Blogshoot

This post is a plug for the upcoming blogshoot that is coming up this Saturday. I am going to do a “first aid for the shooting range” quicky class.

Be there. We had a good time at the last one.

This is the only post for today because I am doing some training for the maintenance of my medical license. Gotta get that done.

You are a racist

The news today is that Coca Cola is the latest company to teach white employees that they are all racists and are part of the problem. They go on to say that fixing this requires them to be “less white.” This is not a new concept.

At the beginning of each school year, teachers spend a day being trained on policy changes for the coming year. During the briefings in 2019, one of the meetings was with the discipline team. As usual, we reviewed discipline trends from the previous year and were then told how we were to address those issues.

When a teacher has an issue with a student being disruptive in class and the behavior is serious enough or repetitive enough that it cannot be handled in the classroom, that teacher refers the student to discipline. This referral process happens more in some classes than others. I teach the :underperforming” students, and the office admitted to me that they purposely give me the troublemakers because I am better at handling them. As a result, I wrote over 300 referrals the previous school year. Everything from fighting, to cheating, cell phone usage in class, sleeping, to possession of drugs (including weed and tobacco), and (once) weapons.

So that year we were presented with the statistics for discipline. Black students comprise 30% of our student body, but represented over 50% of our discipline referrals. We were told that this meant we as teachers were racist. That is faulty logic. In order for this to be true, black students would have to break the rules at the same rate as other demographics. I asked the team what percentage of our black student body was part of the “honors” track- the students who are likely college bound, and are all taking more advanced coursework, like AP classes. He asked why that was relevant, and I pointed out that honors students almost never are discipline problems.

He then said that black students had poor grades and poor test scores because the entire system was racist and discriminated against black students. I left it there, because my point was made. However, that is the attitude that is present in the USA today. In education today.

Intrusive

My sister just got a letter in the mail from the US Census Bureau, claiming that she had to take the “American Community Survey.” The letter gives her 48 hours to take the survey by mail, online, or by calling some woman for a phone interview. The claimed penalty for refusing to answer is $5,000. There is an even larger penalty for lying.

The questionnaire is 28 pages long, and asks questions like how much you make, what your rent payment is, and what time you leave the house to go to work.

The Census bureau claims that they will keep your answers confidential. Uh, the CIA couldn’t even keep the identity of their spies confidential.

Fuck that. No one has been prosecuted for refusing to answer since 1970. Look, I will answer to tell you how many people live in my house, as the Constitution requires, but that is it. If there is a penalty for lying, that must mean that you are comparing my answers to some database somewhere. That tells me two things:

  • You already have the answers.
  • You plan on using the answers to incriminate me, which is a violation of one of those Amendments you keep ignoring.

So, no. I will take my chances with you ignoring me. Or maybe I can get an attorney. I don’t know if you can rely on the courts any longer, and I am sure that the ACLU isn’t interested.

Dictatorial powers

Fail to follow the orders of a minor politician in a Communist run state, and get summarily punished without trial. That is what one man in California discovered when he held a party in violation of the mayor’s orders. The mayor responded by having his electric and water services turned off.

There are some who say that this isn’t punishment, so a trial isn’t required. What next? Have a goon show up and break his kneecaps?

Home of the free no more

This is going to be commonplace for many of us over the next several years as we are forced to come to grips with the fact that this is no longer the “home of the free and the land of the brave.” We can stomp our feet and deny it, we can try to act as though we don’t accept it, but it is not going to change the reality that the great American experiment that was launched just over 230 years ago is finally producing empirical results. The conclusion: People are capable of sustaining individual liberty only for as long as they can be constrained by a system of law that suppresses and contains their true nature.

Hobbes was right.