Sunday's Ante-Nicene Fathers Read

Carrying on from last week, here's an excerpt from the next chapter in The Shepherd of Hermes (also called the Pastor of Hermes or Hermas, as pastor, presbyter, elder, shepherd, and bishop were used interchangeably by the early church)

Now a revelation was given to me, my brethren, while I slept, by a young man of comely appearance, who said to me, “Who do you think that old woman is from whom you received the book?” And I said, “The Sibyl.” “You are in a mistake,” says he; “it is not the Sibyl.” “Who is it then?” say I. And he said, “It is the Church.”⁷⁶


And I said to him, “Why then is she an old woman?” “Because,” said he, “she was created first of all. On this account is she old. And for her sake was the world made.” After that I saw a vision in my house, and that old woman came and asked me, if I had yet given the book to the presbyters. And I said that I had not. And then she said, “You have done well, for I have some words to add. But when I finish all the words, all the elect will then become acquainted with them through you. You will write therefore two books, and you will send the one to Clemens and the other to Grapte.⁷⁷

And Clemens will send his to foreign countries, for permission has been granted to him to do so.⁷⁸ And Grapte will admonish the widows and the orphans. But you will read the words in this city, along with the presbyters who preside over the Church.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
⁷⁶    The Church. The Church of God.—Vat. [See Grabe’s note, Bull’s Defens. Fid. Nicæn., 1. cap. 2. sec. 6; Works, vol. v. part. 1. p. 67.]

⁷⁷    Grapte is supposed to have been a deaconess.

⁷⁸    [Here, as in places that follow, is to be noted a development of canon law, that could hardly have existed in the days of the Pauline Hermas. He is supposed to be a lector, who might read for the edification of the elect, if permitted by the presbyters. Grapte, the deaconess, is supposed to have charge of widows and orphans; while Clement, only, has canonical right to authenticate books to foreign churches, as the Eastern bishops were accustomed to authenticate canonical Scriptures to him and others. The second Hermas falls into such anachronisms innocently, but they betray the fiction of his work. Compare the Apost. Constitutions with (apocryphal) authentications by Clement.]

The Shepherd of Hermes was considered by the church of Rome in the second century to be suitable for private, but not public worship- much like Pilgrim's Progress or Fox's Book of Martyrs in later years. 

The Shepherd of Hermas is the largest and most expansive amount of literature that is part of the Apostolic Fathers.  From the information contained in the work, there were lazy Christians who needed to be instructed more carefully.  What happened to Christians who heinously sinned after conversion?  Is there hope for them, or not?  The Shepherd of Hermas faces these questions in a collection of five visions, twelve mandates and ten parables.  The five visions are exhortations to steadfastness, and the ten parables bring together the teaching so the visions with the mandates.  For Hermas, Christianity is a series of commands that must be followed. 

 Part of this section that I did not include is a section where the elderly lady tells Hermes that he needs to tell his wife to restrain her tongue, which she uses overmuch and with which she commits iniquity.

We don't want to catch up with the Greek Canoe

Another excellent article from Victor David Hanson. Mark Steyn

HERE'S the Victor David Hanson article. Both are excellent and informative reads.

You Might Want To Turn Down Dinner Invitations...

from this family:

Another Sixties Myth Debunked

At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. The fire came at the tail end of a month of protests that had roiled Columbia, paralyzing the university and provoking the biggest police bust ever undertaken on an American campus. Members of Students for a Democratic Society, which led the protests, denied responsibility for the arson, claiming that if anyone had set fire to Ranum's papers, it was the police.

They convinced just about everybody else, too.  Only recently, then chairman of the SDS chapter, Mark Rudd, admitted that it was an SDS member who had done it, and Rudd had known and given his approval, in a completely undemocratic move.

The fire should have turned public opinion against the protesters, but some liberals were so awed by the radicals, and guilt-ridden about their own inaction, that they went into denial. The literary critic Dwight Macdonald, writing in The New York Review of Books, said that while he found the arson "base and disgusting," he doubted that SDS was responsible. He went on raising money for the organization, from which, within a year and a half, the violent Weathermen faction would emerge. On March 6, 1970, three members of that group, making bombs in a town house in Greenwich Village, accidentally blew themselves up.
[...]
In the months that followed the fire, Ranum felt increasingly ill at ease at Columbia. The atmosphere had changed. One professor stopped asking Ph.D. candidates questions during dissertation defenses; he didn't feel he had the moral authority. Other faculty members stopped speaking to Ranum, furious at him for opposing their call for Kirk's resignation and for supporting the decision to empty the buildings by force. "You did it. You brought the police!" Ranum recalled two instructors screaming at him as police officers led away students arrested in the raid. "I never had any problem forgiving the students," he said, "because they were young and full of vinegar. But some of my colleagues were really outrageous. And some of those relationships could never be repaired." In March 1969, Ranum announced that he had accepted a better-paying position at Johns Hopkins.

Read the rest here.

Ignore The Expiration Dates

From Slate:

The fact is that expiration dates mean very little. Food starts to deteriorate from the moment it's harvested, butchered, or processed, but the rate at which it spoils depends less on time than on the conditions under which it's stored. Moisture and warmth are especially detrimental. A package of ground meat, say, will stay fresher longer if placed near the coldest part of a refrigerator (below 40 degrees Fahrenheit), than next to the heat-emitting light bulb. Besides, as University of Minnesota food scientist Ted Labuza explained to me, expiration dates address quality—optimum freshness—rather than safety and are extremely conservative. To account for all manner of consumer, manufacturers imagine how the laziest people with the most undesirable kitchens might store and handle their food, then test their products based on these criteria.

A New Rule My Mama Never Told Me I'd Need to Make...

No, do NOT tell the three year old that your brother is a pinata and if the 3 year old hits him, candy will come out.

If you want to see our other rules Mama never told me I'd need to make, click on the label at the bottom of this post.

What it really will take to restore trust in the Climate Science Community

Willis Eschenbach has an impassioned and brilliantly on target response to Judith Curry's article on how to go about restoring trust in the climate science comunity.  Judith's ideas primarily center around 'communicating better,' and Willis explains why the problem isn't one of communication, it's one of bad science and no substance, and dishonesty- refusing to police their own backyards and shutting their eyes to the sins of their comrades.  I'd love to quote the whole thing but this excerpt will have to do.  Read it all:

The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.
And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.
And you still don’t seem to get it. You approvingly quote Ralph Cicerone about the importance of transparency … Cicerone?? That’s a sick joke.
You think people made the FOI (Freedom of Information) requests because they were concerned that the people who made the datasets were the same people using them in the models. As the person who made the first FOI request to CRU, I assure you that is not true. I made the request to CRU because I was disgusted with the response of mainstream climate scientists to Phil Jone’s reply to Warwick Hughes. When Warwick made a simple scientific request for data, Jones famously said:

Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?

When I heard that, I was astounded. But in addition to being astounded, I was naive. Looking back, I was incredibly naive. I was so naive that I actually thought, “Well, Phil’s gonna get his hand slapped hard by real scientists for that kind of anti-scientific statements”. Foolish me, I thought you guys were honest scientists who would be outraged by that.
So I waited for some mainstream climate scientist to speak out against that kind of scientific malfeasance … and waited … and waited. In fact, I’m still waiting. I registered my protest against this bastardisation of science by filing an FOI. When is one of you mainstream climate scientist going to speak out against this kind of malfeasance? It’s not too late to condemn what Jones said, he’s still in the news and pretending to be a scientist, when is one of you good folks going to take a principled stand?
But nobody wants to do that. Instead, you want to complain and explain how trust has been broken, and you want to figure out more effective communication strategies to repair the trust.
You want a more effective strategy? Here’s one. Ask every climate scientist to grow a pair and speak out in public about the abysmal practices of far, far too many mainstream climate scientists. Because the public is assuredly outraged, and you are all assuredly silent, sitting quietly in your taxpayer funded offices and saying nothing, not a word, schtumm … and you wonder why we don’t trust you?
A perfect example is you saying in your post:

Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this …

For you to say this without also expressing outrage at realclimate’s ruthless censorship of every opposing scientific view is more of the same conspiracy of silence. Debate is not “alive and well” at realclimate as you say, that’s a crock. Realclimate continues to have an undeserved reputation that it is a scientific blog because you and other mainstream climate scientists are unwilling to bust them for their contemptuous flouting of scientific norms. When you stay silent about blatant censorship like that, Judith, people will not trust you, nor should they. You have shown by your actions that you are perfectly OK with realclimate censoring opposing scientific views. What kind of message does that send?

It sends the sort of message the mianstream public hears loud and clear.  It would be nice if those within the field could remove the ear plugs and listen to it honestly.

Irish Wolfhound Mauls Child. With His Tongue and Fierce Tickling Skillz

Climate Change Odds 'n Ends

Why is Jones reviewing someone who is reviewing his work? This is a gross conflict of interest and a violation of peer review.

This and other pertinent questions here.

How the NCDC appears to massage the raw data-  That 'adjusted' temperature may not be very reliable after all.

More on how weather is not climate except for when it is, and how global warming definitely results in less snow according to the climate models which predict global warming, but more snow is actually fully to be expected with global warming.  Yes, you fell down a rabbit hole.

The Met is going to recheck all the temperature data.  At this point, I am not sure whether they intend to release the raw, unadjusted new temps or just the adjusted temp.   Similarly, the IPCC says they are going to institute some reforms (hmmmm, why?), but skepticism is in order. 


Let's consider the 'skeptics are well funded' argument.  And demolish it.

Judith Curry is one of the few AGW proponents who appears to make an attempt to understand the criticisms climate scientists are facing right now. She's written an article about 'rebuilding trust' in the climate science (it's not the science we do not trust, it is the scientists the material they produce which is, in many cases, not science at all)- and she has invited other bloggers to repost it and use it for discussion.  You can find it on many of the skeptic websites, as the skeptics are generally more open to discussion than her colleagues.  Here's a link to it on Lucia's blog with Lucia's ideas for building and mainting a better data base, which is the basis for producing trust-worthy science.

On Keeping Chickens

The first year we got chickens, we spent a lot of time out in the yard just watching them. It was amazing.  It was more fun than cartoons and more educational than the internet.

Peter Lennox writes about his experiences with keeping chickens in a similar vein.

How Our Government Killed People Over Prohibition

It's a mystery and a horror story, and it's true:

As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

The year was 1926, during Prohibition, and to try to stop people from drinking, the government poisoned the alcohol supply. More here.

On This Day in...

1863 - U.S. President Lincoln signed the National Currency Act.


1993 - Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured when a van exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center in New York City. The bomb had been built by Islamic extremists.

Irish Wolfhound Puppy and the Monster Bottle

Is American Really That Hard to Govern?

Or are those making that claim more interested in dictating than governing?

The Economist:

America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.


Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. If, instead of handing over health care to his party’s left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got health care through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill. Once Mr Clinton learned the advantages of co-operating with the Republicans, the country was governed better.[...]

Really Cool Video Footage of Sea Stars

Blynken enjoyed these Wednesday night, although he thinks the tube feet of the seastar are gross, icky, and kind of scary.

Who Said The Science is Settled?

Andy Revkin, former NYT climate reporter, now a freelancer with the Times, claims in the comments here:

there's a decent case made in the following link that no one (except skeptics) has uttered the phrase "the science is settled" with respect to global warming: http://j.mp/settledNOT 

that tiny link cites... Wikipedia as his source, and that wikipedia article is by... William M. Connolley.


Comment #72 from Brian in Colorado deserves repeating in full:

Andy, I'm surprised you're contending that only skeptics are using the phrase "the science is settled," and shocked that you're backing it up with a Wikipedia article.

A 5 minute google search starts with an article in today's NYT quoting the EPA's Lisa Jackson: "The science behind climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming," http://www.nytimes.com...

Other hits include NPR quoting Al Gore in 2007, editorials in The Atlantic, and quotes from the Sierra Club. I'm certain more searching would turn up a longer list.

Your (and Wikipedia's) assertion seems to be in line with Gavin Schmidt's contention that "The phrase 'the science is settled' is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ’some scientists’ are supposed to have said."

I don't rely on Wikipedia, and I know Real Climate spins and exaggerates most everything; but I've come to expect more thorough research from you. 

Andy's response to having his false claim pointed out is to say weakly, "glad you had more time to sift."  But a google search is not more time consuming than hunting up 'the science is settled' at Wikepedia, and any reporter worth his salt should know better than to quote Wikipedia as a reliable and objective source on a controversial topic such as climate science and AGW.  I just googled it and the first link was to Al Gore making that very claim before the Senate.  And here's Marc Armbinder making that claim, and here we have Heather M. of the Climate Crossroads blog with the Sierra Club claiming:

This is the truth, folks, the science is settled: Global warming is real and humans are causing it.

Temple Grandin on Autism

She didn't talk until she was four. Doctors said she be institutionalized, and her father thought that was a good idea. Her mother disagreed and brought in people to work with her. She grew up to revolutionize the cattle industry, winning awards from both fast food places and PETA for her work. She's written ten books, very popular with parents of autistic children in particular.

