(With grateful acknowledgment to Charlotte Butler Wright, who came up with the first part and has it on her Facebook page. And I've witnessed the second part more times than I care to count.)
The vote occurred along split partisan lines. The ten Republicans on the board voted for the curriculum changes and the five Democrats opposed it. The results have been both hailed and condemned as giving the teaching materials a "conservative" and "right-leaning" slant, as opposed to what some construe is a "liberal" one.
The reason this is going to be a big deal for the rest of the country is because Texas is one of the biggest consumers in the highly lucrative business of school textbooks. So if textbook publishers have to produce for the Texas market, those same learning materials will likely be adopted in other states.
Matthew wrote on his blog about how this smacks too much of political propaganda. And, he would be correct.
But what troubles me especially about this - and it's taken me a few days to really feel ready to articulate my thoughts on it - is that the Texas State Board of Education is perpetuating a terrible ignorance... and it has nothing to do with the ideological flavor of the textbooks that they will be using. I would be just as bothered by the board's actions if it had purposefully chosen an admittedly left-leaning curriculum.
The ten members of the board who voted for these changes demonstrated no wisdom or foresight by wielding their power in order to literally ensconce Newt Gingrich and the Moral Majority in the history books, or to remove entirely any mention of Thomas Jefferson as a leading intellectual guiding light of early America (huh?!). And it's even troubling that the board deliberately chose to remove Ross Perot's 1992 run for President from historical discussion (the 1994 "Contract with America" however did make it in).
Is it Republican/"conservative" propaganda? Hell yes it is. And it would be just as wrong if it were Democrat/"liberal" propaganda. The examination and deliberation of history should never be defined by and along partisan lines. History is a broad tapestry, and to selectively pull this thread or that one out of it is to cheapen and make worthless the work entire.
But that still isn't what is particularly frustrating me about what the Texas State Board of Education has chosen to do. No, what irks me the most is that in spite of its sworn duty and very title, the board has chosen not to educate young minds, but to rather instill unquestioning obedience to the status quo and a paradigm fast approaching obsolescence.
Education is supposed to be a thing that transforms a person into an enlightened individual. The intended result of education should be a person capable of wise choice, rational mind, and liberty to pursue the exercise of personal conscience. In short: education is that which most empowers one to be free... including the freedom to question The Way Things Are.
The Texas State Board of Education, however, has chosen to compel the millions of children in its charge to accept The Way Things Are without question. And I would say that regardless of which ideology the curricula was being slanted toward. The Texas State Board of Education however has taken an education of ignorance to an entire new level of brazenness. The board - along with all other school boards in the United States - should be doing its damndest to encourage its students to not think in terms of "conservative and liberal". That is a dichotomy as false as anything could possibly be. It is also one that I am increasingly seeing is being challenged and questioned by a growing number of people.
But it's not freedom of mind that the Republicans of Texas' state school board have shown they are interested in by this course of action. Rather, they have demonstrated that they want, in their own way, to continue propping up the two-party puppet show that is destroying America.
Well, America isn't going to be saved for our children by the party faithful of either the Democrats or the Republicans. If America is going to have any future at all, it's going to come by the hard work, tireless efforts and even sacrifice of those who refused to abide by The Way Things Are.
The Texas State Board of Education had an opportunity to lead the way in this country by an infusion of fresh blood. Instead it chose to continue a condition of terminal anemia.
Perhaps there is a country in history that has thrived on a determined education in ignorance and apathy. But if there is one, it's not coming to the mind of this writer. And I doubt that Texas, as a state, is going to prove to be any different.
Dini suggests that in the future, his technique could be used to quickly establish a base on the Moon by supplying it with native lunar dust and building required structures from there, instead of hauling material from Earth.
Hit here for more about the D-Shape printer, which will probably be pretty cheap when it comes to market... but the cost of the ink cartridges will be insane! :-P
That big green chunk of geography represents overwhelmingly Baptist populations. The "thin red line" stretching roughly from northern Virginia across to the Midwest is primarily Methodist. Mormons are chiefly located across Utah and the western states. Lutherans have their stronghold around the Great Lakes. Catholics are heavily settled in New England. And if you examine the map further you can find places populated by the Amish, Presbyterians, Seventh-Day Adventists, Orthodox and Anglicans.
Pretty neat!
Media conglomermonster Viacom - which has tied up the video hosting service in litigation for the past three years over "copyright infringement" - is now said to have been secretly uploading its own videos to the Google-owned website!
From the statement on the official YouTube blog, pertaining to court documents made public earlier today...
Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.Good. Lord.For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.
If true, Viacom's actions are about the most boneheaded legal maneuver pertaining to digital entertainment that I can think of since Universal tried to sue Nintendo for using Donkey Kong to infringe on King Kong when Universal didn't own King Kong to begin with. That case became a huge victory for Nintendo and helped propel it to being the corporate giant that it is today. Might this allegation - if found to be true - prove to be a similar boon for YouTube? Yeah, I think it's possible.
Click here for more about this story, and the learned minds that are Slashdot readers are already contributing their trademark colorful thoughts to the matter.
EDIT 6:48 p.m. EST: Do not think for one moment that I am NOT hysterically giggling about this turn of events, for reasons that should be more than obvious :-)
And today it's making a comeback, courtesy of Steven Westlake and his alter-ego, "proprietor William A. Mays". Westlake has propelled National Police Gazette into the 21st century via the Internet and it is a scream of a good read! Aim here for the National Police Gazette website. And the website Ragazine has posted an in-depth interview with Westlake that provides even more history about this groundbreaking publication and its return.
