Six Bananas!

Scary Times (#TSA, #Wikileaks, DNS)

Let me start out with a disclosure and disclaimer: I am an employee of an agency that is part of the Department of Homeland Security (home of the "rainbow of doom"). I do not speak for them. They do not speak for me. It is fairly typical for management and employees to have differing opinions on the issues that affect them, whether those differences are of degree and emphasis or deep philosophical differences.

I work with a group of hard-working and dedicated individuals. We often work more hours than we are allowed to be paid for. It is not unknown for employees to spend their own money on equipment or software that our agency cannot  purchase, in order to get the job done. We exist to help the public, whether directly or indirectly, and we tend to remember that. I enjoy my job and my co-workers, even when we don't have the authority to fix a locally-solvable problem, and must contact someone higher up to do what we should be able to do. We know that over-centralization is part of any large organization, DHS and its member agencies  included.

Recently, another DHS member agency (TSA, which is not the agency that employs me) began using electronic scanners that produce high or medium-quality full-body imagery through people's clothing. Those who decline the nudescan are given highly invasive "pat-downs" of a type that would get any sheriff's deputy in the country fired. We're told this is to protect us, but this is actually a reaction to the "underwear bomber" and is not going to prevent a well-organized, determined, group from doing their evil deed.

Since we know that this is "security theater" and that it is highly ineffective, what reasons could be behind it? I don't know, and neither do you. But the temptation to violate the Constitution in order to protect it is among the most dangerous impulses to our republic. Unless Americans of all stripes wake up and replace the current Democrat / Republican duopoly with a good-sized number of competitive parties, including those that are committed to curtailing these privacy violations, our nation will become more like those seventy to one hundred years ago in Europe. Seeing what the result was, I personally wish to avoid that.

America needs change, and not the "change we can believe in" that comes of left-wing versus right-wing sloganeering. We need the kind of change that comes through informed, involved voters kicking party-approved candidates to the curb and selecting their own choices. We need the kind of change that comes when thinking people extrapolate the activities of corporations and advocacy groups and publicize the resulting actions. We need the kind of change that comes when individuals freely and publicly chastise politicians for going beyond their constitutional authority. We need the kind of change that comes when people stop buying the products and services of corporations and groups whose actions are hostile to our liberties or our economy.

Let me be clear. This must not be done through any kind of violence. America will only continue to be the shining light for the world around us if we figure out how to truly change our course at the ballot box. Reading about the French revolution will tell us what violence will bring. First, they executed those who they regarded as oppressors, then they executed a few other bothersome people, and soon, it was almost randomly-selected people who were beheaded. Thousands were killed, and then a power-mad dictator (Napoleon Bonaparte) was put into power. We cannot allow that to happen here.

We must remember how Pol Pot and his regime in Cambodia killed off anyone who wore glasses--because they were educated, hence part of the former power structure--and how the Communist revolutions in Russia and China led to millions of people being tortured, executed, or intentionally starved to death. The United States is a great country, and the way to preserve that is to go to the ballot box and to vote against all Republican party and Democratic party candidates and to vote for minor-party candidates that wish to reign in abusive acts by government officials.

Now, as for Wikileaks, as a federal employee, it would be downright stupid for me to visit their site, so all I know about it is what I see on the LA Times site. However, I do want to point out that a number of people on Twitter and elsewhere have said about the TSA nudescan, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear." Wikileaks is like putting the whole government through the nudescan machines. If the government is doing nothing wrong, Wikileaks will have nothing to expose.

What? You say that the government should take that guy's life? Don't get me wrong. Whomever leaked these documents clearly broke the law, and should be punished for it. But Wikileaks is doing the job that the news media should be doing--exposing possible wrongdoing in high places--even if their methods are not acceptable. Do you think that the Nixon administration should have assassinated the two guys who broke much of the Watergate story? No? What about the guy who leaked the Pentagon papers? No? Well then why in the world would you think that Julian Assange, the leader of Wikileaks, should be killed for doing the same thing?

As for DHS agencies seizing domains of organizations that are believed to assist in violating copyrights, that is so far afield from the department's mission that it could cripple the whole department. Already, DHS covers the gamut from transportation security to immigration enforcement to disaster relief and recovery. Such a broad mission means that there will always be conflicts, and various agencies will be less effective than they could otherwise be. But imagine a time when resources are taken away from those who live in an area that has been hit by a hurricane in order to raise the revenue for a major music or movie company. If you think that will not happen, you are naive. I think we should leave assisting big corporations to the Commerce Dept and the Federal Reserve. They have years of experience and are good at it. (But it does point to the problem that the domain name system needs to be completely immune to government interference, whether ours or China's. The health of the entire Internet is threatened by such actions, regardless of their effect on file-sharing and copyright abuse.)

As for the leaders of our government, we need to expect and demand that they uphold the Constitution and their oath of office, in a spirit of reverence and submission to God our Maker. Vote against those who do not do so. Vote for those who seek to do that very thing.

Above all, become informed. Not just by listening to mainstream media or even NPR. Either one gives you what they want you to know and ignores what they don't want you to know. You need to find individuals who are on the scene of the events and involved in the organizations that matter to you. You should not be persuaded to vote for any candidate or ballot measure based on their advertising or your news outlet's editorializing. Neither one is trustworthy.

When a politician, a lobbying group, an advocacy group, a corporation, or a government agency has a news conference, they are not telling you the whole truth, just their group's edited version of it. When their competitors respond within minutes after the conference, they have not had time to think about what was said, so their response is likewise invalid.

Read, read, read. Ask for the raw data behind graphics. Throw the figures into spreadsheets. Play with cut-off values--if I raise the taxable income limit here, how does that change what is shown--and question the underlying assumptions. Turn off the television and log off of Facebook, so you can spend time exercising your brain. Do not accept what the mass manipulators media tell you, but question it.

We did not reach this point overnight. We should not expect to get over it overnight. It will take a sustained effort. There will be spies who will see a decentralized people's political movement as a threat. They will try and twist the words of individuals to make it seem like said movement is violent. There will be prosecutions against those who advocate or whose words can be twisted to make it seem like they advocate violence. Make it clear: comply with every law, and seek change only at the ballot box.

