Guard Dog

As a foreigner, I'm genuinely curious (and ignorant): what makes state government so much better than the federal in these cases, such that so many commentators will often say "give it to the states and they'll just do it better"? Is it a general statement about scale, and governing as locally as possible? Is there a proven track record of states handling education or other issues far better, and if so, is that an efficiency question or is that about states tending to take different solutions? Ok, this is a bit complex because in the most un-libertarian fashion I do believe the Federal Government does have a role to play in education and not everything is has done has been a disaster. Although most of the recent things have been. The federal government is responsible for de-segregating schools, the national school lunch program, the act that created the Land Grant Colleges in the post-civil war US (I forget the name of the act) and the Special Education programs of the 1970's. These were all a big deal that helped. Prior to the 1830's (give or take, I'm going on memory here) most schools were community managed or parochial. Most children learned from their parents. Around the 1830s a Congressman named Mann began a reform program for "common" schools based on German education of the day. Basically students were taught the same thing all over the state. All the other states followed suit. This was when teaching actually became a profession. Now the students were being taught a curricula that the Universities and trade colleges ( they were called Agricultural and Mechanical colleges and many are still around) wanted incoming students to know. By the late 20th Century a fellow named Dewey (if you have ever used a card catalogue you know who he is) began writing textbooks that taught not just academics but life skills and they were quickly incorporated into state run schools. By the 1950s & 60's I think the US primary education system was the best in the world. And then it started to fall apart. In the '70's and 80's the Government began to get more involved in funding, curricula design, and the local school boards and state governments began to lose control. And then the federal government began to take funding collected by taxes in one state and distribute (or withhold if the schools did not comply with mandatory curricula) and the whole thing has become something of a mess. That is a very brief summation of something big, complex, and sort of messy but I hope you get the idea.

Get the Federal Government out of education. Once upon a time the individual states designed their curricula around what the State Universities expected incoming freshmen to know. In those day the US education system was much better. One of the best in the world. Now the federal government was made a bloody mess of it (as if they could do anything else) and we never break into the top 10.

I agree that it was motivated largely by the sovereigns' greed. It all falls down to power and money stands as a currency for such. Nevertheless the religious motivation proved successful for the larger mass of the army, and what I was pointing out to Ben was that had religion not been such a powerful ideological force back in those times, and had it been something else like, say, a political movement, patriotism, or even science, these would have provided the new necessity by which to justify the Crusades. Yep. I'll go along with that. If humans are not killing each other because Deus Vult, then it will be over some other reason.

We went to war with the British over far fewer taxes and property rights violations than the US Government is hammering us with today.

Wow the language of education has changed quite a bit in 122 years. I assume principle parts of a verb is a long way to say conjugation. What is the volume of a bushel of wheat? Heck I don't know. I could answer the second math question pretty easily if I did. The first math question is talking about the Associative and Distributive properties I guess. On number 9 how the heck many rods are in an acre? Uh oh... History question #4 is a no no. The Democrats won't want you discussing THAT with students! The rest isn't too hard. Why is "Show the territorial growth of the United States." a no no? Doh! Thanks. I fixed it. It was question 3.

That's the problem, nobody is telling these kids they should be ditch diggers. They can be anything they want if they go to community college. But with a bit less snark, college is fairly accessible to almost any student coming out of High School. This is great because it offers opportunity to a diverse range of students instead just of the ones that come from specific socio-economic backgrounds. But it also means you are going to have a much wider range of academic abilities. Couple that with the fact public education has been doubling down on math, science, and language arts for decades and devaluing trade skills, and you have some issues. Trying to convince my students that plumbers, electricians, and mechanics are not only important, but can make a lot of money is not an easy task. They get the exact opposite message from their parents and society as a whole. Yeah no kidding. I went to a Community College for four years! And my career has been.... it's been.... well, I have one.

Wow the language of education has changed quite a bit in 122 years. I assume principle parts of a verb is a long way to say conjugation. What is the volume of a bushel of wheat? Heck I don't know. I could answer the second math question pretty easily if I did. The first math question is talking about the Associative and Distributive properties I guess. On number 9 how the heck many rods are in an acre? Uh oh... History question #3 is a no no. The Democrats won't want you discussing THAT with students! The rest isn't too hard.

Yeah KP is right! Most students are ok! To quote Judge Smails "The world needs ditch diggers too!"

30% of Colorado & Montana's incoming freshmen were placed in Arkansas??? Who they heck are you and how did you get Gromnir's password?

