Welcome to Monday, September 21, 2026: the last full day of summer and the second and final day of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur ends at sundown, and observant Jews who have fasted and refrained from drinking can start ingesting then.
It’s also National Chai Day. I’ve been drinking the stuff for decades, since I first went to India, but now it’s become very popular (in various forms, like lattes) in America. Here’s how the really good stuff is made in a street stall; note the high pouring from vessel to vessel (6:05) that cools the tea and foams the milk. The chaiwallas pride themselves on the height of their pour.
A nice cup of chai I had ten years ago in Bangalore (Bengaluru):
It’s also International Day of Peace, National Beef Stroganoff Day, National Pecan Cookie day, and National Sponge Candy Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 21 Wikipedia page.
Posting will be light tomorrow, and perhaps for several days thereafter, as I have to have the lens in my right eye pulverized, sucked out, and replaced with an artificial one. Such are the ravages of age.
Da Nooz:
*Trump has carried through on his threat to ban reporters for three liberal media venues from the White House (article archived here).
“The First Amendment extends to White House grounds as strongly if not more than pretty much anywhere,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “It’s the people’s house; it’s the center of government.”
The media organizations all said they would fight the restrictions and continue reporting on the president. CNN and MS NOW journalists began reporting across the street from the White House on Saturday.“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW said in a statement. “MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.”
Trump abruptly announced Friday he would ban MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House, saying he disliked how they covered him. “They’re fake news,” he said.
Akayla Gardner, a White House reporter for MS NOW, described on air how she tried to scan her badge to enter the White House grounds but was told it was “disabled.” An MS NOW producer who was with her was able to enter, but a photographer “had their badge taken this morning,” she added.
It’s clear now that what Trump means by “fake news” is “news I don’t like”, even if that news is true. But this decision will not stand, for it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment and, if it stood, would allow any President to exercise censorship over news he didn’t like. Obama said yesterday, with a chuckle, something like “Imagine if I decided to ban Fox News from my press conferences.”
*In an article in the NYT Magazine (archived here), Nikole Hannah-Jones of “1619” infamy sent her daughter Najya to a so-so public school in Washington, D.C.: an attempt to improve the substandard system by participating in it. It failed; her daughter got a poor education up to middle school:
In an interview in the paper’s morning newsletter yesterday, Jones said this:
I asked her permission to report it in the first place, and then I asked if she wanted to be photographed for the story. She’s angry about the choices that my husband and I made, and she wanted to have her say. Did she really want people to know she had failed algebra after middle school? Her answer impressed me: “Well, it’s true.” But when I showed her a draft, she didn’t feel I was hard enough on myself. So I tried to capture the conflict. In the years since my original essay, I’ve moved through the world with the unearned valor of people commending me for the strength of my choice. Now I felt I owed it to her to tell the truth.
I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.
As they neared the end of her seventh–grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.
Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.
By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.
. . . So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
. . .We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.
After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn.
. . .“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.
Luana has pointed out to me, though, that the school where Hannah-Jones sent her daughter was actually quite well endowed. Here’s a tweet from Wilfred Reilly.
This is the profile of a failing school.
A taboo but obvious truth is that the #1 thing that determines how a school performs is the students entering it. pic.twitter.com/GLQlItsUzi
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) September 20, 2026
But in the end, it remains a sad story. Ultimately Najya got to choose her own high school—a selective public school that was mostly white, but she was floundering (even in math, her favorite subject) because of a substandard education in lower grades. And Hannah-Jones is clearly overcome with regret. What it goes to show is that you shouldn’t force your own values on your children, especially if it could hurt their welfare. Jones ends with an indictment of racism and the “riches” of white people.
*The WSJ reports on “The twin sisters facing the wrath of Iran’s crackdown” (subtitle: “Romina and Taraneh Rahimi were detained in January after a wave of protests. One was sentenced to decades behind bars; the other condemned to death”).
Taraneh Rahimi was staying with friends on the night of Jan. 24 when masked, armed men barged into the house, put a bag over her head and took her away. They later came for her twin sister, Romina.
For months after that, their loved ones didn’t know where they were, or whether they were even alive. Their mother searched for her 20-year-old daughters everywhere, begging staff at hospitals, in courts and outside prisons for information about them, to no avail.
In April, she received an anonymous call, a family member said. “Your daughters are at Dowlatabad Prison. You can book an appointment to see them,” the caller told her.
When she finally saw the twins again, in Isfahan’s female prison, their mother could hardly recognize them. Their faces were puffy and there were bald patches where their hair had been ripped out. They recounted harrowing tales from their time in detention, where they were tortured and sexually assaulted, according to information obtained by relatives and lawyers who reviewed their case.
An Iranian government spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Their crime? Peaceful political protest, of course, and now one of them may die but both will be in a dire prison for a long time—for protesting, for crying out loud.
The Rahimi sisters were among 16 defendants detained over their alleged role in the unrest around Shohada Square in Isfahan earlier this year. The central Iranian city, known for its blue-tiled Islamic architecture, has emerged as a focal point of the continuing judicial crackdown.
. . . The twins spent the first three months in a detention center run by the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, where they were tortured and sexually assaulted.
A lot of the torture was psychological, according to information obtained by relatives and human-rights lawyers familiar with the case. The sisters were held separately in isolation, but they could hear each other screaming and crying from a distance. They were made to watch male prisoners being tortured. Taraneh suffered severe physical injuries when she was repeatedly beaten with a baton on her leg, knee, hand and arm, according to the lawyers and relatives.
. . . . The twins turned 21 in prison. At the end of August, Taraneh, along with nine others, was sentenced to death. Romina received a 25-year prison sentence. The convictions could be appealed, but rights groups worry the executions could be fast-tracked.
Taraneh’s relatives fear she could soon be the first woman to be executed in Iran in connection to the protests. “Every night we fear it could happen,” said Masoud Nourmohammadi, a cousin of the twins who is based in the U.S. “It could be any time.”
Here’s a photo of the twins supplied to the WSJ by their family; the caption’s from the paper. They’ve already been beaten and sexually assaulted; this is what Masih keeps writing about in her twitter feed (see below).
*Over at the Times of Israel, Amit Segal describes “How Hamas stopped and started the presses,” showing how the terror group controlled all the news coming out of Gaza.
It’s Sunday, September 20, and the most revealing sentence spoken from Gaza’s press corps this year came on a podcast from one of its greatest stars. “If someone says something like this, many journalists lower the camera.”
That is Motaz Azaiza—one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2024, GQ Middle East’s man of the year—explaining how, when faced with dissent, the Gaza media complex fixes the narrative on Hamas’s behalf.
Speaking on the Palestinian podcast Taqarob, Azaiza described a WhatsApp group that “all the Gaza journalists are in.” For anyone picturing a professional association: its icon is a Hamas flag, and its administrator, he said, is the media director of the Rafah crossing.
Azaiza is no friend of Israel. TIME’s honoree celebrated October 7 and filmed hostages being beaten in a Gaza street, but then promptly buried the footage. When Yahya Sinwar was killed, he told mourners that anyone who had not answered Sinwar’s call to go out and engage the enemy had “no right to mourn and boast about the manner of his death.” Sinwar, he wrote, “wanted you in the field.”
That Gaza is an authoritarian hellscape is hardly worth stopping the presses for. Anyone thinking critically assumed Hamas controlled the narrative from the very beginning. Azaiza’s testimony is less an indictment of Hamas than of the media complex that lapped up its releases.
The Committee to Protect Journalists ran a feature in May of last year in which the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate listed Hamas’s methods—summonses, interrogations, threats, beatings, arrests, publication bans, interference with content, surveillance—and his deputy conceded that most journalists in Gaza now censor themselves. One photographer, beaten unconscious by plainclothes police beside Nasser Hospital, told CPJ that when colleagues tried to intervene, they were informed that “the spy and the journalist are one and the same.” CPJ noted the violations were vastly underreported, because the victims were too frightened to say so.
. . .The foreign press has omitted Hamas control since 2008, when Hamas stopped the West Bank dailies at the crossing and told their editors, according to the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, that they could enter Gaza once they signed an undertaking not to criticize Hamas. It broke cover once again in 2014, when, in a rare moment of lucidity, the Foreign Press Association condemned the “blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods” used against its members in Gaza. A Hamas information official then confirmed it on Lebanese television: the security services, she explained, “would give them some time to change their message.”
When the war began, Hamas already had years of evidence that the foreign press would take what it was served. That is how a single group chat, with no foreign members, set a global narrative.
This is one reason why I trust the IDF more than the press coming out of Gaza. Israeli journlists (many, like those at Haaretz, opposed to their government) don’t have to take an oath not to criticize Israel.
*Finally, the WSJ has an article by the U of C President, Paul Alivisatos, on AI: “Teach students to think with, without and about AI“.
Something different and far more optimistic is emerging at the University of Chicago, including a new, AI-adapted core curriculum. Campuswide work on this topic commenced in the fall of 2024, with the creation of an interdisciplinary group of faculty to consider reforms. The report of this working group provides a simple, principled framework that will guide our changes in curriculum and classrooms. The first goal is that our students should learn during their time with us to be ethical, skeptical and ambitious about the role of AI in their education and their lives. The second is that all students at UChicago should learn to think both with and without machines.
Here, we hold fast to our belief that a core curriculum is the foundation for a college education that supports a life enriched by a love of learning and ideas. In the past, anyone proposing a change in our core curriculum would have to be steeled for a decadelong debate. Yet the urgency of this moment is prompting beneficial changes in tandem at a pace commensurate with the technological transformation.
Our core curriculum—which students largely complete within their first two years—consists of humanities and social science, as well as the study of mathematics and biological and physical sciences, and the study of civilization and the arts. Soon all undergraduates will be required to take a class in writing, without the aid of any machine, and engage in the true struggle. Real writing. Blank page. Tough comments from instructor and peers. The humanities and social-science cores will also exclude technology from the classroom.
In line with the principle that it is important for students to learn how to think with machines, there is broad internal support for the notion that to be an educated person today and in the future, one must be able to use computational tools and concepts within one’s domain, and to reason critically about how computation, data and algorithms shape what can be known and built. Likely, this will result in a new core curriculum requirement for coursework in computational thinking within the next year.
The idea that learning to use AI should be an integral part of learning how to think increasingly cuts across the whole of the university. Earlier this summer, our law school declared that first-year students will be required to learn to write and reason without technology in the classroom or the use of AI. This will be followed by deliberate and thoughtful integration of AI tools and methods in years two and three.
I heartily applaud the course in writing, though I’m not so keen on a course about how to use AI. I suppose they need to know how to use it, but it’s dead easy to learn on their own. I still consider writing skills essential for reasons I’ve stated before.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s knowledge of art prompts a question:
Hili: Did Rousseau have a cat?
Andrzej: I don’t know, why do you ask?
Hili: I’m wondering where he got the idea of the noble savage from.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy Rousseau miał kota?
Ja: Nie wiem, dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, skąd mu się wzięła koncepcja szlachetnego dzikusa.
*******************
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Bad Spelling on Signs and Notices; another salacious one:
From Masih, who argues that the Iranian government is not giving any “freedom” to its people. Au contraire: they are training more authorities to oppress people.
Nobody gave Iranian women their freedom. They took it back. So that is why the regime hired these undercover police to crack down on women!
Recently on Christiane Amanpour’s video, I heard it again: the reformist government allowed its people to light candles for the victims of… https://t.co/LlMKt88Uz5 pic.twitter.com/6RYVxQivQ9
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 19, 2026
From Science Girl. Look at the Milky Way!
Have you ever wondered what happens at night on top of a mountain in the darkest place on Earth?
