The Daily Parker

Yesterday, I posted about author Hilary Layne's argument that the whole-language method supplanting phonics as the favored method of teaching reading to young children is the principal reason that late Millennials and Gen Z Americans have such difficulty understanding what they read. In the video that I embedded, she maintains that whole-language instruction led directly to teaching critical literacy rather than critical thinking, which in turn led to a generation and a half of American college graduates unable to comprehend anything more advanced than the instructions on a Kraft Mac & Cheese box.

I agree that young (i.e., under-30) people today have an alarming lack of critical thinking skills, but after chasing down Layne's sources, I have some...concerns.

First, whole-language seems to have fallen out of favor, and phonics is back in. It appears that this shift occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet reading comprehension scores continue to fall, and young people continue to believe before learning rather than the other way around.

Second, I started to read one of the sources Layne mentioned several times, Charlotte Iserbyt's The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, and I have some...serious concerns.

Iserbyt was nuts. Not "mentally ill and needs medication" nuts; no, she was "John Birch wasn't right-wing enough" nuts.

Her preface started fine, though it seemed a bit alarmist in the first few paragraphs. Then I got into the second page and I wondered if I was reading a pamphlet from the 1950s. My brow had already furrowed a bit at "brainwashing by our schools and universities is what is bankrupting our nation and our children’s minds," but then I got to "The brainwashing for acceptance of the “system’s” control would take place in the school—through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification, which comes under so many labels: the most recent labels being Outcome-Based Education, Skinnerian Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction" and I uttered my first confused "huh?"

Oh, but wait. It got better from there:

In the 1970s this writer and many others waged the war against values clarification, which was later renamed “critical thinking,” which regardless of the label—and there are bound to be many more labels on the horizon—is nothing but pure, unadulterated destruction of absolute values of right and wrong upon which stable and free societies depend and upon which our nation was founded.

In 1973 I started the long journey into becoming a “resister,” placing the first incriminating piece of paper in my “education” files. That first piece of paper was a purple ditto sheet entitled “All About Me,” next to which was a smiley face. It was an open-ended questionnaire beginning with: “My name is _____.” My son brought it home from public school in fourth grade. The questions were highly personal; so much so that they encouraged my son to lie, since he didn’t want to “spill the beans” about his mother, father and brother. The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out the student’s state of mind, how he felt, what he liked and disliked, and what his values were. With this knowledge it would be easier for the government school to modify his values and behavior at will—without, of course, the student’s knowledge or parents’ consent.

I ask my friends who are K-8 teachers: did shadowy state authorities make you send them copies of these "hello my name is" assignments before you returned them to the kids? Or did you, you know, just get to know the students better?

She then goes on a rant about "the Hegelian dialectic," or at least a version of the same that I didn't quite get when I encountered Hegel in college*, culminating in the paragraph where I actually exclaimed "what the actual fuck" in my office†:

This war has, in fact, become the war to end all wars. If citizens on this planet can be brainwashed or robotized, using dumbed-down Pavlovian/Skinnerian education, to accept hat those in control want, there will be no more wars. If there are no rights or wrongs, there will be no one wanting to “right” a “wrong.” Robots have no conscience. The only permissible conscience will be the United Nations or a global conscience. Whether an action is good or bad will be decided by a “Global Government’s Global Conscience,” as recommended by Dr. Brock Chisholm, executive secretary of the World Health Organization, Interim Commission, in 1947—and later in 1996 by current United States Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

Only when all children in public, private and home schools are robotized—and believe as one—will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive-sounding “choice” proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotization (brainwashing) of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training—part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism.

The socialist/fascist global workforce training agenda is being implemented as I write this book.

Ohhhh kaaaayyyy...

The historically literate reader will be shocked—shocked, I tell you!—to learn that Iserbyt worked in Reagan's Department of Education, where it seems even they had enough of her after a couple of years.

If Iserbyt's book significantly influenced Layne's video essay, perhaps I need to apply some of that critical thinking I learned from my government minders in the 1970s and 1980s and re-evaluate Layne's conclusions.

I may have more to say about this tomorrow, after I flip to the later chapters of Iserbyt's book to see if she was perhaps being satirical. Sadly, I suspect not.

* Hegel was describing the process, not suggesting it as a form of advocacy.
† I was listening to Mozart at the time so my door, thankfully, was closed.

Meteorological summer ends in just a few hours, so this weekend I'm spending lots of time outside. Today, unfortunately, Cassie can't come with me. So yesterday, she and I left the house at 1:15 and didn't get home until 9:15. She got almost 3 hours of walks (including this 8.7-km hike to the Horner Park DFA), tons of pats, lots of treats, and extra kibble for dinner. And perfect weather.

She also met new friends:

And had some time to chill while I read my book:

Isn't she pretty?

Like I said, she can't come with me today as my cousin got me a ticket to the Yankees game at the minor-league park on the South Side. There's a chance the Yankees could win their 10th straight on the road this afternoon, so I'll be cheering them on. (For the record, the Yankees are my 27th-favorite team. The team they're playing is my 29th-favorite team. The Mets are 28th and the Cardinals are 30th. It makes sense if you grew up on the North Side of Chicago in the 1970s.)

Only 14 hours of summer left...

The pilot and journalist, who wrote clear and readable articles and books about complex topics, has died at age 70:

For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for “Rules of Engagement,” about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard.

Mr. Langewiesche’s account of the EgyptAir crash in 1999, which was profoundly enriched by his own aviation background, blamed a suicidal co-pilot. Egyptian officials refused to accept that conclusion, a response, he wrote, that was rooted in political and cultural chauvinism.

William Archibald Langewiesche was born on June 12, 1955, in Sharon, Conn. His mother, Priscilla (Coleman) Langewiesche, was a computer analyst. His father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a German-born émigré, was a test pilot for the maker of the Corsair fighter used by the U.S. Navy; he wrote a classic book on flying, “Stick and Rudder,” in the 1940s.

William’s father taught him to fly before the boy could see over the instrument panel. Later, as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Mr. Langewiesche helped pay his way through college by piloting air taxis and charters.

“Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.”

I've quoted him extensively in the Daily Parker, and for good reason. He will be missed.

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past:

• A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, London’s homicide rate was about 1.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.)"
• An economist I've quoted often on The Daily Parker looks at the entirely-predictable falling out between the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X and finds a perfect example of the worst corruption the US government has ever experienced: "both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance."
• Yascha Mounk sees it as the OAFPOTUS failing to build a coalition. (That this feud has erupted between two malignant narcissists and may be entirely kayfabe is left unexplored by both writers.)
• Jeff Maurer takes a different view that is no less depressing: "that farting baby penguin is a harbinger of the end of democracy (is a sentence that I thought I’d never write). ... Trump found a major flaw in our system, which is that you can get away with illegal stuff as long as you do so much illegal stuff that nobody can keep track."
• A tech bro with about the competence you'd expect named Sahil Lavingia used an LLM to create a script that purged more than 600 Veterans Affairs contracts in a partially-successful attempt to become the Dunning-Krueger Champion for the month of April.
• I'm not sure Slate's Scaachi Koul is entirely fair to Katy Perry in an article from earlier this week, but it's a compelling read.

Finally, I plan to spend a good bit of this afternoon on my semi-compulsory half-day holiday reading an actual book, John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye, his latest and one of his silliest. What would happen in the moon suddenly turned to cheese? Hilarity, in Scalzi's world. It's a lot more fun to read than any newspaper.

And then...dinner at Ribfest!

I had a lot going on today, so I only have a couple of minutes to note these stories:

• Not only is the OAFPOTUS's "new" (actually quite well-used) Qatari Boeing 747-8 a huge bribe, it will cost taxpayers almost as much as one of the (actually) new VC-25B airplanes the Air Force is currently building, as it completely fails to meet any of the requirements for survivability and security. (“You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft," former USAF acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter said. "And the answer may be that it’s too expensive for them to maintain.”)
• The Economist analyzes county-level data and finds that Republican areas are outperforming Democratic areas on a couple of measures—for now.
• Rolling Stone criticizes Ezra Klein's Abundance for playing into the oligarchs' plans, though I wonder if I'm reading the same book they did? (I'll have more to say when I finish the book.)
• Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, on the other hand, have some pretty good ideas about how the Democrats can get their mojo back, and "oligarchy" doesn't come up once. (For the record, I think Kamarck and Galston have a better take than Rolling Stone.)
• Times reporter Molly Young went to the "world's happiest country" in February and was not the world's happiest reporter.

Finally, a late-night club in Lincoln Park that the city closed down after shootings and other crime in 2017 will reopen at the end of May as a doggy day spa. Pup Social, at 2200 N. Ashland Ave., will offer off-leash play, a coworking lounge (presumably for humans), and a bar (also presumably for humans). The fees will start at $99 per month.

Yesterday Cassie and I took a 9 kilometer walk through the Lincoln Square and West Ridge community areas. If she got tired, she didn't admit it, at least not until we stopped for a beer:

Otherwise, not much to report, other than I started Agency, William Gibson's sequel to his novel The Peripheral. It's really good. I'm already a third the way done and should finish in a day or two.

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!

Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:

The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.

This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.

Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.

Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.

Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?

Meanwhile...

• The S&P 500 index of large stocks fell 2% yesterday and 3.5% over the last week as the OAFPOTUS started the stupidest trade war in history with our three biggest trading partners.
• Who could have guessed that China's and Russia's foreign-intelligence services have ramped up efforts to recruit US government workers, now that so many of them are legitimately disgruntled? Who indeed.
• American Airlines has cut hundreds of flights from its summer schedule because of the Clown Prince of X illegally firing thousands of government employees.
• Yascha Mounk does not completely understand the new world order yet, but it seems clear to him that we're in a truly historical transition.
• Paul Krugman interviews Nathan Tankus, an expert on the COBOL code that runs the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
• Charles Marohn is infuriated by the OAFPOTUS rescinding Federal approval for the New York City congestion pricing plan, even though he found flaws in its implementation.

Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.

Garmin periodically challenges its users to get active. About once a month they put out a distance challenge for walkers. This month, the challenge was to do a 4.8 km walk this weekend. Cassie and I just did that, as it turns out Jimmy's Pizza Cafe is conveniently 2.6 km away. It helps that we haven't had temperatures this warm (4.0°C) since just after 1pm on the 3rd.

Butters, however, did not like getting left behind. According to my security camera, she spent 18 minutes crying by the front door, took a quick stroll around my lower level, then went back to cry by the front door for another 10 minutes before going upstairs to cry in the living room. She gave up for a while, then returned to the front door for another 15 minutes, alternately crying and sitting quietly. I haven't watched the whole 54 minutes but I'd bet she was quiescent for less than 10.

I am sorry for my neighbors. Fortunately, the neighbor to the north is out of town. And frankly, the neighbors to the south have a 3-year-old boy who makes far more noise in the aggregate than any dogs I've ever owned (or looked after).

Tomorrow I'll go back to complaining about world events. Right now, I'm taking both dogs and my friend Kat's new book to Spiteful Brewing.

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out.

In other news:

• Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI causes plane crashes").
• Aaron Blake says "it's complicated" whether the OAFPOTUS completely caved to Canada and Mexico earlier this week, despite the "deals" with those nations having already been worked out by the Biden Administration, while Ruth Marcus calls the era that began on January 20th "the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history."
• Margaret Renkl reminds everyone that the Republican plan to destroy public schooling so those people won't get basic education continues apace.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has issued an order to align transit funding with marriage and birth rates, which will help places that don't actually have transit and hurt places like Chicago and New York.
• A woman has sued author Neil Gaiman for sexual assault, alleging serial abuse that occurred in New Zealand while she was his live-in nanny.

Other than the Neil Gaiman thing, which pains me deeply, this all goes to show that President Camacho will be a Republican.

First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th.

Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering:

• The Guardian has a reflection on Seoul removing the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in 2005 to expose the historic stream that the highway previously covered.
• Margaret Renkl praises the coyotes that live with us in our cities.
• Christopher Geier equates mandatory return-to-office policies as a manifestation of the sunk-cost fallacy, on a par with the Concorde airplane.
• SBA and SSA Inspector General Mark Ware pushed back on the OAFPOTUS's purported firing of him and 16 others IGs in a letter suggesting that the White House check with counsel's office and Congress first.

Now for the bad:

• The OAFPOTUS has called on all federal agencies to halt all grants and loans, putting $1 trillion of funds at risk and creating the first constitutional crisis of his second term. This is especially evil because it's using the bogeyman of DEI to cover up an unconstitutional power grab.
• Maytal Eyal has had it up to here with "weepy influencers."
• Anne Applebaum warns that oligarchs like Elon Musk have undermined European elections to a dangerous degree.

And, of course, the stupid:

• Because Google Maps reflects the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and because the OAFPOTUS directed GNIS to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to something too stupid ever to appear on The Daily Parker, Google will update the US view of Maps to reflect the new name. (Contra the Post article, Google's process has no mystery at all. They simply follow GNIS, as does Weather Now.)
• The OAFPOTUS lied (sacre bleu!) about reducing inflation, as his immediate steps upon taking office and his stated plans will, as everyone who has ever taken Econ 101 knows, actually increase inflation.

I might as well finish with a good thing. The temperature has gotten all the way up to 6.2°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 7.8°C at O'Hare. It was last this warm at WHQ on December 29th. If O'Hare can get up to 11.1°C, it will eke past December 27th.