If this holds up, this is great news for Nebraska. And a big "Hook THIS" for Texas, which will be stuck in a dead league, the Big 12.
THE WORD comes from sports-radio WHB in Kansas City, and already the website is about to melt down:
The Big Ten Conference has extended initial offers to join the league to four universities including Missouri and Nebraska from the Big 12, according to multiple sources close to the negotiations.
While nothing can be approved until the Big Ten presidents and chancellors meet the first week of June in Chicago, the league has informed the two Big 12 schools, Notre Dame and Rutgers that it would like to have them join. It is not yet clear whether the Big Ten will expand to 14 or 16 teams but sources indicated Missouri and Nebraska are invited in either scenario. Notre Dame has repeatedly declined the opportunity to join the Big Ten. If Notre Dame remains independent, Rutgers would be the 14th team. The Big Ten would then decide whether to stop at 14 or extend offers to two other schools. If Notre Dame joins, sources say an offer will be extended to one other school making it a 16-team league.
In order for the University of Missouri to join the Big Ten, the Missouri Board of Regents will still have to approve the move. Sources close to the governing body say the Big Ten has told officials that Mizzou could add $1.3 million per month in revenue to the lucrative Big Ten Television Network. The Big Ten Network is currently offered on basic cable to very few of over 7 million residents living in Missouri television markets and adding it throughout the state will be a windfall for the conference.
Big Ten representatives have also told Missouri officials they would like to have the entire expansion process wrapped up this summer with a formal announcement coming no later than July.
Biz prof smwhre was sayin smthin abt the prez bein a h8tr on cellphones & web intruding on clsrm.
Fnd articl here while surfin by. Chk it OUTTT!!!!!
In his commencement speech Sunday at Virginia's Hampton University, President Obama suggested that social media and the devices on which they are accessed distract students from learning. The president does not hate your precious freedom to isolate yourself in a cocoon of music, videos and text messages. He just realizes that if students are going to realize their potential, they need to focus more on the classroom.
As a part-time professor, I agree with him. I have to fight students' natural desire to keep an eye on Facebook during class. (I may be a really bad teacher, but Bloomberg Businessweek ranked my Babson College Business department second in the country for teaching strategy to undergraduates.) According to academic . . . 96% of college . . . students . . . Facebook . . . YouTube. . . . hour a. . . .
The stories of the flooding to hit Nashville and the damages incurred have made headlines around the nation. On all the network newscasts there have been pictures and stories of what has happened to our city. Some authorities are calling it, "The flood of 500 years," or The flood of 1000 years," based on the likelihood of something like this happening. One of our dedicated listeners referred to it as, "Nashville's Hurricane Katrina."
The outporing of concern from friends and fans of WSM and the Grand Ole Opry has been overwhelming to all of us connected with each of these businesses. There have been, and there continues to be, a lot of prayers being held up for our city, its resdients, businesses, and all that have been affected by this flood.
The Grand Ole Opry has been mentioned frequently on television and in print and the damages that have happened.
Let me share with you something that I've said for the fifteen years I've been with WSM, that is more relevant now than ever. The Grand Ole Opry is not a place--the Grand Ole Opry is a show, and as the old saying goes, "The show must go on." As many know, the Grand Ole Opry is world's longest continuously running live radio show. What many people don't know is, the Grand Ole Opry is our Saturday show--only. The program that is on Friday nights--started in 1949 as the Friday Night Frolics at WSM Studio C, then became the Friday Night Opry upon moving to the Ryman Auditorium in 1964, is formatted like our Saturday show. Our seasonal Tuesday Night show is the Tuesday Night Opry, and our seasonal Thursday night program is Opry Country Classics. Nothing has happened to any . . . shows and they . . . to continue. . . .
America is a less classy place today. Lena Horne is dead. She was 92.
Her obituary in The New York Times points out how sin really does make you stupid, and how America's original sin had the power to make a whole region of the country stupid unto death, doing violence against culture and beauty in the whole sickening process.
THIS ONLY seems insane today because it was:
Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”
Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.
“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.
Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.
That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.
She got involved in various social and political organizations and — along with her friendship with Paul Robeson — got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.
WE WON'T see the likes of Lena Horne -- amazing singer, champion lamp thrower -- again, I fear. God help us.
Saturday's New York Times has a story about young people once again pushing their dinghy onto the pristine sands of terra incognita, a whole new world we shall dub The Obvious.
Oy.
WELL, SCREW IT . . . there's just so much one can say, so just go on and read it yourself. Here's the first part to get you started:
Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.
Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.
The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.
While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.
They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”
The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue among active users of social networks. Last week, Facebook scrambled to fix a security breach that allowed users to see their friends’ supposedly private information, including personal chats.
Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google, said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I’ll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.”
Mark Lilla, in the latest New York Review of Books, looks at the tea-party movement and -- by Jove! -- absolutely figures it out. If I may be so bold as to summarize this amazing piece of commentary (and do go here and read the whole thing), it goes something like this: We Americans, bastard offspring of the coupling of the sexual revolution and Gordon Gekko, think John Donne was full of beans.
We also aren't too sure about the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Fall. Except when it comes to "big government" -- we think gummint types got their share of original sin . . . and ours, too.
A little over a decade ago I published an article in these pages titled “A Tale of Two Reactions” (May 14, 1998). It struck me then that American society was changing in ways conservative and liberal commentators just hadn’t noticed. Conservatives were too busy harping on the cultural revolution of the Sixties, liberals on the Reagan revolution’s “culture of greed,” and all they could agree on was that America was beyond repair.
The American public, meanwhile, was having no trouble accepting both revolutions and reconciling them in everyday life. This made sense, given that they were inspired by the same political principle: radical individualism. During the Clinton years the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation). As I wrote then, Americans saw “no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace…and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now.
What happened? People who remember the article sometimes ask me this, and I understand why. George W. Bush, who ran on a platform of “compassionate conservatism,” seemed attuned to the recent social changes. The President Bush who emerged after September 11 took his party and the country back to the divisive politics of earlier decades, giving us seven years of ideological recrimination. By the time of the last presidential campaign, millions were transfixed not by the wisdom or folly of Barack Obama’s policy agenda, but by absurd rumors about his birth certificate and his “socialism.” Now he has been elected president by a healthy majority and is grappling with a wounded economy and two foreign wars he inherited—and what are we talking about? A makeshift Tea Party movement whose activists rage against “government” and “the media,” while the hotheads of talk radio and cable news declare that the conservative counterrevolution has begun.
It hasn’t. We know that the country is divided today, because people say it is divided. In politics, thinking makes it so. Just as obviously, though, the angry demonstrations and organizing campaigns have nothing to do with the archaic right–left battles that dragged on from the Sixties to the Nineties. The populist insurgency is being choreographed as an upsurge from below against just about anyone thought to be above, Democrats and Republicans alike. It was galvanized by three things: a financial collapse that robbed millions of their homes, jobs, and savings; the Obama administration’s decision to pursue health care reform despite the crisis; and personal animosity toward the President himself (racially tinged in some regions) stoked by the right-wing media.1 But the populist mood has been brewing for decades for reasons unrelated to all this.
Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.
Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.
A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.
LIBERTARIAN MOB. That's about it.
We can't agree on anything in this country, except that we're God. Well, I'm God . . . or at least a god, if not the God. You, you're the spawn of Satan.
Today’s conservatives prefer the company of anti-intellectuals who know how to exploit nonintellectuals, as Sarah Palin does so masterfully.16 The dumbing-down they have long lamented in our schools they are now bringing to our politics, and they will drag everyone and everything along with them. As David Frum, one of the remaining lucid conservatives, has written to his wayward comrades, “When you argue stupid, you campaign stupid. When you campaign stupid, you win stupid. And when you win stupid, you govern stupid.” (Unsurprisingly, Frum was recently eased out of his position at the American Enterprise Institute after expressing criticism of Republican tactics in the health care debate.)
Over the next six months, as midterm elections approach, we’ll be hearing a lot from and about the Tea Party movement. Right-wing Republicans hope to lead the movement by following it. Establishment Republicans will make fools of themselves trying to master a populist rhetoric they don’t know and don’t believe in. Democrats will take cover, hoping that their losses won’t be too great and that they’ll pick up seats in places where Republicans are slitting each other’s throats. In the end we will likely find ourselves with a divided and irresponsible Congress even less capable of gaining public trust by governing well. Confidence in government will drop further and the libertarian commedia of American politics will extend its run.
But the blame does not fall on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the Republican Party alone. We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing—though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have—and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.
Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”
Even in the patently whack, one can find kernels of truth. Welcome to the world of Angus X and the Landless Peasant Party.
As I've said before, if American tea partiers weren't such crypto-racist, whiny tossers, they'd be forming a U.S. branch of this.
After all, can you really totally hate an entertaining Scottish eccentric who blatantly steals from Patrick Henry and makes it his own right under the nose of the British monarchy?
There's nothing like a song to kick off the 100th episode of 3 Chords & the Truth.
Good thing, then, that happens to be our standard procedure here on the Big Show. Let me move on, though, before you accuse me of facetiousness.
But before I do, can somebody explain to me the concept of "Tobalby"? And if you can, I'll think that maybe you're a little tipsy on Potliquor.
YES, it's my show, and I love her madly, but sometimes the whole deal -- and tha late nights -- just make me loopy. If not Monster Raving Loony.
On this auspicious occasion of the completion of the100th of the 3 Chords & the Truth program -- or, if you will, programme -- I'll just get in the drivers seat and crank up the Radio, Radio. For it's a sound salvation.
After all, the last thing I want to be today is a Wallflower.
So repair all the broken bells and let them ring out greetings through the air to all the white birds . . . let them ring out this simple message from your Mighty Favog.
"Trust Me." And "Love Me."
BECAUSE it is that little fire in your belly that tells you the music here is important. That the program -- er, programme -- that is the Big Show fills an important niche that is ignored by the insipid tossers that fish and whistle while radio and the music industry burn.
But it's still, whatever way you cut it, quite easy to say "What a Wonderful World," even if we sometimes look on a fouled landscape and think . . . "Is That All There Is?"
Whatever. Sometimes you make good sense, sometimes you don't.
Y'all, this is what the end of the world looks like. Really.
It looks like a bunch of sniggering hens talking about finger (expletive deleted) -- complete with a leering, old-lady librarian sagely advising the young'uns about autofreakeration -- while Corporate America turns millstones into stockholder value. The Huns, Visigoths, Vandals and other barbarians had nothing on us.
See the bloke behind Gordon Brown at last night's vote count in the British prime minister's Scottish constituency?
Yeah, that one. The one with the upraised fist. Right on. Can you dig it?
That is Deek Jackson of the Landless Peasant Party. And he -- along with the Jesus Christ guy and the Monster Raving Loony Party -- is why British politics is far and away more entertaining than the colonial brand of democratic futility. BELOW, enjoy a not-work-or-family-friendly advert for the Landless Peasant Party, featuring Mr. Jackson, whom we'll refer to as Angus X. This is what the tea partiers would be on this side of the Atlantic . . . if only they had . . . er, bollocks.
AND HERE is Scotland's No. 1 peasant, Angus X, on the campaign trail.
AYE, 'tis a bonnie thing to have a candidate tell a voter he thinks he's daft. Almost as good as when the BBC's Jeremy Paxman gets a hold of a politician who unwisely tries to "spin" him.
David Cameron may be hard pressed to win an outright majority for the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, but he had amazingly little trouble dispatching the King of King and the Lord of Lords in his Witney, Oxfordshire, constituency.
No wonder no one thinks it will go well for the British after the politicking is done and the attempts at governing begin.
Another disappointment was the poor showing of the Monster Raving Loony Party, though I believe it did come in ahead of the Almighty.
ALL IN ALL, you have to admit there is far greater entertainment value in British elections than in ours. Then again, I'm just geeky that way -- as you can see here.
A most pleasant surprise in the BBC coverage of the UK national balloting is the emergence of veteran Beeb presenter David Dimbleby as the most entertaining damn thing on network television since Dan Rather spun his last Election Night simile and mangled his last metaphor.
Dimbleby -- who has a refreshing lack of patience for any kind of television, or political, foolishness -- even came up with a Ratherism fine enough to warm a colonist's heart: "But behind the scenes, you know they're fighting like cats in a sack."
And then there was this question from someone on the BBC team to a Labour minister: "It's 20 past 3 in the morning, couldn't we please just have a straight answer?"
You know how Millennials just have to share . . . and share . . . and share . . . and share, and it seems like they have no sense of privacy or discretion?
You know what I'm sayin', Bubbie?
I hate that.
And now the king of the Millennials, Mark Zuckerberg, is bringing that ethos to its fullest fruition on Facebook. And we Boomers -- who, to be fair, started this damn mess with our "letting it all hang out" -- apparently have to like it.
