Jewamongyou

My brother, who is a school teacher, sent me this article by a (presumably) socialist school teacher.

Here was my reply:

I have a few questions about this article:

1) “the biggest predictor of a child’s future is what their parents do…class and growing economic inequality”  And yet Miss Behrent wants to expand public education to include (presumably) even toddlers.  Any reasonable reader would conclude that the author does not approve of the fact that parents are the #1 influence on a child’s life; he would prefer that the State be the #1 influence, with teachers (most of them, anyway) serving as its proxy.  She assumes that the parents’ income and social class are the sole important factor in their influence on their children.  What about heredity?  What about culture?  There are many reasons for economic inequality, not all of them bad.  As old class structures disappear, I.Q. takes a more and more important role in determining who lives with whom and who marries whom.  All this was explained quite well in “The Bell Curve”.

2)  “That a school’s “effectiveness” is so strongly correlated with the racial makeup and economic status of its student population suggests that poverty is what keeps our schools unequal. Not teachers.”  I think she’s got it backwards.  Poverty is a byproduct of lower average I.Q. – which, in turn, is correlated with race.  This is why higher income blacks score lower, on average, than lower income whites.  It is why North Asians consistently score high regardless of their income.  I can back this claim up with facts.  I wonder if Miss Behrent can back up his assumption with facts.

3)  “Rigoberto Ruelas, a 14-year teacher in Los Angeles who went missing after the reports came out and was recently found dead, with suicide suspected.”  As unfortunate as this is, let’s put this in perspective and consider how many people, of other professions, commit suicide because of their work or loss of their careers.  To use this anecdotal story as evidence is pretty pathetic.  The implication is that teachers should be shielded from criticism lest they commit suicide.  Really?

4) “only 17 percent of charter schools do better than public schools, while 37 percent perform worse”.  “Better” or “worse” by whose standards?  Here, read this:

“Many parents would prefer to see their kids “survive” school intact and with their outlook still healthy even if they don’t ace their SATs. Whereas a bad-ass public school can still make kids scrape through but many may be brutalized already and this will affect their future. A child in an inner city public school who performs well on scores against all odds has often undergone the kind of pressure a child should not have to undergo to be given a place at a college. Scores are not education they are just a selection tool.”

5) “the continued and increased segregation of schools; and the growing gap between rich and poor that leaves all poor children behind.”  What’s his problem with segregation?  I think it’s a good thing – if that’s what the parents want and as long as it’s not by force of law.  As for the “growing gap between rich and poor”, again see The Bell Curve.  Also, income disparity comes naturally with any multi-racial society.  I don’t think you can find any exceptions.  All over the world this is the case.

Okay, so they weren’t all exactly “questions”.  For the record, I know that my brother is a skilled, and very conscientious, teacher.  He really cares about his students and always goes the extra mile.  This being the case, I’m certain that if the government hadn’t hired him to teach kids – many parents would gladly do so.  After all, if you have a valuable skill, people will pay you for it, right?

With millions of smokers eager to kick the habit, and the rest of us just as eager to help them, you would think that innovations such as e-cigarettes would be in good standing with the powers that be.  Apparently, this is not the case.  As Thomas Knapp explains, in this article, not only big tobacco, but the F.D.A., big pharma (see comments) and the American Lung Association are all erecting hurdles to keep people from availing themselves of this technology.

Enter the electronic cigarette: No tobacco involved. Nicotine and flavorings are delivered in a liquid (propylene glycol or vegetable glycerine), slightly heated to produce a fog or vapor. While the full health implications aren’t yet clear, it’s a safe bet that e-cigs are safer than “real” cigarettes. Cigarette smoke is full of carcinogen-laden “tars.” E-cig vapor isn’t. There’s no “secondhand smoke” because there’s no smoke at all.
Even thought they’re currently only a tiny portion of the nicotine market, e-cigs are driving all the usual suspects crazy.
Big Tobacco wants them gone ASAP because they threaten tobacco profits.
The FDA wants to bring them under its regulatory authority because authority is what regulation is all about.
If you’re surprised to hear that the American Lung Association has condemned e-cigarettes, you shouldn’t be. They rake in more than $50 million per year, mostly by leveraging the scare value of tobacco-related lung disease. “Non-profit” or not, the continued solvency of ALA depends largely on the continued popularity of their bête noire, smoking.
The alleged Axis of Anti-Smoking — Big Government and Big Non-Profits — are fully aligned with Big Tobacco on the issue of electronic cigarettes. If we take their claims at face value, smoking kills more than 400,000 Americans per year … and they want to keep it that way.

