StickWithANose

Watching what passes for local news in these parts is always a challenge to one’s sanity, but this morning an all too aptly named TV personality took me to the edge. Said TV personality offered up two back-to-back stories on education with a cheerful vacuity despite an obvious contradiction between the two… First, she told [...]

The reason that I didn’t support passage of the new health care law is because I assume that once a conduit that opens up public treasuries to private interests is created it will inevitably be exploited. It is a topic that I discuss regularly in this blog in regard to public education, but it is [...]

Billmon channels Kirk’s flight into an alternate universe in order to detail the dark art of disinformation. It is a critique of instrumental reason that would make Adorno proud.
The difference between disinformation and just plain lying is in the scope of the enterprise: A lie is intended to conceal a specific truth (e.g. “I did [...]

I can think of no better reason why public education should be our number one policy priority than this example of almost pure contradiction… Bloomberg
More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is trying to [...]

Lykins posted this gem from the NYT in 1938 that hits a little too close home these days…
When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany;” it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism,” Professor [...]

Definition: the pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism. Evidence: the new Harris poll.
67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist. 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in [...]

I’ll be giving the ‘race’ lecture this week, so this piece on All Things Considered caught my ear. It is stunning to see the lengths that we humans will go to in order to achieve [or approximate] normative ideals of beauty.
Every culture has its idealized woman — a standard of beauty that is sought and [...]

This video makes me extremely sad.