Gymnastics Of The Mind

Maybe the US Army’s electro-shock cap can help kids learn math.  But which kids?

Have you ever noticed how boys have disappeared from public schools? Actually, they’re still there, but now they just don’t have a gender.  They have become members of some uni-sex entity called “students” or “children”.  “Students” and “children” only acquire a gender when (1) there’s some whine that women can make about girls perceived to be at some disadvantage, or if (2) there’s some complaint that can be made about boys behaving badly.  If no whine about girls or complaint about boys is readily available, then it’s all this uni-sex thing.  Otherwise, everyone is led to believe that both genders are doing just swimmingly.  Given the tremendous screaming and frequent trips to the courtroom about some new issue with girls’ education that filled every other week during the 1970s and 1980s, that’s a natural assumption to make.  Since American women will scream about anything, no matter how petty, at the drop of a dime, one would think that since all the screaming about school has dissipated, then there’s nothing much to worry about these days.

Of course, anyone who takes the time to actually check will quickly discover that it’s all just One Big Lie.  While girls, in fact, are doing swimmingly, boys are simply drowning.  But since boys don’t have a lobby, since all the money is in girls, since women have a sense of responsibility only about their own group, since men are cowards, … well, who cares?  Women are still making loud noises about gender imbalances in athletic programs and are still marching off to court to oppose racial affirmative action college admissions – even on campuses where they own incredibly obscene student majorities.  So gender is still very important to women – wherever it might be advantageous to them.  Whenever it is not, the subject of gender is completely censored out of the discussion.

One of the things that strikes me most about published work on social issues, including education, involving children these days is the near universal application of the presumption that both genders are the same (unless the two exceptions above apply).  The reason it strikes me so profoundly is that for thirty years this very presumption would have sent women’s lobbies into apoplexy.  From around 1965 to about 1995, American women’s lobbies were screaming almost on a weekly basis about some new “issue” with girls that set them apart from boys and thus required “special” attention.  Then, beginning around 1995, it all seemed to just fade into the ether.  Suddenly “boys” and “girls” disappeared, and by the turn of the century only “children” and “students” arose to take their place.  Why this profound change?  Another thing that strikes me is that virtually everything written or spoken these days on the subject of education, including education research, is authored by women.  What is behind the “thinking” of these women?

Well, I could select almost any “scientific” study at random from a social science journal and pick it apart piece by piece, but that would only bury the reader in mundane minutiae.  Perhaps a general audience article that explains such a study can do the trick better.  For example, I see the following stuff every day in “serious” articles on various aspects of human research written by American women:  This one comes from New Scientist, 2012, “Shock And Awe” by Sally Adee.  It illustrates my point quite easily because the principles involved are so fundamental, and they are all right there in her article.  You just have to be conscious of the problem to see it.  To quote Ms Adee, a civilian writer looking into some military research, “The experiment I underwent was accelerated marksmanship training, using a training simulator that the military uses.  I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified M4 close-range assault rifle,…  (The M4 is a lighter and more versatile version of the M-16, with a shorter barrel better suited for urban warfare in tight places.)  I was terrible, and when you’re terrible, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are.  And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at.”

Notice her cavalier use of “you”.  She doesn’t describe “me”; she is presenting her own feelings as universal.  She automatically makes the presumption that everyone, including males, feels the same way she feels about trying to master something. It’s pure self-serving rationalization.  Perhaps because I was born at a different time, grew up with this stuff, was forced to live with it every day of my life, studied it in detail in college, etc., it just gets my blood boiling.  All men I know, including me, would never want to stop doing something like shooting a rifle until they had fully mastered it.  (And it would NEVER take “a few hours”.)  Put two or more males together in the same quest and just watch the learning curve accelerate.  Being “terrible” with early shots is a terrific incentive for guys to keep at it until they are NOT “terrible”.  There are several reasons for this learning difference between this woman and most men, but fundamentally it’s the difference between “competition” and “cooperation”.  Competition is individualistic; it pushes the self to the forefront.  Cooperation is group activity; it allows one to hide in the herd.  In competition the individual strives on their own to rise above the herd even if this runs counter to the herd; in cooperation the individual depends on the herd for reinforcement so as to rise only so far that it is not threatening to the herd.  Competition achieves excellence, the highest uncommon denominator; cooperation achieves mediocrity, the lowest common denominator.  The former is risk inclined; the latter is risk averse.  (See Footnote #1.)

(Social media is perfectly made for the cooperative grazing herd; it is entirely feminine – safe, secure, friendly, comfortable, reinforcing, non-threatening, like a womb.  The fact that it has spread like wildfire in America is primarily a product of our uni-sex public school mediocracies.  Mark Zuckerberg essentially is a very smart and successful dairy farmer – growing, tending and milking his grazing herd.  The universe he created stands in very stark contrast to how incredibly difficult it’s been for the past century getting more than a few women in our culture to participate in competitive sports, and for other women to then support them, despite an abundance of inducements.  It’s important to remember that the single greatest factor that made America great was citizens willing to take really great risk in a free and robust environment to rise above the herd; many failed, but many others, like Mark Zuckerberg, succeeded spectacularly – to the great benefit of all.)

