One thing leads to another to another … Red Ice Creations is a Swedish source for podcasts that I’ve subscribed to for a couple of years. For 80% of the time Henrik Palmgren, the host, will take us down the path of extraterrestrials and ancient civilizations, none of which interest me – maybe even spooks me a little. I mean Henrik, please.

But that other 20% of the time makes the subscription worthwhile. He seems to be scouring the landscape looking or interesting people with different outlooks. He introduced me to Bruce Veinotte and the “School Sucks” project. I was a bit leery at first, as I am with so many of Henrik’s guests, but as I listened realized that Veinotte is intelligent, mindful, and counter-cultural. He reminds me of my son.

Judge for yourself. The first hour of the podcast is free to non-subscribers. If you want to hear the second, email me and I’ll see what can be done. Veinotte calls school a “jail with books,” and has very little use for the buildings or the teachers. He thinks that learning is a lifetime challenge, should be self-guided, and that we can dispense with regimentation, permission to go to the bathroom, hall passes, bells, lines, and that godawful focus on testing for temporary retention (before tossing the information aside). (I found the second hour far more intriguing.) His take on “bullying” is utterly sensible: It usually happens in prisons and schools, those places where people are held against their will.

Veinotte mentioned “the” nine-types of intelligence (as if). I am one of those people who always tested well on ACT’s and SAT’s. I happen to have the type of smarts that are valued in our society – pattern recognition, numbers, language skills. But oddly, I’ve noticed over time, I suck at things like chess and checkers and poker – I would call these “gaming” skills. I can see the past very clearly, but cannot anticipate the future (as in why you moved that bishop to that square). Also, I cannot tell you how an internal combustion engine works – way too may things going on there at once. I struggle with our snow thrower, our plumbing, building a simple staircase.

It just demonstrates that people have wide and varied talents, and that we overemphasize some, undervalue others. Anyway, “the” nine types of intelligence are actually a fairly comprehensive description of the many facets of the interaction of the human brain with nature. I found it in many places on the Google. Here they are:

• Naturalistic: Living among the elements, plants, rocks, animals, harmonizing … these are our farmers, hunters, chefs, botanists, gardeners with that “green thumb.”
• Musical: People sensitive to pitch, timbre, rhythm, harmony and who add so much to our lives.
• Logical and mathematical: People who discern relationships and patterns, demonstrate sequential reasoning skills, and generate and use abstract thoughts. That’s me, I guess, or why I scored well on those damned tests.
• Existential: These are our philosophers, religious types, who wonder why we are born, exist, what happens at death. I am drawn to this, but am not very good at it.
• Interpersonal: People-smart. People who get along easily, size up, enjoy people. Blog behavior aside, this is me in real life. I enjoy meeting people, and look for reasons to like them.
• Bodily kinesthetic Dancers, athletes, surgeons … all of those talented people out there who are not me.
• Linguistic: To think in words and makes oneself understood. ‘Nuff said.
• Intra-personal: Self aware – this, while evident in some people (my late older brother for one) at a very young age, is something we develop as we age … if we are paying attention.
• Spatial: Thinking in three dimensions – understanding how a damned snow thrower works. These are the architects, mechanics, many artists, and those amazing people who design the cardboard containers that we use to ship products around the world. Have you ever wondered how they take a piece of cardboard and slice and dice it to the exact shape needed to hold your set of glassware you just ordered? I marvel at those designs. Just sayin’.

So go back to your SAT and ask yourself what were they testing, and how many ways there are that we can develop outside of formal schooling, which Veinotte says (and I agree) is a prison with books, and a waste of our precious time.

People generally have their feet set in cement and cannot be reasoned with. It is therefore my view that we should simply say what we think and bring our evidence to the table.

That’s why I admire people like Chomsky, the late Gore Vidal, and the man above, Norman Finkelstein. They say what they believe to be true and defend their position with vigor. They are not nice, because like every other means of persuasion (short of advertising and propaganda), being nice does not work. Knocking an opponent for a loop can remove cobwebs, creative cognitive dissonance. Honest people then self-reflect and alter their views.

