See Under: “Irony”

See Under: “Irony”

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent(sic) into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

That’s the opening line in an op-ed . . .

. . . in PRAVDA. It’s titled American capitalism gone with a whimper.

I shit you not! (Hat tip, Arms and the Law). Here’s some more:

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

There’s more.

One of my commenters has been insisting that Obama is not a marxist/socialist. He also insists that we should pay attention to “primary sources.”

Pravda is a primary source, is it not? At least for this topic.

Education Quote of the Day

From: Drew Lingalot
To: Angry Professor
Re: Exam grade

I got a 45/60 on the exam. Can you tell me what this translates to?

Drew Lingalot

From a blog post titled Oh, for the love of god.

“Drew Lingalot”! Damn, that’s vicious!

I think I’m going to have to add A Gentleman’s C to the education blogroll. The blogger “Angry Professor” is “a tenured faculty member at a large state university.”

I’m sorry.

But I’ll definitely be reading the archives!

ETA:

From those archives:

I took the Angry Kid to the dentist yesterday. We were a little early, so we got to sit in the waiting room for a while. We were joined by a stereotypical Red State kid, a sturdy boy of about 11 years wearing camo and a John Deere cap, and his younger sister.

One wall of the waiting room is painted with blackboard paint and much chalk is provided. Imagine my surprise and delight when Red-State boy wrote out the first 25 digits of pi and then started to teach his little sister the Pythagorean theorem. (My students don’t know the first significant digit of pi and couldn’t recite the Pythagorean theorem if their lives depended on it.)

I’v only memorized Pi to about 11 digits, but . . .

COLLEGE students!

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

You’re a product of the public system, they say. You turned out all right, so it must be…..

No.

Stop looking for outside influences as the root cause of problems. I drank, I smoked, I slept with girls and went to parties and ditched class and got into trouble. I also realized that the school systems are a joke, and learned to work that in my favor. Yeah, I learned…how to skirt the system, just as these jokers today are doing. But in my case, I had a genuine hunger for knowledge.

I read ceaselessly outside of school. I worked on chemistry and physics stuff at home, because I liked it. I did computer science classes at the JC. I learned…just not in that system. I played catch up in college for it, but that was easy. For me…not them.

So, no…the problem is the system.

But…

No.

The kids are getting dumber.

I have data to support this statement. It is not an opinion.

Every. Single. Year. It happens. The graduating class scores lower on their tests than the year before, and the next year is lower, and lower, etc. All this while classes are being cut due to budget constraints, schools are tightening admissions requirements and looking for higher and higher test scores and GPA’s.

They’re still being filled up, but not by local kids.

Local kids are failing. They start college level math, something for which they should be prepared, and then throw their hands up in defeat because they never learned the foundation materials.

You can’t do quadratics when your teacher let you watch TV in class instead of teaching you the order of operations.

Do you understand?

I’ve got a girl here, born in the US, schooled here to 13 years in this system, ready to receive a diploma from this system. I give her a test on college level material, and she does so poorly THE COMPUTER ASSUMES SHE MUST NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!

Does that not concern anyone else?

Ballistic DeanimationDumbing Down

READ THE WHOLE THING. It even has illustrations!

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. Allowing the cultural relativists to annex the education system ultimately destroys the grown-up world, too. – Mark Steyn, The loss of societal memory

(Tip of the chapeau to Van der Leun)

Just a note – this QotD has been postponed twice due to far better ones coming up in the interim.

UPDATE: Firehand has an associated post. Read it.

Paul Campos, Economic Illiterate

I’m sort of tempted to ask Professor Reynolds if this seems plausible to him. Does it seem plausible to him — a law professor who is probably paid around 200K a year by the great state of Tennessee to do whatever it is he does while performing what is technically his actual job — that he is “working” five times “harder” (using Wingnuttia’s definition of “hard work”) than a guy roofing houses in San Antonio in July who makes 40K a year?Lawyers, Guns and Money, Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Now, Paul himself is a professor of law at the University of Colorado, and by all appearances about as socialist as they come, rather than economically illiterate, but really Professor, can’t you do any better than that?

Of course, he precedes this by building a virtual army of strawmen which he then hacks at with great zeal, but here’s the deal:

People get paid based on one thing, primarily: how valuable their skills are to others. Of course, their individual competence weighs heavily in there, too, but there are a lot of people who can do roofing. There’s a somewhat lesser pool of those with the skills required to be law professors.

