Month: September 2018

With the reality of a Supreme Court filled with Justices who will protect freedom of religion (freedom to impose its come from above narratives of how we came to be and what we should do on the lives of believers and non-believers alike) and the freedom of those who use the religion of capitalism to keep most of the people passive enough so that when they are abused they say thank you to those who provide them with enough of what they have been convinced to want to keep them happy.  These are truly terrible days and not only because something evil has overtaken us but because–far, far, worse–we have given our consent by making their evil ways our way.  Without the us that is that general public that goes about doing their business everyday, year after year, their wishes would not be so richly granted and there would not be an us continuously help them get richer and ever more powerful, ever more in command of what we are able to do with our lives, ever more in command of what becomes of the planet on which we live.

There should have been a revolt over the Patriot Act and their should have been a revolt over what Rumsfeld and Cheney cost us in lives and treasure.  We should have revolted long ago over there being so much for war (that money went into the hands of corporations, the corpses were rarely those of the children of politicians or corporate leaders) and so little for schools and roads and the building of institutions for human progress.  We should have revolted when the banks sucked from the average person–lover of America and the American way–most of what he and she owned, even most of what they needed, their homes and money to send their kids to college and all that stuff that makes the American dream possible, two SUVs in the garage, large screen TVs, and CocaCola in the fridge.  We should have revolted, we should have revolted, we should have revolted but there would be no revolution, there would be no revolution, there would be no revolution on that day or any other day.

Sucks!!!  Too satisfied.  To preoccupied.

Tragedy is that there has been a revolution going on for most of our lifetimes, a coup we can and probably should call it, the rich and powerful choosing who can be rich and powerful and the rich and powerful and their chosen running a government that should by of the people and for the people but is, and has been for a long time, a government by a few people for a few people.

What makes these days different is that those few, with our complicity, have finally rigged things so the few can have at us in anyway they want.  And they have show themselves, the few, to want every thing they can get.

The new court will let them have it–everything they want.

And still, there will be no revolution.

Oh my!!!!  No Child Left behind did not improve the cause of education.  Modest assessment, I will claim, and in the book I am writing that is nearning completion, I argue that it was not only a failure but a profound disaster.  Why?  Because it was.  I do not forgive easily.  I cannot forgive McCain and I cannot forgive Bush and I have never forgiven Henry Kissinger (a “dignity present at the McCain funeral) because the results of  actions predicated on their advise and command harmed great numbers of people greatly.

As for NCLB, I cannot forgive those who initiated it and those who perpetuated it, G. W. for sure but Obama chose Arnie Duncan to lead the Department of Education and the reign of error was continued far beyond the time when disaster was acutely apparent.  I will be accused by Diane Ravitch fans of continuing to want to whip the repentant–she has apologized in a hundred different ways for her participation in crafting the legislation that twisted the education system into a more twisted mess than it was before, a deed that showed that the impossible was possible if a few dastardly people could find ways to do their dastardly deeds.

So, the article from which this quote comes, authored by Diane Ravitch, is but another in a series of apologies made without apologizing and speaking to the errors without acknowledging the magnitude of the damage done.

She reports that,

“No Child Left Behind will be recognized in time as the most colossal failure in federal education policy, whose disastrous effects were amplified by Race to the Top.

Its monomaniacal focus on test scores warped education. RTT just made it worse and left a path of destruction in urban districts.

And the gains were, as a new study reports, modest and diminished over time.

Anyone familiar with Campbell’s Law could have predicted this result. Social scientist Donald T. Campbell wrote:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Here is a link to the article: NCLB Got Little and Diminishing Returns.

LITTLE AND DIMINISHING RETURNS!  Understated, to say the least.

Sanity.  We the people too often fail to demand sanity as an essential component of any argument and any initiative for which our argument allow. Our societal decision-making processes are infused with good amounts of arguments that are something other than sane. We are far to accepting of this and acceptance has become our way of life and too our determent.  There is the better idea and there is the horrible idea and the sanity of the deliberations which determine which is which is of incredible importance to a humane society, a society that is kind and generous because such are qualities of a humanely sane society.  Anyone alive who lives to be mistreated, most sane people would agree, is not fully sane.  The adverse should understood to be just as sane, that anyone who mistreats others, anyone who decides in favor of the mistreatment of others or decides for allowing others to be mistreated, should also be considered to be something other than sane.

I understand the reason fair minded people would think that to declare some not sane and not allow or not listen to what they have to say is undemocratic and, too, who is it who gets to determine who is sane and who is not?  I think that sane people have a pretty good notion of what is what and who is who in regard to this matter even though they are too fair minded—too tolerantto make public the distinctions they make in their minds.

Really, I would like it if there were to be a public discussion of what stands as sane argument and what does not, this in the context of appreciation for all human beings and a strong desire for them all to be treated humanely.  That some are very poor, deprived of what they need so that others can have lots of what they want, that some can get what they want bydepriving others of what they need would, I would hope, be found to be inhumane and not sane, the do onto others principle understood as something more than a convenient moral adage, as a basis for declaring arguments sane and otherwise.

We would have to look at or laws and the arguments made for them, whether those arguments sacrifice the well-being and the happiness in life of others and whether the sacrifices of some serve no other reason than making some much better off in their lives than others.  The wealthy would not be alone in receiving sanity-oriented scrutiny but also those driven insane by their situation, those driven to understanding of the world that, in the light of good sense, would be shown to be the product of something other than informed good reasoning.

People have to be allowed to be who they are and think what they think but the criteria for participation in any decision-making process that has an effect on the well-being, on the quality of life of others must be that they engage in humanely sane thought, their ideas scrutinized for attention to not good for me than not good for them either kind of reasoning.

Debate, disagreement would not be eliminated.  Nor would our public debates be wholly reasonable or necessarily cause all decisions to be good ones.  But good, in those debates, made the foremost criteria, as in good for all and none harmed as the ideal might get us somewhere nearer to becoming a good and humane society, capitalism be damned and so to pernicious religious beliefs that interfere with good reason.

I was watching a segment on some news program that pointed out that a good number of people running for office this election season have affiliations with our clandestine services. The piece suggested that the reason they are running for office in such numbers is because of the way their agencies are being treated by the Trump administration–understandable. They are mostly running as democrats, the party where liberals felt they had a political home. Personally, I have never thought of the CIA or the FBI or NSA to be populated by people of the liberal persuasion. And not too many years back, liberals were, for good reason, leery of the secret services because they all had a long history, under the cloak of secrecy, hiding from a democratic missions being carried out of which few who were liberal in their thinking would approve, for one thing because many of the secret actions were carried our against liberals and their causes. Is it really good for freedom and democracy to fill the chambers of Congress with people who worked for these agencies? Has bad, bad Trump made FBI, and CIA, and NSA the good guys and are they really now representatives of what good liberals understand to be good? My enemies enemies are not, by virtue of being their enemies, necessarily my friends, right. It might be that Trump has caused liberals to lose their minds.L