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Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Warning: Mercenaries at Work

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:09:13 -0800

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Warning: Mercenaries at Work: Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. (See Thomas Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, for a superb analysis of Ronald Reagan’s slogan “government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”) Its objectives have long been to discredit what it called “big government,” while capturing for private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in national defense. It may be understood as a slow-burning reaction to what American conservatives believed to be the socialism of the New Deal.

Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door - by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:48:07 -0800

Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door - by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt: As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license) - Boing Boing

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:35:03 -0800

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license) - Boing Boing:

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license)

Posted by Cory Doctorow, June 17, 2008 4:55 AM | permalink In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use” — the right to copy without permission — means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.”).

It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”

Over on Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden nails it:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

Link

Plutocracy Reborn

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:52:15 -0800

Plutocracy Reborn

via www.stateofworkingamerica.org

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:19:58 -0800

via www.stateofworkingamerica.org

The Awesome Alain Robert

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:25:00 -0800

The Awesome Alain Robert

The Great Oil Swindle

Fri, 30 May 2008 22:35:56 -0800

The Great Oil Swindle: The Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating trading in oil futures to determine whether the surge in prices to record levels is the result of manipulation or fraud. They might want to take a look at wheat, rice and corn futures while they’re at it. The whole thing is a hoax cooked up by the investment banks and hedge funds who are trying to dig their way out of the trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities (MBS) mess that they created by turning garbage loans into securities. That scam blew up in their face last August and left them scrounging for handouts from the Federal Reserve. Now the billions of dollars they’re getting from the Fed is being diverted into commodities which is destabilizing the world economy; driving gas prices to the moon and triggering food riots across the planet.

"to get the kids right into the new consciousness you can’t just give them articles to read or..."

Thu, 29 May 2008 13:49:41 -0800

“to get the kids right into the new consciousness you can’t just give them articles to read or speeches to listen to or even rallies to watch but instead you have to absolutely invent a whole new medium that begins with and depends on involvement and participation, that defines reality through immediacy rather than through passivity, that replaces explanation with actualization.”

- Making Yippie! — an excerpt from Chicago ‘68 by David Farber

Karl Marx and informal education

Tue, 27 May 2008 00:24:00 -0800

Karl Marx and informal education:

What significance does Marx have for educators and animateurs today?

by Barry Burke.

Karl Marx never wrote anything directly on education - yet his influence on writers, academics, intellectuals and educators who came after him has been profound. The power of his ideas has changed the way we look at the world. Whether you accept his analysis of society or whether you oppose it, he cannot be ignored. As Karl Popper, a fierce opponent of Marxism, has claimed ‘all modern writers are indebted to Marx, even if they do not know it’.

Wall Street's Racket Has Gone Too Far, and We're Going to Pay the Heavy Price | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Sun, 25 May 2008 23:35:12 -0800

Wall Street's Racket Has Gone Too Far, and We're Going to Pay the Heavy Price | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet:

by James Howard Kunstler

Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the service of industrial productivity).

We’ve tried just about everything else. There was the so-called service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization — which allowed a few hundred or so 30-year-old smoothies to retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley while hundreds of thousands of retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban sprawl under the theory that houses (or “homes,” in the jargon of the Realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned into existence — along with massive fees for structuring the loans into bundles of bond-like thingies.

This has all failed now because the racket went too far. Every possible candidate for a snookering got snookered.

[more]

Austin Kleon via farm4.static.flickr.com

Sun, 25 May 2008 22:15:00 -0800

Austin Kleon

via farm4.static.flickr.com

Press Action ::: How Class Works 2004: An Interview with Michael Zweig

Sun, 25 May 2008 12:07:05 -0800

Press Action ::: How Class Works 2004: An Interview with Michael Zweig:

Because class is a question of power, class is a relationship. One cannot have power alone or in a social vacuum. This means that to understand working class experience one must understand all other classes in society and how they interact. Likewise, to understand the life of the middle class (professional people, small business owners, and managerial/supervisory personnel) one must place their experiences in the context of dynamics between the capitalist and working classes. Working class studies reports on other classes much as Women’s studies has something to say about men and Black studies about White people.

One important feature of working class studies is that it addresses the lives of all working people, not just the traditional labor studies focus on collective bargaining. Working class studies addresses the full range of economic, social, political, and cultural experiences of working people. Class dynamics shape much of our social life, not just at the workplace. Changes in the distributions of income and wealth, the absence of health insurance for 45 million people, the war in Iraq, campaign finance and other corporate/government connections, concentration of media and the shaping of the news offered by the media, outsourcing, privatization of education and social security, the new Medicare law and prescription coverage - these are issues that millions of people care about and each of them is shaped by class dynamics. Significant social movements address some of these. Working class studies has something to contribute to and much to learn from all of these social movements in addition to traditional union campaigns.