I, for example, am an electrical engineer. I’m well paid for the area in which I live, but compared to similar electrical engineers in other markets I’m probably average or a bit below-average in base pay. (Tucson doesn’t pay all that well, but I refuse to move to Phoenix, for example.) However, the only reason the office I work at exists at all is because of one guy – an engineer who specializes in a pretty small field, and sits pretty high up in the rankings of that field.

Our home office is in California. When this engineer became available, they hired him in a heartbeat.

But he wouldn’t move to California.

That was OK with the home office. They opened a branch here in Tucson.

For one guy.

We currently have 14 people in the Tucson office. I am thankful every day for the existence of this individual.

But does he work “five times harder than a guy roofing houses in San Antonio in July who makes 40K a year?” That’s not the question. Can the guy roofing houses in San Antonio do the job of this engineer?

That’s the only question that counts. Because if he could, he’d be making the kind of money this engineer does.

And somehow, in Paul Campos’s world, having an ability that perhaps less than 1% of the working population possesses entitles the other 99% to a much bigger chunk of his income.

Campos says that the “wingnuts” paint the argument in terms of “hard work” versus “lazyness” – that rich people are rich because they “work hard” and poor people are poor because they’re “lazy.” This is, apparently, what we believe. (Sound like anyone you know?)

No, Paul. Rich people can be rich for any number of reasons, but quite a few of them got that way by having skills that other people don’t have, and using them. Poor people, the truly poor, generally are that way because of bad decision-making skills. Granted, some get there through illness or bad luck, but tell me why someone making $250k a year who is making their mortgage payment on time should have to fork over a bigger percentage of their paycheck than that $40k/yr roofer in San Antonio? Is he “poor”?

We believe that people should be rewarded according to their worth in the free market, not “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Because who put you in charge of determining either?

Quote of the Day – “Cultural Framework” Edition

Quote of the Day – “Cultural Framework” Edition

I should be in bed asleep, since I’m writing this at 9:45PM for delayed posting tomorrow, but . . .

Perusing my Sitemeter stats tonight, I ran across a post from 2004 that links to a piece that, well, I just can’t describe, but I’ve decided to archive here in case the originating site ever disappears, since new posts apparently stopped in June of 2006.

LeeAnn of the defunct blog The Cheese Stands Alone wrote about being called in to HR for being “intimidating”:

Sorry, You Forgot To Give Me A Lobotomy With My Nametag

Just got home from work. Am purple with aggravation, frustration, and disbelief. Cannot possibly speak rationally right now. Also apparently have lost all my pronouns somewhere between the car and here.

Breathe deep. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean…….

Okay, I’m better now.
Here’s the thing… I was called into the HR office today, because one of my coworkers (let’s call her Blondie) wanted to file a complaint against me. The complaint stated that I made her feel “threatened”.
I was slightly reassured, however, that they’d given the problem to the Intern. This bodes well in favor of this being silly enough to count as training for her, apparently. The Intern is approximately 12 years old and has not blood but political correctness flowing in her pre-pubescent veins.
“How” I asked the Intern, “in the world does she think I’ve threatened her?”
Intern: “You’ve made no overt action. She feels intimidated by you, however, and wished to make an official complaint. We felt it was better to discuss the matter with you before taking any action, if necessary.”
Me: “Exactly what did I do?”
Intern: “Er… nothing, really…. she said she’s intimidated by you, because you talk about people and events that she knows nothing about, and she said it makes her feel stupid.”
Me: “You’re kidding, right?”
Intern: “We have to take it seriously, it’s in the manual. “
Me: “Exactly what was it I said that got her upset?”
Intern: “She mentioned something about medical references, and once you talked about Henry VIII…. it bothers her that she doesn’t understand what you’re talking about most of the time. Oh, and McGuyver. “
Me: “She’s upset because she doesn’t know who McGuyver is?”
Intern: “We’re not writing a complaint on this. We just wanted you to be aware of her feelings and be more sensitive to her cultural framework.”
Me: “Oh, you did NOT just say that.”
Intern: “Beg pardon?”
Me: “Nothing, nothing…. okay, so basically if I have to talk to her, I should talk slow, use small words, and mention nothing that happened before last Tuesday?”
Intern: “Did you know sarcasm is considered a form of aggression?”
Me: *backing slowly out of the room* “Uh… okay, gotta go, late for my shift… buh-bye now.”

