Tuml Ate My First Blog So Time To Start Again

King Ozymandias

rendered in stone with a

strident decree.

Says our dear traveller

(unsentimentally)

"All that remains is his

It wasn't the swastika. It wasn't the SS lightning bolts. It was a skull and crossbones that the majority of people would not recognize as anything other than a skull and crossbones. I didn't even know what that symbol was until this came into the news, and I'm Jewish.

The American education system doesn't teach you each and every symbol that the Nazis used. You can't complain about "moral purity tests" and then expect someone to know everything or be labeled as bad.

It's like if you called that dumb girl who tattooed the Z for Gen Z on her hand during lockdown a Nazi because it looked like an SS lightning bolt. She wasn't a Nazi, she was just ignorant.

Saying he can't be a good candidate because of that is absolutely a moral purity test.

As for the tattoo - his ex said something about it while talking shit to her friends, that doesn't mean that he knew it was a Nazi symbol. It also happened two months before he learned about it and covered it up, which is about enough time for that to get through the grape vine to him.

I'm not saying shill for the guy. Hell, I know very little about his politics because I don't live in Maryland.

A bit later I had a conversation with all my family members, mother last, about the kinds of jams and preserves they like. My father likes certain preserves, but he would never go into the cellar and grab a jar of plums, or cherries, or apple-sauce. He wouldn't even open a bottle of home-brewed cider. He's completely passive. It would never in a million years occur to him to go down the stairs and get some marmalade. My father wants me to grow chili peppers, but he rarely uses them. Instead, when it's harvest time, I dry them, and then he buys chili powder at the store anyway. He doesn't like the varieties of apples in the garden. He eats lots of apples, but he buys new ones at the store.

My sister doesn't eat breakfast. She has coffee for breakfast and that's it. She doesn't eat marmalade. She likes marmalade, but she doesn't eat it. She uses home-cooked bottled tomato sauce and salsa. My sister would prefer fruit to preserved in 300ml jars and savoury sauces in 700ml bottles.

Mother often talks about opening a jar of plums, but she never actually does. She doesn't ever open a jar of marmalade that is older than six months. The next year, she says "Why not open the good stuff first? I don't want to eat the old marmalade!" This way, there's marmalade from 2010 that has never been opened. She likes apple-sauce, but she would rather cook it fresh from store-bought apples. She would never open a jar of her own home-canned cherries, because she didn't take out the pits. She would never drink the preserved apple juice.

Nobody actually ever opens a bottle of apple juice, or a jar of cherries. Everybody buys cherries and even apple juice when they need to cook or bake something with apples.

As a result, there's marmalade in her basement that is ten years old, and there are large jars of canned plums nobody eats, large jars of canned cherries nobody eats, bottles of cider and apple juice and home-brewed wine and so many apples. Apart from one of the trees, they don't really store well, but every year, I help harvest the apples and the pears and the cherries and three different types of plums, and then nobody eats the preserves.

But this year, I talked to everybody, and I got everybody on the same page, and I even got mother to agree that this is dumb. I took charge of jams and preserves, and I worked out how many jars of cherries we actually eat, how many jars of marmalade we need, and so on. If some cherries or strawberries go to waste, that's ok. If some plums go to waste, well, I don't like them anyway. I got mother to agree to only make preserves she actually eats, and unless we make cider again, we're not juicing all the apples.

There was already a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, because mother wanted me to no be so fast with all the cherries, but I got a large pot and 20 small canning jars and I canned 8 kg of cherries – the cherries I like to eat, prepared the way I like to eat them – in one day. Usually, she processes 2 kg of fruit per day, as the buckets and baskets of harvested fruit pile up in her kitchen. This year we made 3 kg of strawberry marmalade only, and some rhubarb marmalade. I decided to make syrups out of the berries instead of jam, because we have so much jam from last year, and we made 2.5 litres of syrup. I opened some jars from 2018 and dumped out the stuff that wasn't edible any more. I even popped out all of the pits of the cherries before canning them, which mother never does, because she says it's too much work, but then the cherries spoil faster and there's cyanide in the jar. Not enough to kill you, but more than necessary.

Basically, somehow I got my way. I talked to mother in a calm and measured way, and I explained that we don't have to eat all the cherries and strawberries and apples just so they don't go to waste, and we don't even have to make preserves if we never eat the preserves. Even then, when we make preserves, we should make sure that we actually want to eat them, and prepare them according to our tastes.

Year after year, this was a point of contention, and mother made me climb into the trees and harvest cherries she didn't need, or she made me juice every last fallen apple, even though we don't drink apple juice. And this year, she just listened to me, and she agreed that we don't need that much marmalade. This year, she admitted that she doesn't like pits in her canned cherries. She admitted that it doesn't make sense to make preserves you know you won't eat.

Clearly doesn't matter if the person is trained or not to teach, apparently. Public schools are not really teaching kids.

Meanwhile, my brother is homeschooling his kids, matching their level of each subject to where they're at, and in many subjects, they're ahead of their peers. In others, they're on par to what their grade would be.

So the question is, why is it unacceptable in homeschooling -most of the time to the point of removing it as an option or putting more safeguards against it- yet acceptable en masse in public school?

