Angry words
The story “Staffer, Foxx in elevator kerfuffle” (Dec. 7) was based, as its first sentence reads, on an item in a gossip blog. So Rep. Virginia Foxx exchanged some angry words with a junior staffer. I’m sure that some of your readers enjoyed this, but is it really what passes for news at the Journal? On the front page? Seriously, isn’t there anything important to report?
At its worst, this is one exchange out of probably hundreds that Foxx has every week with staffers. Are you going to report on the pleasant exchanges?
RENEE ELLINGSWORTH
Winston-Salem
Education topics
Even though I am semi-retired from the education profession, I rejoiced to see the front-page story about the value of teaching cursive writing (“A sign of the times,” Dec. 2). An unbelievable amount of instruction time is wasted on an outdated skill. Past the need to have a distinct signature, this time could be much better spent increasing writing vocabulary and mastering genres of writing.
How many of us use print as adults and can read our doctors’ signatures? I have seen prolific young writers completely shut down and write “snake” instead of “boa constrictor.” Keyboarding is the future. Let's move on.
Another article that caught my eye was “Board members question curriculum” (Dec 5). Terms like “communism,” “socialism,” “dangerous for students’ minds” and “Buddhist” could have scared some parents. I decided to use a skill, now introduced in kindergarten with the Common Core Knowledge framework, of researching facts. I examined a number of unconnected sources.
I learned that the program Systems Thinking (developed at MIT), isn't a curriculum at all. It is a framework to teach learners how to gather and organize information, collaborate with other students and their teachers and to build intrinsic motivation to learn. That encourages students to think for themselves — all the skills needed for our century and beyond.
Paradigm changes are hard, but we need to grasp this one and hang on. But don't trust me or any other single source. Board members and parents: do your research for our children's sake.
PATRICIA WILLIAMS
Lewisville
Finish the Thought
Saturday, we asked readers to complete the sentence: “All I want for Christmas is …”
“ ... peace, health and a four-year survival kit.”
DEB PHILLIPS
“ ... for the curtain to drop as soon as possible on House Speaker John Boehner's theatrics of the so-called ‘fiscal-cliff’ negotiation and to clear the airwaves of the two words ‘fiscal cliff,’ which are getting on a lot of nerves.
“And also for a change of the filibuster rule in the Senate, which is fast becoming the theatre of the absurd. The Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) filibustered his own bill on the debt ceiling. How comical is the minority leader who wants to drag the august institution before the eyes of the world? Get serious, senator, time to do some serious work instead of the nonsensical posturing for a change.”
BOON T. LEE
“ … a spiritual need — and I think it is beginning to be answered. I don't expect perfection, but just to see a glimmer of light in the tunnel, that is joy indeed.
“No amount of stuff can take the place of salvation and the assurance of a home in heaven.”
RAMONA TIMM
“ … for Obamacare to be repealed so my family won't be financially ruined and our religious freedom will be restored.”
PATTIE CURRAN
“ … an ongoing opportunity to read the well thought out, articulate letters the Journal receives from Boon T. Lee. Merry Christmas, Boon.”
KENNETH B. SCALF
“ … for our government officials to recognize God and ask him for guidance in governing our country.”
JESSE ADAMS
“ ... peace: in my country and throughout the world.”
LINDA DIORIO
“ ... more free stuff from the government and a sparkling unicorn.”
JAN HUGOSSON
“The annual tradition of asking what people want for Christmas is often answered with wonderful, but unattainable things, like world peace.
“Not wanting to go against the grain, and allowing my cynicism free reign, I want a Congress, president and North Carolina Legislature that are humble, honest and more concerned about us than reelection. I want an electorate than has the ability to pry themselves away from Honey Boo Boo long enough to find out what is happening in our country. I want a media that admits it is biased and a tool of its chosen party.
“Finally, I want to stop being delusional, thinking this might ever happen.”
KEN HOGLUND
Angry words. Next time, take the stairs and not the elevator.
ReplyDeleteEducation topics. Cursive writing seems to be a lost are. Texting is easier along with printed stick figures on paper. And there is also "street speak" that needs mastering to fit in with our entertainment culture. BTW, the public is not supposed to read a doctor's writing.
ReplyDeleteDoctor's handwriting too is going the way of whale oil lamps. It is being replaced with electronic prescriptions.
DeleteNo wonder I can't read it.