I haven’t quite decided how to handle this yet. Part of me wants to completely and utterly ignore Blondie and speak nary one more word to her… ever.
And the other part of me wants to start a discussion about quantum physics and watch her head explode.
I’m probably going with the third path…. I’m going to laugh my ass off.

Any guesses as to who The Intern (much less the cow-orker “Blondie”) voted for in the 2008 presidential election? (Though I’m fairly certain “Blondie” screwed up her ballot.)

Thomas Sowell, Illustrated

“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.

“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.”


Touché.

Another Invitation

Another Invitation

Say Uncle linked to a David Codrea post at Gun Rights Examiner where a sportswriter showed his ignorance in the comments and was promptly smacked down for it. Feelings apparently hurt, the writer took his ball and went home after complaining about how nasty gun rights advocates were.

So once again I have decided to extend the olive branch and invite the sportswriter, Tom Ferda, to have an open, public discussion on the topic of gun rights right here at this blog or anywhere else he feels comfortable. Even though I’m up to my eyeballs with work for at least the next two weeks, I really want to engage Mr. Ferda. Here’s the text of the email I sent him tonight:

Mr. Ferda:

Welcome to the wonderful world of the gun rights debate! My name is Kevin Baker, and I live in Tucson, Arizona. No, I’m not Kevin Baker the award-winning novelist, I’m Kevin Baker the Professional Electrical Engineer who happens to run a blog by the name of The Smallest Minority, if you care to Google my name (which is how I found your email address).

Obviously you’re new to this topic, but don’t feel too bad – many are. On both sides. The problem is, there’s been a concerted effort for, oh, the past forty years or so to remove firearms from the public. It’s been described as a “decades-long slow-motion hate crime” against gun owners, and a lot of us are quite tired of it. So you were the recipient of some (very mild!) backlash when you demonstrated your ignorance the topics of firearms and Constitutional law.

I understand that you’ll find this difficult to believe, but when you wrote the words “semi-automatic machine guns” you basically punched nearly every hot-button most of us on this side of the aisle have. The ones you missed on that first pass you punched – emphatically – with the words “think about when these original right to bear arms laws were written.”

Mr. Ferda, I’m a calm, collected kind of guy. I started blogging with the intention of debating people like you in a public forum. Honestly, I don’t expect to change your mind, and I’m absolutely certain you won’t change mine (my position being the result of well over a decade of research, study, and consideration – I should have a PhD in the philosophy of gun rights) but I do believe that people LEARN when they discuss and defend their positions with people who DISAGREE with them. Hopefully, so do you, since you wrote: “Stay aggressive, call people with different opinions idiots and chase us all out of your area. You guys are doing a great job of forming a group where everyone can have identical opinions and keep anyone else out of the club.” And: “Good-bye and enjoy conversing amoungst yourselves without any more comments from people like myself who may differ in opinion.”

I earnestly wish to have a discussion with you – in a public forum! I will remain civil, factual, and I will give citations with links for you to follow and verify. (You’ll have to bear with me, however, as my day job at the moment is pretty overwhelming, so my responses will be necessarily slow.) I am willing to give you guest-posting privileges at my blog, and I promise not to edit anything you write (except possibly for readability – text size, font, etc. – never content) or you may email me your responses and I can post those – again, in total and without editing – or you may post your half of the discussion anywhere you’d like, so long as I can copy those posts to my blog for archival purposes.

I do have open comments. If you are as sensitive to the response of the readers as you appear to be at the Gun Rights Examiner post, I suggest you not read them. Oh, and this invitation is also being published at my blog.

I hope you do accept this challenge. I promise you, if nothing else you will come away much more knowledgeable about the topic.

Kevin Baker,
Tucson, AZ

Here’s hoping he accepts. Whatever the response, you’ll be the first second to know!

UPDATE, 1/19 8:00PM: No response from Mr. Ferda as of yet.

Quote of the Day

I called it. Not exactly; back when I was cautioning friends and co-workers not to be too confident about the change-over date, I expected a Democrat-dominated Congress (rather than an incoming Democrat President) to push the date back, frettin’ about the “technologically disenfranchised poor,” or, as PBS President Paula Kerger whines chides us,

she’s especially concerned that children in less-affluent homes that rely on free television might lose access to PBS educational shows for kids.

