Free Learner

How the Earth Was Made

When I was in middle school I had a year of "Earth science," which I actually remember as one of the more interesting science classes -- I mean hey, it beat weeks and weeks of binomial taxonomy a couple of years later.  Still, what I remember from the class boils down to the definitions of the following terms:

• igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary
• plate tectonics
• magma vs. lava
• core, mantle, crust
• Pangea

Hmm, yep, that's about it.  I may be forgetting some terms, but then, I may already have known most of the above terms prior to the class, since we always had fairly nerdy dinner conversations.  I definitely knew about erosion and the water cycle before taking the class, but I imagine that was also covered.

In lieu of schooly earth science, lately we've been watching episodes of How the Earth Was Made, a History Channel program (instant playable on Netflix) that actually manages to make geology interesting.  I mean, geology is interesting, but given the extremely long time frames it can be tough to get people too excited about it.

I figure that watching all 24 episodes of this show is far superior to my own middle school earth science class, and it's not a criticism of the teacher or even the textbook necessarily, it's just... computer animations and video footage are so much more informative than those textbooks.  And the information is up to date to within the past 1-2 years.  And the same vocabulary terms are introduced, only in context, at a point in the show where you actually need to know that term.  And you get to hear real scientists talking about hypotheses and data and their field experiences; science is not presented as dead facts, but rather, as an ongoing investigation.

Anyway, I highly recommend the series to homeschoolers.  But note that some episodes involve natural disasters (Krakatoa killed 40,000) and a few may cause kids to worry (the San Andreas fault or the Yellowstone supervolcano).  So choose the episodes accordingly.

The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 has been called by Arthur Conan Doyle “one human episode amid all the atrocities.” It is certainly one of the most remarkable incidents of World War I and perhaps of all military history. Inspiring both popular songs and theater, it has endured as an almost archetypal image of peace.

The above is from the addendum to an article written for schoolchildren on the truce at Christmas during the first year of World War I.

I knew about the Christmas Truce but had subsequently heard it was enormously exaggerated if not apocryphal.  Apparently, that's not so.  According to the above link, a few historians have verified that it really did happen and was quite widespread along the front line.  Which made me think: Wow -- for a day, or a few days -- they held a war and no one came.

What's more, this is not as unprecedented as people think.  Also from the addendum to the article:

Another false idea about the truce was held even by most soldiers who were there: that it was unique in history. Though the Christmas Truce is the greatest example of its kind, informal truces had been a longstanding military tradition. During the American Civil War, for instance, Rebels and Yankees traded tobacco, coffee, and newspapers, fished peacefully on opposite sides of a stream, and even gathered blackberries together. Some degree of fellow feeling had always been common among soldiers sent to battle.

In more recent times, he points out, cultural and language barriers have prevented informal truces from occurring in many battle arenas.  Nonetheless, their historical occurence, along with estimates that (for instance) soldiers only fired 1 in every 7 times they were ordered to fire during WWII, does suggest that sometimes the common people quietly rebel against war.  The elites, the CEOs, the war mongers, the intelligence mavens-- these are the men who want war, and bring us to war.  The Zbigniew Brzezinskis and Henry Kissingers of the world.  And when they garner the populations' support for war, it is always through false pretenses.  Lies, propaganda, and false flags (such as the non-existent Gulf of Tonkin attack, or the apocryphal Spanish attack on the USS Maine) are used to whip up fear and anger in a domestic population to allow for war. 

There's an anti-war book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that argues that warfare can be exhilirating and addictive to some of its participants, but also to whole societies involved in a war.  I shouldn't comment on a book I haven't read, but I would imagine that this process doesn't work quite so well without state propaganda.  When I watched the old series Upstairs, Downstairs they showed that many British were gung-ho for war against the Germans, at the start of WWI.  But that was on the basis of outrageous propaganda about the evil Huns.  Remember those Iraqi soldiers who knocked over the incubators of premature babies in a Kuwaiti hospital?  It never happened, but it's very much like the WWI anti-German propaganda.  Take all that away, and would the common people feel so inspired by war?  I doubt it.  It's just that war, because it involves death, enemies, and "the Other," provides for the most potent propaganda there is.

We are constantly being told how terrible human beings are, but the worst atrocities are committed not because people run amok, outside the control of any State, but rather, on the orders of the State.

 Except when, sometimes, they refuse.

College after homeschooling

Recently one of the moms at one of our homeschool groups held a talk / discussion about applying to colleges after homeschooling K-12.  My own kids aren't there yet (being only 11 and 7) but I thought there were plenty of useful things to pass along.

