“Schools”

It's cheap and easy to put up a sign saying "School" on the front of a building. It's entirely another thing to run a functioning school. Many of our schools are among our institutions that are being rotted out on the inside. This is permanently hurting millions of people and threatening America's future. From City Journal:

No issue is more pressing in California than education. In late October, the state released scores for the first post-Covid-shutdown state standardized test, conducted earlier last year. The results were horrendous. Less than half of all students who took the Smarter Balanced test—47.1 percent—met the state standard in English language arts, down 4 percentage points from 2018–19. One-third of students met the standard in math, down 6.5 percentage points. Only 16 percent of black students and 9.7 percent of English learners met standards in math.

Not only did test scores plummet; the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has also skyrocketed. The no-show rate leapt from 14.3 percent in 2020–21 to 30 percent in 2021–22. (California defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10 percent of the days they were enrolled for any reason.) But amazingly, during the 2021–22 school year, data showed that the state’s four-year high school graduation rate climbed to 87 percent, up from 83.6 percent in 2020–21.

How is this possible?

Continue Reading“Schools”

Argument Pyramid: Deploy in Case of Ad Hominem Attacks

This pyramid is an elegant response to shitstorms of ad hominem attacks.

If your response is "this pyramid sucks," it's especially for you.

Credit for this meme goes to Paul Graham, a computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author.

Continue ReadingArgument Pyramid: Deploy in Case of Ad Hominem Attacks

The Annual Love-In with the White House and “Journalists”

Have you recently visited any of the left-leaning corporate media outlets to try to find one thing, anything, that they write that is critical of Joe Biden and Democrats? What are the odds that even your favorite politician can do no wrong for 2 1/2 years? But it happens over and over. With only a few notable exceptions (e.g., Tucker Carlson), it also happens on the right.

Well, it's time for those journalists to celebrate with the country's centers of power and you will never hear Glenn Greendald heap such scorn upon other human beings. It's because they are proudly abandoning their mission to be adversaries of the White House, not buddies seeking to get even more friendly. The net result is what you don't see: News accounts that **** badly on the White House. Here's an transcript from Glenn's Rumble show, System Update:

s repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy, it actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are. It's become kind of like the Oscars, in the sense that – in many senses, actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night, but many days leading up to it, where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend. But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is that these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars, in gowns and tuxedos, and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest and sleaziest event you can possibly imagine held at the White House hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering.

And so, in the days leading up to the event, they spend a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing and within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think. As I said, it's a mask-dropping event. They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides. It's really why they do their job – to be around power or to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the Royal Court – and so, it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know that it's one of the most revealing lights that ever get shined on them.

You can view the entire episode here, at Rumble.com

Continue ReadingThe Annual Love-In with the White House and “Journalists”

Michael Shellenberger: Totalitarianism is on the Rise

If I heard anyone saying these things three years ago, I would have thought that person needed help for a mental condition. Based on many things I've read and seen in the past three years, however, I am gravely concerned that Michael Shellenberger is not overstating the problems we face:

Around the world, politicians have either just passed or are on the cusp of passing sweeping new laws, which would allow governments to censor ordinary citizens on social media and other Internet platforms.

Under the guise of preventing “harm” and holding large tech companies accountable, several countries are establishing a vast and interlinked censorship apparatus, a new investigation by Public finds.

Politicians, NGOs, and their enablers in the news media claim that their goal is merely to protect the public from “disinformation.” But vague definitions and loopholes in new laws will create avenues for broad application, overreach, and abuse.

In Ireland, for example, the government may soon be able to imprison citizens simply for possessing material that officials decide is “hateful.” Under the RESTRICT Act in the US, the government may soon have the authority to monitor the Internet activity of any American deemed a security risk.

Continue ReadingMichael Shellenberger: Totalitarianism is on the Rise

About Countries that Irreversibly Lose Their Way

I increasingly think of Chesterson's Fence:

Chesterton's Fence is a principle that says change should not be made until the reasoning behind the current state of affairs is understood. It says the rash move, upon coming across a fence, would be to tear it down without understanding why it was put up.

Peter McCullough, M.D. was censored during COVID and he has since been proven correct on many of his positions. Yet he didn't become bitter (at least that I could see in public). Rather, he keep trying to communicate where we, as a society, have lost our way. McCullough keeps trying to shed light on the problems he detects, but I detect an ominous undertone in his writings, a sense that we are sustaining too much damage as a society and that we might no longer have the tools, as a society, to repair the damage. I increasingly detect that same feelings in myself. In a recent article, McCullough writes:

Once the belief in a country and institution has been lost, it is very difficult to rejuvenate it. This is the principle reason why most conservative commentators often come off as sounding staid and uninspiring to the young. It’s as though the spirit has departed from the body that no amount of edifying rhetoric can reanimate. As Hegel pointed out in the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Law:
Philosophy always arrives too late to teach the world how it should be. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after reality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. This lesson, also taught by history, is that only in the late stage of reality does the ideal appear in opposition to this reality, grasping it in the form of an intellectual construct.

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.

That feeling that we might have crossed the event horizon has increasingly been expressed by people who inspire me, including (now deceased) George Carlin and Jonathan Haidt.

Excerpt from The Australian --

"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"

We might have fucked things up too much to ever fix them. George Carlin gets the last word here.:

Continue ReadingAbout Countries that Irreversibly Lose Their Way