Culture of Life Education News

Washington Post's Pundit, Cohen, Celebrates Stupidity

2006-02-17T16:18:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, the editorial pages of a top newspaper is used to proclaim the utility of being stone stupid. Mr. Cohen's inability to use logic and forethought meant he couldn't learn even simple algebra or even percentages. He is proud of his poverty of mind and thinks this is a great way to think. I explain why it is not a good idea.

From the Washington Post:

The L.A. school district now requires all students to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate. This is something new for Los Angeles (although 17 states require it) and it is the sort of vaunted education reform that is supposed to close the science and math gap and make the U.S. more competitive. All it seems to do, though, is ruin the lives of countless kids. In L.A., more kids drop out of school on account of algebra than any other subject. I can hardly blame them.

I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time -- the only proof I've ever seen of divine intervention -- somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.

I was at the top of my class in America, even had spent a summer taking university level courses at Kansas University and I won a scholarship to study in a German Gymnasium. Going to school in Europe was an eye-opener. The yawning chasm between where I was in math and science as well as literature compared to what was required in Europe was nearly a hopeless barrier for me. I had to demand the teachers grade me because they were too embarrassed to let me know how far behind I was. After huge struggles, I managed to begin to catch up only to come back to America and discover I was way ahead of my fellow university students at the freshman level and got permission to take much higher courses.

"Dumbing down" is a slippery slope. After Bush, the dumbest man on earth after Cheney, demanded we have more science, more math, a poll of parents of high school students was done and,57% of parents polled thought we are doing just fine in school and we need no changes. What Mr. Cohen wants are fake diplomas so students can go to college and fail there, too. The WP pays him a lot of money to say irrational or stupid things so I suppose he imagines everyone will be kicked upstairs if only we just ask them to not bother their pretty little heads over trivial stuff like math.

I yell every day about numbers and amounts and point in despair at where graphs are going, how plotting out mathematical forms clearly show danger because we can't ignore the numbers and here we are, fuzzy numbers hiding reality!

The history of the words for counting things and figuring them out, "math" and "reckon" and "number" have a revealing history. Let's start with "math." In ancient Rome, the word for mind was "mens" and indeed, there is a connection between "math" and "mind". You can't do one without the other! In Greek, the word "menos" meant spirit and it is the root of the Greek word for "remember".

The oldest roots of this word are Sanskrit. "Manas" is "mind" and "medha" means "intelligent." This is, in turn, connected with words concerning meadows and hay. A "matha" in Sanskrit means "straw hut" which is where the intellectual would sit and think for this is the name for Hindi monastaries. Note the "monas" here, too!

"Number" comes via the Latin word for "nimble". " Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick," sort of agility. In Old High German, the word mutated into "to take" which I suppose reflected a past history of taking things from Romans, back at the beginning of the Dark Ages? Anyway, going way back to long ago when animals were just beginning to be domesticated on the great plains of Eurasia, the word "nemein" which is the ancestor of word "number" meant "meadow" or "pasture" and "ordering the distribution of various sheep or cows." Those who could count controlled the tally of animals and assigned their proper order in herding them about.

All of which is deeply connected to kinship relationships, religion and dynastic controls.

"Rational" comes from the obvious thing: to divvy up something. It is closely akin, in thought, to "number" in the sense of deciding who gets how many and apportioning land according to various formulae. In Old Frisian, "reathe" means to prove your case in the various Allthings. In Old High German, it means to bring matters to an accounting (note the word "count" here!). In Greek it becomes "arariskein" which means to fit, to shape something, molding it to the body which spawns the word "arms" and "armor". Namely, the rational mind is one that can build a suit of bronze armor and since this is heavy, heavier than steel!--in the bronze age, it had to fit snuggly. I have fought in steel armor and if it is loose or ill fitting, it becomes a great burden but being able to forge and hammer steel, I cunningly shaped each piece to fit snuggly and closely to my limbs and chest so they rode lightly, comparatively speaking.

To do this requires intelligence and care and all the words having to do with calculations and math are words frought with needing intelligence, using the mind, being sane and careful, proper handling of animals and materials, figuring out how to use these jointly.

This is why the inability of our government to function, the inability of businesses to function, we see a nation wide collapse in rationality. The numbers don't add up at all, they are way out of whack and growing worse by the hour and we are told, numbers don't matter, don't project them into the future, don't think! Stop being rational! We are happy with this deadly status quo!

It is like pasturage: the tendency to overgraze, to poison the pastures, is very strong. All of Africa is being turned into desert by out of control herding done by tribes that have no more control over their rational use of the land. Everyone strives to have as many sheep or goats or cattle as possible. And since raiding is now controlled by the states, the herding is out of control since there are no tribes of raiders redistributing the animals, mostly by killing them and selling or eating the parts.

In Medieval Europe, many lawsuits, laws, regulations and directives were passed out by the nobility to control the peasants, what they raised, in what numbers, how to distribute all this. Mostly, the nobles killed each other and the peasantry, it was the simplest solution for untrained minds which simply went bezerk when they gazed upon a neighbor's flock.

But the Church liked percentages and divvying up everything, they were semi-communistic and wanted x amount of y divided by 3, for example, which is where the "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool" nursery rhyme is all about. "One for my lord and one for my dame and one for the little boy down the lane (which was the Church, by the way)". So the Church elevated Mathematics to one of the highest callings and they strove hard to resurrect it from the mess of the Dark Ages where counting consisted of, "One for me and none for you, two for me and, forget it, *whack*." The shifty Venetians, living on very limited lands, sucked up as much math as they could over the years and spent some pretty happy days starting with the Second Crusade, making bad deals with illiterate, unnumbered kings and emperors. They had a hard time trying to not be cheated which takes me back to today.

We are being cheated because we are kept stupid concerning numbers and numbers matter and I wish people would start being rational and take off those shoes and count on the fingers and toes...we are being cheated!

And Cohen should be fired. But then, he is counting on a lifetime paycheck from the Washington Post.

On an aside here, the BBC reports babies can count. From the BBC:

Babies have a rudimentary grasp of maths long before they can walk or talk, according to new research.
By the age of seven months infants have an abstract sense of numbers and are able to match the number of voices they hear with the number of faces they see.

I think we should put some toddlers in Congress. Maybe they can do the budget for us. So long as we outlaw giving them lollypops by lobbyists.

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Teacher Harassed Viciously For Showing British TV Show "Who's Afraid of Opera" In Classroom

2006-02-03T17:13:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bennett, Colorado parents are persecuting a teacher who showed a video of Dame Sutherland and some puppets discussing Gounod's "Faust". They object to the fact that the opera has a devil in it. They think their kids will admire and love him. In opera, many basses sing roles of villians, devils and despots. Maybe they should feature only castratos? Heh.

From Associated Press:

Some parents in this prairie town are angry with an elementary school music teacher for showing pupils a video about the opera "Faust," whose title character sells his soul to the devil in exchange for being young again.

"Any adult with common sense would not think that video was appropriate for a young person to see. I'm not sure it's appropriate for a high school student," Robby Warner said after two of her children saw the video.

Another parent, Casey Goodwin, said, "I think it glorifies Satan in some way."

Tresa Waggoner showed approximately 250 first-, second- and third-graders at Bennett Elementary portions of a 33-year-old series titled "Who's Afraid of Opera" a few weeks ago.

The insanity here is multilevel.

&spades This was by far, the most popular opera in the Victorian era, bar none.
&spades The devil in Gounod's Faust is the bad guy. This is made abundantly clear from the minute he steps on stage.
&spades Faust makes a deal with the Devil and it turns out very badly for him. He has to be saved by Marguerite.
&spades Marguerite doesn't have an abortion. But in despair, she drowns her baby when Faust abandons her.
&spades She goes to heaven after begging Jesus to forgive her.

OK, I do believe I found the real reason why the parents hate this great opera. Marguerite is forgiven her sins!!!! I happen to know the nut-case religious types out west, I grew up in the south and west and got to see them close up. The place is wall to wall hypocricy and lies. They all want to drive out the devil and then hop in their trucks to meet him on a back road to make a deal. This is why they are plagued by all sorts of unhappy circumstances.

Who is this devil, anyway?

Well, the Bush family knows, they worship him at Yale and love to make the Evil Eye sign, haha. They are satanists. Many people in the back hinterlands are satanists, too. The best way for Satan to function is to hold court in a church. Becoming a Pope is wonderful for the devil.

He makes deals. "Want to be rich? Kiss my ring and bow to me," he whispers. Many churches are all about becoming rich and the Pope lives in one of the biggest palaces on earth. "Jesus says, give to the poor and trust him and to not worship money but we know, money is God and just sign here on the dotted line and I will help you cheat your neighbors, steal, gamble and lie. OK?" And they all sign the dotted line.

Why is gambling roaring across the Great Plains, thriving best where the anti-devil Jesus lovers live? Why is speed ravaging them all? Why is our country spending much more than it earns? Aren't we in the grip of a very powerful devil, one that tempts us? Isn't this what temptation is all about? "Vote for me and we will pay no taxes while spending tons of money on ourselves" type temptations?

And gluttony. Jesus warned us to not stuff our faces but instead, share our bounty with the hungry. Are we doing this? Which politicians are voting this last month to cut foodstamps, healthcare to the poor? Bet you, the devil representing this town voted that way. Bet he votes for all the devil's programs.

Aside from that, the striking thing about American right wingers is their degraded cultural condition. They want to call driving in a moronic circle endlessly, a "sport" along side cock fighting and bull baiting. They hate anything even dimly resonant of higher culture. Painting, sculpture, music, history, science, the Muses bemuse them and they react by tying the fine arts ladies to the nearest stake and torching them.

These people want eternal gray mushiness. One of their favorite TV shows for their kiddies feature talking vegetables that are crosseyed and speak in goofy voices who comment on stories from the Bible. "Did you see that, Tomato(e)? God killed everyone but Noah! I am glad God asked him to save the vegetable garden too, yuck yuck yuck." This blasthmeous show mocks and belittles the Bible more than a million Muslims swinging swords and screaming "Death to Christians." Indeed, many entertainments these right wingers choose smack entirely of the Devil.

One teacher has been chased out of her classroom in a right wing community because she talked about "peace" and this offended war mongering, right wing, "Let's have a massive world war with the Mulsims" parents. This is the ultimate Devil at work. Jesus=man of peace and love. Devil=war and hate. So guess who these people really worship.
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After Wasting Millions of Dollars, FEMA Launches A Kiddie Web Page

2006-01-21T17:21:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

After a year of hard work and millions of dollars, FEMA comes up with a promo for kids so they know what to do when a hurricane or terrorist attack happens. This monumental waste of money is also on the surface, insane. A hermit crab as mascot? How about an even more appropriate one like Square Pants Sponge Brownie?

From CNN:

After more than a year of delays, the Department of Homeland Security says it plans to launch a preparedness program next month aimed at alerting and preparing children for terror attacks and natural disasters.
*snip*
FEMA, an agency within the DHS, already has a program preparing children for disasters. "FEMA for Kids" (www.fema.gov/kids) includes a pudgy and nervous-looking airplane leaking a trail of smoke, a hermit crab mascot named "Herman," and a song with a rap beat:

"Disaster . . . it can happen anywhere,

"But we've got a few tips, so you can be prepared,

"For floods, tornadoes, or even a 'quake,

"You've got to be ready -- so your heart don't break."

Stop! Stop! You're killing me! Osama is laughing to death! The hurricanes are hurrying away! America is prepared! I suppose they could film kids singing this in front of the Super Dome, too!

Who are the psychotics designing all this? One character is a smoking airplane? What???? Is the plane's name "Atta boy"? Herman the hermit crab, geeze, someone is channelling some old 1960's pop singers, aren't they? "I'm 'Enry the Eigth, I am"?

They are having a contest to pick a new mascot. I nominate Squarepants Sponge Brownie. He sponges off the public till, he is clueless and lives in flood waters so he doesn't mind it if everyone is drowning, he would get along with 'Enry, the Hermit Crab and the plane dude can just go crash on someone else's couch.

Like, Dr. Freud's.
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Even College Students Can't Understand Basic Economic/Mathematical Matters (I say, ditto a lot of people running America!)

2006-01-21T10:28:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

According to this study, most Americans can't read credit card offers. No surprize: they are written to be impossible to understand unless one is very clever or very suspicious or downright evil---like me.

From CNN

More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

OK, several things here. Ever try reading credit card offers? First, the fine print is not only fine, they print it in light grey! I have to turn on search lights to see it, it is like getting a super secret message from a CIA spy! Worse, it is written in an archane language called, "Ponzian" which is similar to German, all the verbs are at the end and everything you don't need to know are capitalized.

Anyway, they haven't sent any in cuniform or Chinese but I suppose that is in the developmental pipeline, no doubt.

I actually do sit down and read these documents in my mail, after all, I write about economic matters. It is difficult, at best. I remember the Democrats passing a bill calling for simpler language in credit offers. Well, kiss that goodbye!

Several years ago, I applied for a fixed rate loan. I even asked the banker in front of several witnesses (always, always bring witnesses when talking money with anyone!!!!) if it was a fixed rate and was told, it was. So one day, I get the monthly statement which we go over carefully, and we saw that the payment schedule was altered and then noticed the new interest rate being charged.

So we charged down to the bank who tried to weasel out but we brought the witnesses and pointed to my notes and they had to recind the rate increase but I closed the account.

See? It isn't mere "are you able to understand the Rosetta Stone?" but really nailing down these slimy bastards when they openly, verbally, lie.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

In Europe, you aren't allowed to stint on the tips, especially in France which is why the waiters are rude, heh. It is automatic. Ditto in most of Manhattan.

Most fine dining establishments, one passes the American Express to the waiter and checks off which percentage one wants to pay. Then they bring back the paper, you check to see the balance due and then OK it. Sounds simple enough.

Calculating in the head is a nice skill which I strongly encourage. One must be able to see instantly relative figure values like the difference between $4.2 trillion red ink under Clinton and $8.1 trillion under Bush, Bush doubling, roughly, our collective debts from all Presidents up to the end of eight Clinton years! Heh. Seems simple math to me and why do so many powerful men seem utterly unable to understand this number and what it means? Can't they read the writing on the wall, "Yo, dummies, we are going bankrupt"?

Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

"It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things," said Stephane Baldi, the study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization.

Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills. That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map.

American students are famous for not finding things on maps. We are lucky we can find our own asses in broad daylight. This is why we want to dominate the world. Then, everything is "USA" so we won't be lost.

What really disturbs me is Bush. He got, I would bet, through fraud and cheating, degrees from our top universities, Yale and Harvard. Yet he seems to not only not know very much about virtually anything, he can't even speak English. So how did he crib those tests?

Another Skull and Bones mystery! Yeah, that is it.

Greenspan is supposed to be a genius yet he seems clueless about his own field of expertise much less archane stuff like the declination of High Middle German verbs, for example, or the history of Mesopotamia from 6000BC to modern times. We just want him to be honest and open about simple things like how much money is the Fed printing these days and how is it impacting on inflation and is the budget deficit really under $500 billion a year, if so, how could Bush run up over $2.5 trillion in red ink in less than five years? Some dead cat is bouncing somewhere.

Last I looked, we never went over $425 billion, mostly in the $300 billion range. So where did the mysterious extra trillion missing dollars go? Hmmm. Maybe they do know their math, these clowns, and are really thieves.

Well, arrest them all. And force our students to learn real economics for once. Of course, this means changing our entire school system. Arg. Students who figure out figures: revolutionary. Dangerous.
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Bush Babbles Bizarrely About Need To Learn Language Skills

2006-01-10T07:52:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bush babbles about how we should all learn foreign languages. He doesn't pause to wonder why he can't speak English better than a stoner taxi cab driver from Jamaica.

From Smirking Chimp:

We had Bush sum up his Iraqi Crusade thusly: "It's tough...And it's hard work. What you're seeing on your TV is hard work." (I'll say. Watching Dubya speak in public is like watching a twitching "Monk" marathon on cable. )

We had Blinky state before a U.S. University Presidents' Summit on International Education: "We're going to teach our kids how to speak important languages. (As opposed to those UNimportant ones.) We'll welcome teachers here to help teach our kids how to speak languages. (Instead of teaching them how to grunt and point at shiny objects.) But we're also going to advance America's interests around the world and defeat this notion about our — you know, our bullying concept of freedom by letting people see what we're about. Let them see firsthand the decency of this country." (WTF? This is addled even for Blinky!)

