How America Made Its Children Crazy
February 4th, 2012It’s not some sci-fi dystopic concern that’s always 20 years out. They’re gunning for your children’s minds with this right now.
—Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs
Via: Asia Times:
Learning how to learn is the point of education. We will forget the great majority of specific things we were taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem, Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights, the poems of Browning, and whatever else was stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize, analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra or French today, it is not because we retained our knowledge but because we re-learned the subject. School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The most successful people are not the cleverest in terms of sheer processing power, but those who multiply cleverness with persistence.
The psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage it is to use another machine, namely a computer. Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands of people who believe that gratification is the highest human goal, and the quicker the gratification, the better, have devastated our mental landscape. Our children do not read; they only surf. They do not write; they only text. They do not plan and strategize in games; they react to visual and aural stimuli while inflicting simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they cut among disjoined images in the style of rap videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give them Adderall and Ritalin.
It is mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom hasn’t worked, so the educational establishment recommends more of the same quack cure. The New York Times reported last September that computerized education has produced no measurable results, except for some negative ones (test scores fell after massive investment in computers). Yet the education gurus remain undeterred. ”The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data, ”Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote: ”And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: ‘It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”’
Related:
Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education
Are Teenagers More Doomed Than Usual?
Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Research Credit: jb
Syria: Hundreds Dead After Government Unleashes Artillery Barrage on Homs
February 4th, 2012Via: Guardian:
More than 200 people were reported to have been killed yesterday in the Syrian city of Homs as security forces continued their efforts to take back opposition-held areas on the eve of a vote by the UN security council on a much-disputed resolution on the country.
Hundreds more were killed in shelling of the city, according to the the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which cited witnesses.
Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the campaign group, said that women and children were among 217 people killed, many of them in the Khalidya district of the city.
“Syrian forces are shelling the district with mortars from several locations, some buildings are on fire. There are also buildings which got destroyed,” Abdulrahman told Reuters.
Riots Outside Cairo Interior Ministry
February 4th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Rock-throwing protesters fought riot police through clouds of teargas to within metres of Egypt’s Interior Ministry on a second day of clashes triggered by the deaths of 74 people in the country’s worst soccer disaster.
A demonstrator and an army officer were reported dead in Cairo and in the city of Suez two people were killed as police used live rounds to hold back crowds trying to break into a police station and fought in front of the state security headquarters, witnesses and the ambulance authority said.
Most of those killed in the Port Said football stadium on Wednesday night were crushed in a stampede and the government declared three days of mourning, but protesters hold the military-led authorities responsible.
It was country’s deadliest incident since an uprising ousted Hosni Mubarak almost a year ago and it gave fresh impetus to regular street protests against Egypt’s ruling generals.
“We will stay until we get our rights. Did you see what happened in Port Said?” said 22-year-old Abu Hanafy, who arrived from work on Thursday evening and decided to join the protest.
The ministry in Cairo, an object of hatred for football fans who say lax policing was to blame for the stadium disaster, has been hemmed in by the street battles since Thursday.
Thousands were still battling riot police there and more protesters were expected to gather in the centre of the capital for a “Friday of Anger” declared by 28 youth activist groups and political parties.
Feds Steal Children from Illegal Aliens
February 3rd, 2012Via: ABC News:
The scars of childbirth were still healing on Amelia Reyes Jimenez’s stomach in 2008 when police came to her Phoenix apartment and took her three-month-old daughter from her arms.
Three and a half years later, Reyes Jimenez and her four children have become statistics in the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration. Each year thousands of children of undocumented immigrants, like Amelia’s kids, wind up in foster care when their parents are arrested for immigration violations. Some are even adopted by U.S. citizens while their parents are held in federal detention centers or deported back to their native countries.
Reyes Jimenez’s son and three daughters are now living in foster care in Phoenix, and are awaiting possible adoption. Reyes Jimenez is back in Mexico, her parental rights terminated by an Arizona judge, and she cries when she remembers the raid that began it all.
“My daughters were calling, ‘Mommy, my Mommy,’” said Reyes Jimenez. “I felt destroyed. I felt like I would never see my girls, even worse [the baby] was so small. I had just bought her cradle and her stroller.”
A new study by the human rights group Applied Research Center estimates that as of summer 2011 there were at least 5,100 children of detained immigrants in foster care in 22 states.
Use Encryption Software on a Computer in a Cafe? Pay in Cash? You Might Be a Terrorist
February 3rd, 2012Via: Public Intelligence:
A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity. The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity. The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using “software to hide encrypted data in digital photos” or other media. In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone “overly concerned about privacy” or attempting to “shield the screen from view of others” should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.
