frankilin roosevelt

It's not about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.


Check out my old  Voice of the People page.


Gino Napoli
San Francisco, California
High School Math Teacher

jonsdarc@mindspring.com




Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.

a middle-aged
George Washington



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Saturday, 7 January 2017 at 2h 26m 24s

Two days later

Two days later, the weather North of Hawaii, spun by the Hawaiian Pineapple express, sends California a whole lotta wet.



And it's looking like another 7 straight days of wonderful wet weather. That's why they call this the Pineapple Express. Notice the group of clouds Northeast of Hawaii, that's 4 or 5 days from now weather. The strong band you see about 1000 miles east of Hawaii is going to spin everything just north of Hawaii over into California, and then crash into California. The whole process can take 10 days once it gets established over the Pacific waters just East of Hawaii.



Now just in case you didn't see the expected inches of rainfall in the graphic above. Adding Saturday and Sunday alone, you get 3.5 inches of rain. The rest of the week looks to spill out another 2 plus inches of rain. That's 5.5 in one week in a part of the world that averages 23.6 per YEAR !!! Which is almost 25% of the yearly total in just 7 days, 1.9% of the year.

Here is the windmap from earth.nullschool.net/.




Friday, 6 January 2017 at 2h 59m 1s

You go Obama

Honestly, Obama is surprising me about both his recent actions and his post-Presidential attempts to get involved in the various state anti-democratic actions, in particular "Gerry-Mandering" voting districts. Which is older than the KKK by the way -- hey that rhymes :-). All the way since BEFORE the America revolt against Britain in the 1770 to 1780 time frame, as far back at the later 1600's in fact.

Obama's 9 year Attorney General, Eric Holder -- who could not hold Wall Street financiers accountable for a single offence -- has been recently hired by California Jerry Brown to represent the state in any and all probable law suits the state takes against the incoming Federal administration. This is the same guy who made a big to-do against various California pot medical dispensaries -- but unable to prosecute a single Wall Street or big-bank criminal -- during Obama's first term. Nevertheless, I look at his with an open mind, because I trust Jerry Brown.

Boy am I so glad to be a Californian at this point in American history.

Full disclosure. I have met and have spoken with governor Jerry Brown's brother infrequently. He is a law professor at USF. Interesting person and mind. The entire family, all the way back to the father, ex-governor Edmund "Pat" Brown from 1959 to 1967. Responsible for the state water project, "Pat" Brown is the reason why California is great today.

Even though I am usually skeptical of Wikipedia, Wikipedia is fair on this matter.


Opposition to the State Water Project was immediate, especially with Sacramento River Delta users worrying about saltwater intrusion which had already been a concern without factoring in redirection of outward freshwater flow. Residents of the Bay Area and elsewhere in Northern California were concerned about the increase in water draw the South might demand as populations expanded. While Southern support for the project was clear, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California worried that the project did not ensure permanent rights to Northern water. This lead the legislature to amend the plan, prohibiting the state's southern water rights from being rescinded, clearing any remaining reservations from the state's southern water authorities.

Governor Brown was a staunch supporter of the plan, energetically opposing critics and seeking solutions. He lobbied Congress to exempt California from the 160 acre rule, lauding the benefit of employment and progress to the state's northern and southern residents, calling for an end to the north-south rivalry. Brown also reduced his introductory bond issuance from $11 billion to $1.75 billion, beginning a television campaign to appeal to residents. Governor Brown insisted on the Burns-Porter Act which sent the bond issue to a referendum; the 1960 vote saw Butte County as the sole Northern California county not voting against the measure. However, the growth in Southern California's population lead to the plan's adoption.


[SOURCE: Wikipedia]


Friday, 6 January 2017 at 2h 34m 28s

Can I scream




Thom Hartmann : "Why aren't the Democrats doing anything about this?"

Hello, that was my question, spoken loudly on this blog fucking one month ago. Thanks Thom.

And would you look at that queer scowl on James Clapper's face (current head of CIA) ? Almost like he's ashamed that his asshole is where his mouth is located, and hopes no one realizes it during the brief duration when he has to speak in front of cameras and video recording devices. Creepy.


Mike Papantonio : "The Corporate-controlled media won't touch issues like [this] because they're not sensational enough, uh, they can't make the story appealing enough to an audience with a 30 second attention span so they feed us absurd fake news about Russia hacking the election or [what] Donald Trump ... tweeted this morning.

Right now you see the new DNC [Democratic National Committee] ... It's outrageous. The 'new' DNC Leadership -- which is nothing more than the Hilary camp -- is now making the Russian hacking story their number one attention. This is the number one story they are paying attention to rather than voter suppression that probably killed them in the last election. We know that Republican trolled states have been systematically purging Democratic voters for at least 16 years. And these methods keep evolving."


