If you think our education system is getting torn asunder bit by bit rather than actually being reformed and harnessed then sign this petition. A stand can be made starting with Bryant High School.
April 29, 2012
Take a Stand, Make a Stand
March 15, 2012
"Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke."
— Paul Krugman 3/5/12
March 12, 2012
"The idea at the heart of Rumsfeld’s forgotten speech [September 10, 2001] is nothing less than the central tenet of the Bush regime: that the job of government is not to govern but to subcontract the task to the more efficient and generally superior private sector."
March 11, 2012
To Be(lieve) or Not to Be(lieve)
One cannot help but feel there is something terribly limiting in ascribing oneself to a particular ideology. Yet, simultaneously there is an emptiness that pervades in not defining oneself properly either.
March 11, 2012
"The human costs of the IMF’s opportunism [during the Asian Contagion of the late-90s] were nearly as devastating in Asia as in Russia. The International Labor Organization estimates that a staggering 24 million people lost their jobs in this period and that Indonesia’s unemployment rate increased from 4 to 12 percent. Thailand was losing 2,000 jobs a day at the height “reforms” — 60,000 a month. In South Korea, 300,000 workers were fired every month — largely the result of the IMF’s totally unnecessary demands to slash government budgets and hike interest rates. By 1999, South Korea’s and Indonesia’s unemployment rates had nearly tripled in only two years. As in Latin America in the seventies, what the region’s “miracle” in the first place: it’s large and growing middle class. In 1996, 63.7 percent of South Koreans identified as middle class; by 1999 that number was down to 38.4 percent. According to the World Bank, 20 million Asians were throwing into poverty in this period of what Rodolfo Walsh would have called planned misery."
March 11, 2012
"That was the real point of Fukuyama’s dramatic ‘end of history’ announcement at the University of Chicago lecture in 1989: he wasn’t actually claiming that there were no other ideas in the world, but merely that, with Communism collapsing, there was no other ideas sufficiently powerful to constitute a head-to-head competitor [to laissez-faire capitalism]."
— The Shock Doctrine
March 11, 2012
Math and Science
Of late, at least in the United States, an emphasis has been placed on the teaching of math and science. Thus, there are a number of arguments frequently touted in favor of this, ranging from the United States facing up to advanced international competition in the the fields where “innovation” takes place to the idea that the regression in American education has taken place due to somehow getting away from the emphasis on these subjects in the first place.
Yet, the “science” that many pundits are really pointing to is computer science, and the math they speak of resembles something more like the mundane work of accounting; after all, that’s where jobs are at. However, one would like to think there is more to life than a job. The immediate response to this would be, without even being allowed to say anything further, “you have to think practically, provide for your family..” with the list of banal points trotting on. It’s almost as if such platitudes take on a life of their own, albeit quite the comatose one.
Is this what life is reduced to? Better yet, is this what a nation of over 300 million peoplehas been reduced to? Whether there is any rectitude in the often perpetuated idea of American Exceptionalism, the idea implies that there is something soulful that can be found in America. Propounding the grand achievement of getting a job as the highest level of fulfillment one can attain in life is soulless. Where are those that have an interest in the arts, history or any other subject that doesn’t fit under the apparent golden scope of “math and science” supposed to fit in? It’s nice to have a job, but it’s better to have one with a purpose. It’s better for a nation to promote job growth in the area of purpose, not in those that simply reduce its citizens as just another cog in the wheel.
March 11, 2012
(Source: arielnietzsche, via occupywallstreet)
March 9, 2012
Pieces Of Mee: KONY 2012: Causing more harm than good.
Dear Jason Russell,
After being bombarded with your KONY 2012 crusade, I have no choice but to respond to your highly inaccurate, offensive, and harmful propaganda. I realized I had to respond in hopes of stopping you before you cause more violence and deaths to the Acholi people (Northern…
March 7, 2012
"Only a blitzkrieg approach during the window of ‘window of opportunity’ provided by the ‘fog of transition’ would get the changes made before the population had a chance to organize to protect its vested interests."
— Joseph Stiglitz
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