Or else.
SAYSThe New York Times:
For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations.
On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.
Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether.
Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.
“Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md.
Mr. Ament said he was so fed up with Facebook that he deleted his account this week after three years of using the service. “Every week there seems to be a new privacy update or change, and I just can’t keep up with it.”
Facebook said it did not think the security hole, which was open a few hours, would have a lasting impact on the company’s reputation.
“For a service that has grown as dramatically as we have grown, that now assists with more than 400 million people sharing billions of pieces of content with their friends and the institutions they care about, we think our track record for security and safety is unrivaled,” said Elliot Schrage, the company’s vice president for public policy. “Are we perfect? Of course not.”
Facebook is increasingly finding itself at the center of a tense discussion over privacy and how personal data is used by the Web sites that collect it, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University.
“It’s clear that we keep discovering new boundaries of privacy that are possible to push and just as quickly breached,” Mr. Katz said.
Social networking experts and analysts wonder whether Facebook is pushing the envelope in a way that could damage its standing over time. The privacy mishap on Wednesday, first reported by the blog TechCrunch, did not help matters.
“While this breach appears to be relatively small, it’s inopportunely timed,” said Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It threatens to undermine what Facebook hopes to achieve with its network over the next few years, because users have to ask whether it is a platform worthy of their trust.”
Over the last few months, Facebook has introduced changes that encourage users to make their photos and other information accessible to anyone on the Internet. Last month its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled plans to begin sharing users’ information with some outside Web sites, and Facebook began prompting users to link information in their profile pages, like their hobbies and hometowns, in a way that makes that information public.
That last change prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, to file a complaint on Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission.
“Facebook continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for commercial purposes,” Marc Rotenberg, the group’s executive director, said in a letter to the commission.
DAMN PUNK KIDS. They learn all too well, then they start an Internet company that eats the world.
Before it "jumps the shark." That's another thing we Boomers started. Heh.
A laptop, after all, can multitask, unlike an iPad. A laptop also can run lots more programs than an iPad, and it has a full-featured operating system.
Why, given all this, would I try to turn an iPad into a really lame fake laptop? Instead of buying the real thing.
Denial in the name of "school reform" is going to do no one any good.
And in Omaha, politically correct political posturing may have just turned into full-blown delusion. Unfortunately, Washington has the clout -- and state officials are craven enough -- to turn a public-policy psychotic break into a world of hurt for children . . . and for those struggling to teach them.
Here's the story: One day, Nebraska education officials are praising the excellence of four local high schools. The next, the state puts the schools on a "persistently lowest achieving" list, qualifying them for federal stimulus money aimed at lifting troubled schools out of the educational gutter.
To qualify for these stimulus funds, Omaha Public Schools must institute "reforms" at the excellent-yet-underachieving schools, reforms ranging from removing the "excellent" administrators to shutting down the "excellent" schools.
We are Americans. That means we do insane things, from destroying Vietnamese villages in order to save them from the Red Menace to closing "excellent" schools to rescue them from dissoluteness.
The full list includes 28 high schools, eight middle schools and 18 elementary schools. Two of the schools house both middle and high school students.
Included on the list are five Omaha area high schools Omaha Central, Omaha North, Omaha South, Omaha Benson and Bellevue East. Indian Hill Elementary School in OPS also made the list. The designation could mean federal grant funding for the schools if their districts agree to reforms prescribed by the Obama administration such as staffing changes at each school building.
John Mackiel, superintendent of the Omaha Public Schools, expressed frustration Wednesday at OPS schools making the list.
The four OPS high schools made the list because they have graduation rates below 75 percent.
Mackiel sharply criticized state officials for labeling the schools in order to receive federal funding.
“I don't believe there's anything more reprehensible than gaming the system to access $77 million of federal money by accepting it and then labeling schools that two months ago you just celebrated in terms of the educational opportunities going on in those schools,” he said.
Schools on the list are eligible for a total of $17 million in grants, but there probably will only be enough money to serve schools with the greatest need of improvement. As a result, many of the districts with schools listed won't have to make difficult decisions on whether to remove principals or take other drastic measures.
Schools that accept federal School Improvement Grants would have to implement one of four models. The models range in severity from removing the principal to closing the school.
Nebraska sought and received a waiver in the federal rules allowing use of a graduation rate of 75 percent instead of the 60 percent called for by the federal government.