What would I like to see? I'd like to see our leaders being more considerate of the 4th amendment. After all, the people who are advocating the death of Wikileaks' founder are probably violating the law. We would not want them to be rounded up because hidden microphones captured a bit of unguarded speech, would we? Neither do we want old ladies and three year-olds subjected to nudescans and ultra-invasive personal searches without probable cause, just because some bozo from overseas once hid a bomb in his underwear. And I'd like to see us calm down over the Wikileaks thing. The Pentagon papers didn't destabilize our nation and neither will cablegate.

If anything, cablegate should teach us that any information we collect and store will be misused if we store it long enough. A disposal policy is a fundamental requirement of privacy and security, both for individuals and organizations.

NOTE: This does not represent government policy, and was not paid for or approved by the government. It represents the personal opinion of one individual. If you disagree, you may respond in the comments or in your own blog.

Of The #TSA and the 4th Amendment

In response to Rob's article here. Please read that first, and if you can, go to his link and read the report there.

It seems amazing to me that people are not considering the big picture. We've got UAVs and satellites using infrared to track who sleeps in our homes at night. We've got TSA taking nude photos and giving hand jobs before we get onto airplanes. We've got insane "zero-tolerance" policies in our schools. Now think about what happens when some Congressmember convinces his/her peers that these resources should be deployed against people who wear thong underwear or who believe in a creator or who voted for Ronald Reagan.

Continuing to allow these things means that we as a nation become intolerant of dissent. We become subject to the threat of the same kind of officially-denied "disappearances" that characterized South America years ago. And we become subject to "round up a suspect so we can hang him" policing, with little hope of someone mounting a successful defense.

The whole purpose of the 4th Amendment is to shield our homes, our bodies, and arguably our vehicles, e-mail, and social networking profiles, from pre-emptive monitoring and intrusion. We like to say "innocent until proven guilty," but what we really mean in the case of the 4th Amendment is "not subject to government monitoring without some prior evidence of substantial misconduct."

Does the nudescan and grope violate the 4th Amendment? Yes, certainly. There may not be a judge who can read (so the courts may not uphold our rights), but a plain reading of the document makes it clear. Which is why it is so scary that elected and appointed officials do not seem to understand it. These are dark and scary times for the nation that exists to be a shining light for others to follow.

Does this new procedure (or most of the old ones) improve the security of airline passengers? Not in the least. Remember, these are not the camel-riding tribesmen from the movies. Middle eastern religious extremists were supplied advanced US anti-aircraft weapons and trained how to use them about 15-20 years ago, during the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. That would likely include training on how to conceal weapons from every kind of electronic screening. Neither have we considered someone's intestinal contents or the materials that their clothes consist of, which I'm sure the CIA would have taught the Afghani fighters.

So it looks like what we're doing is sacrificing the essential freedoms that make our nation worthwhile in exchange for illusions of security that could be shattered at any time. This is worse than the "security theater" we knew we were engaging in. This is hypnotising us not to see the burglar as long as he wears a certain shirt. We have a lot of work to do to get our nation back to its root principles, now extended to everyone.

Can Chaos Theory Predict Non-violent Political Moves?

This is a response to Rob's post here: http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2010/11/terror-attacks-and-chaos-theory.html Please read that post before you read this one.

That's very interesting, including the things it doesn't cover.

I'm wondering how well that maps to internal non-violent political movements. Here in the US, we strongly need a movement that refocuses our government around the Constitution (not court interpretations as much as the document itself). That movement cannot and must not be outside the system or violent (read about the excesses of the French revolution for some reasons why). And that movement must seek, by non-violent political means to move most power and responsibilities down closer to local levels except as expressly granted to the central government (read Amendment X if you wonder why).

And yet, it must necessarily overcome an entrenched group of powerful leaders in corporations / politics / government organizations on the local, state, and national level / non-profit and advocacy groups / labor unions whose power and wealth depends on keeping individuals, families, and small, locally-owned businesses subservient to and dependent on the big guys who run the system.

We made some good choices in the late 1700s. For example, we sided with debtors against foreign creditors in a way that did not repudiate foreign-held debt, but made it uncollectable. We allowed people who got into financial problems or wanted adventure to disappear and take up new lives in the untamed West. We tried a national bank (twice, if I recall) and gave it up as a failure, leaving nearly all our banking in the hands of smaller local banks. And we (for the most part) expected that parents would take a leading role in directing their children's education.

Instead, we now have a powerful centrally-run educracy (educational bureaucracy) that sucks up much of the money we allocate to schooling--a federal education department and then state education departments (and in some states, county or city education departments) and finally the school district itself. At each level, there are additional requirements placed on the schools and additional financial monitoring staffers hired. By the time it gets to the classroom, there sometimes isn't even money for pencils.

We have financial regulators that are controlled and run by alumni of the very institutions they regulate. It is no surprise that they won't force financial institutions to follow state consumer-protection laws. Those institutions routinely include language about them having the power to change the terms of the agreement at any time--completely contrary to the uniform commercial code's definition of a contract--and those changed terms are routinely enforced in our courts.

Worst of all, we make it insanely difficult for someone to get a new start, whether by purging old debts or by relocating and name-changing. This isn't about "security," but about maintaining the current ruling class's financial and political power.

So we have a profound challenge ahead of us, and it would be exceedingly interesting to be able to use similar mathematics to determine where and when someone should run for mayor or governor or senator or judge in order to help our nation survive.

Climate Hysteria: MWP And LIA Happened--We're Not Unique

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As you may know, Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the leading climate researchers and the man behind the so-called "hockey stick", wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post a few days ago.

Among other things, he says:

As a scientist, I shouldn't have a stake in the upcoming midterm elections, but unfortunately, it seems that I -- and indeed all my fellow climate scientists -- do.

President Eisenhower warned us about allowing the scientific and technical elite, now dependent on government funding (instead of their own initiative) for their research, from controlling our policyies for their own benefit. This was mentioned in Willis Eschenbach's response to that letter.

If this is a surprise to you, it should not be, and not just for climate scientists. Cast your mind back President Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1960, wherein he said (emphasis mine):

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

You are funded by the government, and are a salaried member of that scientific-technological elite that Eisenhower warned us about. Why on earth would you think that you would not have a stake in the election? The problem is the opposite – you have far too large a stake in the election, since climate science funding comes solely because the government is willing to back your ideas. As a result, a change in administrations might dry up your funding. You have a huge stake in the elections, and it is curious you want to claim otherwise. You are fighting like mad to keep the funding coming, so don’t pretend that you “shouldn’t have a stake” in the elections.

I would advise you to visit both links and read both. Furthermore, I would advise that you seek out President Eisenhower's remarks, because they are very appropriate here.