This article is fascinating. Here's an excerpt:

Mostly, though, her advice is simple: It's about hard work. Young children need 20 or 30 hours a week of one-on-one time with a committed teacher or mentor. Money, Ms. Grandin says, should not be an obstacle. If you can't afford a professional teacher, find volunteers through your church or synagogue, she says. Parents need to teach 1950s-style social rules "like please and thank you, basic table manners, how to shop."
There have to be high expectations. She's worried about the "handicapped mentality" that she thinks is increasing. "When I see these kids with 150 IQ and their parents want to put them on Social Security [disability], it drives me nuts." These kids "will come up to the book table and start talking about 'my Aspergers.' Why don't you talk about becoming a chemist, or a computer programmer, or a botanist?"
She continues: "It's important to get these autistic kids out and exposed to stuff. You've got to fill up the database." Silicon Valley and the tech companies are like "heaven on earth for the geeks and the nerds. And I want to see more and more of these smart kids going into the tech industry and inventing things—that's what makes America great."

She also thinks parents should be working hard at teaching their autistic kids the basic 1950s manners and social skills- I think that would be a good idea for all of us.

As long you're here: Though today was the last day to vote for 10 favorite poems at Semicolon http://bit.ly/9HaiJN She will take votes thru the weekend. She's not gotten that many entries, so send her your favorite ten poems published before around 1924 NOW!

And before you judge us, get to know us- look around, see who we are, and come back Thursday!

On This Day in...

1913 - The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It authorized a graduated income tax.

1919 - The state of Oregon became the first state to place a tax on gasoline. The tax was 1 cent per gallon.

Irish Wolfhound Finds Useful Pot for Putting Things In

Macabre Discovery at Abortion Clinic

What’s interesting is how this story pokes a gigantic hole in one of the primary pro-abortion arguments. Feminists often like to say that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, for example, or abortion is legalized, then women will die from botched abortions and will have to suffer through procedures in disgusting, back-alley abortion clinics. It seems like that’s exactly what’s happening now though, doesn’t it?

More here.

On This Day in...

1803 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled itself to be the final interpreter of all constitutional issues.

Not a happy day, I think, for America's Constitutional Republic

Math Teacher, Hero

Impressive story of math teacher David Benke, who tackled a gunman at his Colorado school who had already wounded two students.

Ebeling On The Modern Welfare State

The modern welfare state had its birthplace in late nineteenth-century Imperial Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In the 1870s the Social Democratic Party gained increasing support from the voters in elections to the parliament, the Reichstag. Fearful that the socialists might win a majority, Kaiser Wilhelm and the conservative parties resolved to thwart this dangerous challenge to their power and the existing order.
In the early 1880s the Kaiser agreed to support the first welfare-state legislation sponsored by Bismarck. A decade later, Bismarck explained to an American sympathizer the strategy behind these laws that guaranteed every German national health insurance, a pension, a minimum wage and workplace regulation, vacation, and unemployment insurance. “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare,” he said.
But it would be a mistake to view the birth of the modern welfare state simply as a cynical political move to win over the workers by preempting the appeal of the socialists. It was also argued for on the basis of a supposed higher “social good” and a conception of human freedom superior to the “mere” protection of life, liberty, and property.  
In 1915, an American admirer of the German welfare state, Frederic Howe, explained the nature of the system in a book called Socialized Germany:  

The state has its finger on the pulse of the worker from the cradle to the grave. His education, his health, and his working efficiency are matters of constant concern. He is carefully protected from accident by laws and regulation governing factories. He is trained in his hand and in his brain to be a good workman and is insured against accident, sickness, and old age. While idle through no fault of his own, work is frequently found for him. When homeless, a lodging is offered so that he will not easily pass into the vagrant class.  

Howe admitted that under the German system, with its extensive controls and regulations, “The individual exists for the state, not the state for the individual.” But he insisted that this did not mean a loss of freedom. “This paternalism does not necessarily mean less freedom to the individual than that which prevails in America or England,” he argued. “[T]he German enjoys a freedom far greater than that which prevails in America or England. This freedom is of an economic sort. . . . It protects the defenseless classes from exploitation and abuse. It safeguards the weak.” 
If the state were to take on these new responsibilities, how far would the new powers extend? The answer was that there were no limits. The only rule was political expediency. Howe explained this as well: “In the mind of the Germans the functions of the state are not susceptible to abstract, a priori deductions. Each proposal must be decided by the time and the conditions. If it seems advisable for the state to own an industry, it should proceed to own it; if it is wise to curb any class or interest, it should be curbed. Expediency or opportunism is the rule of statesmanship, not abstraction as to the philosophical nature of the state.” 
In this new world there was no place for universal and enduring principles concerning the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property, or for constitutions to prevent governments from encroaching on freedom. Every policy issue was to be guided by the pragmatic interests of the day.

Read the rest at this link.


Bonnet tip to Cafe Hayek.

Imagination

We read this a few days ago, and the boy really got a kick out of it.  The kind of kick you get from reading Screwtape Letters.

The author begins by talking about typical daydreams where you imagine yourself a valiant prince or a beautiful princess, and then goes on:

"These are lovely dreams, and there's not much harm in them, unless you spend so much time dreaming that you aren't doing. Remember that life is made of doing, not dreaming.

When people criticize us, it can be comforting to dream of all the wonderful, beautiful things we'll do, such as caring for the sick and building homes for the poor, and buying gifts for the parent who found fault with us. We like to imagine how everyone will admire us for our beauty, or kindness, or cleverness--especially people who made fun of us. It's satisfying to imagine how kind we'll be to them and the presents we'll buy them--and to picture to ourselves how sorry they'll be for treating us badly!

I don't think it's right to use our Imagination in this way. For one thing, while we're preoccupied in our dreams, we're missing opportunities to do. And, after we've dreamed of ourselves as a superior and lofty person, so good and wonderful, we become easily offended. Then our Imagination stops creating visions of our goodness and starts magnifying the faults of our friends. Imagination tells us that Mom doesn't understand us and can't see what a great person we are. Or Dad isn't very nice, or Shelby is always noticed more than we are, or school lessons are too hard, or going for a walk is too much of a chore, or visitors are bothering us, or any book that isn't just stories will be boring. And, little by little, we begin to turn into the very people that we imagined to be so displeasing.

And then even our best friends will have to admit that we're boring and disagreeable, irritable and resentful. They'll say there's no pleasing us. They'll complain that we won't join in games, or get interested in any kind of plans. They'll say that we don't care to be pleasant with anyone, and that we don't care about helping anybody. Children will say that we're always grouchy, and they won't try to coax us to play with them. Older children will think we're grumpy and they'll leave us alone. It frustrates us because, in our own minds, we see ourselves as wonderful people. We have beautiful thoughts about the kind things we'll do for all those people, and we can't understand why people won't show a little gratitude!

