Category Archives: Culture

UPDATED (4/28): Grad Inflation: American Kids Are Dumbest In Developed World, Yet Graduation Rates Keep Rising

Affirmative Action, America, Culture, Education, Kids

American school kids, in aggregate, are the dumbest in the developed world, yet their high-school graduation rates keep rising. Looks puffed-up. The Economist explains how grad inflation is carried out:

…. Nationally, high-school graduation rates have increased at a steady clip even while other measures of learning and achievement—international exams, state-mandated standardised tests, college-admissions test scores—have been flat or even slightly negative. That could be because children are doing better, or because schools are lowering standards.

An ever-present element in these stories is the reliance on online credit-recovery classes. These are remedial courses delivered via computer that students can take if they fail a class, rather than attending summer school or being forced to repeat a grade. Jeremy Noonan, a former science teacher in Douglas County, Georgia, was assigned to supervise a credit-recovery course in 2016. Mr Noonan says a colleague told him that his responsibility was to manage the course so that students received an average grade of 80 or higher, which would enable them to graduate even if they failed the end-of-term exams.

The computer programme doing the teaching allowed students to retake exams they failed, with many of the same questions. “I realised right away it was all about manipulating the system,” he says. “Most teachers just gave the students the answers without bothering to explain the course content,” says Ayde Davis, a former public-school teacher in Del Rio, Texas, who reported violations to the state education agency. “Students could finish their courses at accelerated rates, the administration was happy, and credit-recovery teachers who co-operated were feted.”

Students completed exams at unreasonably fast speeds—one finished a physics exam in four minutes and earned an 80% score, according to records she saved. In the 2015-16 school year, 144 credits were given for recovery courses completed in less than ten hours, Ms Davis’s documents show. According to the makers of credit-recovery software, each course has between 60 and 75 hours of instruction.

It is not possible to know how many credit-recovery programmes are being used as diploma mills. But these courses are now widespread. The Fordham Institute, an education think-tank, estimates that 69% of all high schools in America use them. Some high schools have more than half of their students enrolled in credit-recovery programmes. They are especially popular in urban high schools attended by poor and minority students—in other words, precisely the places where graduation rates have risen fastest.

READ: “Grad inflation: The rise in American high-school graduation rates looks puffed-up. Online credit-recovery classes have been implicated in many school scandals.”

UPDATE (4/28):

And folks think their kids are so smart for flicking through mindless content.

The chimpanzee, which has yet to master speech or bipedalism like humans, has learned how to use Instagram. pic.twitter.com/atGggwlVBM

— Roosh (@rooshv) April 25, 2019

Tucker Touches On The Orchestrated Consumerism And Voracious Corporatism Destroying American Lives

America, Business, Culture, Economy, Ethics, Globalism, Multiculturalism, Nationhood

More forbidden topics, touched upon by the Tucker Carlson treasure. Some of the highlights of his editorial, delivered on his Fox News show some days back:

Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became fantastically rich doing this. Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country. …

…

The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.

The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.

But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.

One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this …

Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow, they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories. …

“They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children.”

HERE is the underwhelming title: “Tucker Carlson: Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating.”

Only Feminists Ignore That Women Are Way More Vulnerable; That The World Is Not Their Oyster

Conservatism, Crime, Culture, Feminism, Gender, Islam, Jihad, Sex

Pundits are so unfocused and unthinking. A Muslim kills Europeans and, right away, it’s Jihad, and Jihad alone.

Yes, there’s the “bonus” of jihad for the killer. Jihad is probably part of the predatory behavior involved in the decapitation of two lovely Scandinavian women, murdered in Morocco.

But so is pleasure.

You adopt the argument of feminism—the one incorrectly asserting that rape is about power, never sex—when you ignore SEX, gender, the man-woman disparities.

Men, rough men in particular, will rape women. Rape is about sex.

DEAL! And teach your girls how to deal.

Crazies who ignore natural gender disparities endanger their loved ones. Parents who omit this lesson are derelict.

So, yes, Jihad. But can parents please start teaching young girls that the Third World is not their oyster? That women will likely get raped, even killed, if they Kumbaya defenseless around the world, especially the Third World?

UPDATE (12/26/018): “What would make two 20-something Scandanavian women expect to be safe while backpacking in mountains of Morocco?”

INTERVIEW: ‘Writer Ilana Mercer Takes On The Cato Institute’s ‘Left-Libertarianism’

Culture, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, The West

INTERVIEW: Big League Politics interviewed me on my paleolibertarianism under the headline: “Writer Ilana Mercer Takes On The Cato Institute’s ‘Left-Libertarianism.’” I didn’t think I took CATO on, but was just pointing out sharp distinctions, in reply to correspondent Seth Segal’s sharp questions. But OK. <g>

BIG LEAGUE POLITICS: Being a preeminent paleolibertarian thinker today, how would you define paleolibertarianism and how does it differ from standard paleoconservatism?

ILANA MERCER: First, let’s define libertarianism. It’s concerned with the ethics of the use of force. Nothing more. This, and this alone, is the ambit of libertarian law.

All libertarians must respect the non-aggression axiom. Libertarians don’t initiate aggression against non-aggressors, not even if it’s “for their own good,” as neoconservatives like to cast America’s recreational wars of choice. If someone claims to be a libertarianism and also supports the proxy bombing of Yemen, or supported the war in Iraq; he is not a libertarian, plain and simple.

As to paleolibertarianism, in particular. And this is my take. It’s how I’ve applied certain principles week-in, week-out, for almost two decades. So, some will disagree. In my definition, a paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the just-mentioned libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which all decent people should live, will crumble. …

… Read the rest. “Writer Ilana Mercer Takes On The Cato Institute’s ‘Left-Libertarianism’” is on Big League Politics.