Jaime Dimon Gets the BBQ Invite

Jaime Dimon (and Mitt Romney!) strike the correct poses that will get them invited to the barbecue. Unfathomably, it works.


In the "great minds think alike" department, The Saker sees what I see.

https://www.unz.com/tsaker/what-kind-of-popular-revolution-is-this/

Line Dinh Lets it Fly

This could only be from a site that has been banned by Facebook.

Line Dinh has a site appropriately named "Postcards From the End of America".  Dinh has it right.  We are seeing, at warp speed, the beginning of the inevitable end of the American Experiment.  There is no way to save it, as the double standards combine with wanton destruction.  That is a lethal combination, and throughout history, it always has been.  Our historically illiterate woke population doesn't know or understand any of this of course.  It's all about how they feel at the time.  Facts and history are anachronistic and irrelevant.

I wonder how they'll feel when they're hungry?

As I write this, they're going after the former paragon of woke virtue, JK Rowling.  Her sin?  She's now 'transphobic' for defending women.

Cereal is now racist as well.  It's difficult to keep up.  I don't think I'll try.  I will stick to Education and School - my specialties.  However, this is from today.  It's a real story:

Dinh, in his article, quotes from Joe Sobran, a writer who was kicked out of the mainstream.  He was consistently conservative, and the Elites in the Neoconservative movement branded him all the usual names and he was "cancelled", before there was such a thing.  This was in the 1990's.

Sobran nailed it, years ago.  He saw what was coming:

Dinh explains how this whole thing went down in Maoist China.  It's happening here.  It won't end well.

Will America Break Up in 2030 or 2033?

They seem to be sprinting for the finish line.  The Top of the Pyramid, for whatever reason, is really going hard.  I think they'll succeed.  This seems engineered, and I'm not the only one who sees it:

The Elite, who went to the elite boarding schools, have read Caesar's Gallic Wars.  Divide and Conquer works.  After The Great Hollowing Out of the United States - 1913 to 2016, they seem to be rabidly picking out the carcass while feverishly working to remain in control.

I have had some questions after the fact:

• Why is a border, armed with people with guns, acceptable for CHAZ? What about 'gun violence and gun control?  Is that topic finished?
• Who brought the barricades to wall off CHAZ? Who paid for that? Who set them up without getting bothered?  If you went to your street, and did the same thing - what would happen?
• How do random pallets of bricks show up on non construction zones?  Who paid for that?
• How come the Corporate Press isn't critical of the protest / riot gatherings?  What happened to COVID?
• Since when do people in Brussels and Paris care about police brutality in Minneapolis - or America for that matter?  Don't they have their own problems?  Yet they manage to have massive protests ... about happenings in Minnesota?
• How does the Corporate Press manage to rigidly stay on message, even when the message, and the parallel hypocrisies and turnarounds, are also exactly the same?
• Who is paying for all of this?  Can you just up and leave your house, go to a major city, and protest?  I can't, and I'm a public sector employee who has been getting paid throughout COVID.
• Why is the timing perfect for the protests / looting / after ruining the US Economy?  I'm always supposed to believe in 'coincidence theory', and never 'conspiracy theory'.
• "Defund the Police" emerged out of nowhere.  There has never been any approval or agitation for this.  Until now - and it's nationwide.  How did that happen?

Unfortunately, the historical cycle will go the way it always has.  The country simply cannot hold together, nor do I think it wants to.  I see the Elites not only ignoring, but encouraging looting and the destruction of private property.  David Dorn was killed.  Memorial Day weekend in Chicago was a massacre with black people getting killed in the double figures.  These topics are not only officially Not News, they don't matter at all.  Even worse, if you speak about them, much of the sheeple herd will pillory you on social media.  This fact will be a large reason behind the inevitable breakup.  The smart money says it happens around 2033.  With things going the way they have, I say that's optimistic.  My date is 2030.

If we all saw the Top of the Pyramid and their repellent shenanigans, we could stay together.  But that isn't happening.  People are cheering and following the figures they see as authorities.  

