How to save public education

Kevin Baker - whose blog just celebrated its nineteenth blogoversary - has an uberpost about the dire state of education in this country.  You should go read the whole thing which lays out in detail (it's an uberpost, remember?) just how FUBAR'ed public education is on these shores.

It's an uberpost so it's impossible to excerpt, but Kevin's conclusion is what made me think:

The public school system cannot be reformed. I must be destroyed and the people in it must never have power over children again. 

Alas, destruction would be very difficult as there are too many vested interests at play here.  What we need to do it minimize the enemies our plan will make, and maximize the allies it will get.  I posted about this several years back, and still think that this plan has at least a fighting chance of getting through:

A modest proposal to prevent the fall of civilization

Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.

― Edward Gibbon

The Silicon Graybeard muses on the fall of civilization:

Over the years, I've said (and more often hinted) that what I see in the future is not just the chance of an economic collapse due to the world's unsustainable debt levels. I see a real chance for another Dark Ages. The main driving force there is the Postmodernists in academia pushing the idea of "my truth and your truth"; the idea that there isn't anything other than our perceptions of things. That works fine for simple questions like, "what's your favorite color?" but is completely wrong for "what's the speed of light?", "will this virus survive in air?" or any interactions with the real world. VDH follows those trends to the conclusion a Dark Age may already be starting.

When civilization falls, it falls hard.  We hear mostly dry statistics about the collapse of civilization, things like the population of Rome in 100 AD was around a million people.  That's impossible to visualize.  Instead, we should look at this:

Immagine gentilmente concessa da Wikipedia

This is Monte Testaccio in Rome.  It is a hill made entirely of broken pottery, and it dates to the first and second centuries AD.  It's over 100 feet high, around a kilometer around, and historians think that it used to be much larger but has eroded over the last two millennia.  The Roman "bread and circuses" was a huge welfare project that fed much of the city's population, and which required huge imports of not just grain but also olive oil - over a million gallons of oil each year, every year, for hundreds of years.  The oil was shipped in big clay pots, but what do you do with the pots when you've distributed the oil?  The Romans were the best engineers until at least the eighteenth century, and so they came up with an engineering solution: they made a mountain out of broken up pots.

And then it all fell, and fell so far and hard that it was forgotten.  The Roman Forum itself - the political center of the Ancient World for centuries - became a cow field, the Campo Vaccino:

Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino by J.M.W. Turner, painted in 1839

It's been said that any system can survive only three generations before facing crisis. The first generation is the generation that created the system. They knew it intimately. The second generation saw the system being created, and so at least understood its main functions and how they worked. The third generation inherited the system. They may or may not know anything at all about how it works.

If this is a system created by the government - and remember that government is politics - then politics will be the main thing that we can expect the third generation to understand.  NASA is an excellent example of this dynamic: the generation that won World War II created it.  They landed a man on the Moon and returned him safely to the Earth, all in that decade.  The generation that followed watched that.  They were able to make a Space Shuttle and a Mars Rover.  Now NASA is in the third generation and the Space Launch System is pushing a decade late and $20B over budget, all while offering less capability than SpaceX at ten times the price.  But hey, a Senator is happy so it's all good, amirite?

This Republic has a population that is observably more stupid than when I wore a younger man's shoes. This isn't just get offa my lawn ranting, it's a measurable fact:

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), test scores for 17 year olds have not improved since the early 1970s. That is, the average 17 year old in 2012 got about the same score in reading and math (287 and 306, respectively) as a 17 year old in 1971 or 1973 did (285 and 304, respectively). 

The response from professional educators?

Carr argues that flat scores aren’t terrible. “It’s a good thing that they’re not going down,” she said.

Well okay, then.  This is the same time period when per-pupil spending on K-12 education has skyrocketed:

If anything, this understates the scope of the problem: there is lots of discussion about how incoming college students can't read or do math very well, and so they have to take remedial course (and take on student debt while doing so) before they can start what would otherwise be their studies.

Note that this discussion has been about the portion of the public education system that is arguably working; it doesn't work at all in the inner cities.  None of Baltimore's schools graduate students who can do mathematics, and Atlanta's school system had a huge scandal where test scores were massively manipulated so that administrators could get their incentive bonus.  People went to jail for that, but the system is no better almost a decade later.

In short, the more government has gotten itself into education, the dumber the population has gotten - and at fabulous expense.  The system is broken, and since it's a government system (in which politics is uber alles) it will not reform itself.  Further, the public education system is generally popular throughout the land, so the normal political process will be useless for reform.

And so the Republic slouches towards the Campo Vaccino.  The third generation will lead to a fourth, and as Graybeard fears, a new Dark Age approaches.

Immodestly, I believe that there is a solution.  It's one that will improve performance, reduce costs, and be politically acceptable to large portions of the voters.  The Department of Education can issue a rule saying that if a public school system does not issue vouchers allowing parents to send their children to the school of their choice, that the Department will withhold education grants to that school system equal to the average per-pupil cost in that district.  The Department will then issue an Income Tax credit to the parents for that amount.  The Department will provide a free home schooling curriculum and teaching materials for free with the tax credit.

