Category Archives: women

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(PERSONAL BLOG)

I haven’t been blogging the past few days (writing, but not publishing) because the utter depravity of the food stamp fight was more than I could bear.  I was truly wondering whether to stop publishing….

Being poor doesn’t usually bother me to the point where I don’t want to blog–but this hit a little too close to home.  I resent being characterized as a no-good bum by people who are no good bums who get free haircuts, free parking, and coffee and complain because someone asks for food on the table….

More here.

And here.

Being poor has taught me so much,  which I know was the intent.  I have let go of the chains of thinking that my self-worth was wrapped up in what clothing I wore, the kind of car I drove, the house I had, or how much money I made.   Those, I discovered, were empty “calories” for want of a better word…that led to an emptiness of life.  Friends who like you because of your status will desert you when that status is lowered.   This was the second time I had gone through it (my first after my parents’ divorce).

It hit me the other day how badly I was treated after my parents’ divorce and the subsequent poverty I found myself in.  It hit me about the kids in school who may not have known their self-worth because they had not obtained the same status that I had previous to the poverty.  Before the divorce, I had people exclaim with delight, “Oh, you’re [popular doctor’s] daughter!”  After the divorce, these same people would treat me coldly.  Had I not known my previous life of self-worth (even if it was false)…had I not known that their treatment of me had nothing to do with me as a human being, but everything to do with my financial and social status….I perhaps would have felt as I imagine people who are poor their entire childhood (and perhaps life) feel when they don’t realize that they are not dirt because some idiot treats them that way–rather the person who treats them like dirt is the one with the problem.  And I’m not in any way trying to diminish how being treated that way affects one, as my opening statement attests to, but you can feel bad for awhile, but then get your second wind, hold your head up, and take a step forward.

It’s a hard lesson to learn–took me until my forties to realize all of that.  I let others define who I was and what worth I had.  Nobody gets to define who I am, what I am about, or what my soul’s worth is……which is really what you’re left when all the material things are stripped away…

 

 

The reality that you don’t hear about…

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…that the folks on food stamps can also be adjunct professors.  This has got to be one of the most sobering stories I’ve heard yet.  What the mainstream media won’t tell you is that college educated WORKING people are also in dire straits because the top 1% are taking it all for themselves, as we see in this case.

Note the comment where some administrator in a hospital gave herself a 90k bonus while paying low wages.

And other comments are blasting the university for her extremely low un-livable wages.   Good God.

Many ask why she didn’t have Medicare/Soc. Security at her age?  The article doesn’t tell us, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say she was probably making too much money as a professor for Social Security.  I don’t know about Medicare, but assuming they also have limits on how much they will pay for certain conditions, and if this was the second time that Margaret Mary had cancer, she had probably reached those limits.

They also ask the question of her being on assistance (food stamps, I presume?) .  Ooookay.  Um, let me explain something to those who think that food stamps are some sort of panacea–they’re NOT.  Even if she got food stamps, which we don’t know by this article, it still would not be enough.   Jaysus H., $10,000 a year?  That is less than a $1,000 per month, before taxes.    Who can survive on that??

Here’s the op-ed from Daniel Kovalik, who may have been the last person to talk to her.  What huge indignity for her (and anyone else who has to beg for food or medical care).

And here again we have the fight against unions for teachers…and a glaring point of why we need unionized teachers, because the administrators have their priorities in the wrong places (themselves and athletics):

While adjuncts at Duquesne overwhelmingly voted to join the United Steelworkers union a year ago, Duquesne has fought unionization, claiming that it should have a religious exemption. Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students.

This would be news to Georgetown University — one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report’s list of top 25 universities — which just recognized its adjunct professors’ union, citing the Catholic Church’s social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.

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What is truly, truly, incredible was the heartless act of the university in calling the police after it was discovered she was sleeping in her office because her electricity was shut off.  Yeah, because Jesus would have tossed her out on her ass, too. /very snarky.
Lastly, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that Margaret Mary was a woman….women are more likely to be in poverty than men.

Statistically, women in America are more likely to be poor than men in all racial and ethnic backgrounds. With over 37 million people living in poverty, over half of them are adult single women. Surprisingly so, women in the U.S. are further behind in comparison to women in other areas of the world. This could be all connected to the gender wage gap, with women earning less money than their male counterparts, and the often expensive responsibility of raising children.

