Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

A student at the Abundant Life Christian School shot and killed another student and a teacher and wounded others. And I thought, If only we had prayer and Bible study in the classroom, this would not happen. Oh, wait a minute; this was a Christian school.

Where is Elon Musk? Trump suggests that the government will study any connection between vaccines and autism. Such research has been done many, many times with the same result (i.e., there is no connection). This is a clear waste of taxpayer money. However, I don’t expect Elon or Vivek to speak out against this reckless spending.

I used to play a lot of tennis, but those days are over.  Friends urge me to play pickleball, but I have not. The name pickleball is silly. The game is sillier. And you can tell the game was invented by some old-fashioned men. You can’t set foot in one part of the court. They named it the kitchen.

There are movements again to get rid of daylight savings time, although proposals differ. Some want to return to God’s time when at noon the sun is overhead. Others want to have permanent daylight savings time without the twice-yearly shift. (No more Spring forward, Fall back.)  But what we should really remember is what a wise person said: “The best way to save daylight is to use it.”

Especially during the holiday season, we should remember what Jerry Seinfeld has said: Nothing in life is “fun for the whole family.”

Over the last few decades Republicans have been responsible for most of the drama surrounding government shutdowns. I learned from C.W. Goodyear’s President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier (2023) that the first government shutdown was caused by Democrats. It was under President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879. The Congressional term expired without passing sufficient funding for the government. Democrats attached riders, that is, unrelated provisions, to appropriations legislation to curb federal poll watching in the South. Hayes vetoed these bills. Goodyear writes, “Never before had a House majority deprived the government of funding in an attempt to extort a policy change.” Eventually the Democrats backed down and the government resumed. There was no mention of a debt ceiling.

Perhaps showing my age, I had no idea who Andrew McCarthy was, but I plucked his book Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain off the Barrett Friendly Library shelves. The book about hiking the Camino de Santiago touched me. It is a reflection on love, a father and son, fame, faded fame, ham, eggs, lots of pizza, blisters, physical and other pains, and…well, love. It made me reflect on much in my life.

After the House ethics report on Matt Gaetz, I wonder if Woody Allen’s line is still true: “The most expensive sex is free sex.”

Posted on by rjonakait

Educational Disconnect

Grade schools and high schools are back in session, but I sometimes wonder why. I hear again and again that our schools are a failure, so why send kids there? On the one hand, the schools do not teach. On the other hand, they teach the wrong stuff. Of course, this is a disconnect. If the schools are not good at teaching, it does not make much sense to get exercised over their curriculum. This, of course, is a bit like what Woody Allen said about a resort: The food is awful. And the portions are so small.

That many think that our schools fail our kids was confirmed by a recent Gallup poll on education. The polling organization asked how satisfied the polling participants were with the quality of education students received in grades K-12. The responses: 9% are satisfied; 33% are somewhat satisfied; 32% are somewhat dissatisfied; 23% are completely dissatisfied; and 2% had no opinion. In other words, the total of those indicating a dissatisfaction with the present American education were in a distinct majority, outnumbering the satisfied cohort by fourteen percentage points.

This question was about all K-12 schools. The results were even more depressing when respondents were asked about the quality of the education in public schools: 9% are very satisfied; 20% are somewhat satisfied; 28% are somewhat dissatisfied; and 40% are very dissatisfied. While the satisfied/dissatisfied split for all schools is about the same now as it was a decade ago, that split has widened for the public schools. Now 68% fall into the dissatisfied camp while in 2013 56% did.

So, K-12 education generally in this country sucks, and public education sucks even bigger time, or at least that is what the country thinks as indicated by the Gallup poll. But wait: There is more information.

The poll respondents were asked if they had a child in school, and what grade their oldest child was in. The responses indicated that 33% had their oldest child in K-5, 21% had the oldest child in grades six through eight, 44% had the oldest child in high school, with 2% not responding to the question. Overwhelmingly, these children were in public schools—82%, with 9% in private schools; 1% in parochial schools; 3% in charter schools; and with 5% home schooled.

Here comes the shocker: The poll participants were asked about the quality of the education their oldest child was getting. The responses: 32% are completely satisfied; 48% somewhat satisfied; 14% somewhat dissatisfied; 6% completely dissatisfied. The satisfaction group, now at 70%, was even a bit higher than in 2013 when the satisfied cohort was 67%.

So, there is a big disconnect between the general populace’s perception of our education and those with children in our schools. Over two-thirds of the parents were in the satisfied group, while only 42% of the general population fell on the satisfied line. I have been trying to figure out why this split exists, but I don’t have answers. I could give speculations but that is all they would be.

I was not a participant in this poll, and I don’t know how I would have responded. I do know some K-12 teachers, whom I respect, but I have no firsthand knowledge of the K-12 educational system. It has been a lifetime since I graduated from high school, and a quarter century since my son did. Whatever I think I know about our education comes from news stories, politicians, headline-seeking parents, and pundits (also seeking attention), and this is mostly negative. But I find it striking that those who have important contact with the system—parents with kids in school—report satisfaction with the quality of the education being delivered.

Can somebody explain this to me?

