National Urban League, with Lots of Gates $$$, Supports Common Core

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…follow the money….

dianeravitch's avatarDiane Ravitch's blog

Politico.com reported that the National Urban League is aggressively supporting Common Core. Politico neglected to mention that the National Urban League has received more than $5 million from the Gates Foundation in recent years. Anytime that any group advocates for the Common Core, publications should report whether they are funded by the Gates Foundation. The oversight is comparable to giving the results of a study showing that smoking does not cause cancer, yet failing to report that the study was funded by cigarette companies.

Here is the politico report:

“URBAN LEAGUE STEPS INTO CORE WARS: The National Urban League is stepping up its advocacy in support of the Common Core with new radio and TV spots narrated by CEO Marc H. Morial. In one ad, an African-American student flips through a textbook and imagines great possibilities for his life, as images flash by depicting him as a judge, a soldier…

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Gotta love humor against ignorance…

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As always, I love when we can laugh while trying to make sense of the nonsensical.

From Carol A Hand’s blog on the Daily Show:

That Daily Show segment was really, really good. After those four fans came face to face with the Native Americans, they sure changed their tune. That’s the problem with racism. It generally evaporates on a human level where interpersonal contact is high. To perpetuate it, society must be segregated and stratified. That’s why true racists hate the concepts of equality, egalitarianism, and justice… it destroys their perverse vision of an ordered, hierarchical society.

I’ve suggested many times that owner Dan Snyder should change the name of his team to the “Washington Foreskins” because everyone knows he’s a dick.

In the News Today…

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The Daily Show did a good job with this. But I think one should be careful with the one-sixteenth Native blood thing–making fun of it for not being “Indian enough” is as bad as making fun of Natives for being “too Indian”. I think it matters more whether one observes, honors, and follows the traditional ways rather than how much Native blood they have.
And as I was reading this, I recalled my own schools’ mascots: One was Abe Lincoln (railsplitters), one was berries (there’s a reason for that, but risk of disclosing the town I grew up in forbids it); the bulldogs; and finally, one school was “warriors”…ironically, or not, it was named after Daniel Webster, and I can’t recall his history, but him fighting the Native Americans comes to mind.
Graham Greene (Dances with Wolves, Thunderheart, Lost in the Barrens) once said (in Thunderheart) that when we were growing up, we played Cowboys and Indians…and he never wanted to be an Indian–he always wanted to be a cowboy.

“We’re Honoring Indians!”

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Wow. Just wow. Threatening her life over a mascot? Are you serious??
I admire you, Carol, for your courage and persistence. You were going up against people who are supposedly educated, and should know better…and yet still ignorant of Native American history and how our views have been shaped by the warped history we have been taught. And the history we have not been taught–such as Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards killing the indigenous and the smallpox inserted in blankets handed out to the tribes to kill them through bio warfare.

Professors on Food Stamps? Yup.

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What we’re told by the mainstream media…and the reality of it all. Quite the gap between castles in the sky and life on Earth…

gfbrandenburg's avatarGFBrandenburg's Blog

One way to see that this country is screwed up is to realize that an adjunct professorship doesn’t even pay minimum wage. In other words, a lot of college professors are on food stamps.

This article is not about the handful of mega-celebrity professors who earn millions from speaking gigs or business ventures.

We are talking about adjunct professors (not ‘assistant’ or ‘full’ professors) who teach a single college course for one to three grand per semester per course, with no benefits at all. It’s not unusual for such a professor to earn less than they would earn at the minimum wage (I calculate $7.50/hr x 40 hrs/wk x 50 wks/ year = $15,000. Obviously people who have adjunct or minimum wage jobs will earn varying number of hours per week, and varying number of weeks, so this is just a single comparison pont)

Don’t forget that the adjunct prof…

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Facebook relaunches Atlas, its stalker-ish ad platform

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I’ve noticed this, too, when I don’t erase my history–ads of sites I’ve visited suddenly pop up. Even worse, yahoo has now made it their business to track me and show me articles their software has decided I want to see. Sorry, yahoo, f_cebook, and the rest–your software cannot read my mind and cannot begin to understand what or why I might look at a site. Your software makes a lot of assumptions…most of which are wrong.

Glucuronidation: one of the body’s detox pathways

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I am forever in awe of our bodies and how they perform every day miracles of protecting itself from toxins.

Today, I learned another term from the wonderful mercury support group: glucuronidation.  It’s apparently another chemical reaction in the body that helps the detox pathways to work properly.  Isn’t this fascinating?

Note how your everyday drugs can interfere with the body’s own design to take care of itself.

I’ve recently started taking ibuprofen to head off a migraine.  It worked a couple of times last month, and I took some this morning because I felt another one coming on.  It’s the only time I will take it anymore–because it can cause damage to the intestines, and it damages kidney cells.  So I have to really feel that  migraine is coming on in order to risk the harm to my body.  I figure that a migraine is much, much more harmful and devastating.  I feel so weak afterwards, it has to be doing some damage…especially when I lose five pounds with them (and then gain it back).

I cringe at the thought that I used to take ibuprofen almost on a daily basis, back in the day.  With being exposed to mercury via coal dust, and amalgam in baby teeth, and being gluten intolerant, I  had been taking ibuprofen for symptoms that would go away with proper detox.  It’s that slippery slope–where the body is damaged, resulting in pain, and the man-made drugs help for a time, but with interfering with detox pathways, make everything worse–and the person takes more of the drugs to relieve the increasing symptoms…and on…

Now, with the glucuronidation knowledge, there is even more reason not to take these FDA approved drugs unless there is an overwhelming reason to do so.

And Big Pharma thinks it’s quite all right for you to get worse on their drugs…more profits for them.

Hope my dear readers find this as fascinating as I do.  Isn’t the body wonderful?

Domestic abuse without raising a hand…

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Order of the White Feather has a sobering post up on using technology to continually abuse and control a partner seeking to get away from her abuser.  It is just astounding that someone could think up this sh*t (probably an abuser himself), and then be able to sell it without worry of prosecution.

The companies market the tools as “safety features” to monitor your kids….it always starts out that way–marketed for something good when it’s used for something evil.  I don’t buy mSpy’s assertion that they have no knowledge or responsibility for their product being used for abuse.

Here’s why:

MSpy has a step-by-step guide — with screenshots — on how to download the app onto an iPhone or Android device, how to activate it, and then how to delete any visible trace of it. It’ll just hang out in a hidden folder, with a nondescript name like “Android.sys.”

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Why would you need to hide it if you were using it for innocent reasons?  I don’t understand the parents-as-stalkers mindset, either.  Good Grief, the poor children with such controlling parents, monitoring every single thing they do!  Suffocating.

And the online banking thing…one of the reasons I will not do it is because of security.  I had to close my free account recently because the bank insisted on a $500 balance, or I could switch to online banking and not deal with the humans at all (putting another person out of work is not my idea of doing unto others as I would have done to me…).

This story drives that point home–no matter how much they would like to assure us that technology = security…the facts speak differently.  Paper is still more secure, with less ability of someone gaining access to information that is none of their business.

And in this case, someone’s life depends on it.

In this rape culture, women are still seen as extensions of men.  As objects to be owned and possessed.  The domestic abuse represents that sense of  entitlement.