Nonfiction – Page 2 – education and deconstruction.com

The Strongman Mash – BONUS POST

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

There will be at least two more years of suffering under this Trump regime. Here’s a song about it in a nutshell.

STRONGMAN MASH

sung to the tune of “Monster Mash” with apologies to Estate of Bobby Pickett, the Crypt Kicker 5, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Trump did scheming for a power GRAB with the greedy Right. Our eyes behold, a traumatic sight, for this dictator with his cult, has damaged us all, and his inner circle has yet to fall.

He does his mash. He does the strongman mash. The strongman mash. It caused a political crash. He does his mash. It is extremely brash. He does his mash. He does the strongman mash.

From destabilizing the Middle East, to wanting a ballroom where his cronies feast. His sleazy donors all kiss his ass, to get deregulated by his top brass.

They do the mash. They do the strongman mash. The strongman mash. It caused a political crash. They do the mash. It is extremely brash. They do the mash. They do the strongman mash.

The fraternity is having fun. Democracy is coming undone. Many deaths have been caused by their actions, and the deaths have just begun.

The scene is shocking. Their greed knows no bounds: Trump’s muddled brain, backed by Fox’s baying clowns.

A political reversal is about to arrive. But for now Trump’s gang is still alive.

They do the mash. They do the strongman mash. The strongman mash. It caused a political crash. They do the mash. It is extremely brash. They do the mash. They do the strongman mash.

Out from his coffin, Trump’s voice does ring, seems he is troubled by many things. He stomps his feet and balls his fists and cries, I won the 2020 election, and Dems are CommunISTS!

He does his mash. He does the strongman mash. The strongman mash. It caused a political crash. He does his mash. It is extremely brash. He does his mash. He does the strongman mash.

Now his cruelty is uncool. Musk’s a part of his band. And his strongman mash is wrecking our land. If you don’t worship him, his mash targets you. When they come to your door, have a Supreme-Court-Justice with you.

But Trump can strongman mash. The strongman mash. It’s a political crash. Then he can mash. You’ll catch hell in a flash. Then he can mash. Then he can strongman mash…

The Dope

The Book of the Week is “The Dope, The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade” by Benjamin T. Smith, published in 2021.

In this wordy and redundant volume, the author mostly stuck to his subject of narcotics– opium, heroin and cocaine, but also mentioned marijuana (not considered a narcotic nowadays). From the 1800’s, there have always been legal loopholes allowing stakeholders to sell narcotics.

The cycle of changing politics, supply and demand of specific illegal drugs, enforcement efforts and violence, have become a cliche in both the United States and Mexico. The author mentioned France, Canada, Colombia, Peru and China in passing, but failed to mention other narcotics sources and hubs that might be relevant to the story, such as Bolivia, Panama and Central Asia.

Anyway, destroying narcotics supplies and distribution networks NEVER works when politicians and law enforcement are trying to get rid of certain kinds of drugs. In a few years, entrepreneurs will always have found a way to make money from other kinds of drugs, or other enterprises– such as protection rackets. The same old corruption and atrocities return, time and time again. Unsurprisingly, it is actually ulterior political motives and the profit-motive that drive the cycle.

Starting in the late 1800’s, opium was a drug whose regulatory crackdown was an excuse for a smear campaign against Chinese immigrants in Mexico City– the major makers of it. In the nineteen teens, Americans zipped down to Tijuana or Mexicali in Mexico to get their fill of gambling, the sex trade and alcohol.

In June 1916, the governor of Baja, California put on a show, pretending to ban opium and shutting down its distribution, and killed some Chinese drug traffickers. It was a charade because the black market on opium stayed alive and well and the drugs’ stakeholders paid the governor protection money. With the minimum portion of that money he needed to spend to stay in power, he did public-works projects and funded schools in his district, imposing mandatory education.

In the 1920’s, goon squads in Mexico City raided Chinese stores and arrested anyone with opium paraphernalia. That same decade, the state of California passed anti-vice laws that adversely affected the Chinese.

