Rebane's Ruminations

About

November 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

ARCHIVES

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • The Foreign Policy of a Community Organizer (updated 13aug14)

    George Rebane

    It is hard to believe that someone can be elected to the highest office in the world, spend six years in the most expensive learn-while-you-earn educational program, and come out a reprobate dunce.  The man has the consistent counsel of countless advisers ranging from lackeys to bureau heads, department secretaries, and the Pentagon’s military braintrust.  They all tell him that ISIS is now subsuming Al Qaeda, and will most certainly deliver on its promise to launch attacks on our homeland.

    ISIS is no longer simply a ‘terror organization’.  It rules a large multi-national territory, is rapidly enlarging its army of fighters, has acquired modern arms, money, fungible natural resources, allies, and religious zeal second to none.  ISIS, now calling itself the Islamic State or simply The Caliphate, has laid out its objectives and strategy the achievement and terrible execution of which it has and continues to demonstrate in the field.

    As all this unfolds, America has the moral equivalent of Stalin huddling under a coffee table during the week after Hitler’s launch of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.  We also have two so-called allies in the region – one feckless (Maliki’s Iraq) and one we’ve f@^ked over (the Kurdish Peshmerga) but still eager to fight – allies who today will not or cannot stop ISIS.  Our president dithers in arming the Peshmerga while waiting for Maliki to put together an appropriately “inclusive government” in Baghdad, which BTW is now surrounded by ISIS – the Iraqi government’s influence ends at Baghdad’s city limits.

    So here we prevaricate, monitor opinion polls, and tremble while the broader war between Islam and the west takes on a new and terrible dimension.  And our leader, who has sworn to defend America, cannot muster the will to launch a full scale attack on ISIS, and demonstrate that if you promise to kill us in our country and are gathering the wherewithal to carry out your promise, then we will do our best to visibly destroy you with all the means at our disposal.  What happened to JFK’s “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.”?

    For our survival we don’t wait for permission from foreign rulers, we don’t wait until “inclusive governments” are formed according to some arbitrary notions, and we don’t wait for favorable polls from an electorate that knows little of what is happening where.  That is why we were given a Constitution and a republican government.

    I believe I’m not the only one in America who wants the president to act forcefully against an enemy that is the modern equivalent of the Mongol hordes in its ferocity, terror, and determination – an enemy that shares not a shred of our values.  However, if any deem me to be some lonely outlier (a constant theme among our lightely read progressive brethren), then I’ll gladly wear the mantle with the embroidered ‘Rebane Doctrine’ on its back.

    [11aug14 update]  It’s as if someone at the WSJ has been reading RR ;-)  Today the paper points out that three prominent Democrats – “James Steinberg, formerly the President's Deputy Secretary of State, and Robert Ford, formerly his Ambassador to Syria, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, formerly his loyal Secretary of State” – have taken Obama’s foreign policy to task.  It’s interesting to note that all three were instrumental in executing the Obama Doctrine before leaving the administration (more here).

    But the real scary read is the recent report by the National Defense Panel co-chaired by William Perry (Clinton’s SecDef) and Gen John Abizaid (CENTCOM commander 2003-07).  They calmly conclude that the defense budget cuts under Obama have essentially left the nation naked against fulfilling its overseas military commitments to allies, and more importantly to defend ourselves against a spectrum of likely foes ranging from ragheads to Russians.  You can read for yourself the scope of the damage done by this president (here).

    And finally I want to remind you again that America’s progressives continue believing that the US and the free world had nothing to fear from international communism, and the Cold War was all a ruse carefully concocted to transfer wealth from America’s middle class to the military-industrial complex during those decades.  They are advising us that the same thing is now taking place with the false hyping of the danger presented by the growth of radical Islam.

    [13aug14 update] Schadenfreude!  Isn't it delightful to see the Dems, led by Hillary, landing direct hits on the CCO's foreign policy, and then getting their accuracy confirmed by supporting columns in the Washington Post and NYT along with desperate counters coming from the likes of David Axelrod? 

