Turns out, the Germans are actually pretty dang similar to the Dutchies, as profiled in The Happiest Kids in the World. Or maybe it’s just a reminder that it’s Americans, with our high-achievement-demanding, helicoptering ways, that are the aberration, at least relative to the West. In any case, I read this book with an eye to how her experiences compared to my two years there as well as the above-mentioned profile of the Netherlands. To begin with, this is the... Read more
So I have a number of posts in the queue, so to speak, whether as actual drafts or just topics or things from my twitter feed I want to talk about, but I haven’t had much time to blog recently. And at the same time, my youngest son is going on his first Boy Scout outing this weekend, and my husband, the Scoutmaster, is chasing up the parents of the new scouts who have not replied on whether their boys... Read more
I don’t really have much to say on the issue of mass shootings. I don’t think there is a pat solution. The sort of gun control needed to ensure that the various killers would not have had weapons accessible to them really seems to approach the level of confiscation, which is hardly realistic. There are smaller steps, to be sure, like the proposed “gun violence restraining orders” and educational steps like, “store your arsenal offsite to avoid someone else getting... Read more
So. . . I got this book (an older one, published in 2007 and deaccessioned at my own library, because, grrr, they’re like that, so I had to borrow it through interlibrary loan) because I wanted to challenge my preconceptions about immigration, and figured that this book written by a journalist who lived and worked in Mexico for 10 years, and whose book about the opioid epidemic, Dreamland, I had previously read, would do this. Surprisingly, it didn’t, really. The... Read more
Or, rather, Black Panther thoughts, but I can’t format a post title — the point being, that is, that I want to say a few things about the movie, not the titular character. And I should preface this with the comment that I am not a comic book reader so I cannot really fit this into any kind of overall arc, though the movie itself was fairly independent of the other films in the overall universe, except for a bit of... Read more
The title is, of course, a play on Jesus’s statement, “the poor you will always have with you,” made when a woman anoints him with costly oil and one of the disciples flips out and says, “that money could have been spent on the poor.” Jesus then follows that up with, “you will not always have me” (Matthew 26:11), and praises the woman’s deed as anticipating his coming death. I’m reminded of that not just because of the passage itself,... Read more
CNN reported on the Obama portrait unveiling yesterday, but it’s not yet available in the public domain so the image above is from the Bush portrait unveiling. Instead, I can only offer that you look at the link above and promise that I’ll update the placeholder images below when available. My reaction to President Obama’s picture: it’s OK, I guess. I know that it’s the style of the artist, Kehinde Wiley, to depict “African-Americans posed in the style of Old Master paintings,... Read more
This is a very short item but something I came across the other day that was entirely new to me. The “Dreamers,” we are told, are in need of legal residency in the United States because they left the countries of their birth so long ago that those places are wholly unfamiliar to them, including language and school system. But there’s another category of individuals in the same circumstance: sons and daughters of people who came here on H-1B visas.... Read more
As reported in various sources, including Politico, the Trump administration in its latest budget has proposed reducing food stamp allocations and replacing them with packages of actual food, shelf-stable items including ” shelf-stable milk, peanut butter, canned fruits and meats, and cereal.” The plan would save money because the government could source these items at much less than retail, and would combat fraud, because users can’t sell cans of tuna in the same way as they can sell food stamps. ... Read more
Yesterday I spent too much time summarizing Teresa Ghilarducci’s Rescuing Retirement, in which she promotes her GRA retirement concept. Today I’d like to give a bit of an evaluation. The core idea — make people save their own money instead of increasing Social Security — is a reasonable one, and is, after all, similar to the Jane Plan, except that in my plan I start the saving requirement only after a given earnings threshold. But here are where the plans... Read more
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