In 1925, in Mexico, the secret service agent who investigated and prosecuted members of a large Mexico City heroin ring, became the new chief law-enforcement officer, and eventually the new drug kingpin. The year 1936 saw Mexico again become a hub for illegal narcotics going to the U.S.

In early 1940, Mexico tried a new policy: opening dispensaries that allowed addicts to get their fix at a discount while still holding down a low-skilled job, in order to put black-marketeers out of business. Yes, street-crime in the local areas fell because addicts no longer had to steal to stay alive.

However, the head of the U.S. Treasury was against the dispensaries. He was “supremely pragmatic and with only a passing interest in the actual facts, he would go on to blame U.S. narcotics addiction on an almost comically incoherent litany of shady conspiracies…” He was the one who decided which countries’ narcotics were medicinal only, not recreational; only the medicinal could be imported into the U.S. The dispensaries were shut down in a few months.

President Nixon (with his usual “public humiliation, manufactured panic and diplomatic bullying”) started anti-narcotics hysteria in his first term. But the series of anti-narcotics operations implemented in Mexico by American presidents and law-enforcement from the late 1960’s to the mid-1980’s, never did reduce the overall addiction rates of Americans, because other countries picked up the slack.

Around 2006, Mexico became like the red-light district of Amsterdam. Former members of Mexico’s military in the Zeta drug cartel violated what in the United States were the “RICO” laws, amply aided by gun violence.

Read the book to learn a boatload more about: how untold amounts of American taxpayers’ monies have been wasted in all different ways on trying to fight the drug wars; what roles shifting power structures (involving different stakeholders including but not limited to PJF, DFS, DEA, ICE agents, drug traffickers and cartels), weapons (guns, grenades, bazooka missiles), herbicides, deaths (lots of them!), and marijuana have played in the narcotics shenanigans in the last hundred years.

God Help America – BONUS POST

The United States needs divine intervention. Here’s a song about that.

GOD HELP AMERICA

sung to the tune of “God Bless America” from the scene in the 1943 movie “This is the Army” with apologies to the estates of Irving Berlin, Kate Smith, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

While our president blathers about “me, me, me”

let’s vote to make sure our land is free.

Let us all help keep elections free and fair, heed our founding documents. Deeply, we care.

God help America. Bring back the love.

Democratize her, exorcize her of GOP’s “might makes right” from above,

from ICE and Fox News, to the White House, to the reflecting pool, filled with scum.

God help America. Land of freedom.

God help America. Bring back the love.

Democratize her, exorcize her of GOP’s “might makes right” from above,

from ICE and Fox News, to the White House, to the reflecting pool, filled with scum.

God help America. Land of freedom.

God help America. Bring back the love.

Democratize her, exorcize her of GOP’s “might makes right” from above,

from ICE and Fox News, to the White House, to the reflecting pool, filled with scum.

God help America. Land of freedom.

From ICE and Fox News, to the White House, to the reflecting pool, filled with scum.

God help America. Land of freedom.

Test Pilot

The Book of the Week is “Test Pilot, How I Broke Testing Barriers…” by Stanley H. Kaplan with Anne Farris, published in 2001.

Kaplan was born in 1919 in Brooklyn, NY. In the last several decades he parlayed his passion for teaching into a big-name corporate entity in America. Kaplan began a tutoring business in his hometown and added the service of preparing students for the New York State Regents exams. In 1946, he added the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” (SAT).

At that time, the SAT’s original purpose was to provide a criterion based on merit (rather than white male privilege) by which colleges would accept students. The test was supposed to be predictive of a student’s first six months of higher education. Supposedly, the SAT was not the kind of test one could study for. It tested aptitude– “developed abilities” acquired from life-experience.

In 1947, the College Board (a trade group that monitored higher education in the United States) created the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to administer the SAT and other tests. ETS is a nonprofit organization. More and more WWII veterans were taking the SAT in order to get accepted to the college of their choice, and have the GI Bill pay their tuition. More and more colleges were considering the SAT in their admissions process.

