YouTube killed the Rogan interview. Shopping for old textbooks. Grandparental health.
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YouTube killed the Joe Rogan – Robert Malone interview in one day. The link I provided yesterday is dead. They can't afford to let the truth leak out. Not to worry – here it is on Bitchute.
Chris wrote me back with a link to a Jimmy Kimmel piece praising Dr. Fauci. As a little bit of asymmetry here. Kimmel's piece will never be taken down by anybody. Nobody will object to my linking to it. On the other hand, the Joe Rogan interviews are toxic.
Who does it serve to suppress the free exchange of ideas? The simple answer is, people who have something to hide. There are good reasons why they don't want you to listen to the Joe Rogan stuff.
Kimmel goes on at length about what a great guy Tony Fauci is. Neither he nor anybody else answers the charges that have been raised about his helping Robert Gallo steal the HIV virus from the French, enriching himself from AZT as he was killing gay people, spreading lies to destroy Peter Duesberg's career because free speech jeopardized his income. And that's all long before Covid! The doctors Rogan interviewed say government malfeasance has cost a half million lives – more than the US lost in World War II – while making civil servants and Big Pharma rich? And they don't want to talk about it?
Eddie and I went to the Pochaina book market today to find a fifth grade history text in Ukrainian. I have three online versions and they are all crap. Just like American textbooks, rich with pictures, jokes, text balloons and anecdotes, and awfully thin on content.
I have written that Eddie's math textbook is pretty good, and that I have good textbooks of Ukrainian history for fifth and seventh grade in Russian, and a decent ninth grade text in Ukrainian. That led me to believe I'd be able to find something.
Nope. They simply did not have new hardcopy schoolbooks. I get the sense that the schools have moved two online texts because they are cheaper and easier to distribute.
Going through the book market was a sad experience. It used to be very lively, but now about 90% of the stalls were closed, despite the fact that it was 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Granted it is the winter holiday, but it was pretty bleak.
After trying three or four stores for new books, we went across the street to the used book sellers. We walked past 40 or 50 shuttered shops until we got clear to the end, a place that I have bought quite a bit before. Clear in the end of this last little niche, I found a guy who spoke my language. What a treat! He had whole stacks of stuff.
I wound up buying a Soviet era in history of Ukraine for seventh and eighth graders published in 1963. I'm able to read the first couple of paragraphs, which is a pretty good indication that it shouldn't be too hard for Eddie. It's 200 pages with black-and-white illustrations every fourth page or so.
Is this too hard? I bought something that is specifically for fifth grade students published in 1980. A history of the ancient world running 225 pages. About the same number of pictures, although some of them are in color.
One should never work from a single text. Besides that I like the bookseller. We got a second history of the ancient world for fifth and sixth graders published in 1959. This one just short of 200 pages, about the same percentage of illustrations, still all black-and-white.
The bookseller could see I was in a good mood. He ventured to suggest mathematics. I told him that I liked Eddie's math textbook. The material seems simple for Eddie, but I like the format of the book. He didn't give up, showing me a geometry textbook for ninth and 10th graders.
That got my attention. I had a fairly rigorous geometry course in the 10th grade that I had loved. Geometry not only teaches you something about the world, but it teaches you the notion of mathematical proofs. Pythagoras' proofs are a beautiful thing to behold, and they provide an introduction to the method of rigorously proving any mathematical proposition. I said, yes! And put it on my pile.
But he still didn't give up. He dug deeper and deeper, coming up with sixth and seventh grade geometry textbooks. I had never heard of such a thing! Eddie and I just went through geometry in his textbook. Pretty simple stuff – line segments, rays, and lines. Counting the sides of geometric figures, even some three-dimensional figures such as parallelopipeds. It does not touch on concepts such as supplementary and complementary angles, the sum of the interior angles, sum of the exterior angles, bisecting angles or any of that stuff.
Looking at the sixth grade text, the question I face is whether I should bother teaching Eddie more than the standard curriculum for his grade level. As far as mathematics goes, I don't think I will.
Eddie's biggest challenges remain reading and writing. I am thrilled to see him pick up Ukrainian fairytales and read them to Zoriana. Although he is still a little bit hesitant reading adult level stuff in English with me, he doesn't have difficulty at all with grade level Ukrainian. This is probably as it should be.
Writing remains a challenge for Eddie, as it is for most kids. It is hard to get him to commit his thoughts to paper. He uses the dictation software on his computer to produce essays in response to my requests. The software bypasses problems of handwriting, spelling, keyboarding and so on. It is simply a question of producing the thoughts and vocalizing them.
Once he has captured his thoughts in a document, he has to go back and edit to clean them up. This step is not too difficult. The biggest task is chopping up run-on sentences. The second biggest task is identifying places where the software misunderstood and inserted the wrong word. He can use translation to figure out where the words were wrong – stuff that doesn't make sense in Ukrainian didn't make sense in English in the first place. Once he gets the words right, he can use Microsoft's tools to do most of the rest of the editing.
Having bought this new history book in Ukrainian, I'm going to ask him to read a few pages at a time and summarize what it says in Ukrainian. There are a number of possible approaches. My advice would be to do the following:
· Compose his thoughts in English
· Edit to make sure that he has them right
· Translate into Ukrainian
· Fix the infrequent glitches in Ukrainian, such as incorrect cases and conjugations
However, there are many other alternatives, one would be:
· Dictate in Ukrainian into Google Translate
· Copy what he dictated into Word
· Clean it up
· Put it back into translate to make sure it makes sense in English
Having read the textbook myself in advance, I will be able to read what he writes in Ukrainian without too much difficulty. I can critique his content. Oksana may be able to check his grammar, though I think it will be better if we can find a tutor to wrap into the process. A tutor can also give me some pushback as to whether I am asking too much or too little.
The trip to the book market was my first time to the right bank of the Dnieper since October. We took the regional electric train getting there and a bus coming home. There were signs of normalcy all around us. Only half the people on the bus were wearing masks, fewer than that on the train. Nobody bothered in the stores. The number of people out and about seem to be rather low, but that may be because we are in the week between New Year's and Orthodox Christmas.
Dale wrote with some good advice on beating the winter crud. For some of it I will have to refer to his letter, but garlic stands out. Yeah. We all like garlic. I need to do that even more – thanks.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, except for Grandpa Sasha whose legs are bedeviling him again. Oksana is in fine shape, and her mother is home for the weekend to celebrate Christmas in church. Eddie always has a great time with Daddy, and Zoriana got through breakfast without Grandmother there to tell her what she couldn't eat and how hot what she did eat had to be. Daddy is pretty easy.