The School Revolution - Book Review

"I have been working on a curriculum for high school student that is designed to help them understand the freedom philosophy, and will enable them to articulate it.  This involves the ability to read carefully, analyze arguments, write clearly, and defend their position verbally."

"What I doubted (about the Obama appeal in 2008) was the practicality of a philosophy of government that presented the state as an agency of healing."
 - - Ron Paul, pages 34 and 35 of The School Revolution

Ron Paul's The School Revolution, A New Answer for Our Broken Education System is a calm, methodical case for parents who want two things: freedom to oversee their children's education, and adherence to the freedom philosophy within that education.

Most people are confused about the libertarian philosophy.  It's very simple - the use of force is never justified, unless in self defense.  This includes education of children.  Parents should not be forced to send their children to schools with which they disagree.  Your local public school is staffed by people who were products of a system that says that government schools are the 'agency of healing' and the people in them are dispassionate unbiased quality educators.  Some of them are.  Most of them are not.

Dr. Paul spends little time ripping the current education system.  What he does spend a lot of time on is explaining, in clear terms, what his philosophy is, why he promotes homeschooling, and what the data shows with regard to student performance.  His program, at Ron Paul Curriculum, is strong on what used to be called 'classical education' (and it also used to be in the public school program).

1. A curriculum must be integrated and coherent,
2. There must be a common theme: the freedom philosophy.
3. The best methodology is self instruction.
4. Courses should reinforce each other.
5. Students must learn to write and to speak in public.

A top flight education is not expensive.  School districts spend thousand of dollars per year per child.  The national average is somewhere around $10K a year per student.  The system is churning out barely literate students unable to communicate and helpless on many fronts.  The upper level classes in his program cost $250 for the year.  Not only that, Dr. Paul focuses on the idea that people should be first and foremost - free.  Then his program goes into a low cost (grades K - 5 are free) system of rigor that uses the internet and primary sources that are available on the web.  American History is taught by people like Tom Woods.  Literature and entrepreneurship are taught by people like Gary North.

The content rich program offered by Ron Paul is superior to what the public schools are offering today.  It is offering it for much less.  I think he is one of the early adopters of what will be the next wave of education.  The internet has destroyed the Establishment Media.  Public School is next.  The gatekeepers of Public Education are still standing at the gates, but people are slipping under the wall faster and faster.  Ron Paul's book gives them the roadmap.

JFK killed - 50 Years Ago - Watch the MSM Continue to Push the Absurd 'Official Story'

It's really amazing to watch.

Despite the fact that the web is up and running and information is easily available, the Mainstream Media is pushing the idea that the "official story" perpetrated by the Warren Commission is not only legitimate, but not to be questioned.  JFK's killing is treated by the Establishment in one of two ways: 1) anyone who questions the official story is a 'conspiracy theorist' and a 'kook' or 2) ignore anything else other than the 'lone gunman' Warren Commission story.

There is even a story on how the magic bullet theory, now that we have modern scientific techniques, has been proven true.

There is a story that the sound recording, which has more than 3 shots fired recorded on the audio, was recorded at the wrong time.

The fact that no sniper has been able to replicate Oswald's act is ignored.

The fact that the secret service was pulled off of the limousine before the turn to Dealey Plaza is ignored.

The fact that a fingerprint of LBJ's top assassin was found in the 'sniper's nest' in the book depository is ignored.

The roster of the Warren Commission is never analyzed.

PBS Frontline, which should know better, has dedicated its site to "Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?", a not so deft way to ignore any other possibility and focus attention in the wrong place.

CNN feels that the only relevant question that any 'conspiracy theorist' (the horror!) might have is about Oswald's activity in Mexico.

NBC has a web of interviews to handle the conspiracy section of their page - my favorite is with Dan Rather, who lied about what he saw on the Zapruder film.  The film was in storage and kept from the public for 12 years by Time Life inc.  Rather said it showed Kennedy's head falling violently forward.  Now we know this to be brazenly untrue.  Rather's sentence for lying?  A job in the MSM for life.

As usual, one must go to the real investigative journalists in alternative media for any critical thought or questions with insight.  The absurd freak show that is the MSM is reaching a fever pitch.  I guess it's a good thing that they are clinging to the Official Story, as it not only tips their hand as corporate toadies, it hastens their demise.  Their reliance on fakery, half truths, ad hominem and incredulity has run its course.

