No hot takes on Dobbs: Curmudgeon offers opinions that can upset everyone on all sides, at least to some extent

This image, of what looks like a letter to some unnamed editor from a Mr. Robert Veitch of Richfield, has been making the rounds in my social media posts of late:

Here is the text of what appears in the image:

Overturning Roe requires another law be passed that ensures men bear equal responsibility for pregnancies. Call it the "Personal Responsibility Act." Using DNA as a verification, paternity for every embryo should be established and the male responsible obliged by law to support the woman and the child through the child's majority, including medical costs, living costs, education — all the costs a father normally assumes for his child. In addition, the child should have a full share of the father's estate if and when the father dies. If women cannot decide whether or not carry a child, fathers should not be able to decide whether or not to support the woman and the child. It's about time men assumed responsibility for the consequences of their pleasure.

Some of my outraged progressive friends on Facebook are posting this as if it were some thunderbolt from the blue -- take this you nasty Pro-Lifers! As if this were some new, threatening, and hitherto unknown concept.

To which I say... um.

I am not endorsing a specific statutory proposal, not that one has been made, but it seems to me that this letter reflects what IS and what SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE BEEN the correct attitude. Women should always have insisted that any man capable of completing the marital act, inside or outside of wedlock, should bear the consequences, should any result. Duh.

And any male of the species who desires to be called a "man," and not just a sperm resevoir or animated sex toy, should embrace responsibility for one's offspring as eagerly as he embraced said offspring's mother.

Of course, we have paternity laws now, and "men" who evade them, leaving their children to be raised by over-stressed single mothers or, worse, as wards of the state. Such "men" should be shunned and shamed. And society should do all possible to provide for the spurned mother and her child.

But I promised not-hot takes on Dobbs. Here they are:

• Dobbs, the shrill protests notwithstanding, is not judicial legislation. In reversing Roe v. Wade, the Dobbs court undid what amounted to judicial legislation. It returns the matter of whether to allow abortions, or under what circumstances, to the leglislatures of the several states, where the matter should have been, in my opinion, all along. That's such a mild take that, at one time, no less than Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with it.


• Dobbs did not outlaw abortion anywhere. Some states had legislation in place that imposed various restrictions on abortion, up to and including outright abolition, that were 'triggered' or revived by the reversal of Roe. Until recently, Illinois was one such state. But our enlightened, 'progressive' legislature changed the laws a while back, making Illinois one of the most pro-abortion states in the union. And yet, here in Illinois, our political leaders howled in outrage, as if something had actually changed here. Gov. Pritzker issued an immediate call for a special session of our General Assembly in the coming weeks to take "swift action to further enshrine our commitment to reproductive health care rights and protections."
  
  Our legislature will posture and preen about how they support the right of women to make their own health decisions. As long, of course, as women the right health decisions -- as opposed to, say, making a decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Then the State can interfere, and must! Other states, Red States, as they are called, will now have to live with the consequences of the statutory anti-abortion regimes they have created: Promising bounties to snitches and informers who turn in their neighbors who might seek an abortion. Freedom and Justice -- East German style!
  
  For all their supposed ideological differences, all of these performance artists, Left and Right, are united in this: They are all a**holes.


• None of the Supreme Court justices promised not to overturn Roe. Or to support it, for that matter. Sens. Collins and Manchin may say now that they thought they'd received assurances, but it is not so. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC to her friends and foes alike, wants the Trump-era justices 'impeached' for 'lying under oath' about their views on Roe at their confirmation hearings. What crap.
  
  No judge -- at any level -- can ethically say in advance how he or she would rule on a given case. In Illinois, Supreme Court Rule 67A(3)(d)(i) expressly provides that a candidate for judicial office shall not "make statements that commit or appear to commit the candidate with respect to cases, controversies or issues within cases that are likely to come before the court." That's for the man or woman hoping to sit in the basement of the Daley Center hearing speeding cases in Traffic Court. But it applies just as much to those who would sit on the nation's highest court.
  
  Elena Kagan had never been a judge at any level when she was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010. At the time, as I wrote in this post, the red-meat Right was particularly upset about this because they didn't have a body of judical opinions they could use against her. They did have an article she'd written, some years before, "in which she criticized the Supreme Court confirmation process as vacuous, farcical and devoid of substance." I said her confirmation hearing would be no different -- and it wasn't -- and I added, "Grandstanding Senators from both parties will demand that Kagan commit herself on abortion, gay rights, and the proper reach of executive power. Some idiot will undoubtedly ask for her opinion on Obama Care. Were she ever to answer such loaded questions, she would be committed, not confirmed." She didn't answer those questions, of course, and she was confirmed, just as Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett likewise dodged those questions on their way to confirmation.


• Dobbs does not signal an attack on gay marriage or birth control or anything else that the "experts" were claiming five minutes after the opinion was handed down. The majority opinion is 108 pages long; with the three concurring opinions and the dissent, the whole Dobbs opinion is 213 pages long. Yet, all manner of opinions were launched within minutes of the first report that the case had been decided making all sorts of outlandish claims. You may be assured that these claims were based on supposition or political expedience, not on actual analysis of the case.
  
  At several points in the majority opinion, the Court goes out of its way to assure the world that it is not using this case as a 'starting point' for some new judicial offensive in the Culture Wars. In the law we sometimes refer to an argument as suggesting a 'parade of horribles' -- this is bad enough, but this leads naturally to x, y, and z.... This one statement from the majority opinion (slip op. at pp. 71-72) addresses the dissent's charge that Dobbs is just the beginning of such a parade:

Finally, the dissent suggests that our decision calls into question Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Post, at 4–5, 26–27, n. 8. But we have stated unequivocally that “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Supra, at 66. We have also explained why that is so: rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U.S., at 150 (emphasis deleted); Casey, 505 U.S., at 852. Therefore, a right to abortion cannot be justified by a purported analogy to the rights recognized in those other cases or by “appeals to a broader right to autonomy.” Supra, at 32. It is hard to see how we could be clearer. Moreover, even putting aside that these cases are distinguishable, there is a further point that the dissent ignores: Each precedent is subject to its own stare decisis analysis, and the factors that our doctrine instructs us to consider like reliance and workability are different for these cases than for our abortion jurisprudence.

Justice Clarence Thomas, bless his heart, did provide some kindling to stoke the fears of all the "experts" in his separate concurrence. But he joined the majority opinion, which means he subscribes, whether he likes it or not, to the above statement. And the attack in his concurrence is on the legal doctrine of substantive due process, which underpins those other cases, not on the 'rights' to contraception or gay marriage as such. And none of the other justices joined his concurrence. He is on an island on this one and there is no reason to think that any of the Trump-era justices plan to join him there.

• Abortion is a moral issue, not a legal issue. Until and unless there is a national consensus on abortion, there is no law, or set of laws, that will heal the nation's divisions on this contentious issue.
  
  Here is the inescapable truth: Depending on who asks the questions, and how they are asked, a majority of Americans are both pro-life and pro-abortion. Americans are in favor of a right to abortion in at least these four circumstances: (1) in cases of rape, (2) or incest, (3) where medically necessary to save the life of the mother, or (4) when a 'nice' girl gets 'into trouble.'
  
  It's this last category that will get people screaming at one another.
  
  The challenge for those who claim to be pro-life will be to persuade their neighbors that abortion, whether legal or not, is morally wrong. That's going to be a very steep hill to climb.

A downside of 'working from home' that we never thought of

As you can see above, it's snowing in Chicago today. It's worse in the south suburbs and (not surprisingly) in Northwest Indiana (they call it the NWI) but many of the Catholic schools around my home on the northwest side of Chicago are closed today, too. Long Suffering Spouse has the day off (which isn't as good a thing as it might be on another day -- but that is outside the scope of this essay). Middle Son's oldest daughter (Granddaughter No. 5), who attends a nearby parish school, also has the day off.

And therein lies the problem.

Like a great many people since the start of our two-week shutdown to flatten the COVID-19 curve (a shutdown now almost two years old), Middle Son and his wife Magaret, both CPAs, are now working from home. Every time one or both of their employers starts talking about reopening their long-shuttered offices, the public health authorities find that Covid has spun off a new Greek-letter variant and reopening plans are shelved as we brace for a new surge.

We're on omicron now. Will it be over when we get to omega?

Granddaughter No. 5 is a sweet, well-mannered child. She's also four. And for all her sweetness and good manners, she can and will get underfoot while Mommy and Daddy are trying to get their work done.