Yikes, Mike really tears apart the corporatist Democratic establishment. Awesome skewering. The "Pap" attack is spot on, and really shows his feisty fearless intellect for those of you who may not be familiar with this fellow Southern Italian. (I admit to being a fan)

We got Trump largely because Kris Kobach got 28 state Republican Secretary’s of State to send him their voter registration lists so that he could run a computer program called “cross check” that removed loosely associated names under the pretense that these were persons who were double registered.  Hence Michael Eugene Jackson of Georgia was matched with Michael Lebrun Jackson of Virginia, and Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio was matched with Donald Eugene Webster Sr. of Virginia.  Over 7 million persons were paired in this way, and had their names removed off the voting rolls.  When they showed up to vote, they had to vote on provisional ballots, most of which were never counted.  75,355 ballots in Michigan alone were not counted, in a state where Donald Trump won by only 10,704 votes.  And those votes largely came from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

This happened in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and all throughout the 28 states who sent their registration lists to Mr. Kobach. This was why the Republican establishment stonewalled Jill Stein’s recount efforts, otherwise why would they deny democracy if they were not afraid of their anti-democratic actions?  Instead, Jill Stein and Democrats are called “sore-losers” or “cry babies”  who “waste tax payers dollars” when really it’s as simple as Jill Stein standing up for democracy and the right of citizens to have their votes counted.

Kris Kobach’s state of Kansas was the only state out of 50 states not to respond to a recent New York Times survey of actual voter fraud, of which less than 100 incidents were actually legally acted upon, 65 of which were in the combined total of Georgia and Tennessee. According to the New York Times: "The findings unambiguously debunk repeated statements by President-elect Donald J. Trump that millions of illegal voters backed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.”


Thursday, 5 January 2017 at 1h 38m 0s

Modern Weather

This is how I discern the weather nowadays. I go look at Intellicast.com and see the West Coast Pacific Satellite imaging.



Notice that counter-clockwise weather system spinning rain out of the Pacific that is just North of Hawaii. That's called the "Pineapple Express". It usually means rain for the next four or five days.

Then I check out Wunderground.com for San Francisco, and look at the following panorama of weather data displayed graphically



Yikes, looks like this weekend is gonna be rain, rain, and more rain. Confirmed by the satellite imagery.

Back in the day, people actually watched the weatherman on a regular basis, or listen to the radio to get weather information. The National Weather Service nationalized the collection of weather information so that citizens would not have to pay a premium to get less than reliable weather. During the 1980's and 1990's the Weather Channel developed a way to provide radar information from the National Weather Service. Every 10 or 15 minutes, you got to see a radar of the region where you lived -- Pacific, Northwest, Southwest, California, Southeast, Mountain-central, Mid-South, Mid-west, Northeast, and so on.

Once the internet came, people got access to the raw data from those who set up graphical imaging and data displays, like Intellicast and Wunderground. A lot of people get their weather from cell phone app nowadays, but all of these sources are using data obtained by the National Weather Service. If these businesses had to include the cost of collecting such data themselves, these companies would have a lot more overhead, and more than likely eventually skimp on certain data analysis. Or if not, the cost of the service would be prohibitive, just like many hi-end university data and library collection systems (like Lexus-Nexus) -- sometimes costing $600 or more per year. The result would inevitably be a secondary market of substandard or stripped services controlled by the data collection agents.

Which is a perfect example of what government does well. Governments invest the tax collections into developing basic or necessary infrastructure so that other businesses can take advantage of the cost or service savings and not distort the market into oligarchical funnels. If every single thing that is needed by or necessary for society gets outsourced to private firms, than what happens is the gradual devolution into those firms who control the necessary check points in the distribution system of goods and services, and those firms who do not. The market becomes oligarchical and the quality of service becomes fractured or stratified into rent-seeking tiers.

Government not only needs to be a functioning part of every economic order for capitalism to properly function, but also to ensure that the needs of the community and society will inhibit the inherent bent of mankind to evolve into aristocracy, irrationality, and authoritarian regimes.


Sunday, 1 January 2017 at 21h 33m 45s

Global Trade Visualized




Sunday, 1 January 2017 at 19h 21m 22s

REM Michael Stipe on the Colbert Show



REM (1980-2011) did this song when I was in college. Michael Stipe was the lead singer -- he's the guy with the gray-white beard in the above video. I loved REM at the time, and this song in particular. "It's the End of the World" from 1987, which is the year I started Freshmen year in college at Tulane University. My roomate, Tim Conley, introduced me to REM, and this song was my favorite when I heard it in the Fall of 1987. THANKS TIM :-)




Thursday, 29 December 2016 at 18h 31m 21s

Bullshit commentariat Retro 16 years


This fucker still writes an opinion column at the New York Times.

David Brooks' "opinion" is often contrived, highly compromised with obvious biased agenda, and is even comical with its pathetic bloviating ability to ramble on trying to weave a nonsensical argument. Driftglass is incessant in a long term attempt to point out how David Brooks is full of shit.

When David comes on PBS and debates Mark Shields I was always able to point out Mr. Brooks subtle deceptions and blatant incongruities. He has been a plant of respectable reason and has betrayed that assumption more than half the time. His purpose is to appear reasonable sometimes, only to suddenly turn on a dime and make proclamations that don't relate to whatever reasonable opinion he most recently espoused. He is a dagger. Just when he starts to make to make sense, wham, you get hit with the irrational statement that leaves his real intent bare. David Brooks is a hired word assassin. He is sponsored by that segment of the corporate elite that rely on Mr. Brooks to "gum-up-the-works" and provided a courtier role of justifying the corporate paradigm in a way that might be palatable with the upper middle class and educated classes.


Thursday, 29 December 2016 at 1h 51m 23s

What schools cannot do alone

Fact: the correlation between student responses on multiple choice standardized tests against various sociological parameters is very high. Above 90 percent R squared (Coefficient of Determination) – which is the percentage of variation accounted for by only the two factors of data being analyzed.

  • Scores versus Family yearly income.
  • Scores versus Parental Level of Education.
  • Scores versus amount of vocabulary attained by age 5 or 6.
  • Scores versus Zip Code.

All of these factors are so highly correlated that they are borderline predictive. In many schools, the location of the school indicates the sociological factors of which that school will have to become associated. These factors are independent of the school itself, because they are based upon the sociological and economic background of the location -- not the ability or functionality of the school. Hence separating the school from it’s inherent sociological environment is very difficult to do. Not all failures are a result of the school system when the resulting society ignores community and social investments which can make a palpable difference beyond anything school personnel can do. After and before school programs, school lunch, breakfast and dinner programs, parental education programs, subsidizing community sponsoring events, investing in pre-K education, subsidizing child care, insuring a viable nationalized retirement system, and single-payer nationalized health care would all go a long way towards alleviating the other factors that cause issues with the scores of our pre-18 year old youth. When these other factors are not addressed, or become exacerbated, the more relevant issues of why students do not achieve their potential cannot really be separated from what is measurable at school.

Granted, correlation does not mean causation. This is precisely why statistics alone cannot completely capture what it is that we call the phenomenon of prerequisite knowledge, because the results are too dependent upon too many various factors and indicators to be indicative of anything beyond the specific issues of the individual child upon which each individual assessment is taken. We cannot average out these individual assessments to attain anything meaningful, other than what it is that might be dominant characteristics of the overall population from which such individual statistical slices come. However every average is always somewhere in between the maximum and minimal values of the data set, and not representative of any individual in the group.

This is why charter schools in the same districts as the public school do not make a measureable difference when the students come from the same population of students without separating the population based on various beneficial statistics. The best charter schools actually separate the better students using various tactics, often kicking out the lesser endowed, so their success rates compared to the public school is more a result of these mechanisms of subtraction, a result that comes from removing the students who are more difficult to teach. Schools who are said to be failing are largely suffering from being overwhelmed by social factors not being addressed by the government and the local community

Schools provide a service called education. This service involves a teacher who creates and enhances whatever curriculum or spectra of topics are desired to whatever course a student becomes attached. This teacher, under the most efficient and beneficial assumptions, gets to know each student, adjusts and caters the overall curriculum design to meet the various needs of the incoming students. Students who have less cognitive dissonance move far beyond their own expectations, while at the same time students who are cognitively inhibited (for whatever reason) do not fall farther beyond. At best it is assumed that these low-end students actually rise above their prior level, so that we give credit to the best teachers those who rise the level of all their students across the spectrum.

Under certain stable conditions, this is possible. The Bell curve of the classroom all shifts to the right an equal amount. In practice however, this bell curve of the incoming students represents not just one group, but many different groups; each of whom respond differently to different situations and have their education affected by different factors throughout the measurable time frame (semester, quarter, tri-mester, or year-to-year). These students have erratic learning habits, and are highly affected by their non-school related events.

  1. Students who live with single parents
  2. Students going through a parental divorce
  3. Students who live with step parents
  4. Students who have had a history of mobililty over a five year period
  5. Students who live in poverty
  6. Students who have poor dietary habits
  7. Students who come from a poor educational background.
  8. Adolescent Psychology

Students responding to computer programs that are meant to address their individual needs cannot address the eight issues above. Removing the teacher-student relationship alone is not an effective means of addressing the education phenomenon that appears to be “broken” and in need of “reform”. Assuming the reason why students lack success only relates to their pace of learning, is it a good idea to place impressionable, possible highly ignorant young people responding to a computer program with little or no interference from a teacher or any other human being? Learning is not a passive experience, involving mere pressing of buttons on a keyboard, quietly answering questions using simple words without interacting with other persons during the experience. Students watch videos and then respond or click boxes based upon how much they remembered (this is called a Quiz). Students do not interact based upon watching the same video. Students do not analyze their opinions or reflections of the video. Students do not get differing viewpoints about the video from other students, or even feedback from the teacher. The experience is solitary. The answers to such questions are thusnot referencing a dynamic involving various reactions with the learning environment, but responses to a script.

Hence the phrase “catering to the individual needs” of the student is really a means of disconnecting the individual from the group and from the peers where the learning environment is organic. The method doesn’t guarantee long-term or developmental memory because it depends upon inferential solitary integration with the dissemination of knowledge. Most people need to be engaged with the learning experience. Discussing and sharing knowledge also enhances an individual’s understanding. Linkages are created whenever there is some sort of group socialization or attempt to form a socialization around knowledge that do not occur when knowledge acquisition is solitary.

Think of this like reading a book. Reading a book is solitary knowledge acquisition. You learned something by reading the book. When you discuss the book with someone else, you attach your information to what you have already learned in the past, in addition to reflecting on what it means in relation to what you have already learned. If you then write a paper explaining the book -- or speak to a group -- on what you have gained by reading the book, you are suddenly not only regurgitating that information but putting it in a context that you feel expresses the knowledge that you have. All of which creates a deeper, longer lasting learning experience. You would not get the same development or understanding if you just skimmed a few chapters of the book, watched a five minute video that summarized the book, or just looked up references on Google that gave you some solid paragraphs – after which you answered ten multiple choice questions that assessed your learning. That is called learning by proxy.

The idea that we can rescue dysfuctional communities by removing qualifying students to different schools is just another way of ignoring and not investing in the issues that affect dysfunctional communities. Syphoning these funds to a private or for-profit institution at the behest of the individual assumes the individual alone can be plucked away from the community as a way of “saving” the community. But what merely happens is that such individuals who are “saved” eventually leave the community, leaving the community unchanged, a community that continues to languish because it never got any benefit from the investment that “elevated” the student and moved the individual somewhere else to become more successful. The coasts and urban cities are filled with migrants who relocated, without making a difference at all in the communities from where they left.


Tuesday, 27 December 2016 at 22h 30m 17s

Why is this necessary

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's transition team has asked two Cabinet departments for the names of government officials working on programs to counter violent extremism, according to a document seen by Reuters and U.S. officials.

The requests to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security involve a set of programs that seek to prevent violence by extremists of any stripe, including recruitment by militant Islamist groups within the United States and abroad.

Reuters could not determine why the Trump team asked for these names. The Trump team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


SOURCE: Warren Strobel & Arshad Mohammed | Reuters | 23 December 2016

Why would an incoming presidential administration make a formal request to ask for these names so soon? Why would this be a priority given the overall success over the last 8 years? Why would this even be leaked to the press?


Monday, 26 December 2016 at 19h 50m 11s

Why You Cannot Run Government Like A Business

These are some sources to read, but the answer is quite simple. People run a business to earn a profit. Thus the desire to control costs and maximize revenue serves as the governing protocol for everyday situations and decision making processes. Obtaining loans to finance operations or making capital investments are always secondary to the need to make a profit, hence decisions on what to finance and where to invest are determined by short-term revenue potential and a desire to form a monopolistic or at least dominant position versus any competitors.

Government however is not a competitive industry. Whatever competition that exists should be about ideas, upon which voters are suppose to choose based on the strength and legitimacy of various ideas. Government investments and revenue practices also have longer term goals, that mostly are not profitable in the monetary measurable quantity of revenue and profit alone. Social and community goals are highly beneficial to society but cannot be quantified by money. Other social organizations and investments save the overall society money, but these savings are so diffuse that they cannot be separately aggregated to any one individual or group.

But read the following links for a more poignant analysis:

  1. [SOURCE: Georgie Bishop | Excellence In Goverment | 6 April 2016]
  2. [SOURCE: Mike Sabo | The Federalist Papers | 8 January 2016]
  3. [SOURCE: John T Harvey | Forbes | 5 October 2012]




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