Based on Dr Mann's "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction, we have proposed policies that will be very costly to all of us, even though his reconstruction is thoroughly debunked: it is now known that it was this warm or warmer during Roman times and also during part of the medieval times, which calls into question whether this is really CO₂-caused warming or just part of a natural cycle.

Regardless of whether Dr Mann and his cohorts know it, they are the patsies of a political movement that seeks to place rigid restrictions on individuals and businesses around the world, restrictions which optimistically might cool the earth by a few hundredths of a degree. In obsessing about global warming--no, climate change--no, now it is called climate disruption--we are ignoring many of the things that we can do now.

In most of California, for example, there is bright and abundant sunlight. If we insisted that every residential and commercial building be retrofitted to heavily insulate it and to use sunlight and wind turbines to produce 85% of its estimated annual electricity consumption (EAEC) within the next five years, we would greatly reduce the consumption of oil, gas, and coal, help our nation be less vulnerable to supply disruptions and market manipulations. In the process, we'd consume less fossil fuels, and we'd emit less CO₂. Similar initiatives across the sunbelt and the windbelt would also be possible.

It bothers me that otherwise intelligent people consider it "anti-science" to ask researchers to show their evidence, especially when their research is being used to bolster proposals that will be both costly and restrictive. It bothers me that we're now being told that the media is legitimizing "illegitimate" scepticism by occasionally letting someone who doesn't completely toe the line speak up. It bothers me that some of these eco-fanatics are such "true believers" that they threaten violence upon "carbon criminals", and the mainstream climate alarmists don't denounce them or separate themselves from them.

My bona fides:

• I recycle paper, cardboard, plastics, bottles, and aluminum cans. I'd love to recycle the steel "tin" cans, but nowhere will accept them.
• I have converted, despite opposition from "true believer" family members, from incandescent bulbs and disposable batteries to the twisty fluorescents and rechargeable batteries. They complain about the performance difference in the batteries, and the color and single output level of the "bulbs" (preferring those useless three-way bulbs), but whenever I'm replacing a bulb, I go for the twisty instead of the old-style bulb.
• I walk around town whenever I can, preferring it to driving. This means, of course, that you sometimes buy too much and regret having to carry it. On an average day, I probably put in 4 miles, not counting what I do around the house and yard.
• I'm trying to grow a garden. So far, it has produced more weeds than vegetables, but I don't use pesticides, so it can be difficult to keep up. The latest Google Earth images show my garden pretty clearly.

There's more, but that is most of it. It is irrational to try and knock society back to the 1800s based on some questionable assumptions and a well-known math error. But you and I can do some things that will mitigate changes in the temperature, whether upward or downward. We should admit to ourselves that we know hardly anything about the world's climate, and that it is rank speculation to say how it will change in the next 100 years.

At the same time, it is unfair to ourselves and our descendants to let important things like polution control, preserving nature, constraining our resource consumption be subsumed by the all-consuming fight against CO₂. If leading scientists and politicians decided tomorrow that CO₂ is not causing warming, the resulting disappointment would prevent us from moving forward on those issues. Better to deal with the issues at hand, knowing that--if CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) is shown to be true--these same things help us deal with global warming.

I Love America. Do You?

I want to start by saying that I love America. I could not imagine trading the freedoms I've grown to enjoy and the standard of living that I hope to achieve for the standard life of any other nation. It is because of my love for this country that I  write about where we can do better. If you believe this is unpatriotic, I'm sorry for you.

The United States became a great nation in 1776, when we laid down the principles which we felt every people should live by. The Declaration of Independence set us in the direction which eventually led to what was once the least repressive, most open society, a society in which government support of distinct treatment of individuals based on their ethnic or social class backgrounds or even their sex is illegal.

The Constitution enumerates specific rights and responsibilities for the federal government and the states in order to adequately support those principles in the Declaration. That is, the Constitution is subordinate to the Declaration, for without the Declaration, the Constitution has no effect. Indeed, the purpose of the Constitution is to implement the principles in the Declaration. I love the Constitution, and would have none other document serve as the schema (descriptive governing framework) of our nation.

But one of the things which threatens our nation's stability and even its existence is corporate personhood, which enables ever-increasing corporate influence to eclipse ever-decreasing influence of individuals. Now, this actually goes back a long way, to a court decision in 1886. What this does, in effect, is to give a group of people extra an extra say in the operation of our nation.

Look at it this way: If you're an IT support technician and there's a proposed law that will impact IT support techs, you may write or call your representatives. If 35,000 support techs all contacted their representatives to voice concerns about the effect of the bill, they still might not be able to override the impact of an association (let's call it ITSTA ) containing those same individuals as its membership.

One person, one vote has been an important principle in our political system, but that should also be extended to one person, one right to petition for redress of grievances. And it certainly would be possible, without the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. That is, any person could speak for himself with about as much weight as any other.

What has happened since then is that any group organized as a corporation speaks for everyone that is involved in the corporation--members, stockholders, employees, managers, et cetera. But nothing stops those same individuals from speaking for themselves. So they get two bites at the apple. Meanwhile, others who may also be affected by the same decision or law only get a single voice. Those who have no corporation to speak for them, then, are shouted down in the legislative and executive consultations of our government--national, state, and local--and are increasingly marginalized.

Now, the CEO and the board of directors for any corporation (including for-profit, non-profit, political advocacy, legal advocacy, educational, or industry consortium) decide what views that group's lobbying will represent. Said views may be opposite of the views of others associated with the group--employees, members, stockholders--and even be contrary to their best interests, but it is given to those at the top to decide what the funds and good name of the group will push for. In fact, we often see on labor issues, that corporate leaders advocate positions that are clearly harmful to their employees' interests. We allow this because the Supreme Court made a mistake in 1886, and thereafter we've expanded and expanded this hole in our system.

What this winds up doing is allowing a very small group of people to have an oversized voice in deciding what gets done. This is even more of a problem once we consider the financial side of things. Corporations have essentially unlimited lifespans, which makes them ideal ways to accumulate financial resources in a way that individuals (and groups of individuals) cannot because of mortality. So a small group of less than 50 people can control millions or billions of dollars, some of which can be directed to campaign and political advocacy activities that most individuals cannot afford to indulge in.

