A Depressing News Day

The really depressing thing is that I am sitting here writing this blog rather than in my car driving to the golf course.  The building's garage door broke late yesterday and they are fixing it today without informing us that we would be unable to take our car out of the garage.

1st, it appears there is no effective secular military force in Syria other than Assad's army and they are backing an evil guy.  Unfortunately, the effective military on the Sunni side is jihadist or equally awful. this is going to be bad for a long time.

The press is scrambling to try and find a way to blame some organization for not knowing that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a potential terrorist.  Well, his name was one of 700,000 on a list and that is an awful lot of people for the FBI to check out and they did at least interview him.  The Russian's unfortunately do not always use their intelligence gathering to find simply bad guys.  They also use it for political manipulation.  The bottom line is the government cannot protect us from anarchists 100% of the time; be they Muslim, Aryan Nation, crazy people, or some other ilk.  They can hopefully find 90% or more of these guys before they attack and arrest the successful one's before they commit a 2nd attack.  When I was growing up, children died in a variety of ways.  They still do, it is sad when it happens, but we don't live in a police state and sometimes anarchists will strike.

ADHD may be a sleep disorder much of the time.  I have been distressed for sometime now that so many kids are being diagnosed with this and given drugs.  No one had this when I was growing up and people got educated and got jobs.

So it turns out that income is the best definer of the probability of whether a child will get a good education.  No surprise there, but the really sad thing is what it says about lower middle income families today. My upbringing was probably lower middle income, but my parent's cared about my education and I got what I needed to be accepted at elite schools.   No preschool back then, that was what kindergarten was for.  Now, kid's need preschool and they need to be pushed to excel all through elementary school and junior high, not just high school.  The people of my generation who did not leave the rural area of their upbringing were not equipped to do that for their children.  If they were, they wouldn't be there.  Now the jobs have left many of those area's and people cannot find work.  My home town is still relatively well off with jobs despite losing over half the jobs.  But the school is viewed as substandard 40 years after sending the top 15% to schools that are now considered elite.  The kids are not dumber, they just don't get the same oversight at home that the more wealthy families provide. (I probably didn't explain that well, but I hope you get my drift.)

Thomas Friedman again highlighted things I have commented on.  Muslims want to strike Americans for conducting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don't want to improve their societies.  Now that is not true for all Muslim's.  After all, the Arab Spring was aimed at bringing about democracy.  Iraq is a democracy caught up in the realities that the Shiite are the majority, and unfortunately, Shiite's want to kill Sunnis, Sunnis want to kill Shiites.  The extremes of both Sunni and Shiite want to kill American's and Israeli's.  The Islamic world is a mess and needs to be fixed from within.  Only if unhappy people try to become educated and work on change from within, will there be real progress.  I will be dead before that happens because Islamic clerics think of everything in 1,000's of years.  All we care about in the West is our lifetime and in the U.S. political ranks, the next election.

With the GOP blocking everything, the only way forward with compromise is to hope that the GOP somehow loses the House in the next election.  I am not holding my breadth for that.

Maybe the garage door is fixed and I can slide into a late tee time.