Research Credit: Damian
Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education
February 3rd, 2012“Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.”
—John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
I didn’t think that this piece got into the real why behind the increase in the number of parents who are homeschooling their children in the U.S. It seems to frame this as a bunch of wishywashy yuppies who have embraced a new fad.
For more about the likely reasons why people are homeschooling their children, definitely see the writings of John Taylor Gatto. He makes The Underground History of American Education available for free on his website if you don’t want to buy the book.
In short, I’d say that increasing numbers of people are figuring out that handing over their children for social engineering, by organizations created by fascists, is an act of madness.
Via: Daily Beast:
They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They knit. Now a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their own kids.
Are Teenagers More Doomed Than Usual?
February 3rd, 2012“Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.”
—John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Via: Wall Street Journal:
“What was he thinking?” It’s the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.
How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn’t even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents’ basement?
If you think of the teenage brain as a car, today’s adolescents acquire an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.
Research Credit: JH
Italy: ‘Pitchfork Movement’
February 2nd, 2012Video from Iranian State Television, PressTV:
Via: Bloomberg:
The fourth day of strikes by truckers continue to disrupt transport across Italy, forcing Fiat SpA to stop production and Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Co. SA. to halt two plants, as protests mount against the government’s austerity measures.
Truck drivers demonstrating against high fuel prices, with the backing of farmers, livestock owners and fishermen, are maintaining road blocks in parts of the country. Drivers crippled nationwide commerce on the first day of the protests on Jan. 23 when they blocked toll booths across the country’s highway network.
Fiat said it won’t be able to restart output before 2 p.m. tomorrow because of a shortage of parts. The maker of the Punto and Panda models has lost production of 8,400 vehicles since the start of the strike. Coca-Cola said in a statement it halted two facilities because it wasn’t receiving supplies and was having trouble distributing its products.
Food shortages are driving up prices in parts of the country, and the protests have cost farmers about 100 million euros ($131 million) by preventing delivery of produce, trade association Coldiretti said.
Drivers are suffering from higher levies on fuel included in a 20 billion-euro austerity package passed by Prime Minister Mario Monti’s government last month that left Italy with the region’s highest gasoline prices, currently about $9 a gallon. A second plan passed last week aims to open up closed professions, and has prompted protests from taxi drivers, pharmacists, lawyers and notaries.
2010 Attack on VeriSign Just Recently Disclosed
February 2nd, 2012Via: Reuters:
VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world’s websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company.
The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.
VeriSign said its executives “do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System network,” which ensures people land at the right numeric Internet Protocol address when they type in a name such as Google.com, but it did not rule anything out.
VeriSign’s domain-name system processes as many as 50 billion queries daily. Pilfered information from it could let hackers direct people to faked sites and intercept email from federal employees or corporate executives, though classified government data moves through more secure channels.
“Oh my God,” said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and before that the top lawyer at the National Security Agency. “That could allow people to imitate almost any company on the Net.”
The VeriSign attacks were revealed in a quarterly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing in October that followed new guidelines on reporting security breaches to investors. It was the most striking disclosure to emerge in a review by Reuters of more than 2,000 documents mentioning breach risks since the SEC guidance was published.
Even if the name system is safe, VeriSign offers a number of other services where security is paramount. The company defends customers’ websites from attacks and manages their traffic, and it researches international cybercrime groups.
VeriSign would possess sensitive information on customers, and its registry services that dispense website addresses would also be a natural target.
Ken Silva, who was VeriSign’s chief technology officer for three years until November 2010, said he had not learned of the intrusion until contacted by Reuters. Given the time elapsed since the attack and the vague language in the SEC filing, he said VeriSign “probably can’t draw an accurate assessment” of the damage.
‘Gasland’ Director Arrested for Attempting to Film Congressional Hearing on Fracking
February 2nd, 2012Via: Politico:
Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Josh Fox was arrested Wednesday morning after attempting to film a House Science Committee hearing on hydraulic fracturing.
Fox was led out in handcuffs by the Capitol police shortly after 10 a.m., before the hearing could be gaveled into order. The “Gasland” director was attempting to film the hearing looking into EPA’s investigation of potential water contamination from natural gas drilling in Pavillion, Wyo.
“I’m within my First Amendment rights, and I’m being taken out,” Fox shouted as he was led away.
Fox has been charged with unlawful entry, according to Capitol police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider.
Fox is working on a sequel to his Oscar-nominated “Gasland.”
An ABC news crew was also turned away from the hearing. The committee chairman has the discretion on whether to allow uncredentialed members of the media to film hearings, according to a democratic staffer.