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    76 comments on The Foreign Policy of a Community Organizer (updated 13aug14)

  • Ruminations – 9aug14 (updated)

    George Rebane

    IBM’s new NeuroSynaptic chip was recently announced and is making a big PR splash in the print and online media (more here and here).  The chip’s processing power is based on the parallel implementation of essentially identical ‘neuronal’ structures that mimic major sections of the brain’s neocortex.  We reported on one such promising structure – hierarchical temporal memory – developed some years back by Jeff Hawkins (On Intelligence).  The IBM chip achieves higher transistor density levels, but most remarkably has an architecture that consumes miniscule power compared to standard chips with equal numbers of transistors.  The claim for the NeuroSynaptic chip is that we are now a skosh or two away from truly intelligent machines in the form factor of a human brain that don’t require a dedicated utility to supply its electricity.  I will get real excited when IBM starts reporting on how easily a brain from such a chipset can learn to do everyday things in the real world.  

    GreenKoolAidCommon Core is the latest jumbo sized Community Kool-aid served in Nevada County.  Opening this morning’s (9aug14) Union, we see multiple articles (here and here) and commentaries (here) on the joys of the new federal education standards.  RR readers long ago learned how the heavy hand of federal education funding programs now mandate the adoption of this fast track to a deeper national educational deficit.  The naifs still claim that CC is the best thing since sliced bread for our kids who will now learn less at a slower rate, and be forced into college catch-up courses when they leave high school.  The remediation of CC kids will be required for many majors before they can start the prescribed four-year course of study.  But hey, education will then be much more expensive, employing additional legions of registered Democrats, who will take more classroom time to teach the little darlins to think correct thoughts.  All of it part and parcel of the ongoing fundamental transformation.  (For more, search RR for ‘Common Core’)

    Data scientists are highly paid and in short supply.  Data scientist is the new label for a class of STEM workers who are skilled in handling massive databases, searching them for patterns, and developing algorithms to use such pattern data to generate information that is used for making decisions in all kinds of fields from medicine, through energy production, to investing and finance.  We learn that STEM degrees in data intensive fields of science and engineering can get a twenty-something upwards of $300K a year for openers.  (more here)

    Over the recent months (years?) there has been much discussion here (search RR for ‘STEM’) about the availability of STEM workers, the number of STEM jobs, importing STEM workers, and so on.  According to my lights,  STEM fields and skill sets are now so numerous and diverse that not all areas are equally likely to ‘guarantee’ employment to the graduate.  It pays to do some considerable research and get in on the ground floor in a promising STEM field during school.  And when in doubt, take lots of courses in applied math, physics, algorithmics (computer science), and data handling.

    Romney’s return in 2016.  I felt kinda lonely coming to the conclucion that Mitt might not be a bad candidate again in 2016 given the absolute disaster that Barack Hussein Obama has made of the Office of the President.  I have reported the recent writings of American pundits on that possibility.  Now we are starting to hear people overseas looking back at the big mistake our electorate made (again) in 2012.  Here is an interesting report from a very popular British outlet.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    22 comments on Ruminations – 9aug14 (updated)

  • We can’t think about Common Core, or anything else …

    George Rebane

    When seeking solutions to society's problems, always hold government guilty until proven innocent.

    Modern progressivism is the most cynically named socio-political ideology since the world of Orwell’s 1984.  Evidence abounds that there is literally nothing progressive for organizing human society in the (niggardly revealed) tenets and expanding practice of progressivism – it gives rise to arguably the most regressive politics in the so-called free world.  Thomas Sowell, celebrated social theorist, economist, political philosopher, and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, argues convincingly that “growing evidence suggests that we are living in a post-thinking era.”

    He joins many learned observers of the human condition to conclude that in America we are wallowing in a rising mire of dumbth in which main street is no longer capable of thinking through even the most basic concepts that ultimately impact their lives.  This deficit is the visible preamble to not being able to reason about simple decisions from what they read, see, and experience.  Progressives throughout the land are uniformly blind to that state of affairs and continue promoting programs and public policies guaranteed to remove the last vestiges of independent and critical thought from the public forum.  (In this context consider the online outpourings of local progressives.)

