The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

#WaxMyBalls Update

Posted on | April 3, 2023 | Comments Off on #WaxMyBalls Update

Has it really been more than three years since I last updated readers on the bizarre career of Canadian pervert Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv?

When last we checked in on “Jessica,” he/“she” had been arrested in January 2020 on charges of assaulting a Canadian journalist outside a courthouse. In case you’d forgotten — who could ever forget? — Yaniv became notorious for going to salons and seeking genital waxing (depilation) on his/“her” genitalia, then filing complaints of discrimination when the requested treatment was denied, hence giving rise to the #waxmyballs hashtag in reference to the case.

The good news is, there will be no further such cases filed by Yaniv because he/“she” finally underwent “gender confirmation” surgery in January 2021. The bad news is, there were post-operative complications that led Yaniv to file a lawsuit against a Vancouver clinic, and also, whatever you do, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK if you don’t want to know what botched sex-change surgery looks like. The folks at KiwiFarms employ the phrase “gaping axe wound” to describe the result of Yaniv’s surgery, and anyone willing to risk irreversible mental trauma can click the link to discover how accurate that phrase is. DON’T DO IT!

The website MeowMix.org has become a clearinghouse for all things Yaniv-related, and among other things, they have posted court documents related to Yaniv’s tragic “gaping ax wound,” which you can read if you have a morbid curiosity to know what happens when Murphy’s Law is applied to transgender surgery. But the good news, as I say, is that Yaniv no longer has any balls in need of waxing.

However, as I’ve pointed out on previous occasions, having your genitals removed is not a cure for mental illness, and Yaniv continues to be a dangerous lunatic. He/“she” has faced numerous criminal charges, including a charge of assaulting an elderly resident of the apartment building where his/“her” mother lives (Yaniv is now reportedly banned from that property). Speaking of places Yaniv is reportedly banned from, this would include the campus of Simon Frazier University, where Yaniv is enrolled as a student, but can only attend via online classes because of some kind of drama involving fellow students. This has not, however, prevented Jonathan/“Jessica” from declaring himself/“herself” a candidate for the university’s Student Senate.

By the way, I should point out that Jonathan/“Jessica” no longer goes by his/“her” surname, Yaniv. Instead, he/“she” now refers to himself/“herself” as . . . Can you guess? Wanna guess? C’mon, guess!

JESSICA SIMPSON — Yaniv is basically stealing the identity of a 1990s teenage pop singer, because why not? Being transgender means you’re a Victim of Oppression, which means that no matter how crazy and/or criminal your behavior may be, there are never any negative consequences — except, of course, that “gaping ax wound” where your testicles used to be. [Insert “social justice” sarcasm here.]

Can’t believe I let three whole years lapse without an update on Jonathan/“Jessica,” but what with the COVID pandemic, war in Ukraine, etc., there seemed to be more important news worth commenting about. Next time there’s a slow day in the news cycle, somebody remind me to do another update, because Crazy People Are Dangerous.



 

 

Category: Canada, The Transgender Cult

Brain-Damaged John Fetterman Gets ‘Democrat Helper’ Served by CBS News

Posted on | April 3, 2023 | 1 Comment

The best way to understand how liberal media bias operates is to think of it as a heavy wind, blowing into the faces of Republicans — at least a 10-point disadvantage from this hostile headwind — while providing Democrats with an equally powerful tailwind. Everything Republicans do is made to seem wrong and scandalous, while everything Democrats do is noble and courageous. There are occasions when this is so obvious that it’s like the media are serving up Democrat Helper™ — a steaming dish of one-sided bias. Just add a Democrat politician and stir.

Matt Margolis calls attention to how CBS Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley did this in her recent interview with John Fetterman, the Democrat who was “elected” U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania despite suffering traumatic brain damage from a stroke shortly before the Democratic primary last May. Shortly after he was inaugurated in January, it became apparent that Fetterman was incapable of fulfilling the duties of his office, and in February his staff came up with the genius idea of concealing the senator’s cognitive incapacity by having him admitted to Walter Reed for treatment of depression. Does anyone seriously believe that Fetterman’s biggest problem is a mood disorder?