Simples.  No fuss, no muss.  It may even be that the Education Department can do this without any action of Congress.  I Am Not A Lawyer, but Congress has granted a huge amount of authority to the Regulatory State.

So why do I think that this is politically possible when the Teacher's Unions and Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) will fight this to the death?  Consider:

• Vouchers are popular among blacks and hispanics and have been for a long time.  This makes sense, as its their kids who are locked into failing school districts.  You don't get much more White Privilege than mandatory public schools.
• Tax Credits allow stay-at-home Moms to school their kids if they want.  Home schooling three kids at an average tax credit of around $12,000 per kid is the equivalent of a pre-tax job paying around $50,000/year.  Politically, this will play very well with women.
• We can expect this to be especially popular with black and hispanic women.  No doubt some upper middle class white women will complain that these women of color cannot be trusted to educate their children but we can dismiss this as veiled racism, and the women certainly can't do any worse than the current inner-city schools are doing.  At the very worst, the money wouldn't be going to an impenetrable education bureaucracy but rather directly to voters.
• Public schools will have to do a better job, at a lower cost.  Competition will focus on results, rather than on a politicized curriculum.

Now what's interesting about this is that politically this would hurt democrats and help republicans.  However, the people who think that politics doesn't enter into the public education system shouldn't concern themselves about, well, politics entering into the public education system.  And anyway, since government is politics, a better  description of "public education" is "government education", leading to "political education".

This is no panacea against the New Dark Age.  However, it puts resources in the hands of parents who presumably care more about their kids than a set of bureaucrats.  Eliminating all the nonsense permeating the schools (hello, Critical Race Theory!) will let teachers and parents focus on reading and math and you know, education.

Don't ever change, WaPo

Pretty much everyone is mocking Taylor Lorenz' WaPo article about how EVIL conservatives scuppered the new Ministry of Truth. You remember Taylor, don't you?  She's the one who doxxed the woman who ran the Libs of TikTok account and then sobbed about how mean everyone was to her.

Anyhow, this is the bit from her article that is the most jaw droppingly stupid:

Jankowicz’s case is a perfect example of this system at work, said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They try to define people by these single, decontextualized moments,” Brooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few TikTok videos, or one or two comments out of thousands of public appearances. They fixate on these small instances and they define this villain.”...

Okay, Taylor - now do Roseanne.

The Czar of Muscovy wrote a long, long time ago that you will understand the media perfectly if you just think of them as mean middle school girls.  Jealous. not very smart, but mean.

About that NATO expansion

So Finland and Sweden have applied for NATO membership, which would make them the first NATO partners to share a border with Russia.  Well, ignoring Kalingrad aka Konigsburg which is basically occupied and ethnicly cleansed East Prussia and not contiguous with Mother Russia herself. So NATO would be literally on Russia's doorstep.

This strikes me as exceptionally unwise.  It's hard to see how international relations will be more stable after this.  On the contrary.

But politics ain't beanbag, and neither are international politics. Turkey has had a rocky relationship for some time with the USA, NATO, and the EU.  But they are a full member of NATO, and so have veto power over any expansion.  It looks like they're exercising that option.

Maybe it's just to work a better deal with the US, NATO, and EU.  Me, I hope they hold out and make it ridiculously painful for Sweden and Finland to join.

I would ask full EU membership for Turkey in return of Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership if I were Erdogan.

Fair and neat.

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) May 18, 2022

Dad Joke CCIII

What do you feed a vegetarian zombie? 

Graaaaains!

NSA: "No known problems" in Quantum Computing resistant ciphers

Story.  Bruce Schneier (a crypto heavy-hitter) says he believes them. 

I'm not so sure.  Long term readers will remember how the NSA subverted commercial grade encryption.  I wrote about it at some length here and here and here.  Each of these were pretty damning:

1. These were all independent attempts to undermine commercial crypto.  In other words, NSA has tried at least three times to break crypto so that they can ready whatever they want, whenever they want.
2. Each of these attempts is very well documented.  NSA's fingers were found in the cookie jar, without question.
3. NSA's public statements need to be very carefully parsed.  I was at the Black Hat security conference and listened to NSA Director Alexander assure everyone that NSA analysts didn't just go joy riding through the data bases of stuff they collect from you and me; it was only hours later that the disclosure came out that, well, yeah they do.

So is this crypto on the up and up from NSA?  I don't know.  I'm sure not a crypto mathematician but their track record on trustworthiness leaves me wondering if they know something that we don't - a something that is classified so that they're technically truthful when they say there are no "known" (err, and unclassified) weaknesses.

Man, I'm so old that I remember when the NSA crypto nerds were the good guys ...

Happy Birthday Wolfgang!

The little pup has turned ten years old.

UPDATE 15 May 2022 19:17: Here is is at the Venice, FL dog beach today. 

Southwest Florida Spring Blogshoot - CANCELED

Both The Queen Of The World and I have had a continuous set of medical ailments, and that looks to continue.  Unfortunately, these include surgeries for both of us and we just can't organize the spring blogshoot.

Hopefully this is just a temporary phase and we will look for a fall blogshoot in October or early November.