Nebraska Education Commissioner Roger Breed said no Nebraska high schools except for Native American schools would have qualified for funding at 60 percent.
(snip)
Mackiel called it “a curious Alice-in-Wonderland contradiction” that in February, the Nebraska Department of Education performed an annual assessment of the district and issued a “glowing” report commending the leadership at South, North, Central and Benson high schools.
In the next 10 days, Mackiel said, graduating seniors at the four high schools will be awarded more than $25 million in scholarships, “but to see the list today you wouldn't know that.”
MACKIEL is right. Both Central and North, to name just two, are excellent schools. Both feature first-rate facilities, and Omaha North also is a magnet school.
What all Omaha's "failing" schools also happen to be are smack-dab in the inner city. What all Omaha's "failing" schools happen to be charged with is educating most of the offspring of the city's underclass.
These are the young victims of a failed culture, one which values many things, just not education, responsibility, achievement or familial stability. Back when I was taking just enough college sociology courses to be dangerous, one term of art for such was "deviant." Another was "dysfunctional."
As in "deviant behavior." Within a "dysfunctional environment."
According to the state -- and to the feds, eager to remedy a crisis, just not the right one -- the likes of Benson, North, South and Central are "persistently lowest achieving" schools because they graduate only 75 percent of the children who wander through their doors. According to the real world, Jesus Christ never performed a bigger miracle when he caused Peter to walk on water or fed more than 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.
Verily, I say unto thee if North, South, Central and Benson were more white, less underclass and a lot more suburban, the quality of teaching going on there would have the world beating a path unto them as the new MIT, if not the new Jerusalem.
But you cannot say that in America, because that would be impolitic.
IT IS BETTER for state and federal officials to ignore that Omaha, for example, has the third-highest black poverty rate in the nation. Ignore that its percentage of African-American children in poverty is atop the American hit parade of suck.
No, it is much more expedient to pretend that none of these things stack the deck against even the best educators and the best-resourced schools. It's a lot easier to downplay the fact that this kind of endemic poverty breeds real cultural deviance -- as opposed to America's everyday, middling cultural deviance -- and that a deviant hip-hop subculture glorifying Every Wrong Thing takes real cultural deviance and supersizes it.
Why, oh why, open up that can of racially-charged Whoop-Ass when you can just blame the schools instead?
Not acknowledging plain facts does not make them any less plain. Or factual.
It certainly doesn't make stigmatizing certain schools and punishing the educators formerly known as "excellent" any less of an insanely stupid starting point for embarking on the Sisyphean task of trying to fix broken people and a deviant culture.
Can we agree it's not a good idea to engage in a culture war when you're completely outgunned and your ranks are full of Benedict Arnolds? Can we agree that "conservative" Christians engaged in this "war" with all the forethought and all the tactical aplomb of George W. Bush, circa 2003?
And finally, can we just agree the culture war is over, and the "moral majority" lost? Actually, it wasn't even a contest.
MAYBE WE could call it "Dobson's Last Stand," considering this story in Miami New Timesabout one of the men who co-founded the Family Research Council with him:
The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch c*** (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.
On April 13, the "rent boy" (whom we'll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.
That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy's client and, as it happens, one of America's most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.
Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. "I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him." (Medical problems didn't stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.)
Yet Rekers wouldn't deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it.
At the small western Miami townhome he shares with a roommate, a nervous Lucien expressed surprise when we told him that Rekers denied knowing about his line of work from the beginning. "He should've been able to tell you that," he said, fidgeting and fixing his eyes on his knees. "But that's up to him."
For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the culture wars, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America's best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a D.C.-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation's extreme right wing. Its annual Values Summit is considered a litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls, and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have spoken there. (The Family Research Council would not comment about Rekers's Euro-trip.)
THE FRC will be unable to hide from this one, so it just as well address the issue. Then again, what in the world could its officials say? "Holy crap! This may have just discredited us?"
As for Rekers' part, it seems there's no explaining this one away. His pathetic attempt to do just that was his best possible shot. Read on:
In his interview with New Times, Lucien didn't want to impugn his client, but he made it clear they met through Rentboy.com, which is the only website on which he advertises his services. Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.
