And my brother is Erik Prince!
Fom Alternet comes that title, adding: ‘A new documentary aims to drum up public support for Betsy DeVos’ proposed voucher system’, by Brett Robertson via alternet.org, June 15, 2017
“Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her department have pushed for an expansion of privatized school choice programs in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2018, particularly in the form of private school vouchers. Now a propagandistic three-part documentary series called School Inc. will help DeVos in her efforts to gain public support for expanded private school choice options. The series has already aired on PBS stations in some markets and will be shown on more this month.”
Despite these problems, private school vouchers are a long-standing priority of the corporations and right-wing funders backing the education privatization movement. The late Andrew Coulson, long-time head of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, was the driving force behind School Inc. The Cato Institute is a right-wing libertarian think-tank that calls for the elimination of public schools in support of greater “educational freedom” to choose from a free market of privately run schools.
In addition to School Inc.’s roots in the radical, libertarian Cato Institute, education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch found that the film was funded by a number of arch-conservative foundations with ties to the “dark money ATM” DonorsTrust and the Ayn Rand Institute.” (the rest, again, is here)
The title is a bit of a silly question, and it’s all creepy-bo-peepy, but it’s hard to imagine that PBS wouldn’t air it, including the fact that ‘the funders’ can contribute to PBS and tell the world they have, as do the nasty Koch Brothers. Wall Street love charter schools, so…no one who matters is gonna gripe, are they?
But really it’s hard not to notice that the short article made absolutely no mention of Obama’s Secty. of Ed Arne Duncan’s drive for the same, nor Rahm Emanuel’s, either. Now I’m out of free clicks into the WaPo, so she may have mentioned that in her linked op-ed to that rag.
by Anthony Freda
School, Inc’s ‘Free to Choose’; 19 youtube videos overviews; OFM, the titles and the bullshit, arrgh. Kewl Nerd they uses to narrate it, eh wot? The teevee tells us that Nerds R the New Sexy, no?
(‘Oriented‘, get it?)
I sure did wonder whether or not Jaime Escalente’s family had given their permission to coopt his 2008 interview documentaries for School, Inc., as da Wiki says he’d left this planet in March 30, 2010, and had gone home to his hometown of Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2001 where he died, may he rest in power. So, i doubt it; f not, they should F off.
Oh this one tops the chart for Most Egregious Lies; from From ‘The Crescent City 10 Years after the Levees Failed’, Café Babylon, August 27, 2015
Bill Quigley:
“While tens of billions poured into Louisiana, the impact on poor and working people in New Orleans has been minimal. Many of the elderly and the poor, especially poor families with children, never made it back to New Orleans. The poverty rate for children who did made it back remains at disturbingly high pre-Katrina levels, especially for Black children. Rents are high and taking a higher percentage of people’s income. The pre-Katrina school system fired all it teachers and professionals and turned itself into the charter experiment capital of the US even while the number of children in public schools has dropped dramatically. Since Katrina, white incomes, which were over twice that of Blacks, have risen three times as much as Blacks. While not all the numbers below are bad, they do illustrate who has been left behind in the ten years since Katrina hit.
91 percent of the public schools in New Orleans are now charter schools, the highest rate in the country.”
It’s easy to see why the Ann Rand institute folks love this. Only when there’s profit at stake, will schools be accountable. That’s why pubic schools are shitty, see? An ‘profit’ is only a marker of success, not the intent, which is ‘making schools excellent for the good of the chirren.
ha ha!
Just look at those little kids of color and why you should invest in them!
See also: ‘Betsy DeVos: a terrifying confluence of Church, State, Kleptocracy, & the Unbearable Whiteness of Being’, Café Babylon.net
Of course there was ‘Waiting for Superman’ made in 2010, trashing teachers’ unions and advocating for charter schools. Small wonder that the Elites at Sundance gave it #1 documentary award. Who could resist the legendary faux-thranthopist Bill Gates’ cheerleading: “Many of these high schools are terrible, and this film, ‘Waiting for Superman’ by Davis Guggenheim, which I have a very minor part in, tells this story in a brilliant way,” he said. Gates, 54, sees it as a way to teach Americans just how far the U.S. system has fallen and how to redeem it.”, Gates told Reuters after the film’s premiere on Friday.”
It seems that PBS must have aired it, plus a hella lot of interviews with self-proclaimed ‘Lefty’ (on Tavis Smiley) ‘Davey Guggenhein’, the (ahem) brains behind it.
ya thimk if ol’ betsy’d been edjukated better she’d know it’s ‘an historic’ investment?
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Why did German collaborators reveal the locations of Jews, Catholics and other enemies of the “state” to the SS?
