Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
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Saturday, May 9. 2020Saturday morning linksSchools Risk Drowning in Red Ink “Predictive models” rarely are predictive How can governments learn from their expert failings? Why do so many diseases come from bats? Many viruses originate in bats, but that doesn’t mean we should live in fear of them. How the 1619 Project slandered America Banish Wrong Thoughts In Higher Ed Week At Legal Insurrection Biden Pledges To Strip Students Of Due Process Rights On Campus Reinstated By DeVos Everyone Deserves to Live Under the Biden Standard Facebook's New Censorship Czar Is Anti-Trump Leftist Who Made Barron A Punch Line Kayleigh McEnany DESTROYS Liberal Hack Yamiche Alcindor and Fake News Media at Friday Presser New Red Flags Emerging From FBI's Handling of Michael Flynn's Case Related: BARR SPEAKS Where Does Lt. Gen. Flynn Go To Get His Reputation Back? Trump On Obama Officials Behind The Russia Collusion Hoax: ‘Hopefully They’re Going To Pay A Big Price’ A Key Obama Meeting Was Held to Ensure FBI Russia Collusion Probe Wasn't Discovered by the Trump Administration Trump: The ‘So-Called Journalists’ Who Received Pulitzer Prizes for The Russia Hoax Should Be Forced to Give Them Back New Documents Show Obama Involved In The Flynn Takedown Democratic congressman said opening California beaches was 'reckless.' Then he was seen at a private beach. Bad State Decisions about Nursing Homes Are Heavily Driving the Coronavirus Outbreak Reopening The Country Seen As Greater Risk Among Most Americans Coronavirus pandemic may lead to 75,000 "deaths of despair" from suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, study says America the Wuss - From Rugged Pioneers to Cowering Sheep. What happened to the American spirit? Worst Jobs Report In History: 20.5 Million Jobs Lost As Unemployment Rate Hits Record 14.7% Dalrymple: The Pandemic of Authoritarianism Nate Silver: 'Basic error' on coronavirus stories reveal media’s true goals To Speed Vaccine Development, Infect Me With the Coronavirus Niall Ferguson to Newsmax TV: China Screwed Up, Covered Up The EU has admitted it let China censor an op-ed by the bloc's ambassadors Comments
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Re: nursing homes and Wuhan virus. Here in MA over 80% of the 4703 deaths are of people over 70 and most of them are in nursing homes. The lockdown is stupid, take care of the elderly in the nursing homes and leave the rest of us alone to live our lives.
The reporting is just awful, constantly pushing sensation over information. It’s times like this that makes me hate the press, a bunch of self-important jerks who had to flunk an IQ test to get into journalism school and have to take their shoes and socks off to count to eleven. The governors who forced nursing homes to accept Wuhan virus positive patients should be prosecuted for man slaughter.
I up vote this rant. To bad you are making sense. Common sense thinking is very much discouraged, if not outlawed, in 2020.
"Schools drowning in red ink"
They should look back 60 years. My grade school, 1st through 6th, had 6 teachers, 1 principle and 2 janitors (2 because one had to keep a coal fired burner running). No cafeteria, no secretaries and specialized teachers, no library or librarian, no guard, no hall and playground monitors. And this was during the post war era when all the classes had 35 students. Today there is a entire cadre of workers just to feed the kids. There are more support staff than teachers and there are typically 1 teacher per 15 kids and every teacher gets two periods off to sit in the lounge. Fire half the people and make the teachers teach; problem solved. And stop feeding everyone even those who don't want it. I think I went to that school--although it was K-8. We brought our lunch in a brown paper bag, or if we were lucky, a metal lunch box with a Disney character or maybe a cowboy on it. Those are collector items now. The male teachers were WWII veterans who went to school on the GI Bill...they were no nonsense guys so you toed the line or suffered the consequences.
And there were no black people, and all the developmentally delayed and brain-injured children had been sent away to special schools for the rest of their lives. A large percentage of your classmates (on average 25% nationwide) eventually dropped out as illiterate and innumerate, but you have forgotten them, preferring a different picture. Physical abuse and public humiliation of children was common. Average and bright children pretty much do okay in any setting so long as you don't actively screw them up.
Conservatives make me crazy on this, year after year. (Not that I can stand to listen to liberals talk about education either.) Their memories are deeply flawed on the topic, but nothing budges them. The people destroyed under the old system don't tend to comment about educational practices on multi-topic blog sites. I went to that school as well and no, students were not shipped off to special ed or dropped out of school. The only students that dropped out were one girl in my class who got pregnant and dropped out and got married and another who was about four grades ahead who got pregnant and dropped out to get married. There were two in my class of 57 that got certificates of completion rather than graduation certificates. There was one that dropped out in 12th grade and joined the Air Force for a career. There were no blacks in rural Minnesota at the time and still aren't any in that rural area of Minnesota. If that drives you crazy I sympathize but I can't change that reality.
