Personal Musings category archive

As I read this article, I wondered why, whenever the potential cost to the government of reforming healthcare coverage is mentioned, the potential savings to business, consumers, and the overall economy are not.

From BuzzWhack.

Reinventing the Flat Tire:

To make the same mistake made before, despite extended debate and a formal vote.

Sounds like the wingnut worldview to me.

Reader’s Digest Denies Move “In Decidedly Conservative Direction”

Here’s a link to the Toimes story that prompted the denial.

Full disclosure: I have been an off-and-on reader of Reader’s Digest all my life (right now, I’m “off”–subscription lapsed). The main trends I’ve noticed is to shorter articles and more abridgier abriged books.

When has it been not conservative?

I sure don’t remember any drift towards the center, let alone the left.

How many trees would live if Verizon stopped browbeating me with letters to subscribe to their FiOS service in which I am intensely uninterested?

The local rag features an organization for therapy for the abusive:

Three days later, at his wife’s insistence, Michael called Menergy, a private counseling program for abusive men. Sixty percent of the men who come to Menergy are referred by the courts because they have been physically violent. Most of the rest are emotional abusers who come on their own, usually because they have lost or are at risk of losing significant relationships. Most stay for about 20 weeks; some participate for two years or more.

The remainder, well, you know.

Despite my low opinion of Twitter as a means for social networking (really, I do not care when XXX goes to lunch, and I suspect that almost no one cares when I do), I must concede that it seems to have its uses, despite itself.

I don’t have a clue what events in Iran mean and, at this point, I doubt anyone else does either. Too much dust is still in the air.

Including the Iranians.

If you do, come to Drinking Liberally to enlighten me at 6 p. m. tomorrow, Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa.

Q. What’s the difference between “thoughts” and “ideation.”

A. The $130 an hour you pay someone to tell you that your thoughts are ideation.

Atrios sums it up.

My three or our regular readers know that one of the things that drives me absolutely batty is improper flag etiquette.

Perversely, those who most routinely show disrespect for the American flag are also often those who most vociferously protest of their devotion to it, while being the most willing to trample the rights for which it stands.

Walter Brasch over at the Democratic Daily:

During the 1960s, war protesters who wore clothes with the American flag design were beaten by “patriots” who believed the “hippies” were abusing a sacred image. However, for several years after 9/11, the fabric of America was “patriots” who wore high-priced T-shirts, pants, ties, and bandannas, all with images of American flags and slogans, all in violation of federal regulations.

Americans use flags and flag-decorated clothes, most of them made by non-union labor in China and other overseas countries, to “prove” they are more patriotic than the next person. They have demanded that politicians wear flag lapels. They have bought bigger and bigger flags, in the mistaken believe that flying a flag and being patriotic are the same thing. But, these “patriots” have also flown their flags improperly, often hanging the blue field in the wrong corner, sometimes tacking the flag to wooden walls. They have allowed their flags to have flown in rain and snow storms, to have become tattered and faded. And when some flags become too faded or too torn, their owners just throw them out, rather than give them the proper retirement that the Flag Code requires.

Is it just my imagination, or am I seeing more commercials on the telly vision depicting Not White characters and families as just, well, characters and families?

is a great thing. That must be why I’ve had two of them.

But which tradition? From a letter to the Philadelphia Shrinquier:

Which tradition would they most like to uphold? The biblical version? Solomon, we are told in 1 Kings 11, had 700 wives. The medieval version? Marriage for the nobility was more a matter of property and dynastic control than love. Queen Isabella of France, for example, was betrothed to Edward II as an infant and married off (with the church’s blessing) at the age of 12. According to John Boswell in his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, marriage was not even a sacrament until the 12th century. Too ancient? Until the 1970s, women could not apply for credit or enter into many legal contracts without their husbands’ consent. That kind of marriage? Of course, until 1967, if you loved someone of a race different from your own, it was illegal in many states to marry.

I can remember when being homosexual was a crime. Persons got arrested for it, and because of that, homosexuals were driven underground. And so on.

More and more, science shows that homosexuality is not a choice; it is simply a state of being, not asked for, not chosen, just there.

As I have said before, my position on gay marriage is a resounding “I don’t care.” That’s why it’s a subject I have seldom addressed here. Nevertheless . . .

Neither of my two marriages crashed and burned because of what other persons did with each other in other houses.