Sad to say that is and has been the point at which we stand today as a society, (using the term loosely).
Heylloo wendyedavis,
I got officially quoted, completely out of context today in the county Gannett affiliate over our local county government officially endorsing private anonymous funding for our county sheriff’s department to spend as it sees fit and especially for law enforcement, “community relations,” programs. A good day for me, personally, a horrible day for the collaborators who think they’ll get their piece of the action from the powers that be for their cooperation and collaboration.
Peace and Resolve, fighting the good fight as long as I am able.
nonq
Sorry forgot one potential answer… to be alive and available for the trickle down crumbs that might come their way… No shame no blame? Self preservation?
Forgot the most important gesture, hugs and luv to you and yours. (damn old age and loving old age, good memory it just happens to be short)
yes, buffy said it right in her ‘priests of the golden bull’
Money junkies all over the world
Trample us on their way to the bank
They run in every race
Windego…
We’re starving in a handful of gluttons
We’re drowning in their gravy spills
Their tongues are silver forks
There’s a lack of wisdom,
You can hear it on their breath
Windego…
There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile
He raised a crooked sixpence to hide a crooked style
He won a crooked vote and smiled a crooked smile
Windego…
and love and embraces to you and yours as well, my friend. and good on ya for being such a local warrior.
good for you man. rock on.
Gotta be quick, will read/digest later, but from the peruse, and in answer to the headline: because one of the things the lone opposition put a nail in the coffin with Arne Duncan was the public school system. In addition to their continuity with the Bubya admins, Duncan as personality was a brilliant lobbyist thru his basketball skill. He was popular with the players and fans, already coming from Prez Coolgone Bo Rama’s crib; his being able to shoot and pass was a clincher of sorts. You might say I’m a fan of of the game. While watching one of them just this past season, I was reminded how that lobbying works when the commentators were lauding a particular world class player for his off-the-court contributions. Seems he had put up several million of the (obviously much more) money to found a charter school. Now, I am reticent to say, “This can not end well,” for I as recently as last night coined (if I may toot) the phrase “A common mistake hearing such news is rhetorically deferring what’s wrong already today to a suggested ominous future.” On that note, I’m off…
i’m fuzzy as to your meaning here, davidly: ‘because one of the things the lone opposition put a nail in the coffin with Arne Duncan was the public school system.’ but yes, O and arne were homies in chi-town, and i admit i’d forgotten that he was superintendent of chi-town public schools from 2001-2008. but that round-ball excellence may have conjoined them more fully, if i get your drift.
and of course he was a ‘reformer’ w/ his ‘race to the top’, common core’, etc. sorry, bad test scores again? you’re fired, and here comes a charter. now all charters are not the same, but most used to get start-up funding in the manner of your b-ball not-lobbyist, corporate boards, then later…get necessary public funding dollars. and w/ miz devos and her hubbie’s religion expressed in calvinist ‘god, amerika, and free enterprise! woot! her/their part in causing the plethora of charters in MI to be unregulated is bad, but it’s all of a piece with their other antics in michigan. right to work state, etc.
well, this will certainly end well for some™, anyway, won’t it?
but the videos are almost hilarious, partially in that sweden for-pay-schools are featured in several of them; are swedes calvinst as well? kinda kidding, but one wonders.
The lone opposition was Bo Rama, Rahm and Arnie, and by leading from behind in a direction their party had at one time promised they’d never go, the Overton window has shifted the discussion for PBS or CBS. The only thing that’s ever mattered to public tv, legit or not, is the standardized reasoning of the official parties of the state. There is no policy other than theirs to discuss as far as they are “concerned”.
So Rahm oversaw the disingenuous move to transfer as much $$ as possible to the industries of medicine and the new party leads the boldfaced effort to remove as much “care” from the previous move and transfer more wealth at the margins. And Arne made it hip to look at education as a private investment opportunity for the boys in the hood, as if it represents some kind of brilliant fourth way, while the newcomers point out that we’re headed only one direction as far as education is concerned.
PBS would seem downright retrograde not to cover the other side of the aisle from the feel good liberalism that Waiting for Superman and Hamilton represented the last eight to twenty-four to thirty-six years.
ta; i was thrown by ‘the lone opposition’, but w/ your explanation as to how they accomplished it by ‘leading from behind’ while their party promised never, etc., i get it now. but god’s blood; have you ever heard arne ‘talk’? i did give him a chance after his first year, and it wasn’t that he was just snooze-worthy, but let’s face it: a dim bulb. but yanno what they say about graduatin’ from Hahvarhd and other ivies, lol. this was brilliant, though:
“And Arne made it hip to look at education as a private investment opportunity for the boys in the hood…” can’t wait to see what the virtual instruction amounts to. but yeppers, O knew just how to put the patina on fucking over the Rabble as ‘reasonable’, even ‘enlightened’.