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Very few people are calling out those in power.  Glenn Greenwald is one of the few.  He sees the obvious hypocritical messaging fail, and disembowels them in print:

Matt Taibbi sees it too.  He exposes the Corporate Media and rips apart 'progressives' and the 'progressive media':

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Lastly, here are some images and a short video from Richmond, VA yesterday.  All I see is an unthinking herd.  People easily manipulated, who will do as they're told, with bafflingly limited knowledge of American History, or anything else for that matter.

One of the pictures shows that someone out there knows what's up.  The "Justice for Duncan Lemp" was good to see.  There's a reason you don't know who he was.  Once you look into it you'll see why.

The Check Cashing Place

Stonewall Jackson

Arthur Ashe

Robert E. Lee

Sir Ken Robinson Response: Time for a New School Transformation

I gave a Ken Robinson TED talk as an assignment a few weeks ago.  He talks a lot about how school doesn't need a 'reformation', it needs a 'transformation'.  I think he's right.

These were the questions:

1. Robinson talks about curiosity, particularly among young people. I think it is the most important thing in the learning process. Do you agree?
2. Ken Robinson gave a few of these talks 10-15 years ago. Nothing much has changed. Will this era of 'distance learning' be one of the things that speeds up people breaking away from traditional public school?

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Here is one of the best responses, from the same young woman in my previous post. It's amazing:

1. There’s the saying that “curiosity killed the cat” but what if that cat had nine lives? The cat would try something new to avoiding dying next time and keep trying till it accomplishes what it wants. Curiosity sparks discovery and discovery sparks ingenuity. The second principle that Ken Robinson describes as a driving force of human life is curiosity. “If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners”. Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” and SOLE is based on this particularly important fact. His experiments with the children in India and the Himalayas support Robinson’s argument. Children learn best when they’re free to explore and comprehend at their own pace. As Robinson suggests, “Curiosity is the engine of achievement”. If the cat from my earlier example wasn’t curious, then it wouldn’t have found new ways to survive and achieve what it wants.

Robinson’s description of great teachers is similar to Gatto’s methods in teaching his students. He articulates that great teachers don’t just reiterate information, but also “mentor, stimulate, provoke, [and] engage”. Gatto ensures that he does each of these things with his students, by involving in apprenticeship and teaching them to focus on creating new ideas and analysis. He doesn’t focus on tests and encourages his students to be their own self-critiques. Robinson has a comparable point about testing as well. He acknowledges the importance of standardized testing for diagnostic purposes but not for it to be the main attribute of education. “Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power imagination and curiosity”. Gatto spoke about one of his aversions in the school system is the idea of the “one right way” to educate. Both Robinson and Gatto have reinforced the importance of learning through curiosity rather than test scores.

Finland doesn’t focus on standardized testing and doesn’t have a dropout rate compared to the US. Instead, Finland highlights a variety of subjects besides Math, English, Science and Social Studies. As Robinson articulates, the US has an industrial approach towards education and will only improve with better data. “Education is not a mechanical system. It’s a human system…Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it, which is rooted in their own biography”. Using data alone to determine the success of millions of children is ineffectual. A human’s mind doesn’t operate like a machine and each one of us isn’t built to have the same skillsets. What one person may perceive a subject as irrelevant and hard, another may perceive it as important and easy, and vice versa. If each person receives specialized education to tailor their strengths and weaknesses, then they can all thrive. “The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility”. An environment that supports curiosity, creativity and independence, opens a world of possibilities.

2.

I think the era of distance learning has the potential to break people away from traditional public school. For most of us, as students and teachers, distance learning was a new and insightful experience. Doing all my work from home has allowed me to see the hidden good and bad aspects of traditional public schools and the education system. There are some things I would never miss about school such as: going to sleep late due to homework and waking up at 5am, taking the bus to and from school, starving myself because the cafeteria food is distasteful, and being restricted from using the restroom for ridiculous reasons. Well more accurately, there are many things. However, there are two important things I’ve missed the most, hanging out with my friends and talking with my teachers. Classes aren’t the same without everyone together. Fortunately, we’re in the age of technology and those problems are easy to solve. They’ll be many more opportunities to interact with everyone (once there’s no pandemic, of course). Distance learning has displayed the brokenness of the education system by illustrating the unpreparedness for uncontrollable disasters, lack of timely response and action, and lack of organization skills. This year was supposed to be my first graduation in my lifetime. I can’t blame the school for following social distancing regulations, but I had hoped they would at least give us (seniors) good compensations. We missed on the most exciting parts of senior year. Each year, the schools has Senior Awards but this year, they didn’t offer any. There doesn’t have to be an event hosting the awardees and their families, the awards can just be mailed to homes without a grand gathering.

Distance learning offers more opportunities to teach oneself and work at their own pace. To my surprise, I’m doing better in Math with distance learning compared to learning it in school. There’s a lot more work entailed but I get to take my time and comprehend what I’m learning better. I also have better resources to work with. Learning outside of school has proven to be more beneficial.

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Sugata Mitra Meets John Taylor Gatto: Intellectual Shackles Broken - A True Story

I didn't change a thing.  Not one bit of editing.

This young woman is one of the top writers in the Public Speaking class.  She showed up with the writing part of her skill set down cold.  She was in my class to bolster her verbal presentation.  As a soft spoken young woman from the Lesser Antilles, she has a quiet dignity about her, and she realized she needed to get up in front of the group and say her piece.  She did well in the class and overcame her public speaking fears.  Good for her.

Then came The Novel Coronavirus and we went online.

She saw the John Taylor Gatto documentary "Schools From the Heart", and the next assignment was the Sugata Mitra TED Talk: "The School in the Cloud". 

What you're about to read is a type of clarity from a young mind that has not been snookered and bamboozled by Corporate Media or the Campus Industrial Complex.  She makes all the connections that are there, and uses newer, better information to .... change her mind.

This is what it's like to see a young person whose BS-ometer isn't broken.  She has eyes to see.  There are many negatives to working in the Bad Neighborhood.  This is one of the positives - one of the best.

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Sugata Mitra’s presentation on learning, education and school has changed my mind about the effectiveness of homeschooling. My mother wants to home school my little brother, but I opposed it. She doesn’t like the idea of him going to public school with ‘wild’ children. She even wanted me to go to a private school, but it was too expensive. I opposed homeschooling because I thought he needed some exposure to other children his age and learn how to interact with people. “Schools as we them are obsolete…It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated”. As he explained that the teaching methods used are from the times of the British Empire, I began to understand why school has become outdated.

Mitra’s experiment with the children in the slums next to his office was very enlightening. It’s amazing that the children learned how to browse the internet within 8 hours, having no prior knowledge of computers. When he tried the experiment again with different children in a remote village, the children learned how to play games and even asked for “a faster processor and a better mouse”. Their knowledge about computers and how to use them was exceedingly high, considering it was only a few months and the computer’s language setting was English. These children taught themselves another language without the help of a teacher or English speaker. “In 9 months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West”. I found this ironic because the school year is about 10 months and I have been learning Spanish since 7th grade, yet I’m not even close to fluent. If I could become more fluent at home, then why go to school? I realized that my brother learns on his own all the time, just from watching tv. He has a broad vocabulary for a 3 year old, he can count to 20 then count by tens to 100, do basic addition and subtraction and recognizes things by color and shape. Leaving him alone with the proper learning material helped him to explore different things, find what he likes and learn in new ways.

An eight-year-old and twelve-year olds who speaks Tamil learning the biotechnology of DNA replication in English does sound far-fetched but not impossible. Two months is a short period of time to understand the basics of such a complex subject, especially when it is in a foreign language. These children scored a 30% on the test but in my opinion, that’s a high score. When I was eight years old, I was in 4th grade. I learned about Social Studies (geography), subject/verb agreements and Math. At that time, I didn’t like science in the slightest, so learning about DNA replication would’ve been a struggle for me. Mitra explains that tests were created as a method of a survival test. “Punishment and examinations are seen as threats”. Tests can be worrisome, but I hadn’t realized that our brains register them as threats. It explains why my brain sometimes shuts down on particularly important tests when I know the material. As Mitra emphasized, those methods were effective for ancient times of war. So, I’m not sure how that type of survival is going help me in present day life. “If you allow the education process to self-organization then learning emerges”. This reinforces Gatto’s reasoning for allowing his students to go on field trips every Friday because Mitra is basically saying that schools are made to teach children in one manner only, discouraging them from thinking for themselves and hindering creative thinking. Whereas the children who are able to freely teach themselves are open to learning and new ideas. Mitra suggested that creative ways of teaching uninteresting topics is more effective than simply stating the main idea and I agree because for me, Math is subject that I like based on who’s teaching it. Some teachers explain the topic once or twice in a boring, complicated manner and expects everyone to understand. Other teachers give scenarios and ‘real-life’ examples to make it more interesting and relatable.


