot of weapons, but most everyone asked said that “it appears to have had little effect in the communities where it really matters.” Another in 2004 brought in few firearms. In 2007 after a boy died after being shot with an air rifle, an amnesty in Wales brought in:

10 air rifles
4 air pistols
2 BB guns
1 blanks firing pistol and ammunition
1 hunting knife
1 imitation handgun
3 boxes of air gun pellets
1 crossbow

Wow.

And after each amnesty, gun crime increased.

(3) Now it is very hard for low-level housebreakers to pick up an untraceable gun
Too right. Now they have to fence the stuff they steal and buy an untraceable gun! Or just rent one. There’s apparently an active rent-a-gun business in the UK these days, for the down-on-his-luck criminal who can’t afford the fifty quid necessary to purchase one.

No one knows how many guns are in circulation across Britain. Senior police sources confirm that they are ‘easy and quick’ to obtain. Whether they rent, borrow or buy, young men have no difficulty getting ‘tooled up’. Semi-automatic pistols remain the weapon of choice, although Trident officers admit ‘military hardware’ has found its way onto the streets.

That quote comes from a September, 2006 piece.

(4) Now there are very few gun-dealers, so the police can take time to investigate ‘break-ins’ by which their guns are passed to criminals.
Oooh! “Break-ins” with scare quotes! From that same September report:

Elsewhere, thousands of AK-47s from east Europe are reported to have ‘gone missing’ in Britain. One senior police source admits halting the supply of weaponry into Britain remains a thankless task: ‘We suspect a number enter the UK via lorry drivers using secret compartments. The issue is that we’re concentrating on drug and human imports and yet bringing in a handful of guns is, relatively, dead easy.

Who needs to break in to a gun shop? It’s easier to smuggle in the stuff that legal gun dealers can’t even handle – handguns, submachine guns, hand grenades, and assault rifles. The kind that actually have select-fire switches.

(5) Now, there is a very restricted market for bullets – it’s possible to trace the bullets used in a crime back to the shop and back to the purchaser. Arms dealers get more cautious about who they sell bullets to.
Really? And where do you get that idea? If it’s easy to smuggle in weapons, ammunition is a snap. Your ignorance is showing, grungekitty!

(6) Now its hard to shoot someone dead on impulse – so your murder rate is dropping
And THIS is the one that leaves my jaw on the ground. The UK has done everything on this list, and their murder rate continues to INCREASE. I’ve done this comparison before, but here it is again – the ratio of homicide rates between the U.S. and Scotland, and the U.S. and England & Wales since 1946:


So the U.S. without all that “draconian gun control” has been experiencing a decline in homicide rates, while Scotland and England & Wales have had a slow but steady increase in their rates. If you project the slopes on out, you’re looking at a 1:1 ratio about what, 2012?

But we’re not done yet!

(7) and the chaotic, unstable criminals at the bottom of your society can’t get a gun at all.
Riiiiight! Just like in the UK, WHICH IS AN ISLAND. I believe I’ve already addressed this bit of cranial flatulence.

(8) You drop the insane, vindictive multi-lifetime jail sentences for crimes against property – so it makes logical sense for a thief to surrender instead of trying to kill all witnesses or die attempting to get away.
Words fail me.

(9) So the more ‘professional’ criminals don’t need guns for self-defense. And they don’t want the extra jail time they get for carrying a lethal weapon.
Words fail me still.

Result: A low level of guns in your society and a low level of gun crime. It’s not a zero crime rate. But about 8,000 fewer Americans will be shot dead each year.
Give her credit, she’s wrong about everything, and she finishes BIG!

Sorry, grungekitty, but we’ve seen the petri dish of the UK. We know what actually happens. The government succeeds in disarming the victim pool, and the criminals are emboldened. So not only does the homicide rate increase, but all other forms of violent crime go up too. After all, they’re not afraid of the police, who – as crime victim Nikki Goeser explained, can’t be everywhere all the time. No, the cops show up just in time to put out the crime scene tape and take photos of your loved ones. Not their fault. Protecting you and yours isn’t really their job.

It’s yours.

Sweet bleeding Shiva, the things people can convince themselves of in the face of all the evidence.

It’s Not Just John Stossel

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It’s Not Just John Stossel

PJTV’s Steven Crowder does some undercover investigation of Canada’s much-vaunted (by Democrats) socialized health care system. And, being on the web, his report can be ten times longer than ABC would allow. The results should enlighten you:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=560&h=340]
If you’re a human being in Canada and you want a blood test, you’d better have your own physician, because the walk-in clinics won’t do it, and the hospital emergency rooms won’t do it, you have to have a personal doctor for such tests as cholesterol or a PSA (prostate cancer screening). If you don’t have a doctor? You get to wait 2-3 years, as Stossel illustrated.

Quote of the Day

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At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.

—

Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, “I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?”

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

No, it’s not nuts. It’s sabotage. Deliberate, intentional sabotage.

Once More, Into the Breach

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Once More, Into the Breach

Robb over at Sharp as a Marble discovered someone I just had to invite, one Marc Rubin:

Mr. Rubin:

I’d never read your Examiner column prior to today, but I have to admit that I was fascinated by your assertion:

“In an earlier article about the 2nd amendment I proved beyond a shadow of any doubt that the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun. And the facts are irrefutable.”

You see, I am apparently one of those “many people ignorant of what the 2nd Amendment means” and who insists that it is all about an individual right to own a gun.

And I really, truly enjoy debating the topic with those of opposite mind.

I am the proprietor of a blog, The Smallest Minority, where I invite you to debate this topic with me, in print, in public view. Now, I don’t expect to change your mind, or you to change mine, but what I endeavor to do is to put up both sides of the topic, argued by dedicated advocates using reason, logic, and citations so that those still on the fence – the ignorant, as you style them – can be educated and decide for themselves which argument makes more sense on the evidence.

Experience tells me that it takes a bit more than a single 3,500 word column.

I await your reply.

Sincerely,

Kevin Baker
Tucson, AZ

We shall see . . .

UPDATE: After 24 48 hours, no reply.

UPDATE to the update: Mr. Rubin finally replied by email on Sunday, July 19. My response is up.