Dec2000

The Armed M is a publication of the 2nd Amendment SIG, a special interest group of American Mensa Ltd. Opinions expressed herein are the opinions of the writers, and not of American Mensa, Ltd. which has no opinions. This newsletter is linked to the Mensa web page WWW.Mensa.org as WWW.webcatt.com/2ndAmend_SIG

I have moved and am now in Wilmington North Carolina. My E-Mail address is Smith13@Worldnet.att.net. I can always use contributions to the newsletter. If you write something or find something e-mail it to me I'll put it in the newsletter as space and theme allows. Bob Smith

I thought the following article was very interesting and does have an effect on how one relates to the government programs.

AUG. 4, 2000 THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz Could they really have done it on purpose?

In a mere three centuries, America has written some of the most glowing chapters in the long history of man's struggle for freedom.

So how did we become in the space of only a few generations a nation of pathetic bed-wetters, mewling "Oh, please don't trust me and my neighbor to save for our own retirements; we might blow it" -- "Oh, please don't trust me and my neighbor to own military-style weapons; we'd probably shoot each other."

John Taylor Gatto, a former New York state (public) Teacher of the Year, thinks he's found the answer: the government schools.

Gatto's thesis is one of those "big ideas" that takes a little time to wrap the mind around. The public schools cannot be reformed because they're not failing, he argues. They're succeeding beyond all expectations at precisely what they're supposed to be -- not only a huge make-work jobs program, but also the incubators of a dependent class of conscienceless sociopath, their emotional development purposely stunted, a generation (by now two or three) with little knowledge of "the narrative of American history connecting the arguments of the founding fathers to historical events, defining what makes Americans different from others besides wealth."

Oblivious to that heritage, our young people instead sulk about, whining for the modern Morlocks of our welfare/police state to do a better job feeding them and keeping them entertained.

Gatto started to develop this thesis in his slim but estimable 1992 volume "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling." Now he's returned with a massive and far better-developed follow-up, the 400-page "Underground History of American Education," subtitled "A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling" ($34 postpaid, Oxford Village Press, 725 McDonough Road, Oxford, N.Y. 13830.)

Gatto's historical research tells him none of this is an accident -- public school pioneers like Horace Mann found the regimented system they were looking for when they visited Prussia in the 1840s, importing wholesale a scheme to tame and regiment what they saw as America's dangerously anarchist new immigrant working class, training the young of this underclass to report to a central government facility as soon as they were old enough to use the latrine, there to be trained to all hold identical shallow, memorized opinions and to march around to the sound of bells.

Yes, some basic literacy and numeracy would be necessary for them to fill their intended roles in the army and in the factories ... but not too much, and certainly not the kind of critical and analytic skills which might lead them to question their new bosses.

"We want one class to have a liberal education," Gatto finds Woodrow Wilson telling a group of businessmen shortly before the First World War. "We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." Gatto challenges the whole underlying notion that the kind of academic disciplines taught in our schools are so complicated that they have to be divvied up into small mouth-sized bits and doled out over a period of years on a careful scientific schedule arranged by highly-trained experts.

Teachers should be adults over 40, Gatto argues, "people who've proven themselves at life by bearing its pain like free spirits. ... No one who hasn't known grief, challenge, success, failure, or sadness should be allowed anywhere near kids. ...

"Have you noticed nobody talks to children in schools? I mean “nobody. All verbal exchanges in school are instrumental. Person-to-person stuff is contrary to policy. That's why popular teachers are disliked or fired. They “talk” to kids. It's unacceptable."

Americans are now trained to believe that no child is capable of assuming any responsibility till he or she is 18 or 21 -- and that even adults need a huge and permanent government "safety net" to protect them from their own childlike incompetence.

Yet Gatto reminds us of a young American who left school at an early age because he was judged "feeble-minded." Just before turning 12 he talked his mother into letting him go to work full time as an apprentice on the railroad, "a permission she gave which would put her in jail right now," in Gatto's phrase. Claiming some old type from a printer who was about to throw it away, the young lad begged a corner in the baggage car in which to set up a little four-page newspaper about the lives of the passengers and what could be seen from the train's window. At age 12 he had 500 subscribers, earning more than his former schoolteachers.