Let us stipulate that a stroke as severe as the one Fetterman suffered could damage every aspect of his neurological function, including mood regulation. But the real problem — the reason Fetterman should resign, to allow Pennsylvania to have functional representation in the Senate — is that his cognitive abilities (which perhaps were never stellar) have been so impaired as to leave him unable even to speak coherently or process information. And what CBS did to conceal this was to carefully edit Paulie’s interview with Fetterman, using an obvious trick: Two cameras were used in the interview, one with a tight close-up of Fetterman, and the second with a wider shot, and whenever Fetterman speaks, they cut between the two shots, as if this is being done to add visual interest to the interview, rather than to edit out moments of babbling incoherence.

 

There is never any segment during the interview where Fetterman is shown speaking in a single shot for more than five or 10 seconds consecutively. And if you watch carefully, these interview excerpts constitute a fairly small share of the 10-minute piece, much of which is filled with Paulie narrating a tale of Fetterman’s “struggle,” intended to frame this as the saga of a hero courageously overcoming misfortune.

As much as anyone might lament Fetterman’s misfortune, however, it is certainly not evident that he has overcome the brain damage he suffered from his stroke last year, and Jane Paulie’s interview cannot be regarded as an honest depiction of Fetterman’s current condition. The CBS segment is propaganda, the whole point of which is to help Democrats maintain the fiction that Fetterman is capable of functioning as a U.S. Senator, so that they can avoid the risk and expense of a special election to fill the seat, if Fetterman were compelled to resign.



 

 

Category: CBS, Pennsylvania, Senate

Rule 5 Sunday: Sanna Marin

Posted on | April 3, 2023 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Finnish politician Sanna Marin is in the news again as the Finns voted for a pair of conservative/nationalist parties over Marin’s Social Democrats in this weekend’s elections, which means Marin’s term as Prime Minister is over. Marin gained notoriety as the youngest Prime Minister in Finnish history, and also in a pair of incidents pertaining to clubbing during the COVID panic and a revealing photoshoot that some thought demeaned her office. Here’s a pic of her at the Ruisrock Festival before she became famous.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Welfare State Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: John Wick Chapter 4, The Night Agent, Riley Gaines, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Ladyhawke, Giulia Tofana, Gwyneth Paltrow, Carnival Row Season Two, and MAGA Persecution

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Genie Bouchard and the Wearing ‘o the Green, You’ll Eat Bugs and Like It!, Merry Trumpmas! LOTT Punks AOC, Q-Man Released, Insurrection in Tennessee, Fish Pic Friday – Capt. Miranda Adams, Noise from Nashville, Trumpmas Put Off a Month, Lo Que un Hombre Debería Saber, Gnashing of Teeth over Nashville, IRS ‘Drops In’ on Matt Taibbi, No ‘Trumpmas’ This Week, Some Wednesday Wetness, Forget It PETA, It’s Baltimore, Trans Day of Rage – Transgunman Kills 3 Kid 3 Adults at Nashville Christian School, Tuesday Tanlines, It’s DIY Monday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Is The Tide Is Turning Against Big Trans?, Palm Sunday and Week Ends with No Arrest, Maybe Never

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Category: Rule 5

What Joe Biden Wants

Posted on | April 2, 2023 | 1 Comment

Don’t know who deserves credit for that meme, but it is accurate in its description of the rhetoric of gun-control advocates, including President Joe Biden, who invoke “assault weapons” to incite an emotional reaction from ignorant people — which is no different, really, than Democrats’ rhetoric about “corporate greed” or “climate change” or “Russian interference in our elections.” Not to digress, but let me quote something Freddie deBoer wrote about the Trump indictment:

The example of Trump is interesting. I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been observed that Trump’s fundamental political proposition is not really populism, or foreign policy isolationism, or economic protectionism. Trump’s political pitch is, simply, “I will destroy your enemies.” Which is part of what makes him a monster, his zeal for attacking his targets and the targets he picks. But when I see people who favor police and prison abolition exactly up until the police and prisons become useful tools to them, it convinces me even more that “I will destroy your enemies” is all that politics is. When you scrape the surface even a little bit, that’s all that you find, the will to destroy the other side.

