Homeschooling progress. A trip to the market. The dam breaks on Covid. Interview with Linh Dinh.

2021 06 20

Eddie completed his first week of homeschooling. We had a couple of objectives for the week in mathematics: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions. He handled those with ease. I inadvertently interjected negative numbers, with which he didn't have much experience. We talked about those and I think he gets the concept.

Though reading is difficult, we can see progress. Certain groups of words (might, fight, right, light, night and would, should, could) still make him stumble, even though we have talked about it a great many times. On the other hand he often gets long words right the first time, and will inexplicably trip up on a word that he has read properly the previous five times. I do not want to delve into why this is so. The main thing is to keep doing and watch the difficulties diminish. He is maintaining a good attitude, which is most important.

I asked him to write two pages about what he had read. He had the usual problems composing his thoughts. He asked me a dozen times to suggest topics from what the book. Once I suggested them he could usually come up with one or two sentences. Getting it on paper was the other issue. He is getting fairly quick at typing the home row letters. Absolutely time to move on to the rest of the keyboard in English, at which time he should be able to start to type his work.  I'll give him a couple of months to get comfortable keyboarding English and using the translator to produce Ukrainian. The Cyrillic keyboard layout is totally different, but once you have the concept of touch typing it's not that hard to do. We have a USB keyboard with dual alphabet key tops.

The major device we used this week was dictation. We established early on that my Dragon dictation was more complex than he needed. The easiest thing is to dictate into Google Translate and then cut and paste into Microsoft Word. This has the added benefit that he can immediately check to see if what he wrote makes sense. Grappling with all this new stuff is not easy, but Eddie likes a challenge.

I took Eddie and Zoriana to the Yunost hardware market this morning. A three city block warren of tiny shops that sell everything conceivable in the way of hardware, if you can only find it. We did pretty well, buying cheap crockery, light bulbs, boards and angle brackets to make a shelf for mom's computer and a tall fan for my bedroom. They don't see many kids in the market and the vendors are always very open. Zoriana had a long conversation with the lady who sold us the Soviet style crockery at 37¢ per plate. When the guy who sold us the fan started to tell me how to assemble it, I introduced Eddie as my engineer. Eddie conversed knowledgeably, and then had it together within 20 minutes after we got home. He just about has the shelf for mom's computer made.

Nicholas Wade's piece on the laboratory origins of Covid has caused the dam to break. YouTube personality WhatsHerFace as a series of devastating short takes on how they lied to us, and how the lies had been cooked up three and four years back. Bret Weinstein, in the process of being banished from YouTube but still easy to find, has laid out in detail the planning and origins of the pandemic and most frightening the deadly nature of the untested cocktail of chemicals contained in the "experimental" vaccine. Highly recommend reading his stuff before it disappears. America's Frontline Doctors have been advocating hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for a year now. Nobody has rebutted them, but they have been harassed, fired and deplatformed. My penpal Stephanie Seneff is still standing, probably because her major issue is glyphosate and not the vaccines.

I did my own research this week on the vaccines my kids are likely to take, MMR and DPT. Though the CDC's VAERS database is convoluted and very hard to navigate – the fact that this is by design is evident to me as a database guy – it is still clear that more people in the United States have died recently from the vaccines than the diseases. The situation is obviously the same in Ukraine with regard to DPT, though when it comes to measles it is more or less a push. Merely being a push, the balance favors the vaccine because it raises herd immunity. However, it is not the slamdunk of "safe and effective" that they would like to claim.

One of you readers mailed me a piece of fear propaganda claiming that "Measles killed an estimated 207,500 people last year after a decade-long failure to reach optimal vaccination coverage, resulting in the highest number of cases for 23 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said in a joint report on Thursday."  Do your own search and you will find it.

My research showed the deaths in the top four countries they listed, Madagascar, Ukraine, India and the Philippines, came to about 1600. That's more than two orders of magnitude off. These people contradict each other shamelessly. Here's another official organ making the same claim but with a number only half as big. Bottom line – they have been telling whopping lies about measles, mumps and rubella for a long time. Is there any reason to expect they are telling the truth about Covid?

Linh Dinh's long-standing series "Postcards from America" chronicles ordinary life across the country, the kind of existences that seem to be invisible to the powers that be in Washington. A few months ago he started a series Escape from America, about ex-pats. That's me. Here is my interview. I will be delighted if you chime in in the comments.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the women are spectacularly good looking in their summer best, the men strongly but not always successfully resist ogling, and the children are loving swimming in the warm lakes after so much cold weather.