DeleteWhat I want for Christmas sure does sound political this year. I first thought Honey Boo Boo was something that was hard to wash off. Turns out it is a child. We need everything under the sun to entertain us in our decline as a nation.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I decline to decline. If the rest of the nation wants to decline, that is their business, but I decline.
ReplyDeleteSame with terrorism. The best way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized.
The terrorists won instantly on 9/11 because the citizens of the US went into a hysterical state of panic and have been there ever since...so frightened that they were willing to give away all kinds of rights and be treated like common criminals in airports for "safety", which they do not now nor never will have.
Practically the whole nation became like the scaredy cats who can't leave home unless they're carrying a gun. Pitiful.
I refuse to be terrorized. I will go where I want to when I want to. And while I am going there, I will not be declining. Sorry.
Good afternoon folks!
ReplyDeleteLTE 1: Foxx has pleasant exchanges? Another Monday morning editor.
LTE 2: This is something I've never really thought about, but devoting time towards teaching how to operate a computer in lieu of teaching cursive does make sense. Isn't it amazing how much one can learn when utilizing the long lost skill of researching topics. The complete ignorance of terms such as "socialism" and "communism" often displayed in LTE's and blog sites demonstrates the need for programs such as System Thinking so people won't have to rely on talk radio to do their thinking.
Finish the thought: hmm...a Porsche Cayman R. Ooh..and Katie Holmes :) As for the responses:
Deb: usual Chicken Little BS
Curran: WTH are you talking about?? My wish for you is System Thinking
Scalf: sounds like a man-crush going on
Adams: sorry, but this ain't no theocracy. Personal spiritual guidance is groovy.
Of Kay Hagan had acted like Foxx, the usual suspects would be calling her arrogant and maybe the b word. But because it's one of theirs, they make excuses. Govt power isn't so bad when they're the ones wielding iit,
ReplyDeleteIt's really predictable.
Please. Hagan is a complete dope. We haven't heard pee turkey out of the bimbo. I'd rather have Rielle Hunter as a U.S. senator for N.C.
Delete(part 1)
ReplyDeletePart of the problem facing the GOP is that they have no sense of humor, so they take themselves so, so seriously, even as they provide prime fodder to comedians everywhere with their pontifical pronouncements and ludicrous behavior.
The last "conservative" writer who had a sense of humor was Bill Buckley, who is long since mouldering in the grave, whence his party is now headed. Not so the other side, where Maureen Dowd and a host of others are always waiting to puncture the balloons of the pompous. Maureen published this gem last week on the New York Times op-ed page.
Take particular note of her quotation from the great historian Will Durant. It's a version of what I keep saying about America, and it is certainly true of the last two "great civilizations", the Romans and the Ottoman Empire.
(part 2)
DeleteDecember 8, 2012
A Lost Civilization
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
MY college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.
My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?”
Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead to its extinction.
Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans.
(part 3)
DeleteThe Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.
Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.
Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the “gifts” they got.
Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.
As the historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
(part 4)
DeletePresident Obama’s victory margin is expanding, as more votes are counted. He didn’t just beat Romney; he’s still beating him. But another sign of the old guard’s denial came on Friday, a month after the election, when the Romney campaign ebulliently announced that it raised $85.9 million in the final weeks of the campaign, making its fund-raising effort “the most successful in Republican Party history.”
Why is the Romney campaign still boasting? You can’t celebrate at a funeral. Go away and learn how to crunch data on the Internet.
Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone else could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in an obtuse and outmoded way that spelled doom.
The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the idea that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant creating barriers to letting them vote.
Although Stuart Stevens, the Romney strategist, now claims that Mitt “captured the imagination of millions” and ran “with a natural grace,” there was very little chance that the awkward gazillionaire was ever going to be president. Yet strangely, Republicans are still gobsmacked by their loss, grasping at straws like Sandy as an excuse.
Some G.O.P. House members continue to try to wrestle the president over the fiscal cliff. Romney wanders in a daze, his hair not perfectly gelled. And his campaign advisers continue to express astonishment that a disastrous campaign, convention and candidate, as well as a lack of familiarity with what Stevens dismissively calls “whiz-bang turnout technologies,” could possibly lead to defeat.
Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?
Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice of the party. The former president lectured the G.O.P. on Tuesday about being more “benevolent” toward immigrants.
As Eva Longoria supersedes Karl Rove as a power player, Republicans act as shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers in “Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”
Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm themselves.
But history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested) Conquistadora Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her, and finished them off.