PBS sold out back in 1994 (the year I dumped my TV), so I went to BBC; they sold out later; then I went to Democracy Now; Amy sold out a couple of years after Iraq was invaded; and the clincher (for me) was her gushing reporting on the White Helmets in Syria.
IMO, there are only a couple of U.S. media worth their salt. TRNN and Gorilla Radio (Canadian).
Basically, I do not trust any media with the thinnest thread to the U.S. and the “west” in general.
Bernhard at MoA does some pretty darn good analysis of important news stories and generally gets to the meat very quickly.
maybe you can explain to me then, v arnold, why it is that so many peeps conflate pbs w/ npr. same funding? the former is teevee, the latter radio, afaik. garsh, i still watch pbs for the mysteries and masterpiece dramas. news? nope. but i don’t watch any teevee news.
i agree about DN!, but once in a while, she still has a few good stories on. guess i pretty much trust TRNN, but they’ve gotten too focused on reforming the Dem party for me, and touting the bern as well. but i do click in once a day to see who’s on, and am glad when it’s glen ford. ;-)
sure, b’s a brilliant analyst, but necessarily (or penchant?) has a limited scope. in general i trust the reporters at wsws, but their man in berlin, johannes stern iirc, has gotten it wrong a couple times according to davidly. i do trust his first-person accounts. but in the end i reckon all we can do is sift thru accounts…and decide what seems to be credible, what agitprop. such as: rumors has it that assad is about to unleash more sarin attacks’, lol. so many weasel words out there, eh?
In fact, I’m most critical of NPR and stopped listening in the late 90’s.
PBS does indeed have some fine programs (Nova comes to mind), but due to my location I cannot access them.
Generally if I have to sign up for something I pass.
I live with a very light foot print in the world.
the only times i listened to npr was in the car driving to work at night; radio reception here in the house has long been iffy. but i do remember ‘all things considered’, and some of the sketches on SNL jesting about the soporific nature of the voices and…subjects.
but as you’d mentioned your location, it got me to wondering if you might like to email me a description of your local world, as in: the sights, scents, local environment, gardening, wild fora and fauna, art work, architecture, etc. well, any of it, really.i could stick it up as a stand-alone diary here. for me, perhaps most of us, thailand is exotic as all giddy-up, and it would be great to have your impressions and descriptions.
and i know you can’t speak of the political sphere, but that’s okay.
you could even look for art and images online, send the urls to me, if you’d like. and only if you’d enjoy it of course.
ha, yes: here it is, from wsws this morning:
“On Monday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer declared that the US had “identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.” If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons,” the statement continued, “he and his military will pay a heavy price.”
Washington’s ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, added Tuesday, “The goal is at this point not just to send Assad a message, but to send Russia and Iran a message… That if this happens again, we are putting you on notice.” In other words, any alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria could be used to justify war against Iran and Russia.”
Pressed to substantiate the White House’s allegation, Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis refused to produce any evidence.” just yanno, it kinda looks like it… ‘Let’s have war with every meal! (part of a balanced meal)’
Because C0RP0RATI0N “for” ‘public’ broadcasting.
arggh, thanks. both the public broadcasting system and national propaganda radio are funded by ‘the corporation for public broadcasting’ but this is great, much as davidly had indicted, and (conversely, i reckon) why the alternet piece had failed to mention the Ds involved in the new normal (or coming new normal) of privatized education.
“The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (da wiki) requires the CPB to operate with a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature”.[12] It also requires it to regularly review national programming for objectivity and balance, and to report on “its efforts to address concerns about objectivity and balance”.
acceptable now may not have been so acceptable…earlier. but while poking about, i noticed several fairly recent frontlines along the lines of “supplements and the safety factor”. but sure, bigPharma has been lobbying hard against ‘dangerous supplements’. now myself, i’d like it if some supplement i take actually contains what it says on the label, and the amount it claims. but i reckon that’s not what these things are in aid of. shoot, they managed to get bloody comfrey taken off the shelves nationally; that vexed the hell outta me.
when coupled w/the rampant diabetes, obesity, poverty, etc., of US youth, how does further dumbing down society aid imperialist endeavors? which is what school privatization will lead to. let’s not forget schools are laboratories, for gmo foods, big pharma, brainwashing (yep), etc. and the architecture & aesthetic of efficient, bureaucratic control. a managerial class, the brain trust, will still go to the ivies and the like, but what sort of national strategy, if any, is involved in the fucking idiocy of school privatization? well, warfare will be conducted by machines, and kids love video games, so there’s that. how fat a kid is won’t matter, until retinopathy sets in. and like all the rest of the poor in this country, fuck kids.
