Category Archives: communications/media

Money can’t buy security, either…

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<sigh>  Well, folks, if you were feeling a little more secure about our Constitution with the last court ruling on NSA surveillance...think again.

As the commenters said, I wonder what kind of dirt the NSA has on Judge William Pauley.  There is no way on Earth that this is in keeping with the Fourth Amendment:

 

U.S. Constitution › Fourth Amendment

Fourth Amendment

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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This bears repeating:  No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Probable cause is required for searching a person, their houses, papers, and effects.  A court must agree that there is probable cause in order for the agency to violate someone’s privacy.

This amendment protects a person from a government abusing its power, as we saw in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and China.  People who are not doing anything wrong have a right to be let alone.

 

Third Way

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You might remember this post with a quote that says the words “third way”.  Not long after I posted it, Ed on the Ed Show (MSNBC) mentioned the Third Way.  I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was negative and the segment intrigued me.

I’ve just now gotten around to doing a bit of research on Third Way.  Whew…do you smell a rat??  Me, too.

Red flags are going off with Elizabeth Warren being attacked by supposed Democrats for…speaking out against selling us out to the 1% by cutting Social Security and other social programs….calling them “populist”. Um-hmmm…that and the word “entitlement” are key words for the “I’ve-got-mine-screw-you” crowd. 

Now, getting back to the previous post with Hillary Clinton’s religious leader saying those words:  third way…and how they wanted to do away with New Deal programs:

It emerged, he [Reverend Don Jones] says, as a third way, a reaction against both separatist fundamentalism and the New Deal’s labor-based liberalism.

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Social Security. Public Schools.  Medicaid.  Medicare.  Public employees like fire fighters, police.  Public Libraries.  A decent living wage.

I know that it’s hard to believe they want to destroy it all, but all signs are pointing towards that very end.

Elizabeth Warren stands in the way of that.

Here’s a humorous video up on it:

Please, please run for President, Elizabeth.  Please!!  I’ll go knocking on doors…whatever needs done to help get you votes.  Hillary Clinton is nothing but a Goldwater Girl doing the dirty work of the bankers, warmongers, education profiteers, Big Oil, Monsanto, and no doubt countless other organizations that don’t give a crap about Americans or America, the poor, the elderly, the children, the environment, nor the middle class.

Please run, Elizabeth.

School Colocation

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Yeah, I didn’t know what “colocation” meant, either. The former post on Bloomberg at Diane Ravitch’s has led to a great discussion on it and there is a   charter school troll there advocating Success Academy, a charter.  A poster supplied a link to an insightful post here.

This is just absolutely wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Another link provided a report on Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy receiving preferential treatment from the DOE.  Good Grief, can they be any more of an enabler?

More  here,

The preceding also has a link to Juan Gonzalez’s column on the sardine-like atmosphere in the colocation schools.  Shocking cannot even describe the overcrowded conditions that led to an autistic child disappearing.  Good God.

…and $1300 on marketing…per child….are you kidding me??  That money could have been used for public schools in more education-oriented ways.  It’s just mindboggling how dense and misguided this misuse of funds is…

…and how the public is being ignored:

Moreover, it is also clear from the abundance of comments at public hearings that the vast majority of parents oppose these proposals – and these parents’ choices are being ignored.  Just check any of the Public comment analyses on the DOE webpage.  In many of these summaries, every single parent who spoke opposed the co-location, as well as representatives of the Community Education Councils and elected officials.

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The public, that pays the taxes for the public schools, is…ignored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bloomberg: if you’re homeless, it’s God’s fault **edited

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Diane Ravitch has a blog up on a homeless girl, Dasani, and the heartless comment about her living conditions by Michael Bloomberg, as self-righteous as they come.

What a smug, heartless little turd.

Jesus has said one can only have one Master–money or God.

Obviously, Bloomberg chose money.

I read stories like this and feel such despair….

