1/ Excellent column from Gail Collins about online education......she is amusing as usual but with a steel core to this story - how we as a country are steaming ahead with online learning which will destroy the chances for a decent education for whichever kids are enrolled in it....and the reason it's catching fire is there are large corporations behind the companies supplying the software, including Goldman Sachs.....
What she doesn't mention is who is the brains behind this drive to online - yup, Jeb Bush......
Here's another factoid.....remember FCAT, the program that still plagues the Florida public schools? Neil Bush, the brother of "W" and Jeb, runs the software company that owns FCAT. Corruption? Naaaaa........
It’s weird how you can lose track of our ever-changing world. For instance, until recently, I thought “reality TV” meant games about people who were stuck on an island or locked in a house together for the summer. Then, suddenly, I noticed that there were seven different regularly scheduled shows about real housewives, three about people who bid on abandoned storage lockers and two about people who kill wild hogs for a living.
And then there was online education. (Confession: This entire column is actually going to be about online education. I just used the wild hogs to reel you in.)
I always thought that the only kids getting their entire public schooling online were in the hospital, living in the Alaskan tundra, or pursuing a career as a singing orphan in the road company of “Annie.” Not so. There are now around 250,000 cyberschool students in kindergarten through high school and the number is growing fast.
If I had managed to envision a lot of students going to school online, I’d have imagined them being home-schooled by a diligent middle-class parent. But, lately, the target seems to be low-income families. Andy Berke, a state senator in Chattanooga, Tenn., says that when an educational company named K12 Inc. held a meeting to publicize its online taxpayer-funded academy, it chose “one of the poorest neighborhoods” in his district. In Pennsylvania, where K12 runs a statewide online charter school called Agora, you can go to the Web site and watch Head of School Sharon Williams explain about “online learning as an alternative to a violent in-school experience.”
O.K., here is my first question: Does full-time online learning really work for disadvantaged kids who may be alone at home all day?
2/ One of the best wildlife videos ever.....a mountain lion chasing a baby bear.....and how on earth did the director film this? Amazing.....4 minutes.....
3/ Are you an "invisible American?". Probably not, but I'll bet you know some......
Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.
Most of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol.
This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.
The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your fifty-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes - and the willingness - to find them.
Invisible: Millions of the long-term unemployed.
While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.
Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.
It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.
http://www.nationofchange.org/4/ Fox News has all of it's stupid viewers up in arms about the alleged "War on Christmas", so Jon Stewart exuberantly nails them as usual and then declares his own war on the holiday......
Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
Two clips, watch the bottom one first [5 minutes].......
Fox News' annual "War On Christmas" coverage(and Jon Stewart's ensuing reaction segments) have become holiday traditions in and of themselves. This year, however, Stewart chose to debunk Fox's holiday paranoia in a slightly different way: declaring war on Christmas himself.In part one, below, Stewart pinpoints who Fox News sees as this year's biggest Christmas offender:Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, who's calling his state's Christmas tree a "holiday tree" instead. But Fox's outrage goes far beyond one person
5/ I get mailers all the time for long term care insurance so this article was very interesting to read - if you are thinking of getting this insurance or already have a policy make sure you read this from the Baseline Scenario......
I’m currently in the process of buying long-term care insurance—you know, so my daughter won’t have to take care of me when I’m old. I have a good agent who knows all about the market and has answered every question I’ve had. I understand personal finance, opportunity costs, discount rates, and inflation. I know my way around a spreadsheet (one benefit of my years at McKinsey). But I find it’s still hard to figure out what to do.
A bit of background: Long-term care insurance pays for your stay in a nursing home if you become unable to take care of yourself. Depending on the policy, it may also pay for care you receive at home instead of going into a facility. According to the insurer I’m considering, the median annual cost of a semi-private room in a nursing home in my state is $145,000, and the average stay is something like three years. To put that in perspective, in 2009, the median net worth of families where the head of household was of age 65–74 was $205,000 (including real estate assets)
6/ Kristen Wiig was brilliant in Bridesmaids, but she also does comedic great work on SNL - here are five clips from that show of her best character impressions......4 minutes.....
7/ I know a few of our DDD readers live in the Southwestern US, so you might be very interested in this article and the next one.....
The first is about the present water crisis, and the coming water disaster......
The fires were a function of drought. As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, “Young Adult” shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy. More radically than “J. Edgar” or even“Greenberg,” this movie, written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, challenges the dreary conventional wisdom that a movie protagonist must be likable. Along the way, it systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about — for starters — high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota and the capacity of human beings to change, learn and grow.
Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)
And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. No kidding.
