Spanish is done for this semester. The final was this past Thursday, and we pick it up the last day, which is Tuesday of next week. It was stressful, because last Tuesday she reviewed a little, and told us not to worry about imperfect past verbs, because she was just getting ahead, and she felt she shouldn’t put it on the test because it wasn’t on the syllabus. I would not be surprised if someone complains about the test, because she put them on the test, the imperfect past verb forms. Not only that, all most of the verbs used on the test were the irregular ones. There are quite a few, and the only way to know them is to memorize the forms.

Beyond that, I have been going through more books, just haven’t had a chance to iterate here the ones I’ve finished. It’s hard to remember which books I haven’t mentioned already, but I think I left off with Secret Empire, about espionage from the air in America. Interesting, but I got the impression there was a lot left out. After that it was China Inc., I think. This book was VERY interesting. The ruling class have one thing right, they have been beating it into the heads of the citizenry that hard work is a good thing… good for the country, good for the individual, and one of the few ways to get ahead and improve the quality of life. Because of this, and the fact that there are millions of able bodied workers, China has replaced Japan as the place to get cheap manufactured goods, and it is bringing wealth to the country, more than before anyways. The ruling class is letting foreign investors in to take advantage of the cheap labor force, but the investors have to play by China’s rules, giving all kinds of concessions for a chance at the labor market.

After that I tried Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival again, and got a little more out of it than I did the first time around. It’s very hard to grasp some of the stuff he says, partly because he’s a smart guy, and partly because he loves to support his charges with ambiguous arguments. He will use a phrase like “a recent study by a prominent government agency showed that…”. I’m sure the book has footnotes, and the sources are annotated in the back of the book, but more than a few are questionable I’m sure. He berates the government and the media all the time for keeping the important questions away from scrutiny, but uses the same tactics himself.

After that it was a science fiction book called The Stars My Destination. Not as good as I thought it would be, but then again it is an old book. After that it was more of the same with a collection of short stories called The Science Fictional Dinosaur. Some of those stories were really good..

Right now I’m working on What Kind of Nation, a book about the exploits of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and others around the beginning of the 17^th century. It is interesting, but there are times when I drift while listening and have to shut it off.