Another reason to homeschool

Federal authorities, believing that government schooled adults are too dumb to comprehend the concept of gas mileage, are pushing a plan to put letter grades instead of mileage numbers on new car stickers.  If they have anything resembling a case, this would be exactly why you want to help your kids avoid Chicago Math by teaching them from Saxon or other drill-based curricula at home.

A gem from John Taylor Gatto

...in which he demonstrates exactly why I don't like "revised" versions of literature (including many modern translations of Scripture), and also exactly how "whole language" reading instruction originated, and if you live near a school district that uses it, you will probably want to educate your children at home.

Come to think of it, reading other works by Gatto (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/) will probably convince you of that as well.

Cash for Clunkers update

According to Edmunds (http://www.edmunds.com/), the price for used cars has skyrocketed since Cash for Clunkers took hundreds of thousands of family vehicles and destroyed them.   Prices for popular used cars like the Grand Caravan are up as much as 33%.

As the owner of a minivan with 211,000 miles on it who is wondering whether he'll be able to keep it long enough to wear out the current set of Michelins, I'm not exactly thankful.   Between CAFE regulations and this, it's not exactly easy to find a good car anymore.

Quality control in discipleship

Going further with earlier thoughts on whether we ought to use statistical methods in the church, there is something that comes to mind as we (should) engage in active discipleship; what do we do with the commands for husbands to love their wives, and for wives to submit to their husbands?

Of course, we ask our friends that question, and they say yes, and then we go on with life, don't we?  And then we wonder what that happy couple just got a divorce, right?   What's going on?  Well, we've forgotten Deming's Law; In God we trust, all others must bring data.  No, it's not just for quality control; it's essential to discipleship.  So how do we apply this?

Simple; one asks for specific actions one is taking. "Bob, tell me how you're showing your love for your wife."  "Jane, tell me how you're submitting to your husband."  "Tell me how you're training your kids for Christ."  "Tell me what you're doing to help manage the family budget better."

In quality, it's called "corrective action", and it's high time that the church--this humble writer included--took it seriously.  If we do, we might hear this kind of response:

"Well, Sam, I led family worship and took the TV out of our bedroom--and you won't believe what happened!"

"Well, Sara, I served dessert first like Bob wanted, and he took the TV out of the bedroom and we read Scripture together!"

Stranger things have happened....

Another triumph of socialized medicine

....new mother is told to clean her room only two days after her C section.  Even beyond the absolute cruelty of such an order is the fact that, ahem, a woman on heavy painkillers and with her abdominal wall held together with stitches and staples is not exactly going to do a very good job at the task.  If you were trying to set up a way of ensuring that the next patient would have a significant risk of infections, you could hardly do better.

Statistical analysis in church?

Terry's post about a recommendation that  churches measure their divorce rates over time to measure how well the church is doing spiritually.  Now, to start, I would agree fully that how marriages are doing is an excellent measure of a church's vitality and spirituality; if a believer does not understand that his marriage reflects on Christ's relationship to the church, something is very wrong.

That said, I've got two big reservations about using statistical methods in the church.  The general problem is that those who use them a lot in a corporate setting know very well that they tend to be applied in an impersonal, "hands off" way.  Management loves these in great part because it allows them to "do something" without really interacting with the people involved.  Disaster often ensues because the statisticians and managers don't realize that what they've found only correlates to the real problem--but is not the real issue.  To get at the real issue, they've got to get themselves on the shop floor, or (perhaps better) out to the smoke shack.  (I don't smoke, but I do a lot of good quality engineering with the lovers of cancer sticks)

Now consider that the goal of the church is to enter into close--really intimate in a way--relationships and make disciples of all nations.  The "hands off" approach is generally a problem in a corporate setting; it can be a disaster in a church.  It often distracts the deacons and elders/pastors from what they really need to be doing; again, making disciples.

Regarding the proposal specifically, it falls into the problem of measuring outputs instead of inputs; a divorce is not a cause, but is rather the result of years of poor decisions by one or both spouses.  The husband decides he doesn't need to be discipled, or to disciple his family.  The wife looks elsewhere for spiritual leadership.  Without discipleship, that wonderful part of marriage gets neglected.  One or the other looks elsewhere, and then things go rapidly downhill from there.  Church members who have said "hi" to them for years, or decades, are shocked.

While at the church, this couple has had three different pastors, ten different boards of deacons, and has interacted with a number of people that is four times the current membership.  Statistically speaking, how do your sort it out?  There are simply too many variables.

You sort it out, of course, by remembering what our Lord tells us to do in Matthew 28; make disciples.  If one desires statistics to be used by church leadership to evaluate how the church is doing, ask the pastor how many members he's gotten to know well.  How often is he a guest at their homes, and vice versa?  Ask the deacons the same thing, and then.....