If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not yet nigh.
http://www.nationofchange.org/8/ This story from the Times is about dust and air quality - Phoenix even experienced a haboob [powerful dust storm] last year.....
Health authorities are also noticing a rise in asthma cases.......
The question of how clean the air is in the American West has never been an easy one to answer, strange to say. And now scientists say it is getting harder, with implications that ripple out in surprising ways, from the kitchen faucets of Los Angeles to public health clinics in canyon-land Utah to the economics of tourism.
It is at least partly about dust, something that has been entwined with Western life for a long time, and now appears to be getting worse.
In the 1800s, the high deserts stretching west and south of the Rockies became a famed destination for respiratory sufferers like “Doc” Holliday, the gunfighter-dentist (and tuberculosis patient), who came to take what was called the desert cure.
But cattle and sheep by the tens of thousands were at the same time trampling across those fragile landscapes, loosening once stable soils to the four winds and creating a kind of parallel — but equally true — Western mythology around the tumbleweed and the dusty trail.
The region’s air quality, then as now, was partly pristine and partly poor depending on when and where you looked and which way the wind blew.
But now a new and even more complicated chapter appears to be unfolding, researchers in many different fields say. From off-road vehicle use, which has in some places replaced the clumping trod of the old cattle herds, to drought’s impact on plants with their soil-anchoring roots, more dust appears to be up and moving.
And scientists say they are also understanding for the first time the deep connections between the dust’s main source — a vast high-desert region called the Colorado Plateau, which stretches through four states and is home to national parks like the Grand Canyon and Arches — and the economic, environmental and demographic life in cities and suburbs far removed.
9/ Incredible card trick.........very clever and totally mystifying.....well it stumped me anyway......2 minutes......
10/ Nothing significant or political, just an interesting story about a British reporter who was visiting the US and was bitten by a brown recluse spider, and what she went through inside our health care system......
It started with a spider. Someone with a taste for narrative justice might call it retribution, but there's really no moral correlation between the wisdom of absconding with a relative stranger after a party and waking up the next morning in Brooklyn with a rash of poisonous bites on your arm. When the angels of sexual continence want to punish you, they send crabs not spiders.
I assumed, at first, that the maddeningly itchy marks were the work of common-or-flophouse New York bedbugs, but 12 hours later, with my right arm swollen to the width and purplish colour of a prize turnip, my friend identified the hallmarks of the brown recluse spider, and uttered words I had hoped never to hear on this side of the Atlantic: "You should really get that checked out by a doctor."
I first came to New York to write about the emerging social justice movements associated with Occupy Wall Street. Through my conversations with the protesters in Zucotti Park, I began to understand how profoundly the stranglehold of American private healthcare keeps ordinary people cowed and compliant in the land of the notionally free.
It's not just the 59 million Americans living without health insurance and unable to access treatment for everyday maladies without crippling expense. It's the millions more who dare not risk a dispute with their boss for fear of losing their medical cover, who expect to remortgage their homes in old age to meet the costs of failing health, or who live in fear of bankruptcy should they develop a chronic condition or have an accident
11/ Calvin Harris with 'Feel So Close".....a vision of small rural town America, with aimless teens, cheerleaders, an old guy with a lariat, and the singer who sounds like a black blues singer but isn't......quite nostalgic, and totally unrealistic but who cares - it's a video......
12/ A Texas mother who was denied food stamps for months shot her two kids and herself at the welfare office.....that's Rick Perry's Texas all right......poor people [who aren't scholars at the best of times] have to fill out an 18 page application for food stamps......
SAN ANTONIO — A Texas woman who for months was unable to qualify for food stamps pulled a gun in a state welfare office and staged a seven-hour standoff with police that ended with her shooting her two children before killing herself, officials said Tuesday.
The children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, remained in critical condition Tuesday. The shooting took place at a Texas Department of Health and Human Services building in Laredo, where police said about 25 people were inside at the time.
Authorities identified the mother as Rachelle Grimmer, 38, and children Ramie and Timothy. Laredo police investigator Joe Baeza said Grimmer had recently moved to the border city from Zanesville, Ohio, about 30 miles east of Columbus.
Grimmer first applied for food stamps in July but was denied because she didn't turn in enough information, Texas Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said.
Goodman didn't know what Grimmer specifically failed to provide. In addition to completing an 18-page application, families seeking state benefits also must provide documents proving their information, such as proof of employment and residency.
13/ An excellent thinking persons movie for the holiday season out this weekend - "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy" from the novel by John Le Carre with an all star cast, Gary Oldman as Smiley, John Hurt and Colin Firth as well.....
The Times gives it an excellent review.....