    Dr Sowell gives examples to underline his assertion in ‘If people would just think things through …’.  When we focus on the particulars presented it is simply mind boggling that an advanced society like ours can be induced to regress as rapidly as we have witnessed in the past decades of impeccably regulated politically correct thought, speech, and conduct.  None of this should be a surprise for RR readers; we review it here because the speed of our downward spiral is picking up.

    To underline this trail of tears for those who still can and do think, I draw your attention again to the Common Core education standard much covered and discussed in these pages.  UC Berkeley professor emerita and honored mathematician Dr Marina Ratner recently examined Common Core’s math standards and the curricula that it has inspired across the land.  She presents a summary of her analysis and professional conclusions in ‘Making Math Education Even Worse’.

    There she begins by joining many of us in amazement that we have ignored the successful instruction methodologies and texts used in advanced countries that regularly beat America's youth in international math ratings, and instead have spent almost $16B in devising a new standard that is “several years behind old standards, especially in the higher grades”, and specifically “vastly inferior to the old California standards in rigor, depth and the scope of topics.”

    Common Core is so flawed that even one of its authors, Jason Zimba, admits “that the new standards wouldn’t prepare students for colleges to which ‘most parents aspire’ to send their children.”  To this the good professor gives sufficient examples and details to make your eyes roll and heads spin (assuming you are not among the sad cohort described by Thomas Sowell).

    Dr Ratner concludes that “American students are already struggling against the competition.  The Common Core won’t help them succeed”, but instead “will move the US even closer to the bottom in international ranking.”

    My point here is that this may well be the progressives’ long sought coup de grace to take America down from its position of world greatness and leadership.  As pointed out here and by noted national thinkers over the last years, there is a definite agenda being followed by collectivists to bring the US to heel in the community of nations.  Dinesh D’souza takes his readers through an expanded trail of evidence for this assertion in his recent America: Imagine a World without her.  Saddened I continue to observe how willingly and without whimper we travel this path to oblivion from the pages of post-tipping point history now being written.  And yes, it is all due to the spread of the stifling and  diseased memes of progressive thought already metastisized in America.  We should think about it while we still can.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    80 comments on We can’t think about Common Core, or anything else …

  • Rumblings of the Great Divide

    George Rebane

    A main theme and designated category of posts in these pages is the idea of the Great Divide.  The idea has been growing for some years now as the country polarizes, taking opposite sides of achieving objectives for the future organization of society best summarized under Agenda 21 (q.v.).  While not embraced solely by a sizeable fraction of the Right, the Great Divide is vehemently rejected by the non-Hispanic Left.  Those on the Right acknowledge the overarching objective of a GD in the peaceful achievement of one or more territorial partitions of the US so that people can gather into jurisdictions where they feel that their government more closely represents their socio-economic ideologies.

    The movements for partitioning, like the State of Jefferson in California (replicated in one form or another in at least eight other states currently), are encouraged by the polarized political wranglings in Washington and the various state houses.  And we must remind ourselves that these politicians really do reflect our own beliefs which today are so remote from each other that the hope for finding a ‘middle ground’ is now relegated to poets, songwriters, and charlatans.

    OldGlory_ravagedPeggy Noonan’s piece – ‘Out of Many, Two’ – in the 2aug14 WSJ talks to the politicians’ contribution to the coming Great Divide.

    If you, dear reader, are among the Left who will use Leviathan to resist to the bitter end any notion of a sustainable post-GD America, then you should be prepared to establish a world such as shown in the ‘Hunger Games’ future.  There the autocratic elites have enslaved and partitioned their ideological pariahs into enclaves that are managed as virtual prisons.  But you can be sure that those like me will not go quietly into such a dark night.

    On a more dour note.  Reports are coming in daily of the various economically mismanaged nation-states beginning to question the efficacy of (classically) liberal democracy as the desired form of governance.  Most have dunned it through national dialogues questioning capitalism as the continued basis for their economies – even though they have not practiced capitalism in the years leading up to their economic debacles – because it is such a convenient strawman to demagogue to the teeming and huddled masses of their own making.  The direct corollary here is that you cannot destroy capitalism without collapsing the Bastiat Triangle’s other rights of individual liberty and security of your person (see under ‘RR Fundamentals’, upper right).

