'different learning styles'

This is a phrase that ed-school leftists seem quite enamored of.  What exactly does it mean?  What does it mean to say that inner-city youth aren't stupid, they simply have different 'learning styles' from suburban white and Asian kids.  I've never heard any specifics as to how these people's 'learning style' differs from that of other people.  Moreover, I've never heard any indication that this different 'learning style,' whatever it is, is remotely as effective as that of other people.  If the only difference between one 'learning style' and another is that one is more effective than the other, you should simply ditch the ineffective one, n'est ce pas?

how suicidal are we?

How suicidal as a nation are we that we would subsidize the least successful among us to reproduce?  Our welfare system should be providing strong-- and successful!-- incentives for these people NOT to reproduce.  I think the taxpayer would be much more amenable to providing a reasonable 'floor' of income, housing, etc. and the social services to support it, if he could also be assured that the number of children would be limited to, say, one for a single mother or two for a married couple on welfare.  Then we could concentrate on trying to help these people and their children make their way in the world.  But if they are allowed--or even encouraged, by higher benefits-- to dig the hole they're in even deeper by having more children, the prognosis is unavoidedly grim.  We can't allow these people to reproduce us into being a third-world nation.

synthesis

My right-wing views on reproduction and my left-wing views on environmental issues meet at this point.  We probably can't have a planet on which virtually everyone enjoys a Western middle-class standard of living and still have seven billion people living on it.

marketplace money

Here's a link to the 'Marketplace Money' website.  Look for the October 5th show about poverty.

http://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-money

There are many segments, but the thing that struck me about so many of them was that these people had many more children than they could support.  One has to wonder how many of these people would still be under the poverty line if they had just stopped having children at two (or one for single mothers).  There was one Somali woman who had six out-of-wedlock children.  What the hell could she expect?

People shouldn't have children they can't support.  That means that people on welfare shouldn't have children.  The welfare system should provide serious-- and successful-- disincentives to having additional children.  Certainly there should be no increase in benefits.  In fact, among other things, maybe there should be a monthly bonus for NOT getting pregnant, and if the woman became pregnant anyway she would lose the bonus.

irresponsible reproduction

This is one issue where I've become very right-wing.  I listened to a 'Marketplace Money' show on NPR last Saturday that made my blood boil.  I'll give the link and expand on this in a couple days when I have more time.  The subject was poverty and how people deal with it.  Yet all of these people had at least two children, and one had six, all out of wedlock!  I wonder how many of these people would fall below the poverty line if they had only two children per couple or one child per single mother.  These people are reproducing us into being a third-world nations!  More later.

the earth system

THE EARTH SYSTEM

It seems to me that we might have a better chance of seriously addressing environmental problems-- especially climate change-- if we started thinking of this planet as a congeries of interlocking systems-- the climate system, the food system, the energy system, etc.

This would be a different approach than the 'Gaia Hypothesis,' which is a kind of romantic biological metaphor of 

planet Earth as a living organism. Given that our species seems to have this technological bent, thinking of it as a kind of ubersystem might have more appeal.

We know that human activity takes place on such a scale now that it can have significant effect on these different systems. We affect the climate system by throwing all these greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere; we affect the food system by driving some fisheries-- cod, tuna-- to the brink of extinction; etc.

If we got into the habit of thinking all these related systems as part of an 'earth system,' then we could use systems analysis to 'tweak' it toward better 'performance.' This would become a habit of mind that would then drive public policy.

bumper sticker

There is only one 'Job Creator':  DEMAND.