Revenge is taking the poison and hoping others die. Forgive everyday. – unknown
I really don’t mean the saying today for what has been going on the last week even though it applies. It is a saying for all of life. What happens this week will be over soon and there will be another issue to try and cause strife.
On a personal level, we all run into someone every once in a while who says something or does something that either causes harm or offends you. It’s best to forgive and move on. Whether you can forget is up to you, but the other person is probably not thinking about you.
I read the best revenge is not giving a shit. Once you do that, you can forgive a lot easier.
“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rapidly promoted by mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end.”
Here’s where someone is going to get offended. I’m going to go ahead with it anyway even if there are a few people who always try to spoil the party for the rest of us. Most people really don’t care. Call things by whatever you want if it makes you happy. Heck, I’ll be happy for you especially if the PC police would shut up. I just can’t remember all the names you want me to call things I grew up calling something else.
There are so many important things than this in my life that come before being PC like cleaning my nails, sweeping out dust bunnies, contemplating my naval and much more because well, I have a life.
I already have posted that the media is biased from the point of view of the audience they want to reach, all of them. They have their lapdogs the celebtards who gladly will tell us what we should think because of their self-inflated opinion of themselves.
The funny thing to me is that some of this PC crap is made up like in the circle game. Reddit made up a story about the OK sign being offensive or white power or something to see if they could get the offended to bite. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, they salivated when the bell rung.
Art Linkletter said he loved to interview kids and older people the most. Kids always told the truth and older people just didn’t care anymore and would say what they thought. Here is the Kids version.
I suppose every generation considers the learning of the next generation as inferior to theirs. If we didn’t, why do millennials eat tide pods? Why do parents talk about how better their education was and how soft they are on kids today? There are many reasons for this including prejudice, standards, government intrusion into the learning system and deviation from what made our education system the one that led to more progress, inventions and breakthroughs than any in the history of man.
We’ve now potentially gone backwards and have therefore failed the following generations.
In working with public school kids, I observe that there are many reasons. People are not equal and some are smarter and learn better than others. Those with two parent families or with a single parent who is highly integrated in the student’s learning consistently outperform those who don’t. The system has gone backwards due to interference from do-gooders, government (over)regulation and unions. Note: that is my observation only. I see kids rise above the system to achieve, but they have to swim upstream. Most can coast their way through.
Conversely, children who learn under Classical Education have an advantage in learning as it is taught to a standard the kids must keep up with as opposed to teaching to the lowest common denominator so no one is left behind, penalizing those who could achieve more.
Further, Classical Christian education is an approach to learning which emphasizes biblical teachings and incorporates a teaching model known as the Trivium, which consists of the three stages of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
Classical education complements a child’s natural development stages. Young children can memorize information easily. So, in the early years, learning is enhanced by songs, body movement, recitation, and exploration. This sets them up for success in their next stage of learning, critical thinking.
The critical thinkers are what companies want to hire. They look at problems differently and come to the table with better skills for success.
They also have a distinct advantage over the public school system and the below discussion of how we are destroying learning.
WHERE EDUCATION HAS FAILED OUR KIDS
The biggest failure I’ve observed is the Common Core learning system. It threw away the standards of learning that has proved to produce educated kids by introducing a system that borders on the ridiculous.
It was implemented by those we thought were helping us, yet it may have set us back for years.
Behind a lot of this is none other than Bill Gates, a man I’ve met and have mixed thoughts about. Microsoft is far more successful than his support of Common Core.
But Bill Gates should have felt some uneasiness. Common Core was untested, unproven, and micromanaged by David Coleman, a man with limited credentials but reliably far to the left. Nobody in the business world launches a big new product without years of research and refinement. Instead, Common Core was wrapped in $1 billion’s worth of propaganda and dumped on the country as a fait accompli.
The late, great Siegfried Engelmann, a real educator, was asked what he thought of this approach: “A perfect example of technical nonsense. A sensible organization would rely heavily on data about procedures used to achieve outstanding results; and they would certainly field test the results to assure that the standards resulted in fair, achievable goals. How many of these things did they do? None.”
Did Gates realize that Common Core, supposedly a new and higher instruction, incorporates all the dubious ideas from decades prior? New Math and Reform Math were the basis for Common Core Math. Similarly, Whole Language and Balanced Literacy were rolled into Common Core’s English Language Arts (jargon for reading). Constructivism, which prevented teacher from teaching, has been undermining American schools for decades. Nothing new and higher about these clunkers.
An earlier generation of Gates’s business partners had created so much illiteracy that Rudolf Flesch had to write a book to answer every American’s favorite question: “why can’t Johnny read?”
I don’t hold Gates responsible except for his funding and use of his status to push this, but I hold those who pushed this system on the generation suffering from this learning standard.
