Anatomy Of A Tantrum

What’s Behind A Temper Tantrum?
Scientists Deconstruct The Screams
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/12/05/143062378/whats-behind-a-temper-tantrum-scientists-deconstruct-the-screams

I only remember Don throwing a single temper tantrum. He had a melt down in the Harrisonburg Home Dept when he was a couple of years old and was lying on the filthy carpet in the doorway kicking and screaming. I recall giving his bottom a swat, and sticking him in the child carrier of the cart and within a minute or so he was drowsy and soon fell asleep. I have always felt that because we did nothing to give him a payoff for his action he never felt the need to repeat it. I suppose it could be interesting, as the author describes the researchers responding to kids tantrums, but I would still rather just avoid it altogether.

OWS

I haven’t written much about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, I think largely because I am not convinced this leaderless organization with diffused demands can make any impact even if it wasn’t marginalized by the mainstream media.  I figured that they would do something really stupid (or it would be arranged to make it look that way, as there have been several attempts so far) and earn the ire of the general population.  Well, it seems to me they are just about read to do so:

Can a big coordinated effort save Occupy?
Despite union opposition, West Coast protesters from Seattle to San Diego plan to close ports on Monday
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/09/can_a_big_coordinated_effort_save_occupy/singleton/

I doubt that the average union Joe on the dock is going to be happy with a smaller paycheck because the port is closed, no matter how much they might otherwise support the movement. While the similar thing happens when secretaries and janitors get screwed in Wall Street when the OWS people cause problems there, those people don’t tend to talk directly with crowbars and fists like dock workers. The last thing the movement needs is to have a legitimate reason for the mainstream media to marginalize them and I think they are just about ready to provide that to them.

My prediction is that OWS movement is just about ready to fade away, though only after a big bang that makes them the butt of jokes and subject of ire of mainstream America (or the 99% they profess to represent).

Too bad, I really like their overall message. The 1% has grown way too powerful in our society and without dramatic change, the path forward is to more and more emulate the corrupt third world.

“It’s poverty and punitive funding formulas, stupid”

What real education reform looks like
Teachers unions aren’t the problem. Poverty and punitive funding formulas for poor schools are
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/09/what_real_education_reform_looks_like/singleton/

Staggeringly obvious, to me at least. If a school has comparatively fewer funds, it does a comparatively poorer job in educating students. Correspondingly, students that come from a poorer environment generally do much poorer than students from a less poor environment (I read that recently, but apparently didn’t post it here). Couple these two issues together and magically! you get really crappy education for poor communities. All this blather about unions, the moronic focus on test scores (only our _average_ test scores are poor compared to Europe and Asia, throw out the above mentioned poor students and all the sudden we are on par with or better than the European and Asian averages), etc. is a smoke screen for those who simply want to profit at the expense of student’s education (see http://sol-biotech.com/wordpress/2011/10/27/the-educational-industrial-complex/).

The suggestion that school taxes need to be de-localized is the key one, I believe. Wealthy parents will provide resources to their school systems (private schools are CONSTANTLY doing fund raisers!) so schools in wealthy areas will always be better off than those in poorer areas, so the idea of preferentially ‘stealing’ money from higher taxed areas to subsidize education in poorer areas makes a lot of sense (but, of course, is all about Socialism and whatnot, so will greatly anger the red horde (I mean the GOP and libertarians)). Indeed, the earlier article I alluded to indicated that subsidizing poor student’s parents actually had a better educational result than simply subsidizing the schools themselves. It seems that if the students are too impoverished to eat, they don’t do their homework! What an astounding concept! The US used to call itself the land of equal opportunity, but that has gone by the wayside quite a while ago and I don’t see any trend to reverse it.

Yet more signs of the apocalypse

Whose army is it?
The 99 percent has become dangerously removed from the military-industrial complex that controls our remote wars
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/08/whose_army_is_it/singleton/

I guess there are some small upsides to a draftee army, at least the 1% have to make a spectacle of themselves to avoid service thus drawing additional attention. In our all-volunteer army we now have an all poor, backwoods and ghetto army that serves at the beck and call of the 1%. Really it should be called a mercenary army because it certainly isn’t representing the people of the country it purportedly comes from, polls consistently show that the 99% are ready to end the expensive wars and shrink the military. Just like the police force no longer represents the ordinary citizen, our military no longer represents our country and is instead a taxpayer funded arm of the 1% to preserve their privileged, power and money.

Pretty soon when the military completes its takeover of our police forces (well on its way down along the Mexican border with the National Guard acting as police officers and police officers armed and armored like the army) and with our Great President willy nilly declaring people to be terrorists (and thus unpersons (I really need to read 1984!) we who dare to complain about the good old days will be rounded up and disappeared just like in the third world countries we all like to make fun of.