One obvious reason for such learning difference in Adee’s particular case is survival.  The use of simulators in the US military today significantly reduces the cost of the weapons learning process, especially considering the limiting price of ammo in the past.  It is NOT designed to speed the learning process; it is designed to reduce the costs of learning.  We used to send men to war who had never fired more than a dozen bullets.  Soldiers know that the most important thing in their world is their rifle; if they don’t know how to use it instinctively, they’re dead.  There’s something about the very real possibility of being dead that makes a terrific learning motivator.  Obviously, this author is not required to assume responsibility for her own survival, or for anyone else’s survival, either.  And, of course, she sees no requirement to point that fact out to her readers.  Nothing is threatening to her in that womb.  She is dabbling in an activity that is of zero consequence to her – if there is actually anything of real consequence to her left in America.  If she fails, all she has to do is plop down on the floor and wail, and everyone will feel sorry for her.  It has become incredibly easy to fail in this country.  For a half century, we have been steadily lowering the standards everywhere so that the standards are not “threatening” to anyone.  No one fails; everyone is “special”.  All you have to do is show up, maybe try a little.  Everywhere are easy excuses, crutches, “someone else” to blame, social bail-out programs, daddies needing to feel relevant, suckers who carry their brains in their pants, and, worst of all, because of all this, no stigma for not measuring up or for using birthright entitlement favoritism to compensate for shortcomings.  Literally everything can be rationalized to deflect personal responsibility.  The only thing in our society that is threatening to our women is the remote possibility that one of them may not be popular with their herd.

Let’s taker a closer look at the task at hand.  The only thing difficult about mastering the M4 would be trying to use it as a sniper rifle; it’s too light for tightly controlled long distance shots.  The shorter barrel and lighter weight naturally sacrifices long range accuracy.  While the maximum range of the M4 is about 3600 meters, maximum effective range to a point target is only about 500 meters. Training ranges are considerably shorter than 500 meters, so hitting within the target quite early is not that difficult, especially since the rifle is gas-operated and has no recoil.  Aim, shoot, see where the bullet hits.  Zeroing in after the first few shots is accomplished rather quickly.  The Army knows that women in uniform can master it just as well as men in uniform, and one woman Army MP even won a Silver Star (for Valor) using it eventually to even launch grenades against enemy fighters during a protracted, running and fluid combat battle in Iraq.  (The weapon even has a switch near the trigger to shift it into full automatic, OR into an ingenious trait that allows three bullets to be fired in rapid succession with one quick pull of the trigger.  In a hectic fire fight in a tight environment, full automatic might be too much, but missing a target with three closely grouped bullets is not very likely.  The M4 is even more dummy-proof than the M16, first fielded in the late 1960s and very easily used by many millions all over the world ever since.  Since few Americans make routine use of this tool, it might appear imposing to some.  It isn’t.)

(The first rifle I was taught to use in the US Army, believe it or not, was the standard-issue M14 battle rifle (which many say wasn’t as effective as the lighter M1 used during WW II).  It was over 44 inches long and weighed over ten pounds.  (Try carrying that rifle over your head while running a mile.)  When a shot was fired, it produced a good kick that easily bruised the shoulder of the novice.  But with that weight, a 22-inch barrel, and a 7.62mm cartridge, it was very accurate over long distances and packed a wallop that could penetrate most covered targets.  I quickly qualified as expert and took the M14 into war (along with hundreds of thousands of drafted guys not yet 20).  But the mass-produced Russian AK47 had some definite advantages over the M14, so some changes were needed. A little later I was handed a new M16 (civilian AR15) and told to fire it at the target with the rifle butt against my crotch.  Remembering that first M14 kick, I was not eager to try this position.  So the instructor took the 8-pound/ 40-inch M16 and fired off a half clip of smaller 5.56mm cartridges with the butt snug against his crotch.  That was probably the best trait of the early versions of the M16 – no recoil.  It was also easier to break down, clean and assemble, but it required more frequent maintenance and could jam up with stuff that wouldn’t bother an M14.  After lugging around that hefty steel and wood M14, that simple plastic and aluminum M16 felt like a child’s toy, but the lighter weight and smaller cartridge allowed the soldier to carry more ammo, and the weapon sort of grew on you.  Years later the contemporary M4 scaled down the M16 for an even lighter and shorter rifle, better for close quarters fighting.  The M4, only 33 inches long (15-inch barrel) and weighing just 7 pounds, is now the standard-issue US military weapon.  Like all members of the “modular” M16 family, the M4 has many different possible configurations.  This very popular weapon, developed for the US military by Colt, has been copied by many other manufacturers and is rapidly becoming as ubiquitous as the AR15 (M16).  The M4 is symptomatic of warfare involving ground soldiers evolving from large conventional armies battling each other in huge units over great expanses of mostly rural terrain to smaller units battling each other selectively (and unconventionally) in more urban environments while trying to minimize civilian “collateral damage”.  Such warfare is inherently very difficult, very dangerous and very personal, so anything smart that gives the American ground soldier and his buddies even a slight edge in staying alive is welcomed indeed.)

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“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”  –  Douglas Adams (1952-2001), British writer, humorist, and dramatist, best known as the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

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But there’s something else at work, too, in this woman’s mind.  Most young guys I ever knew would have stayed on the range until it was too dark to see the target, as long as that expensive ammo was still available.  They certainly would never “obsess” about how difficult it was to learn.  On the contrary; the more difficult the task, the greater the challenge, and thus the greater personal reward for finally achieving the objective.  This is an integral aspect of male competitiveness, including internal competitiveness (with one’s self) – that evil male trait women labeled “aggression” during the 1970s and banned from schools (to find other far less productive outlets).

