That thing about insufficient funding for schools

Some of what I'm posting today was actually written on Sunday. I've had an ongoing problem of a few favorite blogs crashing Adobe Flash within my Firefox browser. Before it does it appears to suck up a lot of memory (a half gig at times), reducing my computer to a crawl. At times I mutter, "Crash already!" so I can have my computer back. Sometimes it isn't the page contents that use Flash, but the ads that dance to call my attention to them. I'm sure it doesn't help that I tend to leave several tabs open. If I find a blog posting worth writing about I'll leave it in an open tab and sometimes I don't get to it for several days as I accumulate more open tabs.

In an attempt to fix the problem I looked at Firefox help pages. They suggested I make sure I have all the latest versions of the various browser plugins, Adobe being one of the ones out of date. Another recommended for update was Quicktime (which, to my surprise, is supplied by Apple). Since I did this just before shutting down for the night it was the next day when I found several blogs weren't displaying properly. The reason turned out to be that Quicktime had declared itself to be the plugin of choice for several types of images, but the pages themselves were written for Flash. I installed the latest version of Flash, cleared cache and everything displays properly. And Flash still crashes.



I was down at the Detroit Institute of Arts Saturday evening for a showing of the short films nominated for Academy Awards. The auditorium was sold out (I bought my ticket the week before). The program was wonderful. It was very easy for me to choose a favorite of the animated shorts -- The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was charming and I highly recommend it to my sister librarian. It was very difficult to choose a favorite of the live action shorts. It came to a tie between Time Freak and Tuba Atlantic (which is not about music). We'll see who wins next Sunday.



GOP candidates and House members have been fond of saying the Obama stimulus has made the economy worse. Dave Johnson of Campaign for America's Future, writing about the 3rd anniversary of that stimulus, supplies the graphs to show otherwise. Yeah, we know the people the candidates are speaking to are not the ones who read graphs.



Jeff Bryant, also of Campaign for America's Future, wrote about the Education Wars. He uses Cleveland, Ohio as an example. Mayor Frank Jackson and Gov. John Kasich are doing all they can to make sure Cleveland Public Schools are not sufficiently funded to properly teach poor kids. Teacher salaries are being slashed so that they will see Cleveland as a step to somewhere else and the city's schools will be roiled with turnover. The money is being diverted to charter schools, which are not better.

I wrote about this because it has been playing out in Alabama for more than a century. The GOP intentionally wants poor kids to be uneducated, a direct violation of the Christian ethics most of them profess.

I've been hearing some GOP hacks crowing about how various GOP governors around the country have balanced their state's budget. One of those is Gov. Snyder of Michigan. He balanced the budget all right -- by giving corporations a tax cut and slashing school spending. So my question for those proud of all those balanced budgets: At whose expense? Who is being denied a viable future because of all this intentional underfunding of schools?



The Occupy movement has hit the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has posted new rules for bank regulations to allow public commentary. Banks, of course, are trying to throttle those rules and gut the laws behind them. The Occupy movement has delivered a comprehensive letter to the SEC explaining why the rules are important and should go into effect. The scruffy occupiers speak the language of the SEC? Yes. Occupy the SEC includes a "vast array of specialists" from inside the financial industry. Cool!

And just because they need all the linking possible, the Occupy Wall Street blog is here.