The hegemony of the College Board was such that it wouldn’t tell students (and their parents) their SAT scores. The scores were sent directly to the colleges to which students applied.

The author wrote that in the 1960’s, “I still supported the use of admissions tests along with grades as the best predictors of success because grade inflation was rampant.” That decade, Kaplan expanded his company’s service lines to include test-prep for the PSAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, DAT and MCAT. It also did test-prep for medical-school board exams, the passing of which was required prior to graduation.

In the early 1980’s, Kaplan’s business was allowed to take on a duty of the Immigration and Naturalization Service– a federal agency. At that time, there was a shortage of medical doctors in America, so Kaplan issued visas to foreign students to study medicine in this country. There were students from Vietnam, Syria, and Russia, among others. Fortunately, Kaplan also offered test-prep for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

There were controversies through the decades. Kaplan wrote, “I realized that the SAT wasn’t biased; inferior education in America was biased… I saw firsthand at my own centers what a difference small classes, higher expectations, and individual attention made in students’ academic achievement.”

It appeared Kaplan did have bragging rights in that he built a billion-dollar business, and truly loved teaching. It is possible the test-prep trend he started, DID actually help reduce education inequality across the country by imparting basic skills to underprivileged students (with scholarships) whose under-resourced school districts failed them. In other words, his test-prep business was a stand-in for providing basic education for students who wanted to learn but couldn’t, at their poor-quality local schools.

However, it is impossible to prove whether or by how much, students can raise their standardized test scores by taking-prep classes, as the statistics on the students are trade secrets, and there has been propaganda from all the different stakeholders from the get-go, on all the standardized tests.

The reader might notice that the original name of Kaplan’s business was “Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center Ltd.” That “Ltd.” means it was incorporated NOT in the United States, but in the UK or some other offshore tax shelter, and a place that would minimize the company’s having to defend against lawsuits!

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the author’s business history, and his philosophy.

Out of Thin Air

The Book of the Week is “Out of Thin Air, Running Wisdom and Magic From Above the Clouds in Ethiopia” by Michael Crawley, published in 2020. The author documented his experiences training for long-distance running-races, with an Ethiopian club.

Most of the time, the mostly-male runners worked out, one to two hours at the crack of dawn, and again in the evening, but sometimes, they ran at 3am. There are races going on all over the world all the time, but only a tiny percentage of runners win sufficient money to make a short few years’ career of it. Some Ethiopians have enough to retire after winning prize money from one race. They have a culture of running together, because they feel they inspire one another to do better, but of course, in actual events, there is cutthroat competition for big money, that can be won or lost by a fraction of a second.

The Ethiopians also vary the places they practice, because the change of scenery is good for the brain. They might go on a few hours’ bus ride to the mountains to train at an altitude of a few thousand feet. The author ran with the Amhara tribe, who are Orthodox Christians. They believe God will reward them for hard work and clean living, and they don’t get too cocky because pride goeth before a fall.

The runner might have a day-job laboring in a field, as a security guard or herding cattle. They might have to scare away oxen, donkeys or hyenas on their runs. The runners are goal-oriented compare to angry young men who are poverty-stricken and hopeless in Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia). The latter don’t want to work at dead-end, menial jobs.

Read the book to learn about: terms and conditions of agents or business managers who act on the runners’ behalf, their belief in witchcraft, how the runners can be exploited, the runners’ diet, why they are tempted to move to a major city or to foreign running clubs, etc.

We Will Never Ever Feel Shame – BONUS POST

Please Note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger. NO post in this blog is sponsored.

The following is what Trump and his claques, flacks and sycophants are singing.

INFINITE disclosures of their criminality will NEVER shame them into better behavior. Those disclosures are meant to inform voters about the actions of the Republican Party, which has held a Congressional majority for the last several years.

The only way to stop this charade is to vote out this rotten clique. One hopes this won’t be deleted again by hackers.