DeBoer believes that applies to his “progressive” allies as well, and having spent the past 30-plus years watching Democrats crusade against a series of bogeymen — remember the “Patriot militia” scare of the mid-1990s? remember the overblown rhetoric about the danger of “the Religious Right”? — I think the Left is actually much more addicted to this destroy-your-enemies approach to politics, and their demonization of firearms ownership is typical of this. If you’ve read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed, you’re familiar with his analysis of how liberals think in categories of “mascots” (e.g., the homeless) and “targets,” those perceived as villains in the political melodrama. When you hear Joe Scarborough ranting about Republicans being “whipped into a paranoid frenzy by the NRA,” you understand how this selection of “targets” functions to direct liberals’ response to any controversy. If the National Rifle Association didn’t exist, liberals would have to invent it, in order to have an object of hate whenever gun violence makes national headlines.

Here is something Biden and his media allies never mention: Most shootings don’t involve “assault weapons,” or rifles of any kind, for that matter. The vast majority of shootings are committed with pistols, with 9mm and .40-caliber semiautomatics being the most common weapons used in shootings. So-called “mass shootings” are rare incidents, accounting for only a tiny fraction of the roughly 26,000 homicides in the United States in 2021. Most homicides are either domestic disputes or associated with inner-city gangs engaged in drug trafficking. Moreover, homicide is geographically concentrated:

When it comes to murder, there are three types of counties in the United States. Most counties experience no murders, a smaller set where there are a few murders, and then a tiny set of counties where murders are very common. In 2020, 52% of counties (with 10% of the population) had no murders. 68% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 18% of the population. These counties account for only 2.6% of all murders in the country. The worst 1% of counties (the worst 31 counties) have 21% of the population and 42% of the murders. The worst 2% of counties (62 counties) contain 31% of the population and 56% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 73% of murders. But even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas.

Did you catch that? There are more than 3,000 counties in the United States, of which 62 account for more than half of the nation’s murders. About 70% of Americans live in places where murders are quite rare. And, it is important to note, the rates of firearm ownership are not predictive of homicide rates. That is to say, Americans living in rural areas are far more likely to own guns than residents of urban areas, and yet murder rates are highest in those urban areas where gun ownership rates are comparatively low. The rhetoric around “assault weapons” obscures all of these relevant facts about violent crime, and most of the Democrats you see opining on the subject (especially Joe Biden) either don’t know what the hell they are talking about, or simply don’t care about the facts. Consider this recent news item:

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas affirmed he supports an “assault weapons” ban, but would not define the term “assault weapon” when asked by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. . . .
Mayorkas make clear his support for an “assault weapons” ban.
Kennedy then asked, “What is an ‘assault weapon’”?
“It is for example, an AK-47,” Mayorkas responded.
Kennedy then pressed him. “Can you give me a definition other than just pointing to a specific weapon? Would there be other weapons besides an AK-47 you would ban?”
Instead of defining the term, Mayorkas recounted his work as a federal prosecutor and said, “The vast majority of law enforcement officers, leaders with whom I worked, were greatly in support of the assault weapons ban.”
Kennedy then said, “You know why we get so frustrated with you? Because you won’t give us straight answers.”

It is estimated that Americans own about 20 million AR-15s, which is the most popular type of rifle in the country. Yet how many AR-15s have ever been used in the commission of a crime? In an average year, how many times do police arrest someone for a crime in which an AR-15 was used? And what is the ratio between (a) crimes committed with pistols and (b) crimes committed with AR-15s (or any other “assault weapon”)? These are questions that Senator Kennedy and other Republicans should be asking Biden administration officials. And speaking of pistols, police in Chicago say they are seeing more “switches” used to convert 9mm pistols to fully automatic fire. If you add a “switch” to a 9mm pistol and have a large-capacity drum magazine, you’ve got yourself a miniature machine gun — which is a federal felony, by the way. Let us ask, who is being arrested with these illegal weapons in Chicago? Are they right-wingers? NRA members? Trump voters? I don’t think so.

Maybe Senator Kennedy should ask about that issue, too.



 

 

Category: Crime

FMJRA 2.0: So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done

Posted on | April 2, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Passover begins on Wednesday, so it seems appropriate to use Metallica’s Creeping Death as the SOTD. Also noteworthy: this mashup of the preceding with Megadeth and The Who. ABC is showing The Ten Commandments tonight, but since I don’t have cable I’m out of luck.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

A show with everything INCLUDING Yul Brynner!

‘Limited Scientific Evidence’
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Die Macht Der Bilder
A View From The Beach
EBL

 

Fear And Loathing On The Intertubes
The Political Hat
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

NOT a Babylon Bee Headline
First Street Journal
A View From The Beach
EBL

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Riley Gaines
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Inheriting a Legacy of Liberty
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

BREAKING NEWS: Nashville School Shooter Is Probably Not a Trump Voter
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic
The DaleyGator
First Street Journal
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.28.23 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Nashville Shooting: Expert on Violence Agrees That Crazy People Are Dangerous
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.28.23 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

The Unlimited Wretchedness of MSNBC
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.29.23
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

BREAKING: TRUMP INDICTED
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.30.23
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.31.23
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending March 31: 

  1.  EBL (16)
  2.  357 Magnum (13)
  3.  A View From The Beach (12)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

‘Adult Film Actress’

Posted on | April 1, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘Adult Film Actress’

The scholars and theologians assembled under royal commission to produce the official English translation we know as the King James Bible were working with Hebrew and Greek original texts, and when it came time to decide what word to use for women who have sex for money, settled on the word whore. If that word was good enough for the finest scholars of 1611, it’s good enough for me, but the folks at CNN have chosen the phrase “adult film actress” to describe Stormy Daniels, as if sleazy porn videos deserve to be classified as “film,” as if it is “adult” behavior to watch such sleazy videos, and as if acting was her claim to fame. Or infamy, to be more exact. The fact that Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) is having her “15 minutes of fame” extended we owe to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who was elected two years ago on a simple platform: Prosecute Trump. (We are not supposed to say “Soros-funded” in connection with Bragg, although he was in fact funded by Soros, because it’s anti-Semitic to call attention to this.)

Bragg has made it a policy not to prosecute crimes he deems “low-level offenses,” and crime has skyrocketed out of control in New York, but what Bragg does prosecute is the very serious crime alleged against Donald Trump: Paying a whore to shut up.

This is only a crime if it’s committed by a Republican. Basically, being a Republican is a crime unto itself, according to Alvin Bragg.

“A whore is a deep ditch” (Proverbs 23:27) and Bragg has stumbled into this ditch by his own foolish choice, apparently ignoring the omen of Michael Avenatti’s downfall. Avenatti gained national fame as attorney for Stormy Daniels, and where is he now? Fourteen years in federal prison is a harsh lesson, and one might think Bragg would be forewarned by this example, but he is heedless of the danger, “relying on debatable facts and untested legal theories to transform minor misconduct into a felony,” to quote Jacob Sullum (hat-tip Instapundit). But I did not start this post with the intent to engage in punditry about the Stormy Daniels case, because what’s the point? Every pundit on the planet is babbling about this case, and why should I add my voice to that cacophony? No, I started this post with the intention of making fun of CNN:

Primetime ratings for CNN have fallen 61% this month — the steepest dip in viewership among the big three cable news giants, according to the latest figures released by Nielsen.
The drop in ratings is a bad omen for CNN, which has struggled to right the ship since parent company Warner Bros. Discovery tasked Chris Licht with the job of turning the news channel around more than a year ago.
Despite the poor ratings, Licht has the support of his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who gave a pep talk to network managers urging them to steer clear of politically oriented commentary and partisanship.

Cue the Paw Patrol theme song.



 

 

Category: CNN, Crime, Donald Trump, New York, Scandal

Escaping the School Trap

Posted on | April 1, 2023 | 1 Comment

The two-room schoolhouse

Every normal boy hates school, and it is fair to say I was “educated” against my will. Maybe some of my readers are weirdos — nerds and teacher’s pets and other goody-two-shoes types who derived a perverse pleasure from school attendance — but that’s your problem, not mine.

There are few critics of public education who have been at it longer than I have, since I was a first-grader at Annette Winn Elementary School in Lithia Springs, Georgia. As I warn friends, don’t ever get me started on this subject, because I could go on for hours about what’s wrong with America’s education system, namely everything — every damned thing!