In a report entitled Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America’s Families, lead authors Shawn McMahon and Jessica Horning found that 45 percent of American families live on incomes that fail to provide the basic economic security required to support their basic needs. In just four years, the overall financial insecurity rate rose from 38 percent to 45 percent with an increase in poverty of White children and unmarried couples. Children of color were also found at risk of economic security with more than three-quarters of Black children and three-quarters of Hispanic children facing poverty in their households.

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Don’t Be That Guy

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A campaign is underway to bring date rape to the forefront.  It’s ironic that guys are finding the posters offensive….which is telling of how little men understand the devastation of rape.  I can tell you there isn’t a woman looking at the posters and not feeling anxiety and fear and vulnerability.

Someone put up posters protesting the campaign.  Note how the headline writer frames this as anti-feminist….instead of anti-woman.  It seems like a minor change of words, but has a huge impact because it’s easy to hate feminists, but if they say “woman”….that would be harder to justify.

And I think it is absolutely rape when a woman is intoxicated and is not able to give her consent.  And what kind of guy would take advantage of that??  Any decent man, no matter how much he desires her, is going to do the right thing and take her home and let her sleep it off.  If he wants to have sex with her, he will wait until she is sober.  A good man will want the woman to come to him willingly.

 

Klonskys Rainy Sunday Blog and others **edited

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Fred Klonsky has an excellent blog covering the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, the NY Post slam piece on Diane Ravitch, and more.

As I was watching Bill Cosby speak on MSNBC Sunday, I thought of the bombing happening in August….and President Kennedy being killed just a few months later…and Martin Luther King just five years after that…the Kent State and Jackson State shootings…

Dailykos Teacher Ken blog on Diane’s book here.

The end of Clinton/Reagan politics.  We can only hope there will be no more Clintons or Clintonites in the White House after Bush, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush…and I don’t agree that Barack Obama has been quite as Clintonite as the author believes–maybe at first, but I really feel he has started to break away from that in his second term. …especially within the last year.  And I can do without all the psycho-babble of why people choose political candidates….psychology and sociology theorists would like to put people in packages that suits a scientific measure, when people are much more complex than that.  Take me, for example….I am nothing like they would like to pigeonhole me as….

If a person matures psychologically as they get older, they will make their own choices according to their inner voice–not according to outside influences.  I think this is especially true if they are a spiritual person.

Challenge for Steve Perry.  Wow, it is unbelievable this guy is a Principal!  Really on the outer edge in his tweets, rightwinger for sure.  So glad that NBC and CNN are supporting the destruction of the public school system. /very snarky, indeed

HIs “no excuses” garbage is just that–just look at the statistics for how many of them his school serves.  And making a five year old stand up during lunch period because her mother didn’t send her to school with the proper uniform?  Are you kidding me??

Nobody is making excuses…the teachers and parents fighting for the public schools ARE fighting for kids in poverty and in minority neighborhoods who have multitudes of issues to deal with.  Not getting shot on the way to school is one of them…

Nancy Flanagan why all the snark?

A word about competition and profits

Rhee tells Philly how to solve problems.

Michelle Rhee penned an article about how to fix the public schools of Philadelphia. She says it is time for performance pay, so that there is “a great teacher” in every classroom.

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Great.  let’s start with Michelle Rhee’s performance in D.C.  Fail!  Or…how about her taping the kdis’ mouths shut and then laughing about it when they peeled the tape off and it tore their delicate skin off, too, leaving them crying and bleeding? Fail!  Or…how she is married to a predator??  Not someone I would want in charge of schools.

Be sure to click on the renegade video by an attendee to the *cough* conversation of Michelle Rhee and I think she mentions Steve Perry, too.    I love this–passionate public school advocates standing up against the propaganda.   Notice that they tell her they are “at the end” of the program and they try to hurry her up to quash her statement…but that is only 7 minutes into the program…it goes on for another 20 minutes!

The man talking (Perry) uses a LOT of emotional language–a red flag he doesn’t have facts to back up what he’s saying.  And, as the video asks…who are these “wrong” students Perry is talking about?  Not the dreaded poor, disabled, and minority students…that he says he wants to serve and calls Ravitch, et al, racists for not sending them to charters who will dump their butts for not jumping through hoops…..okay, I’m confused….