But this woman writer makes the presumption that men feel the same way about such a learning objective as she does.  Take that statement, “.. how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at.”  I thought a very long time until I came up with a situation in which a young male might have uttered such pathetic words.  I finally concluded that a boy might feel this way if he were forced to perform the lead in a ballet wearing a pink tutu before a large audience.  But shooting an assault rifle?  It simply would never happen.  Boys, young men, don’t obsess.  They don’t run away from such challenges; all they want to do is beat them.  It’s in their genes, a consequence of over 80,000 years of human evolution.  But Adee’s statement is a sweeping generality, meant to apply to everyone in all situations.  How is it even possible for someone to become so myopic, so self-centered, so supremely arrogant – and then to convey it as if it were all simply self-evident and natural?  This is important.  Such presumption characterizes literally everything now published in the entire “child development” industry, including sociology, psychology and “education”, and promulgated by legions of women “journalists” parroting the nonsense.  The fundamental principle underlying literally everything coming out of this vast women-dominated industry is that the minds and personalities of boys are precisely the same as of girls.  This is why universities are now trying to teach math and trigonometry to college freshman and sophomores that I was taught in the ninth grade.

The presumption exists solely to force boys into constructs that best fit “me”, the female authors of all this tripe masquerading as “science”.  It exists in order to force others into a construct that works best for girls; if others don’t perform well in that construct, then it’s their own fault.  It exists because no one ever challenges it or the creeps advancing it.  No one is bright enough or daring enough to ask why our women-dominated school industry has been serving girls enormously better than boys for the past thirty years while ensuring that twice as many women as men go on to get university degrees in this country – all in the interest of “equality” (serving “me”); it’s all the fault of “dumb” boys.  Up until twenty years or so ago, that presumption was the epitome of self-serving sexist bigotry.   And sadly there’s no sound reason for the presumption to exist at all.

The rest of Adee’s article returns repeatedly to the notion of “self-doubt”.  Any “self-doubt” in any boy, much less in any man, I ever knew would vanish immediately after the very first bullet responded to his finger-pull on the trigger.  And yet she holds the supremely arrogant conviction that males “feel” just as she does.  She’s proclaiming, “If I feel this, then so must everyone else.  I simply cannot accept that I learn, feel, experience such things differently.”  It’s why these women all now refuse to mention gender differences in their “scientific” work, even in school performance reports.  Their dictate is simply breathtaking: “I will NOT compete with you. You WILL become cooperative me.”  Such women simply will not entertain the notion that boys are any different from girls in how they learn, what they think, how they react, what they experience, feel.  So as long as the learning environment is tailored to their wants, then boys can just adapt to it.  Theirs is one relentless drive to an effeminate uni-sex “me”.  A generation ago, no one would have hesitated one second to label such “thinking” for what it is – sexist bigotry.  But, apparently, as long as women do it, it’s perfectly “acceptable” sexist bigotry.  That it’s actually intended to constrain males and put them in the same cooperative “uni-sex” group-think box with girls, just to “advance” girls at the expense of boys, is of no consequence.  No one has ever dared tell these self-serving women that they are full of sexist crap.

Still oblivious, in her article Adee wonders where her self-doubts originated, and, of course, is quick to blame a 7th grade science teacher who advised her to become a waitress, never considering what effect such advice would have had on a boy.  (All “7th grade science teachers” are presumed to be male jerks; it’s a very old American cliché.)  Women used to whine incessantly about this; the “thinking” was that anyone making such a statement was condemning the recipient to never even trying to accomplish something else, much less actually accomplishing it.  Every teacher I ever had in any subject always said that I would be better at something else – as a motivator, one that always worked.  It simply energized my competitive instincts, mainly with myself but also to prove others wrong.  Telling me that I probably couldn’t master something was a guarantee that I would, if only so I wouldn’t look foolish in front of the other guys.  I wonder what Adee thinks is happening to all those boys in school being forced to become girls like her, now full of the same imposed self-doubt.  I think her self-doubt is actually guilt for what her kind have been doing to boys for decades.  Maybe American women DO have a conscience, after all.  But there’s no sound reason for them to possess self-doubt, either.

(There is, of course, a flip side to this.  Tests I took as a boy consistently showed that I could master anything – except plumbing.  That was ‘tremendous’ aid for counselors in assisting me to focus my objectives; I never did find something that interested me significantly more than anything else, so even today I have no idea if I would have been better off doing something completely different from what I did do.  And I much later discovered by accident that plumbing was something that I could easily master, too.  (I designed and built my own large multi-story home, as if it had been lifted out of suburban Chicago and placed way out there in the Montana wilderness.) As with everything else, all it ever took was the challenge, and in the absence of pathetic excuses.  I took my values without reservation from men of the Greatest Generation; my biggest problem has always been to remain productively engaged while fighting off suffocating boredom.  I’ve met men like me throughout my life in the Regular US military, so maybe I did end up where I belonged after all.  There’s nothing we can’t do, and well, too, from saving lives and teaching kids to briefing presidents and kings with firm confidence, and using M4s in between.)

Adee’s article “Shock And Awe” is about the US military’s research into “trans-cranial direct current stimulation” (“tDCS”), which is essentially quite mild electroshock delivered uniformly throughout the brain, to see if it’s possible to speed up the rate at which “people” learn a wide range of tasks, such as object recognition, marksmanship and, yes, math skills.  (Effective use of almost all modern weapons requires some use of math, although now they are trying to develop new tools that will do the math for the operator.  An expert sniper, for example, will apply elements of math, trigonometry, geometry, calculus, physics, plus several other sciences such as meteorology, even geology.)  The tDCS science follows tentatively on old military work with various types of drugs, and shows some interesting results.  A key aspect is that the electricity somehow temporarily eliminates extraneous thought processes that hinder, interfere with, or slow down the desired learning process.

