The Last Jedi: A Fractured Fable

**There are nothing but spoilers in this review.**

Definitely the most badass poster since ROTJ

In the closing moments of The Last Jedi, there is a wistful moment where the entire franchise’s lynchpin character gazes out over the horizon in the fading sunlight and remembers where he started from. You can sense how much the turmoil over his life has consumed him, and how he has finally found peace. It is a deep and meaningful moment in a movie that can’t decide if ‘deep and meaningful’  is what it wants to be. Does the new trilogy want to commit itself to forging out in new directions that the first trilogy blazed for films to come? Or does it seek to replicate the action-film paint-by-numbers cacophony of last year’s Rogue One in all its superficiality and inauthenticity?

Amazon takes cronyism on a nationwide tour

We are already a month into the process, so nearly everyone alive is aware that the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com has decided to expand their administrative operations beyond Seattle, to another metropolitan area.

Green = states where government is too big.

In a stroke of public relations genius, and setting the stage for a battle that would put Thunderdome to shame, cities across the country are very publicly competing for the prospect of being home to HQ2, and laying out the reddest of carpets. The advertised potential benefit to the welcoming city would be huge: $5 billion in investment, and 50,000 jobs, which would likely average in the low six figures.

Choice Needs a Voice

“Charter school saved my life.”

This isn’t just an anecdote from a concerned constituent that I have heard in passing. These are the words this very morning of my wife, an incredibly bright, but also quite introverted woman who moved from rural Nevada to Southern California in middle school, and felt lost – struggling to thrive in enormous classes that teachers had challenges managing. Then she was given the opportunity to attend high school at a charter school in Apple Valley, CA and blossomed. She graduated at the top of her class, while taking not only college-level courses in high school, but classes at local area colleges as well.

She credits this to the idea that all students are not alike and shouldn’t be educated as such. While charter schools like hers recognize and foster individual differences in learning, public schools regress to a mean established by whatever standard du jour is imposed upon them by the federal government. These methods may or may not make for good test scores, but even former New York state Teacher of the Year John Gatto doesn’t believe they lead to a well-educated mind that is capable of critical thinking.