Month: September 2017

A not so satisfying follow-up on WCSD school building projects

Is the response to the reasonable questioning of a one year 40% cost hike in the building of the buildings promised if WC1 passed an acceptable one?  Even if the bonding will cover all of the projects proposed despite the new cost estimates, is there not good reason to question how it is that costs have risen so incredibly fast in the little less than a year since WC1 was approved?  Remember this, that this measure was sponsored and the campaign for it paid for, in large, by the building industry and its friends in the Chamber of Commerce and other business boosting organizations, most of which have traditionally not supported proposals for raising taxes to support education.

These WC1 boosters got voters to vote for a sales tax increase that will pay only for the cost of building buildings.  There is not a penny of WC1 money that can be used to hire new teachers or raise the salaries of teachers so that the District can attract the numbers of teachers needed and insure that they are the best and brightest available.

As I said in the earlier post regarding this issue, if it is true that costs have risen so precipitously over the course of the last 11 months or so, then it will be reflected in the cost of living.  All will be affected by rising costs, not only the builder amongst whom very few are  living paycheck to paycheck as many teachers must.

If the builders are, as they worked hard to make people believe during the campaign, really interested in education and the betterment of the community, shouldn’t they be willing to lower their profit margins, for the sake of the community they so love, absorb some of the added costs they claim to face, maybe even do the work on a non-profit basis?

When hell freezes over, right?  Washoe County, voters, I think you have been had.

Watching the Vietnam films on PBS, it struck me that an effective strategy for bringing about change in our society was provided us by Richard Nixon when he ended the draft and began the lottery.  The draft allowed for all kinds of deferments which went mostly to upper and middle class men who could afford to go to college or pay a doctor or lawyer to find legal avenues to avoiding service.  I was, to some extent, one of those men though the legal reason for my not being drafted had much to do with a self-inflicted medical condition that led the family physician to say that recurrence of the problem was possible without mentioning that it would only reoccur if I did to myself what I had done before which was a pretty stupid thing to do and very easy to avoid ever doing again.

The lottery, invented by the Nixon administration to deal with claims that were so obviously true to hide, that those who were fighting and dying in Vietnam were disproportionately poor and of color, was conceived to change the balance by making the selection process a random one, almost every boy attached to a number in a tumbler in a barrel from which would be drawn the next batch of potential war heroes.

Up until this point, the anti-war protest was relatively weak, who was dying in Vietnam and why not of much concerns to broad portions of the American public.  Those dying for whatever the cause may have been were reflected in statistics that were not attached to faces of any real consequence; the vast middle class was not feeling the pain, its parents and children were not being made to suffer.

The lottery, more or less, evened the playing field, the battle field casualties coming to be of more familiar faces and, thus, concern for the results of war and for the reason for the war grew to monumental proportions.  The protests became louder and louder as the death toll and the numbers of those injured now rose to include more white members of the American middle class.

For those who currently have access to good medical care, it seems, especially those who get the best care, there is but little concern for those who suffer without it.  I know people who can afford to go to the Mayo Clinic, for instance, and of people who go to the emergency room so their sick children can receive minimal care.  I know of some who receive no health care at all even when they are badly in need of it.  I have always gotten enough when I needed it and even something more even if it wasn’t necessarily the best available.

I am not proposing a lottery for health care, but such would be a better, more democratically equitable system than what we have now.  What I do think we must have is a system that affords all access to good health care.

Those who do not insist on good health care for all really have not right to that they are willing to deny others.  So, maybe the way to end their resistance is to make it very difficult for them to get what they allow others to not have. (An article on medicine for the very rich).

Instead of fighting against the all to numerous attempts to do away with what now stands as the health care system’s access for the many (and that is not enough–only all is enough–let’s make it impossible for those WITH to access what they have that others don’t!  Make them feel the pain.

Protests should focus on keeping those who have away from what they can get that others cannot!  Block the entrances to their clinics and their doctors and, if public resources, police and so forth, are used to clear the path, ask loudly for whom it is that these public servants work.

From article that begins on the front page of our local newspaper: “Two new middle schools, one in Sun Valley costing $85 million and another in Spanish Springs costing $80 million, will eat up the largest chunk of the bond. The remaining $34 million will go toward a new elementary school in the South Meadows area.

Meaning that celebrity culture continues to gain force because in our nation celebrity counts for a lot, in my opinion (to be heard by very few), there is no good sense reason why it should, unless, that is, it of particular worth in terms of what it has to offer our democratic discussions of how we should, as a society, deal with today and go about fashioning our future.  One of the guys who wrote the book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, the late Neil Postman, later wrote a book just as important and as little known in American society titled Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  The first,co-authored by Charles Weingartner,  was published in 1971.  Amusing Ourselves came out in 1985 reflecting the fact that schools had not taken seriously the Postman/Weingartner suggestion that schools concentrate on helping students develop real critical thinking abilities, what they called “bullshit detectors.”

Everything aspect of the democratic decision making process has come to be more showbiz than of substance.  Americans care far more to be entertained and entertained in mindless ways for that matter as evident in the kind of entertainments now most popular.  The purveyors of this kind of entertainment, now, not only deliver incredible amounts of meaningless material to occupy the minds of citizens, they have also come to be respected as legitimate voices for expression of political ideas.

In two previous articles I shared my brooding over the prominence of the stories concerning the dominance over the past few days of stories in the news concerning sports leagues and their players reacting to the president’s ridiculous remarks concerning player protests in response to particular issues of consequence to the public welfare, issues that have been raised before, over and over again but hardly ever with the kind of response the players have managed to create.

Good for them?  Yes!

But the important story, as I have tried to explain before, is more about us than them, more about what we as a public accept as legitimate authority, the legitimate authorities we ignore and, in turn, why it is that things are as they are.  While celebrities may not intend to steal the light from those who have studied and have thought deeply about the issues, it seems quite evident that they have done just this, their few words having must more suasive value in the society than the many words published by thinkers like Postman or Chomsky, Hillary Clinton or Stephen Hawkins.

I have intentionally included Hilary Clinton in my most absurdly short list because she is an interesting example of how the celebrity as source of wisdom phenomenon can work upon a public such as ours, educated as it is.  Hilary Clinton, first and foremost, is an intellectual, one has dedicated a large portion of her life to studying the issues, thinking through what they mean, and then trying to use her knowledge and understanding to inform the public decision making process.  One may like the conclusions to which she comes or the policies she supports but, what she has to say, the positions she takes, most of the time, are the result of serious intellectual engagement with the issues at hand.

In order to play the political game as it is presently played, however, celebrity had to become a critical aspect of her existence as a politician, a popular figure more than a sensible one because popularity for whatever reason trumps good sense in this society, the lack of a subversive pedagogy and subversive pedagogues a real cause of our current frivolousness when confronted with matters of real consequence.  Of course, Hillary came to be the Hillary who was a candidate by popular demand, because of what the American public demands from those who are to win office now.

Soon, it may happen, that the democrats will have to run Jimmy Kimmel and Whoopi Goldberg as candidates, performers who have been well used to play important supportive roles in the quest for political victory–consider again the number of speakers at the conventions who were famous for things other than their good ideas or political brilliance–will become the new political stars.  I remember Sonny Bono.  I have seen the power of Bono to deliver persuasion to politicians.  I suffered the reign of Ronald Reagan.     Someone named Shailene Woodley is considering the  possibility of running for Congress.  She is an actress I think.  And what about Kid Rock?  Jack Kemp?  Jessy Ventura.  Arnold Schwarzenegger. Al Franken. Curt Schilling.

Oh yes, and Donald Trump.

This is not to say that such people should not run for office or to argue that none of them are properly qualified for office.  The fact is that many of them are not but have been elected or have a real shot at becoming elected.

Watch out for what Postman predicted because what he predicted is actually here, an unbelievably merger of entertainment and political realities, sports and movie and musical personalities becoming dominating forces in the societal decision making processes of the society, becoming the voice of current day political ideologies, and, if not candidates for office, certainly the most listened to pitch men and women.

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Addendum to previous post:

The NFL, it should be noted, management, is not protesting because it supports players’ right to express their political views through the game.  Management protests expressed over the past few days are about the president calling upon fans to act in ways that would hurt team and league profits.  If the president had only taken aim at Colin Rand Kaepernick, the league and team owners would have done nothing to defend him or the other players who supported and emulated Kaepernick’s kneeling.  A good number of those involved NFL management, a good number of team owners, are Trump supporters, many having shown up at Trump rallies and several having given him hefty donations to support his candidacy.

