All Imported Posts
So, I am stepping WAYYY outside my comfort zone on this post. Normally, I don’t post sugary pop music, but you know, I came across that Iron Man remake by Cardigans, and it just kind of came together. Thus, a post of some of the lighter tunes that came out of a decade that truly rocked (see my post from yesterday is you have any doubts that the 90’s rocked).
I won’t lie…sometimes I am a total puss when it comes to music…the oddest songs catch my ear, and these tunes all caught my ear for one reason or another. Take for instance the Mellisa Etheridge song. There’s two reasons for that. First, in the 90’s I was going to school to be an electrical engineer. (Yep, I’m an engineer by training that has always worked in IT) One of my better friends, and a member of my brutally efficient and totally genius study group was a lesbian who LOVED Etheridge. So she kind of got me hooked on her stuff for awhile. The second thing was the video for the song. For some reason I had a huge thing for Juliette Lewis. I’m a sucker for the freaks, and that girl I believe to be a super freak.
You’ll also notice Digital Underground and ask yourself “Has the Infonoistacrat gone totally insane?!?” Well, no. That’s my tribute to my old shipmates on the USS Coral Sea. We LOVED that damn song in 1990, the last year we were all together before we all left the Navy and went our separate ways.
Oh, and I just read that there may be a new Big Lebowski movie based on The Jesus character. I now officially have something to live for!
I just ran John McCain’s speech from the final day of the RNC 2008 convention through Wordle to generate a word cloud to see major themes.
I've been in Philadelphia for three years, and the School District has had three different leaders. There is not a single cabinet level position that is held by the same person that was holding it when I start. The district has absorbed over a quarter billion dollards of cuts in that time. One of the ancillary issues around that is that is that much of what people talk about is, not surprisingly, the palace intrigue and the latest personnel and structural changes, rather than talking about the big ideas around education reform, rather than talking about how we can transform our schools to reflect the world we live in today.
This summer was no exception to that rule as people wondered who was going be where, and what positions would and wouldn't survive the latest changes. And, in the end, it's too easy for people to be distracted by the intrigue and lose track of what matters -- what it means to teach and learn in our schools.
And even if we don't get distracted by that, we can drift too far from the practical to the theoretical, and we can worry and wonder about a thousand things.
But the great thing is that there's an antidote to all that talk. And that antidote happened today. The kids came back. They came back with all their energy and excitement and passion and life. And today, after the laptops went out and the schedules were filled out, we were reminded of what matters most -- the kids we teach.
SLA flat out crackled with life today. Kids were happy to be back, not just to see their friends but to see their teachers, to see their school. And I spent the afternoon walking in and out of classes, watching the process of building classroom communities resume and restart as teachers and students got down to the work of the school year.
And the building just felt right. We had our kids back.
That's the best lesson we relearn every September.
Nearly a year after New York City’s first report cards for public schools were issued, the majority of the principals who ran the 52 schools labeled as failing remain in place.
Speakers opposed to the expansion of Columbia University in the western part of Harlem linked the university’s plan with gentrification taking place elsewhere in Harlem.
The attorney general is preparing a lawsuit against Goal Financial, charging that the lender broke laws by luring borrowers with cash and gifts and that it misled consumers about loan terms.
Christopher Hayes of The Nation:
But this kind of hits me where I live, since my dad is a community organizer, so lemme spell this out: the difference between a community organizer and a politician is that a community organizer can't tell anyone what to do. They have to listen. So they can't order books banned from a library to indulge their own religious sensibilities. They can't fire someone because they didn't follow orders to fire an estranged family member. They can't ram through a $15 million dollar sports complex that leaves their local town groaning underneath the debt. Unlike politicians, they don't have any power other than the power of people who want to see something changed.
Decades ago, before the ADA and a raft of other legislation, schools had essentially no requirements to provide decent education for special needs children. Then a movement of parents, engaging in - gasp - community organizing changed that. And they continue to fight day in and day out for educational equity for children like Sarah Palin's.
Too bad Sarah Palin just spit in their faces.
illdoc1:
So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn't know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed--job training, help with housing and so forth--from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord's work--the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a "task from God.")
This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man's decision "to serve a cause greater than himself," in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate's favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service--the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other--as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.
