School sucks
I have no desire to go back to school. I hated it then. I’m not interested in it now. (For added measure, its cost does not make the prospect more inviting.) How often do you hear somebody say something like “I love reading now that I’m no longer in school” or “I enjoy learning so much more as an adult than I did when I was a kid.” We all feel this way to some degree, and researcher Peter Gray
explains the reason. Humans do not learn best when the education is coerced.
Our schools were set up in a way that is structurally damaging to the learning process, and we’re paying the price as a society by clinging to blind tradition rather than exploring innovation. Children love self-discover. They have a deep, natural curiosity and strong critical thinking skills. These pieces are in place long before they even enroll in school. The maturation in the early years is rapid. As they age, typically, school work becomes something to be endured. I had no interest in the natural sciences when I was a student. The work was compulsory and the subject matter did not resonate. But now that I live in the world, I find myself attracted to the subject tremendously. It seems silly to me to credit school for laying “the groundwork.” I’m not retroactively more thankful for having been introduced to the concepts at a young age. To the contrary, I’m resentful that my interest laid dormant for so long because I had been made to associate the subject matter itself with the process by which it was fed to me.
Much of education today also doubles as institutional reinforcement of the social order, particularly higher education. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a letter of support to a writing colleague at IUPUI, Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, a school with a decidedly-unglamorous reputation. He expressed support for urban schools "whose diplomas are not famous for being tickets to establishments of the ruling class." "Your students," he wrote, "are miles ahead of the Ivy League, since they feel no obligation to pretend that America is something it obviously isn't."
As an adult, free of obligatory study, dictatorial judgment, time restraints, and age segregation, I can see the forest for the orthodoxy.
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A new Reuters poll finds that only nine percent of Americans support U.S. military intervention in Syria. But I’ll be damned if you can tell it by watching the news. The network news shows yesterday and this morning (which, granted, are not really news shows) are beating the war drums. They are treating the intervention as an inevitability and even an imperative for the Obama administration. Secretary of State Kerry called President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapon a “moral obscenity.” Here come the cops.
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Charles Pierce gets
it. The three franchises battling it out for supremacy in the National League Central are an anomaly, all original National League franchises still playing their home games in the city of their birth. Pay close attention in September. It's a special situation.
The Empire Strikes Back
How do you combat the leaked reports of criminal wrongdoing by your government? If you’re the government of Great Britain, you begin
leaking your own secrets, but you do it to your own choice of source, and then you attribute the leak to Edward Snowden to give the appearance that the former NSA-contracted employee is leaking “harmful” information to sources indiscriminately. What’s the word to use after you’ve blown past “Orwellian”?
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The U.S. government, incidentally, is not against leaking information. They are the biggest leaker of U.S. government secrets on the planet. Bigger than Edward Snowden, bigger than Julian Assange, bigger than Chelsea Manning. Officials at the Department of Justice, as an example, leak information all the time if it serves the department’s prosecutorial purposes. They leak names and information about Americans they’re trying to build legal cases against for presumed steroid and narcotics abuse. They violate the privacy of sealed grand jury indictments. Indeed, the only leaks they get testy about are the ones that reveal government crimes.
The law abiders
This week has been a banner week in Iowa for the National Rifle Association. A story almost tailor-made for them played out in Western Iowa and it allowed the lobby group to score major points on statewide media and beyond. Rodney Long, a 38-year-old escapee from the Clarinda Correctional Facility, was shot dead by a 71-year-old retiree that he was holding hostage in a farmhouse along with the man’s wife.
In yesterday’s Des Moines Register, a representative from a group called the Iowa Firearms Coalition (an NRA-affiliated club), was quoted within the first seven paragraphs of the front page, “above-the-fold” story in response to the shooting. A spokesman said that it was “definitely a living example of why our right to keep and bear arms is important,” and he lamented that “more of these stories don’t get the media’s attention. There are people who defend themselves from criminals in their homes every day in the U.S.” Today, there’s a follow-up story online and in the print edition of the paper about the “renewed call” in Iowa for a “stand your ground” law in the wake of Long’s killing.
