It's still hot, despite storms that break the heat for a few hours at a time, and I've still been using more Internet time on writing articles than on hunting links. Nevertheless:
Economy, The
For years all the news from Britain sounded a bit like this song. Their economy was ravaged by the wars and, no matter how many British imports we bought, it seemed hopeless. Then for the first ten years or so they screamed that PM Thatcher was only making everything worse--though she may have deserved credit for breaking the downward spiral.
And now? The Waste Age in the 1950s and the dot-com boom in the 1990s were temporary booms. We've still mechanized away too many jobs and had too many babies The Economy does not need. We could impose artificial bans--taxing businesses ten times as much for each robot cashier as they'd pay a human, putting lethal tariffs on companies that contract to have all the parts for "American" products built and put together in foreign sweatshops--so that all the "millennials" can go to work and recover from socialism the way we did. We could have simply had fewer babies, but for my generation it's too late to make that choice now. I do recommend it to the "millennials," though. One child or none until everybody is working and everybody can afford a decent house, no apartments after marriage, with a vegetable garden.
Education
"The question presented is: Do public schools burden parents' religious exercise when they compel elementary school children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents' religious convictions and with-out notice or opportunity to opt out?"
Multiple choice:
a. Yes
b. Yes!
c. Bleep yes!
If children aren't allowed to opt out of listening to stories "designed to disrupt [their sense of gender] normativity," well, I think they're still allowed freedom of expression on T-shirts. To disrupt any sense that the children's parents' beliefs are being suppressed, stigmatized, de-normalized, shamed, etc., the children should logically have a right to wear little T-shirts saying "WHAT A PITY [the writers and/or characters in these stories] are going to BURN"...And yes,. the kids who don't join in "shaming" the teachers who read these stories to the class should be conspicuously un-invited to a few after-school parties. I'm sooo sorry if that hurts somebody's little feelings, but the political issue here goes beyond the feelings about "popularity" we all need to outgrow and the sooner the better. The Montgomery County schools need to pull a 180. Complaints of hurt feelings among the children of the few super-rich parents who send their kids to public school are the most efficient way to make them do what's necessary. Hurt feelings about "popularity" in primary school heal easily.
Because public school attendance is mandatory, anything teachers say that is controversial can be construed as an attack by a government agent on a student's or family's religious freedom. That means the controversies teachers raise in the classroom should be limited to topics like "I enjoy springtime more than autumn." That means the schools have a responsibility to present the biological facts about the reproductive process, but nothing whatsoever about "sexuality," even after students are old enough that they might have some sense of their own sexuality. This is what makes babies. Anything else people may do is their own business. Class dismissed.
Extroversion, Consequences of Treating as Normal
Until we stop electing extroverts who look charming on television and start voting based on people's records of wise decisions and good character, we can expect political news like this:
The Minister for Children's personal relationship with a teenager might be considered a political statement, but that petty thief...!
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