ThinkAboutIt

I have been busy for the past couple of weeks setting up my new Apple iBook and networking it with my Dell desktop.

When the first Mac came out back in the 1980s I wanted one. I read about them. I even bought a book about the Mac. But they were far too expensive.

In 1987 I had some money left over from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and I bought a Commodore Amiga, a far better value than the Mac back then. I used this computer until 1994 when, on the advice of a knowledgeable friend, I started using PCs. One of the reasons was that I could count on my friend for expert help with Windows.

This year I had serious trouble with my Dell laptop (14 inch screen). First the optical drive had to be replaced and then the hard drive had to be replaced. Although I had a service plan the help I got with the first problem, from very courteous people in India (I suppose), was horrible.

A friend had bought an Apple iBook (12 inch screen). I decided this was the kind of computer I needed, something small enough to carry to a library or a coffee shop and work there.

The computer has worked out just as I hoped. I am much more productive. I visit a library with a wireless internet connection and so when I am writing there I can easily look up information. I can work comfortably at a coffee shop. The iBook is small enough to conveniently carry with me.

I have set up a home network with my Dell desktop using Airport Extreme. I have connected my printer, which is in my computer room, to it so I can print from the Apple when I am in the living room. I have hooked up my audio system to an Airport Express unit and put all of my iPod music on the laptop. I can very conveniently play any one of 2841 tracks on my stereo without walking across the room and replacing CDs.

It's been a lot of fun. There have been problems which I may detail later. Apple support (I have an extended care program) has been excellent.

I am one of those who had a good experience with an iPod and followed up by buying an Apple computer, another reason why Apple stock is soaring.


pripensulo at 7:33:10 AM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

It is not fair that some people work for so little that they could not support a family on that income.

It is not fair that people have to pay so much for housing.

It is not fair that gougers charge a lot for basic supplies in areas hit by a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane.

If the world were fair, everyone would earn enough to support a family, and nobody would have to pay too much for housing, and people who had supplies that others needed during a catastrophe would sell those supplies at their normal prices.

This is a way of thinking that is easy to understand and sympathize with.

The problem comes when we try to do something about these instances of unfairness through government action. Then we create incentives and disincentives that lead to a great deal of unnecessary human misery.

A higher minimum wage law or a so-called "living wage" law sounds wonderful. It requires employers to pay their employees a higher amount of money than they have paid up until now. Some workers get the higher amount and are certainly benefited.

But this requirement to pay out higher wages creates a powerful incentive to employers to find new ways of getting along with fewer employees, perhaps by buying expensive equipment that enables two people to do the job that three were doing.

And this requirement to pay out higher wages creates a powerful incentive to businessmen to set up their businesses in other areas where these higher wages are not required or, in the case of a higher national minimum wage such as John Kerry called for, to locate their businesses in other countries or to buy the products that their workers have produced up until now in the United States from other countries.

All of the people let go, all of the people never hired because businesses move elsewhere or are set up elsewhere pay the cost of the higher minimum wage because they now receive no wage whatsoever.

When rent controls are established it creates a powerful disincentive for private investors to build new housing. It also creates a powerful incentive for people to stay in housing even though that housing is much more than they need. Imagine a family with a six room apartment. The children grow up and move away. One of the spouses passes away. Now a single individual inhabits the huge apartment but, because of rent control, that individual remains taking up space that new families would love to have. But if theindividual moves away to a smaller, more suitable unit, the rent that would now have to be paid would be much greater than the smaller rent-controlled sum that has been paid.

When a catastrophe hits an area people need a lot of ordinary supplies and are willing to pay (although not happy to pay) extremely high prices. This provides an incentive for others to rush the supplies to the area even though this might mean braving dangers.

When price gouging is prohibited then people from other areas have no incentive to make heroic efforts to bring their supplies in from a great distance to sell them to the people that need them. Consequently there are very long waits for the supplies that people desperately need right now.

Fairness is one thing. But sometimes taking away incentives does so much harm that we would be better off recognizing, along with John F. Kennedy, that life is not fair.

pripensulo at 3:47:49 PM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I am reading a new version of THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, the oldest written story in the world. It has come down to us on small clay tablets from 3700 years ago and more.

I used to teach about this story in my world history classes, to ninth graders.

Gilgamesh is a great violent hero who is distraught when his closest friend Enkidu dies. He goes on a quest seeking eternal life.

The story is filled with monsters and violent battles and ritual sex and killing and, at the end, the knowledge that death is what awaits each one of us, even the greatest of heroes Gilgamesh.