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

“But how aboutism” is rampant. Trump is indicted. And indicted again. And again and again. A constant response from the right: But how about the Biden family? But how about Joe Biden’s lies? But how about Joe Biden’s being on vacation? A response to the right’s how aboutism is, How about the Trump family? Questions are raised about Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. A response: How about Sonia Sotomayer’s book deal? And so on. Such how aboutism is just another way for us to talk past each other. Perhaps the how abouters address legitimate issues about Hunter Biden’s sleaze, but that says nothing about Donald Trump’s behavior. The concerns about the Trump family’s grifting are important, but it says nothing about the appropriateness of the behavior of the Biden family. We should address the important issues that confront us, not just try to deflect attention from them.

The liberal cable-news host was talking about the vacations and other things very, very rich people have given to Clarence Thomas. The host insinuated that if Thomas wanted to live like the extremely wealthy, he could do that if he left the Supreme Court for a position in a private law firm. Thomas, however, the host said, wants to retain his power, and so do some conservative richies. Thus, in what are extremely friendly gestures that almost none of us will ever encounter, Thomas has taken vacations regularly not on his dime, but on the tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, of others’. What struck me, however, in this report was not only the slippery ethics of donor or donee, but also the host’s comment that Clarence Thomas gets only “a middle class, an upper middle class” salary as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. He makes $265,000 a year. The median household income in this country is about $70,000 per year. Clarence Thomas alone, even without considering what his wife Ginni Thomas procures,  makes more than 95% of what other households make. Please, let’s not call this middle class of any sort.

“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” Woody Allen

“Money really isn’t everything. If it was, what would we buy with it?” Tom Wilson

Did you ever wonder how the fool soon parted from his money got the money in the first place?

“When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power would bring me happiness. . . . I was right.” Gahan Wilson.

In the small-town bar, as I waited for my beer, a picture of Donald Trump came on the television. Without stopping to think, I said, “Trump is a horse’s ass.” The guy on the next stool socked me in the nose and stalked out. As I was stuffing paper napkins up my nostrils, I somewhat apologetically said to the bartender, “I should have realized that there could be Trump lovers in here.” The barkeep replied, “He’s not. He is a horse lover.”

“He was like a cock who thought that the sun had risen to hear him crow.” George Eliot.

A wise person said, “A windbag is a person who is hard of listening.”

Another wise person said, “The more you speak of yourself, the more you are likely to lie.”

“There is only one rule for being a good talker; learn to listen.” Christopher Morley.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

It’s my birthday in a few days. It will be celebrated on Sunday along with Mother’s Day and the spouse’s birthday, which is a few days after mine. (Don’t send any presents . . . unless it costs over $99.) Just the NBP, the spouse, and me for a simple dinner and some smiles. But the oncoming birthday had me thinking back to more than a quarter-century ago, when Jeff and I were at the tennis net. He and I were regular doubles partners, and we also played a lot of singles against each other, with him winning at least sixty percent of the time. He is considerably younger than I am, but we had never discussed our ages. For some reason I no longer remember, age came up that day, and he asked, “How old are you?” I replied, “Fifty.” He involuntarily spurted out, “Fifty!!!” Now that he has finally passed that age, we laugh about the interchange. Ah, to be a frivolous fifty again.

          I am not young, and more and more I relate to the wisdom of Woody Allen: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

          “No wise man ever wished to be younger.” Jonathan Swift.

          When people refuse to take the Covid-19 vaccine, perhaps they could be persuaded to inject bleach instead.

          Hannity said, “As I have told you repeatedly, you the consumer pay for increased corporate taxes.” He made no mention of another possibility: that corporations would pay lesser dividends. I don’t watch Hannity enough to know who he said paid the tariffs imposed on China and other countries by the previous president, but I doubt he told his viewers that they paid for them. And I wondered, if Hannity were right, why do corporations oppose an increase in their tax rates if they just pass it along? They should then be indifferent to a tax increase, but they don’t seem to be.

          Hector had tracked me down by getting a phone number for me off the internet. His message said that he had found my Covid vaccination card on the subway steps. Sure enough, it was not in my wallet. I had recently shown it to someone a few days earlier who was keeping vaccination records in my Pennsylvania community. It had been hard to get  out where I had put it in my wallet, so I put it back in a more accessible spot. Apparently, it was now so easy to get that it fell out when I took out my subway card. Hector and I arranged to meet at the corner of my block, and he returned it to me. Once again, I was reminded that there are many, many good people in this world, even, maybe especially, in New York City.

As avid readers of this blog know, the spouse did not know who Aaron Rodgers was. Her annual football watching generally consists of half-watching a few plays on one Sunday in hopes that a Super Bowl ad will soon appear. But she does know some players. She went to a doctor for a shoulder problem recently and hanging up in his office is a Brett Favre jersey. Showing off her knowledge, she said, “You’re a Packers fan.” He said no, he had treated Favre when he was with the New York Jets. Even so, he is going to perform on her what we hope is a routine procedure today.

“Today’s Medical Tip: Never undergo any kind of major surgery without first making an appointment.” Dave Barry.