Dread throbs like a heartbeat in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” a superb new adaptation of the 1974 spy novel by John le Carré. It’s a deep pulse that maintains its insistent rhythm throughout the film’s murmured conversations, life-and-death office intrigues, violence and yearning loves. The throbbing does a number on your nervous system — this is a movie you watch on high alert — and brings you into the state of mind that can feel like a state of siege and goes by the name of British secret service, or just the Circus. For those inside the intelligence service, like George Smiley, played with delicacy and understated power by Gary Oldman, knowledge is power, but so too is fear.
The story, skillfully mined from Mr. le Carré’s labyrinthine book and set in 1973, is a pleasurably sly and involving puzzler — a mystery about mysteries within mysteries. The head of the service, known as Control (John Hurt), believes that there’s a Soviet agent, a mole, among the agency’s elite. His main suspects include his closest aide, Smiley, along with Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Bill Haydon (Colin Firth). To find the mole, Control secretly sends Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), who runs the agency’s scalp hunters (field agents with dirty, sometimes bloodied hands), to Hungary to retrieve information. But Prideaux, in an agonizing botch-up, is shot, and Control, already politically weak, is fired along with Smiley.
Mr. le Carré’s seventh novel and the first in his Karla trilogy, “Tinker, Tailor” is set against a geopolitical (and movie) moment that is almost quaintly, reassuringly old-fashioned, a time when enemy agents had names like Boris, and a red flag with a hammer and sickle made the ideological and political stakes clear. It’s a world of secrets and lies, shadows and light, illusions and sordid truths, loyalties and perverse betrayals (it could be called “Enemies, a Love Story”) that the director Tomas Alfredson conjures up in the film’s uneasy opening in Control’s apartment, a cluttered warren fogged over by cigarette smoke. “There’s a rotten apple,” Control says to Prideaux, drawing on a cigarette as he explains his theory about the mole, the folds in Mr. Hurt’s magnificent face sagging a bit lower.
Good atmospheric trailer......
14/ Also in theaters - an interesting movie that is much better than the plot might sound, according to the Times.
"Young Adult", with Charlize Theron.......
When we first encounter her, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) seems to have grown, though perhaps not in the most constructive ways. Crossing the treacherous, unmarked boundary between her mid- and late-30s, Mavis has acquired some of the trappings and habits of adulthood. She lives in a spacious, slightly sterile high-rise apartment in Minneapolis (a Midwestern variant on the den of Manhattan anomie that Michael Fassbender’s sex-addled character inhabits in “Shame”) and has, for company, a fuzzy little dog and a big, flat-screen television permanently tuned to some Kardashian or another.
Eventually we hear about a divorce, though not much about the marriage that preceded it. Mavis supports herself by writing installments in a popular series of “Gossip Girl”-like novels for teenagers, and though her name does not appear on the cover, she derives some creative and professional satisfaction from the job. She drinks a lot, pulls at her hair and seems generally unconcerned with other people. She is pretty, poised and imperious in the way that can come naturally to tall, beautiful, blond women, but also weary and blue — a platinum princess suffering from metal fatigue.
Looking for a way to break out of her rut and return some luster to her life, Mavis decides to go back to her hometown, Mercury, Minn., and reconnect with her high school boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson). Just how spectacularly bad this idea is — how packed with vanity, magical thinking and plain, stupid meanness — emerges over the course of a few days, but the warning signs are there from the start.
Most interesting trailer.....lots of zingers......
Todays video - for Elvis fans......
Elvis died in 1977, his daughter Lisa Marie was born in 1966. She was eleven
when her father died.
With today's technology they united father and daughter to sing this song
together....isn't this great ??
It's difficult to realize that this video is super imposed !!
This electronic union between father and daughter is wonderfully done,
he sang this song in 1968 and Lisa Marie in 2008.
when her father died.
With today's technology they united father and daughter to sing this song
together....isn't this great ??
It's difficult to realize that this video is super imposed !!
This electronic union between father and daughter is wonderfully done,
he sang this song in 1968 and Lisa Marie in 2008.
Todays political jokes....
How to Speak Republican
- America (United States of): A country located in the N. Western Hemisphere that is #1.
- Bible: A sacred text that provides incontestable answers when thumped.
- Birth Certificate: An official birth record required of all US Presidents, regardless of race, since 2008.
- Capitalism: A system of economic organization that has never been attempted.
- Christmas: A holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, now rarely celebrated due to persecution by atheists.
- Compromise: (uncommon) A form of political suicide.
- Coast (East): A very bad coast of the continental United States.
- Coast (West): Another really inexcusable coast.
- Communism: The belief that the government should ever do anything.
- Condescending: Accurately informed.