Her article does touch on the ethics of such technology in a variety of areas, except the most important area.  True to form, Adee can’t help introducing gender into her uni-sex universe – when it’s beneficial to her group.  (Whenever girls can be shown at some disadvantage, gender is ALWAYS front and center, but when boys are at a disadvantage these self-serving propagandists ALWAYS hide the truth behind gender-neutral or uni-sex terms – which serves to provide the deliberately false illusion that both genders are in equilibrium.  Such despicable propaganda, based on deliberately deceptive lies, has been de rigueur among American women for over a generation now, so no one even notices it anymore.  But guys like me can spot it in a millisecond – because women taught us to.)

According to Adee, on one hand, “If you told me tDCS would allow someone to study twice as fast for the bar exam, I might be a little leery because now I have visions of rich daddies paying for Junior’s thinking cap.”  But on the other hand, “Could school-age girls use the zappy cap while studying math to drown out the voices that tell them they can’t do math because they’re girls?”  The technology is bad because it might help “privileged” boys, but good because it might help “victim” girls.  Get it?  She doesn’t even recognize her own bigotry, so automatic it has become.  Gender is most definitely alive and well in this women’s mind – when it is to her advantage.

Here is what she is really saying:  “I am pathetic.  So, to make me feel better about myself without making extra effort, I have to ensure that boys are even more pathetic by denying them opportunities intended only for victims with big powerful lobbies.  I call this “leveling” process “The Fairness Doctrine”, according to “me”.  This “leveling” doctrine is now a very widely held belief in our society, thus my automatic use of presumption to demonstrate the superiority of my position.”

(And don’t tell me you didn’t know where this “fairness doctrine” nonsense originated. Originally it had nothing at all to do with Wall Street.  (See Footnote #2.)  It came from women in “academia” and had everything to do with men.  It had everything to do with leveling everyone, and especially those “aggressive” boys, to the lowest common denominator, so that “achievement” could be “fairly” accomplished by everyone with little or no real personal effort.  Now we even have dumb men advancing the same doctrine that made them dumb.  Pity the fools.  “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have left that people are still thinking.” – Jerry Seinfeld.  Notice how rapidly those bookstores are disappearing.  Hint: It’s all about screwing over some other group in order to benefit “my” group.  It’s all about destroying those who work harder and succeed without excuses in order to make “me” feel better for not.  The pay-off:  ANY two-bit twit can stand in the very safe rear and scream orders to purposefully crippled morons.  I’ve noticed that a LOT of American women are drawn to this area of research – seeking ways, through psychological or physiological tinkering around with the mind in a very comfy work environment, to either give their own group an artificial leg up or to mentally cripple “the male enemy”.  I would watch them ALL with a very wary eye; ethics are irrelevant to their objectives, serving only themselves.  And the thing that makes “victimhood’ so very enticing is the fact that victims cannot be held responsible – even if the victimhood is a delusion, a falsehood perpetuated by their own propaganda.)

This crap permeates literally EVERYTHING these women write.  Since the early 1990s!  Over twenty years!  It’s the secret “Androgyny Cult” – according to “Me”, naturally.  Adee is asking, “If this technology works out, how can we keep it from helping boys, make certain that it only helps girls, while still hiding our conspiracy from the public?”  Such sexist bigotry is apparent to any careful reader except women – even in a world they totally control and have totally controlled for a century – even as our schools routinely send twice as many girls as boys to college decade after decade.  (Besides, just what voices are telling girls such nonsense about math?  Are ALL science teachers evil men — the same mythical evil male science teachers who first appeared in women’s propaganda fifty years ago as another never-proven blame-shifting excuse?)  These women don’t give a damn about what happens to boys, to men, as long as girls, women, come out on top, with the least effort (and without the responsibility, of course).  There is no clearer definition of sexist bigotry.

“It’s too hard competing with boys, so we’ll just turn boys into us.  And, besides, what boy wouldn’t like to be free of a need to compete, to excel?  We can ALL be mediocre!  We can ALL sit there and whine.  We can all do useless human tricks. … As long as I am the one who gets the college degree and the highest pay in the best job – and lord all that over all those dumb men.”

As long as you continue to wallow in your “eternal victimhood”, you can not only avoid responsibility, you can even slickly shift blame to those “evil” men while condoning your own sexist bigotry against boys – and still pretend you are a victim.  Absolutely incredible. If anyone had told me a half century ago, when I was a student of such things at excellent universities, that such self-serving mental gymnastics would be possible in ANY American “scientific” community, I would have known that the author was a prime candidate for commitment to a padded cell.  But there it is, now front and center in almost every social “study” and “news story” in America.

Why?  Because no one ever challenges these self-serving creeps.  Because boys have no lobby.  Because all the money is STILL in girls, forty years on.  Because men are cowards.  Because women have no sense of responsibility beyond their own group.  Because schools and their unions want to keep benefitting from all those federal programs to help girls, and definitely do not want to start addressing the needs of some other group.  (The programs include a million “research” projects, as well as “women studies” (navel contemplation) that exist on every university campus, allowing women “academics” and “scientists” to bask a lifetime in socialist heaven doing nothing but proclaiming their eternal victimhood to all the world – being compensated extremely well to whine ad nauseam.)  Our entire public “education” system knows full well that it is in gross violation of important civil rights laws.  That’s why American public schools come in last place (25th) in the math and science developed world arena – despite being far and away the most expensive “black hole” school system in human history.  And if those school systems reported gender data, everyone would see that American boys fall far lower than even that.  But since US gender differences in those tests are never revealed, we are deceived into believing that both genders are equally dismal at everything – which is why such an enormously greater number of boys drop out and never see the inside of a university – all while women continue to play victims who are awarded university degrees at twice the rate as men.