The root cause of the evil is what’s called ADA, i.e., the state makes a certain allotment of taxpayer money for every child in public schools, based on Average Daily Attendance. It therefore behooves the administrators of public schools to maximize attendance and to increase the years of schooling. If you are familiar with the history of education, you know that preschool and kindergarten were not part of public schools until quite recently and, if you go further back — prior to the 1930s — high-school attendance was neither mandatory nor commonplace in many parts of America. In rural counties, public education was provided at the two-room country schoolhouse, the curriculum of which extended only up to eighth grade. There was often only one high school in the entire county, a municipal institution in the county seat and, for example, the farm boy in rural Floyd County, Georgia, who wished to attend Rome High School circa 1914, would have to (a) find someone in town to provide him room and board, and (b) pay for his tuition and books, since the school was funded by city taxes, rather than county taxes.

Jethro Bodine and Jed Clampett

Those who’ve watched The Beverly Hillbillies laughed when Jethro would boast of his intellectual prowess: “I’ve got an eighth-grade education!” However humorous we might find it, this was the reality for most people who grew up in rural America, even as late as World War II. Girls and boys growing up on the farm didn’t have access to schooling beyond eighth grade, unless they had some way to get to town. Think of how long a 10- or 15-mile trip would take by horse and buggy on winding dirt country roads, so that even if a farm family were prosperous enough to be able to afford such an expense, difficulties of traveling any great distance were a serious impediment to pursuing education beyond what was available at the nearest two-room country schoolhouse. About 30 years ago, when I lived in Rome, Georgia, it was my good fortune to be assigned to interview several old-timers, including local historian Dr. C.J. Wyatt, about conditions in “the old days” (i.e., between 1900 and World War II).

The way education was organized in those days bore little resemblance to our modern school system. Out in the county, the two-room school might only meet for 100 days a year (rather than the 180-day school calendar than now prevails) and advancement from grade to grade was not based on a child’s age. The school was divided into the primary group, up until fourth-or fifth grade, which met in one room, while the upper group met in the other room, roughly the equivalent of a middle school curriculum. The staff of the school was exactly two — the principal teaching the upper group, and an assistant teaching the lower grades. A particularly precocious child might begin attending school at age five or six, but age seven was more common. And because children’s labor was valuable (even necessary) to farm life, many students attended sporadically, and their schooling often ended at age 12 or 13. To advance in grades, a child had to master whatever was required at each grade — there was no “social promotion” — and it might be that a child of 10 or 12 would still be toiling away on second- or third-grade lessons, while a bright and studious child the same age was already doing seventh- or eight-grade work.

Perhaps you now understand why Jethro Bodine felt he’d made a great academic accomplishment by finishing eighth grade. There were plenty of farm boys who never made it that far, and we may contrast this seemingly primitive educational system with what we have now in America.

Back in the 1990s, not long after Newt Gingrich had become Speaker of the House, I watched him give a speech on C-SPAN where he referred to modern high schools as “subsidized dating” and pointed out that many high schools were graduating kids who couldn’t even read their own diplomas. If this was true in 1995, how much worse is it now?

Before I continue further down this path — as I said, I could go on for hours in detailing what’s wrong with education in America — let me explain that this rant was inspired by a Glenn Reynolds article on Substack, “The Age Barrier, And Its Costs,” addressing the problem of age segregation. For a definition, I’ll cite Wikipedia:

Age segregation is the separation of people based on their age, and may be observed in many aspects of some societies. . . . Age segregation in schools, age grading, or graded education is the separation of students into years of education (grades, forms) by approximately the same age.
In the United States, graded education was introduced during 1848 to 1870. Age segregation in the U.S. was a product of industrialization, Western formal schooling, child labor laws, social services agencies, and the rise of disciplines such as psychology and education. A combination of these caused a shift from family working as a unit to separation of economic activities and childcare emerged.

To say that this was “a product of industrialization” is a way of implying that the division of children into age-graded classrooms was a social trend — something impersonal, a more or less natural byproduct of the processes of history — but this is false. In fact, the U.S. school system began changing in the mid-1800s because certain “reformers” had gone to Germany and came back promoting “modern” ideas based on their enthusiasm for the Prussian state school system. This “reform” movement began with Horace Mann in Massachusetts and gradually spread from there. We are far removed from Boston in the 1840s, of course, but it’s important to recognize that the ideas which shaped our public school system didn’t just happen as part of some historical trend, rather that these ideas were advanced by individual human beings, activists and organizers who had specific goals in mind.