Now here’s the part of the same news story that nobody focuses on. The escapee Long was only armed because he broke into another farmhouse first and stole ammunition and a semi-automatic handgun. So once again we’re examining the tale of a “law-abiding” gun owner having failed to keep his or her firearms safe from the “bad guys.” Time and time again we’re told that the “good guys” need to be armed to keep us safe from criminals and then that philosophy put into practice leads to violence. The same thing happened in Newtown, Connecticut. Law-abiding citizen Nancy Lanza failed to keep her firearm out of the hands of her dangerous son, Adam, and 26 school children and educators were murdered.
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Tuff without a gun: Now, for what it’s worth,
a story about a mentally-unstable would-be shooter being disarmed by human compassion.
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Here’s a fact that’s more inescapable than the Clarinda Correctional Facility: “Stand your ground” laws are racist. There was never any doubt that Sanford, Florida police were there to protect George Zimmerman, not Trayvon Martin, even though the facts of their tragedy portray a story in which Martin was the one with the moral authority to “stand his ground.” And nobody older than me can remember gun rights activists coming to the political aid of the Black Panthers when they were encouraging their members to carry guns and defend themselves against violence in the late '60s and early '70s.
Quota Sales U
This is
an interesting article about for-profit schools. The author is precisely correct that students that attend these schools are looked down upon by their peers. But that has to do with the way our increasingly-Ayn Rand-ian country has demonized poverty. Students born of privilege look down their noses at their academic competitors of a lower economic class because that’s what they’ve been trained to do by their parents.
However, this fact does not mean that for-profit schools are not predatory. The author of this piece points to an interview subject of hers, "J.J.", a military veteran, who wrote to her an impressive defense of his education via a for-profit school, ITT Technical Institute. This is noble, and his passion is persuasive. But exactly like the health care industry, it’s imperative that the social investment industry of higher education never operate with a financial mission.
America’s early experience with for-profit schools bears this out completely. Institutions bound to private ownership or shareholders are contacting potential students through phone and television promising a college degree “without leaving your living room,” but what steps are they taking to make sure students are advancing and graduating after the school has cashed the funds from the student's need-based federal Stafford loans? Almost to a school, these for-profit outfits are churning out student loan default rates at more than double the national average among their former students.
“J.J.” is correct is his assertion that there is tremendous administrative waste at the top of most public universities and private non-profit schools, but he’s wrong to be impressed that his for-profit school “pays taxes.” I guarantee you that ITT is paying taxes back to the U.S. Treasury at a tiny fraction of the amount they’re extracting from it.
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What I dread about growing older: The widening gap between me and my age compatriots in our general opinion about the relative state of the world and particularly that of “young people today.” I used to visit my grandparents in Texas in a retirement park. They aged very well in this respect, but I remember their friends coming to the house and sharing their rather sour concerns. I’m 38 years old and I’m already starting to detect my age mates trying to pull me down into the morass of perceived “cultural decay.” I can deal with getting old, but dealing with old people, I don’t know.
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We now know that the NSA has broken the law thousands of times with their surveillance activities. An internal audit in May of 2012 tallied 2,776 incidents in the previous 12 months alone of unauthorized access, storage, distribution, or collection. How bad has it gotten when the agency is defying even the judgments of its rubber-stamp secret court (FISA)?
It's in the game
Ed O’Bannon and a group of a dozen former and current major college athletes are suing the NCAA and gaming company EA Sports for unauthorized use of their likenesses on NCAA-sponsored video games. The lawsuit has caused the Southeastern Conference to end their licensing agreement with EA. The Des Moines Register’s Andrew Logue feels “caught in the middle” as he’s a consumer and he just wants to “plug in (his) console(s), tune out any sort of legal wrangling, and lock (his) favorite team into Dynasty Mode.”
I’m not a gamer, but I know exactly how he feels. I like cheap shit and I felt like I was caught in the middle when Walmart’s garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 430 people.
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I am not an attorney-- though I sometimes play one on the internet-- and yet it seems as if President Obama provided Edward Snowden with a strong legal defense last week. By acknowledging that the American people deserve to have a “dialogue” about the NSA program, in effect arguing that there was a public interest in the details of the program, wasn’t he also acknowledging that the information should not have been classified?