Unexpected closures, such as we're experiencing today in the Chicago area, put a wrench in child-care arrangements for a great many young parents. If there were a foot of snow on the ground, or more, Middle Son and his wife would be more understanding. But, while it's still snowing, at least off and on, and there may be some lake-effect to deal with later today, there's only about six inches on the ground so far. So they're not happy.

Why? Because they know that there is every expectation -- in this brave new day and age of working from home -- that business can go on as usual no matter how much snow comes down. And why not?

When people had to toil in offices, we'd put on boots and extra layers and slog and stumble our way to the train. If we were among the first to make it in on a crumby day like today, we could imagine ourselves as heroes, the most dedicated of the dedicated, valiant workers in the vineyard. We could put on the coffee and look down our noses at the people straggling in who didn't have such efficient train service or who had to endure travel at glacial speeds on our supposed 'expressways.'

Of course, they thought themselves heroes too, having had the tenacity to traverse what the salt trucks and plows had yet to clear. And, of course, we could all look down on the poor shlubs whose cars would not start or who wound up in a ditch. There was plenty of feel-good-smugness for everyone who made it in -- and if any work did get done on such a day it was more by coincidence or accident. But so what? We had a little triumphal moment.

There's no analogous moment of triumph for the at-home workers, like Middle Son or Margaret, who have only to roll out of bed and come downstairs to their respective "offices." Getting to work would not sap, could not sap, and had better not sap, one's energy quota for the day. Whatever they are expected to do today had better get done, whether the snow stops or piles up to the roof. And they must accomplish their day's work despite the added complication of having to keep Granddaughter No. 5 entertained.

When I was in their shoes, I had the office to slog to and, if the schools were closed, Long Suffering Spouse was home anyway. Even after she began teaching, she would have been home on such a day because she taught (and continues to teach) at the school my children attended.

Working from home has been great for a lot of people, my kids included. But it's been even better for their employers, hasn't it? And that's without even talking about the money the bosses will eventually save on rent as they can contract their offices to fit the new realities.

A day like today shows the unexpected downside of working from home. But that's life: There is always bitter with the sweet.

The Perils of Punditry? Knowing when... and how... to hold your fire

Stephan Pastis nails it again in yesterday's installment of Pearls Before Swine (image obtained from GoComics.com).

He does have a platform -- a daily comic strip -- from which to issue Important Pronouncements about the state of the nation and the world and the species. And, of course, from time to time, he does, usually in an amusing way. As he does here.

You beg to differ, perhaps. You will not contest whether the strip is or is not amusing -- what strikes me as funny may leave thee cold -- but, you say, this strip does not make an Important Pronouncement.

But think for a moment: What he is saying here is that, sometimes, at least, it's OK not to be consumed with the Big Issue of the day. Sometimes it's OK not to expound on the same issue that everyone else is expounding (and pounding) upon. (Twitter may devour you for failing to Do Your Duty and foist your Proper Opinion on the rest of the world, but that's another story. And who are the Twitterati to tell us what to speak, and when, anyway?)

Sometimes it's OK just to think about obscure Scrabble words. Or something else that interests you. (I haven't actually checked to see if "crwth" is really in the Scrabble Disctionary. But I remember the rhyme from when I was a child -- The vowels are A, E, I, O, and U/ And sometimes Y or W. Perhaps this is the word where W serves as a vowel. There had to be at least one or it would never have made it into the rhyme... right?)

Fact is, we are all pundits these days, or we can be, with Facebook or Twitter or even Instagram or Tik Tok as our Public Platforms. I was already one among millions when I started this blog... now I may be just one among billions. My opinions are as strongly held as ever -- as Long Suffering Spouse would attest, when she sits with me during the evening news -- but they are mere drops of water in an endless ocean of online opinion.

I am grateful for the reiminder that I am under no obligation to share them all. Neither is Mr. Pastis. Neither are you.

That does not mean we should not speak our minds. But we can pick and choose our shots. Maybe even -- and I know this is crazy -- but maybe even when we're not shouting into the void... we might actually be able to listen?

Who are the Twitterati and why did we cede control of our culture to them?

It must have been so difficult in Ye Olden Days to put a mob together. It happened, of course, from time to time, even before the Internet. No less an authority than Smithsonian Magazine, in a June 2020 article, reports that nearly 2,000 Black Americans were lynched during Reconstruction, perhaps as many as 6,500 from the end of the Civil War until 1950. Murder by mob. Over and over and over again.

A mob is a gathering of people which collectively adopts, by some unspoken means, the IQ of the most ignorant person present.

Which is why Internet mobs are so very dangerous indeed: With old style mobs, whether recruited by newspaper or word of mouth, the individuals comprising the mob had to have at least enough intelligence to work their own doorknobs. Now, with the Internet generally, and Twitter specifically, even that minimal qualification is no longer necessary. So we have mobs that are more ignorant than ever, and they can assemble at the Speed of Light.

And supposedly serious people take these mobs seriously indeed.

Careers are ruined, reputations trashed, lives are forever altered all because largely anonymous people take their umbrage to Twitter.

In a recent post by Ken Levine, "Dave Chappelle and the current state of comedy," Levine laments, "Remember the days when some people thought something was funny while others didn’t and it was just chalked up to differing senses of humor?"

Levine was not defending Dave Chappelle per se. He's not particularly a fan. But, he said, he is glad there is at least one comic out there who is fearless, who is willing to ruffle feathers, who forces people to think. On the other hand, he adds,

I’m personally not a fan of mean-spirited comedy. And if it’s designed to demean anyone, regardless of color, gender, age — then it’s not for me. And it’s not the type of thing I write. But I don’t think there should censorship when it comes to comedy. I don’t think writers or comics should be blasted for things they wrote or said that may not be acceptable now but were when they wrote or said them.

That last sentence should be engraved in stone somewhere. Perhaps atop a pile of rubble left over from the destruction of statues of persons we (as a society) once thought heroic or important for something they had done in their lives, only to be torn down recently by mobs who were outraged by their failure to espouse 21st Century "values" (as they see them) in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, or 19th Centuries. I'm not talking Robert E. Lee here, kids. I'm talking about George Washington. Or Abraham Lincoln.

Anyway, Levine's post cited to a long article on Commentary called "Destroying Comedy," by David Zucker. Zucker was one of the creators of the classic movie Airplane!, one of the many funny movies made a generation ago that could never, ever be made today.

Which was Mr. Zucker's point exactly. Go ahead, read the whole article. I'll wait.

You're back? I thought some of his jokes very funny, others crude and tasteless. Kind of like his movies. The good ones had more hits than misses, the not-so-good ones had more misses than hits. Whatever.

This passage in particular jumped off the screen at me:

[S]ome of the best contemporary comedy minds are abandoning laughter in favor of admittedly brilliant but serious projects such as Joker, directed by Todd Phillips, and Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin. These men collaborated on two of the Hangover pictures, which struck gold at the box office. Phillips summed up the general plight of the comedy writer when he said, “It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it. So, you just go, ‘I’m out.’”

Zucker suggests we use Phillips' estimate of 30 million as the number of the perpetually outraged Twitterati or, as Zucker writes, that portion of the "population is killing joy for everyone." By his reckoning, that comes to about 9% of the population.

Nine percent. Do you realize how vanishingly small 9% is?

Donald Trump -- Donald Trump! -- got 34% of the vote in Ken Levine's California (source: Wikipedia). Trump was buried in a Biden landslide -- in a state where Republicans are an endangered species -- and he still got nearly four times (3.77777 if you're keeping score at home) the estimated percentage of perpetually outraged Twitterati, compared to the rest of the country.

And I think Mr. Phillips may be overly generous in his estimate. An outfit called Statista estimates that there are 73 million Twitter users in the U.S. as of July 2021 (and another 17.55 million in the U.K. -- not all our online outrage is necessarily domestic). An online marketing firm called Oberlo suggests that there were 55 million active daily Twitter users in the U.S. as of Q4 2020.

That makes sense to me: In my own family I am by far the most active Twitter user. I post fairly regularly. But my sons follow the latest local sports news and rumors on the site and seldom, if ever, post. Their usage varies widely, fluctuating with the seasons. None of us, to my knowledge, has ever joined a Twitter mob.

So the percentage of persons regularly active on Twitter should be less than the total number of registered Twitter users. And there are uses for Twitter, believe it or not, besides trying to ruin the lives of persons who inadvertently offend the perpetually outraged. And there are right-wing kooks and crazies on Twitter, too, and these would presumably not be upset at the same things that animate their equally dim brethren on the Left. So the total number of perpetually outraged Twitterati should be some modest percentage of overall active Twitter users -- 30 million may be way high and off the mark.