Apologies to everyone about this, but it's just been too much.

When do The Powers That Be respect International Law, and when do they not?

It seems that one of Trump's Defense Secretaries has a new "tell all" book coming out, and in it he talks about how Trump wanted to bomb the drug cartels in Mexico and how awful that was.

I mean, what a shocking, awful, disgraceful violation of International Law - sending an attack into the territory of a sovereign ally.  Unthinkable!  I mean, he probably wouldn't have even let the government know he was going to attack!

Sort of like this:

That's Barack Obama his own self, saying that he basically knew he was violating International Law, for good reasons.  And what was the reason?  3,000 dead Americans, and the Pakistani government unwilling or unable to do anything about the perpetrators on their soil.

So what was Trump's reason?  Oh, wait:

More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.

So Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and was killed ten years later.  That's 300 a year, or about one a day.  The cartels kill 100,000 each year, or about 275 Americans a day.  But it was awesome that Obama violated International Law and it's The Worst Thing Ever that Trump even thought about it.

It makes you suspect that all this pious bloviating from the "Elites" is a bunch of hooey.  And it makes you wonder if they think that 275 people from Youngstown, Ohio and similar places in the hollowed out "Fly Over" America are less valuable (and less worthy of protection) than one person working high finance in the World Trade Center.

Actually, I don't wonder at all.  It does make me wonder if J.D. Vance is right: "If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?..."

Man, Trump sure hired a bunch of snakes in the grass.

What happens when tens of millions of Americans become convinced that elections are shams?

I don't know the answer to that, but I dare say that we're likely to find out. 

Peter posts a review of the documentary 2000 Mules that lays out in gory detail how the election of 2020 was stolen.  It's hard to argue with his conclusions.

Adaptive Curmudgeon compares and contrasts the 80:1 long shot that won the Kentucky Derby with the election of 2020.  This is the key bit:

Let me repeat this known and undeniable fact because it’s important; I could watch the Kentucky Derby and see every damn hoofbeat frame by frame if I wish. But during an American election campaign 51 “intelligence experts” all collectively lied. One single event like that would ruin horseracing pari-mutuel betting for decades and yet we watched it happen in a presidential election. This was not one or two bad apples. It’s 51 of the motherfuckers. They all lied. I can’t get 51 people to agree on the best pizza topping but the press got 51 of them to sign their names on the record to an actual verifiable lie.

...

I could go on. I could link ten times as many images and endless bits of evidence and statistical anomalies. You’ve seen the same information as me. You’ve seen the images. You watched the vote tally change enormously in the middle of the night. You saw the vote counting stop in the middle of the night and then restart with vastly different results. You’ve seen the vote count charts. You’ve seen the mule videos. You’ve seen the Hunter Biden photos. You read the same Time magazine article.

Does any of that sound, look, or smell like the Kentucky Derby race?

Larry Correia posted a former auditor's impression of the election immediately after results were announced in November 2020.  His conclusion was pretty chilling:

I can say without hesitation though, that fuckery is afoot, and if an actual real investigation happens they’ll be able to prove it. Only this is politics, so who knows. The only thing I do know for certain is that this election is so fucked up it is just going to make America’s two halves hate each other even more. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

The United States was never a democracy: it was intentionally set up as a representative Republic.  For much of its history it was a plutocracy (government by the rich).  We managed to survive those times because growth trickled down to the masses.  That hasn't been true this last 50 years, but the rich still use their control of the Organs of the State to keep themselves in the money.

Everyone else?  Well if you live in Youngstown Ohio, or Leominster Mass, or Detroit Michigan at least the fentanyl is cheap.

But look at that bit from Larry Correia that I highlighted.  We're on that trajectory.  It looks something like this:

2008 - John McCain screws up and puts an actual populist on the ticket as his running mate.  Sara Palin's winking and sense of humor and unabashed normalcy almost won him the election before the Powers That Be reined her in.

2010 - the Tea Party rallied in their millions, but were polite and picked up their trash when they were done.

2012 - the IRS illegally abused the Tea Party and other conservative groups.  We know that they think it was illegal because Lois Lerner (head of the office that did this) pled the Fifth.  Of course she has rights, and cannot be compelled to offer incriminating testimony against herself.  The fact that she thought that this might happen is enough to convince me that she knew she committed a crime.  The Powers That Be got her off.  Oh, and the IRS apologized later.  After the election, of course, but no blood no foul, amirite?

2016 - Donald Trump shocks the world by beating Hillary Clinton.  He was the equivalent of a late entry 80:1 shot at the Kentucky Derby.  Quite frankly, he was the only candidate (other than Bernie Sanders) who spoke to those voters in Youngstown and places like that.  And suddenly they found their paychecks bought them more than they had a year ago - for the first time in 30 years.  

But Trump was brash and said mean stuff, so the Powers That Be did the hoodoo they doo so well in the 2020 election.  And here we are with gasoline costing twice what it used to and stores running out of baby formula.

So what is that hypothetical voter in Youngstown going to think?  Go back and look at that quote from Larry Correia: it is just going to make America’s two halves hate each other even more.

