Malice or Incompetence?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Recently I came across a news article estimating that 80% of NYC graduates cannot read and write and are functionally illiterate.  I’d bet those numbers are not far off across the country, and it wasn’t a surprise.  What was a surprise was what my son told me when I discussed the matter with him.

Five years ago, those numbers would have shocked me.  Then my blog got invaded by “children” in the eleventh grade of a gifted and internationally respected program in the high school my son was attending.  They seemed to have erratic spelling, the vaguest of acquaintances with grammatical rules and a thorough lack of ability to think.  (If you tried to challenge their assumptions or what amounted to received dogma, they reverted to profanity, in the hopes that it would make you pass out or go away and stop saying things that made them uncomfortable.)  It was clear their reading comprehension was iffy and their writing ability shaky.  (And the scary part is half of them were accepted into Ivy League schools a year later, which put paid to any idea I had this was a meritocracy.)

As bad as those kids were, they were at least semi-functionally-literate and, yep, they were the “cream of the crop”.  Since then, with the kids being in college and my having contact with kids the same age, I’ve got to see the work of the average student.

I’ll just say that I once screamed at Robert for three hours for writing something about half as bad as what I see from college students.  He was in third grade.  I told him unless he improved he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better.  (More on that later.)  He took it to heart and improved.

Anyway – it is neither a brag, nor preening – to say my kids are better than that.  Robert is gifted with words, and Marsh is gifted with storytelling.  But beyond all that they WERE TAUGHT to use language.  We were reading to them from before they could talk (Ray Bradbury is as effective as lullabies) and they watched us read, write and discuss writing.  More importantly, I corrected their grammar and taught him rules of exposition.  While they attended public school, I mostly used it for what it does well: babysitting.  Robert once let the cat out of the bag by telling his seventh grade ecology teacher that the only reason I sent him to school was to have 8 uninterrupted hours to write in, and that his real learning took place in three hours after school.  It was true, of course, but stunningly tactless of him to say it.

And yes, both the kids are high IQ.  However, that’s neither here nor there.  So were the kids invading my blog, and they were writing at the level of D students in my day – and I was in an English as a Second Language class.

Look, we all went through school and we all saw the kids who came through.  About 1% were “natural born” learners.  (Though in most cases those might be from environments where learning was facilitated.  It’s hard to tell where genetics ends and environment takes over.)  The next 5% or so were strivers who, in varying degrees and for varying reasons (either love of learning or an interest in an intellectual profession) were determined never to have less than B and if possible to have A.  After that came the large, lumpish, group of C students: some of which might have very high IQ but who had absolutely no interest in academics.  Most of them, at least in my day, were intending to get jobs in that vast non-intellectual middle class, from retail onto auto mechanics or other specialty, non-academic professions.  Depending on how smart they were, they were either aiming for clerk or manager, but they had their life planned and reading Shakespeare wouldn’t really have helped it in any way.  Nor would quadratic equations.

So they made a mental calculation and applied their effort where it mattered, learning about life outside school.

THEN at the other end of that, and as rare as the 5 or 6% top learners, were the hopeless – the addicts, the petty criminals, and the apathetic.  The ones who had already charted a course to government dependence and had no interest in ever making their way by themselves.  They too had made a rational decision and since what they wanted was to drift through life, learning anything beyond basic reading/writing and how to count wasn’t in their interest.

I will note though that even most of the hopeless, unless they were impaired in some way, could read fairly fluently and could write at least enough for every day life.

So – how do you take most of the youth of a country, a country, moreover, rich enough that most kids have no major developmental disabilities, and make them functionally illiterate?

You WORK at it.

And this comes to the part I didn’t know, and the part that shocked me.

My son happened to be loitering in my office (they do this a lot) when I read that headline and I said “I’m not exactly shocked, and I’d be surprised if it were much different across the country, because I sent you and your brother to the school reading, and then spent the next three years screaming at you to sound out words and stop guessing them.  So they took kids who COULD read and would have made them illiterate, if I hadn’t stayed on top of it and made you re-learn.”

At which point my son said “Oh, you have no idea.  Let me tell you what happened in Title One.”

Here we break to explain that Title One is – afaik – a Colorado program for children with learning disabilities.  To my knowledge, neither of the kids had been in it.

However, as I’ve learned over the years, my knowledge is often far from complete, and what happens OFFICIALLY is also not what happens in truth.  (For instance, if I’d known both the kids were sent to the school psychologist once a week through elementary, to fish for stuff that might be considered “abuse” – probably because Dan and I were troublesome – they would have been out of there so fast that the school’s head would spin.  Unfortunately both kids assumed this was “normal” and didn’t tell me till high school.  On paper, it never happened.)

I think the other day I said it was in third grade that the school gave us trouble over Robert.  I was wrong, it was actually in first grade.  I sent them a kid who could read, write and was working on fractions.  Imagine our shock when in our first first grade conference, the teacher informed us that Robert was learning disabled and would probably never learn to read and write.  This was particularly surprising since one of her pieces of evidence was a worksheet that consisted of 1+0, 2+0 etc. across the top of which Robert had written in properly spelled words “this is stupid and boring.  A number plus zero always equals the number.”

Dan and I threw a fit – we would – and they insisted Robert needed to be in Title One and remedial education.  We insisted he didn’t.  In the end, they had him IQ tested, after priming the school psychologist, who used a “set” that topped out at 107 IQ.  Then they informed us his IQ was 107 and he needed to be in Title One and remedial education.

At that point I wanted to go raze the school or perhaps set it on fire.  (I did say I’m excitable, right?)  But Dan wouldn’t let me.  Instead we burned around 1k dollars we didn’t have (we were so tight in those days we hugged each cent till it squealed.  Considering whether to buy an extra head of lettuce was existential.  We drove a $1500 car, and only had one for the two of us,) found the most reputable psychologist in town, and had him tested over Christmas break.  (They were making noises about a “staffing” meeting in January and how they’d take our parental rights away if we didn’t sign Robert for “what’s best for him.”)  We said nothing, just had him tested.

He tested profoundly gifted (which is a technical designation.)

So, next thing you know, Dan marches into the staffing meeting with the results, authenticated by a psychologist who was known and respected in the region.  He first asked them what they thought of her, and they said she was very good, but of course very expensive.  Then he laid the results on the table.

Shock, horror and confusion ensued, the most important – the teacher, who btw, we later found out did this every year to a kid she perceived as ‘minority’ (this, btw, in a town that is one of the most liberal areas in CO.  I told this story to a leftist friend who absolutely refused to believe it.  And yet it happened.) and her friend, the school psychologist were both present – reaction being BETRAYAL.  “How could you go and do this behind our backs, without warning us?”

Then the meeting broke up in disarray, Robert got put in “gifted” classes and no more was said about it.

Which is all very well… except…

Except that not only did we have the right to have our own kid tested and no, we didn’t need to “warn” the school – but that I didn’t find out till this week that, before we had signed on to their diagnosis of him as “disabled”, they’d sent Robert into Title One.  (This btw should NOT shock me, as they put Marshall in speech therapy before we’d signed an agreement to let him be put in – we never did, because the way it was worded, it amounted to signing our parental rights away, including giving them the right to put him in a foster family if they thought we weren’t making “the right decisions” for his “welfare” as determined by them.  Instead, we again cut out other stuff and put him in a private speech therapist.  Who, in six sessions, fixed what the school therapist hadn’t in a hundred.)

More shocking yet is what happened in Title One.

Remember, Title One is supposed to teach kids who are disabled to read at normal level.  Remember too, the kid they sent to Title One was reading The Life of Caesar at four.  (Though he did get stumped by the meaning of “incest.”) While they were sending him to Title One, one of the books confiscated for reading in class was one of our signed Pratchetts (can’t remember which now, but might have been The Color of Magic. I remember because instead of telling me – he wasn’t supposed to take those to school – he broke into the teacher’s closet and stole it back.  He was never caught.)

He told me last week, when I said I had to fight his and his brother’s tendency to “guess” words for three or four years until they got it through their heads that these are not ideograms and you don’t “guess” (I think every other sentence out of my mouth those years was “Sound it OUT”) that when he was in Title One, they FORCED him to guess.  He said, “No, look, I’d read the word correctly at a glance, and then they’d shout at me I was supposed to GUESS.  And I’d have to come up with words that sounded like it, before they TOLD ME the correct one.  They trained you to NOT read.”

This explained Robert’s best friend in elementary who was at least as smart as Robert but who got sent to Title One by another teacher.  I tried to tell his mom at the time there was nothing wrong with the kid except maybe needing glasses.  But she was working class and respected teachers.  That child left elementary school unable to read.

Right here, let me tell you that if your kid is in school, chances are he or she is being taught to “guess” words, aka, “whole word.”  If you ask him if they use whole word, they’ll act shocked and say oh, no, they use phonics “in combination” with other methods.  They told me all of this too, at the time.  However, the entire lesson plan is geared towards guessing words, sometimes working from the meaning.  (I.e. Terribly and Therapy are the same word at a glance because they begin and end with the same letters, so you’re supposed to “guess” one of them, and then work out which it is by the meaning of the rest of the sentence.  [This was referred to, ten years ago, as the “whole language” method.])

Do I need to tell you that in a language that is largely phonetic – yes, I know all the exceptions, but it’s easier to work to the right word from a mispronounced version than it is to do it from “meaning” or “guess” – this is NOT only the way NOT to teach reading but is, ultimately the way to teach kids not to read.  By turning words into ideograms, which they were never meant to be, you make reading too difficult for all but the most dedicated strivers.

I’m surprised the literacy rate is 20%  I’m surprised it’s not 5%, and I wonder how many of those kids read well enough to read for pleasure.

Now, I realize that an illiterate peasantry is needed for a proper neo-feudal regime, but I wonder how many of these people are actually malicious, and how many are just full of their own self-importance and convinced that they are doing what is best for these children?

Judging by those I dealt with, most of them aren’t bright enough to see any overarching social aims in this.  They are simply full of their own “good intentions” and they’ve been TAUGHT this is the best way of teaching to read.  In fact, if you push them they become either irate or lachrymose and tell you that you don’t UNDERSTAND, you’re not an expert and you weren’t taught the latest METHODS.  (This reminds me of when we stayed in NYC in a new hotel and every night our bed was, essentially, short sheeted – it’s more complicated than that, but that was the effect.  When we complained the maid, with an accent stronger than mine, informed us it was “latest, Russian bed-making technology. … that one too didn’t end well, at least as soon as I stopped rolling on the floor laughing.)

Dave, yesterday, made a comment that the public school system for all its flaws might teach a kid to read who would otherwise not know how.  Since I don’t know every teacher in every corner of the US – but I know from other contexts that at least some of them will be decent and competent and tell the system to stuff it – nor every kid, nor every school, this is POSSIBLE.  What I guarantee and would put my hands in the fire for is that the percentage of those is dwarfed by the MASS of what would otherwise be competent “middle brow” C students, who could read and express themselves passably in writing, if they were left alone/had online teachers with just a class supervisor/were taught by anyone (retirees? Mothers?) BUT people who had been convinced they were education experts and that teaching children to read – something that village teachers managed for centuries.  (And BTW my first village teacher was a discarded fallen woman, whom some guy had seduced and set up in a little cottage with no running water and only two rooms.  She was, it was rumored “of good families” and left with no other means of support, taught the kids to read and fancy work (needlework, guys!) to the girls and died respected and almost revered in her eighties.)

But whether it’s from malice or misguided credentialism and do-goodism, what I can tell you is that our system of education is accomplishing the “miracle” of turning out a population MORE illiterate than the poor never-taught people in Tudor England.

Malice or incompetence, it comes to the same.  If you have kids in the system, look to their future.  If they read by “guessing” (the signs are easy.  They’ll think words that start and end with the same letter are the same) stop that right now and teach them to sound it out.  They’ll hate you for a month, but the hatred will pass and the literacy will remain.

However remember most parents are too busy living their lives to follow the kids that closely/teach them after the kids get home (it doesn’t take very long.  Most of the school day is filled with cr*p.  You can teach them the essentials and more in two/three hours after school.), and even more most parents think they’re not qualified to teach the kids.  Which leaves us in the mess we’re in.

As a nation founded on the consent of the governed, we can’t afford to have a school system that turns out illiterate peasants.  Whether it’s by design or incompetence, it doesn’t matter.  We simply can’t afford it.

If we are to survive as a people and a culture (and our “methods” have spread across most of Eastern Europe) SOMETHING else much arise in place of public anti-education.

Local systems, with trustworthy people, known to have succeeded in other fields, would be better, as would practically anything else.  It’s time we realize that the Public Education System is designed to do the exact opposite of its stated goal.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers.  Thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

1,184 thoughts on “Malice or Incompetence?”

  2. As a child who was already reading at a fourth- to fifth-grade level when I entered kindergarten, I too experienced much of the same treatment at the hands of so-called “educators” as your children did. I actually did end up in special education for several years; the excuse given my irate parents by administrators at the semi-rural Missouri school I attended was that since the school didn’t (at that time) have a gifted program, they had to put me in special ed because the other option of jumping me a grade or two would result in “social dislocation.”

    Well, what did they think putting me in special ed would do? And did, for that matter?!

    It absolutely flabbergasted my parents – and me – that they treated intelligence and an elevated reading level as a behavioral problem to be corrected.(One of my teachers actually demanded I be sedated. My parents, with the backing of our family doctor, told the school district to get bent.)

    My folks had a lot of fights with the school before they eventually took me out of the program, but by then the damage – to my social status with my peers, and to my self-esteem – had pretty much been done.

    And at that, I suppose I was pretty lucky. Most of my fellow inmates in special ed were kids from poor “redneck” families. Some of them actually did have learning disabilities – which the “teachers” and “counselors” couldn’t be arsed to deal with, even if they were capable of it – but most of those kids were simply, in the not-so-hidden opinion of the staff, destined to be future welfare recipients, criminals and ditchdiggers and thus weren’t worth the time and effort to educate.

    So yeah, it’s safe to say that “Incompetence or Malice?” struck a chord with me. Been there, done that, got the scars. It was years before I could even drive past my old school without literally getting sick to my stomach.

    But Sarah, I’m not sure the question you asked in the title of this essay really means anything, I expect you’re familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous riff on technology and magic. Well, at a certain level doesn’t also a sufficiently advanced incompetence become indistinguishable from malice?

    Especially when the incompetents are credentialed, and utterly convinced of their own righteousness and superiority?

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  3. Just a note to those who say lesson plans and so forth are easily available on the Web: things change, links get broken, sites go down. Or you forget what site you found that wonderful article on. (I know, thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition :) !)

    So, search out what you need, or seems interesting/ useful for the future, or what your child might enjoy a year or two or three from now. Save it to your own hard drive (&/or burn your “teaching collection” to CD). Remember that everything “out there in the ether” is impermanent.

    And thank you, Sarah, for a thought-provoking article!

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  4. I’ve been lurking on your blog for awhile but here goes with my first comment– this post struck a nerve because I am raising five kids and we are early on in the school torture (my oldest is only a 5th grader). My state (AZ) has charter school options and I chose the best one that I could find in our area. Still, I’m concerned, especially when I hear all the public school horror stories. My trouble is, I’m beginning to realize that the public school education that I had growing up in CA was terrible, and what my husband had in Mississippi was even worse– so I’m not sure I’ll know what gaps to fill in with my kids. Homeschooling scares me to death. I have friends who are doing it successfully, but really, I’m terrified that I’d screw my kids lives up even worse. Hard to provide a better education for your kids when you are a product of the group work/social justice/self-esteem curriculum yourself.

