There is much talk these days about what is happening in several states about striping teacher unions of their collective bargaining rights. The balance of power between labor and management is a volatile one each side feels the other is taking too much. All states are now facing budget problems states do not produce anything they take and distribute they cannot crank up production to give more they can only take more but there is no more to take. On average 90% of each state’s budget is spent on three things: Education, Medication and Incarceration. They won’t cut medication because that would make them seem heartless and they won’t attack incarceration because that would make them look soft on crime, also both of those programs have many and very strong voters. So they attack education. This is principally the fault of the teachers unions. They have always thought of themselves as invincible and as such have done a very poor job of PR.

Their saying has always been, “It’s for the kids.” now for so many that saying rings hollow. It seems that every voting cycle there is a tax on the ballot for the schools yet test scores are dropping, the number of those going on to college is dropping, school violence is rising - yes by most accounts our schools are failing. True, the percentage of “bad” teachers is below the average of any public industry but the only news we get is from those bad ones. The unions have not spent the energy to publicize the successes.

The education field is hurt because they have taken on the job of parenting, a job they are not equipped for and will always fail at. A village cannot raise a child. At one teachers meeting, I was at, the principal told us we need to find more ways to get the parents involved. My question was, “Why would we want to do that”? No one had an answer. The last thing any teacher wants is being kibitzed by a parent because they do not care about your classroom they only care about their child. As one parent told/demanded of me was that her child needed more individual attention and it was useless to tell her that I have a 40 min class with 30 kids so he will just have to wait his turn to get more than his one minute. I am sure the reason this edict came down for on high was to improve public relations but they did not have the mental tools to complete this program – we are teachers not sales and marketing people.

Also schools are now all teaching to the test. Overall test score are linked to federal dollars. Teachers are no longer given the freedom to follow a train of inquiry. The new merit pay program for teachers will be linked to test results. Schools will become more and more like Dilbert factories that put out defective product.

The attack on unions will not improve education only save money. Lower salaries will not attract quality people but attract more like the one I knew who said, “I only teach to get money for my clothing budget.”

Good game for the first day of spring

Its Monday the first day of Spring so who wants to work.

Imagine for a moment you're a baby plant - a seed. Depending on the choices your make, your life could go in any direction. You could grow into a beautiful rose or a Venus fly trap. You could get eaten by a bird or crushed by a bowling ball. You might even find yourself babysitting a chorus of giggling baby broccoli florets.

Such is life.

Gameplay: Not so much a game as a series of decisions. Transfer those decisions from your thinker to your computer via the click of your mouse.

Recommended for: Anyone currently circling the circle of life.

Play HERE

PLANNED PARENTHOOD LIES AGAIN

Somehow I don't think they will really correct the problem - and will continue to deceive.

Ultimate Loyalty: Japanese Dog Stays With Injured Friend

One of the reasons I love dogs.

Chesterton Sighting

Of the five seasons I dislike Mud Season the most. Although it is the shortest it is the ugliest. We try to console ourselves with Robin and Crocus sightings
but we walk on roadways to avoid losing a shoe. The rains are relentless, there is flooding and the streams and creeks are swollen to the 10th month with twins capacity. On those days when the rain abates I take lunch in my car trading the gloom of my shop with the gloom of nature. I usually park my car near the pedestrian suspension bridge that spans the wet gash that runs through our park.

This is a good looking bridge that all the area’s first year photographers make a pilgrimage to. I enjoy this structure for its simple man-made beauty. One of the things that has amazed me about this bridge is that it is always sans graffiti. That was until yesterday. The creek it spans was as high as I have ever seen and on one of its anchoring black girders someone wrote in chalk “POOL CLOSED”.

The two things that lightened my heart was of course the sense of humor displayed in this bleak time of year and that this person respectfully wrote in chalk, the next rain will wash it away. Then I thought what kind of person walks around with chalk in their pocket? Could it have been a large human wearing a cape and Pince-nez glasses?

It seems that today relationships follow this pattern: This is a great deal becomes an ordeal becomes looking for a new deal. And in our sped up world the seven year itch has become the three year glitch. A new survey of 2,000 British adults points to the 36-month mark as a significant point of relationship restlessness. The poll cites weight gain, stinginess and snoring as key factors that seem to be annoying couples earlier than ever, which are big deals in a materialistic world. The poll was commissioned by Warner Bros. in promotion of the U.K. release of its film, Hall Pass, which addresses marital tedium. (I have been married for 32 years and it has been a lot of things but never tedious or as Uncle Gilbert said "The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.").

Incidentally, 34 percent of those polled said the film made them feel slightly better about their partner, while 66 percent said they saw the movie while cheating.

Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa said, “Whenever a person’s fear of sin comes before his wisdom, his wisdom will endure; but when a person’s wisdom comes before his fear of sin, his wisdom will not endure.”

Which is the eloquent way of saying “Sin Makes you stupid”.

Again, although conflicted, I think Live Action undercover videos may come to a bad end. And we should take a pray and wait and see approach. But I know offering prize money to follow that precedent might lead others to “Lie for Jesus”.

Careless drinking

"... For in so far as drinking is really a sin it is not because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in so far as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worst way to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and especially not caring for the drink. "-gkc

Apology

In my recent post on helping your Wednesday I mistakenly attributed the quote to Chesterton, it rightfully belongs to Maryanne Williams. I have no excuse.

Indefensible

Attorney General Eric Holder says the United States will continue to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, but will not defend it in court because he and President Obama have decided it is unconstitutional.

I don't know about you, but I find it alarming when the President and the Attorney General get together and decide that a law is unconstitutional. Last I checked that was not their job. If this stands a precedent will be set that the President can now over turn any Supreme Court decision or just decide which laws are worth obeying. Can you say cafeteria constitutionalism?

In a bizarre letter, to John Boehner, the Attorney General opines that the DOMA violates the Fifth Amendment. You will recall that the Fifth Amendment protects people from having to testify against themselves in court, assures people accused of crimes of due process of law, and keeps private property from being taken without just compensation.

How this could have any bearing on DOMA boggles the mind, but that's why lawyers are paid the big bucks. CNS News explains it far more cogently than the Associated Press. In a nutshell, the Attorney General argues that there is no legal basis for government not recognizing a "marriage" between two men or two women. The only reason he can see is irrational and therefore discriminatory and discriminating irrationally against someone violates his or her implicit right to equal treatment under the law.

Got it?

It's a stretch, but that's the gist of it. According to the Hon. Mr. Holder, Congress can defend the law if it wants to, seeing as how he has washed his hands of doing his job.

“…Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.” GKC

This should help your Wednesday

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” -GKC

At Last a Game for Liberal Arts Majors

Today's Game: The Great Gatsby for NES.

Gameplay: If the literary classic The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald were interpreted by Japanese developers in the 1980s, it presumably would result in something like this runaway Internet hit.

It's actually a decently entertaining platform, featuring the novel's Nick Carraway as the hopping, boomerang death-hat tossing protagonist. Collect coins for extra lives. Down martinis for health. Upgrade your weaponry with snazzier and apparently more aerodynamic hats.

This adaptation ends up being surprisingly faithful to the book, including elements from the bespectacled admirer of Gatsby's library to Daisy Buchanan's fateful automotive accident, to Nick's epic battle against Dr. T.J. Eckleburg's giant floating laser eyes atop a train speeding through the desolate Valley of Ashes.

If you don't remember that last part, clearly you haven't revisited the book since high school. To your local library!

There has been allot of discussion on the blogger sphere about the work of Live Action and their undercover video’s that expose Planned Parenthood for what they are.

The question is “Can you sin (lie) to bring out a greater good”? Every parent has taught us that ‘two wrongs do not make a right’ and the Church teaches us that ‘the ends do not justify the means’

Many respected Catholic bloggers have come out against the tactics of LiveAction (and here) and yet all of Catholic radio is in favor of it. This type of sting operation has always bothered me. Even on shows like 60 Minutes whenever they did a sting I was always confused for whom to cheer for. When Police do it I always felt it was the quick and lazy way. Whatever good comes out of Live Action’s “undercover work” I think it will be short lived because it is a house built on sand.

That said The House has defunded Planned Parenthood whether the Senate passes it as well looks doubtful and we know Obama will veto it.

Very Cool Stuff

For those of you unaware of Fr Spitzer please take the time to check out his work - Faith and Reason in action. And of course he can be held up as a role model that the Church is NOT anti-Science. The mission of his Magis Center is: To explore and share the close connection between reason and faith as revealed by new discoveries in astrophysics and philosophy.

The Videos are worth checking out. View them in order (12 of them 10 mins each) yea it will take some time but worth it. Great for Home School lessons.

A GOOD FRIDAY NIGHT TUNE

We have all heard of the “Death Panels”in our new health care bill and this begs the question: will we get a Court of Protection?

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"A New Theory of Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose – well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes – make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!" Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

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Yes, G. K. Chesterton thought Huxley’s book sadly laughable, observing that, “However grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.” Maybe this could be the only place where Gilbert got it wrong, that future is here.

My Dear Watson

IBM supercomputer Watson made history this week when it defeated former Jepordy! Champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the popular quiz show. Watson finished the three-day tournament with $77,147.00.

“It was no sweat,” Watson told reporters. “I could have beat those clowns with 80 gigs of RAM tied behind my back.” Watson was later spotted in Hollywood with fellow supercomputers Deep Blue and HAL9000. Huffing aerosol keyboard cleaners and flirting with several shapely iPads.

Chesterton spotting

In The New York Times of all places Ross Douthat writes:

"Chesterton is rather a publicist and a polemicist on behalf of those ideals. He is not joining some great conversation with Don Scotus, Aristotle, and Nietszche. Rather he is in a constant scrum with Bertrand Russell, Benjamin Kidd, Cecil Rhodes, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Edward Carpenter, W.T. Stead, etc… Notably, only half those names live on and most are dimmer than Chesterton’s. Judged in that company he is sterling. When was the last time you saw an H.G. Wells insight applied to anything? If Chesterton were alive today a similar list would be something like, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Karen Armstrong … Marty Peretz, Stephen Hawking, and Jonathan Chait. If I were going to produce a polemic against Karen Armstrong’s book The History of God – and I dearly would like to – you might be satisfied with a clever review. You wouldn’t chastise me for failing to produce the Summa Theologica. To criticize Chesterton in this regard seems unfair. Besides The Everlasting Man, his books are mostly recycled newspaper material. Next to a considered book of philosophy, Chesterton seems a little smug. Next to a cartoon and letters to the editor and in response to his actual opponents, he’s not only a genius, but a delightful one."

article here