    But the most direct assaults on liberal democracy are now coming from national leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban who are telling their people of the benefits of adopting the illiberal ways of countries like Russia, Turkey, and China – more in ‘The Illiberal Idea Rises’.  This new cohort of leaders have concluded that our Founders’ seminal question ‘Can Man govern himself?’, for which America was to be the Great Experiment, must now be answered with a resounding No!  The progressive Left came to that conclusion long ago, and has since busied itself with how best to keep the man behind the curtain concealed until the time is ripe.  Well, Obama’s ascendancy, re-confirmation, and take-no-prisoners presidency has told many in the world that the time for a new agenda of governance in the 21st century may well be now.  And by some coincidence that agenda already exists (see above) and comports to all the ideals of environmentally sensitive and socially just people in the world.  Oh happy days!

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    19 comments on Rumblings of the Great Divide

  • STEM is not powered by STEAM

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary aired on 1 August 2014.]

    Listeners to these commentaries are aware of how important America’s STEM workforce will be to the future of our country and our quality of life.  Recall that STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.  Preparing for a STEM career is hard, and not everyone is qualified to do so.  That is a prime reason why so many of our youth seek easier educational paths into adulthood and the nation’s workforce.

    With the longstanding decline of our students’ science and math rankings, recently more of our politicians and local civic leaders have come to realize the importance of offering solid STEM curricula in our K-12 schools.  At the same time education budgets have gotten tighter for a number of other reasons we have covered before and will visit again.  But the bottom line is that there have had to be significant reductions in courses covering non-mainstream subjects such as in civics, the arts, and humanities, in addition to the elimination of many non-academic school programs such as certain sports and special interest clubs.  Courses in the graphic and performing arts have been among the hardest hit in such budget cuts.

    In the meantime, most school districts have not yet set up a stable curriculum that adequately delivers education in the STEM subjects.  Doing this has also been delayed with the recent adoption of the controversial Common Core standards promoted by the federal government.  In fact, Common Core now puts a hitch into STEM education by essentially shifting pre-calculus and calculus subjects into college remedial courses for STEM majors.

    With all these important things going on, we suddenly see a new initiative from the progressive Left to revive arts education in our public high schools through a specious attempt to attract additional funding from established STEM programs.  This is done by injecting ‘Arts’ as a necessary and integral part of a complete STEM education – the new acronym then becomes STEAM.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    30 comments on STEM is not powered by STEAM

  • Sandbox – 1aug14

    [My apologies for letting the 24jul14 sandbox overfill.  Out of desperation, I suppose, people were beginning to discuss local drone flights under the SoJ post, and other transgressions ;-)  Here's a fresh one.]

    Posted at

    in

    67 comments on Sandbox – 1aug14

  • Ruminations – 31jul14 (updated 3aug14)

     

    George Rebane

    Moonbeam’s bankrupt California continues to buy Latino votes with money we don't have. Our “balanced budgets” are achieved by not paying the state’s pension obligations.  And today facing over a half trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, the governor announces that the state will “shelter immigrants”, those munchkins dumped by the hordes across our y’all come border with Mexico (more here).  Never mind that California already is the nation’s leader in all the metrics tracking the poor, disabled, unemployed, ignorant, and stupid.

    Local blogger and RR reader Todd Juvinall has more to say about the latest wave of juvenile illegal aliens.  He writes an excellent piece that appeared in the 30jul14 Union.  Give it a read (don’t know whether The Union has accepted the advice to un-paywall its op-ed page).

    Doesn’t it just frost your external plumbing when you come to realize that the Fed has been promoting the fortunes of the dastardly one-percenters, and creating more inequality by keeping interest rates insanely low in order to counteract Obama’s destructive policies impeding economic recovery?  It is, of course, sold as part and parcel of the administration’s ongoing Big Lie claiming that it is all done to help Main Street counter Wall Street.  Ruchir Sharma at Morgan Stanley lifts the curtain for us with his ‘Liberals Love the One-Percent’ in the 30jul14 WSJ.  The dots to be connected are that the policy maintains the fat cats’ buying of political influence while camouflaging the administration’s fundamental transformation of America.