....ask the members.  Put simply, if you want a statistic that you can use to improve your church (and reduce the divorce rate), count the number of members who are actively discipling their families and each other, and have the pastor and deacons guide that effort.

Sometimes, it really is as simple as.....the Gospel.

How not to do statistical analysis

Check this out.  Apparently, an anti-smoking group commissioned a study of whether Minnesota's restaurant smoking ban hurt restaurant and bar business, and the conclusion is that, because employment over 2.5 years was steady, there was no problem.

Now I am no friend of tobacco, and I hate to go places (Lost Wages, Wyoming) where all too many establishments reek of stale cigarette smoke.   Ick.  I'd be glad if a number of these places either closed, or went cigarette-free.

That said, the study involved does not appear to have a control; in general, a 1-5% shift in population is indeed a measurable shift as long as a control is used.  Hence, we do not know whether this is far better, far worse, or about the same as we would have expected without the law's enactment.  Garbage in, garbage out.

It's statistical analysis worthy of the original EPA study used to justify the ban--where the EPA was publicly rebuked by a judge because they had arbitrarily changed the criteria for statistical significance when correlating second hand smoke exposure to the risk of lung cancer.

And what's scarier than the fact that this study apparently made it through planning stages and even peer review; someone probably got their PhD for doing such a transparently flawed study, and may end up teaching your children as a result.

Another "success" of the government schools

A quick look at insurance/accident statistics from Indiana reveals that those who have taken driver's education courses are actually four times more likely to end up in an accident than those who learned from their parents--5% have accidents by age 18 vs. a bit above 1%.  The article suggests that the problem is that driver's ed is for basic driving skills, not accident avoidance, but I'd suggest that there might be some other issues in play.

First of all, "Student Driver" signs create an artificial bubble around new drivers that is removed.....just as they start driving on their own.  Bump.  Also, student drivers are forced to completely obey the rules of the road--hence they never get the feel of careening along the Borman going into Chicago at the prevailing pace of 75mph with a semi on their bumper.  (and then they do, alone--yikes!)

Probably more importantly, parents simply have more at stake in their own children's driving (their childrens' lives and limbs, of course), and they're not hamstrung by the school's rules.  In other words, they simply have the motivation, and the means, to teach real world driving to their children.

A final correlation might simply be that many parents who send their children to driver's education classes simply neglect to do some instruction themselves.  Oops, oops, and oops.  Looks like it's time to take back drivers' education from the teachers' unions.

Update: apparently there is a bill in the Minnesota legislature to require drivers with learners' permits to post a sign stating "student driver" on their cars--and I'd have to argue it would make our problems worse.

Just plain irresponsible

I've been thinking about how one might make the point about why one ought not support Democrats this election cycle, and the thought occurs to me that the theme "just plain irresponsible" comes to mind.  To wit:

Democrats voted nearly unanimously for a stimulus ("spendumore") bill before either they, or their staffs, could possibly have read it to know what was in it.  Would you do this with a contract to purchase a car?

Democrats voted nearly unanimously for a health insurance deform bill before either they or their staffs could possibly have read it to know what was in it.  Would you do this with a credit card application?

Democrats voted nearly unanimously for a financial services deform bill before either they, or their staffs, could possibly have read it to know what was in it.  Would you do this with a mortgage?

Trillions of dollars and millions of jobs are lost because....the Democrats are perfectly willing to vote for bills with no understanding of what is in them.  They're just plain irresponsible. 

Here's a great use of our tax dollars

Evidently, a $500,000 grant has been given to the city of Dayton, Ohio, population 166,000, for the purpose of tracking whether residents are actually using their recycling bins.  If the bin doesn't make it to the curb, then trash supervisors will go through your garbage to make sure you're recycling.

Never mind the little issue of how much time, effort, and yes, energy it takes to send someone out to your house to quantify what percentage of your garbage you recycle, as well as the fact that recycling isn't necessarily more efficient than throwing your bottles and cans in the garbage.  It demonstrates, once again, my (environmentalist) brother's dictum; "environmentalist" too often means "person who cannot do math."

(my brother is environmentalist to the point of cancelling trips to visit family because of the carbon footprint...yes, I'm encouraging him to send Gore a note so Gore can cut down his travel so we can see my brother and his family more often)

Finally, an engineering hint; if you have a "microchipped" recycle bin, simply cover the microchipped area (top and bottom) with aluminium foil, glued down securely and painted with spray paint of the color of your recycling bin.  Watch with delight as the city sends its highly paid administrators out to your house once a month to find....nothing!

A meditation on Matthew 15:24; apparent sarcasm from our Lord's lips

Have you ever noticed where Jesus was (Matthew 15:21) when He said "I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel"?