The numbers I gave you were national numbers. 25% dropout rate in the 1950s until late in the 1960s, gradually decreasing after. If you were in a better place, that strongly influenced who went to your school. Other schools, using the same methods, did not have good results because it's largely genetics. Nice Scandinavian above-average IQs, it sounds like, further selected for those who had succeeded enough to own a little property. We just don't see what is out of our immediate sight.
I don't credit teaching methods and attitudes for genes. There were some pointless things, like extra penmanship if you weren't good at it, lots of coloring maps to no purpose. Stuff like that.
#2.1.1.1.1
Assistant Village Idiot
on
2020-05-09 22:25
(Reply)
And how has schooling changed for the better? We have blacks, browns, pinks, blues, whites in school, plus 77 genders. Basically all kids are illiterate in American civics. They teach math in a way that makes it impossible to proceed past fifth grade. Capitalism is evil, socialism good. America is the greatest source of evil that the world has ever known. Paganism has replaced God. There is still a high dropout rate. Even if you do make it to college, you’re taking remedial courses; unless you go to a Woke college, than you are right on schedule. All students are special, except boys, they have all been diagnosed with attention deficit disorders and given downers. The slow learners may be in the same building, but have their own special classes. Physical abuse has been replaced with psychological and law fare abuse; conform or suffer the consequences. Yes, this is a tough topic. Maybe there is a middle ground?
I understand the point you are trying to make but there are flaws in what you are saying. There was absolutely no physical abuse and public humiliation of children. I don't remember any black children in grade school but every year we had immigrant children, mostly from Eastern Europe, who could not speak or read English. Every year our teacher would introduce a few recent immigrants and tell us that they didn't understand English yet so we should be patient and work with them. And not surprisingly they all could speak English within three months and read and write it by the end of the year. We did have a few "odd" students, some who just couldn't seem to learn and some with anger issues. A few times the "odd" student would simply be gone one day, probably sent to a special school.
You mostly get it, remembering that children were just gone, though some of them were gone just at the age of school starting, or before. I have only learned of some siblings of classmates who were sent to the state school years later, at reunions or running into them. No one talked about it then. Now that I have spent my career in human services and take the histories of families around the state, I have a clearer idea of what was up.
As to abuse and humiliation, I witnessed it personally, every year. I can name the children. I went to mill city schools in NH - a good place that usually has among the highest SAT's every year, so I can't think I was in an unusually bad situation. My younger brother was put in the corner or in the hall for much of the day because he couldn't focus and kept talking to his neighbor. Great education there in the corner. He eventually put it together on his own as an adult and went on to teach college.
#2.1.1.3.1
Assistant Village Idiot
on
2020-05-09 22:36
(Reply)
Give over. Okay, no blacks in the small town I grew up in; but we did have a special ed class (thank you, Mrs Rooney) for the Down's syndrome and other kids. May have been a library, but no full-time librarian; each teacher supervised his/her own class. We did have a gymnasium, but that was only because the old high school was taken over by the young'uns while a new high school was built "up town". Did have a music teacher; she taught us while our regular teacher took over her class. Principal and vice-principal each had grades they taught though - I can't remember details - probably there was a sub coming in to give them the half day or so a week to do the paperwork. But IT WORKED. Even at high school level, all the administration people (sans the secretaries) taught at least one course; knew a teacher who - on landing in admin - insisted on this as a prerequisite to being "promoted".
It was much more "holistic" and community-oriented back in the day. The local schools even developed special courses to help students attain the prerequisites for getting apprenticeships at the nearby smelter. There were some time-servers (and we knew who they were), but our teachers generally cared about giving us the necessary knowledge and skills for becoming adults. In 1957 we had Sputnik. Even our little town got the message. Any kid who demonstrated any aptitude for math or science was placed in the "college" track so that they could become engineers and scientists and beat the Russians.. Guess what? They did it.
"The male teachers were WWII veterans who went to school on the GI Bill...they were no nonsense guys so you toed the line or suffered the consequences."
Much the same here in Canada. Almost all my male teachers 45+ were veterans. Our vice-principal had a bull neck and a brush cut and was not a man to be trifled with! In Grade 11, our English teacher seemed like such a quiet, retiring, unassuming old geezer. But boy, were we callow youth! Only later did I learn he had been a CANLOAN officer in WWII (a programme where Canadians were "loaned" to British army units to make up officer shortfalls). He spent the war with a commando formation specializing in raiding parties. In other words, he could have cheerfully cut our throats or broken our necks had he a mind to. NYC has about 150,000 people working at the Dept of Education; there are about 1,500,000 students.
Do the math. That's about 10 students per employee. Costs about $22,000 per student per annum. Yep,we're getting our money's worth. Lee and Rocdoctum, I also went to that school, but we were high class--we got to pay a nickel for 2 half pints of milk! Nanner,nanner.
California Democrat congressman seen at private beach.
There are no private beaches in California. Exactly right, One Guy, but the rich, with their beachfront properties continually try to keep the little people from accessing "their beach." It's illegal but they don't care.
Take about basics errors splatted out by the media, anyone want to speculate about an agenda or motive for this gem from CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/06/health/happy-hypoxia-pulse-oximeter-trnd-wellness/index.html Yeah, I seriously doubt that doctor was seeing people walk in with pulse-ox readings of 50%. Maybe he meant 50 mm Hg? Maybe the reporter just clean made it up?
