Poetry Friday — Belated edition; Meet Malcolm X. London

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Chuck Stanley

By Charlton Stanley

Recent events in the news make this young poet/storyteller/activist’s words even more meaningful. At the Louder Than a Bomb competition, teenager Malcolm London was the top individual performer for 2011, selected from over 700 competitors. His team Youmedia also won the team competition, a first for the LTAB competition.

Malcolm London was an 18-year-old Senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago when he made this video two years ago. He speaks of inequalities of the public school system when he says, “The educated aren’t necessarily the educated.”

He says, “My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose. Social lines are barbed wire. Labels like regulars and honors resonate. I am in honors but go home with regular students who are soldiers in a territory that owns them. This is a training ground.”

More over the flip.

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Posted in Education, Education Policy, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

First Life

Posted on August 13, 2014 by James Knauer

By James Knauer

This is the first of a three-part series dealing with life, its constituency, and some prophesy regarding its future here on Earth.

The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo

The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo

It’s worth checking in on abiogenesis, the self-assembly of life from nonliving matter. Life thrives at the margins of the universe. Don’t wash your shower tiles to see this within a month. Lovers of wetness and dank, mold and mildew will certainly find a home in the grout, as the air is thick with their spores. We find microscopic life on and within Earth no matter where we look. No environment is too harsh. If weighed, over 90% of all life by mass on the planet lives within the first ten miles of Earth’s crust, and the vast majority of that is single-celled organisms. We’re evidently that green fuzz growing on the moist, salty rind.

Abiogenesis concerns itself with where and how this all began.

Our solar system’s location has played a huge part in the rise of life on Earth. A spherical shell centered on our sun known as the Oort Cloud spans nearly two light years in diameter, the icy outer remnants of Sol’s ignition and coalescence of planets. Spherical is the key. Undisturbed at the largest scale, even after over four billion years, and having orbited the entire galaxy nearly 20 times. Which is not to say the Oort Cloud is some magical shield – standing on any one body you’d need a powerful scope to see the nearest neighbor – rather it’s a piece of evidence that Sol is located within a star desert. This isolation has given evolution virtually free reign on our planet to select traits based on changes in environment, many of which appear repeatedly within the record, with vast stretches of time to tinker and refine. This tends to point in the direction of a larger scale construction that is independent of any one species.

Because it can all begin with a single cell, such as the one that carried its genetic code into the year of this article’s publication, such that I, the fleshy bit, can bring it to you.

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Posted in Astronomy/Astrophysics, Biology, Countries, Geology, Government, Health Care, Medical Technology, Science, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

Is Campbell Brown the New Michelle Rhee of School Reform?

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

MichelleRhee3 By Elaine Magliaro

News broke yesterday that Michelle Rhee, founder of the anti-teacher group StudentsFirst and former chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., is planning to step down as CEO of StudentsFirst. Joy Resmovits (Huffinton Post) said that as local media “reported that StudentsFirst is winding CampbellBrown1 - Copydown activities in at least four states, Rhee has taken on other jobs.” It was also reported that Rhee will “become board chair of St. Hope Public Schools, a charter school chain run by her husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (D).” In addition, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. recently announced that Rhee would join the company’s board.

Resmovits said that if Rhee does step aside, StudentsFirst will lose its “main attraction.” She wondered if Rhee’s organization “will draw as much attention without its famous founder.”

A few weeks ago—prior to the news that Rhee would be giving up her leadership role with StudentsFirst—Jeff Bryant (Salon) wrote an article titled Education “reform’s” new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown. Bryant said that as Rhee’s school reform efforts had begun to “flounder, new links emerge between a group she founded and a new face, Campbell Brown” He added that Rhee had “been upheld in the media as someone with the formula and fight required to ‘fix’ public schools.” Bryant continued by saying that Rhee had provided “lots of attention-getting optics for a movement made up of rich and powerful people who press their belief that what ails public education most is ‘bad teachers.’”

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Posted in Constitutional Law, Education, Education Policy, Politics, Propaganda, United States | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Why Are Campbell Brown, David Boies, Robert Gibbs, Hedge Fund Managers, and Other Wealthy Elites Going after Public School Teachers and Their Right to Due Process? Part II: David Boies, Star Lawyer and School Reformer

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

DavidBoiesBy Elaine Magliaro

In Part I, I focused on Campbell Brown.

Why Are Campbell Brown, David Boies, Robert Gibbs, Hedge Fund Managers, and Other Wealthy Elites Going after Public School Teachers and Their Right to Due Process?, PART I

In Part II, I’m focusing on David Boies.

David Boies, Star Trial Lawyer, Education Reformer, and Limousine Liberal

John Thompson, an award-winning historian and inner city teacher, wrote an article about David Boies last week for Huffington Post. According to Thompson, Boies, one of America’s most well-known lawyers and the attorney who represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court, is now “shilling for the decade-long, test-driven, scorched earth campaign that demonstrates its pro-student commitment by imposing nonstop test prep on kids, and crippling teachers’ power to resist mandates for soul-killing, bubble-in accountability.” Thompson said that “dilettantes like David Boies” used to be called “Limousine Liberals.” He said today liberals like Boies are “known as corporate reformers.”

Last week, Mitoko Rich (New York Times) reported that Boies would be heading a group that is challenging teacher tenure in a lawsuit filed in the state of New York. Boies, “the star trial lawyer who helped lead the legal charge that overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban,” has become chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, “a group that former CNN anchor Campbell Brown founded in part to pursue lawsuits challenging teacher tenure.” Rich said that Boies, in “aligning himself with a cause that is bitterly opposed by teachers’ unions,” has become “emblematic of an increasingly fractured relationship between the Democrats and the teachers’ unions.”

The son of two public school teacher, Boies doesn’t appear very knowledgeable about the main causes of the problems facing public schools in the United States today. He seems to be drinking the anti-teacher/anti-tenure Kool-aid of people like Michele Rhee, Campbell Brown, and charter school prima donna Eva Moskowitz.

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Posted in Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Courts, Education, Education Policy, Liberals, Media, Politics, Propaganda, United States | Tagged , , , , , | 17 Comments

Music Monday: So Say We All

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Gene Howington

By Gene Howington

I have been a fan of movie and television scores for as long as I can remember. They are an essential layer for storytelling on that canvas and so very often go unnoticed although they establish mood (or character) just as much as the script, the acting, the writing and the production design. Independent filmmaker John Carpenter, famous for also scoring his own films, has even told the story that his seminal horror classic Halloween “didn’t work” until he laid down the soundtrack. Today’s Music Monday selection is written by Bear McCreary for the first season of Ron Moore’s excellent re-boot of the Battlestar Galactica franchise.  It is called “Passacaglia”. 

The name is actually the form of the composition and may not be as familiar to many listeners as forms such as overtures, fugues, concerto, symphony, sonata, suite, or études. A pascalle was originally a type of strummed interlude between songs common in early 17th Century Spain.  This became passacaglia in Italian and it was the Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi who in the late 1620’s transformed the incidental Spanish form into a series of continuous variations over a bass (which itself may be varied). By the nineteenth century the word came to mean a series of variations (usually of a serious character) over an ostinato pattern which is exactly what McCreary provides here.  Enjoy.

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Posted in Music | 16 Comments

“SCROTUS”: A Song by Roy Zimmerman

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

I want to thank OroLee for posting the following Roy Zimmerman video in the comments on my column titled Pro-Life Nurse-Midwife Sues Tampa Family Health Centers for Not Hiring Her after She Said She Wouldn’t Prescribe “Hormonal” Contraception.

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Posted in Christianity, Constitutional Law, Fundamentalism, Health Care, Health Care Insurance, Pharmaceuticals, Politics, Religion, Reproductive Rights, Roman Catholic Church, SCOTUS, United States | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Not Equal: Gaza in over 1000 frames (A Mark Fiore Political Cartoon Video)

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

Posted in Israel, War | Tagged , | 139 Comments

A Sunday Morning Video: Crying Baby Grooves to Katy Perry Song

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

POETRY FRIDAY: A Few Clerihews for Those Who Enjoy Light Verse

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

PoetryFridayButton

By Elaine Magliaro

It appears that light verse for adults has gone out of vogue. That saddens me. I enjoy reading the work of writers like Ogden Nash, Morris Bishop, Arthur Guiterman, and others.

One of my favorite Guiterman poems is Ancient History. Here’s how the poem begins:

 

I hope the old Romans

Had painful abdomens.

 

I hope that the Greeks

Had toothache for weeks.

 

I hope the Egyptians

Had chronic conniptions.

 

Click here to read the rest of the poem.

Today, I’m posting some examples of a specific form of light verse called the clerihew. A clerihew is a four-line poem composed of two rhyming couplets. The clerihew pokes fun at a famous person. The first line should end with the name of the famous person. The form was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Here is one of Bentley’s clerihews:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Detested gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

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Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 16 Comments

Why Are Campbell Brown, David Boies, Robert Gibbs, Hedge Fund Managers, and Other Wealthy Elites Going after Public School Teachers and Their Right to Due Process?, PART I

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

CampbellBrown1 - CopyBy Elaine Magliaro

Who the F*ck Is Campbell Brown and What Has She Been Up to Lately?

Earlier this week, Charles Pierce posed a question in a post he wrote for his Politics Blog at Esquire:

To paraphrase from my grandmother, the former shepherd lass from the hills and hollows of north Kerry, who the fck is Campbell Brown when she’s at home?

A former broadcast journalist, Brown once anchored a couple of news programs on CNN. To be sure, a man as politically savvy as Pierce KNOWS perfectly well who Campbell Brown is. In fact, he provides readers of his blog with information about Brown, her education, her spouse, and what she has been up to lately:

Well, on the basics, she’s from Ferriday, Louisiana, the hometown of Jerry Lee Lewis, and she graduated from Regis University in Denver — after a brief stop at LSU — with a B.A. in political science. She is married to Baghdad Dan Senor, one of the most conspicuous prevaricators in the employ of the late Avignon Presidency… She also spent a year teaching English in Czechoslovakia, which I guess qualifies her for her current job, being a public spokesperson for the latest attempt to privatize American public education, Michelle (Big Grift) Rhee having apparently run her course as the rake in this long con, what with the cheating scandal and the big salary and all that sweet corporate sugar. The make-education-a-business scamsters needed a new face for the operation. Enter Campbell Brown, B.A. in political science, and professional communicator.

As Pierce noted in his Esquire piece, Brown is currently “out there shilling for the latest ‘reform’ scheme — using the courts to bust the teacher’s unions and to deny public school teachers the freely-bargained rights to due process that ensure that they will not be altogether subject to the whims of local school board fanatics.”

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Posted in Constitutional Law, Education, Politics, Propaganda, United States | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments