Category Archives: bullying

Expanding VAWA to protect Native Women

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Turtle Talk has this blog up on a petition to expand Violence Against Women Act to protect Native American women.

Video here:

 

Here’s an article with more details on what is going on.  Be forewarned–the links to other instances of rape and people condoning it (Australia)–even participating in it (California) are tough to read. The 15-year-old gal that was raped barely escaped being murdered, if she was so brutalized that she was unconscious.  Makes me sick to my stomach.  What can possibly be going on in someone’s brain to make them treat another human being like that??

Romney still hates the poor…

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*yawn* <coming from someone who brags at paying less than his fair share in taxes who expects the gov’t to pick up the tab for feeding and care of his horse and hides money in foreign bank accounts…>

Yes, we are all victims who *love* being dependent on the gov’t for handouts.  It’s sooo much fun not being in control of your own life.  It’s sooo much fun being the object of scorn.  And it’s freaking hilarious to be sick and not have that illness recognized–so much easier to just call someone lazy…I just don’t understand why more people aren’t doing it. /snark

 

Birds of a Feather…

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I found  this on the long relationship of Benjamin Netanyahu and Romney.   So…Netanyahu appears to be part of the mindset of austerity measures, if what I’m reading between the lines is correct…

So, if we’re supposed to come running when they start bombing Iran…isn’t that asking government to interfere?

Doesn’t that go against the idea that gov’t should just get the hell out of our lives…?

Oh…I think I get it now…there’s a book out there on teenagers that goes something like “I hate you, Stay out of my life! But first, can you take me to the mall?”

Netanyahu is like a teenager…”Get out of my life, but can you bomb Iran first…?”

 

 

News from Indian Country

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Here’s a story on the continuing fight for sacred sites and the environment. Another story about it here.

Why are they making fake snow? And why are they occupying a sacred space?

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Story here on the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous.  I’m glad that the U.S. has finally signed on.  Special Rappoteur statement here.

One of the problems is that with my generation, the Boomers, we grew up with “Cowboys and Indians” …with the Indians being the “bad guys”.  Along with that, we had John Wayne movies (and others) that also portrayed them as the bad guys.  Then, when we studied history, we were told of all the brave settlers and how they were to be commended for “settling” the West…we were never told of the other side, or if there was, it was only when the “good Indians” helped whites to settle the land.

It was only when I began reading the Native Americans own account of their history that I began to realize how one-sided my history book had been.  This would also include women’s history, by the way, but that is another topic for another day.

I would learn that they were in many ways just the opposite of what I had been told:  they were spiritual; they were compassionate; they cared deeply for the environment (the “wilderness” of America was actually a carefully cultivated ecosystem); they respected their elders; they looked out for one another; they were not greedy–they took only what they needed.

We lost so much when we sought to impose our own beliefs on the Native Americans instead of trying to understand their culture.

Libya, et al…

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Well, now, common sense hasn’t left Washington, after all….

…of course Romney is gung-ho on getting us into yet another war–his five boys aren’t going to bleed for the country…

This up on the idiots behind the film that set off the violence…

Financial crimes. Check.

Pose as someone else. Check.

Claim to be a Jew when you’re a Christian. Check.

Sounds like a stand-up sort of guy. /snark

And let’s not ignore that Steve Klein is what appears to be a religious right activist who is training militias in churches…stunning, just stunning…

 

Attack on embassy in Libya

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Report here. Stevens was apparently trying to find a safer place when he and his staff were killed.  And for what?  He didn’t produce the offensive video, so why target him?  Or why target anyone?  If your spirituality is strong, you’re not going to let something like this make you insane. And the Islamic religion also has  “do unto others as you would have done to you” in their book, as well, so by this act, they are going against their religion.

And what about the idiot who produced this hate-film?  Terry Jones was advocating burning the Koran, and is behind promoting this—so why isn’t this guy being reined in?  And who is the Israeli-American property developer?  I’m suspicious that he wasn’t named in the piece.

DN! reports on the Libyan situation.

They are also reporting that President Obama has refused to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Gah, the guy has a pair, after all. Color me shocked.  Israel has made the statement that they are free to do as they wish–to attack Iran if the mood strikes them, and the U.S. is not supposed to have any say in the matter, but we’re supposed to come running and bail them out if they do attack–extending our people, our funding, our equipment, etc. when the country is struggling. (Well, not the 1%, mind you)

So…anyone wanna place  a wager on us getting into another senseless war…?

 

Chicago public school teachers to strike

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Story here.

Emanuel is just another member of “the team” that is trying to undermine public education.  (haha, I typed “undermind” at first–perhaps a better term? 🙂

…because, you know, bankers, financiers, business-oriented people who look at kids as products or resources to be exploited.  They look at the kids with $$ in their eyes–what can we squeeze out of them?  What kind of profit can we make off of them?

This report from Indiana.

From the story:

But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.

Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.

 

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Unbelievable.  What a way to worm out of accountability.  The teachers from public schools have made the argument for not giving them a failing grade for the above reasons–children from “challenging communities” are difficult to bring up to speed if they are poor, the parents are not involved, and there is some learning/behavioral difficulty.
But charter schools officials want to claim it’s not their fault that the kids are failing?

This from Pennsylvania.  Nepotism? Um, yeah.  Nice little game they have going there.

Notice how they use the same lines as the Indiana officials–the kids are poor performers, they’re special needs…blah, blah, blah.  If you’ve got only a 15% graduation rate, you’re not the people to be teaching kids. Period.

This from Miami.  Taxpayers should not be funding them at all.  But that would cut into the profit margin for the education vultures, wouldn’t it??  You know, privatize the profits while socializing the costs, eh?

 

 

Entertainment?

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You know, sometimes it ain’t so bad being without cable…

I had no idea this kind of garbage was on NBC.  And look at the cast–Todd Palin…why does that not surprise me?

…um, do people know that GE, a defense contractor, owns NBC?  Do they think that just maybe this is a way to *glam up* war so more folks will blindly go into combat not knowing how horrific and soul-destroying it is…?  Or how the viewers watching it will become more numb to human suffering?

What about Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor”…which I always detested for its pitting people against one another, and encouraging a “weakest link” mentality…I often said that I grew up on “Gilligan’s Island”, where everyone worked together– while my kids were exposed to crap like “Survivor”, where people worked against one another for their own selfish reasons.  This encourages that  mentality of fear and violence and discourages cooperation and charity.

Good God.