The Pierces were treated to lots of art at the 2017 Dixie Elementary Art Show.  Then, we toured the classrooms and saw lots of effort in all the work being done this year.

Some samples.

From the New York Time:  Full article here.

Ferrante Casting Call in Naples Lets Children Dream, if for a Day

NAPLES, Italy — A legion of children raced up a dead-end street in Sanità, a tough Naples neighborhood dripping with laundry and suddenly brimming with the promise of stardom.

Marta Reale, 10, her smile broad, her bangs blanched, made her way to a recreation center’s doorway through the dense crowd of other children, sunlit cigarette smoke and mothers fanning themselves on the seats of scooters. Above her, more children were hanging out the window, and above them, more were crammed onto a balcony.

Then she approached the desk where she gave her name and age and got a numbered slip of paper and a parental release form. The sign above her head read, “Dream.”

This was not just any casting call, but one for “My Brilliant Friend,” an adaptation of the first of the four smash-hit Neapolitan Novels written by Elena Ferrante, whose hidden identity enthralled the literary world and whose books have sold more than a million copies.

Here’s the memo that  deputy attorney general Rosenstein wrote about Comey.

The problem for all Trump haters, including me, is, of course, that Rosenstein is a very highly regarded guy. With a  27-year career in the Justice Department under five administrations, and the distinction of being the longest-serving United States attorney in history.  Ugh. And the memo is good.

And you think you’ve got troubles?  Check out this guy’s problem.

Oldie but goodie.

Best line: “The so-called trash letters”

The Decabet! from josh apter on Vimeo.

Nice day at Limontour.  And we saw a whale! Close to shore!

Robert had never heard of this until today.  Not that he’s going . . . Last time he went to Yosemite he was almost poisoned to death by rat urine.

As I tell the kids . . . often. . . “That’s not for us. It’s for rich people.”

http://www.travelyosemite.com/things-to-do/specialty-events/food-and-wine-events/bracebridge-dinner/?utm_source=travelyosemite&utm_medium=specials_packages&utm_campaign=bracebridge_package

Celebrated annually since 1927, the renowned Bracebridge Dinner transforms The Majestic Yosemite Hotel’s Dining Room into a Old English-era hall filled with Christmas festivities. The inspiration for this incredible Yuletide ceremony was Washington Irving’s Sketch Book about Squire Bracebridge and Christmas traditions of the period. More than 100 cast members portray the Squire and his family, their servants, the Lord of Misrule, and minstrels.  

Bring the whole family for this fantastically imaginative experience!

Lots of activity during Spring Break 2017!

David Brooks spoke in the Silicon Valley recently.  The Pierces really like listening to him, by the way. Especially his talks on character building.

He spoke on the state of US society in 2017, the recent Presidential election, and his observations traveling the country over the course of the last year.  His picture was not pretty.  To summarize, US society will never again be like it was during the second half of the twentieth century.  Those days of prosperity and ease are over. Now we have hefty doses of psychological dysfunction, unemployment, suicide, drug abuse and poverty for many Americans.

According to Mr. Brooks, whereas the primary political tension in the twentieth century was big government vs. small government, the primary tension going forward is open vs. closed. For many in our society, the affluent and successful middle class (the dominant class), the urge is toward openness. Open trade, open morals, open society, open borders. For those who are not doing well, the tendency is for closedness. Closed trading channels, closed borders, closed moral systems, heterogeneity. While the affluent feel the winds generated by openness blowing at their/our backs, propelling us/them to greater wealth and security, or at least, sustainability,  those who suffer from the change fight the wind blowing in their faces.

Okay, Robert likes the metaphors.  He can go with this.

But, it is worse than this.  And Robert thinks that public intellectuals like David Brooks need to take the next step in the analysis. They need to stop allowing the affluent dominant class to get off so easy. It is not only that “the system” is allowing some to flourish and others to suffer.  More completely, it is the actions of individuals in society that cause the pain of the underclass. There is moral blame here. Individuals in the upper and middle classes, and that is many of us, even if we don’t feel blameworthy, can’t be allowed to avoid responsibility. Personal responsibility.

So much of the dominant classes’ success is generated from damage done to the secondary class.  Individuals in the dominant class create and market the violent filth of the cinema that results in violence borne largely by the underclass. Individuals in the dominant class drive a consumer marketing behemoth that preys on human weakness for screens and celebrity.  Individuals work for the end-purpose of commercializing childhood. Individuals participate in the marketing and distribution of guns.  Very few of us wake up every morning with the goal of hurting others. Most of us feel like we are just trying to get by the best we can. To build some security for ourselves and our families. But very few of us are without blame. Our actions, however slightly, help keep others in our society back. Our actions directly or indirectly rely upon treating others as consumers of things that are not good for them. It adds up to a very ugly whole. We sow the seeds of our destruction.

Individuals in the dominant class (and I mean most of us) don’t simply benefit from a system that is not of their own making. Individuals in the dominant class, however so indirectly, are “winning,” at the cost of their morals. Every day we wake up and go to work as a middle manager at an Internet advertising firm (Google or Facebook) or at a conglomerate distributor (Walmart) or at media conglomerate (Disney), or at one of the vendors and enablers of these industries, we are acting increasingly immorally. We violate the categorical imperative. Unfortunately, in the modern day, by participating, even very slightly, we end up treating others (and ourselves, by the way) as means to and end. Not as ends in themselves.

We don’t need to destroy capitalism, or even the underlying self-interest that fuels it. But we need to look at ourselves, individually, as the source of what creates the intolerable whole. Someone needs to take the descriptive stories told by very smart people like David Brooks, and to create a normative path. Someone needs to help us point fingers at ourselves. Tell us what is moral, and what is not. Maybe there can be competing views, but we need to move away from relativistic storytelling.  Especially on the left.

By the way, Robert is not as angry or weird (hopefully) as he may seem in this post.

No school today.  That means doughnuts!

Just one each.

Are those doughnuts or Frisbees?