RSSNew location for Blithe Spirit
Jun 29
The rest Blithe Spirit No Comments
Have moved again, this time to this place.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Way to skin the education cat
Mar 30
Get that kid out of the classroom and in front of his computer at home, like in Florida and “dozens” of other states:
Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week.
And here is a truly revolutionary part:
The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country.
And AP courses?
Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students.
Instapundit led me to this in WaPo.
The poet and the junior high struggle
Aug 28
The rest Books and authors, Oak Park, Schooling No Comments
Here’s to an American winner:
If Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were alive today, he’d be 201 years old and on his 13th knee replacement. He isn’t, having died in 1882 at 75, young by today’s standards. His bust was placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey after his death. It’s the only American bust there.
“Like T. S. Eliot after him, he spoke with authority on the whole of European literature. He wrote six language textbooks, and was fluent in German, French, Italian and Spanish,” said reviewer Jay Parini in 2001. Translator of Dante, Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, and Heine among others, if there had been Nobel prizes, he would have gotten one.
In addition, he had an Oak Park school named after him, posthumously.
There’s more more more . . . .
Roeser again to the ramparts
Jul 30
The rest Gay clergy 3 Comments
Tom Roeser, Chicago’s ultimate curmudgeon, continues to bull his way into readers’ hearts and minds. Or at least their minds, after which he is confident, I am sure, hearts will follow.
His latest incursion into Chicago consciousness, especially its Catholic consciousness — forget conscience, which may follow or may not, who’s to say? — is his “personal aside” of today in which he reports Robert Novak-like but with more verve, gusto, in-your-facedness, whatever, that the Catholic Diocese of Rockford is pulling its seminarians from St. Mary of the Lake University, Mundelein, otherwise and generally known as Mundelein Seminary.
Why? Because “Two upperclassmen propositioned a Rockford youth for homosexual favors.”
Uh-oh.
Thus the Rockford diocese has decided it is finished with Mundelein.
This is not good, in itself and in its public relations aspect. At the heart of this debacle, not counting chancellor Jimmy Lago, is the archbishop — “the parser” in Roeser’s lexicon, he who must be obeyed but who, in the words of “an authenticist bishop in another diocese,” i.e. conservative, given to conserve Roman Catholic identity, “can’t run a two-car funeral” and should be gotten to a university, where he can parse things, says Roeser.
Later: Pardon me for second-guessing myself, but what’s a blog for, anyhow? In this case I am wondering about the quote from Tom Roeser, “Two [Mundelein seminary] upperclassmen propositioned a Rockford youth for homosexual favors.”
2nd guess: a Rockford seminarian? We have to presume that from the context, but commenter Charles Goodacre (DDS? of Loma Linda U.?) doesn’t. I have asked Roeser for help on this. Goodacre seems to have missed the point, but I’d rather be sure.
I have also asked the official Rockford diocesan newspaper, The Observer, to confirm the Roeser report that the Rockford bishop, Thomas Doran, will no longer send candidates to Mundelein. More later, I hope.
Yet later (12 days later): Nothing yet, nor anything expected. Cat has tongue of both teller and told-about. Sorry.
Blogged with Flock
Read this book . . .
Jul 24
The rest Books and authors, Writing No Comments
Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007), a novella, is such a good book. The reader is the current Queen Elizabeth, who picks up reading in the years immediately preceding her 80th birthday and finds it liberating and elevating. It’s a book about reading and the life of the mind and coming to terms with oneself.
In the end she turns to writing, which leads to a stunning denouement better left unrevealed here. Writing her memoirs, that is, but not showing and telling with them: no gossip but “analysis and reflection,” as she tells her assembled privy councilors from her 50-plus years as queen, gathered for her birthday in a festive tea.
Proust weighs heavily in this decision. So does Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom she had “damed” some time back without reading a thing she had written. Wonderful, wonderful book.
Buy it here, through Google, or here, at ABE Books.
A book for our age
Jul 22
The rest Books and authors, Economics 1 Comment
This fellow has it right: “Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek.” I do.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the social revolutions they hoped to spark.
Did not know that but am glad to hear it and am not surprised.