But whatever. Assume that they are 9% of the country's population. Ninety-one to nine is not just a landslide, it's an avalanche. And while the vanishingly small cadre of perpetually outraged Twitterati may be concentrated in various geographic locations -- perhaps in the most hip, trendy, and tawdry neighborhoods of our largest cities -- they could not carry an election for dogcatcher. Anywhere. Why do we listen to such as these?

Part of the reason, presumably, is because the perpetually outraged make such outlandish statements that media types, the few remaining journalists and all the multiplying cable 'news' outlets, find them irresistible. They bring in eyeballs. Or clicks. And that's how media companies make money in 2021. And, some, surely, are embedded in the media or in academia. But, if you went to college -- heck, if you went to high school -- you know darn good and well that not all teachers are necessarily smart.

And they may "follow" each other. The more followers one has on Twitter, the greater that person's presumed influence. But if all the like-minded (and I am using 'minded' here in the loosest possible sense) perpertually outraged folk follow each other, that has no influence on the 91% at all. And some of them aren't even influential enough to attract followers even within their own tiny-minded clique. Chicago Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) recently apologized online for 'engaging' with a Twitter user who had one more nostril than he had followers.

That's a positively Churchillian put-down.

Let me conclude by going back to the Ken Levine post I mentioned at the outset. A final quote:

The night ALL IN THE FAMILY premiered on CBS, they installed extra phone banks and operators to field the inevitable throng of complaints. They got 12 calls. 12. Now today those 12 could cause such a stink that they might be able to pressure ALL IN THE FAMILY off the air. How horrifying is that?

It doesn't have to be horrifying at all.

In the Pixar movie A Bug's Life, a handful of grasshoppers terrorize an ant colony until one ant, Flick, realizes that, just by sticking together, the ants are far stronger than the grasshoppers no matter how loud the grasshoppers roar or how scary they look. The perpetually outraged Twitterati are the grasshoppers, people. We are the ants. We don't have to live in fear of them.

Curmudgeon falls into the streaming revolution -- Part II

I begin today's installment (for yesterday's, click here or just scroll down) with something of a confession: I was not entirely ignorant of streaming services before the kids gave me the Roku stick.

The TV in our family room -- the one that's hooked up to the DircTV service -- came with Netflix and YouTube and something else (I forget which) built in.

And, when Olaf and Younger Daughter were living here (they moved out four years ago already!) I was allowed to use their Netflix account.

See, it can be set up for five people -- and I was one of them. I think my designated screen name was "Mooch." No, that's not a name I chose.

Anyway, that's when I learned an important lesson about how these services operate: Every time I clicked on a program or movie to watch, a computer algorithm started whirling and twirling deep within the bowels of Netflix -- if I clicked on a Mickey Mouse cartoon, I got all sorts of cartoons and other Disney effluvia "suggested" for me next time I watched. And, of course, if I clicked on a rom-com I'd get a whole bunch of those suggested for me. Eventually, the Netflix algortihm would start getting to "know" me -- just as Amazon's algorithm has since gotten pretty good at figuring out what books or movies I might like. Scary good.^*

Sometimes, with the DirecTV, or, before that, with the cable, when I've clicked through the channels, I'd pause on some cheesy movie or tasteless TV show, just to see what all the fuss was about. You've done this, too, I'm sure; don't pretend otherwise.

But the way I figured it, the show was on anyway, and would be there, whether I lingered there or not. Unless I was hooked up to a Nielsen meter, I didn't contribute to the decline and fall of Western Civilization by peering in.

On the other hand, with Netflix or some streaming service, when I order up a program to watch I am in some small way endorsing it. I am complicit. Because the algorithm will note what I have chosen and then serve up more or whatever it was that I elected to watch. A reality show. A Chuck Lorre sitcom. Any movie with the words "bikini" and/or "hot tub" in the title.

I understand that I could give a negative review if I thought the program tasteless or trashy or whatever -- but I assume the algorithm would just wait and see if I called up another episode or similar show before sneering, yeah, right.

So I'm a little uncertain about how much I'll actually use my new Roku stick. I might learn -- or confirm -- things about myself that I don't really want to know.

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^* Long-time readers -- as if I had any left given my erratic, and infrequent, posting here -- might remember that, in 2011, I publicly declared that I was afraid to buy from Amazon. I wasn't lying. And I did not in fact buy from Amazon until the giant corporation made peace with my home state by collecting taxes on purchases. And, once that happened, I didn't suddenly start buying everything online -- mostly, if not always, I confined my online orders to stuff not readily available from local stores. But even this was enough for the Amazon algorithm to start predicting with increasingly eerie accuracy stuff I might like. Recently, I've begun searching on Amazon for things I don't like and wouldn't buy -- so I can put its computer off my scent....

A marriage made on Tinder? A somewhat apologetic introduction to a story I may never actually tell

So... this could be -- and may eventually be, I think -- a cute story about the marriage of one of my many cousins' many kids. But the story wouldn't make sense unless you know what Tinder is. Long Suffering Spouse assumed it was just another dating app -- but, as you may or may not know, Tinder has little or nothing to do with "dating" in any conventional sense.

So... I thought, for purposes of the story, maybe I should find and link an article that explains Tinder to those who, like Long Suffering Spouse, might not understand what Tinder actually is. This morning, I found an August 2015 Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales entitled, "Tinder and the Dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse,'" -- but, after reading it, I am so depressed I don't feel much like telling my little story.

You know how to make a man a feminist? Give him daughters -- and granddaughters. Now, of course, the 'woke' feminists (you'll have to do your own research on what 'woke' means -- I'm researched out for the day) wouldn't have me. Which is fine. I don't subscribe to a lot the ideological nonsense that so many self-proclaimed feminists espouse. But I do understand how awful I feel for the poor young women interviewed for Ms. Sales' article. I hope that most, if not all, of them have found some happiness and fulfillment in the intervening years (the article is three years old already) -- but I fear they have not.

And I realize, now, better, after reading this article, why one of my cousin's wives was giving us the Death Glare as we boys chortled at the wedding reception dinner. Her daughters are younger than mine. And still single. She has to deal with this horrifying Tinder "culture."

I still think it's a good, funny story. But the Death Glare and the linked article make me cautious about the telling.

So I'll have to come back to it.

Soon, I hope. But not this morning.

Reciprocity? Can you get an ointment for that? (More adventures of Youngest Son in the ignorant world of education)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the best way to improve education in this country would be to tear down all schools of education. My rant was prompted on that occasion by my son's being refused the opportunity to student teach during his 7th college semester. After he had received fairly mediocre grades in his freshman year education courses---still adequate, mind you, according to the standards then in force---the Education Department at Youngest Son's thrice-cursed South Janesville College decided to raise the standards for student teaching.

Yes, I know. Ordinarily, I'd be the first to say "hooray" for raised standards. But the school retroactively imposed these standards---held them against---Youngest Son; they did not 'grandfather' him into the program. He wound up having to 'return' for a ninth semester---which was the Education Department's goal all along, to keep pumping kids for tuition for the longest time possible---and, even then, he had to battle because the grades he received freshman year, which would not have been perfectly acceptable for eventual student teaching according to the standards in place at the time Youngest Son earned those grades, were still used to threaten his prospects.

Now you may think that my beef is really with South Janesville College, that the SJC Education Department is particularly incompetent and inept---and it is---but my beef is with the entire education establishment in this country, at least insofar as I've encountered it. I said tear the system down in 2014. My attitude has only hardened: Blow up all the schools of education, I say now, burn the buildings down, raze the rubble and sow salt on the sites where the buildings once stood.

Now, not all of the dialog in the screed that follows is exact. I exaggerate for effect. But though I may exaggerate, it is only to expose to sad and sorry truth of the closed, dim, dumb, dense, peanut-sized brain of the apparently typical education bureaucrat and administrator....

Youngest Son did persevere in his quest to complete his teacher's credentials. He served his ninth semester largely at home, teaching in a near north suburban high school, under the mentorship of a friend of ours---someone we know not to have two heads, someone I would wholeheartedly exempt from my attitude toward teachers generally. Every rule has exceptions. My wife is a teacher; I surely exempt her.

And the 'supervising teacher' (I may have the idiotic nomenclature wrong, but this is the teacher who is enlisted by the college to see whether its student functions well or badly---it does not rely solely on the report of the classroom teacher to whom the student teacher is assigned) is the husband of a former colleague of my wife, a colleague that my wife and I both think very highly of. She's actually made appearances in these essays, at least a couple of times. I like her; I trust her. I don't know her husband from Adam's off ox, but I know he has a PhD in history (my son's a would-be history teacher) and a Vietnam vet (that makes a difference to me, which I will come to... eventually).