Frankly, I think the political battle about gay marriage is over. It is a done deal.

What’s left is just the mopping up.

Why?

Because, as more and more persons realize that they daily deal with gay folks–folks they never would have thought were gay–they realize that gay folks are not monsters. They are persons. And, like straight folks, some of them are nice and some of them aren’t. But that has nothing to do with their being gay. It has to do with being persons.

As I said to a friend of mine the other day, if gay folks want to know the joys of divorce court, I say, “Let ’em.”

William Astore on education:

What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess: plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique, authority in any meaningful way.

(major snippage–all the way to page two)

Perhaps I’m biased because I teach history, but here’s a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.

We don’t have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history — not when they never learned them to begin with.

In the course of my short and largely-unnoticed stint in Blogistan, one of the things I’ve observed is how many persons know little or nothing about (in this case) American history, freeing them to say most sincerely outrageous and outrageously false things, such as “America was founded as a Christian nation.” That is just not true. It is not just unsupported by the historical record, it is directly counter to it. It is a historical–and a historic–lie. But the ignorant of history may believe it sincerely.

Earlier in the article, Astore discusses the current emphasis on teaching tech. It’s flashy, exciting, and, most of all, quantifiable. Persons like numbers. They are nice and concrete, unlike writing skills. “How many computer labs” is ever so easier to advertise than “how much thought goes on.”

Now, I think tech is a wonderful thing. I spend a good part of my day messing about with tech.

But here’s the kicker: Tech changes. History doesn’t (although historiography does, both as new information is discovered and different perspectives are employed).

I remember in the early days of computers when the educational system was all a-gaga over “computer literacy” (whatever that is–there never was an accepted definition*). A number of outfits decided to make students “computer literate” by teaching them how the program in BASIC.

No one programs in BASIC any more. In fact, no one was programming in BASIC five years later. Hours wasted. Teaching today’s tech does not prepare one to use tomorrow’s tech.

A half-semester class in Boolean algebra, which is the underpinning of programming, would have been far more useful. (Boolean algebra, by the way, is math, not tech.)

I am a trainer by trade (and a historian by training). When persons ask me the difference between training and education, I tell them that

The goal of training is to teach someone how to do. The goal of education is to lead someone how to understand.

Someone who can understand will be able to do. Someone who can do may not be able to understand.

_________________________

*”Computer literacy” seems to boil down to being able to do whatever the person using the term thinks you should be able to do, whether or not you’ll ever have to do it in your real life.

California is proof that the ballot initiative is a bad idea.

Self-righteousness is a cardinal sin.

A self-righteous fruitcake with a gun is a very dangerous thing.

Anyone who thinks abortion is an easy or casual decision has never known anyone who had one.

Those who commit acts of hate in the name of the God of love do blaspheme.

She keeps leaving the carcasses of her conquests for me.

At least she doesn’t do what a friend’s cat used to do.

His cat would tuck little mousey presents in his shoes while he was sleeping.

Remind me to add Dijon Mustard to my shopping list.

If Obama had nominated Jesus Christ himself to the Supreme Court, the wingnuts would have left (their hate-full version of) the Christian faith rather than support the nomination.

Newark (Del.–ed) City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday making it illegal to idle a vehicle for more than five minutes in an hour.

Not sure how I feel about this.

On the one-hand, idling vehicles don’t seem to be the eleventh plague.

Rant below the Fold

Military personnel have no protection from medical “errors.” Follow the link for full details:

. . . Wilson never got to hold her baby. According to her medical records, a uterine artery was cut during the delivery, causing massive internal bleeding. The estimated blood loss was equivalent to the total blood volume of an average adult.

Then, during frantic efforts to repair the damage, two surgical sponges were left in Wilson’s abdomen. Twelve hours after giving birth, she was dead.

In civilian surgeries, the doctors and nurses routinely count sponges. Indeed, they count everything.

Leaving a sponge or a piece of apparatus in a patient is ipso facto evidence of error, if not malpractice. Penalities attach; a doctor or nurse could easily lose his or her license, even if no legal action takes place.

Because of the Feres Doctrine, no such accountability attaches itself to military medical staff.

Whereas some of the aspects of the Feres Doctrine may make sense in the fog of war or on the field of combat, it does seem a stretch for it to apply to a routine obstetrical delivery at a stateside hospital.