Whenever a vast infrastructure grows around a “war against… (fill in the blank)”, we should be suspicious of the “warriors” true motives.  There is no doubt in my mind that many, if not most, anti-Cancer activists have noble intentions.  They would probably celebrate if Cancer were eradicated for good.  The same is no doubt true of anti-AIDS activists, anti-hunger advocates, anti-poverty advocates and even those who wish to extinguish “racism” (whatever this means for them).  However, money has a way of talking.  Each morning, when those activists get up for work, money speaks to them and says things like, “don’t you like your job?”, “you sure have a cozy job and good benefits… it would be a pity if, for some reason, you would lose it.”  Yes, it’s true that if Cancer were conquered, most of those doctors and researchers would find equally good jobs in other fields.  But will they all be able to do so and what guarantee do they have that their new jobs will be just as good?  The people we should be more concerned about are the lobbyists, fund-raisers and administrators of “non-profit” groups.  Those people have a great interest in keeping their enemy alive.  For them, Cancer, AIDS, poverty, hunger and “racism” are their bread and butter. Would it be surprising if we found out that some of those activists were secretly working to propagate the very evil they are supposed to be battling?
At the bottom of the above article is a small piece of text that reads: “Copyleft 2010 Center for a Stateless Society”.  Copyleft is a way to retain credit for intellectual work while allowing the work to be freely distributed.  I’ll take this opportunity to say that every one of my articles on this blog is copylefted.
Those who invented electronic cigarettes deserve to make massive profits from their work.  If the powers of evil succeed in robbing them of this profit, my suggestion would be for them to create easy-to-read instructions so that average people could manufacture their own electronic cigarettes.  If they could succeed in doing this, then the victory of big tobacco, big pharm, the F.D.A. and the A.L.A. would be a pyrrhic one.

Who was the worst mass murderer in recorded history?  Many people would instinctively answer “Hitler” – and they would be wrong.  Stalin was certainly worse in this regard; he was responsible for about twenty million deaths (mere statistics, in his view).  I am speaking here of civilian deaths, not military ones.  But even Stalin probably does not take first prize amongst mass murderers.  By most accounts, the man responsible for the most civilian deaths was Mao Zedong.
One disturbing aspect of the above ranking is that the number one murderer is also the only one who is still held in high regard by his victims’ survivors.  Most Russians despise Stalin.  The vast majority of Europeans loath Hitler.  Certainly Pol Pot is not held in high regard amongst Cambodians.  Yet the personality cult of Mao is still alive and well in China.  If most Chinese spit upon his memory, they can only do so secretly because, officially, he is still a god.
I once visited China and, behaving like the typical “ugly American” I was quite outspoken about my disdain for certain things.  I told Chinese, to their faces, that I’d nicknamed Beijing “Mucus City” because everybody smoked and spat their mucus upon the street so that pedestrians must watch where they step.  I was almost arrested for photographing a pathetic amputee beggar clinging to the leg of a passerby.  My tour guide was confused when I told him Mao was the last “emperor”.  He replied, “no.  He was not an emperor; he was Chairman Mao.”  I retorted, “if he wanted you dead, you were dead.  He had absolute power and even had concubines.  How was he different from an emperor?”  The tour guide had apparently never thought of that; he stood there dumbfounded with no answer.  When street vendors tried to sell me “The Sayings of Mao”, I told them, “I do not like Mao”.  It is a wonder I was not arrested.
Perhaps I should have been less outspoken, while in China, about my distaste for Mao and cigarette mucus – well, at least about the mucus.  It is, arguably, a good thing to show your dislike for a brutal dictator who brought about the deaths of tens of millions of people.  Could it be that most Chinese are unaware of his crimes?  I could only imagine the pain and anger of those Chinese whose families and friends were murdered by Mao’s ruthless regime, but who must see him adored publicly.

I also wonder about those street vendors who sell “The Sayings of Mao”.  How many of them were orphaned because of Mao?  There is a certain irony in this situation.  What would a true communist say about his books being sold on the free market in the streets?  Perhaps, at some level, those vendors see this as a small measure of revenge.