Busy Times

 I haven't been on here for nearly a month. Getting back into the flow of writing regularly is going to take me time and consistency. I have been very busy in work and in life--my teaching variety load is always such that even when I am teaching a class that I have taught before, it may have been a few years since my last time teaching it (such is the case this semester with University Physics I, which I have taught a few times before but which I last taught pre-Covid). 

The next few weeks promise to be packed, and yet next week is Holy Week, Triduum, Easter. There are always busy times, and there are always urgent matters. We all need to make time for the human things: for life and leisure, for prayer, for family and fun. Make room for repentance and then for joy: for it is that thread of joy which marks the lives of the saints.

WWII's European Theater

This is a fascinating graphic video showing who controlled what territory day-by-day in Europe during the second world war:



Wow.

SEC! SEC!

Oh and 2, Oh and 2!

That would be the SEC's BCS bowl record this season. And that's a happy thought, especially since there was a lot of "S-E-C! S-E-C!" chanting going on just before FSU scored the game-winning touchdown. That almost makes up for the fact that FSU didn't blow Auburn off the field.

In other news, this now means that the last 6 (and 7 of the last 8) BcS championships have been won by teams from Florida or Alabama.

Morissey vs the Moron

Ed Morissey (and the rest of the internet) performs his autopsy on the recent Slate article claiming that people who don't send their kids to public schools are morally evil:

"Benedikt’s entire argument is that non-participants in an organization ruin it by their non-participation.  It’s not the actual participants who are to blame for the institution’s failures – not the teachers, not the administrators, and not the policy-makers — but the people who avoid the failure that should be blamed.... 

Before we deconstruct the idiocies in that argument, let’s test that theory.  The worst-performing school districts tend to be those in densely-populated urban cores, where teachers routinely complain not of half-empty classrooms but of student-teacher ratios that are way too high. If Benedikt’s theory holds water, then those districts — where school choice is verboten and economic opportunities to provide alternatives are nearly as rare — should be models for educational improvement. Over the last 50 years, which direction have these schools taken?  According to every measure, it’s not the path of excellence. 

Even more fundamentally, Benedikt argues that parents should have the welfare of the public sector as a higher ideal than that of their own children.  So what if they get a lousy education?  Kids fifty years from now might get a better one if parents today would only sacrifice their children’s future on the altar of the Public School Gods, whose beneficence can only be derived through complete sacrifice! And speaking of the common good, exactly how does producing a few generations of mediocre-educated children improve the communities and the country as a whole?  The only way this strategy makes any sense is we aim for a future that looks a lot like the film Idiocracy."

What is it with leftist "progressives" and doubling down on abject stupidity? That the public schools are failing is basically reason to pull as many children out of them as possible. Tear them down and start a new system, preferably one in which there is some balance-of-power between parents and teachers (but not unions, which in this case are worse than worthless). Making the failure into an "education" monopoly (or, more accurately, a publicly-owned education cartel) will not result in their bettering their product (in this case, education), nor for that matter will it result in better conditions for the teachers. A vibrant (and accessible) private/charter/homeschool system which exists as an alternative to the failing public schools is a boon to those parents who do care about their children's education.

A Satanic Syllogism

Passed on by a friend:

1. Pro-choice protestors chant hail Satan. 
2. They believe Perry is Satan:

3. Therefore, ... 

I had wondered about that myself.