Contrary to what you may think, education “reform” has been actively resisted at every step of the way by intelligent people who saw clear dangers in the changes being promoted by the reformers. The problems of the age-grade system were apparent long ago. Education consultant Karl Bunday cites the work of a 1912 critic quoted in Charles Silberman’s 1970 book Crisis in the Classroom:

“[The age-grade class system] is constructed upon the assumption that a group of minds can be marshalled and controlled in growth in exactly the same manner that a military officer marshalls and directs the bodily movements of a company of soldiers. In solid, unbreakable phalanx the class is supposed to move through all the grades, keeping in locked step. This locked step is set by the ‘average’ pupil — an algebraic myth born of inanimate figures and an addled pedagogy. The class system does injury to the rapid and quick-thinking pupils, because these must shackle their stride to keep pace with the mythical average. But the class system does a greater injury to the large number who make slower progress than the rate of the mythical average pupil . . . They are foredoomed to failure before they begin.”

This “lockstep” nature of a curriculum based upon the average student results in what I’ve called the “Hansel and Gretel” approach to teaching. Those who recall the fairy tale know how Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs behind them to help them find their way back home. In a similar manner, the teacher doles out lessons in a time-ordered sequence — the bread-crumb trail of knowledge — with a certain amount of math, grammar, history, etc., to be taught each day, without regard to the abilities or interests of the students. Let us stipulate that this method cannot be separated from the classroom system; we are not passing judgment on whether teachers are “nice” people, or whether they are sincere in their desire to help students learn, when we apply critical scrutiny to the system itself. No matter how intelligent or dedicated the teacher may be, so long as “education” is a matter of group instruction, with children assigned to classrooms by age (rather than by their ability or interest), and the teacher required to bring the children along through a prescribed set of lessons, this “Hansel and Gretel” method must be used, and its effects are predictable, as the critic saw in 1912.

Public education in general violates a basic principle of successful organization, i.e., voluntary association through mutual self-selection. Think about college fraternities. Candidates for membership attend rush parties at the houses that they’re interested in joining. Members of the fraternities meet the prospective candidates, then vote on which ones should receive offers of membership. A student might receive such bids from more than one fraternity, in which case he is free to choose between them. And once an offer of membership is accepted, the pledge must go through a trial period — learning the secret handshake, etc. — before becoming a full-fledged member. Each fraternity has standards of behavior, embodied in a code, and enforced by a membership committee that can expel any member who fails to uphold the code. And if member for any reason becomes dissatisfied with the obligations of fraternity life, he is always free to quit. In a free society, this is how practically all successful enterprises are organized, and a major reason public schools are such a disaster is because they are not based on this principle of mutual self-selection. Public schools are based on government-imposed compulsion, and as such are offensive to the spirit of liberty.

The spirit of liberty at Faber College, 1962

We have heard liberals talk about “structural racism,” the idea that black people suffer disadvantage (and white people benefit from “privilege”) even without anyone in the system having racist intention, simply because of the way the system is set up. We might make a similar critique of our education system — American public schools are defined by structural failure. The problems of the system cannot be fixed by reform; the system itself is the problem. Students are collected into classrooms not on the basis of their interests or abilities, but rather on the basis of age and ZIP code. Every eight-year-old in a certain geographical district must attend third grade at the local elementary school, where they are all instructed in the same curriculum. This one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, and it hasn’t been working for a long time, and efforts to reform it by creating limited alternatives within the existing system — “magnet” schools or whatever — must be recognized as efforts to preserve the system, rather than to fundamentally change the system.

And it all goes back to the ADA. Funding schools on the basis of Average Daily Attendance creates perverse incentives which have in several cases led to scandal, as in Baltimore, where “ghost students” were listed as attending schools that they did not in fact attend. “City Schools receives $15,973 per student, every year from taxpayers,” so that a school with 20 fictitious enrollments was swindling taxpayers to the tune of more than $300,000 a year. The level of academic achievement in Baltimore schools is almost non-existent: “Just 7 percent of third through eighth graders testing proficient in math, meaning 93 percent could not do math at grade level.” This evidence of system-wide failure demonstrates the underlying problem, where the people in charge of the school think of it as a jobs program — the goal being to maximize revenue, in order to provide employment for more certified “professional educators” — with little regard to the ostensible objective of educating children.

