Elephants and Jackasses...

This has been bothering me all day. I decided that I could at least give the claims made in the article a fair shot even though even my bullshit detector was blaring from the very first paragraph.

I went back to the article and decided to just look at the main claims which were:

The author lists this presentation as the source. The presentation says the numbers were compiled by the GAO report which you also cited.

I just googled the main claim and found this: Tom Tancredo muffs illegal immigrant murder stats by Jon Greenberg for Punditfact (a sub organization of Politifact)

It's worth reading the whole thing, but the "bottom line is this: Even the man who generated the numbers, which Tancredo then misquoted, expresses uncertainty about their precision." It was all a load of horseshit, horseshit made up to support a loathsome viewpoint that American culture is being erased. Tancredo then made it worse than horseshit for basically the same reason.

You can criticize the mainstream media all you want, but it is shit like this that is causing real problems. How much other outright bullshit does the right wing media push to it's voters? The fact that in 2016 only 27% of Republicans agree that President Obama was born in the United States is probably a good indication.

Why do so many of the articles supporting right wing positions turn out to be utter nonsense? Researching them always turns into running through a byzantine mess of self-referencing right wing websites that contain at best partial truths. But these partial truths are shouted from the mountaintop like gospel. The faithful let it hit their ears and pour out of their own mouths, but the gospel rarely holds up to scrutiny.

These websites live in a world devoid of reality and free of facts. Then again maybe it is just like Rob Corrdry said and that the facts do have a "well-known liberal bias."

 

For most of my upbringing the only feminist who had any influence on my beliefs was my mother. When I was young my mother had a big group of friends who were feminists but she ended up ditching them because they were assholes. I'd say those closest to me would identify as Liberal, though most of my friends aren't especially political. My best friend growing up was a proud conservative (though he's done a 180 since he went to college) and we'd have friendly debates about our ideological differences, and many of my extended family are conservative. I also didn't move to a big city until I was 17; prior to that I lived in small towns or the country, so it's not like I've lived in some Liberal bubble my entire life. As an aside, I'd say the fact that I spent my formative years living in a rural environment is probably why dislike a lot of democratic/liberal gun control objectives (that and I can't give them [gun control propositions] my full support without feeling like a hypocrite).

 

I thought this was a really interesting article.

Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go: Win or lose, the Republican candidate and his inner circle have built a direct marketing operation that could power a TV network—or finish off the GOP.

It goes into how Trump has built his campaign and the guy responsible for a lot of it is interesting himself. He totally hustled his way into Trump's organization and up the rungs.

The most illuminating bit is about the overall strategy for the rest of the campaign.

He barely tried to win the voters in the center. It wasn't ever part of the plan. It's sad when the strategy depends on the other guys not showing up. And even if he loses the article makes it clear that the political world post-Trump is going to be a fractious one indeed.

 

Not only are all those real quotes, but those are real farm kids. I'll give you some examples of a true rural high school

--We had to end practice early on certain weekdays because it was "church night."
--we had two team captains ditch practice to go hunting
--we had to cancel morning weights because the kids were out hunting at 5 am and not going
--one player (who loved to call black people "them colored boys") ditched school to drive a tractor in his buddy's dad's farm
--they had to close a bathroom a week due to the amount of dip spit that would be on walls and the floor. The kids would just rotate to another one. We had more kids thrown off the team for dipping than anything else
--the one black kid in school was nicknamed Token (and yes they lifted it from South Park)

I could go on. They embraced it. They loved being rednecks. They called each other rednecks. They'd fly the confederate flag in their cars and go "muddin" on rainy weekends. A fun night was drinking in a corn field and playing mailbox baseball. Opening day of deer season saw a spike in school absences. A mantra of several football players was "college is for pussies" (mostly cause they couldn't get a scout to look at them).

But if you point out that they're complaining about "black people just collecting welfare" while their poor asses were on free or reduced lunch? "I'm just telling it like it is" was frequently the comeback, OR their dad would be working if it weren't for those illegals!

See, being white and poor was someone else's fault. Being black and poor was because of drugs and them being lazy welfare queens.

Not all of them were terrible, mind you. I had a lot of students I genuinely liked and were decent kids. Even the kid who kept calling black people "them colored boys" was one of the most polite, hard working kids you'd ever meet (if you were white, of course). There were 2 gay students dating (who were bullied frequently but also had a large group of friends supporting them), and some kids who genuinely wanted to work hard and I'd support them as much as I could. The rednecks, though. Holy shit.

I spent my time there hiding that I was liberal and just listening to their horseshit. What was I going to do, call them on their racist comments? Fuck, half the teaching staff would say the same things, they wouldn't back me up. Hence the reason I left there.

