My Time to Waste

Louann has an interesting post up at Holt and Beyond concerning a fifth grade boy she has undertaken to tutor.

I scrapped the textbook after one night of trying to read it. I swear textbooks destroy brain cells. I told the boy that I didn’t like the book. He looked surprised and then pleased. He said, “It’s boring, isn’t it?”

Boring indeed.  And the boy’s perception of that could more easily be evidence of the boy’s intelligence than it is evidence that he is dumb.

And why are history textbooks so awful?  Because too many people have input into them.  On the one hand, there are committees of “educators” deciding what factoids should be learned by all students.  Then the text book is written to include all of the factoids.   This renders, at best, a torturous narrative.  Then there are the people who monitor all the educational materials to root out any bias they perceive.  God forbid a child learns anything that might be ideological.

There is a nearly endless supply of great reading history and biography books, the reading of any one of which would lead to more learning than the entirety of textbooks.  But these books can not help but contain some bias or another.

The emphasis on factoids yields very poor results.  Few remember the factoids for long and few have any understanding of the forces of history since that was never taught to begin with.

Note:  Some of this was posted as a comment to the linked Holt and Beyond post.

I have seen a couple of references to the idea of changing the Senate filibuster rules.  I am completely opposed to this.

In the first place, the Democrats were able to pass health care reform within the existing rules.  The blame for the difficulty involved lies far more on the Democrat’s own shoulders than it does on those of the Republicans.  True, the Republicans did everything they could think of to stall and obstruct, but the Democrats had the votes any time they decided to get their act together.

In the second place, changing the rules is shortsighted.  Eventually, the Republicans will again have majorities in congress.  I do not think it likely that when that time comes the GOP will begin by reinstating the filibuster.

Finally, there is Massachusetts.  The Democrats changed the rules there when they were afraid a Republican governor would be appointing a replacement for Senator Kerry.  This was completely unnecessary since Kerry went on to lose the presidency and keep the senate seat.  And it bit the Democrats in the ass when Ted Kennedy was dying and they had to hurriedly change the rules back so the Democratic governor could appoint a replacement.  I wonder how much this playing with the rules influenced the election of Brown.

There are times in life when rules need to be ignored.  There are times when rules simply do not work anymore and need to be changed.

But this is not one of those times.

The other day I opened up an old issue of The Paris Review to a poem by Elizabeth Neiditz,  That I was not Insane, or Worse.

The ending lines sounded familiar:

And my father, a master of the two-line letter

And the fifty-six second phone call,

Liked to say that “brevity is the spice of life.”

My father, to my knowledge, never said “brevity is the spice of life”, but he was a master of the two-line letter and the fifty-six second phone call.  My only exposure to his letter writing was the notes he included with the checks he sent when I was in college, the full text of which was something like “I know you need this so I won’t waste time writing much.  Love, Dad”

The phone call was not really fifty-six seconds because Mom would talk longer, but Dad would come on to say hi.  Fifty-six seconds would have been a long time on the phone with Dad.

I have no idea why conversations with Dad were inherently brief, but a possibility for the brief letters occurs to me.  Dad was an excellent attorney.  I have been told that a big reason for that was his thoroughness.  He covered all the details.  I suspect that this was not a difficult skill to learn for him, that he had a natural instinct to be thorough.  The letters had to be brief, since any expansiveness would then require a detail or two to be covered.  Much simpler to keep it down to the bare bones.

Then again, maybe he was just busy.

I know as I blog that my goal is to always be brief.  Mostly because I do not like blogs that consistently have long posts.   I can’t believe I am the only one who feels that way.    But my efforts to be brief are constantly frustrated by the desire to explain a bit more.

If this PDF (4.06 MB) is relevant (and I believe it is), then Elizabeth Neiditz is now Elizabeth Benedict.

I must confess that for all of Dad’s brevity in letters, I make him look like Dickens in comparison.   I have written too few letters in my lifetime.

Congress has passed it.  The President signed it.  It is law.  We still need the reconciliation to be passed, but I am confident that it will get done (may take more effort than one would think, but it will get done).

Seems like a common theme I was hearing in recent weeks was how Obama’s presidency was a failure (from conservatives).  Now I hear that the Obama presidency is an historic success (from liberals).  In both cases it is a bit soon to judge.   It is still too soon to judge George W. Bush’s presidency.

This was not rammed through against the wishes of the American people.  It was passed by normal legislative procedures against the wishes of a minority of the American people.   53% of voters voted for Obama.  Anyone who voted for Obama and did not know he or she was voting for health care reform was not paying attention.   Although there were recent polls showing that a majority were against the health care reform bill, those polls actually showed that a lot of people were against what they believed the health care bill to be, not what it was.  And a few were against it because it was not liberal enough.

Don’t believe it when Republicans claim they had no choice but to oppose the bill at all costs since the Democrats refused to negotiate in good faith.  It was the other way around.  In particular, Senator Baucus spent weeks trying to get a compromise that would garner some Republican support.  Later, the Democrats stuggled to find the ground that would get both the conservative and the liberal Democrats to vote for the bill.  If there were some moderate Republicans there to stand in for the loss of the liberal Democrats…..

This is not the salvation of the Democratic Pary (though it does and will stand as an important achievement).  There are still seats to lose in November.

This is not the Waterloo of the Republican Party.  The Party is not now exiled onto St. Helena to die six years hence.   There are seats to win in November.

Now the lawsuits begin.  Under the heading of  “be careful what you wish for”, if this bill gets thrown out as unconstitutional due to the individual mandate, then the next time around the bill that will be passed will be single payer.  Yes, it might take a few years to get us back to such a point, but it will happen if this gets tossed.

