Education
Get a job…ANY job!
Get a job…ANY job! Don’t wait for a job in your college degree set.
That’s the advice being given to current college graduates. With the current job market already tight and with new grads competing for choice jobs against folks with already established career experience, new college graduates are being told to face reality and get a job so that they can support themselves and not to wait for that dream job to come available. At least, not right now.
Less Affluent Favor Gas Tax Holiday.
According to a rasmussen Poll released Thursday forty-six percent (46%) of America’s Likely Voters favor a federal gas tax holiday this summer. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 42% are opposed and 12% are not sure. Most voters who earn more than $75,000 a year oppose the gas tax holiday. Most who make less than $60,000 a year favor that policy change. Among those make less than $20,000 a year, 62% favor the gas tax holiday while only 11% are opposed.
McCain proposed suspending the 18 cents a gallon federal tax and Hillary supports it. Obama opposes it.
Dizzy’s Ten Post Round-Up
There’s no news like good news. Sadly, there is no good news in today’s Ten Post Round-Up:
1: A serious drug ring was busted up at San Diego State University….
2: Whites and Blacks use drugs at the same rate, yet Blacks are far more likely to be arrested for drug offenses…
3: The offices and home of Special Counsel, Scott J. Bloch, who oversees protection for federal whistleblowers, have been raided…
FBI Searches Office of Special Counsel Building–Crooks and Liars
4: The “Robbins” half of Baskin-Robbins, has passed away (the other half - Baskin, died awhile back). Both left behind more than 1000 flavors enjoyed by ice cream lovers the world over…
5: They saved the school and were served with pink slips…
CENSUS BOONDOOGLE RAISES COSTS TO $14 BILLION
UPS can put thousands of delivery-drivers on the streets everyday each carrying a hand held gadget to track millions of packages but the U. S. Census Bureau failure to build an effective hand-held computer will cost taxpayers an extra for $1.3 billion – no, you are not seeing things that’s a $1,300,000,000,000 boondoogle.
So, it is turning instead to 600,000 temporary workers to do a paper and pencil census in 2010 just like 1910. Another massive federal bureaucracy run amuck. The $1.3 billion hi-tech gadget glitch will add $2.2 to $3 billion to the 2010 census costs that are now expected to total a mind numbing $13.7 to $14.5 billion.
Dizzy’s Ten Post Round-Up
Put on your thinking caps. You will definitely find today’s Ten Post Round-Up educational:
1: Why does it seem that people who have a problem with women having abortions seem to have no problem with war?….
2: Gas is almost up to $4.00…
3: 4,327 Florida 10th graders can’t read…
4: Do we really want four more years of GWBs policies?…
John McCain didn’t vote for George Bush in 2000: Has adopted his platform for 2008–Crooks and Liars
5: The woman who helped overturn the law that banned interracial marriage, has passed away (Dizzy and her husband are thankful for that)…
GM CEO Predicts Bankruptcy
In a letter to shareholders General Motors’ Chairman and CEO Porter Stansberry says he sees light at the end of the tunnel but it is a GM bankruptcy and that a company cannot suffer 40 years of bad decisions, bad ideas, and bad debts and expect to compete with the rest of the world’s automakers.
He says, “what’s killing us is a legacy of debts and obligations we cannot possibly repay.” Stansberry says, “nor do we have any pleasant way to repudiate our promises. The only answer is bankruptcy.” He likens it to promises made under Social Security saying, “we cannot make enough money selling cars to afford the service on our $33 billion debt load, ” and “or the $11 billion we owe in cash pensions. These debts are killing us.” He thinks, “we’ve finally entered the end stage – the death spiral.”
“Given our current burn rate, I estimate we will declare bankruptcy in a little more than three quarters, “he predicted.
Toyota pays workers $43 an hour to make cars in the U. S. but the United Auto Workers demand $67 an hour from GM, Ford and Chrysler. Plus, they make cars that consumers judge to be inferior. Turn out the lights the party is over in Detroit, and Dearborn.
Dizzy’s Ten Post Round-Up
I don’t know if the electorate are really bitter or not, but today’s Ten Post Round-Up will probably leave a grimy taste in your mouth:
1: So it seems that the only people that benefit from your college education is the college and the banks that issue student loans…
America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree–The Chronicle of Higher Education
2: Glass houses come to mind…
You Can’t Complain About Sexism If You Participate In It–The Democratic Daily
3: Single mom flips the script and sues RIAA…
Accused music pirate turns the tables on the RIAA–Geeks Are Sexy
4: Dizzy is a sucker for true crime murder mysteries…
Smiley Face Killers: All About The Growing Mystery Gang–The Huffington Post
5: Wright-Obama controversy: An interesting perspective on why religion and politics should stay separate…
Separation of Church & State Really of Religion & Politics.–Hypocrisy.com
Dizzy’s Ten Post Round-Up
I slept the day away in hopes that I would feel better, but, today’s Ten Post Round-Up tells me I probably should crawl back into bed:
1: Shameful: US servicewomen more likely to be raped by fellow soldiers than killed by enemy fire…
At War With Ourselves: Battling Sexual Violence in the Military–AlterNet
2: Not A Surprise: Teenage girls adopting eating disorders from healthy eating messages at school…
3: ACLU comes out in defense of polygamist ranch…
4: Florida fire hydrants to begin multi-tasking as spyware…
5: Smart: Bush sneaks into New Orleans, Not So Smart (?): To discuss expanding NAFTA…
6: Grandma’s weird Depression-era recipes are beginning to look good, now…
7: Oh, but flip-flops are so comfy, aren’t they?….