"When the Civil War broke out, the newspaper becomes a goldmine. ... He sold the war to crowds at the various stops. 'The Grand Trunk Herald' sold as many as 1,000 extra copies after a battle," amassing the young man a handsome stake for his next venture.

If he tried that at age 12 today, everyone involved would be arrested and put on trial for exploitation of "child labor" ... and we would likely never have heard of the young man who got the early start in question, Thomas Edison.

How does this giant jobs program known as "public schooling" work? Gatto tells the pathetic story of little Benson, Vermont, where citizens were happy with the single school that served their 137 schoolchildren.

But the state bureaucracy wasn't happy. Oh no. The state condemned the old school for lack of wheelchair ramps "and other features nobody ever considered an essential part of education before." A massively expensive new school was mandated, and into this new school the education bureaucracy piled a new non-teaching superintend, a new non-teaching assistant superintendent, a new non-teaching principal, a new non-teaching assistant principal, a new full-time nurse, a new full-time guidance counselor, a new full-time librarian, 11 full-time teachers where eight would have sufficed -- in all, a new cadre of poobahs and potentates costing an additional $250,000 per year -- or $2,000 per kid.

Property taxes in the little town went up 40 percent in one year, "quite a shock to local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails."

In nearby Walden, a town happily getting along with four 19th-century one-room schoolhouses for its 120 kids -- with four teachers and “no” administrators -- Gatto visited and found the story was the same. Building condemned, and then the administrators started to arrive, like clowns piling out of that little car at the circus.

"Is there a soul who believes Benson's kids are better served in their new school with its mercenary army than Walden's 120 were in four rooms with four teachers?" Gatto asks. "What happened at Benson -- the use of forced schooling to impose career ladders of unnecessary work on a poor community -- has happened all over North America. School is a jobs project for a large class of people it would be difficult to find employment for otherwise. Forcible redistribution of income to others to provide work for pedagogues and for a support staff larger than the actual teaching corps is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of the children. The more 'make-work' has to be found for school employees, the worse for kids because their own enterprise is stifled by constant professional tinkering in order to justify this employment."

Public schooling hasn't even improved literacy, Gatto demonstrates -- it's considerably eroded it.

"By 1840" (more than a decade before the opening of the first tax-funded government schools on the modern model, in Massachusetts) "the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent. ... In Connecticut only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: 'Last of the Mohicans,' published in 1818, sold so well a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

"By 1940 the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites. 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the 20th century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled," despite the fact that "we spend three or four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago."

"During World War Two, American public schools massively converted to non-phonetic ways of teaching reading," Gatto explains. "According to the justice department, 80 percent of the incarcerated “violent” criminal population is illiterate or nearly so (as are 67 percent of all criminals locked up.) There seems to be a direct connection between the humiliation poor readers experience and the life of angry criminals. As reading ability plummeted in America after World War Two, crime soared, so did out-of-wedlock births, which doubled in the 1950s and doubled again in the '60s when bizarre violence for the first time became commonplace in daily life.

"When literacy was first abandoned as a primary goal by schools, white people were in a better position than black people because they inherited a 300-year-old American tradition of learning to read at home by matching spoken sounds with letters, thus home assistance was able to correct the deficiencies of dumbed-down schools for whites. But black people had been forbidden to learn to read during slavery, and as late as 1930 only averaged three to four years of schooling, so they were helpless when teachers suddenly stopped teaching children to read; they had no fall-back position."

In 1882, Gatto reminds us, fifth graders read in their "Appleton School Reader" the original prose of such authors as William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Daniel Webster, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper: "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, if, in, is, it, have, he, home, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

Again, all this was no accident. Gatto finds the 1888 "Report of the Senate Committee on Education" asserting "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes. ...” Within a few generations, working from such goals as "Destruction of the narrative of American history connecting the arguments of the founding fathers to historical events..."; "radical dilution of the academic content of formal curriculum which familiarized students with serious literature, philosophy, theology, etc. -- having the effect of curtailing any serious inquiries into economics, politics or religion"; "enlargement of the school day and year to blot up outside opportunities to acquire useful knowledge leading to independent livelihoods ..."; and "relentless low-level hostility against religious interpretations of meaning," the public schools had taken care of “that”.

