A Modern Undergrad’s View of Guns, Fear, and Race

I have a very, very, very low opinion about Gates. He is dishonest, manipulative, greedy, a liar, false to his best friends, pretty much anything bad you can think about him applies. But he has never encouraged others to violate the law, which many wealthy black artists do. That’s one difference.

In other words Gates is ANOTHER POS product of Harvard (though a dropout). As Yale/”Ivy” League.

Was Gates trying to figure out how to make oil more affordable or was he discussing strategies to continue waging his war against poor people? I’ll try to catch up with him at the next local meet and greet to get a firsthand impression of how terrible he is.

Danny, no, we were discussing small nuclear and micro nuclear reactors as well as chemical catalyst pyrolysis and it’s role in reducing ocean plastics.
But my greater point is, I don’t believe the media. I don’t believe it when I agree with it and I don’t believe it when I disagree with it. I certainly don’t believe it when it tells me who to hate.

@jwtaylor. People loved Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy too. I don’t much care what you think about Bill Gates. You ever been to Epstein Island? Apparently you’d get along famously there.

I took English electives to broaden my outlook (The Dubliners, anyone?) while getting two STEM degrees. No arguing with the professors…was in the south where gentile respect was the norm. 🙂

If you like arguing with your profs, you should definitely sign up for this. I did. I told my profs they were full of shit, and they didn’t grade me down for this!

An interesting way to date yourself.

@Jawjuh and @strych9 Profs I talked with were usually happy when their students disagreed with them and engaged in discussion. But I acknowledge that some schools may not be like this, also that things may be different these days.

Lol…yep
I was building the equipment that put pacman in the tv screen and transferring computer programs over the phone with using modems. I learned to solder before making it into high school. But that was a time when Radio Shack was a place to spend money. One time, I even built a wired remote buzzer for a teacher just because of the cool way she taught class.

But truthfully, i’m not convinced that the versatility your talking about is what employers are interested in. It does make for a more well rounded human.

That city-journal article “Down a Black Hole – Even the hard sciences are no longer immune to the ongoing racial hysteria” is both hilarious and sad at the same time.

If you want to fix a problem you have to admit that it exists.

The Conservative position on life is fine, so long as you don’t mind eventually being taken over by Commies and executed or enslaved.

Talk of children in this context has long been nothing but pabulum. You can’t let the enemy determine the future and claim you care about your offspring. You can’t bankrupt your nation, demand “mUh SoCiAl SeCurItIz!” well beyond what was paid in and claim to care about the future either.

The list of things that fall into this vein is extremely long and Conservatives faceplant on nearly all of it.

90% of Blacks won’t vote for Republicans. H.L. Mencken wrote “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“…as long as it helps them stay in power.”

That’s a key point right there. For both sides of the political aisle. Too many politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs, etc. do not really solve problems. Back in my remodeling contractor days, I learned pretty quickly that the best way to stay busy (get more business from satisfied customers, and gain new customers) was to have the attitude of working myself out of a job. Solve someone’s problem, doing it well and efficiently at a reasonable cost, and you’ll be the first they call if another problem crops up. Good folks remember and reward good work.

Blow a bunch of smoke, to make folks think that things are happening, and you’re just perpetuating your job at their expense. Shame that it takes so long for folks to catch on to the racket that is right in front of them.

My wife was only ever pulled over for driving when black when she lived in NYC, never in GA for over 20 years. I’ve no opinion on Atlanta’s cops other than they are busy since the Democratic mayor(s) bought into the defund idiocy.
She had a family member killed on the streets of NYC so, yeah, she has a heightened awareness of crime.
The only cops to ever pull me over were white, and the last two were anuses.

Um, Danny, really? Think about it.

My stepsons are smart, well-educated (IT and lab worker) and stay out of clubs. My wife moved out of NYC for their safety and kept them busy with after-school activities.
As for clubs in ATL, danger, danger Will Robinson.

