By the way, the two options being presented to the public were drawn up by the City Plan Commission. Oh, it wasn't called the City Plan Commission. It was called the Council District Boundary Commission. Was it just a coincidence that the latter was made up of exactly the members of the former? Hardly. No other option was even considered. The City Council had an opportunity to live up to their adopted goal to "Promote avenues for public engagement and input," including "Evaluate opportunities to promote service of boards and commissions and to broaden the diversity of applicants." They could have recruited members of the public who haven't been picked for all the other boards and commissions. This could have been a good avenue for broadening public engagement and input. Like the headline says, the district boundaries are meaningless. What's the risk in picking some newbies for the commission? It's not like the commission can adopt anything. Adoption is still left to the City Council. But nyah. Those goals were always more PR exercise than promises to live up to. So go ahead. Study the two options like it means anything. Flip a coin. Pick either one.
Monday, March 21, 2022
Meaningless Council Boundaries Shift Again
The Adam Project (2022)
Rotten Tomatoes |
Saturday, March 19, 2022
POTD: The Swing
The Swing, by Robert Louis StevensonHow do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!Source: The Swing.
Friday, March 18, 2022
Review: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. Choose just about any metric you want and it tells the same story. People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains." | |
Amazon |
Kolbert opens her book with the prophecy of man's dominion over all the earth. Until very recently, that fact was considered an unalloyed good thing, a sign of God's favor, a sign of human progress. Only recently have we recognized the downsides to our dominion. Kolbert closes her book with this summary, "This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems." Those problems were originally introduced by us exercising our dominion.
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Playing "Follow the Money" with History
Source: Boston Seaport. |
Boston Tea Party or Amusement Park Ride |
The culture wars being waged in state legislatures around the country are making teaching an impossible profession.
There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s a classroom. Consider the dilemma of teachers in New Mexico. In January, the month before the state’s Public Education Department finalized a new social-studies curriculum that includes a unit on inequality and justice in which students are asked to “explore inequity throughout the history of the United States and its connection to conflict that arises today,” Republican lawmakers proposed a ban on teaching “the idea that social problems are created by racist or patriarchal societal structures and systems.” The law, if passed, would make the state’s own curriculum a crime.Source: The New Yorker.
This all reminds me of when I used to "help" my sons with their history lessons in elementary school.