Anyway, both of these supervisors thought the world of Youngest Son. They thought he handled himself superbly in the classroom. They thought that he should be snapped up in a minute by the school district where Youngest Son was student teaching -- and there were, in fact, three history jobs coming due in the high school for the coming year.

Of course, Youngest Son completed his ninth semester around the end of 2015. Maybe his responsibilities stretched into January of 2016; I don't recall at this point and it really doesn't matter.

High schools hire for the Fall, not for January. And Youngest Son was cut loose, cast adrift, placed at liberty in January.

Sign up to be a sub, he was told. The rules with regard to subbing have long been that anyone with a college degree---even me, though I'm totally unsuited for classroom work---can be a sub. That's what we were told.

He was never called.

There was some delay in processing Youngest Son's license. In a final insult, South Janesville College couldn't quite finish its paperwork so that Youngest Son could get his Wisconsin teaching license right away. It took a couple of extra months, many phone calls and emails and even a pilgrimage to the old campus by Youngest Son to get the paperwork moving.

But eventually it moved. He had to be fingerprinted, submit to a background check, a few things like that. But the license was finally issued.

Now, Youngest Son could supply his license number when he applied for teaching jobs. And he applied to any and all teaching jobs in the Chicago area during the Winter and Spring and Summer---and the glowing recommendations he received from his student teaching supervisors notwithstanding---he got nary a sniff from anyone. Even the school where he had student taught, which had three history teaching positions to fill, did not give him an interview. That school interviewed a knuckleheaded grammar school classmate of Younger Daughter, a girl who'd stretched her undergraduate career to 11 or 12 semesters; Younger Daughter saw it on Facebook and was afraid to mention it to her brother lest his head explode.

Youngest Son became quite adept at applying. It was all computerized, he told us, and it was the delay in getting a license number that, Youngest Son later determined, created the first problem. The computer kicked out anyone without a license number: Even if the person in question had taught in the building and was vouched for by a senior teacher there, the application never made it to a set of human eyes.

How nuts is that?

But it gets much, much worse.

Remember how I mentioned that Youngest Son got a Wisconsin license? Thrice-cursed South Janesville College is in Wisconsin. Naturally its graduates would be licensed in Wisconsin.

Fortunately, Wisconsin and Illinois have a reciprocity agreement: An Illinois license is good in Wisconsin and a Wisconsin license is good in Illinois. Teachers are told that, if they wish to remain in Illinois, however, they should convert their Wisconsin license to an Illinois license within five years.

On this, all were agreed. South Janesville College said so. We heavily discounted anything SJC had to say, of course, but the teachers who supervised Youngest Son's student teaching efforts both concurred as well.

Finally, in August, having applied for a history position that just came open unexpectedly at a Chicago science and technology charter school, Youngest Son received an invitation to interview.

Initially, things went well. He had his Wisconsin license with him, and his glowing letters of recommendation, and the initial interviewer seemed quite taken with him. She called in someone else---an administrator, presumably---who came in and seated himself before the computer. A few keystrokes later he said, "Your name's not here." He was looking at a page on the website of the Illinois Board of Education. He read off a name. "Is this person related to you?" he asked. "My mother," said Youngest Son. "Well, she's here, but you're not," he said.

"Yes, but I have reciprocity." Youngest Son held up his Wisconsin license.

"Is that contagious? Maybe you should see a doctor."

"No," Youngest Son tried again. "My Wisconsin license is good in Illinois for five years."

"But it's not here," said the man, the apparent administrator at a science and technology charter school, gesturing at the screen.

The interview was over.

But---the statutes notwithstanding---now we knew: The Wisconsin license was bupkis. Youngest Son immediately began the process to convert his Wisconsin license to an Illinois license. More forms were required. South Janesville College was required to send records---Youngest Son's copies weren't good enough---but, wonder of wonders, on this one occasion, South Janesville College acted promptly. Still, two months later, according to the same website that charter-school jackass was looking at in August, the application is "pending." The kid can't get a job without the license---even though he has a license that is supposed to be good under the law---and he can't get the State to act on his application.

Meanwhile, we've learned that the State of Illinois does issue a substitute teaching license. It isn't required, so far as we know; it's just that no one will hire you as a substitute without one. So Youngest Son went a got a substitute teaching license -- I saw it this morning on the screen at the Illinois State Board of Education website. There were still more forms to fill out, another set of fingerprints, all for the hopes of getting $100 or so a day as a sub. A hundred dollars a day, even if you work every day, adds up... slowly... and not to very much.

Public high school teaching jobs start anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 a year---decent money---but you have to jump through an awful lot of hoops to get there.

And, of course, you have to be on the screen.

Now you may be wondering---if you have a good memory, at least---why I mentioned that it was significant, in my mind, that my son's supervising teacher was a Vietnam vet.

Well, it may not be the only reason why departments of education, education bureaucracies, and educators generally suck (that's a technical term), but I'm absolutely positive that the Vietnam War contributed.

See, back when the war was on and the draft was going, one of the best ways to get out of the draft, and thereby avoid Vietnam, was to go to college. So many of our most hawkish neocons evaded actual military service in this way. A lot of schools, including my own alma mater, had "draft counselors"---students in good academic standing who could earn their continuing deferments---who helped their duller classmates find departments and programs that would allow them to stay in school, too. I was a little young for Vietnam, but some of the ex-draft counselors were still in school or hanging around campus when I started. I got to know a few (I worked for one for many years---I didn't meet him until my last year of law school---but, once I did meet him, I found out we had several mutual acquaintances). And I know a lot of the dullards got steered into education programs. Easy, easy A's and B's---or C's, anyway, for the really dumb ones---aided and abetted by sympathetic professors who did not want to be responsible for sending anyone to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Yesterday's draft-wary dullards are the deans of education departments today, the superintendents, the principals. Once in power, they continued to recruit and promote equally dull, untalented, unimaginative people just like themselves. And public education in this country went careening downhill. I don't know why the husband of my wife's colleague actually served, but at least he wasn't 'saved' by draft counselors, which is why I automatically exempt him from the scorn I heap upon so many of the 'professional educators' of today. You may not think that's a proper tie-up, but that's my opinion anyway.

Banks do something else stupid... and, in other news, the Sun will rise tomorrow in the East. Unless a banker is put in charge of sunrise, that is....

After the Great Recession, when the banks nearly destroyed the national economy, you'd think that banks might be a little more -- I don't know -- cautious about doing stupid things.

You know, the next time the bankers destroy the economy one or more of them may actually go to jail.

But, apparently, I am ever the optimist -- failing to realize just how mind-numbingly stupid banks can be.

Today I went to my bank with the simple objective of depositing a check in my business account.

Now, you've been to a bank recently -- you know what they look like -- whether the decor is wood or marble, chrome or wrought iron, there are always four or five teller windows, and only one or two is ever open. A really big bank -- really big -- may have a dozen teller windows... with only three or four of them open.

No matter how many people are in line, right?

Even the grocery store knows enough to open a new register when the lines get too long. This will shock you, but I've actually seen this happen at the Post Office.

But never at a bank.

Well, this bank has some new, fancy wallpaper -- covered with slogans -- up on one wall now -- new since I was last there a couple of weeks ago (it's been a long time between checks for deposit, I know) -- and exactly no teller windows open.

Seriously.

This, by the way, was in the early afternoon. I hadn't broken in after hours or anything.

A banker walked up to me as I stood there puzzling over the complete absence of tellers. I didn't realize he was a "banker," of course. I took him for a greeter. A lot of banks have greeters these days. Just like Wal Mart, only younger. With the money banks make from nonsensical fees alone, they can afford to hire armies of greeters.

"Can I help you?" says the banker.

"I'd like to make a deposit." I gestured at the empty, closed teller counter.

The banker picked up on my meaning. He may have noticed the deposit slip and check in my hand. "We don't have tellers at this location anymore, sir."

This is still a bank, right? Some vestige of the good manners my mother taught me as a child prevented me from asking that question in the tone in which I'd have liked to ask it.

"I can show you how to use our ATM machine. Do you have an ATM card?"

"No, this is a business account," I said, "I don't have -- or want -- an ATM card."

"We have bankers handle all these transactions. I'll get you into see a banker as soon as one is available." He was carrying an iPad Mini on his arm -- maybe that's how he kept track of all the "bankers." Maybe he used it to play cards.

"We don't need dedicated tellers because we are cross-trained to do everything," he added.

"You do realize that that is the dumbest thing I've heard all day." My mother -- and my childhood -- have been gone a long time.