There are plenty of issues to occupy Washington after health care, but my vote for most important issue is the deficit.

As we, supposedly, come down to the final hours before the House vote on Health Care Reform, the Republican National Committee has come out with a poll on the subject.  The timing of this poll is clearly intended to intimidate Democratic congressman into voting no.

From the link:

The RNC poll also holds other good indications of a strong Republican showing in November. Among undecided voters, 46% said that they would prefer a “Republican candidate who would be a check and balance to President Obama and the Democrats in Congress,” compared to 19% who disagreed with the statement. 53% said that the would consider voting for a Republican so as to “send a message to President to President Obama and the Democrats and make them listen to voters like me.”

If the poll shows that 46% would prefer a “Republican candidate who would be a check and balance to President Obama and the Democrats in Congress,” the poll had to have that language in the question.  Ditto with “send a message to President to President Obama and the Democrats and make them listen to voters like me.”

The result is that the poll is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless.  But it was guaranteed to give the result the Republicans were looking for.

The Republicans are desperate to prevent the bill from passing because they fear the electorate will like the bill once it is seen for what it is and not through Republican distortions.

I heard on the radio today that Indiana is the third highest gaming destination in the country taking the place of Mississippi.  Nevada is number one and New Jersey is number two.  No surprise there.  But Indiana is number three!?!?!?  I consider this a dubious distinction at best.

I also learned recently that Indiana leaped into the upper echelon of wind power states.   I believe that Indiana installed 900 something MW of wind power in 2009 and now has a total installed wind power of 1036 MW.  This puts Indiana at number twelve of the fifty states in installed wind power.  Only Texas installed more wind power in 2009 (Indiana was not a close second).

Indiana has the wind, the manufacturing facilities, and the grid.

That’s better than gaming!

While watching the NCAA basketball tournament, I notice the PSA’s for the census say that we should fill out the census form this March.  But the census form asks for the name of the people that were living here on April 1, 2010.

It does not ask who will be living in this dwelling on April 1?, it asks who WAS living in this dwelling on April 1?

So we are to predict the future in the past tense.

The New Yorker has posted a profile of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.  It is a bit lengthy and I confess I did not read the whole thing even though I found it interesting.

A little more than halfway through, there are a couple of paragraphs on the 1989 flag burning case.  Stevens “dissented from the decision that protected the right to burn the American flag as a form of protest.”

I remember that controversy.  I know I told a few people that it did not make any sense.  If someone did not want the flag to be burned, then the best thing to do would be to make it legal to burn the flag.  Making flag burning against the law would assure that there would be more flag burnings.

The court said flag burning was protected speech and could not be criminalized.  The result:

“The funny thing about that case is, the only consequence of it—nobody burns flags anymore,” Stevens told me. “It was an important symbolic form of protest at the time. But nobody does it anymore. As long as it’s legal, it’s not a big deal. You just don’t have flag burning.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all#ixzz0iGKSpbOD

This is a picture of a coverlet on a store shelf.   The color of the coverlet in the photo is much more vibrant than the color of the actual coverlet.

If the more vibrant color helps sell the item, then would it not make sense to give the actual product the more vibrant color?

At least the untruth of the picture is clearly demonstrated.

I recently connected on Facebook with an old friend from high school.     I offered an apology to her for my sad teenage ways and assured her I’ve spent decades getting my head out of my ass.  She responded with

Sounds like you’re being a little hard on yourself…You always seemed to have your act together – responsible job, car, etc.

Well, I did have a job.  I worked at a corner pharmacy throughout high school.  I have no doubt that my employer considered me to be gold.  I was conscientious, dependable,  and competent.  So I concede that.

Car?  No.  I had no car.  I had ready access to my mother’s Plymouth station wagon.  If she knew how I drove it, I would never have been allowed to drive a car belonging to my parents again.  I street raced constantly.  I was routinely driving 50, 60, 70, 80 or more in 30 and 40 mph zones.  There was a train crossing that I drove over frequently that was pitched just right so I could “jump” it (I don’t know if the car left the ground or not, but it sure felt like it.  People standing on the corner would disappear as I came down the street after “landing”).  There was one late night variation of the  game of chicken that could have easily ended with Mom’s car in the lake.    I was a maniac.  How I never got caught I’ll never know.   I am positive I am only alive today because I was always stone cold sober.   Mom and Dad usually kept cars for four years.  They traded that wagon in two thinking it was a lemon since it constantly needed brake work, suspension, etc.   But I never scratched it.

OK.  I concede the point that not doing drugs or drinking booze would be construed as having my act together.  I did smoke though.  And I had tried marijuana three times and found it to have no effect other than to smell bad and irritate my throat.  I tried to like drinking but I could not stand the taste and the one time I got drunk felt like the end of the world the next morning.   I wasn’t sober from lack of effort to be otherwise.

I was a terrible student.  I had no clue what I wanted to do in life.   In early grades I always got good grades without having to put out any effort.  So when the material got harder I had no study skills to apply to it.   I rarely studied.  I occasionally read assigned reading.  If I liked the teacher (which usually meant if the teacher liked me)  I paid attention in class and if I did not like the teacher I paid little attention in class (and in one case I simply slept through every class the entire year while sitting in the front row).

Then there was my violent temper which I seemed to have no control over (though I don’t believe it ever appeared while at school, and certainly never at work, so I must have had some control).   Fortunately I was the proverbial 98 pound weakling so I never actually inflicted harm on anyone while flailing away with my fists.  Vestiges of that temper still linger.

So while I may have always seemed to have my act together, appearances can be deceiving.