Monday, October 26, 2009

CATHY Ison captured this image of Duke, my husky/shepherd mix, at rest in his lodging on the patio:

Sunday, October 25, 2009

IT'S been a busy week. So, to catch up some, here's Jerome Groopman, author and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, with some thoughts about wisdom and medicine.

WHAT? There's going to be "rules" for bloggers?

OK, so we're staying put more ... not moving around the country as much. Good thing, right? Newsweek seems to think so.

WHAT is Frank Rich trying to say here? That there's no such thing as "news" on any of the so-called national broadcast media? If so, he's pretty much right. A quotation:

Richard Heene (the "balloon boy" dad) is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

MEANWHILE, I need to photograph some more art to post.

Monday, October 19, 2009

WHY look to Canada or Europe for an example of health-care/insurance efficiency when we have the Hawaiian example? But is either Congress or the White House interested?

Sunday, October 18, 2009

INDEED, Mr. Blow, there's only one conclusion to be drawn from your analysis: Barack "Change" Obama is a fraud.

Yep, there are those who can say (and do say) from the left and then from the right: Well, we told you so.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

SO Nicholas Kristof, writing in the NYT, wonders if the Democrats in Congress can fend off the teachers' unions in doing the Obama-Duncan educational reforms — like making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. The comments to this column are interesting, too, such as this one:

Jennifer
San Francisco, CA
October 15th, 2009
6:38 am

Why is it that the focus of our failed education system is always the terrible, terrible teachers and our terrible, terrible unions?

I am a good teacher myself, with a long and well-documented history of student success and numerous accolades from private and public institutions. I have always taught in poor communities in public schools. Over the years, my work conditions have included asbestos, cockroach infestations, mice and rats, catastrophic plumbing failures, mold, unheated classrooms...shall I go on? We show children how little we care by the schools to which we send them and their great disrepair.

Each and every year, I spend at least one thousand dollars of my own, not terribly generous salary to provide what my school's budget will not: field trips, healthy snacks, manipulatives, paint, carpets, bug spray and so on. I have advanced degrees from prestigious universities. By providing a strong education, I help to ensure a strong and stable community of critical thinkers and innovators to support our society.

In exchange, I get to hear how we teachers are ruining the schools. I can't speak for all my colleagues, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the one letting students go to schools with no working bathrooms, or that are over twice as full as they should be. I feel certain that we are not the ones cutting school budgets instead of considering equitable and progressive taxation. And I know that Mr. Kristof boasts less than half my brain power and could never, ever do my job as well as I do.

So really, find someone else to blame. Or get a teaching credential yourself and join us in the work. Or donate a significant portion of your salary to projects on Donors Choose. Give up on the teacher-blaming, though.

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Addendum ...

IT'S not a surprise that Andrew Sullivan was not impressed: the Obama speech to the HRC was"highfalutin bullshit."

Sunday, October 11, 2009

SEEMS to me Frank Rich is trying too hard to avoid stating the obvious: that the reason McCain and the war crowd want to juice up things in Afghanistan is really to feed The Beast that President Ike warned us about lo those many years ago.

(Yes, I've said this before. But it's worthwhile reading this speech every so often because it's by a man who knows what he's talking about, unlike the draft-dodgers and other neocon rabble.)

MEANHILE, the younger son, one of the outside props crew for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, bought and then chopped up all of the black olives and all of the green olives for this gig: