Readers will recall that I am the proud(ish) owner of a new minivan — and with that, the free trial subscription to sattilite radio, and the yes-I’m-a-Gen-Xer 80s on 8 channel, on which the Billy Joel song Allentown made an appearance earlier today while I was running errands. Here it is, readers. To be honest, I don’t remember this music video, just the song itself. I suspect that this predated the installation of cable TV in our home, when we... Read more
The lawyers at the Boy Scouts of America are working over time. First, as a Cub Scout committee chair, I got a set of posters in the mail, along with the instruction to display these at every meeting. They included a Code of Conduct, an anti-bullying message, and a poster telling parents that if they ever observed leaders failing to follow the two-deep leadership rules, there is a corporate helpline to call, instead of, oh, say, actually talking to the leaders... Read more
In her first Washington Post column: Referencing Delta’s elimination of a group discount for the NRA, Delta is wanly protesting that it wasn’t trying to make a political statement but to keep out of politics altogether. But it ended the discount in response to a political pressure campaign. And the company made a point of announcing its decision on Twitter, rather than quietly informing the NRA. If anyone at Delta thought that this wouldn’t be taken as a swipe at... Read more
Miscellaneous items from my twitter feed: Are Muslim immigrants to Europe mission territory? From Church Times, as retweeted by Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead), “After Damascus, where? Churches and cathedrals tell of a growing number of converts.” Individuals, families, and small groups of people from other faith backgrounds have been approaching churches in unprecedented numbers — for spiritual as well as material help. In some cases, they have reinvigorated struggling congregations, while presenting pastoral, cultural, and theological challenges. What’s wrong with Kids... Read more
Here are just a few words of commentary with the aim of inviting discussion: On armed teachers School districts should not be in the business of promoting the carrying of weapons by teachers. They should not ask a teacher who just wants to impart her love of knowledge to students to now be tasked with physically protecting them, nor should a teacher feel any expectation to do so. But at the same time, I’d add that schools should be willing,... Read more
The graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are striking. Not the STEM students working in labs on grants, but the teaching assistants who work running discussion sections for the large lecture courses, or teaching introductory classes. They are upset that, in the new contract, the university proposes to remove the rock-solid guarantee that, once provided with a tuition waiver, students will keep that level of waiver except for cases of poor performance. What’s more, they are asking... Read more
Yes, I know, rhetorical questions generally have the answer, “no,” and in this case, I’m referencing a Washington Post Wonkblog article, “Millions of jobs are still missing. Don’t blame immigrants or food stamps.” (Pet peeve: article titles that are multi-sentence.) The article reports that The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 — amounting to about 11.4 million fewer workers in 2016. At least half of that decline probably was due to an aging... Read more
It’s all over the news lately — or all over twitter, anyway: the reports cheering various companies’ announcements that they are pulling out of NRA discount programs. And there are calls to repeal the Second Amendment and proposals that the right path forward to end the scourge of gun violence is a gun confiscation program like that of Australia or Great Britain, plus “modest proposals” to succeed in the long term by, in the short-term, placing a stigma on gun ownership... Read more
Here’s the background for everyone fortunate enough to live elsewhere: Illinois’ primary election is coming up shortly. On the Republican side, we’ve got incumbent Bruce Rauner, and his opponent Jeanne Ives. She’s attacking him from the right, on social issues (and doing so, in internet ads, in a way that has riled people up), though you wouldn’t know it from her website, where she promises to rescind the income tax hike, and that’s about it. Logic would dictate that she... Read more
We tend to explain “helicopter parents,” or, as I labelled them previously, “tight-leash parents,” with respect to their tendency to drive their kids everywhere, or insist on accompanying them on any venture outside the front door, as the outcome of a fear of kidnapping that set in with the “have you seen me?” milk cartons of the 1980s, convincing a generation of parents that, however safe it might have been for them to roam the neighborhood or the city by... Read more
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