WE WILL NEVER EVER FEEL SHAME

sung to the tune of “There Is Nothing Like A Dame” (the 1958 South Pacific movie version, up until the “Hup two, three…” dialogue) with apologies to the Estates of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

To Trump we lend a HAND. It’s national securITY. SO ICE detention and AI data centers you cannot SEE. You little people are all losers and you are all lame. WHAT ain’t we got? We ain’t got shame!

We got women blamed and fired. We have distractions. We have SHOWs. We do speeches from our leader and defend against our FOES.

Put lipstick on the liberals’pig. We deny Trump’s brain is STALLED. What do we get? Spoils for us ALL!

We make world peace. Our country is the biggest and, the best. We protect all of you. We do it all at, Trump’s behest.

We will never-ever feel SHAME. Never ever ever. To us, it’s a great-big GAME. We never ever-feel-any shame.

We feel macho and we feel bold. We miss Epstein Island sex. We feel the rope getting tighter, and tighter, around our necks. We’re still strong and innocent, in your pesky hearings game. What DON’T we feel? We don’t feel shame.

Lots of things, we have done. We are still, in POWER. That shows we’ve done nothing wrong in any way shape or form, ha ha. You GLOWER.

We will never-ever feel SHAME. Never ever ever. To us, it’s a great-big GAME. We never ever-feel-any shame.

No other government’s the same. Biden failed the world. He was soft and lazy, and lame. We’ll put a tariff on his name. There is absolutely nothing about which, we feel shame.

Weapons of Math Destruction

The Book of the Week is “Weapons of Math Destruction, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy” by Cathy O’Neil, first published in 2016.

This hodgepodge of a volume pointed out the dangers of Big Data, whose name has been changed to AI. The software that collects data and does number-crunching that results in harm– the author calls “weapons of math destruction” or WMDs. Since the book’s writing, ALL aspects of Americans’ lives have been taken over by AI. The author provided several real-life examples of groupthink and herd mentality that has led to a toxic loop of self-deception and cluster-screwups.

The three elements of WMDs are: damage, scaling and opacity.

In software engineering, the cliche, “Garbage in, garbage out” means that a flawed process that generates inaccurate data (garbage) will result in an end-product of inaccurate data (garbage). When AI models collect data on a small number of people, and those data are extrapolated to an entire applicable population (“scaling”), there can be honest ineptitude or even malice; numerous additional people’s lives can be adversely affected. The software models used are opaque because they are considered trade secrets or intellectual property. Of course, maximizing profits is the number one goal of AI makers.

The author discussed the subprime mortgage crisis that resulted in the 2008 financial crash. In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed. The repeal allowed banks to enter the securities business. The securities-ratings services went hog-wild in their quest to collect huge fees from banks, labeling high-risk securities as the opposite of what they really were, while the banks bet against the very same securities they’d sold to their customers.

These perpetrators poisoned the well for everyone, so that new laws were enacted that made it more expensive for financially responsible, law-abiding people to apply for mortgages going forward.

In the 2010’s, students in Zhongxiang in China were slated to take the national standardized university entrance exam. There had been a crackdown on cheating. Approximately two thousand students protested outside their school, shouting “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you don’t let us cheat.”

American politics is currently witnessing this kind of unmitigated lawlessness and hubris. It waxes and wanes through decades, but now it is more extreme than ever because:

Since the 2008 financial crash, the profiteers’ wealth has been compounding, which has increased its power, as money is power.
The “president” (who some would argue is a dictator) is entrenched with the legal system.
Previous administrations were neither as litigious nor as driven to stay in power forever by rigging everything (including but far from limited to: a blood-for-oil war, insider trading, redistricting, launching smear campaigns against all enemies, sweetheart contracts with political donors, etc., etc., etc.).

Here is one last example of how poor Americans were the victims of expensive stupidity: Between 2013 and 2015, a deeply flawed AI system that screened unemployment-benefits recipients in the state of Michigan, wrongly accused 93% of the recipients of waste, fraud or abuse.

Read the book to learn about many more examples of the Orwellian juggernaut AI has become.

White House Fraternity – BONUS POST

Please Note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.