Their dogma, their dictate, never challenged, they actually believe their own self-serving bullshit.  Probably the scariest part of all this is the fact that it is now 2012, and Adee’s “thinking” is based firmly on “feminist” victim dogma lifted verbatim right out of 1962 – a whole half century ago.  Despite truly massive changes throughout our society over that period, this trite nonsense, which is essentially the usual blame-shifting rationalization, is still running full-steam on brainless auto-pilot.

There was a time long ago when we accepted, even embraced, that there were important differences in boys and girls and thus used different approaches to ensure both excelled at equal rates and levels in anything they wished to pursue.  It did require more effort and talent on the part of teachers, but there never was any thought then about “inferior” or “superior”.  There was only “different”.  And the differences were very very important.  Then along came “me” and “victimology”….

The Adee article is more about the author’s own self-pity, her own self-doubts, than it is about anything else, including such crutches as tDCS, Zen, psychoanalysis, drugs, hypnosis, etc., to help her overcome her own pathetic self doubts.  She has these self-doubts because she’s been allowed far too many excuses, has effectively shifted blame far too often, has never been responsible for anything, has never been forced to grow up and be an adult.  No one has screamed at her, as they’ve screamed at me since I was twelve, “Just shut up and do it!”  American women have never been required to do anything.  So she wallows in this self-doubt, in her eternal victimhood, in her self-pity, projects such traits onto everyone else to get herself off the hook, and whines.  What she is seeking is just another crutch to help her avoid responsibility for herself, while, equally important, also hobbling her main “competitor” so as not to damage her own pathetic self-image.  She knows that her infantile victimhood effectively absolves her not only of responsibility for herself, but responsibility for anyone else, too.  (How many of these favored women are pursuing college studies in fields not needed, are up to their eyeballs in huge loans, and are now seeking government bail-outs as another “right”?)  Her kind is becoming a cancer on our society, breeding nothing but childish dependency and birthright entitlement, totally corrupting what we are, what made us great.  This crap has been going on unchecked for a half century!

These are the same women who sit comfortably on the sidelines ostracizing the few male rebels who march to a different tune, who eventually decide to reject “the system”, who strike out to follow their own path, invest all they have into their own innovation, work like slaves for years, risk literally everything and then even more, and finally see a pay-off in a very successful company – only to face gold-digging women whining about not getting their “civil rights” quotas in the spoils, in job hirings, in “respect”, in company profits, in board membership.  Which man would feel the same way about coming in on the tail end of a women’s successful dress shop that was “built” with a low-interest “minority” loan, underwritten by dad’s or hubby’s generous support, championed by a hundred different women’s organizations and TV shows, cushioned by guaranteed monthly alimony and staffed by several of her girlfriends?

When is a half century of this “my quota” nonsense too much?  Unfortunately creating the next IBM or Boeing or Amazon or Intel or Facebook isn’t another of those government-guaranteed women’s birthright entitlements, at least not yet.  How many American women have started with nothing to create global businesses like PayPal and then used the profits to build super-efficient luxury sports cars, space vehicles that can ferry humans to the International Space Station and beyond, developed rockets that can go to the Moon and then return for refueling and re-use – all very high risk and extremely competitive endeavors that employ many thousands of people?  Why not!?  (See Footnote #3.)  (The only instance of which I am aware is the case of a woman from a very poor family in China who came to America to build, completely on her own, a global enterprise and ended up, in less than a decade – in this century – as the world’s richest woman billionaire – in China.  See ” The American Spirit … Now Comes From China“.  Obviously this woman was not infected with the same self-inflicted whining mind-set that now afflicts American women, and, increasingly, American men.)  But then, the PayPal guy who builds electric race cars and sends vehicles on round-trips to space … went to school in South Africa.

Instead we have women college graduates out there whining that the jobs aren’t where they want them!  American women purposefully re-engineer the nation’s public schools to ensure that twice as many of their own as men are ensured university educations – despite civil rights law mandating equitable balance K through post-graduate school – and now they complain about the locations of the jobs?  Why aren’t a few million of those well educated women out there creating global corporations offering jobs for everyone wherever they want to place them?  Just how have all those decades of gender favoritism benefitted the nation?  When are today’s women going to start measuring up to women of the 1920s?  Don’t women have a responsibility beyond themselves?  A thinking man just wants to scream, “Shut up!  And do something!”  After a lifetime of adjusting every ten minutes to the latest iteration of their oppressive “me” dogma, today I can’t consider a “feminist” without immediately imagining a spoiled rotten leech still wearing the same stupid shoes and ten pounds of deceptive mask they were hiding behind during the 1960s and still blaming men for the consequences of all their endless rights and choices, and wondering if they will ever just shut up, grow up, and do something.  As even the densest among us can now discern, the country can no longer afford the luxury of carrying all that needy dead weight.

Responsible adulthood is a far more effective crutch than any artificial aid.  A guy like me can erase her self-doubts in one military training exercise – by simply not granting her the option of failure.  The euphoria, self-satisfaction and “inner peace” one experiences from conquering a difficult challenge solely on their own merit is a better drug, a better jolt of electricity, a better philosophy than any silly crutch.  If you don’t want that challenge, that natural adrenaline rush, don’t keep others from embracing it!

