It’s been a long time since I looked at this photo. I used to be a CPA, and due to that I had to take 40 hours annually of “CPE”, or continuing professional education. That’s not a bad thing. Most often in my early career I would take courses by mail, but as time went on invested in seminars. Sometimes there were good speakers.
That’s all over now. I gave up my license in 2019 and have not looked back. Here’s something interesting: After I retired, I got an email from a person just gushing about me and my abilities, telling me she is running a business and in need of a CPA, and people told her “Get in touch with Mark!” Views differ, but I am not, in my opinion, stupid, and what I saw there was the Colorado Society of CPAs [DORA – the Colorado agency that governs professions] attempting to lure me into what looked like a professional gig. Had I fallen for it, they would have nailed me for practicing without a license. It was a trap.
I turned down the gig, mentioning that I was retired. It only happened once. The Colorado folks must have been satisfied that I was an honest man.
What’s that got to do with the photo above? Am I alone here? This was the cover of an advertising brochure by a company in Bozeman, Montana that sold CPE courses. Our profession has a bad reputation of being sticks in the mud, but honestly, a guy sitting on a hillside in a suit with polished black shoes reinforces that notion.
I lost another photo I had to run with this one. When I got to Colorado and joined the society of CPAs, I got their monthly magazine. The very first issue was of men on horseback riding hard crossing a creek, wearing chaps and cowboy hats. These were supposedly accountants. They wanted us to know the image did not fit them.
Anyway, the photo above needs a caption. Mine is “Should I do it? Should I jump?
Piece of Mindful 
Mark, interesting story, but I am confused. Are you saying these people wanted to nail you for practicing without a license? Are they bounty hunters? I don’t know why anyone would do that, and get some kind of thrill entrapping someone in “breaking the law”. Unless they are scumbag liars.
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State boards and state societies are a royal pain, strict and by the book. They are like professional hall monitors. I had just hung it up a month or so earlier and got that email from a complete stranger. Yes, they wanted to catch me practicing without a license. It would have been entrapment, but had I accepted the gig I would have been guilty, and paid a large fine. It would be done to send a message to anyone else who practices and signs documents without that official “CPA” designation.
Once upon a time while studying in college I read a book by a guy who was critical of the AICPA, the big national group that, like AARP, I never joined*. They were in charge of professional discipline, and this guy looked into it and found that the only enforcement AICPA ever did was to nail some poor schmucks for advertising, which at that time was not allowed.
*I only ever engaged in private practice. The suits ran a gig called “peer review” where they would go into a CPA company and examine their work to see if it was good enough. Never once in all my years did I ever submit to peer review. I found it offensive. I have never been a good soldier, I guess.
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We were talking education, and teachers a few posts back, and how the system is not setup to award the best and brightest, or best teachers, but rather those that are total conformists, and teachers who are “lifers”. I didn’t mention i spent almost 2 years teaching middle and high school science (earth science, physics, and chemistry) before getting my masters, as a semi-permanent substitute, in upstate New York. The “gifted” kids were wonderful, eager to learn, and a pleasure to teach. However, the middle school kids with “no future” were a complete nightmare, it was worse than babysitting.
In any case, that was enough for me to decide teaching was not a career for me. Because to be a teacher in the public school system requires a masters degree in education and all this certification (nonsense) that IMHO greatly hinders bright young people wanting to go into education. Because you have to be locked into living in the same state (each state requires it’s own certification, so you can’t move between states easily as a teacher). Also, someone who gets easily bored, i would only have wanted to teach maybe 10 years then move on, whereas the system is setup for you to be a “lifer” and have to spend 30+ years doing the same old curriculum over and over, as most teachers end up doing, especially since the students are required to take very specific standardized tests and pass.
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Probably just me, but I bristle at the ones who insist on being called “educators” instead of just teachers. What’s up with that? They all imagine they are doing wonderful things for kids and at great personal sacrifice, I guess. Most of them are average, but become very proficient at one subject if they teach it long enough.
At my 50th reunion one of the gals there had been a high school teacher for many years, and proudly told me that she “taught One Flew Over The Cuckoos’s Nest” to her charges. If ever there was a gal that that book flew over, it was her. But she “taught it”, you see,
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Miles hits another one out of the park destroying the latest dinosaur hoax. You know how they love to mock dinosaur “deniers” or even “doubters” as dumb Christian hicks who think the world was created 6000 years ago. OK. And all the dinosaurs were destroyed 66 million years ago by a rock 6 miles across, according to “official science”, i.e. the state religion. So you have to choose one of two camps. Because high school earth science supplies all the answers.
denver.pdf
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I thought I would post this because it’s right in your backyard Mark. What say you, think this is good science?
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I have the distinct impression that science has gone AWOL.Has it always been so?
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I think around the time of Maxwell, late 19th century science reached it’s peak. Before Einstein and the modern physicists stepped in. If you look at inventions, most great inventions that impact our modern world were done by the ~ year 1900. With the exception of the transistor, modern computer, and fiber optics/communication. For practicality the great engineers and scientists of the late 19th century are the pinnacle, from thermodynamics to physical chemistry, etc.
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I suspect the real issue with science is how quickly it could advance now if it wasn’t intentionally sheckled.
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He humbly left open the possibility that dinos are real, just saying that finds like this one are done for funding or promotion I guess. What say you Ray? Across the board hoax, or just a lot of hoaxing going on?
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I think it’s an across the board hoax. I don’t see how you can reliably date something over 60 million years old first of all, since there are no calibration standards. You’re going by a lot of assumptions.
I believe dinosaurs are just a modern rendering of dragons. In not so ancient times, they would put on the map “there be dragons” for places of danger, where I’m sure the vast majority of people believed there were dragons. If you look at Asian cultures the dragon is deeply embedded in the culture. And yet I think we can agree dragons are mythological creatures that don’t exist.
I see the T. Rex as a modern day update to the dragon myth. Except that instead of dragons being far away by distance, they are far away by time. When Darwin and company (Freud) were destroying the old myths, they needed to repurpose old myths, and give them a fresh coat of shellac for fresh fakery. Dino bones are also similar to the religious relics of old, and peoples facination with them.
You do know there are no actual dinosaur bones on display in any museum, and you can’t see them (nor I)? Kinda like all the a-bombs hidden behind the secret curtain we can’t see, because its top secret. Except the dino bones are so rare, and so valuable, that the public can’t be allowed to touch them. Kind of like Nigel Tufnels guitar in Spinal Tap “don’t even look at it!”
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I can’t usually get a clear answer on that – I’ve seen it implied that some exhibits include “real” fossils, mixed with “recreated” areas for the missing parts.. of course the “real” bits may be only rubble-ized fragments that could be anything.
But yes, one dino book I read told of a famous fossil hunter – I think from a Colorado university or that area – who had just an unbelievable number of incredible finds to his name.. but they were all or mostly housed in some Indiana Jones warehouse under the stadium(?!) or someplace. All crated up, awaiting scholarly examination.
The fakery goes back a long ways too. I really enjoyed a book about the Marsh/Cope dino wars in the early 20th C, that filled newspapers of the day. It was ridiculous kayfabe, as these two colorful characters raced around the country uncovering amazing ancient dinos wherever they swung a pick.
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I found this series interesting: The Dinosaur HOAX: The Royal Society, United Nations, Quaker Oats and Chicken Bones
https://chemtrails.substack.com/p/the-dinosaur-hoax-the-royal-society ________________________________
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Good post I’m reading now.
I was thinking today about the absurdity of trying to identify what kind of large animal is encased in some stone, or hardened mud, if it is millions of years old. Just based on common sense, theres likely a lot of large marine skeletons, like whales, that died and then fell into the bottom of the ocean and were semi-preserved. So assuming these “scientists” were honest, the first assumption of finding a fossil is it came from the ocean floor, from a very large vertebrate.
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He makes a good point of where a lot of the discoveries were made. #1: the Gobi Desert. Central Asian hell hole that outsiders are probably forbidden to enter, and who would want to?
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Also the myth of the dinosaurs disappearance is another story they love to float about the insignificance of the earth, and you, just tiny specks waiting for a big ol’ rock to slam into the earth and wipe us all out.
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Why prospect for gold when you can prospect for dinosaur bones, way more valuable.
The dudes in the know (meaning a billionaire who knows better) who buys some dino bones must be buying some kind of fund into a dinosaur museum(s), which make incredible profits. The dinosaur industry has incredible returns, since it’s a small club of elites controlling it.
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About the maps.. there would also be a big proprietary interest in keeping trade routes or happy hunting grounds/ resource rich areas secret. Phoenician Hunter on his substack has some articles on this. Paywalled, but the podcast is free.
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“I became a teacher because I love children!” (Not even close)
1) 4 years of college then begin teaching at age 22
2) Work 32 weeks a year, get 20 weeks off
3) Great pay, healthcare and retirement benefits
4) Actually teach maybe 5 hours per day
5) Get to stroke ego acting superior to children
6) Retire at age 52 with $million dollar retirement package stashed away at taxpayer expense
7) If retirement money runs low city council will float another bond at taxpayer expense
8) Get another 3-4 weeks of personal and sick days from the 32 weeks
9) While teacher take paid personal day, sub teacher gets paid at taxpayer expense
10) Get paid extra cash to coach a team or do some sorta club activity
11) Buy a house on the lake that most property taxpayers cannot afford
12) Opportunity an administraitor and make even more ridiculous amounts of cash
13) Take your narcissism to another level with easy prey all around
14) Fill children’s minds with complete garbage, most of which is useless
15) Become a College Professor and become even more arrogant and pompous
16) Use assignments to collect intelligence data on the child and family!
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I know nothing about tenure, but always thought it served us well in that Chomsky, a dissident, was able to teach at MIT due to tenure. That was before I came to understand that he was a spook.
Just on impressions gathered over time, and nothing rigorous, I suspect that tenure is awarded to those who have their minds right. I don’t imagine too many dissidents get that kind of shelter on the job.
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