Antigovernment ideologues admire him as one of those few who kept Adam Smith’s fires burning during the dark reign of John Maynard Keynes in the West; his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, has sold more than 350,000 copies in the United States alone.
I bought it. If that be ideologuism, make the most of it.
And the modern right has enlisted Hayek as a political weapon: Why can’t those loony lefties acknowledge the simple and obvious truths that he understood?
Wait. This too is news to me. Hayek is not quoted much in what I read. As for why loony lefties don’t buy H., it’s because they are stupid, that’s why.
This fellow — Jesse Larner, author of Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered (Nation Books, 2002) and Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left (Wiley and Sons, 2006), writing in Dissent for Winter 2008 — has been reading up on Hayek, he said, “much as, in my twenties, I decided I really ought to read the Bible [because it’s] influential, whether I it or not.”
He has found him “a surprise, in several ways, nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants.”
But he makes “a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life.” What makes for serfdom, in Hayek’s argument.
Keynes called it “a grand book.” Orwell found in it “a great deal of truth . . . collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”
But in Road, says Larner, Hayek “thoroughly, eloquently, and convincingly demolishes an idea that virtually no one holds nowadays.”
In 1944, however, when it was published? The conventionally wise were horrified at it then and condemned it right and left. In the U.S., nonetheless, it sold immensely well, because it shot down conventional (Keynesian) wisdom.
And today there are governmental meddlers who want so much to run things, thinking they know best, which they do not.
It’s a relatively simple, small, moving book, a sort of catechism or introduction to free-market thinking, based on the revolutionary notion that human nature “is what it is,” to use a catch phrase of our day, meaning you can’t get away from it.
Weis grilled
Jul 16
The rest Crime, Guns 1 Comment
John Kass has the Supt. Weis questioning as politics as usual in Chi, W. having shaken up things that were just fine as far as aldermen are concerned — why did he have to go and do that? they wonder as K. sees it, probably with unerring accuracy.
Just a few years ago, even the Chicago mob had a big say in who worked where in the top echelons of the department.
William Hanhardt, the heroic chief of detectives, was once the guy to see in the department about promotions and transfers and so on, even though he wasn’t technically the superintendent, and the Hanhardt culture shaped the detective division. When he was later convicted of running an Outfit-backed jewelry-heist ring, using top cops to glean information about his targets from police computers, the aldermen neglected something.
They neglected to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of things. They didn’t ask any questions. Not one. Not even the mayor would condemn him, which is the Chicago Way.
In addition, an op-ed from an ex-FBI black guy living in Texas who grew up in Chi and got shot for his trouble by a ‘hood resident whom he tackled while fleeing with a snatched purse, says about the aldermanic grilling:
Chicago’s public officials are looking through the wrong end of the telescope when they indulge in second-guessing Supt. Weis’ shuffling of his command structure. And it’s not handguns that need to be controlled, it’s the hands holding the guns.
But the formidable Heather Mac Donald in WashPost has substance to beat all in the matter, pushing for the sort of police procedures that saved New York from itself in the 90s — “the single most effective urban policy of the last decade: accountable, data-driven policing.”
[I]n New York City in the 1990s, Police Commissioner William Bratton and a group of hard-charging reformers embraced the iconoclastic idea that policing could in fact radically lower crime.
Iconoclastic in view of “[t]he received wisdom of the Great Society . . . that crime could be lowered only by eliminating its “root causes”: poverty and racism.”
The N.Y.P.D. pioneered an array of techniques to provide precinct commanders with the most up-to-date information on crime patterns and to constantly evaluate which crime-fighting strategies actually worked. Most important, commanders were held ruthlessly accountable for crime in their jurisdictions.
Sans aldermanic or city council member input, it goes without saying.
The results were startling: From 1993 to 1997, major felonies in New York City dropped 41 percent and homicides 60 percent — a record unmatched anywhere else at the time.
New York “roared back to life”:
Not only the central business districts of Manhattan experienced this rebirth; businesses poured into predominantly minority areas in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The residents of these once-troubled neighborhoods experienced freedom of movement and economic opportunities that had been deemed permanently lost.