Mr. Gatto's book rambles. It took him an entire career to reach these counterintuitive conclusions ("They can't have done it all “on purpose” and it shows.

Dipping into these pages is like allowing a still-hearty old man to take you on a walk through his home town, pointing out where the old barns used to stand. It swings from historical analysis to personal anecdote and reminiscence. The furthest thing from the kind of forbidding "rigorous" tomes generated by those seeking Ph.Ds in education, it invites the interested reader to sink down into it like a comfortable easy chair, to be stunned and amazed in turn by a 150-year history of the fully conscious and willful campaign to turn all but the offspring of the big banking and corporate families who would attend Hotchkiss, Choate, Kent and Groton (the last three endowed by the Mellons, the DuPonts, and J.P Morgan -- the first by the machine gun widow) into -- well, malleable morons.

Mr. Gatto's books -- he promises his next will be "How to Get an Education in Spite of School" are a wonder and a delight. It's only too bad they're true.

I thought it might make an interesting contrast with current circumstances to read the words of advice that Teddy Roosevelt gave the Boy Scouts in 1911.

Before I quote his words, which cynics will say are corny, let me remind you that these words did not come from either a niave or a wimpy man. Roosevelt had known the death of loved ones, the hardship of ranching in the Dakotas, the fierce infighting of being a police commissioner of New York City, a member of the legislature, a governor, a vice president and a president.

He had built the Panama Canal, and he had led men in combat and killed men in personal combat. There is no modern politician I know of whose resume comes even close to that of Teddy Roosevelt.

In a letter to a Scout executive, Roosevelt wrote, "The movement is one for efficiency and patriotism. It does not try to make soldiers of Boy Scouts but to make boys who will turn out as men to be fine citizens and who will, if their country needs them, make better soldiers for having been Scouts. "No man is a good citizen unless he so acts as to show that he actually uses the Ten Commandments and translates the Golden Rule into his life conduct - and I don't mean by this in exceptional cases under spectacular circumstances, but I mean applying the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule in the ordinary affairs of every-day life. I hope the Boy Scouts will practice truth and square dealing and courage and honesty. The man who counts and the boy who counts are the man and boy who steadily endeavor to build up, to improve, to better living conditions everywhere and all about them.

"The same qualities that mean success or failure to the nation as a whole mean success or failure in men and boys individually. To be helpless, self-indulgent, or wasteful will turn the boy into a mighty poor kind of man just as the indulgence in such vices by the men of a nation means the ruin of a nation. Any boy is worth nothing if he has not got courage, courage to stand up against the forces of evil and courage to stand up in the right path. Let him be unselfish and gentle, as well as strong and brave. It should be a matter of pride to him that he is not afraid of anyone and that he scorns not to be gentle and considerate to everyone, especially to those who are weaker than he is. If he doesn't treat his mother and sisters well, then he is a poor creature no matter what else he does; just as a man who doesn't treat his wife well is a poor kind of citizen no matter what his other qualities may be. Let the boy remember he must have knowledge, he must cultivate a sound body and a good mind and train himself so that he can act with quick decision in any crisis that may arise. Mind, eye, muscle all must be trained so that the boy can master himself and thereby learn to master his fate."

This letter is taken from the very first Boy Scout handbook. It has been reprinted by Applewood Books, Bedford, Mass., and shows an organization that was pretty tough. It contains, for example, instructions about how to kill a mad dog and how to stop a runaway horse.

It's hard to imagine a modern president giving the same advice that Teddy Roosevelt offered. Most recent presidents have more or less fractured the Ten Commandments, and, of course, Bill Clinton has not treated his wife nor any other woman well. And nowadays there are people attacking the Boy Scouts rather than encouraging them, because they refuse to compromise on religion and morality. Such is the ruined state of the nation today.

