All our lives we have seen the continuing decay of America’s public schools. Especially in inner cities.
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Watch: Dysfunction (from A to Z)
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John Callahan
It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?
Former Federal Aviation Administration investigator John Callahan, who, as part of an international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials convened at a National Press Club conference, “said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska” [Reuters, Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe,” November 12, 2007].
On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars – the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
On October 1, 1918, Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) helped lead a combined Arab and British force that captured Damascus from the Turks during World War I.
Paul focuses on how public schools have failed us.
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Niccolò Machiavelli
He who desires or wants to reform the State [government] of a City, and wishes that it may be accepted and capable of maintaining itself to everyone’s satisfaction, it is necessary for him at least to retain the shadow of ancient forms, so that it does not appear to the people that the institutions have been changed, even though in fact the new institutions should be entirely different from the past ones: for the general mass of men are satisfied with appearances, as if it exists, and many times are moved by the things which appear to be rather than by the things that are.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, XXV (1531).
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Blasphemy? Independence?
Botswanans celebrate their independence from Great Britain with an official day on September 30.
Also, September 30 has served as Blasphemy Rights Day since 2009, when it was initiated by the Center for Inquiry.
After falling on ice, a 46-year-old Swiss man became paralyzed, losing all mobility.
Now he is beginning to move again thanks to a brain implant that enables what the Dutch firm Onward, its inventor, calls “thought-driven movement.”
The implant interprets neural impulses that are triggered when the patient intends to move. A second implant in his abdomen then stimulates parts of the body so that he can move them as he wishes.
Onward says that although its results are preliminary, “the technology works as expected and appears to successfully reanimate his paralyzed arms, hands, and fingers.”
This astonishing work is not without precedent. Over a decade ago, French neuroscientist Gregoire Courtine conceived of the possibility of a digital bridge between brain and body to help such patients.
It took a while to realize his dream. But this year, Courtine and Swiss neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch installed implants in a Dutch man, Gert-Jan Oskam, to restore his ability to walk after he lost the use of his legs in a biking accident.
One unexpected benefit of their procedure is neural regeneration.
“What we discover,” says Courtine, “is that when using this system for a long period of time, through training, nerve fibers start growing again. . . . That was like the dream, regenerative medicine!”
Onward CEO Dave Marver says that the next step for its own implant technology is small trials, then a larger one, then “hopefully get FDA approval and make it available.”
What a wonderful world.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.
Epicurus, Principal Doctrines (Robert Drew Hicks, trans.), no. 38.
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Congress & Mises
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
You may have thought it couldn’t get this bad.
“Not one student at 13 high schools in Baltimore City, Maryland, achieved proficiency in math,” informs the city’s Fox 45 News, “as indicated by state math exams.”
That’s 40 percent of the city’s high schools and we’re talking not a single soul managed to come in at “proficiency.” Not mastery, mind you.
“Among those 13 high schools,” the report continued, “a total of 1,736 students participated in the test with 74.5% of them achieving the lowest possible score of one out of four.”
Okay, okay, but what about the city’s best schools?
Well, a Fox 45 News follow-up found that only “11.4% of students” even at “Baltimore’s five top-performing high schools” are “proficient in math.”
Adding, “In fact, not one high school student in the entire city, last school year, achieved a top level of math proficiency.”
Jason Rodriguez, with People Empowered by the Struggle, an edgily named Baltimore nonprofit, calls it “educational homicide.”
“It’s not a funding issue,” says Rodriguez. “We’re getting plenty of funding.” He thinks “accountability is the issue” and has “been calling for the resignation of the school CEO.”
Young people in Baltimore can learn mathematics just as well as young people anywhere. That we know. But they also need functional families as well as functional schools. The government, plausibly the chief cause of the dysfunction of both, has only official responsibility for the latter.
Sure, it sounds like time to lop off the top brass. But also past time to give every parent of a school-age child in Baltimore (and everywhere) a choice about where to go to school — purchased with the tax dollars that taxpayers are already providing.
Currently, to no avail.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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