As a person who had gotten scholarships in German language studies, I will now scream something very loudly: my life was personally messed up by all the schools, high and low, from the University level on down, stopped hiring German language graduates. SUNY, for example, fired their entire German language staff! Amazing! And all the languages, if they can hire foreigners to teach, they do. Even when I went overseas and learned a lot, it was useless.

I did get hired for a short while by a German firm with offices in NYC. But that is a different story.

The main thing here is, what is that babbling idiot doing, talking about learning languages? He speaks English worse than a taxi driver in Manhattan who just arrived at Kennedy Airport from Uzbekistan!

What is very Freudian about babble boy is the "our bullying concept" statement. Obviously, the dark corners of his mind are at work here, he thinks about being a bully boy and inside his pathetic bubble, he struts and preens desperately, hysterically, his feeble chin all aquiver, his pencil neck thrust forwards. And the "decency of this country" is particularily funny.

From the Yahoo picture site
You know, watching a heavily painted, primped whore bloviate about morals is particularily funny. I mean, I don't care, but then I don't run around talking as if I were some blue stocking Puritan. Shudder at that.

Learning languages in this immigrant country has been entirely aimed as getting people to learn English which we English invaders foisted upon this continent, years ago. The lack of interest in learning languages is heightened by the fact that English, thanks to the British/American imperial efforts, is the Lingua Franca of the world right now, superceding even Latin.

I will note that Bush won't say what languages we ought to learn. French? Bon! German? Ich glaube nicht. Spanish? Well, one must talk to the gardener and servants in the kitchen! Heck. Learn Chinese? Ahem. A good idea. Japanese, ditto. It pays to know the nuances of another language especially when one is doing diplomacy. The Chinese and Japanese ambassadors and all their staff and everyone learns English and they happily chat in English with us but when doing diplomatic work, they revert to their home languages and this is a severe handicap for our stupid negotiators who probably are being paid by these foreign powers anyway, but they can't figure out what is going on during translations and believe me, no translation of anything is straight forwards!

All languages have their idiosyncracies! And Chinese is famous for the many permutations and levels of meaning surrounding diplomatic language. They carefully crafted this over many centuries, forged by hundreds of emperors served by a history of vast numbers of servants and advisors, it is a complex and difficult Mt. Everest of Meanings. One can't climb this mountain using English only.

But of course, the entire point of learning a language means knowing how to use it and this takes us back to Bush and his lunatic asylum crew. They think language is an old hack one can whip into any direction. Far from carefully perusing words, they blabber and blubber all over kingdom come, the laughing stock of the world. To use language is more than talking like an ill trained parrot.

It means thinking and speaking intelligently. And only by rewarding intelligent speakers and punishing babbling idiots can we expect our youth to be inspired to take the trouble to speak English well and to learn to be coherent in other languages.

Someone, please shut up Bush. Thank you.
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Bush's Staff Lies About His Reading Books

2005-12-28T12:16:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

They lie all the time and they particularily like to lie about trivial things. Everyone knows Bush can barely read 3x5 cards. He even admits to barely scanning headlines. Yet he has his servants issue rank lies about him reading books for fun and to learn something.

From the Waco Tribune

Read nothing into President Bush's current choice in books, the White House says.

The president is reading "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House," but presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush is not thinking about his post-Oval Office days.

"He is an avid reader and the president knows full well that he's got a lot of time left in this second term and he's going accomplish big things," Duffy said here Tuesday where Bush is relaxing between Christmas and New Year's.

They think they are so cute with the "read nothing into this..." crap.

And the stuff about him reading, "Imperial Grunt." I would suppose he thinks this is about a fat little piggy eating at the emperor's trough, a Halliburton hog fable? If this idiot wanted to find out what a grunt goes through fighting, he should have volunteered during the war in Nam like so many Democrats did. But no. He even said, he didn't want to get muddy, the little baby.

Why he issues these lies baffles me. I doubt his mother believed him when he pretended to read, holding the book upside down. By the way he talks, I doubt he read even the comix.

American youth is reading less and less. Functional illiteracy or rather, reading minimalizm is sweeping our culture just like it did in ancient Rome after the empire reached its zenith. There must be some sort of connection here for I always wondered why reading petered out in ancient Rome but then, see here! Language is debased daily as our media and many authors openly lie, openly misuse words and concepts in a frantic attempt to con people into doing things that are dangerous or bad for them.

Since businesses want customers who can't read the big print much less the fine print, our business leaders always urge us to get more education, to be more and more literate yet at the same time, they absolutely hate to deal with a literate, aware customer so they conspire along with others to keep everyone dumbed down. This is true of any dictatorship, when they desperately try to get their youth interested in education only to try to get them uninterested in thinking for themselves. This is why all rulers keep a wary eye on the schools and campuses.

Bush, like several famous emperors who were born into the office and took over very young, knows he doesn't have to master any skills to be a ruler, just issue orders and wishes and bingo! Everything goes his way. So why extend the mind? After all, he just has to summon a courtier or servant and have them explain everything and then cease when he waves his hand. This is why this incurious, stupid man could claim he read "Issac's Storm" which is all about the disasterous Galveston hurricane 100 years ago but when the identical hurricane hit in reality, claim he had no idea it would be bad, would kill thousands, would flood New Orleans.

I read the book which is why I sounded repeated alarms about Katrina before it hit. Maybe Bush should try reading my blog. Har.
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Barbie Dolls And Children: Many Mutilations and Mock Deaths

2005-12-20T21:46:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

British researchers are shocked (well, maybe not all that shocked) to learn that both little boys and little girls love to maul and mutilate and even utterly destroy Barbie (tm) dolls. I will explain some of the background of Barbie and why this might be happening today.

From Yahoo:

"The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," said Agnes Nairn, one of the University of Bath researchers. "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving."

Researchers from the university's marketing and psychology departments questioned 100 children about their attitudes to a range of products as part of a study on branding. They found Barbie provoked the strongest reaction, with youngsters reporting "rejection, hatred and violence," Nairn said.

"The meaning of 'Barbie' went beyond an expressed antipathy; actual physical violence and torture towards the doll was repeatedly reported, quite gleefully, across age, school and gender," she said.

While boys often expressed nostalgia and affection toward Action Man — the British equivalent of GI Joe — renouncing Barbie appeared to be a rite of passage for many girls, Nairn said.

"The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown," she said.

If only! But this is not the end of it. Children today are literally mutilating themselves. I remember distracted, out of sorts children in my earlier years, mutilating themselves using knives or needles or pens. By the time I was thirty, it became fashionable to mutilate one's self. Indeed, the speed pill popping that is sweeping parts of America are Barbie-inspired: rail thin. Actresses mutilate themselve to become Barbies: big tits and starved to death.

Barbie wasn't always the way she is today. In 1960, I possessed a real live Barbie doll, myself. None of the dolls came with anything more than her traditional birthday suit: a zebra striped swimsuit. These dolls had serious faces. They didn't smile and their eyes darted to one side as if to avoid looking directly at any girl daring to manipulate her. She was expensive so getting just one was just fine, you had to care for her. There were two hairstyles and four hair colors. Bobbed or ponytail. The bobbed doll looked remarkably like Jackie Kennedy which made her exotically and seriously elegant. The ponytailed one was the sillier teenager doll. Naturally, I took the bobbed Jackie lookalike.

You were supposed to buy lots of clothing for her but my mother wouldn't do this, being pratical. We had to make clothes for her so I happily sewed away. Then I discovered something: I don't want to play traditional doll games. I liked playing with the supersized Tonka toys. The backhoe was a favorite. So Barbie worked a backhoe. Then I decided she also would be part of an insurrection so I created Resistance Barbie in 1961. She used molotov cocktails and we had a shortwave radio so I would have her tune into broadcasts coming out of Radio Bulgaria and she would leave mysterious messages. She worked in the Himalayan mountains and stormed Prague. Her little molotov cocktails were real. I really did put some gasoline in a small pill bottle and would light the fuse and throw them. Very verboten but then, Resistance Barbie wasn't exactly all about following the letter of the law, was she?

And what happened?

I grew up, put her aside and ran around Europe, street battles galore! More than one government nearly toppled! The Russians invaded Prague and I was arrested and deported! Resistance Barbie flew into Berkeley and had a very joyous time.

Eventually I got my own backhoe and now use it all summer long, a happy situation. When I first mounted a backhoe, I was thrilled. I wondered if it would scare me or be too much. Instead, it was a duck to water! Barbie helped me grow mentally capable of using a backhoe and of course the street fighting and revolutionary actions. Heh. Why did I do that?

Lord knows. But I did. Ask my mom.

Back to Barbie. In the seventies, to popularize her with younger children, they redesigned her face. They turned her into Bimbo Barbie, the vacuous smiling automatom which looks directly at the child. A mommy doll. No longer cold and remote and mysterious, she became a bubble headed gad about who wanted to possess things with a vengence. Namely, she became cheap.

Cheap comes from the name of Cheapside, Britain. In Medieval times, this was where one went to the Faire to buy goods. Then it degraded until it became a place where vagrants hawked ribbon and odds and ends. Thus the word, "cheap" meaning inexpensive and useless.

Now, all Barbies came with various eleborate outfits. The price continued to fall as merchandizers expanded the market. Expensive, collector's dolls flourished right alongside the ever cheaper dolls. Like mistresses of wealthy men, the collectible dolls stayed aloof from the street walking cheap dolls below. As Mattel sought out ever cheaper workers to exploit to churn out these dolls they discovered the Chinese who can crank them out with maniacal determination. Now the world is flooded with these vapid dolls. In response, children now get them a dime a dozen and being smart in a horrible way, they instinctually know the dolls are worthless so they treat them accordingly. As younger and younger children get cheaper and cheaper dolls, they abuse them more and more. Carrying around the Barbie by her long, tangled mess of hair is typical. Once the long hair is messed up, anger causes the child to extend the destruction because the doll now looks like an used up heroin addict and so the child literally will kick the doll around and throw her into the gutter.

Adults my age who remember the fashion conscious Jackie Kennedy style Barbie have kept her from being totally destroyed but the younger generation is certainly increasingly alienated from this doll and indeed, from any dolls at this point.

This is the dark side of capitalism and mass manufacturing. Everyone has the same item which has to seek increasing sales so it grinds out ever more until public revulsion makes it suddenly cease. Kwepie dolls went through this cycle 100 years ago. Barbie has had a longer run only because the sales had to extend to other nations that have had the doll for only the last 20 years. Nonetheless, she is ten years younger than me and aging rapidly.

Children, when given many gifts, end up treasuring none of them. Sometimes, they might cling to one special toy or blanket from the sincere early years when they were aware of only a few select items but by seven, they usually hide these precious things because of public mockery and try out other toys. When there is a flood of such, they sort of jumble together and end up making no impressions on the mind or the delicate psychological landscape of the child's mind and end up a swirling chaos of unattached things. No memories, no history. Just here today and gone tomorrow.

This is a shame for I think it ruins the mind and soul because as we age, we need things to cling to in order to keep our sanity. Having little stable, long time memories can be damaging in unexpected ways.

I once knew a gentleman who used to pose for a famous illustrator 90 years ago. When this gentleman was over 90 himself, he had to move to a nursing home. His mind was going. I came over with an antique toy assessor to go through his attic.

There were many very valuable toys up there. One was a great big teddy bear made in England in 1902. I took it to him and asked him if he remembered it.

"My best friend!" he said, a smile breaking out. He took the bear and hugged it and then began to talk to it. "We should go outside and play! But don't tell nursie," he whispered. He kissed the bear. He then turned the bear to me and had me talk to it. "How did you tear your ear?" I asked it. "We were running around outside and I got snagged on a thorn bush and that is how it was torn but nursie sewed it back on before Mother could see what happened!"

It was so lovely as well as heartbreaking because he normally just sat around, doing nothing. The bear which his child's mind animated reactivated his mind. It went into obvious high gear. Very impressive to see. This valuable bear is now on display.

After all, all that we really have in the end is our memories. And creating them is like any artistic enterprise: if you do it right, you will have many memories, beautiful, painful, glorious or serene. Collecting them and attaching them to parts of one's mind is what life is all about. Not opening presents but opening the present up. Today is tomorrow's treasure.

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Finding Kit Carson's Graffitti Out West

2005-11-08T21:07:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Kit Carson was a romantic figure in our history...To invaders. He "opened up" the southern route to California via Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. I grew up out there and often saw his name scratched into rocks at various picturesque places. He left a bloody trail in a bloody land that was wracked by warfare with the introduction of the horse.

From Wikipedia:

Under Carleton's direction, Carson instituted a scorched earth policy, burning Navajo fields and homes, and stealing or killing their livestock. He was aided by other Indian tribes with long-standing enmity toward the Navajos, chiefly the Utes. Carson was pleased with the work the Utes did for him, but felt some irritation when they went home in the middle of the campaign, having collected what they thought was sufficient booty.

Carson also had difficulty with his New Mexico volunteers. Troopers deserted and officers resigned. Carson urged Carleton to accept two resignations he was forwarding, "as I do not wish to have any officer in my command who is not contented or willing to put up with as much inconvenience and privations for the success of the expedition as I undergo myself."

There were no pitched battles and only a few skirmishes in the Navajo campaign. Carson rounded up and took prisoner every Navajo he could find. In January 1864, Carson led forces, including Utes auxiliaries, into Canyon de Chelly to attack the last Navajo stronghold under the leadership of Manuelito. The Navajo were forced to surrender due to the destruction of their livestock and food supplies. In the spring of 1864, 8,000 Navajo men, women and children were forced to march 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Navajos call this “The Long Walk.” Many died along the way or during the next four years of imprisonment. In 1868, after signing a treaty with the US government, remaining Navajos were allowed to return to a reduced area of their homeland, where the Navajo Reservation exists today.

Kit Carson cut a dashing figure. He dressed in the classic "Byronic" fashion, the penetrating glare into the firmament, the locks of unruly auburn hair, streaming over the shoulders, the sensuous but determined mouth, the constant need for activity and movement, ever seeking conflict and glory.

This is what undid another classical romantic, Col. Custard. Like Carson, he stepped into an ancient world to wreck chaos and bring wealth home.

When I was a child in the 1950's, America was undergoing another imperialistic spasm similar to the 1848-1890 period and the iconography used to express this was the same used back then: the romatic frontiersman overcoming nature and natives to take over and exploit. This topic was all over the movies and the brand new TV channels. Every kid was playing cowboys and Indians with the Indians as the bad guys, naturally.

I knew real Victorians who grew up in the Wild West, they were very much alive if very elderly. Their tales were quite different from the TV or movie's tales. It was all so schizophrenic to a child who is trying to figure things out.

Kit Carson, in classic fashion, first lived amoungst his victims, learning their lore and their ways. Then he hired himself to General Fremont to find a secure southern route to California. At that time, sailing ships had to go around South America, a long and very dangerous journey. Lewis and Clark had found a credible northern route to Oregon and Washington but California was difficult due to the Sierras and Death Valley. Carson knew, thanks to living with the natives, all the watering holes, streams and hazards of the complex landscape of New Mexico and Arizona. One of his graffitti marks I found as a child was at Sawtooth Mountain in Texas. I got to spot others in south Tucson, in the mountains in New Mexico, he marked significant rocks with his name so he could insure his trails were true.

One of his more gruesome actions was to subdue the Navajo tribes. In the 1950s, many Hollywood movies were made where the Navajos were rounded up, it is a very striking landscape. Scene after scene featured those amazing stone mesas and mountains, glowing blood red in a stark setting. It is now a great tourist site, like the Grand Canyon, breath taking. It is also a land of mineral wealth which is why Carson and Fremont were so eager to find a more direct route to the Golden Land of California.

Subduing the natives on the Great Plains and the Southwest Desert was very difficult because unlike the natives in the east, these people got ahold of horses from the Spanish and took to them like a fish to water. This gave them mobility and power which caused great changes to rip through the native tribal communities as the horse users harrassed and harried the farmers who didn't use horses like the peaceful tribes in southern Arizona. These people wanted the strange "white" men to help them fight off the horse raiders.

