Brazil’s Milton Nascimento sings Anton Carlos Jobim’s musical celebration of Rio de Janeiro, Samba do Avaio (The Jet Samba) . The lyrics reference the statue of Christ the Redeemer that towers over the city and the Guanabara.
Minha alma canta
(My soul sings)
Vejo o Rio de Janeiro
(Seeing Rio de Janeiro)…..
Cristo Redentor
Braços abertos sobre a Guanabara…
Hmm..some flying fur:
Matt Yglesias has a blog post called “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity” to which Karen de Coster administers several unkindest cuts.
The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.
Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.
Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have.
[Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It’s not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].
So let me toss my two cents in.
From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.
Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).
He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.
As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..
What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.
Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.
My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.
It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.
Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.
The Daily Mail had this in June:
“A scientist who advises the Government on swine flu is a paid director of a drugs firm making hundreds of millions of pounds from the pandemic.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), a 20-strong task force drawing up the action plan for the virus.
Yet he also holds a £116,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, the company selling swine flu vaccines and anti-virals to the NHS.”
Note, 25% of that is in the form of shares, so he would directly benefit if the company’s stock were boosted by larger sales. But, apparently, he’s completely unrepentant about it.
There’s more:
During the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, Sir Roy’s advice to Tony Blair led to the culling of more than 6million animals.
The previous year at Oxford University, Sir Roy was at the centre of controversy after claiming a female colleague had slept with her boss before getting a job. He was forced to apologize and pay compensation.
A university inquiry in the wake of the scandal found that he was in breach of rules by failing to disclose his business interests as director and shareholder of International Biomedical and Health Sciences Consortium – an Oxford-based biomedical consultancy, which had awarded grants to his research centre.
Sir Roy was forced to resign, although his career soon recovered. He moved to Imperial College within months, was made the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientist and, last year, took over as Rector of Imperial College, London where he earns up to £400,000 a year.
From Bill Engdahl via Financial Sense.com:
The Pew study notes, ‘That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..
Tamiflu and Rummy
In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.
What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold.14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.…….
….. Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.”
In the news, AP reports:
“Critics of the bailout were concerned that the Treasury Department would never see a return on its investment. But the government has already claimed profits from eight of the biggest banks.
The Times cited government profits of $1.4 billion from Goldman Sachs, $1.3 billion from Morgan Stanley and $414 million from American Express. It also listed five other banks — Northern Trust, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, U.S. Bancorp and BB&T — that each returned profits between $100 million and $334 million.”
The government has also collected about $35 million in profits from 14 smaller banks, the Times reported.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.
— Ayn Rand
My Comment:
Especially note the comments on the video about the complete end of medical privacy in the US
There will be (is?) a dossier on every citizen that contains their medical information, their financial transactions/status, their legal problems. It will be (is?) available to the government, to homeland security, probably to the police, to insurance companies..and to whoever any of these entities want to give it to..
And that’s apart from the snoops, crooks, personal enemies, corporate spies, domestic and foreign spooks, advertisers, computer hackers, vigilantes, activists, and private eyes who might get their hands on it. Sleep well, my friends.
As Ron Paul points out in this video, vaccinations by themselves are not necessarily the problem, (although we probably do far too many of them, with far too little long-term testing). The problem is the federal government taking vaccination programs over, on a massive scale, in military style, and with the threat of force behind them.
That’s a problem. Not to mention the history of germ warfare and CIA black ops, that, of course, is supposed to be only the stuff of tin-foil hat theories.
Yeah. I wish...
Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy declared, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
That image – the women in the back alleys, the doors shutting on the citizens’ fingers – was powerful enough to prevent Bork from winning Senate approval. It is thus not unfair to say that the vitriol that has surrounded Supreme Court nominations ever since is one of Kennedy’s legacies, too….”
— Anne Applebaum in The Telegraph.
My Comment
Ms. Applebaum nails it. The “borking” of not just Supreme Court nominations but of political figures in general goes back to this sad episode in media history.
The Kennedys are American royalty, like the Bushes. So on an occasion like this, it’s probably not appropriate for an outsider to say more. Anyway, I was glad to see that conservatives, even rather shrill ones like Michelle Malkin, have been restrained enough and allowed Ted Kennedy’s family a few days of solemnity and sympathy, before discussing his political or personal flaws.
From Sify.com:
“State health commissioner P.N. Sreenivasachari told IANS: ‘It’s difficult to say why Karnataka, more precisely Bangalore, which is endowed with adequate healthcare facilities, is witnessing large number of swine flu deaths. We too are puzzled.
‘We can say the virus is already in the air and it’s time people became more aware and cautious to stop the spread of the virus. However, from the point of view of the administration, we have provided adequate healthcare facilities to treat swine flu patients,’ added Sreenivasachari.
Principal secretary (Health) I.R. Perumal said people should not get panicky.
‘People with swine flu like symptoms should immediately get themselves checked, as the city is well equipped to deal with the pandemic,’ added Perumal.
On Friday, two deaths were reported from Bangalore, one came from Bijapur.
My Comment
Why? I have no idea. More international travelers is one reason and a plausible one. But I confess I couldn’t help thinking about this piece I wrote in 2005, “Terror Hits Bangalore.”
One result of swine flu scare-mongering will be a shift of money to influenza research – hitherto absent in India. That means funding for drug trials. I wonder who the lucky drug companies are that will benefit?
The two states hit hardest are Karnataka (where Bangalore is) and Maharashtra (where Bombay is). Those are also the states that are the destinations of most foreign travelers and where India’s IT business and stock market are located. Bangalore is the home of a booming biotech business. And a locus of the anti-globalization movement as well. Just thinking out a loud…
Deaths so far are a hundred or less. That’s in a country of roughly a billion and a quarter where tens of thousands die from traffic accidents (300 a day or around 100,000 a year) and from water-borne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and jaundice. Hundred of farmers are committing suicide. None of that has qualified for the term pandemic….OR for the accompanying switch in research funding..
Here’s some information on malaria in India in 2008:
“While the official figures state that in 2008 India had 1.5 million malaria cases, resulting in 924 deaths, the real number of deaths is higher by several orders of magnitude.
“These numbers are a joke,” said Sunil Kaul, a doctor who works for a volunteer organization called the Ant that treats villagers. “In Assam alone we had at least 1,500 deaths last year.”
The real number of malaria-related deaths in India was closer to 40,000 in 2008, according to various non-governmental sources and some government officials who didn’t want to be named.”
Under-reporting and lack of knowledge about the disease are two of the main obstacles in retarding the spread of malaria. But interestingly, it’s also international organizations like WHO that obstruct progress in many ways:
“These problems are further complicated by foreign agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which — under the influence of global lending agencies like the World Bank and big pharmaceutical companies — have pushed India to adopt prevention methods that don’t suit the local conditions and to initiate huge, ill-considered projects rather than targeted ones. ….”
More here at The Global Post.
One of my favorite poems, and certainly my favorite American poet.
The Waking
– Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go….
etc.