Remember everything I said yesterday about the natural laws of bureaucracy?

Well, it was national news when the entire graduating senior class of Washington D.C.’s Ballou High School applied to college.  The school is in a poorer section of D.C. and is overwhelming a minority school.

Turns out, the entire administration of the school cheated.

But all the excitement and accomplishment couldn’t shake one question from Butcher’s mind:

How did all these students graduate from high school?

“You saw kids walking across the stage, who, they’re nice young people, but they don’t deserve to be walking across the stage,” Butcher says.

WAMU and NPR talked to nearly a dozen current and recent Ballou teachers — as well as four recent graduates — who tell the same story: Teachers felt pressure from administration to pass chronically absent students, and students knew the school administration would do as much as possible to get them to graduation.

“It’s oppressive to the kids because you’re giving them a false sense of success,” says one current Ballou teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her job.

The quality of education at Ballou for those who graduated was about as good as you could exepct.

Last school year, 3 percent of Ballou students tested met reading standards on citywide standardized exams. Almost none met math standards.

D.C. is about 40 miles from Baltimore, and politically, even closer than that.

Based on 2017 state test scores, 13 out of 39 high school had zero students proficient in math, the report said. Another six schools had only one percent of their students who tested proficient in math.

Doing the math, that means that 49% of Baltimore schools can’t produce a statistically significant number of students with proficiency in math.

According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, a proficient student has certain mathematical abilities including “apply the mathematics they know to solve problems arising in everyday life, society, and the workplace.”

Given what we know about Baltimore and Ballou, virtually none of the students that graduate have the ability to solve everyday math problems, like… how to make exact change, calculate a percent tip, or figure out the square feet of area given the dimensions of a room.

These kids are unemployable by the lowest standards of any industry.

This is what happens when you graduate a city that can’t do basic math.

I guarantee that these kids did learn three things in Baltimore and D.C. schools.

Not how to read, write, or do math, of course, that’s hard.

They learned that when they are unemployed, living in poverty and misery, that:

1. It’s because they are black/brown/[victim minority status].
2. America is racist.
3. It’s all Trump’s/the Republican’s fault.

Welcome to the laws of bureaucracy in action.

What the hell is up with progressives like DeRay McKesson?

Give them the opportunity to side with a mass murdering dictator and commit treason against the US and they will jump at it like a drowning person grabs at a lifesaver.

I cannot fathom the depth of the cesspool that is their souls.

I think we are living in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.  He wrote a movie called The American President which was sort of a prequel for The West Wing.

There is a scene towards the end of The American President in which the president chastises the American people about not knowing what leadership is right.

The reason this movie and The West Wing are so beloved is that only in fantasy land does a Left Wing president so so much charisma and is so effective at running the country.

The prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, apologized for how Canadian gays were treated.

Liberal Americans went nuts.

Aaron Sorkin was supposed to me criticizing conservatives in his movie, but like I’ve said before progressives can’t actually criticize progressives correctly in the media.

It is the progressives who are drinking the virtue signaling sand thinking it’s leadership.

Keep in mind Trudeau responded to Trumps Muslim Ban by importing Muslim refugees who are not integrating into Canadian society.

Trudeau can apologize all he wants  on behalf of the Canadian government, but when gay Canadians start getting tossed off the CN Tower, I wonder how hollow his words will ring then.

Everybody knows “what goes up must come down.”  It is the first law of science than everybody learns.  The law of gravity is immutable.  You can’t cheat it.  You an resist it for some time by expending a lot of energy, like flying or launching a rocket into space, but once you stop expending energy your craft falls back to earth.

The laws of economics are just as adamant as the law of gravity.  That is because the good laws of economics come from the same place as the law of gravity, observation of the natural world.

People behave in certain ways because we all have been influenced by the laws of evolutionary biology.  Economics is really just the study of human behavior with the medium of money.

People will naturally tend to self preservation.

People naturally expend the least amount of energy necessary to attain a goal.  If you are salaried, you are not going to put in 60 hours a week if you can do your job in 40, if putting in 60 gives you no chance at a raise or promotion.  Nobody gives away free work.

This is human behavior.  Every time a politician attempts to come up with a system, regulation, or policy that fights the natural economic laws, the only way it “works” is by expending HUGE amounts of energy in the form of money, and as soon as they stop their scheme crashes back to earth.

There are three natural laws of bureaucracy that are worth committing to memory.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

Gammon’s Law of Bureaucratic Displacement: In a bureaucratic system, increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production.

Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution

Taken together, what they say is anytime you hand any problem to a bureaucracy, that bureaucracy will make the problem worse because it is in the best interests of the people in the bureaucracy to have the problem exist in perpetuity to guarantee their future employment, and the people put in charge of the bureaucracy will consume more and more resources to never fix the problem, ever.

Looking at DC, what all the Democrats and a large chunk of the Republicans keep telling us is “trust us, this time the bureaucracy will be different, we promise.”  It doesn’t matter what the issue they are addressing is.

The answer that best satisfies the natural laws of economists is “do away with the bureaucracies.”

Unfortunately politicians are bureaucrats and are not going to vote for the demise of the system that feeds them.

Cute.  Very Cute.

Now do a gay Muhammad you dickelss, feckless, pusillanimous, yellow-bellied, chicken-shit, gutless fucking coward.

Joy Reid tried to sound deep on Twitter on the subject of fascists.  Unfortunately, her “deep” sounds more like a fortune cookie platitude.

Fascism counts on you thinking people who notice fascism are suffering from hysteria.

— Mkay (@JoyAnnReid) November 26, 2017

No, fascism counts on people who stand in the way of fascism getting their heads knocked in by fascist thugs.  The Germans and Italians who weren’t supporters of Hitler and Mussolini lived in fear of being killed, not the fear they they were thought of as being hysterical.

The amazing thing was this Tweet came a couple hours after Tweeting this.

This is the core threat to our democracy. The rural minority — the people @JYSexton just wrote a long thread about — have and will continue to have disproportionate power over the urban majority. https://t.co/fzBHaZ9kzR

— Mkay (@JoyAnnReid) November 26, 2017

That Tweet was a response to MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin’s Tweet.

By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them. https://t.co/f1SibnIGHv

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 25, 2017

So in the matter of a couple of hours we have two MSNBC big-wigs calling the biggest threat to democracy our bicameral legislature.

Keep in mind that America is a Republic, with a bicameral legislature, specifically to prevent the tyranny of majority rule.

Both Hitler and Mussolini were elected by the majority of their respective nations  with the deliberate intent that they oppress unflavored minorities in their own country.  Hitler blamed the Jews, Communists, and others for Germany’s failures.  Mussolini was more like Stalin, demanding ideological purity and blaming non-Fascists for Italy’s problems.

It is been plainly evident over the last year just what the Left thinks about Middle America and Red States.

This attempt to make the Senate seem like a threat to America is an attack on the last bit of government representation Middle America will have.

When 70% of American’s live in cities, the urban population of America will control the House of Representatives, and by electoral college numbers, be able to elect the POTUS.  Only the Senate, and its equal representation of the states stands to protect the interest of rural America.

The urban Liberal elite can’t stand the idea of rural, Red America having anyone look out for their interests.  Undermine the Senate and they have the capacity for majority rules oppression of one-third of America.

They are the Fascists.  They scapegoat rural and Middle America for their problems, work to deny them their civil protections, and then when they have control of the government, presumably will exact their retribution.

One other thing I saw during my Thanksgiving convalescence was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

It is the latest Sci-Fi movie by Luc Besson.  Besson is best known for The Fifth Element, which is one of the most perfect Sci-Fi movies every made.  The plot is good, the effects are great, and it has the perfect blend of action, comedy, camp, and enjoyability with none of the technology being a deus ex machina.

He also did Leon: The Professional, which is also a damn good movie.

Valerian was enjoyable.  Not quite as good as The Fifth Element, and is based on a French comic book.  The plot is decent, the acting by the main characters is meh, but Besson reminds you that he has the best, most creative costume, makeup, and effects people in the industry.   The movie is visually stunning.

The opening really well done.

Later in the movie, we are introduced to an alien played by Rihanna.  I can’t say I am a fan of her music, but she is a talented dancer.  Besson does a great job of showcasing a performer’s talent, not unlike the diva scene in The Fifth Element.

I know I have been told that I have terrible tastes in movies (I hated The Godfather trilogy and I don’t get why Casablanca is such a big deal), but if you have 2 hours and $6 to kill, this is a movie worth watching.