    Did you see what the political scumbags in the Texas legislature are doing to the First Amendment to keep from having their corruptions being exposed by non-profit issue advocacy groups?  They are working through their Ethics Committee to reinterpret existing state election code to now require these groups to “register with the state, hire campaign accountants and attorneys, and file and disclose detailed reports on contributions, spending and their beneficiaries.  Violations are a criminal offense.” (more here)  Can you spell 'knee-buckling expenses'?

    Returning to the Convention of States – the constitutional amendment procedure described in our Constitution’s Article 5 – about which I remain perplexed with a number of questions about its current direction and resulting efficacy having gone unanswered by the conservative proponents of launching such a convention.  I gave some background on the CoS in my 7apr14 post.

    Various groups on the Right and Left are almost rabidly in favor of holding CoS as an answer to making changes in America’s governance that are not possible under the current Constitution as amended.  Each party's objectives are anathema to the other.  While the Right seeks to establish a requirement for fiscal prudence and limited government, which I support, the Left seeks to abridge/eliminate more freedoms and enlarge the scope and reach of Leviathan.

    The bottom line is that, under current constitutional procedures, holding a controllable (by either party) CoS, or another Constitutional Convention, is nigh on impossible (more here).  However, this problem has been extensively studied and there are reasonable ways forward.  A particularly good piece of work was done by the Cato Institute and reported in its Policy Analysis #691 (18jan12) titled ‘Renewing Federalism by Reforming Article V – Defects in the Constitutional Amendment Process and a Reform Proposal’.  I’d sure like to see someone on the Right in the leadership of their CoS initiative, someone like, say, Mark Meckler respond to Cato’s analysis of the problem and its proposed way forward.  Simply dismissing criticisms of the current efforts toward a CoS with denigrations and/or crickets is not productive.

    [1aug14 update]  RR readers will recognize that today’s announcement of 200K+ jobs in July is just treading water and not a cause for celebration, even though we have a modest surge of hopeful people entering the job market and thereby giving truth to the ongoing doldrums by driving the unemployment rate up to 6.2%.  The natural net accretion of working age people in America (out of the education pipeline and immigrants) is somewhere in the 200-250K per month range.  Creating that many jobs is required to just absorb the newbies; recovery, let alone growth, requires a significantly higher job creation rate.  The details of all this were explained here and here.

    [3aug14 update]  Leviathan implementing Agenda21 right down to the donuts and cupcakes that can be made and sold by volunteers at school bake sales.  The scheme is simple – take their money at gunpoint, give part of it back to (partially) fund schools, roads, hospitals, bridges, waterways, utilities, …, then attach whatever liberties limiting regulations you want to the refunds under threat of witholding the refunds for non-compliance (more here).   It sure seems that progressives see no infringement of *their* liberties as long as government does not interfere with how, where, when, and with whom (or what) they can induce orgasm.  Everything else can have the bejeezus regulated out of it with no nevermind from the Left with the proviso that someone else can be made to pay for all ensuing costs related to their practice of such freedoms.  Rampant fascism.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    3 comments on Ruminations – 31jul14 (updated 3aug14)

  • State of Jefferson Townhall in Penn Valley (updated 4aug14)

    George Rebane

    SoJposter140802RR has posted on the national movements to break bigger states into smaller ones as part of the impetus to achieve some form of America’s Great Divide (here).  These movements are birthed by the realization by large cohorts of conservatives in the several states that they are no longer represented in their states’ legislatures, and the movements are fueled by the growing irreconcilable polarization of America’s Right and Left socio-political ideologies.  For some time now the distance has grown so large that no one can any longer suggest a plausible middle ground acceptable to sufficient numbers in both camps.