Sorry, that's just wrong. And it needs to change. Quickly and non-violently. I want to emphasize the non-violent part. If you ever read about the excesses of the French Revolution, you'll know that you don't want that to come here. There are more individuals than there are corporations. We can change this, if we all work together. Start by notifying your political representatives that you will no longer vote for anyone who doesn't actively work to pass a Constitutional amendment that erases corporate personhood. Then, follow through. If your representatives don't work toward protecting and preserving our nation from the outsized influence of a few corporate executives, they are not on your side. Vote against them until and unless they change.

ClimateProgress: I Am The Pope

Recently, a number of blogs and tweeters I follow made reference to a piece on ClimateProgress about the news media. Supposedly, the news media's effort to be "fair" is distorting the science and enabling big oil to deceive people.

One could only believe that if one refused to read. The BBC, for example, is overwhelmingly pro CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) in its coverage, its opinion pieces, and its intra-story commentary. The LA Times is even more extreme in its pro-CAGW stance. In either case, anyone who doesn't immediately genuflect at the altar of "scientific consensus" is branded a flat-earther and a pro-oil lobbyist.

The problem is that our scientists and their organizations, treat science as a religion, where a hierarchy of priests tell us what to believe and what we must do. The news media then proclaims the message (unchanged, except for simplification and sometimes exaggeration) to the congregation--us--and we are expected not to question, but to believe and to obey.

In the 1600s, when Martin Luther separated himself from the Roman Catholic Church, the Church responded with the doctrine of papal infalibility. If the Pope says something "from the chair", he is speaking the very words of God, and we must not question or dispute it. Protestants, agnostics, and atheists have all moved on--we do not blindly accept the words of the Pope as a direct message from God. Because we don't accept the Pope as God's prophet, we are free to question, debate, dispute, and deny whatever the Pope says.

This, indeed, is foundational to our system of government. Educated citizens have a responsibility to question, dispute, debate, and to require proof before we accept anyone's dogma and codes of behavior. It is our job as citizens to question when someone tells us that we have to change X or we'll all die. It may very well be true, and if those people can show us the evidence and explain why the evidence tells us to change or die, we'll agree to change.

However, our news media isn't doing its job--they act as a PR arm and as heralds of the one true message. It has fallen to non-traditional media, such as blogs, to inform us of the holes and the unanswered questions in the consensus view of climate science.

It is the geologists, whose field deals with millions and billions of years all the time, who are least likely to accept that man's activities are the primary cause for the planet's warming since about 1850. They point out that earth appears to have a number of warming-cooling cycles, and that earth has been warmer than today in the past without any human intervention being necessary.

Mathematicians, specifically statisticians, poke holes in many climate-related studies by pointing out that the models in use often produce "hockey stick" graphs, even with random noise as the inputs. They show us how many of the assumptions behind the models and even assumptions about the proxies used to estimate past temperatures are clearly wrong.

Meteorologists are another group where many members challenge the climate consensus. Weather forecasters know that the models they use (which are similar to those used by climate scientists) fail to account for randomness, so they are only good about five days out. Beyond that, future weather is a crapshoot. And for anyone who wants to say "weather is not climate", save your uneducated breath. Climate is merely the long-term weather, the averages and extremes that tell area residents what they can expect based on past experience.

Further, climate changes. It always has, and it always will. What we do may indeed affect that change, but there would be change even without our help. I think warmth is to be preferred over cold, for the Northern limit of growth for many crops would move Southward by hundreds of kilometers if we went back to the temperatures of even a couple of hundred years ago. With almost seven billion people depending on those crops, I would expect some of the most savage wars ever known as Northern nations fought to expand South and food-producing nations fought to stave off hungry invaders. Between starvation, war, and disease, we could easily lose billions of people in a decade or two. I don't see the present warming doing that much damage in such a short time, even assuming that the hockey stick projections actually happen (after a decade of non-movement).

There are valid questions about measurements, about splicing and interpolation, and about historical temperature trends that should make any pro-science person question what they are telling us.

It doesn’t much matter if you use anomalies or not, when you take a station that warms 1 C as it grows, then in a later decade add a new station that warms 1 C as it grows, then in the final decade swap to a third station that warms 1 C as it grows. Tack them all together and you a 3 C “warming trend”. It matters not if this is done via averaging, direct splicing, or “homogenizing” using each to “adjust” neighbors.

The temperature series codes like GIStemp are FULL of that. And anomalies make it easier to have happen rather than harder. (No station has to reach unheard of record highs and call attention to itself…) I saw this effect in the region near Marble Bar Australia where an all time ever record was set back near the ’30s and never exceeded, yet the ‘region’ has a ‘warming trend’. -- Chiefio  

So, no, Climate Progress, the problem isn't the media's attempt to be balanced. The problem is the media's refusal to investigate the claims of  scientists, politicians, coal and oil companies, and various advocacy groups and to look at the actual data. The media has been co-opted, and smart people everywhere are undertaking their own efforts to examine the evidence. Your "I am the Pope" attitude toward science and climate does not help and is not the way we work in a constitutionally-limited representative democracy.

We, as educated citizens of the US, Canada, the UK, et cetera, must not allow rhetoric to stampede us into something we will later regret. On the other hand, whether global warming is manmade or not, we know that we need to live close to where we work (minimize the need to commute and therefore cuts fuel consumption and emissions), we know we need to minimize the distance that our food and supplies travel (again, minimizes fuel consumption and emissions), we know that our homes and businesses need to be heavily insulated (minimizes the need for heating and cooling) and yet able to let in useful quantities of natural light (eliminates use of lighting during daylight hours) and that--subject to our local conditions--we need to equip our homes and businesses with some sort of power generation capacity (wind and solar where that will work).

Here's the most important thing:

We shouldn't need somebody's crisis, real or imagined, to motivate us to do these things. If you haven't done so yet, change jobs or change where you live. Change what you drive. Change where you shop, and what you buy when you shop, and where that food / those products come from. Get your home retrofitted for energy efficiency. Replace your appliances with energy-conserving versions.  Check into sustainable power generation systems for your home or business. Now, if you do these things, you'll be doing more to help the environment than many CAGW alarmists, including those who jetted to Copenhagen to try to legislate sacrifices that apply to everyone else. If you don't do those things, shut up, you hypocrite!

To The Governor and President: Fulfill The Purpose (Part II)

Now, we have already spoken of the purpose of higher education and the way that our political leaders and the higher-ed industry have distorted it in order to create a money stream.