Ben & Algroth, Sorry Gents, but you are wrong. The knights and soldiers might have been fighting for God but the Pope's, kings, and sovereigns who sent them were all about money. And without that none of them would have been there. The Byzantines lost Jerusalem somewhere around the middle 600's AD. For four hundred years after that it was under several different caliphates, Sunni Muslim every one, and nobody gave a damn because pilgrimages and trade with India and Persia still flowed. Then in 1068 the Seljuks closed the land to Christians and cut off the silk roads to the East and the Kingdoms of Europe started to take notice. So take that, the fact the Pope Urban II (who had so little power he could not even enter Rome) needed an "issue" and the opportunity to reunite the Church of Rome and the Greek Orthodox and the Sovereigns of Europe wanting trade resumed and you have the recipe for the First Crusade. Had the Seljuks kept the status quo none of it would have happened.

Well, at least the folks we've lost in '17 have been elderly who lived long happy lives. Still sad but less so than when 2016 was devouring young and old alike.

Irony. Definitely my favorite form of humor.

Well, as far as the travel ban goes, the Trump administration is going to lose in court on that one. Wow, slapped down in court within the first two weeks. That has GOT to be a record.

That's not quite how it works. If you have a family living and working in the US, in some of these examples for nearly a decade, and suddenly the father is deported back to some war torn country (which the US shares responsibility for it being war-torn to begin with.) That family may have just lost their breadwinner, the kids have lost their dad, their entire lives are flipped upside down. They probably aren't going to pack it up and go to a war-torn country, but you've now created a situation where those kids are incredibly vulnerable to extremist ideologies. The US is no longer the place they came for opportunity, it is the country that forced their father to leave and is filled with people who hate their way of life. Brother, you said it all right there. That is the biggest argument against intervention in foreign conflicts. Intervening in other nations makes things worse every time. Yes Assad is a bad guy. Yes he was committing atrocities on his citizens and yes things are worse off for trying to stop it. If muslims want to kill muslims, LET THEM. It is NOT OUR PROBLEM. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy but Iraq was an effective counter weight on Iran. To "save" the Iraqi people we invaded and removed him. How did that work out? The US backed a breakaway faction that set up a government in South Vietnam. Then militarily supported it for 10 yeas. How did that work out? Enough is enough already. US "interests" begin on the east coast of the US Virgin Islands and ends at the western end of the Aleutians.

Great article about just how far the Patriots have come. I'd forgotten a lot of this stuff: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/the-nfls-model-franchise-was-once-a-tear-down-project/2017/01/27/8431dd7c-e4be-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.bb05981c7cc4

like it or not http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/ but yeah, even trump voters didn't necessarily like him so much as they hated hillary clinton. as to the Court, possible the only positive we see from trump's election is we will are more likely to see replacement Justices who favor judicial restraint. HA! Good Fun! Presidents come and go. A Supreme Court Justice can f--k you decades.

Now reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. So far it is lively and interesting. But it's also a bit too broad and light on detail for my taste. It's like cliff notes for a history of a thousand years. And since Spring Training is just 25 days away I'm getting in the mood with one of my favorite writers Roger Kahn and Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing about It a Game

one thing am almost certain of is trump will be disappointed with his Court nominee, whoever it is. none o' his top three choices is obvious political creatures. all o' them is Judges first and foremost. whether they seem to favor 2nd amendment freedoms or a more restrictive view o' probable cause will all be pointless if they sees unconstitutional excess from an executive. loyalty is important to trump, but is often lost on a Justice, and so-called conservative Justices is more likely to take a jaundiced view o' the kinda stuff we has seen thus far from trump. HA! Good Fun! The exact reason Obama chose Kagan & Garland IMO. I think Sotomayor has not turned out to be the utter disaster I was afraid she would be. To the chagrin of some she has become a pretty consistent champion of the 4th Amendment. Although much less so on other aspects of the Constitution I'm afraid to say. Kagan, so far at least, seems predisposed to allow the government broad power. Garland seems to have been cut from the same cloth. I am deeply relieved he was not seated, even if the way it was done was not cool. I see no reason why the Republicans simply didn't just vote him down. Nothing wrong with doing that. I read a bit on Trump's top three. I think Prior would be in for the biggest nomination fight. The other two seem ok. I wish I could make his pick. I'd choose Janice Rogers Brown and dare the Democrats to try to stop her. Also I love how your country mouse is uneducated. I wouldn't cast too many aspersions if I were you. Trump's victory has less to do with his own merits than being the best of nothing but bad choices. I think most of the country mice would agree.

So, Kramer was right!

The "everyone gets a point" Panthers played an OT game again tonight. Only, will wonders never cease, they managed to win one. This season has been a textbook example of how to ruin a program.