**edited to add:  There’s quite a discussion going on at Diane’s blog, and I thought I’d explain my thoughts.  Here’s a comment I left at Diane’s:

Wow, I must have struck a chord. I personally am poor and homeless as I write this. I am nothing like what Bloomberg, et al, would like to characterize the poor as– I’m college educated, once lived an upper middle class lifestyle. Being poor has taught me so much–that I could have and should have done so much more when I was wealthy. If I had money again, I would choose driving a Ford over a Mercedes, and give that difference to the poor.

To me, that is choosing God over money.

Your mileage may vary.

Why won’t public schools just go away already?

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(said very snarkily)

Jan Ressenger has this up on the recent nominee to the Dept of Education.  Yeah, if you were hoping that President Obama had somehow seen the light about the U.S. education fiasco, well, you (and I) were sadly mistaken, because he’ s nominated another corporate takeover twerp.

Be sure to click on the link to the Nation’s report:

In addition, [Ted]  Mitchell serves as an adviser to Salmon River Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in education companies. Mitchell sits on the board of Parchment, an academic transcript start-up that is among Salmon River Capital’s portfolio. Salmon River Capital helped create one of the biggest names in for-profit secondary education, Capella University.

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Italics mine.

That, my friends, should read as a rap sheet.

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In other Education News, School Matters has this blog on the lack of transparency for the State of Indiana….so what else is new?

I agree that individuals should probably not be named, but there absolutely needs to be an accounting of how many students went to school B, and how much money was diverted from School A.

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School Finance 101 has a good report on the lies and statistics of mis-edumucation.  One can make statistics say anything you want, if you know how to skew the data…or leave out the data that doesn’t agree with your goals.

African Soul Fried Rice

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Michael Twitty has done it again with this blog on African Soul Fried Rice.  Sounds delicious.

I like the fermented aspect of the food.  I wondered if he means the bean from the locust tree…so I went looking and found this.

It’s considered medicinal, too….gotta wonder how much wisdom has been lost about our ancient remedies.  Thanks, modern medicine, for a bang up job of ignoring past wisdom. /snarky, for sure.

The locust beans are seen as a nuisance here…as is the dandelion.  We’ll discover, when it’s too late, that the things we thought were nuisances were healing plants to cure cancer, diabetes, etc.

Michael Twitty also has a blog up on some badass rice growers.  Yes, badass rice growers.  I *love* that they are bucking the system, the status quo of  Big Ag and getting the cold shoulder for it.  They are raising rice crops in unconventional ways that thwart the Ag profiteers who want to sell chemicals and bioengineered rice.  Heh.

On top of that, the way that they are raising it lowers the arsenic level in rice–very important to lower our exposure to heavy metals.

From the Washington Post article:

Thomet has unwittingly aligned himself with a small group of experimental U.S. farmers and hobbyists, probably no more than 50, who are breaking with a tradition that dates to colonial America. They’re rejecting paddy rice in favor of an increasingly accepted agricultural system that promises to increase crop yields while decreasing water use, chemical dependency and even the amount of arsenic in our grains.

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See, it bothers the status quo when you don’t play along with the technology-is-king mentality.  Using one’s brain is not allowed. :p

 

Can You Hear Me Now? **edited

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A self-fulfilling prophecy by AT&T.

This article must have been written by AT&T….or perhaps it’s *cough* nooz placed by their PR dept.

AT&T has failed to maintain the land lines in a way that we were accustomed to before the push for cell phones.

This article barely touches on the problems rural folks would face if land lines are phased out.  The service where I’m at is spotty at best.  It is in no way as reliable as land lines are.  I’ve wondered how many calls I’ve missed.  What if an employer tried to call for an interview and kept getting “service not available”?

The elephant in the room that the article fails to mention is the devastating effects of Electro-Magnetic Fields (EMF) on people.    As I’ve stated before, mercury poisoned folk are especially sensitive to them.  When I was really sick, I could not talk on a cell phone for any length of time without getting a migraine the next day.  I can now talk on them for longer periods, but knowing how it impacts me, why would I want to risk that exposure?

