Why I'm Not A Socialist

Basically, he’s saying that Barack Obama, Harry Reid, John Boehner, and the rest of them don’t have a clue as to the ordinary goings-on of us average people. That’s probably why they do things like require us to buy toilets that don’t work and light bulbs full of poisonous mercury.

Those in Washington may have the best intentions when they do things like require Americans to purchase health insurance for the very act of breathing, but they fail to see how that will affect the lives of ordinary Americans. Ensconced in their bubbles, they like the idea of ‘helping’ people, so they pass legislation without any idea as to how the majority of us tick. link

At its core, socialism is at least paternalistic and more probably tyrannical. However good the intentions, the road to Hell still leads to Hell.

It's Great Work, If You Can Get It

From the New York Post:

Hell no, he won’t go.

In a defiant raspberry to the city Department of Education — and taxpayers — disgraced teacher Alan Rosenfeld, 66, won’t retire.

Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay.

Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says.

Until we educators quit protecting people like this, quit expecting unions to protect people like this, and start policing our own ranks, we can hardly expect to be considered professionals.

Set Up To Fail

From Joanne's Community College Spotlight:

Both intellectually disabled students and their instructors are set up to fail, writes Anonymous, a professor at a commuter college, in an essay in Inside Higher Ed.

We've probably all thought this at one time or another, usually in the context of modifications or accommodations required by IEP's. Click on the link to see what Anonymous has to say on the topic, from the junior college level.

Why Don't You Hear Much About "Occupy" Protests Anymore?

Here's why:

You can tell that the movement has lost popular support because the press suddenly stopped the breathless coverage. As I predicted, once it became clear the movement was hurting the Democrats, the coverage dried up.

Remember that less than 2 months ago there was a suggestion that my local union officially support that movement. I said then that they were a day late and a dollar short; I was right then, and even more right now.

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The Furor Over Start Time

Several months ago, word got to our faculty that a group of parents was working to move our school's start time (and hence finish time) 30 minutes later in the day. They did a fairly decent job of poring over research and late last year (month?) gave a presentation to the faculty. The presentation was clearly biased towards a later start time, but that was to be expected since that's what they wanted. They anticipated many challenges to their proposal and addressed each of them. A couple of "community forums" were held after school hours so that interested parties could raise their points, but they were sparsely attended.

After that first presentation to the teachers, a straw poll showed faculty support for moving the start time to be about 60%.

In mid-January the teachers union president came to give a presentation. He wanted to explain how making this change involved the union, the district, and their negotiation teams. He also mentioned that when making such decisions, a mere majority often isn't a good idea; he recommended a 75% majority. One of our teachers (correctly) pointed out that we couldn't get 75% of our faculty to agree on summer vacation, so the threshold was moved to only 55%. I believe this number was chosen because of the aforementioned straw poll.

Discussions about the change took place in the halls, in the staff lounges, via email, you name it. I questioned why only teachers got a vote on this, and not our administrative, clerical, custodial, or food service staffs. We took informal polls of students and parents and those, while not scientific, were overwhelmingly against the change. Some staff members thought a vote on the change was being forced on us in a time crunch. The issue was fast becoming contentious, and the vote was held.

The start time change failed, 57%-43%.

Yet Another Reason I'm Not A Socialist

I'm currently reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, so I find it interesting that Hayek also discussed fascism as it relates to socialism in his The Road To Serfdom. Here's a snip from the chapter called The Great Utopia, and its wisdom speaks as loudly today as when it was written 70 years ago:

Nobody saw more clearly than the great political thinker de Tocqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom," he said. "Democracy attaches all possible value to each man," he said in 1848, "while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives—the craving for freedom — socialists began increasingly to make use of the promise of a "new freedom." Socialism was to bring "economic freedom," without which political freedom was "not worth having."

To make this argument sound plausible, the word "freedom" was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth...

What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as "the general welfare." There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

Democratic assemblies cannot function as planning agencies...

Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible. There is no justification for the widespread belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; it is not the source of power which prevents it from being arbitrary; to be free from dictatorial qualities, the power must also be limited. A true "dictatorship of the proletariat," even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.

Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated.

I choose freedom over the kind of order envisioned by the utopians, whose good intentions are paving the way to Hell.

A "Frost Fair" on the Thames Sounds Like Fun

From the Daily Mail:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Smaller Class Sizes Don't Help Students Learn Better

From the Washington Post:

Two Harvard researchers looked at the factors that actually improve student achievement and those that don’t. In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Will Dobbie and Roland Freyer analyzed 35 charter schools, which generally have greater flexibility in terms of school structure and strategy. They found that traditionally emphasized factors such as class size made little difference, compared with some new criteria:

We find that traditionally collected input measures — class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree — are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research — frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations — explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.

I believe this to be true, but that doesn't mean I'm going to fight for larger class sizes. At some point it becomes a matter of working conditions; it takes me a long time to grade papers from a class of 37 students--and yes, I have classes that large.

The Main Problem With Higher Education, Shown In One Simple Graph

What Obama Won't Mention Today in Michigan: Campus Has 53% More Administrators Than Faculty

Not Classy

If you don't want to accept an award from someone you disagree with, don't go to the ceremony. It's narcissistic and selfish to go and then, in front of an audience, to make a scene of not accepting the award.

social studies teacher won't accept an award from Congressman Paul Ryan

Anyone want to try to justify this behavior? Anyone?

Government Shouldn't "Invest" My Money

From Power Line Blog:

But this got me to thinking: just what does a investment specialist with the Steadman Funds do after crashing and burning in such a comprehensive fashion? I wonder if maybe they went to work for the Obama administration’s “green energy investment” program? I offer this as a possible explanation after seeing the news this week that yet another green energy company backed with over $100 million in taxpayer dollars has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ener1 Inc., a battery maker, has joined the ranks of Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and Beacon Power in the Obama Administration’s Steadman-like portfolio of energy investment losers. More failures are thought to be in the pipeline, according to a recent CBS News report.

If the president really believed the Abraham Lincoln quote that he mentioned in this past week's State of the Union Address, that government should only do for people what they cannot do for themselves, then it has no business making risky "investments" in companies. Any one of us can do that all on our own. This president seems hell-bent on using his office to enforce his view of society on the rest of us, and I hope this dystopia ends next January.

You Know What Sucks? This Sucks.

This is just sad, sad, sad:

A man who took 10 years to create his own personal man-cave—in this instance, an awesome Star Trek starship interior replica that would make every Trek geek weep—has to tear it all down because his wife is divorcing him...

Unfortunately, the soon-to-be-ex-wife, named Georgina—who actually owns the apartment and has paid the mortgage since '94—wants to sell it in the divorce. So Alleyne has no choice but to destroy the entire thing...

So how much would it cost for Alleyne to rebuild the whole thing from scratch? Close to £100,000 ($155,630.63 U.S.). Ouch!

I'm sure someone's done it already, but if not, there should be an Android app that turns such tablets into PADDs or LCARS terminals.

Which Is The Bigger Problem Here?

Is it worse that a substitute teacher was dozing off in class, or that a student used "an unauthorized electronic device" (my term) to document it?

A ninth grader who snapped a picture of a snoozing substitute teacher with his cell phone camera and posted it on a social network is in hot water with his school district.

The unnamed student, who attends Mustang Mid-High School in Mustang, Okla., was suspended, according to ABC affiliate KOCO...

"Appropriate follow-up action has taken place," Mustang Public Schools spokeswoman Mary Leaver wrote to ABCNews.com.

Let's grant that the student violated a policy. Did the school act appropriately? If so, would the suspension be justified if, instead of putting the picture on a social network, the student had shown the picture to the school administration as a sort of FYI?

Al Gore Won't Like This...

...and neither will the rest of the lefties:

There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.

Who says so? The usual suspects:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Why do I believe these people while discounting others with similar credentials? Because these people make sense to me. It's truly as simple as that.

Occupy vs. Tea Partiers

This was sent to me today. Is it true? We know a lot of it is. Anyone want to defend the behavior of the animals in the 2nd column?

