portfoliosept09

Step right up, step right up;
get your tickets for the Doctoloto 649

Alas, it’s over.

Summer, such as it was, has come and gone and you’re back in the classrooms along with a few thousand bright-eyed, sparkling potential H1N1 carriers.

Yes, according to many news reports we may be on the cliff edge of a raging pandemic as opposed to the medium pandemic we have now… then, again, may not. We will no doubt again hear the cautions as we did months ago, before the media got bored, that now is not the time to panic, leaving us again to wonder: when is the time to panic?

This was just one of the many news items that you might have missed during the summer interval. There was, surprisingly, more happening than the demise of Jon and Kate and the death of an American icon, who went from cute child singer to King of Pop to circus clown to Martin Luther King, all in less than 60 years.

Indeed a fair bit of the lesser news was about our impending medical doom. Aside from the flu, Canadians with an ear to the winds blowing from south of the border were getting quite an education about our country’s health care system.
Inevitably Canada was drawn into the debate over President Barack Obama’s plan for universal health care.
As it turns out, we have a health care system based pretty much on leeches and elixirs sold from the backs of covered wagons. But that’s pretty much only because we don’t really care.
As Georgia Republican Paul Broun, an actual doctor, pointed out: with public health care “a lot of people are going to die.” Apparently nobody in the U.S. ever dies.
Broun, however, couldn’t leave his analysis at that, he added that people dying in the streets is “exactly what is going on in Canada and Great Britain today. They don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently.”
Nope, we don’t. And try as we might, we can’t seem to change Canada’s ranking as having the 14th highest life expectancy in the world. That’s slightly ahead of the United States, which is 45th, just below Bosnia.
That bit of genius was topped, however, by national radio windbag Glenn Beck, who told his audience that up here in Canada, we have to buy lottery tickets just to see a doctor.

“Canada has a great health care. That’s why people are suing,” he said. “That’s why in Canada they have a lottery. They have a lottery system: who gets to go see a doctor this month in Canada.”

This lottery system must be why we deny people health care for years at a time, as Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said in a speech.

“Government-run health care systems like the one in Canada not only deny, but also delay care for weeks, months and even years.”

Well, so? Tough luck if you don’t hit the lottery jackpot.

And then there was the editor-at-large of the U.S.-based National Review: “If Canada were our future we would be holding bake sales for the Pentagon budget and the Post Office would be running health care.”

Well, at least we’d be getting operations delivered within days, faster if you go Priority Post.

And both schools are likely publicly funded

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who attended taxpayer-funded public school and publicly-funded universities and now is paid a salary from public funds, said over the summer that all taxes are bad.

“You know, there’s (sic) two schools in economics on this. One is that there are some good taxes and the other is that no taxes are good taxes. I’m in the latter category. I don’t believe than any taxes are good taxes.”

The PM didn’t offer to forego his taxpayer support pay cheque or expenses or move out of his taxpayer-owned house.

Amazon is watching

Over the summer, Amazon reached into the Kindles of its customers and deleted two George Orwell books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Amazon said the books, which were purchased by the customers, were uploaded by a publisher who didn't have the rights to reproduce copies of them.
The move angered buyers, many of whom compared the move to the workings of the totalitarian government in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which documents deemed inappropriate are dropped into a "memory hole" and erased forever.

As Orwell wrote: "If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."

OK, then how about they get paid for working 24 hours?

Speaking of Big Brother, teachers in England are outraged at a new code of conduct for their behaviour outside of school.

More than 10,000 have signed a petition calling for the scrapping of rules which require them to uphold 'public trust' in their profession outside school.

The code aims to reinforce the traditional role of teachers as pillars of society.

It urges teachers to act as role models for pupils inside and outside the classroom by maintaining 'reasonable standards in their own behaviour'.

Brian Cookson, a geography teacher told the Daily Mail the code was 'practically demanding sainthood'.

'Teachers are already subjected to enormous accountability. Which other profession would stand for this code on top of that?' he said.

No problem, they're all training in Britain

A majority of trainee teachers in a study by Bristol University believe people don't need to pay attention to learn.

The study on knowledge of the brain also found that 18 per cent believed the brain can shrink if a person does not drink six to eight glasses of water a day.

And more than one in 10 said consciousness is possible even if you don't have a brain.

The study concluded: "In the sense of learning that is commonly used in education, it is difficult to imagine how learning without attention can occur."