If someone starting shooting at Ms Adee with real bullets chewing up the concrete around her, and she knew that no one was going to come rescue the victim “damsel in distress”, I know full well that she’d learn how to use that M4 like an expert in about ten seconds, without one single crutch in sight.  Survival is an especially effective learning motivator.  Life IS tough; but it’s still better than the alternative.  It’s a matter of simply having no excuses, of not being allowed to shift responsibility.  (And it works for math, too.)  “Self-doubt” is just a self-pity product of self-declared victimhood.  No one is born with it.  It has to be taught, and learned.  It needs to be un-learned!  (Just don’t count on her using that M4 to save her buddies; responsibility, accountability, for others, is an entirely different matter.)

A society of bland cooperating people sitting around nicely holding hands while playing effeminately with little talking toys is a society going NOWHERE; all it achieves is the lowest common denominator among very marginal humans hiding in herds so as to avoid risk, and failure … and great accomplishment. Soon a guy like me, or a foreign competitor, will only have to clap his hands twice loudly and watch a thousand crystal-fragile self-esteems shatter into a million pieces on the floor, suitable only for sweeping up and dumping in the dust bin.  Self-esteem has become an artificially manufactured delusion.  Can’t anyone do anything alone and on their own merit?  Does anyone else see the stupidity in all those useless human tricks?

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“It just got too hard.”

“It’s supposed to be hard!  If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it!  The ‘hard’ is what makes it great!” — 1943 Rockford Peaches coach “Jimmy Dugan” (Jimmy Foxx) to catcher “Dottie Hinson” (Dottie Green), in “A League Of Their Own” (1992).  (And repeated, one way or another, by just about every American infantry sergeant I ever knew.)

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There’s a lot of talk these days about Sweden intending to eradicate gender from its schools.  That practice has been going on in secret in the US for the past twenty-five years.  But in Sweden, educators make certain that both genders are performing at equally high levels.  In the US, the practice is used to hide the fact that girls are performing at levels significantly above those of boys.  In the US they pretend that boys don’t exist in order to hide from the public their enormously higher drop-out rates, their enormously lower test scores, their enormously higher suicide rates, their enormously higher drug use rates, their enormously higher arrest rates.  In the US they also do it to hide from the public the enormously higher test scores achieved by girls, their enormously higher advanced placement (AP) participation, their enormously higher graduation rates, their enormously higher college acceptance rates, their enormously higher scholarship awards, their enormously higher degree awards.  They do it to hide from the public the fact that today no school system in the US is in compliance with federal civil rights law mandating balanced achievement levels for both genders in every aspect of American education, K through post-graduate school, in each and every one of these and similar indices where imbalances are now the greatest in all of our history.  So expect US “educators” to quickly adopt the Swedish example as added cover for their despicable conspiracy.  “Education” in America is a woman-dominated industry, serving only itself.

Rather than schools, teachers, students or anything else, it is this mind-set among American women, as promulgated by powerful “feminist” lobbies, and systematically transmitted to their clones, that is killing American education, and, by extension, the nation.  According to American women there are no differences in gender – unless, of course, they want to retain for themselves their “special” status while making demands of those “dumb evil men”.  (Don’t ask; it’s women’s “logic”.  If both genders are the same, then who are women going to blame, bill and order around?  They need a very different gender, to both justify and address their incessant whines.)  So uni-sex is only applicable where it benefits women, at the expense of the other gender.  In the US it’s a uni-sex thing only to keep secret the fact that, “Really, we are not at all alike.  I am smarter then they are, and it’s my turn, my “right”, to run the show, so I will do whatever it takes; I will cripple the other half before they can even get started.  All I have to do is lower the standards and the expectations, and force boys to perform like girls, create a whole generation or two of swishy girly men.  I am an eternal victim, so it’s impossible to hold me responsible, to label me a bigot.  In the US the uni-sex thing is a sexist concept that works in my favor.  It doesn’t matter that the nation loses, that the future is stifled.  It’s all about “me”!”

If anyone tried this crap with the genders reversed, the resultant women’s revolution would quickly leave the nation in rubble.  It’s the same type of unchallenged self-serving herd mentality among the privileged “elite” that somehow was able to make slavery, and later segregation, completely “acceptable”, “normal”.  Actually, it’s far worse, since THIS dogma involves privileged elitists, with self-anointed birthright entitlement, manufacturing twisted CHILDREN in their own image – the epitome of delusional self-adulation.

Now politicians are eager to buy all women votes by getting government to assume several more years of their early child “raising” responsibilities in new universal institutional programs employing millions more women at staggering cost.  So I tell boys:  “No one gives a damned about you.  Your main purpose in life is to provide an excuse for women to get paid to pretend to fix problems other women create – by engineering you to be just like them, while you are still a child.  And “men” have already become so stupid that they just sit there sucking their thumbs and watching the pervasive self-serving bigotry of all those ruthless women.”  Why shouldn’t any boy with a brain find a far better tune to march to?