"Many banks are moving to this model," he told me, "but we still have some branches with tellers." He named one a few blocks out my way. At least it was still Downtown.

Somebody else came in at that point, also hoping to make a deposit. I watched the scene play out again.

"We're short-handed today. We have three bankers out with the flu." Well, we have had 50 degree temperature fluctuations here in Chicago in the past few days. That can get a lot of people sick. If bankers are people -- a mighty big if, mind you -- I suppose they wouldn't be immune.

Someone emerged from a cubicle. I don't know what he'd been doing in there. Undermining the economy, probably. But it freed up a live terminal for my helpful banker to take my deposit.

Finally.

On the way to my next errand, the craziness of what I'd just witnessed sank in a little. Banks are moving to a model that does away with tellers? What next? Grocery stores doing away with food? Auto dealers doing away with cars? A bank is a place where you put money in or where you take it out... and they are moving away to a model that does away with people who actually handle money just so customers can meet with a "banker" on each visit? Why? So the "banker" can tout the unsuspecting customer on the dubious virtues of credit debenture swaps or whatever scam they dream up next on Wall Street?

They say the Great Recession is finally over. They say the economy is recovering. But the banks... and the unjailed bankers... are still here. Innovating insanely. Don't count on the recovery lasting any length of time.

And start keeping your money in your mattress.

The sad, desperate world of Clash of Clans

I'd seen the ads in the subway for some time prior to the baseball playoffs this fall.

The gentleman at the left was featured prominently in most of them: Gaze into my mustache and despair! read the caption on the poster.

Seriously? I admit I had to look it up in order to get the words right, but I at least remembered that this slogan was meant to evoke a famous poem. It's Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in case you're at all curious: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Then came the MLB playoffs and the commercials -- hundreds of them, thousands of them -- for this stupid game. I watched and I wondered: Who would be goofy enough to waste their time on nonsense like this?

At a family gathering I found out: My sons had all downloaded the game and were happily destroying each other's villages.

"Can't you peacefully coexist with your neighbors?" I asked. "Can't you grow and prosper by trade or diplomacy instead of warfare? Must everything end in violence?"

My kids regarded me with that pitying look reserved for hopeless cases. They hated the way I'd played the one computer game of theirs that I had attempted (a few different incarnations, over the years, of Sid Meier's Civilization) -- "your turns take 45 minutes," they'd complain, as I built railroads and cleared forests and negotiated trade routes. "No, Dad," they told me, "this is just kill or be killed."

It sounded awful... but the kids were clearly enjoying themselves. And I have this iPad at home and you can only play so much Sudoku or Solitaire and, well, one thing led to another. I downloaded Clash of Clans.

I liked building up my village. I liked clearing the obstacles and setting up my gold mines and building defensive walls. It's hard to build up quickly, because you have to carefully husband your resources. (Either that or spend real money to buy "gems" that can be used to spur production. Well, that wasn't going to happen in my case.)

Still, I started to feel a certain affinity for my villagers, all of whom, apparently, resemble the nice young lady at right who calls me "Chief."

At first, she offered helpful hints about what to build first and where to build.

But all too soon, her messages became darker: "While you were gone, our village was destroyed by MetalMan" -- and, sure enough, I could watch a "replay," starting with my villagers fleeing in terror to the village hall for protection while my cannons and archer towers spat death at my attackers, only to be overwhelmed by force and numbers. Then my mines were destroyed and the builder's huts and resource storage units and, finally, my poor village hall and all the poor creatures huddled within whom I had failed by not upgrading my walls from wood to stone.

But, somehow, all my villagers survived. "We must build up our defenses!" my villager told me, but with no seeming bitterness. If I were them, I'd get me a new Chief pronto, one who could keep the invaders at bay.

But my villagers are stuck with me.

And now I perceive the true horror of their plight. I upgraded the walls, I improved the cannons, I strengthened the archer towers, and still the invaders come as soon as I move onto something else (you know, like work?), and each invasion is more terrible than the last, the attackers always just a bit stronger than anything I'd prepared to repel them, overwhelming my defenses and destroying the town hall where the villagers tremble in fear.

And it never stops.

As soon as I come back, they are made whole again, ready to keep building as I direct even though they should be moving out in droves.

After the village is destroyed, there is a breathing space -- a shield is set up (no thanks to me) -- that keeps the villagers safe for 12 hours or even 16 depending on the extent of the carnage. My villagers are behind such a shield now. But I don't have enough gold to upgrade to level 4 walls -- and if and when I do, stronger armies will come to knock those walls down, too....

Am I taking this a little too seriously?

I wonder if serfdom got started in sort of the same way

Younger Daughter and her husband Olaf are still living with us, but they just took another step toward what we now think of as "independence" this weekend.

They bought a car.

Olaf has been driving a car that belonged to his father, a Japanese car that wound up with something like 170,000 miles on it in the end. You could always tell when he was leaving for work. Somewhere around 5:45 a.m. there would be this enormous noise -- not a rocket taking off exactly, or a jet plane coming in for a landing, but some sort of an engine whine. A loud engine whine.

Now I'm generally not outside to see Olaf leave in the pre-dawn darkness, but I have been round the car when he's returned, or when the kids have gone out on weekends. The air around the car would be heavily perfumed with gasoline smells. Pungent. Heavy. Unmistakeable.

And the car died several times during this terrible winter, a winter which may now, finally, be loosening its grip on our collective throats.

So it was time for the car to be retired.

The kids bought another Japanese car, a Subaru, one allegedly made in Indiana.

I'm old and I don't understand these things. But my kids assure me that Japanese cars are often more American-made than cars with American name-plates. "My Ford Fusion was built in Mexico," Middle Son assured me, when I raised the apparently quaint and outmoded notion that buying foreign cars puts Americans out of work.

Younger Daughter and her husband were able to put down a fair down payment on the car (as opposed to Middle Son who bought his car on a smile and a promise that he was about to start a long-delayed job). As a result, Younger Daughter and Olaf have fairly favorable finance terms, at very low interest.

But there will be payments. Hefty payments.

In our confused world, this is apparently a good thing. Indeed, Olaf -- with his good job and decent income -- is deemed to have worse credit than my daughter who has picked up a couple of freelance projects here and there but mostly stays at home with my granddaughter. But she has large debt -- college loans, in particular -- and a high FICO score while Olaf, who got scholarships to pay for nearly all of his college tuition, has no significant debt and a lower FICO score.

Huh?

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can now explain how the Great Recession happened: Bankers are out of their ever-loving minds if they think that my essentially unemployed daughter is a better credit risk than her salaried husband.

The really good news from this weekend's car purchase is that Olaf and my daughter did not have to raid their savings account in order to come up with the down payment on the car. So they are still able to save for their own house -- which will, of course, come with an enormous mortgage and huge monthly obligations.

It occurred to me, thinking about this, that each milestone of maturity and adulthood these days seems to carry with it a greater and greater voluntary assumption of financial peril.

No one goes out and buys a car. They put down something -- and take on debt. No one goes out and buys a house either -- there's a down payment, and a mortgage, and a Sword of Damocles that is suspended over the new homeowners' heads. You say it was ever thus -- but I'm not so sure. Incomes were considerably lower 50 or 100 years ago, but houses and farms and vehicles and education were cheaper, too -- and the costs of these necessities have risen far faster than our incomes.

Now there are a few people -- bankers, presumably -- who can pay cash. Maybe drug dealers. Some professional athletes or entertainers. Are we seeing a new 'nobility' coalescing before us? Are the rest of us doomed to continually lower our expectations, staggered over by an increased debt burden? Are we seeing the rise of a modern serfdom here -- with most of us totally dependent on a wealthy few who dole out chattels and services for which the rest of us can never fully pay?

I tried to congratulate Olaf on his new purchase. I did. It looks like a nice car. But independence? It's starting to look like we're becoming increasingly resigned to permanent dependence.

Duck Dynasty: Why is anyone surprised that a weird character on a "reality" TV show has politically incorrect opinions?

I've never watched Duck Dynasty and nothing I've seen or heard or read in the last day or two suggests that I would ever want to.

But let me ask this: Why is anyone surprised? Why is anyone outraged? A&E (which used to provide actually watchable TV programming, several years ago) found a weird-looking family that makes duck calls in the swampy backwoods of Louisiana and created a "reality" TV show about their weird lives, hunting, fishing and making duck calls. Phil Robertson, the gentleman pictured here, is the 67-year old "patriarch" of the clan. Have I gotten anything wrong so far?

