The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/934377
C-10 Opinion Wednesday, Januar y 31, 2018 The Press-Dispatch TECHNOLOGY Continued from page 9 Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Trump acknowledges School Choice Week Court Report CRIMINAL Pike Circuit Court Brian D. Wedding II charged with battery resulting in moderate bodily injury, a level 6 felony. James A. Green charged with bat- tery resulting in moderate bodily in- jury, a level 6 felony. In re: search warrant. In re: search warrant. In re: search warrant. In re: Intrastate probation transfer. In re: Intrastate probation transfer. CIVIL Pike Circuit Court Carolynne Dreiman sues Dana Moy- es, aka Dana Chen, Dana France or Da- na Gott on complaint. Name change of Roni Lynne Fiscus. Federal National Mortgage Associ- ation sues Eric L. McQueen, aka Er- ic McQueen, Vicki D. McQueen, aka Vicki McQueen, American General Fi- nancial Services, NK A OneMain Fi- nancial of Ohio, Allied Collection Ser- vices, Inc., and Pike County School Corporation on complaint. Donya Marie Simmons sues Rus- sell Kent Simmons for dissolution of marriage. TRAFFIC AND MISDEMEANOR Pike Circuit Court Jessica L. Smith charged with oper- ating a vehicle while intoxicated. Rodney W. McDowell charged with domestic battery. Eric M. Slunder charged with disor- derly conduct. Aaron Nowark charged with disor- derly conduct. SMALL CLAIMS Pike Circuit Court Hoosier Accounts Service sues Kel- lie J. Blume on complaint. Hoosier Accounts Service sues Al- len L. Cox on complaint. Hoosier Accounts Service sues Tara M. Lyons on complaint. Hoosier Accounts Service sues Cheri L. McLaughlin on complaint. Hoosier Accounts Service sues Zo- ey I. Risley on complaint. Hoosier Accounts Service sues John R. Montgomery, Jr. on complaint. D&S Hardware, Inc. DBA Peters- burg Hardware sues Taylor S. Cates on complaint. Tower Construction sues Kylie Ham- mock on complaint. INFRACTIONS Pike Circuit Court David Jennings charged with stop- ping, standing or parking where pro- hibited. Zachary Parks charged with speed- ing, 65 mph in a 55 zone. DeMarcus Peterson charged with speeding, 69 mph in a 55 zone. Dalton Short charged with driving while suspended. Justin Hughes charged with speed- ing, 64 mph in a 55 zone. Michael Hoff charged with speeding, 92 mph in a 70 zone. Continued from page 9 TUITION the symbol of the god Tam- muz (being in the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name) in that coun- try and in adjacent lands, including Egypt." Regardless of the exact fashion of the cross, the cross was so prevalent in the life and death of Jesus that, that word became an iconic symbol of Christi- anity. There are few known uses of the cross in the church for the first two centuries. The cross to the disciples of that era repre- sented a gruesome form of execution. Therefore, there was great reluctance among the faithful to use it. However, toward the end of the second century, the cross was emerging as a symbol of the church and Christians, and mention of it can be found in anti- Christian writings of the period. Over time different types of crosses began to be used in Christian ico- nography, with the St. An- drews cross being the most prevalent. By the middle of the third century A.D., the church began to embrace the cross as a symbol and icon of the faith, and by the fourth century, the church replaced its use of the St. Andrews cross, to the Lat- in cross. It was during this timeframe that the rit- ual of making the sign of the cross became common- place within the church. The use of the cross as a symbol of Lent is obvious because it represents suf- fering and affliction. Lent as practiced by the church across the centuries was to observe a time before Easter to contemplate the death of Jesus and the af- fliction He endured. Part two next week will center upon Lent, the mean- ing of the cross and how to live a sacrificial life. Think about it as you live a life pleasing unto God! Continued from page 9 THE CROSS misconduct during the Obama administration. Andrew McCarthy left his federal post in 2003, but he is once again confront- ing the wreckage of faith- less public servants in po- sitions of trust. He parses the evidence nowadays as a scholar and National Re- view columnist. Now it is evidence that President Obama discour- aged prosecution of crimi- nal behavior by his Secre- tary of State, Hillary Clin- ton, because he was guilty of the same behavior. It's evidence that the presi- dent lied when he said he learned of the email scan- dal from media accounts, just like everybody else. McCarthy compares early drafts of FBI Direc- tor James Comey's memo- randum with the sanitized final version, and with in- ternal emails between senior Obama staff that raised objections to the early version. He has per- suaded me that Comey was not even remotely indepen- dent or impartial. Comey deleted a sen- tence from his earlier draft that referred to email be- tween Secretary Clinton and President Obama. At the direction of his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, he called the FBI's inquiry a "matter" instead of an "investigation." This is the same woman who met privately, unan- nounced, with former pres- ident Bill Clinton on an air- plane parked on the Sky Harbor tarmac in Phoe- nix, and claimed their con- versation was about grand- children. She said shortly thereafter that she would accept the FBI director's judgment whether Mrs. Clinton should be pros- ecuted, but she already knew what his memoran- dum was