September 26, 27

 Good sunny morning. Spent a nice morning getting the hexagon granny patches started. Started with one pattern but didn't like it much so I started over with slight changes and like what is going on now. I finally quit when I made the same mistake three times on the last hexagon. I took that back to just before the mistake and put it away. I am using the last of the fingering yarn--I hope. I also brought out the last of the heavier yarn and will use it with the Zoom loom. Slowly my stash is diminishing. 

27***********************************************

Another morning--I continued to reduce my stash by weaving a half a dozen squares on the loom. I tried to read my e-mail but found my eyes didn't want to focus on the print no matter what adjustments I made. I hope that doesn't happen again.

Gisela Selim-Peyer wrote an interesting piece for THE ATLANTIC that is good match for Parker's earlier piece a few days ago. "Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal--til it doesn't" draws on the experience of Venezuelans through Chavez's and then Maduro's rule and the gradual erosion of their government, economy, and society. I hope her comment towards the end that the 250 year history of American democracy might blunt some of what Trump is doing. I am afraid it might not.

As I read James Marriott article "The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society" I wasn't surprised and thought "OH, we are so f**ked!" For more than half of my 76 years I have heard repeated bleats from so called experts and politicians that we had a crisis in our education system because each year American students achieved lower and lower scores in reading, math, and science. Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s Dunesberry (for those too young to remember, it was a cartoon series) which showed a professor telling his  American lit students that only a decade before he had assigned an extensive reading list including several books with over 500 pages. But for the last five years he cut the list down to only half a dozen books none with more than 250 pages. For the coming year, however, he was only assigning three short books. One of the students yells "Whoa--Three!!??" At the same time experts and politicians were pushing "No Child Left Behind," a common curriculum nationwide, STEM and other ineffective measures, the new generations were less and less capable of working in an environment which requires literacy, numeracy, and advanced science concepts. Ironically, I think the only reasons why we have gotten away with this moronic situation include 1) large numbers of foreign workers (who are now being discouraged and/or deported) and 2) the industries leading our tech dependent industries don't really need all that many workers.