Roland Martin on CNN:
From The Long When:
| Either we get green or our layer of the lithosphere wraps early. We have to learn to respect a scope of time that geologists and too few others even begin to conceive. That’s why I love what the Long Now folks are trying to do. Our species has been operating on a free lunch program for the duration. We’re a start-up species, exploiting everything we found when we came here, and giving back approximately nothing. If we don’t come back from lunch pretty soon, lunch is what we’ll be. |
Wrote that 7.5 years ago.
A really nice piece that offers the case of Bush Pioneer, Randy Best, as the quintessential education profiteer among an illustrious collection of slime bag snakeoil salesmen and ideological pitch men and women. Among the cast: M. Spellings and Charles Miller. Here is a small clip:
. . . . launched in 1994, Voyager was Best's first foray into the business of education. After three decades of making money the old-fashioned way, the serial entrepreneur says he caught the philanthropy bug. He launched Voyager as a nonprofit that offered after-school programs as a way to keep latchkey kids engaged in learning. Yet after two years of sluggish growth, he switched to a for-profit model and hired school superintendents from Dallas and a nearby suburb to pitch the program to their former colleagues. Business picked up, and Best became a believer in a market-driven approach to social problems. "If you become a for-profit, then every single person in the organization is incentivized to do what you are trying to do," he explains. "Their rational self-interest is at stake; it is not just always trying to do something for the greater good."
Voyager enjoyed an enviably cozy relationship with its customers. After Texas' education commissioner intervened to help the company dodge child care regulations, competitors complained that it had cashed in on its connections. In 1998, Best and his investors donated more than $45,000 to Bush's gubernatorial reelection campaign. (Best says they supported Bush "because he was billing himself as the education governor," not because they expected anything in return.) That August, Bush dropped in on a Houston elementary school and spoke in front of a Voyager banner. Touting the benefits of for-profit after-school programs, he called for $25 million to fund them across the state.
Voyager's friends in high places were not enough to make it profitable. But by staying close to Bush and his allies, Best learned of new, bigger opportunities. In the mid-'90s, Charles Miller, a Voyager investor and Bush campaign donor, worked with the governor's office to design a new state reading program, the Texas Reading Initiative. Miller's team—"this small little mafia," as he puts it—included Bush's adviser Margaret Spellings and several others who would go on to occupy key positions in Bush's Department of Education in Washington. By 1998, Best had reinvented Voyager as a reading program, hiring researchers who'd worked on the Texas Reading Initiative or had ties to its designers.
Best says the idea for the new direction came from his own experience as a dyslexic and his interest in cutting-edge literacy research. "I think Voyager copied from a lot of the things we did with our reading initiative," Miller says. "Voyager saw that and just got in the draft, so to speak."
In 2000, Best and Miller signed up as Bush Pioneers, pledging to raise at least $100,000 for the governor's presidential run. When Bush entered the Oval Office, his education team included several people with connections to Voyager—and some who went on to work for Best. They set out to implement a revolutionary new policy that, despite the talk of smaller government, essentially put Washington in charge of setting state education standards. Miller helped select former Houston schools superintendent Rod Paige, a longtime Voyager booster, as secretary of education. Bush made G. Reid Lyon, a reading researcher who had consulted on the Texas Reading Initiative, his unofficial reading czar. Lyon cowrote the section of No Child Left Behind that created Reading First, a $6 billion program to fund state literacy curricula that drew upon "scientifically based reading research"—exactly what Voyager had been selling back in Texas. . . .
Last week, Jay Cross hosted a discussion on the un-book and several people discussed the concept of self-publishing on the Web, given services like Lulu. The question was asked by Dave Gray, “Why publish and then get feedback?”. Also, with self-publishing the author stays in control of the process. The publishing world is changing.
Eric Frank from Flatworld Knowledge spoke about his new venture, which is set to go live in 2009, but already has 26 universities involved in testing the concept. Flatworld’s business model:
Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students – print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more. Our books are open for instructors to mix, mash, and make their own. Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.
Eric mentioned that they work with established authors/experts; use a Creative Commons license; and allow textbooks to be re-purposed for each user and/or the adopting faculty member. Revenue is generated on the add-ons such as print, audio, PDF’s, and later on the Kindle. All of this is designed to give faculty more control over content. The service includes the ability to make private/public notes and comments as well as text chat and later some social networking.