Basically, you make up your own transcript.  This will often be a combination of classes taken in some "official" format (online high school classes or community college), credit hours given based on the student's own home study, extracurricular activities (which for homeschoolers can be just about anything), and any external tests / proficiencies (such as AP exams or language proficiency tests).  There are various transcript formats -- these things aren't standardized among schools, either -- and you should experiment with which layout looks best for your child.

This mom's child had applied to 5 colleges using a homemade transcript, and none had asked for any sort of verification of anything in the application.  (3 of the 5 sent acceptance letters and the other 2 are still pending.)  If your kid reads 25 books on a subject, and they've been discussing them with you, you can call that a class, and no one is likely to question you.

One of the moms in the discussion found this a bit odd, especially since a homeschooled kid -- who can keep reading and studying until (s)he has 99% comprehension of the materials used -- is very likely to get an "A" in any home study course you list on the transcript.  She said it seemed odd to just say "Mom gave me an A".

The mom leading the discussion said that of course there are subjects which don't work well, for any given child.  A kid might love physics and despise chemistry, but as a homeschooler one is free to list an "A" in physics and simply leave chemistry off the transcript.  You could potentially list environmental studies, astronomy, or paleontology as a science class instead.

At some point I chimed in that school grades don't necessarily have any more integrity than an A your mother gave you, because a schoolkid can cram for tests, pass them with flying colors, and remember absolutely nothing 2 weeks later.  This was what I often did in school.  There are rarely cumulative final exams in high school, and for obvious reasons-- kids would flunk them in droves.  A homeschooled kid who has pursued their own interest in some area is likely to have excellent retention of information relative to a kid just trying for the "A" in their high school class.  And it goes without saying that you'll remember (say) a Stephen J. Gould book far better than a textbook.  To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, those who can write well don't get stuck writing textbooks.

Colleges do often want some sort of third-party verification of abilities from homeschooled applicants.  The usual PSAT, SAT, ACT tests are one source; there are topical SAT tests one can optionally take (say in world history or higher mathematics); there are tests offered by organizations such as Sylvan Learning Centers which can be useful; community college or online high school classes are a source; and letters of recommendation from academic sorts (tutors, music teachers, etc) are yet another.  Some colleges have homeschoolers fill out an extra, supplemental section of the application.

Rather than finding the discussion stressful, I actually found it very reassuring, because this particular family are not just homeschoolers but unschoolers.  I found out that on one of the standardized tests, students are asked to copy out a sentence, in cursive, which affirms that they are who they say they are and have not cheated, or whatever.  This was the most time-consuming part of the test for this kid, because they'd never studied cursive and were writing it for the first time.  I, too, have been thinking of giving cursive a miss (both my kids type faster than they write and always have)... but now I know that my kids should at least be able to write this particular sentence in cursive!

Lastly, it occurs to me that if your kid was 17 and you didn't think (s)he was quite ready to apply to colleges, he/she could always do a little test prep and take a couple of community college classes and pick up an additional extracurricular activity, and then apply a year later.  For homeschoolers I think it's often a more gradual transition from high school to university.  For example, one of the high school-aged kids in our group has a volunteer research internship at the local university, even though college is still a couple of years off.  And many of our kids take community college classes while still in high school.

The mom who led this discussion had this final advice: Don't think that homeschooling in itself will make your kid stand out, but don't worry that it will be a hindrance in any way.  I'd add that in the recent past, statistics showed that colleges and universities were accepting homeschooled kids at a higher rate than schooled kids.  I imagine that's partly because homeschoolers have the time and the freedom to study unusual things and/or to pursue unusual hobbies, which does make them stand out.  And there's evidence that homeschoolers participate more in the community and tend to be more politically active than schooled kids, which may matter to some colleges.

Widespread American protests

Here is an excellent 5-minute report on RT (Russia Today, a global news network) about the Occupy Wall St protests now going on in multiple US cities:

 

Not only is this extremely thoughtful reporting, in sharp contrast to what you see in the US media, but their guest is James Corbett (woot!), an alternative blogger / reporter.  (I've followed him for some time, he's a really good guy and does some great work, check out his site.)  RT frequently has such alternative researchers on its network.  One of the reasons it does that, admittedly, is to poke a finger in the eye of the US establishment, which fears these independent muckrakers. 

American and British media, which have global reach, have been waging information warfare for decades, more or less unopposed by any other major government.  (al-Jazeera, which seemed to have so much promise early on, seems now to be afraid of United States disapproval, possibly because we openly targeted their offices and reporters during the second Iraq War.)  Now there is RT to oppose Anglo-American media domination, and there's no question RT has its own agenda.  But because the US is an empire without any clothes, all they really have to do to oppose us is to speak the truth.