- Constitution (U.S.): The hallowed founding document of the United States, the text of which must be interpreted strictly and amended immediately.
- Corporations: Large people who are overtaxed.
- Deficits: 1) Fiscal shortfalls incurred by Democrats that threaten to bankrupt the country. 2) Fiscal shortfalls incurred by Republicans that don't matter.
- Democrat: A political party.
- Election: A method of selecting representatives, the fraudulence of which may be determined by the outcome.
- Elitist: Qualified.
- Endangered Species: Animals that have it coming.
- Evolution: A theory of human origins that is out there.
- Extremist (Liberal): Espousing or adhering to political beliefs that are held by only a majority of Americans.
- Fact: Information that has been verifiably posted to a RedState comment board.
- Forest (National): Trees that have it coming.
- Gut: Region of the body from which decisions should be made.
- Homosexuality: A membership-only lifestyle organization that perpetuates itself through youth recruitment.
- Hitler: A man to whom it would be inappropriate to compare President Obama in spite of the many uncanny similarities.
- Jesus: Charismatic religious leader and son of God; born in Bethlehem in the year 0; beliefs include love, charity, enhanced interrogation, privatized healthcare, elimination of the estate tax, and the right to carry concealed semiautomatic weapons.
- League (Ivy): an association of eight Eastern universities and colleges, the lack of a fancy education from which qualifies a candidate for political office.
- Liberal: A person who should be rounded up and shot but not really.
- Marxism: A political and economic philosophy developed by Karl Marx and promulgated by Paul Krugman.
- Media (Mainstream): Where you won't hear things.
- Medicare: A fraudulent, socialistic boondoggle that is sacrosanct.
- Mexicans: Brown people who have it coming.
- Mountaintops: Ancient rock formations that have it coming.
- Muslims: Brown people who have it coming.
- News: Fox News
- Obamacare: A Federally-mandated policy to address the national oversupply of grandparents through euthanasia.
- Organic: Eaten by lesbians.
- Party (Tea): A grass-roots movement of patriotic Americans fighting for the principle of "No Taxation With Representation."
- Poll: A survey used to determine, to within a margin of error, what percentage of Americans are right.
- Poverty: The condition of having inadequate financial or material resources due to not trying hard enough.
- Propaganda: The politically motivated dissemination of biased information, opinion, or data through its publication in the New York Times.
- Punishment (Capital): The legally authorized killing by the State of someone who is definitely guilty.
- Racism: A form of discrimination that typically happens in reverse.
- Regulation: Rules issued by a government agency for no reason.
- Ronald Reagan: A fictional character based loosely on President Ronald Reagan.
- Scientist: A person who employs a rigorous system of observation, experiment, measurement, and verification to perpetuate his Godless left-wing agenda.
- Social Security: A redistributionist Ponzi scheme that is sacrosanct.
- Socialism: An economic system invented by FDR.
- Taxes: Levies imposed by the government that raise more revenue the lower they are.
- Torture: A method of interrogation that does not rise to the level of torture.
- Terrorist: A person to whom a person who threatens to destroy the U.S. economy unless his demands are met should not be compared.
- Unbiased: Giving equal weight to both sides of the looking glass.
- Wealthy (the): People who earned every penny.
- Up: A direction which, depending on circumstances, is down.
- Warming (Global): An anomalous, anthropogenic increase in the earth's atmospheric and oceanic temperatures that isn't happening.
- Welfare: A government program to distribute Cadillacs to unwed mothers.
- Yes: (no translation available)
Todays male sexist joke
While creating wives, God promised men that good and obedient wives would be found in all corners of the world.
And then He made the earth round.
And then He made the earth round.
And one for the ladies
A woman went up to the bar in a quiet rural pub... She gestured alluringly to the bartender who approached her immediately. She seductively signaled that he should bring his face closer to hers. As he did, she gently caressed his full beard. "Are you the manager?" she asked, softly stroking his face with both hands. "Actually, no," he replied. "Can you get him for me? I need to speak to him," she said, running her hands beyond his beard and into his hair. "I'm afraid I can't," breathed the bartender. "Is there anything I can do?" "Yes. I need for you to give him a message," she continued, running her forefinger across the bartender's lip and slyly popping a couple of her fingers into his mouth and allowing him to suck them gently. "What should I tell him?" the bartender managed to say. "Tell him ," she whispered, "There's no toilet paper, hand soap, or paper towels in the ladies room." |
The bottom line is online or virtual education is extremely profitable that is why they are popping up all over the nation. Students still need social skills and peer interaction that a regular classroom can provide.
ReplyDeleteI'm neither Mexican or a Muslim..but I'm brown.It's scaring me. LOL
ReplyDelete