It’s a new business model but doesn’t push things too far, which should make it viable. The professors remain in control, which should get buy-in, and the service will not be disruptive to the teaching model in higher education. Lowering the cost of text books will be positive for students as well. The key will be in getting a critical mass of text books and it looks like this is proceeding well. Self-publishing, or at least publishing without the middle-man, appears to be hitting the mainstream and this should be good for anyone in the learning field.
Watching the speeches, and the contortions Republicans have to go through to avoid mentioning the current president (and ostensible head of their party), it's like getting stuck in a "Twilight Zone" episode. The multi-millionaire former mayor of New York railed against "cosmopolitans." The multi-millionaire, Harvard-trained, former governor of Massachusetts railed against "eastern elites." Just 48 hours after the party's nominee insisted the convention would be less partisan, we're bombarded with the most ugly and nasty partisanship of any party gathering in years.
Haha, “community organizer”. Barack Obama sold mixtapes out of the back of his Cadillac, that shifty bitch.
...the speech was slave to the same priorities that governed her selection as vice president: It was aimed at wining the news cycle, not the campaign.
...basically the GOP told the party the Reichstag was still burning...
This is a speech to Michelle Malkin’s fucking comments section.
In the past several hours, Dems I’ve spoken with and who’ve flooded my inbox are energized. A woman friend and Democrat who had not worked for Obama’s campaign: “I am volunteering tomorrow.” An Obama organizer who was operating on fumes five months ago: “They are not getting away with this. 10 hours of call time tomorrow.” A shorter read of the mood: “Let’s get it on.” (...)
Fire up both bases equally, it’s not even close. Obama wins going away. In 2008, there are so many more Democrats, numerically.
Finally, Nate at fivethirtyeight.com:
I think some of you are underestimating the percentage of voters for whom Sarah Palin lacks the standing to make this critique of Barack Obama. To many voters, she is either entirely unknown, or is known as an US Weekly caricature of a woman who eats mooseburgers and has a pregnant daughter. To change someone's opinion, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to be a trusted voice of authority, or you have to persuade them. Palin is not a trusted voice of authority -- she's much too new. But neither was this a persuasive speech. It was staccato, insistent, a little corny. It preached to the proverbial choir. It was also, as one of my commentors astutely noted, a speech written by a man and for a man, but delivered by a woman, which produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.
In exceedingly plain English, I think there's a pretty big who the fuck does she think she is? factor. And not just among us Daily Kos reading, merlot-drinking liberals. I think Palin's speech will be instinctively unappealing to other whole demographics of voters, including particuarly working-class men (among whom there may be a misogyny factor) and professional post-menopausal women. As another of my commentors put it:
Not only does Palin's inexperience trump Obama's... her "otherness" also trumps his. Where she comes from, the way she talks, her bio, lifestyle, and all the moose and caribou stuff... it makes her seem more exotic than Obama, who after all lives in the middle of America and has a life that people can readily understand.
Palin may be just as American as anybody, but she still seems to come from Somewhere Else.
This would be fine... even interesting and appealing... if she weren't attacking. But we have a deep, instinctive aversion to people who are part of us (even if we don't really like them much) being attacked by people we perceive as outsiders. Our instinct is to stiffen up, to protect.This point may be a little bit overstated, but the fact remains that Barack Obama is extremely well known and Palin is largely unknown, and when that is the case, your perception of the known commodity is more likely to influence your perception of the unknown commodity than the other way around. If there's a certain Italian restaurant that you've been going to for years, and some stranger stops you on the street and tells you that they don't know how to cook their pasta, you're going to think that the stranger is a kook -- not that the restaurant is poor.
And not only is Barack Obama exceptionally well known, but perceptions of him are exceptionally well entrenched. In today's Rasmussen numbers, 63 percent of voters had either a very favorable or a very unfavorable perception of Obama. This is an extremely high figure.
Joe Sudbay nails how I felt last night:
This convention has such a creepy, disturbing feel to it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels creepy. I really don't like having this group of people in my life - even if it's just on tv and in the news for now.
More substantially, I think Mark Schmitt is right:
...I did think that she was picked because she was the closest thing available, even if it required jumping her to the head of the class, to the next wave of the Republican Party -- the Sam's Club Republicans who could combine social conservatism with an appreciation for the real needs of vulnerable working families. There was a tiny bit of that -- the talk about the First Dude being a union member and the promise to be an advocate for families with special needs children. (This is my least favorite trait in modern conservatism -- the carving out of a sympathetic exception for the single family need or health problem that you have personal experience with. When a man did it -- Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon -- I called it "Miss America Conservatism," in the sense that each Republican has his or her little platform issue -- in Smith's case, mental health funding, because of his son's suicide -- that shows their soft side, and then they go back to the demeaning pageant of cutting taxes and slashing Medicaid. The lesson in having a child with special needs is not "we need more attention for kids with special needs," it should be, "life hands out lots of difficult circumstances and lots of families need different kinds of help, so we're all in it together.")
But at any rate, that was a minor note of the speech. The major note was one of fierce, sarcastic, unrelenting partisanship, amped up, as Josh Marshall notes, by following immediately in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's ugly attack, delivered with the passion of a man who for much of his mayoralty had been held to account solely by "community organizers."
And so Palin's was not the face of the future GOP. It was the face of the Republican Party that got so carried away with itself that it impeached Bill Clinton. It was the face of the self-righteous, nasty party of Tom DeLay, John Boehner, Bill Frist, and George Allen. It was the face of Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, not the softer and superficially more accomodating tones of Ronald Reagan and, to be fair, the election-year George W. Bush.
This was exactly the face of the Republican Party that people have been voting against since at least 1998, when Democrats gained in congressional races amidst impeachment. It's certainly the face of the Republican Party that voters rejected in 2006, when they turned out Allen, Rick Santorum, DeLay, and others. And the fact of being a woman does not soften the partisan face; hard-partisan women like Linda Smith in Washington have had no more success outside of the reddest states than their male counterparts. (Which is why McCain had no pro-life Republican women with experience to select from.)
On top of the fact that Palin's retro approach has consistently failed, it also provides the perfect foil to Senator Obama's cross-partisan pitch. The challenge for Obama was to assimilate the Democratic nomination and a fundamentally progressive agenda with a cross-partisan, new politics tone and attitude. That required some cooperation from the Republicans -- he had to paint a picture in which they were partisans and he (and Biden, et al.) were able to get beyond that old partisanship. McCain, who had cornered the market on bipartisanship, made that move very, very difficult. So did Palin in her first presentation as a different kind of Republican last Friday and on Labor Day in Dayton. But the Palin we saw tonight is a perfect foil for Obama, allowing him to retain the cross-partisan, forward-looking vision, in contrast to the 90s-style, sarcastic partisanship exemplified in Governor Palin's speech.
Also, this:
Palin: "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House."Sarah Palin might have changed her mind on this one recently. However, a comment here notes that Palin actually slashed funding for schools for special needs kids by 62%. Budgets: FY 2007 (pre-Palin), 2008, 2009 (all pdfs).
The gift to the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard was the biggest so far from Eli and Edythe Broad, who are giving away a multibillion-dollar.
Did you ever try to talk to teenagers about international politics or modern history? At our house, their eyes usually glaze over and the subject changes. Last night we watched Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, produced by the Morgan Spurlock who also made Fast Food Nation. This is the kind of documentary that takes on big issues but in a not too serious way, using humour to make its point.
I would recommend this movie as a starting point for discussions on terrorism, geopolitics, the war on terror or religious studies. Morgan ties together a story of discovery as he travels through North Africa, the Middle East and finally Pakistan, asking where is OBL. At various points he adds in computer-animated history lessons, which cover an entire semester’s worth of material in a few minutes. This movie keeps your attention, tells a serious story but doesn’t beat you over the head with the lesson. Judging by the comments on Twitter last night, this movie was a better use of my time than watching the Republican National Convention 
If you’re looking for good movies on serious issues, see Global Civics 201 and Global Civics 101.
Yesterday was a brutally mid numbing day of dealing with a customer that won’t listen to reason, and insists on making demands based on inadequate or incomplete requirements. As an IT architect, I live and die by requirements, and the solutions I give to a customer is only as good as the requirements given to me. So I had a monster headache yesterday, and had a need to put together a list to bang my head to. Most of the tunes are from late 90’s and early 00’s, and are pretty much from that era when alternative started to turn into that nu-metal stuff. It’s all good, all aggressive, and all rockin’. Enjoy!
Joe Lieberman... Change You Can Believe In!
"I was for Barack Obama before I was against him..."
The panel of education experts recommended that the law be renewed but amended to limit City Hall’s power.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced regulations that are meant to combat bullying in city schools that is based on bias.