    Two distinct yet related movements are stirring in California in which many of its mostly rural counties, located in the north and in the Sierra, have formed citizens groups to explore the feasibility and form of such a break-up.  The bigger and older movement – Six Californias – was founded by venture capitalist Tim Draper in 2013, and has gathered enough signatures for an initiative to be placed on the 2016 ballot.  The passed initiative will launch a process that then must successfully proceed through California’s legislature and then through Congress.

    The other is the State of Jefferson (SoJ) movement that intends for a group of northern California counties to secede from the state and become a new state.  A number of northern counties have passed resolutions of support for SoJ, and more are in the offing.  SoJ is spearheaded by Mark Baird and others of the Jefferson Declaration.  Mark Baird will be one of the featured speakers at this Saturday’s SoJ townhall gathering in Nevada County’s Western Gateway Park.

    I invite everyone who is interested in knowing more about the motivation for and means of achieving a viable State of Jefferson to bring their lawn chairs to the park this Saturday afternoon.  You don’t have to have made up your mind about SoJ or any of the national partition movements, just come and find out what all the fuss is about so you can speak a bit more knowledgeably when you talk to your friends and neighbors.

    [update]  In today’s (30jul14) Union we have ‘State splitters secede from reality’ by local resident Jerry Henderson.  From his article it is a safe bet that the man is of liberal leanings by just looking at how he reasons.  His message is summarized – People who have no voice in their state legislatures should not seek to constitutionally separate from their current states because that is a complicated process unlikely to succeed, because the majority party will oppose such moves in order to maintain its ideological monopoly.  Instead, such discontents should just “play by the rules” and “do something positive that will make (their) community and region a better place to live.”

    So there you have it.  IMHO, if for nothing else, a split is warranted to just be out from under the electoral thumb of thinkers like Mr Henderson; my scrap lumber pile reasons better.  But the question that all such pooh-poohers should answer is, ‘How real is it to expect an aggrieved minority to remain compliant indefinitely, people who have been repressed for years by a government blind and deaf, nay, inimical to their just needs (liberty, security, property)?’

    The reply of the majority Hendersons to the minority conservatives is to hunker down, accept the current order of things, and do your best.  It was the same perpetual advice that King George III gave the colonists.

    [3aug14 update]  It was a fine gathering yesterday at the Western Gateway Park with good speakers making a cogent case for SoJ and the state splitting movement that is gaining momentum across the land.  The main grievance fueling discontent is that with growing national polarization that has now put permanent super-majorities into many state houses, the minorities have lost any effective representation in their states’ legislatures.  For a complete report of the Nevada County SoJ townhall meeting, visit Russ Steele’s Sierra Foothills Commentary here.

    [4aug14 update]  George Boardman, columnist for The Union and RR reader, wrote a thoughtful piece in today’s edition of the paper – ‘‘Power to the People’ isn’t what it should be in California’.  There he advises conservatives to not “waste their energy on dead-propositions like the State of Jefferson, constitutional sheriffs, overturning Common Core, and taking control of federal forests …”.  Instead he proposes that it is the establishment of another state elected office (and supporting bureaucracy) that will “defend the will of the people all the way to the US Supreme Court if necessary” that will get conservatives’ juices flowing productively and beneficially.

    IMHO that approach asks us to piss into much stronger winds than the ones now buffeting the specific and focused objectives he dismisses.  Such an initiative defending ombudsman (IDO?) will itself require an initiative to launch which has no more chance of being implemented than the other initiatives that have been overturned by activist progressive judges.  The IDO will immediately be seen as a conservative cause to be squashed by the states’ liberal super-majorities that today exist at all jurisdictional and bureaucratic levels.  The other problem is that an IDO office without an immediate cause celebre will be an abstraction that is harder to sell to the electorate than regaining representation of ideological minorities or opposing specific government overreach.  In short, given that the state’s Attorney General will remain dysfunctional (biased), I like the notion of an aggressive IDO, but in addition to the established conservative objectives, not as their replacement.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    57 comments on State of Jefferson Townhall in Penn Valley (updated 4aug14)

  • ‘Why Do Americans Stink at Math?’