The Thinker sums it up like this:
We have to wonder if Bill Gates performed due diligence, that being the care that a reasonable person exercises to avoid harm to other persons or property. In other words, before putting your business funds to work on anything, you should make yourself an expert. That’s what we need in this country: everybody becomes an expert. For sure, nobody should trust the official experts. If Bill Gates had observed that simple rule, he would still have a billion or two he doesn’t have now. And the country would have tens of millions of better educated students it doesn’t have now.
We need to stop this disservice to our kids and have them learn properly, and to learn to think critically.
Here is a video that shows just how far we’ve deviated from the learning system that invented computers, vaccines, technology that has helped mankind and sent men to the moon. Go to 1:24 under Decompose to see how far we’ve digressed.
CONCLUSION
It would seem the dumping common core and putting real learning would be best for the kids. The world is getting tougher and we need to give them every advantage possible.
I’ll state up front that Dave Barry should have written this, because I just can’t do it proper justice, but here goes.
I love going to the grocery store, not just because I get to buy stuff to eat, but it’s a people show extraordinaire. I pretty much hate shopping, it’s go get what I need and get out like most real guys. But the grocery store is different.
I first noticed that I liked going back when I lived in South Florida, where I spent most of my single years. People would get dolled up to go to the mall, out to dinner, the movies, anywhere. But ask them to go to the store and they’ll put anything on, anytime of day. I’ve seen some cuties that looked like death warmed over picking up something to eat. There was of course, some making the walk of shame picking up eats or coffee on the way home early in the morning.
Since it was South Florida, there were a few phenomenons. If you went to the store by the beach, people would shop in their bathing suits. Being a normal single male (walking hormone) at that time of my life, this made for quite a bit of entertainment. I’ll make only passing comments here about liking the frozen aisle.
The other phenomena there is that there were a lot of old retired cranky people, mostly moved down from New York which made for endless shopping entertainment. Where I lived in Delray Beach, they used to bus them in from the retirement villages, either Kings Point or Century Village, affectionally known as cemetery village. They’d hit the Publix en mass and raise the level of complaining to new highs. I varied between going to see this almost like going to a sporting event, and avoiding it because it could really grind on you. These folks could spend 30 minutes complaining to the manager about a 5 cent increase in the price of anything. If there was an advertised special, they moved faster to get there than the rest of the year, except maybe to the bathroom after prune breaks. Hitting each other with their shopping carts was hilarious until it happened to me. I politely informed the person that if they did it again, they’d wind up in the meat section.
You can tell pretty much the state of life they are in by what’s in their cart. The college kids usually had health food like cheez-its for breakfast, a frozen pizza and a case or two of beer, real cheap beer like old Milwaukee, Busch, Pabst or Schlitz when it was available. Young couples would have 40 cans of baby food and diapers. Middle age had progressively healthier food, the elderly’s had prune juice and polident.
The time of day that you shopped will vary the crowd also. The moms running households dominate the morning, Working moms and dads are on Saturday mornings. The folks picking up something for dinner after work are regulars from 5-7 PM. Anywhere from 10 PM on, especially are the partiers. Anyone after 10 in the twinkie aisle had the munchies.
Who don’t you want to see at the grocery store? Anyone you know usually, especially someone from work. Unless you’re already lunch buddies, the level of uncomfortableness increases dramatically with how far away they are from your cube. What’s really embarrassing is someone you know and forgot their name. People duck down the quickest escape route to avoid conversation like there was a nerve gas explosion for this one. I find it especially rewarding to see someone I know who looks like death warmed over at the store, but they spend extra time to be dolled up at work. I’ll always make it a point to say hello, even when I wouldn’t want to talk. One person whose name I’ll not mention does have her hair always perfect, I can’t figure this out. My son’s kindergarten teacher told us at orientation that seeing someone at the store was her least favorite place to see a parent as she would have to run down the kid’s behavior.
Back to South Florida, seeing someone you work with in a bathing suit at the store was like a touchdown and an extra point for me. Invariably, they acted like they were naked in public for which I got endless pleasure.
It’s a lot different now that I live in North Carolina and am married and running a household. It’s a contest to see if you can hit double or triple coupon day to see how much you can save. The old people are different here also. I heard the other day, “please get in front of me, you have a baby and I’m not in that big a hurry”.
Also, as I’ve mentioned, I have a dog, and we have to pick up the output when we take her for a walk. Only plastic (not paper) works for that. Since she goes for a walk about 20 times a day, we need a big supply of bags. So its always a struggle to get as many bags as possible for this while the store tries to cram every item you buy into as few as possible.
And about me, think I care what I look like? Think again. I’ll put on jeans and a hat and it’s off to funland, hunting for co-workers. Too bad we live inland now.
Delusions of Adequacy 