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    1. Trust yourself. You taught that kid to walk and talk. You can teach him the other stuff. With the younger boy, I was RUNNING to keep up with him and it was exhausting, but honestly, trust yourself. And there are probably homeschool leagues in your area that can help.

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    2. Heidi, You can do it, and you will be surprised what you will learn. There are many resources available to help you.

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  5. Pingback: Lightning Round – 2013/03/13 | Free Northerner

  6. For those concerned about reading: I recommend that every parent be certain their children can read before being sent to any school public or private. By read I mean be able to read essentially any English word, and I recommend you test by showing them nonsense words like deamy and cromagnanimous. Those won’t be “easy” but any five year old who can read can say them. Once children can read then their speaking vocabulary is their reading vocabulary, and they can read the rest of the words but won’t necessarily know what they mean. And they will get some wrong. I mispronounced covetousness until after I had my PhD because I never heard anyone else say it. But I knew what it meant from very early on because when I was about ten I heard about Dr. Faustus and looked him up in the encyclopedia. But that’s another story.

    English middle and upper class children traditionally learned to read at age 4 in nursery, taught by nannies, and a nanny who couldn’t teach the kids to read wouldn’t keep that job very long. English protoplasm isn’t any better than American.

    For those who haven’t the foggiest about how to do this, start with HOP ON POP and some of the other Seuss books which are quite phonetic, but to be sure you’d be better off with a systematic program. My wife developed a system when she was teacher of last resort in the LA county juvenile justice system, and we computerized it in early Windows days. It runs on any Windows system (alas the Mac version was for power chip Macs and won’t work on modern Macs).

    You can find the program here:
    http://www.jerrypournelle.com/OldReading.html

    It is hokey, and not at all cool. It just works. It’s an insurance policy. Most kids if given reasonable instruction (not told to guess but told NOT to guess) will learn to read; but Mrs. Pournelle’s program is 70 lessons, about half an hour each, and when done (you have to get through each lesson to go on to the next) it is DONE. After that its just do some reading. Lots of reading. I am about to put the California 6th Grade Reader of 1914 on Kindle — about 2 weeks now — and that’s age appropriate up to about 12 or 14, all old public domain stories and poems. Kids often like poems. By the shores of Gitchee Gummi by the shining big sea waters… and so forth.

    Relying on someone in a school, public or private, to teach your children to read is a bad mistake. At worst test them yourself: at the end of first grade they ought to be able to read Longfellow, and some will like him. Or Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. If they can’t read The Pleasant Land of Counterpane at the end of first grade, PANIC.

    Enough. Sarah, we’ve discussed this stuff before, but apparently it’s getting worse out there now. There’s no excuse for kids getting a bad education, but they won’t get it from most of the public schools which exist to pay union rates to teachers with tenure. Some teachers will break their hearts trying to do more, but many give up early on. Don’t chance it.

    For God’s sake be sure your kids can read.

    I’d send a picture but I can’t figure out how to do it.

    Jerry Pournelle

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      1. You know I read his comment and agreed with it, and went on without even registering the name at the top. I thought it was a someone else quoting Jerry and that is why his name is at the bottom, until I seen your comment and scrolled back up. :)

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          1. *Rolls eyes* Will you ladies please stop fanning yourselves like Southern Belles in August? You’re probably embarrassing the poor man. :-)

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      3. Fangirl here, too. Love your books and re-read them often.

        I had a good friend in high school who for the longest time thought “determined” was pronounced “DEE-ter-mEYEnd.” I myself missed the significance of “infra” (below) “red” and thought the word was the past participle of the verb “to infrare,” about whose meaning I was fuzzy. If I’d heard it pronounced as “infra-red” it would have been more obvious!

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        1. You should see what Portuguese translators do to things like “he replied with heat” which are idiomatic to English — speaking of unclear meanings — for years I thought there must be something wrong with the body temp regulation of Americans, but I couldn’t figure out why talk about it. Because the way it was translated, in Portuguese, was “he said, and was hot.”

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        2. Another Texan here, and I shared your mispronunciation of “infrared” as a kid.

          I also remember going to Odessa at around age 10 to see the World’s Largest Jackrabbit statue and bringing home a can of Prairie Hare Milk. The can’s label told the story, referring to the rabbit as a “martyred milk machine.” I pronounced that “Marty-red” in my head; the rabbit statue was of a slightly reddish hue, and I had just read a story about a kid named Marty with red hair, so “Marty” being a shade of red made perfect sense to me.

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    4. I almost wonder if the new, horrible “Doctor Seuss” books were put out to destroy the home teaching utility of the ones actually by him; they’re so bad that I’ve taken to editing the rhymes on the fly when my daughters insist on them being read, and I’m no poet. It’s not like recognizing the pattern of the rhymes are hard, and the way the words feel when you say them is part of what makes the books possible to read thousands of times without going utterly insane.

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      1. I think it’s declining literacy. My in laws kept giving the kids “age appropriate books” (Apparently Robert reading middle readers at three was a BAD thing.) and their grammar and spelling were appalling. I think the publishers don’t CARE.

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        1. *laughs* My mom’s idea of monitoring that my material was ‘age-appropriate’ consisted of asking me to loan her my library books. The only two cases where she was considering stepping in– one was a Steven King book about wizards, I think, and I can’t remember the other– I scowled and quit reading the book before she made the decision.

          It’s not a route without hazards, though– I got her hooked on the Drizzt books, and then David Weber’s War God!

          I rather dislike how ‘age appropriate’ has been hijacked away from concepts and applied to theoretical ability. I had no problem reading Ender’s Game on an ability thing, but I can remember getting to the word “vivisection” and going– um, no, full stop. Never did pick it up again.
          Ditto the book on photos about what, exactly, the Nazis did– I did finish that one, but I can still see the lampshade with someone’s tattoo on it, and a pair of lady’s gloves. That was probably age inappropriate, but sadly needful.

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          1. I remember those pictures– so I must have picked up that book about Nazi atrocities at ten. I always wondered why there were people (I had an uncle like this) who denied the Holocaust never happened.

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            1. Some things like the Nazi atrocities become fuzzy on the age-appropriateness scale, they are about things that are so inappropriate that it becomes hard to define what age it is appropriate to learn about them.

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            2. The first time I got an adult book about Nazi atrocities (in the adult section of the public library) I was physically so nauseated after reading it that I went to the ladies room and threw up. I’ve always wondered about Holocaust deniers myself … when the evidence was so widespread.

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              1. My theory has always been that most Holocaust deniers don’t actually believe it never happened, they simply find it more politically expedient to publicly deny it than to publicly support it.

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                1. I have noticed that those most eager to deny the Holocaust are also the ones most disappointed that it wasn’t more successful.

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              2. I think it’s mostly a form of mental self-defense, the same way that folks limit “The Holocaust” to Jewish victims– if it was exaggerated, there’s more mental space. If it was aimed at a specific racial/religious group, there’s more mental space.

                If it was a systematic attempt to wipe out every group whose elimination would contribute to the success of the movement, though, then it’s too close, just a more extreme and efficient form of what everyone does if they resist another. (I think this is the root of the pacifist urge folks have pointed out in Europe and the elite– you are Not Like Them if you don’t fight for your interests, after all.)

                Folks were denying what they heard about it when it was happening— it was too much in line with the “our enemies eat babies” type war rumors, and Germany was so modern, you know?

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                1. … and Germany was so modern, you know?

                  Not to mention that if it happened in modern, sophisticated Germany, it could happen anywhere. Why, it could even happen here. (Whatever “here” means to the person saying it.) This is a truly scary thought, and most people shy away from it involuntarily. (It’s the ones that shy away from it voluntarily that you have to watch out for — they usually have a hidden agenda, and don’t want you to realize that yes, it could happen here, and their agenda is likely to lead to it happening here.)

                  And yes, it could even happen in the USA. It wouldn’t be America as we know it by then, and most of us (by which I mean those who comment here) would either have died trying to prevent it happening, or would have fled the country when we realized we couldn’t prevent it, but it could happen. Which is why, despite how horrible it is to read about, it is vital to continue teaching people that it did happen. Because there are those trying to make it happen again, and their most effective ally is silence.

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                  1. I spent a period of time reading intensely about Germany and WWII. My poor Daddy feared I had become mixed up with the neo-nazi movement that was so much in the news at the time. I tried to explain that I was absolutely flummoxed how an educated people could have committed such a atrocities, and feared that if we did not form some understanding of how it had happened we would see it again.

                    Yes, we could see something like it here, and some would argue that we are already seeing it. And once again it is all wrapped up in the justifications of science, practicality, true compassion and rational thinking. :-(

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                    1. It is easy to perceive the ground being prepped for the propagation of the weeds of hatred.

                      The bloggers at Powerline have been revisiting Palestinian Terrorist Theatre, exploring how the “journalists” of the BBC, Washington Post and other “Western” news agencies have fallen prey to the poison of fostered misperception. See http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/tools-of-jihad-part-5.php for their most recent analysis. (Mike Weatherford, I would be especially curious for your expertise’s application to this pictured bomb damage and professional analysis offered.)

                      Willing agents or useful idiots, the effect is the same. The long, well-established history of Palestinian libel of the Jews seems oddly unaffecting of those eager to point fingers and cast blame.

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                    2. And why must it always be the Jews? Who said “All the isms of the 20th century were wrong, except Zionism. That was predicated on the idea that highly civilized people would want to kill Jews and it was, as we know, true.”?

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                    4. And as for they agree — they’re still doing it. Quality of life and all that. If I’d been born in Europe, in a hospital, today, I’d likely be left to starve with sedatives. And my older child… I had bad pre-eclampsia. They assured me he would be mentally retarded. When I refused to consider abortion, they accused Dan of abusing/controlling me.

                      These people are SICK.

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                    6. Seen on the web site for London’s Telegraph this morning:

                      Thousands more hospital deaths ‘could have been prevented’
                      Professor Sir Brian Jarman
                      At least 20,000 NHS deaths could have been prevented if warnings had been acted on, a Government adviser says.

                      336 million abortions under China’s one-child policy
                      More than half a billion birth control procedures, including at least 336 million abortions, have been performed in the name of the one-child policy, China’s Health ministry revealed yesterday.

                      I do not care to provide links to such stories. It is sufficiently vile to know of and tell others of them.

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                    7. Sarah,
                      As has been said recently by characters from both John Ringo and Travis Taylor,

                      that’s why a doctor’s place of business is called a ‘practice’.

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                    8. Re: Sarah’s comment,

                      And why must it always be the Jews?

                      The only explanation I’ve ever seen that makes any sense is the religious one. The Jews were, and still are, God’s chosen people (cue Tevye saying, “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?”). And that’s why the devil hates them, and when he influences humans to commit evil (he doesn’t make people do evil, we do it of our own free will, but he sure can suggest things), one thing he always suggests is to hate the Jews.

                      Whether you buy the religious explanation or not, it’s undeniable* that one of the patterns of evil throughout history has been hatred of the Jews. They’re the perennial whipping-boy people, the canary in the coal mine: tyrants, dictators, you name it, have gone after them time and time again, and one sure sign that you shouldn’t trust politician X or cause Y is if they start accusing the Jews of all kinds of over-the-top things. Global financial conspiracies, being the real culprits of 9/11, whatever the latest flavor-of-the-month is this time.

                      * Although some people will try to deny it. Beware such people, because they’re the ones who will be the collaborators once the next evil regime rises to power. Happens every time.

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                    9. Even folks who are just ethnic Jews– modern scholarship indicates that the convesos were, indeed, Catholic. Just not popular with Spanish nobility.
                      (My favorite story: When the converso bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, prayed the Hail Mary, he would say with pride, “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood relative, pray for us sinners….)

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                    10. Burgos? I heard it was the Bishop of Braga and I always wondered if it was one of mom’s relatives — because that totally smacks of mom’s family. No, seriously.

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                    11. I rather doubt that only one guy ever said it– especially since I spent the last day having nifty fits over JPII’s old camping pictures looking like escapees from our family album.

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                  2. Some aspects of what Germany was doing were going on here. The last forced sterilization law was in force– and use– in the last few decades, and there’s an amazing amount of fighting against laws preventing eugenic abortions, to look at only the most obvious connections.

                    Sometimes I think the reason that the systematic slaughter of the disabled was never mentioned is because a significant number of folks today think it’s a great idea.

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          2. Many Odds get into SF because “age appropriate” is less of an issue. It is also a reason SF is viewed with faint disdain.

            Some genres (mystery, e.g.) require a depth of understanding that most kids (and many adult Odds) lack. Even literature — think Anna Karenina – require a depth of understanding kids don’t have.

            The thing is, most kids won’t actually read age inappropriate literature because, well, the reasons you gave and the ones I gave. They don’t “get it” and lose interest.

            Porn, well, is a special case. It is cartoons and many of those reading it, not understanding it is farce, think it accurate.

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            1. *laughs* Funny, I read mysteries from way back– the biggest things I didn’t like about other stuff I didn’t borrow from my folks was the endless obsessing about boring things like relationships, or things that MIGHT EVENTUALLY BECOME relationships. And all the “relationships” were…um… physical.

              Other than my husband, I’m still just not interested in that, and really don’t want to hear about anybody else’s intimate interactions.

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        2. I agree, and am glad I never made Stephanie keep to age-appropriate books. We used to go to the library and she quickly (at age 6 or so) moved from childrens books up to YAthen up to adult books, including science books on biology.I didn’t know itwas so important, but I wanted her to know and like going to the library
          OBTW, I cross posted your blog to Jerrry’s blog, so you get to squee probably becaue of that.

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            1. Speaking of Dr. Pournelle and learning at home might tip a hat to Robert Bruce Thompson and especially his kits – good for adults who want to do more than read without access to a school lab as well

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    5. (OMG! Jerry Pournelle! Squee!)

      Similarly, if you are concerned about arithmetic (and you SHOULD be), I recommend you use math-drills.com or – if you have the money – the Spectrum math workbooks. I use both resources at my workplace to teach the traditional algorithms.

      And by the way, a note to current and future parents: If your school system is using MathLand, Everyday Mathematics, or Investigations in Data, Number, and Space, PANIC. My county adopted the latter curriculum a few years ago, and I’ve watched it destroy an entire cohort’s ability to efficiently cipher.

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      1. we got the Spectrum math worksbooks and great courses, though those are mostly for me — in my copious spare time. I made to pre-calc by 9th grade. After that, the school didn’t allow me to have it, since I was tracked humanities. I actually loved math, but I tend to drop/transpose digits. When I do carpentry it’s “measure twice, have someone check I wrote the measurements right, have someone check I don’t transpose them when measuring the piece — then cut once.” Either that or I cut in paper the shape to cut in wood/right dimensions. Mind you, I was always a B student in math AT WORST, usually B+, but in the competitive college-entrance climate you needed to be A, so… humanities. Anyway, it’s been thirty years and I’d kind of like to play with it again. As soon as the spare time materializes.

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        1. Oh, you’re another one of the, “I cut three times and it’s still too short,” types are you. :)

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          1. Um… No. I do stuff like turn 35 into 53. Though usually my issue is more than one set of measures at once OR an odd shaped piece OR a three digit measurement. it’s literally something wrong in how my brain sees numbers. I used to think I was just dumb.

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            1. I used to survey with a guy who was dyslexic. This was back when we wrote everything in a fieldbook instead of using a data collector. When you ran a 3 man crew oftentimes you would have the guy running the gun (transit) reading off angles and distances, and another guy writing them in the book. I recall the boss calling us into the office one day and telling us how much he hated having the two of us working together, because we could get the fieldwork done twice as fast as any other crew, but it took him twice as long in the office to figure out what the heck we did. Because Greg would transpose numbers, and I would occasionally just put random numbers in, so with one of us reading them off and another writing them down, there was always something off somewhere.