[ Bob ] I have had the honor of knowing some military and former military that have been inspirations to me. One time I was reading a book on the B24’s that bombed Polesti oil fields. I commented to a co-worker that flew B24 in WWII, about the pilot who had the propeller shot off one of his engines and made his bombing run anyway. His comment was” It was my number 4 engine.” In Vietnam I interviewed the commander of the F100 squadron at Ton san nut, I finished the interview and went to lunch, the commander went to war. When I got back to the office everyone was gone to interview the commander who had been shot down while I was out to lunch.

Subject: DECEMBER 7,1941 Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 0700 DECEMBER 7,1941 PEARL HARBOR

Pearl Harbor, on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii, (then a territory of the United States) was attacked by the Japanese Imperial Navy, at approximately 8:00 A.M., Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. The surprise attack had been conceived by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. The striking force of 353 Japanese aircraft was led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. There had been no formal declaration of war.

Approximately 100 ships of the U.S. Navy were present that morning, consisting of battleships, destroyers, cruisers and various support ships.

Two destroyers, the USS Cassin (DD372) and the USS Downes (DD375) were in dry dock #1 (with the USS Pennsylvania) and the destroyer USS Shaw (DD373) was in floating dry dock #2, approximately two hundred yards to the west. The USS Ogala (CM-4) was moored next to the USS Helena (CL50) near the "1010" dock, Naval Ship yard.

Simultaneously, nearby Hickam Field was also the victim of the surprise attack by the Japanese. 18 Army Air corps aircraft including bombers and fighters and attack bombers were destroyed or damaged on the ground. A few U.S. fighters struggled into the air against the invaders and gave a good account of themselves.

A total of twenty-nine Japanese aircraft were shot down by ground fire and U.S pilots from various military installations on Oahu.

The final resting place for 1,102 (75 were recovered) crewmen of the U.S.S. Arizona who lost their lives on December 7, 1941. They are still entombed within the Arizona herself. The sunken battleship is commemorated by a 184 foot-long memorial structure that spans its mid-portion. No part of the edifice touches the ship.

There are three sections in the memorial: The entry and assembly room, (a central or middle area) used for observations of the sunken ship and for ceremonies. Many visitors drop flower leis into the water from this section, honoring the dead. The third section is the shrine room. The room contains the names of all those killed on the Arizona and their names are engraved on a marble wall. Upon entering the shrine room, the reverence and honor it is was intended to inspire is immediately noticeable. All persons are keenly aware that this is hallowed ground.

The memorial's architect was Alfred Preis. After years of fund raising efforts that began 1950, the memorial finally was dedicated in 1962.

The USS Arizona is no longer in commission, contrary to popular belief. A flag of the United States of America does fly above the sunken battleship. The flag is attached to a severed mainmast of the USS Arizona.

In recent years, the memorial has come to represent all the military and associated personnel killed at Pearl Harbor.

All of the ships, with the exception of the USS Arizona, Utah and Oklahoma were salvaged and later saw action in World War II.

"The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man."

"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Though it is not customary for the Court to issue an opinion in connection with its grant of a stay, I believe a brief response is necessary to JUSTICE STEVENS' dissent. I will not address the merits of the case, since they will shortly be before us in the petition for certiorari that we have granted. It suffices to say that the issuance of the stay suggests that a majority of the Court, while not deciding the issues presented, believe that the petitioner has a substantial probability of success.

On the question of irreparable harm, however, a few words are appropriate. The issue is not, as the dissent puts it, whether "counting every legally cast vote can constitute irreparable harm."

One of the principal issues in the appeal we have accepted is precisely whether the votes that have been ordered to be counted are, under a reasonable interpretation of Florida law, "legally cast vote[s]." The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner, and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires. Another issue in the case, moreover, is the propriety, indeed the constitutionality, of letting the standard for determination of voters' intent- dimpled chads, hanging chads, etc.- vary from county to county, as the Florida Supreme Court opinion, as interpreted by the Circuit Court, permits. If petitioner is correct that counting in this fashion is unlawful, permitting the count to proceed on that erroneous basis will prevent an accurate recount from being conducted on a proper basis later, since it is generally agreed that each manual recount produces a degradation of the ballots, which renders a subsequent recount inaccurate.

For these reasons I have joined the Court' s issuance of stay, with a highly accelerated timetable for resolving this case on the merits.