Author: David

This is a personal tale of dealing with my son’s sick dog this week. If that’s not what you came here to read and you’d rather not, there’re plenty of other posts below. Otherwise, CLICK the “read more here” and read on.

Continue reading “Buttons, Buttons, Who’s Got a Buttons?”

The young checker at the local grocery gave me the total for my purchases. I thought I had misheard her, so I checked the total on the register. Yep. Including tax, it was less than the cost of the items I had submitted for total.

“Was something on sale and I just missed it?”

“No sir. The price includes your senior discount.”

Ouch. Hadn’t asked for one.

*heh*

From the mouths of babes…

(Guess I’m looking forward to my birthday anniversary next month.)

Parking my walker at the CIA (no, the other CIA), Camelot Destra Ideale (if your Italian is as weak/rusty as mine, go ahead and use Babelfish), Adam’s Blog (Hey, Adam: My Wonder Woman is off to a librarian’s meeting that lasts through Tuesday–know how ya may feel *sigh*) and TMH’s Bacon Bits, where I hope TMH is catching some family time this weekend.

This is an open trackback post, open all weekend long. Link to this post and track back. See more information below the post body.

This makes so much sense that it’s bound to never happen (at least as long as teachers’ unions, educrats and politicians are in the mix). Jerry Pournelle makes the following suggestion as part of his response to a reader who was himself responding to an earlier comment on education by Pournelle. Confused? Go read the posts. 1 2

“As a first cut I would offer first grade teachers a bonus of 100% of base salary if 100% of the pupils could read at the end of first grade; 50% bonus if 99% (or all but one) can read; 10% bonus if all but two; no bonus otherwise. It would make first grade teaching interesting…”

Well, d’oh, of course! If a first grade teacher has more than a couple of students who cannot read by year’s end, they have simply not done their job. Now, that could be because some jackass administrator has placed so many barriers in the way of the teacher doing his/her job that it was nigh onto impossible to do any real teaching, but it’d more likely be because the teacher was taught wrong by some jackass school of education. As Pournelle further noted,

“… give a teacher a class of IQ 70 and it will be very hard work getting them to learn to read, and they won’t learn much else — but they WILL learn to read if properly taught.”

Big “if” there. Any readers with young children (or grandchildren or neices/nephews) might want to explore Roberta Pournelle’s reading program before some prison for kids warden (disingenuously called “public school principal/superintendant”) gets its paws on them and passes them to a hamstrung teacher. (Did I just label pubschool administrators as “other than human”? Yep. And I’ll do it again. As a class, the dumbest things in “public education” are the critters that go into administration. Dumber than rocks—with the ocassional notable exception.)

Link to this post and track back. Open all weekend.

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

Continue reading “A sensible start to education reform/ Friday—Weekend Open Post”

This is just some geeky stuff. Nothing to see here; move it along, and all that (if this sort of stuff doesn’t interest you much). There’s a good tip to some grat info about the invasion of the U.S. in a post below.

OK, the geeky stuff…

Internet Exploder uswers who are readers of this blog have risen back to about half the number of readers/visitors. *sigh* Get a clue, folks. It’s not called (by me and now most of my clients) “Internet Exploder, the world’s crappiest browser” for nothing.

The other half of the readership is now about equally divided between Opera and Mozilla (mostly Firefox) with a sprinkling of Safari users. Interesting thing (to me, at least): the Opera users are mostly Windows-based, but there are a few who are Linux/Opera users and even a Mac user who browses the site with Opera. I’d like to see a few phone users who drop in with Opera, but that’s just cos I’d like to see its use spread more.

That’s all. You may return to your regular fare, now.

Linknzona has an important post up.

Here’s the nut of his case:

Will it be a nation integrated under equal justice? Or will it be a nation with one set of laws for one group and another set of laws for other groups based on race and national origin? We have tried this before and got our bloodiest war ever, 600,000 deaths in the Civil War, to restore equal justice under law. Later it took the upheavals of the bloody Civil Rights struggle when we tried it again nearly a century later. In both cases Americans fought and died for equal justice under law free of race and national origin as means of discrimination.

But here we are again. Our leaders are now saying if you are Hispanic illegal aliens, your rights exceed those of other illegal aliens, and even, the rights of legal immigrants and native born Americans of all races.

“Important” doesn’t say the half of it. Go. Read.

And after reading LomaAlta’s piece at Linknzona, I recommend this article on immigration from The Center for Reclaiming America’s online book, “Issues Tearing Our Nation’s Fabric”. A sample:

The problems created by these inequities cannot be measured in dollars and cents or in quality of life alone. At this moment there are nearly four million eligible people on waiting lists for legal immigration to this country; some have waited as long as eighteen years. But illegal immigration has further extended the delay, as the steady stream of invading peoples makes a mockery of American law and immigration policies and places law-abiding citizens and thousands of legal aliens at a disadvantage.

This political football game that congresscritters (and yes, President Bush) have turned into a game of “keep away from the electorate” is more than just an issue of economics, as many political poltroons play it, more than an issue of political and diplomatic relations with Mexico or any other country, more than just an “immigration issue” (as many paint it). It is an issue of justice, of fairness, of security and of soveriegnty.

Will we be a nation of equal justice, regardless of race, creed or national origins? Will we even survive the depredations of Washington pols to be a nation at all?

Asking, “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?” at Basil’s, TMH’s Bacon Bits, Woman Honor Thyself and Freedom Folks.

Mini-rant ahead. Buckle up.

Consider:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”—A Nation At Risk – April 1983

Ask yourselves: with four year college graduates showing an appalling lack of reading comprehension in a recent survey, are we better off now than 23 years ago, or worse? Why have we not isolated and vanquished the enemy that has foisted off an ever more expensive “prisons for kids” system of “education” on us? Complacency? Stupidity? What?

Of course if the goal is to see that the children of people rich enough to send their children to private schools, or to have a stay at home parent to home school, will get far ahead of everyone else regardless of intelligence or merit, we may achieve that goal… _*_

The war is indeed in progress… and it is we ourselves who are either waging it against our own or acting as dupes or witting accomplices of the educrats, politicians and others who are wrecking the minds of yet another generation.

More? How about, “We have seen the enemy and he is us”? Yup. We keep electing traitors to Congress. What else can they be when they refuse to enforce our borders? (*sigh* And here is also President Bush’s greatest failing: he has joined the enemies of the United States in inviting invaders to stay. *profound sigh*)

“…a nation is a country with a valid government when that nation-country-government can control its borders… permitting the proper administration of its governance over that territory…” _**_ (pdf file linked)

Let me just add that it seem to me that a country whose government refuses to defend its borders has an illegitimate government–especially a supposedly democratic republic whose populace is strongly in agreement that defense of its borders is a high priority. Hmmm, am I saying that our nation’s government is illegitimate?

It seems intend on proving itself so.

“The truth is advocates of amnesty, guest-worker programs and open borders are unconcerned about the 280 million American citizens, the men and women of this country who work for a living and their families.”—Lou Dobbs