The American Plutocracy is acting like they think they will never face any consequences.  They are acting like they can push anyone around and do anything to anyone at any time.  I do not believe that they have thought about what our hypothetical voter in Youngstown wants.

For our hypothetical Youngstown man, he may think that the problem is that Trump wasn't mean enough.  And he's very unlikely to be alone in that thought.

God save this Honorable Republic.

Dad Joke CCII

 I don't carpool. I'm afraid I will be in the car and go into a tunnel and we will get stuck and not be able to get out.

It's not an uncommon fear. It even has a name. It's called carpool tunnel syndrome.

Dad Joke CCI

Why does a flamingo lift up one leg? 

Because if it lifted up bot legs it would fall down.

Congratulations to Old NFO

Blogging 15 years.  I believe that there were still Wooly Mammoths on the Blogosphere steppe back then.

It's hard to keep active and productive after blogging a long time, maybe harder than you might think.  This is quite an accomplishment.

Dad Joke CC

Why is it impossible to explain puns to kleptomaniacs?

Because they always take things literally. 

Chet Atkins - Kentucky Derby

Today is the Kentucky Derby, so music is to get you in the mood.  There are no lyrics, just Chet Atkins at his picking best. 

I've previously posted The Queen Of The World's Mint Julep recipe and so there's no need to repeat that.  Instead, I will give you my recipe for a killer smoked Old Fashioned:

Ingredients:

• Luxardo cherries (yes, I know they're crazy expensive; they're also crazy good)
• Two slices of orange, at least 1/2" thick each
• 1 tsp granulated sugar
• Blood Orange bitters
• 2 oz (or to taste) Kentucky Bourbon (I like Four Roses which is good enough to sip neat but not so expensive that you don't want to mix cocktails with it)
• Ice

The hardware:

A rocks glass (preferably of the Second Amendment type, just because):

A muddler: 

 

A cocktail smoker:

Assembly:

1. Remove the rind from one orange slice and put into rocks glass with two Luxardo cherries and the sugar.

2. Muddle the fruit until you have basically a fruit slurry.

3. Add two shakes of bitters.

4. Add the Bourbon.

5. Stir with a spoon.

6. Add ice.

7. Use smoker as directed.  This is the one that I have and how it works:

8. Put a plate over the glass and let the drink rest with the smoke in it for five minutes.  Don't skimp on the time, because the smoke flavor will infuse the drink.

9. Garnish with two Luxardo cherries and the other orange slice.

I said it was a killer drink; I didn't say it was quick to make.

A note on Luxardo cherries: these are something like $20/jar, although Total Wine has a #10 can of them for like $99 which really drops the price per cherry but gives you a lot of cherries. If you are wondering why they are so expensive, let me just say that these are nothing like the Red Dye #2 cherries that you get at the supermarket.  Nothing at all like them.  It defies description, so you will have to take my word that they're worth it.  

Or not, heck it's up to you.

Let me just say that a jar will last you the better part of a year so it would be a shame to go to all the work on this cocktail and not have good ingredients.  

Dad Joke CLXXXXVIIII

How many seconds are in a year? 

12.  January 2nd, February 2nd, ...

I think I've seen this movie before

Via Insty, new poll shows Biden losing to Trump by double digits in 2024:

“A majority of voters think President Joe Biden shouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, and he would lose a rematch with former President Donald Trump by double-digit margins,” read the early analysis of the Rasmussen Reports poll sponsored by the Heartland Institute.

That's very sweet, but has the Heartland Institute been asleep for the last two years?  Trump could beat Biden by 100% and Biden would get re-elected.  Math is hard, amirite?  Especially when people cheat.

But everybody vote harder next time!

This is the most important blog I've read since The Archdruid Report

Dominic Cummings has a substack where he posts the most insightful musings that I've read since I ran across The Archdruid Report back in 2016.  His post about how to reboot the Government Agencies is an absolute must-read. 

He is very thoughtful, and probes deeply.  I think his criticism of Donald Trump is mostly fair:

And Trump showed:

1. He does not understand power in Washington.

2. He doesn’t have a CEO mindset or skillset in the Bezos/Gates/Jobs/Musk sense of being able to execute at scale and speed.

3. Like Boris Johnson, his insecurities mean he can’t face his lack of skills and trust/empower anyone to build the team to run the administration for him.

4. He has some showman skills, a good nickname game and a sporadically good twitter game. But like Johnson, he prefers to spend his time babbling about and at the media rather than the (often mind-numbing) problems of institutions and incentives you need to focus on to change big things.

This combination meant Trump made a lot of noise but got very little done.

He could not control the government. He was sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes idiotic, often right in his complaints that the media were lying, but very little he said mattered because his words did not connect to power. He annoyed the swamp but he couldn’t drain the swamp — not the tiniest corner.

This is a very short overview of his thoughts on what would avoid these pitfalls:

So, the most important thing for the next GOP candidate and their team to appreciate is this: if you want to have a serious effect, if you want to have a chance of dealing with serious crises, if you want to bend the arc of culture rather than just have a cool-sounding job, then you should generally not be trying to ‘take over the institutions and run them’, you should not develop a traditional ‘reform’ agenda, instead, like Lincoln and FDR, you need to be the once-every-~70 years sort of a President who actually controls the government.

