Substitute teacher duty is a contrary exercise: terror signaling celebration. The entrance of the “sub” into the classroom signals Mardi Gras. A remarkable pageant to behold, an ordinary ritalin riddled middle school class alchemically converted into a celebration of puberty in its most lovable form. Everything upside down for the day while the Prince of Fools attempts to rule. Originally for me, substituting was merely a means of making quick bucks to furnish other projects. At that level, education is out of the question. Only later did classroom observations of youngsters so wide of the mark of education’s beam— let alone morality, let alone human standards— hit. Black Board Jungle be my guide.

☞ The newer looser classroom standard borne of baby mania indulgence, mixed in with generous shots of progressive deconstruction, brought off an Infantada wherein infantile minds rule. This sets the developmental stage for hapless individuals, regardless of age, bringing off our own Reign of Error. Doubtless, historians won’t call it that, but the concept serves here.

☞ To be more specific, during the revolutionary Reign of Terror, heads were chopped. Tribunals ruling with an extremely slanted sense of justice were mounted on high benches (slang for them was montagnards, the mountaineers) from whence they delivered their harsh sentences. In modern America, montagnards are still operating in congress much the same way, as exemplified by high-mounted bogus impeachment hearings. But those are merely show trials to keep undesirable opposition in line. A more fashionable development should go instead by the more accurate Reign of Error.

☞ In such a reign, heads are not chopped— how would they serve “the cause?” Heads are simply rendered full of the sugared innocence of fairy platitudes in order to disguise necessary blood sacrifice— all for achieving sweetness of state. Beginning at a very young age the Infantada requires sugar in all things besides food, whether in film or entertainment or instruction. Sustenance for future endeavors requires a sweet coating of platitudes for open violence to go down easier.

☞  Lest we think this is merely national, be advised that the Infantada is not just a domestic ocurrence. It has had many homes for quite some time. Just a couple of examples from the fount of progressivism, Europe.

A “Techno-Messe” in Reidenberg, Germany, shows how the European mind and manner is on a similar track of coddling youngsters out of any seriousness to life. That’s what a church is supposed to be, nay? Answer some of the deeper questions? But that isn’t the aim of the young pastor producing a techno-mass in his kirche. “Rave-o-lution in the Church” offers to the jungen fans loud music sporting a big beat so dear to the young heart, not to mention strobe lighting (maybe shooting from the altar). Johan Sebastian Bach need not apply. Using a word so dear to the American educationist, that display seems highly inappropriate. Maybe inappropriate, but rather fitting after we learn that the church producing the Techno-Mass is in fact located near the site of the Frankfurt School in obviously Frankfurt, Germany. Progressive education got its infamous start in large part there, as fawning American academic educationists like John Dewey became fans. In that locale techno-Mass seems appropriate.

☞  Another European touch is recognizable by American protesters sporting Guy Fawkes masks. Now why might a silly mask of a 17th century Englishman executed for the Gun Powder Plot be significant on today’s troubled American streets? And why? Is it because Fawkes was an undesirable Catholic caught plotting to blow up Parliament and Charles I. By that light we see a connection in the revo mind: there’s little difference in blowing up an English Tory or a Maga Republican. By which we can smell an English Marxist in the woodpile.

☞ From the point-of-view of a former “sub,” laziness and corruption negated a better system of a respectfully controlled learning environment, which in turn allowed the infantada. Regular teachers were aware of loony substitute behavior, which was preparation for nonsense in the regular classroom, but due to a high chicken manure content, chose to ignore it. In fact, substitutes were considered by some union teachers to be scabs. Women teachers especially seemed to coddle the breakdown, playing to students as fellow outlaws, keeping low profile for a job with no heavy lifting. And as the infantada grew louder and more violent, administrators learned survival kow tow bending like Chinese peasants.

☞ Not to be misunderstood about the mission of teaching in general. It would be foolish to condemn a student body who through the decades have grown to turn out some magnificent works and cures and inventions within a unique empire. The condemnation is solely aimed at the corruption festering in an overblown system, classroom bullies, administrators bending over for the most asinine concessions, union thugs rewriting pedagogy as a horror show. At the same time awakened parents themselves are bullied by police-backed administrators while their children are subjected to the most rank techniques of personality dishevelment and denied basic knowledge to boot. In other words, this is against kids learning inhumane garbage to act inhumanely, not against kids themselves. After all, we were them and they are us.