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Now that Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly’s racist “stop-and-frisk” policy has been ruled unconstitutional, let’s examine the good that came of it: Between 2004 and 2011, these “stop-and-frisk” stops of mostly black- and brown-skinned men (90% of the overall total) produced enlightening results of just how non-dangerous these profiled characters really are.
Even though these were supposedly the “right” individuals to target, less than two percent of these unconstitutional stops led to the uncovering of a weapon. Nearly nine-tenths of all stops did not lead to other law enforcement action (such as an arrest or a summons), and that’s even taking into account that “other” action would include draconian drug seizures and charges.
The first question to pose is why the NYPD thought it could engage in policing that was clearly racist. (The judge in the case pointed out in her verdict that the department has been given “actual and constructive notice since at least 1999 of widespread Fourth Amendment violations” occurring with this approach to community policing.) The results of their defiant efforts nonetheless beg a second question: Why is New York City law enforcement still fighting to continue tactics that have proven so futile?
Rejoice White Establishment, you can now take a deep breath, relax your shoulders, and un-clutch your purse. Unless the guy is packing a parcel of Skittles and an iced tea, you’re aces.
Malfeasance and sacred cows
The NSA is completely lawless. Its audacity is striking. Even when caught, their officers double down on the lies and continue to cover-up the extent of their surveillance crimes. Thanks to
Reuters, we now know that the NSA is not just sharing information about criminal investigations of terrorism, but sharing information with the DEA on drug investigations. In concert, they’ve been lying to judges and defense attorneys about how they've come across their suspicions.
Considering the history of our terrorism police entrapping foreign nationals to commit crimes, it’s not a large jump at all to imagine a scenario where Americans are entrapped into making drug buys. It speaks precisely to the lie that the government is only spying on you to “stop acts of terrorism.”
If you are one of the 312 million Americans being targeted by NSA through your internet searches and phone conversations, you need to start concerning yourself with your own liberty. It’s a lonely job to perform for the rest of us.
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Iowa is one of only two states that has never elected a woman to Congress or to the governor’s office. This is not something to boast about. The other state is Mississippi. Hillary Clinton is well aware of this distinctin and brought it to the media’s attention when she campaigned for president here in 2007 and 2008. It becomes vitally important now that we elect a woman to one or more of these high offices in 2014 so that Clinton can be reliably rejected on the basis of her merits in 2016.
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The Iowa State Fair "butter cow" has been hit by vandals. Activists from a group called Iowans for Animal Liberation went full anarchy on the buttermilk bovine in the wee small hours of Sunday morning with a bucket of red paint and a dream. I, for one, love, love, love this story. I'm not a vegetarian but I do admire them-- and I admire bold action. The fact that every politician in Iowa, including the governor and Senator Charles Grassley, has come out in support of the cow makes it all the more beautiful. The fact that every local media outlet has been spinning the story in such a way as to try to minimize the impact of the action makes me positively orgasmic. The fact that a butter Abraham Lincoln sat three feet away in the same refrigerator, watching the action, makes me proud to be a freedom-loving American.
Anonymous drones attack evildoers
Let’s analyze this AP headline for a better understanding of how subservient our national news media is towards the military state: “2 suspected US drones kill 9 militants in Yemen”.
First of all: the word “suspected” is laughable, but the CIA's drone program is still
officially non-existent. (This is the real benefit of having a group like WikiLeaks around uncovering the truth about our war crimes.) Therefore, according to news reports like this one, the US is only “suspected” of dropping these bombs. Maybe these drones were dropped by someone else. Maybe they’re Icelandic drones.
Secondly: we can't trust the word “militants.” In a fashion that would shock even George Orwell, our Department of State, as a matter of policy, re-classifies any dead human in the vicinity of a drone strike to be a “militant". Evidently you win more hearts and minds that way. These accursed souls may not have lived as enemies of the United States, but they will be buried that way.
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Twenty-five years ago tonight, Wrigley Field
turned on the lights for the first time. Baseball, in general, grew a little dimmer. I was 13 years old at the time and I remember the occasion being a very big deal. I also remember the rain and I remember that painters caps were all the rage.
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Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper has been in hot water with fans and teammates since a video surfaced last week featuring him using a racial epithet at a country music concert. The sports media uses a racial epithet every time they refer to the football team in Washington D.C. as the “Redskins.”
Shots fired where?
Big business gets protected by the media in ways you don't even realize. Last week, the Des Moines Register reported that a drive-by shooting had taken place outside "a gas station at 22nd and University" in the city. The article did not report the name of the station. As I live about 10 blocks away, I'll just tell you that it's a Kum and Go station, part of a convenience store chain that now has 400 stores in 11 states. And more importantly, they advertise. Nobody at Gannett Media's Des Moines branch wants to give Kum and Go a black eye, even though a convenience store is about the shittiest neighbor you can have in the city and you can be sure that if a podunk tavern in the same Drake neighborhood had a shooting in its parking lot, the Register would be loudly broadcasting the bar's name. Why do I let this stuff get me riled up?
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Art Donovan has died. The former NFL star lived until the age of 89, defying each of the U.S.D.A.'s dietary guidelines. Here's
Art on with Letterman in 1986.
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An observation: For several weeks, Salon.com has had a "most popular" link to a story called "37 ugliest child stars ever." Up until a few days ago, the photo connected to the link for the entire time was always that of Raven-Symone, who played Olivia on
The Cosby Show. And that, of course, is ridiculous. It would annoy me every time I saw it. Anyway, middle of last week, the actress comes out as a lesbian on Twitter. Immediately after that story hits, the photo on the same story is that of Fred Savage.
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To Cardinals manager Mike Matheny: Stop bunting!!!!
Vietnam, the psychotic's playground
Wanna have your patriotism seriously challenged? Read Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" (2013). It outlines many of the atrocities of the Vietnam War-- or as they call it in Vietnam, the American War. These pungent acts of terrorism by your military against these small villages, which were filled almost always entirely with only unarmed women, children, infants, and old men, as Turse details thanks to declassified documents and eyewitness interviews, served as more command policy than aberration. As mass killings and gang-rapings go, many of them were larger in scale than My Lai. They were "not a few random massacres or even discrete strings of atrocities, but something on the order of thousands of days of relentless misery-- a veritable system of suffering." Along with your nationalism, you may lose your lunch.
Four topics to be raised upon reading this book by Turse, who had set out to report on post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American combat vets who served in this war of nightmare:
1) The popular myth about Americans spitting (literally and figuratively) on vets when they returned from Southeast Asia has its roots in institutional efforts to propagandize what was an indefensible, immoral mission, but now it seems to me that it's also rooted in part in the damaged psyches of returning soldiers (many of them teenagers at the time) that had had their humanity stripped from them by concerted effort and then committed atrocities on a scale that Turse refers to as a "haystack of needles." Even the soldiers that were court-martialed, by and large, avoided prison time, with some even being restored ultimately to full rank.
2) The parallels between the world then and the world today are stark. Reporting war crimes became the gravest offense. The three servicemen, for example, that blew the whistle on My Lai, were denounced by many Americans, even some members of Congress, as traitors. Today, whistleblower of the 2009 Granai airstrike and the 2007 "Collateral Murder" Baghdad bombing, Bradley Manning, has been demonized as traitorous and now been successfully prosecuted in a military court under the Espionage Act. Then and today, civilians guilty of only the misfortune of living in the wrong area were re-classified by the military as "the enemy," or "terrorists." They are considered subhuman. Lyndon Johnson called Vietnam a "a piddling piss-ant little country."
3) The public worship over our military is terrifying. The flood gates are wide open now for them to commit industrial slaughter.
4) One has to wonder whether full facts will ever be known in some instances. Many case files regarding war crime investigations in Vietnam, according to the author, are fragmented or missing full pages or sections. After we've hunted down all the Nazis, will we then set our sights on the commanders of these U.S. army and marine battalions still living, as well as their superiors in Washington?