📹 Connor Paton/ connorpatonphotos pic.twitter.com/8kzUIpXet0
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) September 20, 2026
From the parody account “AOC”:
— AOC (@ay_oh_see) September 9, 2026
.From Malcolm; photobombing cats (don’t miss the cat butt):
“Up Where?” pic.twitter.com/rv8KMNzgmA
— 𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑙 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑 (@cuteeanimals0) September 12, 2026
One from my freed; an excellent summary:
This lady from Isreal sums up the whole Ed Sheeran bullshit excellently ‼️
And she’s very funny ❤️ pic.twitter.com/4EDieDTmtF
— Olly Parramore 🇬🇧 (@OllyParramore) September 19, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was 13 years old. https://t.co/ZKQHWc2CWo
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 21, 2026
Two from Doc Cobb. First, dinnertime for tortoises:
Dinnertime! #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmil…
— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-09-19T11:26:18.850Z
Matthew posted this himself and says that I MUST see “Amadeus”:
Re-re-re-re-watched AMADEUS. Even better than I remembered. The editing – film and sound – is extraordinary and Abraham deserved his Oscar. A really fabulous, opulent production. As to truth? It’s a fantasy, very harsh on Salieri, but rightly shows Mozart as the voice of God. One of the great films.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-19T20:51:39.989Z
Nikole Hannah-Jones is still under the impression that there are “good” schools and “bad” schools, and that white families use their influence to send their kids to the “good” schools, and thus white kids do well, whereas society conspires to send black kids to the “bad” schools, and so black kids do badly.
As Wilfred Reilly says, the reality is that the performance of the school is purely a product of the cohort of kids sent to it. Thought experiment: take the best-performing schools (full of white and Asian kids) and the worst-performing schools (full of black kids) and swap the cohorts around. Which is then the “good” school, with good discipline and outcomes? America needs to face up to the answer to that.
She is also oblivious to the effect of policies that she herself has pushed, for example the prime directive that schools must “close the gaps” so that groups have equal outcomes, in other words that black kids all score As.
Well there’s a hard way of achieving that (educate the kids to the point that they deserve As) and a vastly easier way of achieving that (don’t even bother to mark their work and award them As whatever).
Human nature being what it is, can Hannah-Jones really complain about schools taking the latter approach, given the pressure they’re under to attain equal outcomes?
Look these up :
Whole Child
And then
Whole School- Community- Child (WSCC)
My brief experiences as a secondary school teacher is that there is a strong correlation between the parents’ education and expectations (income as a proxy) and the school’s outcomes
That is what one would expect given that parents with genes for academic success and for valuing education pass on those genes to their children.
Yes, she subscribes to the Magic Building fallacy. The incredible performance of places like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science is mainly due to the properties of these structures. Switch the kids from Stuy and a low performing school, and viola the low performing kids will now be stellar, and the higher performing kids will now struggle.
In reality, you would see only a marginal improvement and probably an eventual return to poor results in the kids placed in Stuy. The poor study habits, lack of parental interest, and behavioral issues would not magically disappear just because these kids are placed in a different building. And, the higher performing kids would not suddenly jettison their drive, educational values, and parental support once they enter the “worse” building. The “poor school” would in due time overtake Stuy.
It is too much to expect that Ms. Hannah-Jones would would examine the historical record of the NYC school system, particularly the school strikes in the late 1960s which resulted in the firings of many experienced, white (predominately Jewish) teachers. Black segregationist activists got what they demanded. In addition to losing the most experienced teachers in the system, the curriculum was altered in many schools, and courses in subjects like Swahili and African methods of counting were introduced. Given the limited amount of time that students spend in schools, that came at the price of losing class hours in more traditional studies.
Somehow, I don’t doubt that, given today’s educational climate, NHJ’s daughter will be accepted at Ivy League colleges, where she may continue to struggle in subjects like math, as a result of her parents’ educational choices. Perhaps she can major in history where she can do serious work, or, like her mother, she can write fiction and pass it off as history.
Well, of course. The only reason people seek to ban news is because they don’t like it.
Remember the post in which readers added their Best Movies Ever in the comments?
I add Amadeus – in addition to – and above – Clerks! One could study to understand the star of the film by listening to the soundtrack.
Looking forward to a great report on the eye results 😁!
In my experience a good education is founded on expectations set in the home. My daughter’s saw how their parents were involved with the public schools and set an example for them to follow. I was one of the unfortunately very few males that served on the schools PTA board. Want better schools, volunteer and get involved. It’s no secret that families and cultures that value education tend to produce better preforming students.
Best of luck on your pending eye surgery.
It’s almost as though the genes that made the parents successful get passed on to the kids and then make the kids sucessful!
[We know it’s genes, not the actual family environment, partly through adoption studies (outcomes for adopted kids correlate with birth parents, not adoptive parents) and partly through twin studies (comparing outcomes for fraternal and identical twins disentangles the effect of genes).]
Trump is now stating that press he does not agree with is a threat to national security: “It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW.”
The best thing the press can do, besides filing suit, is for all the media outlets to just stop covering him. His ego would be crushed.
Mike Resnick (IIRC) wrote a short story set in the far future. The ruler of the galactic empire (or some such) was angry at the press coverage he received, and threatened to shut down the press. So the head of the editors’ union (or some such) made an agreement with the politician: no negative coverage.
And the press kept the deal. They refused to mention the politician at all.
I won’t spoil the ending.
I enjoyed Amadeus immensely.
I learned recently that F. Murray Abraham did Amadeus and Scarface at around the same time. He had to switch between the roles and shooting locations. I don’t know if that is common.
I had a friend who came from a well-to-do Jewish family in New York where the children were raised to be social activists. After a divorce she deliberately moved herself and her daughter to Cabrini-Green, a notorious high crime black housing development in Chicago (this was back in the 60’s.) The local public school was terrible, and her daughter suffered constant bullying and a very poor education, apparently because Mom wanted to Prove a Point about the racial divide and white responsibility. Her daughter was so resentful she ultimately didn’t speak to her mother for decades.
My friend wasn’t sure she had made the right choice, but admitted she would probably do it again. She’d been a vocal advocate on many of the grievance committees.
Cabrini-Green was the setting for the fictional 70s television show Good Times. What I found ironic about that show was that the Evans family lived on the 17th floor of their building. The tallest building in that project was 16 stories.
And trying to prove a point, the mayor of Chicago moved into Cabrini Green. She lasted less than one month before she moved out.
Cabrini Green was also the setting of a great horror film, Candyman, starring Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd.
Candyman was supernatural fiction, but its portrayal of Cabrini Green was a lot more realistic than that of Good Times.
Good luck with your cataract surgery!
My elementary school in Binghamton, New York was a “good” school because the students from the First Ward were mostly first and second generation children of working class Eastern European immigrants who believed that education was the pathway to the middle class. The parents made sure that their kids were well-behaved and ready to learn. The teachers had good material to work with. And most of those students went on to live the American dream.
We’ll see what happens with Trump’s ban on the press. The case(s) may have to go to court, or Trump may relent when his cortisol level goes back down to its usual dull roar.
The Israeli woman is right about Ed Sheeran. The mob will bully him until they get as much as they can get from him. Then they’ll move on to the next victim. It’s a never-ending hustle.
Finally, on to Chai, the topic you led with. Has Chai yet succumbed to the law that every purportedly healthy food eventually becomes a confection? See: “All snack foods that are meant to be healthy eventually evolve into forms of confectionary.” (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/10/coynes-laws-of-life/). Maybe Chai is a rare exception. Or maybe it’s not a snack food. Or maybe it actually has become a confection. I’ve never had one. Yogurt will never be the same. It started out as a modestly caloric tangy food with refreshing sour notes, sometimes complemented with actual fruit for extra credit. Now most brands are a gooey slurry of sugary sweet slime.
Chai at the coffee houses I go to are indeed candy confections. Bigby’s (a small eastern chain) is better than Starbucks, but I like both of them.
“But what did it do?”
The same could be said of Nichole Hannah Jones’ career.
The irony is NHJ’s career has been propped up by white people, who like her, NEVER see the world as it is. Take it from a successful old Mexican dude, nothing is fair and equal. Not in the United States, not in Mexico and certainly not in Africa.
I tell my adult grand kids, play the hand life dealt you to the best of the abilities God granted you.
NHJ certainly did a terrible disservice to her daughter (and us) by limiting her academic potential. Her professional work is a disservice to people of color by writing us off as victims of history instead of recognizing the progress (and advantages) we as a society has produced.
Ms. Jones, most of us (POC) realize it’s not 1619 any longer.