Mitra’s Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) for educating children, sounds like an environment where their soul is being nourished and that they’ll flourish by teaching each other; especially since its based upon broadband, collaboration, and encouragement. His wish to build the “School in the Cloud” is not only a simple way to educate children across the world, but also a way to secure a future for many children. As the saying goes, “Knowledge is power”, so these children will be given the power to gain a career in anything they want. 

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This was my response:
This is one of the best, if not the best, bit of writing you've done. As you're a skilled verbal tactician, that's saying a lot. I'm glad the video reached you. I saw it 10 years ago and never forgot it. You, your little brother, all of us have so much potential. I remember thinking how strange it was that after seeing this video that school was stifling potential. It was eye opening and wildly ironic. Fantastic work.

1971: Muhammad Ali Says Racial Integration is Wrong

I gave this assignment to this year's Public Speaking class back in early March.  That feels like a few years ago now that I think about it.

I wanted the 12th graders to see what an unpopular opinion looks like.  They get 'diversity is our strength' put in front of them all the time - and no one questions it.  Certainly no one ever asks for proof.  It's become dogma.  Muhammad Ali was one of the best at using rhetorical skills to take the current dogma and slam it to the floor.  He does it here in 1971, much to the consternation of the British interviewer.

I wish we had a young Ali here to speak, seeing how wretched things have become.  As a side note, every student had a lot to say on this one.  I had 100% return for this assignment, and students had a lot to say, especially the young women, who did not like his message.

This was the assignment:

Muhammad Ali talks about racial integration in USA; November 1971 on Parkinson, a British television chat show.

1) Explain how Muhammad Ali uses rhetoric, and only rhetoric, to take command of the conversation. He deftly calls the interviewer a liar. Explain how he did that.

2) Ali argues a point that was controversial at the time, and his points would be more controversial today. How would people react to this interview today?

3) Is Ali correct? Argue your position on this controversial topic.

John Taylor Gatto Response: Another Independent Thinker Arrives

Here is another response to the John Taylor Gatto "Schools From the Heart" mini documentary lesson I gave last month.  I am consistently amazed how they have eyes to see things that many older people can't.  To the teenagers, these things are obvious - right in front of your face.  To many adults, they are "crazy".

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There were some gems I caught in this video:

· Only in real life experiences will a student be able to teach himself.
· Schooling is not education but an attempt to write one right way for everybody.
· Self-knowledge is key.

When I heard him say schooling is not education, but an attempt to “write one right way for everybody”, I got chills because that is the truth. It’s pretty crazy because one day after our class we spoke about the education system and how it is failing its students. Growing up I remember being taught not to do certain things because ‘it wasn’t the way it is supposed to be done’. I remember being introduced to a new and complicated curriculum in elementary and middle school. Often, my mom would teach me another, simpler way.

He also says firsthand experiences are the only way to learn. I agree. With all new experiences come new findings and learning. If it is constructive, like doing internships, I believe it definitely brings a different perspective. What I picked up on the most was the emphasis on the outside world. Stepping out of the classroom, which is far more important than any classroom. He wants his students to have life skills - which I truly believe is important. To connect this all to Covid, with all of this time on our hands, it is hard to know what to do with it.

Truthfully, recently, I haven’t been using my time in the most constructive way. I realized that and started to do more. I picked up a few new hobbies and I’m actually pretty good at them. I have been getting into spirituality and things like that. I have found new topics that have made me think. I Even watched a whole show about the CIA and the crack epidemic, which I found extremely interesting.

Overall, I am very thankful for this break. It showed me a lot.

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