As long as X-number of children are attending school, the school receives Y-amount of money, and nothing else matters, in terms of the basic functioning of the system where funding is determined by ADA. Basically, children are held hostage for taxpayer ransom: “Give us $15,000 a year per child and nobody gets hurt.” Except, of course, children are getting hurt by this system, but most adults don’t care because they’re telling themselves a narrative based on anecdotal experience: “Well, I attended public school and I turned out OK.” Thanks, Grandpa, we’re glad you enjoyed yourself back in the Good Old Days, but how is this relevant to the disaster in Baltimore? How can your misty-eyed memories justify imprisoning kids in failing schools until they turn 18, in order to provide employment to certified “professional educators”?

Professor Reynolds talks about age segregation as a society-wide phenomenon, but it starts with the way our schools are organized. Any reasonably bright student — say, the top 10% or 15% — could complete a high-school education by age 16, if placed on an accelerated program, but the schools don’t want to lose the revenue! In other words, if the schools allowed bright students to learn at their own pace and complete high school early, the system would lose the additional revenue it would otherwise obtain by keeping the kids until age 18. The age-grade system serves to preserve the “lockstep” fiction of everyone learning the one-size-fits-all curriculum at the same pace, so that the system maintains its iron grip on all children in a geographic district, in order to guarantee funding according to the ADA formula. The addition of kindergarten and pre-K to this system was simply a means of expanding funding by extending the system’s reach, to put 4- and 5-year-olds into its greedy clutches.

Here’s a question: If it is not necessary to keep bright students trapped in public schools until age 18 — if they could complete the required work by age 15 or 16 — what about the lesser minds among them? What about the children of below-average intelligence, who are not destined for collegiate education? Wouldn’t it be better, in terms of social benefit, to direct these kids toward a skill-based training that would prepare them for gainful employment? Shouldn’t they be directed at age 14 or 15 toward apprentice-type situations where they can make minimum wage while doing on-the-job training? And if, at age 16, they’re able to work full-time, shouldn’t the school system say, “Well-done and farewell”?

A willingness to “think outside the box” is necessary when the box in question is a system that has become a crime scene that ought to be surrounded by yellow tape while detectives investigate what went wrong that led to this catastrophic outcome. Beginning with the Prussian-inspired “reforms” of Horace Mann, our education system has followed a trajectory that seemed to be going upward — by the mid-20th century, American schools were producing students who would eventually send men to the moon — until, almost imperceptibly at first, signs of trouble began to appear, like a “check engine” light on the dashboard. Is it a coincidence that the great upheaval of the Civil Rights era began with a Supreme Court decision regarding schools? Is it also a coincidence that the turmoil of the 1960s was typified by protests on university campuses that shut down such elite institutions as Columbia and Yale? And isn’t the greatest threat to free speech now the climate of repression on university campuses? So many of our society’s problems are rooted in our school system. Conservatives should be paying more attention to this, and less attention to the endless political carnival of Washington, D.C.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

 

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 03.31.23

Posted on | April 1, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

“They hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s their reason?”

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Beria Bragg, also, Gwyneth Paltrow Wins in Utah Ski Crash Trial
Twitchy: Sen. Fetterman Released From Hospital After Recovering From Being Healthy, Stephen King Shaming Trump Defenders Because “He Cheated On His Wife” Ends Badly, and NWS Weighs In On #TransDayOfVisibility And The Forecast Calls For Ratios
Louder With Crowder: Father obliterates school board over daughter’s in-class assignment about who she would do…and in what orifice, Girls sports advocate Riley Gaines stumps scientist on basic biology, crowd laughs as he pulls ‘Ph.D’ card, and Nancy Pelosi gets fact-checked into oblivion over ignorant Trump indictment tweet
Vox Popoli: Finland Joins NATO, also, He’s Not Wrong
According To Hoyt: A Weary Morn, also, It’s Memerific
Monster Hunter Nation: WriterDojo S4 E12 – On Location, also, ID2A Review
Stoic Observations: The Coming Crisis

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Greasy Pole #27 – The Anti-Semite episode
American Conservative: Public Sector Unions Threaten Our Fiscal Future, also, The Professionals
American Greatness: The Democrats’ Road to Hell, Left-Wing Violence Chic, Tennessee State Troopers Prevent Far-Left Radicals from Storming State Capitol, and Biden White House Remains Silent on Trump Indictment
American Power: Brandon Sanderson’s Fantasy Empire, Twitter’s Transgender Ideology Problem, and You Can’t Cancel Me, I Quit
American Thinker: Diversity Executives – The U.S. Version of Soviet Political Commissars, also, Christopher Wray and the Politicization of the FBI
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Welfare State Friday
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship certifies its own farce election, Solidarity vs. Disparaging the flag in communist Cuba, Reports from Cuba: What it’s like to live in a medical superpower, and Father Alberto Reyes dares to challenge the ‘great lie’ of Cuba’s dictatorship
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm for March 31
Behind The Black: Two launches by Red China, Spain’s government officially establishes a Spanish space agency, and Sponge terrain on Mars
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Trump is indicted
Da Tech Guy: It’s During Weeks like this when I get Christ’s Admonition about “Loving Your Enemies” the most
Don Surber: Banning The Truth
Gates Of Vienna: Culture-Enriching Terror Plot Foiled in Flanders, also, Enricher vs. Enricher Knife-Play in Padua
The Geller Report: Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing Red China for War, also, Fox News Poll: Trump’s lead grows in GOP primary race, now over 50% support
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Earendel, and Fisking a Tweet
Hollywood In Toto: Joe Rogan Was Right – W.H.O. Backs Podcaster Over Vaccine Advice
The Lid: Moses, The Prophet Who Got Cheated
Legal Insurrection: ‘This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the Highest Level in History’, A Significant Tornado Outbreak Sweeps through South and Midwest, Arizona Democrats Sue to Keep Spoiler ‘No Labels’ Candidate Off 2024 Ballot, Trans Activists Storm Florida Capitol Building Over Bill Banning Teaching Sex Orientation, Gender Identity From PreK-8, and Yes, It’s Okay To Point Out That Alvin Bragg Was “Soros-Backed”
Nebraska Energy Observer: Scattershot Friday
Outkick: LeBron James Won’t Pay For Blue Twitter Checkmark , Angels Infielder Anthony Rendon Grabs Athletics Fan, Swings And Misses, In Video Posted To Twitter, Larry Bird Felt Disrespected Pistons Used White Players To Guard Him, Says Isiah Thomas, Dodgers Fan Gets Pummeled Mid-Proposal By Stadium Security, and Colin Cowherd Roasts Will Levis For Posting Muscle Pictures
Power Line: How to Handle a Senate Demagogue, Tied Up In Knots, and Thoughts from the ammo line
Shark Tank: Florida CFO Patronis Targets ESG Standards
Shot In The Dark: Our Semi-Constitutional Monarchy, #Unexpectedly, and Sticking It To The Man
STUMP: These are a few of my favorite graphs
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Middle East Explosion and American Detente
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, Nidal Hasan may face execution, The Russians will stop providing the US with advanced notices on nuclear capable missile tests, and DOD Education DEI* Unit Dissolved
Transterrestrial Musings: Virgin Orbit
Victory Girls: Transgenders Shaping The Soul Of Our Nation – Biden
Volokh Conspiracy: Douglass Mackey Convicted for Vote-by-Tweet Meme
Watts Up With That: More Nonsense About Greenland, Fossil Fuels Still Dominate Security and Defense Needs, and Southern Labrador coastal landscape dominated by fat polar bears in March
Weasel Zippers: MSNBC Calls DeSantis An Anti-Semite For Saying Manhattan DA “Soros-Backed”, also, In Zambia, Kamala Harris Gives A Word Salad Definition Of “Agri-Tech”
The Federalist: Why Are Conservatives Talking About 2024 Instead Of The Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Next Week?, Trump Indictment Launches Era Of Police-State Politics In America, The Gaming Press Is A Sorry Tool For Wokescolds, Biden’s Department Of Defense Denies Drag Shows On Bases Even When Confronted With Undeniable Evidence, and Twitter Officially Joined The Censorship Regime When It Silenced ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ Reporting
Mark Steyn: The Indictment of a President

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