Disarming the Demons

The truth is, the others are more accurate in their assessment of us. Consider -- who is the main person in all the fantastic scenarios you create, and in all the plans you imagine? If you have to admit that the main person is you, yourself, then your Imagination has been spending too much time making pleasure-houses for Self, when it should have been collecting images of the wide, rich world all around. Correct Imagination's vision, and put this glorious servant to work doing his rightful duty. Then your friends will look forward to seeing you because you'll have so much to say, and you'll be interested in so many things. You'll no longer trouble them (or yourself!) with that touchy, critical, grudging Self who can be such a tyrant. In fact, you'll discover so many fascinating things to think about, that you'll hardly have a spare minute to think about yourself! Throw Self out as soon as he intrudes on any vision in the Imagination. One good tactic is to take your Self by the shoulders, look him right in the face, and laugh at him for being so ridiculous. That's what's called 'the saving grace of a sense of humor.' People who can laugh at themselves don't make themselves seem absurd by putting on airs and forced manners. Another help, though not quite as effective, is when the people you live with can laugh at you and tease you. Learn from their laughter. Put up with their teasing with good humor.
More here. IT's from Charlotte Mason's OUrselves, Leslie Noelani's modern day version.

On This Day in...

1922 - The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 19th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote.

1933 - The Reichstag, Germany's parliament building in Berlin, was set afire. The Nazis accused Communist for the fire.

1949 - Chaim Weizmann became the first Israeli president.

1951 - The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, limiting U.S. Presidents to two terms.

More here

Happy Belated Birthday To Chopin

Article here.



Martha Argerich plays Polonaise No. 6

Here's Nocturne:


And the sound quality here is unfortunately bad, but Zino Francescatti's playing is so sweetly poignant:


And here's a find, a 1928 recording of Backhaus playing Op 10 and more:


To add anything to that would be superfluous and distracting.

Health Care Plans

The Health Care Bill Obama presents relies on price controls.  They don't work.  more here

Obama's bill also relies on postponing excise taxes until long after his imagined second term would end.  Oh, good, that time bomb is gonna make legislators happy.  Not to mention taxpayers.  Like our children.

That health care plan:

contains $11 billion in funding for “community health centers,” much of it destined for Planned Parenthood clinics around the country. What do they do with that money? Lila Rose and Live Action Films released their ninth video exposing the tenth clinic that broke laws requiring medical providers to report potential child abuse to the state. This time it’s the PP clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that advises a 14-year-old girl how to get an abortion without disclosing that a 31-year-old man is responsible for impregnating her:

 That's illegal in Wisconsin (in every state, in fact) and Planned Parenthood is required by law to report this crime.  They didn't.  They don't (anybody who really thinks this is an isolated case just isn't in touch with reality) And yet they are going to get more funding from the Federal Government.

From Drew at Ace's place:

And just for fun, Obama and his minions are lying when they say the Republicans don't have a health care plan. They are also simultaneously demanding, as Hoyer points out, that Republicans have one plan. This is pretty funny since the Democrats have 3 at last count. I guess that's ok because the Democrats are in charge or something.
I still don't see anything passing. You can talk about reconciliation all you want but there's not even agreement on what they'd be passing that way. Tomorrow's show is going to produce nothing but a chance for the Democrats to say they tried to work with the Republicans and they will go the nuclear route. Problem is they are fools calling their own bluff. That never works out for anyone.

Betsy has a tidy little roundup of comments and posts on it- basically, he seems to have taken the worst elements of both Senate and House versions and combined them, with a few nasty twists of his own (like postponing tax collecting until some other politicians get to be the bad guys.

There are some major problems with calculating the costs of the bill (one of them being that several states have banned one of the revenue sources the bill counts on for funding).

School Uses Gov't Issued Laptops To Spy On Kids At Home

This is pretty ugly. 

Blake Robbins and his 18-year-old sister both attend Harriton High School and were among the 2,300 students in the district to receive the Apple laptops. All students and their parents had to sign a "memorandum of understanding" to take the laptops home with wording that explained the rules and regulations that came along with the computers. The paperwork did not include the disclosure that the school district had the ability to remotely activate the embedded webcams at any time, without student's permission.


Last November, Blake Robbins was called to the office by the vice principal to talk about what she called his "improper behavior" at home. Vice Principal Lindy Matsko allegedly cited as evidence a photograph taken with the computer's webcam that had been activated in Blake's bedroom. Robbins claims that the Matsko accused him of selling drugs when she saw him holding up what she believed to be pills. The 15-year-old says he was simply holding his favorite candy, "Mike And Ikes," which are small oblong, chewy jelly beans.

A portion of the article wastes time on the kid and his mother defending themselves against the drug charge, and I say this is a waste of time because for this case it is totally irrelevant.  I am willing to believe it was candy, but I really do not care if it wasn't- the school had no business at all spying on the kid in his home.  He was in his bedroom, for crying out loud!   The school officials who turned on that webcam were clearly playing Peeping Tom and they deserve to be fired, at least.

Typically, they insist that they never use this function for any but legitimate purposes:

School district officials say the only time they ever turn on the webcams is when one of the school-issued laptops have been reported lost, stolen or missing, so that they can try to track them down. They concede that the wording in the laptop policy was not sufficient, and did not explain the security feature, but insist that they never spied on students. Lower Merion officials say that they turned the cameras on 42 times in the past 14 months, which helped them recover 28 missing laptops.

The math here is an obvious problem as well.  But since his own laptop was in his own bedroom when the school took a photograph of the 15 year old student, then obviously, the school district  officials are lying- blatantly, in fact.  They have no control of where the laptop is when they activate the webcam, so the risk that they might be viewing undressed teens in the privacy of their own bedrooms is an obvious risk, and I am cynical enough to believe that somebody nasty in the school district viewed that as a feature and not a bug.

Last week, a federal civil rights lawsuit was filed against the Lower Merion School District, its board of directors and the superintendent for allegedly violating the privacy of a 15-year-old student at Harriton High School by remotely activating the webcam inside a school-issued laptop computer. Now, the FBI has reportedly opened an investigation into the case to see if there were any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws that were violated.

Something else that really disturbs me is the compliant, well brainwashed response of the other students in the school:

Some students tell Fox News that they want to learn more facts before casting judgment on their vice principal and other school administrators. Others say they will only use their computers with a piece of tape over the camera's eye. With the alleged incident happening in November of last year, Victoria Zuzelo, vice president of the student council at Harriton High, says she wants to know why it took so long for all of this to come out.

It's the first group that bothers me.  There isn't more to learn- they activated webcams without permission or any sort of warning that this could happen- they already admit that.  Nothing else matters (except gifts from the government always come with strings).

Here's a pro-laptop in the schools video.  At the 4.37 mark we learn that the principle can monitor the students' use of their laptops- including watching them via webcams.  He demonstrates this by having the news team spy with him on a girl who is brushing her hair.    All the footage showed here shows him monitoring the students at school.  I don't know if they take their laptops home or not.