To arrive at Lucien's site, Rekers must have accepted Rentboy.com's terms of use, thereby acknowledging he was not offended by graphic sexual material. He then would have been transported to a front page covered with images of naked, tumescent men busily sodomizing each other.
OH, MY! And then it gets really disturbing if you apply just a little imagination.
Not to mention Rekers' blog, TeenSexToday.com. Again, from New Times:
Indeed, much of Rekers's activism over the past three decades — beginning with his 1983 book, Shaping Your Child's Sexual Identity — has been devoted to improving children's lives by educating them, protecting them from their own budding sexualities, and keeping them safe from gay adoptions — as he did by testifying as an expert witness in favor of gay adoption bans in both Arkansas and Florida.
Well, it's a good thing Rekers isn't gay himself. Lucien tells us that Rekers frequently takes in foster children and that four years ago he adopted a 16-year-old boy. We found the boy, who is now Lucien's age, on Facebook. He declined to be interviewed.
IN THE ARENA of culture and morals -- in the quest to redeem a fallen culture and dysfunctional society -- it just doesn't work to look at this and say "Well, he's a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch."
You can't preach the gospel and promote good morals with a gay "rent boy" by your side. Well, you can, but the cynics will laugh and everybody else will be scandalized. You can't win a "war" by giving your "enemies" ammunition.
Assuming, of course, that what Christians are called to is war. Which we aren't.
We're called to love our neighbor and proclaim the truth -- in love. This is not achieved by entrusting a pearl of great price to culture-war hypocrites who lust after "rent boys" as they troll the halls of power, flattering Caesar and living a lie.
What you are about to hear is a voice -- a voice lost. A voice faded into the haze of the memories of old men and old women, a world lost in the fog of history.
The voice speaks in an unfamiliar dialect. It speaks of strange things in a strange manner.
This voice -- this lost voice -- calls to us from a nation that is no more. A people who are no more.
The voice is strident. It is confident. It is imperfect, and its sins are as manifest as its hope for the future and its determination to do better tomorrow. Somehow.
This alien voice sounds like Shakespeare, performed in a tavern. By Broderick Crawford.
THE FUTURE GENERATIONS who hear this voice are strangers to its cadences. The future that plucks this voice from the ether -- from the past -- belongs to an alien people, a weary people, a frightened people. They, I think, are a beaten people, though I am not sure they would recognize this.
They would not recognize this voice on a note of triumph. Nor would they any longer recognize the name Broderick Crawford.
Certainly they will not recognize the name Norman Corwin.
This program, On a Note of Triumph, was regarded as his masterpiece -- a masterpiece among many Corwin masterpieces -- aired on every radio network on the occasion of the end of the European War, May 8, 1945.
Adolf Hitler was dead. The Third Reich was vanquished. Americans remembered, and took stock, and gave thanks. On a Note of Triumph.
Lord God of trajectory and blast, Whose terrible sword has laid open the serpent So it withers in the sun for the just to see, Sheathe now the swift avenging blade with the names of nations writ on it, And assist in the preparation of the plowshare. Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings, Who walks in the circuit of heaven among the worthy, Deliver notice to the fallen young men That tokens of orange juice and a whole egg appear now before the hungry children; That night again falls cooling on the earth as quietly as when it leaves Your hand; That freedom has withstood the tyrant like a Malta in a hostile sea, And that the soul of man is surely a Sevastopol Which goes down hard and leaps from ruin quickly. Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage Who has furred the fox against the time of winter And stored provender of bees in summer's brightest places, Do bring sweet influences to bear upon the assembly line: Accept the smoke of the milltown among the accredited clouds of the sky: Fend from the wind with a house and a hedge Him who You made in Your image, And permit him to pick of the tree and the flock, That he may eat today without fear of tomorrow, And clothe himself with dignity in December. Lord God of test-tube and blueprint, Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam, Who taught worms and stars how they could live together, Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes; Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice: Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend: Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of little peoples through expected straits, And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead, That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.
LORD GOD of history and culture . . . we do not understand. This world is lost to us.
Lord God of reality TV and bling, what is the past trying to tell us?
Lord God Almighty, are we all the better or all the worse for all the "progress" we, Thy unfaithful creation, hath wrought?
We, the sophisticates of monosyllabic mindlessness, have no time for these earnest ghosts.
Norman Corwin, the genius of glowing vacuum tubes and the "Golden Age of Radio," turned 100 on Monday. Unfortunately, this is no country for old men.