Addressed to Queen12…

Exactly. This whiny victimhood garbage is BLM, Bullshit Lying Marxism.
Vast majority of Negroid people in the US are best termed as BlaKKK.
Transparently hooded racists addicted to welfare and unwilling to recognize much less fix their cultural cancer.
Read the crime statistics. Facts are irrefutable.

Dude,
Any government $ needs to come with some ‘strings.’

IE: You get a government welfare check, you must submit to reversible semi-permanent birth control. And not ‘after the fact’ abortions, either.

NO MORE GENERATIONAL WELFARE FREELOADERS ON MY DIME.

This will NEVER happen, as LBJ so eloquently pointed out.

Welfare was supposed to be a ‘safety net,’ not a way of life.

They were married. They were both college students. They came from typical middle class backgrounds. They’re probably working professionals now. They used welfare programs so they could afford to buy luxury items. I find that behavior disgusting. I too was a poor college student living on my own at one time. I made enough money to pay for college as I went, make rent, etc. as well as make payments on a new truck, and take my girlfriend out on the weekends.

Not only did I work a regular job while I was a full time student, but I also mowed lawns on the side. My apartment had a storage closet where I could fit everything except the riding mower which was at someone’s house. If I could do that, then anyone could do it. People don’t want to work hard. They want handouts.

Yes, generational welfare is a problem. However, the bigger problem is the issue of morality and ethics. A moral and ethical person doesn’t want to take from someone so they can have luxury items, or so they don’t have to work, or work as hard.

Dude,
I also worked when attending Tech school. It NEVER crossed my mind to apply for ANY kind of assistance, although I’m sure I could have qualified. Left over pizzas at the end of the evening, plus one ‘free’ meal while on shift (used to deliver pizzas,) supplemented the food budget quite a bit.

So, yes, it is a moral issue. Our founders warned us that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were for a moral people and wholly inadequate for any other. (To mangle the quote somewhat.)

The exception vs the rule. The best thing the government could do to help families like your hypothetical situation is to do their best to keep inflation low. But they refuse to do that. They actively do the opposite because it helps themselves and their cronies. Then they entice those families with welfare programs which…wait for it…also helps those people stay in power!

If? No need to make up hypotheticals. He didn’t have 14 kids. He wasn’t even religious (hence his preference to scam the government). Inland was loathe to fire him, though, because a) he didn’t do anything on the job worthy of it, and b) he was from a protected class. I’m pretty sure he could have told them to pound sand. But if they were motivated they could have ratted him out.

The cost of education outpacing inflation has been notable since the 1960’s.

Back then and in the 1950’s you could attribute a lot of it to Project Blue Sky, which honestly wasn’t a terrible idea. We copied it from the Germans after we found out how they ended up with so many good scientists due to Operation Paperclip.

The cancellation of Blue Sky didn’t change the loan programs and, honestly, created a bunch of other side hustles for universities. Since the late 1970’s the program has gotten progressively more predatory.

The root of it is that loans for a new year are defined as inflation+x% (2% IIRC). No institution isn’t going to raise tuition to meet the new rate, that would be leaving money on the table.

The former President of OSU (Ohio, not Oklahoma) gave a pretty long interview about this from an administrator’s point of view back around 2011.

@strych9 I’m not familiar with Operation Blue Sky, but America’s university system is nothing like Germany’s university system. They don’t let just anyone in, we do. That alone weeds out the underachievers. Second, their universities don’t have all the amenities that a typical US university does, like coed this and that, gyms, shooting centers (yes, even Michigan State University has an indoor firearms range), concerts, etc. It is all about school, not extra frills. Third, Germany doesn’t include housing like we do, and we do it up big. Fourth, Germany doesn’t spend on sports like the US does. There are a few other differences, but you get the point. Comparing the US university system with Germany or any other European country is an apples-to-oranges comparison for the most part. But yeah, if the US government is going to give student loans at an ever increasing amount every year, universities will raise their rates to meet it and then justify the increases.