Coleman Hughes, in The Free Press, has a very good response to the NHJ article. He makes a point (among others) that in her description of teacher absenteeism and indifference, and complete lack of discipline, NHJ neglects to pay any attention to an obvious fact: the teachers and administrators are not doing their job. In a private school, such people would be fired. In the NYC public schools, firing teachers is almost impossible, due to teacher’s unions.
I have taught advanced science classes at a traditionally Black college. The students there were highly motivated, as they worked very hard to get into that college and stay there. No one cut them any slack. When I asked the students about their background (as in how they got there) all of them credited their parents for emphasizing education and hard work—not to mention discipline—all from an early age.
In my opinion, the teachers’ unions have done as much as any other factor, except one, in ruining American education. that one factor is parental indifference and unwillingness to participate in their children’s education.
Coleman Hughes is an excellent writer.
I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s in BC, Canada, which at the time was mostly white with a few Asians and the natives (who lived on their own reserves. They were free to live anywhere but housing was provided without charge on the reserve).
All the schools I attended (some in small interior towns, others in Vancouver) were remarkably similar. I got a perfectly good education at all these public schools (which also featured teachers’ unions).
Private schools existed but there were very few and they were expensive.
I think the demographics made the difference. Unions alone were not going to destroy those schools. But I can see how they might make a bad situation worse.
I compliment NHJ for living up (down?) to her stated values. Most of her ilk take the approach of espousing their views publicly while living a privileged life privately. But putting her child at risk and disadvantage as a result is inexcusable. It will still very likely end well – I can envision her daughter getting into any Ivy League school based on her mother’s name and the compelling story of going to these schools, especially if she pursues a social science or “studies” curriculum. In this way, NHJ’s daughter much more advantaged than the whites she berates.
I served on public school boards in two states, and have the experience of raising 3 children who all did well in school and in life. Parental involvement is strongly correlated to student success, and the more parental involvement there is, the better the overall school system. Throwing more money at the problem doesn’t help. $52k per kid and only 10 kids per classroom is outrageous.
Good luck with your cataract surgery tomorrow. It is surprisingly easy to endure, I found. The only annoying part is the drops, but that is a small price to pay for better vision.
“Amadeus” is my favourite movie of all time. The writing, the acting, the music, the costumes and more – all fantastic.
In this morning’s news here in Eastern Ontario, a synagogue in Belleville (a town about a 2 hour’s drive from me) was shot up by a lone gunman yesterday. There was a policeman guarding the place. He got shot but not killed, and the gunman was shot but not killed. They have not identified the gunman publicly yet. None of the 25 or so people inside the synagogue were harmed. I’d say it’s hard to believe that this happened in a quiet and lovely community such as Belleville, but then, there is so much vitriol toward Israel now, even from my own circle of family and friends, that it is not at all surprising. All I can think of to say to them is: “There, are you happy now?” I know that is not helpful but I am just so sad and tired of hearing people support terrorists versus supporting Israel .
I am scheduled to attend a commemoration of the October 7 massacre in Ottawa in October, and I have to say that I am a little nervous.
Jerry, about the turtles. In the spring of 1970 I took advantage of a holiday to visit the Frankfurt Zoo. It had a building “Exotarium” that was a combined public aquarium, reptile and amphibian exhibition and an invertebrate exhibition. One of displays in the herptile section was a large cage of North American box turtles (Terrapene spp.). I was there at feeding time. A keeper entered the cage holding a tray of foot. The turtles rushed at him and pawed at his cuffs. I suggest that you designate box turtles as honorary cats.
On another topic, good luck with your cataract surgery. When I had mine done, like you they were done one at a time. Please report on your surgery’s effects on color vision. After my first operation, the eye with a new clear lens saw everything with a blue tinge and the eye with an old clouded lens saw everything with a yellow tinge.
Good luck with your cataract surgery, Jerry. Both of mine went extremely well. My vision in my right eye went from 20/400 to 20/40, then to 20/20 with glasses. My left eye went from 20/200 to 20/20 without glasses. I still have an astigmatism, however.
Just follow all your surgeon’s instructions. Try not to move your head too much, especially if you’re getting toric lenses.
Loved the cat photobomb video!
Rest easy. I know of no one who had a problem with cataract surgery. Mine went very well, each eye one week apart.