A congresswoman in Arizona, movie-goers in Colorado, Sikhs in Wisconsin, mall shoppers in California and Washington. Unfortunately, I could go on. Sons and daughters in Afghanistan.
“These were BABIES. There’s just no comparison,” a friend said of last Friday’s mass shooting in a Newport, CT, school. Continue reading “Wall to wall, throughout the day”
Our children are getting entirely too used to living in a police state.
I remember when Officer Friendly graced children’s book. He often was a bit portly in his double-breasted overcoat with the shiny brass buttons. He carried a shillelagh, often in both hands, behind his back. He smiled at children, joked with them, and helped them out of minor childhood troubles while encouraging them to avoid more serious transgressions.
What brought that to mind was an article in TechNews Daily about a new program that will allow teachers to look over their students’ shoulders – even when they’re not in school.
I have an electric stream behind my house. Water flows down the rocks, offering a drinking fountain for the dog, birds and wasps that live here, and soothing sound for me. There is a pump submerged at the bottom of the stream to raise the water back to the top. Even with the pump running, I must regularly add water to replace what the critters and the sun take from the system during the day.
Money, I’ve noticed, is like my backyard stream, in reverse. Money naturally flows uphill.
In spite of publicity in recent years about state agencies being made more transparent, there remain plenty of road blocks to acquiring information which seemingly should be public. Such a situation faced Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania-based author and social issues journalist Walter M. Brasch earlier this year.
“I was needing information for a book I was working on about fracking in the state,” he said.
At issue was Act 13, signed into law in February.
In high school, my son got in a little hot water with a social studies teacher who had said the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was about oil. I’m guessing Mitt Romney went to the same class and decided it wasn’t about oil because, he said, Iran is supporting Syria to gain access to the sea.
It makes sense for Iran to want to whup Iraq, since the latter nation stands smack dab in the way between Iran and Syria, the latter which is on the Mediterranean Sea. On the other hand, it would seem cheaper for Iran to simply build a seaport or two on the Persian Gulf (named for Iran when it was called Persia), and the Gulf of Oman – both of which provide Iran with large expanses of ocean front property.
Google recently spent $12.5 billion dollars acquiring Motorola. Monday, the company known primarily as an Internet search engine announced it would be closing about one third of the 90 former Motorola facilities, and fire about 4,000 workers. That’s business.
What Google really wanted was the nearly 20,000 patents Motorola owned – heavy weaponry in the field of mobile communications, in which it seems everyone is suing everyone else – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and others – over who actually invented the latest piece of technology, or even the way a switch moves up or down to select a function.
When I was young, Eighth Grade graduation marked the limit of many students’ academic career. I was raised in rural Maine, where young people helped their families on the farm, and the school calendar was written around planting and harvest schedules, and the fall agricultural fair.
The engineer who designs wind turbines can benefit from advanced education in physics. The primary requirements to operate a crane or read a torque wrench are ability to read and follow directions, and good hand-eye coordination.
I graduated Eighth Grade in ceremonies held at the local Grange hall, next to the town fire station, at the other end of Church Street, where the town’s only church stood.
It was in the two-room school house, and on the way home from it, I learned about bullying, … Continue reading…
Google has started a new, free, travel opportunity. It’s called the Google Art Project, and offers young people of all ages opportunity to visit places many will never have opportunity to see – for instance, Freer Gallery of Art (Smithsonian), Denver (Colorado) Art Museum, Hong Kong Museum of Art. Point your browser to www.googleartproject.com and start admiring.
Art, one of my college professors said, is the history of the tribe. To which I add, that and fiction. In both, the creators get to show life as they see it, without their stories being approved by Texas and California school districts.
“But the little boy said…
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one”
(From “Flowers are Red,” by Harry Chapin, 1978)
When my son started school, … Continue reading …
I went for a walk in the woods one day with the granddaughters, in search of the source of a creek which flows from the county where I live in south-central Pennsylvania, across the state line into Maryland, and joins the Monocacy River east of Thurmont.
A paper company once owned the particular piece of forest, 2,500 acres of the first tree farm in the state that gave birth to the nation’s forest conservation movement. There was a time when men with axes and horses took to the woods to cut trees and drag them to a nearby road, from whence they could be carted to the mill. Axes gave way to chainsaws, and horses to huge, powerful tractors called “skidders,” but even then, logging was a slow process. I know; I was raised where logging and paper making was the primary industry.
Chainsaws have been replaced by machines with air conditioned cabs from which one operator can virtually denude a mountainside in a matter days, instead of the months or years once required, leaving the owner to pay taxes for several decades while waiting patiently for trees to grow to usable girth. Glatfelter, owner of that 2,500 acres, had decided to sell the land, to let someone else pay the taxes and “call us when you’ve got wood to sell.” … Continue reading …
State legislators have begun work on long overdue legislation to limit the damage to local taxpayers when a school board and its superintendent part ways.
In Fall 2010, after renewing his contract only a few months earlier, the Gettysburg Area School Board decided it no longer found Supt. Bill Hall acceptable. So, with three and-a-half years left on his contract, they fired him.
Well, not fired – exactly.
“Bill Hall is on administrative leave for personal reasons,” board President Patt Symmes said the day after the Sept. 20, 2010 school board meeting, “and that’s all I can say.”
Placing Hall on “administrative leave” was done in secret, during an executive session … Continue reading …
A fellow columnist wrote last week thanking other kids’ parents for buying their eight-year-olds cell phones. He thought a cell phone to be far down on the list of things an eight-year-old should have to keep track of.
“But dad,” his offspring moaned, “Everybody’s got one.”
My daughter used that line on me once or twice, to which I replied, “I doubt that a lot.”
Sometime after the last time, Daughter was overheard in conversation with a friend who wanted her company going someplace.
“Everyone’s going,” the friend said. Continue reading …
Gov. Tom Corbett’s seems to believe that putting money into things like education, so that future jobs might find young Pennsylvanians qualified to take them, is unnecessary, wasteful spending. Investment, on the other hand, means continued tax breaks to gas and coal companies so they can have profits now, some of which they may later contribute to his re-election campaign.
Case in point: A report published in December revealed the state gives about $2.9 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Continue reading …