{"id":10969,"date":"2008-02-15T16:16:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T21:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/02\/15\/10969.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:11","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:11","slug":"fundamentalish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/02\/15\/fundamentalish\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundamentalish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Evidently, the federal funding for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rif.org\/\">Reading Is Fundamental<\/a>\u2019s program where they give away books to poor kids has been eliminated from the budget. Or at least from the budget proposed by Our Only President. I have little doubt that it will wind up with some funding, in the end, although I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if the final compromise between the zero budget proposed and last years $25.5 million turns out to be something like $10 million.<br \/>\n<p>The RIF people would like a lot of letters to congressmen about this. YHB is skeptical of letter-writing campaigns. Some Gentle Readers, I know, are not. For them, I pass the information along without prejudice, for what it is worth.<br \/>\n<p>There are general questions about whether this is the sort of business we need our federal government to be involved in, and whether giving kids books is, absent a more coherent and more general education strategy, a good use of money. Fortunately, the correct answer to those questions is <i>yes<\/i>. Sure, it would be better if RIF was entirely funded through voluntary donations. And sure, it would be better if we had a coherent education strategy. And sure, it would be better if a poor family spent money on books instead of videogames, DVD players and fancy shoes. All of that. Fine. But so what? RIF is a Good Thing, and is doing a good job at turning money into books for kids.<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which YHB sticks to fundamentals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18270,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10969\/revisions\/18270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}