@Danny:

Allow me to enlighten you as to how you just managed to punch out a paragraph of meaninglessness because, as you said, you don’t know what’s being discussed.

Project Blue Sky was developed as a way to accelerate US tech development immediately after WWII based on what we learned from German scientists that we got ahold of via Operation Paperclip. It is, essentially, a method of panning for intellectual gold in the population.

Shortening a 100 year story quite a bit:

The German system, pre-war, was designed around the concept of improving on the Austrian school system, itself coming from the early 1800’s Prussian system, which was designed to produce soldiers. (There was a similar movement in the US, see Horace Mann, who in the mid-1800’s advocated for professionalized teaching utilizing the same basic techniques, lectures and such, as European university systems. This wasn’t meant to produce soldiers either, nor factory workers because major factories of that type didn’t really exist pre-Civil War.)

The German’s reckoned that the Austrian tweaks went in the right direction but not far enough. They thought that they could modify this to produce scientists and other highly educated people by using the system to detect and cultivate intellectual talent. Mostly they desired engineers and well trained professionals to run their various industrial and government systems, sorta borrowing from the Brits in a certain regard.

While probably not specifically in their mind, the idea of having someone like Einstein spend seven years in a patent office because the Swiss didn’t want him teaching or anywhere near a university, well, that’s a waste of talent. His bosses didn’t even think him worthy of a promotion, actually.

The general German concept being the use of “Normal School” to train teachers to a set standard, teachers who then worked in a public education system designed to be utilized by all children (or as many as possible) specifically for the purpose of discovering the smart kids and giving them opportunity, including assistance with higher education where applicable, which was considered a wider scale than most people today would probably think. Other talents were recognized an exploited as well via what we’d call “technical schools”.

The system worked well. It gave the Germans quite the edge in engineering as evidenced in everything from the V1 and V2 rockets to the ME-262 or Me-163 to the Panther tank, MG42 or the STG44 among a host of other things. The system produced everything required, personnel wise, for a society capable of mass producing a plethora of finely engineered objects.

In the US, until the end of the war, the public school system was designed mostly to produce factory workers, not soldiers or educated adults. Huge numbers of people never attended high school though, because it wasn’t available to them even in 1940. The university system was out of reach for all but the well to do because the universities ran on a combination of private tuition and state-level grant funding and many people, again, didn’t qualify since they didn’t even attend high school. (Ed Bernays talks about this in his book Propaganda in the chapter on education which is all about how to convince the public to fund education.)

Project Blue Sky, an umbrella term/operation, was a three pronged attempt to replicate the German successes in science and technology and even improve on it.

First, by funding public education K through post graduate in a manner that would allow anyone with the talent to rise to the top. Smart kids from poor families could attend a top university, on merit and legions of less adept people could become technically proficient as support staff with the bachelor’s system. This is also what created a demand polytechnics, technical schools. They’d been around since the late 1800’s but mostly focused on mining.

Many of technical schools you see today are because of this program. They exploded in use after 1945. This is why.

Second, the project also took people who showed promise in science at the PhD level and threw grant money at them with no strings. “Fuck around and find something cool” money.

This was spent in chemistry, engineering, math and physics with a large emphasis on the latter two. This is where the name really comes from, Blue Sky Research being that kind of research that doesn’t have an immediately apparent goal but is done for the sake of curiosity.

The project was, quite clearly a success in this regard. For example, went from knowing basically nothing about rocketry in 1946 to the moon landing in 1969, 23 years. Yeah, the Germans helped with that in the late 1940’s but we did most of it on our own. This birthed numerous scientific instruments we take for granted today and was also instrumental in figuring out the structure of DNA and creating what we’d call “molecular biology” today. Whole new areas of study were opened up.