Now we need to discuss the K-12 education system. It makes sense that fixing the collegiate system cannot be completed until we are ready to tackle the compulsory Kindergarten through twelfth grade system's problems.

Again, we must begin with the history of the system. Our education system expanded and was made compulsory just as the industrialization process hit our nation. It makes sense, then, that the needs of the factories shaped the design and function of our educational system. The main problem that our schools have is not that they aren't doing their job, but that their historical job is no longer appropriate for our society or economy.

Schools were designed to produce graduates with near-identical knowledge and skillsets, so that factories and other mass-consumers of labor would have a predictable product to take in as new employees. We use things like age-lockstepped grades to ensure that at each age, students are being taught the same things. This way, employers could tell what to expect based on the number of years of education a person had. It was great--as long as we had a factory-centered economy that could absorb most graduates right into the assembly lines--but it isn't so great any more.

Because of the loss of most of our factories and other industrial age, large, mass-consumers of labor, we do not have the need, nor the ability, to put most of these identically-trained graduates to work. Hence, we tell them to go to college, trade school, the military, or an on-the-job training (OJT) program in order to gain distinctive qualities which may enable them to obtain employment.

Now, we've tried adding lots of specialized programs, we've tried extending school-like programs down to younger and younger ages, we've tried breaking up school vacations into multiple shorter "break" periods. We've tried "educational" television,  educational software, increased emphasis on standardization, supplanting local funding and control with state and federal funding and control, but we still cannot produce graduates that walk out the door and into decent-paying employment.

It is like the person who has a hole in his pocket. Every time he places a coin in that pocket, it vanishes. The more coins that are placed in the pocket, the more that escape. At some point, it is time to remove all the coins, remove the pants and sew or replace the pocket.

The world has changed, and the schools must change with it. Where before, the great hope for high pay was to work for a large corporation (and to move up in the ranks there), the hope for honest increased pay these days is to be part of the ownership and management of a small, locally-owned business (SLOB). Therefore, the educational system must stop trying to create large cohorts of similarly-trained graduates, instead training students to have the same basic background with a highly-individualized skillset on top of it.

Note, this cannot happen with the funding and control of our schools centered in far-off state and federal capitals. It will require that most of the funding and most of the control, including the setting of standards for students and teachers alike, be centered in the local community. Fixing the schools is going to be far more expensive than letting them remain the way they are today. Even removing the massive administrative overhead that consumes an ever-increasing slice of school budgets, we'll still need to push increased monies to the schools.

The basic purpose of our schools is to give everyone the basic background needed to become participants in our social, economic, and political life. But until and unless we are ready to acknowledge that the requirements necessary to achieve that purpose have changed, we can go nowhere.

We must avoid the "the myth that our school system is for job training. The fact is, high school graduates should be highly teachable / trainable, having nothing more than a basic foundation. We all know that no matter who you hire, no matter what his or her training or experience, you still have to train the person to do the job the way you want it done in your business." (link) With some more time to think about it, I believe that graduates need a little more. They need language and music and math training, because learning these languages prepares them for the new language of their workplaces. They need individual, interest-related training, especially self-directed training, because this is where they build up the "I'm different than the other 335 people who applied for this opening" part of their resumes.

Mr. / Ms. Governor and Mr President: We need you to be honest. The top-down standardized thing has failed. It failed, not because it wasn't a good idea, but because large, top-down institutions are our society's dinosaurs, dead, dying, or destined to die soon. Thirty students in a classroom? Try twenty, with at least two teachers in the room. Schools with 5,000 students? Try 150, with students in special-topic local education centers (LECs) throughout the community instead of massive, unfocused mega-campuses. Try online learning, based around students' interests and initiative instead of collecting students into violence-prone middle and high schools.  Standards being imposed by bureaucrats and politicians in far-away places like Sacramento and Washington? Try local funding, local control, local standards, local responsibility for results.

Above all, get out of the way and let parents, teachers, and principals (and no one above that level) experiment in finding the best ways to educate the young people that they are fully motivated to assist.

Can you admit that centralized funding and administration has been a failure? Can you admit that the problem wasn't primarily lax local standards or lack of resources for our schools, but failure to respond to the changing world that the school systems exist to serve? Because that is what we need from you, our leaders. The truth.

To The Governor and President: Fulfill The Purpose (Part I)

One thing that I've heard come out of politicians' mouths over the past few years is how we need to help more people go to college, so they can obtain better jobs and contribute more to the economy. I believe this shows a shocking lack of familiarity with the purpose of a college education, with the expected benefits to society, to the economy, and to the person who pursues it.

Let us start with the standard Kindergarten through twelfth grade educational system. This system was profoundly influenced by the economic transformation we call the industrial revolution.  Large businesses, such as factories, railroads, mines, food processing companies, and even early versions of what became corporate farms depended on obtaining large numbers of nearly identical employees to serve as interchangeable pieces of the corporate machine. Schools evolved to provide a standard set of knowledge and entry-level skills which would enable corporate entities to build their workforces.

Colleges, on the other hand, took a small fraction of high school graduates and provided them with a generalized background and rigorous mental training, so that graduates are ready to be the leaders of society (e.g., political leaders, business leaders, and leaders of social groups and movements). As a consequence, college education was focused around teaching students to ask questions and dig deeper, rather than obediently following instructions and accept what is presented to them.

Now, to industrial age management, college graduates usually make horrible employees. They don't obey as readily as someone who only went to high school. Their level of job-specific skills is lower than taking a random Joe (or Jane) off the street. They constantly question the effectiveness and appropriateness of managers' directives. And they try to examine the history and the motivations behind those directives. Terrible!

Unfortunately, we already know (business and management research shows) that these are exactly the skills that companies need to embrace. It seems counter-intuitive, as though managers have some inborn superior knowledge or intelligence that enables them to make good decisions for all of us, but the truth is, managers are individuals with limited knowledge and limited intellect, just like the rest of us. Allowing workers to question their decisions is one way to bring greater knowledge and intelligence to bear on solving the problems they are seeking to solve.

Not that I am advocating (in any way) that society and businesses be run by majority vote. Voters elect politicians because those politicians are expected to use their own knowledge and intelligence and background / experience to help solve society's problems. Stockholders elect management because they expect those managers to use their own knowledge, experience / backgrounds, and intelligence to help run companies better and produce better results.

But until we understand that college is not and never has been about job-training (except for certain fields, such as medicine and law), we'll never be able to help college or their students to cope with the changing society and economy. In particular, we won't be able to help students and prospective students avoid excessive debt in the pursuit of higher incomes that they will probably never experience.

