BBC loves

I love the Doctor and I love Merlin and Arthur. What can make for a better video?!?

I [heart] Confusion

Or is that Confucian? I'll let you decide:

"When the government of a nation has gone astray, Heaven will chastise it through calamities. If storms and floods do not cause the government to mend its ways, Heaven will strike terror in the people's hearts by still greater disasters. Ruin will come at last if these two visitations are not sufficient to check the downward course. With gracious love toward the ruler, the Heavenly Way will make use of these means to prevent the final necessary evil, while the principles of propriety and music are positive means to guiding the people"
--nope, not from some recient Christian group, but from "The Heaven-Appointed Duty of Subjects" by Kumazawa Banzan (1619-1691) Confucian Scholar of sorts who "submitted an opinion to Shogun Tsunayoshi, who ordered his arrest".

Why This Country Sucks

I'm going to start a new series here called "Why This Country Sucks". Pretty much, I'm just going to identify a problem with this country and give a credible solution. There's a whole lot of overlap (go figure) so it'll probably be a pointless and confusing series. But there's going to be one major theme, I know. That is, individual accountability goes a whole lot farther than what you do for yourself and your family and friends. Individual accountability must be an accountability for the entire country (and ultimately the world) if you ever want to expel the phrase "this country sucks" from your vocabulary.

Today's lecture: On schools; specifically on in-school-suspension--why it's great and why it's so hard to find.

Did you know that the typical punishment for a child that skips school is out of school suspension for the day? So you just rewarded the child with the outcome that they wanted in the first place—they get to skip school. A suspension counts as an unexcused absence, which at the schools I've been to, 10 equal failing the class. So, if a student gets caught skipping school for one day, plus the day they get sent home for punishment, that's 2 days absent. The major reason for this is because schools don’t have an in school suspension program in place, generally because when the funding fails the extra teacher who doesn’t actually teach but supervises the delinquent children is let go. With no extra hands there to watch them, the students are sent home. If the parents were to all volunteer for just an hour a day to sit in that classroom then no students would have to be sent home as a reward for skipping school. I believe that no crime committed by students should result in an out of school suspension, including fighting. If we send them home, then those student who don’t want to be in school will start fights to be sent home. And what’s to stop them? They aren’t going to get some revelation while sitting at home in front of the TV screen that an education is the key to their future. We have to make it so that if nothing else no one slips through the cracks in the education system by being absent due to suspensions.

A Simpler Label For Not-So-Secret Information

President Obama on Thursday rolled back a proliferating array of policies by which federal agencies had kept unclassified information from the public, issuing an executive order intended to create a uniform way of handling such information. Mr. Obama’s order requires agencies to use only one term — “Controlled Unclassified Information,” or CUI — when stamping certain documents that officials believe should be safeguarded but that are not delicate enough to warrant being classified. That label would replace almost 120 markings that various agencies had developed to protect information.
---from this article from the NY Times

Wow, you'd think that they would learn this years ago. But then, ICS is still not fully incorporated--there is still ego amongst the ranks.

I didn't mean it!

I'm watching Bones and was thinking earlier this episode that Booth and his new girlfriend, Hannah, are getting too close. I randomly thought that the only way that he and Bones will ever get together is if Hannah ends up dead. And then Booth get's a phone call saying Hannah got shot. And then in the hospital, Bones saves Hannah's life by telling her that the nick on her leg is worse than her doctor told her and that if left untreated it could kill her. Wow. I really didn't mean for the producers to kill her off. Or maybe I'm just really good at pointing out the predictable.

Cathy's 2011-12 Political Predictions

I'm actually optimistic about the coming 2 years. And no, I'm don't classify myself as Republican. Here's why:

I'm pretty sure that the Republican's threw away the past 2 years. They did NOTHING that I can see to help Obama make better policy decisions--they threw him and the rest of congress under the bus.

The Democrats aren't Obama's type of people--they also threw him under the bus. They handed him crap and he had to sign it to get anything done.

Now, why do I think both parties tanked? Because the Democrats are a bit too idealistic and a bit too much government for the rest of America. They really should have pulled back on some things and would have had the Republicans actually pulled their weight. But they didn't because they have their head's stuck up their butts too often.

So, now that we have Republican majority in the House I expect better bills to come out. I'm not sure how the numbers work and how much Reps and Dems in the house will have to work together there, but with the Senate still belonging to the Dems, whatever hits the president's desk is going to HAVE to be bi-partisan.

So, we're going to see 1 of 2 things happen:
1) The dems and reps are going to actually work together and the country is going to prosper.
2)They're going to play chicken and see who blinks first and nothing will get accomplished.

In either case, it's going to be a hard sell in 2012 to say that Obama caused the issues, though maybe in the 2nd case I would expect him to get his butt to the Capital Building and show them who's boss.

I'm also extremely giddy to see what happens to the tea party backed candidates. I'm sad that it looks like they all ran as Republicans (I was hoping that they would make my life easy and actually get themselves together to run as a 3rd party)--it's made finding them in the election results difficult. But anyway, I fully expect that somewhere one or more of them is going to wake up one morning about 2 months into their term and wonder how on earth they are going to keep their word on the platforms that they ran on. How many said no to pork barrels? How exactly do they plan to get money to their localities without them?

By the way, I need to look into one candidate labeled "the mom in sneakers" because she's quite proud to be, what?, 9th in pork barreling. I'm glad that she's honest.