Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

April 16, 2010

"Florida Governor Splits With G.O.P. on Teacher Pay"

Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, has vetoed a bill passed last week by the Florida legislature that would have introduced the most sweeping changes in public education in decades. It proposed to eliminate tenure for Florida public school teachers, and tying their jobs to how well their students were learning. Crist said that the draconian changes would have put “teachers in jeopardy of losing their jobs and teaching certificates, without a clear understanding of how gains will be measured.”
      Trip Gabriel and Damien Cave wrote in the New York Times today,

When Florida proposed strict accountability measures, teachers, parents and administrators pushed back. They argued that the proposed system [...] would hold them responsible for factors in students’ lives beyond their control.
      “I am not a puppet master; I can’t pull strings and make them perform,” said Amy Horr, a second-grade teacher in the Miami-Dade School District who attended a rally on Monday. “I can’t even make them come to school."

And there is the nub of it. I trained as a teacher. In Madison, Wisconsin, in 1973, I worked as an assistant in a junior high school in a prosperous part of town where the parents sending the kids to school were doctors, lawyers, and college professors, and it was a magical place. I also worked in another school in another part of town where the parents were not so well off. Then I went to England and worked in a high school in South London in early 1974 where the kids didn't show up half the time, because their parents didn't give a damn whether they went to school or not.
      It has always been the case, and will always be the case, that some teachers are better than others. But almost all of them could do an acceptable job if the kids came to school with the right attitude, and the teachers have no control over that. This country has much worse problems than teacher pay, a fact that the Tea Party types don't understand, and Charlie Crist is to be congratulated for standing up to them.
      Meanwhile, in the Morning Call today, the town of Easton, Pennsylvania, is having to lay off dozens of teachers and cut extracurricular activities (including sports! Omigod! They're cutting sports!) because the town is broke. I have only been living in Pennsylvania for six months and I am still discovering new taxes that I have never heard of before (two different property taxes on our house); I brag that I don't mind paying taxes, but where the hell does all the money go?

 

April 16, 2010

Environmental Hazards (Wall Street Journal columnists)

Kimberley Strassel writes today in the Wall Street Journal about "a bleak 15 months for the environmental left...scandal has left climate science in tatters..." Her column turns out to be about Richard Pombo, a Congressman in Central Valley in California who lost his seat in 2006. "For 14 years...the rancher was the GOP's sturdiest voice on private property rights, energy exploration and environmental reform." (Note the juxtaposition of "private property rights" and "environmental reform".) What Strassel is on about is Pombo's attempt to get back into Congress, and the Green groups' tactics in 2006, which included "vicious ads, mailers and door-to-door campaigning" and a "gerrymander that pushed Mr. Pombo's 11th district into liberal San Francisco suburbs".
      Apparently the Greens are telling porkies: Pombo was accused of taking his family on a vacation paid for by taxpayers, when he had in fact paid their way out of his own pocket, and so on, and so forth. It's like looking in a mirror. Those nasty Greens are using the same tactics that American so-called "conservatives" have been using for years. Have they got Karl Rove working for them?
      I'm reminded of a recently-published book called How The Left Swift-Boated America. Doesn't the author of this right-wing tract know that the original swift-boaters were on the right, self-appointed patriots telling lies in 2004 about John Kerry, who came home from Vietnam with shrapnel in his body? Have these people no shame, or are their memories getting even shorter?

 

April 16, 2010

Environmental Hazards (Wall Street Journal columnists)

Sorry to repeat myself, but I've just remembered Bret Stephens's column of 6 April, which began "So global warming is dead." Yes, folks, the Wall Street Journal doesn't just doubt it, or discuss it, but has decided that it was all a scam (that is, the editorial side. You can still read about the real world on the news side.)
      Stephens wants to know what's going to be the next panic, now that we don't have to worry about the ice caps any more, and proposes a readers' contest. "It must involve something ubiquitous, invisible to the naked eye, and preferably mass-produced. And the solution must require taxes, regulation, and other changes to civilization as we know it." The prize is a beer and a burger.
      Six days later, Hugh McDiarmid in Farmington, Michigan had written in to say that Stephens should have asked a different question:

Name the most significant environmental or public health problem successfully addressed despite the ridicule and denial of those who clung blindly to the status quo. Nominees could include:
      Cigarette health warnings...Tobacco really kills people. Who knew?
      Removing lead from gasoline and paint...children permanently brain damaged and neurologically disabled...You mean it wasn't a hoax?
      Regulating industrial chemical discharges...After the Great Lakes started catching fire...

I think we should just hope that the Journal's editorial board takes good care of themselves, so that 60 or 70 years from now they can be there in Iceland with the rest of the world's press, filming the last little bit of the last glacier in that country as it melts away. Then they can have a contest to decide what to call Iceland after all the ice is gone.

 

April 16, 2010

Classical Music Reissues on CD

This morning I have been listening to Mahler's 2nd symphony, as recorded by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic in the 1950s, and Mahler's 4th symphony, by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, beautifully recorded in about 1962. Both were on Columbia, and both have been reissued on compact disc. But the versions I am listening to are not the commercially available ones. The classic Walter M2 has had the CD reissue goosed by an audio-restoration engineer who I truly think is a genius, while the wonderful Szell has been transferred from a reel-to-reel tape that was once commercially available, by an outfit called High Definition Tape Transfers. Both sound much better than Sony/Columbia's CD reissues.
      Here is a question about the state of the record business: if hobbyists and bootleggers can do work like this, why can't the record companies do it themselves? And why should we buy the stuff the record companies put out if we can get better-sounding CDs from our friends?

 

April 16, 2010

What Recession?

The Great Recession, they are calling it, with millions of people losing their jobs, a great many foreclosures on houses and many more people "under water", that is, owing more money on their houses than they are worth. Today I received my 2010 Real Estate Assessment Roll on my very ordinary suburban house in West Des Moines, Iowa, from the office of the Polk County Assessor. Nothing has changed except the collapse in the property market, but my house's "full assessed value" has gone up $5,700. Go figure.