The inevitable? war with Iran

US: Edging closer towards war with Iran?
The biggest problem for the US is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, but getting it and not using it.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112411011569936.html

What am amazing thing! In order to get clear reporting on the US foreign policy you have to go to a foreign web site! I bet you would never get such reporting even from BBC since we were so fully supported by the Brits in our last disastrous illegal imperial invasion. Still, quite interesting reading even though it is from that damn nasty foreign dirty AlJazeera web site. It seems clear, particularly from their conclusion (below) that war with Iran is quite inevitable no matter which clown wins the next Presidential election:

Nonetheless, at this point war looks likely. Under our political system, the side that can pay for election campaigns invariably gets what it wants. There is, simply put, no group of donors who are supporting candidates for president and Congress based on their opposition to war, while millions of organised dollars are available to those who support the neo-con agenda. Pundits used to say: As Maine goes, so goes the country. It’s just as simple today: As the money goes, so goes our policy.

We are already going (went) broke on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and relying on China to fund it, why not add another war on there? It will help to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire, though I would prefer it linger for a few more decades.

Popping the education bubble

The higher ed bubble is bursting, so what comes next?
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/12/sunday-reflection-higher-ed-bubble-bursting-so-what-comes-next/1969376

I like this quote best:

…homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class.

People need to earn an education and it needs to be challenging to do so. Schools, however, get paid based on the number of people that attend, so schools have no incentive to make it challenging to attend and in most cases, simply attending for the requisite period will get you the degree. As much as I complain about our f-ed up educational system relying so much on memorization, at least it relies on something that, while a crappy proxy for learning, is at least better than giving degrees away.

Presuming we survive this period as a society, I am sure we will look back on these silly excesses of our government with wonderment and slack-jawed amazement. How could they be so stupid? Yet today we are those stupid people and from my current vantage point I don’t see any prospects for any kind of change in the next decade.

Email dead already?

Tech firm wants to ban office e-mail
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/05/tech/web/atos-office-e-mail-ban/index.html?hpt=hp_bn6

I have never tweeted and never expect to (as you dear readers no doubt know already, I can’t even say ‘Hello’ in 160 words or less) and find text messaging (at least from a phone, smart, dumb or otherwise) unbelievably painful (I have ‘texted’ from a keyboard via my email, but I am not sure that really counts), but I have used chat at work (and occasionally at home) several times. To me it is not as nice as email because I feel there is pressure to get the message transmitted, thus less time for reflection and review (it drives me nuts that people send emails without bothering to proof read them!). I suppose I will have to adapt, but I took to email straight away as it meshes very nice with my skills. My handwriting sucks so bad I can’t even make sense of it 5 minutes later (my grandma was always upset with me that I typed letters to her, but I bet she would be even more upset if I had sent her a letter in my 2 year old chicken scratch instead), so nothing by hand from me, but I suspect in the next generation or so only artist-types will bother with handwriting as once the world has finally settled on a form of electronic authentication no one will even need to sign their signature any more.

Of course the spam thing is out of control, but I believe that is a fundamental problem in the email protocol as it doesn’t require any sort of authentication to transmit messages. I get well over 1K spam messages a week and have written my own software to make trolling through and deleting my spam faster and easier. I suppose something needs to replace email, but please, not tweets!

It gets dull with repetition…

Police state this, police state that, I run on and on and on about it. I will probably finally stop droning on about it at some point because I will be arrested for having droned on so much about it, but until that point here is another…

Why no one’s investigating Wall Street
The government finds money to crack down on food stamp “fraud.” If it wanted to go after finance crooks, it could
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/06/why_no_ones_investigating_wall_street/singleton/

Selective enforcement of the law is sort of a hallmark of a police state. When it is selectively enforced such that the wealthy and powerful are immune from the law and the poor and powerless are subject to the law, that is the prime definition of a police state. The article didn’t mention that our great leader is already targeting people for incarceration and even assassination on his personal whim without any publicly available evidence whatsoever, let alone a public trial, and the people who shrug and say that is OK are all complicit in our new police state and when it comes to the point (which it will, unless this is reversed) when they are cowering in their basement because some local blowhard dick with a gun and a badge has decided he doesn’t like their hair cut (or whatever spurious reason, it really won’t matter at that point) they will richly deserve their fate.

Those of us who believe in such arcane ideas as Constitutional rights such as free speech, the rights of assembly, due process and law (amongst many others!) will shortly have no recourse but to go underground
and attempt a revolution. Of course I have a big fat target on myself because of this blog, even though I got, maybe, a half dozen readers (I am being very generous to myself), but if no one complains then everyone is saying it is OK. I am saying it is not OK, though I doubt my shouting into a vacuum will matter any little bit. The American Empire is in its declining years and we can decline with a bang or we can decline with a whimper, but without a total revitalization of our entire government putting it back into the hands of the people, there is absolutely no reversing the decline. If I am really really lucky, the overt signs of the decline (the more covert signs of the decline have been visible since shortly after WWII) will hold off just long enough for me to establish some sort of means of independent (from the ‘great’ U. S. of A.) existence, but I expect it will come when I am unprepared, just like everyone else.

It seems rather pointless to have the vision to predict the future if you can’t alter the future or actively prepare a way to personally mitigate the future’s effect on you. I guess I understand Paul Atreides better now since I have my own gift of future sight (gifted through the study of history, economics and public policy). I think I would be happier if I were ignorant, that way I wouldn’t waste so much energy being upset about something I likely will have no influence on anyway.