So does anyone give a shit?

Rusty volunteered to take our granddaughter Sara from Mom’s to Dad’s, via McDonalds, and asked me if I wanted to come along. I hadn’t seen her without her braces; hadn’t seen much of her at all, really, since she became 13 and too cool. So we got fed (No more Asian salad!! So I do the fish deal, on a feast day…does that count against the meat I eat on Friday?)  and I was trying to make small talk:
“Doing anything musical?”
“Just chorus.”
“Singing anything interesting?”
“No.” [pause]. “We ‘re singing [List of 2nd rate pop tunes].”
“Wow, you’re right, you aren’t singing anything interesting. Are you reading Harlequin romances in English Lit?”
It takes her a minute to understand what I’m asking. “No”
“Then why do they teach that material in chorus?”
“History is worse. Mr. X never teaches anything; he just has us copy timelines and notes. And he has the answers on the board during the tests.”

And thus goes education in the hometown of President McKinley. I can excuse incompetence; I can’t excuse not caring. This is the sort of thing that gives educators a bad name. There are effective and ineffective ways of teaching, so pedagogy courses aren’t a complete waste of time. But when nobody seems interested in applying what they’ve learned, one is tempted to conclude that it’s just another organized-labor trick to restrict access to the trade.

Afterwards, we check out Severstal (the Mill Formerly Known as WCI, where Rusty used to work). Not a sign of life in the place, except for a few cars around the blast furnace. Hank Rearden probably isn’t in there.

Earlier, after church, I’d stopped at City View, the foreclosed mall. Out at the end were several uncompleted buildings, and then a blocked off road to nowhere, going up a hill. One of the abandoned stores was becoming a dollar store. That’s better than at Randall Park, where there’s a flea market, and “Church ‘n the mall” in the old Lerner’s.

There are bits of hope though, always. A solid 4 story brick building in Warren, which Rusty had had fantasies of renovating, has been bought and is being renovated. Steelyard Commons in downtown Cleveland seems to be doing fine. I was there after church at the Wal-mart, to buy a new coffeepot and some vise-grips (to be stamped with my initials so my wife won’t disappear them). They’re downhill from the barrio, so they stock certain sorts of prepackaged meat for the Hispanic trade (tripe etc.) . I bought 4 lbs of beef heart at $.86/lb, which will make a dandy stew tomorrow.

Eric Holder: lying sack of shit

So much for that statement that he’d leave medical marijuana distributors alone.
I am so ashamed to have been taken in. He’s a politicians, and his lips were moving; I should have known better. I guess I just got overwhelmed by all that Hope for Change.

How about an antitrust investigation of the Duopoly?

I don’t know whether to be utterly pissed that Congress is meddling in the affairs of college football, a matter in which they have no Constitutional mandate, or overjoyed because they are wasting time on it instead of ruining the economy some more.

Well, they’ll probably ruin the economy of college football before they’re done, so maybe it’s a twofer.

Even Smart Cars are piling up

Well, duh, there’s a depression on. Can you afford to pay full-car price for half a car? Even if it is cute?

Suleman fires Angels

I dunno…if I were convinced that the people training my nannies were spying on me for CPS, I’d fire them too. That has nothing to do whther Octomom is fit… which almost nobody believes.

Gotta laugh:

Angels in Waiting had initially offered to provide around-the-clock care, to be paid for by public donations, but later scaled back its offer to only provide training to Suleman’s nannies. Suleman has said the offer was changed because the group wasn’t receiving donations, but Allred has denied that claim.

Well, do you know anybody who has donated?

She wanted ‘em, let her take care of them. Or maybe she can hire this woman to take care of them, who is probably going to lose her job as a teacher anyway.

POW!

[Obama] inherited these deficits like OJ inherited Niccole Brown’s head.

Check out the scary graph too.

Daniel Hannan for President

Yes, he’s not a native-born American citizen. Is Obama? But I can’t think of a single American politician who is as articulate and has such an understanding of the current problem.

YouTube at the Anchoress; it’s just as awesome as she says, maybe even the best thing to ever have happened in the European Parliament.

No saviors in Washington

I was listening to some local talk host named Bob Frantz on WTAM last night, and he was holding forth on the Missouri terrorism report. I haven’t been covering this because, well, everyone else in the dextrosphere has, and because it’s ultimately BS. But what caught my attention was this guy saying, “Where are the Republicans on this? They should be hitting it nonstop.”   Why would they do that? Right-wing third parties just steal votes from them. And Ron Paul is a RINO: the only good one. (Don’t tell me what the GOP should be or claims to be; by the standards of Republican policy in practice, Paul is not a Republican; if he were, why would the partyarchy in Texas be trying to remove him from office?). The GOP is ultimately very comfortable with Obama’s power-grabbing, given that he’s mostly using tools forged for him by George Bush. And when the electorate in revulsion kicks out the Democrats in 2010, they will gratefully use every tool that Obama originates.

In a sense, the Missouri report is true: anti-government “men causing disasters” (new PC term for terrorists) are likely to come from outside the Duopoly, because they see that the parties are broken. But it’s mostly false, because they don’t see that the system is broken. They name parties after the “goddam piece of paper” and think it has something to do with liberty. As long as political activists are playing the electoral game, they are no threat. It’s when they change the rules of the game that the rest of us might have a chance of winning.

Meds for the dead

NHS doesn’t take no for an answer; they want you, dead or alive:

Andrew Wild, 44, received more than 20 reminders asking his father Peter to attend kidney clinics at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire – despite repeatedly telling them he had died in 2007 – so he took the urn to one of his own appointments.

He said: ‘The consultant asked how I was feeling. I said I was OK, then produced dad’s ashes and asked, “But what can you do for him?” 

‘He was gobsmacked. I know it was morbid but I couldn’t think of what else to do.’

The hospital has apologised.

Ah, but are they still calling for appointments? Do they think he’s a parrot?

The old world passes

First, I noticed on my way in to work that the Sears in Randall Park Mall was closing. I worked there about 20 years ago, first as a Discover Card peddler, and then in Lawn and Garden, commission sales. I guess it was a foregone conclusion that since Randall Park Mall closed, Sears would soon follow, though they had their own entrances. 

And the Ann Arbor News has announced that it’s going out of business. I was a regular reader 30 years ago, particularly political and cultural news and the acerbic concert reviews of Jim Leonard.