Just Tell Me I Can't - Book Review

"Good learners risk doing things badly in order to learn how to do things well." -  - Harvey Dorfman

Jaime Moyer always seemed like someone to watch.  As a fan of Major League Baseball, I was intrigued by Moyer's career path.  I had seem him arrive with the Cubs, then disappear, then resurrect and transform himself in Seattle as a top flight pitcher for a decade.  I enjoyed watching Moyer, with guile and smarts, dissect major league hitters by pitching 'backwards', changing speeds and hitting spots.  It is a select audience that enjoys watching an old lefty changeup artist carve up steroid fueled gorillas, and that audience will immensely enjoy Just Tell Me I Can't.

My interest in Moyer was confirmed in the book Moneyball - the smartest sports book of this era.  Moyer is portrayed as an old ghoul in that book - a vampire who will scramble your brain by out thinking you and feasting on your desire to crush his slow offerings.  It turns out there was a method to the psychological madness, and his name was Harvey Dorfman.

The best part of the book was Moyer's introduction to Dorfman.  Moyer had been reduced to being offered a job as a pitching coach.  He was on his way out of the majors - seen as a failure and at the end of the line.  Dorfman was recommended to him and with Dorfman's mental re-working of Moyer's psyche and confidence, turned Moyer around.  Dorfman taught Moyer how to train the mind and ones approach as one would train a muscle.  Dorfman seems to have been a master at getting people to take responsibility for their actions and failures, and use those things as strengths.  The fact that a man who could not top 84mph, by changing his mental approach, was able to not only change his life and career around, but thrive in the major leagues is what makes this sports book different.

Just Tell Me I Can't is really a book about failure and risk.  How to deal with failure, learn from it, control the after affects and become motivated rather than defeated by it.  The lessons learned from failure and taking risks are liberally sprinkled throughout all of the success stories I've know, and Moyer's is no different.

The old adage is "hitting is timing, and good pitching destroys timing.".  Moyer was able to pitch until he was 49 years old in the majors, with stuff that frightened no one, because he was a master technician and his mental approach was fostered by an old asthmatic man from the Bronx who never played baseball.  I found this book motivational and useful - baseball is just the medium used, it is the message within the book that makes it worth it.

"To aspire to great achievement is to risk failure"
"Think and talk the solution - not the problem"
- - Harvey Dorfman

War Against the Weather - Keeping the 'Climate Change' Drumbeat Going

There is an article in today's NY Times about how Climate Change is seen as affecting the food supply.  The article is filled with quotes like these: "On the food supply, the new report finds that benefits from global warming may be seen in some areas, like northern lands that are now marginal for food production. But it adds that over all, global warming could reduce agricultural production by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century."

Well, which one is it?  Do we have 'climate change', or do we have 'global warming'?  Didn't climategate happen?  I seem to remember emails from the top people, the same organizations and people quoted in the article, as saying "we must hide the decline."  You can read the code that was used to rig the data.  If you don't understand the computer code, the high numbers of comments by the coder will tip you off.  This was data used to 'support' Global Warming.

The NY Times article naturally assumes that you sit in the first pew of the Progressive Church of Global Warming.  Not only do you get 'climate change' in the title, and then a switch to 'global warming' midway through, you get an increase in agricultural productivity in some northern lands, but overall there will be lessened agricultural production.  Why?  The plains of Canada and Russia will now be able to produce food - how do we get to a reduction in 'agricultural production'?

The most hilarious part of the article is the link to Al Gore's winning the Nobel Peace Prize - this is used as an appeal to authority tactic by the author.  Not only is Al Gore the owner of two huge homes, the latest one being a $9 million monstrosity on the fragile California coast, but he jets around the world preaching Global Warming, blasting CO2 into the air and pollution while waving a Nobel Peace Prize around.  The same "peace" prize that Henry Kissinger, Yasir Arafat and Barack Obama have won - all warcrimes killers.  This is the person the hapless author chose to use as an 'authority'.

Zerohedge and the commenting community did its requisite job on the Executive Order put out by the president to fight the weather.   You have to wonder who still blindly believes this stuff.  Didn't we hate W Bush for all of these executive orders?  Doesn't the massive amount of climate fraud by the IPCC and the Rent Seekers get through to the Climate Crowd?

Someday the NY Times will be the headliner at newspaperdeathwatch.com.  That day can't come soon enough.

Watch how the co-founder of Greenpeace, MIT scientists and other scientists associated with top schools and organizations destroy the "science is settled on global warming" crowd.  According to the Mainstream Corporate Media, these people don't exist.  See them for the first time:





"Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."