Now take just one more glance at Mr. Robertson. Why would anyone think that Mr. Robertson's views would be compatible with those of the persons employed by the New York ad agencies who buy time on reality TV shows?

Each can hardly believe the other is a citizen of the same country.

Now another question: What would GQ, a magazine that purports to cater to men interested in style and fashion, want from an interview with the Duck Dynasty clan?

Isn't that one an easy one to answer? Drew Magery's article for the January issue of GQ, titled (at least online), "What the Duck?," may not have been intended as a hatchet job, but it was at least intended to give the smart, well-dressed metrosexual readers of GQ something to laugh at and people to make fun of. Men who buy a magazine that features articles like "Women are Judging Your Nails" are not interested in duck hunting or backwoods philosophy per se.

Mr. Magery addressed the controversy in a Wednesday post on Deadspin. He wrote, in part, "[W]henever I go deep into the heart of 'MERICA * * * I'm always careful not to be the sneering LIBRUL who ventures into red-state territory just to rip on all the people there. That would be unfair, predictable, and dickish." No, sir. Mr. Magery just writes what he sees -- and his audience does the ripping for him.

Mind you, I'm not defending Mr. Robertson. Granted, he has a right to his views, even though I may disagree with some or all of them. However, I completely understand and agree that the folks who run A&E have a right to "suspend" Mr. Robertson for offending the New Yorkers who buy ad time -- it's their network and they are privileged to do with it as they wish. Even if they daily make TV a far worse, far more vast wasteland than Newton Minow's worst nightmare prediction. I'm not even criticizing GQ. They came up with a scheme to get some free publicity and sell some magazines. That's the American way, right? And Mr. Magery got paid to write a story. Good for him.

No.

The only one I think is open to criticism here is the the PR genius who told the Robertson family that doing this GQ story would be a good idea. He or she would best be advised to get out of town quickly: Don't those Robertsons all have guns and crossbows and such?

The nation remembers a "dream;" Curmudgeon watches a nightmare

Yesterday the nation remembered the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the occasion on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his memorable "I Have A Dream" speech.

Anniversaries provide opportunities to measure, to assess, to evaluate. How have we progressed, or failed to progress, in the area of civil rights?

Some answers are obvious: The legal barriers that barred African-American progress began falling within a couple of years of the 1963 march. We have an African-American President now.

But I went to a deposition yesterday afternoon and encountered a world so alien from my own, and so very different from the promise and the progress shown yesterday on the National Mall that I am compelled to write about it this morning.

I can't tell you details of the case, of course, but our deponent yesterday was a 19-year old African-American woman. Pretty. Soft-spoken.

She dropped out of her Chicago Public High School in the middle of her 10th grade year, three years ago. Since then, according to her testimony, she has held exactly one paying job, lasting for about three months, earlier this year.

Her "best friend" is now in jail on account of a fatal accident. Our witness yesterday and her BFF (also a young African-American woman) were with an older man -- he's in his mid 50s -- at the time. Both our witness and her BFF had a sexual relationship with the older man. The young woman yesterday insisted that she "was sexual" with this man only on the first day she met him. (She would have been 17 at the time, just like her BFF.) Her BFF had "intercourse" with him, but it was not a relationship. The older man installed our witness's friend in an apartment; our witness stayed over four or five times a week. The older man stayed over, too, two or three times a week.

No, our witness said, the older man did not pay her and her friend for things they did (allegedly, they sometimes helped clean the building where the BFF was staying and another one that the man appeared to own). But the older man would take them shopping, buy them clothes, take them out to eat.

The older man had a number of young girlfriends. Sometimes our witness would hang out ("just kickin' it") with her BFF and some of these other girls. Once, after the BFF got into trouble, our witness went to a wedding reception with the older man -- and two other young women. They all stayed together in the same hotel room.

He bought them marijuana. Our witness yesterday had a lot to say about getting "fried" and how a high progresses; she and her BFF often smoked marijuana with the older man.

She stated that she stayed friendly with this older man because he was so good to her and her family, "a big help."

I could go on, but I might stray too close to the relevant facts of the case or inadvertently supply potentially identifying information. Suffice to say, I was cringing, even queasy, when left the other attorney's office yesterday afternoon.

The thousands who marched on Washington in 1963 wanted to make freedom ring for all Americans. I saw yesterday how some Americans are using that freedom.

I might feel better if I could believe that I have only stumbled on an isolated instance, that there are very few people who are living life this way. But I don't think I can believe that.

Evolution... or devolution? Of the teaching of evolution and the abandonment of space

Adapted from this post on The Blog of Days.

Image of the final landing of Shuttle Atlantis obtained from NASA.

There are many who would call today Monkey Day because it was on July 21, 1925 that the Scopes trial ended -- with a finding that high school teacher John Scopes had violated Tennessee law by teaching the theory of evolution to his students. Fortunately, we've progressed quite a bit (evolved, you might say) since then: I don't think even Texas has again made it actually illegal to teach evolution in the schools. Of course, there are more than a few states where the teaching of evolution appears to be frowned upon. A 2012 Gallup poll revealed that 46% of Americans believe that God created mankind in our present form -- and somewhere in the last 10,000 years to boot. Maybe we've not evolved as much as some of us would like to think.

And yesterday, July 20, was Moon Day, commemorating mankind's first tentative steps on another world (our own Moon). As mentioned in Friday's post, we gave up on the Moon in 1972 -- haven't been back since. The American Space Shuttle program, which ferried astronauts to and from Low Earth Orbit, was itself abandoned two years ago today, on July 21, 2011, when the Shuttle Atlantis touched down in Florida at the end of STS-135.

Come to think of it, maybe we should reconsider this evolution thing. We seem to be going backwards....

The daily newspaper gets harder to find

It's cold in Chicago this St. Joseph's Day, colder than historic averages, colder still when one thinks about how warm it was just last March.

But this is Chicago, where the weather can be hot or cold or windy or rainy or snowy or humid or dry or chilly or warm -- and often all on the same day.

We're used to it.

So that doesn't excuse the nice man who usually sells the Sun-Times outside the train station in the mornings.

This is a different nice man than the one who was there regularly for a couple of years; this is the fellow we see Sundays peddling the Sun-Times at church.

I'm not singling out the Sun-Times at the expense of the Tribune. The Tribune experimented, a while back, with a tabloid commuter edition and, when that failed, it abandoned street sales entirely. Unless you take a paper at home, then, if you want a paper for the train, you're limited to the Sun-Times -- unless you consider a 'free' publication like Redeye an acceptable substitute, as only the functionally illiterate can.

Of course, even the Sun-Times is a pale substitute of what it once was. Just a few years ago, for 35 cents, the paper was 100 pages thick. Then the price went up to 50 cents and the newshole shrunk and the amount of pages contracted. Then it went up again, to 75 cents, and was lucky to hit 50 pages. Michael Sneed is still in the paper, and Mark Brown, but Richard Roeper is increasingly shunted to movie review duty (Roger Ebert -- who's a marvelous writer -- must be in shaky health again, poor man). And recently the price went up to $1, just like the Tribune and, just like the Tribune, the street vendors began to disappear.

Let's see: People aren't reading newspapers, so we raise prices and make our product hard to find.

I begin to think that politicians have been put in charge of newspaper marketing.

Curmudgeon complains about those who complain about the weather

We've had so little real winter weather in Chicago this year (and last winter, too, come to think of it) that maybe the over-reaction of my six million friends and neighbors to just a taste of normalcy is understandable.

Sort of.

Last Friday's morning rush snow squall (maybe we got an inch from it -- maybe) was enough to turn the Kennedy (and all the other local "expressways") into a stalled sea of sheet metal -- travel times three and four and even five times normal. I woke up to news of an eight-car pile-up on the express lanes at Armitage. This was amended soon thereafter; turns out, there were 12 cars involved. On the other hand, things always get dicey around here -- even in normal winters -- when it snows at rush hour. I recall a two hour odyssey one Christmas Eve many years ago (I'd gone into work) -- a trip that should have taken about 20 minutes. (I was a very popular fellow at home that night.)

But what justifies yesterday?

We had a bit of an ice storm yesterday afternoon.

Now, there's no question that freezing rain is the worst form of precipitation possible. I'd rather have a foot of snow than try and cope with even a quarter-inch of ice. Ice storms are murder on power lines and pedestrians both.

But even in our 24/7 world, if there's one afternoon when things can slow down, it's on Sundays, right? So the weather is awful; driving is hazardous. On Sunday afternoon most of us have the choice to simply avoid it. The weather forecasters promised that temperatures would warm overnight, so any ice that did form would simply melt away. (And, sure enough this morning, according to the thermometer in the van, it is an unseasonably warm 47 ̊. It's a gray, rainy morning in Chicago that April would be proud of.)

