There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
Categories
Will Rogers
Categories
Gandhi Arrested
On November 6, 1913, Mohandes K. Gandhi was arrested for participating in a march of Indian miners in South Africa.
Categories
Arnold Bennett
The price of justice is eternal publicity.
Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me, 2nd series (1923), “Secret Trials.”
Categories
President John Hanson
On November 5, 1781, the second session of the United States in Congress Assembled began, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This “Second Confederation Congress,” as it is popularly known, ended on November 2, 1782.
And on that Fifth of November, 1781, John Hanson of Maryland (pictured above) was elected to serve as president of the United States in Congress Assembled. He would become the first president of Congress to serve a full one-year term as specified under the Articles of Confederation, for the second session of the Confederation Congress. Of course, this presidency was nothing like the presidencies under the Constitution. Hanson merely presided over Congress.
On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony defied the law to vote, and was later fined $100.
Categories
Will Rogers
On November 4, 1879, American humorist Will Rogers was born. Aside from his cowboy act, and his work as an actor in Hollywood, he gained much fame for being a topical comedian “just reporting what’s in the papers.”
Keeping track of the threat from the Chinese Communist Party and its hegemony over the Chinese (and other) peoples:
A Two-day Trip, A Four-year Trap
A two-day business trip to became a four-year trap for
Taiwanese businessman. . . . [Monkton, Nov. 3]
Pro-democracy Parties “Failed to Field” Candidates in Rubble of Hong Kong’s Democracy
Failed to field. That’s one way of putting it. . . . [Scribbler, Nov. 1]
If you’re a former or current member of the
U.S. military, the CCP wants you to spy on
your country! [Scribbler, Nov. 1]
To Victims, the Premier Was No Good Guy
Many of Li Keqiang’s mourners are doubtless sincere
and are not, like some. . . . [Scribbler, Nov. 1]
Why did the world go so crazy in its reactions
to COVID? [Anders Chydenius, Nov. 1]
International travel is being more strictly limited for
Chinese government bureaucrats, public school
teachers, and even . . . [Monkton, Oct. 31]
China’s “Planned Capitalism” Kills Wealth
Sometimes, prosperity is an illusion. The massive
building boom in the People’s Republic of China
is creating outer signs of affluence, but there
isn’t enough demand. . . . [Sandy Ikeda, Oct. 29]
Categories
Auberon Herbert
If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings — as in one country they propose to do — in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules — if we are, in a word, to trust to machinery, to harden our hearts, and simply to meet force with force, always irritating, always clumsy, and in the end fruitless, then I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time.
Auberon Herbert, The Ethics of Dynamite (1894).
Although homeschooling had once been common in the United States, by the 1970s few families taught their kids at home.
This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Researcher Brian Day estimates that by 2019, some 2,300,000 children were being homeschooled.
During the recent pandemic, even more parents gave homeschooling a try. But the trend had already been intensifying for decades. Not coincidentally, of course, because public schools continued to get lousy report cards, with the quality of government-provided education demonstrably in steep decline.
In a recent article on the growth of homeschooling, The Washington Post concludes that it has become “America’s fastest-growing form of education” as families “embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”
Apparently, now even normal people are rescuing their kids from the educrats (unlike back in the day, when only fringe parents like my wife and I did so).
Looking at data from some 7,000 school districts, the Post concludes:
- The number of homeschooled kids has increased by 373 percent in Anderson, South Carolina. It increased by 358 percent in one Bronx district.
- In 390 districts, for every ten children being taught in public schools in the 2020–2021 academic year, one child was homeschooled.
- The Post estimates that between 1.9 million and 2.7 million kids are currently being homeschooled in this country.
Post-lockdowns, the practice is still going strong. In most districts for which data is available on the 2022–2023 school year, homeschooling “dropped from its pandemic peak. . . . Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.”
That’s good. For the children.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Will Rogers
Always drink upstream from the herd.
Will Rogers, in The Friars Club Bible of Jokes, Pokes, Roasts, and Toasts (2001), by Nina Colman, p. 316
Categories
Army Disbands
On November 3, 1783, the American Continental Army — its mission fulfilled — was disbanded.
On November 3, 1969, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon made a television and radio appearance, asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity on the Vietnam War effort.