"What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza.

"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."

"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills."
- - - - Don Quixote

Steve Jobs - A Sincere and Detailed Interview

I stumbled across this video interview of Steve Jobs from 2010.  He goes into great detail about how the iPhone and iPad were developed, as well as the competition between his company and others - particularly Google, Adobe, and Microsoft.

Notice how throughout the interview Jobs mentions the 'market' and the 'marketplace'.  He eloquently boils down the free market system into the arbiters of success being the consumer.  Jobs understood that the prime authority in the free market is the consumer.  I'm paraphrasing, but he says at one point that "people vote YES when they buy our product and NO when they don't.  Hopefully enough people vote YES and we can come to work the next morning."   It is impossible to distill the marketplace better than that. 

As a worker in an insuffereable bureacracy, I was intrigued by Jobs' comment on how many committees exist at Apple - - zero.  He talks about how Apple is the "world's biggest startup" and it is run like one.  The areas of the company responsible for certain aspects and products work independently - and they meet once a week to compare notes and during those three hours they share progress metrics and ideas.  Key, trusted people have independent authority delegated to them, and they respond positively.  This was music to my ears, because my workplace, the public school system, there are committees started for everything, and nothing gets done.  The 'consumer' loses where I work.

One area where Jobs is counterintuitive to his own ideas is between the 30 minute and 42 minute mark.  He's talking about the new tools that bloggers have, and his attempted 'resurrection' of the press.  He laments the downfall of the NY Times, Washington Post and the Wall St. Journal and fears that we'll become a "nation of bloggers."  He says he feels it is important that these companies thrive and that a free press is necessary for a functional democracy.  Jobs was keenly aware of the disappearing balance sheet of these companies - he uses the terms "hard times."

What is odd in that line of reasoning is that the Mainstream Media he mentions have been tools of the Elite Establishment for roughly the past 100 years, and have tried to control thought and be the Gatekeepers of opinion for about as long.  For a man who had trip wire sensitivity to the needs of the consumer, the looming bankruptcies of the mainstream media should have been a signal to Jobs that the content was substandard, and the consumer didn't (and doesn't) want what they were offering.  The consumer is smart enough to know about what phone and apps he wants, but oddly deficient when it comes to news content.  I found this opinion of Jobs to be incongruent and the perfect example of cognitive dissonance. 

Here is the entire video - it is information rich and worth your time.  Listen to Jobs if you wish to hone your entrepreneurial skills.

League of Denial

Jim McMahon can't remember where is.

Ricky Watters memory is slipping, causing arguments at home.

Kevin Turner, Watters lead blocker and fullback, has ALS.  He's 44 years old.

John Mackey lived his last years in an assisted living center, addled and on disability.

These stories and more like them are getting more attention because of the book and the PBS Frontline documentary "League of Denial".  Grantland wrote an honest article about what will become a problem for the NFL, if left unchecked and handled in the same 'protect the shield' mentality that has been the method thus far.   I first heard of "League of Denial" from a snippet of an interview on Mike Francesa's radio show on WFAN.  The NFL had just settled a class action suit involving scores of former NFL players for $765 million - the majority of which will go to disabled players.

The PBS special is worth watching.  The analysis of player's brains, the scientific process uncovering CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) is riveting.  What's more incredible is the NFL's dogged stance of not allowing the findings through its media filters.  You will watch a clinic on leverage - the moneyed behemoth and massively powerful NFL blocking, denying, obfuscating and altering information to delay, deny and hide information that could hurt, or possibly devastate its bottom line.

One wonders if the NFL had simply, in the 1990's, paid restitution to disable players and required players to sign a "play at your own risk" contract.  It would have been a public relations nightmare - for about 6 months.  Then the sports obsessed and intellectually limited average fan (apologies to HL Mencken) would have forgotten about the whole thing and continued to spend money on the NFL product.

Instead, the NFL opted to hide and then deny scientifically sound findings, and now they have a problem.  Eventually, the NFL will be fine, as America is sports crazy and the NFL rakes in billions in profit - it is too powerful to be down too long.  There is a quote, however, that could create a bigger problem than anything else for the NFL.  In the documentary, one of the NFL officials is quoted as saying "if 10 percent of the mothers of America are against football, we're finished."  Ironically, this rings true - it is the concerned mothers of America who could do more damage to soon to be $25 billion dollar industry than anything else.

Facebook Follies - part 27

There is some debate going on about the ACA, also known as "Obamacare".  Of course Obamacare will contribute to the bankruptcy of the United States.  It won't do as much damage as Medicare or Social Security, or Bush's Medicare Part D, but it will simply speed up the train as it barrels toward the burning trestle.

Someone who sits in the 1st pew of the Church of the State took my and someone else's free market (and hence negative) views of the program as sacrilege  - he was OFFENDED.  In the below exchange you'll see how logical fallacies, logical leaps and poor attempts at obfuscation rule the day on Facebook.  Unfortunately for this person, he ran into a buzzsaw - me.

FS and I agree on the moral reprehensibility of the ACA.  NLB loves his masters, God - oops - government will heal all, and it is the beneficent overlord of the economy as well.  I used to be surprised that people thought this way, but I am naive no longer.  Take a look:

-----------------

FS -  What I would like, is for the position of "hey, let's not force each other to do things" to be recognized as a legitimate human right and not be chastised as being a crazy extremist position. Especially when I am caught between two factions: one that wants to take my money and throw it TO people they do like and the other which wants to take my money and throw it AT people they don't like.

Mr. M - Mr. S you are correct, but you're going down a thoughtful path that many cannot understand as they've been addled and bamboozled. In order for healthcare to be a 'right', then you make healthcare workers slaves, as they are forced to provide their services as one has a 'right' to those services. The free market works, is has worked, but one must go back (in US history) at least 100 years to see even a facsimile of such a market. Once the AMA and the Rockefeller foundation got its claws in the medical establishment, the downward cycle began.

(side note - I was thinking of this article when I wrote this.  I will add italics to NLB's intellectually limited response)

NLB - I guess we'll all find out soon enough how monumentally the ACA destroys the good and pure market system I suspect we'll be just fine.
And Dcm, Last I checked there were plenty of major crashes pre-1900. Check your history. It's only in the highly market regulated 50s-70s that the boom-bust cycle took a break.
LOL the only country in the world where people talk like this, as though we're all goddamn mercenaries and everyone else can go f*** themselves. It's truly our national religion. "Yeah, screw the greater good." Rah rah, America. *sigh*
And yes, you are aligning yourself with a very common political position, FS, all assertions to the contrary.

MR. M - "check your history". Ok. I think I will, but only if you go through the reams of evidence that show that the business cycle is affected only by gov't intrusion. The boom / bust cycle is caused by 3rd party intrusion - it's why the French, when asked by the gov't officials 200 yrs ago said 'laissez faire' - let us be. I suggest von Mises' magnum opus, "Human Action", where he demolishes the views you seem to have adopted. Another good choice is Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression", where he showed that the FED and the US Treasury caused the Great Depression by the artificial expansion of credit. It's why you never hear of the Great Depression of 1921, because the federal gov't did....nothing and it was over in 18 months, and the downturn post WWI was worse than the one in 1929. Rothbard's "Man, Economy and State" is if you want the full monty, and not just an isolated American study. You can also go through Isabel Paterson's "Ghost in the Machine" - a great read, written in the WWII era when her views were unpopular. Albert J. Nock's "Our Enemy, the State" will, if you're looking for an analysis of the 17th and 18th centuries, do the job of showing you how government is the enemy of the people. For the 'happy ending' you can go through Carroll Qugley's "Tragedy and Hope" (B Clinton's mentor - mentioned by name in his DNC acceptance speech in 1992) for an insider's view of how the Big Banks have been intruding and, via the Morgans, Rockefeller's et al, taking over what was once a free economy and a free people. He wrote it after having 2 yrs of access to the papers of the CFR. Of course they broke the plates because it caused such a stir, but that's just coincidence.

----------------------------

It was the "check your history" comment and the "It's only in the highly market regulated 50s-70s that the boom-bust cycle took a break." comment that made me write all of that.  Telling me to check my history is one thing, but the 50's - 70's is purely odd, as 2 minutes of analysis blows it away.  Our economy now is multiple times more regulated, and we have no vestiges of a gold standard, and our boom bust cycle is out of control.  The guy makes no sense.  Notice the arrogant *sigh*, as NLB takes the pseudo high road, after making so many unfounded assumptions about freedom and the free market that his response becomes a parody.  FaceBook is usually not worth it to go bananas like that on someone, as he won't read any of those things, but there might be an enterprising person, or a critical thinker who will, and then it is worth it.  In the space below I posted this link, not for NLB, but for one of the Remnant: