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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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]


Monday, 26 December 2016 at 21h 51m 5s

Things people say

This an article about an interview with Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign manager and chief Strategist, and the chairman of Breitbart media. Breitbart is a known promoter of various right wing mis-truths and contrived docu-mercials depicting political falsehoods, like those against Acorn, Planned Parenthood, and the hyperbolic non-sense of falsely registered voters or voter fraud.

(Note: yes it is true that some registration organizations gather signatures of person's who write Mickey Mouse and Superman on registration ballots, but these are 100% filtered out by the employees at the local state Registration office, and never make it to the actual real world voter registration list. However, attacking these groups by infiltrating their signature gathering attempts with people who deliberately contrive to put these fake names on the registration cards -- and then "exposing" this occurrence in a docu-mercial -- is what Breitbart calls "journalism."


He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.

Shocked, I asked him what he meant.

“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment ...”

“[The] National Review and The Weekly Standard,” he said, “are both left-wing magazines, and I want to destroy them also.” He added that “no one reads them or cares what they say.” His goal was to bring down the entire establishment including the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress....

Trump’s behavior thus far has been compatible with Bannon’s belief in Leninist tactics. As the Bolshevik leader once said, “The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.”


[SOURCE: Ronald Radosh | The Daily Beast | 21 August 2016]

Some other things about Steven Bannon and Breitbart "in their own words" comes from the New York Times.


Referring to Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin in a 2011 radio interview on Political Vindication Radio, he said: “These women cut to the heart of the progressive narrative. That’s why there are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane, and that’s why they hate these women.”

[SOURCE: Danile Victor and Liam Stack | New York Times | 14 November 2016 ]

 ~~ hat top toNancy Friedman


Monday, 26 December 2016 at 21h 5m 13s

The Trump Hypocrisy

The pot calls the kettle black and then makes some tea.


Donald Trump spent the past two years attacking rival Hillary Clinton as crooked, corrupt, and weak.

But some of those attacks seem to have already slipped into the history books.

From installing Wall Street executives in his Cabinet to avoiding news conferences, the president-elect is adopting some of the same behavior for which he criticized Clinton during their fiery presidential campaign...

GOLDMAN SACHS

Then: "I know the guys at Goldman Sachs," Trump said at a South Carolina rally in February, when he was locked in a fierce primary battle with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. "They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton."

Now: A number of former employees of the Wall Street bank will pay a key role in crafting Trump's economic policy. He's tapped Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn to lead the White House National Economic Council. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary nominee, spent 17 years working at Goldman Sachs and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor, started his career as an investment banker at the firm.

Trump is following in a long political tradition, though one he derided on the campaign trail: If Cohn accepts the nomination, he'll be the third Goldman executive to run the NEC.

BIG DONORS

Then: "Crooked Hillary. Look, can you imagine another four years of the Clintons? Seriously. It's time to move on. And she's totally controlled by Wall Street and all these people that gave her millions," Trump said at a May rally in Lynden, Washington.

Now: Trump has stocked his Cabinet with six top donors — far more than any recent White House. "I want people that made a fortune. Because now they're negotiating with you, OK?" Trump said, in a December 9 speech in Des Moines.

The biggest giver? Linda McMahon, incoming small business administrator, gave $7.5 million to a super PAC backing Trump, more than a third of the money collected by the political action committee.

NEWS CONFERENCES

Then: "She doesn't do news conferences, because she can't," Trump said at an August rally in Ashburn, Virginia. "She's so dishonest she doesn't want people peppering her with questions."

Now: Trump opened his last news conference on July 27, saying: "You know, I put myself through your news conferences often, not that it's fun."

He hasn't held one since.

Trump skipped the news conference a president-elect typically gives after winning the White House. Instead, he released a YouTube video of under three minutes. He also recently abruptly canceled plans to hold his first post-election news conference, opting instead to describe his plans for managing his businesses in tweets. "I will hold a press conference in the near future to discuss the business, Cabinet picks and all other topics of interest. Busy times!" he tweeted in mid-December.

FAMILY TIES:

Then: "It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and really for I guess the making of large amounts of money," Trump said at an August rally in Austin.

Now: While Trump has promised to separate himself from his businesses, there is plenty of overlap between his enterprises and his immediate family. His companies will be run by his sons, Donald Jr and Eric. And his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have joined Trump at a number of meetings with world leaders of countries where the family has financial interests.

In a financial disclosure he was required to file during the campaign, Trump listed stakes in about 500 companies in at least 25 countries.

Ivanka, in particular, has been caught making early efforts to leverage her father's new position into profits. After an interview with the family appeared on "60 Minutes," her jewelry company, Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, blasted out an email promoting the $10,800 gold bangle bracelet that she had worn during the appearance. The company later said they were "proactively discussing new policies and procedures."

Ivanka is also auctioning off a private coffee meeting with her to benefit her brother's foundation. The meeting is valued at $50,000, with the current top bid coming in at $25,000.

"United States Secret Service will be Present for the Duration of the Experience," warns the auction site.


[SOURCE: Lisa Lerer | AP News | 26 December 2016]


Friday, 23 December 2016 at 19h 29m 39s

Where did Trump get his capital

After 6 bankruptcies, Trump was somehow still able to get new capital investments. James Henry, who recently published an article in the magazine, The American Interest, titled "The Curious World of Donald Trump's Private Russian Connections."



This information comes not from some fringe lunatic.

James S. Henry is a leading economist, attorney and investigative journalist who has written extensively about global issues. James served as Chief Economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. As an investigative journalist his work has appeared in numerous publications like Forbes, The Nation and The New York Times. He was the lead researcher of the recently released report titled 'The Price of Offshore Revisited.'




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