    George Rebane

    ConfusedThat is the title of a major piece in the 23jul14 NYT by “education journalist” Elizabeth Green of chalkbeat.org that one of my east coast correspondents pointed out.  In it she highlights the record of American students and adults on international placement tests and our own regular surveys of adult literacy and numeracy.  Longtime RR readers are familiar with my interest in and alarm at how our schools are failing to educate our youth, especially in the critical STEM subjects required for getting jobs and reasoning about the direction of our democratic republic.  The justification for such alarm is evident in our anemic economic recovery and in the quality of people we send to our state houses and Washington.

    Ms Green and her colleagues at chalkbeat appear to have solid liberal credentials.  This goes a long way to explain her omitting the role of teachers’ unions in contributing to the stink in America’s math education.  Although she does acknowledge the cognitive deficits in our teacher corps, she does it so very gently, and places most of the blame for our poor teaching methods and results on school administrations not preparing its teachers to teach to the various math standards (the latest being Common Core) that have sailed through government schools in America during the last 40+ years.

    In one way I am heartened that such an article with its provocative title appeared in the Gray Lady, even though all of the (at least to me) obvious dots were neither presented nor connected.  For example, there was no mention of the impact of cultural differences between America and Japan, whose math education she compares and contrasts with ours.  Only in America is it socially acceptable to shamelessly admit in public that ‘I don’t do math’ or ‘I’m really not a numbers person’.  (Functionally that is equivalent to saying that ‘I can’t evaluate alternative public policies’ and ‘I can’t really reason about anything’.)   But then what would we expect in a nation whose adult population is 40% functionally illiterate, and has become 95% innumerate according to our National Center for Educational Statistics.

    Most people who keep up know that among developed nations America ranks in the world’s educational dregs, while our competitors in Asia and northern Europe scramble for the top rankings.  Do I think that there is any light at the end of this tunnel of national dumbth?  Not a smidgeon (love that word) that I can see.  We are beyond the tipping point and guaranteed to keep sliding as long as teachers’ unions gatekeep the teaching profession and progressives dominate academia.   All that organizations such as chalkbeat can do is uncomprehendingly observe the catastrophe and report at its margins.

    But when viewed from the ideological perspective of our central planners, we are on their desired track of fundamentally transforming into an unexceptional, guilt-ridden, economically strapped, and internationally compliant nation that will be integrated into a new world order on terms that we will be in no position to refuse.  Given what they have been taught, the legions of new voters spilling out of our governments’ educational pipeline will have it no other way – developmentally deficient democracy in action.

     

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    14 comments on ‘Why Do Americans Stink at Math?’

  • More Central Planners’ Outrage (updated 26jul14)

    George Rebane

    Google has announced the launch of its Baseline Study – a “moonshot” research effort to obtain the quantitative description of a healthy human body along with early precursors to the likelihood of eventual dreaded diseases.  They’ll do this by assembling initially hundreds then thousands of volunteers who will donate their bodily data placed into an anonymous data bank.  Researchers from Google Research, interested universities, and even private enterprises will ‘mine’ this data to create information that will be useful for administering personal and aggregate healthcare programs.  (more here)

    There’s a disquieting aspect to this report.  Google’s efforts will be monitored by institutional review boards, primarily at Stanford and Duke.  It is they who will determine “who are allowed” to analyze the data.  And one of their prime efforts is to see that the data doesn’t get into the hands of insurance companies, and employers, and people planning to marry each other, and … .  At this point most people are at a loss as how to evaluate this kind of oversight, and the cited WSJ article doesn’t provide much help.  As RR readers know, there is a huge difference between data and information, the latter being made from the former.  (more here)

    To me it is clear that the assembled and maintained raw (and anonymous) database should be made very public, available for anyone to download or send away for a DVD that costs a nominal fee (determined by Google) to duplicate and mail.  The information made from the data by various researchers may be confidential and/or proprietary, depending how it was developed and who paid for the effort.  The information sets themselves become assets which may be incorporated into other software and decision support systems that should be able to be marketed like any other kind of information so derived.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    4 comments on More Central Planners’ Outrage (updated 26jul14)

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

76 comments on The Foreign Policy of a Community Organizer (updated 13aug14)