So let us start this series by talking about college, but we won't stop there.

Instead of selling higher education by telling prospective students that they'll earn more money, we should sell collegiate education by telling students that they'll learn to think for themselves, and that they'll be able to see through the smooth-talk of politicians and managers who prey on the obedient masses. Tell them that they'll be able to help steer a family-owned business (FOB) or other small, locally-owned business (SLOB) around the minefield of corporate competitors seeking monopolies. Tell them that they'll be prepared to help form and lead nonprofit social-benefit groups that work to make our society better for all who live in it. But do not tell them what is effectively a lie, that they should go to college because their wallets and bank accounts will be larger.

We subsidize higher education in two primary ways. First of all, we use taxpayer funds and the nation's credit rating to enable individual students to pay some or all of the cost of attending college. We certainly do not do this because that student will then earn more money and pay more taxes. Well, that is certainly not the main reason, or else we would long ago have stopped it. Secondly, states have their own university systems, where their taxpayers' money is used to make it easier for their residents to afford to attend college. Again, states aren't looking at individual incomes (and the taxes that come from those incomes) as the reason for doing this. They must, instead, look at how students go on to lead and organize groups that increase the economy and improve society as a whole. And therefore, we should not deceive ourselves and our young into believing something  that we know is not true.

Now, for those who work for colleges, shame on you for participating in a convenient falsehood. Yes, talking about increased incomes makes it easier to sell college attendance. It makes it easier to justify spending the ever-increasing funds needed to attend. But you are selling them a pig in a poke. They don't know (and likely won't until they are finished or nearly finished with college) that your statement of the benefits of college ignored the biggest, most important, and most certain benefits, and focused on something that is uncertain and unforeseeable--increased incomes for graduates--instead.

Mr. / Ms. Governor, Mr. President: you weren't placed in office to continue telling us what is convenient. Tell us the truth. Tell us about the massive textbook scam, by which students pay exorbitant amounts for texts containing knowledge which has barely changed in a century (e.g., introductory and intermediate texts for English and foreign languages and some forms of Mathematics), often through "bundles" with disposable and nearly useless "study guides" and workbooks that can double the price of a book. Tell us about the financial industry's lucrative hold on students and their families through loan programs. Tell us about the use of "graduate assistants" to teach classes, rather than the instructor of record (so it looks like students are getting the benefit of someone's years of research or experience, but instead are instructed by someone with slightly more experience or research than they have), about the infection of academic content with political viewpoints, and about the false and outdated concept of the clock hour.

Yes, that's a good one. The concept of a clock-hour is that one hour of classroom time with one instructor at one college or university is equal to an hour of classroom time with any other instructor at the same or any other college or university. This is so obviously untrue that one must wonder why it remains in place. Instructors have their own styles, their own skills, and their own ways of interacting with students. Classrooms have their own sizes, which serves to decide how many students can be in the class, and to decide how (and how much) instructors can interact with students. Some instructors are easily distracted, and will wander off on a tangent without covering the day's assigned material. Some instructors are strict about attendance and appearing to pay attention, while others are not. And that's even before we consider the differences between students and their preparation. All of that matters, but a campus catalog's clock-hour figures won't and cannot capture this. (Clock-hours may be known as credits or units, but it is the same concept.)

Let me make it clear. I believe in higher-education. I support higher-education. I went hungry or lived on ramen noodles to help put myself through college, and now I'm helping to put the next generation through college and having to buy ramen noodles again (plus I'm still paying Sallie Mae for my own schooling). I just think we are not doing our young or the colleges any good by continuing to perpetuate a lie. Let us be honest and admit that no, college is not for everyone. Let us admit that the current format of college classes may not be the best, either.

Financial Reform: What I Wish I Heard

President Obama is pushing his financial reforms, seeking to prevent a repeat of the mistakes that led to the current financial collapse. His plan looks on the regulatory structure that was in place tries to reshape it to prevent a recurrence. 

The good:

• Much of the current regulatory structure is piecemeal. The President proposes to consolidate much of that functionality into a single agency. This could deal with the unregulated "holes" in the current framework, if the agency's mandate is written to allow broad action instead of specificly-defined actions.
• Banks, being backed by taxpayers, do not currently have much of a disincentive for large and risky transactions. The effect is that of going into a casino knowing that the owner's son is your gambling partner. The President proposes to force them to place the company's (and its stockholders') own capital at risk. This will make it so that a large losing bet results in an FDIC takeover.
• Top management of financial institutions currently receive bonuses for raising short-term profits. This has the effect that they seek out those strategies that will dramatically increase profits in the near term, at the expense of potentially losing them in the more distant future. The President proposes to require contingent compensation to be tied to longer term profits. (I think he said five years or more.)
• Under the current regulatory structure, the most important thing for an institution to do is grow larger quickly. Once it reaches a certain size, it becomes "too large to fail". This means that regulators will not shut the institution down, but will instead grant special lending facilities and management assistance in order to keep the bank going. The President has stated that "too big to fail" is not going to be permitted, although I still don't understand the details of how his proposal would do this.

However, the proposal is missing the most important and most needed reforms. If the President is serious about wanting to prevent a recurrence of this experience, he's going to have to do some things that neither he nor anyone in Congress seem to have considered.

Over the past twenty years of bubbling leading up to this collapse, a number of states saw banks and other financial institutions doing things that were injurious to the welfare of the states' residents. As a consequence, some states attempted to rein in the behavior of these institutions. Federal regulators went to bat for the institutions, asserting primacy, but refusing to block the institutions' offending behaviors. Subprime lending is just one area where this has been true. Payday loan organizations are another such area.

What don't I hear? I don't hear anyone proposing to require federally-chartered or federally-regulated financial institutions to comply with the consumer protection laws of states where they do business (where "do business" consists of engaging in any consumer transaction with a resident of that state). As long as federal agencies are subject to "regulatory capture," it is important that states (being closer to the consumers and therefore more responsive to the needs of those consumers) have the ability to effectively regulate the behavior of financial institutions toward consumers who are residents of said states.

Many, if not most, contracts or "agreements" between a corporation (including financial institutions) and consumers contain a clause that says in effect, "we can change the terms at any time and that change is binding." Now, we know that one of the foundations of contract law is that parties agree to the terms of the contract. If one party can subsequently change the terms (including interest rates, repayment schedules, available remedies for misconduct, and so on) at its own whim, how is that a contract? If your credit card company can change its terms at any time, what is stopping it from inserting terms requiring you to accept work as a street whore?