This means appointing people to many parts of DC not to ‘reform’ the department/agency but to close it while someone else runs the startup to replace it (if it needs replacing) operating on completely different legal and management principles and staffed by completely different sorts of people. This does not of course mean closing everything — there are parts of the regime that can carry on pretty much as before — it means closing and reopening those parts necessary to control the important parts of government, such as the Pentagon.

 Highly, highly recommended, even though it is a very long - dare I say Borepatchian? - post.

Hat tip to Isegoria, who finds the most interesting stuff.

May the Fourth be with you

But remember, beware the Nerd Side of the Force ...

Dangerous out there it is.

Dad Joke CLXXXXVIII

What do you call a bear with no ears?

B. 

What I would do if I were Xi Jinping

Here's what I would do if I were Xi.  I'd invade Taiwan.

Consider: America is weaker and more divided that it has been for 50 years.  A weak, divided America is likely what Xi will see as being in China's best interests.

Consider also: NATO will find itself strained in any response, because it has sent so much equipment to Ukraine that it might not have a lot left to send to Taiwan.  NATO seems to want to keep the pressure on Russia, to bleed Putin and get regime change.  NATO will either be distracted from Taiwan, or will have to give up their dreams of different rulers in the Kremlin.  It may take NATO long enough to figure out what to do that the Taiwan invasion becomes a fait accompli. Advantage: China.

Consider also [2]: A June or July invasion will likely wrap up before the elections in November.  Losing Taiwan (after a pretty disastrous  response to Ukraine and a completely disastrous pullout from Afghanistan) will likely contribute to a rout of the Democrats in the election.  Big GOP Congressional majorities will further weaken Biden.  A weakened Biden is likely what Xi will see as being in China's best interests.

Consider also [3]: Even if a strong Republican gets elected to the White House in 2024, that will be 2 years after the fact, allowing China to consolidate/reintegrate Taiwan.  It will be hard to put that toothpaste back in the bottle.

The downside is looking like an aggressor in public.  Perhaps the biggest fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining NATO out of a sense of needing help against the Russian bear.  You could see something similar with India, Indonesia, Philippines, Korea, and Japan joining together in an anti-China bloc.  My take is that Xi doesn't care - China has never been expansionist outside of China (and they absolutely see Taiwan as part of China).  The domination they seek is economic, not military, and since the hypothetical Asian bloc would never be able to invade the homeland, this is likely not much of a consideration.  Also, if America and NATO are weakened then there may not be a credible alternative to China in Asia.

So the downsides are low, the benefits to China are likely high, and both of these could very well change in the next two (or even one) year.  The iron is hot, right now.  Timing will probably never be more in China's favor than now.

This is maybe a good time to short Taiwanese stocks.

Dad Joke CLXXXXVII - special Outer Space Edition

If athletes get Athlete's Foot, what do astronauts get?

Missile toe.

Blogging has been sparse because we went to Cape Canaveral to see a rocket launch.  It was (ahem) a blast.  It was also made more enjoyable by the visit of The Silicon Graybeard and Mrs. The Silicon Graybeard who live over on this side of the State.  He is exactly the same in life as on his blog, and the two of them mixed equal portions of graciousness and wicked-smartness.

Yesterday was spent at the Kennedy Space Center which was way more interesting than I had expected.  Their display of the Space Shuttle Atlantis is not to be missed, and has perhaps the most dramatic and theatrical entrance to the exhibit that I've ever experienced.  Well done, NASA.

Oh, and the Visitor's Center is 100% funded by entrance fees, so once again well done, NASA.

Damn

Tam says that New Jovian Thunderbolt has died. 

Supersonic Rocket Ship

One of the nice things about being in Florida is that we can go watch a rocket launch.  There are a bunch of them - you can see the lineup at Space Launch Schedule.  SpaceX is launching another few dozen Starlink satellites on Friday so The Queen Of The World, Wolfgang, and I are off to Titusville to watch.

Maybe I'll play this while the Falcon 9 goes up:

Dad Joke CLXXXXVI

Do they allow loud laughing in Hawaii, or is it just a-low-ha?

Dad Joke CLXXXXV

My High School english teacher said I would never be any good at poetry because I'm dyslexic.

What did she know?  I've already made four plates, three vases, and a jug!

Man, a lot of people sure hate Ron DeSantis

He's making the right enemies.  He has cleverly aligned himself with 80% of the voters in his battles against Covid lockdowns, pedophile teachers, and now Disney.  He had and has massive support in all of these.

It helps that he comes across as trying to protect children in each of these areas.  It also helps that his opponents are just so creepy and weird.  Both of those things will help him with the Minivan Mom voter demographic.

The Democratic Party has been intellectually out of gas for a long time now.  They've basically defined themselves by what they are not - not George W. Bush, not Donald Trump - rather than what they are.  They've had a lot of success doing this over the last 20 years.

But DeSantis is now shining the spotlight on what they are, like being the party that wants to teach weird sex fetishes to kindergartners.  This is exposing just how, well, weird the party is.  So weird that people don't want to be associated with it.