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                1. No, this was Washington, before I left the coast, similar terrain though on the Olympic Peninsula to SE Alaska. I worked with some guys from SE Alaska, but Greg wasn’t one of them.

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  7. I had similar fights with my two oldest children, both of whom are exceptionally bright. However, my eldest was starting to guess at words. I couldn’t figure it out until I noticed that he was assuming that words starting with the same letter and were more or less the same length were the same words. I kept repeating, “Stop guessing; sound it out.” He was not happy. However, he reads pretty well and he reads a fair amount for pleasure. Now I understand why so few young adults read for pleasure: they are simply unable to, as it’s too much work to guess the correct words.

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    1. It’s also why comics have got so MASSIVELY popular. Pictures support the words. It’s one of the ways kids teach themselves to read, after the fact. (I helped younger son by getting him TWO THOUSAND Disney comics (it was a bulk deal.) And yeah, I can explain why THOSE for a six year old.)

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  8. Pingback: Rants of a soon to be father - Page 2

  9. Great post. A keeper. But I wonder why anyone wouldn’t be deeply aware of the problem since Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It” back in 1955? Lack of suspicion of government? 1941 – 4% of recruits are rejected for failing the Army General Qualification Test because they could not perform intellectually at the 4th Grade level. These recruits would have learned to read before Progressive Education came to dominate American schools. 1951 – 16.6% of recruits are rejected for failing the Army General Qualification Test because they could not perform intellectually at the 4th Grade level. These recruits would have learned to read after Progressive Education came to dominate American schools. Illiteracy increases by 4 times in just 10 years.

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  10. You better homeschool while you still can. The academic elitist Liberals do not want us reading and understanding our Constitution any more than the twisted Roman Catholic Church wanted people reading and understanding the Bible in the Middle Ages. (Funny how the Liberals don’t want us learning the Bible either.) If we can’t read and can’t think, we just won’t be much of a threat to their hold on power.

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    1. Myth– or myth-interpretation, to pun with a point. ^.^

      The Church discouraged freelance interpretation of the sort that’s familiar to anybody who’s seen the equivocation so popular in “Bible prophecy” conspiracies, for a wide-spread example. There area also a lot of bans on reading bad translations and edited/changed editions of the Bible, which ranged from tilted translations to flatly removing entire books or inserting known-bad heresies.
      This was really, really unpopular with Protestants whose religions were based on such stuff, and a lot of our “information” on the Church comes from those sources. (I’ve even found English Protestant misinformation on Catholic apologetics sites.)

      I’ve got a list of sites here, but I don’t want to hit the spam filter so I’ll suggest catholic.com (the Catholic Answers site– their search function is horrible, the forums have a lot of information on this. Look for discussions with actual citations and links for the fastest information) and, if you just want places to start double-checking what some loon in a combox said, has dates and citations coming out the ears. Question #2, sorry it’s not one question a page!

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  11. Pingback: Public education: malice or incompetence? | Internet Scofflaw

  12. I was lucky enough to go through grade school when teachers still (mostly) believed in teaching. I still had some problems. This is what I hear from my parents since it involves some things I wasn’t in a position to see for myself, or to remember.
    When I was enrolled in school, the school doctor looked me over, noted where it said “cerebral palsy” on my chart, and told my parents, “You’re lucky. It looks like he’s not too badly retarded.” Of course, he knew cerebral palsy and mental retardation go hand-in-hand.
    I made it through kindergarten, playing with blocks and “being socialized”. Then in first grade, the educational program called all children to start learning to read. We were given homework. On the first day, we were to write a page of the letter “A”. Fill an entire sheet of lined paper with copies. The next night, we did the same with the letter “B”.
    According to family legend, I got terminally bored halfway through the letter “P” and quit, going back to something I enjoyed doing — reading. The teachers and administrators decided I had reached my limit and didn’t try to push me.
    Finally, when I was in fifth grade, I was called down to the office and administered an IQ test. This was the Stanford-Binet test so there was no cap at an IQ of 107. (I remember some of the questions and recognized them when I saw them in another context.) It turned out the school doctor had been right. I was, in fact, in the extreme end of the Bell Curve.
    By the time I was moved to the Gifted program, I had already been thoroughly trained to regard school as boring and a waste of time, and it would take me years to un-learn that training.

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  13. One of my second cousins is a teacher at grade school level. I asked him once about using the “Hooked On Phonics” program in school. He told me he wasn’t allowed to use it because it wasn’t also available in a Spanish version.

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  14. As a nation founded on the consent of the governed, we can’t afford to have a school system that turns out illiterate peasants. Whether it’s by design or incompetence, it doesn’t matter. We simply can’t afford it.

    Ah, but a nation that can’t read and can’t think is much easier to convince to vote the “right way”. *sigh*

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      1. We also can’t keep on paying Maserati sticker prices for a Yugo. We’re pouring more and more money down an educational drain and getting less and less for it.

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  16. Take blood pressure meds before continuing. Ensure anybody likely to be disturbed by you screaming is adequately forewarned.

    Courtesy Walter Williams, former head of George Mason University’s Economics department:

    Educational Rot
    [SNIP]
    The California Basic Educational Skills Test, or CBEST, is mandatory for teacher certification in California. It’s a joke. Here’s a multiple-choice question on its practice math test:

    “Rob uses 1 box of cat food every 5 days to feed his cats. Approximately how many boxes of cat food does he use per month?
    A. 2 boxes, B. 4 boxes, C. 5 boxes, D. 6 boxes, E. 7 boxes.”

    Here’s another:

    “Which of the following is the most appropriate unit for expressing the weight of a pencil?
    A. pounds, B. ounces, C. quarts, D. pints, E. tons.”

    I’d venture to predict that the average reader’s sixth-grader could answer each question. Here’s a question that is a bit more challenging; call your eighth-grader:

    “Solve for y: y – 2 + 3y = 10,
    A. 2, B. 3, C. 4, D. 5, E. 6.”

    Some years ago, the Association of Mexican American Educators, the California Association for Asian-Pacific Bilingual Education and the Oakland Alliance of Black Educators brought suit against the state of California and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, charging that the CBEST was racially discriminatory. Plaintiff “evidence” was the fact that the first-time passing rate for whites was 80 percent, about 50 percent for Mexican-Americans, Filipinos and Southeast Asians, and 46 percent for blacks. In 2000, in a stroke of rare common sense, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found CBEST not to be racial discriminatory.

    [SNIP]

    Textbooks used in schools of education might explain some teacher ineptitude. A passage in Marilyn Burns’ text About Teaching Mathematics reads, “There is no place for requiring students to practice tedious calculations that are more efficiently and accurately done by using calculators.” New Designs for Teaching and Learning, by Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm, says, “Content knowledge is not seen to be as important as possessing teaching skills and knowledge about the students being taught.” Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar’s text Methods that Matter reads, “Students can no longer be viewed as cognitive living rooms into which the furniture of knowledge is moved in and arranged by teachers, and teachers cannot invariably act as subject-matter experts.” The authors explain, “The main use of standardized tests in America is to justify the distribution of certain goodies to certain people.”
    http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/13/educational-rot-n1530968/page/full/

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        2. *looks around, points to self* Moi? Oh, I would not dare to infringe on the territory of the properly degreed education BAs and MAs. No, no, the public school classroom is no place for people like me. *goes back to reviewing material to inflict on private school students*

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    3. Most of the CBEST isn’t stuff like that, most of it is stuff about whatever teaching methods were the favored techniques the last time the test was revised, fun things about laws dealing with teachers you’re actually expected to know, and then some moderate background stuff for most subjects, no matter which subject you teach.

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  17. Thank you for putting into words EXACTLY how I feel better than I ever could. I previously taught at two Big Ten colleges and gladly put my PhD on the shelf to homeschool my two sons. My husband has been a public school teacher at an award-winning, “high quality,” suburban school for 15 years. We have observed EVERYTHING you brought up in your post firsthand. If there are any grammatical errors in my comment I apologize in advance…I too am a product of public schools.

    What do two disillusioned teachers do with their children? The annual tuition per child at the only two private schools in our area that met my standards were $7,000 and $22,000. I believe this is why middle class families are the fastest increasing segment of the homeschool population. Now that we have been homeschooling for a few years I wouldn’t trade it for the world. As you said, it only takes a few hours a day. It probably takes less time than it would to undo and reteach what the public school did each day.

    My blog is about Montessori and homeschooling. Because I have a lot of readers who are interested in Montessori but not necessarily interested in homeschooling or sending their children to a Montessori school, I try to teach by example rather than making my blog overtly about “why” to homeschool. However, I do occasionally indulge in posting a link to someone else’s post about that if it is particularly interesting. I am cranky today because one of my Facebook readers, a first grade teacher, left angry comments. Basically I am a moron if I think “modern classrooms” are as described. They also played the “I wish you would respect my choices as I respect yours” card. Since when is it a societal requirement to respect someone’s BAD choices? If she was doing drugs am I to “respect” that choice as well? I respect a family’s choice to send their child to public school because that is what they want to do. I refuse to pretend it is an equally good situation for the child. If an intelligent, involved, and high-information parent decides to send their child to public school it is a compromise for their own convenience. If you believe they are equal-quality choices then you are either a low-information parent (in the area of education at least) or you are refusing to see what you don’t want to see.

    The shame is that some children are truly better off AWAY from their parents. Obviously the child of a depressed, drug-addicted single mother shouldn’t be homeschooled and isn’t going to a private school either. I see traditional schools as “outsourcing” at best, babysitting at worst. If it IS babysitting the question is “what does the best quality babysitting” look like?

    As to the “appropriate” vs. “inappropriate” reading material question, my mother set me loose in the adult section of the library when I was eight or nine. But we had a rule that she had to look at what I read before I read it. I remember her taking away a book about Lebensborn, for example. My husband and I are always astonished that otherwise good parents will NOT educate themselves about what they let their children read. We feel sick when we see all the middle school girls reading “Wicked,” with its explicite bestiality passages because they assume it is okay because the choir director took the kids to see the musical. Of course we are also appalled whenever a teacher takes the kids to a musical or shows them a movie based on a book that is inappropriate for children of that age to read…but that’s the intelligence level of many teachers today for you.

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    2. Wikipedia is not always your friend.

      One of the reasons the Maccabees led the revolt against the “Hellenistic Jews” is the Greeks were doing stuff like defiling the Temple with the occasional pig pickin’. As an ethnic group we’re pretty tolerant of apostasy, but even the most liberal Jews (e.g., the ones who’ve stop attending schul altogether) draw the line at roasting pigs on His altar, even once they’ve stopped believing in Him.

      John J. Collins writes that while the civil war between Jewish leaders led to the king’s new policies, it is wrong to see the revolt as simply a conflict between Hellenism and Judaism, since “The revolt was not provoked by the introduction of Greek customs (typified by the building of a gymnasium) but by the persecution of people who observed the Torah by having their children circumcised and refusing to eat pork.” In the conflict over the office of High Priest, traditionalists with Hebrew/Aramaic names like Onias contested with Hellenizers with Greek names like Jason and Menelaus. … the Hellenistic kingdom of Syria sided with the Hellenizing Jews against the traditionalists. As the conflict escalated, Antiochus prohibited the practices of the traditionalists, thereby, in a departure from usual Seleucid practice, banning the religion of an entire people.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabees

      Emphasis added

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      1. Yes, there was a legitimate grievance there, but it didn’t cause the split or shift in the cluture of the Jews that was already there. Brought on by the introduction of Hellenistic/Greek culture. This lead to a resugence in orthodoxy with in the Jewish comunities.

        I only brought up Wiki as an reference not as a primary source, for my thoughts.

        Does Souther culture represent the whole culture of the US? Was the predominate cultural in Hellenistic times Greek or Jewish? We are also talking about large periods of time.

        My statment was that christian influince came later than a lot of the other influnces in “Western Society” not that it had no influence.

        The Maccabees are the Maccabees and product of there times.

        It’s easy to say that western society of to day is a Judeao-Christian society, but that leaves out a whole shade of other influences of thought.

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        1. It’s easy to say that western society of to day is a Judeao-Christian society, but that leaves out a whole shade of other influences of thought.

          More properly, one should say that “western society of to day is a predominantly Judeo-Christian society, but then one could quibble ad infinitum over the precise meaning of predominantly.

          There are certain principles and concepts that arise in various cultures at various times and trying to find “the one true root” of them is as pointless as it is futile. Futile, because it is unlikely to ever be achieved with a level of accuracy for it to be unquestionable, pointless because even if you could prove that the Western idea of individual responsibility arose from the Greeks, the Jews or the Zoroastrians, then what? You either accept or reject the principle as valid, useful and important and the intellectual antecedents have no value either way.

          Western Civilization, like Pornography, is primarily known when you see it. Once upon a time its instruction occupied several years worth of college bullsh… seminars. It is unnecessary to determine how Western or how Civilized it is, the fact remains that it is a body of thought, an accumulation of art and a general view of the world that remains distinctly different from other civilizations. Perspective is a matter of where you stand, and for most of us where we stand is on the peak of Western Civ.

          Once upon a time, not so long ago — and for much longer than the current name has been in place — Western Civilization had a different name. For obvious reasons, Christendom is no longer used, although it offered a certain clarity that Western Civ lacks.

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        2. Hum? Pulled my Penguin Atlas of Ancient History and The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece. The area considered Gaulish was pretty large at the time…and the Finns controlled a large one in the north. What had been Alexander’s Empire had fractured into quite a number of pieces. The largest of these was the Seleukid, including parts of modern day Turkey to the Hindu Kush, and the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt.

          We can conclude that the size of a given kingdom does not seem to have much effect on what is commonly call ‘Western Civilization.’ Various peoples from around the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from Britain to the various German provinces have all contributed. We traditionally drawn a line of thought from the Judeo-Christians and the Greeks through the Romans, on to the Enlightenment and beyond.

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          1. We can conclude that the size of a given kingdom does not seem to have much effect …

            So what I hear you saying is “size isn’t everything.”

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    3. Did you read to the point where Wikki mentions that Hellenistic Judaism was part of the diaspora? That is those Jews who had been spread outside of their traditional lands. Did you continue to the mention that the movement ‘became marginalized’?

      You suggest this was a matter of a schism? Check and read the article on the Maccabees as well. There you will find that the Greeks had banned the practices of the Judaism. Children were not to be circumcised. The people were to eat pork. A little argument as to who the true Jew is this was not.

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      1. I’m not trying to denigrate the Jewish people, but point out that The predominate cultural influence of that time was Greece. I have great admoration for a people that have been around this long.

        And just as there is a schism to day between liberal and Orthodox Jew with in the Jewish comunities.

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  19. Responding to Wayne on Koko way up above, because the nesting thingie is dead anyways. :)

    I think Koko may have been the one I heard about, too, actually– and Lucy was the famous either modern or nearly modern (can’t remember) skeleton where almost all the pieces were there, named for the song.

    The story we were told was that her not-taught concept thing was signing something like “kitten give me;” they had a cute video of a re-enactment, complete with the storybook the researchers were trying to teach her from. (And finding out she actually had signed ‘kitten give me me kitten kitten given me kitten give kitten me me kitten’ or something was what disillusioned me so badly.)
    Sweet but kinda sad, what with the first kitten dying. (They, of course, wouldn’t say why– but I kinda suspect it’s the same reason that we didn’t leave my two year old alone with her new kitten, no matter how much she adores him.)

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    1. This is in reply to Foxfier’s comment on the Forest Service expert.