Robert Smigel is seriously f-----g funny!

This just ****ing cements Jackson as my favorite president ever. Makes me wish I was American. And they left a of of stuff out. He was actually called Old Hickory from his military career. He was as tough and immovable as an old hickory tree. He led a militia force of just 5000 men against a force of 7500 British infantry and 600 Kings German Legion troops at the Battle of New Orleans and won. Completely won. He led the army in the Great Seminole War, pushing them from Georgia down into Florida. He was the last military commander to defeat them in battle. Then after they made peace, just for the hell of it, he took Florida from the Spanish. The city of Jacksonville in Florida is named for him. During the election of 1828 he was referred to as Jackass by his opponents and to spite them he made it his symbol. It later became the symbol for the whole Democrat Party (he was a Democrat). He is probably the first populist to be President and did a lot to help farmers and labor class folks. He empowered people other than political elites. Today that is called Jacksonian Democracy. So you might say he is the real founder of the modern Democrat Party. At least up until 2000. Starting with Gore, then Kerry, then Obama the Democrat Party turned their backs on Jacksonian Democracy. Heck they even turned their backs on Andrew Jackson, removing him from the $20 bill in favor of Harriet Tubman. There is another story about him, I don't know if it's true. He had a habit of walking to Blodget's Hotel down the street from the Capitol in the evenings. He's sit in the lobby and have cigars and whiskey and just talk to people. Folks with a political interest would of course try to persuade him to help their cause and this activity is where the term "lobbying" came from. I heard that on the Paul Harvey radio show a long time ago. It might be true, but it is a good story.

So the US authorized itself, therefore it was legal. In other words, "might makes right". Can't really argue with that. Great philosophy while you're top dog, not so great when you cease to be. It was legal inasmuch as the standards for going to war under the US Constitution were met. It was "legal" if for no other reason than there is no international body to whom sovereign states are beholden to justify themselves to or has power to redress the wrongs they do. Was it just? Was it moral? No, I'd have to say it wasn't. With Iraq at least. Add to that it was extraordinarily ill-advised and what you have left is, I hope, an object lesson to future administrations to use military force more judiciously and sparingly. Sometimes the status quo is better than all the possible alternatives. And I'm sorry to say, might does make right. When Russia invaded Crimea did the "international police" go arrest Putin? Did anyone do much of anything meaningful? Not really. So to me that means it is incumbent on those with might to learn from past lessons and use their power responsibly. Which brings me back around to Manning going public with bad deeds which just puts everyone's back up rather than be a true whistle blower and give the information to people who might have done some good with it.

No, you didn't comment on it, which is precisely what rubbed me the wrong way: "once the shooting starts no questions whose side I'm on right or wrong". Those were your words. I might have misunderstood what you meant there, but it sounds like you'd take "our boys'" side regardless of what they did, because they wear the same uniform you did. That's not patriotism. As for the bangers, being part of an armed service in a combat zone does not *in theory* afford you impunity to commit illegal acts, even though it usually does in practice. The big question is if the Iraq war was illegal to begin with. If it was illegal, what is the moral difference between your average jarhead and a common thug? Again, no conscription. Frankly, I'm surprised that you think that following proper procedure would have yielded any results, especially considering your wider stance on Congressional dereliction of duty, executive overreach, etc. So Manning should have followed the rules knowing that it would have amounted to nothing? Even considering that the leaks were open and public, what has been done about them? The only person to go to jail over the whole affair was Manning. Honestly, what do you think the outcome would have been if some commission had been tasked with "reviewing" the claims made by some nobody analyst with serious issues? I'll have faith in the rules and the system when the people who actually put the lives of servicemen and intelligence assets at risk are made to face the music. Fat chance that Dubya, Rummy and Cheney will be indicted though, so I guess I'll keep rooting for "lawbreakers". Right or wrong meaning you don't damage your country by enabling or helping it's enemies. Like I said, if he had gone to the Senate Armed Services Committee justice, after a fashion, would have been done. It would not have been big, or splashy. It would have been kept quiet and would be altogether unsatisfactory but it would have also included steps to prevent a repeat. Now, were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illegal? No. They were not. Right or wrong in both cases the Congress of the United States authorized the President to do what he did. There is no higher international law to measure that against. Were they ill-advised? Yes. Were the poorly executed? Well, the combat phases were not but the management that came after is certainly questionable. Iraq in particular was a total waste of lives, time, and resources that made a bad situation worse. As for Afghanistan, in the wake of 9-11 doing the wrong thing would not be as bad as doing nothing.