My regime is changing ever so slightly. I am now using almost one hour less on French freeing me to blog more and spend my time with my head in books. My two hour reading of news has not changed.
Having finished Driven Out I have taken up reading “The Teacher Wars” when I wake up at night but want to avoid my cell phone’s blue light. I’m on page 174 with three chapters to go. As I wrote earlier I bought the book a decade ago and set it aside thinking it was over sold to me at the School Board convention I bought it at. It wasn’t. I just finished a chapter on Al Shanker that gave me a new appreciation for the fellow I once loathed as a college kid in 1971. I also finished the chapter on Ronald Reagan’s not killing Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education which involved a very unusual Secretary of Education Terrel Bell. Time and perspective have added greatly to my appreciation for the years following college when I screwed up three serious attempts to become a public school teacher.
Here’s a screen shot of things on my mind today as I prepare to write my next weeks column for the Reader:
From left to right
Screenshot of a story on Bloomberg about Peter Thiel the tech billionaire and former PayPal partner of Elon Musk. I haven’t subscribed to Bloomberg but it has great stories and if you look closely you can see it is readable if you join the break away BlueSky.com built from refugees of the nihilistic freedom to lie Musk’s wrecked Twitter. I will at least give it a start in large part because I checked Thiel’s name in the index of Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money which is second from the left. You can see the pink slip of paper which shows I was about 40 percent finished with the book before setting it aside. I decided while cleaning up Teacher’s Wars that after finishing it I should probably make the Mayer book my nightly reading when I wake up fretting.
I just added a new category to the blog. You can see it on the left. Billionaires
The third image is the screen shot which is self explanatory but which I will be referring to in the column I will submit to the Reader tonight. I was furious to see Trump spending my tax dollars as President on self promotion on television.
The forth image is a representation of the massive heat building up in the Pacific ocean which will break a short cooler spell and likely make this year the next hottest year since the extinction of the dinosaurs. It represents a break I will take this afternoon from writing when I attend a protest about Trump’s gutting of science research from the Federal government including NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Along with tampering with FEMA Trump is giving one more middle finger to keeping track of our catastrophic environmental changes.