nyc haywire

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has come up with a truly awful plan to impose virtual racial quotas on the city's top examination schools. It seems there aren't enough blacks and latinos at these schools, because not enough of them do well on the rigorous entrance exams. (Unspoken, of course, is that there are too many Asians at these schools, where they typically make up well over half of the student population.)

We need to be making sure that the brightest kids get the education they need. Affirmative action quotas for these schools create only the illusion of ability, and the result will be that the good students at these schools will inevitably be slowed down while the quota students try to keep up. A terrible, self-destructive idea that will produce predictably horrible results.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/05/de-blasios-latest-bad-idea-will-hurt-citys-elite-schools/

he, her, hers

This is a rather personal post, but I think it solves a problem that has been bedeviling writers and editors for some time now.

It has to do with the third person singular of the personal pronoun. This pronoun is gender-specific in all three cases: nominative: he, she; objective: him, her; and possessive: his, hers. This has led to a lot of handwringing in the gender-neutral world we now live in-- and some very tortuous locutions. When this first started becoming an issue, writers would say 'his or her' or 'his/her,' which is pretty clunky: 'Each student should put his or her notebook in the drawer.'  Later they tried putting things in the plural so they could use they, them, and theirs. 'Students should put their notebooks in the drawers.' This involved rewriting whole paragraphs and passages, though. Another ploy was to put everything in the passive voice, which was even worse: 'All notebooks should be put in the drawers.' And now we have a whole new issue with transgender people who don't fit into either of these 'binary' categories.

Solution: Just dispense with she, him, and his altogether. Simply dispatch them to the dustbin of syntactical history, along with thou, thee, and thine. Thus fragile male egos would preserve pride of place in the nominative case with he, but the female forms her and hers would obtain in the objective and the all-important possessive cases. The he- form is preserved in all three cases, for simplicity; and each term is totally inclusive and so would include all varieties of 'nonbinary' preferences.

Problem solved, and rather elegantly if I do say so myself.

arithmetic

Even something as simple as arithmetic is related to our remaining a first-world country. Don't you think so? Wouldn't it be a good idea if all the schoolkids had to memorize their multiplication tables from 1 to 10 before they graduated from elementary school? Don't you think they could do it? After all, it's basically rote memorization, right? Only later might it sink in what these relationships actually are. And it would give kids a certain basic confidence around numbers that might lead on to further mathematical understanding. It's that kind of understanding-- that logical-mathematical intelligence-- that will keep us in the ranks of the first-world nations.

schizophrenic google

It seems there are actually two separate Google companies. One is the successful high-tech company whose great service we all use. The other is a politically correct second company that has been piggy-backed onto the first and advocates for a 'multicultural, diverse' tech universe that doesn't quite seem to exist in reality. Here's an example of their output, bemoaning the attributes of a 'white/male dominant culture.' I doubt you can have it both ways.

news from the left coast: kamala harris

The DNC and its accomplices in the media are evidently already trying to foist neophyte California senator Kamala Harris on an unsuspecting voter base as the party's standard bearer for 2020. If this clip from a Senate confirmation hearing is anything to go by, this combination showboat/shrew is not yet ready for prime time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcC1Ti1hHlk

chicago and the greater midwest

The Chicago Board of Trade building, built in 1930 and topped by an Art Deco statue of Ceres, Greek goddess of grain. (Think 'cereal.') There was a time when Chicago thought of itself as the economic capital of a great inland empire stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio and Missouri rivers,including notably the wheatfields of Kansas and Nebraska and the cornfields of Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. This was the Chicago of the Columbian Exposition, the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago, and this Board of Trade building.

Somewhere along the line, Chicago became a much more parochial place, given over to working-class politics, organized crime, and racial tension. The city's older sense of itself got lost in all that, but I think we need to get back to that older, greater vision.

For starters, Chicago should at least be the capital of Illinois. The idea that a flea-bitten backwater like Springfield should be capital of a state that includes a world-class city is ridiculous. Talk about the tail wagging the dog!

But I'd go even beyond that. I'd like to see Chicago become capital of a semiautonomous  region on the order of a large Canadian province. Then this great city would achieve its true destiny.

'flyover'

I see where Minnesota Public Radio is now putting out  a weekly show called 'Flyover.' I listened to the first few minutes of it yesterday and found it to be your usual tax-subsidized center-left NPR pablum. I doubt I'll listen again. I also tuned in the last few minutes while waiting for the top-of-the-hour news. Interestingly, there were two guests in the last segment; one was in Philadelphia, the other in Los Angeles. Really? Flyoverland? Really?

https://www.mprnews.org/topic/flyover