The simple remedy would be to require that the original terms remain in force for the entire term of the agreement unless both parties voluntarily and without being pressured agree to a change. As an example, a number of institutions decided to pare down their credit card lending portfolios. They announced unilaterally that some cardholders' accounts were canceled. Now, imagine if these institutions also announced accelerated repayment schedules for the now-closed accounts. A person who was paying $50 per month could find their lender demanding $500 per month.

I am not saying that accelerated repayment schedules are happening, because I don't know. I am saying that I don't hear any politicians saying that they want the proposed law to prevent unilateral changes. In a situation where the bank or other financial corporation has all the power and the consumer comes, hat in hand, seeking financing, any financial reform legislation worthy of the name must include a provision that revokes all existing unilateral change clauses and prohibits them in future contracts.

I don't hear much of a solution to "too big to fail". Massive institutions like Citi and BankAmerica should be forced to choose a home state, and to do business ONLY in up to five states (including their home state) that must all be contiguous (touching). Large financial institutions, like large corporations, pull resources out of local communities over wide areas, in order to concentrate those resources in a few locations under the control of a small group of people. In order to prevent this concentration from threatening the economy, there should be hard limits to geographical spread.

The Standard Oil solution works well if the Justice Department vigilantly watches for collusion and cartels among the descendants. That is, break up overly-large enterprises (such as Citi and BofA, but certainly not limited to them) and keep the pieces from rejoining or scheming to disadvantage consumers. It certainly helped reign in big oil companies--until DOJ fell asleep at the wheel, and the companies started acting as a cartel--and it can and will help reign in the big financial companies.

I don't hear anyone proposing to end "corporate personhood", and with it, any so-called rights of corporations to express political points of view and contribute to political campaigns. Since this is a majore part of why our nation and government are so screwed up, I'd call that a foundational reform. Without it, no other reform matters, because the banks, NBFIs, and other corporations can water-down and block any real reforms.

I don't hear about a massive investigation and prosecution effort against current and former financial and corporate executives. I sincerely doubt that a serious and intense effort would fail to nab at least 500 top officers among the 10,000 largest corporations, banks, NBFIs (non-bank financial institutions), and insurance companies. These corporate officers should be marched, in leg irons and orange jumpsuits, before the television cameras (with clips on YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion, as well as other sites) and held without bail for various criminal violations, and for threatening the integrity of the nation.

The best thing about such an effort is that current laws are more than enough. It is already illegal to manipulate stock and bond prices, to tip favored insiders with information that could enable them to profit at the expense of others, to enter into unfair or deceitful consumer contracts, or to deal unfairly with consumers in transactions. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure there are lots of detailed loopholes in the law. But I sincerely doubt that every officer in every one of those top 10,000 corporations and financial organizations can slip through those loopholes.

Why am I not hearing, then, of a determined and fully-resourced effort to prosecute those wrongdoers? Rather than obsessing about putting six year-old girls whose names resemble names used by someone considered disloyal onto "do not fly" lists, we should be focused on those in corporate boardrooms and executive suites whose actions truly do endanger our nation's government and its people.

Why am I not hearing any of the above points being brought up? Is it that the political elite have no clue about what is going on in the real world? Or is it just more political corruption? Only time will tell, but I'd like it if the President and various members of Congress showed the slightest understanding about what happened and how we might change things to prevent a recurrence.

Toward Realistic School Reform

Rob Paterson recently wrote about the schools in Kansas City, MO, closing and merging about half their campuses because of a money shortage. Reader Matthew Buckley-Golder wrote a response, to which I responded. We had a little back and forth, which is good. I hope that Matt also writes a longer post about his reasons for wanting schools to be more like the old days.

They say you shouldn't put so much personal information online, and I generally try not to be too chatty, but I can't make my point without getting into my own history.

My experience as a student in the 1970s:

• I was identified as a "gifted" student.
• I sat in a classroom with thirty other students. Because so much of school is repetition of things covered last year and the year before, I was really bored.
• I basically lived in a dream world inside my own head, because it was so hard to continually see and hear the same things over and over.
• I was interested in learning. I was motivated to learn. But the school system wasn't designed to enable student-directed learning. Even as a 12th grader, the bulk of the content of my classes was the same as what I'd learned in 5th grade.
• The school system was based around compliance. It still is. A "good student" needn't learn much over his thirteen years in the prison school system. He just needed to go where the told him to go, do what they told him to do, and parrot the teacher's words in his answers. A "bad student" was simply one who didn't comply and obey enough.
• We were constantly lectured about completing high school and getting our diplomas, so we could "get a good job". Once graduation happened, I found that graduation was about as valuable as used toilet paper when one went to apply for employment.
• After a student spent most of his waking hours sitting in school, they'd have homework--more mindless repetition and parroting back--almost as though they didn't want students to have any independent thinking time. As I got older, of course, my sleep needs diminished, and I had more time, including time that could be used to get into trouble--not that I did that, good Catholic boy that I was--or to use the television as a hypnotic drug to help me get through the ordeal that was the school system.
• I hated school to the point that I swore I wouldn't darken the doors of another educational institution as long as I lived. It took a few years for me to willingly go to college.
• Once I got to college and found that it wasn't anything like the Kindergarten through twelfth grade system, I loved it, because I could explore areas that interested me, and above all, I was responsible for my own learning.
• If I found a rich woman to support me, I'd quit work and go back to get my Ph.D. Big change, wouldn't you say?

Okay, if you haven't read Rob's post, right-click on this link and select 'open in new tab'. Now, read what he wrote, what Matt wrote, and what I wrote.

Okay, so what are the issues, as I see them?