Divide and conquer. During the fifties, it was difficult being a native because of the flood of propaganda exaulting the exploits of our exploiting forebearers. The romance of the wild west faded rapidly during the Vietnam war. The natives were not being herded into camps and tamed, they fought us toe to toe and shoved us out of Vietnam entirely! We became morose and our propaganda became one of victimization whereby we complained about our men being tortured as prisoners. In addition, the American Indian Movement arose and today, the tribes are finally finding wealth and prestige again. Kids want to be Indians, not Cowboys, in fantasy play.

Well, full circle yet again, no? Only now, to "heal the wounds" we inflicted upon ourselves in the Vietnam orgy which grew out of the Wild West fantasies, we are again involved in a new Wild East venture that is more like Custer's last stand rather than Carson's victory in Chelly Canyon. And unlike the military suppressing the natives using cheap technology and few soldiers, we are doing this romantic (sic) venture gold plated and reckless about losses.

I suspect that 100 years from now, the people in the Middle East and there abouts will be romanticising thier war with us and replaying scenes of American soldiers being blown up after showing the evil invading soldiers torturing the Muslim heroes with various ingenius, ugly ways.

Yup. Ride 'em, camel jockey!

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Republicans in Congress Put Poison Pill in Headstart Bill

2005-10-19T08:37:00.000-04:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Hastert and the House GOP put a poison pill in the Head Start bill to force Democrats to vote against it. They want Head Start classes which are held in churches or synogoges to discriminate in hiring by allowing them to hire only people in their own religions. Another Taliban move by the religious right bigots.

From Yahoo.com:

An amendment to the new funding bill for Head Start promotes discrimination on religious grounds and would deal a devastating blow to some one million low-income children and their parents who are dependent on the program, according to a large and varied coalition of U.S. organizations.

Late last month, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted 231-184 in favor of the so-called School Readiness Act, which renews funding for the anti-poverty preschool program Head Start.

Wide bipartisan support for the bill's reauthorization through 2011 melted down after the attachment of politically charged amendment, introduced by Rep. Charles W. Boustany, Jr., (R-Louisiana), and Rep. John A. Boehner (news, bio, voting record), (R-Ohio).

This cynical ploy so the GOP can run commercials pretending the Democrats are against Jesus was hatched in Hastert's office which is why an Ohio entity introduced it. They do this all the time, attaching bad legislation to good so they can vote for the bad thing and force the Democrats to go against it.

It is also the Taliban right's hard push to destroy the Constitution's most basic foundation: the seperation of Church and State. The churches that rent out space to Head Start are already pushing the envelope because they are collecting money from Uncle Sam, the little blood suckers. Now they want to determine who works in their government rented space! Talk about stealing with both hands!

Why they want to become an arm of the state baffles me. Too lazy to work for Jesus and thus, needing to become Welfare Queens? Or are they too stupid to see what happens next, namely, resentment from tax payers at supporting insufferable churches that meddle in our private affairs? Look at the collapse of religion in Europe.

The GOP isn't at all serious about working for America. They need to scare the religious people into voting for their economic enslavement by offering goodies. Remember, dear Christians, the Devil shows up with bribes! This is how he tempts people! Can't you read the Bible?

Hell, read the story about Daniel Webster and the Devil. Sheesh. I read it when I was a kid.

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CREATIONISTS REFUSE TO WORSHIP MOTHER NATURE

2005-10-17T07:31:00.000-04:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

From Yahoo:

Marginalized by his university colleagues, ridiculed as a quack by the scientific establishment, Michael Behe continues to challenge the traditional theory of how the world came to be.

For more than a decade, the tenured Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author has been one of the nation's leading proponents of intelligent design, a movement trying to alter how Darwin's theory of evolution is taught in school.

This week, Behe will testify in a federal courtroom in Harrisburg in a landmark case about whether students in a Pennsylvania classroom should be required to hear a statement before their evolution classes that says Darwin's theory is not a fact.

"The fact that most biology texts act more as cheerleaders for Darwin's theory rather than trying to develop the critical faculties of their students shows the need, I think, for such statements," Behe said.

In papers, speeches and a 1996 best-selling book called "Darwin's Black Box," Behe argues that Darwinian evolution cannot fully explain the biological complexities of life, suggesting the work of an intelligent force.

This clinging to an "intelligent force" is most bizarre. Namely, the "Christian" religion, like all the other religions today, believe in magic. Namely, invisible forces capriciously manipulate reality changing it due to human requests of mysterious gods who have this bizarre need to interfer with Lady Luck and Mother Nature. Even when both Great Ladies display their terrifying powers, humans continue to construct all sorts of entities that are not either of these amazingly powerful entities.

Humans almost didn't make it through the hazards of massive volcanic eruptions and gross planetary changes due to the Ice Ages. To reassure ourselves, we created gods and goddesses that would take interest in our needs and protect us. The first ones created were mergers of human/animal/plants which the charming people in the Nile valley elevated into a huge pantheon of some of the nicest, most humane gods ever. When I go to the museum and look at tiny statuettes of the cat/human goddess carrying her little basket, golden earrings jangling in her pert ears, I am reminded as to why cats were domesticated in the first place.

To kill mice and rats and purr.

Dogs go way back for they were our first friends in the cold chill of the Ice Ages. All humans formed alliances with dogs during the onset of that terrible time. The merger was so intense we carry dog socializations to this very day.

The ancient Egyptians knew that the barrier between humans and animals was paper thin. I suspect they would have no problem thinking about how closely related we all are with all those living creatures that surround us. But modern religions cut off the oxygen that connected the animal-spirit world with the human-spirit world. And our brains wither and our interactions with nature go sour.

Why are people so unable to accept Mother Nature and Lady Luck? Luck determines if you are where a landslide happens or if you are not hit by falling trees. One can avoid these things but eventually, luck is the determining thing, you could be missed and someone right next to you, taken down. Mother Nature is She Who Must Be Honored. When one lives in kindly regard with Mother Nature, one has a prosperous future. Think, twenty generations from now type of future. Right now, many religions encourage the rape of Mother Nature and the reckless abuse is giving us greater and greater grief! She has another face: the Grim Reaper. Abuse Her, you meet Him!

Jesus can't fix this any more than Buddha or Allah. Pray to them and you get nowhere. They have no power. These lifeless, male dominant religions have no room for feminine powers of birth and recreation via natural forces, the laying of eggs, pregnancies or splitting in two! The fact that the "scientist" who is testifying in court this week wants to teach about a Being Who Creates, well, he better be ready to teach about Her, Mother Nature! Pretending the earth suddenly appeared 6000 years ago and all the living things here appeared magically at the same time can be an amusing affectation of little minds that can't think logically for more than five minutes but asking this to be taken seriously as a science is stupid.

Or bring back the Egyptian pantheon. I could live with that! Personally, I would put up my little statue of a cute catwoman with her little basket and every day, ask her to protect the household and make my grocery shopping go well.

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"DAM"SEL IN DISTRESS

2005-08-29T08:57:00.000-04:00

Cartoon by Elaine Meinel Supkis

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Well, I'll be damned! This is a really funny story out of Texas I stumbled across while looking up stories about Cindy Sheehan.

From ABC TV in Texas:

Last year, 12-year-old Needville Middle School student Heather Mercer was told she could not wear to school a T-shirt her parents bought her during a trip to the Hoover Dam, a shirt neither she nor her parents found offensive.

"Somebody went to Hoover Dam and all I got was this "dam" T-shirt," read Heather from the shirt.

Trying to resolve the issue, Heather's parents went to a Needville school board meeting, one J.R. Mercer says was opened with a prayer and praise of Jesus Christ, something he told us by phone he immediately found troublesome.

"The Bible says you know, you're supposed to pray in private. That was the main issue there," he said. "They were throwing the Christian deal out there on everybody and there may have been somebody out there that was just plumb offended by it."

So the Mercers sued, not just over the freedom of speech and the T-shirt, but because of Mercer's perceived lack of a separation between church and state.

Recently, a federal court ruled the shirt was a souvenir, one not protected by the First Amendment. The prayer issue was resolved when Needville's school board agreed to never hold a denominational prayer again.

Well, no more violations of Supreme Court rulings! On the other hand, the ruling that souvenir T shirts aren't free speech? Huh? That one doesn't go past my bullshit detector. I don't recall Ben Franklin who pushed for this as the first amendment saying, "Oh, and those 'I &hearts Revolutions!' aren't free speech!" Indeed, it would seem that even something as innoculous as a joke T shirt is 100% covered by the First Amendment, wouldn't you think? Or are all these things illegal?

I recall here in Albany the local mall, Crossgates, made international news because their goon squad arrested a man wearing a "Peace Now" T shirt when Bush was pushing to invade Iraq. The man sued and won his case. It was totally insane because he bought the shirt at that mall! Kicking people out for wearing what they purchase is a new low, isn't it?

Funny how that works.

Anyway, what does Jesus have to do with running meetings? I am puzzled by this. The need to drag the poor man around Texas and insert him into every activity but meaningful ones is a real riddle. Note the utter lack of outrage over the cross desecrations at the peace camp in Crawford! Well! But then, I noted for many years a similar lack of outrage over the KKK burning crosses. One would think this would be the ultimate desecration but in the twisted world of these sorts of people, obviously, it isn't.

Damn.

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ART PERCEPTION

2005-08-23T16:17:00.000-04:00

Chinese scroll art by Sheng Mou, 1350

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I grew up with Asian art mostly because my parent's activities took them to Asia a great deal and they came back with all sorts of goodies and we went to Asian events here in America and this is how I got hooked on Japanese anime, for these were the cartoons they showed us kids...the artistic ethos of Asia is quite different from main stream post 1500 European Art. Indeed, the reason I adore, really adore Bosch is because his art is very Asian: the background is as in focus as the foreground and figures in the pictures are of equal value and are set in place by everything around them. One can be lost for hours, moving the eye from point to point in his paintings, drinking in the dense scene.

The scroll above is like that. It is very tiny here but if you see it in a museum, you can see the three little humans walking along the road, the waterfall on one side, the pine trees climing the mountains with the peak rearing overhead. To view Chinese scrolls is to take a long walk with the eye.

So today's goofy, aggravating story is connected to all this: From Yahoo news:

Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students Â— 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese Â— to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

"They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

"Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it."

A lot of baggage dumped on a frail beast of burden, I would say! Why do these people jump, and this is a huge jump, to this conclusion? The reason for the difference is cultural but not social.

Japanese screen, 1500

It is all due to artistic sensibility that one learns in one's youth. I "see" in the Asian style because of the art around me and my first babysitter was Chinese and she also taught me how to eat with chopsticks. It is a learned process! Western art the last 500 years due entirely and totally to the revolution in creating a sense of perspective, sees the foreground in focus and important and the background as a backdrop framing the figure in the front! Cameras aggravated this aesthetic.

The most distant leaf on the far horizon in Asian art is as elaborate and in relative size equal to anything in the foreground. This was true of Medieval art, too. This is the natural way to look at things close up. The Modern method is to see things within a frame, like in a theater. The Rafaelian clouds surrounding his virgins and saints were theater curtains pulled aside to reveal the all important foreground figure.

In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.

Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.

Obviously, when one is making up stuff, best to go all the way! Village farming from the Neolithic onwards carries an amazing degree of similarity to solving farming problems of security, commonality and sharing of lands. The differences are slight, if any. Any view of Europe shows all the villages clustered with houses with the fields lying outwards in concentric rings or long strips! When settlers came to America, thanks to the military/police set up of the Europeans, they abandoned the village model only after the natives were ruthlessly eliminated. There was no need for mutual protection when the new fangled rifled guns came into everyone's hands.

Even so, living in isolated farms took such a severe toll socially, the midlands are still falling apart from it. One drives through the Midwest and it is one long abandoned farm after another. Men struggle to keep women on these remote, asocial, sad places.

I live on a farm on a mountain a very short walk from a real, European style village. When it was built, back in 1770, Berliners had to stick together or be killed so they lived in a tight community.

In modern American films, from the beginning, the camera tracks the foreground. If you watch Japanese anime and look only at the figures in the front, you miss tons of amusing and well drawn activity going on in the background, sometimes, the elements of the next story development is something that was happening behind the main characters in a previous scene. This is true also of video games. I would suggest that kids playing Asian video games are already tracking their eyes like their counterparts on the opposite side of the world.

Cave said researchers in his lab have found differences in eye movement between Asians and Westerners in reading, based on differences in the styles of writing in each language.

"When you look beyond this study to all of the studies finding cultural differences, you find that people from one culture do better on some tasks, while people from other cultures do better on others. I think it would be hard to argue from these studies that one culture is generally outperforming the other cognitively," Cave said.

Note the sop thrown to us all. We shouldn't worry, we are still smart...heh.

But the fact is, learning Chinese or Japanese, just for example, requires much more memorization. The subtle differences of the characters require sensitivity and a steady effort to comprehend and integrate it all into the mind. As someone who went to school in other languages, trying to cope with Chinese, for example, is tremendously difficult. To read it, one has to focus on every character rather than groups of words. Different focus style. Because of the intellectual effort in learning to read, this stimulates the mind of the young scholars to greater efforts. A half hearted stab won't do the trick.

The decline in American scholarship shows this clearly. This is why we have to lure people from Asia to come here. The brain drain is strictly one way in this regard.

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SUMMER SCHOOL FOR BUSH

2005-08-17T12:34:00.000-04:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bush just released his summer reading list, all heavy tomes. For example, there is the ~~"Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the US"~~ book but Condi said, it is all old news, past history, no need to read.

So he is reading all about the Romanovs. I would say this is a good suggestion only the book he chose stops shy of WWI and the shooting of the Romanovs, wiping them out. The Romanovs thought WWI would be short, not shot.

From Mosnews:

Edvard Radzinsky’s popular historic novel, “Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar”, has happened to be on the list of books the U.S. president has taken with him to his ranch in Texas where he is spending his 5-week vacation. Radzinsky hopes his book will help George W. Bush to learn more about the origins of terrorism.

“We, Russia, created the first great terrorist organization in the world,” Radzinsky said commenting on Bush’s choice of his book, “Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar”, in a phone interview for The Los Angeles Times from Moscow. “We are the father of terror, not Muslims.”

Bush’s choice of “Alexander II” appears to reflect his interest in books about transformational political leaders, The Los Angeles Times wrote this week. Among those he has perused since becoming president are biographies of George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, Richard the Lionheart and Peter the Great.

Aside from the obvious silliness of all this...we all know Bush can barely mouth his way through a children's book and "The Hungry Catepillar" seems to be his only childhood book which happened to be published when he was all of 30 years old...aside from trying to pump up this pathetic puppy, these books haven't increased Bush's vocabulary, his understanding of history nor his ability to understand the mess he is making of this world.

The author of this latest Bush "read" is an intelligent man who spent his waking hours trying to understand what went wrong with the Russian Empire. The collapse of the Ottoman and Russian empires still reverberate loudly. Indeed, just like the clash of the European empires, struggling with each other to see who could cannibalize the dying Ottoman empire, led directly into causing WWI which spawned WWII.

56+million humans perished violently or starved to death in WWII. It was a giant catastrophe.

After surviving six attempts on his life, Alexander II was assassinated by a group of anarchists who tossed home-made bombs at the emperor as he was riding in his carriage on the streets of St. Petersburg. They had plotted the attack for weeks, operating out of an apartment across the hall from the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Radzinsky said he assumed Bush had drawn the connection to the terrorists of today. “Very noble young people who dreamed about the future of Russia became killers, because blood destroys souls,” Radzinsky said. “That for me is the most important lesson.”

Bubble boy doesn't have to worry about this. We do. He can sit, engrossed in children's reading material while others get assassinated.

From the Guardian:

As well as brush cutting, mountain biking and fishing, the president will also be tucking into Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky during his five-week summer sojourn on his Texas ranch. The other tomes are reported to be Alexander II: the Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky and The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M Barry.

Gads. I still remember the anthrax killer, he was traced all the way to a secret military anthrax facility that has a very short list of people who could have gotten the anthrax and used it and no one was arrested. And that killer only targetted people who Bush wanted taken down or intimidated. Starting with the photo editor of the newspaper that ran the famous Jenna Drunk photos at a time when Bush was pretending she was a pristine Christian virgin.

We are closing in on 9/11 with the entire system in the hands of the people who allowed the attacks last time to happen. And this time, again, Bush's numbers are way down, his economic mess is messy and everyone is poking around him, learning bad stuff he wants the media whores to cover up, not uncover, a pesky investigation that the NYT and WP want to strangle but have been unsuccessful. All reasons to reunite America via some nifty terror event.

The Salt history book is amusing. Money came from salt. This is why we use the word "salary" today, it comes from the word "salt". Gandhi's first famous peace march was to the sea to make salt and thus evade the British monopoly on salt sales in India which were a culvert tax by the King of England to fatten England's purse while beggaring the poor of India. The marchers were brutally beaten, you know. Can't have them making salt!

Sounds like Bushland, no? He would pull this sort of nasty thing, anything to get richer.

Time to read some more books like the Decline and Fall of Rome or the Fall of the Third Reich.

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BUBBLEGUM CRISIS

2005-07-16T19:36:00.000-04:00

There is this Japanese anime called "The Bubblegum Crisis" which depicts a world of robocop only these are used stupidly. Just the other day, in California, the police shot a deranged man holding his own child hostage, 90 times. I would call that rather excessive except this is what we are doing in Iraq to people who drive past our soldiers when they patrol.

The 9/11 attitude of shoot first and ask no questions is permeating our society. An excessive use of force like I detailed here such as the poor woman who was tasered twice because she panicked and wanted to talk to her husband on the phone when the police pulled her over (they claimed this was more humane than shooting her dead!) or the little kindergarden child who was arrested for acting like a child. When we put all our money, energy and love into police, they end up being used for anything and everything and especially, to use violence or heavy handed force out of proportion to the problem they are trying to solve.

The militarization of the police has been ongoing since the Vietnam war and is now totally out of control.

This latest episode, my son spotted and told me to write about it. From the BBC:

An 11-year-old girl who threw a rock at a group of boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault charges in California.
Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation which involved three police cars and a helicopter.

She has since spent five days in detention, in which she was granted one 30 minute visit by her parents, and has spent a month under house arrest.

Her lawyer accuses the authorities of criminalising childhood behaviour.

"They're treating her like a violent parole offender," Richard Beshwate said. "It's not a felony, it's an 11-year-old acting like an 11-year-old."

The girl is due back in court at the beginning of next month.

Police say they had to investigate as the boy who was hit by the stone she threw suffered a deep gash to his head and needed hospital treatment.

He has reportedly acknowledged to officers that he started the fight in late April.

Several things about this story: First, any boy that loses a fight with a girl and then lets the cops arrest her is...well, we know what sort of adult they become. Second. the boys admit they attacked the girl who was minding her own business. Third, they were a gang and I am assuming, white. She is minority. Fourth, a helicopter and three police cars? And they didn't arrest the assailants? Fifthly, a girl walking alone who is assaulted by strange boys in a gang has a right to self defence and this includes using rocks and sticks and whatever to drive them off.

Period.

In my mispent youth in Arizona, we had "Desert Wars" which were fought over the no-man's land between the golf course and my parent's home grounds. This battle raged for years. We used all sorts of weapons and developed tactics though the trench digging got us in hot water when a boy broke his arm falling into one, but he never ratted on us. This was universally understood that we kids kept our secret wars secret.

One day when I was in the fifth grade, a boy decided to ambush one of us and used a slingshot to fling a piece of teddybear cacti which was long, venomous spines, at us. It slammed into my foot right through the leather shoe! I fell, screaming for this ran right into my young bones. I was hospitalized. None of us told the adults who did it. We kept that a grand secrect.

But I was told! I made certain it was really Timmy and then, while still limping, I nailed him with a rock and knocked him out. Again, he didn't rat on me nor did anyone turn us in.

All's fair in love and war.

Many years later, I went into Poco Loco, a notorious biker bar, to find someone. This tall, blonde tatooed guy was there. I told the bartender to tell Red Fromme that I was looking for him. When I said my name, the biker turned and yelled, "Goddam! Elaine! Haven't seen ya since sixth grade!" He then bellowed, "I hit her with a cactus and she knocked me out with a rock! She made me what I am today!" refering to our battles back then.

I was stunned. I had other commitments but would have reconsidered hitting Tim with a big rock if I knew he was going to stop being a pesky skinny buck toothed kid and turn out a hunk. Oh well.

But back to the news, the whole thing is, we kids would rather die with a rattler in our beds than have parents or cops or anyone interfer with our stuff we did when not under supervision. Indeed, when my son moved up to our mountain, he had to carve out his place the same way. There was a certain amount of violence involved including his famous taco tackle in the school lunchroom when he used a taco as a weapon of mass destruction. Ask him sometime about that. Heh.

The only time police needed to come was when someone reached for a gun. This was a sign of a coward. This is dangerous. But rocks in self defence?

I have used worse, much worse, and with great effect. And I did it always in self defence.

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FINAL FANTASY SYMPHONY

2005-07-14T06:51:00.000-04:00

This is for my own kids and their friends. Great news! From the BBC:

The sound of leading orchestras playing the music from the Tomb Raider game, or the scores of Frogger and Pacman, may be heard all over the world if a new venture in the US proves a success.

Symphony orchestras will be playing the music from games like Halo
The dramatic soundtracks of today's video games are a far cry from the time when arcades resounded to the noise of repetitive bleeps and jingles.

Advances in technology mean music can now drive in-game action and stir players' emotions, much like the score of a Hollywood blockbuster. In the US, two renowned video game composers are trying to tap in to gamers' growing attachment to the soundtrack of their favourite software.

Last week, in the first of a series of nationwide concerts, an audience of more than 10,000 heard the famous Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra playing the hits of the pixelated world.

Against a backdrop of images and lights, classically-trained musicians turned their hand to the themes from sci-fi epic Halo, Tomb Raider, the Mario games, plus a medley of old-school favourites like Pong, Space Invaders and Pacman.

We have discussed this before, the puzzling inaction of orchestras taking advantage of real interest in music. I studied music as my minor at the university and I recall with horror the attempts to force me to listen to annoying, hellish modern stuff that was no fun to play and nearly intolerable otherwise.

I will note here that Japanese anime/game music has many modern components even using 12 tonality without being annoying because it is in small doses and fits the framework of what is happening. But I notice that my response to melody is as always, very strong, namely, when something divinely lovely happens, it causes joyous feelings to radiate from within which brings pleasure.

Ah, pleasure! The forgotten component of music!

As for the light show: my daughter and I got to see "The Wall" done to Pink Floyd in the NYC Museum of Natural History's planetarium with lasers and all sorts of fun stuff. It was fabulous. When I was a child, I saw Holst's "The Planets", a fun piece, done at night with a slide show of the universe and our galaxy. Loved it so much, when I choreographed one dance, probably one of the audiences' favorite if applause is a gage, where slides of Voyager photos were projected on a black stage with a black backdrop and you could only see it when I moved about with the 100 yards of highly reflective guazy cloth I used, recreating Loie Fuller's famous style of dances 100 years previously.

All done to "Au Clair de Lune" by Debussy.

"Video games have become a new way of telling stories, and music a fundamental part of that.Mr Wall began working in the industry 10 years ago, with an eye to the expanding area of game soundtracks.

In the early days, technology was a limiting factor. But as consoles and computers advanced so to did the sophistication of in-game sound. When Mr Wall composed the score for Myst III, he used a full symphony orchestra and choir.

The soundtrack was packaged on a separate audio CD with 250,000 special editions, while more than 30,000 CD's of the game's music were sold online.

"That's when I realised there was a big market out there," he says.

I am so pleased Mr. Wall and the other composers of appropriate music have found a place to grow and flourish. Video games and anime are the opera houses of today. I remember an early Final Fantasy environment. You could go to an opera house and watch a pig sing on stage. It was hilarious, outrageous and a great way to bring opera into a kid's life.

Warner Bros cartoons back in the forties and fifties had a resident composer who wove opera, symphonic music and his own, very modernist, creations into memorable wholes. The studio had a small symphony orchestra that rendered the music very beautifully.

We look forwards to the tours of Mr. Wall's show. We hope there will be more like it. Enjoy!

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EDUCATION NUTS AND BOLTS

2005-07-12T16:35:00.000-04:00

An old favorite of American mythology is the "can do" attitude and the "invent a better mousetrap" bravado. This was well earned and well respected. When faced with an obstacle, one relied upon technical cowboy inventiveness. Unlike the European peasants, mired in tradition, the American immigrant strode forth to try new things in new ways even if much of it looked like the Old World, we did create a lot of creators.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and even old Ben Franklin were inquiring minds which explored nature and roamed about in literature and science, seeking new things.

From Reuters News:

Moves by international companies to move jobs in information technology, high-tech manufacturing and research and development to low-income developing countries were just "harbingers" of that longer-term adjustment, Freeman said.

Urgent action was needed to ensure that slippage in science and engineering education and research, a bulwark of the U.S. productivity boom and resurgence during the 1990s, did not undermine America's global economic leadership, he added.

The United States has had a substantial lead in science and technology since World War II. With just 5 percent of the world's population, it employs almost a third of science and engineering researchers, accounts for 40 percent of research and development spending and publishes 35 percent of science and engineering research papers.

This was due nearly entirely to Adolph Hitler and the Russian Revolution and all the war and destruction and the impossibility of being an intellectual in a dead totalitarian climate. Refugees came to America which was sort of free and reasonably ripe for action. Money was here too, thanks to us winning both the British and the French empires in one swoop after WWII.

Numbers of science and engineering graduates from European and Asian universities are soaring while new degrees in the United States have stagnated -- cutting its overall share.

In 2000, the paper said, 17 percent of university bachelor degrees in the U.S. were in science and engineering compared with a world average of 27 percent and 52 percent in China.

The picture among doctorates -- key to advanced scientific research -- was more striking. In 2001, universities in the European Union granted 40 percent more science and engineering doctorates than the United States, with that figure expected to reach nearly 100 percent by about 2010, the study showed.

The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged U.S. students from entering these fields, but not those born in other countries.

52% of Chinese graduates are in the sciences? This is an eye-opener indeed. After Sputnik, I remember how our government got really big on the "study technology" hobby horse...and then went off to try to take even more of the British/French empires when we occupied Vietnam unsuccessfully.

Now the hobby horse sits in the attic collecting spiderwebs.

On the other hand, there has been this ongoing symposium in Oxford, England, called the TED. From the BBC:

Scientist Professor Richard Dawkins has opened a global conference of big thinkers warning that our Universe may be just "too queer" to understand.

Professor Dawkins, the renowned Selfish Gene author from Oxford University, said we were living in a "middle world" reality that we have created.

Hell, according to Justin Raimondo at Anti-war.com,

George Orwell's playbook: war is peace in this monstrous new world, and vice-versa, since the clear lines that used to separate them are erased. And this is not an anomaly, but the dawn of a new era, which might be called the Bizarro Age, in which up is down, the old rules are repealed, and the laws of God and man annulled

We are in Bizarro Age! Too queer....actually, it isn't that hard to understand any of it. All one has to do is drop the self-centered attitude homosapien animals enjoy and look at the works of nature with a critical eye.

Back to Dawkins in Oxford:

For example, what if the universe isn't static nor is flyin apart but is actually twisting inside out? Thanks to increasingly huge black hole entities? Won't that be interesting?
"Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe."

Each species, in fact, has a different "reality". They work with different "software" to make them feel comfortable, he suggested.

Because different species live in different models of the world, there was a discomforting variety of real worlds, he suggested.

"Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see," he said.

"Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large."

He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games to play with that familiarize them with quantum physics concepts.

Well, I grew up exactly that way. At first, my parents were proud that I could comprehend various concepts that were supposedly difficult to fit into a belief system. But it wasn't hard at all! It was simple as falling off a chair.

Since I had no previous beliefs to deep six, it was simple.

Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins.

We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued.

This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world - the medium scale environment - a world in which we cannot see individual atoms.

My grandparents as well as parents were all astronomers. They always talked about this sort of thing. How different timescales work on objects in the same quantum matrix. Time for a rock passes quite differently from that of a fly yet both exist on the same plane of reality, however briefly.

When I learned about the spaces between the atoms of seemingly solid objects and that within these atoms there is still more space within which movement is occurring, I was about seven years old. I thought, if only I were able to visualize and then merge with the sub atomic structure, I could insinuate myself through solid objects.

In other words, I could use my mind to walk through walls. So I worked on this research project which mystified my mother who wondered why I would stare long and hard at a wall and then walk into it.

Maybe teaching children this sort of stuff has a downside?

Even as Dawkins, the number one evolutionist theorist around today, talked excitedly about expanding the minds of youth, the Catholic Church turns its back on science. From the NYT:

An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph SchÃ¶nborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

It seems, the more monkey-like the human, the more they detest Darwin's assertion that we are mere apes.

Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal SchÃ¶nborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.

Cardinal SchÃ¶nborn, who is on the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, said the office had no plans to issue new guidance to teachers in Catholic schools on evolution. But he said he believed students in Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just one of many theories. Many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.

"One of several theories" is funny. I don't see any other "theories." I do see blind faith declarations all designed to elevate homosapiens to a plane equal with invisible and vindictive gods.

Why this is a step up baffles me.

Even as we bewail the loss of faith in engineering and surrender the laurels of that great institution, the Tinkerer who made things work and replace it with mordant desires to live forever, brainlessly proud, we must remember this: living forever is a curse.

At the Oxford symposium there were the usual lusts for everlasting life. The vision of the future was to do what Dr. Faustus wanted to do: stop time. As the great magician/scientist declared he had reached perfection, the devil came to collect his paltry soul. For indeed, eternal life is like the Egyptian pyramids: dusty, dry and dead. Even if the entity exists and can be touched and seen, it would be dead inside or more like a rock or a comet floating in space. Detached and disinterested. This is why the race against time spawns great things as even the busy bee works hard for the hive even as itself has but a very short life compared to the queen and hers isn't that long, either.

This is why birth and death are the intertwined snakes of existence.

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ELECTRONIC SCHOOLS

2005-07-05T10:41:00.000-04:00

In Britain, there has been rising consernation about the situation in many schools. Several undercover stories detailing or filming the mayhem in and outside the classrooms have caused quite a stir over there. In many countries, boredom and disrespect and lack of self control causes breakdowns in the learning process.

From the Telegraph company news:

The girl was ignoring me and playing music on her mobile phone, so loudly that the rest of the class could hear. I kept telling her to stop. Then suddenly she lost control. Standing up, she put her face inches from mine and shrieked: "Don't make me hurt you. I swear to God I will do it."

I was two days into my undercover investigation for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme when this incident happened. It was the first time I had felt physically threatened in school and the feeling stayed with me for a long time. Although extreme, this was the type of behaviour I encountered again and again in the 16 secondary schools I went in to, eventually filming those that seemed to be representative of the problems I saw.

Children always challenged teachers but the trick is for teachers to challenge students...to learn.

In my very first lesson, I spent 20 minutes trying to get children to be quiet, take their coats off, put away their mobile phones and stop hitting each other. Pupils were supposed to be studying for a GCSE exam on earth materials but when I mentioned the subject, one girl shouted out: "I haven't got a clue what earth materials are." It transpired that a staggering 26 supply teachers had taken the class since the start of the year.

I tried to teach them but had been left with no real instructions. In the worst example of this lack of planning, I was handed a scrap of paper with "draw a picture of your favourite food" written on it - that was for a class of 14-year-olds for an entire hour.

Learning for tormorrow. Most students at the bottom are slated for being cut out of society. They will mostly end up either on the dole or in prison. They keep many people employed. Teachers, prison guards, police, courts, newspaper staff, they are the grist in society's job mill. This isn't productive nor good. These are not capitalist jobs or value added jobs. They are just jobs.

The methodology for teaching has barely moved since my grandfather picked up a piece of chalk in front of his blackboard in 1914. Up until ten years ago, he could walk into any university, pull his stem wind-up pocketwatch out of his vest, reset it, clear his throat, and begin teaching, it had changed so little. We are fortunate that some schools dare to experiment with new ways of doing things and I found this story most interesting: From the Associated Press:

An honors student at Ohio State, a kid in a fifth-grade science class in Kentucky and a deaf student in England, all begin their learning experience the same way: with their hand wrapped around a remote control.

Not a TV remote, but rather one that connects a student with everyone else in the class, with the instructor and with the subject at hand.

Hundreds of colleges, high schools and even middle schools are using "clickers" — as even manufacturers call them. A moderator can pose a question and within seconds the respondents' answers are anonymously logged on a laptop at the front of the room.

"This is the MTV era," said Neal H. Hooker, an Ohio State professor who uses the technology in his agricultural economics course. "It's the instant gratification generation. They don't like doing a quiz and hearing the responses in three days. They want to see if they've got it right or wrong right then."

Interwrite, a clicker manufacturer in Columbia, Md., has over a half million remotes in use, most in classrooms.

I always wanted instant feedback when I was trying to learn something. Students are understandably shy about raising the hand and asking for clarification or to start all over again. Yet this is a need. Any method that helps a teacher gage student understanding gets a full hearted hooray from me.

The clicker itself isn't different in size or shape from the one that enables you to switch from "Fear Factor" to "Nova" at home. Software logs the students' answers enabling the teacher to determine if students understand the topic as the topic is being discussed. Teachers can post a true-false or multiple-choice quiz at the front of the room and, within seconds, the students' responses are logged, their scores tabulated and a grade is assigned to each.

I loved flash quizzes when I was a young student. They were very useful for studying for exams. The one problem was grading them. Most teachers had students pass each other's quizzes to each other but then, this did lose a lot of time. And the teacher would see the results much later, too late to act forcefully to reset minds.

More book publishers are tailoring their textbooks to provide exams and quizzes for classes with hand-held remotes to meet the growing demand, said Donald Yocum, a social studies teacher and technology specialist at King Middle School is in rural Harrodsburg, Ky.

Yocum's school has five sets of mutually compatible clicker sets — all won at state or national teachers conventions.

Many clicker-makers hand out the systems as prizes. Their thinking is that once teachers and students see how cool the systems are, the word will spread.

"All of the kids like it," Yocum said. "It helps the ones who don't like the traditional way of doing things, who don't like to sit there and write out their answers on a piece of paper. This way, through an interactive system, they stay engaged."

Many feel that the ideal use of clickers is in larger classes at universities, where sometimes hundreds of students jam lecture halls to hear a distant figure at the front of the class talk in a monotone until the class ends. Clickers are also becoming popular in various business uses, such as seminars and conventions.

"It's not like an hour-long lecture where the professor is droning on and everybody goes to sleep because they don't know what's important," University of Southern California physics and astronomy professor Christopher Gould said. "It lets the lecture turn into a two-way conversation."

Readers of this blog know I am an enthusiastic pro-computer, pro-electronic person. I type way faster than I can write by hand and logging on and interconnecting is so much more brain-friendly than other methods of doing scientific or literary things, I feel as if my mind and body finally are working in tandem, not struggling for dominance with each other or worse, the brain desperately trying to drag the hand around, frog marching it into battle.

My husband is half deaf. He struggled to do well in school despite his disability but he lost a great deal of potential ground thanks to not being able to hear what the teacher said when they turned to the blackboard. Each time, the voice faded to nothing and he couldn't read the lips, either. If he had electronic multi-tasking devices in elementary school onwards, what a difference it would have made.

We have build so many useful tools, like prehistoric humans, we must use them. We are the tool using animals.

Here is another interesting study in the opposite direction: from the BBC:

TV viewing before the age of three was linked to poorer reading and maths skills at the ages of six and seven among the 1,797 children they studied.

The Washington University findings back the US advice that children under two should not watch any television.

But TV viewing among those aged three to five seemed to aid literacy later.

Very interesting. I suspect one problem is the growth of the brain needs socialization more than anything in the very beginning and this means more tactile contact since this is the most ancient part of our psyches. We are, above all, animals. And animal babies need a great deal of physical contact with their mammalian mothers. The same is true of birds. Learning to socialize, identify those nearest and dearest, to be consumed by this process seems very important for the very young. Song birds memorize their songs during nesting time, not as adults. Young mammals learn to get along with siblings and to copy mother for when they must nurture. Namely, we learn how to be mothers during infancy. In humans, being mother is very difficult and complex just like giving birth is difficult due to the large size of our babies' heads. So the learning process lasts much longer but the emotional base is built in infancy.

Without this base, it is nearly impossible to build anything later as studies of severely abused babies show.

Watching TV interferes with all this due to the fact that there is no tactile backup and the attachments are inappropriate, namely, the child isn't memorizing mommy's face or other social details but is being put in a coo-coo bird's cheat whereby the attachment is indifferent to the survival of the baby and indeed, hostile to it. Advertisers, for example, are particularily hostile to the survival of the baby.

Another study in the same medical journal, by Dr Robert Hancox from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, found that children aged five to 11 who watched the most television were the least likely to leave school with qualifications.

Another, also published in the archives journal, of Californian school children aged eight found those with a TV in their bedroom, but no home computer, achieved the worst scores in school achievement tests.

Those without a bedroom TV, but access to a computer, scored the highest.

Heh. My kids had computer games and computers and very little TV watching, actually, by choice. They enthusiastically dove into the interface/active universe without hesitation.

They now teach me, not the other way around!

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CLASSICAL CULTURE: Saving Our Orchestras

2005-06-25T08:34:00.000-04:00

My minor in college was Music. I played the cello for many years. I fell in love with it when I was a child. Why?

We went to Chicago to see "Fantasia". The only part of fantasia I really liked was the Beethoven Sixth. I was struck directly by a very powerful lightning bolt that hit the tree outside the open window of my bedroom at Yerkes Observatory. Since I loved the pictures of Pegasus in the observatory rotunda, I felt that Pegasus flew down to save me when I was hit. So I was amazed to see the flying horse families in that cartoon.

When the first one flew onto the screen, the music swelled with a beautiful, playful theme. "What are they playing," I whispered to my mother. "Cellos," she answered.

I never achieved cellohood, not being blessed with sufficient talent, but I love music a lot. From the NYT:

All over the Western world, the alarm is sounding that classical music is in trouble. Orchestra subscription sales are dropping widely, in some cases by as much as two percentage points a year. Ensembles are not balancing their budgets. Audiences are getting older; young people are turned off by classical music. The Chicago Symphony can no longer sell decently even at its own festival. So, at least, goes the refrain.

This is true. As pop music fills stadiums, the orchestras, which used to be loud and daring thanks to having a huge number of musicians, declines. This is due to many factors starting with amplification of noise. Orchestras started out really small 300 years ago and they played rather delicate music. Mozart is a fine filigree of sound. Then Hayden and Beethoven came along, two titans who, being boisterous Germans working with equally boisterous and uppity audiences, made loud, crashing music. It sounds delicate to our ears, plummeled by artificial boosters, but in its day, they were startlingly loud. The orchestra doubled in size during Beethoven's revolutionary life. Each symphony he wrote required a bigger and bigger machine until the great ninth which roars in the ears, a shocking sympathy.

Wagner took the Beethovian orchestra, put it in the pit and charged it up to the max. The final opera of the Ring der Niebelungen ends with Goetterdaemmerung's crashing, terrifying explosive ending. The arc of this development, most of which happened in Germany and tracked Germany's rise and fall, reached its apex as Germany flexed imperial muscle and started WWI. Gustav Mahler, the end product of this great arc, died as the first guns lined up for the German Goetterdaemmerung. He reversed Beethoven, his first symphonies loud and brash and then quieting down until the ninety which sighed and whispered into nothingness.

Arnold Schoenberg took over. His Guerrelieder is patterned after master Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand, a full, giant packed orchestra and huge chorus. Very beautiful, hairraising music. Sitting up in the rafters of Carnegie Hall, awash with the full bellow of the 50 man male chorus, I shivered with delight. But WWI shattered Schoenberg and he had a vision as awful as the one that possessed Hitler the same year: he decided to murder music.

Yes, kill it outright. So he reduced it to nearly nothing, smashing the symphony orchestra, reducing it in size. All the other composers like Stravinsky joined in this tragic demolition derby. Stravinsky relented in the end and tried to refind Mozart and rebuild it. Richard Strauss continued with the mass orchestra, harnessing it to Hitler's mad dream. He utterly destroyed it the the holocaust of Nazi Germany. When he was interrogated by my father and the group of American OSS/translators all of whom were music lovers and loved his music, they asked him about why he did his crimes. He cried. He knew about the concentration camps. His wife's mother died in one! He couldn't stop things.

He went into seclusion, wrote "Four Final Songs," a terribly sad ending, the music harkens back to his first Tone Poems, and then sighs and dies. As he did, in despair.

When I studied music, I wanted music to play. Forced to go into the past, I found in Germany, some neat cello duets written by an unknown German and we played those. New stuff! But asking for new music was to despair. What was written for us was hideous. When I was pregnant with my daughter, my professor gave a concert of music he wrote. It was a writhing, dissonant pseudo-Schoenberg mess. I warned him, I would not like his music. He ordered me to listen. My daughter woke up and began to bang against my stomach with her feet in protest. The more he played, the more she kicked. Groaning, I rose and left and he refused to talk to me again.

My daughter has excellent taste in music.

Across the planet, musicians and orchestras desperately tried to force us to listen to hideous stuff that set the mind in despair. Ouch! Losing audience rapidly, they did a u-turn and played tons of old stuff we have heard a thousand times. Everywhere, lassitude and despair set in as audiences were literally dying.

My other love: anime. I adore Japanese anime. Like any massive form of entertainment, it has a full spectrum of divine to stupid, crass to spiritual, bad art to breathtakingly beautiful, detailed art. Trolling through anime, one can find anything. Including very classical stuff like this season's "Emma". This week's episode in Japan, Emma's boss, the old lady she tends, dies such a beautiful death, quietly in bed of old age, I wept the entire last 15 minutes. All of Japanese anime uses music often very expertly. They use classical, modern, even Schoenbergian music to heighten the emotions, in one series, they will alternate jazz with classical with ancient Japanese to rock and rap all in rapid succession, seamlessly. I cock an ear to the music, marveling at the tour-de-force of the composers in Japan who make this all up! They don't clip music, they compose in multiple styles!

Wow!

This music is so amusing, so fresh, so new, they have begun to not only sell it separately from the shows, they hire the Tokyo Symphony to play it in public! Yes, they have concerts....of video game/anime music. And these concerts are sold out. And get broadcast. And are enjoyed here in America as we pass the music around with each other either on line or buying it in stores or at conventions. Years ago, listening to Nadesico, a goofy space anime, I laughed at the composer cycle rapidly from Mozartian quartets to goofy kid's music to Stravinsky sarcasm to Wagnerian blasts and then a shocking small piece of sad music for solo cello and orchestra, the cello saying goodbye to a destroyed childhood, I was crying, I couldn't bear it, the beauty and the sorrow pierced my heart.

American orchestras found that if they play Star Wars music, they suddenly get an audience. Do they follow this trail further?

No. Instead of our media/amusement complex feeding each part as they morph over time, a great divide yawns ever greater. Obviously, eclectic music that is tied to popular entertainment is fun. So why aren't we doing this a lot more?

The mysteries of life.

DON'T TOUCH

2005-06-19T07:12:00.000-04:00

I sort of looked like this at 5 years old. My favorite color was red.

During the 1980's there was this witchhunt for child molestors working with very young children. It got so out of hand, all sorts of obviously innocent people were sent to prison on very flimsy charges. Since then, rules have sprung up which are, I think, pretty inhuman since they preclude any sort of normal human touching which all children desperately need to grow up sane and happy.

Like all things on earth, touching has good sides and bad sides. In the effort to eliminate all bad side effects, the baby has been tossed out with the bath water.

Here is an example from England:

I find Ruth Kelly's plans to open hundreds of after-school clubs and the government's pleas for more men to work in them a complete joke. What happened to me when I was a playleader demonstrates why men steer clear of these jobs and why they are right to do so.
There could have been few men better qualified for the part-time job I took at an after-school club for four-to-11-year-olds. I was always a very active father and, when mine grew up, I missed that involvement.

I adored the job, but the restrictions imposed on me became unbearable. I have never been accused of abusing a child, but I was judged to be "too tactile". I lost my job, in effect, for being a man playing with children.

This poor man details how he was given demerits for touching children or letting them climb into his lap. Women teachers were allowed contact and lap sitting but not he! As if he were toxic. He was not allowed to hug children, either.

I used to work with children. Hugging and holding small children is what makes them sane. They crave this and need this and Mother Nature hard wired them for this. To prevent childmolestation charges, we always did everything in a group. So no one was ever alone.

This teacher in England was never alone with the children but that wasn't enough for the New Puritans. They wanted him to be the cold father figure, forbidding and distant. This model quite frankly, is a Frankenstein construct. And it is very harmful for boys, for example, to see this as their role model. Fathers who can't play with their children are a nightmare to live with. Most people who had to endure such a childhood usually have to deal with the alienation and anger well into adulthood. Why educators want this is beyond me. Hysteria.

I learnt in training about "inappropriate touching", being told that piggybacks were all right, but men shouldn't take children on their laps. Children would want to climb on my knee but I'd immediately stand up and push them away.

Last spring the committee told me I was "getting too close" to some of the children. They said I must stop holding children around the waist and only take their hands. It wasn't easy teaching children to skate that way and it was unpleasant to feel I was being watched and under suspicion.

One day a girl of nine ran up crying, saying she had been bullied by two boys. She leant her head on my chest and I put a comforting arm around her. For that I was given a written warning. Apparently, when she put her head on my chest it was "child-led touching", which was acceptable, but when I responded it was "adult-led touching", which was not. I was told that if it happened again I should fetch a female playworker.

How cruel. Heartbreaking.

Now for a confession: I was raped, yes, not touched, raped, when only five years old. This trauma was bad enough but the real damage is what happened to me afterwards: all adults who knew about this ceased touching me. Here I was, in great physical and emotional pain, everyone wanted to fix it but no one, not a soul wanted to touch my physical body. I remember very vividly crouching on the ground wailing my eyes out and feeling a finger touch me and then retreat. I knew I was doomed. I described my childhood in a diary at 16 as "a desert wider and drier than the Sahara and as devoid of life and love," and seriously contemplated suicide. When telling this, again, the sorrow, and sincere words of encouragement and at least three feet of space seperating me from my own parents. No touch. I was the family leper.

I have discovered an interesting thing ever since I regained the memory of this assault (this isn't fake, the man was put in an insane assylum for five years and he confessed to me when I was 40 years old)---if I tell someone about what happened to me, they will express horror and sympathy and not touch me. Period. Indeed, the physical withdrawl is quite visible since I am tuned into it.

My point here is this: even after being raped, I wanted to be held, held and comforted and touched...yes, by my father and by men in general. I wanted desperately to find safe haven in that particular port. When I read "The Scarlet Letter" I nearly screamed with rage. Like Heather, condemned to live alone in awful rejection?

This is why, when the sixties happened, the Summer of Free Love literally saved my life. I didn't have a boyfriend, the habits of being a nonentity all my childhood were hard to break so I did anonymous sex...but only for a short while, for I finally found men who wanted to touch me because they loved me, not because they wanted sex.

And so I was able, after much suffering (as well as surgery!) get married and have children and be happy.

This is why I pains me greatly to see men being treated like they are all child molestors. I was unlucky enough to meet one of those but 99.9% of the men in the world are not child molestors. I would gladly put up with the bad to be able to enjoy the good. I don't want women locked away like in Saudi Arabia nor children treated like they are toxic waste. We have to live with the bad to live for the good. A perfectly safe society is a prison.

I felt I was being victimised for being a man. I didn't think it inappropriate to hold children around the waist, but I agreed to adopt a "no touch" policy and withdrew from the children to concentrate on office work.

One day last June, I was suspended. Someone had allegedly overheard two children talking about me and had made a report to the police. I have never been told who it was, who the children were, or what they said.

The police never contacted me and when I rang them after six weeks they said they had no record of any investigation. It's impossible to defend yourself when you don't know what the charge is or who is accusing you.

But the fact a report was said to have been made led Ofsted to tell the committee to ensure I was always supervised when I returned to work last September.

I was asked to resign but refused. They produced a document citing "causes for dismissal", containing statements from eight people relating to incidents which they said supported their case.

Some of them were true, such as when I cheered up a girl of five who was miserable on her first day by holding her hands and helping her jump. One statement said the girl's skirt was flying up, "clearly displaying her underwear". The mother had given me a "look", but I didn't stop.

Other incidents were equally minor or could not have happened. A boy told his mother he'd seen me with a girl on my knee and my fingers in her trouser waist-band. I had never taken a child on my lap.

My best teacher in grade school was a man. In the fifth grade, he could see I was really messed up. So he began to give me books. He introduced me to Tolkien and to Don Quixote. He let me sit nearby while he graded papers, letting me read books. He weathered my outbursts of childish rage. I still remember him very fondly.

I hated all my principals. Their response to my sufferings was to beat me with sticks, this being the fifties. The cold, hard, Big Father, grim and vicious. Grrr.

Enough of this. Sorry to load this stuff on anyone...

PROPAGANDA/CORPORANDA

2005-06-17T08:53:00.000-04:00

The British web site, Mr. Snaffleburger...a great cartoon
Back in the stone age, when NPR and PBS were first launched, they were supposed to be a counterweight to corporate American media, aka, "The Great Wasteland." I am old enough to remember the hoo-ha about the study that showed TV land was not exactly an intellectually stimulating place. I do remember the very old days when RCA, for example, hosted Leonard Bernstein's Philarmonia Orchestra's Children's concerts. I adored that series and he inspired me to study music harder. I even remember regular TV channels running operas and high quality plays! Wilco Theater, anyone?

And the very scariest character on TV was the Bardol saving cream cartoon character. He terrified me.

Well, buy 1968, all the high fallutin' stuff was gone with the wind and we were hee hawing our way to stupifaction. So PBS was started. It was a DC conglamoration of all those college stations across the nation and the very first thing they sponsored and paid for came from that hot bed of culture/liberalism: NYC.

I vividly remember the first Sesame Streets for I was raising my niece, Gale. She took to the show which was only 1/2 hour long, like a fish to water. I spent the show laughing my head off at the Muppet's antics.

When I moved to NYC, I got to meet Jim Henson. A wonderful, delightful man who was truly charming to children all so naturally. His death was a sad day for us all.

And now this! This news really annoys me. As if the tentacles of the American corporate machines aren't already prying apart the bricks all over the place! Now this! N is for NAFTA, S is for Social Security Privatization and T is for Tax Cuts:

Yesterday, Sesame Workshop announced that it has teamed up with Merrill Lynch to teach kids about globalization and financial matters.

Maybe this is part of the new corporate takeover of public television. Merrill Lynch employees were big donors to the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign.

As a part of the Sesame Workshop plan, "Merrill Lynch employees in North America, South America, Asia and Europe" will teach children in "pre-schools, community centers and child care agencies in their communities."

OK. What can I say about this? Blech? Geezus f*rking whoosis? Is Oscar Grouch going to be the Repro Man?

"The sooner you become familiar and comfortable with the concepts, the better able you are to be a responsible and successful citizen," Merrill Lynch's Chief Executive Stanley O'Neal told Reuters in an interview.

"The world is no longer a world of fixed interest rates or very slow moving interest rates, fully amortizing mortgages and easier choices in terms of retirement plans. It is much more complicated and much more personal."

Hahaha. Seriously, if the plan is to teach tots to not get trapped by corporate America, I will send them my resume and be one of the writers for Sesame Street!

For example, we can have Big Bird get a credit card solicitation. "Don't use it!" yells Mr. Schuffleuppagus. "It is a credit trap!" Then they sing, "Compound interest is compound trouble, every month your rates will double." The mind reels. The "personal" stuff is funny. Bert and Ernie discover they over drew their draft and now can't pay the mortgage and must declare bankruptcy only to find, "The big bad wolf is at the door and we can't go bankrupt anymore, Ernie!" Ernie then says, "I hocked the bottlecap collection, Bert! We can pay them off today!" The next episode, Bert sells Ernie to a bordello in Morocco.

Geeze. No more mamby pamby stuff for tots! We could show them little films instead of farm animals, kids in kindergarden being arrested for being unruly in Florida! Or tots being tasered for throwing temper tantrums. This will teach the little buggers the meaning of obedience!

I know that Jim Henson would never work with a proto or openly fascist organization. It wasn't his temperment. He did his own thing his own way. Now, it is all about making money as fast as possible. The Sesame Street thing went long ago from being a liberal oasis to being a corporate entity. This latest devolution is merely one more nail in a coffin that was built long ago. Don't let your kids watch a lot of TV.

It is a wasteland.

THE BRAIN DRAIN

2005-06-10T07:35:00.000-04:00

One of many brand new Universities rising in China, we build military bases in lands that loathe us and they build intellectual palaces for their own people.

Once again, the Chinese are giving us the boogeyman blues even as we embrace them ever harder.

China, whose surging growth feeds an incessant appetite for U.S. technology, poses a growing intelligence threat that the United States may be ill-equipped to combat, current and former U.S. officials say.

With the Bush administration embroiled in Iraq and the war on terrorism, intelligence experts fear it may be ignoring a determined Chinese strategy to acquire sensitive technology with commercial and military applications through informal spy networks with potentially thousands of operatives.

Such efforts could eventually erode U.S. economic and military prominence, officials and analysts said.

OK. When will they hire me to be an official analyst? Seriously, the "intelligence threat" is strictly on our side, namely, a deficit in our own ability to think about anything rationally. First: breaking news for the analysts. Hate to clue them in, but China is already challenging our power because they are rapidly building an awesome industrial base at roughly the same speed we are dismantling our own! Geeze!

The FBI lack resources to cope, they said. Also, U.S. corporations face business pressure to transfer key research and development facilities into China in exchange for promised access to its massive domestic market.

You know our rulers are pulling our legs about the war on terror, China, the whole kit and kaboodle. As readers of this blog know, they verbally attack China here and then fly off to that place to smooze and to conspire to make things even worse then they fly home and feign, yes, pretend to be surprized and horrified at what is going on. Our media conspires to cover all of this in such a sly way that even smart Americans are fooled. I have debated about this for years and only this year, made any headway in convincing anyone that we are being set up for a vast betrayal. For starters, we doubled the FBI budget, we increased spy vs spy powers and money and etc and every month they cough up this crap about not being ready, not having enough money, not enough power to stop what is going on! Well....duh.

China has about 3,000 "front" companies in the United States that exist mainly to obtain sensitive U.S. technology, according to government estimates cited by experts.

Some 300,000 Chinese citizens and 15,000 Chinese delegations visit the United States annually. An estimated 150,000 Chinese students are at U.S. universities; many are destined for jobs at high-tech U.S. firms or national research facilities.

The Chinese government assumes such individuals "will be intelligence collectors. And many are," said I.C. Smith, a former U.S. counterintelligence official.

Front companies! Hahaha. Like...IBM? Gads. Name names! There are all at the pinnacle of our industrial giants!

Why are we assisting and even paying for all these "dangerous" Chinese nationals to come here and take all those courses in college that make them more powerful because we need them, desperately. They get an excellent lower school education and come here eager to learn and easily best the best of the American student body which has funneled the best minds into medicine and business and law which is where the money is, not nuclear physics or astronomy or electrical engineering. The "hard sciences" languish in America while being cherished by the Asians.

I remember when Americans took courses in rocket technology. Then NASA didn't hire them! Then we started Star Wars but made the work so odious that former rocket experts who were young switched careers, I watched this happen from the front lines! This is why our rocket programs now stink. Working on hyper-secret stuff is no fun. It is awful, actually. The security has shot up the last five years making it a very unhappy place to work! And a slip up means prison?

The best minds fled this dark, coffin like box. Worse for great brains is your work can't be published nor talked about. Intellectual stagnation=dying interest in rockets.

The Chinese leadership made a collective decision after Tiananmin Square: they let their intellectuals pretty much free to go where ever. Previous to that, only people with children kept in China were allowed to study overseas. Now, pretty much anyone can. This freedom of movement is how they keep the lid on at home, scholars won't attack the Central Committee if they have intellectual freedom while the censorship of the internet at home clamps down further, the freedom abroad increases for the elite.

China is much bigger than the USA. It can lose 50% of its top intellectuals and still have more than twice as many as we have. They love the fact that we have to import Chinese and put them in increasingly powerful positions because this spreads Chinese power in significant ways. Since overpopulation is their problem, taking over more parts of the earth is OK with them just like the Europeans spread all over previously. It is a natural part of what a rising empire does. When Germany was rising, they allowed emigration of intellectuals with a shrug because they churned them out at a frantic rate.

So we do, indeed, have an "intelligence problem" and it isn't a thing more money to the FBI can fix.

PLAYING IS LEARNING

2005-05-24T09:39:00.000-04:00

Odds Stacked Against Pleasure Reading says a headline in the Washington Post today. The article is about students and parents complaining about school reading assignments for advanced students. They claim it is killing the joy of reading.

They are right.

The reason people read books is to kill time, entertain the mind, learn something new and to collect reference points so one can sound cultured in a conversation. In past times, people read things that were topical for themselves. There were fads such as Sir Walter Scott's medieval sagas that caused a rage for all things chivalric that changed architecture, music and fashion. People read his books because they were exiting and fun. They talked about these books excitedly in parlors and in schools. Dickens was wildly popular. Literally, his books stopped business and traffic as everyone rushed to discover the latest developments in his chronicles. All of this was topical and uninhibited.

Take the same books and force people to read these archaic stories and the eyes glaze over and the reader's interest collapses. I vividly remember reading books. They were private and they were mine and better than all that, I could warp them to my own woof! Seriously, I altered all the stories I read, some of them very significantly. For example, if the proteganist was a boy he would become a girl. Or a minor character that I liked would become a major character. Or I would alter whole sections or even the end of the book or discard 90% of it and completely redo the entire project to suit myself. This mental tinkering was not only fun but was creative and necessary to the enjoyment of the book.

This made it nearly impossible for me to participate in proper book rehashing sessions. I can deconstruct a book ruthlessly and if a work doesn't inspire me, I can tear it apart easily. But this is cold blooded work. When I hate an article or a book I rip it to shreds on various levels.

"I haven't read a book for pleasure in about three years," said Sachar, 18. "If I do, it's in the summer, and I might only get through one book because I'm so sick of trying to read. It's not fun anymore."

Allowing students some choice in what they read and helping them understand the content is a difficult balance to strike for today's teachers, educators say.

The dead hand of the academic at work here. I must confess, I love medieval books and read them for fun. The Icelandic sagas or old Mittlehoch deutsch minnesaenger, I read this for fun. I have a huge library of ancient books. No one tells me how to think about these books and nothing would please me more than sitting in a leather chair with a cool beer, fire in the grate, feet up, chatting with a group of interested people about the intricate trellis of Songs of the Rose. Well! No one is grading me or punishing me for spouting off so it is fun!

Why do academics kill fun?

This is the fundamental question.

Allowing students to pick their own books is more than a democratic reading experiment. Studies show that reading achievement is significantly improved when students have an opportunity to choose from a selection of interesting texts rather than being dictated to.

Here lies the key. "Dictated to". No living creature likes dictators. The natural urge is to resist or rebel. The liberal revolution was supposed to be all about freeing the mind. But stubbornly, humans try to chain it up. The urge to microcontrol minds is irresistible. I know, my teachers tried it in vain on me. They could stymie me but not stop me.

Fun. This concept of play being important to the human mind needs to be explored more. Let's look at sports. One sees jr baseball teams and basketball leagues and so on all over the place but when you look at the majors you see something astonishing: most of the very top players, the very best, came off of the "streets" and usually are former street urchins who played with other street urchins. Watching these people play, one sees immediately that they are having fun. It is all a blast to them as they move effortlessly and gracefully along, not a puppet on strings but free humans! Why do children in the Dominican Republic playing with broken sticks and empty tin cans make the top baseball players? They have few rules, no umps and they hit anything and everything and run everywhere, laughing, no adults in attendance!

I used to live in the inner city in NYC. Every day, children took over the basketball courts and played. Not as teams, really, but pairs for slightly more, all under one basket, no dribbling back and forth, they just jostled for the ball so they could pop it into the basket and the score that mattered was how niftily or with what level of cool one did the dump. Then the watchers would yell compliments and high five each other and the player who did the best mid air choreography would be the winner. There never were any umps or adults stopping the action with whistles and instructions.

When these same kids end up in colleges playing for schools that don't like them much, one can see the sullen anger build up. The play is less chaotic but less fun, too. By the time the ruthless winnowing process is over, the survivors play with grim determination because this makes them very rich but the joy of the game usually is lost.

Rules are good but too much control can be bad. This yin/yang tension is where creativity happens. The reason why novels are getting less and less well written is because the reader is tired and the writer is frantic.

PROTECTING GAY STUDENTS BY LOCKING THEM IN A CLOSET

2005-05-23T08:45:00.000-04:00

Bakersfield, California, has been the butt of LA jokes for all my life. I used to drive through Bakersfield all the time, commuting from UC, Berkeley, to the U of A in Tucson. This is where I heard Janis Joplin popped herself off. A desolate truck stop restroom where the radio was blaring, no less. Bakersfield was a place kids escaped. But it seems things have certainly changed over the years!

Student journalists sued their Bakersfield high school district Thursday in an effort to keep the school's principal from censoring student newspaper articles on homosexuality.

The suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, requests an emergency order to allow the paper to publish the stories in The Kernal's year-end May 27 issue.

I sued my highschool. I love it when students take the bull by the horns. This takes real honest bravery. Bravo.

East Bakersfield High School Principal John Gibson said he blocked publication because he is worried about violence on campus.

"It's not about gay and lesbians. It's about student safety," he said.

Paramo, however, said the principal's decision "regrettably sends the unmistakable message that school officials would rather students keep closeted about their sexual orientation."

Paramo is correct. I remember high school. At no point in time did anyone protect gay students. Au contrair. The administration often led the attacks.

The articles include photos and interviews with gay students discussing their sexual orientation. The reporters obtained written permission from those they interviewed and from the parents of those who were minors.

"No incident in the past led us to believe that those students, who are already open about their sexual orientation, had anything to worry about," Paramo, 18, told reporters Thursday at the ACLU's Los Angeles office.

The plaintiffs include 18-year-old senior Janet Rangle, who was interviewed along with her mother for the paper. She said when she came out as a lesbian, students were either supportive or didn't care.

Gibson's decision "made me feel like I was back where I was -- in the closet again, hiding," Rangle said.

This isn't a newspaper attacking gay students nor is it like the Christian leaders threatening gay students, it isn't Dobson trying to legislate against gay rights. It isn't...we all know what it isn't! Moreover, the students know the principal isn't protecting the gay students. If he were so concerned about gay students being attacked, he should go to the potential attackers and tell them in no uncertain terms they better watch their step or else...bang. Into jail they go!

We have seen this all our lives. The potential victims being told to wear a burkha and hide at home because angry, scared males want to attack us. No way. No way is this going to happen in America.

Oh, and if Newsweek or CBS or any news media wants real reporters and real editors who really know when to stand up and speak out and can talk back at officious jerks, there are several graduates coming out of Bakersfield high who are ready to rock and roll.

Bring 'em on!

*HILLARY IN TROY

2005-05-22T10:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Renssalaer Institute hosted Hillary Clinton as their commencement speaker. I was picking up my son to go work on this house when I saw a tiny group of just four Young Republicans demonstrating against her. I swear, the camera will go along from now on, this missed photo opportunity was too funny.

These young males who refuse to fight in Iraq but hang out at home, stuffing their faces, were all very fat. One was drinking beers and bellowing. They were very rowdy and rather rude but mostly pasty faced and smug. This reminds one that we can't get enough soldiers to die in war anymore. During the Vietnam war many a right wing Republican student would make a big too doo about being patriotic but if one asked them to sign up...poof.

As expected, Hillary was on target:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton warned some of the next generation of scientists who graduated Saturday from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that the Bush administration forces science to serve a political agenda on energy.
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As a handful of college Republicans protested outside ceremonies on Harkness Field, the senator told more than 1,000 graduates that Bush officials pressured government researchers to manipulate or suppress findings in areas like global warming and mercury pollution.
"This betrayal of the scientific tradition could have long-term, lasting consequences," Clinton said. "There are a lot of powerful interests that don't want to change the way they produce or use energy."

RPI is a techie school. Many of the graduates are foreign. The hollowing out of research is bad. The "powerful interests" she mentions we all know well what they are! Culture of Life News is very pleased to hear her talk about this. It is most important that the young people stepping out into the greater world see clearly what is at stake.

One of the many foreign students who graduated was Marija Kuzmanovic, who drew praise from RPI President Shirley Jackson for raising social awareness on campus by getting concessions to provide coffee from worker-based cooperatives in Central America and Africa. The cooperatives ensure more proceeds go to workers rather than distributors.

The President of RPI is a sanctimoneous two faced critter. The workers at RPI like in so many other universities and colleges is not unionized. At all. And the administration will pull and trick and do anything to insure the workers there toil for next to nothing, the graduate students do the professor's work with virtually no pay and the professors stay divided and weak. The school can be very vicious in this quest and the worker turn over rate at the lower levels is ferocious. More than one person has left because they just couldn't take the toxic atmosphere anymore.

This is why the President of RPI wanted to flatter herself by giving a taunting reward to a student who did pretty much nothing to change the school itself. When I went to a university, I sued them regularily over student/worker rights issues not to mention leafletting and making speeches and sit ins. Of course, no awards for me! Quite the contrary.

For this is what it is all about: doing pretend nice things while making real things worse. This is why nothing much is getting done as far as worker's rights are concerned. Left by the technocrats and the ruling class to fend for themselves, they are outgunned and out thought.

There happens to be students at RPI working for the right of unionization. They weren't cited for rewards.

More On SAT Writing Tests

2005-05-15T18:12:00.000-04:00

It seems that Culture of Life News isn't the only ones desiring more writing in schools. In the NYT Op Ed section is a piece by a businessman, Brent Staples. He is a regular editor to the NYT so we do wonder after reading him, why doesn't he do the editorials instead of say, Brooks, who is totally insane or Teirney who is downright evil. Why is the NYT hiding this writer under a basket? I can't say.

Companies once covered for poor writers by surrounding them with people who could translate their thoughts onto paper. But this strategy has proved less practical in the bottom-line-driven information age, which requires more high-quality writing from more categories of employees than ever before. Instead of covering for nonwriters, companies are increasingly looking for ways to screen them out at the door.

This was clearly the subtext message of a report released last year by the National Commission on Writing, a panel of educators convened by the College Board. At the heart of the report - titled "Writing: A Ticket to Work ... or a Ticket Out" - is an eye-opening assessment of corporate attitudes about writing, surveying members of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation's leading corporations.

The findings, though given a positive gloss, were not encouraging. About a third of the companies reported that only one-third or fewer of their employees knew how to write clearly and concisely. The companies expressed a fair degree of dissatisfaction with the writing produced by recent college graduates - even though many were blue-chip companies that get the pick of the litter.

I would venture to say one third of the writers on the NYT editorial page can't write clearly or concisely. Certainly, pointing out irrelevant obvious things while ignoring important things takes a dubious skill, but the childish level of some of the NYT editorial sections leaves us scratching our heads. Forget businessmen being annoyed, we are annoyed! This bothers us even more. We remember the good old days when everyone had secretaries and since women were not allowed above that position no matter how talented or educated, the men had the women do virtually all the writing. "Blah blah blah," the man would say and then the secretary would write a normal letter with the appropriate whatevers and insert the blah blah blah in the proper place with the proper spelling. Few businessmen wrote even memos.

Having worked in corporate America back in the Dark Ages, I assure you the boss, when he wanted to dash off a memo, called in the secretary. Now, the owners want even the upper management to be able to write memos. Even then, the bosses try to fob it off to others who are not trained to do this thus the annoying office chaos. So they want this fixed and fixed, now.

Hiring secretaries and paying them isn't an option. Heh.

So they want the schools to teach writing. We are happy about this. Literacy is a good thing, all around. The more, the better, we say. But then, Donald Trump will have to learn to write his own "you are fired" red slips, won't he?

Kultur Krieg: Kids vs Rush

2005-05-15T11:56:00.000-04:00

Click here for Rush parody site

Courtesy of 1/2 Kracked Kup, comes this story:

Rush Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated radio show that Evanston Township High School students "don't know anything about World War II" and "they've probably never heard the name Adolf Hitler" because they're so focused on a multicultural curriculum.

Some Evanston kids want to show Limbaugh what they know. They want to debate him on American history.

Of course, the Great Debator, drug addict Rush refused to back his bluster with actually showing up and debating these students. We wonder if he is angry because they might not know about his personal hero, Hitler?

Limbaugh's comments came after he read a Christian Science Monitor article Tuesday that profiled global studies courses required at ETHS. Limbaugh railed against multicultural education generally and singled out the North Shore school.

"What multiculturalists is, is balkanizing this country," Limbaugh said Tuesday. "People are coming here from various parts of the world and they're bringing their cultures with them and the multiculturalists are saying 'your culture is better than the American culture. The American culture is discriminatory, it's racist, sexist, bigot, homophobic.' "

What is the "American culture" anyway? Jazz? Yes. Who created jazz? Why those dark skinned people who were brutally discriminated against for many years. Great jazz musicians were not allowed in through the front doors of the hotels they played at and were not allowed to sleep there, either, for example. In Europe, especially France, they were treated like human beings which is probably why Rush hates France above all other nations.

How about basketball? White only leagues until the Civil Rights Act skewered that. Homosexuals? Well, the "red staters" have a particular and vicious hatred of all gays and goes out of the way to deny them basic civil rights and scream day and night about this matter so I would say a good hunk of America is very homophobic even as gays in the WH ride this wave of hate to great power and Bush kisses his Saudi friends and rubs bald men's heads we see tons of homophobia in America.

Sexist? When I first started fighting for my basic civil rights I was called every name in the book and literally spat upon unlike the mythical "protestors spitting on well trained soldiers who know how to kill people" stories. People spat on me because I was a woman and they erroneously thought I couldn't fight. A bad choice, by the way. I know several forms of combat.

American culture spread because of feminists like Isadora Duncan threw away her corset and danced barefoot and Louis Armstrong kept playing for white audiences even as they abused him in private and gay designers and artists and actors and writers and composers worked day after day entertaining and dressing us and fixing our cities so they were vibrant and beautiful.

Not to mention all the women, minorities, gays and everyone dying for America even as America rejected them again and again, even today, rejecting gays when they want to be patriots! It is still illegal to be in the military and gay!

In 2003, ETHS won an excellence in international education award from the Asia Society and the Goldman Sachs Foundation. ETHS offers seven languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, and has several clubs with an international flavor, including Model United Nations and Amnesty International. Students and staff also point out that the school requires yearlong courses in U.S. history and Western civilization.

"It's funny to me that someone would say we don't know about World War II -- we live in a large Jewish community," said Jane Biliter, a senior. Each year, the school hosts activities for Holocaust Remembrance Week. "Until 10th grade, all we did was U.S. and European history. It's just so false that what he says is funny."

The students are not only right, Rush is right in the wrong way. Feh on him. We applaud the Evanston Schools for this program. May more schools imitate this.

Dissecting Live Dogs

2005-05-15T11:30:00.000-04:00

I thought that it would be just really a good experience if they could see the digestive system in the living animal," Biology teacher Doug Bierregaard said.

Red America loves to pretend they are hyper moral and hyper religious. Yet they say and do things that makes one marvel at them--how can they stand themselves?

This news out of Gunnison, Utah, home to some of the most "strict" religiousness in America leaves one speechless. This is the sector in our country that objects to teaching Darwin because the children might figure out we are descended from monkeys. Perhaps this is wrong. Some of us skipped the monkey part altogether, it seems. Straight from red in tooth and claw Nature comes this classroom experience:

Biology teacher Doug Bjerregaard, who is a substitute teacher at Gunnison Valley High School, wanted his students to see how the digestive system of a dog worked.

Bjerregaard made arrangements for his students to be a part of a dissection of a dog that was still alive.
The dog was still alive, but the teacher said it was sedated before the dissection began.
With the students watching, the sedated dog's digestive system was removed.
"It just makes me sick and I don't think this should go on anywhere and nobody's learning from it," student Sierra Sears said.
The teacher said the lesson would allow students to see the organs actually working.

The Principal of this school "assures" parents this dog was going to be killed anyway so why not do this thing to it first before putting down the trusting animal.

Old Yeller, roll over.

Sounds like Frist who used to experiment on cats he illegally got from the adoption agencies, lying to them about his intents, would be overjoyed with this teacher and his brutal methods. What are the childern learning from this "lesson". "Dismemberment of living things is OK if you plan to kill them anyway"? Or how about "If you think this is gross, visit a factory for butchering cows and watch them skin the poor things alive"? Or "This is your stomach at work, gross, isn't it?"

The mind reels.

I am all for forcing children to watch the death of animals we plan to eat. As a vegetarian, this process upsets me anyway so why hide it from us, the ugly truth about our diets. We think videos of dying cows should appear right after every McDonald's advertisements on TV.

This still doesn't excuse this sadistic biology lesson. The fact the poor dog was going to be killed anyway doesn't change things. Utah, after all, is the place where they had a lottery to see who would win the right to shoot criminals dead. A brutal, Christian state.

A Writing Tutorial Ad Tells It All

2005-05-06T12:49:00.000-04:00

While researching the series of stories about computers in the classroom, I came across
this intriguing ad:

In the student testimonials were these two:

"In the English course I am taking this year we haven't had many opportunities to write essays, so it was a good exercise keeping me practiced over the summer… It will definitely help me in the future." :

"The school year is stressful enough. It is nice to work on our weaknesses without the added weight of grades."

What did this obviously intelligent student complaining about no essay writing do in "English Class"? "Keep me praticed" is bad writing. This student definitely needs essay writing skill improvement. And the only way to do this is to write and rewrite and review and then listen to critics...which is exactly what this online summer session does! Via computers! At home! Amazing. And students attest it works wonders and pleases them.

So why don't they do this all the time?

This is the burning question. Sure, it is tons of fun to sit around talking about books and poems and such like. I created or joined clubs in high school and college which did this...for fun. Any good class should have intrested students who join such clubs to discuss what they are reading. But the class itself should be devoted, especially in high school, to learning how to write about these things. This means a minimum of one essay a week.

Teachers hate grading essays. I used to make money moonlighting for them doing exactly this. It was fun work for me because I would copy down the funnier sections and then use it in the Daily Bandersnatch, our off campus newsletter at the time. Ha ha. My specialty was philosophy/language classes. It was appalling work, actually. I can understand why some professors hated doing this work, it would possibly drive them to drink...oops. They did drink with me. Another beer, bartender!

On line it is easy to read and critique essays. I also note the on line tutoring is done in a group...over many time zones and several nations. This extends horizons and makes maximum use of student/teacher time. Time really becomes and Einsteinian reality.

So why don't we do this all the time already?

This is the burning question, one that will burn brighter as school costs/school failures torment us all. Any questions, class?

Computers in the Classroom

2005-05-05T21:05:00.000-04:00

The Culture of Life News admits to being rather geeky in outlook. We love computers, especially really good (and perhaps expensive) computers. The better the computer and the better the interface the happier we all are. We look forward to improvement in computer technology, speed of processing, programming break throughs, all of it. The more the better, we say.

But there is a legion of naysayers. They point to the dismal, sad way computers are used in school. Always, the schools vote to use the cheapest systems available. If a child is computer savvy and lives with really up to date systems, using the dinosaurs at school, far from being educational is painful if not utterly infuriating. As my son would say, "Just DO it already, sheesh". Teeth grinding. Nightmarish.

As universities mandate computers, for example, Renssalear Polytech required laptops for all students, the kids would sit in class and multitask. Namely, talk to each other via on line chat systems. My own spawnlings do this all the time. They get bored if they can't do this. Sometimes, they even put up chat for the professor. A good teacher responds.

But this is way out on the outer edge of techyland.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1014/p20s02-lecl.html">An aquaintance of mine going way back, Todd Oppenheimer, wrote a book a few years ago which tears apart the use of computers in school comparing them to passive systems like movies or TV or other visual aids. This is possible only if one views computers in schools as limited, passive machines feeding information to children and not much else. This ignores the real power of computing: the active interface which extends powers tremendously if used aggressively.

According to the Christian Science Monitor: Mr. Oppenheimer's conclusion: Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless.

"At this early stage of the personal computer's history, the technology is far too complex and error prone to be smoothly integrated into most classrooms," Oppenheimer writes. "While the technology business is creatively frantic, financially strapped public schools cannot afford to keep up with the innovations."

Of course, this is not the first time US schools have been seduced by new technology, Oppenheimer points out. He summarizes the history of technological innovations in American schools and explains how each (TV among them) has been hailed as education's savior.

And yet, despite technology's lack of success in US classrooms, many Americans still prefer to invest in computers rather than in teachers, Oppenheimer charges.

My son's geek buddies in high school loved doing this. Sometimes they got caught...hacking. Hacking is the dark side of the force. It developed its own community. Its own culture and language. The "error prone" part of computing is disappearing as programmers improve the language tools and the electronic interface changes due to improved chip design and energy travel details are ironed out. But even in the old, "error" prone days, the geeky computer hacker kids that were previously despised by other children far from being deterred by the errors, they reveled in them! At home they would chat online about what happened and solutions or even suggestions for MAKING IT WORSE. For you see, in the 3,000 year old battle of the kids vs the teachers, this was a wonderful tool to run circles around a teacher. I wish I had that.

Teachers often drove me nuts. You can't interrupt them, that is rude and makes a class unruly yet one also wishes the class would take a hike, too. Obviously, many kids are profoundly disinterested in school or learning. So instead of leaping ahead, lights turning on, the class room run by the dictator/teacher is an onerous place to be endured and ditched as quickly as possible.

This really irritated me because I loved to learn stuff. Anything. Just give it over, OK? Instead, the most boring, tedious way to share information, all due to the fact that it was archaic and habitual, passed on generation to generation nearly unchanged since ancient Rome!---when out there, in the other world, there exists an exciting system that has everything, nearly everything!--right there, including contacting humans from far away of like mind....the joy, the sheer joy of the net....way back when we had it only for college kids I started to haunt the net and met...boyfriends who were geek freaks! Precious souls, all! Sigh.

In today's edition of Space.com:

Recently, I’ve seen a bumper sticker that states, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” Each year the first full week in May is Teacher Appreciation Week. There’s more than 3 million teachers in elementary, middle and high school classrooms teaching about 46 million children how to read, write, calculate, conduct experiments, observe the universe, and grow up to be good citizens. That’s a lot of people to thank, but thanks are not enough.

By 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts that we will need about 18% more teachers than are in the classroom now. The BLS notes that “Currently, many school districts have difficulty hiring qualified teachers in some subject areas—mathematics, science (especially chemistry and physics), bilingual education, and foreign languages.” Teaching is a growth industry, but will schools be able to attract people to the profession? In particular, will schools be able to attract those trained in mathematics and physical sciences?

Ouch. So many things wrong, I don't know where to start. Did any of the readers of this blog learn to read IN SCHOOL? I certainly did not. Nor did any of my brothers or sisters. Mom taught us and we taught each other in turn. When I learned, I couldn't wait to enlighten my littler brothers and sister. My mother was yelled at for teaching my eldest sister (super computer geek today) to read so she didn't teach my older brother and was reprimanded by the teacher because "he was refusing to learn how to read" so she taught him, too. And gave up listening to teachers.

I was reading as a three year old so books and I became friends long before teachers and I became alienated advesaries.

I taught my children how to read. At home. No "system" was required. We read books. Lots and lots of books. Together. My daughter even told her teacher in school she couldn't read simply because she wanted to read with someone and not alone!

When we began to use computers at home all the time as various systems came out that were useable, we found that our interaction with each other increased. When the internet (thank you, Gore!) became available at home, as my kids left home, we were never far apart thanks to the internet. I know my kids communicate all the time every day via the net. Just like this community here on line talks, every day. We love this. And the quality of writing?

WOW!!! I know my speed of writing and ability to frame an article has shot up thanks to interacting on the net. I have learned so much because we tell each other about mistakes, errors, unreasonable conclusions, all the pitfalls of writing are immediately critiqued and the feedback loop is very intense. I love this!

Every day is a lesson.

The article above goes to the usual canards: we need more "teachers" and they need better salaries (yeah, like I can pay another $5000 in property taxes each year?) and computers are OK but can't teach like the old fashioned classroom dicators I fondly do not want to remember? Yeah, you know, I have learned so much about many things thanks not only to computers but interacting with intelligent people AS AN EQUAL. When this happens, you are not resentful or angry or imposed upon and learning is a cup of tea. For two.

In a sane system, all students learn from computer programs...like physics, really easy to do. The "teacher" can cover many students over great distances via computer. The kids would have to learn to log on and frame questions using the human languages they use and this helps develop and extend the critical writing abilities. Use it or lose it.

The ability to write improves as one uses it to write and the thing most American students seldom do is...write. I taught my kids how to write. They had to write things all the time. I insisted on it. Now they are good writers. Nothing magical. But what gave this all a big boost was the internet. Today, the illiterate scratchings I used to see all the time are clearing up! People in general write better than ten years ago. Seriously better.

Today, on CNN, is an article about test cheating thanks to the stupid "Leave No Child Behind Act" which terrorizes teachers and the system into desperate measures to pass through children who are profoundly disinterested in learning anything, just so they get more tax money and can keep getting pay checks!

The Houston district began an internal investigation four months ago after finding unexplained jumps in scores and statistical irregularities on standardized tests at 23 schools, Saavedra said.

Two months into the investigation, Saavedra announced the district had identified two teachers at an elementary school who assisted students on the state exam. The district has recommended those teachers be fired, and has demoted the school's principal.

Kids hate tests. So do most sane creatures. Not all do, of course. "99 percentile" kids, those who are at the top, love tests. It is a break in a normally hideously boring day. I once had a teacher tell me, "If you don't do this, I will give you a test". I said, "That's great! I accept the challenge!" I was so happy. After three punishment tests, he decided to surrender.

In closing, there is the debate about teaching evolution which, as usual, centers in Kansas. "What is the matter with Kansas" indeed! I think Kansas is brain dead. I went to Kansas University for one summer and outside of the campus enclave, it was an intellectual desert. Some people want to kill off all knowledge and being dictator types feel they can do this by muzzling teachers. Of course, any sane, enterprising student can go around this feeble barrier but they don't care. They simply want to have the schoolroom dictator spout complete nonsense and force kids to parrot it back.

This teaches nothing but how to be stupid. Not that anyone cares. What they want are automatic responses to see if the propaganda or social controls work. "How many fingers to you see, Mr. Smith Jr," says O'Brien waving his hand, glaring. The cage of rats squeaking in terror and hunger is nearby.

More:

to see the cartoon better: Tole's homepage

Note how even the cartoonist thinks we will use the most archaic form of writing on the SAT tests! Why not use cuniform? Or illustrate it like the monks did in the Middle Ages?

The Hart/Rudman Security Report and Education

2005-05-04T08:57:00.000-04:00

Frontline...PBS news documentary about SAT secrets

The NYT ran a recent letter from the former Senators concerning our security and they wisely point out the neccessity of improving educational standards:

"Americans are living off the economic and security benefits of the last three generations' investment in science and education, but we are now consuming our capital.

"Our systems of basic scientific research and education are in crisis, while other countries are redoubling their efforts.

"In the next quarter century, we will likely see ourselves surpassed, and in relative decline, unless we make a conscious national commitment to maintain our edge."

Bill Gates wants to import Chinese and Indian computer experts because they get trained over there and he doesn't like American ones (too uppity?). Hart and Rudman think this is a bad thing and they want improvements at home, instead.

Well, the SAT system has decided to make reforms and look at the ruckus these small changes are making:

A professional organization representing 60,000 teachers of English criticized the new essay portion of the SAT as a poor predictor of how well students will perform in college and expressed concern that it could encourage mediocre, formulaic writing.

The report by the National Council of Teachers of English comes as half a million students prepare to take the SAT this weekend. The standardized test, part of the entrance requirements for many colleges, was expanded this year to include a writing and essay section in response to criticism from leading educators, including the president of the University of California, that it was too narrow in scope and discriminated against minority students.

Upon rereading the article what strikes me is how little sense it all makes.

The College Board, which owns the SAT, attacked the report as "elitist." College Board spokeswoman Chiara Coletti noted that six of seven members of the task force are college professors rather than high school English teachers.

"It is very condescending," Coletti said, arguing that the new SAT will help focus attention on writing skills in the "many classrooms in this country where very little writing is taught."

First, it seems that college professors are attacking the SAT essay section? Huh? Why is that? I remember college. I took the SAT three days after arriving in America and not using the English language for a year. I got a near perfect score. If you scored high, you didn't have to take the huge remedial English writing classes. Out of curiosity, I went to some of them with a friend. "Why don't they teach these courses in high school?" I stupidly asked.

Welllll..because the classes were not divided up between the college bound and the ones who didn't want to read at all except if a gun was put to their heads. So the compromise was to have everyone do minimal work.

I wrote essays constantly in German in Germany. When I came home, I was a writing fanatic. It was fun to do. I found the SAT questions to be bizarre. Even the contextual parts were minimal. Being able to write clearly is a skill that can and should be judged and it is easy to grade.

Which brings me back to computers. The SAT should be taken on a computer. It should involve seeking information skills, utilizing information and integrating information in a proper, university style format. In other words, you prove you know how to write a short paper complete with footnotes and citations. This can easily be taught in school.

Literature: we waste a great deal of time in high school on teaching people how to read novels and poems. Up until recently humans wrote and read novels and poems FOR FUN. It was a leisure activity. Not work. Still is, in my books. Using old poems and novels as windows into the past is good only if you are trying to understand society and history and as a person who avoided taking courses in these things when younger, I assure everyone, you can pick up an amazing amount of information all by yourself by using history books and pictures while reading books written long ago.

Now you know why no college will hire me. Ahem.

All SAT tests should be conducted on computers and can be easily supervised and judging the materials can be easily done: YOU SEND THE RESULTS TO THE SCHOOLS. In other words, let the universities and colleges look directly at the materials and decide if it is up to their standards or if the student is someone they want! Wow. Talk about simple. No grades. No hoop jumping. No filtering.

This will force highschools into a new way of functioning. The whole point of our pointless childish activities there was to teach us how to produce stuff colleges want and need. Yet high schools, nearly universally, refuse to do this. They won't make kids write. Too much work for everyone. Much easier to grade those "a/b/c/d" multiple choice questions.

Multiple choice, when I was in school in Germany, didn't exist there at all. You had to write down the formulas and calculate the answers, no shots in the dark guessing. You had to write, not choose answers. It worked.

I won't see this happen here in my lifetime because everyone, absolutely everyone in the system from first grade on upwards is addicted to this easy, destructive methodology. Writing is fun. I do it every day without effort. Pratice makes perfect. Before computers, it was much harder. Correcting my errors is now a breeze so I take the plunge and write...onwards! Upwards! To the barricades!

The pen is mightier than the multiple choice.

The NYT Puzzles About Schools and How to Fix Them

2005-05-03T17:00:00.000-04:00

http://www.midnightsociety.com/web/abandoned/
"Are Our High Schools Obsolete?" asks the NYT.

Easy. They have been "obsolete" for a long, long time. I remember when I won a scholarship to go to school in Germany. Back then, the kids went to school six days a week and had much fewer days off than American kids. No long summer vacation for them!

I was a top student in America, took college courses on the side while in high school, played in not one but two orchestras, chorus and track team. I thought I was top of the top. I wasn't an exchange student, I was a full, for real Gymasium student!

Then reality hit: I was so behind everyone. They wrote essays every week. We did one about twice a year in America. I loved writing (as readers of this blog can see) but this took me by surprise. In every course I was a million miles behind. Took a lot of patient turoring from amused fellow students to catch up. When I came home, I began to agitate for changes in the system, alarmed at how far behind we Americans were. You probably know, not one of my suggestions was implimented.

The easiest one to do is the hardest: get rid of summer vacation!

Impossible. So we slag along. I used computers for my kids so they could learn during the summer. Then they had to endure two months of "review" as the more sluggard students had to repeat 50% of what they "learned" the previous year. This brainless school schedule left over from the farming past continues to destroy any attempts as fixing what is wrong with our schools.

Bill Gates evidently wants smaller classrooms. I believe we need multi age one room school houses where the teacher is the be all and end all. I like this letter in the NYT:

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman argues, following John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, that "comparative advantage today is moving faster than ever from structural factors, like natural resources, to how quickly a country builds its distinctive talents for innovation and entrepreneurship - the only sustainable edge."

In other words, students and others need to be brought up to speed regarding technological advances, or we will be overtaken by other countries that are educating their citizens more rapidly than we are.

Having worked on computer-aided instruction for a number of years, I can attest to the typical response of educators when I suggest that my program might help students learn and retain knowledge more proficiently than the traditional approach: total silence.

It does not bode well.

William Vaughan Jr.
Chebeague Island, Me.
April 29, 2005

As my previous article notes, kids interface with computers with amazing speed and learn astonishingly fast using this wonderful tool.

Many adults have trouble understanding this. They think, computers will make kids antisocial. Yet I watch "geeky" kids with their computers. They talk animatedly, they share both verbally and in writing, sending messages or visiting forums and such, a complex interaction on several levels at once, their eyes alive with excitement. Where, oh where is the sullen, difficult, angry student? I see them not, at least, not when they are messing around with their computers.

And they don't just goof off. They mess with the coding, they mess with web sites, they seek information. My son was the font of information about ancient Norse Gods and Goddesses, just for example, thanks to his devotion to some of the games he plays.

The concept that people will learn what they want to learn is hard to learn, isn't it?

Punitive Patriotism

2005-05-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

http://www.theodora.com/flags/new8/flag_burning_1.html

While trowling about the web with my little net I picked up this fish from New Jersey:

A movie from Indymedia made by some high school students who wanted proof of their home room teacher violating the law trying to force students to stand and salute the flag. This video also shows a teacher unable to project authority. He seems to be a skinhead teacher who barks orders. Imagining the school is a military facility, I presume.

It also shows what a farce the enforcement of patriotism is. Our leaders right down the line in the GOP are shirkers who mouthed patriotic platitudes while running away from their obligations which seems to be what they are still doing. After 9/11 everyone was supposed to be super patriotic. Evidently this has fallen to the wayside. This is why super patriots aren't signing up to fight for "democracy" anymore. Even the biggest flag wavers are flag waverers when it comes to doing the right thing for the right wing.

Screaming at students is easy. Fighting with unarmed kids is a snap. Fighting in Iraq when the "students" can kill you is a whole different kettle of fish.

I remember very vividly when the Supreme Court ruled we no longer had to salute the flag. I decided it was a farce for the same reasons I think it is a farce today. My homeroom teacher screamed at me. He threw a trash can at me. I kicked it back. He hit my desk and I told him to hit me. He turned very red. He screamed that if we were in communist Russia I would have been hauled off and tortured. "What is freedom?" I asked him. He stood there, mute at last.

"It is the freedom to salute or not salute the flag," I informed him. That ended it. After a week, the school agreed to give me an "A" in history and let me out of the class for good. Best "A" I ever earned.

Computers Interface With Kids Better Than Teachers

2005-05-03T15:37:00.000-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4498511.stm

When my son went into special ed when he was only three years old he had trouble communicating with humans. The school had an Apple computer, this is many years ago. He spent about five minutes with it and bonded. It was astonishing watching this "learning disabled" child glom onto the computer and merge. He just...did things with it. The teachers who were supposedto instruct him ended up asking him for assistance with their own computers. This amused and amazed me.

Seems I am not the only one to think that maybe computers are different from all other forms of learning.

From the BBC in India:

Teach-yourself computing for kids

By Mark Rickards

Today is an important day for one Indian boy, nine-year-old Narput Singh. Something new is arriving in his remote village of Varna in the dusty, dry state of Rajasthan.

Something he has never had a chance to see before - it is a computer.

The digital divide seems at its greatest in India. On one side you have some of the most advanced work in IT taking place in cities like Bangalore or Delhi.

On the other you have children who have little or no access to new technology and live in conditions where clean water and electricity are still luxuries.

Please remember that the Indians are now a very formidable challenge for Americans in the field of programming and running computer systems.

Sugata was able to make some important but controversial observations.

"Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own - most of the objectives."

Teaching themselves

In the thousands of small villages across the length and breadth of India, this clearly has enormous implications. If the schools cannot provide access to both computers and trained teachers, then perhaps Sugata's approach could work.

The Hole in the Wall project is to leave a computer in their village, and it will be up to Narput Singh and his friends to work out how to use it.

The moment the box is open, the children swarm around it. They've never even seen the packaging before and some of them are rubbing bits of polystyrene on their arms, even trying a bite of it. Sugata gives a short talk before letting them loose.

"Who can ride a bicycle?" he asks. Forty hands shoot up.

"And who taught you?" There is some confusion and shaking of heads.

"No-one taught you," he says. "It's a skill you can learn on your own."

He turns to the computer behind him. "And the computer is like a bicycle."

I want to cry. This is so very simple. It is exactly how I feel about computers. As an older person, I struggle to learn. Lucky me, my kids are here to save me from my own timidity. My son says, "Hey, just do anything. Even if it crashes the computer." Certainly he wizzes along merrily while I drive like a senior citizen. Periodically, I have to flag the kids down for help.

But Sugata has noticed a pattern emerging after the first initial chaos. "You find that the noise level begins to come down, and from somewhere a leader appears.

"Often his face is not visible in the crowd, but he is controlling the mouse because suddenly you see the mouse begin to move in an orderly fashion.

"And then suddenly a lot of children's voices will say 'Oh, that pointer can be moved!' And then you see the first click, which - believe it or not - happens within the first three minutes."

Narput Singh has the mouse and takes control. And within three minutes he has clicked and, to his surprise and pleasure, inadvertently opened a game. He doesn't distinguish between educational games and those that are just for fun, and he is soon learning English words through a painting game with colours to fill in.

Whilst he is picking up the use of the computer directly, others around him are absorbing what he does.

With no adults giving cautions or commands it takes three minutes for children to begin nonrandom interfacing with the computer. Scary. I have watched children including my very own refuse learning in school. What really eats at them is the "lecture" method. They already are online and in control with computers and to slog along with someone can be painful. As I interface with the internet I feel the same rising anger. "You just don't get it, do you, here, let me show you," I want to shout. Heh. I do shout.

"We know that in nine months the entire group of children in a village would have reached approximately the level of an office secretary, which means they know dragging and dropping files, they know downloading, they can play video and audio and they can surf the internet".

Not everyone is enthralled with Sugata's results. Tom Standage, technology editor of the Economist, is sceptical of such projects. He points out that Bill Gates chose not to drop computers across the developing world as part of aid packages, preferring to concentrate on medicines and other more practical help for poor communities.

One wants to shake Gates awake. Here he is, pretending to be the cutting edge of the computer revolution and he can't see his own mountain he stands on. He does know he wants those Indian computer programmers. He complained to Bush just this last week about the immigration restrictions.

"The internet is the future," says one elder, "and our children have dreams."

Time will show whether the dreams are turned to dust in the desert, or whether the computer can make a lasting difference to these children's lives.

Hellfire, yes! I know that computers unlocked my son's inner genius. I know of an army of Asberger kids who are productive adults thanks to computers. Bill Gates, one glaring example. I know that my computer interfacing is most important. I love my computers and want better ones all the time, who cares about cars, I want the best computers available. To say that I adore them is an understatement. My kids make their livings off of computers. And they are very aware of the challenge of everyone else learning about this great tool. It puzzles me that computers are used so poorly in American schools. Just let the kids go with them. Some will do stupid things and some will do smart things.

That is life. Just like they learn to drive and some use this skill to flip cars into ditches and die.

Video of "violent" child

2005-05-03T15:34:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Jesus' General, here is the video

My take: the child is acting out but is remarkably quiet. Her most violent act was to push away an unsympathetic teacher. You can hear the other white staffers talking about the child as if she were a dog or something. I was really outraged by this video.

The only time the child was loud was when two adult police officers, one a woman, both white, grabbed her and twisted her arms. Up until then, she was sitting utterly still in a chair and was totally quiet! This is rank child abuse. I hope she wins her case. I wish she could find some great hearted teacher. This video made me very sad and unhappy.

It reminded me of our kindergarden. We had Korean, Chinese, Jamacian, Haitian, Anglo Saxon, Eastern European, American black children. We were very international. Our teachers were equally varied.

Rats.

I wish I was this child's lawyer....

Welcome to the Culture of Life Education News page

2005-05-03T14:38:00.000-04:00

This is an ongoing series about our school system and what to do about it and why nothing real is ever done and how public education is under fire from many fronts.