      That reminds me of a biologist I ran into down in Oregon. I asked him what he was doing and he explained he was checking on a mated pair of spotted owls that nested in this patch of reprod (10-20 year old timber). Totally ignoring all the claims that spotted owls only nest in old growth (not true, I have seen at least three pairs nesting in non old growth, and incidentally none in old growth) he explained that for 15 years they had been the most productive mated pair in the state, two years ago they had pre-commercial thinned the reprod they nested in, and he thought they might have disturbed them, because they had raised any owlets since. When I asked him if he had ever thought they might just be getting old he gave me a totally blank look, and went right on talking like that couldn’t possibly be a consideration.

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      2. I loved the part about the new threat to Spotted Owls being that they have interbred with other owls. Yeah, let’s see, if they can breed, then they are not separate species, are they. Oops.

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        1. Here’s something you might enjoy:
          you know about Red Wolves?

          Turns out they’re just a stable hybrid of coyotes and wolves… the different groups have different behaviors, but even though the “easter coyote” is mostly wolf, and acts like it, they keep calling it a coyote.

          There have also been some studies that had the “shocking” result of finding that coyotes will have both dog and wolf DNA in them, even when they act like coyotes.

          Trust me, cows can tell the difference between coyotes and dogs or wolves– a scientist should be able to do so. One of the scariest moments when I lived in Spokane Valley was when I realized that the “stray dog” next to the bus stop by the mall was clearly a coyote by the build, size and markings. That usually means rabies.
          The desk lady at the fish and game, bless her, understood what I was talking about and explained that there was a known population of coyotes that did that in the area, but they’d send someone over– because they don’t act like coyotes anymore, they’re like dogs, and stray dogs are dangerous to have around bus stops popular with kids and drunks.

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          1. A few years back they tried to charge some coyote hunters in North Carolina with killing an endangered species, after they were bragging about the wolves they had killed. The case fell apart however, because while what the hunters were calling wolves were MOSTLY wolf, they all had dog and coyote DNA, and a hybrid cannot be a species, so ergo it can’t be endangered.

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            1. DAMN! I wish I’d know about that to suggest to a family friend… they sent a swat team in without a warrant and confiscated his guns and computers on the basis of his son being a poacher, so it probably wouldn’t have done anything to help, but ugh.

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        3. I went to several meetings where this was pointed out, but they don’t listen to logic, it is more of the, “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts,” syndrome.

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          1. This is because they have been educated to think correctly, which is to say: to ignore facts and to not think.

            Daughtorial Unit and I recently discussed an article about atheist Penn Jillette schooling Piers “I’m Catholic” Morgan on why the Pope does not poll the congregation in defining Catholic Doctrine. We realized that because Jillette had not had the “benefit” of a college education (indeed, my have not bothered with a HS Diploma) but is clearly highly intelligent he had been forced to work out his understanding of things by observation and analysis. Piers Mogan, OTOH, having had a first order modern education, knew nothing but has all the correct attitudes.

            We can be reasonably confident which of those two will gladly welcome our new alien overlords and which will join the resistance.

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            1. I’ll point out that even though I think Jillette is an ass, he’s an honest one rather than only doing it in order to be nasty. Puts him well ahead of… hm… most celebs?

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              1. I am unsure to what degree Jillette is professionally an ass as opposed to being personally one (I trust I need not explain the difference.) I think he has the intellectual integrity (and confidence) to thoroughly consider the implications of a position, as he demonstrated in schooling Piers Morgan on the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and as he demonstrates in this video about evangelism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCdCVto2MN8

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                1. I kinda suspect it’s a public face. My mom acts a not meaner than she is to keep from being run over, and I’ve been known to suddenly acquire similar body language. (My little brother, on the other hand, is just an ass because he thinks it’s cute. I still love him, and he can be a good guy, but it gets REALLY old.)

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      3. Someone pointed out a long time ago that there’s not much of a food source for them in old growth forest, because the canopy shuts out so much light nothing grows underneath, so not much lives there.

        (I’m not sure if that’s true, but it sounds reasonably plausible.)

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  20. I would guess that nearly 100% of those 20% who aren’t illiterate read for pleasure. After all, how else could they possibly be anything _but_ illiterate, after years of exposure to public education? If they weren’t profoundly motivated to both read on their own (and thus, presumably, for pleasure) _and_ to actively deceive their teachers about their lives (or else they’d have flunked, rather than graduated), they wouldn’t be in the 20%.

    Seriously…if your kids are in the system, Step #1 is to GET THEM OUT OF IT! You’ve got plenty of time to figure out Step #2 once that’s accomplished.

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  21. *leeeans back and peers towards the top of the thread*
    Dang, bearcat wasn’t kidding about y’all writing the great american novel in here. I managed to be lucky enough or blessed enough (or both) to have avoided public schools, so I haven’t the personal experience with them a lot of you seem to. I will say that the idea of being even mostly illiterate scares me almost as much as the idea of being blind, and for much the same reason. I can’t imagine what I’d do without the ability to read and write easily. For schools to turn out students as unprepared as that 80% functionally illiterate mentioned above is downright criminal, to my mind.

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    1. When I came through it was more neglect than malice. The smart kids got left alone, unless the district needed to trot us out for a press release or something. Well, OK, the AP physics teacher stopped leaving us alone after that incident with the laser, but anyway. I do recall that if I had not been an autodidact, I’d never have gotten into a top-tier college with a very fat academic scholarship. Reading was not especially encouraged in the regular classes, if memory serves. Now, 20+ years on, everything his slumped downhill like a chat pile in the rain.

      You know, thinking about it, what happened at Aberfan in Wales in 1966 is not a bad analogy for the education mess. For years the business administration piled mine waste on a hillside, ignoring a few small slips, seeping groundwater, and the warnings of people who knew about mining waste. The pile reached a critical and unstable mass. When a long and heavy rain came, the whole morass slid into the valley and buried the school and part of town.

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      1. I wish WE had had a laser for physics class. I would have tried to make holograms.

        I tried to build an apparatus to reproduce an early speed of light experiment for a science fair project, but the parts I tried to use weren’t adequate for the job.

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        1. We, er, that is, the guys tried to burn numbers into the paint in the math classroom on the other side of the courtyard. The math teacher got irked when they were making figures with the red dot. It distracted her students. My lab partner and I just tried to blow up the chemistry teachers’ work room, and almost succeeded. But an orbital sander, open window, and much scrubbing removed the evidence.

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  23. I had an experience yesterday which I think it might be appropriate to share here.

    I gave my 22 year old nephew, John, who had recently completed Cordon Bleu training, an extra copy I happened to have of the Larousse Gastronomique which with Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking I believe are among the finest cookbooks in the world.

    John thanked me for the book, and began reading it with avidity and accuracy (he had learned how to read at home). I asked him what he was studying, as he had gone back to college, and he said, “computer programming” and “basic English”. He was doing well at the first, in large part because his grandfather, with whom he lived for most of his life, was an electrical engineer, and had done much to teach John how to think logically.

    But when I asked John how he was doing in English, he said, “Not so well.” I found that John had never been taught basic grammar in grade school or high school. This would have been understandable, if he had gone to the Inglewood (Los Angeles, CA) public schools his mother had wanted him to attend. John had instead attended a Beach Cities grade and high school, which had received full funding and the sort of teachers that the yuppie scum who infest the coast here are able to provide for their children.

    I took the time to give John a crash course in general grammar. It went something like this. “We have learned from Noam Chomsky and his fellow grammarians that in all languages so far studied, there are only four types of phrase: Noun Phrase (NP), Verb Phrase (VP), Prepositional Phrase (PP), and Conjunctional Phrase (CP).

    “A noun is simply the name of a person (“John”), place (“L.A.”), thing (“rock”) or concept (“Intelligence”). An adjective is a word which qualifies or describes a noun (“smart John”, “warm L.A.”, “red rock” “high intelligence”). In English, adjectives usually come before nouns. A noun or noun phrase can be replaced by a pronoun such as “a” “The” “I”, “you”, “he”, “she” “it”, “this”, “these”, “those”, etc. A noun phrase can consist of a pronoun or noun alone, or any combination of pronoun, adjective and noun (“the red rock”).

    “A verb is a word which expresses action (“walk”, “cook” “talk”), being (“am” “is”), or some other quality (“think”). An adverb is a word that modifies a verb (“walk quickly”, “cook slowly” “talk unclearly”.) Most adverbs follow the verb, and end in “-ly”. A verb phrase can either be a verb alone (“walks”), a pronoun and a verb (“he walks”) or a pronoun, a verb and an adverb (“he walks quickly”).

    “A preposition is a word which shows the position or relation of a noun phrase or a verb phrase. Examples are “under”, “over”, “around”, “with”, “without”, etc. In English, the preposition usually comes at the beginning of the noun or verb phrase. In most languages, there are usually only fifty or so prepositions in common use.

    “A conjunction is a word which links, joins, or qualifies a noun, verb, or prepositional phrase. Examples are “and”, “or”, “if”, “then”. Again, there are usually only fifty or so conjunctions used in most languages.

    “With a knowledge of these four phrases, you can put together any sentence in a language. There are two good uses of a basic knowledge of grammar: 1) you can, with a little effort, learn the trick of parsing a sentence, so that you can you can avoid ambiguity. 2) if, in learning a new language, you take the time to see how the four types of phrases are put together, and you have by heart all the pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions in that language (usually less than 200 words in most languages), you can learn to speak and think in a new language with a fraction of the time and effort that most people take.”

    John later told me that I had taught him more about grammar in five minutes than his teachers had done in the previous twelve years.

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  25. Rachel Alexander, at TownHall today (Monday, March 18th, 2013), has an article about some of the “myths” of Common Core. Based on what I’ve read over the last few weeks, our current school situation is both based on Malice (Federal level) and incompetence (local level). The State, County, and District level more or less share elements of both, to varying degrees. Glenn Reynolds is beginning to look more and more correct in stating that sending your children to public schools is equal to child abuse. Unfortunately, there are millions of Americans that have no other choice.

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    1. “Unfortunately, there are millions of Americans that have no other choice.”

      Mike,

      Bullsh*t!!!!

      That is a cop-out. Having choices you don’t like is not having no choices, and most of time (my opion) it is prioritizing things over the kids, mcmanisions, cars….

      There is always a choice, it just isn’t guarantied to be easy or pleasant.

      Sorry, that mentality is hard enough to take when the *left* spouts it; we don’t need to buy into it to.

      Everytime here someone one ourside buy into this narrative, I just want to screem.

      Sarah, this why I don’t think it’s going to turn out well what ever happens. We, it seems, have lost that; what ever it takes we will pick ourselves up by our boot straps, mentality that mades us great.
      :.(

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      1. You’re misunderestimating people. It’s not MacMansions, it’s food on the table. If I hadn’t had writing, I’d have to work as a secretary or teach in community college — for roof over head. Josh, we shop for clothes from thrift stores. Raising kids ain’t CHEAP. And taxes are eating family budgets alive. We pay more in taxes than in food, clothing and mortgage combined. EVERY YEAR.

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          2. RES

            Two points.

            1. FED current monetary policy of quantitative easing is already distroying what buying power we have insavings. In essences stealing it.

            2. What savings?

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            1. We’re fast running out of saving — aka the little edge my income gives us, because… no raise in 5 years, and well, kids in college and food… I want to cry at the checkout line.

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        2. As Sarah said– First the hubby and I have never lived in a house, mostly apartments. I have never owned a new car. Every car we have owned is used. My hubby was put on furlough (one day a month) for two years, which dropped our income significantly. Plus the taxes on food, transportation costs, apartment and utility costs have gone up. Plus the hubby has NOT had a raise in eight years. We have only two in our household and are barely making it. My medical costs have risen as well (I have a chronic disease). So ummm I am pretty sure if the taxes dropped, there would be more money in everyone’s pocket. –less jobs here, more houses going under, more businesses going under, and everything costs more– reminds me of the 1970s.

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        3. I live next door to a low encome community housing. I walk/cut through all the time, on my way to Target. You no what I see parked infront of a lot of them, Lexis & Cadillacs…

          The middle class does it too. Buying houses & cars they can’t afford.

          Why are our taxes so high, because we buy into; for some there is no other choice but public schools.

          When poeople choose to send there kids to public school, it’s because it’s easier choice, not that there is a lack of choice.

          Instead of people facing hard budgeting problems, the US’s solution is just to enable/subsides peoples bad choices with public schools & Foodstamp/CHIP programs.

          A hundred years ago or so It was all most a deadly insult to offer some help. It was like splapping them in the face.

          Now we are at the point of who cares if we fail someone(government) will come all and bail me out or edjumicate my kids.

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          1. My car is twelve years old. Dan’s is 24 years old. Our house IS kind of big because we were trying to get into a good school district, but we bought at fire-sale prices. And we can only afford it because we don’t splurge on anything else. I now have SOME cool tech because I needed to bring down my net at the end of the year so that the self employment tax wouldn’t be crazy, but other than that, we use a phone model 7 years old, and we pay as we go, which means 20 every three months.

            For half of our married life we drove ONE suburban with a missing front fender a side stoved in which we bought for 1200. I drove Dan to work, so I could have the car when we had appointments or needed to go shopping. Our oldest taught himself to play piano at six, and really should have had lessons, but he knew the gymnastics we were making to survive (and by then I was making SOME income — I was teaching in college at the time) and refused. (And that hurts more than giving up our stuff.)

            Yes, you see that. Low-income gets subsidies and earned income credits and all sorts of breaks — but low-income you don’t have two parents working. Not full time. Hell, you don’t have a parent working, quite often. We? We get skinned.

            HONESTLY we don’t even qualify for college help because we have money in the bank (my income comes in lump sums.) They count on us spending all that money, each time, twice, once for each kid.

            Without my income, we’d have gone under by now.

            Seriously Josh, you have NO clue what the rest of us are surviving on out here.

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              1. 1) Don’t trust infographics– they put stuff into small, easy to swallow measures that are thus incredibly easy to spin.
                2) Don’t believe infographics that don’t tell you where the data came from.

                More specifically:
                the closest they come to telling you what their data is about is where they talk about “50% of American households.”

                At one point, my small nuclear family made four households– mom and dad, my sister at college, my brother and I in the Navy. We’d actually raise the average for retirement accounts, there, assuming the TSP is counted. (depending on the results you want, you can ask the question differently and define it differently– for a tax dedicated retirement account, only my brother and I have one of those)

                If my brother and I had gone to college instead? That would be only 25% of the households having a retirement account– or none, if they’re requiring a tax defined retirement account.

                Data about “households” or “residents” will include illegal aliens, who of course are unlikely to have retirement accounts or even bank accounts.
                Common-law spouses in cases where both are gaming the system would likewise be two “households,” with very little (reported) income.

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          2. We don’t receive subsidies. The money I make from my writing goes to my medications. I haven’t even received unemployment. When we came back to the US, my brother gave us a room so that I could get my chemo every four weeks. I couldn’t work. The hubby had to take care of me, so he couldn’t work either. It was a hard time for us. It is better now– So yea– the middle class is being used as a punching bag.

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          3. I live next door to a low encome community housing. I walk/cut through all the time, on my way to Target. You no what I see parked infront of a lot of them, Lexis & Cadillacs…

            Gosh, we hadn’t noticed that most of the folks that “need” the money from our high taxes were gaming the system. Really, what news! Did you hear that water is wet, too?

            If you are willing to game the system, break laws and commit fraud, of course your standard of living is higher. I got royally sick of the ex drug dealer (never officially caught) I was in the Navy with, who constantly complained about how “hard” it was to show up for fewer hours and more pay than I’d ever seen in my life.

