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LRC linked to an expose on Hall from HERE. Thought I’d do the same. Plus this:
Hall/Youtube.
You’re welcome.
Trivia time! Hall is the reason they never built the underhanded water treatment plant on SGI.
02 Saturday Jun 2018
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LRC linked to an expose on Hall from HERE. Thought I’d do the same. Plus this:
Hall/Youtube.
You’re welcome.
Trivia time! Hall is the reason they never built the underhanded water treatment plant on SGI.
01 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Other Columns
Seems appropriate to run this one again:
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At ceremonies coast to coast these meanings serve a justifiable purpose. The valedictorian speaks first to bid the class farewell to the sheltered academic lives the members have known. The salutatorian then speaks to the promise of the coming years. Or, something like that.
Those acquainted with the works of John Taylor Gatto or who have children of school age, surely understand the decline of quality in American public education. Gatto was formerly New York’s teacher of the year (State and City). His distinguished career spanned decades. Now he speaks and writes of the critical need for drastic school reform. His writing is frequently published at lewrockwell.com. He is the author of The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (2000).
Gatto has related the American model of public education to Soviet-era brainwashing:
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01 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in News and Notes, Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Homeschooling Rising in Popularity
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For good reasons.
One is avoiding public school culture and violence.
After a gunman opened fire on students in Parkland, Florida, the phones started ringing at the Texas Home School Coalition, and they haven’t stopped yet.
The Lubbock-based organization has been swamped with inquiries for months from parents seeking safer options for their kids in the aftermath of this year’s deadly school massacres, first in Parkland and then in Santa Fe, Texas.
“When the Parkland shooting happened, our phone calls and emails exploded,” said coalition president Tim Lambert. “In the last couple of months, our numbers have doubled. We’re dealing with probably between 1,200 and 1,400 calls and emails per month, and prior to that it was 600 to 700.”
Demands to restrict firearms and beef up school security have dominated the debate following the shootings, but flying under the radar is the surge of interest in homeschooling as parents lose faith in the ability of public schools to protect students from harm.
That’s violent physical harm, the risk of which is actually, statistically lower than it was 20 years ago. The greater danger, outside an immediate, isolated incident, is the admitted harm the schools do by graduating students who can’t read or calculate.
Five Things to Know Before Getting Started, by Melodie Kennedy.
30 Wednesday May 2018
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I was with a friend at a South Carolina Publix last year. We walked in, she looked around, and then asked someone where the scale was? They didn’t have one. Turns out that’s a strictly FLA affair:
The scales have actually been there since Publix founder George Jenkins opened his first “food palace” Publix in 1940. At the time, the only opportunity to weigh yourself was at the doctor, or maybe by finding a coin-operated scale. Jenkins offered it as a free service, and it stuck.
That original Publix scale still works. It now sits in the late founder’s old corporate office, where new associates see it when they take tours.
The model No. 2830 people weigher found in a new Publix today is identical to the ones the old Toledo Scale company started manufacturing in Ohio around 1950. Mettler Toledo, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Switzerland, now makes industrial equipment, precision lab instruments and high-tech scale components. But for decades, they kept manufacturing the low-tech, but reliable, people weighers for Publix, essentially the only company that wanted them.
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In a 1988 feature in the Orlando Sentinel, writer Donna Bouffard, with the help of store employees in Winter Park, identified seven recurring categories of scale users, including “pickpockets,” who set aside keys, change and wallets,” “bashfuls,” who go to great lengths to make sure nobody is looking, “hoppers,” who leap on in a single bound, and “mechanics,” who insist this thing must be broken.
Now you know, if you ever wanted to. I thought it was a So. Tampa thing as just about all the customers are in shape and would want to confirm that metrologically. Maybe it’s all just as well. At that one SC store, there would be a lot of scale mechanics…

Usually right up front. Martha Asencio Rhine/ TB Times.
28 Monday May 2018
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≈ Comments Off on Decoration Day 2018
Last for I celebrated Memorial Day at an aquarium and attached museum. Not a fish fancier, I did delight in a cigar box.

This year I loafed at the gym and then enjoyed a cigar. I think that’s about all for the day.
Wait, later I need to wrap up the TPC article for Wednesday. I just read a little reinforcement in this month’s copy of American Consequences, which you might want to inspect.
That’s all…
24 Thursday May 2018
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≈ Comments Off on Remedial America: On the Public Schools
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America, education, failure, government, Piedmont Chronicles, schools, TPC
Somewhat fitting with this being graduation season. Yesterday’s TPC piece on schooling, part one of two:
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The top ten schools in several categories are front and center in the USN report. There is other good performance outside the upper extreme, such as one school I found in a large Floridian city: 96% graduation rate; 64.4% college readiness; 84% AP participation with 69% success; and 71% reading and 66% math proficiency.
That school ranks 29th among all Florida schools and 343rd in the nation. However, this “best” school still graduates 96% of students when 29% are not reading at the level and 34% have trouble with arithmetic. It makes one wonder. It should make one suspicious.