This is a song for all law-abiding Americans. Don’t hesitate to show that you still believe in democracy.

WHITE HOUSE FRATERNITY

sung to the tune of “The Addams Family” TV theme song, with apologies to whomever the rights may concern.

They’re sleazy evil criers, mysterious deniers. They’re altogether liars. The White House Fraternity.

The House is a greedfest for ’em, with a shrinking Congressional quorum. It’s impossible to ignore ’em. The White House Fraternity.

Beat. Cheat. Wall Street.

So vote out the corrupt leeches. Ignore the cliched speeches. We’ll correct the contract breaches of the White House Fraternity.

Freefall, A True Story

The Book of the Week is “Freefall, A True Story” by William Hoffer and Marilyn Mona Hoffer, published in 1989. The authors told a suspenseful story of a July 1983 Air Canada Boeing 767 flight that went awry. The authors caught the human interest element of the story as well, revealing biographical information on the passengers so that the reader would relate to and sympathize with the characters.

“Four more insistent beeps sounded, disrupting conversation. The cockpit was assailed by eerie warning buzzers and foreboding color-coded lights alerting them to a series of problems escalating in severity.”

As is well known, commercial aviation is an industry especially fraught with danger. There are always multiple causes for disasters. Flight 143 ran into trouble for the following reasons:

The Boeing model 767 had been launched only three months before, so workers had yet to work out all its kinks and update its three different flight manuals.
The plane’s different flight-related measurements used a mix of the metric system and the imperial system, so there was confusion, and there were miscalculations.
The Canadian agency that regulated commercial aviation allowed cockpit-visitors, who might be a distraction to the plane crew.
There were miscommunications among the pilots, the flight staff, and a myriad of workers who maintained the plane.
Air traffic controllers were still using the outdated system of “primary radar” at Winnipeg’s airport.
A delay on the first leg of the flight due to a mechanical problem, a malfunctioning of the plane’s movie projector in the rear cabin, and undercooked food, resulted in additional stresses for the pilots, crew and passengers.
The airline’s workers were always under time-pressure every flight, as time is money. Their employer lost money every time there was a delay, so they rushed their assessment of the situation.
The airline’s cost-cutting measures meant two pilots had to do the work of three. The workers who were tasked with different jobs spoke English and / or French so there could easily have been something lost in translation, and cultural clashes.

Read the book to learn the fate of the people on the plane and on the ground.

He Parties Hard – BONUS POST

Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.

As is well known, FBI head Kash Patel has been accused of wasting American taxpayers’ money on luxury vehicles and pleasure trips. Here’s a song about that.

HE PARTIES HARD WITH YOUR MONEY

sung to the tune of “She Works Hard for the Money” with apologies to the Estate of Donna Summer and to whomever else the rights may concern.

He parties hard with your money, so hard with it, honey. He parties hard with your money, and furthers the agenda of the Right.

Flying in style to see his girlfriend’s band and we wonder where he is. And it infuriates us. He lies about everything. It’s high time, the hour’s at hand, for the prez to let him go. And it’s a real pity, his behavior reflects the status quo.

He parties hard with your money, so hard with it, honey. He parties hard with your money, and furthers the agenda of the Right.

A year and a half has come and gone and we’ve seen his shenanigans. Most FBI agents really resent his presence there. It’s interagency rivalry with the DOJ every day for luxury perks and frat-boy play. It’s worth the risk. He lives for today. He doesn’t CARE.

He parties hard with your money, so hard with it, honey. He parties hard with your money, and furthers the agenda of the Right.

The irony goes, he can’t see his OWN crimes. For a long time, he’s targeting the New YORK Times. More truth will out, it always will. But Americans will foot the bill. He parties hard.

He parties hard with your money, so hard with it, honey. He parties hard with your money, and furthers the agenda of the Right. Out-of spite.

He parties hard with your money, so hard with it, honey. He parties hard with your money, and furthers the agenda of the Right.

He parties hard with your money, so hard with it, honey. He parties hard with your money…