            Heck, if you have four kids by four fathers, two of them are in the SSD system as “disabled” for “learning disabilities” (easily doable if getting on ADD drugs doesn’t suddenly make them able to read) and know how to game the system for your specific area, you can easily pull in a lot– especially if you pay attention to exactly how much you need to make in a year to be able to get the maximum tax refund. Leaves lots of time to hit various foodbanks, so you can sell your foodstamp card for cash.

            Even easier if you don’t bother with a driver’s license or with registering the car.

            Now what does that have to do with people who are married, at least one has a full-time job and they do not game the system– or even use the “safety net” unless they actually NEED it?

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            1. Waters wet???
              :-)
              My point is this safety nets lead to unrealistic risk assesment. Why should I care if I go into debt to buy a house, car or what ever; I can always declare bankruptcy or someone will bail me out. Some go to the extreme and actually game the system, others just use it as a crutch to get themselves into trouble.

              Stupid should hurt, how else do we learn not to do stupid things. When stupid doesn’t hurt, all we learn is we can get away with doing stupid things. Our politicians learn that all you have to do is promise that no one will have to pay the consequence for their actions to get re-elected.

              Safety nets make us Fragile, and we should be striving to be Anifragile.

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              1. If you go bankrupt from buying a house or car, they’ll take the house/car. (with some exceptions, which can be argued about otherwise)

                The problem is– as folks have pointed out– the safety net becoming a hammock, so that the only thing that keeps it from being used thus is the honor of those who might.

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                1. I suspect a lot of those cars are leased, not owned. Reduces assets owned which might impair eligibility for government stipends. Also means you aren’t stuck having to maintain an older vehicle.

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                  1. My late grandfather-in-law leased their vehicles both for tax reasons and because it was simpler than dealing with owning a vehicle. (His last act before dying was to finish that years’ taxes so his wife wouldn’t have to deal with it. There’s a REASON we want to name our firstborn son for him, he was awesome.)

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          4. You know what’s happening in a lot of that housing you’re walking through? A woman with children is on welfare, gets food stamps, and all sorts of other assistance, to the point that she’s getting more money in a year than I clear after taxes and health insurance, and then she’s got a live-in boyfriend, who thereby is not counted on her household income, so his income gets to be used without penalty on her assistance.

            Or, even if it’s a person with a nominally low income, after they get their government assistance, they still have more spending money than I do:
            http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak

            Just because you see people who are supposed to be low income, it doesn’t mean they don’t have money.

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            1. I know several people on SSD (some legitamete, some not) the last I time I knew income numbers on any of them was a few years ago when a couple of them were discussing how much they got, so if anything the numbers will have gone up by now. At that time they were bringing in over $37,000 a year, TAX FREE. This is equivalent to something over a 50K annual salary, because the 37K from the government is cash in hand and that is not including all the other benefits they get, like their medical being paid for. Also several of these have a spouse that works at a low-paying or part-time job, again the SSD is not figured as income, so the spouse is eligible for all the low-income benefits.

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              1. Bear, Wayne,

                I wasn’t asking a question. I was giving an example.

                The prevailing wisdom is, “I would be a sucker & a simp not to take my FREE Obama phone.” Or, “Darnit I overextended myself, I’m going to NEED help pay this off.”

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                1. Josh, I can’t tell from what you’re posting, but SOMETHING was wrong in your thought processes on this series of comments. Your answer to bearcat and myself prove it, if nothing else does, as our replies to you were not answers to perceived questions, they were explanations of how many of your examples likely came to be.

                  You replied to Mike, above, claiming that his comment was wrong about millions of Americans having no choice but to send their children to school. You then followed up with an example of people who, really, if you sat back and thought about it, clearly don’t fit in with Mike’s claim. We tried to explain how your examples were examples of people obviously gaming the system.

                  People in middle income brackets who are honest, often simply don’t have the luxury of sending their children to private school, and for whatever reason, don’t have the time, resources, or skills to homeschool. Unless there are other options, such as Charter schools and vouchers for them, public school is all they have available.

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                  1. “People in middle income brackets who are honest, often simply don’t have the luxury of sending their children to private school, and for whatever reason, don’t have the time, resources, or skills to homeschool. Unless there are other options, such as Charter schools and vouchers for them, public school is all they have available.”

                    All I hear is excuse, and no real reasons as to why someone can’t or is prevented from doing something they want to do. If someone raelly wants to do something they will find away.

                    This is my reply to mike that is stuck in moderation (I’m going to leave out the links to the books):
                    ————
                    Homework for Grown-Ups = $12

                    Advanced Homework for Grown-Ups = $12

                    Math for Grown-ups = $12

                    How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes = $11

                    Any number of For Dummy books & Idiot Guides under $20. (A good place to start, if you’re starting from scratch on a subject.)

                    What is causing this monetary inflation? Who did a lot of these same people vote for?

                    Remaining ignorant is a choice not an excuse to practice stupidity.

                    The 6 P’s of life: Piss Poor Plaining —> Piss Poor Performance.

                    Life is only as complicated and hard as we make it.

                    ————–

                    I’m now going to add Edward de Bono’s Thinking Course.

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                    1. There is a further consideration. Under the Affordable Care Act, businesses are mandated to provide a specified package of health benefits or pay a fine once their full time employment reaches fifty people. This runs into serious money. Businesses are cutting worker’s hours back just to stay in business.

                      I know this is anecdotal evidence, so take it for what that is worth:

                      I have a friend who has worked all her adult life. She had been working for a small print shop. The printer retired and sold the business, which ultimately shut down. With advancing computer technology, companies are finding less need for outsourcing their printing.

                      Fortunately, my friend had picked up a part time second job. So she switched to full time for that company, which holds the local franchise for fourteen card shops. Now the company is cutting back everyone’s hours, because they cannot afford the Affordable Care mandates. In the process she is loosing the benefits which she had. (No, the card shops are not free to raise their prices, the licenser sets them. As it is, the card market is shrinking. Thankfully, they still have their Christmas ornaments and collectibles.)

                      Meanwhile, the government continues to tell us that there is no inflation. Well, tell that to my friend. She is paying a lot more for her energy and food. She owns a small house she inherited and her car, but fears that her property taxes will go up and hopes that nothing major will require repair. She certainly doesn’t have the money to make discretionary purchases — or purchase a more fuel efficient car, as our President has suggested. She has been looking for other work, and knows in the local business climate she will be lucky if she finds a second part time job.

                      Again, sure, there are people who have made bad choices. Yes, people have purchased houses and try to live lifestyles that push beyond their means. BUT in today’s economy people who are not doing that, who are not living off the government and have been responsible find themselves struggling. Several people here have told you a bit about their own experiences. These are intelligent, informed, well read, hard working people. To treat them in so dismissive a manner seems rather cold.

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                    3. The lasted word I will say on this as everyone is taking this personaly.

                      You are making at best questionable claims on the basis of bad information, and are using those questionable claims to attack people who know better, then ignoring the better information.

                      Oh, and a line that says “Source: Federal Reserve, US Census Bureau, Internal Revenue Service” before a bunch of obviously interpreted information IS NOT CITING YOUR SOURCE. It just makes it very clear they were spinning for all they were worth. A source would be “2009 Household Survey, USCB, all households over 2 persons.”

                      Why is it so obvious they’re spinning it? None of those groups go by “American family,” they check “households” or “individuals.”

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                    4. Foxfier, I will say this again it’s a sliding scale you have on one side longterm welfare abusers & on the other you have those (mostly in the middle class) that allow themselves to over extend and get themselves into trouble, because why not someone will bail them out.

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                    5. That is a false range– that’s only one end of a much bigger scale where, shocker, most of the folks here don’t fall on that tiny scale.

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                    6. Foxfier,

                      Just because you want to include the responsible in to a discussion of, as CACS pointed out, those practicing malice or incompetence doesn’t mean I making a false grouping.

                      There are two groups of people under discussion here.

                      1. The group that relies on the safety nets, whether there malice or incompetance. the 47% if you will.

                      2. The groups Left & Right that make excuses for group one. The Left’s excuses; You deserve them. The Rights; they just don’t know any better, they don’t have a choice.

                      I’m talking about groups with in groups, in broad general terms. Do I needed to put in the disclaimer for the responsible, “This is a generalization. Not everyone acts like this or does these things, if this doesn’t apply to you move along.”

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                    7. You made sweeping statements, not about those who were using the safety net but about those who do not have the resources to home-school, and brought up the social safety net/hammock as support for your claims about what EVERYONE could or could not do.

                      You supported it poorly.

                      You are now trying to abandon it, and claim that those who called you on the extended support for the claim are somehow being unfair.

                      Advantage of the internet: it’s dead easy to look at what you previously argued, and find that it is NOT compatible with what you are now claiming you meant.

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                    8. If you must invoke my name do me the courtesy of understanding my argument.

                      The world is not so simple as a electronic switch. People make choices based on a multi-layered comprehension of their own position and their possible options. They may be bloody well wrong in their assessment, but that is what people do.

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                    10. Yes, but in noway is it can’t.

                      No such thing as can’t? Try telling that to the family who is dealing with one of the parents undergoing care for a critical illness. I know one family where both parents were diagnosed with cancer within a year and only one survived. Tell that to my friend with two daughters, whose beloved husband went up for a nap after helping to clean up after Thanksgiving dinner and never got up again. No, these are not your average situations, but they do occur.

                      Your continued insistence of there is no such thing as can’t flies in the face of too many people’s real life struggles. This is why your arguments have engendered such negative reactions.

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                    11. The lasted word I will say on this as everyone is taking this personaly.

                      Gee, maybe because that’s the way your presentation makes it sound. You’re telling everyone that they’re a bunch of worthless assholes if they don’t do what they would like to do, and their reasons are not valid. You can claim that’s not what you’re saying, but the words coming from you are telling a different story.

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                    12. Not everyone, but we are working on a majority.
                      Around 50% of are take some form of government assistance. Do I need to list all the ways government has got their hooks into us?

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                    13. You might be right Josh– but try to do everything with daily chemo and prednisone. Plus you get ill every time you are around any people (other than hubby) for an extended amount of time. –no there are times you learn that the body can only do so much.

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                    14. All I hear is excuse, and no real reasons as to why someone can’t or is prevented from doing something they want to do. If someone raelly wants to do something they will find away.

                      Oh, so we’re not *really* forced to use public schools, because we could lie, cheat and steal enough to be able to survive while homeschooling.

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                    15. “Oh, so we’re not *really* forced to use public schools, because we could lie, cheat and steal enough to be able to survive while homeschooling.”

                      Holy Fucking Shit …..

                      Foxfier don’t put words into my mouth. At no point have I sugested that you have to lie, or steal. Cheat maybe in finding your work around. They can use their brain and think out side the box. You are only trapped by circumstances if you give up hope.

                      I’ve listed 4 books that total cost under $50 that will give any a sold foundation of education, and library card is free.

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                    16. I did not put words in your mouth.

                      I pointed out what you had said, rephrased so that it’s a lot less nice-looking. What did you think subsidized housing meant? How did you think people that, on paper, qualify for it are driving cars more expensive than anything my electrician-and-nurse-with-no-kids-at-home uncle and aunt could afford?

                      You felt comfortable telling others what their personal finances could or could not cover, based on walking around low-income areas, but you want to get upset when it’s rephrased out of what you’re comfortable with and into what your claims actually required?

                      Sad thing is, if you weren’t being such an ass about it and trying to apply it to everyone, especially on such cruddy evidence, people would probably agree with you. A lot of folks who say they can’t afford to home school simply can’t afford to home school and keep the lifestyle they have right now. Others can’t home school and provide for their families, period.

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                    17. And there’s kids and kids. And a lot of people don’t homeschool out of misplaced humbleness. We always intended to homeschool, but Robert scared us and we thought “ooh, we’re not qualified. We could break him.” Yes, we were idiots. Just goes to show. BUT teaching my kids, particularly with their voracious minds and divergent interests WOULD have been a full time job plus some. And I remember those years — you’re in them now, and with a third on the way — when the kids were little and even with them in school for a couple of hours (Kindergarten) a day, it was run, run, house and writing and… Because to make ends meet with me at home we bought a house that needed rebuilding from the inside out, and I made our clothes and refinished our furniture, and… Yeah. When we took a weekend away without the kids (like, once a year) I tended to just pass out for twenty four hours.

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                    18. I think it comes down to this: Yes, most children can be taught the BASICS of reading, writing, and arithmetic, plus history and an overview of science, without a significant outlay of money or even time.

                      However, if you want to prepare a child for more than unskilled labor, or if your child is not in the normal range, then it will take more money, more time, or both. If both parents have to work, in order to pay the bills, that can leave not enough time, and if they can get by (barely) with one working, then that can leave not enough money. Or sometimes, even if both work, if they can’t find GOOD jobs, it can leave not enough time OR money.

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                    19. Wayne,

                      “it can leave not enough time OR money.”

                      Which are problems that can be worked on and solved, if we determine that the goal is worth the effort, if not we take the easer path.

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                    20. I really, really hate, despise the word can’t.

                      So, why can one family can, and the orher can’t?

                      I will give you the the can’t family doesn’t fave the resource or time at the moment, but that is not a permanent, immutable, unchangeable fact of life. To many people say I can’t when they mean I don’t wan’t to put forth the effort.

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                    21. Your emotions are irrelevant; your emotions also were offended when it was pointed out that what your “sure they can” entailed included, at the very least, gaming the system.

                      “Too many” can be as few as one, and does not support the claim that no-one is right when they say “we cannot do this thing.”

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                    22. Bearcat,

                      Then they need to use the word WORSE & not can’t.

                      I can’t do something is a declarative statement.

                      Declarative statements shutdown the problem solving portion of our brain/thought process.

                      Why? How? Thinking in questions opens up the problem solving portion of our brain/thought process. It’s says this is a problem to be solved. That it can be solved. It leaves us open to new posibilities as the world changes around us.

                      All I’m going to say is their diffinition of worse is different than mine, and people have to deal with the consequences of their actions.

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                    23. Foxfier,

                      If that data is wrong do you have a better source?

                      At no point have I attacted anyone, but made a a broad statements about two income brakets.

                      Cyn,

                      There are exceptions to everyrule.

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                    24. It is NOT my job to do your research for you.
                      Build your own damn argument, with decent evidence. YOU are the one making claims that run counter to what those who are offering firsthand evidence and solid information have offered. YOU are trying to find evidence for what you think, so you do the work. Try as close to the source as possible, such as the actual reports from the US Census B, or places that explain upfront how they’re unpacking the data like the Heritage Institute.

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                    25. We’ll all statistics is spin, in how you interpert the raw data.

                      I think it was Mark Twain who said, “There are liars, damn liars and statisticians.”

                      So, I gave two links that came to simular conclusions from the source material you sited.

                      Do you feel you are under no obligation to show your own work for why you fill the way you do, because that was all I was asking you to do. All you did was tell me I wrong.

                      The only economic website that I know that say the we are doing well are the Kensain ones that feel that the only thing that keeps a service economy floating is continued spending.

                      Click to access DistrictReport_Q22012.pdf

                      Then there is Shadowstats.com for their take.

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                    26. You are not interpreting raw data.

                      You are taking data that has been chopped, massaged, tortured and carefully selected then phrased in a misleading manner, and getting angry when people point out that it’s not good.

                      You have NOT shown any work. You showed someone else’s work, then started accusing others of various bad things for disagreeing.

                      YOU make a claim, it’s on YOU to support it. “This site that makes unsupported claims says what I said!” is not support.

                      YOU are making claims about people here, and the accuracy of their statements, and behaving poorly when they point out that you’re doing a bad job of it.