Also–as the commenter notes–Rhee mocks Hannah Nguyen.  Um-hmmm….but, yes, of course Rhee sincerely wants a conversation.  bwahahahahaha  *snort*  bwahahaha

**edited to take off the school finance link.  Like I said, I was tired last night, and mistakenly put that up.  After viewing one of the videos, it appears that the blog is pro-charter schools.  Or perhaps I should say anti-public schools.  Sorry for the mistake.

More on Irish Slaves

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I went back to read the blog again, and this time clicked on the comments section.  I found the comment below about further study of the Irish slave trade.  It is amazing that this went on for 200 years, and nobody knows about it!

Stumbled upon this website doing Irish Genealogy and thought I’d post that I just finished the book To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O’Callaghan and am starting White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan & Michael Walsh.

I highly recommend To Hell or Barbados. It reads a little like a history text but still fascinating none the less to learn about this little talked about portion of history even though it went on for almost 200 years!

-J

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I found this blog on Sean O’Callaghan’s book To Hell or Barbados.   She writes a powerful paragraph in which she asks:

What if this story of the Irish and Scots had been exposed and well known; would slavery have had a different complexion and perceived differently today? Would the legacy of slavery, the blight and scourge it has inflicted upon people of African descent in the Americas be the same? Or would slavery have been understood for what it is: a system based on the conrol and subjugation of those who have no power–for economic gain.

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There is a short documentary video on the site, as well, but it only covers the African slave trade, so no new information on the Irish/Scots slave trade there.

Something disturbing, though, as I’m trying to find other blogs reviewing the book–one had stamped on it “White Pride World Wide”.  That is the LAST thing I would want to come of this information—we don’t need the KKK (and cohorts) to use this to further its hate agenda.   Good God, it should cause them to pause and reflect on how it was done to the vulnerable whites, as well, and therefore, should be a learning moment on empathy and justice.  It should be a lesson on how once again, those in power create hatred towards a specific group to gain even more power (the Nazi’s flash in my mind as I write that).

Do unto others…

The Irish Slaves

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I happened upon a blog on Irish slavery, and as I read, it seemed to want to pit the African American experience against the Irish, by who-has-suffered-more,  so I continued to search for a less adversarial historical blog and found this.

I don’t recall any mention of Irish slaves during History class.  This piece was rather eye-opening.  The Africans and Irish were forced to mate because the women were comely and would help produce lighter skinned blacks, which apparently meant higher prices for them.  

It also states that the Irish were cheaper and even though Catholic, not considered Christians, so it was nothing to beat them to death.    It never ceases to amaze me how others can dictate how religious another is or isn’t…..to suit their own purpose of degrading them.

Anyway, being of Irish heritage, I found this interesting as well as personal.  My ancestors came over here about that time…so I wonder. 

But I also know one of my ancestors was a slave owner five generations ago….so there is guilt there, too.  (Another ancestor fought in the Civil War on the Union side, so…yeah…trying to right a wrong).

 

 

Behind the science

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I found the comments in this post intriguing.   I’m like the others with the post itself, however, not too happy with it.

I didn’t know what STEM stood for, so I looked it up:  Science Technology Engineering Math.

I don’t know why education has to be divided into either/or with Math/Science and the Arts.  They both benefit from the other.  I would say Science benefits more from the arts than the other way around, but that’s just my take on it.

The comment on Darwin’s theory being used to justify power over others is spot on.  I don’t think Darwin meant for it to be interpreted that way.  Robert Shepherd asserts that Darwin saw all of us as interconnected, rather than adversaries as the social darwinists would have you believe.  I believe it, too.  That is one reason I became a vegetarian.  I only went back to eating meat because I had gotten sick and was advised that i should eat meat.  I think that we owe it to the animals who give their lives  for us some respect.  Factory farms do not do that.   Once again, it’s following the golden rule of doing unto others as we would have done to us.

Another comment was striking:

Sharon

September 14, 2013 at 7:22 pm

I think STEM is being oversold and that some skepticism is in order. Here is one personal story on top of those articles and the information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

My daughter was very strong in math and ended up majoring in chemistry at a top-20 school. After college she was selected to be a paid intern in the research division of a successful pharmaceutical company. One year later she started in the PhD program for organic chemistry at a top University of California system school. STEM-speaking, this would all seem to paint a rosy picture for her future because she’s done everything right. Right?

But what she learned from working at the pharmaceutical company and from talking with other organic chemistry graduate students, was that much of the R&D in that particular STEM field is being increasingly outsourced to Asian countries. Not only that, but the pharmaceutical company was inclined to fill its labs with a large number of imported scientists (to save money). Some people have theorized that the reason for the current STEM push is to saturate the market with extremely educated scientists who then get stuck having to accept lower and lower wages.