It is rare but it happens.

By the way, Norman Finkelstein is banned in the State of Israel. He cannot enter the country. If he were nice (i.e., stfu) that would not have happened.

He actually hated working in any world. Later on, when we were doing Car Talk, he would come in late and leave early. We used to warn him that if he left work any earlier, he’d pass himself coming in.” (Ray Magliozzi)

The news of Tom Magliozzi’s death hit me very hard last night, and I realized that it is because time is passing along with generations, and that I too am in that relentless march to the sea.

Car Talk was never about cars. That was just a cover story. It was about two brothers, the one twelve years younger idolizing the older one. They were men of good will, self-deprecating humor, and who even knew the difference between a fuel injection system and carburetor, but would never brag about that.

I listened for years as I could, and when podcasting started, never missed an episode. I noted one time a few years back that Ray ran an entire show while Tom sat silent. I thought he must have been under the weather. Sometime after that, Ray started, rather than ended the show with “Well, you’ve wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk…” and then sighed as he plunged into the week’s episode. Something was wrong.

Tom had Alzheimer’s. Typically that disease takes about ten years to kill a person. So they’ve been faking it for a good long time. And now we know why Tom did not drive. Also, as Ray reminds us, that’s why Tom could never remember last week’s puzzler.

They retired in 2012 and rebooted Car Talk as re-runs, and they could do that because they were always careful not to be topical. By staying away from current events, they stood out among all shows on NPR by not lying to us. At the end of the re-runs their voices sounded patched in, current, and there would be topical references. But at one point I realized that Tom’s laugh had been electronically spliced into that part of the broadcast, and that Ray was working alone. NPR liars did indeed penetrate the studio overlooking Harvard Square in their fair city.

Oh well. So it goes. Car Talk was the best thing ever on NPR. They’ll continue with Best of Car Talk and I will continue to listen. What, I have to wonder, becomes of the staff members left behind? What now for Irasmus Bedraggin, the head of working mothers support? Or their brake tester, Carson Delake? The gal in charge of repeat business, Lucinda Bolts? Staff tailor Hugh Jass? Will they find other work?

Unlikely. There’ll never be anything like it again.

Lizard introduced me to Moon of Alabama, and SK to Vineyard of the Saker. I’ve been impressed with both over time – these guys get it. They are highly cynical of western politics, seeing through much of the bullshit. One thing that annoys me is how agents of western imperialism latch on to phrases like “democracy” and “human rights’ even as they don’t give two shits for such concepts, only using them as window dressing.

It was interesting, for instance, to see Western NGO’s like Agency for International Development and National Endowment for Democracy go into Ukraine and pour hundreds of millions of dollars in to spark and uprising, and then stand back and criticize the government of Ukraine if it dared react. That is the purpose of such activities, to incite rebellion so as to open up countries like Ukraine for penetration by western capitalist agents. Something similar is going on in Hong Kong right now, and they are always busy in places like Venezuela and Cuba – anywhere where there is resistance to western capitalist agents, the NGO’s are working the turf, trying to undermine the existing governments, and waiting to pounce should there be any reaction to their subversion. They reek of hypocrisy.

Here”s the Saker:

The fact is that western human rights organizations are below contempt. Some are political tools in the hands of the Empire (Human Rights Watch), some are full of western intelligence agents (Medecins Sans Frontieres, OSCE monitors), some are lead by cynical bureaucrats who use idealistic young delegates as cannon fodder (ICRC), some are used by big business as a tool (Greenpeace) while others are quasi-official CIA tools (NED, Freedom House, Open Society Foundation, etc.).

The funny thing in this case is that the photo is not taken in Russia, but in the Ukraine, and the riot cops shown here have Ukrainian unit badges. But then, who cares anyway? It’s not like “truth” is a topic that matters to HRW…

Also, from Wikileaks, the first chapter of Julian Assange’s book When Google Met Wikileaks is online. It’s long, detailed, so set aside time if you’re inclined to be curious about it. I was impressed with Assange’s grasp of international politics, far more sophisticated than my own (not surprising), but I intend to re-read it for that purpose alone.