The cartoonist who created the Peanuts gang and television specials like “A Charlie Brown Christmas” drew from some of his experiences as an Army staff sergeant during World War II to fashion the enduringly popular comic series.
Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind “Peanuts,” took part in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and the occupation of Munich shortly before the end of the war.
Biographies about Schulz, as well as his own essays, talk about the impact military service had on him and the characters he created.
“The three years I spent in the army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness,” Schulz wrote in “My Life with Charlie Brown,” published in 2010. “My sympathy for the loneliness that all of us experience is dropped heavily upon poor Charlie Brown.”
Charles Schulz’s kid characters are precocious, cruel, and nihilistic. They’re also among the most compelling in children’s literature.
Source: Did Charles Schulz Really Write ‘Peanuts’ for Kids? – The Atlantic
For four years, Democrats have had a fairly simple theory of action when it came to education. Something along the lines of “Good lord, a crazy lady just came into our china shop riding a bull, waving around a flamethrower, and dragging a shark with a head-mounted laser beam; we have to stop her from destroying the place (while pretending that we have a bull and a shark in the back just like hers).”
Now, of course, that will, thank heavens, no longer fit the circumstances. The Democrats will need a new plan.
Trouble is, the old plan, the one spanning both the Clinton and Obama years, is not a winner. It went, roughly, like this:
The way to fix poverty, racism, injustice, inequity and economic strife is to get a bunch of children to make higher scores on a single narrow standardized test; the best shot at getting this done is to give education amateurs the opportunity to make money doing it.
This was never, ever a good plan. Ever. Let me count the ways.
Source: CURMUDGUCATION: Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action
A study of 50 years of tax cuts found that “trickle-down” economics — a concept pushed by Republican lawmakers to justify slashing taxes on the wealthy — have only benefited the rich and worsened economic inequality while failing to decrease unemployment or grow the economy.
Source: 50-year study of tax cuts on wealthy shows they always fail to “trickle down” | Salon.com
Source: Your brain on cortisol: Why overstressed gray matter is leading us astray in lockdown