This, from the local news yesterday: “Arlington Heights woman dies from crash injuries.” The story: mere blocks from my home, a 16-year-old, on his or her way to school, hit a 57 year old woman out walking her dog, and she subsequently died from her injuries. Terrible news. Checks are being done on the speed and they’re pulling the phone records, to see if the teen was on the phone or texting at the time. In any case, this was... Read more
Boy, that’s a cryptic title, but something more descriptive would also be significantly wordier. “Power of 15” is a new initiative at our local high school. It’s a partnership between the local community college, Harper College, and the high school districts in the area, intended to bring community college classes to the high schools. See a description in the local paper, here. The idea is that “research show[s] students who enter college with 15 or more credits are twice as... Read more
You’ve been following the reporting on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address, and only a private e-mail, for her official correspondence as Secretary of State, right? The fact that she claims that she handed over paper printouts (the better to impede searching through the e-mails) of all SoS-related e-mail to the government, but will not hand over her “private” correspondence, referencing e-mail exchanges with her husband (who is on the record as saying he simply doesn’t use e-mail),... Read more
The subtitle to the book pretty much says it all, “Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All” — that is, communicates the authors’ opinions, not my own. The book is an extended argument that Social Security is doing just fine, thank you very much, and the only changes to be made are to expand the benefit levels and types and expand revenue sources. (Some of what follows is based on my notes prior... Read more
This’ll be short, as I already had to return the book from the library and am going on memory and a few notes. Remember when I said, “Islam needs a Jewish Enlightenment“? No? Well, I invite you go to read this post, from January (pre-Patheos) and tell me what you think. Dr. Jasser has — well, OK, this book was published back in 2012, so clearly he hadn’t, but it felt like the core of what I was trying to... Read more
Yeah, I’d been meaning to read this one for a while, and now I’ve got to get this summary written before returning the book to the library. (New readers: this is one of the nerdier things I do, as I figure that if I write up little summaries of books I’ve read, I won’t forget what they’re about later.) Who are the Smartest Kids in the World? Ripley refers to kids from the countries that have top scores on the... Read more
You’ve read this before, right? For much of human history, children were economically valuable to their parents. Either as farm labor or, later as factory workers, they provided valuable extra labor at little cost. Only in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with child labor laws and the shift to a predominently urban population, were children more burden than benefit, and, in the last couple decades, a significant burden indeed, as parents are expected to put substantial time and... Read more
At the old blog, I would occasionally link, without much comment, to various interesting articles. Here, in my new Patheos world, I’ve decided to take a different approach: I’ve set up a facebook page, not a personal but a “public” page, where I’ll be posting the various links I come across, and I’ll reserve the Patheos blog for more substantive blog posts. I imagine that periodically I might share an article on facebook as a preliminary to later commenting on... Read more
You all know Megan McArdle, right? Blogger extraordinaire at Bloomberg View, author of “The Up Side of Down,” home cook, etc. She’s also childless. No, she’s not one of those proud “childfree” people, and she doesn’t go around calling parents “breeders.” In her book (sorry, Megan, I checked it out from the library, rather than buying it!), she talks about failure, and not being afraid to fail, and tells the story — also retold in a recent Valentine’s Day post... Read more
So here’s something I came across yesterday (and forgive me if it takes a while to get to my point): the Atlantic had a piece observing that female presidents on TV tend to be Republican (whether that’s true or not, I don’t know; I don’t watch enough TV, and when the TV is on, it tends to be the Science Channel or the Food Network). In the comments section, out of nowhere, a commenter quoted Hilary Clinton as having said,... Read more
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