Each culture has their own festivals, celebrations and observances.

Among others, we observe the following ones.

date	observance
July 20	Moon Day, Interplanetary New Year
August 17	Indonesian Independance
November 16	Moon Pie Day
March 14	Pi Day
First Friday in May	No Pants Day
Third Sunday of May	State of Franklin Decoration (Memorial) Day

I have long been disturbed by the use of the term “Human Resources” when talking about people who work for giant corporations.

The definition of resource is “any physical or virtual entity of limited availability that needs to be consumed to obtain a benefit from it."

That is a good description of the evil that corporations do though. Consume the worker until there is nothing left, nothing more to give, and then discard him like a used tissue.

How does one reconcile any moral path with the objectification and dehumanization of people by calling them Resources. Resources are things. People are not things.

The term “Human Resources” is very offensive. Anyone using this term should be regarded with suspicion.

There's a study that just came out that took a real detailed look at high school graduation rates across the entire US, and broke it down by Urban, Suburb, Country, Race and Gender. Here's a summary of the results:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080401/ts_alt_afp/useducationsociety_080401184532

The institute that put it together has more details about the study here:

http://www.americaspromise.org/APAPage.aspx?id=10354

And that page has a link to the pdf file of the actual report if you're interested.

So here is the big summary. Rural areas have better graduation rates than Urban. Well that's not surprising, I think? And Suburban does best of all, but is close to Rural.

But the rates are much lower than I would have guessed if you asked. Lacking data, I would have guessed 90% of students graduate high school. But it turns out that nationally, only 69.9 of students graduate, but 74.9 percent in the suburbs and 73.2 percent in rural areas do.

Looking at the numbers where it is broken down by race, you can see that the whole rural/urban/suburban thing has nothing to do with location, but is really just a projection of racial distribution. Minorities are more concentrated in urban areas and not so much in rural and suburban. It turns out that only 50% of American Indians and African Americans who start high school ever graduate, 57% of Hispanics, 76% of whites, and 80% of Asians. So if you just look at the racial distribution of a school, you can account for the urban vs rural rates without even knowing it is rural or urban.

This is interesting since Tennessee has this bill up where they want to ban people from getting a drivers license until age 21 if they don't have a diploma. What that bill is basically saying is that 50% of the African Americans and American Indians, like Cherokees, in our state will be banned from having a driver's license. Clearly this will make it impossible for them to get a job, and will drag them even further down into the cycle of poverty. I have to wonder if that is the real goal of the bill since there's no doubt that the legislators are aware of the racial component to graduation rates.

People reading this might start to get some ideas in their heads about racial intelligence, but I'll tell you that graduation rates have little to do with how smart someone is. People who get expelled are more likely to drop out. In many schools, minorities are more likely to be expelled, and are punished more harshly for the same things that white kids do. Minority students are also more likely to have to drop out of school to support their families who are more likely to be poor. A high achieving minority youth is far less likely to be hired for a job than a similar white one. I know many brilliant and creative people who are black and hispanic and indian, and I know plenty of white folks that can't convert a fraction to a percentage.

Here is my controversial angle on this. Most everyone assumes that high drop out rates are a bad thing, and society must do anything it can to get graduation rates up — by force if necessary. For example, the bill I mentioned. Come down hard, like the Gestapo. Either you graduate, or we will destroy your life. But wait — what if a good portion of the 30.1% who didn't graduate are the lucky ones? What if they are the ones who escaped destruction?

Could this be? I happen to have professional experience tutoring and teaching college students from well regarded school districts, so I know how things really are. Folks, regardless of what the line is the school systems are feeding you, you need to know that most high school graduates are not qualified to do much. Basic, rudimentary literacy can be assumed, yes, but many graduates do not have enough functional literacy in either math or reading to be able to properly participate in a system of representative government, which requires an educated and thoughtful populace. If our freedoms are going to be kept, they have to be understood and defended. For the most part, that is not happening right now. Our educational system is not to blame here, but rather should be accredited: for this is not an accidental plan, but rather one conceived by the power brokers in society who can only thrive with their wicked schemes as long as the population remains ignorant of the foundations of democracy. When people place a higher value to spend their evenings watching sitcoms instead of reading, when people pop a prozac and press the close button rather than show up at a school board meeting and demand accountability when a 12 year old girl is strip searched by school officials looking for a government unauthorized ibuprofen tablet, oh horrors.

You see, perhaps the real issue here is that the smart people are the ones who drop out of high school and move on with their lives and their education. Education is something you earn for yourself, not something someone programs you with, and the sooner you escape the system, the sooner you can get on with a real education. One involving working for yourself, thinking for yourself, and putting together a fine library of those classics that are no longer taught. The foundations and values of civilization have been set aside to make way for sex education, nuclear education, commercialized holiday education, brand name education, and field trips to the movie theatre.

In addition to the free minds issue, High Schools in this country are not exactly known for being a wholesome educational environment.

I've got kids, and at this time, all things considered, I don't think it would be in their best interests to attend any of our local high schools. This has nothing to do with the teachers or administration though! It has to do with the system and the values that schools have taken on nationally for whatever reason.

Like almost all american high schools, the high schools here expose kids to drugs and violence. You learn more about conforming to fit into a clique than you do about learning to think for yourself or be your own person. There are also the issues of zero tolerance punishment, over the top expulsions for being tardy too many times, for using a cell phone or an aspirin. It's not that kids should be allowed to run wild, but these are minor things that in the past either would not have been issues, or would have resulted in suspensions. There is also general culture of trying to instill an ethic of unquestioning obedience to all authority.

I find all these things contrary to the educational ideals that Thomas Jefferson promoted.

I would prefer to have children educated to always question orders to see if they are the right thing, to ask if they are just, to see if they promote freedom. To contemplate themselves what is right and moral, and not to merely conform to systems of rules and facts that have to be memorized. I would prefer for them to learn to be free people, to be able to think for themselves, to be the captain of their own destiny rather than cogs in the machine that are just following orders. To me, the individual free in both actions and words is the highest expression of the ideals held by Jefferson.

It's hard to find good music nowadays but it is out there if you look for it.

I do believe that the issue with the music industry making less money these days has nothing whatsoever to do with people downloading mp3s. If anything, the availability of mp3s increases sales in the exact same way that playing songs on the radio increases sales. It's advertising the product. If people like the product, they'll buy it. It takes forever to download mp3s and burn them to a CD and the sound quality isn't that great and you have to make a label. Who has time for that? Another issue is that CDs cost too much. The closest Borders to here has the new Eminem CD for $19.99 on sale. With tax that's $21.94. I've paid that much for Jean-Michel Jarre releases that I have to order from Europe, but I don't want to pay that much for o domestic release that's a best-seller. But then again, if they can charge that much for a best-seller, more power to them. I do think they'd sell a lot more CDs if new releases were $9.99 and those that have been out a few months, $11.99. But what do I know, I don't have an MBA from Harvard now do I? I milk goats for a living so I must not have much economic sense. [As a quick aside, I think DVDs should cost less than CDs since you only watch them one or two times and a CD you listen to hundreds or thousands of times and is much more interesting than a movie. I'd buy DVDs for $5 and they'd sell a lot and the studio would make $5 for each person who watches it, or $5/viewing. Instead they sell the DVDs to rental stores for $19.99 and they rent it to 10,000 people so the studio makes $20 for each 10,000 people who watch it, or 1/5 cent per viewing. You tell me which makes more sense economically.]