In the modern era, we have become obsessed with the achievement of the individual to the point where all appeals for community seem minuscule in comparison to the rhetoric and rationale. However, human beings are group animals. We all depend upon other persons producing and making goods and services for a large part of our daily and yearly needs. The individual is only so good as what can be offered as worthy to the individual's peers, so why is it that the modern era seems to have very few politically sponsored ideologies beyond obvious or subtle appeals to individual achievement.

A pitcher alone cannot win baseball games. He needs good defensive, a good catcher, some good hitters, a bullpen that doesn't give up runs, and sometimes a little luck -- over and above whatever talent and exploited weaknesses that might exist. Regardless of whatever players are on the same team, a pitcher will always get the gloss of the surrounding environment.

The same can be said of a football quarterback. Or any team coordinated effort. In the modern era the obsession with the entrepreneur making their individual mark conveniently forgets about the other individuals or the context of the situation that enabled motivated persons to be in the right situation at the right time. The luck arrived, and they were ready.

Entrepreneurialism is the nice word here. People walking around collecting cans or selling food outside downtown businesses at lunchtime, or female streetwalkers, are doing what they need to do make money -- regardless of whatever choices or life paths are involved. Disguising what the current top-down destruction of a functional balanced economic order with an entrepreneurial myopia forgets that people doing what they do to make money are not entrepreneurs. They are desperate. They are dealing with the loss of jobs and income that were exterminated by upper-level management to squeeze a few extra bucks from the revenue so that investors and themselves can have more profit. Blind and oblivious they are to the upheaval they have made to the social system, they cannot understand the chaos except in the terms of their own lexical paradigm they use to justify their communal selfish destruction.

Hence, the people who no longer have the good middle class job opportunities of the past that form their own small businesses are seen as "entrepreneurs". Which is great for the few who ever actually succeed at this endeavor. Most people will be employed to a boss their entire life, and most of them are not due to the weakness of the individuals themselves. Most of the time the long-term security and reliable salary are critical factors, because in reality, employees have to exist for an economy to function. There can never be an economy or social order in the modern world with no employees, in which everyone is an entrepreneur. With primitive tribal groups of 1,000 members this ideal might be achievable, but it is never true in a nation of 400 million, and 200 cities with at least 100,000.

The person's who push this nonsense are using it as mace. They want to spray it into everyone's eyes so they can be blinded by reality and not realize that the community is what actually creates the worth of any individual. That's why the elite form their own communities. In a sense, they have removed themselves from real communities and create their own office board room / country club / exclusive resort communities. But for non-elite persons, the community is the neighborhood, the people who go to the same church or coffee shop, or the township in which they live. The elite have lost their own attachment to any real community, and this is why they often do not perceive their own situation as something other than individual achievement. The reality that luck or happenstance events have anything at all to do with success is not part of their paradigm.

In reality, for most people, either the luck arrives and, for whatever reason (sometimes sad irony) they are not ready -- or the luck never comes. The path an individual takes in life is a function of the environment more than it is an actual choice that any individual gets to make or take. For all people, their next step was not by design, but because that was what was available or realizable at the time. Despite the hagiography of the self-made individual, people do not create their own destiny. Destiny falls upon humans in a whimsical manner -- that's why we get incompetents in high places, and stupid kings. The true test is what an individual does with the chances life gives. If you get the royal flush on the first poker deal, what do you do with the money you made?

The lingo the corporatists use for the top-down scripted standardized curriculum is "Career and College ready." But when you carve away everything in high school but specific skill set development in only English, Science, and Math -- no computer language, no drafting, no carpentry, no auto-shop, no art, no ceramics, no journalism, only 2 foreign languages --- what the hell is left that will actually create students who are "Career and College ready."

Common Core is just training our children to be "test takers" giving them "formative assessments" every single god damn day, and calling other assessments on what are called "Problems of the Month" -- tests tests tests every day of the week -- but oh don't worry, the students can retake them until they get it right. Think about that for a second. Is this guiding kids to think, or to regurgitate a process that they get repeatedly tested on the same way every year?

Oh but the next year the tests are a little more advanced. The "reformers" actually call this "spiraling" too -- WHEN IT IS NOT SPIRALING AT ALL. Spiraling occurs when you come back to previous concepts and add on another connected layer. These "reformers" actually think using the same test as last year but tacking on another advanced question is the same thing. And when the kids do the tests correctly (after how many tries?) it's called a "success" and the "teacher" is seen as doing their job. This is why they call teachers "facilitators" of the curriculum -- instead of "educators" -- giving the kids scripted standardized "assessments" and grading them every single day.

OMFG.

People tell me stories without saying one word, so I listen.

If you open your soul to the reception of the cosmos, you will understand the above quote.

If however, you

1. surround your soul with watch dogs that bark at whatever reminds you of a painful experience
2. wrap your soul around a dream that you have scripted from beginning to end, AND insist upon enacting with everyone you meet
3. bury your soul in a process or an endeavor that is supposed to achieve grandiosity or elevation of the self above everyone and everything else
4. distract the soul with constant repetitions of whatever the mind tosses out in order to orchestrate the need for self worth, over and over again, on an ongoing never ending basis
5. extirpate (good word, look it up) your soul by focusing upon everything external that is easy to access, or in other words, becoming brainwashed mindless slaves to the orchestrated world

These are the reasons why humans "lose" their soul. This is the "devil" at work, or more simply put, this is the result of the ego gone berserk and unmitigated. The ego is something of which we must be constantly mindful, because it is the source of so much delusion and is the reason why the soul becomess vanquished, whatever the excuse. It is the ego that drags you into the pits of hell.