While I am reading this, house-to-house combat is going on in Fallujah in the same land where THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH was composed. There American fighting men are facing a kind of a cruel, primitive enemy, men who ritually decapitate their captives, who aim to strike terror into the hearts of civilized men and women everywhere.

 Gilgamesh was two thirds god and one third man, a giant against whom ordinary men were helpless.

The American marines and soldiers go into battle like phantoms in the night armed with night vision goggles that turn photons into electrons and multiply the electrons and then turn them back into photons so they can see the enemy when the enemy cannot see them.

The Americans see in a kind of green light. They can carry with them parts of small drones they can put together and set the drones flying above the battlefield to transmit back pictures of the enemy. The Americans have guided munitions that seek out and strike the enemy. When the enemy fires, the instruments of the Americans trace the path of the mortars back to the shooters who are then demolished with guided munitions. It is all like some great science-fiction saga I could have read a half century ago when I was a high school student and still reading science-fiction.

There is humor in the EPIC OF GILGAMESH, in the monsters, in the wild man Enkidu being tamed by the sacred prostitute, and there are the gods and godesses that are powerful and yet can be frustrated.

And there was humor in the presidential campaign. A candidate windsurfs and turns off mid-America. A president grimaces during a debate and loses ground. Billionaires donate tens of millions of dollars to one side. Volunteers turn out by the hundreds of thousands on the other. The leader of the decapitators appears in an attempt to influence the election. Sex, in the question of homosexual marriage, becames a key theme of the election. The election is a kind of an epic battle, democracy in action, human nature at its funniest.

And so much is at stake. The president wins. The Battle of Fallujah begins.

And death still awaits each one of us sooner or later.

pripensulo at 6:53:40 PM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Bush improved his performance in every state in 2004 compared to 2000. He got more people to vote for him in each state in 2004 and he got a larger percentage of the vote in each state.

pripensulo at 8:52:44 AM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

In San Francisco Muslims attacked Republicans at San Francisco State.

"Another member of the SFSU College Republicans who was present at the demonstrations also told me he has received death threats since the incident and wished to remain anonymous out of fear. "

In Holland a Muslim wearing traditional Islamic garb murdered Theo Van Gogh. The dead man had made a movie Submission about the horrible mistreatment of Muslim wives.

After shooting Van Gogh the Muslim nearly decapitated Van Gogh and ended by affixing a message to the corpse with the knife. The message threatens death to Ayaan Hirshi Ali a former Muslim who is a member of the Dutch Parliament. Hirshi Ali is a Somali who sought refuge in the Netherlands. She worked with Van Gogh on the movie.

The English-language Dutch blog Zacht Ei is a good place to go to follow developments. Zacht Ei considers the date of the assassination to be the Dutch 911.

pripensulo at 6:50:26 AM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

 A few thousand Muslim intellectuals are petitioning the UN to "ban the use of religion for incitement to violence.

They are tired of so-called religious leaders who give Islam a bad name for such acts as calling for killing Israeli pregnant women and their children or justifying September 11 as legitimate in Islamic law.

pripensulo at 5:31:14 AM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

A Dutch filmmaker and columnist who made a film Submission about Islamic mistreatment of women received death threats.

Theo van Gogh, who was related to the painter Vincent van Gogh, was killed in Amsterdam.

He was planning to make a film about Pim Fortujn, a gay Dutch political leader who was critical about Islamic intolerance and who himself was killed two years ago.

Van Gogh made Submission with  Ayaan Hirsi Ali a Muslim Somali woman who fled an arranged marriage and took refuge in the Netherlands where she eventually became a citizen and has been elected to the Dutch Parliament. She too has faced death threats from Muslims who hate her criticism of the kinds of treatment millions of Muslim women receive at the hands of Muslim men.  She has had to go into hiding.

She says,  "If I were to say the things that I say now in the Dutch Parliament in Somalia, I would be killed."

 

pripensulo at 5:09:50 AM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Jew-hating inscriptions such as swastikas, slogans such as "Death to the Jews!" and SS symbols were applied to eight tombstones in the Jewish cemetary in the French town of Brumath in eastern France not far from the German border.

pripensulo at 5:04:08 AM EST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I was a college student on the campus of Wayne University in Detroit. The headline was in giant letters. The Supreme Court of the United States had unanimously declared public school segregation to be unconstitutional.