REPORTED	OCCUPY PARTY	TEA PARTY
ARRESTS	4149+	0
RAPES	12	0
DAMAGE	$10,000,000.00	$0
PUBLIC DEFECATION	YES	NO
ANTISEMITIC RANTS	12	0
COST TO TAXPAYERS ( by 11/9)	$19,327,487.00+	$0
PUBLIC MASTURBATION	3	0
MOLOTOV COCKTAILS THROWN	10	0
FIGHTS STARTED	YES	NO
CHILDREN EXPLOITED	YES	NO
POLICE CARS DAMAGED	2	0
PUBLIC DRUNKENNESS	YES	NO
DRUG POSSESSION ARREST	YES	NO
CONCEALED WEAPON ARREST	YES	NO
DRUG OVERDOSE	YES	NO
THEFTS	YES	NO
BURGLARIES	YES	NO
VANDALISM ARREST	YES	NO
TRESPASSING ARREST	YES	NO
NON FATAL SHOOTINGS	1	0
PUBLIC URINATION	YES	NO
URINATION ON OTHERS	YES	NO
ISRAELI FLAGS BURNED	2	0
AMERICAN FLAGS BURNED	1	0
AMERICAN FLAGS DANCED ON	1	0
AMERICAN FLAG DESECRATION	25	0
FELONY ASSAULT ON AN EMT	1	0
HEAD/BODY LICE OUTBREAKS	1	0
TUBERCULOSIS OUTBREAKS	1	0
MURDER	1	0
SUICIDE	1	0
SHOTS FIRED AT WHITE HOUSE	1	0
SCABIES OUTBREAKS	1	0
OBAMA ENDORSED IT	YES	NO
PELOSI ENDORSED IT	YES	NO
CAIR ENDORSED IT	YES	NO
SOCIALIST PARTY ENDORSED	YES	NO
NAZI PARTY ENDORSED	YES	NO
MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD ENDORSED	YES	NO
COMMUNIST PARTY ENDORSED	YES	NO
BIDEN ENDORSED	YES	NO
HUGO CHAVEZ ENDORSED	YES	NO
BLACK PANTHERS ENDORSED	YES	NO
HEZBOLLAH ENDORSED	YES	NO
MARXIST UNION ENDORSED	YES	NO
9/11 TRUTHER ENDORSED	YES	NO
BOLSHEVIK ENDORSED	YES	NO
IRAN GOVERNMENT ENDORSED	YES	NO
AYATOLLAH ENDORSED	YES	NO
NORTH KOREA ENDORSED	YES	NO
FARRAKHAN ENDORSED	YES	NO
NATION OF ISLAM ENDORSED	YES	NO

School Choice Video By Juan Williams

“A Tale of Two Missions” – a film by Juan Williams and Kyle Olson – tells the story of competing cultures in American education through examples from Chicago.

While the fight for school choice rages across the nation, perhaps no better example exists than that of the Windy City. Traditional alliances are breaking down. Both political parties are pushing for education reform and expanded school choice. The status quo is under attack, because most reasonable people understand that thousands of Chicago students are trapped in failing schools.

There's a clip at the link.

It Doesn't Fit The Narrative, So No One Will Care

And we'll continue to spend money making school food that kids not only don't want to eat, but food that we force them to take (when they get free school meals) which they then throw away:

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University tracked the body mass indexes of 19,450 students from fifth through eighth grade...

No matter how the researchers looked at the data, they could find no correlation at all between obesity and attending a school where sweets and salty snacks were available. link

A valuable study for my statistics classes.

What Lessons Are We Allowing These Students To Learn

If they're going to act like children, holding their breath until they get their own way, we should reinstate the principle of in loco parentis--and then swat them on the butt and send them to bed without dinner:

Following a noontime rally Tuesday, University of California, Davis, students spilled into an unused campus building, saying they intend to occupy it around the clock.

The students entered the building that formerly housed the Cross Cultural Center shortly before 1 p.m. The building will take the place of a tent encampment as the center of operations for the campus Occupy movement, said student Artem Rafkin.

"We are going to be permanently occupying it," Rafkin said.

Good lord, are there any adults in Davis?

I'm Officially Old Now

Some would say I've been old for a long time. Perhaps I could challenge that claim before, but now there's no way: two members of my West Point graduating class have just made general!