The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To Use Each One » SlideShare

Sun, 18 May 2008 16:46:07 -0800

The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To Use Each One » SlideShare

Reading Online - Articles: Contexts for Engagement and Motivation in Reading

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:53:36 -0800

Reading Online - Articles: Contexts for Engagement and Motivation in Reading:

Classroom contexts can promote engaged reading. Teachers create contexts for engagement when they provide prominent knowledge goals, real-world connections to reading, meaningful choices about what, when, and how to read, and interesting texts that are familiar, vivid, important, and relevant. Teachers can further engagement by teaching reading strategies. A coherent classroom fuses these qualities.

additional context:

Engagement Impacts Reading Proficiency

The Science Creative Quarterly » THE MYTHOLOGY – AND POTENTIAL – OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL. LEARNING FROM RACHEL CARSON

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:36:10 -0800

The Science Creative Quarterly » THE MYTHOLOGY – AND POTENTIAL – OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL. LEARNING FROM RACHEL CARSON: Public intellectuals are symbolic figures in society, who represent social ideas and utopic visions rather than individual perspectives. Their influence and power comes from their ability to channel public fears and desires in specific directions, and to portray problems in personally affective ways.

"The need for the founding of Progressive Education on an adequate social theory is peculiarly..."

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:20:33 -0800

“The need for the founding of Progressive Education on an adequate social theory is peculiarly imperative today. We live in troublous times; we live in an age of profound change; we live in an age of revolution. Indeed, it is highly doubtful whether man ever lived in a more eventful period than the present.”

- George S. Counts: Dare Progressive Education be Progressive?

"We willingly accept the way people in the past have viewed and arranged the world. Does bowing to..."

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:43:04 -0800

“We willingly accept the way people in the past have viewed and arranged the world. Does bowing to that authority prevent us from looking at things with a fresh perspective? Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it. It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.”

- The Failure of Names | Orion magazine

Where the Blog has No Name: “A Nation at Risk” Twenty-Five Years Later

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:49:00 -0800

Where the Blog has No Name: “A Nation at Risk” Twenty-Five Years Later:

In a report for the libertarian Cato Institute, former New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein, takes the 25th anniversary of the Reagan Administration’s A Nation At Risk report to analyze its flaws; how it perpetuated the lie that public schools were collapsing; and how warped the public’s view of the relationship between schools and the economy. Rothstein illustrates three fundamental flaws in the arguments presented in A Nation At Risk. First, the report wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.

responses by Michael Strong and Sol Stern

"Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech..."

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:46:49 -0800

““Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.”

- Chuang Tzu - Translated by Yutang Lin

Education Policy Blog: Teaching as craft?

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:29:00 -0800

Education Policy Blog: Teaching as craft?:

by Sherman Dorn

Those who argue over the nature of teaching often are arguing about the appropriate metaphor: are teachers artists, craft workers, intellectuals, technicians, babysitters, … ? In the long run, I am not sure that the metaphors are that useful. (Then again, I read Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists my first year as a grad student, so I may have imbibed a distrust of metaphors from that book.) Instead, I’d argue for a close examination of how teachers make decisions.

There are a variety of ways in which people can and do make decisions, and perhaps one way of looking at teaching is matching up decision-making against these templates, perhaps creating some others, and seeing what is required for each to work successfully. The list below is not an attempt to be comprehensive or even fair:

Improvisation. Jazz musicians start with a basic melody that is repeated, and then improvise either a solo or background.
Scripting. Actors follow a script that is thoroughly rehearsed (for stage productions) or recorded repeatedly until satisfaction (for television, movies, etc.).
Clinical best practices. Medical practitioners diagnose a case and follow best-practice guidelines for making decisions based on data for an individual.
Open-source software engineering. Programmers divide tasks into modules, try to make a reasonably-working module available as soon as possible, and then use feedback from the user community to fix bugs, decide on further development, etc.
Throwaway sketches. Designers sketch multiple disposable options before anything is produced, subject the ideas behind those sketches to a social critique, and winnow the options down to what is interesting and workable.

related: How Doctors Think -

Brain Trust: Dr. Groopman on “How Doctors Think”

From Morning Edition on “How Doctors Think”

What’s the Trouble?

A Conversation with Groopman