Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

Report from Louisiana: COVID-19 and online teaching

Posted: March 16, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

By: Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – What a difference a day makes.  Wednesday, last week, I was cutting across the Atchafalaya Basin on an airboat enjoying Spring Break, and within twenty-four hours of that Governor John Bel Edwards closed down K-12 schools, universities were shuttered, and everyone is practicing social distancing. Well, except New Orleans; they do their own thing there.

As an educator, I can tell you that my students are full of anxiety. Fortunately, I’m in a better position than a lot of people in that my kids have already been using Google Classroom. I immediately posted a sort of “check-in” assignment and on Sunday, still technically on Spring Break, most of my kids responded. Since then, most have filled in.

By Friday, my husband and I had returned to Shreveport and decided we needed a few groceries after being out of town for a week.

Big mistake.

The store was chaos.

You’ve seen images from all over the country, or seen it yourself, I’m sure. Even today, days later, there are zero paper products in the stores. Zero dried beans, no rice, canned goods are sparse. Things are restocking, but good grief – what chaos.

In Louisiana, our schools are closed until mid-April; I’ve got friends in other states who have said they won’t return to school at all this year. So far there are no directives from the Louisiana State Department of Education on graduation or testing, which has filled my students with anxiety.

As of today, all casinos in Louisiana are closed for two weeks, except those on Indian reservation. The economic loss to the state is estimated at $22 million.

With bars and restaurants closing, people staying home from work, schools closed…I don’t even want to think about the long-term economic effects of this.  It’s mind blowing, to me.

So, meanwhile, I’m teaching school from home, trying to reassure my students and still be sure they are learning. We are staying in as much as possible. Louisiana currently has 114 positive cases and two deaths. Most are in the Orleans parish area – no surprise given that Mardi Gras just happened.

Stay safe where you are. Be smart. Don’t panic or overreact.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Is Joe Biden a moderate? Checkout his campaign website

Posted: March 12, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

It has been often reported by the liberal media, and even some on the political right, that Joe Biden is a moderate.  My immediate reaction to these statements is that they are a bunch of bunk. After studying his positions and statements on issues I knew he is nearly as far  to the left as Bernie Sanders.  To confirm this I checked out the Biden for President official website.  Here are his positions on some of the most important issues.  All quotes are from his campaign website and all emphasis is from the website.

Joe Biden still is completely all for ObamaCare, which was a socialist takeover of our healthcare industry.

As president, Biden will protect the Affordable Care Act from these continued attacks. He opposes every effort to get rid of this historic law – including efforts by Republicans, and efforts by Democrats. Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate.

Because Joe Biden supports the public option rather than the full Medicare for All, he is slightly more moderate on healthcare than Sanders.  He is only slightly less to left of Sanders because the public option has always been a stealthy installment plan way of eventually reaching an entirely government run healthcare system.

Giving Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option like Medicare. If your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another, better choice. Whether you’re covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers.

As you can see from this quote on gun control Joe Biden is very much a radical leftist.

It’s within our grasp to end our gun violence epidemic and respect the Second Amendment, which is limited. As president, Biden will pursue constitutional, common-sense gun safety policies.

As president Joe Biden would use executive orders to drastically infringe on our right to bear arms.

Joe Biden also knows how to make progress on reducing gun violence using executive action. After the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, President Obama tasked Vice President Biden with developing both legislative proposals and executive actions to make our communities safer.

Here is a very radical gun control proposal.

Hold gun manufacturers accountable. In 2005, then-Senator Biden voted against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, but gun manufacturers successfully lobbied Congress to secure its passage. This law protects these manufacturers from being held civilly liable for their products

Here are three more gun control quotes from his website.  Judge for yourself whether they are radical or moderate.

Get weapons of war off our streets. The bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that Biden, along with Senator Feinstein, secured in 1994 reduced the lethality of mass shootings.

Buy back the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines already in our communities. Biden will also institute a program to buy back weapons of war currently on our streets.

Reduce stockpiling of weapons. In order to reduce the stockpiling of firearms, Biden supports legislation restricting the number of firearms an individual may purchase per month to one.

That last quote is one of the most radical positions I’ve encountered.  The government at any level has no right to tell anyone how many guns they can own.

The immigration section of the Joe Biden Website is very lengthy and very far to the left.  Here is the most telling quote,

Creates a roadmap to citizenship for the nearly 11 million people who have been living in and strengthening our country for years. These are our mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. They are our neighbors, co-workers, and members of our congregations and Little League teams.

This one quote is an attempt to appear more centrist. Democrats have promised border security but have never delivered.