Or their genius. Or their poetic prose. Glorious words lovingly set so gently, so precisely onto the airwaves of a lost civilization. What?I can't unders. . . .
LBJ killed JFK! Elvis faked his death and last was seen at a Burger King in Chattanooga!
The North Koreans blew up the Deepwater Horizon!
We "know" all this because right-wingers hated the Great Society, beehived middle-aged ladies and assorted weirdos couldn't believe the King could ever die, and Republicans find it more plausible that Kim Jong-il launched a minisub on a suicide mission from a freighter steaming from Havana to blow up an oil rig that . . . oh, for pity's sake!
FACE IT, right-wing ideologues have gone around the bend, tinfoil hats are in vogue, and now is the time to buy, buy, buy those aluminum stocks.
With tensions increasing in the region throughout 2009 and into early 2010, the news suddenly reached the world that a SKorean naval patrol ship, the Cheonan, sank off Baengnyeong island in the Yellow Sea, near the border with NKorea on Friday, the 27th of March. A close range explosion had rocked the ship. More than forty sailors were missing and later presumed dead.
Earlier that same morning, the North's military leaders threatened SKorea and the United States with "unpredictable strikes."
At first, South Korea played down any involvement with its totalitarian neighbor to the north, but gradually incontrovertible evidence emerged that the North had deployed an armed, sophisticated mini-sub into the Yellow Sea. It launched a torpedo at the Cheonan and sunk it in an unprovoked attack.
Twenty-four days later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig owned by the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor Transocean, and operated by British Petroleum, suddenly exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico. More than a dozen were injured and 11 assumed dead.
(snip)
Now as SKorea vows retaliation for NKorea's act of war, evidence has surfaced that NKorea may have deployed the same type of armed military submersible against Deepwater Horizon.
Facts have also emerged that Hyandai Heavy Industries of Seoul, South Korea built the rig at a cost of $1 billion and despite insurance may have to write off significant losses. The oil rig explosion also has repercussions for the SKorean economy.
So with one attack, NKorea could have dealt a serious blow to two of its greatest enemies.
According to some reports, suspicion has fallen on a NKorean merchant vessel, the Dai Hong Dan, that left a port in Cuba the night of April 18th. The merchant vessel is the class of ship that intelligence agencies have long known can be fitted for—and has carried in the past—NKorea's two-man mini-submarines.
The mini-sub, an SSC Sang-o Class submersible, can carry two torpedoes. They have been known to be transported by several classes of their warships, disguised as merchant vessels or by their older submarines.
The older NKorean subs have been determined By the SKorean navy to be based on a former Yugoslavian design that the NKorean military adopted. Those 1990 versions were retrofitted to carry the two-man submersible and capable of sea launch.
The newest generation of the NKorean mini-sub has stealth abilities, a longer range and can stay submerged much longer than its previous versions.
According to Russian intelligence which released a report in Moscow on May 30, 2010, the NKorean vessel carried a force from the 17th Sniper Corps and departed the Cuban port of Empresa Terminales Mambisas de La Habana April the night of April 18, 2010. Although it's destination was Caracas, Venezuela, it changed course and steamed to within 113 nautical miles of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The mini-sub is estimated to have an effective range of 175 nautical miles.
Then, according to the Russians, the NKoreans launched one of its SSC Sang-o mini-subs (the same kind it used in the attack on the SKorean warship in the Yellow Sea). When the stealth sub reached the offshore oil platform it fired two incendiary torpedoes at the rig's superstructure.
BECAUSE ALL of this is soooooooooo much more plausible to conservatives than an oil company and its drilling partner getting greedy, lobbying against regulations requiring state-of-the-art blowout prevention, then cutting corners and screwing up . . . and blowing themselves up in a catastrophic fashion.
Next thing you know, the right-wing echo chamber will be arguing that destruction of the wetlands, and much of the Gulf fishing industry, actually is a good thing. That those shrimpers and oystermen ought to thank their lucky stars that multinational capitalists applied a little black-gold tough love to their blue-collar, loser asses and gave them such a golden opportunity to retrain for much more lucrative -- and much less smelly -- careers as derivatives traders and financial analysts.
Remember, no freedom-loving American capitalist patriot is worth the label if he can't believe at least a half-dozen impossible things before Rush comes on at 11.
If this holds up, this is great news for Nebraska.
