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Today, I got up, did work, and then went off to have chili at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greyweirdo, droewyn, and hollygraham‘s invitation. Good stuff, not the kind that would make anyone spit fire, served in a nice bread bowl. And there was cake afterward. The conversation is worth being there for, and it just only helps more that greyweirdo can cook extremely well. I got home, and then realized that the data model I’d just sent off might be incomplete. Which means finding more space on an already crowded graph to try and put it in. (Arrrrgh.) I think I might have managed to make it work, though.
I have a very small set of links tonight, actually. Which is probably pretty good for me, since I’m going to try and be an observant person tomorrow. (Those of you who know me well will laugh - the absentminded boy has to concentrate...) Hopefully, whatever it is that I write down will be of use to me later... there’s a paper riding on this.
For something to help you salt all things you read, including this list of links, Corporate Mind Kontrol reminds us that PR people make the spin go round, and that everybody’s got PR people. (Even one-person operations like this one. I can spin anything. PR firms can spin it well.) So what looks like information may be well-constructed PR. Actually, that probably sounds like a lot of “information” that’s been used over the years. The best PR is that which is true, at least on face. It’s when you add the complexities that things break down.
A football championship was decided today Poland beat Croatia on penalties, 5-4. Oh, did I mention that these were Roman Catholic priests playing footie? For as much as the Catholic Church appears to frown on fun, they do apparently let the priests have a little bit of enjoyment in their sport. Those who probably have much more fun in their sport are the Dudeists, who I’m sure I’ve linked before. Funny how things stick around on the Internet.
Sticking with the religious theme, Liberal Eagle suggests that most liberal Christians, much like atheists and others, get perfectly good morality from a non-Biblical source. And that, perhaps, in fact, they primarily get their morality from non-Biblical sources, because of all the violence, murder, and other deplorable acts are in the Good Book. This leads to a bit of skepticism about new initiatives from the government - American Samidzat rounds up a selection of opinions on The First Freedom Project - a new initiative from the Department of Justice designed to educate people about religious freedoms. There’s a significant skepticism there, considering the track record on religious freedom this Administration has, and that the announcement came to a room filled with Southern Baptists, rather than a cross-religious perspective. It waits to be seen whether the DOJ is serious about this commitment, and will seriously take that commitment to members of all religions, as well as those that do not practice any.
Still got your salt shakers through all of that? Good - here’s one more to apply some to. World Net Daily reports on German parents who had their child taken away from them because she was being homeschooled - an illegal action in Germany. Supposedly, the government then offered a compromise to remove the other children from the parents’ custody to ensure that they met the mandatory public school attendance requirements, and was considering psychiatric examinations for the other children so that the state could take custody of them, as well. The tone of the article slants the material reported, turning it into a persecution issue. Phrases such as, “That [The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Child or the European Convention on Human Rights] is the foundation being cited by the German government to ban homeschooling entirely, and to indoctrinate public and private school students into a sexualized, socialist society.” and “In the last several years, many homeschooling parents in Germany have been sentenced to prison for teaching their children in a Christian lifestyle.” definitely demonstrate the bias of the reporting. I would like to know if there isn’t a more practical application to this law, like the German government wanting to ensure all students receive a particular standard of education. I’m not personally against homeschooling, so long as that homeschooling ensures that the student receives the education they would have gotten in public schooling (not a particularly grueling set of standards) in all the subjects they would have taken. That includes sex ed and science, which means a parent will have to teach their kid about human maturation and development and about evolution from the scientific perspective. If they can’t do that, or can’t do it up to standards because of their religious beliefs, then send the kid to public school. There will be an entity to rail against if the kid starts getting funny ideas in their head, but they’ll also be getting some sort of minimum standard education from which they will hopefully make their own decisions. And maybe they’ll use the library more, too. You never know.
Anyway, that’s it (Ia, really!) for tonight. Tomorrow will probably have more material, and maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself to finish things out in a manner acceptable to my work ethic so that I can start relaxing!
greyweirdo, droewyn, and hollygraham‘s invitation. Good stuff, not the kind that would make anyone spit fire, served in a nice bread bowl. And there was cake afterward. The conversation is worth being there for, and it just only helps more that greyweirdo can cook extremely well. I got home, and then realized that the data model I’d just sent off might be incomplete. Which means finding more space on an already crowded graph to try and put it in. (Arrrrgh.) I think I might have managed to make it work, though.I have a very small set of links tonight, actually. Which is probably pretty good for me, since I’m going to try and be an observant person tomorrow. (Those of you who know me well will laugh - the absentminded boy has to concentrate...) Hopefully, whatever it is that I write down will be of use to me later... there’s a paper riding on this.
For something to help you salt all things you read, including this list of links, Corporate Mind Kontrol reminds us that PR people make the spin go round, and that everybody’s got PR people. (Even one-person operations like this one. I can spin anything. PR firms can spin it well.) So what looks like information may be well-constructed PR. Actually, that probably sounds like a lot of “information” that’s been used over the years. The best PR is that which is true, at least on face. It’s when you add the complexities that things break down.
A football championship was decided today Poland beat Croatia on penalties, 5-4. Oh, did I mention that these were Roman Catholic priests playing footie? For as much as the Catholic Church appears to frown on fun, they do apparently let the priests have a little bit of enjoyment in their sport. Those who probably have much more fun in their sport are the Dudeists, who I’m sure I’ve linked before. Funny how things stick around on the Internet.
Sticking with the religious theme, Liberal Eagle suggests that most liberal Christians, much like atheists and others, get perfectly good morality from a non-Biblical source. And that, perhaps, in fact, they primarily get their morality from non-Biblical sources, because of all the violence, murder, and other deplorable acts are in the Good Book. This leads to a bit of skepticism about new initiatives from the government - American Samidzat rounds up a selection of opinions on The First Freedom Project - a new initiative from the Department of Justice designed to educate people about religious freedoms. There’s a significant skepticism there, considering the track record on religious freedom this Administration has, and that the announcement came to a room filled with Southern Baptists, rather than a cross-religious perspective. It waits to be seen whether the DOJ is serious about this commitment, and will seriously take that commitment to members of all religions, as well as those that do not practice any.
Still got your salt shakers through all of that? Good - here’s one more to apply some to. World Net Daily reports on German parents who had their child taken away from them because she was being homeschooled - an illegal action in Germany. Supposedly, the government then offered a compromise to remove the other children from the parents’ custody to ensure that they met the mandatory public school attendance requirements, and was considering psychiatric examinations for the other children so that the state could take custody of them, as well. The tone of the article slants the material reported, turning it into a persecution issue. Phrases such as, “That [The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Child or the European Convention on Human Rights] is the foundation being cited by the German government to ban homeschooling entirely, and to indoctrinate public and private school students into a sexualized, socialist society.” and “In the last several years, many homeschooling parents in Germany have been sentenced to prison for teaching their children in a Christian lifestyle.” definitely demonstrate the bias of the reporting. I would like to know if there isn’t a more practical application to this law, like the German government wanting to ensure all students receive a particular standard of education. I’m not personally against homeschooling, so long as that homeschooling ensures that the student receives the education they would have gotten in public schooling (not a particularly grueling set of standards) in all the subjects they would have taken. That includes sex ed and science, which means a parent will have to teach their kid about human maturation and development and about evolution from the scientific perspective. If they can’t do that, or can’t do it up to standards because of their religious beliefs, then send the kid to public school. There will be an entity to rail against if the kid starts getting funny ideas in their head, but they’ll also be getting some sort of minimum standard education from which they will hopefully make their own decisions. And maybe they’ll use the library more, too. You never know.
Anyway, that’s it (Ia, really!) for tonight. Tomorrow will probably have more material, and maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself to finish things out in a manner acceptable to my work ethic so that I can start relaxing!