I found the educator's comments about computers and distractable students rather jaw dropping as well.  A teacher says she can't sit and do the same work for an hour, so why would she expect her students to do that?


Bonnet tip to Hot Air.

The Cost of Education

From Betsy's Page:

Andrew Coulson shows how the District of Columbia spent a whopping $28,000 per pupil in the 2008-09 school year. If you take out special education students, they spent an average of $23,000 per pupil. As John Stossel points out,

Oh, and the $7,500 for voucher schools? Turns out that the average voucher school only charges $6,620 (many are catholic schools.) So they cost a quarter of what public schools do, but still they do better!

Yup. And that's the program that the Democrats are ending. Great thinking there.

Vouchers are just about the only welfare program Democrats won't support, oddly enough.  Wonder why?

Here's a disturbing look at one reason why public schools drain so much money, and it's not because of the education they provide.

Homeschooling Carnival

Check out the blog posts on homeschooling related topics here!

Maybe Serving in Congress Should Be Like Jury Duty?

...just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.
However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group...

And:

Nearly half of all voters believe that people randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress.

I think my idea of having Congress telecommute instead of abandoning its constituents and going off to hobnob with others in the separate and unequal political class sounds better and better-- and if we do this, then serving in Congress being something like jury duty sounds better and better.

While I'm complaining, I also think Congress should generally avoid perks not shared by all Americans- no cadillac health care plan, no golden parachute.

The Schedule is Plan B, Or, Keepin' It Real

The boys were supposed to go home Sunday night after a ten day long visit.  The five year old called his mother on our way home from church and told her he wanted to go home.  After they left we had plans to watch a movie I was really excited about because it was based on a Terry Pratchett novel and I really enjoy Terry Pratchett (that is not a recommendation) and eat snacky junk as soon as they left.  Eventually their mum arrived and stayed.  And stayed.  And stayed.  Finally my husband told her we were going to watch a movie, would she and the boys like to come upstairs and watch?  No, she said, they had to go.  During the customary but totally unnecessarily long, drawn out leave=taking process, the five year old asked her why he had to go home, why couldn't he stay?

There's not much I should say about the ensuing conversation between Blynken and his mother because I won't be a fair and impartial witness, so suffice it to say that the end result was that the boys stayed and she went home, and my husband and I stood around staring at each other a bit dumbfounded and pretty annoyed. 

Trying to salvage what was left of the evening, I told certain people to start the movie without me and I would get the boys ready for bed and read to them while everybody else got to watch the movie.  I did all that, and answered about forty-eleven very hard questions from a very confused and upset little boy and comforted a crying 3 year old who really was ready to go home after 11 days at my house, but for inexplicable reasons there was no movie watching in the other room, as I discovered when I finished with the boys and came out.  There really isn't anything else I should say about the rest of the evening because nobody comes out very well in it, and I think  everybody went to bed mad, except possibly The Cherub and the dog.

On Monday the boys had been coming back anyway because there was a doctor appointment, so I was already sitting for them. I made plans for school stuff to do all day with the little boys and my own two youngest children.  I wrote some of the plans down.  In the morning I was working on finishing those plans and gathering some of the materials I needed when The EC called and reminded me Shasta has asked the night before if anybody could come over to their house Monday to help with getting the house in order.  He really wanted them there before he left for work, but they didn't want to go until after lunch because they had schoolwork they wanted to finish.  So the new plan was he'd drop the wife and baby off at my house on his way to work and the EC would take them back to her house after lunch in our van.

My mom needed somebody to sit with my dad, so Pip left to do that.

The little boys and I made play-dough and then we all sat down at the table to do schoolish stuff and shortly afterwards Shasta called.  His truck wouldn't start, could I come pick them up?   So I did that.

This post is already too long and tedious, so the short version of the rest of the day is that:
The phone rang.
The phone rang.
The phone rang.
The phone rang.
The phone rang.
The phone rang.
The phone rang.

Sometimes the land-line rang and while I was answering that call the cell phone rang.  Other times it was the other way around.
The boys didn't go home until five p.m. and after they left I learned their mother told Pip they'd be back on Wednesday which is the first I knew of that.

I think I need a plan Z.

Here's my tip for the week

I have really bad knees.  I have knees to bad that when one of the dogs merely bumps into my leg it sometimes make me sick to my stomach it hurts so badly.  I almost never pivot to change direction- I accieentally and thoughtlessly pivoted a few nights ago, not even a major swivel, and I had to hold on to a chair and bite my lips a few seconds.

But Saturday night The Cherub and both the little boys needed baths, and everybody else was busy, so the task fell to me.

Kneepads.  Like football players wear.  I found an old, tatty pair a few years back at a thrift shop and I put them on to bathe small children or scrub the bathtub.

Now I need something for my back.

Woman attacks pro-life protestor at abortion clinic....

She threatened her with a knife, was charged and given a mild sentence, and decided not to go through with her abortion as schedules, tearfully thanking the prolife protestors for being there and stopping her from doing something she would have regretted the rest of her life.  Pro-aborts are, naturally, furious at this choice.

Keeping Up With Haiti

This article in Salon is just beautiful- I would make it required reading for high school students as part of their geography and social studies.  HEre's an excerpt:

I want you to know that, before the earthquake, things in Haiti were normal. Outside Haiti, people only hear the worst -- tales that are cherry-picked, tales that are exaggerated, tales that are lies. I want you to understand that there was poverty and oppression and injustice in Port-au-Prince, but there was also banality.

Tip of the bonnet to Tara Livesay, who also has a fascinating post on maternity issues in Haiti, both pre and post earthquake (triplets?  Wow).


One of the 8 freed missionaries from Haiti (they'd been arrested for attempting to transport children out of the country without the proper authorizations) speaks out.  He thought the children had their paperwork, and he'd been told that they were all orphans. 

The Apparent Project has some great links to articles with more information on Haiti, photographs, and even some websites to start learning Kreyol if you want to go to Haiti to help.

Haiti has an official national day of mourning in response to the earthquake.  These two articles discuss that.

For those of you who sew, here's a list of ongoing needs for diapers, pillowcase dresses, and aprons that the RHFH Rescue Center has, and, Licia says, always will have.
And if you don't sew, here's another way to help from home- purchase needs like vitamins, diapers, and more online.  This post is very informative.

Climate Change Claim De Jour

Claims about rising seas withdrawn.  Oops  It's not that they aren't rising.  It's worse than that, actually.  The errors in the paper so seriously undermined the study's conclusions that the entire paper had to be retracted- they do not know whether sea levels are rising, sinking, or remaining the same.

In a statement the authors of the paper said: “Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

[...]  This was a peer reviewed paper:

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.
At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results“. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

This expert says sea levels are not rising:

Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner is the head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project.

And here we have an article about how the sea levels were higher 83,000 years ago when there was less carbon....

And this scientist is making some fundamental errors about cause and effect, about science in general, in fact:

Oceanographer James McCarthy, the AAAS's president-elect, said that after initial successes in tripping up the IPCC, sceptics will redouble their efforts to highlight other errors.

How about they just worry about finding the errors themselves and correcting them?  How about they consider how much better this makes their papers?
The headline where McCarthy is quoted says that 'attacks on climate change research are damaging the public's faith in science.'  Um, no.  The attempts to get climate change researchers to own up to their errors and, in some cases, their hypocrisy, are damaging the public's faith in those scientists.  A discipline that cannot share the data and so its results can be accurately reproduced by other scientists is no science at all.  I would say it is the antics of the Climate Change Researchers that have done more to damage faith in the climate change researcher's 'science,' falsely so called.


Unfortunately, The Guardian publishes this nasty, unfounded hit piece,
“Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain” by Jeffrey Sachs.  Anthony Watts has deeply personal reasons why the charge of being connected in any way to support of the tobacco industry is appalling, and dishonest.



Speaking of funding:


From the Climate Research Unit's own web site we find an interesting list of those providing funding to the CRU, including:
British Petroleum, ‘Oil, LNG’
Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, ‘Food to Ethanol’
The United States Department of Energy, ‘Nuclear’
UK Nirex Ltd. ‘Nuclear’
Sultanate of Oman, ‘LNG’
Shell Oil, ‘Oil, LNG’
Tate and Lyle. ‘Food to Ethanol’
Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, ‘Nuclear’
KFA Germany, ‘Nuclear’
World Wildlife Fund, ‘Political Advocates’
Greenpeace International, ‘Political Advocates’

More in the 'climate is not weather unless we say it is department:

In answer, the climate campaigners note that "weather is not climate" and that localized weather events are consistent with climate "change." They may be right — yet these are the same folks who jumped up and down claiming that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, even though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that narrative.

The ruckus exposes the greatest problem of Al Gore & Co.: They've pointed to any weather anomaly — cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters — as proof of climate change. That is, they can't name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory.
The rest here.

Donna Laframboise has a conspicuous example of linking climate to weather:
 

The fact that snow is conspicuously absent from some of the venues at the Vancouver winter Olympics was held up by President Obama yesterday as evidence that global warming is, in fact, occurring. Responding to a question, the President declared:
I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn't mean that every place is getting warmer…But...Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees… [bold added]

And she finds an excellent refutation:

Furthermore, a 2003 article from the Vancouver Sun plucked from the archives demonstrates that everyone knew back on the day Vancouver was awarded the Olympics that snow would be in short supply:
…no city with a climate as mild as Vancouver's has ever hosted the Winter Games…sports fans who turn on their TVs in 2010 will probably see the kind of winter Vancouverites know all too well: a cloudy, rainy city full of people carrying umbrellas...

"The typical view of a Winter Games is snow," said Alex Carre…a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee…People will come here and say, 'Gosh, where is the snow?'"…While there are likely to be at least a couple of nice, sunny days during the two-week event, there could also be plenty of days of driving rain... [bold added]

You wouldn't know it from reading the American media, but:

The meltdown of the climate change movement is entering a new phase as the European left turns on the UN climate change office and the IPCC.
The German left wing press, one of the world’s strongest supporters of the ‘climate change movement’ is turning against the scientists and UN bureaucrats responsible for leading the movement.  A round-up of German press coverage over the unexpected resignation of UN climate chief Yvo de Boer offers a perspective on the failures of the climate change movement that is both more scathing and more frank than anything the mainstream US press has yet brought itself to utter.

George Garth of New Zealand writes:

I am indebted to a reader for sending me a copy of an article which appeared in this newspaper and which I hadn't read. Under the headlines "Man is making the earth too warm, Threat of melting polar caps", it quoted a prominent physicist as saying that the levels of the oceans could rise 12m and flood vast areas of the Earth in the next half century unless atmospheric temperatures were controlled.
The physicist, Dr Joseph Kaplan, professor of physics at the University of California, said such flooding could occur as a result of accelerated melting of the polar ice caps.
Should the oceans rise by 12m, their waters would roll through parts of New York, London, San Francisco and many other coastal cities.
Dr Kaplan said the melting of the ice caps was being speeded by man's tremendous use of oil and gas which was "changing the Earth's atmosphere".

There's more at the link.  Here's the kicker:

Now the reason I missed that story is that it appeared in this newspaper on Tuesday, April 9, 1957, at which time I was 16 years old and preparing to travel by ship to the United States on an American Field Service scholarship.
Dr Kaplan, meanwhile, was head of the National Committee for the 1957-58 International Geophysical year. He died in 1991.

With all those Chicken Littles running around, taking tax funds, regulating the economy, hindering business and imposing ever tightening restrictions on our lives as they bet billions of our money on their business models (Cap and Trade), where is Foxy Loxy when you need him?

On the Teaching Of Poetry, Part 2

The first part is here.  I guess one month between installments is not bad.

Okay, yes it is.  But here's the second partof :

On the Teaching of Poetry
by Mary A. Woods
Headmistress of The Clifton High School
Page 111 of Volume 2 of the Parents' Review, 1891/92
 [...]

How then should poetry be taught?  In order to answer this question I must attempt a definition of poetry, not indeed adequate, but sufficiently so for our present purpose.  It is one which covers, I think, the whole of lyrical poetry, and the more poetical passages of epic and dramatic poetry.  I would define poetry, then, as the musical expression, by means of words, of thought charged with emotion.  I use the word "musical" not,  of course in its technical sense, but as applied to rime and to rhythm, the sweet consonances and cadences of verse; and the word "emotion," as applied to all forms of human feelings, from the impulses of love or of sorrow to the subtleties of foreboding or regret.

If we go further and analyse the genesis of poetry, we shall, I suppose, find that thought, when sufficiently charged with emotion, when heated- as I have heard it expressed- to the white heat of passion, instinctively seeks a rhythmical outlet.  This is the case even with passionate prose; and what is rhythm in prose becomes metre in poetry.  Thus the elements of poetry are thought, emotion, music; and I lay stress upon the music because I believe it to be not only an element essential to poetry, but an element too apt to be overlooked.

Poetry appeals primarily to the ear, and its sounds ought to satisfy the ear.  This is true even of poetry as profound as Milton's, to whose blindness we are doubtless in part indebted for his majestic harmonies, and it is more obviously true of the ballads and other simple poetry more suited to children.  And it is precisely this element of music which is the first to appeal to children.  For the child the order I have given is reversed.  It is not "Thought, emotion, music," but "music, emotion, thought."  A child will hear and enjoy the music of a poem before he can appreciate the emotion; he will appreciate the emotion before he can understand the thought.

Now this order, which is the natural and therefore the healthy one, is obviously to be followed in all attempts to teach young children.  I would say then, if you ask me how to teach poetry-


To be continued...

Blynken Asks a Question

Turns out it's a good thing I decided on a plan to do some school stuff more regularly with Blynken when he's here, because....
Well, when I took Blynken to see the social worker last week, or rather, so she could see him and dismiss the case (the school turned his mama into CPS for non-attendance) the social worker made some inadvertent comment to Blynken that indicated to Your Friendly DeputyHeadmistress that Blynken's mama had told the social worker that YFDH was homeschooling him.  The inadvertent comment?  Something like, "I know your Mama says you're going to school at your Tee-Tee's house now, how is that going?  What do you do there for school?"

Happily Blynken did recognize that some of the stuff we do is school, and he talked about how he reads here, and how I read a lot of books to him.  We talked about it later, however, and he was worried that he wasn't doing 'enough' school.

That day had been a busy day, interrupted in the middle by the visit with the social worker at his mother's house and then a trip to the grocery store and then dinner prep for some company we were having for dinner.

But while in the van we had listened to Peter and the Wolf again, only this time we learned the signs for each of the animals involved, talked more extensively about the instruments, discussed what a composer does (he know what an author does, so it was an easy step to go from there to composer as somebody who writes music he makes up), and where he was from.
"That was school?" he asked.

That day we had gone to the grocery store and I had him help me count out apples, oranges, and tomatoes.  I asked him to get me four cans of olives and when he picked up one can I asked him how many more he needed to pick up, and when he picked up the second can I asked him again how many more he had to pick up.  In the car we counted by tens and we counted up from 32, 54, and 87, and I asked him questions like "What's one more than 63?  What's one less than 63?  What's one more than 50? What's one less than 50?"
"That was school? he asked.

We read from the Golden Book of Geography, and then I asked him to draw me a picture of something we read about.
"That was school? he asked.

I assured him that was all school  So then he had another question.

"But when do we get recess?"

Not a Sunday Hymn Post

I've been doing a hymn post every Sunday for five years, with just a few exceptions.  So I thought I'd like to try something else for a while.

Here's an excerpt from The Shepherd of Hermes, an early Christian allegory, written no later than the 2nd century.  It was one of the most popular extra-biblical works with the Christians of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries (and not all of the early Christians thought it was extra-biblical).  Something like Pilgrim's Progress, the story is told by Hermes, who says he fell into a vision.  In this portion, he is being rebuked and warned by a wonderful old woman who warns him:

And although you love your sons, yet did you not warn your house, but permitted them to be terribly corrupted.¹⁹ On this account is the Lord angry with you, but He will heal all the evils which have been done in your house. For, on account of their sins and iniquities, you have been destroyed by the affairs of this world. But now the mercy of the Lord²⁰ has taken pity on you and your house, and will strengthen you, and establish you in his glory.²¹ Only be not easy-minded,²² but be of good courage and comfort your house. For as a smith hammers out his work, and accomplishes whatever he wishes²³ , so shall righteous daily speech overcome all iniquity.²⁴ Cease not therefore to admonish your sons; for I know that, if they will repent with all their heart, they will be enrolled in the Books of Life with the saints."²⁵ Having ended these words, she said to me, "Do you wish to hear me read? "I say to her, "Lady, I do." "Listen then, and give ear to the glories of God."²⁶ And then I heard from her, magnificently and admirably, things which my memory could not retain. For all the words were terrible, such as man could not endure.²⁷ The last words, however, I did remember; for they were useful to us, and gentle.²⁸ "Lo, the God of powers, who by His invisible strong power and great wisdom has created the world, and by His glorious counsel has surrounded His creation with beauty, and by His strong word has fixed the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth upon the waters, and by His own wisdom and providence²⁹ has created His holy³⁰ Church, which He has blessed, lo! He removes³¹ the heavens and the mountains,³² the hills and the seas, and all things become plain to His elect, that He may bestow on them the blessing which He has promised them,³³ with much glory and joy, if only they shall keep the commandments of God which they have received in great faith."
When she had ended her reading, she rose from the chair, and four young men came and carried off the chair and went away to the east. And she called me to herself and touched my breast, and said to me, "Have you been pleased with my reading? "And I say to her, "Lady, the last words please me, but the first are cruel and harsh." Then she said to me, "The last are for the righteous: the first are for heathens and apostates." And while she spoke to me, two men appeared and raised her on their shoulders, and they went to where the chair was in the east. With joyful countenance did she depart; and as she went, she said to me, "Behave like a man,³⁴ Hermas."

These All Sound Like Good Ideas to Me

DEMAND A BALANCED BUDGET: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.

STOP THE TAX HIKES: Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to income, capital gains, and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011.

COMMIT TO REAL GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY: Every bill, in its final form, will be made public seven days before any vote can be taken and all government expenditures authorized by any bill will be easily accessible on the Internet before the money is spent. (Proposed by: Steve Kulik, Gonzales, Texas; and Steve Hollis, San Francisco, Calif.)

PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.

PASS REAL HEALTHCARE REFORM: Greatly improve affordability of health insurance by permitting all Americans access to all health insurance plans sold anywhere in the United States through the purchase of insurance across state lines and allow small businesses and associations to pool together across state lines to buy insurance.

ENACT FUNDAMENTAL TAX REFORM: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the Internal Revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words—the length of the original Constitution.

END RUNAWAY GOVERNMENT SPENDING: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth.

LET US SAVE: Allow all Americans to opt out of Social Security and Medicare and instead put those same payroll taxes in a personal account they own, control, and can leave to whomever they choose.

PROTECT INTERNET FREEDOM: No regulation or tax on the Internet.

GIVE PARENTS MORE CHOICES IN THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN: Improve American education by reforming the broken federal role through eliminating ineffective and wasteful programs, giving parents more choices from pre-school to high school, and improving the affordability of higher education.

PASS AN 'ALL OF THE ABOVE' ENERGY POLICY: Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition.

PROTECT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS: Prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from using funds to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in any form, including requiring "localism" or "diversity" quotas.

RESTORE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY & CONSTITUTIONALLY LIMITED GOVERNMENT: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in a complete audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states.

PROTECT PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS: Block state and local governments that receive federal grants from exercising eminent domain over private property for the primary purpose of economic development or enhancement of tax revenues.

REJECT CAP & TRADE: Prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from implementing costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation's global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.

STOP THE PORK: Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the process is fully transparent, including requiring a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark.

NO CZAR REGULATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION: All "lawmaking" regulations must be affirmatively approved by Congress and signed into law by the president, as the Constitution requires for all laws.

AUDIT THE FED: Begin an audit of the Federal Reserve System.