Third, the program also interfaced with the private sector, particularly on the theoretical math, physics and engineering fronts, often for defense purposes. Many of the weapon’s systems that made the US a superpower came from this interface. Huge leaps were made in radar, for example. Or consider the jumps made in aircraft tech between, say, 1940 and 1958.

The SR-71 also owes a lot to this sort of research feeding into that program. In 1945 we had not yet deployed the P/F-80, our first jet which will have a top speed of 577mph, still behind the Germans who were over 650mph with the ME-163. The SR-71 goes operational in 1966 with a top speed of Mach 3.2, nearly 2400mph. Skunk Works was benefiting from this program, obviously, from the P-38 to the SR-71 in 27 years.

Blue Sky was canceled in the late 1970’s (’78, IIRC) for no apparent reason, which produces some odd questions as to why. Those are most apparent in the theoretical math and physics worlds but that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

However, proving that the most permanent thing in the universe is a temporary government program, the student loans portion of the program was left in place under the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and, within a few years, the Department of Education is created and takes over.

The loans aspect of the original program has continued and changed over the intervening decades in ways that make no sense, mostly because it was severed from its original purpose. One of the major changes being the way money is dispersed. Universities are given a massive block grant, which they dole out to themselves based on student loan applications of people attending the university.

The program itself has also ballooned over the decades, particularly after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, which has allowed Congress to spend trillions, probably several hundred trillion, that we don’t have. This injudicious use of national credit has created massive inflation over the decades, which the program remains pegged to outrun.

Overall, keeping a financial system meant to funnel people into college/tech school as a method of improving the scientific capacity of the country, yet fucking up K-12 and tweaking the loans program to create what amounts to a kickback system for universities has created enormous distortions in the education market post-high school.

This is one of the major reasons why you see Universities act the way they do. If the money’s there and the schools are all the same, why not go to the one with the rooftop pool?

I’m not going to get into a long discussion of how this system bears very little resemblance to the one you went through.

I’ll simply say that what really needs to happen is that K-12 needs to be burnt to the ground and rebuilt while the university system needs a gut-and-remodel approach that removes 80%+ of the administrators, who now on average outnumber faculty 6:1.

This is why colleges mostly hire “Instructors” who are not, and cannot ever be, tenure track. They pay these poor fucks like $28-$32K/year on average and discard them like trash after a few reappointments because at that point the Instructor could apply for an Assistant Professorship and enter the tenure track which requires an actual salary worth having.

Cutting the teaching faculty to the bone is how they afford to hire admins by the boatload and give them six figure salaries, which at this point is mostly a form of nepotism because they only hire likeminded admins who will support what the nutjobs already in place believe.

@strych9 you should write a white paper (or grey paper) on this school situation. I, for one, would be eager to read it. You could get it published easily, although you probably wouldn’t get paid much if anything for it. But if you’re passionate enough, you may be willing to though.

I’ve published a number of articles nationally. Sometimes it’s simply cathartic. 🙂

I could publish a paper but I’m not going to.

As I said to Geoff several years back: You guys think small. You want to beat the totalitarian Left in elections and shit, but mostly you don’t want to do actual work. I don’t want to beat the Lefties. I want to bury them for decades to come.

Writing papers doesn’t do that because, truth be told, the vast majority of Conservatives don’t read. They “TLDR” as a virtue signal and then complain about something online in stock bumpersticker sloganeering for virtue signal points.

And if they do bother to read and if I tell them 1% of the actual truth then they scream that I’m a “Leftist” or “drunk”. It even happens here.

The ones that do read are people like Bill Kristol, hardly friends of freedom and best treated like mushrooms.

But the sorting algo is coming and those it sorts out won’t flinch from the whole truth, they’ll demand it more strongly than anything else. And at that point, there won’t be a need for papers, bullet points will do just fine.

Until then, the best I can do is try to help a few other people gather the tools to get through that algo. But, they have to want it before I ever bring it up, otherwise it’s a waste of time.