Another casualty of the assault on the Capitol – Decline in student academic scores – Defeat of Sarah Palin – The dangers of Russian hospitals – Abortion in Michigan – Evening statistics
Here is a sad story, one of collateral damage by those grand schemes of politicians who scarcely deign to notice the tools they have employed on their behalf and have been ruined in the process. Thomas Webster, a former NYPD officer, was sentenced to ten years of prison for assaulting a police officer during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Webster broke down utterly during the sentencing, pleading the judge for mercy and adding that “I can never look at my kids the same way again. The way they look at me, it’s different now. I was their hero until Jan. 6.” He was one of the many caught up in the orgiastic frenzy Trump orchestrated, and it is probable that, now that he has returned to a state of sobriety, he is fully aware of his culpability in doing so: he was, until recently, a police officer himself, with a record of 20 years of service. Whatever the outcome may be for any of the other participants, he will almost certainly emerge from his sentence a broken man, possibly impoverished, certainly destitute in reputation amongst his friends and his relatives.
But when, oh when, will retribution overtake Trump himself? It is long overdue.
Speaking of collateral damage, there is some from the pandemic I have not yet mentioned. For the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years. How can it be otherwise? The education process has been continually disrupted by the pandemic, with students being obliged to vacate their classrooms and attempt to learn via Internet and via Zoom in particular – and, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, not all children take readily to this mode of instruction. Scores in reading, and especially math, have generally trended upward or held steady since the test was first administered in the early 1970s. The late 1990s to the mid-2000s in particular was a period of strong progress. Over the last decade, scores had leveled off, with an increasing gap between the highest-performing students and the low-performing students. The pandemic has exacerbated this issue. It has been estimated that the low-performing students would require about 36 weeks (9 months) of additional instruction to make up for the ground they have lost.
Sarah Palin – she who played the role of John the Baptist to Trump’s – but I suppose I should not push this analogy too far. Where was I? Oh, yes – Sarah Palin has expressed stunned disbelief upon hearing the news of her defeat in the special election to fill the state’s only House seat to Mary Peltola, who is not only a Democrat but who – worse still, at any rate from her point of view – is of native Alaskan descent (Yup’ik in particular). “I mean, really?” Palin stuttered. “Alaskans want Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi ?” The possibility that voters might have preferred a sober, industrious judge to a flighty, weak-minded flibbertigibbet who happened to become a Vice-Presidential candidate by sheer accident never appears to have occurred to her. Perhaps, however, she will be able to console herself for her defeat by contemplating the views of Russia from her house.
While we are on the subject of Russia, that nation’s hospitals continue to be a source of strange fatalities. In the spring of 2020 a number of defenestrations occurred amongst those who criticized the administration’s handling of the pandemic. Today Lukoil Chairman Ravil Maganov died after falling from a window of the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. Lukoil is Russia’s second-largest producer of oil, and Maganov was one of the few industrial business heads who criticized Putin’s involvement in Ukraine. As I have said repeatedly, those who criticize Putin’s regime in his own country would do well to avoid hospital windows.
The state of Mishegoss1 – no, I should say, Michigan – has decreed that so controversial a matter as abortion should not be allowed to be decided by mere commoners. A Michigan elections panel has rejected a ballot initiative which would ask voters whether abortion rights should be incorporated in the state constitution and another which concerned expanded access to voting. Sorry, Michiganders: this is too important an issue for the hoi polloi to have a voice in the matter. Best to leave such decisions in the hands of the evangelists, who, of course, are much better qualified to pass judgment on such concerns than you are.
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 608,533,619; # of deaths worldwide: 6,497,947; # of cases U.S.: 96,462,062; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,072,120.
1Mishegoss – an expressive Yiddish term meaning folly, senselessness, or lunacy.