Of course league management and team owners were upset by Trump’s call to fire players involved in protest!  They are the characters who draw people to the play, they are the stars whose performance people come to see, tune in their TV sets to watch.  Their politics are irrelevant as long as they are innocuous, innocuous to their drawing power.  If fans, as Trump said, were causing people to not watch the games, not buy the products that advertisers pay the league sell, then those players would likely be gotten rid of someway.  Interference with political views has nothing to do with owner/league outrage at the president.  It has everything to do with money.

We really are in rapid decline as a society. Individual good sense is given up for the sake of getting along, for being with it even when it is something utterly ridiculous. Good sense would tell one that a meaningful line, a critically important line when the important political news of the day is that the president has insulted members of professional sports leagues and those involved in professional sports come to be important representatives of political righteousness. It isn’t that these sports stars should ever be denied their right to speak their minds, represent their political beliefs before the public. But it is the sign of a society become absurd when, because they are able athletes, they attain degrees of political power that those of the general public do not share. That the country is roiled so by a president castigating football players for their political statements reflects how individuals attain prominence in this society, not by showing high degrees of intelligence but by becoming entertainers, smarts not a requirement for becoming representatives of the people will . I do not mean to belittle their, the players’ sentiments, not theirs or the other entertainers whose opinions are shared on a regular basis with a public that somehow has come to believe that those opinions are more important than their own. I do care that so many are willing to make more of the opinions of these entertainers than they do of their own and of those, who, like themselves, are the “ordinary” people. We, as a society, have lost perspective, have lost our minds, have been made mindless by the very forces that have given entertainers such prominent roles in our society, roles that should be played by we “ordinary” people and those we have reason to understand to be exceptional in their ability to help us understand what makes good sense.Re

Right Wing Watch report on People for the American Way lawsuit against the Attorney General

Remember that Sessions failed to, on more than one occasion, report activities that should have been pertinent to his requests for security clearances and that should have been stated in response to congressional committees regarding whether or not he was fit to serve as Attorney General.  Despite hiding critical information from various government bodies and despite lying about pertinent activities that would have most likely disqualified him as a candidate, he was confirmed by Congress.

Sessions is a terrible human being.  He does not believe in the force of law.  He is a man of a god who has told him throughout the years that he, a nasty excuse for a human being, is somehow superior to others and his nasty way of thinking about himself and others is enough to disqualify him from any government that serves the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

The he was appointed and confirmed is contemptuous, contemptuous of the very values that, if emulated, would make the United States a great nation.  This suit is important for showing Sessions as he is and for is contempt for law and proper order under a democracy.

A more reasonable analysis of “What Happened” By Marc A. Thiessen September 13, WAPO

“Another reason these Obama voters defected to Trump is that they kept hearing from Clinton and the Democrats how great the economy was doing. Yet, according to Priorities USA Action, “50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.” When Clinton touted Obama’s economic progress, she seemed hopelessly out of touch.”

I remember well the sickening feeling I experienced during the Democratic National Convention each time a speaker proclaimed that America was already great and doing well, thinking that there were a good number of very angry–justly angry–people in the country who were suffering while those speaking were experiencing a prosperity shared by a relative few, amongst them the anointed candidate and many members of the democratic party leadership.

It was the party atmosphere at the convention, the celebratory nature of the event that galled me and caused me to think about how many people would be alienated by the claims being made about our nation’s good health as indicated by a growing prosperity fueled by entrepreneurship, this when wages for wage workers were stagnant, even those working for the prosperous entrepreneurs, many of them actually thrown out of work through application of the innovations these entrepreneurs were selling to cut production costs with technology, technology that was replacing workers with machines.

I thought that there would be a good many who would hate the message and those delivering the message and that Trump’s lies would gain power in contrast with the everything is so much better refrain consistently delivered by those who were nominating a candidate to oppose him.

So, I find this article to be one that all who are opposed to Trump and who are looking for whom to blame for the debacle that is his presidency an important one to read and to think about until it hurts, to think about with a degree of honesty, enough to get past the blame others than the current democratic party and its leaders kind of thinking that pretends to greater tragedies down the road.