Then, there are the “worst” schools. I skewered them recently in a related article. Please pardon any caustic effect therein. The worst offender districts spend more money than the average while delivering single-digit proficiency results. I think it’s safe to say “fraud” again.
The situation, the fraud is much worse than just poor test results. The whole basis and structure of the public schools in this country is so out of touch with American values that placing children in many or most of our schools is tantamount to child abuse. Seriously. The American model, in many states, is built on the fraud and historic bigotry of Blaine Amendment meddling. A beginning based on hating Catholics. Then, segregation and the hampering of black achievement. Next, integration, both of students and of plans to lower expectations and results. No free thinking citizens produced, just barely competent and obedient worker drone units. That was then. Now, the schools have become prisons.
I’ve been to more than a few schools recently. And I’ve been in more jails and prisons (on professional business…) than the average. There really is little difference. To convert a prison into a school, just add some desks. To make a school into a literal prison, just add bars to the windows. Beyond the physical similarities, there is congruence in the treatment of the inmates. And, in many places, the students literally have fewer rights, less freedom that prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Click here, read, and think about the application of these principles to your child’s school: Basic Rules and Protocols. In addition to suspicious, you should now be getting angry.
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17 Thursday May 2018
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≈ Comments Off on Twin Commentary on the Hyper-Sensitive Culture
PC “Right think” is a low-quality cover for no think. Joe Bob Briggs writes, today, for Taki’s Mag (a “wrong think,” thus, not politically correct, thus, actually correct publication) on the failure to grasp humor by the outraged, unintellectual masses.
He takes offense with the offended youth of today:
Satire is a machine gun on a swivel. You aim at a target, fire, move one foot to the right, fire, move again, aim and fire—you hit all the targets, without exception, and about one in ten targets will scream. When that happens, you hit that target twenty more times.
That’s how you identify the sacred cow, then exterminate the sacred cow.
The difference, in 2018, is that it’s not one in ten targets, it’s one in two. Everybody screams, like, all the time. Nobody ever says, “Oh, wow, you caught me, yeah, that’s pretty stupid.” And everybody assumes you have some kind of second agenda, usually political.
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I stopped reading the Comments sections entirely, not because I couldn’t take the heat but because I often couldn’t even understand the context of the argument.
Unreasoned assumptions are bad enough; making an “ass out of u and me.” It’s much, much worse in an era and an area of rapidly declining intelligence. For instance, assuming (wow) that most could even read the above-selected Briggs’s quote, some might assume (again) that he’s promoting gun violence and nothing else.
He’s not communicating at the highest level but at one a good deal higher than the passing average. By strange coincidence, today’s Pearls Before Swine strip tackles the same subject from a slightly different, easier to comprehend angle:
Stephan Pastis, Pearls, 5/17/18.
Again, even here, a basic literacy is required, else the viewer merely sees three generic people and a rat holding a beer. But Pastis is saying the same thing as Briggs: mind your own business, brighten up, and lighten up!
The other day we lost the mighty Tom Wolfe. He made a mark offending the pretension, as Monica Showalter observes.
What a treasure he was. He wrote about the world as it is, telling our American story because he loved our American story. How sad that we don’t have him to write about the ongoing story of America. He wrote about the world as an outsider, and he examined the establishment as it needed to be examined, and naturally, that added up to making the left look stupid. There was no other way for a writer this honest, and we are the richer for it.
It’s true that I would love to step into Wolfe’s role, merely lacking the talent and those white suits…
I do hope all this offended someone.
15 Tuesday May 2018
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≈ Comments Off on The Good News: Some Women Never Age
Okay, the last post was a bit of a downer – a necessary expose – but still maybe a bit much for a fair Tuesday evening. So, here’s a cheery one! I’ll not sign off for the night, tonight, with sourness.
Nena (remember her?) looks almost the same as she did 35 years ago. Better maybe. And with 35 years of stored kinetic energy:
Nena. YouTube.
Bonus: It’s not just Nena. Kim Wilde (remember her?) is hanging in there too.
Somehow, somewhere, sometime. They gotta be, what, 55 apiece?
15 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in News and Notes, Other Columns
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America, culture, decline, depression, fear, health, insanity, Perrin hates robots, society, The People, young
This is one of those posts that could easily run on for 3,000 words. So, in the dual interests of brevity and laziness, I’m going to keep it as short as possible.
Note: I have an initial feeling that all the following matters are interrelated, especially the issues related to the linked final story.
The robots are coming for your jobs. With issues like this lingering, growing, it’s no wonder people are fearful and depressed. This is a real developing trend.
One third of able-bodied American men between 25 and 54 could be out of job by 2050, contends the author of “The Future of Work: Robots, AI and Automation.”
