I slept in late this morning, and now the weekend’s half over. Lots I ought to do today, and then, blip, it’ll be Sunday night and I’ll have to got to freakin’ work. This living for the weekend shit is getting old. I want the Star Trek reality, where they’ve solved all the piddly problems like poverty, starvation, & single payer health care, and have presumably harnessed technology to relieve the people of the burden of doing all the lousy jobs like picking up the garbage and snaking out the septic system, allowing everyone to pursue activities more in line with their inner, higher natures, like poetry, art history, astronomy, and smoking pot. Instead, 90% of us have to go to work and scrape by week to week, while the other 10% have enormous wealth, get the best access to everything the country has to offer, and huge tax cuts so they don’t have to pay for it. Goddamn it, I want food replicators, transporters, warp drive, and holodecks. Actually, just give me the holodeck, and I’ll pretend I have the rest.
Gail Collins:
As if we didn’t have enough wars, the House of Representatives has declared one against Planned Parenthood.
Maybe it’s all part of a grand theme. Last month, they voted to repeal the health care law. This month, they’re going after an organization that provides millions of women with both family-planning services and basic health medical care, like pap smears and screening for diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.
Our legislative slogan for 2011: Let Them Use Leeches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/opinion/05collins.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
If there’s one thing the chancellor, the deputies, the deputy mayor and mayor share — they do not appear to be slowed by second thoughts. They seem to share a sureness they are right.
But what if they aren’t?
The schools scheduled for closing are evaluated in good part by test scores. How dependable are the scores? In 2009, when the mayor was running for re-election, he cited skyrocketing scores as one of his most important achievements: 69 percent of city students scored proficient in English, 82 percent in math. And then, last summer, the state announced the tests were too easy and the results needed to be rescaled. Suddenly, 54 percent of city students were proficient in math and 42 percent in English.
Many of the big high schools to be closed will be replaced by small schools. Yet studies indicate the size of a school is no guarantee of quality. Indeed, of the two dozen schools chosen this week to be closed for low performance, 8 are small schools.
Seven of the schools replacing the closed schools are charters. But a national study on charters indicates that 17 recent are superior to traditional public schools; 37 percent are worse; and the balance, 46 percent, are of similar quality.
These facts, however, were just notes in the margin. The script was written, and was not to change.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/nyregion/05winerip.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
RIP Tura Satana
:omg: :boobs: 🙁 :gate: