醉翁谈录

Let's Have Another Cup Of Coffee

Just around the corner

There's a rainbow in the sky

So let's have another cup o' coffee

And let's have another piece o' pie!

Trouble's just a bubble

And the clouds will soon roll by

So let's have another cup o' coffee

And let's have another piece o' pie

Let a smile be your umbrella

For it's just an April show'r

Even John D. Rockefeller

Is looking for the silver lining

Mister Herbert Hoover

Says that now's the time to buy

So let's have another cup o' coffee

And let's have another piece o' pie!

China Assimilates Uighur Females

From an Australian paper:

Han Chinese men had been assigned to monitor the homes of Uighur women whose husbands had been detained in prison camps. The reports came out after an anonymous Chinese official gave an interview with Radio Free Asia, confirming the program but denying there was anything sinister about it.

As part of the “Pair Up and Become Family” program, Han Chinese men stay with and sleep in the same beds as Uighur women. According to the Chinese Government, the program is designed to “promote ethnic unity”.

J reflects: Does the Pair Up program take into account what will happen when the Uyghur husbands complete their education and return home and find a Chinese man in the bed with their wives? Or that scenario will never happen? 

Real Money

A humbling thought. What is wealth? A big house in Tel Aviv? The sale of 1.5 percent of Aramco was oversubscribed 4.65 times and the total worth of the company approaches 2 Trillion US dollars. Owner: Saudi King. 

Why are Israeli teenagers so stupid?

The question, formulated more politely as "Why Israel failed in the PISA exams?", is the title of an article in today's fishwrap HaAretz. Prof. Irit Keinan * (from "Women Make Peace" movement), one of the top mandarins of the educational establishment, observes the paradox of Israel's very high investment in education and the very poor results. She writes that it should not be like that, since she KNOWS that children fail in exams because of poor facilities and lack of teaching equipment. And in Israel, education is well budgeted. The government school is frequently the only building in Bedouin tent encampments in the desert.

She discovers the solution to the paradox in the "bizarre alliance" between the right-wing political indoctrination and liberal multiculturalism. Ah! this may be an important insight! But no, she goes on protesting against the politicians in education, and proposes more humanities. To understand the idea, I try to identify the politicians in education and yes, the Minister is a politician, but under her, the bureaucracy is "technological", "professional", career-administrators with Ph.D.s in Education. What is what she wants? Whom she hates? Only she knows. **

Regarding humanities, yes, the latest directive is to emphasize mathematics, and a fifth advanced math subject has been added to the curricula. Is she against it? It is unclear.

I should moderate my criticism of the article because it provides a clear answer to the title question, why are Israeli teenagers so stupid and cannot match Equatorial Guinea *** PISA ranking. It is because Israeli educational leaders are confused and stupid. ****

----
*   She has a nice smile.
** May be she does not.
*** Equatorial Guinea does not participate in the PISA.
**** There is another possibility, but it would invalidate the gist of my criticism. May be Israelis are not very bright, could that be possible? 

Melasma: The Sign of Death

Looking in the mirror I saw a brown blotch on my right cheek, in the same place where there was an identical blotch on my Father's cheek. It is melasma, also called hyperpigmentation, and it does not hurt nor causes any harm. Most elderly Jews in my street have more blotched skin than I do, but for me it is just the beginning. It signals an hormonal change: meaning, surprise!, I am getting older. Not dead yet, but already I am carrying on my face the dark sign of my decease. Be ready! On this optimistic note, I leave and sit at the sabbath table with my replacements. 

Israeli Mandarin Prof. Yaron is far from stupid, yet ...

Sammy Peretz reports in The Marker  (Hebrew) about the speech of a High Mandarin, Prof. Amir Yaron, Chief of Bank Israel, about Israel's public investment criteria. The Bank wants to select investments that most increase the GNP, and it has calculated the yields of investments in three key sectors: Infrastructure (each shekel invested  in roads and so increases the GNP by about five shekels), education (better equipped school facilities, highly qualified teachers, more pre-kindergarten hours and so) produces six times its cost, and investing in making the bureaucracy more efficient (more computers, more regulators and consultants, etc.) costs very little and each shekel yields ten, so he says. He prefers infrastructure, like Tel Aviv underground trains project (pic), even if it yields the less of the three investment alternatives, because it is well defined, is highly visible and reduces the time spent driving at rush hours. Who can disagree?

Yaron notes that Israel's population is one of the most educated of the world, and Israel's education budget is among the highest of the world in terms of GNP. Yet the latest PISA results show that Israeli students are among the worst, ranking lower than third-world countries. He wonders "What are those students doing all those years in school?" It is obvious that they are not learning, and we do not know how to spend  in education to achieve results.

He is aware that something is not working as it should, yet he repeats that unproved, untrue relationship between investment in education and economic development. Why? He knows that spending even more in education will produce no results, yet he increases year after year the Ministry of Education's budget to the point that Israel is number one in spending (and the last in PISA exams).

I shall not comment on investing in the bureaucracy. Yaron must well know that investing in regulatory agencies does not increase the GNP but reduces it. That is obvious except for those whose salaries are an item in the Budget, say, Prof. Amir Yaron.