Vox Popoli

SC writes: I just read your latest writing on WorldNetDaily. We are blessed to have two boys, ages 5-1/2 and 4. I am not a teacher by profession, but my Mother taught me to read by age four. I am a passionate reader and knew I wanted my children to share the love of reading. And I knew it was possible….

Anyway, I did nearly exactly what you described because I didn’t find a reading program I was comfortable with. And it has gone just as you said. It was much easier than I ever expected. We don’t spend more than 20 minutes a day on phonics and we frequently miss days. I am by no means spending much or most of my days teaching my kids to read. My oldest goes to kindergarten at an academic Christian school. But he is so far ahead of the other children in reading and mathematics that his teacher says, somewhat disdainfully and disapprovingly, that he is bored. She hasn’t done a thing to challenge him more, even though we have requested it.

So we researched and picked the ‘best’ school district. After preschool at a Christian school, we figured we’d have to put him in pubic school. We went to register him at the public school and spoke with the principal, then the teachers. When we asked the principal about the reading programs, he told us phonics went out with the dinosaurs. I was surprised and told him of the progress we’ve made. He replied, “Parents need to stay out of their kids’ educational lives and leave teaching to the professionals.” He repeated this three times in ten minutes, admonishing us that working with them at home does a disservice to kids by giving them an unfair advantage that doesn’t even last. He said that ‘by third or fourth grade they are all in the same place anyway.’ We were in shock and it lasted for a couple of weeks….

We are no longer interested in having our kids in public school.

The significant question is, why doesn’t it last? The answer is, because public schooling is not designed to teach children to develop their abilities, it is designed to educate children to suppress them. The difference is crucial.

I didn’t think it was possible, but John Kerry is already making himself look like more of a doorknob than before. Now this floppy-haired, foul-mouthed caricature of a candidate is complaining that “if [blah blah blah], we might have caught Saddam Hussein sooner.” Sure, John, maybe we’d take you seriously if you’d been filling the airwaves with all your helpful ideas before the US Army caught the guy. And if you were a different person, you might have a chance to win the election next year.

The important thing is to make sure that the globalists don’t get away with sneaking Hussein off to the Hague. Oh, they’d love another Nuremburg, and the excuse to set themselves up as the ultimate arbiter of global justice. The President better not let them get away with it. Just hand him over to the Iraqis; I’m sure they’ll be able to think of something to do with him.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the war is over. I’m very curious to see what happens next with regards to Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Bob Books are some great first books for a kid learning to read. By the time he’s done with set C1, he’s ready for real books in small doses. They run $15 per set, $75 for all five.

OpenOffice Impress is part of the free OpenOffice software suite. You can download it for Windows, Linux or Macintosh, along with Writer (Word), and Calc (Excel). It will run and save normal Powerpoint .ppt files.

If you prefer to stick with Microsoft and either have PowerPoint at work or a friend on whose system you can create the slideshows, Powerpoint Viewer will allow you to run them. If you do have Powerpoint, it’s a lot easier learning how to add this macro to randomize a slideshow instead of doing it by hand every time.

It’s easier to teach phonics, of course, when you have a comprehensive list of English phonics.

Any show that involves guys dressing up in zebra suits and wandering out into the veldt is definitely Space Bunny’s idea of good humor. “Klipspringer – the cheesepuff of the African safari.”

Space Bunny and I happened upon The Brotherhood of the Wolf recently, and despite the French with English subtitles, we both very much enjoyed it. It’s an interesting take on the dread Beast of Gevaudan. Complex without being confusing, and unpredictable even if you know a bit of the history involved. If there were more movies like this, I would go out to see more movies than Peter Jackson’s annual spectacle.

Christopher Manion writes: Ever since the invasion of Iraq, Karl Rove has been traveling the country mobilizing the evangelical vote for the 2004 elections. In city after city, he is meeting with evangelical leaders. He begs: “in 2000, only 16 million of you voted. We need the other four million.” Rove has coupled these overtures to evangelicals with similar meetings with the Jewish community (in Cincinatti, he left the evangelical meeting to join the representatives of Jewish organizations one floor up in the same hotel). In both meetings, Rove stresses the importance of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq andhis support of Israel. But only with the evangelicals does he stress the president’s unwavering support for the moral issues that are their priorities abortion, pornography, judges, and (most important) the Marriage Amendment.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of the numbers, but I can tell you two things. 1) I am one of the four million who didn’t vote for either a Republican or a Democrat in 2000. 2) There will be more than four million who won’t vote for either next time. I believe that President Bush is a Christian – it’s not for me to judge, in any case – I simply don’t believe that he is either a traditional conservative or a man whose principles of government are primarily driven by his faith.

A man of principle does what he believes is right regardless of the cost. I don’t see that in President Bush, still less the Republican Party. I see no reason why evangelical Christians should spend any money or effort supporting it. I now style myself a Christian Libertarian, and I hope that one day, I’ll be able to cast a vote for a principled member of that party.