I'm not going to list all the things wrong with public education or else I'd be here all day, but in all essence, public school is not about education, it's about indoctrination. It pushes kids to believe certain things, to reject others and then it pushes them towards "higher education" in which 90% of them will take out loans and be in crippling debt due to the interest rates on said loans (the only loan you can't get away from by filing for bankruptcy)

although the stigma against homeschooling did give us one of the greatest scenes in movie history

It is literally never, ever an agentic trick to pretend to be incompetent.

We can see thousands and thousands of educators talk to each other about their jobs. We can see every single step of the process that results in this system. There are no secret orders. There is no covert agenda. We can see who makes the curricula and why and how. They are not receiving secret orders.

This is what I'm saying!! People keep being like "we can't possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don't have to deal with any of those things!"

Tapes were more portable than records. CDs were larger capacity than tapes and better fidelity. MP3s were cheaper than CDs and copiable to multiple locations.

Capitalism depends on actually giving benefits to people, and if you just ignore it and let capitalism fuck up a generation (2008) so much they demand socialism, then the decision makers chose their greed over the preservation of the system.

We currently live under unrestricted free market capitalism.

The only alternative to what we have now is communism.

Neither of these things are true. What we have is not capitalism(or at least not what most self-described 'pro-capitalists' would call capitalism), but rather an 'expert' managed economy. One where the people at the top(government, investment class and megacorps) work together to hinder the functioning of capitalism for everybody who isnt 'one of them.'

The US hasnt had true, unrestricted capitalism since before anybody living today was born(and one could even argue we never really did). But it has gotten further and further from that over the last century. So its not a coincidence that things have gotten worse for most people.

Then comes the 2008 financial crisis and it fucks everyone over. So, because people thought they lived under capitalism they blamed capitalism for this. When in reality the cause of the 2008 financial crisis was a very bad policy by the Federal Reserve to encourage banks to give crappy mortgages that they could never pay back. So when young people on the left rebel in the form of Occupy Wall Street they advocate for socialism. But in reality, if you prod them on what they actually want it's closer to social democracy which comes with its own set of flaws but is not as bad as socialism.

FDR was a socialist totalitarian. The role of the federal government, the reach of the federal government are both unrecognizable when you look at them before and after his presidency. It was during his presidency, from one of his executive orders, that spawned Wickard v. Filburn. EVERYTHING after this decision is within reach of the Federal Government to regulate, to tax, and to control.

The Great Depression gave them the excuse and the emergency powers. World War II cemented those powers by smoothly transitioning them from 'support the economy' to 'mobilize for war.'

The US never demobilized. We have had a military ready and instantly capable of fighting World War II again for the last 70 years. With no buildup. That's preposterous, historically speaking. It's necessary to maintain the fiction that the government requires this much control and power and meddling.

We're the Good Guys because we won, but the evil fascists and communists socializing all of the vital industries, demanding that they make what the government says is needed, in the amounts that they say are needed... That was Soviet farms, German steel, and US automotive and bulk goods in equal measure.

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Clearly doesn't matter if the person is trained or not to teach, apparently. Public schools are not really teaching kids.

Meanwhile, my brother is homeschooling his kids, matching their level of each subject to where they're at, and in many subjects, they're ahead of their peers. In others, they're on par to what their grade would be.

Any pointing out how this clashes with reality simply deflects off of the all-consuming belief in the magic. It conflicts with the absolute certainty that comes of believing in the magic of the Authority™ and the degrees it grants, or has to be explained away with the same sort of ardent anger that the deeply religious feel towards genuine heresy.

At this point I've seen too many videos about teachers bragging about teaching kids sexuality and sexual identity and trying to be the kids "friends" they can come to when their parents "just don't understand".

We used to have a fucking tag line for this.

I was taught classroom management and subject specialties, child psychology and adolescent development best practices. Legal requirements and what the scope of mandated reporter laws are. I was taught how to write a lesson plan to satisfy your admin (and then taught later by fellow teachers how stupid it is), how to write fair tests, how when and why you might grade those tests on a curve. How payscales and teachers unions worked, the history of education in the US and the beginnings of the DEI woke 'we must treat The Blacks Different because reasons no it's totally not racist.'

You know what I wasn't taught?

How to actually teach in any coherent manner. At no point during 4 years of schooling were we given batteries of lessons in a controlled environment of 'this is how you disseminate information, this is how you handle spot-assessments for understanding, go up there and try it and we'll correct your form and methods.'

This was all done a) during one-day/week shadow sessions at the beginning of your freshman year, where you didn't actually teach anything, b) individual lessons or if you're lucky 3-4 days modules without context, and c) throwing you into the deep end of student teaching for a semester.

99% of this was overseen by teachers outside of the actual department you were nominally paying to teach you how to teach, and it was incredibly hit or miss on whether you'd get useful feedback, feedback AT ALL, or even a chance to stand in front of the class and teach things. Very often you'd be a secretary or admin assistant or paper-grader.

The whole thing was very heavily 'you've been watching teachers do this for years now, you should know how to do this,' which is about as useful as 'you've seen doctors working for decades, here's a prescription pad' or 'you've lived in houses all your life, designing and building one is easy.'

Add that they're inflicting these student teachers on actual kids, who should be getting the best education they can. I can almost guarantee that Education Universities would never be able to place if parents were given the same disclosure and option for having student teachers in their kids' classroom as you are when doctors are training interns.