A hunger for education

School lunches are not something I know much about. We had lunches in Catholic school but all I remember about them is that they received surplus food from the agriculture department's program to support farmers -- apparently pea farmers needed the most support judged by the volume of peas we were served.

And all i remember about that is that my mother was incensed when she discovered that surplus butter was not being given to us in school but was allowed to go rancid in the kitchen at Our Lady of the Assumption school. We couldn't afford to eat butter at our house; we ate the cheapest margarine.

The other day I heard bits and pieces of a radio interview about the history of school lunches while I was working around the house but I still do not know much about school lunches.

At least part of that interview was about payment subsidies -- as opposed to food subsidies -- for children whose parents are unable to feed them. In my area, and many others, there are now programs to send backpacks of food home with children over the weekend, and some schools keep serving meals during vacation.


It struck me that if there is even a colorable argument that millions of children in this country whose parents work need government lunches, then our economic system has failed.

Good old German know-how

RtO won't be celebrating the men on the Moon along with everyone else, although I will how long will pause to remember the 30,000 people who were murdered in order to make it happen.

The first and trivial reason  that I won't be celebrating is that it was pointless, as is demonstrated by the fact that no one has gone back to that dead rock for the past half century. It was impressive all right, but so is a Chinese acrobat spinning 20 plates on rods.

The second and important reason to avoid celebrating is that at the bottom of the achievement was crime. Many many crimes in fact, crime that continued long after the Moon men came home. Balzac wrote behind every great fortune is a great crime. This indictment is too broad if there is something to his thought.

Although there was no scientific point in going to the Moon, the crime had a political point: the United States was desperate to prove our moral superiority to the Commies, which we did by hiring Nazi war criminals to build a rocket.

A friend of mine was as a young Air Force officer given the job of calculating the orbits of Air Force satellites. In that job he came to know the Nazis in Huntsville. They were very very happy to be there, he once told me. Indeed. They were aware that if there were any justice in the world they would've been swinging from gibbets.

All this was known or knowable to the public at the time. The public chose and still chooses not to care.

Fear in the streets

Since nobody else is going to say it, not even those most adamantly alarmist and angry about Trump's pathetic parade, in much of the world American tanks in the street and planes in the sky are terrifying, because they mean indiscriminbate destruction and death.