Adee reminds me a little of one of our very senior politicians.  I’ve tried and tried unsuccessfully for years to interpret and understand just five minutes of talk from US Representative Nancy Pelosi.  It’s a futile effort.  I’m convinced that she speaks a version of English that is totally foreign to me.  No matter what the ostensible subject, none of it makes any logical sense at all.  This woman was third in line to the presidency, and her verbiage is literally one long prattle of memorized phrases, political code words, abruptly shifted directions and entrenched dogma that ends up being a sort of stream-of-conscious gobbledygook meaning nothing.  She reminds me of a very jerky robot running on severely flawed software.  All that babble is designed solely to deceive everyone who is not in the upper echelons of her own “elite” herd.  The only thing that this woman cares about is continually tricking all those really dumb men with a bunch of incomprehensible words and phrases in order to funnel as much free money and goodies from “someone else” (of the male variety) to our legions of cravingly whining women as is humanly possible, regardless of the nation’s ability to pay for even part of it.  This is one of the most myopic self-interested privileged “elitist” birthright-entitled women on the face of the planet, who has never since she was six stopped dreaming of becoming Queen of Never-Neverland in her own thoroughly muddled mind.  Put a woman like either Adee or Pelosi (or Clinton) in the front of my classroom, and I’d be ready for the permanently locked padded cell in less than a week.

P.S.   I am not taking a stand at this point on the Swedish intent.  All things in my country are not equal.  Far from it.  If all things were equal, I would probably fully support the Swedish plan – provided that both genders were subjected to the exact same very highly demanding standards, including very demanding competition and responsibility beyond one’s self and one’s own group, and provided one gender does not seek advantage at the expense of the other by claiming birthright entitlement, a whole host of excuses, and eternal victimhood as the kicker.  Real life has winners and losers; so should school – provided the field is actually level in full recognition of inherent differences.  In 2012, I know of no sound reason for women not to be held to the exact same standards and expectations as are men, in every endeavor, or why those standards and expectations are not very considerably higher for everyone than they are today in America.  The main things “feminism” has accomplished in America are the suppression of responsibility, the advancement of birthright entitlement, a truly alarming lowering of standards everywhere, and gross dependency on government.  In the US, the drive to a twisted uni-sex entity is simply the epitome of misandry, a drive to destroy one gender so the other gender can feel better about itself, to bring the standards down so far that a vegetable can meet them. Someone needs to fire one or two very powerful shots across the bow of these self-serving bigots.  I can think of two good ways to do so:  file a class action law suit in any school system in the country on behalf of boys, and require all women to register for the draft at age 18.  American women have never been required to do anything.  Then make credible military service or a married mother of two or more children (without government help) just as important for female political candidates as it is for male candidates.  Maybe THAT will shake up the frozen self-serving mind-set on the majority female side of our population.  With each of those rights comes a corresponding responsibility, and self-respecting men should never allow their nation to fold without a fight.  At the very least, they owe it to their sons.

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I encourage you to look over “Women In Combat“.  Also, for a different angle on this topic, see “The American Spirit … Now Comes From China“.

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See also “Why Are American Men So Dumb?“, posted separately.

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Footnote # 1.  Competition versus Cooperation.  This is NOT an idle matter; each view has powerful philosophical and scientific thought behind it.

Competition.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy who explained how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity.  Having shaped the underlying social philosophy behind industrial capitalism, he is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist and sociologist who developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory.  He established that all species descended over time from common ancestors and introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called ‘natural selection’, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to that of ‘artificial selection’ involved in selective breeding.

There is a common thread of thought running through all three in which, with humans, competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak are the prime directives of the universe.

Cooperation.

However, in Russia and elsewhere an alternative school of thought developed which held that cooperation, not competition, was the driver of evolutionary change, much of it based on the thinking of a German.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist and revolutionary socialist.  Marx’s work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labor and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought.  Drawing on a number of prominent capitalist thinkers of the period, he critiqued their works to postulate an alternative view of social economics.

Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, philologist, economist, writer and geographer.  (He was also an activist, revolutionary and prominent communist anarchist.)  He argued that those species that cooperate most effectively tend to be the most competitive in the long run, advocated a communist society free from centralized government and based on voluntary associations between workers, and proposed a system of economics based on mutual exchanges made in a system of voluntary cooperation.

While many other thinkers have contributed to these two alternate views over the last two centuries, in a wide range of arenas, today strong threads of each can be found in American conservatism (individual competition) and liberalism (collective cooperation), respectively.  However, both also have the advantage of hindsight in that the greatest experiment of the cooperative view – Soviet socialist communism – proved itself a colossal failure.  Even in China, socialist communism has found it necessary to adopt and integrate some healthy competitive capitalism in order to survive and prosper.  After a century of human social experimentation, the best conclusion is that there is probably a place in a healthy society for both, and that intelligent compromise between the two in certain select spheres, with the benefit of any doubt favoring Smith, is the smartest approach.  With human societies, purity of thought leads to extremes represented by Nazi Germany on the one side, or North Korea on the other.  I happen to favor a far more inclusive America than such extreme examples offer, and, as an American, the last thing I will accept, the one thing guaranteed to get my blood boiling, is having someone else’s myopic views imposed on me.  In America, you learn the rules, master the process, and then you beat the jerks at their own game – on your own merit.

(In America, the differences between conservatism and liberalism have been severely diluted by the need for each respective political party to buy the same majority women’s votes with other people’s money – which has pulled both political philosophies to the socialist left.  Due to America’s incessantly whining women and their clones, I’d be very hard-pressed today to describe just what the “conservative” Republican Party really stands for; it certainly isn’t conservatism.  Actual conservatism is represented by the Libertarian Party – which garners less than 4% of the American vote.  Any differences still remaining between the establishment Democrat and Republican parties are mostly rhetorical.)