I guess we'll see how this plays out, but until the Democrats stop coming up with more creepy nonsense aimed at kittle kids, I expect that DeSantis will keep doing what he's been doing.

Castles in the sand

We went to Clearwater Beach yesterday for the Sugar Sand Sculptures.  Florida's west coast has beaches of "Sugar Sand" - very fine, white sand that has the consistency of sugar.  Clearwater has a festival for sand sculptures each year.  Of course there were sand castles:

It's Florida so there are gators:

I liked this one.  The baby frog is climbing all over his long suffering mom.

The weather is perfect now.  It will be hot and miserable soon enough, but not today.  So now, it's off to the shooting range.

Dad Joke CLXXXXIIII

What do you call a laughing motorcycle?

A Yamahahaha.

Computer trouble

My computer is not well, so posting is being sporadic.

And yes, I have a backup - and a backup for the backup.  I haven't lost any data, just a computer. 

John Wesley and John Arnold (verses), traditional (music) - Jesus Christ Is Risen Today

Alleluia He is risen.

What's your prepping strategy?

Big Country has an excellent post about inflation and how it is making food much more expensive.  He makes a really important point:

If you haven't started building a baseline food supply, you a dumb motherfucker.

Peter adds some important thoughts and tips, and concludes:

The more I read about food shortages and rising prices, the more serious I get about our backup food supplies. I hope you're doing the same. They're like a fire extinguisher, or a parachute, or a gun. You may never need one; but if you ever do, at that point it'll probably be far too late to go out and buy one.

The only thing I would add is that you need to know your goals.  Do you want to ride out a hurricane or tornado?  Do you want to ride out a 3 week series of blackout/brownout?  Do you want to ride out a solar flare that takes the power grid down for 6 months?  Do you want to ride out the collapse of Western Civilization?

Each of these has a very different time horizon.

The Queen Of The World and I have our own goals (not saying what; OPSEC is a virtue), but we've picked ONE of the choices above.  I think we're pretty well prepared for that, although water storage/purification is something that I think most people - and maybe us - skimp on.

But this is probably something you should think on.  Being prepared is a Very Good Thing Indeed but you really, really need to know the answer to the question: Prepared for what?

But you should really go real both Big Country's and Peter's posts.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is

That old advice from your parents is good advice in a world of spam.  Here's an example that came in via text message:

Here are a couple of obvious tells here: there's a giveaway for some sort of valuable thing (a TV in this case), and there's also strange use of language ("pending the outstanding tax has been paid").  Weird language is a sign that something is not right, or that the sender is a non-native English speaker.  Both of these together is almost always a sign that someone is trying to attack you.  The link takes you to a web page that tries to load malware on your phone or computer.

Seen oot and aboot

The Costco parking lot got a pretty sweet visitor.

It looks like a Willys MD, otherwise known as the M38A1 Truck, although repainted in Florida beachy colors.  If I'm right on the model it would be from the mid 1950s.

Justified use of force

Brother Dwight emails to point out this example of how there's one set of rules for us, and a different one for those in Police uniform:

Two Buffalo police officers who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground during a protest in 2020 have been cleared by an arbitrator, who said the use of force was “absolutely legitimate” because the man, who was hospitalized with a head injury, was “not an innocent bystander.”

Non-paywalled article here.

So it's an example of a justified use of force, at least for the police.  My reply to him was overly snarky, that if it had been at a Black Lives Matter protest the city would have burned to the ground.  I should have read the article first.  It was at a BLM protest, and the city didn't burn.

Now a few points:

1. This was a Police Department administrative hearing.  The cops got off in the same way that cops who shoot homeowner's dogs, or do no-knock raids on the wrong house, or throw flash-bang grenades into baby cribs get off.  The Blue Wall of Silence, and all that.

2. The man is going to sue the police department, and the city will almost certainly settle out of court.  The taxpayers will lose but the cops will be fine.

3. If you or I roughed up a 75 year old man, we'd be looking at multiple felony charges.  Know your place, peasant.

4. I'd be a lot more supportive of the police if they cleaned up the bad cops.  Everyone knows who those are, but the Blue Wall of Silence tars the good cops with the bad.  This is probably the biggest tragedy of the whole situation.

5. The Queen Of The World disagrees with me on this, and thinks that the cops are being railroaded by a biased media.  She thinks the guy was screaming into their faces and they pushed him back rather than cuffing him, and he tripped when he fell back.  I'm less certain here, and would be more sympathetic to them if there were not a different set of rules for us (#3 above) and covering for bad cops (#4 above).

Oh, and you do read Dwight every day, don't you?  He's your go-to guy for obituaries and which coach just got fired.  

UPDATE 12 April 2022 19:37:  Dwight is going to post Gilbert Gottfried's obit tomorrow.

About "Ghost Guns"

I'm struggling to understand what the Administration is trying to accomplish (other than a Press Conference).  If they ban 80% lowers, people will just 3D print them.  Heck, I've been posting about this for almost a decade, and the technology is way more advanced now.  What are they going to do, criminalize 3D printers?