The public schools of Topeka, like all public schools throughout the southern states and like some public schools in other states, were segregated by race. Negro students ("Negro" was the politically correct term back then) were required to attend all-Negro schools. Linda Brown, a seven-year-old Negro student, had to walk six blocks going through a dangerous railroad yard to reach her bus stop. The bus took her to a school 21 blocks from her home. A local school was a safe seven block walk away from her home.

The court decided that this kind of treatment was not equal treatment under the law as required by the 14th Amendment.

The justice of this decision was easy to understand. Students should be able to attend the public school closest to them regardless of race.

The irony of the Brown decision was that in future years it was used to justify busing children many miles away from the public school closest to their home.

Throughout my three decades of teaching I taught about the Brown decision. I taught that the justices had shown that it had been scientifically proved by sociologists and psychologists that the very fact of making black students attend segregated schools affected their attitudes, their minds, their psyches so as it make it impossible for them to be able to enjoy equal education.

We now know that black students can succeed even though they are not sharing classrooms with white students. As a matter of fact this was demonstrated in a high school very close to where the Supreme Court sits back in 1899 where an all-Negro high school outperformed two of the three all-white Washington DC high schools on standardized tests. Unfortunately I did not know about this and was not able to properly critique the Brown case during all the years of my teaching. If I had I would have emphasized how blacks had outperformed whites academically even though the white schools were much better supplied.

Courts throughout the country decided that the Brown decision meant that schools should not only be open to students of different races who lived in the area, but that students should be bused considerable distances so that black students could sit in the same classrooms as white students and thus have equal educational opportunities. This led to protests from parents who wanted their students to enjoy the right that was denied to Linda Brown, the right to send their children to a near-by school.

This very nearly impacted my children. In 1970 we had moved out of the City of Detroit because we judged that it was not a safe place to raise our children. The crime rate was high, and most of the schools were very bad. Like public-school teachers today I had first-hand knowledge of how bad most Detroit schools were. Even in 1959 when I started teaching I saw that we were graduating functional illiterates. I knew first-hand about the chaos and the danger that was permitted in so many Detroit schools. I taught in schools where homicides occurred.

We moved to a near-by suburb where the schools were better and safer.

Then a court issued a decision that there should be busing of students between predominantly black Detroit and predominantly white suburbs. We began calculating how far out from Detroit we would have to move in order to avoid this kind of disruption to our children's lives. We wanted our children to be able to walk to school. That was a priority for us.

By a one-vote margin the Supreme Court of the United States rescued us. It said the suburbs had not caused the segregation in Detroit and so could not be forced to be part of the remedy. Our children were not threatened with the kind of long bus ride that Linda Brown had been subjected to.

We had chosen our home carefully. Our children were able to walk to school in the very small school district to which we had moved, not only to elementary school but also to middle school and high school. Our children never had to take a bus to school just as I had never had to take a bus to school when I was a student.

I continued to teach in Detroit schools, schools that became increasingly segregated not only by race but by class as middle class whites and blacks found other schools for their children, schools free from the chaos and danger and the lack of educational standards and achievement that had come to characterize the Detroit Public Schools.

 

pripensulo at 12:12:48 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Those who have the most immediate knowledge of the quality of public schools would be the individuals who work in those schools, particularly teachers.

If the public school teachers judged that the schools where they work are excellent, we would expect them to tend to send their children to public schools more than the public in general does.

If the public school teachers judged that the schools where they work are not that good, then, in spite of the increased expense, we might expect them to send their children to non-public schools more than the public in general does.

A recent paper, Where Do Public School Teachers Send Their Kids to School?  by Denis P. Doyle, Brian Diepold, and David A. DeSchryver is an empirical study of this question.

Their analysis of census data indicates that public school teachers are significantly more likely to send their own children to non-public schools than the population in general.

Interest in this question dates back to 1983 when the Detroit Free Press found that "Michigan public school teachers were twice as likely as the public at large to send their children to private school." An even greater variance was found in Chicago as reported by the Chicago Reporter.

This was particularly fascinating: "The Reporter found a bustling private Montessori school on the South Side that enrolled so many children of public school teachers that parent/teacher conferences were held on public school holidays!"

I taught in Detroit from 1959 to 1992 when I retired. We moved out of the city in 1970. One of the reasons was so our children would not have to attend the schools in the school system where I taught. Our children went to a suburban school district. The chaos and danger that students faced in schools where I taught between 1959 and 1982 was not something that I was willing to inflict on my own children.

pripensulo at 4:55:01 PM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own