In the coast of Tyre and Sidon, of course--among the Gentiles.  This region had once paid tribute to Solomon, but had never really been part of Israel.  So what was He doing at this point?  Going to the coast of Tyre and Sidon to minister to Jews was like going to Green Bay to find Bears and Viqueens fans, or to Congress to find an honest man.

My hunch is that He was confronting the Pharisees and scribes sent (Matthew 15:1) to monitor His Work.  First, He leads them among the Gentiles, and while ministering to one of them, He implicitly rebukes them by sarcasm.  While the woman responds admirably--and in the vein of what the Pharisees believed about Gentiles--the central point of Jesus' healing of the woman's daughter is that His ministry was to the goyim as well.  As one, I'm grateful......

Addendum: one might also infer from the context that Jesus could be pointing out to the Pharisees how they are departing from their "traditions of the elders"/"Oral Torah" by leading them far among the Gentiles.  He is presenting, implicitly, the Gospel to them.  Along the coast of Tyre and Sidon, they would have traveled approximatly 200 miles from Jerusalem.  Given that they were most likely rather soft-footed scholars, this travel demonstrates they--and most likely the Sanhedrin as well--were taking His ministry very seriously.

A not so shocking result of feminism....

The death of chivalry, of course.  The Washington Times reports that as our nation abandons (as it largely has in the debate of whether homosexuals can marry) the concept that a man ought to give special deference to a woman for that reason alone, the social manifestations of special deference for women disappear.

On the other hand, the survey also exhibits a remarkable disconnect from reality on the part of those surveyed, who believe that women are paid less than men for the same work (false), and that they're discriminated against for high positions (the opposite is true).  So perhaps we don't have as much a problem with chivalry as we do with....

.....people assuming that they ought to be treated like kings and queens no matter how they're behaving.

Rest assured, of course, that the management and staff at this blog are committed to the idea of chivalry.

Rod Blagojevich update

Michelle Malkin's site gives us a list of the crimes of which Rod Blagojevich was accused.  Apart from the crime of which he was convicted--lying to investigators (who were of course perfectly free to lie to him), the jury was deadlocked, and with good reason.

The reason: convicting a person of extortion and bribery is helped if you have an agreement to take a bribe or extort something from someone.  For some reason, however, someone in the prosecutor's office decided to talk to the Chicago Tribune before Blago could close the deal.  It's possible that someone in Patrick Fitzgerald's office simply started talking after too many cans of Old Style, but I'm guessing that someone in Chicago--Blagojevich, Daley, or possibly someone even more interesting--got a mole into Fitzgerald's office and torpedoed the investigation before it could reach the big players in Chicago politics.

How to clean it up?  Simple; stop paying for the excesses of Chicago politicians in Springfield and Washington, DC, and the scumbags there will realize that there is better money to be had elsewhere.

A campaign finance law I could believe in

Evidently, our President chose to snarl LA traffic during rush hour so he could get some campaign money for the Democrats.  Apart from judgment reminiscent of Bill Clinton snarling LAX so he could get a $200 haircut, this gives me a thought about how one could rein in campaign finance spending.

Require those who use government facilities--Air Force One, Marine 1, the Secret Service, and so on--to pay the bills when government transportation and security is used to host partisan events.  If the Democrats had been charged the $40,000 per hour plus security costs of this event, maybe they'd have thought twice about snarling up LA traffic for it.

Hilarious feminism

I read yesterday that one part of feminist theory--I'm not quite sure how radical it is, as it's really not something I'm that interested in--was involved in rejecting "patriarchal" words for certain body parts because, well, they came from patriarchal, militaristic societies. 

There is a great humor in this; ordering a meal is going to be difficult without using words from patriarchal societies for the simple reason that non-patriarchal societies have trouble defending themselves.  If such a society ever existed, I reckon they would have been slaughtered by the first patriarchal, militaristic society that came by.  Hence, you don't find too many words from non-patriarchal, pacifistic societies because they didn't exist very long, if they existed at all.

This is something that I reckon our churches--and our society as a whole--ought to consider as we drift away from our patriarchal roots.  Does our new authority structure provide adequate security against those who do not think as we do?

Even more humorous were a couple of the attempts to rename things; using Hindi, polynesian, or native American words for those body parts.  Hindi, of course, is the language of the people who came up with sati, the polynesians used to strangle the widows of their dead (John Paton's autobiography details this), and of course when we think of peaceful nations, we always think of the Inca, the Aztecs, and the Pawnee--the Pawnee practicing ritual child sacrifice of girls.

In other words, in order to overcome the muted patriarchy of our society, feminists are pushing to utter barbarity.  Oops.