They caught Saddam. Good on them. Now give him a fair trial and hang him, as my grandfather used to say. Since apparently he was the cause of all economic ills for the past eighteen months, I expect that we may now proceed into a new Golden Age of unthinkable wealth and prosperity for all.

SC writes: I keep hoping that an intelligent atheist would write this message to you, but I’m daily confounded by the vacuous idiocy in the letters you post. I’m writing to offer you a potential explanation on why any likely rebuttal is both irrational and idiotic — your article was correct. My close friends, among us atheists, agnostics and Christians, have long argued the position that to be truly atheist is as much faith as is Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Perhaps surprisingly to you, this requisite position is agreed upon by all the atheists. Not a single one of the atheists in the group was offended or surprised by your article, as most of its topics had been expounded before.

Given that supposed rational, intelligent atheists objected to Bob Schieffer’s ‘no atheists in foxholes’ statement, I suspect that a well-formulated response to your article is unlikely.

Actually, I not only posted the two most thoughtful and reasonable responses to the original article – as well as my takes on them – but refrained from posting any of the truly ludicrous ones until now. I even visited one of the atheist forums, and the responses were so childish and of such poor quality that the person who referred me to it was embarrassed and apologized. Since this thing has dragged on far longer than I’d ever imagined, I’ll end the discussion for the time being with a fairly typical atheist response which happened to arrive this morning at the same time as SC’s email.

Daniel yaps: You are sure a christian to laugh at!!!!! U stupid cok suker…. i would put a bullet in your head if i were beside you, moron.

That’s the critique in its entirety, spellings and all. Yes, proud atheists of the world, Daniel, too, is one of you. Notice that like many of you, he claims to be laughing but is actually far more angry than amused. In any case, I’d be curious to hear a defense of how his ethical and moral system a) has been independently and rationally developed; b) is superior to that laid out in the Bible; or c) is supposed to impress anyone with its rationality or altruism. Just as I must claim all semi-literate Bible thumpers as my intellectual kin, you must claim him. Keep in mind as well that a significant minority of the atheist responses I received were in this vein, and heavily outnumbered the more reasonable critiques.

The combination of unreasonable love for the game and the ability to extricate gems like this from the forgotten mists of sports history is possibly the main reason that I love The Sports Guy.

And if I’m wrong, then Steve Smith can inexplicably beat the crap out of me during the next wide receiver meeting when I’m not looking.

And then there’s those timely current events references too: (And we haven’t even gotten to Koren Robinson and Shaun Alexander yet — they were the John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo of fantasy football this year. Let’s save them for another time.)

Truer words were never spoken. Who was Hasselbeck throwing all those TDs to anyhow? Itula Tualo or whomever? This season was just brutal. I had Hasselbeck and Manning, and was profitably playing a matchups strategy until deciding to go with the hot hand and ride my big hoss – Manning – into the playoffs since I had Stephen Davis and Domanick Davis, plus Marshall Faulk coming back healthy. I dealt Hasselbeck for Reggie Wayne, acquired Chad Johnson and thought I was good to go, right?

Wrong! Oh, so painfully wrong! Somehow, I managed to run into the worst possible combination of matchups, lose four straight and finish well short of the playoffs while simultaneously amassing the highest point total in the league! I was regularly outscoring the entire point total of two teams combined and losing. But no, I’m not bitter.

Mogambo writes: I look at Required Reserves, $41.64 billion, and divide that by Savings/other Deposits of $4084.8 billion. And what happens when you do that? Well, if you are like me, and you have my powerful skills with calculators, then you get some weird series of answers because you did something wrong with all those confusing buttons and then, in desperation, you finally ask someone who is just walking by to please use come over here and figure this damn thing out for me, then we get the surprising answer of 0.01.

This means that for every dollar of deposits , they actually have only one cent of reserves in case people come looking for their money. Okay. Now, taking a look at Total Assets of the US banking system, we find roughly $4,381 billion. And when we compare that to the reserves of $41 billion, it is, likewise, one puny cent of reserves against a dollar’s worth of some of those loans going bad. So that one cent in reserves, that one measly penny, is backing up both a growing contingency of souring loans going bad, AND people wanting their money!

As Mogambo points out, every textbook talks about 10 percent reserves. The Bush administration is working feverishly to stimulate the economy – ala Keynes – with the desperate participation of the Federal Reserve, and they have managed to reinflate the Bubble. But if you thought 2000 to 2002 was bad, just wait for the payback on this mini-boom. I was wrong about a decline this spring, mostly because I didn’t dream that the powers-that-be would be so stupid as to go into inflation mode in order to try something that never ever works except in the short term. I know, I know, never underestimate the potential for human idiocy. I should have known better, especially when the Fed started talking about deflation and printing presses.

This does have the potential to get ugly. I’ve been assuming all along that the destruction of the dollar is part of some plan to move the USA to a global currency, maybe even a gold-backed one, but I’m starting to think that for once the incompetence theorists may be right.

“Paper money eventually goes down to its intrinsic value – zero.”

– Voltaire, 1729