Be Not Idle

“(I)n 1973, the Michigan legislature passed a law intended to regulate unlicensed day care providers, not good neighbors, to ensure the health and safety of children.” – Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Health and Services

Recently the plight of a West Michigan woman made national headlines when she received a letter from the Department of Human Services warning her against running an unlicensed daycare. Except that she wasn’t doing that: She was helping her neighbors. Between the time they left for work and the time the school bus arrived, the woman looked after their children.

In these parts, that sort of caring gesture is called “neighborliness”.

But another neighbor – anonymous, of course – called the DHS to report an unlicensed daycare center. The DHS sent a letter to the helpful lady, complete with a list of consequences like fines and jail time.

News shows and bloggers leaped on the story. A few (very few) right-leaning commenters equated the law with a Michigan full of “union toughs” and power-hungry “libs”. Evidentally they missed when Governor Granholm*- a notoriously left-leaning politician – talked to Mr. Ahmed and Michigan legislators about working together to change the law.

I also tired of comments (both online and in real-life) that stated that the helpful neighbor should go ahead and get a daycare license. I suppose some of them responded out of igorance, having no idea that a license entails background checks, home inspections, etc.

But what bothered me most were others implied that private citizens (Jane Q. Neighbor, if you will) shouldn’t be doing public service.
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Some of my conservative web-quaintances ™ are disgusted by the President’s plan to address Kindergartners and other elementary school children. Bob Parks, at Black & Right, even embedded the “lesson plans” to go with the historic address.

President Obama’s Address to Students Across America September 8, 2009 –

Ha! Amateurs! I refer both to the conservatives and to the “Teaching Ambassador Fellows” who wrote the plans.

Conservative political commentors think they get ticked off by propaganda posing as “education”? Since I spent the summer working on new lesson plans for all my classes, I am furious at these so-called “Teaching Ambassador Fellows”. The classroom activities list is pure crapola. There’s no justification for how it fits ANY curricular goals, and it’s not even grade-specific. Heck, my colleague who was hit by a drunk driver made better lesson plans from the hospital!

A first-year student in the college of education couldn’t get a decent grade on such shoddy work, so I wondered what these “Teaching Ambassador Fellows” were. Thirteen fellows sent to the U.S. Department of Education as ambassadors to learn about this strange American tradition that some like to calll “edumacation”? Why, no! In fact, these thirteen people were chosen for their leadership, their students’ achievements, and their “insight on education policy”. You can read more here:

http://www.ed.gov/programs/teacherfellowship/awards.html

Click on each person’s name and you can read his or her fellowship-earning essay. I find a few vomit-inducing in their political-speak. Except for Tamra Jackson, who spent 23 years in the same district, there seems to be a plethora of experiences outside the norm; e.g. teaching in prison, working under a government grant, etc.

I smiled wryly at the teacher who was shocked to find that education was politicized and that colleagues resisted improving education. Try telling a local politician or business leader that his daughter is failing history class because she plagiarized her term paper. I dare you. Or, in my case, have a “school improvement” guru tell you that American students do worse on tests than the average student in a developing nation, so we should adopt their strategies. And when you point out that the average citizen in that nation doesn’t take those tests because their education ended before high school, the guru smiles patronizingly and waves off your critique. Bonus points if the nation in question has a history of considering girls less worthy of education than boys.

BTW, I have noticed that a lot of the “education experts” at conferences escaped from the daily grind as soon as possible. For example, the writer of The Freedom Writers Diary, Erin Gruwell, left the classroom after her memoir became a best-seller and she had a media tour. She became an educational consultant after just four years of experience as teaching. She now heads the Erin Gruwell Education Project, which focuses on inclusion and scholarships.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before technology enabled a better, faster breed of jerk. (After all, CAD was part of its history – ha ha!)

My ex-boyfriend announced his engagement with a mass e-mail. The e-mail read thus:

SUBJECT: Ahem…
…she said YES!!!!

We broke up about a year and a half ago. He insisted we could remain friends. Our contact mainly consisted of e-mails.

He’d send me jokes and chain letters with lots of graphics. Periodically I’d ask about his dad and stepmother, his sister, his work on the night-shift, his studies… that sort of thing. His replies were nice, usually funny. In all that time, he never mentioned a new (or old) girlfriend. I believe the term actually in play was ”too busy for a relationship”.  

I used to find out such things naturally in conversation. In fact, after 20 years of dating, I prided myself on a hard-earned skill of sensing “hedging one’s bets.” That occurs when a guy keeps me around in case his current relationship doesn’t work.

But with technology, intuition goes out the window. Granted, my best friends have built long-term relationships with men they met on-line, including a still-strong marriage between Type-A Man and Miss Spontaniety.

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Swin flu is more than hysteria in Argentina. Until this past week, I had no idea that the swine flu (H1N1) was still a pandemic in some parts of the world. In Argentina, the number of cases has reached 2,485. Sixty people have died so far. Those totals are lower than other countries, such as Australia.

However, the Argentinian numbers have increased sharply. In less than a week, the reported number of deaths more than doubled. The number of cases jumped by 898 between the WHO’s July 3rd report to its most recent report.

An Argentinian aquaintance told me the normal 15-day school break has been extended to 30 days to prevent exposure. Her daughter is doing her work at home and faxing it in. Theatres and cinemas have closed, and children are not supposed to go shopping.

Her family hasn’t been able to get the vaccine, though a shortage isn’t being reported by the government. Meanwhile, tens of new cases are reported every day – and the death toll goes up. Doctors and medical workers are being pulled from their regular duties to handle the workload. That means surgeries have been cancelled, labs are processing only samples that have already been sent in, etc.

Part of the problem is that swine flu prefers cooler weather (although the new virus isn’t affected as much). Argentina’s weather is the opposite of North America, so it is experiencing winter now – prime flu season.

Lord Jesus, have mercy on all involved in this cowardly murder.

Attributed to a Muslim extremist group, the bomb went off in front of the cathedral, killing  5 people. Thank God it went off during Mass, rather than afterwards, when  people would have been exiting the cathedral.

The Pope released a statement here.

I coined the term “Contrarians” one day in a conversation with Baby Brother. It was a riff on the “Vulgarians” at the Michigan Renaissance Festival, a fictional royal family that was not only vulgar, but also cheated, insulted other families, etc.

In a similar way, Contrarians don’t just disagree with other people’s opinions. They seldom create anything of their own, yet when viewing the results of another person’s labor, they state (loudly) how it could have been done better. They throw no fabulous parties, but they somehow manage to attend the most popular (and disappointing) affairs. Continue Reading »

Another sad day in the war against the drug cartels in Mexico.

Gunmen ordered a priest and two seminarians out of their vehicle and shot them dead in a drug-plagued region of western Mexico, authorities said Monday.

The three were killed as they drove through the town of Arcelia in Guerrero state to nearby Ciudad Altamirano to organize a spiritual retreat, said the Archbishop of Acapulco, Felipe Aguirre Franco.

No word yet on their names.

UPDATE: They are Father Habacuc Hernandez Benitez, and seminarians Eduardo Oregon Benitez and Silvestre Gonzalez Cambrón. More at CNA.

Rabbi Dr. Morton H. Pomerantz, a chaplain for the State of New York, speaks truth to Obama’s power.

Obama’s clever construct comparing the mass genocide of six million Jews to the Palestinian struggle will not be lost on the estimated 100 million Muslims who tuned into to hear him.
(…)
At first blush Mr. Obama’s speech seemed rosy, optimistic — one that espoused tolerance and understanding. If you scratch the surface it is a dangerous document that history will view as a turning point for America and Israel — one that will lead to dangerous times ahead for both Jews and believing Christians.

The immediate danger posed by Obama’s speech is in its incredible re-writing of the history of Jews, Christians and Muslims from Medieval times to the present.

I was already tired of pop culture revisions of the Crusades (among other things), as well as the destruction of pre-Islamic antiquities by those who wish to re-write Middle Eastern history. But it’s something entirely worse when the President of the United States buys into it.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson doesn’t believe the Orwellian Newspeak. He fires several quotable quotes (including “Princeton – the New Guantanamo”). Here’s a sample, but check them all out:

“They” and “Some” did it, not me… (…) The President, the First Lady, and the Attorney General cannot begin a speech without “some say”, “there are those who believe,” or “I am not convinced by others who argue”—all followed by their own enlightened antitheses. We are perennially back to Michelle Obama’s “they” who raised the bar, or the nefarious “some” in the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton nexus that shredded the Constitution with military tribunals and renditions in order to steal Iraqi oil.

No one points out that almost every historical reference Obama invoked in Cairo—from the supposed Muslim role in great world discoveries to Islam fueling the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the Inquisition and Spain—was inflated, but, more importantly, always inflated from a politically-correct point of view.

“We should have a nicer attitude to suicide, saying suicide is a very good possibility to escape.” – Ludwig Minelli of the Swiss suicide clinic Dignitas

Evidentally my transformation to a rightwing nut is complete, as about a month ago I read this story on Fox News.

A perfectly healthy British woman was planning, with the assistance of forementioned clinic, to commit suicide with her terminally-ill husband.  I’d read about it, thought about it, and then recently the subject came up again so I decided to comment on it. Continue Reading »

People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. …I suspect more than a few see themselves, deep down, as “the designated mourner,” from the title of the Wallace Shawn play. – from ”There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression”

Peggy Noonan has discovered that people are anxious about the economic crisis. More people are going to church; city folks are looking for farms. Gun sales are up; some deep-pocketed persons are pulling large sums of cash from their banks. (Or perhaps, being of Irish descent, Noonan is merely on a mortality rant.)

She thinks that anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication contributed to the financial crisis. I jest not. She writes: “In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s.”

Perhaps she should do a little informal study of how many users of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication work on Wall Street. Then, to compare, see how many users of anti-depressants, etc. voted for politicians who had their hands in the pot of various bailed-out institutions.  It ought to be downright interesting, to say the least.

Instead, she talked to a writer, a psychiatrist, etc. to take the pulse of the nation. And the patient isn’t well.

I know what she means. An aquaintance of mine (I’ll just call him “Max”) ignored the signs of the times: environmental change, the devastating cost of gas, man’s inhumanity to man.

He lived as he pleased, a loner speeding around in his gas-guzzling car and having conflicts with nearly everyone he met. But he reconsidered his ways and really thought what kind of world the younger generation would inherit. And that’s why he’s known far beyond Thunderdome.

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