Month: April 2021

Equity Means Punishing the Gifted

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Virginia plans to eliminate opportunities for mathematically gifted students to advance before their less intelligent peers.  What they want to do is eliminate the varying mathematical subject matter courses and have everyone in the same class.  So in 10th grade in the same class the same teacher will try and have some of the smarter kids doing algebra and geometry and the kids who really don’t understand math at all will be cutting and pasting together collages with the names and pictures of female and minority mathematicians who prove that we’re all equally mathematically gifted and so they’ll also get a passing mark.  That’s brilliant.  Meanwhile all the smart kids that have parents that care about them will be pulled out of public high school by their parents and sent to private school to get an actual education.  And everyone else will be reduced to lowest common denominator education.

It’s good that they’re so open about their plans.  It makes it much easier to plan how to protect yourself and your family from equity.  If you have a grade school kid who can do algebra and trig in sixth grade can you imagine wasting five years of his education while his much less intelligent classmates and even teachers catch up to him?  Virginia has just sounded the death knell of their public education system.  It must be a proud moment for the Left.  Equity Means Punishing the Gifted.

Pets – Part 1

photog Current Events, photog's Corner

Our culture has, for better or worse, become obsessed with our pets.  There are many women who seem to have replaced children with dogs and cats as a way to assuage their maternal instinct.  And even many families that have children spend a very sizable chunk of their time and money owning and/or fostering dogs and cats.  It seems as if it is a growth industry too.  From what I understand people are breeding mutts just to provide fodder for the foster dog market and you have to admit that’s sort of madness.  After all the aim of fostering all these dogs is to eliminate the surplus dog problem.  If you’re breeding dogs specifically for this group of people to adopt then you’ve ensured that there will never be an end to the problem.  Neat trick!

I will be the first to admit that dogs are a remarkable part of life.  A good family dog is a part of the family and can also provide benefits.  Their talents as burglar alarm and deterrent are undeniable.  In the rural area their scent around the property deters some dangerous creatures.  But it is primarily their companionship that makes them unique.  A dog that you’ve raised from a puppy truly does assume that you are his parent and takes your family as his.  There is an amazing bond there.  And it goes both ways.  The death of a dog creates a remarkably strong feeling of bereavement.  If you are present at the death, such as when a veterinarian administers a lethal injection, the actual moment of death is a shock to you, especially the first time you experience it.  I guess it has something to do with the child/parent nature of the relationship between a dog and its owner.  It is the responsibility we feel for these creatures that depend on us to make sense of the human world they live in.

This came up today because Camera Girl has a menagerie of pets that she shares with our two-year-old granddaughter when she visits us.  So, the two dogs and the parakeets and finches and the fish and the hermit crab and the rabbit and the guinea pig and the hamster each has its place in the affections of this little girl and if one of them dies it will be necessary for us to explain and sympathize with her feelings about the loss.  And of course, as grandparents we have to clear all this information with the parents to make sure we respect their wishes on how death is explained to a little child.

Well, yesterday the five-year-old guinea pig, “Baby” died.  So, this morning I went out to the pet cemetery that I maintain and found a spot for Baby and dug the grave.  And this is a bit of work even for a small animal like a guinea pig because the ground out there is more rocks than soil.  But all was prepared and services were read and flowers were placed on the grave and all the solemnities were observed.  After all Camera Girl is a very warm hearted pet owner.

When the little girl comes back next week, we’ll tell her, as requested by her parents, that Baby went back to live with her mother who needed her.  And hopefully she will transfer her displaced affections to Petey the rabbit and Jelly Bean the hamster without too much sadness.  Knowing Camera Girl, I am sure that additional living creatures will be added to the zoo to bolster our head count.  We have standards to maintain.

Eventually that little girl will learn about death and it will probably be because her own dog will die.  Hopefully that will be when she’s already eight or ten years old and can somewhat understand the concept of death.  And probably either before or after that loss her parents will have added another dog to the house to continue that role in her life.

But the point of this whole essay is that Americans are transferring their affection and time to their pets because we have become almost completely isolated from each other.  And not just because of the pandemic although that is the ultra-example of the problem.  We don’t get together as communities, we don’t know our neighbors and we even lose touch with our family.  We’re isolated within the boxes we live in and now most of the younger people don’t even talk to each other at home.  They sit with their faces buried in their phones and text.  Walking their dogs may be the only thing that drags them out of their houses and maybe their only interactions with strangers is at the dog park.

So pets may be the clearest indication that we’ve become alienated from humanity at almost every level.  If these people didn’t get to pet their dog or cat at night as they wait to fall asleep they might be almost completely isolated from another living thing.

Strange world.

The Day After Chauvin

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Yesterday I found the news so depressing that I wasn’t in the mood to write.  It’s hard to paint what happened in the Chauvin trial in anything but the blackest terms.  It was not unexpected but the reality of it brought home just how far we’ve fallen from the days of even our fathers.

But some good comes of even the most painful events.  The primary good will be that black crime will go essentially unchecked in all the Democrat controlled jurisdictions.  No policeman is going to arrest a black man for any reason whatsoever.  Why would he?  If the criminal steals a pair of sneakers or a diamond ring subduing him is a dangerous threat to his own life.  And if he injures the criminal he’ll be prosecuted.  If the black criminal kills someone, the correct procedure is put up the crime scene tape around the body and call the CSI team to take fingerprints and DNA evidence that can be recorded and stored away to prove that a good job was done.  And as for drug crimes, please don’t make me laugh.  Drugs are the solution.  Once the whole population is completely dosed there will be a lot less complaining about crime.  So, the Democrats will have effectively eliminated law enforcement

And that will be a very educational development.  Granted, it will cause incredible misery.  And that will be true in both the black neighborhoods and the other areas.  The knock-on effects will be white (and yellow and brown) flight from the cities and even the inner suburbs by everyone who can.  It will also polarize all the other ethnicities against the black population.  Basically, people will be reacting to the reality of a population that no longer is subject to law enforcement.  Even the Hispanic areas will be aware that there will no longer be a break on the kind of inner-city violence that was held in check by the police.

Dementia Joe plans to try to expand this to the red states by using the Justice Department as a weapon to attack any city that tries to use law enforcement to control crime perpetrated by black criminals.  It will be interesting to see if the red state governors are smart and strong enough to prevent this maneuver.  I know that Ron DeSantis in Florida has put together an anti-rioting law that will allow his state to fight back if a local mayor tries to create a BLM riot situation.

But I expect that places like Atlanta and St. Louis will explode this summer and the feds will do their best to punish the police departments in those cities.  I expect that we’ll see the white cops in all these cities retiring at a pretty good clip.  As I said before I’d be really gratified if one of these BLM parties gets out of control and burns down one of the cities before they realize what they are doing.  Minneapolis or Portland would be my obvious favorites but New York or Chicago would also be great.  We’ll see.

So, I’ve gotten over my discouragement.  I’ve begun looking at what I’ll have to do to move in the future and I spend all my time concentrating on the things and the people that are important to me and only use whatever time is necessary to make sure I avoid all the evil and stupid people that are currently in charge of the former United States of America.  But one thing is sure.  They can stop playing the National Anthem in the Blue States.  In places like Minneapolis, “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” is just a hollow joke.