It isn’t just the British, most of the world outside of the US have must-pass entrance exams to determine the type of schooling children are assigned. In much of the world you leave school at 16 and enter an apprenticeship of some kind. This is a major problem of international rankings on education, it really is an apples and oranges comparison.

OTOH, the stated purpose of public education in the US was to provide educated workers for industry if you go back and look at the history of public schools, so Governor Goodhair just wants to go back to the beginning of the 20th century, rather than the beginning of the 19th – very enlightened for a Republicant 😈

Don’t the British do something like this? Start tracking kids mercilessly from an early age and quickly shunt them off to training for trades if they don’t distinguish themselves academically in childhood.

[Note: cops are filling out paperwork in donut shops. It beats trying to bear down through multi-copy forms in the bad light and cramped conditions of your patrol car, and they are open all night. The sugar-high and caffeine are just extra benefits.]

Blog rants are a lot better for society in general than direct action. Unlike the Cambodian villagers, most of the people in the West won’t understand or appreciate direct action against their real enemies as a result of existing in the fetid swamp of propaganda that is the media.

Interesting take on this:

I learned to spot the leader in a group (of any size), and every group of people *has* a leader, even if they don’t know it. A leader is easiest to see when one observes those around them, their body language, their reactions, their responses, what they say, etc. The true leader is not always the one with the loudest voice, or the most visible.

This is what amuses me most about the anarchists. Their solution to the problem of hierarchical society is to abolish hierarchical society and have a society with no leaders. But we’re talking about human biology here, and if you examine the dynamics of anarchist groups that explicitly reject having a leader you still notice that these groups have one or maybe more leaders who seem to initiate whatever they end up doing. Usually these people don’t even realize they’re leaders, they just see something that needs doing and start doing it and others in the group notice and pitch in and start doing it too, but it’s there. Humankind spent millions of years as (mostly) hairless apes and only maybe 10,000 years as civilized human beings, civilization is still just a thin veneer on top of the inner ape.

I truly despair. Most days, I just can’t wait until it’s over, and I’m glad I’m one day closer to my own inevitable end

Thing is, studying history, what we’re seeing today is the usual way of human existence — a feudal existence where the mass of humanity is ruled over by ruthless feudal overlords, where it is the most vicious and venal, not the best, who rule. Go read Dickens. I sometimes reassure myself that we are at least planting the seeds of possibility that might some day, after things hit bottom, sprout into a viable society, but really, most of the time I just shake my head and concentrate on observing the trainwreck in process. We are living through history, after all, and it deserves trained observers to document it even if the trains are long past the point where application of the brakes will stop them from colliding…

I believe you are right, and I have said so many times in the past long before I began commenting here, that the fundamental problems must be addressed, and are getting worse and harder to fix every day. How *we* convince everyone,,, *sigh* I don’t know. I tried at LM and elsewhere for years until I couldn’t continue. We convinced some, but not enough to matter. Some started their own blogs to carry the message, but for every one that started, others closed. It just get’s too hard after years of seeming to get nowhere, of preaching to the choir. 🙂 Been there… yadda!

You and I (and Bryan, and Steve, And Lady Min, and Hipparchia, etc, etc, etc…) are all different. 🙂 We all have different skills, experiences, beliefs, understanding and wants & needs (and of course, we have similarities also). But I think one important thing we have in common, is a fundamental *Humanity*. One thing that is often misunderstood about *who I am*, especially when they learn of my background and training, is that people often think I’m just a soldier or some trained killer, even assassin. And all that is true. But they miss out on the fact that my primary training was as an observer. My training was long and hard, and started when I was a child. It’s partly why after all the Military eval’s, I was offered the opportunity to join an elite and small group. Being a primary observer isn’t about seeing only what your eye’s see, but observing the patterns, the flows of things, group dynamics, of comprehension and understanding. Part of my training was in NLP, Psychology, Sociology, History… it was intense! The combat training was dead easy by comparison! We were up at 5AM, and worked our asses off until lights-out @ 9PM We did the equivalent of three years at Uni in a year. 😆 I learned to spot the leader in a group (of any size), and every group of people *has* a leader, even if they don’t know it. 🙂 A leader is easiest to see when one observes those around them, their body language, their reactions, their responses, what they say, etc. The true leader is not always the one with the loudest voice, or the most visible.