Okay, #3 is maybe all the more amazing for me 'cuz the pilot is flying upside-down. And I once saw a plane crash at an air show. It was in 1996 here in Rockingham County, and the dude in the cockpit was doing a low-altitude maneuver upside-down over the runway. It happened right in front of where we were sitting and it looked horrific. But he got out with just a few scratches and I heard that the plane was even flyable again not long afterward. But when we're looking at a multi-million dollar piece of military hardware doing the same thing... yah, gotta admire the cajones there!
The Tarheels now finally have the opportunity to achieve something they've never earned before...
A National Invitational Tournament championship banner hanging from the rafters of the Dean Dome! :-P
So maybe that's affecting me somewhat, but I thought that "Recon", tonight's installment, was a bit of a step down. That's bothersome because there are only about ten hours or so left of this show's run to tie up all the loose ends. But I'll maintain faith in showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof: Lost has surprised the bejeebers out of us before. It's only fitting that it keeps doing it up 'til the grand finale.
Anyhoo, "Recon" wasn't the best of the Sawyer-centric episodes, but I found it fascinating all the same, and the flashsideways-es have finally begun to grow on me. We've seen Sawyer the con-man who was on Oceanic 815 when it crashed. "Recon" gave us Detective James Ford: the "Sawyer" that would have come about from the road not taken. I've long been intrigued by the notion of Schrodinger's cat. Well, that's the same kind of thing that I got out of "Recon" tonight: James "Sawyer" Ford is like a particle that you can't predict. He told Charlotte that he could have been a crook or a cop and he chose cop... but what made him be one in the "main" universe and be another in the alternate timeline?
What indeed? The thing that most comes to mind is choice: that most capricious of qualities.
And the more I think about it, "Recon" was an episode about choices and whether we have them. Does Sayid believe he has a choice? Does Claire, who seems to have chosen to put aside her hatred of Kate?
I couldn't help but notice that Kate didn't touch the fake Locke's hand when he extended it. Last week Richard told Jack and Hurley that his immortality was because Jacob had touched him long ago. Does the "Man in Black" possess a similar characteristic? Did Kate avoid something by not making physical contact with him?
Gonna have to watch this one again. In the meantime, I'll give "Recon" a 7.5 out of 10.
And in seven days apparently comes the episode that I thought we'd never see: Richard Alpert and his story. Dare we hope for a flashback to the Black Rock?!
Beginning with question #5, the form starts asking for explicit details about each person living at the location. The exact working is "Please provide information..."
The way I see it, you only have to answer the one question that is constitutional (for purposes of congressional apportionment). Everything else on the form is merely a request for optional information.
In other words, simply put "1" or "2" or "4" or whatever, and send the census form back without putting down any more information than what the government is supposed to collect.
Although if you wish to have some fun with it, I suppose one could put down "Klingon" as their race.
Ummmm... why?
Even if Google Fiber is 100 times faster than regular broadband, what good will it be? Within the winning city the Internet might work at blazing-hot speed, but the "normal" speed of the outside world will be a debilitating bottleneck. At least until Google Fiber gets rolled out sufficiently enough to take on a bulk of the data traffic.
It's like trying to win a contest for an SR-71 Blackbird without having a runway to launch it from. No doubt that it'll look real purty sitting in your backyard, but what's the use if you can't even fly the thing?
Graves had a long run on Mission: Impossible, and appeared in Stalag 17. The most recent thing that I remember him being in was Seventh Heaven, when he played that preacher guy's father.
But a lot of people from my generation are going to know him best as Captain Ouver, the airline captain in the classic 1980 slapstick comedy Airplane!
So before you go looking for it, I've done the work for you. Here is Graves as Captain Ouver, asking Joey such things as "You ever seen a grown man naked?"
Farewell Mr. Graves, and thanks for the many thrills and laughs.
Truly, we are living in the age of medical miracles!
(Thanks to Shane Thacker for spotting this.)
(Awright, that's enough of the puns...)
Anyway, the students at Weaver have put together a very good show and I'm glad for the opportunity to have been able to catch this. Sweeney Todd plays again on March 18th, 19th and 20th at Weaver Academy, located at 300 South Spring Street in Greensboro. Showtime is at 7 and tickets are $12. The only thing I regret to inform my readers about is that complimentary meat pie is not served during the performance... but don't let that stop y'all from enjoying it as well! :-)
So what was the Internal Revenue Service doing at Harv's Metro Car Wash, you may ask?
Here's the story from the Sacramento Bee...
The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff's on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was ... 4 cents.Taking into account the gas that was burned for transport to and from the carwash, the salaries of the two IRS agents, the official paperwork describing the delinquent taxes (Lord only knows how much that is) and other expenses, it wouldn't surprise me if the United States federal government spent $400 in the pursuit of $0.04 from Mr. Zeff.Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv's with an obligation of $202.35.
Zeff, who also owns local parking lots and is the president of the Midtown Business Association, finds the situation a bit comical.
"It's hilarious," he says, "that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities."
As if making an admittedly imperfect health care system even more broken isn't enough, President Barack Obama now wants to "restructure" No Child Left Behind.
When the hell are we ever going to get a President that is going to be content to simply govern wisely, instead of being fixated on putting his imprint on everything?
So now Obama is determined to "improve" No Child Left Behind: one of the biggest blunders of the all-too-blunderful misadministration of George W. Bush.
Pssst... hey, Obama. Wanna do something for once that will make a lot of people sing your praises? Then don't "overhaul" No Child Left Behind, but instead scrap the whole damned thing entirely!!!
If Obama did that one thing, then I might entertain the notion of casting a vote for him in 2012.
Would he do that? Probably not. Far too many of our elected officials are fools to egotism rather than followers of wisdom, and the chief executive of the land is no different.
