Maybe you just don't get it.

My "best interest?" I don't adjust my principles by whether or not I personally get a share of the loot. Is that something that doesn't make sense to you either?

I haven't run across the stereotypical managers you talk about, although I'm sure some exist. I don't reconstruct my reality around them any more than I reconstruct my views of minorities around a few gang members.

Public schools? We've BEEN over this.

My children did attend public schools, and the teachers were extraordinary, often sacrificing their own money to insure that we had supplies. I have said so many times here.

I have also showed--many times--that the constant dollar per-student spending has tripled in recent decades in public schools, while the constant-dollar salaries of teachers have barely gone up at all. That's with steadily shrinking class sizes, to boot. Meanwhile, educational results continue to worsen.

Now to a receptive mind, the above information would be what Davy Crockett would call a "sockdolager." Something that calls into question the conventional wisdom that the only thing separating us from a perfect public schools system is a much larger budget. Or that the money in our education system is being used wisely.

The holes in the conventional wisdom pile up. My childhood in many different city schools where the first day of school was heralded by a desk full of shiny new crayons and supplies. Buses brought kids to and from schools from all parts of town.

Now parents buy all the supplies, and we are hit up for donations of things for the whole class: paper towels. Writing paper. Kleenex. Frigging toilet paper. Buses are almost extinct--parents drive their kids to the schools.

And I do not live in a poor district.

We put men on the Moon with the school system of fifty years ago, and long before there was a Department of Education.

Does any of this sink in? Of course not. The information isn't even accepted, let alone processed and integrated. You don't want to know or remember anything that violates your ironclad worldviews.

I make points here that, to a reasoning mind, should be the equivalent of a boat horn in the ear. And I spend a dozen more posts slowly explaining them, and later find I have to repeat the process over and over again.

You know what? I think the reason you find my conservatism annoying is because I refuse to treat philosophy and intellectual ideas as though they were a favorite flavor of ice cream with no objective relationship to reality. I'm not playing the game right.

It might be why numbers and facts piss you off.

Maybe, just maybe, the problem's not on my end.