A public record of some of my thoughts. Feel free to comment, but don't expect me to respond.
It’s not that I care that much about celebrities, but (1) it’s important to call attention to how rotten the Chinese government is, (2) it’s important to remember that we don’t want any authority, of any kind, to have this kind of power, and (3) if I can do my part to poke the bear, I will.
(Or, should I say “poke the Pooh bear”? China bans Winnie the Pooh film after comparisons to President Xi.)
When I was a kid, school started after Labor Day and ended before Memorial Day, giving us a nice summer break.
This morning, coming home from my jog, I saw kids waiting for the bus. And it’s not Labor Day yet! (What happened to Gov. Hogan’s Universal School Start Act of 2020?)
Throughout my life, there’s been a move to expand the school year — starting earlier and ending later — and there’s been grumbling about how dumb kids get over summer. They forget a lot of what they learned the previous year. Also, American kids are falling behind kids from other nations, and some people blame this (in part) on the summer break. So some teachers would rather not have a summer break at all.
After all, the summer break is a leftover from an agricultural society where children were needed at home to help on the farm. We don’t live in that world any more. The percentage of people involved in agriculture has dropped precipitously (from something like 50% in 1870 to less than 2% today), and children aren’t that involved anyway.
Those arguments make some good points, but I like school-free summer. I think it’s good to have down time, and I’ve always resented the effort to get rid of summer break.
But maybe we have an easy solution to this debate. For the last 18 months, the education establishment has been telling us that virtual learning is just as good as in-person learning. So, if the problem is that kids forget over the summer much of what they learned the previous year, one possible solution would be to have some minimal online learning over the summer.
Not that it would have been possible when I was a kid, but I think I could have fit in an hour a day between swim team, fishing, mowing lawns, listening to music, riding my bike, and goofing off with friends.
Forget all the other stupidities of the Afghan withdrawal, this alone is an impeachable offense: Biden armed our enemies.
Noem is punching back against Republicans who are proposing laws to proscribe businesses from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of employment.
Her article rings all the right bells. Constitutional conservatives should work to restrain government, and avoid using emergencies as an excuse to wield power. “[G]overnment is too big, and mandates are not a conservative tool in forcing the behavior of its citizens.”
I don’t believe that a business should require proof of vaccination to work there. … But my personal beliefs are irrelevant when it comes to the state’s role in what a business may or may not choose to do. Government should not exercise its power to force a small business to agree with me.
That resonates with me, but there has to be a limit. At some point, a business’s rules may violate basic rights. For example, if a number of businesses started requiring their employees not to have children, it would be reasonable for Congress to outlaw that. (I’m not sure there would be any need to intervene if just a couple nutty companies did that.)
I believe it’s possible for two Republicans to share the principle that government should not be throwing its weight around, requiring people to conform to their personal prejudices and opinions, but nevertheless disagree on where to draw that line.
In this case, I agree with Noem. I think a business is within its rights to require employees to get vaccinated — especially in certain industries. For example, a coffee chain might consider such a mandate as a way of easing the fears of its potential customers.
It doesn’t matter if I or anybody else personally agrees with that decision. The business owners have the freedom to choose who works for them, or what kind of cakes they’ll bake, or any number of other things, and it’s only when they trample on a basic human right that Congress should intervene.
Of course that part is tricky as well. Is it a “basic human right” to decide whether or not to get a vaccine? Well … I’m not exactly sure. There are situations where governments should mandate vaccines, and both federal and state governments have done it in the past.
In 1905, the Court declared that the Massachusetts law [requiring a smallpox vaccine] did not violate the Constitution and affirmed that “in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint.” They also determined that mandatory vaccinations were neither arbitrary nor oppressive if they do not exceed what is “reasonably required for the safety of the public.” (From The Long History of Mandated Vaccines in the United States)
Reasonable people can disagree over what is “reasonably required for the safety of the public.” Personally, I do not think COVID is such a danger that we should mandate a vaccine. I think people should get the vaccine, but I would not mandate it. However, some other, more deadly ailment, is going to come along where mandatory vaccines will be appropriate.
We have a fig tree, and this time of year it cranks out the figs. If you’ve never had a fresh fig, you should find one. They’re really delicious.
They always remind me of Narnia.
There’s a scene in The Magician’s Nephew where Aslan has just created the world, and things are growing at a crazy pace. Somebody dropped a piece of a lamp, and a fully functional lamp post grew from it.
Digory and Polly are sent on a quest across this new land, but they don’t have any food. All they have in their pockets are some toffees, so — thinking the creation process might still be in action — they plant the toffees. In the morning there’s a tree that has fruits that taste like a fresh fruit version of the toffee.
The first time I ate a fresh fig reminded me of that. It was as if someone planted a fig newton in Narnia and a tree grew that produced these fruits.