Happy Belated New Year!!!

I've been preoccupied with ripping CD's and doing other file maintenance. The laptop is starting to have some free disc real estate for the first time in years. It feels good to have a little over 1G free instead of crossing my fingers every time I transfer photos from the camera to the laptop. What that means is that I haven't spent much time updating things here.

We didn't really do anything for New Year's Eve. We just watched the ball drop and messed around playing board games and watching movies until 4AM or so. I know; we lead very exciting lives.

Anyway, just to start the year off right, I'll beat one of my favorite dead horses: our lousy public education system. This doesn't just come out of left field; Jerry and his readers started it here, here, and here. I can't think of anything to add to that. We used to teach every single kid to read. Now all there are is excuses for why we can't. And don't feed me any crap about the "epidemic" of dyslexia. First, about 99% of kids so diagnosed provably are not. It just a convenient excuse for the failure of everyone from the teacher in the classroom up to the federal education bureaucrats to teach a basic skill that every human with above-room-temperature IQ can learn. Second, I attended school with a seriously dyslexic kid from second grade through graduation. He was never given special treatment. He sat in the same classroom and did the same work as everyone else. Yes, Randy was the last one to turn in his test; the rest of the class just sat quietly and read while he finished. So even truly dyslexic kids can learn to read well enough to get by in a normal classroom setting and graduate high school with usable skills (Randy's father owned a chain of restaurants; Randy graduated high school both able to read and with the training he needed to step into the family business).

At this point, I'm going to go out on a limb here. Anyone sending a kid to a public school is committing child abuse. Yes, that includes you. No, your schools are not different than everyone else's. I don't care what a fine Christian the teacher in your child's grade is. I don't care what the per-pupil spending is (districts like Washington DC spend more than almost anyone else, yet have the worst schools in the nation). I don't care if you are in the big city, the suburbs, the exurbs, or small town. Your district may be able to afford shiny new buildings and shiny new computers, but I can almost guarantee that your kids are not learning one bit more in the classroom than the black kid in the worst school district in downtown Detroit. I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. A commission from the Reagan administration stated that if our educational system was imposed on us by a foreign nation, we would rightly consider it an act of war. Nothing has improved (and in fact much has gotten worse) in the two decades since. If you care about your kids, Get. Them. Out.

I'm sure that will piss off enough people for one day.