Especially Sesame Street. Awwww. How ever else will they learn that it takes a village — or a city block of slum tenements inhabited by creatures from a drug hallucination — to hammer a child’s mind into uniformity and compliance? – Roberta X, DTV Cutover Delay?

With both Roberta and Tam in the same domicile, the psychic snark must be oozing out of the walls by now!

UPDATE: See? Here’s Tam:

FDR Jr. at the podium was telling us that we faced an “unprecedented” crisis in our nation, which no doubt made elementary school history teachers cry.

Then he said that the “wait-and-see” approach hadn’t worked. Apparently “wait-and-see” is where you make stupid regulations for things you know nothing about, and throw borrowed imaginary money at irresponsible people in numbers that make astronomers twitch.

So now we’re going to try his way, which is where you make stupid regulations for things you know nothing about, and throw borrowed imaginary money at irresponsible people in numbers that make astronomers twitch.

I see.

More Catch-Up

Well, the Christmas weekend was pretty relaxing. I didn’t do much of anything but recharge my batteries. But I am reminded once again of stuff I wanted to post about but didn’t get around to.

First up, Stephen Halbrook has an important book out that he (and the Independence Institute) want to drive to #1 on Amazon and beyond: The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms. The push started on the Bill of Rights day (Dec. 15), but Amazon ran out of stock when it hit #140 overall. Apparently it’s back in stock (though Amazon is still quoting 3-4 weeks). If you haven’t, buy a copy. Buy one for your nearest high-school library, if nothing else.

Next up, our buddy Saul Cornell. It appears that he’s still living in his jabberwocky world where history says what he twists it to say. David Hardy has written an article published in the Northwestern University Law Review on the source material Saul Cornell used in pieces that were cited in both majority and minority opinions in D.C. v Heller. David’s piece proves conclusively that Saul was, once again, exceedingly selective and misleading about what was in those source materials. As Clayton Cramer explained,

. . . as several reviewers of Cornell’s most recent book have pointed out, Cornell’s work is riddled with gross factual errors–and like Bellesiles, those errors are remarkably one-sided . . . .

He does seem to do that a lot.

And get away with it.

Here’s the pertinent excerpt from David Hardy’s paper:

One wonders how the Stevens dissent in Heller could have argued, from these lecture notes, that St. George Tucker, on whom the Court relies heavily, did not consistently adhere to the position that the Amendment was designed to protect the ‘Blackstonian’ self-defense right . . . or that the notes suggest the Second Amendment should be understood in the context of the compromise over military power represented by the original Constitution and the Second and Tenth Amendments.

The brief answer appears to be that the dissent relied uncritically on the portions of the lecture notes quoted by Saul Cornell in a 2006 article, which the dissent cites as authority. The article sets out the quotations cited by the dissent and argues that they reflect Tucker’s earliest formulation of the meaning of the Second Amendment, and casts the right to bear arms as a right of the states.

In fact, the article’s quotations are misleading; they come from Tucker’s discussion of the militia clauses of the original Constitution, which predictably deal with military power and the States. Tucker argues that the States have the power to arm their militias should Congress not do so since such power is not forbidden to States by the Constitution and hence is protected by the Tenth Amendment, just as any arms given would be protected by the Second Amendment. When, less than twenty pages later, Tucker does discuss the Bill of Rights, the language he uses closely parallels his 1803 Blackstone’s Commentaries, usually down to the word.

The 2006 paper was St. George Tucker and the Second Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Misunderstandings, 47 WM. & MARY L. REV. 1123, 1129–30 (2006). The words that Saul Cornell left out of his paper?

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed – this may be considered as the palladium of liberty. The right of self defense is the first law of nature. In most governments it has been the study of rulers to abridge this right with the narrowest limits. Where ever standing armies are kept up & the right of the people to bear arms is by any means or under any colour whatsoever prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated is in danger of being so. In England the people have been disarmed under the specious pretext of preserving the game. By the alluring idea, the landed aristocracy have been brought to side with the Court in a measure evidently calculated to check the effect of any ferment which the measures of government may produce in the minds of the people. The Game laws are a [consolation?] for the government, a rattle for the gentry, and a rack for the nation.

Can’t have that when you’re trying to prove that St. George Tucker didn’t believe the right to arms was an individual one, independent of militia service! Best not mention it! Your Joyce Foundation monies might be cut off!

Keep giving him hell. Maybe Cornell can be disgraced out of his position like Michael Bellisiles was.