“We’re already at 12% of prime-aged men without jobs,” said Darrell West, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank, at a forum in Washington, D.C. on Monday. That number has grown steadily over the past 60 years, but it could triple in the next 30 years because of new technology such as artificial intelligence and automation.
It could be even worse for some parts of the population, West argued. The rate for unemployment of young male African Americans, for instance, is likely to reach 50% by 2050.
“That, my friends, is a catastrophe,” West said.
That’s the “C” word we’re looking for, yes. It’s as big a disaster as:
One-quarter of Americans never going outside.
A quarter of Americans spend almost an entire 24 hours without going outside and downplay the negative health effects of only breathing indoor air, according to a new survey claiming a new “indoor generation.”
“We are increasingly turning into a generation of indoor people where the only time we get daylight and fresh air mid-week is on the commute to work or school,” Peter Foldbjerg, the head of daylight energy and indoor climate at VELUX, a window manufacturing company, said in a statement.
VELUX commissioned the “Indoor Generation Report,” published Tuesday, that found 77 percent of Americans don’t believe that breathing air inside is any worse than pollution outside.
It’s unclear how dangerous indoor air is in the modern era — reports by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency evaluating indoor air quality are from 1987 and 1989, which found that it is two to five times more polluted than outside.
Humidity, mold growth, inadequate temperature and being in close quarters with other people are all cited risks associated with poor air quality indoors.
It’s a big, beautiful world out there. I’m typing this outside as I add some of Nicaragua’s finest vaporized tobacco leaves to the air quality.
Something tells me that the younger people are driving up this statistic. Maybe that’s one reason why:
The Millennials are more stressed compared to older generations.
Twenty-seven percent of millennials said that stress often bothered them at work, compared to the 12% of baby boomers that said the same. Millennials were the group most likely to have stress interfere with their work. About a third of millennials (34%) said that they felt stress made them less productive, while only 19% of their older colleagues felt the same.
Why do millennials feel so stressed out? Increasingly insecure job prospects and overwhelming workloads, MHF believes.
“Millennials are more likely to have insecure contracts, low rates of pay and high entry-level workloads. The pressures they face in today’s employment market are very different to past generations,” MHF’s Richard Grange said.
Americans and other denizens of the West have been in a unique historical bubble since the industrial revolution. That bubble is bursting. The insecure economy is only part of the overall problem. And there is a problem:
Major Depression Diagnoses up 33% in 5 years. That’s a sobering report. Read it, especially if you’re under 35.
Major depression has a diagnosis rate of 4.4 percent in the United States, affecting more than 9 million commercially insured Americans.
Diagnoses of major depression have risen dramatically by 33 percent since 2013. This rate is rising even faster among millennials (up 47 percent) and adolescents (up 47 percent for boys and 65 percent for girls).
Women are diagnosed with major depression at higher rates than men (6 percent and nearly 3 percent, respectively).
People diagnosed with major depression are nearly 30 percent less healthy on average than those not diagnosed with major depression. This decrease in overall health translates to nearly 10 years of healthy life lost for both men and women.4
A key reason for the lower overall health of those diagnosed with major depression is that they are likely to also suffer from other health conditions. Eighty-five percent of people who are diagnosed with major depression also have one or more additional serious chronic health conditions and nearly 30 percent have four or more other conditions.5
People diagnosed with major depression use healthcare services more than other commercially insured Americans. This results in more than two times higher overall healthcare spending ($10,673 compared to $4,283).

We’ve got the numbers, they’ve got the rate of growth. Blue Cross.
This report, while eye-opening, is the product of the insurance industry. I smell money. Look at the information and graphs about pills. It’s interesting. These people and their pharma friends make big money pushing dope – for depression and everything else under the sun. That’s costly though it’s clear they’d like to avoid larger costs via payouts for associated auxiliary treatments. It makes sense for their bottom line. It makes little sense for the people.
As I stated at the beginning, all of this stuff is related. There’s a hard link between the mental issues and the heart/obesity/etc. physical epidemic. And with those and the fears, the indooring, the stress, and a thousand other factors.
Plainly put: American society is fractured, faltering, and increasingly trivial, idiotic, and insane. Plainer: it looks like decline. Already approaching 1,000 words, I’ll end here. More on this subject, I think, sooner than later – especially regarding the younger generations. I’m already planning a related piece for next week’s TPC column. For now, draw your own conclusions. Maybe step outside for a bit. Exercise. Kick a bot.
15 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in Other Columns
“Pyrotechnic” is probably the right term:
Even more impressive, to many critics, was “The Right Stuff,” his exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with a cast that included Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language. It won the National Book Award.
At the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and magazine pieces for New York, Harper’s and Esquire. His theory of literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who would listen was that journalism and nonfiction had “wiped out the novel as American literature’s main event.”
After “The Right Stuff,” published in 1979, he confronted what he called “the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding 10 or 15 years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge — The Novel?”
Like his style or not, Wolfe didn’t duck.

Or: Bonfire, South. Wolfe/FSG.
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