In the STEM field of chemistry, American PhD graduates, even those from top universities, are not having an easy time finding work. These are people in their 20s who have been very, very self-disciplined about their schoolwork from the time they were in grade school. So, as far as our children’s futures go, pursuing any old STEM field does not guarantee success. But that is NOT what Arne Duncan or President Obama would have us all believe.

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Okay….here is someone who did everything right….and look what has happened to her.   (working for Big Pharma aside….)

Note the comment on Boeing wanting people getting a well-rounded education so they can “think outside the box”.  If it’s for airplanes, I don’t have a problem with it, but there’s just something wrong with teaching children better arts skills so they can find more creative ways….to kill people.

From the commenter Democracy:

The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, examined carefully its specific claims. The Sandia researchers concluded that:

* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”

* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”

“average performance of ‘traditional’ test takes on the SAT has actually improved over 30 points since 1975…”

* “Although it is true that the average SAT score has been declining since the sixties, the reason for the decline is not decreasing student performance. We found that the decline arises from the fact that more students in the bottom half of the class are taking the SAT than in years past…More people in America are aspiring to achieve a college education…so the national SAT average is lowered as more students in the 3rd and 4th quartiles of their high school classes take the test. This phenomenon, known as Simpson’s paradox, sows that an average can change in a direction opposite from all subgroups if the proportion of the total represented by the subgroups changes.”

* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”

“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”

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He/She goes on to mention an article in Columbia Journalism Review by Beryl Lieff Benderly.    It’s really eye-opening to the myth of scarcity of math;/science majors.  It’s not hard to question who is putting this myth out there and why….especially when they are bringing in foreign workers who will work for lower pay.  Is the myth being created so that they can justify bringing in the foreign workers?  It would appear that way.

From the article:

It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.

High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. 

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“When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.

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And this, which alludes to the point I was making yesterday on the ageism in the corporate world:

For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.

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I saw yet another blip the other day on the nooz of how many tech jobs are going unfilled because “there aren’t enough tech grads out there”….so now, after reading all of this, I realize they’re actually saying “there aren’t enough tech grads willing to work for minimum wage”.

And the whole debate on Science vs. Arts fails to include the argument for being well-rounded citizens who can think critically, analytically, with creativity of arts’ mindset.  I think art that is unscripted allows one freedom of expression that translates into, for want of a better word, “looseness”.  I think science is rigid where art is not (or shouldn’t be), and that translates into humanity’s acceptance of differences.  Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there you go…

 

 

 

A Year at Mission Hill

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Here are a couple of videos highlighting a school that adapts to the students’ needs rather than rigidity.  I would liken No Child Left a Mind to rigidity without creative expression of arts and music.

Chapter 7: Behind the Scenes

This video tells of the struggles of staff to help a student cope with emotional as well as intellectual stuff:

http://www.ayearatmissionhill.com/index.php/chapter7

 

The next one, the world of work, I think is wonderful in that it gives the kids hands-on experience.  I would applaud that kind of learning with books.  I think it takes both to really reach potential.

http://www.ayearatmissionhill.com/index.php/chapter8

 

U.S. and Russia reach agreement

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I thought that perhaps Vladimir Putin blew it with his chest-puffed-out stupid editorial (did you hear it was a U.S. PR firm that got it in the Times?)….but apparently not.

More stories on Syria here, here, and here. 

Ketchum rung a bell, so I went looking on PRWatch.org’s website and found several references here,  here,  and here.  And the biggie (for me, at least) here –the Dept. of Education and Ketchum. 

There’s more there if you care to go and read…

Mexico City Teachers Protest

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Apparently, they’re trying to break the teacher’s unions in Mexico, as well.  The teachers aren’t taking it lying down, either.    So now it appears this isn’t just the United States that this is happening to…

…the question is WHO is doing this…and why?

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….and here we have one of the players, Arne Duncan, who has never set foot in a classroom, being called out for his nonsense.

If teachers and parents are protesting the lame testing that does not test  potential…and they’re protesting No Child Left a Mind…and if  money will be withheld if they do not comply–I say that is a case of taxation without representation.    Time for a true Boston Tea Party.

If parents don’t start getting organized against the hedge fund managers, Gates, Broad, Rhee, and others, they will succeed in destroying public education.