Max and Stacy now report on RT three days a week, in their usual entertaining style... do check them out!

MSNBC lying with statistics

Mike Adams of Natural News has pointed out an egregiously inaccurate chart created by MSNBC, falsely portraying the results of a post-debate poll.  Check out his screen shot:

A quick glance tells you Ron Paul eeked out the win, just beating Mitt Romney.  Closer examination, however, shows you that in fact Ron Paul received twice as many votes as Romney.

Okay, I thought, their chart graphic is wildly off the mark, so maybe that was just a mistake and they've since corrected it.  So I went back to the MSNBC poll page myself, and captured this image (as of 3pm Thursday):

Okay, now Paul is seen as being way in the lead, ahead of Romney.  Only... wait a minute, now Paul has 53.5% to Romney's 16%, which is more than three times as many votes.  And that top green bar sure ain't three times longer than Romney's bar.  So it's still effed.

I'm reminded of this hilarious Daily Show bit (well worth clicking) on how Ron Paul is ignored in the major media.  They are really obvious about it.  Apparently the people who watch TV news are mostly asleep at the wheel and simply don't notice much, because there's a gross unfairness here which even a child could spot.  It ought to piss people off, and it ought to pique their interest as to why the Establishment just hates this guy.

No, he won't win... and thank goodness, because they'd kill him as fast as you can say "military industrial complex" or "corporate fascism".

9/11: on the missing gold and silver

One of the first articles I ever read about gold had to do with the gold which apparently disappeared in the wreckage of the World Trade Center.  It seems, based on newspaper articles, that there had been $950 million worth of gold and silver under WTC 4 on 9/11.  It was located a few floors below street level, protected within bomb-proof vaults.  While severely damaged, WTC 4 did not completely collapse, and the metal should have been fully recoverable, even if it had melted.  Gold and silver are fairly inert and wouldn't have reacted with other materials.

Giuliani, however, was quoted saying that around $230 million worth of precious metals had been recovered.  The question was, what happened to the other gold and silver?  Doesn't that leave hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of precious metals missing?  Had there been a heist of massive proportions, under cover of the attacks on that day?

One answer, the one that seems most likely to me, is not as thrilling.  These vaults were apparently Comex vaults (Comex = commodities exchange).  In the metals investment world, it's widely known that the Comex does not have all the gold and silver they claim to have.  They allow people to think they're buying gold or silver, when in fact the physical metal they believe they're buying does not actually exist in Comex vaults.  See, usually people will buy and sell this supposed gold and/or silver without ever taking real possession of the stuff, because that's a major hassle-- you need Brinks trucks and insurance and you pay fees, and they don't make it convenient by any means.  Basically, all these people think they own metal, but they're just taking Comex's word for it.  "Oh sure," Comex says, "we've got your 100 ounces of gold here, right in our vaults... it's got your name on it, scout's honor."  But the GATA organization and some recent testimony provide evidence that Comex doesn't have that metal.  Because (in recent years) only about 1% of purchasers actually demand to take physical possession for themselves, the Comex has never been definitively caught in its lies.  It's like a bank that only has $1 for every $100 customers believe they have on deposit.  (And don't think that isn't happening too!)

This 9/11 story of the missing metals suggests that even back in 2001 -- when gold and silver were dirt cheap and nobody wanted them, when demand was almost non-existent and you could hardly give the stuff away -- even back then it would appear that the Comex had claimed to possess more physical gold and silver than it really had.  Specifically, they had claimed to have 3 or 4 times more than they did.  Today, that recent testimony I mentioned above suggests that they claim to have 100 times more than they actually do.  And that, my friends, is a balloon waiting to be popped.  The jig will be up soon.

A heist makes a great Hollywood movie, but I'm afraid this is just your generic Wall St fraud.

Doctors wrong about weight loss by a factor of 3

From the Independent (UK), in an article titled Scientists debunk decades-old theories on losing weight (emphasis my own):

If you cut out a chocolate bar each day you will lose only one-third of the weight that experts had thought. For decades, doctors have based their advice to those who want to lose weight on the assumption that cutting 500 calories a day will see the weight fall off at the rate of 1lb a week.

"This is wrong," Kevin Hill, of the National Institutes of Health in the United States, said. "It does not happen." The error has arisen because the calculation did not take account of changes in metabolism as weight falls. The body adjusts to reductions in energy intake (calories eaten) by slowing its energy output (calories expended). The result is that forgoing that daily chocolate bar containing 250 calories will lead to about 25lb of weight loss if it is sustained for three years, much less than the 78lb predicted by the old dieting assumption.