• Schools were designed for the age of labor-intensive farms and factories, where having a common entry-level skillset and little to no differentiation between graduates was desirable. People like Henry Ford were able to build huge corporations because the school systems' output changed to support their needs.
• That factory-based economy hit its peak between the early 1940s and the late 1960s in our country, and began heading downhill afterward. Textiles and apparel were among the first to go. I remember in the 1970s, when the ILGWU--in a last-ditch effort to keep onshore production and union jobs--ran commercials, singing about looking for their label when buying female clothing. Now, I don't imagine that ILGWU members were all that highly paid, but in a very labor-intensive production process, it was just cheaper to have products made with very low-wage foreign labor and sent by ship to Los Angeles / Long Beach.
• Schools never responded to their changed environment. Instead, they replaced local funding and control with state funding and control, and then federal funding and control. In each case, they've tried to make graduates more and more homogeneous through minimum content standards.
• As more and more state and federal involvement has occurred, schools have started assigning minimum homework requirements. Since students work at different speeds, some are finished in minutes, and others spend the whole time until bedtime working on homework. When I talk with my youngest son or my nephews, they really feel like they missed those years, because they were doing homework every waking hour. My youngest niece came to visit the week before Thanksgiving, with a homework packet meant to keep her busy the whole time. I put my foot down: after two hours of homework, there was to be nothing school-related for the rest of the day.
• From the 1980s through about 2000, the "high tech" industries (among others) provided some insulation from the kind of economic and educational implosion that we are beginning to experience now. Such industries as semiconductors, computer hardware, computer peripherals, and even computer software, have been largely sent overseas, as have steel, vehicle, and consumer products manufacturing.
• Meanwhile, schools continue as though it was 1898 all over again.

So let's imagine you're a hiring manager. You get hundreds of resumes each day. How do you decide which one to hire? Well, assuming that all of your applicants have completed high school, their schooling isn't a deciding factor. So now, it is all about what sets person A apart from the crowd. That's what I'm trying to point out is that schooling shouldn't be about producing a million clones each year, but about making sure that each graduate in the batch is visibly different from the others.

What about college? Well, we need to understand that college is not and never has been about job skills training, with the exception of certain "professional" degree programs, such as law or medicine. For most college students, college is much more about learning to think independently and to ask questions that others may not have thought about. A college graduate should not be "politically-correct", although he or she should be sensitive enough to people's feelings that he or she does not unintentionally offend. A college graduate should not be afraid to challenge assumptions, to make waves, to rake some muck. That's the reason we taxpayers subsidize your schooling: so you will go out and change the world in ways that make life better for all of us. You cannot do this if you are quiet and obedient.

Now, I have to say that management in nearly any large organization will not like you if you challenge their assumptions, because they will take it as an accusation that they are wrong. Just like the 3rd grader who points out the teacher's multiplication mistake, they'll look for a chance to mark you down. This is an artifact of industrial age management, and will take a long time to squeeze it out of most companies. You can be a "smart fellow" or a "fart smeller", depending on whose approval is important to you. You need to understand that there are consequences for speaking up, but you need to be willing to bear those consequences sometimes. And if you aren't willing, shut up and do as you're told.

This is the reason I would be more willing to hire someone with a college degree. If all you do is follow orders without question, what benefit do you bring to a small, locally-owned business operating in the 21st century? And yet, even the lowliest high school graduate should bring some intelligence to his / her workplace, and not just blind obedience. If you want blind obedience, get a German shepherd.

I have to admit that there is some benefit in top-down teaching. But I also know that when MJ switched from the overcrowded public school to the charter school, his grades picked up. His reading and math skills and his interest in science all picked up. Before, he regarded school as an ordeal to be endured. After the change, he still didn't bow at the feet of the school (he did not have a personality transplant), but he didn't hate it nearly as much.

The differences?

• Smaller class size. The optimal classroom size is probably ten to twenty students per room. It isn't just more teacher attention. It is fewer individuals to distracting other students.
• Smaller student body. Again, it is harder to get lost when everyone on campus knows who you are.
• Different teaching styles. MJ's first year at AAE, he had some on-campus classes and some "do this and show your facilitator at the end of the week" classes. He had to learn some goal-setting and time-management. Also, his science class involved dozens of dissections, not just book-reading and lectures.

The next year, there were some changes in the California school laws, apparently intended to restrict the activities and expansion of charter schools. They went to a much more rigid traditional-style format, causing an exodus. Before changing to another school, the then-freshman student had regular 'color the map' assignments in his US history class. I asked him a couple of months after this started about the subject matter of the first map, but he couldn't remember it at all.

MJ finally graduated from another charter school, where vocational majors, small classes, facilitators, and curriculum enhancements (classes taken at the local college) made a big difference.

Another thing I want to point out is that our system of age-specific 'grades' is a hindrance. Children learn at different rates, and those rates vary from subject to subject. Traditional age-related grades ensure that nearly every child is both behind the rest of his / her class and ahead of his / her class. It mis-allocates resources, too, because students who have learned most of what the schools can teach about a subject still have to sit around and listen to lectures, when they could be helping other students (not as advanced in said subject) to learn.

As soon as you get out of school and go into the workforce, you have supervisors that are 60 and others that are 25. You have co-workers--your equals--that are in their 60s and 70s and some that are in their twenties. Often, a higher-skilled employee will be assigned to help train a new or lesser-skilled employee, who may be older, younger, or the same age as the trainer. If you have never learned how to relate to that situation, it will cause problems.

I've been a registered voter in California for a long time. Nearly every election has featured at least one local bond measure for the schools. Nearly every statewide election has featured a statewide bond measure for the schools, and some have also featured minimum funding requirements (e.g., around 45% of the state budget, an amount which can never be reduced). At some point, we're going to have to face the fact that money isn't the problem, and neither are (most of) the teachers the problem. The problem is the system in which the teachers work and the students suffer, while highly-paid administrators proliferate.

We're going to have to castrate the school districts and give their power to smaller, parent-controlled educational organizations. We're going to have to put teachers and parents on the same team, so they can work together to shepherd children through the educational system.

Matt pointed out that his foreign co-workers are hardworking and respectful in a way that he doesn't see a lot of Americans being. That is true, for now. However, I doubt they get those values from the classroom. Those values come from the family. One of MJ's best friends has spent years avoiding any situation where he has to call me by name, because I insisted that I be called "Mr <my-last-name>" and he was used to calling his parents' friends by their first names. That isn't taught at school, but at home.

I can tell, whenever I have to call a tech support number (yes, sometimes our tech support has to call your tech support) that the person on the other end isn't as respectful as he/she would have been a few years back. Give it a few years, and they'll be much like American workers.

All the other "reform" efforts are merely rearranging the chairs on the Titanic's deck. Until they get to the root of the problem: that their product (identically-trained factory workers) is no longer needed, the schools will continue to fail. It isn't because there isn't enough "rote learning". There is plenty of mindless repetition in schools. It is because the world has changed, and they have not.

Again, Matt, I'd love to hear a longer exposition of why you feel the way you do.