                      Like

                    27. Foxfier,

                      The only time I have talked about any ones personal life it has been because they brought it up. Even my stament that started this was boils down to, “Hey man, we shouldn’t be making excuses for people, it allows them to feel justified in doing what they are doing.”

                      Nothing after that was directed at anyone on the blog, well other than my statements to the effect of I don’t think we on the blog are think outside the box enough.

                      Other than those?….

                      Like

                    28. Josh, when you read people pointing out that it is not possible for them to do a thing for financial reasons, and you then claim that everyone is financially able to do that thing, you have 1) commented on their personal lives, 2) directed it at them, and 3) had better have something a LOT more solid than “this website that doesn’t show its sources” and “I walked through low income housing and saw evidence of lots of money spent.”

                      “Thinking outside of the box” would be the actual solutions that people have offered, as opposed to your poorly supported claims and personal outrage when called on them.

                      Like

                    29. Foxfier,

                      You don’t get to make a counter claim & have it stand as fact.

                      You have stated that you think the in data is wrong, because of word choice, fine. Do you want to add data that actualy refutes and suports your own claim.

                      If you had said, “I don’t find the evidence compeling.” We wouldn’t be having this discusion. But, you didn’t, you made your own claim, and now that rule aplies to you as well.

                      Like

                    30. You don’t get to make a counter claim & have it stand as fact.

                      *sigh*

                      YOU did that, and all that I– and several other folks did– was point out that you had done it. Your data doesn’t need to be “refuted,” because it is not supported by anything but the force of being claimed.

                      We have multiple primary sources here, who know a hell of a lot more about what they can afford than you do and have explained, multiple times and in various ways, how exactly you are wrong and where the differences in finances lie.

                      You either say the same thing again, claim you didn’t say the thing in the first place, or accuse others of misrepresenting what you said– sometimes all three.

                      Attempting to judo the simple thing of “show actual evidence when claiming something” on the people who point out that you didn’t actually offer evidence doesn’t work.

                      Like

                  2. We didn’t have the time to homeschool or the money to private school. (Turned out we had the time because ti takes less time than I thought, but we didn’t know that.) I bet a lot of people are in our vise. OTOH homeschooling cost us 1k a month because of materials and online classes. Yes, we COULD theoretically have done it, but we’d be in even worse shape than we’re now.

                    Like

                    1. Josh,
                      I lot of people are just squeezing by, a lot of those that were living beyond their means in the big house with the two new fancy cars, and the big new four-door pickup to pull the fancy new boat have long since went bankrupt.
                      So these people that are just squeezing by are getting taxed to pay for the public schools, private schools are expensive, and even home schooling is as Sarah pointed out, and they don’t get those taxes back from the government to pay for it. So essentially they have to pay twice for schooling and they simply can’t afford it. Yes they could maybe cut out some other things, but realize that 1K a month is more than most of them pay for rent or a house payment, and that is the biggest payment they can feasably cut (not paying taxes tends to have adverse effects) personally I think, and most of them agree with me that providing a place for your kids to live is more important than providing them with a quality education. Yeah that choice sucks, but life sucks sometimes, it is what it is.

                      Like

                    2. Bear, Sarah,

                      There is no reason that it should cost 1K a month to educate your kids, unles it’s your state inforcing punlic school protectionist laws.

                      And unless things have changed we choose to live where we live.

                      Like

                    3. Josh,
                      There is a gulf between “I cannot imagine how it could cost $1,000 a month to home school two kids” and “There is no reason that it should cost 1K a month to educate your kids”. Unless you are privy to the decision factors it is more than presumptuous to make that second assertion.

                      As for being free to “choose to live where we live” … a variety of factors affect a family’s ability to easily relocate. Things like jobs, especially in a field where employment opportunities are limited, and when you are invested in a house and mortgage in a flat real estate market.

                      It is advisable to make sure you have a comprehensive understanding, not only of a person’s situation but how they got there, before forming (and expressing) strong opinions about it.

                      Like

                    4. RES,

                      There is the second part to that sentence which is the statment of my assumption.

                      My point of view Homeschooling Texas:

                      http://suite101.com/article/homeschool-regulations-in-texas-a39733

                      A good article:
                      http://thepioneerwoman.com/homeschooling/2012/03/what-does-it-take-to-graduate-from-your-home-school/

                      A good Homeschool course of instruction should cost at the most 1K a year. And I would expect a whole lot of suport material to go with it.

                      After Homeschooling there is nothing that say you have to sit in a classroom to get a college digree, unless you just want the experiance.

                      How to Earn a College Degree Without Going to College (Paperback)
                      James P. Duffy

                      A good article:
                      http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2012/07/04/the-diy-degree/

                      An iteresting resourse:
                      http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/index.htm

                      There are other options avalible we just need to look.

                      Like

                    6. You might recall, as I do, that our esteemed hostess mentioned that while home schooling they covered two and a half years of material in one year. When the son reentered public school it was to attend a program that allowed him to take college courses. The young man is currently in an engineering program in college, and to get into it he had to have taken certain courses.

                      Edward de Bono, while excellent, is insufficient for the needs in this case. He may teach you to think outside the box, but he will not teach you how to design the box, build the box or do the necessary math.

                      Like

                    7. At no point did sugest that Edward de Bono was all that was needed.

                      It was put for with in the context of a list of other books, that would provide a basic high school equivalent education.

                      Like

                    8. When I got Marshall home to homeschool he was reading at “second grade level” which means they had won and he was guessing. Also, for various reasons, he had no idea he COULD learn. So a great part of this was showing him he could learn, which involved tempting him. When someone is ill you don’t need to give them their favorite foods, but it helps.
                      Marshall wanted to learn Greek and Greek history. Yes, we had books, but I don’t know Greek, so I enrolled him in an online course. Then because he liked the teachers, I enrolled him in Greek History too.
                      I didn’t know enough math or physics when he really got going. And a lot of this was following what the school required AND keeping him engaged. Could we have done it cheaper? Sure. But I was under contract for six books that year. I couldn’t drop everything AND research to teach him. 1k a month just about broke us, but it was less than I made on those six books. (At least before taxes. Don’t get me started on taxes. JUST don’t.)

                      Like

                    10. Sir, I am sorry. Either you are being deliberately obtuse, or you have failed to take what you learned from the likes of de Bono to heart.

                      I read a statement which referred to a list of books given elsewhere, suggested that the library could also be utilized and then stated the cost of $50. In replying I suggested this would not be adequate to the task that was at hand, and gave reference to de Bono as an illustration*.

                      I have home educated, and while it can be done on a shoe string this depends on what the child needs and where the child in question is headed. (Still, I know of no one who has accomplished this at the cost of $50 for High School.) In our case The Daughter’s interest and talent lies in the hard sciences. Some of our greatest expenses involved math texts and various college level texts, which, even when acquired used, cost big bucks.

                      *Yes, that box was an illustration — a word picture intended to expresses a point, but, unlike a blue print, it was not to be understood to encompass the entirety. It might also be noted that if said illustrious box were to be built by the family in question it would contain Schrodingers cat, but that, my dears, is entirely a different story. ;-)

                      Like

                    11. CACS,

                      Touché.

                      I have oversimplified my argument to the point of absurdity. But the point I was trying to make is that educating our youth, or ourselves, doesn’t need to be or isn’t necessarily cost prohibitive or time consuming.

                      It’s not that I’m being obtuse it’s I flat out reject the premiss that people can be left with no choice. You always have a choice.
                      :-)

                      Like

                    12. $1000 a month Holycrapola Batman. I’m assuming that is because you are required to buy CO state aproved curriculum and matterials?

                      I forget how good we have it here in Texas.

                      Like

                    13. “Holy Fucking Shit …..

                      Foxfier don’t put words into my mouth. At no point have I sugested that you have to lie, or steal. Cheat maybe in finding your work around.”

                      That sounded exactly like what you were saying, if it wasn’t you used poor word choice, because as far as I can see that is exactly what everyone who responded to you got out of your message, I wouldn’t accuse everybody of independently putting words in your mouth.

                      Like

                    14. “All I hear is excuse, and no real reasons as to why someone can’t or is prevented from doing something they want to do. If someone raelly wants to do something they will find away.” – me

                      At what point in that statment did I say, by any means legal or not. You might think that is what I mean, but that is not what I said. There are legal options not being considered or thought of in our discusion.

                      All I get is they just don’t have any other options/choice. No they have options and choices. They might not know they have them. They might not be looking for them. They might determine that they are not right for their situation. But they have choices and options.

                      —————-

                      Foxfier | March 19, 2013 at 11:11 am |
                      All I hear is excuse, and no real reasons as to why someone can’t or is prevented from doing something they want to do. If someone raelly wants to do something they will find away.

                      Oh, so we’re not *really* forced to use public schools, because we could lie, cheat and steal enough to be able to survive while homeschooling.

                      Like

          5. Yes, some people make lousy monetary choices. But you will find that there are often reasons we do not know.

            When I last read about them, under local subsidized housing rules your rent was set on a sliding scale in relationship to your income, and this was not capped. What was capped was what you or anyone in your household could have in a savings account. So you could invest in a quality car or electronics without being penalized, but not a savings bond. You can’t save to get a nest egg to move out. Nor can you save to send your kids to school. Nor could they. (There is a horrid story I read out of Chicago about a girl who worked so she could to go to college. Her savings were seized to pay the government back for the assistance the family had collected.)

            It could rationally be argued that the rules are written to keep people on public assistance and to teach people to make what would otherwise be bad choices.

            Like

            1. They the choose to stay on public assistance.

              They would want to lower your standerd of live by going off it now would they. Why give up all that easy money. That would be like having self-respect or something.

              Excuse.

              Like

              1. They all of them have plenty of self-respect. they respect themselves for not being suckers, buying into a system which screws the bourgeoisie when they can enjoy most of the benefits of such a life with far less effort.

                Especially since they have political and social leaders quite ready to explain how society has victimized them and exploited them* and makes their aspirations of joining the bourgeoisie hopeless.

                Many of them made their choices while young, ignorant and stupid (but I repeat myself) and having made those choices are trapped in them. Restructuring your life and reevaluating such fundamental attitudes requires effort, discipline and commitment — exactly the personal attributes they have been encouraged to not develop.

                *Logic is a tool of the white devil oppressor, used to keep them down and to deny what they know in their hearts.

                Like

              2. If people who have a record of working and are presently looking for work in our area cannot find work…it makes it rather difficult to pull one’s self up by their own boot straps and it seems the ridiculous image it is. (Think about it.)

                To quote Joseph Heller’s Catch 22:

                “From now on I’m thinking only of me.”
                Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.”

                “Then,” said Yossarian, “I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”

                Like

            2. It could rationally be argued that the rules are written to keep people on public assistance and to teach people to make what would otherwise be bad choices.

              And so the thread comes crashing back to “Malice or Incompetence?” Do the people who write the rules simply not know how to craft incentives that are not perverse, or are they deliberately building in job security for themselves?

              Like

              1. Yup, right back to the question of malice or incompetence. I think the answer is both, although not always at the same time.

                Like

            3. Or take us. We’re near hitting bottom on our savings, but at the end of the year we spent a ton on equipment including that which we marginally might need. Why? Because we got an unexpected check from Japan, which we hadn’t accounted for, and needed to reduce my self employment tax. As much as we spent, it was less than what we’d have to pay the government otherwise.
              Anyone knowing how tight we are would think we’d gone nuts spending money on stuff like drawing equipment for me. (I draw concepts for my cover artists, so it’s deductible. I’ve found trying to explain things to cover artists in words gets very bad covers, but if I show them an even halfway suggestive sketch they go “oh” and do something wonderful like the cover of DST — in my sketch she had clothes, I swear :) ) BUT because of our twisted laws it was the rational thing to do.

              Like

      2. Josh, I know a dozen families where both parents work, and they’re barely scraping by. There’s no money (and at the moment, no openings) for anything BUT public schools. These parents don’t have the time, and in two cases, the education, to teach their kids (one is an Hispanic family that got legitimized by the LAST amnesty — they’re against another one. No one in the family has gone beyond what would be considered the 8th grade in the US.).

        Yes, there are people to squander their money. There are also millions of decent parents with just enough education, just enough money coming in, to cover the bills and put food on the table. If you haven’t been paying attention, the cost of energy has increased by 40% in the last four years, food has increased by at LEAST 20%, and gas has doubled. Car insurance, mandatory in Colorado, has also gone up some 20%. Today’s dollar buys less than 70 cents did four years ago, and raises have been few. I’ve personally had four “cost of living” raises in the last four years that totaled about 9%. Prices have risen about 40%. I’ve managed to fill in the gap, but it hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been fun. There’s a larger segment of the population who haven’t been able to keep up than have. I know this from experience, and from my friends telling me.

        Like

    1. Indeed. 2^10 = 1024, so this gives the thread a little bit of a buffer. (well four bits of buffer:-)

      Like

  27. Pingback: News of the Week for Mar. 18th, 2013 | The Political Hat
  28. Pingback: News of the Week for Mar. 18th, 2013 | The Political Hat

  29. and that is why i homeschool.
    we start with sound out words and flash cards as soon as they are talking (age 2 or 3) and by age 7 or 8 my kids are all reading fluently.
    i hate the guessing words crap.

    Like

  30. “To many people say I can’t when they mean I don’t wan’t to put forth the effort.”

    Josh,
    what you seem either incapable or unwilling to understand is that everybody is not saying that they can’t physically, possibly, have the kids not go public school; but that the other options are WORSE.

    Like

    1. “All I’m going to say is their diffinition of worse is different than mine, and people have to deal with the consequences of their actions.”

      Well if raising a healthy kid, or having a decent place to raise them in, or getting to raise them at all without the government taking them away (which incidentally in all liklihood means they will be going to a public school) is the WORSE choice, well all I can say is I’m glad I wasn’t your kid.

      You obviously CAN”T accept that anyone else might have a valid point .

      Out of curiousity did YOU go to a public school? Because wherever you were educated they did an extremely poor job of installing debating skills. Reiterating the same thing over and over, without having any evidence to back it up, and refusing to acknowledge all evidence to the contrary that is brought up is a poor way to sway people to your way of thinking.

      Like

      1. Bearcat and to all that took offense to my position,

        What you guys obviously CAN”T accept is that I might have a valid point.

        What you guys fail to realize is I’m just stating my opinion. I’m not trying to debate you. I don’t even care if you agree with me. What I do find intolerable is the dismissive attitude that I just haven’t considered my position in the right way.
        My opinion is based in extensive reading/study of economics, my own anecdotal evidence & life experiences.
        What you guys are trying to do is get me to do is participate in a false choice arguments,  where the only acceptable choices are defined by you guys. If I step outside of what you guys find acceptable, I’m then accused of being unreasonable & insensitive. I’m now supposed to, I guess, go I better modify my position, as I don’t want you guys to think badly of me, or excluded me from the group. You want me to practice a little intellectual dishonesty.
        Why am I supposed to take your guys anecdotal evidence over my life experiences? And that is all you guys have put forth; stories of others and how they delt with their life choices.

        I provided links to sites and information as to why I believe the way I do; like the FED Household Debt and Credit Report

        Click to access DistrictReport_Q22012.pdf

        I provided two sites that gave an analyse of the state of family debt in the US. (FYI: The reason I brought up entitlement culture is that as with anything that the government provides that we can provided for ourselves it becomes a crutch .) The one with infamies infography was dismised because they didn’t provide siting on the infography or page. Did anyone look deaper into the site for the detailed analyse? The other site said where they gathherd there information from, but that was dismissed as not specific enough.
        I also directed you guys to shadowstats website as another sourse for where I get my information. I thought about, but didn’t get around to mentioning Peter Schiff’s blog, and there are others.