NO MORE BAILOUTS: The federal government should not bail out private companies and should immediately begin divesting itself of its stake in the private companies it owns from recent bailouts.

STOP CAREER POLITICIANS & CURB LOBBYIST POWER: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require Congressional term limits. No person shall be elected to the Senate more than twice or to the House of Representatives more than four times.

SUNSET REGULATIONS: All regulations will be "sunset" after ten years unless renewed by Congressional vote.

LET US WATCH: Broadcast all non-security meetings and votes on C-SPAN and the Internet.

Source


That's a comment to the bizarre article by Kate Zernike, where she assumes that Jason Mattera's normal working class Brooklynite accent isreally an attempting-to-mock-Chris-Rock-because-he's-black-accent.  Chris Rock is apparently the only guy Zernike knows who is from Brooklyn.  Zernike's bizarre claims reveal the underlying assumptions she has about blacks, and her assumptions are pretty insidiously ugly, all the more so because she is so arrogantly lacking in self-awareness.  More from Ace, who is a little worked up and thus  his language is rather blue here.

Jason responds on video here.

I Wanted To Stand Up And Cheer

I've got a new part-time job, and I love it. Doing what I did my last year at the university, I'm now a notetaker/tutor for students with disabilities at another college in town. I attend classes with students who are unable (for various reasons) to take notes on their own. This means I get to sit in on class lecture (fun!) and provide a service for someone who really needs it (also nice) *and* get a paycheck (ditto the last two parenthetical statements).

One of the classes I'm notetaking for this semester is an intro statistics class. Earlier this week, the professor spent a while talking about probability. She discussed the (slim) odds for getting a good grade on an exam by randomly guessing at the responses.

One of the students then volunteered that for some of his classes, he studied half of the material thoroughly and then randomly guessed at the other half. This gave him a passing grade, so he was happy.

The teacher started to say something, paused, and then decided to say it anyway...
"I think there's a difference between training and education; training is when they train you to respond to exams like monkeys."

:-D

~ ~
On a funny, multi-cultural note... This instructor is originally from India. Unfamiliar with how fast-food restaurants work, she went to McDonalds soon after her arrival. After taking her order, the cashier asked if her meal was "take-out or dine-in." Completely lost, she responded, "I just want to eat."

Have you read this book?! You must.

The Rights of the Reader, by Daniel Pennac. Caution, a wee bit of language. But read it you must.

Mr. Pennac would not agree entirely with Charlotte Mason and neither would she agree entirely with him, but between the two of them a happy medium is probably established somewhere.

As for The Equuschick, she thinks is book is beautiful. For instance, she suspects it explains a great deal of what happened to Shasta.

She gives you Chapter 20:

If young people don't like reading, let's not blame television or the modern world or school. Or rather, blame them all, but only after asking what we have done to that ideal reader since the days we played at being both storyteller and book.

The scale of our betrayal!

The child, the narrative, and us. We formed a Trinity that was reunited every evening; now they're alone, in front of a hostile book.
The lightness of our sentences stopped them from getting bogged down; now having to mumble indecipherable letters stifles even their ability to dream.
We introduced them to vertical travel; now they're dragged down by effort.
We granted them the power to go anywhere; look at them now, trapped in their bedrooms, their classrooms, the book, in a line, in a word.

So where have all those magical characters gone? Those brothers and sisters, kings and queens? Those heroes pursued by villains, who, by asking for help, relieved the children's anxieties about their own existence? What could those characters possibly have to do with the brutally splattered ink marks we call letters? Have those demigods been reduced to this: printed signs?

And has the book become an object? What a strange metamorphosis. Alchemy in reverse. Their heroes- and they- suffocating in the silent thickness of the book.

And not least among the metamorphoses is Mom and Dad's newfound determination, like the teacher's, to make them explain the story that is in their head.

"So what happened to the prince, hmm? I'm waiting!"

These same parents who never, ever worried before if their child had understood that Beauty was sleeping in the woods because she'd been pricked by a spindle. Or Snow White because she'd taken a bite out of the apple. (They hadn't really understood the first few times, as it happens. There was so much amazing stuff in those stories, so many pretty words, so much emotion. All their energy went into anticipating their favorite part and repeating it when it came around. There were other, more obscure, passages too, where the plot thickened. But gradually they understood everything, absolutely everything: they knew that if Beauty was sleeping, it was because of the spindle, and Snow White because of the apple..)

"I'm asking you again: what happened to the prince when his father banished him from the castle?"
We go on and on about it. Good grief, it's unbelievable the kid hasn't understood those fifteen lines!

We used to be their storyteller. We've become their accountant.

'If that's the way you want it, there'll be no television!'

Oh, yes!

Television given the status of a reward...and reading reduced to a chore. Brilliant.

The Real Henry Adams Vs the Cliffs Notes Henry Adams

This excerpt is taken from The Education of Henry Adams. It's kind of long, but I thought it was interesting, especially after I read the Cliffs Notes take on it (which follows):

Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for
there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also
sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments
were all she asked -- Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On
these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man
needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals nor forts."

Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the
Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character,
moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about
Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never
excelled. They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no
doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a
virtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be
sufficient for salvation. For them, difficulties might be
ignored; doubts were waste of thought; nothing exacted solution.
Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realized the
best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the
grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most.
The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read
his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed
in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but
neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real.
Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome
that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and
never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had
vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later
life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion
of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal
defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by
the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever
knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so
thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about
past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the
problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded
time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious
social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life. The
faculty of turning away one's eyes as one approaches a chasm is
not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of Mr. Webster,
how successfully it could be done in politics; but in politics a
certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms
more simple than the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker,
and of the boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed
his father and scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism
that seemed to solve no old problems, and to raise many new ones.
The less aggressive protest of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an
old-world point of view, less serious. It was naif.

The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with
the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy
were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been
possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of
necessity, the more literary and political.

Here's what my modern Cliffs Notes says about the above passage:

"It is important to notice that, during these years, Henry becomes disillusioned with formal religion. Initially attending church twice every Sunday, reading his Bible, and memorizing sacred poetry, he eventually comes ot the conclusion that religion has no meaning for him. Even the moderate discipline of the Unitarian church is excessive. It especially bothers him that 'the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy,' turns its eyes away from the social and political problems of the day. Beyond the age of sixteen, formal religion will have no influence on Henry's education."

I found that slightly jarring, sort of like when I was discussing the movie Sophie's Choice with my mother and she told me her co-worker had told her it was a love-story, but sad.
I had noticed this two or three other times while reading the Cliffs Notes version (which I always read after I've read the actual book section).  I thought it was just me.  But this time I decided I needed other opinions. Is the Cliff's notes assessment really the fairest and most accurate summation of Adams' points here?