StickWithANose

Why I hate SmartBoards and other useless education gadgets: Washington Post
Bi-partisan commission identifies $100 billion of savings in Defense Budget… The press yawns: Project on Defense Alternatives
Lykins smacks down Fiscal Conservatives on Military Budget: KnoxViews
For the Thousandth Time… Freddie and Fannie did not cause the financial crisis: The Big Picture
Predatory Banks & billionaire authoritarian Pete [...]

Between propagandistic “documentaries” scaring the uninformed and economically illiterate and a President who willing adopts right-wing narratives as being responsible and “post-partisan”, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next big fight in the American republic will center around our ballooning debt and the ill-advised austerity proposals being bandied about for addressing that debt. Looks [...]

One of the tragedies of this most current era of globalization is the degree to which exploitation remains hidden from those who benefit from it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploited workers often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes who accumulated wealth from their labor. The exploitation of [...]

This weekend’s must read comes from the always sharp Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism. Yves builds off of this piece by Simon Schama in the Financial Times to discuss the possibility of a societal backlash against the [on-going] greatest transfer of wealth in human history from ordinary citizens to the financiers of Wall Street [...]

The conservative revolt against reason continues today in the on-going drama over the social studies curriculum in Texas. Sure hope that pendulum swings back someday soon… otherwise we’re headed toward authoritarianism wrapped in the American flag and whistling the Star Spangled Banner.
[UPDATE] We Are Respectable Negroes offers a detailed analysis of the new curricula in [...]

The rise of eliminationist rhetoric in the Republican party is yielding predictable results.
One School Committee member, saying she’s “appalled” by the behavior of some of the Republicans who used a room at King Middle School last weekend, wants to protect the city’s public schools from future harm…
The Republican State Convention was held at the Portland [...]

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

In popular discourse, it has become commonsensical that America’s expanding waistline and overall poor health is the result of the highly processed foods we eat and our propensity to sit on our backsides in front of the tee vee. However, there is a growing line of research that ties health outcomes to economic polarization. Could [...]

Modern human societies can never stand still; they are forever in a state of transformation. Thus, the questions specifically addressed by politics are: What kind of transformations are taking place? Do these transformations fulfill or undermine our normative values and ideals? And what transformations are both possible and desirable at this historical moment?
Social progress and [...]

One last tax post for the day and I’m off to garden! This one comes from noted America-hating socialist J.K. Rowling on why she chose to remain in the UK after becoming wildly rich instead of moving to a tax haven country.
I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main [...]