I don't go on restrictive diets, but on behalf of those who do, may I say: "Whoops!" doesn't bloody well cover it.  Maybe they should've based their claims about weight loss on some kind of... oh, I don't know, empirical evidence?

Mainstream medicine has apparently been running with an untested theory.  In theory eating 500 fewer calories per day should equal 1 pound of weight loss weekly.  Here's how the Mayo Clinic puts it:

Because 3,500 calories equals about 1 pound (0.45 kilogram) of fat, you need to burn 3,500 calories more than you take in to lose 1 pound. So if you cut 500 calories from your typical diet each day, you'd lose about 1 pound a week (500 calories x 7 days = 3,500 calories).

It sounds simple, right?  And that's the whole problem.  Nothing in the human body is simple.

Researchers and doctors must have seen, over the years, that things didn't seem to be working out that way.  But apparently, when the data put their hypothesis in doubt, they throw out the data.  That is, if people aren't losing weight at the expected rate, then they must be lying about what they're eating, i.e. the data are flawed.  Doctors didn't see that the equation wasn't true in actual human experience; they just saw fat liars.  People do lie (prolifically!) about what they eat and drink, but someone surely should've gotten to the bottom of this much earlier, and realized the mistake.  In the meantime, many thousands of overweight people who were diligently cutting calories have been disdained as fibbers by their doctors, on the basis of their less-than-predicted weight loss.

Medical folks should've known better for two reasons.  First, the human body is extraordinarily complex, and "calories in, calories out" was always an absurdly, ridiculously simplistic idea (e.g. see this post and this one).  Secondly, didn't they consider the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, during which starvation was a common danger?  And surmise, therefore, that our bodies just might have ways of protecting energy reserves in the face of a declining food supply?  Their simple equation, in which 500 calories x 7 = 1 pound fat, assumed that our bodies would not react to a sudden loss of 500 calories / day, but would simply burn through energy reserves to compensate.  That didn't account -- obviously -- for the possibility that our bodies might find a way to conserve energy.  There is very little respect for nature in modern medicine, else they might have realized what an asisine assumption that was.

 

My new favorite quote

 

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing."

- Gamal Abdel Nasser

 

A graveyard of paper currencies

Check out this post, which has a photo gallery of currencies which collapsed-- i.e. money which died.  The first example is a 10 Billion Dinar note.  When a government is printing currency with "10 Billion" on it you know things are not good.  I'm reminded of a guy in Zimbabwe who held up a sign: "Starving Billionaire".

One thing to notice is that it's a pretty long list, and it's by no means complete.  There were two instances of French hyperinflation, but only French note is in the list.  The Continental (currency of the American colonies) is not there, nor is the Confederate currency.  Poland isn't in the photo list, but they have experienced hyperinflation.  A few early Chinese paper failures are not there; I believe the Chinese invented the concept of totally unbacked currency, and were no doubt the first to experience a fiat currency collapse.

Among currencies that are not backed by anything, meaning that governments may freely create as much of the stuff as they like, a sudden loss of confidence in that currency is a common historical event, and an inevitable one.  People argue about the life expectancy of an unbacked currency, but I've not seen estimates above 40 years, and the US dollar has been unbacked for 40 years next month.  The paper dollar is past its life expectancy.

Maybe worrying about hyperinflation seems like doomer or survivalist thinking to some, but hyperinflation is neither a rare nor a surprising event from a historical perspective.  Just look at those photos.

 

Mass psychosis

This is a horrifying but interesting article on the use of anti-psychotic medications in the US.  It begins:

Has America become a nation of psychotics?

Apparently, in 2008, anti-psychotics surpassed every other category of drug -- even cholesterol-lowering statin drugs -- to become the number one most prescribed type of medication in the US.

Some other shocking statistics from the article:

• In a recent study, 1 in 5 children who saw a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an anti-psychotic drug.
• Because bipolar disorder can be treated with the newer (still patented) anti-psychotics, diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children rose by 40 times between 1994 and 2003.
• 18 of the 20 psychiatrists who wrote the current clinical treatment guidelines for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia had ties to drug companies.
• The number of Americans now classified as disabled by mental illness, enough to qualify for Social Security benefits, has more than doubled between 1987 and 2007, from 1 in 184 to 1 in 76.  This casts doubt on the efficacy of all new (expensive, patented) psychiatric drugs in general.

Anti-psychotics are inadequately studied in children, and may cause obesity and diabetes.  As with many psychiatric drugs there is also a risk that in a small minority of people they may cause violence and/or suicide.

Yep, there's a mass psychosis going on here, but it's not the sort the shrinks are seeing in their patients.