 

My favorite day was going into the lunchroom and listening to a woman who was substitute teaching after retiring as a teacher. She was also the county chair of the Republican party. She avowed that Obama was a Muslim and a Kenyan and that proof would soon come out. This was in 2013.

 

On another election note:

Ted Cruz becomes second republican senator to say republicans will simply block any Supreme Court nominee Hillary Clinton makes, and they'll just have an 8 judge court.

Republicans are saying:
If we win, we go by the people's will. If we lose, fuck the people.

Which side is the potentially fascist side again? I forget...

 

Yeah it's pretty cool that one person's upbringing can be slightly different than someone else's.

 

They did dip throughout the day. Teachers knew it. Kids didn't just carry around coke cans from class to class, milking the same can all day, for fuck sake. They finally instituted a "clear containers only" policy my last year there and it cut back on the issue a bit, but not much. We only called a kid on it if he was being an especially huge dick. One kid, known for dipping, asked to get a drink from the fountain. Now, it was right outside my door so I always said yes, cause they were never gone long and I didn't care. I busted this kid's balls by saying no. He stared at me shocked, but everyone in that room knew he had a dip he needed to get out and couldn't swallow without getting sick. The class (who were also not dumb) knew what was happening because it was one of the biggest laughs I ever got teaching. They thought it was hilarious, as this kid just got all fidgety for about 5 minutes before I let him go.

Problem was, teachers did it, too. One of my best teacher friends would have a dip in his lip most of the day. It was just kind of the culture of the school. My thoughts were as long as they weren't blatantly obvious and didn't spit on my desks, floor, or my room, I'd let it go. I had bigger issues than doing 20 write ups a day for dipping. My philosophy was that if no one else gave a fuck, why should I?

As for the bathroom, In the process of putting that tobacco in their mouth, they'd spill (sinks full of chewing tobacco were normal). They'd spit for the sink and miss, or splatter. Same with the toilet (you did not sit on the toilets), spit and miss or splatter. There were no mirrors in the boys room, thank god. And yes, some kids were dicks who just spit on the floor and walls. Why is it surprising to you that teenagers, especially teenage boys, can be destructive dicks?

The guys at our school hated the men's bathrooms in our school because only one of them had doors. The rest had been kicked off or broken and never fixed (the building was built in 1977 and I genuinely think the stalls in the men's rooms were from 1977, they looked old as shit). They were always complaining about shitting in a stall with no door.

 

When I was growing up the first two weeks of hunting season our entire town shut down. Everything.

And like Juice said...we all had our rifles in our gun racks in the school parking lot to get a couple hours in before and after school.

 

I grew up in rural Ohio. We closed school the first day of deer season (Monday after Thanksgiving). The rest of the week was also usually a light week since so many people were out. I'm not sure what the issue is here. I skipped school regularly to go on ski trips. At least they were doing something productive for their family by hunting.

As far as the snuff issue goes, if they were real rednecks they would learn how to swallow it.

 

We didn't close school down for hunting, but there would always be lots of absences, which everyone understood and no one batted an eye about.

 

The point wasn't necessarily bad, just pointing it out as a reality in a "rural school." If you think that shit happens in suburban or urban schools for "hunting season," you're nuts. I'm not surprised it was the experience of most of the people here as I can quickly see most of the people here are rural conservatives. I could've guessed who went to rural schools based on your political views.

Which kind of sums up the entire point of my post. These kids went to a rural school. Most of them didn't bat an eye about being casually (or more) racist. I think my school was worse than most (there is a well known Klan bar fairly close that kids would talk about their dad going to all the time), but conservative values are normal at a rural school, and casual racism wasn't stopped in the way it would be in a suburban or urban school.

Now for the record, I've worked in all 3. My student teaching was in an urban school and my first job was in a large suburban school. The differences in culture were huge.

In either of those suburban or urban places, the phrase "colored folks" would have resulted in a suspension. In the urban school it also would've resulted in the ass kicking of the century. In a rural school, that was the nice way of saying "niggers and spics," and teachers were happy when kids held back.

In suburban school, there was a drop off in attendance when the new call of duty came out. In rural schools it was when hunting season began.

In suburban schools we'd catch kids smoking. Rural school was dipping.

Suburban kids threw parties at the rich kids house. Rural parties were in cornfields.

Suburban schools had more stuck up asshole rich kids who were dicks to teachers for existing. They were very upfront about it. Suburban school kids have a sense of entitlement about calling teachers assholes.

Rural schools had kids who were more "polite" but would put hateful shit on twitter. It took me about a year to figure out a student calling a teacher sir was really calling him a dick. I didn't get a lot of "sirs" because I just let them call me by my last name and I was pretty laid back as a teacher (if it didn't bother class and their work was done, go ahead and watch movies on your laptop, I don't care, as an example). Some teachers would get offended by students using just a last name and demand to be called "mister." They'd get called "sir," followed by the student posting "mr blah is a giant cocksucker" on twitter. Like a teacher would say something condescending and the kid would say "yes sir." This meant "you're a dick." The more condescending teachers either didn't care or were oblivious and thought it was respect. They didn't read twitter. I was forced too after one of our football players called out another team on twitter and it almost resulted in a parking lot fight. As the only tech savvy person (meaning owning a smart phone) on coaching staff I became twitter police, so I read all that shit.

In the rural school kids didn't have computers or internet access way out where they lived and couldn't afford it. In urban schools, kids didn't have internet access because they couldn't afford it. Okay, some things were the same.

Point is, the culture of a school where kids attend does in fact affect their politics more often than not. Hence rural areas are conservative and urban areas are liberal.

 

We try to avoid delivering to Michigan during rifle season, at least north of Kalamazoo. Way too many bullets flying around for comfort up there. And D26, I'm not sure where in Indiana you grew up but field drinking (or dirt road when you didn't want to get your truck as dirty) was a staple of my school years, though I did go to college. I see you rip on rural and suburban schools but say little about urban schools. Are we to assume they were a beacon of hope and all that is right in the world vs the others?

 

The FBI has just reopened the Hillary e-mail case after discovering the existence of more e-mails relevant to the investigation.

 

I doubt that it will lead to anything. Probably won't change the polls much either. Hillary is all but scandal proof at this point. Her supporters that have accepted that she's a piece of garbage have decided on the 'at least she's not Trump' stance.

 

Oh, I agree...it's not going to change anything. It's just another twist in this election, the FBI investigating a candidate 11 days before the election.

I'll just be glad when the whole thing is over, I'm so fatigued by the whole debacle.

EDIT: It's kind of funny, every news outlet...even Huffpo...is reporting the story. Meanwhile over at msnbc.com....not a word.

 

No no, they had their issues, too. All of these had their positives and negatives.

Urban positives: kids who want out work harder than any other kids I've seen in any other system; discipline is strict and carried out quickly, actually made this the easiest of the three schools I worked at to control the classroom because discipline expectations were clear and unflinching because they had to be to handle the "difficulties" of an urban school

Urban negatives: gang graffiti left every non-office bathroom closed. Uniforms to avoid gang violence. Kids who didn't work could not be convinced it would help them (I.e. They'd given up on themselves), tech access nonexistent outside the school, I was told "never give homework, it won't get done," minimal parental involvement (I went an entire parent teacher night and met two parents of 150 students total), by far the worst standardized test scores, mean job security was minimal at best, schools were poor as shit and used textbooks from the 1990s in 2010

Suburban positives: more money and internet access; high achieving students, you never have to worry about test scores (tests are basically made for suburban schools), lots of options for teaching, will complete homework or face wrath of parents for zeroes, most involved parents

Suburban negatives: unreal sense of entitlement (I.e. I'm here, give me an A), students not exactly shy about being dicks to teachers they dont like, this goes along with the entitlement above, most involved parents (yes this can be both, depending on the parents)

Rural school positives: hardest working students as a whole, if you target their interests (meaning more tech and vocational classes to keep them interested in school when you know they're not going to college), like suburban schools you rarely have to worry about test scores (only slightly more than suburban), most polite of the students (all three groups have twitter trolls, that is actually the same no matter where you go), less parental involvement than suburban school but more than urban (again, can be both positive and negative)

Rural school negatives: dip spit and leaving bathrooms closed, racism was prevalent and generally accepted as a fact of life, lack of tech and internet access, was told "never give these students homework, it won't get done," for different reasons than urban schools but same basic idea, less parental involvement than suburban school but more than urban, and god help you if you want to teach about any religion other than Christianity or that the civil war was not, in fact, the war of Northern aggression, as you'd be met with at least 1 angry parent call ("why are you teaching my kid about muslims in world history!" It's on the state standards I have to follow, muslims have been important to the development of the world, etc. "I don't care don't indoctrinate my kid!")

Again, these are just my personal experiences in working in all three of these environments. I wouldn't want to teach in a rural school again because I just couldn't deal with the casual (and sometimes outright) racism, and I suppose if I must teach again (I hope to Christ I don't) I'd want a suburban school where job security worries and state takeover concerns were minimal compared to urban schools, and they had plenty of money for high end facilities and materials compared to still using overhead projectors in 2010 in an urban school.

Edit: Enough about schools. Back to your regularly scheduled "Hillary is the devil incarnate here to take your guns and be das fuhrer and she has committed more crimes than any politician in history and makes Nixon look like a fucking angel and TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP GRAB 'MURICA BY THE PUSSY!"