        Why should I not summarily dismiss your position as you have dismissed mine?

        Now I going to get into this bit of obfuscation:

        “Well if raising a healthy kid, or having a decent place to raise them in, or getting to raise them at all without the government taking them away (which incidentally in all liklihood means they will be going to a public school) is the WORSE choice, well all I can say is I’m glad I wasn’t your kid.”

        This is a false choice argument.
        That the only valid choices are between sending your kids to public school or not educating you kids, because home schooling is prohibativly expensive and time consuming; with the threat that the government will take your kids away for neglecting their education and by extension them (This last is not even a consideration in Texas). I find the worse solution to be sending my kids (if I had any) to public school where the they will be more than likely to be indoctrinated into lefty idololigy. I feel that I would ended up spending more time & resourse deproraming my kids or fighting the public school system, than if I just educated them myself homeschooling, because that is what I feel I would have to do to not leave my kids at the mercy of our crappy public school system, and that is my definition of WORSE!

        Like

        1. The thing is Josh, most of us here agree with you mostly on your opinions about the public school system . It is your all or nothing, my way or the highway, approach that is causing us to get our backs up, there are other things you have said that some of us have agreed and some have disagreed with. Again it is the fact that you state your opinion as fact, and refuse to acknowledge any exceptions or mitigating circumstances, that is causing hackles to rise. If one of your statements is (I’m struggling for a word here, wrong doesn’t really fit) way out in left field and somebody points it out, like Foxfier did up above, you deny you ever said it, then repeat it using different words.

          Oh, and “the threat that the government will take your kids away for neglecting their education and by extension them (This last is not even a consideration in Texas”

          Isn’t that one of the reasons the Feds used for going it at Waco? True it may not be as much of a consideration in Texas, it isn’t as much of a consideration here in Idaho as it would be across the border in Washington, but with the Feds in charge of the Dept. of Ed. I wouldn’t say it was no consideration.

          Like

          1. If you hold your kids out of school without jumping through the necessary hoops, they will be taken away. Home schooling parents are advised that when visited by ANY representative of the state — truant officer, welfare caseworker, social worker, child protective custody — meet them at the door and conduct the interview on the front stoop/porch/sidewalk. They are NOT to be allowed into the house. That is not paranoia.

            Go here and browse: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/
            I particularly recommend these columns:
            You never took drugs, but you can’t keep your child
            My ‘victory’ over secrecy in the family courts has a nasty twist
            A victory for common sense
            Judge: open family court hearings
            A barrister becomes the judge of her client’s sanity

            Those are just the last 3-4 months. We are not yet England, but they are moving us toward that point. The Teachers’ unions are actively pressuring for imposition of laws obstructing home education if not outright blocking it. The price of liberty has ever been eternal vigilance.

            Like

            1. One of the determinants in sending Marsh back to school was the election of a CO legislature actively hostile to homeschooling. I haven’t actually heard of this happening (but I haven’t been in the loop for … seven years?) but our law apparently now gives the right to ANYONE seeing a school child out on a school day to perform a citizens arrest on the accompanying adult, and hold them till truant authorities arrive.

              Considering that Marshall and I usually did his school work by ten am, went out and ran errands (with him usually relating what he heard) and in the afternoon either took art classes together, or went somewhere to draw together OR went for walks, or went to the coffee shop, or other stuff we enjoyed, often with a book… you see where this was worrisome.

              Like

              1. It is school hours? You want to take your child to the library to do some research and pick up some book on history and language arts. You think it would be a great idea to walk around the lake at the county park for physical fitness and while you are at it do field work on botany. You want to go to a nearby monadock as part of your geology unit and hike around it as part of your physical fitness program. You are thinking about going to the Federal Battlefield for history and more physical fitness. If you are a pubic school teacher there are bunches of paper work, permission slips and arrangement to be made. If you home school in some states watch out, someone may call out the authorities and you might loose your child!

                Thank G-d North Carolina has some of the better home education laws. It appears that someone suggested that whatever requirement they placed on home educators might result in them being sued for failure to meet the same in the public schools.

                Like

          2. Bearcat,

            I’ll start by addressing this:

            “It is your all or nothing, my way or the highway, approach that is causing us to get our backs up,… Again it is the fact that you state your opinion as fact, and refuse to acknowledge any exceptions or mitigating circumstances” – Bearcat

            Something I wrote:

             “Why are you telling me this,” because, even if I didn’t know it my dad was helping me build my own personal code of ethics and conduct, a code or “Tao of Josh” if you will. Now fast forward 20 some years, I’ve tried to live my life by this code. Some of it I got from my dad and some I got from books. I never wrote it down, until now. It was just these ideas floating around in the back of my head. “Again why are you telling me this?” It’s simple, I see so many people making the same mistakes over and over. These same people complain that “life is hard,” and now I can say, “No its not. It’s just you making it appear that way. Here is my code of conduct and lets help you make one of your own, because the hardest part about life, in my opinion, is making decisions; if you have a code of conduct making decisions becomes easy. You see with out a structured way of looking at the world we tend to make decisions haphazardly and in the moment. We might do something one way one time, and then in a similar situation do it another way; this leads to inconsistency of results, and we scratch are heads and wonder why.”

            From: Intro to The Tao of Josh – Why having a code of Ethics and Conduct makes life easer.
            http://the-tao-of-josh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-having-code-of-ethics-and-conduct.html

            (FYI: I wrote this as if I was explaining my code/guiding principles to some else. Also I was think of maybe it could be turned  into a book.) 

            Why even have a moral code and principles for guiding us, if they are situational & mutable? That anytime life get’s hard we can give ourselves permission to deviate from them? I’m pretty inflexable in my beliefs, because anytime that I’ve deviated from them my life has took a bad tern. This is what I demand of myself, and if I let excusism* to creep into my thinking I drift into actions that are not in my best interest (Overton Window). 
            *The easiest person to lie to is oneself. We can easily talk, justify doing some pretty amazingly stupid things.

            The comment that started this all.

            ———-

            “Unfortunately, there are millions of Americans that have no other choice.”

            Mike,

            Bullsh*t!!!!

            That is a cop-out. Having choices you don’t like is not having no choices, and most of time (my op[in]ion) it is prioritizing things over the kids, mcmanisions, cars….

            There is always a choice, it just isn’t guarantied to be easy or pleasant.

            Sorry, that mentality is hard enough to take when the *left* spouts it; we don’t need to buy into it to.

            Everytime [I] h[ear] someone on[-e] ourside buy into this narrative, I just want to screem.

            Sarah, this why I don’t think it’s going to turn out well what ever happens. We, it seems, have lost that; what ever it takes we will pick ourselves up by our boot straps, mentality that mades us great.
            :.(

            ———-

            Bold added and [minor :-) ] spelling edits.

            Do I need state it out-right ever time a say something or state something that it’s my opinion or belief?
            Yes, I’m emphatic (not as clearly as I would like) when expressing myself, from what you tell me this comes across as that you and others think I think of them as facts, not as my opinions. I’ll try to work on this, but this is how the thoughts are in my head. I just write free flow and edit out a lot of the tangential and half-formed thoughts that creep in. You would be suprised by how much (I think) get’s edit out, but some still slip by.
            Like this one, “This last is not even a consideration in Texas” and you correct in pointing it out. I self-sabotage all the time in my writing by adding tangents, and not focusing on one point at a time. I really suck at this communicating with the written word. I so identified with the Sarah’s story (comment made on later post) of her son making arguments to points that haven’t even been made. I find it hard to condense my thoughts into the written form. I get so frustrated. I know what I mean and when someone takes what wrote differently than how I intended it,  it takes me by surprise; even though it shouldn’t, it happens all the time. (More on this in a comment follow for RES.)
            Also, this writing what’s in my head drifts over, and makes it hard to edit.  When I wrote “that is not what I said” what I should of wrote is “that is not what I meant.” Because I know what I mean, I tend to overlook how others might interpt my what I write.
            Aughhhh…. I just want to scrap all this writing, but it’s good for me to grow, and this I hope you guys will indulge me, if Sarah you think this is to disruptive let me know.

            (I noticed others have commented; while, I was writing this. I’ll address their points, but my brain hurts, and I’m going to take a brake for a bit.)

            Like

        2. What you guys fail to realize is I’m just stating my opinion. I’m not trying to debate you. I don’t even care if you agree with me. What I do find intolerable is the dismissive attitude that I just haven’t considered my position in the right way. My opinion is based in extensive reading/study of economics, my own anecdotal evidence & life experiences. What you guys are trying to do is get me to do is participate in a false choice arguments, where the only acceptable choices are defined by you guys. If I step outside of what you guys find acceptable, I’m then accused of being unreasonable & insensitive.

          So you are just stating your opinion based on your research, experience and thought? What do you think we have been doing?

          You are not trying to debate us? Could have fooled me.

          How do you differ from what you accuse us of being? We see you as ignoring anything that challenges your paradigm. You have pressed me to agree with you that there is always a choice. You have explained to others that they just haven’t considered their opinion in the right way.

          You call our challenges false choice arguments. You have, in this manner, implied the we are liars — You never answered my questions: What would you say to my friend who was unexpectedly widowed on Thanksgiving? What would you say to the family that had both parents diagnosed with cancer in the same year, one not surviving? These are real people in my life and their worlds have been turned upside down by things in which they had no choice.

          Don’t care if we agree? Then why do you keep pressing the matter? You have determined that none of us are going to surrender what we have learned, experienced and observed up until now and ‘see the light’ acknowledging obvious superior wisdom … and in this case you are, for once, quite right.

          I am sorry that you CAN’T accept that sometimes people don’t have choices. We can’t accept that. We know that sometime life puts you in a corner.

          Like

          1. CACS,

            Let’s start with this,

            “So you are just stating your opinion based on your research, experience and thought? What do you think we have been doing?”

            The same. Have I stated differently?

            “You are not trying to debate us? Could have fooled me.

            How do you differ from what you accuse us of being? We see you as ignoring anything that challenges your paradigm. You have pressed me to agree with you that there is always a choice. You have explained to others that they just haven’t considered their opinion in the right way.”

            Not ignoring. But nothing that has been put forth has changed my mind, and this is mostly my fault; as, I haven’t made clear what paradigm is. I feel most of what you have put forth is in responce to what you think I mean. I haven’t been pressing you to agree with me. I’ve been trying to make clear, ineptly, what my position actualy is. I guess this came off as you just haven’t thought of this the right way.

            “You call our challenges false choice arguments. You have, in this manner, implied the we are liars”

            That is oneway of looking at it. I think of it as practicing self-deception. It easy to lie to oneself. Hell in my experience it’s our greatest past time. Anytime we make excuses or justify our action more than likely we are lying to ourselves. 

            “You never answered my questions: What would you say to my friend who was unexpectedly widowed on Thanksgiving? What would you say to the family that had both parents diagnosed with cancer in the same year, one not surviving? These are real people in my life and their worlds have been turned upside down by things in which they had no choice.”

            I didn’t answer your question, because I was being a coward. Anything I say could and probable will be take as insensitive. But hear goes.
            This is the problem with the english language; choice implies that there are at least two choices that we can choose from. Yes, there are events in our lives that are out of our control and we are not given a choice. The out come just is. But the point that I’ve been, so badly, trying to make is we always have a choice in how we deal with what life throws at us. We can let life role over us or we can fight on. (Probable still clear as mud. :-( )

            “Don’t care if we agree? Then why do you keep pressing the matter? You have determined that none of us are going to surrender what we have learned, experienced and observed up until now and ‘see the light’ acknowledging obvious superior wisdom … and in this case you are, for once, quite right.”

            Why do I keep pressing the matter? Because I want you to disagree, if you actualy do, with my position, not with what you think my position is. I can live with you disagreeing with me, but not with this misunderstanding between us.

            “I am sorry that you CAN’T accept that sometimes people don’t have choices. We can’t accept that. We know that sometime life puts you in a corner.”

            I CAN accept that sometimes things happen to us that are out of our control, but that is not the same as having no choice in how we deal with life. When life puts you in a corner, to me, you fight your way out.

            This has been my latest atempt at making myself understoud with the writen language.

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            1. I now know that /blockequote doesn’t work.

              “Don’t care if we agree? Then why do you keep pressing the matter? You have determined that none of us are going to surrender what we have learned, experienced and observed up until now and ‘see the light’ acknowledging obvious superior wisdom … and in this case you are, for once, quite right.”

              Why do I keep pressing the matter? Because I want you to disagree, if you actualy do, with my position, not with what you think my position is. I can live with you disagreeing with me, but not with this misunderstanding between us.

              “I am sorry that you CAN’T accept that sometimes people don’t have choices. We can’t accept that. We know that sometime life puts you in a corner.”

              I CAN accept that sometimes things happen to us that are out of our control, but that is not the same as having no choice in how we deal with life. When life puts you in a corner, to me, you fight your way out.

              This has been my latest atempt at making myself understoud with the writen language.

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              2. Josh — Peace–
                I used to believe your position. There was a small Ameridian town near where I lived that was a definite slum. I wondered why and how people lived that way–

                Now it is thirty years later– I have been in the Navy, traveled the world, married, etc. — I am now living in what I considered a slum in my youth. (There are two trailer parts near the apartment complex where I live). I am now seeing what it is like being on the other end without the energy, youth, and health that I had for forty years.

                Yes– there are people who could probably fight out of their circumstances. Less now because the laws have turned against the citizens, which is what some of the comments where showing– However, there are a lot like me who have fought the good fight and are fighting just to stay alive. If you want to know what kind of fight I have been fighting for ten years look up information on Wegener’s Granulomatosis. I am not the only one, whether it is the fight to keep food on the table, or to educate the children. We are living in a day (forced on us imho) where both parents have to work just to keep a roof over their families.

                It still bothers me that parents let their children go feral (We have a teenager who burns the neighbor’s motorcycle, breaks things, and threatens the weaker people in our community– we have a lot of disabled people and seniors here.) It bothers me that my dream to have a piece of property (or even just an RV) has been lost because of how much I pay in medical and dental bills every year.

                You pointed out in your first post that many people in slum areas have new cars and trucks. I saw that on the reservation. However, sometimes it is cheaper to lease–

                Having the energy to fight is a blessing. I learned through my circumstances that I can’t judge another’s fight. I have a couple of sisters who really believe that the government owes them a living. You might say that they are the typical welfare recipient. However, one of them has a disabled child who is mentally and physically incapacitated. Through the disability programs, my sister has been able to care for her for years. The child who should be an adult is the size of a toddler. Even those with entitlement beliefs fight for their children.

                I saw a lot of what you are seeing when the Left was seducing a large population away from religion. Say what you will, but Christianity even with all its faults does teach responsibility and duty, which is missing today. I should say that the faults do not come from the religion, but from the people who are trying to follow its teachings.

                So yea– I am not trying to firm the fires– I just want you to realize that you are not on the same part of your life experience than some of us here. (Yea, I know– you are not as young as you sound.) Plus the whirlwind that we are reaping (in laws, society, etc) started long before we were born.

                Cyn

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                1. Speaking of Native Americans and choices – long ago I sat through Law and Motion Day in the courthouse in Lewiston Idaho (the place where a new janitor tried to scrub the spots off a sculpted Appaloosa thinking it had been tagged). One after another great big handsome men fit to play opposite John Wayne were standing up and promising to pay what they could on child support – when spring came and they could find work throwing rocks out of the fields – the only job available to the Reservation men with their education and training .