Yup.
Nor does intubation consist of running a tube down through the nose into the stomach. Nor is the typical COVID pneumonia the fluid in the lungs type. It is a stiffening of lung tissue, similar to fibrosis. Nor do professional RTs go straight to ventilation without trying every possible less intrusive therapy available such as proning and administering oxygen. Not that this article but BIPAP and CPAP are not used much, if at all, for COVID because of the open circuit. Too much risk to health care workers. The motive for that error filled article, it seems I share Theodore Dalrymple's concerns. Personally, I'm not worried about the virus itself. We'll recover from that. What I DO worry about is the eager acceptance of tyranny among the population and the "What? Me worry" attitude about spending our Country into fiscal oblivion. I really doubt that we'll ever recover from those two things. From now on, every business owner will know that they can be shut down at a moment's notice "for the common good" [TM Adolph Hitler]:
QUOTE: Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper... What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings. --Hermann Rauschning, Gespraeche mit Hitler (Conversations with Hitler), published in the U.S. as 'The Voice of Destruction' in 1940. Yes, snopercod, even in our small conservative county in a conservative state, I have been disappointed in the number of people perfectly happy to go along with the restrictions and even TATTLE on fellow citizens.
Re: USMC
The prescient Marines were training for a war with Japan in 1938. And soft-spoken General Holland M. Smith got his nickname: "Howlin' Mad Smith" while training Marines who were on a long hike in the Dominican Republic in 1916 while training for WWI. Looks like they are now planning for a war with China. Gordon Chang is predicting that China will fail in his book: "The Coming Collapse of China". If it happens China may start a war. Or the Chinese people might start a revolution. Either way, you can bet that the Marines will be ready. The Marines may be ready, but the problem is so enormous that a few Marine divisions (or whatever) won't make much difference. We can't fight a traditional land war with the Chinese, there are far too many of them. Using ground troops against an army with tens of millions of men would not be effective. The Marines are not supposed to be thrown into a meat grinder.
QUOTE: We can't fight a traditional land war with the Chinese, there are far too many of them. Having recently read, On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides, I certainly can agree with that statement. I'm almost reluctant to say this; I was thinking of a plot where China could actually do a land invasion of the U.S. Every day tens of thousands of tourists come to the U.S. from Asia. Typically they are older couples but sometimes they are young couples. The plot would be that China trains a force of male and female soldiers who could fly into our country as tourist couples and not raise any suspicion. Once in country they could be hidden by a cadre of prior Chinese immigrants until they had put in place a million soldier Army. Sneaking in the weaponry would be easy enough. When you look at actual passenger numbers for airlines a million "tourists" would be nothing; a weeks worth of flights maybe. Create a couple hundred muster points each near a military or strategic site and at a precise moment each group would attack and destroy their target.
Some people here seem to not remember that there are other Armed Forces in the United States.
The Navy, Army and Air Force fight big wars. The Marines fight Small Wars. They even have a manual titled that. When I tell people that they usually reply that: WWII was a big war. I remind them that the Marines fought Small Wars, one island at a time. Re: Trump: The ‘So-Called Journalists’ Who Received Pulitzer Prizes for The Russia Hoax Should Be Forced to Give Them Back
A nice thought but fat chance. The NYT made no move to give back the Pulitzer they won from Duranty's reporting from Russia that was basically propaganda for Stalin and a cover up of the Ukraine famine in the '30s and after Duranty's reporting was reviewed by the Pulitzer prize board in 2003, the board declined to ask for it back. It makes one wonder if awards such as for Duranty's reporting and the Russia Hoax aren't really a feature rather than a bug. The Pulitzer has become the annual dunce cap trophy for journalists.
How the 1619 Project slandered America: It's what the NYT DOES.
Banish Wrong Thoughts In Higher Ed Week At Legal Insurrection: Thought Crimes are the WORST CRIMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!!!! Everyone Deserves to Live Under the Biden Standard: Except for Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats. They're "exempt". BARR SPEAKS and Where Does Lt. Gen. Flynn Go To Get His Reputation Back? I've said it before, and I say it again: Mr. Trump needs to don his Hercules outfit and divert the Potomac River thru the FBI building, and any other executive branch offices as he deems needed. Poll: Reopening the country seen as greater risk among most Americans: Really? REALLY? I don't believe it. Nate Silver: 'Basic error' on coronavirus stories reveal media’s true goals: They HATE us. They really, really, HATE us. "New Documents Show Obama Involved In The Flynn Takedown"
------------------------------------------ Of course he was. He was involved in all of it. That's why literally one of his last acts before leaving office was to issue an executive order purporting to legalize what was going on. Obama Expands Surveillance Powers On His Way Out (January 12, 2017) I motion that we start a petition to re-name it the "Pooh-litzer Prize.", and if the motion doesn't carry with Columbia University, just start referring to it thusly.
Old Joe P. wouldn't recognize it anymore, anyway, and would probably prefer to be shut of what it has become. |
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