McCain: That was then (flip). This is now (flop).–Hypocrisy.com
8: Un-frak-ing-believable…
Judges deny some crack convicts legal help on sentences–McClatchy
9: Put this in perspective: The Army and Marines are recruiting individuals who would otherwise not be able to purchase or possess guns as civilians or be able to live in neighborhoods with a school nearby…
Army doubled felony waivers for recruits in year of Iraq surge–Raw Story
10: Oklahoma sheriff (D) works to up the ante of sexual predators vs (R)s…
272 días hasta el final de un error…
Peace.
Dizzy’s Ten Post Round-Up
Yes, today’s Ten Post Round-Up is as cold as the Colorado mountains:
1: thepoetryman has something to say about the FLDS Church…
2: More “supporting the troops” by the Bush Administration…
3: A case where “what happens in Vegas…” won’t be staying in Vegas…
4: You thought your health care plan was expensive before, wait until you get sick with a serious illness…
5: Not able to find enough diplomats to volunteer for duty in Iraq, the State Dept. will now start drafting them to go…
State Department warns diplomats of compulsory Iraq duty–Minstrel Boy
6: Another school kid calls out the big dogs on their errors…
German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA’s asteroid figures: paper–PHYSORG.com
7: Japan has joined in the war against fat people….
8: McCain wants to suspend the gas tax for the summer…
9: There’s a problem with your cereal and it’s ten years old…
Marler Clark Sees Pattern in Malt-O-Meal Salmonella Outbreaks–Signs of the Times
10: This is so typical of our politicians, these days, it comes as no surprise that they would start off with a bill to help homeowners and end up giving the bulk of the “help” to big business, instead…
277 días hasta el final de un error…
Peace.
Greenpeace Founder Quits, Calls “Pop Environmentists” Obstacle
Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder, has become a harsh critique abruptly leaving it after leading the group from 18-years because of what he calls “pop-environmentalism.” Specifically he cites fellow directors who without any formal science training labeled nuclear energy “evil” while going on to chemicals and biology and genetics. He calls it “pop-environmentalism” that uses misinformation, fear and sensationalism to deal with people on the emotional level rather than intellectual level.
Moore favors nuclear power because of its low cost ($1.68 per kilowatt hour) and reliability. Moore says natural gas cost three times as much (and where most of the electrical cost increases have come from); wind cost five times as much and solar ten times as much. Moore calls solar power completely ridiculous.
Mooreexplains nuclear waste recycling reduced it by 90% makinh it disposal manageable. He wonders how many Americans know half of the U. S. nuclear energy comes from dismantled Russian nuclear war heads? He speaks of a nuclear renaissance to replace coals fired power plants, and debunking the misbegotten idea nuclear reactors produce weapons which they do not. Moore labels the environmental movement an “obstacle.”
Excerpted and edited from NEWSWEEK, April 21, 2008, page 42.
D’Oh! That Smarts! High School Kids Finds Flaws In College Textbook
The most glaring thing about the book in question, “American Government”, is not the fact that topics including global warming and the separation of church and state were “skewed”. It’s not even the fact that it turns out that the kid was right about all the “errors” and what amounts to evidence of political bias, in the book (which was written by a couple of conservatives). It’s the fact that one of the book’s illustrious authors, John Dilulio, used to be the Director of Faith-based Initiatives, for the Bush administration.
Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that occasionally every once in a while rarely a conservative and even a former member of the Bush administration has come out with a book that was worth reading. But, didn’t anyone (namely a grown-up, an actual professor, even) vet this book for errors before passing it off as a book suitable for any educational purposes, much less a college education (or AP education, in this case), especially in light of the fact that Bush has shown a proclivity for cronyism and not so much shown that he honestly knows how to pick smart people to work for him (”Brownie”, anyone)?
crossposted: I’m Jus’ A Lil’ Dizzy
Blackened Eyes of Texas…
Desiring an honor code the University of Texas at San Antonio appointed a student committee to draft one promptly plagiarized it, partly word-for-word, from Brigham Young University. The BYU code credited a conference five years ago put on by The Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson but the UTSA version credited neither. The student currently in charge of the honor code project said it was an “oversight”, sagaciously observing the UTSA didn’t want an HONOR CODE that was stolen. The blackened eyes of Texas are upon you.
EDUKATHUN WARS
On March 25, the California Court of Appeal granted a motion for rehearing in the ‘In re Rachel L.’ case–the controversial decision which purported to ban all homeschooling in that state unless the parents held a teaching license qualifying them to teach in public schools. The automatic effect of granting this motion is that the prior opinion is vacated and is no longer binding on any one, including the parties in the case.” - Home School Legal Defense Association, 3/26/08
California law requires children between six and 18 to attend a full-time day school. Failure to comply means falling afoul of the state’s truancy laws, which say kids can’t play hooky without an excuse. But kids who are taught at home are less likely to be truants. Their parents choose to spend their time teaching English, math and science precisely because they don’t think the public schools do a good enough job.”…That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure — namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly. . . . For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education.”Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT — and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.” - Wall Street Journal editorial, 3/22/08
A LOT FOR TOO LITTLE
United States’ taxpayers get the least bang for the bucks spent on education, putting the U.S. at 18th in reading (behind countries like Japan and Poland) and a dismal 28th in math finds an international study. The Center for Union Facts has launched www.TeachersUnionExposed.com, a new campaign to shine the spotlight on the failures of teachers unions.
SELF HYPOCRISY: THE LIE OF LUCK
Are you feeling lucky? I hope so. But don’t press your luck, because there is no such thing. There is only blind chance and randomness. Luck is a purely historical concept. It only works when you look backwards.
When the dice come up seven, then you know you were lucky. Luck is a word we use to describe the past, it has no meaning for the future.
People have a terrible ambivalence towards chance. On the one hand, we play with it. Blind chance is recreational, from the craps tables to the pick-up bars, we love to play the odds.
But blind chance also terrifies us. Humans need an explanation for everything, a reason. We need that reason because we like to think we’re in control. That’s what humanity is; we’re the animal that controls things, manipulates the environment, makes effects out of causes.
We realize that blind chance plays a big part in our lives, but as soon as it happens we explain it away. That’s where the self-hypocrisy comes in. We look back and attribute a cause to that which had no cause at all; it was merely the working out of random chance.
The upcoming baseball season will give you dozens of opportunities to see what I mean. Baseball is a game of skill and strategy, but it’s chance that makes all those strategies stupid or brilliant.
A fly ball tinks off the foul pole and becomes a grand slam. The pitcher goes from being a gamer to a choker, his manager goes from being a gutsy genius who sticks with his players to a blockhead idiot who froze when he should have yanked the pitcher.
That’s what the broadcasters will say, the sportswriters will write and that’s what we fans will believe. But it was really just a random gust that brought that foul ball back a quarter inch so it hit the pole. It was blind chance. But that’s not the way we’ll remember it. We’ll give it meaning, because that’s what we do.
The inexplicable drives us crazy. We can’t stand it, so we don’t.
We make up stories instead. The trendy, semiotic phrase for it is “the narrative.” People tell nice stories to make sense of the world. We write histories and attribute a cause to everything that happened. And when a better reason eludes us, we call it luck.
Darwin talked about survival of the fittest. He might have added a codicil to that profound thought—survival of the luckiest.
Once upon a time there was a trilobite who was smarter than all the other trilobites, but you never heard of him. He fell into a fumarole and boiled before he could reproduce. Maybe you were born because the two fastest sperm collided and let number three get to the egg first.
“Why me?” people say after a bad break. Well, sometimes it’s because you let yourself get fat, sometimes it’s because you drove drunk—those are reasons, things you could control—but the guy in the car you hit? That was just his bad luck.
Chance can reach out and grab you by the neck at any moment. No wonder we lie to ourselves with hypocritical morality tales about fate and luck, they are very comforting.
They are also highly dangerous. We need to be very careful when we look for reasons why whatever happened—by chance—happened. Because we are going to find some.
When things go our way we cheer our luck like it was real, like we earned it. Acting like we believe in our good luck is a silly hypocrisy, but it’s harmless enough. The real damage comes when things go badly and we look for reasons, for someone to blame, for a scapegoat.
Like, “the witches,” or “the black helicopters,” or “the Jews.” That’s when reason becomes hypocritical and bad stuff happens. Humans have been doing it since the first lucky, mutated ape picked up a rock and slew the first unlucky member of his new species because Zog had an ugly blotch on his forehead that angered the gods.
None of this is an excuse to give up, to do nothing, let the chips fall where they may. Quite the contrary, when you can’t control everything you better control as much as you can as effectively as you can. But save a little space in your worldview for blind chance. It will save you a world of trouble.
Heck, if you’re a politician it could save the world a world of trouble.
Feces in a Fish Bowl and 32 Pounds of Pennies
Two and a half dozen 7th and 8th graders at Readington Middle School (RMS) in Hunterdon County, New Jersey aren’t happy with the half hour allotted for lunch every day but they weren’t get