But every newscast yesterday was devoted to how terrible things were outside -- the perils of ice -- and so forth and so on. It might have been reasonable to put the weather bunny at the top of the broadcast to take 15 seconds to remind people it was not nice outside (if one assumes the pelt of sleet and freezing raindrops against the windows insufficient to convey this information) -- but to devote 15 minutes of a 30 minute broadcast to normal (for a change), if icky, weather? Why? Are all the other problems of the world solved that we can dwell on this?

I didn't think so either.

In which Curmudgeon tries to scare his few remaining readers offline....

The bad news this morning is that Google is turning over more and more user data to law enforcement investigators, without a warrant or any judicial oversight.

The good news, according to the linked article by Matthew Sledge on HuffPost Tech, is that Google is telling us about it.

Well... I suppose it is better to know that these sorts of things are going on, and indeed becoming increasingly routine, than to live in blissful ignorance. Probably.

Oh, and one other thing: Sledge writes that "Google received 21,839 user data requests from foreign governments in the second half of 2012, a significant increase from the 18,257 it got in the same time period the year before."

(Sledge's article is drawn from Google's Transparency Report, posted yesterday on Google's Official Blog.)

Meanwhile, yesterday on the Atlantic Monthly website, we have a chilling story by Megan Garber, "'Current Employers of People Who Like Racism' ... and More Actual Facebook Graph Searches."

A Brit named Tom Scott was one of the first to get access to the newly announced Facebook search engine (they're rolling it out slowly). He started playing around with it and posting his results (with identifying individual characteristics generally fuzzed out), on a Tumblr blog called Actual Facebook Searches. The response, he writes, has been overwhelming, all for "a cheap joke I cobbled together in an hour or so."

Oh, but what a dangerous joke...

“Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison”

He ran a search for married men who like prostitutes -- and got back results that offered to identify the spouses of those men. And he did another one for "Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran" -- that's a death penalty offense over there, kids -- or "Current employers of people who like racism" -- he didn't fuzz out the results showing such employers to be the U.S. Air Force, Target, McDonald's....

Mr. Scott has posted some FAQs at his site. An excerpt:

Aren’t you giving ideas to repressive governments?

I’d bet money they’ve already thought of it and have already done those searches. The searches I’m making now were suggested on the day that Facebook Graph Search was announced, more than a week ago.

Also, I think they have more accurate and time-tested intelligence-gathering services than Facebook Graph Search. See the next question:

Isn’t Facebook’s data so bad that it doesn’t matter?

In many cases, but not in all.

Searching for family members, for example, is often disrupted by the (mostly teenage) people who’ve marked friends as their family. And for the “Iranian men who like men” search, a lot of that may be mistranslation: it could be interpreted as the literal ‘interested in meeting’ rather than ‘would like to date’.

I’m freaked out now. What’s your advice?

If it’d be awkward if it was put on a screen in Times Square, don’t put it on Facebook. Oh, and check your privacy settings again.

As I was expressing my anxieties about these latest technological breakthroughs at home, my son-in-law Olaf tried to comfort me with what he said is an old maxim of the Internet: If you're not paying for it, you are the product being sold.

Hard as I tried, I could not find a way to feel all warm and fuzzy about that.

If I were a Republican, I'd start reading Rolling Stone....

Illustration for Rolling Stone by Victor Juhasz

I'll admit freely that I haven't often turned to Rolling Stone for political analysis or insight. Frankly, I'm old enough to remember when Rolling Stone was interested in music. I remember the song by Dr. Hook.

The last time I mentioned the magazine here was in 2010, in connection with the controversy over General McChrystal. That was probably the last time I looked at the magazine as well.

I may have to reconsider.

I saw a Facebook post to a Taibblog post on the Rolling Stone site by Matt Taibbi. The link was to a piece about Zero Dark Thirty and it was interesting. But it would not have prompted this post.

What got me hooked was a sidebar link to this article, in the January 17 issue of the magazine, "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout." It's a long piece, but worth your time.

As befits both his youth (Wikipedia says Taibbi was born in 1970) and his status as a writer for Rolling Stone, Taibbi desperately wants to lay the entire blame for the Wall Street Bailout on the Bush Administration. But, ultimately, he finds he cannot:

[T]he Bush-Obama bailout was as purely bipartisan a program as we've had. Imagine Obama retaining Don Rumsfeld as defense secretary and still digging for WMDs in the Iraqi desert four years after his election: That's what it was like when he left Tim Geithner, one of the chief architects of Bush's bailout, in command of the no-strings-attached rescue four years after Bush left office.

Taibbi's Wikipedia biography says that Taibbi has become recognized as an expert on financial shenanigans (footnotes omitted):

As financial scandals continued to rock the world during 2012, Taibbi's analyses of the machinations garnered him invitations to nationally broadcast television programs as an expert who could explain the events as they unfolded and their importance to viewers and moderators alike. In a discussion of the Libor revelations, Taibbi's coverage in Rolling Stone was singled out by Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, Inc., as most important on the topic, that had become required reading to remain informed.

Granted, of course, that Wikipedia biographies can be written by their subjects (or by their PR firms) but, on the strength of this bailout article, I can well understand why Taibbi might be recognized as an expert. (The Wikipedia article also says that Taibbi is considered polemical -- I can well understand that, too.)

Still, if I were a Republican, I'd make Taibbi required reading. But, then, I've said this before: If I were a Republican, I'd be taking the side of Main Street against Wall Street, the side of the Job Creators against the Economy Destroyers (and, Taibbi suggests, Permanent Economic Leeches, sapping any hope of prompt economic recovery). But I'm not a Republican: I live in Chicago, a place where I could just as easily become a credible Republican as I could become a real unicorn.

President Obama may surprise us, of course, in his second term, launching the criminal investigations of the Wall Street titans that he so scrupulously avoided in his first term. I'm not holding my breath. But if I were an ambitious prosecutor, hoping to nail some big pelts to the wall as I try to climb the cursus honorum, I'd start reading Taibbi as a blueprint. (Prosecutors, repeat after me: Going after 26-year old computer geeks for arguably exceeding his permission on a particular website, when the proprietor thereof was not interested in prosecuting, is a bad idea; going against the Too Big To Fail Banks that are squeezing us to death is a dead-cinch political bonanza. Think about it.)

Taliban upset that their botched attempt to kill an unarmed 14-year old girl has received 'biased' coverage

A Pakistani schoolgirl holds a 'get well' poster for Malala Yousufzai
saying that she prays for the girl's recovery. Me, too.
(Reuters photo by Moshin Raza, obtained from Yahoo! News)

I saw this story, by John Hudson, on Yahoo! News last evening and did a double-take. Was I reading a parody from The Onion? Hey, I know The Onion has fooled the Iranian government -- how much easier must it be to fool me?

But it appears that this linked story is serious: Hudson writes that the Taliban is miffed because their botched attempt to kill Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year old girl, has received bad press.

Really?

Hudson's article quotes a spokesman for a Taliban faction called Tahreek-i-Taliban Pakistanan (the leader of which has apparently called for attacks against the press because in the wake of the overwhelming negative reaction to Yousufzai's shooting) as saying his group would respect reporters and press organizations except for "highly biased" organizations.

"Bias" as determined solely by the Taliban.

Hudson also quotes a "spokesman for another Taliban insurgent group, Sirajuddin Ahmad of Maulana Fazlullah" as saying, "Right from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to Hillary Clinton and President Obama, all of them used whatever bad language and words they could use on the media but when we tried to reply to them, no media organisation was willing to give us importance."

What's to reply? I wondered at first. These idiots tried to kill an unarmed 14-year old girl simply because she had the temerity to want an education -- and to say so, publicly.

But as I thought about it more, yes, the media coverage of the shooting has been biased: It's been far too secular. We in the West use the language of crime or terrorism and the Taliban insists that they are talking about "religion."

So let's look at it from a religious perspective, shall we?

The Taliban are superstitious pagans -- yes, pagans -- hiding behind selected tenets of a great Abrahamic religion. They are tribal thugs who worship only their weapons. And they know -- at least their leaders know -- they are perverting the religion they pretend to profess. How can I say this? Because, in order to mouth the few cherry-picked verses of the Koran they use to justify their crimes, they must have learned -- and chosen to ignore -- the rest of their tradition, which condemns them.

The Hell that the Taliban are creating on Earth, however, for those unhappy enough to live in their evil shadow, is nothing compared to the Hell the Taliban are creating for themselves in the World to Come. Maybe they should worry about that.