Yes. Next time you hear about City Hall neglecting neighborhoods, do not think job training or subsidies. Think law and order. And if it’s not too heretical for you, look towards New York in the 90s.
Jesuits thinking globally
Jul 14
The rest Iraq war, Jesuits 2 Comments
This sort of thing makes me wonder if Jesuits have their heads screwed on right:
Confronting terrorism by police methods is frequently derided as ineffective, and military means are promoted as an appropriate tool for combating terrorists. But criminal prosecution against the 1993 World Trade Center bombers proved more successful than the military campaign against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The ’93 bombers are in prison; bin Laden is still at large.
Egad, they see it as Obama vs. U.S. “War” is not what’s happening. Maddening.
Moreover, they have found the enemy, and the enemy is us.
[I]In the years ahead our country must still come to grips with our national acquiescence to the politics of fear, which has led to the detention and abuse of hundreds of individuals. Among the necessary steps will be restoration of freedom to innocent detainees, accompanied by public apology and some monetary restitution for the years they lost to incarceration. [Italics added]
Make mine white
Jul 05
The rest Health care 3 Comments
Like milk? The whole near-creamy variety that brings a smile to your face? But you dasn’t drink it for health reasons? Consider this:
Whole milk is one of the best foods in the average corner shop-and a vital part of a nutritious diet for . . . children, . . . .
Whole milk is what is called a complete food, because each ingredient plays its part. Without the fat, you can’t digest the protein or absorb the calcium. The body needs saturated fat in particular (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat can’t do the job) to take in the calcium that makes bones strong. Milk fat also contains glycosphingolipids, which are fats that encourage cell metabolism and growth and fight gastrointestinal infections.
Vitamins?
The all-important vitamins A and D are found in the fat. Historically, whole milk and butter were the best sources of these vitamins in the American diet, which had up to 10 times more of both vitamins than modern industrial diets.
In skim and low-fat milk, the vitamins are removed along with the fat, so dairies add synthetic A and D. But Vitamins A and D are fat-soluble; that means they cannot be absorbed into the body unless they’re taken in with fat. Thus, even fortified skim and low-fat milk are not nearly as beneficial as the real thing.
Worried about your heart and arteries?
[S]cientists are increasingly finding that whole milk and saturated fats have been given an undeserved bad rap. Many experts say the evidence blaming saturated fats for heart disease is surprisingly weak. Indeed, the main effect of eating saturated fats is to raise high-density lipoproteins, or H.D.L., the so-called good cholesterol. And with H.D.L., the higher, the better.
Etc., from Nina Planck, author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why
Who she?
[A] food writer, an advocate for traditional foods, an entrepreneur, and the leading American expert on farmers’ markets and local food. A champion of small farmers, she grew up on an ecological vegetable farm in Virginia and sold the family vegetables at farmers’ markets from age nine. After leaving the farm, Nina was a congressional staffer, a reporter for TIME, and a speechwriter for President Clinton’s ambassador to the UK.
A woman of parts, it appears.
One of the D.C. gangs
Jul 03
The rest Guns, Oak Park 2 Comments
Oak Park (IL) village manager Tom Barwin is not apologizing for saying the Supreme Court is “in alliance with the gangbangers” in its ruling in favor of individual right to own a gun, but he does have advice for others:
“I really think we ought to tone down the emotion, which I will also try to do,” he said. “But I think we should be working harder to find common ground and eliminate these conditions that breed violence.
He will try very hard to tone it down but is willing to leave the Supremes dangling with gangsters.
“I think the … gangbanger comments really just were a way to succinctly express that, in my experience and view, the further proliferation of guns will inevitably result in more drug pushers and those of a criminal mind ending up with firearms.”
As it is, of course, they have to get along with their bare fists?
Later, from Dick Cutler in Ann Arbor:
I have strong sentiments about private possession of firearms. I grew up on a farm; I had guns then; I have guns now (several, would you like an inventory and a report of my marksmanship?); and FINALLY, “I intend to keep my guns and my skill in using them — so as to be prepared to shoot the miserable ass off anyone who comes to take them from me.”