Warnings: Malware on line, and Enstupidization in the Schools

View 723 Tuesday, May 08, 2012

A MALWARE WARNING from a long time subscriber:

Malware warning – NCH software "Doxillion"

Jerry,

A warning for your users, the default windows application search when trying to open up a .wps file leads to malware from "NCH software". It purports to install doxillion software converter which on the face of it appears legit and since microsoft’s own application search listed it, you might think that it is in fact legit. In reality, it doesn’t really do anything worthwhile but now opening almost any data file will lead to a pop-up saying that you need a converter update from NCH doxillion so please click here.

I’m 60 minutes into rooting it out of my registry since microsoft program remover doesn’t come close to removing the damage done, and I’m probably going to have to do a system restore or restore from backup since it has altered document opening/conversion settings for nearly every application on my computer (including itunes features for converting between sound file formats).

This is badly destructive and poorly behaved, and microsoft is part of the problem since the automatic application search feature links to this (instead of the correct microsoft word document converter which works fine) and windows doesn’t offer up a way to undo the damage caused without rolling the system back to a restore point created before the installation.

So, my fault for trusting a microsoft "approved" solution, but your readers might be saved a lot of hassle by a warning to treat this as the worst kind of malware.

Oh btw neither Norton nor Microsoft security essentials nor msie’s site screening feature offered any help. And CCleaner wasn’t able to completely root it out of the registry either, the damage was so widespread.

Sean

I have not experienced this and with luck never will, but be careful.  BEWARE.

As usual, Fred cuts through the euphemisms and gets to the point in his latest essay on education.

I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean.

Yet public schools remain very popular, and people are willing to tax themselves (and raise inordinately on others) to “support education” and “support the schools.” Of course this all became inevitable when the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom declared education – something never mentioned in the Constitution or its amendments – as a federal entitlement, rather than as something provided by citizens for whatever reasons appeal to them. When schools are funded by local property owners who also elect the local school board, you get one kind of school; when “education” becomes an entitlement and is paid for by the state (on the basis of attendance, not results) you get quite another.

For my first eight years in grade school, we had about 20 students to a grade and two grades to the classroom. Capleville school was in the middle of nowhere and my classmates were farm children brought in by school bus. In my case the school was about a mile and a half from my house, but the school bus route wandered all through the country east of Highway 78 picking up farm kids. What they learned in Capleville consolidated was pretty standard for Tennessee. The math instruction was arithmetic and pretty well stopped at 6^th grade. English literature included what was standard fare in those days, Ruskin, Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Longfellow, that sort of thing. There was world history, Tennessee history, US history, and in 5^th grade as I recall mostly European history; I remember that because there was a textbook with a picture of something medieval or renaissance (I doubt that we were taught the difference) and the village idiot, a girl about 14 still in 5^th grade, had copied the caption to a picture in the history textbook and read it aloud as her writing assignment.

Fred continues

Schooling, sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate—“graduate”—from high school—“high school”—unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

And that is where I disagree with him. I don’t recall anyone at Capleville who was in misery over schoolwork. Everyone in my classes – gathered from farms all around, there being no more than a couple of hundred families in Capleville itself – could read, and all of them except me learned something. I suppose I learned something too – I would never have read most of the items in our readers if they hadn’t been assigned – but mostly I was on my own. I had the Britannica at home and a pretty good memory, so I often knew more about anything brought up for class discussion than the teachers did, and mostly I learned that this wasn’t always a good thing – adults don’t really appreciate being corrected by ten year olds in sixth grade – and that I hated penmanship classes. And that what you learn from Captain Marvel comic books isn’t very good science, but the notion of an intelligent worm setting out to conquer the earth can be interesting.

Moreover, in my eight years in grade school I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t read. Plenty who didn’t really understand what they were reading, but even the village idiot could read in the sense that she saw words and pronounced them, even though she didn’t see why reading the caption to a picture (The man and the lady are playing chess, a popular game in those times) would be thought amusing to students who had seen that in their history lesson book a week before. Incidentally, the girl in question got pregnant at age 16 and married an Italian prisoner of war who worked on the farm her parents owned, and when I last heard of her she had two children and had inherited the farm.

The point being that the farm owners in the Capleville consolidated district were presumably satisfied with the school. I don’t really know, but I don’t recall any contested school board elections. I think the local general store owner was one of the school board members.

But Fred’s depiction of many schools as sheer hell for bright and stupid pupils alike, and not much use for all those in between is I gather fairly accurate for most of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I happen to live near one of the LAUSD flagship schools and in a neighborhood of mostly behind the scenes movie people – I expect there are more employed writers in Studio City than in any other square mile on earth. Our local school serves us well and people all over the city try to find ways to get their kids into it. There are other decent schools in LA. Alas, Fred’s horror stories apply to a lot of it.

And his conclusion:

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

As I have said, repeatedly, the best way to be certain that no child is left behind is to be certain that no child gets ahead. If you reward schools for attendance and nothing else, then try to modify that by demanding that all the students get over a very low bar, you can predict the result: all the effort will be spent on those who would fail without it. Resources won’t go do bright kids, nor will they go to the average students who could greatly benefit from it. It will go to those below normal and they’ll get just enough to get them over the bar. And of course the unions will insist that there are no incompetent teachers. There never are.

For all its floundering around with the notion that every kid is entitled to a world class university prep education, the Gates Foundation has made one key discovery: you can get about 100% improvement in any school simply by firing the worst 10% of the teachers in it. Don’t replace them, simply get them out and distribute the others into the remaining classes, even if you have to go to two grades to the room. Get the dullards out of the school teaching business and things will get better. Of course twice as good as what we have is pretty awful, but it’s something.

But the only systematic solution to the ‘education problem’ is to go back to transparency and subsidiarity. Let local school boards run the schools, and let them be elected by the people who pay for them. That way there might be some justification for thinking of the schools as ‘investments.’ So long as they remain subject to a central bureaucracy, the Iron Law will see to it that many bright kids, supposedly entitled to a world class university prep education, find themselves sentenced to Hell.

More later, but we have a virus warning.