As president, Biden will finish the work of building a fair and humane immigration system–restoring the progress Trump has cruelly undone and taking it further. He will secure our border, while ensuring the dignity of migrants and upholding their legal right to seek asylum.

On the environment Joe Biden is very much a radical leftist.  As you can see he fully supports the Green New Deal which is a 90 trillion dollar laundry list of liberal dreams and desires.

Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.

Spread the word on social media that Joe Biden is very much a radical leftist

The Paris Library: A Book Review

Posted: March 9, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Add The Paris Library to your summer reading list. Any fan of historical fiction, or any book lover in general, will love this book! 

Coming out in June of 2020, The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles is an engaging tale that is narrated on dual timelines and is sure to become a best seller. A book lover’s delight, I could not help but think about Susan Orlean’s The Library Book as I was reading.  I was provided an ARC via NetGalley and Atria Books in exchange for a fair and honest review, and I am strongly recommending this book.

Navigating dual timelines, the author weaves an engaging plot between two characters, Odile and Lily. Set in both WWII Paris and 1980s Froid, Montana, we are drawn into both their stories knowing they will soon combine, and they do in a beautiful way.

As the book opens, a young Odile begins a new job as a librarian at The American Library in Paris at the onset of WWII, and her narrative is peppered with Dewey Decimal references which could have been very odd and distracting but is in fact absolutely charming. As the employees of the library work to protect their books, and themselves, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, it is interesting to note that many of the characters in this novel are real people and many of the events also all too real.

The author has drawn from the papers of Dorothy Reeder who served as the director of The American Library in Paris during World War II. At the end of the novel, Ms. Charles brings us up to date with what happened to the characters in real life after the war.

Perhaps because of the fact that many of the characters were real people, their story line in the novel is the more engaging and developed one, but the contemporary story line of Odile is still deftly drawn and merges beautifully with Lily’s in 1980s Froid, Montana, where Odile is considered “the war bride,” and an eccentric, odd sort of person. I won’t give any spoilers here, but the ending of the book is absolutely perfect and a very satisfying ending.

This is the kind of book you can get lost in for a few hours, or wade leisurely through over a couple of days. Either way I highly recommend The Paris Library. Mark your calendar for June 2020.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

If we could stop looking to the federal government to solve our problems that would be great

Posted: March 5, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

It is abundantly clear from the transcripts of the Constitutional Convention and the transcripts of the Ratification Debates, the framers of the Constitution would never have dreamed that the federal government would become the primary solver of all the problems facing the people of the United States.  In fact most would be horrified, saddened, and confused to learn how it is now.

The framers of the Constitution would be horrified to learn that most problems are now solved on the federal government level because they knew the end result of this would be an extremely large and powerful federal government.  They knew that such a large and powerful federal government would be an extreme threat to the rights and liberty of the American people.  They took great care to write a Constitution that would prevent the federal government from growing so large and powerful.

The framers of the Constitution would be saddened to hear that the American people chose to abandon the constitution that they so expertly crafted for us.  Only by abandoning the Constitution could we allow the federal government to become the solver of all of our problems.

The framers of the Constitution would be confused that the federal government is now the primary solver of most of our problems because of all the provisions they worked into the Constitution to make sure the federal government would not have power and authority to carry out this role.  The federal government created by the Constitution was only meant to carry specific roles namely, to defend the United States as a whole, to represent the United States as one nation diplomatically to other nations, and to prevent the individual states from squabbling with each other.  The Constitution created a federal government with a very limited number of powers, all of them clearly spelled out.  None of those powers grant the federal government the power and authority to solve problems such as healthcare, poverty, education, and so much more.

The framers of the Constitution knew that the individual States, local governments, and individuals were the proper places to solve the problems of this nation,  That is exactly the blueprint they used when they wrote the Constitution.

Here is my solution to the healthcare crisis that would fit into the Constitution, and has a remarkable probability of working: let each state come up with their own unique solution to the problem for the residents of that state.  The government of each state could communicate with each other to find out which solutions worked the best and perhaps copy it.

The federal government has tried to fix education and has only made the problem far greater.  The same holds true for poverty.

To increase the prosperity of individuals the federal government needs to get out of the way.  For far too many decades the federal government has smothered private businesses with too many regulations.  President Trump has begun to dial this back, however, there is so much more that needs to be done.  Greatly slashing tax rates would be a tremendous help also, the first Trump tax were only a small step in that direction.

The war on poverty has only resulted in more poverty and way too much dependence on government handouts.  Private charity would do far more good along with the greatly increased standard of living that would be generated for everyone with slashed regulations and taxes.

So many other problems we are looking to the federal government to solve would actually be solved at the state and local level if we let that happen.

Older Entries
Newer Entries