going to say, and she supervised its writing. Finally, McCarthy es- tablishes that Comey cir- culated early drafts of his memorandum exonerat- ing Mrs. Clinton before his FBI agents had completed their investigation. There is evidence that Comey began drafting Mrs. Clin- ton's exoneration before she was even interviewed. The "deep-state" FBI leadership is no longer en- titled to the benefit of the doubt. On the contrary, we are entitled to their trans- parency. The Department of Justice and FBI should comply with all current Congressional subpoenas, and desist from the Clin- tonesque tactic of claim- ing that they've "lost" in- convenient documents and email messages. Make the FBI credible again. student loans. Although the PROSPER Act now before Congress doesn't fully achieve this goal, it does begin reforming the HEA in a way that will lower costs for students and unburden taxpayers. The bill would create a single loan option for borrowers, simplifying the current nine convo - luted repayment options into just two: a standard 10 -year repayment plan and an income-based re- payment option. Perhaps most significantly, the proposal would elimi- nate loan forgiveness pro- grams. Today, students can have their loans for- given after 20 years — a figure which drops to just 10 years if a student en- ters government or non- profit work after college. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that American taxpayers are set to lose $108 billion over the next decade due to loan forgiveness pol- icies. Loan forgiveness unfairly shifts the burden of paying for college from the student to the taxpay- er, more than two-thirds of whom do not hold bach- elor's degrees them- selves. At the same time, such practices enable uni- versities to raise tuition, knowing that students will have their loans for- given in due time. Importantly, in addi- tion to ending generous loan forgiveness policies, PROPSPER would also eliminate the in-school interest subsidy, which costs taxpayers nearly $ 8 billion per year, and isn't well-targeted to low- income students. Although there is more work to be done to real- ly cut college costs, con- solidating student loans, eliminating loan forgive- ness, and eliminating in- school interest subsidies provides a long-overdue step toward resetting col- lege pricing. Encourag- ing private lending to re- emerge would also help. Additional reforms to accrediting processes that include alternative education opportunities, without expanding ar- bitrary power to execu- tive branch officials, are among PROSPER's fur- ther moves in the right direction. However well-mean- ing federal policy on ed- ucation, it's clearly mak- ing the problem worse. It's time for lawmak- ers to show that they've learned this very expen- sive lesson — and help make college more avail- able and more affordable once again. Ed Feulner is the found- er of The Heritage Foun- dation (heritage.org). Amidst the ongoing political noise and distractions in Washington, D.C., President Trump continues to focus on and address the nation's most deep- seated problems. In the wake of signing a temporary funding bill to get the government back open, the president directed at- tention to one of our biggest problems. Education. Trump proclaimed the week of Jan. 22 as National School Choice Week. National School Choice Week began in 2011. Trump's proclamation notes a commitment to "a future of unprec- edented educational achievement and freedom of choice." We have a president keenly aware of the need to fundamentally change the status quo in our education system. And one indication of this pledge is his selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. DeVos spoke recently at the Amer- ican Enterprise Institute in Washing- ton, and she delivered remarks about the state of education in America that were courageous. She spoke about the mediocre per- formance of our students, compared to those in other nations of the world, in the Program for International Stu- dent Assessment. Why, when we have among the highest education spending in the world per student, should Amer- ican students be ranking 23 in reading, 25 in science and 40 in math? Even by our own measures in our National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Re- port Card, the results remain disap- pointing. In the case of our black children, the results are dismal. In the 2015 NAEP math scores, 17 percent of black fourth-graders and 11 per- cent of black eighth-grad- ers performed at "profi- cient" levels. In reading, 16 percent of black fourth- graders and 15 percent of black eighth-graders were "proficient." Billions have been spent on education with little to show for the ef- forts. DeVos' bold bottom line: "Federally mandated assessments. Federal money. Federal standards. All originated in Washington, and none solved the problem." We had the No Child Left Behind Act under President Bush, and the Race to the Top Fund under President Obama. Different approaches, but the same power, control and money com- ing from Washington. "The bottom line is simple," said De- Vos. "Federal education reforms have not worked as hoped." A number of left-wing journalists to- day are questioning the mental health of our president. But DeVos' brutally honest assess- ment about the state of education in our country shows that if we have a mental health problem, it resides with those who keep pushing more and more government when this approach consistently fails us. "Insanity," reportedly said Einstein, "is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." How, in a country so diverse in val- ues as ours, can we possibly have gov- ernment controlling how all children are educated? How, in a country that values human freedom, as we allegedly do, can we pre- vent parents from deciding how to educate their chil- dren? Today, there are 63 dif- ferent school choice pro- grams across the nation involving 469,000 individu- als, according to EdChoice. But total expenditures on school choice programs are still less the 0.4 percent of the $586.8 billion we spend annually on K-12 education. One bombshell that Betsy DeVos dropped in her AEI remarks is that federally imposed performance stan- dards in reading and math – known as Common Core – is "dead" at the De- partment of Education. Not because of ideology. Because these federal stan- dards demonstrably do not work. Few would disagree that America's economic and political freedom is the source of our strength and prosperi- ty. Yet, how can we deny America's se- cret of success to the marketplace of greatest importance to our future – ed- ucation? It's not unreasonable to think that one reason the stock market is boom- ing is that our American leadership has the courage to bring real change. Educational freedom is at the core of a new American prosperity. Star Parker is an author and presi- dent of CURE, Center for Urban Renew- al and Education. Contact her at www. urbancure.org. What have we gained from these ac- tivities then? Mostly quick and accu- rate information, but sometimes and unfortunately, inaccurate or false in- formation. I have fondly watched pro- grams about court cases such as Judge Judy and Judge Millan where evidenc- es are presented using text messag- es, e-mails, videos, facebook, etc. on claims for evidence. Practically ev- erybody hands over their cell phones to show to the judge what items and events got recorded. Hardly do we see paper evidence submitted for ar- gument. Looking back from decades ago, we used to haul a lot of papers and pictures for documentations of many things. Before I finally entered my life of re- tirement, I used to carry thick charts that were heavy and bulky. On the fi- nal years of my profession, I carried instead my brain waves and used the laptops inside the rooms to do every- thing I needed to. Only occasionally did I even need to write prescriptions on a pad, except for some required re- stricted medications if I'm away from my laptop. How times have changed. I'm glad I got to experience the days of modern information technology. • • • When I inherited the practice of my predecessor, beloved Dr. Milton Om- stead in the year 1978, he left a cabinet filled with a 4x6 set of cards which con- tained patients' names, date of birth, notations on one or two lines of diag- noses, and the treatment. That was all. He also had a set of very clean and orderly notations on notebooks about house calls he made, with diagnoses and treatments, mostly for the home deliveries he performed. Surprising- ly, his house calls pretty much took place on seven-day-a-week, week af- ter week, month after month. What an amazing feat. Moving forward into the '70s, I chuckle at the thought that I used to carry around one to two inches thick of chart documents, giving about the same diagnoses and providing the same treatment as my predecessor did, but now it involved more legal language and protective documents. There were tons of information by oth- er specialist doctors who dictated one to six pages of what they have thought about referred cases and what proce- dures they did. I went from writing some important notes to dictating lengthy documents. Some of my colleagues called them, pardon the expression, documents with a lot of verbal diarrhea. Moving some more years forward, now I had to learn three different types of medi- cal computer programs that each took three months to get familiar with. Be- lieve me, every time I thought I mas- tered one, the support tech would send a note explaining they were upgrading the system. Now we had to learn new systems again. Excuse me? Was this part of progress or their job security? Nothing against those wonderful sci- entists who took care of the technolo- gy. We owe them a lot. • • • Do you remember about two weeks ago, when I mentioned something about SIRI (I think it stands for Speech Interpretation and Recognition Inter- face)? Apparently the software came from Stanford Research Institute Ar- tificial Intelligence Center. This pro- gram has saved me a lot of time. When I want some answers to anything I don't know, I press the unlock button for a few seconds, then I dictate my question, and I'm not kidding, the an- swers come back in 2-3 seconds in the form of a woman's voice telling me, "Here's what I found…." Then it gives me a whole gamut of choices of top- ics or the appropriate answer/s. Ex- ample, when I ask SIRI when the IU basketball schedules are, it immediate- ly gives me the whole calendar of the games for the season and many details that are helpful. I hardly use Yahoo or Google search engine anymore. Now, how spoiled can you get? When I want to go places, I tell SIRI to show directions to a cer- tain address and it subsequently shows me how to get there. And prompts me street by street turns. For those who have become famil- iar with what I'm I am writing about, you've become savvy. For those who have not yet reached this point, ask your four year-old kids or grandkids or siblings. They will either help you or confuse you. Have a great week! Continued from page 9 FBI