Mercola has an article on it here.

Links from the references —

Effects of EMF on rat brains

Cell phone effects on the young.

Europeans take stance on EMF technology.

The truth about wireless technologies.

Cell phones affect neuological and behavioral aspects of mice.

**edited to correct glaring spelling error. Stupid dyslexia.

Larry Lujack

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Those of you not from the Midwest won’t get this post, but an icon of the 70s has passed–Larry Lujack who dominated the radio during the 70s, has passed.   We lived three hours away from Chicago, but the powerful WLS reached our little town and much of northern Indiana. (There is a great youtube of Lujack broadcasting in May 1971.  I don’t think it’s “official” , though, so I can’t link to it.  But just listening to it is a great toss back to those days–the fun we had (describing oil cans as “beautiful” *snort* ) and the times–Vietnam updates /protestors are featured on the news and I’m not sure, but I think they are announcing officers being investigated for shooting Vietnamese, but I’m not sure if it’s related to the My Lai massacre.)

We loved listening to Lujack on our school bus as we made the trip into school, laughing at programs like the “Tooth Fairy”…complete with background noise like doors opening/closing, footsteps, and all that made radio great.  I feel sorry for my kids’ generation, because they never got to experience that part of our culture.

I had the name “boogiecheck” for awhile as a log on name.  People thought it was something dirty–it wasn’t.  It was in reference to a program on WLS with John Records Landecker, where he made short bits of callers’ conversations into a hilarious soundbyte.   The program was so popular that when Landecker went to a local high school to speak at a convocation, he was greeted with the crowd chanting:  “Boogie Check, Boogie Check, ooh aah!  Boogie Check, Boogie Check, ooh aah!”   This was the intro to the program from that moment on.

Landecker once told a story of one Friday, a payday, in the olden days where they actually handed out paper checks that one took to the bank to deposit.  He said he picked up his check, and started to walk towards the bank, and with each step, he felt more tired.  His arm hurt.  By the time he got to the bank, he could barely put one foot in front of another.  When he got to the bank teller, he found the reason why:  he was carrying Larry Lujack’s paycheck instead of his own.  Haha.  Must have been soooome big ole’ paycheck. 🙂

Peace and comfort to Larry’s family on his passing…

Framing the news

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Look at this segment on ABC News on the ruling that what the NSA is doing is Unconstitutional.

Just the wording alone is alarmist:

CIA Spy Ruling Could Be a Major Setback for the War on Terror

(sorry for the large type)

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The segment states that this is a victory for Edward Snowden. (!)

Wow.  Just wow.  Journalists…er, um, people who get a paycheck pretending to be journalists…who didn’t do their job in the first place, making it imperative for someone else–in this case Edward Snowden–to do what they should have been doing are putting this as a victory for him.

Instead, they should be saying this is a victory for our democracy.

This is a victory for upholding our Constitution.

They frame it as a blow to the war on terror when, as the judge states, there is no evidence that this has saved lives.

And eavesdropping on friendly countries…? How is that helping the war on terror?  Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?

 

The feminine of culture

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I found this piece so interesting.  It perfectly illustrates how much the so-called feminine crafts impacted...created.…cultures.  Would we not all look alike but for our unique sense of style, color, texture in our cultures?  Sooooo boring…

Without the warmth of blankets and solid clothing, wouldn’t we have perished long ago?

…and the creativity of the feminine…is awesome….

And yet, the feminine is still treated–historically as well as today–as if it was not that important for survival…even by women who claim to be pro-woman.

If women had not had the ingenuity to gather nuts, berries, and seeds to eat, would humanity survived? (likely not–men weren’t that good at hunting before tools came along).  How about their intuition in cooking…?

What about their intuition for using plants for medicine?  And yet we have been dumbed down to not trust our instincts that were once keen….

Medical professionals will intimidate a women into dismissing what she knows to be true…because….well, because he’s the doctor and he’s had all these years of schooling and he has that certificate on the wall saying that he is smarter than she…