It seems that it's all a tale told by and for idiots, full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing. 

Miklós Rózsa - "Parade Of The Charioteers" from Ben Hur

People's taste in films changes over time.  Look at Ben Hur: eleven Academy Awards, an initial release Box Office of almost $150M (in 1959 dollars; that's over $1.4B in today's money), first TV airing was watched by 85 Million.  It used to be shown on TV every year around the Easter season.

Today, you have to search to find it.

Since today is Palm Sunday, I'm doing the work for you.  Here is Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning music which is actually very appropriate for the celebration of Palm Sunday.

Epitaph for a dog

Murphy's Law has lost his German Shepherd, Memphis Belle.  He has a touching send off over at this place.

Blogger seems wedged, and so isn't letting me leave a comment over there so I'll put it up here.  Lord Byron's epitaph for his beloved Newfoundland, Bos'un, is justly famous and sums up our four footed friends better than any I've seen.  It seems Miss Belle's due.

Near this spot rest the remains of one who possessed
Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity
and all Man's virtues with none of his vices

He's had her nearly as long as I've had Wolfgang.  Alas, neither Time nor Tide wait for any man (or dog), and Wolfgang is showing signs of age as he approaches his tenth birthday next month.  Hail and farewell, Miss Belle.  If you don't mind I'd like to keep you waiting for Wolfgang a little while longer.

UPDATE 8 APRIL 2022 17:35:  Murphy, maybe she's collecting Mardi Gras beads with Oliver.  It seems that even Sandra Bullock gave him (Oliver, not Murphy) beads, which is insanely cool.  Anyone who never read that story, get you on over there toute suite.

Dad Joke CLXXXXIII

What do you call a pig with three eyes? 

A piiig.

Florida leads the way again

I ranted about the Covid lockdowns, back in October of 2020:

So what does it take to make sure a death is not reported as from COVID?

When the death is caused not by the virus, but by the government's reaction to the virus.  COVID didn’t kill Rita at age 95, despair and loneliness did:

Rita Thomas was a victim of COVID-19, but she never had the disease.

The vivacious and outgoing 95-year-old, who lived independently until last year and celebrated her most recent birthday in February with friends at a Pasco County diner, willed herself to die two weeks ago because she could no longer handle the pandemic-imposed isolation.

“She said to me: ‘Linda. I’ve had a good life. I am ready to die. I don’t want to live this way anymore. I stopped eating,’ ’’ her daughter Linda Gardner said, recalling the conversation she had with her mother in August. Weeks later, her mother was hospitalized for complications from malnutrition.

 Remember, Florida had some of the least restrictive lockdown policies in the nation.  But this steamed me at the time, and it seems that I wasn't the only one as the Florida Legislature has passed a law prohibiting this in the future:

A Florida bill that would require the right to in-person visits at hospitals was sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis from the state legislature on April 5. He signed the bill, the “No Patient Left Alone Act,” on April 6.

Called the “No Patient Left Alone Act,” the bill would require hospitals, nursing facilities, hospices, assisted living facilities and care centers for the developmentally disabled to allow in-person visits.

I'm not sure if the lockdown restrictions were imposed by Florida (probably not), by the CDC (likely), or by someone else.  But it's good to see the Florida Powers That Be recognize just what a Charlie Foxtrot this all was. Better late than never, I guess.

The Queen Of The World and I have not regretted our move here for a microsecond.

How the Ukraine war propaganda sausage is made

Interesting. 

Note that this is published in Germany's Deutsche Welle.  Glad to see some analysis of some of the stories.

Dad Joke CLXXXXII

Hey Zeusie, I'm home ...

 This kicked over my giggle box.

Dad Joke CLXXXXI

Roman numerals actually can be easier than ours.  For example, algebra is simple when using roman numerals.  I mean, X is always equal to ten. 

The restoration of the Republic

In my sixth and seventh consulships, when I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people. 

- Caesar Augustus, Res Gestae 34

The Res Gestae Divi Augustus was Imperial Roman propaganda, commissioned personally by Augustus to put out his side of the story of his reign.  In it, he declares that he restored the Roman Republic, torn after a century of bloody civil war.  Well, that's how it has been translated by historians.

Except the ancient Romans did not have the idea of a "Republic" as we know it.  Plato famously wrote a book called The Republic, although since he wrote in Greek it was actually called Politeia. Translated into Latin as De Republica, Plato's politeia bears no resemblance to any modern concept of a Republic so we should not be surprised that the Romans didn't really understand notions of bicameral legislatures and all that.

Translations are funny things.  A better translation of politeia might be "the body politick" - this expression was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It ran a wide range of options, from individual democracy (as in ancient Athens) to tyranny (rule by a Tyrant, or dictator).  Check your concept of "Republic" at the door.

Likewise with Caesar Augustus, who unsurprisingly did not speak English nor have an Ivy League education.  He used the term res publica, not Republic.  Res publica is notoriously hard to translate because the translations come out clumsy but more accurate, or graceful but less accurate.  It combines government, the economy, public morality, and the happiness of the people.  You see why it is so hard to translate.

So when Augustus restored the res publica, he did not mean at all that he "restored the Roman Republic".  But his propaganda was very much that he restored things to the way they were supposed to be, before all that nasty civil war stuff.

This may be our future.  Our Res Publica is in pretty bad shape, and getting worse.  It very well may take things getting very bad indeed until someone with the right marketing and messaging "restores the American Republic".  What it will look like is anyone's guess, but Augustus' model was an entirely new one that was very carefully draped in the cloak of the Old Ways.

I wrote about this a long time ago: The Fifth American Republic:

If we were going to vote ourselves out of this, we would have done it 60 years ago.  But even then, it wasn't really America.  Moldbug yet again:

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

Of course, all these coups are confirmed by the principle of adverse possession. Otherwise we would find ourselves looking for the rightful heirs of Metacom, or Edward the Confessor, or whoever. Nor is there any automatic reason to treat any of these five regimes as better or worse than any of the others. If, like me, you're tired of the Fourth Republic and would like to see it abolished, all we know about its successor is that it will be the Fifth Republic. It has no need to resemble the Third, the Second or the First. 

We snicker at the French, always rewriting their Constitution.  We gloss over that our Constitution has been a "living document" at least since the time of James Polk.  At least the French had the decency to write their changes down in public.

Archaeologists unearth layers of detritus, reconstructing ancient living patterns from the cast off, scattered rubble.  Similarly, we can observe the layers of parasitic attachment to the Res Publica.  RTWT, all of the links.

And so Obama is a commie, as it Mitt Romney, George Bush major, and Eisenhower.  Non-commies (Sarah Palin [and Donald Trump - Borepatch]) are fiercely excluded from the political Great Game.  What's different is that information flow now is possible outside of the political and intellectual elite.  The perceived legitimacy of this class is now at a historic low.  How will it end?

Who can tell?  But one thing is clear - it cannot continue as it is, with the Elite papering over the cracks with increasingly low caliber drivel.  The Republic waits, expectantly.  Maybe it will just be a higher caliber drivel.

Or maybe it will be Peace.

 

No go away, or I shall mock you a second time

Alinsky's Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

I mean, I can't even ...

 

Dad Joke CLXXXX

How did the Romans pick a new dictator?  They played a game of rock, paper, Caesars.

(Stolen from The John Wilder) 

Stephen Sondheim - A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum

Musicals used to be popular with the4 general public, and even with film critics.  They used to regularly win the Best Picture Oscar.  This one didn't, although it did win best musical score.

 

This was Buster Keaton's last film appearance.  He even did his own stunts despite having terminal cancer. 

Johnny and Donnie Van Zant - Sweet Florida

The Van Zant brothers hail from Jacksonville and they like Ron DeSantis a lot.  They wrote this song for him.

Pretty good song, and pretty funny.

April Fools tech humor

Back in the early 90s I was a nerd [pauses to let shocked gasps die down].  There was a couple year period where I read every single one of the Internet specs that were released.  These documents are rather strangely named "Request For Comment" or RFCs.  Since it was my job to know nerdy Internet stuff then, I read 'em all, probably a couple a week back then.

Well every April Fools Day there would be a joke RFC.  There's a pretty good Wikipedia page that lists them.  Here's a recent example: RFC 8565, Hypertext Jeopardy Protocol.  The Abstract reads:

The Hypertext Jeopardy Protocol (HTJP) inverts the request/response semantics of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Using conventional HTTP, one connects to a server, asks a question, and expects a correct answer. Using HTJP, one connects to a server, sends an answer, and expects a correct question. This document specifies the semantics of HTJP.

Pretty funny right there, in a very nerdy way.  But one that I remember from way back in the day was RFC 1149, Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carriers.  Basically it was sending Internet messages by carrier pigeon.  We yuked this up around the coffee mess.

Well, it turns out some nerds actually implemented this - they built a working system that used pigeons:

Finally, rfc 1149 is implemented! On saturday 28th of april 2001, the worlds very first rfc 1149 network was tested. The weather was quite nice, despite being in one of the most rainy places in Norway.

The ping was started approximately at 12:15. We decided to do a 7 1/2 minute interval between the ping packets, that would leave a couple of packets unanswered, given ideal situations. Things didn't happen quite that way, though. It happened that the neighbour had a flock of pigeons flying. Our pigeons didn't want to go home at once, they wanted to fly with the other pigeons instead. And who can blame them, when the sun was finally shining after a couple of days?

But the instincts won at last, and after about an hour of fun, we could see a couple of pigeons breaking out of the flock and heading in the right direction. There was much cheering. Apparantly, it WAS our pigeons, because not long after, we got a report from the other site that the first pigeon was sitting on the roof.

Read the whole glorious thing here.  Linux nerds FTW!

Ammo Deal alert: 1000 9mm for $330

Ratus emails to point out a good deal on 9mm - 33 cents a round.

CCI BLAZER AMMUNITION 9MM 115 GRAIN FULL METAL JACKET ALUMINUM 1000 ROUND CASE

 

Reactivating the HMS Belfast

 The British government has announced that the HMS Belfast, a museum ship of WWII, will be reactivated for patrol work.