Demographics is destiny: The China Syndrome

You've got a few (thousand) choices besides me if you're looking for hard-hitting analysis of last night's presidential debate.

But there's one line Mr. Romney used -- and he's used it lots before -- that sparks this morning's effort: "I'm not going to keep spending money on things I got to borrow money from China to pay for."

It's a good line. China holds a huge amount of our national debt. I've joked for years that there's no need for China to ever invade us if they want to bring us to our knees: All they've got to do is call their loans.

That's called kidding on the square. Or whistling past the graveyard. Something like that.

As we keep buying more and more we can't pay for, China owns more and more of our debt.

Some people look at this and -- in all earnestness -- think it's dangerous for a potential enemy to have so much of an investment in our country. But think about it for a minute: It would also be dangerous for China to have no stake.

Right now, if America succeeds, China profits. That's an incentive for them not to do anything bad to us, except send us the occasional Asian Longhorned Beetle, Emerald Ash Borer, or Brown Marmorated Stink Bug infestation. And put lead in our kids' toys.

So even if, by some economic miracle, we could buy all our debt back from China, we wouldn't really want to. We want China to feel invested in us, but we don't want to be dependent on them. It's a balance we must seek, not an either-or proposition.

But China has another problem besides potentially shaky American T-bills (remember that financial cliff we're about to go over?) and it's not easily solved.

China has a surplus of men. Young men.

China decided to control its population with a strict one child per family policy. Forced abortions, sterilizations, all sorts of repressive tactics were used to enforce this policy.

In a perfect world, even with a one-child policy, roughly half of the one-child families in China would have a daughter and half would have a son. (When nature takes its course there are slightly more girls born than boys.)

But, in our imperfect world, that's not how it worked out. Many Chinese baby girls were aborted, or killed after birth. For cultural reasons, and perhaps instinctive ones too, parents who could have only one child wanted that child to be a boy.

But now... there's lots of Chinese boys and few Chinese girls. That's great if you're obsessed with Malthus: the Chinese population must and will go down.

In the meantime, though, what do you do with all the extra boys?

There are three possibilities and two of them aren't likely: The Chinese government could embrace and promote homosexuality. Let the boys pair off. Cultural reality, however, says that's unlikely.

There could be some sort of mass religious movement with a strong monastic component. If young men want to go off and be monks, that would ease the problem of having too few girls to go around. But... how do you start a monastic movement in an officially atheist country?

The third choice -- and by far the most likely -- is to start a war.

There's a reason why 18-year olds are sent off to wars: They're naturally aggressive, they want to prove themselves, and they think they're immortal. The Chinese government either must find an outlet for the aggressions of their male surplus population or they may be toppled by them. What do you think the Chinese oligarchs will try to do?

If I were in the Russian government -- with a thinly-populated, resource-rich East and a long border with China -- I'd be taking this possibility very, very seriously. The Mongolians have resources as well, and a lot of empty space. They can't be comfortable either.

There are other targets for potential Chinese aggression, the United States included. But the Chinese government is practical and cynical. Resources are wealth. A little war will ease the population pressure and bring great potential wealth to the Middle Kingdom. And sad, bloody human history is replete with examples of brides being found in conquered territories. A push into Russia and/or Mongolia seems most probable.

Will the winner of the November election have to deal with this? Maybe not. Maybe the lid can be held on the pot a few years more. But I hope they're making plans in Washington, too. How do we handle this? How do we ride this out? Can we stay neutral? And, if we can't, with whom must we stand?

Scenes from the alleged economic "recovery"

I was home again Monday afternoon and I happened to be walking through the living room when I heard the letter carrier put the mail into the mail slot. Though not particularly eager to inventory the day's bills, I took the few steps to the mailbox and extracted the contents.

The top piece was a salmon-colored card that recited the attempted delivery of a certified letter. Holding onto that card, I threw open the front door and went scampering (well, galumphing) down the block after the letter carrier.

"I'm sorry we didn't hear you ring," I began, "the front bell works only on occasion."

"No, I didn't ring," said the mailman (a younger man, not the lady I've often seen in the past).

I held up the card. "Don't you have something for me?"

"No," said the letter carrier, looking the card over. "They just gave me the card."

"But we haven't gotten one before," I said, and the mailman and I scrutinized the card trying to discern clues.

"No," he admitted, "it should say 'final attempt' or something...." We went on in this unproductive vein for a few more minutes, the letter carrier finally apologizing for not having the letter, but saying he can only deliver what he's given. The question next became how to actually get the letter to which the salmon-colored card referred.

"I could put it in for tomorrow's delivery," the mailman offered (never mind that this seemed to contradict his prior statement about having no control about what he's given for his route) -- "but someone would have to be here to sign for it," I continued, "and that wouldn't be until the afternoon?"

"Right."

So I decided I'd go to the post office myself in the morning to fetch the letter. According to the salmon-colored card, that would be my first opportunity.

I'll spare you the anguished speculation in which Long Suffering Spouse and I engaged concerning the certified letter. I was initially concerned it might be a small claims summons -- pretty dirty pool not sending the actual letter with the notice, but who could make the Postal Service participate in such skullduggery? But if it were the Tribune -- the most likely candidate, I thought, despite my so-far unanswered letters protesting their bill -- (this post will provide more details) the summons should have been addressed to Long Suffering Spouse; the salmon-colored card clearly indicated that the letter was addressed to me instead.

Next morning, I arrived at the local post office shortly after the doors opened. There was already a line.

An unhappy man was at the counter. He wanted to buy stamps and pay cash -- but the man at the window could not make change. He called out to those of us assembled in line, "Do any of you have two 10s for a 20?" There were six people in line; one did. (It wasn't me. Break a $20? I didn't have $20 on me.)

The customer at the counter was not mollified. An older gentleman, probably very nice in most social settings, he was nevertheless unafraid to express his opinion. "You'd think the Postal Service would give you enough of a bank to make change for customers," he groused. He was playing to the gallery -- those of us in line -- and the postal clerk at the window felt obliged to do the same.

"You think things are bad now," the clerk began, "but just wait. Things are only going to get worse. The good old days are gone."

Here was a man clearly worried about his pension.

Eventually, the old man left with his stamps and the line began to move again. The clerk continued to offer dark predictions about the future of the Postal Service to each new customer. Finally, it was my turn. (I was actually relieved. Based on the clerk's continuing remarks, I thought the Post Office might go bankrupt before I got to the window.)

I presented my card.

"Do you know what this is?" the clerk asked. "One of these boxes should be checked to say whether it is certified, registered or a parcel" -- he showed me that none were. His manner suggested that this was entirely my fault.

"I assume it's a certified letter from the number" -- I showed him the number scrawled on the bottom of the card, starting with 7011 -- "that usually means a certified piece, in my experience," I offered.

"Hmmmph," said the postal clerk, and off he stalked into a back room to look for my letter, muttering more to himself now.

Eventually he returned, letter in hand. I signed the green card. I signed a machine, like one of those credit card machines, at the counter. At that point I would have signed the palm of the clerk's hand if only I could just get out of there.

I took my letter and fled. The clerk was telling the next customer, "Oh, sure things are terrible now. But they will much, much worse."

I suppose you may be wondering about the contents of the letter at this point.

Well, it was a letter from Youngest Son's old dentists -- pedodontists, actually.

We'd started in with this practice when Middle Son was about two. He broke a tooth learning how to walk -- a cringe-inducing tale I'll save for another day -- and, since we (meaning Long Suffering Spouse, mostly) weren't entirely enamored of the general dentists we had taking care of us, we thought it prudent to put him in the care of a specialist. The younger children, including Youngest Son, also became patients of the group.

Youngest Son, however, is now 6'3" or so, nearly 20, and in college. He has aged out of the pedodontists' practice. Nevertheless, that group has called at least twice a week, and sometimes more often, trying to get Youngest Son to come back for another appointment. We never answered the phone. (I never picked up because Long Suffering Spouse told me she'd told the pedodontists that Youngest Son would be moving to a general dentist henceforth; I didn't find out until yesterday that she'd balked when they tried to stick her with a fee for transferring the kid's records).

From all their calls I'd guessed things must be tough in the pedodontist business, too, but the letter cinched it for me: After reciting the heroic efforts of the office staff to contact us, it went onto state that if all Youngest Son's teeth decay and fall out it won't be their fault.

After picking up the letter, I went to get gas for the van. I paid $4.21 a gallon for regular unleaded. Eight days before, at the same station (one of the least expensive in the area) I'd paid $3.85.

I read that the economy is getting better. But I see no proof in the world around me.