My problem is that I am not at all sure that there are enough *sane*, intelligent, decent humans in the World to overcome the rest. Looking at history, it seems to me that the basic gene pool was corrupted some time ago, and it’s getting worse. It’s not just the USA, not at all! I truly despair. Most days, I just can’t wait until it’s over, and I’m glad I’m one day closer to my own inevitable end, and I will no longer have to look out at the World, and see and understand. If I were a coward, and had no honor, I would have terminated my existence long ago. I have not liked what I see for a very long time, and I am exhausted. It’s why my health got so bad, why I just gave up. I suspected one day, that my subconscious (which is very devious, like everyone’s) was potting me in situations where my health would deteriorate and I would die without having to *pull the trigger* consciously! 😆 (and yeah, I do find it amusing). 😉 I know because I can se the patterns within myself. I’ve never been very good at self-deception. But these *lizard-people* (as you call them), and their sheeple followers, are masters at self-deception. This is why it’s extremely difficult to convince them of *reality*. They don’t see it, and they don’t want to see it. They believe that if they *hope* and try hard enough, what they believe will become true. Even if they have to kill off everyone else to achieve it. 🙂

I preferred Cambodia. It was painful too see and to be there, but it was also simple and straight-forward, and the evil bastards were always easy to spot. And I did my job. And I enjoyed watching them die, and I will never apologies for that, I am not a hypocrite. I will never forget the looks on the faces of the villagers we saved, and the hugs and tears of relief all around, even from myself and my team of super hardened warriors! It’s what kept us Human whilst we were there. 🙂 It’s the only way I can sleep at night. It was a small drop in an ocean, but we achieved some good. Some of the villages *adopted* each of us, and members of other teams (even American and German). There are things (both very good, and very bad) that none of us have never told anyone about what happened there, and never will. It forged a very strong bond between warriors from several Nations. And I know those who survived feel the way I do. I have wondered what would happen if we sought each other out… and decided to do something. 🙂 That makes me smile, yes, it does make me smile! 😀

The United States faces some fundamental structural problems with the very organization of its society, Kryten. Outside of the evangelicals, who have built functioning communities based upon unreason, there is little “community” left in the United States, just hoards of people huddled in their homes being narcotized by television and video games. That is not a recipe for successful community-building, that is a recipe for a nation of sociopathic dysfunction, which is what we’re seeing. Americans live in isolated suburbs where there is nothing to do because everything to do — theater, library, shopping, whatever — is somewhere else and there is a lengthy car trip to get there, a system of residence inherently anti-community. The car-based organization of American society, an organizational structure based on a combination of racism-fed suburbanization and conspiracies by auto makers that destroyed public transit, is unsustainable in a time of peak oil but every time you mention that, the howls of outrage from the narcotized zombie hoards unnerve anybody who might actually be thinking of implementing solutions and solutions never happen. Solutions of the type you mention and such as what happened in Egypt arise from communities, not from isolated individuals, but given that the only actual functional communities left in America are the evangelical ones… well. Now you understand why American politics is so heavily influenced by the evangelicals far beyond their actual numbers should show, and why the evangelicals are gaining in number despite the intellectual impoverishment of their ideology. They offer something that human beings need — community — that is not on offer in many other places in the parched wasteland that is American society.

I do not believe that America’s lizard overlords are going to actually kill millions of Americans with bombs and bullets,but I do believe that before the end game is finished, there will be millions dead of “natural causes” (hey, starvation is natural, right?) or of American-on-American violence where our lizard overlords throw hunks of red meat over the fences of their walled estates and then gloat as we tear each other’s throats out to “win” that hunk of raw meat. Why should they lift a finger when Americans seem eager to kill each other for little more than possession of a handy streetcorner for selling the illegal drug of the day? I do think sanity will eventually reassert itself once reality forces its way into the picture, but there will be dead bodies everwhere and I have no idea what kind of society is going to emerge from the rubble of failed state America. Whatever the end game is, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. A lot worse. Because unlike Cambodians, who at least had some connection with reality and could put their lives back together after Pol Pot got kicked out, most Americans have no skills and no mindset that could be used in the real world as vs. the fake world where most Americans are engaged in selling overpriced real estate and Chinese trinkets to one another. (Well, not so much the former anymore, but the latter, definitely). See Bryan’s neighbor who couldn’t even figure out how to replace a plumbing trap, who lacked even the fundamental mentality that things could be repaired…

Whatever happens, I shall be documenting it — and the solutions — as long as I can. That is the only thing that keeps me going some days when I know there are solutions, when I know the solutions have worked elsewhere and will work here, but I know the solutions can’t happen as long as the vast majority of Americans aren’t interested because they might have to, like, actually budge from their suburban hellholes and do something to rebuild America. Fixing the fundamental structure problems underlying the visible problems you see from overseas is not going to happen until Americans have no choice, and that’s going to be some hard, hard times. In the meanwhile, at least I can munch peanuts in the peanut gallery and shout at the assorted fools acting their parts in this deranged play that is America today, even if it is to no real effect because the majority simply refuse to accept that their way of life is over, done, kaput, an evolutionary dead end that cannot survive the reality of Peak Oil…

– Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

TDS – April 25, 2011 – Gigi Ibrahim

The interview’s at the end of the show. (You can skip all the Royal Wedding garbage). She put’s what the rest of the World thinks about Foreign Policy in a very succinct and accurate nutshell. 😉 😆

American’s could learn a thing or two (now *THERE’S* a radical idea!). 😛 😉

I wasn’t advocating wholesale murder BTW (though, in truth, I don’t consider it murder, simply because I believe these scum resigned any humanity and human rights they may have had long ago. If anything, I’d consider it making fertilizer, they would at least finally serve a legitimate purpose!) 😛 😉 Yeah, yeah… I’ve heard it all before! 😈 My training was all geared towards precision, surgical strikes with a high-degree of certainty. It wouldn’t take many such strikes to make all the cowardly bastard rats run screaming in terror (especially when part of that is ensuring they know I know who they are, and they are on the list!) 😈 (*shrug* The thought of that makes me smile anyway!) 😛

I don’t pretend to know the whole answer or have a final solution. But I do know these things have been solved throughout history, and without anywhere near the means of communication etc that we have today. 🙂

I guess I’m just hoping (though I really hate that word these days) that it won’t happen the way it always has in the past. Millions have to be brutally slain before the rest say “Enough!!” and rebel against the masters. I saw it first hand in Cambodia (which is why I constantly use it as my *benchmark*. I am absolutely certain of what I know because I was there.) Because when the general population waits until it get’s that far, means that many, many more will die than might otherwise be necessary. and it wouldn’t take a bloody revolution (though that is an option), I don’t think things are *that* bad yet, but I do believe (as do you) that time is running out for anything else. You need to get back you media, ad your Justice system first I think. And that’s a lot easier to say than do, I know. But I think it is doable. 🙂 Truth is, that whilst many people around the World despise the USA (the Nation, because they can see the USA is at least partially to blame for their own problems), they would be willing to help the people make it right, if they asked. At least, the sane, intelligent ones would. 😉 🙂

The first thing Americans must realize, is that these bastards *ARE* master’s at manipulation! But they are not actually very bright or knowledgeable individually (you can easily see that when any one of them is caught out with a question they haven’t been prepared for). You (and by *you* in all the above, I mean the collective *you*, not you personally) have to get them off their message, make them look the fools they are. It’s not that hard really. 🙂

There are still many good people in the USA, but many have been thoroughly conditioned to simply accept, and hope. (and BTW, that alone the first time I heard Obama give his first speech all about *Hope* on his Presidential campaign, was enough to ring loud alarm bells, and I said as much at the time on this blog. I suspected then he was just another one of *them*.) This blog, if only in a tiny way, proves that there are decent humans living in the USA. 🙂 These bastards won’t win in the end, but sadly, I suspect it will get worse before it can get better. Who knows, maybe we’ll both be around to see that! 🙂

That said, despite the lizard people largely refraining from overt violence, there is a reason why I blog as a penguin rather than as a human being. Aside from the normal threats of violence that any liberal blogger gets in the United States today, which I shrug aside (the worst that ever happened there even when I blogged as a human is that some scumbag egged my car, which didn’t do much for the paint job but it was hard to notice on a puke-rust-colored Chevrolet Chevette anyhow 🙂 ), the reality is that becoming known as someone who is not a politically reliable member of the Party is a career-limiting move in many professions. While it is quite easy to trace back from my penguin persona to the person behind it, a casual Google will not reveal that connection, and a casual Google is all that most employers do prior to hiring. This actually proved to be a problem in the past, when a certain incident involving my real name and a certain other party was in the news and made it difficult to find a job for a stretch of perhaps six months until people forgot about it and the Google rankings went dormant, which further demonstrated to me the wisdom of remaining pseudonomynous — and also clarified exactly how the mechanisms of social control work. The lizard people are indeed cunning, if not particularly intelligent… why should they *directly* send you to a prison camp and condemn you to starvation, when they can instead arrange to have you rendered homeless and unemployable and have you die of “natural causes” at some point in the future where their fingerprints will not be so evident? After all, simply not hiring you is a lot cheaper than a bullet or Zyklon-B!

To say that I am not optimistic about the future of the United States is an understatement. The fundamental structural problems that have led to the current situation appear to me to be irresolvable, and are leading inevitably to a disastrous denouement. The only faith I have is that I shall faithfully document the U.S. slide to collapse, and salute as it goes under. Too bad I shall be watching the water rise over my own head as it happens, but so it goes. Perhaps something worthwhile shall arise from the ashes of collapse. Perhaps. I suspect I won’t be around to know.

– Badtux the Pessimist Penguin