Footnote #2:

While the propaganda says Washington is controlled by corporations and the rich, the facts paint a very different picture, one of truly enormous citizen dependence:

In 2011 –

61% of annual budget went to social programs ($2.1 Trillion)
………..Poor (Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, etc.) ($626 Billion) –  25%
………..Social Security ($725 Billion) and Medicare ($560 Billion) –  36%

24% –  National Defense
6%   –  Interest on Debt

This left just 9% of the federal budget for everything else, including education, assistance to college students, job training, transportation, housing credit, community development, government, infrastructure development, and general science programs.

To cover all of these expenses, the US government took in 51% of the required funds from citizens’ taxes and borrowed 37%.  Another 6% came from corporation taxes.

About half of American adult citizens pay no taxes at all.

China, by the way, heretofore America’s primary lender, in late 2011 quietly stopped buying US debt certificates.  Since then, the US Federal Reserve has been the primary buyer of US debt – mainly by printing trainloads of new US money, backed up by nothing.

Footnote #3.  The System.  It should not be lost on even the densest among us that so many of those who made it big on the creation side of corporate America in recent times have been men who dropped out of the American “education” system, or were educated outside the US, to strike out on their own.  Everyone knows that men like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg left school to follow their own ideas and slug it out in very tough games.  PayPal developer and Space-X founder Elon Musk, whose new company just sent a space ship to the International Space Station, is a forty-year old immigrant from South Africa.  We even owe an immigrant from Israel, Abraham Karem, now running Frontier Systems, for developing the technology that led directly to the Predator drone line – his Leading Systems “Amber” and “Gnat” drones developed under contract for DARPA.  And the youngest daughter of a poor Chinese soldier came to America and quietly set about locking down big chunks of America’s steady flood of waste paper and shipping it back home; in less than a decade, and without a single crutch, she turned American trash into her gold and became the richest woman billionaire in the world running a string of factories employing thousands of Chinese workers making packaging for many of the world’s biggest corporations – something that would have been enormously easier for an American women to accomplish.

Obviously we have become very dependent on immigrants, but one has to wonder just what the most expensive school system in human history actually contributes to the nation’s forward motion. That system seems first and foremost to breed cooperating herds whose chief characteristics are conformity (according to the demands of women), group think, the lowest common denominator, and dependency on government.  It’s not by accident that the wealthiest region in the country is now metropolitan Washington DC, whose only industry is the humongous federal government – which lives off of money simply confiscated from others while producing absolutely nothing itself.  For decades the country has ensured university educations to twice as many women as men; how many of them have competed successfully in the arena and created huge cutting edge companies?  Why are they still whining, after a half century of concerted favoritism, about their jobs in corporations run be men who did compete successfully?  Why aren’t they creating their own global corporations employing millions?  Why is it still all about quotas, entitlement, occupying the “proper” number of spaces?  Any twit can stand in the very safe rear screaming orders to idiots.  You learn this nonsense in schools favoring cooperation over competition.

As an aside, …. Think it’s great that the size of the federal government workforce has remained relatively stable over recent times?  Think again.  Thanks to the popularity of the latest government shell game designed to deceive the taxpayer, there are now two federal government contractors for every one federal government employee.  Together the whole self-serving enterprise returns five dollars for every one tax dollar paid to the region in and around Washington alone, for a total over the last ten years of $570 Billion of pure profit to that tiny region of the country.   That’s well over a half a Trillion dollars!  Just imagine: A government of very well-paid “special” people feeding at the people’s trough who have almost nothing in common with the slobs they govern in the rest of the nation.  A huge majority of government employees are women.  The Beltway region has become a mecca for young people with unmarketable college degrees and no experience in the real world, where they can be paid Big Bucks to run the lives of everyone else.  Said one recently arrived young lady, “It’s a place where a liberal arts major can get a job, because you don’t need a particular skill.”  This is government “job creation” at work – paid for, naturally, by “someone else” – no marketable skill needed.  And these are the best jobs with the best pay and benefits and bonuses and job security and working conditions in the nation.

Very many of these contractors really love to play the ‘secrets’ game in a city that simply can’t keep even one; most have job titles like “analyst”, “facilitator”, “consultant”, “advisor”, “strategist”, etc., that don’t reveal anything at all about what they actually do (or don’t do), and they invariably invoke the “national security” cover to deflect questions.  They actually don’t do anything.  And, of course, very many of those government employees, after setting up the contracts, then leave their jobs to take jobs as contractors – paying much more.  Well over 65% of this colossal combined workforce is made up of women.  (Uniformed military and postal employees are excluded in this discussion.)  It’s become the biggest racket in government, another type of lucrative “welfare”.  And your Congress keeps feeding the game with ever more of your money – with zero evidence that anything positive is actually being accomplished for the nation’s citizens (other than ever increasing intrusions into their private lives under the familiar “safety and security” rubric so favored by whining women voters).

Footnote #4.  Recurring Nightmare.  So often anymore when speaking with certain men and watching them expound on their expert knowledge of things beyond their comprehension, my mind will begin to wander to more interesting topics, but gradually I will also become aware of viewing in a side corner of my mind the man before me standing there in a colorful dress and heels, primping his hair, checking his nails, fumbling in his purse, and it’s as if I were, in fact, idly conversing with a woman, with all the same presumptions about my responsibility to pay the bills, take the blame and do the hard stuff for the “special” people.  And, of course, I know that I have only a matter of minutes before the nausea takes over and I must flee.  So very well trained are these silly caricatures of males, parroting their programmed nonsense, never examining the premises, descendants of what were once proud independently thinking masculine men, American men….