Residential Collectivization

As any fule kno, Communism is all about taking away the individual and replacing him with a cipher that can be controlled and manipulated by a benevolent Big Brother.  Here’s one such manifestation, in the ravings of some Marxist college professor [redundancy alert]:

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says Kian Goh, who researches urban ecological design, “spatial politics” and social mobilization “in the context of climate change and global urbanization.”

Proposed solutions, including a public takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric, are missing one of the most important factors in climate change-driven destruction, Goh warns: “economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property.”
To prevent catastrophe, Americans must reconsider their ideas about “success, comfort, home, and family,” particularly the single-family homes that followed in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862 and federally backed mortgage insurance, the professor argues.
These policies benefited white middle-class families and “became synonymous with freedom and self-sufficiency” even though they represented “[e]xpansionist, individualist, and exclusionary patterns of housing.”

So having a house in the ‘burbs is a factor in Glueball Climate We’re All Gonna DIEEEEE! Catastrophe.

As we all know, of course, this whole climate bullshit manifesto is just a fig leaf covering the true aims of people like this asshole academic — there is no climate catastrophe looming —  but it sure as hell allows them to create their little model society, doesn’t it?

What really, really  scrapes these Commie bastards is that home ownership is the end result of individualism, provides the individual a stake in the society in which he lives, and provides for private security in his abode.  Private property ownership also means that people will, in the main, resist any and all efforts of the State to confiscate or otherwise appropriate it — and for the Commies, remember, there is no private property because all property belongs to the State.

So yeah, they’d prefer to have us all live in tiny, State-managed apartments in an urban environment, using public instead of private transport, and working for the State rather than for ourselves.

Already, the eeeevil automobile has been blamed for the non-existent growth of carbon emissions which is going to melt ice caps etc.  Now pricks like this Goh creature can add suburban homes to the list of eco-evils, which means that they too can be circumscribed, reduced and ultimately, banned.

Feel free to dispute anything you’ve read so far in this post, but you’d better have something more than emotion, slogans and hysteria in your argument.

“Spatial politics”, my fat African-American ass.

Medical Update

Yeah, yesterday’s colonoscopy went as expected:

…and no cancer, nor even pre-cancer (final results in a couple of weeks, but the doctor was matter-of-fact about the whole thing).

Actually, the procedure wasn’t as bad as the preparation thereof:

…but on to more pleasant topics…

No Surprises There

Like we couldn’t see this one coming:   we suck.

Results of the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found American teens showed no actual improvement in reading, math, and science compared to the 2015 results.

Our ranking improved, though. Why?

The ranking of U.S. students improved only because the scores of students in other countries dropped.

So we’re getting dumber at a slower rate than the rest of the world’s kids?  How nice.  And guess what?

As Education Week reported, PISA reading results indicate American teens are able to comprehend the main idea and draw simple inferences in a medium length text, but comprehension and comparison skills when other texts and ideas are introduced – so-called critical thinking skills – are lacking.
Despite a decade of the Common Core State Standards, an Obama-era progressive education reform that was touted as one that would improve students’ critical thinking and eliminate the achievement gap between white and minority students, U.S. public schools appear to be failing in both areas.

So Common Core is failing… along with just about every other nostrum provided by the education establishment, most notably No Child Left Behind, which should now be renamed “Every  Child Left Behind”.  Here’s some more on the topic.

But all is not lost:  I see that SecEd Betsy DeVos has managed to shed 600 useless functionaries from the Education Department in just a couple of years.  Go, Betsy, go!  MOAR reductions!!!!

Educating Immigrants

From Gates Of Vienna comes a “tl;mr” (too long / must read”) post by a teacher at the sharp end — probably literally so — of the effort to get newly-arrived immigrant children to integrate into the host society.  As you can well imagine, it’s going to fail dismally:

I know I will be called a “damned whore”, “damned pussy”, and I know I will hear, “You don’t decide for me.” There will be mess and noise in the classroom, the hallways, the schoolyard and the dining room. Changing rooms where classes change for physical education classes will, as usual, be places where girls don’t dare change since boys will show up and sneakily photograph the girls.
Showering is not on the world map for girls and even for some boys in school. It is enough that one or two pupils refuse to follow the instruction and scream “shut up” at me every time I am going to say something; thus is the lesson destroyed for 28 other pupils who want to learn something.When I call parents in for a conversation, I hear that I don’t have the right to tell their children off, that I should be careful so that I won’t be reported to the principal or school inspectors. They know where my family and I live, what car I drive, and I know that the risk is great that my car will get scratched or destroyed in some other way. I know that certain pupils threaten other pupils, but I don’t dare get in the middle because I risk being beaten.

Read it, and don’t weep;  get angry.  Because this (and the mindset which enables it) either has come, or will soon be coming to a school near you.

Straightening Out The Military Brass

Actually, I think the so-called “brass” need to be hammered flat like their namesake metal, but let’s move on.

During the awful Obama years, it became obvious that soldiers were not, in fact, supposed to really act  like soldiers.  And when they did, the criteria for punishment were not “this is what happens on a battlefield” but instead, “it’s not a battlefield, it’s a garden party.”

Soldiers got prosecuted for shooting bad guys because said bad guys hadn’t actually done anything bad, yet.  In WWII terms, this would have equated to not gunning down a column of advancing Nazi bastards because they hadn’t started shooting, yet.

Which as any fule kno, is ridiculous except when Obama-era senior officers say it isn’t.  Here’s the story behind the conviction of one unfortunate officer:

He ordered his men to shoot three Taliban insurgents who were charging at his platoon on a motorcycle in Afghanistan on July 2, 2012.
The Taliban did not heed orders to stop. Lorance could have let them men pass and possibly kill some of his own American soldiers by blowing themselves up with a suicide bomb (as has happened in other cases) or by gunfire. He chose to stop them and save American lives.
Sending a soldier to prison for defending his troops in a war zone should never have happened and should never happen again.

God-Emperor Trump, however, seems to know what’s what, and has pardoned or reinstated those unfortunate soldiers who fell foul of the Obama milquetoast rules of engagement.

And it’s about time.  He should have done it on Day One of his presidency, is my only criticism.

Now the next  item should be to go after the fucking officers (up to and including generals) who approved both the rules of engagement and this travesty of justice — it’s the .dotmil, there’s a signature on a document somewhere — and either demote them or toss their asses out.  And the sooner the better.

We need fighting spirit in our senior officer corps, not rules-bound wokeness and pussyfooting.