The idea of standardization is so that computer and textbook companies can make a lot of money by selling standardized products to TFA 3-year teachers. TFA is "Teach For America" which is a Temp Agency of teachers that various and sundry school districts can hire or "pay" TFA to have for a 3 year cycle, after which the teachers are gone. The idea is to take recent college graduates and have them do a 3 year stint to say ... pay off their enormous college debt and then they can enter the work force or job pool after their "service". Which is ridiculous, because 70% or more of these TFA teachers move on to another career, and so all that money is wasted ... BECAUSE TEACHERS ARE AN INVESTMENT. TEACHING IS AN ART AND NOT EVERYBODY IS AN ARTIST. THAT'S WHY PEOPLE PAY FOR ART.

If you hire a good teacher, the "standards" will be taught. Micro-management is what businesses do in order to intimidate the lower rung employees and have them compete against each other. Education is about cooperation. If we create cooperation the "problem" of student's learning a minimum of curricula will solve itself.

The movement for standardization is a bait and switch. They sell you on the "we just want to ensure students are getting a minimum" so they can implement the standardization. Then they hold the standardization over your head and constantly move the yardsticks while beating you over the head with unrealistic expectations. This movement is not about education.

My curriculum & instruction teacher was not necessarily teaching standardization as she was allowing us young teachers to find our own methods and means of achieving the most beneficial learning environment for the maximum amount of children. You nurture the flower to find it's own beauty.

Or as my long-time teaching friend and comrade Alyssa Jenkins says :

Teaching isn't paint-by-numbers any more than great art is paint-by-numbers.

Amen sister. Preach it.

The will to produce art, do your own thing, and/or be an exemplar of beauty is difficult and beset on all sides by hardness and irrational cracks in the cosmos of human potential. Be strong. Stay strong. Find consolation in the bigger picture. Seek truth in circumstances. Have faith in your own inner strength. Never give up.

Take a lesson from this dandelion.

School is about raising and teaching children. It is not about spreadsheets or profit margins. School is about instilling children with self-confidence and leadership skills. It is not about becoming an employee or being managed by a boss to do a required task for the job that you are paid to do. School is about love and learning. It is not about top-down management or following business procedures and protocols.

I almost have 1,000 posts (892). So this is a stupid post to get closer to 1,000.

When I was younger (2001 - 2003) I had this goal of reaching 1,000 posts in my mind.

Common core sucks. I will not speak easy about corporate America trying to destroy real education and our wonderful public system of schools in this country because they misrepresent statistics and data and are well funded by voracious ideologues who could care less about the long term damage to our nation that this will create. I love my country. I love public education in the United States. Therefore I will resist and detest all efforts that do anything at all to harm or destroy the things I love. Simple.

Notice the counter clock-wise spiral. Notice how all the rain drags on the back side of the spiral.

Hopefully this will improve our snowpack. But the rainless January brought the April 1st average DOWN to 14% of normal. According to California Department of Water Resources.

There's probably more rain tomorrow and later in the week -- another counter-clockwise cell is coming West of Hawaii. But we need at least 6 more storms of rain before we even get that average close to 70% of normal. That's how serious this drought is folks.

I hate this commercial. More than 50% of Americans can easily do their taxes, and not have to pay a middle man to figure it out for them --- just so that they can get "their billions back".

Oh and now that we are talking about the subject of "BILLIONS". Hows about the "TRILLIONS" that are protected by the caymen island psuedo corporation loophole. Get your TRILLIONS BACK AMERICA. Force corporate profits and filthy rich people to pay their fair share of taxes. They are not investing it in jobs or creating a diverse economy. They are just simply putting it in tax shelters and using their stash to live lucrative wasteful self-indulgent lives. Which is fine really. Honestly, if that's how they want to spend their money, they have that right. But they also have the right to pay their fair share of taxes, and they are NOT doing that.

This video erks me because it makes it seem like their are so many "BILLIONS' out there for average everyday Americans, when actually, these people are just predators taking a few squid from such average everyday americans for something they can do themselves, and in the bigger picture really has such a tiny miniscule impact when compared to the immense savings if our government ever decide to enforce the tax laws on corporations and the filthy rich.

Because everyday Americans would pay half the amount of taxes if corporations and the filthy rich would ever pay their fair share !!!!

But no .... you average everyday ordinary Americans gotta pay an immensely profitable corporate called "H.R. Block" to know the insights and secrets on how to "get your billions back".

Do you realize that we are unique in the entire world on how taxes are collected? In other first world nations, the government does your taxes for you. In other nations, if you disagree with your taxes, you get to have an interview where you have the right to prove otherwise. In the USA however, your money has already been taken, and therefore you have to find someway to finagle the loopholes and tell the government how much they still owe you so you can get a check. It's a pervertion leftover from the evolution of our government system in which government spending was really a means of supporting a political party system .. akin to Tammany Hall in New York City. So the collection of taxes has to become franchised to for-profit institutions, lawyers, and accountants. A whole industry has sprawled around this dysfunctionalism.

This is not true in other nations. There is no middle man pretending to do you a wonderful service by charging you money for doing what you could do for yourself if ... a) you did a small amount of research , or b) if the government did your taxes for you.

But in the USA we have commercials and advertising to brainwash the citizens. And that's why this perversion of economic common sense thrives.