☞ One of the saddest stories I encountered was from a train agent at New York Metro, working the A line. He wrote of other reasons for quitting the job, but what kicked it off was watching one obviously committed student subjected to repeated, almost daily viciousness, of a gang of bullies who made it sport to heckle and slap him around. Bullies come in all colors, but everyone involved in the story was black, if that makes a difference. Sometimes the intrepid student would show up with bruise marks or a bloused lip. Sometimes he didn’t show up for a while, and then return to be reprocessed by his fellow scholars. The thing that got to the agent observing this terrible progression most was the young man’s persistence. He just kept coming, more books and papers thrown on the tracks. That was the most heartbreaking. One can only wonder what happened to that determined young soul. It’s almost certain that if he survived physically, he made it out of that rat hole. Doubtful I’ll ever meet him, but if so, drinks are on me.

☞ The percentage of regular teachers attacked in the classroom grows higher annually. The attacks are also more spectacular and film worthy, now that the doodle box video is spying. An acquaintance told recently of a teacher friend who one day showed up with bruise marks on his arm. When asked of it, he shrugged, saying it’s just something that happens about every week. This is not in an inner city high school either, but at an average middle-class school district of southern Washington. A regular male teacher readily bearing student-caused bruises weekly— that would be chicken manure coming home to roost.

☞ So images of police stations burning and department store looting and old ladies mauled in the subway just seem to be a logical progression from Mardi Gras in the classroom. Kids didn’t yet have printed placards or riot weapons distributed in class. They were just having a good time mauling authority. And it was interesting to note how most students pitched into the mayhem only after goading by the leaders. Then everyone turned so actively obnoxious they almost had to be peeled off the walls. Infant minds respond to imitation best— all the way up to menopause.

☞ Then it’s not unimaginable to extrapolate how the Reign of Error has extended into all fields. Childish indulgence only institutes lack of respect for instituted forms, not to mention yielding to the Law of Lazy. No homework in school, safe spaces on the job. LOL has become a way of life, efficiency models traded for gender and racial reclassification. Manufacturing and marketing, for example, has slipped into standards so low that consumer expectation is more defensive than satisfactory. We know by experience that the old thing being replaced in the house is superior to the scuzzy item replacing it; it’s almost universal law until the one purchase in hundreds yields a replacement item actually better. Cheap mass production, products cheapened from one cheesy model to the next, and manufactured by foreign slave labor, children not fortunate enough to be indulged into worthlessness. Boiled down into a theorem: Newer is rarely better, while Error smiles smugly from his perch.

☞ So much crap— especially items hitting home personally. Examples of screw heads that twist off and battery failure in a new laptop amount only to low hanging fruit. But crap flows everywhere. What’s in the News? “Lawfare:” vengeance substituting for justice— deconstructing the Constitution is easier than following it. Just about every academic subject is revamped to fit a code, a stupid precedent, and LOL. In the academy, literature has been demolished, and science itself is subjected to the Reign of Error big time.

☞ Consider the platitude of “settled science.” And here we thought Orwell was dead. He must still be around conjuring such concepts for satire. But if Orwell didn’t come up with that dozy— settled science— whoever did has earned the Peter Prize for achieving the highest level of incompetence. And sinister incompetence, too. What a dark gloomy shadow the notion of settled science has cast on scientific research itself— which is never settled. Possibly the most idiotic self-contradictory expression floating in the toilet bowl, never being settled is what makes it science. Science comes from scio, to know. And what’s to know? Well, science, when it’s working properly, wants to discover. When it discovers, it wants to know the better course of study on past discovery, an improved thesis, a sharper view, a deeper dive for truth— and never settled! This used to be the search largely conducted by academies of learning. Only those institutions seem to have streamlined the scientific method.

☞ In a recent article from Epoch Times, [16 Aug 2023] Princeton professor emeritus William Happer in reference to a recent proposal for carbon emissions control condensed the situation: “The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, [italics added] is commonly employed in these studies by the EPA in the Proposed Rule.” The rule referred to is another squat of control supposedly fighting that best-loved bugaboo, CO2.

☞ Cherry picking data is what lazy or malevolent scientists do when ignoring the inductive method of analysis. They are likely to be those same churlish students coddled through college and still ragging on authority. The inductive method, formally the scientific method, used to be the study of phenomena which put science up on its pedestal. Not to be pedantic, but as a reminder, inductive analysis followed the method of gathering data from a hypothesis and coming to a credible conclusion based on all the data collected. But that was supposedly too tedious for folks who want to draw very large conclusions on a tiny piddling phenomenon like climate.