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                  1. YEP– There was a lot of despair there– plus there were business men who would up the prices about 20 percent when they saw an Indian in their store. There was an incident (my father saw this happen) where a doctor refused to treat an Indian with a split open head. (In the 80s btw).

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                  2. Clark, I live by that Nez Perce res, all those res Indians get a government check every month, why would they have to wait until they went to work to pay child support? (Note that I realize child support laws are often abused, and child support set at ridiculously high rates, but your story implied that they were paying none, not trying to get their child support reduced).

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                    1. HEY!! I will thank you to keep me out of your squabble. I don’t live near any Nez Perce (that I know of, at any rate) and I get no gummint checks.

                      Like I don’ got ’nuff trouble with what I do do. Ratzle-fratzin’ trible makers.

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                    2. RES indians. Oh, my. The reservation has a high wall to keep off the pun inundation. Children are trained in thought, deep thought, sideways philosophy and advanced punning. For their manhood ritual the young braves go out into the desert and wrestle with a paradox single handed. Those who return take an adult name earned during their ordeal. Chief Resolute Conclusion says that since the time of chief Conundrum Paradoxical it has been so, and the tradition shall continue till the end of time, or till all RES Indians agree on something, be it the time of day, the color of the sky or the directions of the compass — whichever comes first.

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                    9. Gives a whole new meaning to ‘Shoot the Moon’ when you are at the Res Casino.

                      At RES’s Casino on the other hand, the dealer tosses out loaded questions instead of dice.

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                    10. No doubt the Clearwater River Casino and Resort combined with payments to the Nez Perce and other tribes after the settlement of cases after Cobell ( The federal government will pay more than $1 billion to settle a series of lawsuits brought by American Indian tribes over mismanagement of tribal money and trust lands) has made all the tribal members filthy rich.

                      Although in the post Kramer v. Kramer world Idaho went overboard with joint custody orders assuming that two people who couldn’t stay married would get along peachy keen once divorced still Idaho has a decent or at least pretty determinate system for setting child support. Not much abused in setting payment rates though many men apparently would like to leave the old family behind and start fresh devoting all their resources to their wonderful new wife and the children who appreciate their father unlike the ungrateful children of divorce.

                      Once again a quick quote posted. Google for full text.
                      The Idaho Child Support Guidelines
                      (I.C.S.G.) In Rule 6(c)(6) of the Idaho Rules of Civil Procedure (I.R.C.P.)
                      Updated July 1, 2012
                      Section 1. Introduction.
                      The Child Support Guidelines are intended to give specific guidance for evaluating evidence in child support proceedings. Acknowledging there are diverse needs and resources in individual cases, the following Guidelines will produce a more equitable and uniform approach in establishing child support obligations. The Guidelines may be referred to as the Idaho Child Support Guidelines (I.C.S.G.).

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                    11. Yes, Clark, Idaho does have a much better record on both custody and child support than some other states, still biased towards the mother I believe, but much less so than others.

                      My belief that ALL government subsidies to tribal members should be one of the first entitlements cut also bias’ me on practically any subject dealing with tribal members finances. I believe your point in your original comment was the effectiveness or lack thereof of res public schools, from purely anecdotal evidence I haven’t seen that they are producing an inferiorly educated non-tribal student than other Idaho public schools. Tribal students are however a different case, but then they don’t have much incentive to learn, because they are going to receive a living wage from the feds regardless of what they do or don’t learn in school. Which again brings us full circle to the original question, malice or incompetence?

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              3. I CAN accept that sometimes things happen to us that are out of our control, but that is not the same as having no choice in how we deal with life. When life puts you in a corner, to me, you fight your way out.

                I think I understand what you’re saying. You appear to be using a definition of “having a choice” that is trivially true, but not entirely useful. For example, almost everyone living in a horrible situation has the choice of suicide. This is usually ruled out as a choice, but it still exists.
                The parent who wants to home school and declines to jump through administrative hoops is exercising a choice, but one that will result in the children being institutionally schooled anyway after they’ve been taken away, at gunpoint if need be.
                The police who take those children away have a choice. They can disregard orders from their superiors, quit their jobs, or commit suicide. The consequences of these are bad enough that the vast majority of police officers simply don’t see those as “choices”, and don’t take them.
                Sometimes, the choices people have are like the choice Harry Mudd was offered in “I, Mudd” — none of them very good ones. (Although to be sure, Mudd did “think outside the box” when confronted with those choices.)

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            2. Your emphatic insistence that people always had a choice to avoid the public schools was unfortunate.

              I CAN accept that sometimes things happen to us that are out of our control, but that is not the same as having no choice in how we deal with life. When life puts you in a corner, to me, you fight your way out.

              Until they have managed to fight their way out of the corner life has put them in, there will be times where a family faces blows that put them in a position where they have no choice. They either have to avail themselves of the public schools or face charges of non-compliance with the state’s laws and have their children placed in public schools under court supervision.

              There are good people who have lived decent lives who find themselves in a position where they do not have any good choices in the given moment and they have to choose between bad and worse. I grant you that how someone faces the circumstances is in their control. To do so gracefully requires that you come to terms with where you are so you can rationally assess how to go from there..

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        3. What you guys obviously CAN”T accept is that I might have a valid point.

          Projection is an ugly thing….

          The idea that you may have a valid point is outweighed by the countering evidence.

          That we reach a conclusion you do not like does not mean we did not reach it validly.

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          1. Port 1 of a 2 part reply.

            What you guys obviously CAN”T accept is that I might have a valid point. – me

            That was a refrasing of Bearcat

            You obviously CAN”T accept that anyone else might have a valid point . – Bearcat

            to set up my responce.

            What you guys fail to realize is I’m just stating my opinion. I’m not trying to debate you. I don’t even care if you agree with me. What I do find intolerable is the dismissive attitude that I just haven’t considered my position in the right way.
            My opinion is based in extensive reading/study of economics, my own anecdotal evidence & life experiences. – me

            Projection is an ugly thing…. – Foxfier

            It sure is.

            The idea that you may have a valid point is outweighed by the countering evidence. – Foxfier

            Thanks for giving me your opinion. I respect that your life experiances have lead you to a different conclusion than Me. Can you grant me the same consideration, please.

            Rephrasing what you said:

            That I reach a conclusion you do not like does not mean I did not reach it validly. – me

            Was the exact point of my responce to Bearcat and to all that took offense to my position.

            I now want to address a comment you, Foxfier, made earlier in light of this new comment, and I’ll do that in Part 2.

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            1. Thanks for giving me your opinion.

              Oddly, it being my “opinion” does nothing to change that I– and several others here– have offered rational support for our “opinions,” which would make them educated opinions, while you have offered emotion, appeals to emotion, known bad evidence and– when all that didn’t work– hide behind false equivalency.

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              1. Foxfier,

                “….have offered rational support for our “opinions,” which would make them educated opinions,…”

                What you and other have offered in support of your opinions is anecdotal life experience for why you and others made the choices you have. I do not know if they are educated,  because you have not provided any other evidence other than life experiance, I guess you could be edjucated in the school of hard knocks. But I have tried to show that my opinions are not just based on my life experience only, but other outside research. Have you?

                What you have shown is that you have an internal logic that you use to make your decisions, we all do, but I’m going to go with my own, for now.

                “…while you have offered emotion, appeals to emotion,..”

                Yes, I have shown emotion, frustration and a little anger that it has caused. When has this translated into, you must believe me or see my point, because of it. And I don’t believe I have made a, “Do it for the children comment!” or it’s like any any where in my comments.
                Can you provide a quote of where you think I did this, because, if I did, I was unaware of it.

                “known bad evidence”

                This is your opinion, and I’ll treat it as such until you provide what you consider good evidence. Other than life experience, because my life experience tells me different. 

                And brings me to this:

                “…when all that didn’t work– hide behind false equivalency.”

                So, when you discount my life experience; including any reading and outside sources, by out right saying I’m wrong, it’s different because your life experiences are more valid than mine?

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                1. You are incorrect that we have offered only “anecdotal” evidence, while you most surely did offer evidence on the level of “I walked around a low income area and saw stuff that supports my view.”

                  You ignored countering evidence, offered bad evidence and cling to it even when it’s pointed out that it has been biased. When no other option was left, you would accept correction– but only to try to turn it back on those who pointed out where you went wrong.

                  All of this with a group that largely agrees with you. You can’t manage to avoid ALIENATING people who mostly agree, because you can’t adjust to existing facts or even support your views with decent evidence.

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          2. Part 2

            Foxfier | March 19, 2013 at 11:18 am | *  [* To denote comments from this reply.]

            * YOU did that, and all that I– and several other folks did– was point out that you had done it. Your data doesn’t need to be “refuted,” because it is not supported by anything but the force of being claimed.

            Really? And I feel the same can be said of the personal accounts of others, and I’ll try to explain. —>

            The comment that started this.
            ——————–
            I live next door to a low encome community housing. I walk/cut through all the time, on my way to Target. You [k]no[w] what I see parked infront of a lot of them, Lexis & Cadillacs… [bought with other people tax money]

            The middle class does it too. Buying houses & cars they can’t afford. [bought with money they don’t have, credit.]

            Why are our taxes so high, because we buy into; for some there is no other choice but public schools. [Public schools like all other entitlements is subject to gaming. This is also a call back to, for some there is no other choice.]

            When poeople choose to send there kids to public school, it’s because it’s easier choice, not that there is a lack of choice. [In hind sight you guys would wanted me to say, it’s the less Worse choice.]

            Instead of people facing hard budgeting problems, the US’s solution is just to enable/subsides peoples bad choices with public schools & Foodstamp/CHIP programs. [Tying it all together with the entitlement culture.] 

            A hundred years ago or so It was all most a deadly insult to offer some[one] help. It was like splapping them in the face. [Referencing that bootstrap culture we used to have.]

            Now we are at the point of who cares if we fail someone (government) will come a[long] and bail me out or edjumicate my kids. [We in this is the royal we for the US, not the we of this blog. And referencing the entailment culture.]

            —————-
            Note: Bold added for emphasis  [my thoughts & editing]

            Sarah then gave a personal account of all the reasons & justifications why she made the choices she did. Ending her comment with this:

            Seriously Josh, you have NO clue what the rest of us are surviving on out here.

            FYI: I found this funny as I made a grand total of $20,020.02 after taxes last year. The govt. was kind enough to return $567 dollars back to me. Since we are getting personal, with my refund & a $1000 I have saved/ allotted for this expenditure, I’m going to put half down on a new $3000 SYM Wolf 150 motorcycle. So I don’t have to take the bus & I can pick up some extra shifts. It will be the first new vehicle that I’ve ever owned. It will be the first time I will have any debt in 7 years. I do think I know what it’s like to live on a limited budget. But I choose to do security and make my $10.50 to a $11 dollars an hour, becuse there’s a lot of free time to read. This also is what I have been pulling in for the last 13 years.

            I then made this comment in responce to Sarah:

            ————

            Your assuming that everyone is as respon[s]ible as you. [I said this,  because a sampling group of one family, so far, is not definitive or necissarily representive of the group  at large. And by group I mean the US. Sarah was make to her what she considers responcible choice. I conflated that with was the group under discussion actualy making Responsible choices, and I don’t believe the majority are.]

            This wasn’t ment to be a personsl attack on you. [Giving a personal account & getting heated…. I was trying to talk about how we have choices & entitlement culture creaping over into Conservative & Libertarian thought.]

            And the economic date doesn’t suport your conclusion that everyone else is doing the same. [Think this one speaks for itself, and is based on my own experience & research.] 

            Meet the average American family:

            (The dreaded infographic goes here.)

            [The point of the infographic was to give a glimps into where I was coming from in my thinking, not be a definative source for you to draw a conclution.]

            —————–

            What I got in response was two comments. One a lecture [at lest that is how I took it.] on the evils of infographics, and the other explaining how people game the systems. With this as the last line:

            Now what does that have to do with people who are married, at least one has a full-time job and they do not game the system– or even use the “safety net” unless they actually NEED it?

            Need is such a subjective term, so in my response I talked about  how safety nets distort how we look at risk. I oversimplified trying to get my point across with examples instead of just out right state my posistion. So, in effect, I didn’t make it clear that I feel all to often people conflate need with wanting and necessity.  When someone says, “I need to own my own home.” is this coming from want or nessesity? To me the underling necessity is we need something to protect us from the elements, so that we don’t freeze in the winter or die from heat exhaustion in summer. As long as you fulfill  the necessity is all that should matter. How you want to fulfill it is not a nesesity. I’m sure a lot of good people, never thought they would Need the safety net/hammock.  But it is there, and for me reling on it as my back up plan shouldn’t be an option. I also wonder how many people plan on how to educate and pay for their kids education before they have them. Or do they wait till their already in the corner to then try to figure away out.  [This also aplies to the point CACS brought up.] The left has put for this nerative that we need the government to provide safety nets; like we can’t build our own with good planning. I wonder how many of us plan for the unexpected, like a death in the family, natural disasters, man made disasters….. Or is our back up plan the govt. will step in? Yes, there no guaranties in life, but one. And we, IMHO, need to plan accordingly.
            Why are entitlements so dangerious, because they are like drugs, and there are a lot of drug pushers (left) out there, pushing the narrative, that we NEED them just incase. “You NEED to own your own home. It’s the American Dream, so you deserve it.” “You work to hard, and educating your kids is expensive and time consuming. We’ll do it for you.” Like drugs becoming addicted to entitlements is a gradual process, unless you are born into it. The first time you buy something with a credit card, that wasn’t so bad. You got your first hit, and you paid it back promtly. You learned you don’t actual have to have the money to buy something.
            I need to goto college to make something of myself (debatable), I can’t afford to, but I can get all those student loans, and now I can.
            This is and was the point I was trying to make in answering the question, “Now what does that have to do with people who are married, at least one has a full-time job and they do not game the system– or even use the “safety net” unless they actually NEED it?”

            * We have multiple primary sources here, who know a hell of a lot more about what they can afford than you do and have explained, multiple times and in various ways, how exactly you are wrong and where the differences in finances lie.

            As have tryed to point out I started off talking about general state of entittlement culture and how it is seeping into thought proccess of the right: Libertarian & conservitive. All the personal accounts of your primary sources at best proves is that you as individuals have or have not succumb to the entitlement mentality. Unless you are sugesting that the people that have commented to my comment is a large enough sampling group to draw a conclusion from?

            * You either say the same thing again, claim you didn’t say the thing in the first place, or accuse others of misrepresenting what you said– sometimes all three.

            I said the the samething over, because obviously the entent that I was trying to get across didn’t happen, so I tried saying it a different way. I was, ineptly, trying to point out that just because that is what you think I meant(said) doesn’t mean that is what I meant (said).

            I would also, like to apoligize for cusing at you in my frustration. It was unacceptable behavior on my part.

            Sorry.

            * Attempting to judo the simple thing of “show actual evidence when claiming something” on the people who point out that you didn’t actually offer evidence doesn’t work.

            I’m still trying to figure out what you mean by “actual evidence.” I still don’t know how to convey to you all the hours spent perusing the internet and read reports looking at there conclusions and assumptions. Asking; how was the underling date collected and can it be intereted another way? Do I agree with there conclutions? All I can do is point you at source, and let you determine if you agree with them.
            I don’t happen to agree with a lot of the conclutions in the Fed report I linked to, but the underlying data is solid, as far as I can tell not have read every single individual banks/credit union financial statements and the other sourse for myself. I choose not to invest that much time. That a fulltime job for those that choose to do it, and that is why I choose to cross reference with other sources and their analyzes to try come up with an overal picture.

            Clear as mud?

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            1. Josh, by this time everybody has had ample opportunity to express their positions.

              You are in danger of moving into dead horse, beating of territory.

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