☞ As professor Happer indicates, bureaucratic scientists, acting as corporate henchmen, have obviously resorted to deductive analysis. After all, deductive analysis follows more obediently the Law of Lazy. Deductive analysis does exactly what Happer suggested: cherry-picking data and ignoring contradictory data. Ergo, the LOL scientist gets his happy conclusion with less work— and loads of professional rewards.

☞ To rephrase: the deductive method works when the “scientist” seeks data most congenial to his thesis, as well as his salary. The Law of Lazy snaps into effect and the data gatherer goes merrily a-picking. This scheme is another favor from our academic deconstructionist friends, probably the ones who raised hell in middle school when the sub entered the classroom, singing along with Pink Floyd: We don’t need no education…!

☞ According to some reports on academic studies, it appears that deductive analysis got its snout under the academy tent in the social sciences, where one would expect soggy inquiry. You know, the kind that exists by survey: Do redheads masturbate more than blondes, and by what percentage? Now it appears the method has also been drafted by the physical sciences, schools formerly operating under the distinction of studying “pure sciences.” Pure science now serves mystical weathermen. Er, excuse me, weather persons.

☞ Weather issues offer perfect examples of data cherry-picking. Climate study opens up a whole smorgasbord of unverifiable issues, with CO2 as the main course. Meantime the Earth’s surface and oceans are verifiably bombarded by the effects of decaying entropy on a scale so wide it should attract every field of science and then some, a veritable plethora of shit. Entropy and dystrophy, destruction of form and matter– on a platter. Super-expansion of population and its effect is a good start. Or the stirred up world spawning migrations of very unhappy campers suffering not only starvation, but what Baudelaire called “the desert of the soul.” Desecration of food supply. Oceans becoming sewers. Male fish turned female from chemicals in the water, others dying from trash. Fresh water itself disappearing from Earth’s surface. The disappearance of birds, besides multitudes of other species. And on and on and on, while politicos pick on CO2, which at least sustains plant life.

☞ For comparison to a similarly loony scientific theory applied in the old Soviet Union, one could check out the brutal agricultural policies which caused the starvation of Ukranians by the millions discussed in The Trying Times entry of 21 Feb 2022, “The New Green Raw Deal.” The subject of that issue was an agricultural “scientist,” Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendel’s established theories on plant germination. That’s the thing about these cultural Rasputins. They push credibility way out to meet and greet gullibility. Seems to work well on true believers, as is visibly working today across the fruited plain.

☞ And worst of all, think of poor Francis Bacon! The renaissance man who charged up western science with the inductive method: he must not only be rolling, but heaving in his grave.

☞ When contemporary commentators for the most part struggle for root causes of this universal disturbance, most are only willing to go back a generation or so. Generations of teacher maulers now graduate with serial alphabet labels like X and Z. The 60s are spoken of as ancient days. That’s where literature has the advantage. It’s got seven-league boots able to wade into the mire of the past. It takes a while to figure how Error reigning on this current calendar day matches up with earlier ones sharing similar delusions. The problem is simplified in literature. Some rather brilliant minds wrote stories from their vantage point, with a rather uncanny perception, about shapes of society: writings classified as science fiction projecting scenes on utopian versus dystopian themes.

☞ This brief rundown of social unrest, then, forms a setup. A  question is raised: How did it get this crazy? Again? That’s the key word, again. It shows history in patterns. The question prompts a peek into the past. So this setup is an announcement for a casual series of commentaries relating aberrations lived today, or getting closer, with those earlier conceived in science fiction. The two themes in this present commentary– messing with kids and science– are key points. This project looks forward to speculations about societies cast in futuristic fiction dramatizing places like our own, with problems similar to ours, or in unimagined Hell. Those who presented in detail a prospective paradise that could or couldn’t work, with humor, with horror.

☞ Such is the proposal by staff on hand: one post modern prospector and cosmic stenographer. Commentary on the two-step dialectical posed by comparing utopian/dystopian forms of fiction is the main attraction— but with an additional hitch. Marginal discussion of the printed novel itself is joined, how it too has been transfigured, some would say debauched, along the way. Commerce birthed the press and now keeps the press alive, but are both debilitated? A big point is made that the two important later writers, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, made such a dismal outcome for reading central to their vision.

☞ A multitude of claims, yes. The pledge here is to see if any of them work. Readers welcome to join the search.

JoCo, 2023