William James said something like the most significant feature of modern life is the complete sacrifice of the future to the needs of the present. And all of science is marshalled on behalf of this endeavor.
these people, the Bubyas as Davidly so nicely put it, have the motivation of a turd: apres moi, le deluge. we’re all getting flushed down the crapper, so *might as well make a buck on the way down.* oh, and be the last turd standing. point d’honneur to be the last to swirl down the bowl. there is no strategy except profiting off of the chaos & rubble created from demolishing what previous generations built (as very imperfect as that is). why is the US still in Afghanistan? heroin, destructive force projection into neighboring countries, and just creating as much goddam chaos vis a vis the new silk road as possible. and making some dough thereby. experimenting w/weapons, torture techniques and training the future domestic police force & prison guard. all negative.
w/o a vision the people perish. there is no positive strategy from the USG, nothing integrative with the rest of the world except the maintenance of domination at seemingly any cost. nothing. it’s only goal is to crush any independent actors. (there are initiatives Uncle Sam supports, like saturating the world w/gmo’s. but that hardly counts as a strategy, a vision, for the nation. or making everyone use google so they can be spied on more easily. again, hardly visionary in any positive sense.) in this kind of environment, how can *anything* good about past US domestic policy, like the school system, be viewed but as a means for profit-taking from destruction?
Uncle Sam cannot even be bothered w/cosmetic changes to simmer people down in places like Flint, MI, (not that clean water is cosmetic). there is no further plan behind privatization than theft of public money. ditto ACA, trumpcare (i’m gonna use Bubya a lot, so bubyacare? the original bubya, bill c., proposed in ’97 all the changes to medicare/aid that trump is now proposing.) the chaos created will provide another rent-taking opportunity, from the prisons and the cops, and then the enviro-friendly natural gas ovens we’ll be shoveling our children into very soon (if we aren’t already.)
“they made their children pass thru the fire of Moloch.” maybe the most important social question of all, how a *society* reproduces itself (see W. James above), is not given too much consideration. why would one piece of that, the formal education of youth, be any different?
oh yeah, pbs. boy the newshour is just terrible. always has been. pbs has done some good things, no doubt. much of it from aunty beeb across the pond. or the metropolitan opera or Austin city limits. some respite from yelling parents, teachers, sibs, etc., was no doubt provided by Mr. Rogers. but, one more instance of how “left vs right” (at least as donkey vs elephant) is b.s., Nixon started pbs. hey, let’s throw these hippies a sop, maybe they’ll shut up. mission accomplished? how many of these shows, the cooking, the travel, the antiques, the this old house, are guides for middle class decorum & domesticity? oh look pbs says i’m doing it right. hurray for my creole lobster bisque. i’m such not the bourgeois philistine. and the nature shows: are they warnings of ecological collapse or anodynes & soporifics against such knowledge? both npr & pbs function to heighten middle class fears about some things (colonel q & his Libyan torture porn dungeons & illicit Viagra use) and lull them into smug complacency (not hard to do) about most other things.
what’s it all about, kids?
holy moly, do it for your country, thanks for grease 2; i’ll hafta see if mr. wd can score it from inter-liberry loan. for the rest, you’ve parked it, but needs must, and i’ll need to have to respond it stages; i hope others will as well. but the deal purports to be: you’ll get smarter kids if y invest in their educations, cuz even those ;philanthropists’ who put their reps on the line, i tell ya, ‘on the line’ need that to happen (as a secondary issue, of course), otherwise: cuz altruism, yanno? and they indeed learn a lot about things ‘god, amerika, and freeedumb!’.
i’m not sure i’d waste my time on the whole thing. I haven’t seen it since jr. high, but I think you already know the highlights. i’d hit a few more clips on youtube.
not everyone in this dog patch cottons to this kind of stuff but anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_the_widow%27s_mite
“temple” (and in this story, *Herod’s* temple; remember that colossal asshole King Herod? think the bankers working at temple paid a cut to H.?) is the place where rich people go to perform big displays of their virtue. and look at all the people still applauding the rich man. well, the temple was destroyed…& replaced w/ Charlie Rose, TED talks, and Oprah. see here’s bono in the NYT talking about all the great stuff bill gates is doing to, I mean for, Africa.
meanwhile, back on planet earth:
each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face.
Macduff forgot to add, and another billionaire is born.
speaking of virtue warriors like bill gates: nobody believes his b.s. about how great windows & MS products are. nobody not on the payroll. talk to some computer programmers & find out what a thief & liar he is, despite, perhaps, some initial spark of computer genius waaaaaaaaaay back when. but that last point aside, if you don’t believe his bullshit about Microsoft, why believe it about the bowel movement gates foundation?
ok last thing. getting towards the end of twin peaks, one of the main subplots is how this…nefarious, unscrupulous mega-wealthy, super creepy super suave resort hotel owner gets double-crossed by biz partners he was trying to screw over & kill. he’s almost bankrupt & it drives him temporarily bonkers. when he comes back to “sanity”, he starts remaking himself as a rabid environmentalist, saving the endangered spotted timber weasel or whatever, but solely to sabotage his enemies’ business development projects. though of course, he starts to believe his own b.s.
not everyone is blind to what these virtue warriors are up to.
the william james quote is spot on, but one of the ways our futures are sacrificed is the finacialization/commodification of the commons. i just went back and tried to find which of the 19 videos had the nerve to bring up horace mann, at least i think it was this series. maybe ‘superman’, i dunno. but given that every revenue source is effectively up for grabs, why not schools? hella lot of schools. the jokes in this series, as w/ ‘superman’, are told by the folks naming teachers who get paid, don’t even have to show up for work all year, etc. or taxpayers in india paying for public schools (amply pictured) w/ leaking roofs, broken…plaster, blocks yada, yada. but oh! these kids attend schools for a dollar a day (how many rupees?) and are soooo well edjucated!
was it thd who’d mentioned congress-critters lovin’ the PO? then why haven’t they mooted the law that the PO was forced to save for pensions 40 years in advance or something? so it’s privatized three steps at a time, that’s why, and diFi and her hubbie can sell all those gorgeous PO’s w/ murals made back in the WPA days. oh, and fed-ex has no unions! does that matter any longer? as their pensions get shredded as well?
the wiki says: ‘The CPB was created on November 7, 1967, when U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The new organization initially collaborated with the then existing National Educational Television (Later PBS Kids).’ but yep, in advance of the T budget cuts, the ads are comin’ fast an furious, my pet peeve on is bleeping almost-president from law and order…fred thompson, selling some insurance w/ a big ol’ squid in a car. farmers ins., that’s the one.
yeah, I knew my timing was off a bit, but hey, what’s a little cpb to the Vietnam war? something that might be a good idea in & of itself (might be) is little more than a bribe, a smokescreen, in an economy whose overall purpose is war. still, different times when the gov’t felt like it had to do some good things, no matter what the motivation really was. and the content of pbs has enormous propaganda value, so again, a bribe and a smokescreen. a mockery of what might have been.
pbs gets support from teachers, so wtf? oh yeah, chump change support, compared to Northrup grunman & Citibank. wow, so they jump on the teacher bashing? what do you think their take will be on the further privatization of the airline industry? or defunding Amtrak?
i’m tutoring some kids from china, esl stuff. are they better than the stereotypical fat, lazy, diabetic kids of the US? hyper achievers whose total personality has been subsumed under family/nation? tomorrow’s tower of babel monument to collective will be in east asia. super. the transformers movies don’t discriminate, so are they really that different? they do more standardized testing than we do. anyway, not sure what the point i’m making is…
PBS, which cut its teeth on gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearing was sold out when Reagan and Bush I cut their funding, and they responded by seeking donations from corporations, foundations, and pledge drives. General Electric required the airing of the McLaughlin Report in return for its donation. Then conservatives discovered that they could have a bigger say in the local affiliates if they ponied up a lot of dough. That was in the early 1990s, during which Enron (remember them?) essentially owned the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.
Given that they are in the Trump administration’s sights for zeroing out, it is not surprising that they are trying to be useful as state propaganda TV. And given the source of conservative victories in the school anti-desegregation (or pro-segregation) movement, not surprising that they are attacking public schools and promoting private schools. It is much easier to kill vouchers than to kill the largest employer in a lot of American communities.
fascinating stuff on the ‘pay to play’, thd. enron? ken lay? ay yi yi, remember how many reckoned he really didn’t die in aspen, get cremated, and surfaced again in…abu Dhabi?
kill vouchers locally, you mean? isn’t it so far a state thing? teach for amerika instant-teachers must be salivating a bit, yes? ‘miz brittany packnett’ simply tweets ‘school choice’ recently, but she’s posting lottsa selfies w/ herself as keynote speaker at some acronym conference or other.
It’s N0T whether there’s a law; it’s whether it is enforced. And they ALS0 wouldn’t want your wounds and pickin’ bones healed with comfrey, I declare !
cripes, i grew boatloads of it. tummy pain, anti-inflammatory poultices from crushed roots, and critters love it.
the religion of the US empire is (the horror) evangelicalism. now there’s got to be some reason, several in fact, De Vos & E Prince and Obama & Dubya & Bubba (oh wait, the Bubyas) etc. etc. drape themselves in the mantle of Amerikan evangelical Christianity (AEC). now AEC was born post war out of the status anxiety of poor rural fundies suddenly rubbing shoulders w/their urban, mainline protestant (or, gasp, atheist or, shudder, Unitarian) heretical, more successful in that middle class sense. they come from an environment where *Xian schools separated from the secular public system is a huge deal.* that’s why you don’t go to Boston College, you go to Gordon College, just like I did.
it’s not a stretch to say that there’s a huge amount of status anxiety in AEC. huge. heirs to pre-war fundamentalist separatism, and still speaking some of that language (“don’t be like the world”), in reality deeply conformist, a religion thoroughly integrationist (not oppositional), which is why if you want to find any “prophetic” voices in the AEC…they are all, all of them, African-American. (and just how awful is this country? self-id’d AEC members are on the vanguard of literacy in this country. it is both hilarious, Left Behind and This Present Darkness & crap like that, & really sad, maudlin, getting dehydrated from weeping at Precious Moments baubles.)
Betsy Devos types play these people for the suckers they are. & they are just so awful (though nice, fucking nice as nice, until you tip or tipple one of their fat lazy rbgh & antiobiotic marinated blind & retarded Holsteins.) if there was a vote taken today in the AEC to roll back the modest gains the gay community has made in the last 10 years, just how much doubt is there about how the AEC would vote? and they would immediately start trying to do the same re women. the bourgeois philistine variety Amerikanus is a pretty awful species.
no surprise their true prince is named Erik. “sure he owned slaves, but G. ‘Cincinnatus’ Washington was a true man of God, hero of the faith, a real man.” (sic, manly man. teddy Roosevelt manly). cuz mouthing pious bullshit about jeebus is more important than the slave empire he helped to father.
i reckon i hadn’t known some of this, including that the aec was born post wwII (and why), nor that O, dubya, and bubba had draped themselves in that mantle. now i do vaguely remember that early in his rule that O had given a bunch of money to churches to disburse for alleviating hunger or something (fuzzy on all of it), but his claim against church and state was that ‘the churches already have the charitable infrastructure in place’. now i just poked about for what constitutes an evangelical, and born again kinda covers all of the term, but pew says there are many nuanced variations.
http://www.pewforum.org/2011/06/22/global-survey-beliefs/
crappy-diddle; gotta go for a bit. back soon.
painting w/somewhat a broad brush. one thing they all have in common is the certainty about who is hellbound. i.e., not our little knitting circle. that’s for damn sure. you mean his claim “for”, not “against,” right? the bubyas are all about handing stuff to churches. part of the spoils system from the plundering of the state. throw a check in the offering plate, tell ’em to spend it on breakfast for the homeless, and watch ’em shut the hell up real fast.
the history is a bit confusing cuz there’s different trends (e.g., Pentecostalism, charismatic: similar, not the same), the puritan strain runs deep deep in our history. what we think of as amerikan fundamentalism, the “inherit the wind” kind of stuff, starts about 1900. their sister-wife inbred evangelical hell sprout blossoms in the post-war boom. all that suburbia & Robert Schuller “hour of power,” “be happy attitudes” (get it?) drive in movie theater (lol) nonsense go hand in hand. billy sunday, billy graham, pre & post war. tent revival vs. sports stadium. radio vs. tv. having grown up in this world, I find it fascinating, in an awful sort of way. “love covers lots,” says the bibbel. but not their hellfire condemnation of people not just like them. that shit is unforgiveable. truly wretched.
tell one of them their little (or ginormous) church is their low rent theater, the hallmark channel + Boschian Judgement day, w/hymns, and get ready to join the martyrs. gun-toting, fag-hating Jesus freaks, robes all white, many crosses carried…bright, flaming crosses…but hey the southern Baptist convention just spoke ex cathedra (lol; sorry, anti-Catholicism dies hard) about how “belief that one race is superior to another is contrary to the gospel.” see? progress!
;-) preach it, brother J!
i did like your ‘widow of the mites’; i’d seen it via email, but it’s lost somewhere in this confusion. may i say that franklin graham is several notches more odious than his slick papa? and yeah, i think it’s incontrovertible that most evangelicals believe i’m going to hell, hence the sad-eyed looks mr. wd’s fundie Xianists would cast upon my evil countenance. ;-)
but the prime example to me is pastor john hagee of the cornerstone mega-church in san antonio. remember he founded cufi (chritsians united for israel)? his/their politics are quite er…um…state zionist, and they love having him at aipac conferences, cheer him wildly, even though they know that HE believes that they’ll all go to hell unless they’re born again into jesus. i know i’ve told you before, but the only bumper sticker i ever had on a car (in this case an old datsun compact) was:
Come the rapture…can I have your car?
i discovered that fundies had absolutely no sense of humor about their (almost eschatological?) beliefs. ;-)
Scatalogical. I think you meant scatalogical.
I’ll second the “Preach it brother J.” Nice to hear some history from elsewhere in the firmament. (I was raised Catholic, with some Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Evangelical Catholicism) thrown in. The priests kept an eye on us).
what a sight for sore eyes you be, greyson smythe! evangelical catholicism? yikers, i’ll just bet the priests kept an eye on ya, lol. did any of them speak in tongues?/s
but yes, though i agree that it’s scatalogical, as in shitty as hell, i really had meant eschatological, as in: ‘es•cha•tol•o•gy, noun. as in: the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.’
zo…i still want their cars after the Rapture! and if they’d toss in a tractor, that would be lovely as hell. our 194 ford 8n needs a hella lot of work before winter comes again. i tell mr. wd, ‘yes, brakes might be nice’.
hope you and yours are well, greyson. or as well as possible these darkish days. don’t be a stranger; we’re all in this together.
Yes, of course they spoke in tongues! (not being sarcastic)…
And of course I know of the word Eschatological as not being Spanish for Scatological.
I’m not unwell, thank you. I come here reasonably often; but don’t often utter a peep. Nice to be seen, though!
‘…not being Spanish for Scatological’, lol. i just meant that The Rapture at least sorta means ‘what happens after death’, but i don’t even think they mean ya have to die before getting Raptured…up. i could be wrong, of course. but dang, i even read one of the Left Behind books a couple decades ago; ya’d think i might have remembered. one lay pastor stopped me at the gas station to ‘discuss’ my bumper sticker; called me intolerant for not wanting to listen to him past five minutes. ;-)
there’s an assembly of god church in our town; they apparently speak in tongues, as well. guess it means that the spirit’s really got a hold on you, eh?
well, do pipe up more often, mi amigo.
i just noticed you’d specifically said ‘the religion of the US Empire’ is evangelicalism. i’d think it’s religion is closer to ‘dominating the globe, stealing its resources, over-throwing state leaders who are in *our way*, and hi-jacking any profits to any western kleptocrats in the 1% who are brave enough, smart enough, to hold onto it’.
but yeah, i get your meaning in this case. one of the other features of most evangelicals is creation, not evolution. field trips to creation museums? swear to goddess, one of our relatives related seeing absolute proof! a dinosaur footprint fossil showed it on Top! of a human footprint. and then there are texas curriculae, ‘evolution theory is taught too often, thus redundant, change the curriculum!’
now the devoses seem to believe in prosperity doctrine as well (amway, etc.), betsy’s roman catholic bro Erik seems to have absorbed that as well. billionaire, of course, cia assassin asset, providing ‘security’ to the royal family in abu dhabi to the tune of half-a-billion bucks, yada, yada.
what did that one nerd say on a video? close to ‘humans are the only species that can regulate their number of young’? what was that, i wonder.
anyway, feel free to kick me, but i got on the twitter again. big, big, charter school conference recently, and mary landrieu was a speaker!!!
https://twitter.com/alyssaschwenk/status/876822384044630018
this one’s a transcript of deVos’s speech at the enlightened conference, but i will say they are bummed that herr T’s budget doesn’t allocate nearly enough for charter schools. what budget? which schools, and why? ack, i think i’d rather eat ground glass than read it…
humorless as the Torquemada Grand Inquisitor in brothers k. don’t tip those cows, or you’ll get the horns. no doubt about it.
the billy graham memorial parkway is just up the street. and just what that (far less entertaining) elmer gantry ever actually accomplished? nothing. except provide a gigantic stage for his even bigger asshole son. yes, the ptb’s love the grahams & hagees. standard oil was billy Sunday’s biggest supporter. I can’t wait till one of them is caught sucking someone off, a Unitarian or a Methodist, at the John Hagee Memorial Outhouse. unfortunately, these guys are likely to be into something worse.
i’m the girl (lol) who kicked the hornet’s nest at the moment. i’m on a roll about this church crap cuz of some earnest, deer-in-highlights begging for a trip to the taxidermist hellfire spouting morons on FB. mega minister rob bell expressed some doubts about everyone being damned & his evangie cohorts tossed him to the wolves. not really. for his parachute is so huge that he landed a spot on Oprah to talk about his milquetoast waste of tree of pulp called “Wuv Wins.” I mean love wins. (“love wins, oprah. of course you are going to heaven.” massive applause all around.) boy the killer bees got busy when I offered some criticisms of fucking Oprah. omg. you need to make friends w/unrighteous mammon Jason!
anyway, something happened w/the skateboarders in NYC & they are coming back today. creation science. another sign of status anxiety, reconciling genesis w/all empirical evidence gathered in the last 200 years. & more. the desperate, desperate need to be right in one’s tiny little understanding of the world. offering a tiny insight into why…trump won, something that happened yesterday, completely eludes these people, but the mechanics of creation, whether yesterday or billions of yesterdays ago, they got that shit down cold. don’t let your ignorance of everything else in life deceive you about your knowledge of the big bang!
a long time ago the world began, w/hey ho the wind and the rain. but that’s all one our play is done and we’ll strive to please you every day ;)
for now: Ping! (no one ever commented, but: from march 5, 2015, ‘Apostle of Hatred Rev. Franklin Graham and Three Murdered Muslim Students’, wendyedavis
Pew, the section “what does it take to be a good evangelical?” sitting in a pew & nodding along w/the pastor? nope, evangelism.
the problem w/this question is that every other question, incl. “caring for the environment,” (yes, i’m not j/k-ing), is answered by evangelism. following the teachings of Jesus, leading others to Jesus, helping the poor, (ok not tithing, scratch that one), taking a stand, taking a different stand, etc. all these are satisfied by evangelism, which=following the teachings of the jeebster. again, not a j/k. pretty pathetic. the best way to help the poor is to save their souls. then they can stop drinking & put down the popeye’s fried chicken, pull up the pants, and get a goddam job as American Psycho Obama told them to before cutting SNAP benefits. when you have jesus, you don’t need a big guvmint handout (big? big? wachoo tawkin’ bout willis?)
now where in the multiverse did this battle happen? on rob bell’s facebook? “Rob Bell is an electrifying, unconventional pastor whom Time magazine calls “a singular rock star in the church world,” with millions viewing his NOOMA videos.” hang onto your wallets… yeah, ‘Oprah built a school in africa, but the teachers raped the gurls’. write the jingle, j.
so O gave him her magic approval as she did w/ (i’m not a real shrink) dr. phil mcgraw? oh, dear.
can’t wait to hear what happened to skateboarders; paranoid prophecy almost comes to pass?
i think the music to the song is already written, let’s all chime in:
“i saw the rape down in Africa…”
stupid me, I got the date wrong. the skateboarders are all good.
the oprah was great. we thank you lord that oprah appeared on a rival network so that fox could make fun of her. amen.
” I can’t wait till one of them is caught sucking someone off, a Unitarian or a Methodist, at the John Hagee Memorial Outhouse.” ping! pastor ted haggard; his wiki. but after taking the gay cure, he came back.
but trying to find the seamier side, i’d hit: he told it all to Oprah! oh, bother, i should have checked to see if dr. phil had been there, as well. (wide grin)
i only followed it since our daughter and her hubbie were kinda fundie christians back in the day….
I did not know that about haggard. and there are worse people out there than rob bell, the thinking person’s joel osteen.
I sure did not know that oprah is responsible for inflicting dr. phil on us, the world’s premier fake psychologist.
way-ull…you’d mentioned gay-blowjobs by ministers, sooo, ping! yeppers, we owe fake doctor phil to oprah now rob bell, oy. but somehow every word here is in bold, and i’m not discovering how that happened. i’ll keep working on it. (wish i knew how to opereate the place…)
our daughter, esp., grew to find haggard extra-ridiculous and hypocritical, partially because her hubbie liked his church, and (swear to goddess) ‘creflo dollar’.
it’s a sign! “of course you are the messiah. I should know, I’ve followed a few.” Life of Brian. someone on fb was just lamenting creflo dollar.
I didn’t know haggard made his repentance on oprah. yes, I knew about him more generally.
from wiki on t f baker/messner
Despite her background in Christian fundamentalism, Tammy Faye became a gay icon after her parting from PTL, appearing in Gay Pride marches with such figures as Lady Bunny and Bruce Vilanch. Messner reached out to support gay Americans with HIV/AIDS when it was still a much feared and unknown disease. She was benevolently referred to as “the ultimate drag queen,”[21] and said in her last interview with Larry King that, “When I went — when we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that.”[22]
J Caesar was pontifex maximus of the state religion…and an avowed Epicurean. he didn’t see any conflict b/n running the state religion & not “believing” in any of it. I doubt Devos & Prince are that subtle. as we’ve discussed here & elsewhere, w.d., the highest compliment one can receive is that they convincingly believe the b.s. coming out of their own mouth. they wouldn’t be the first “true believers” in high places, even if they are only true believers b/c their own self-inflicted neuro-linguistic programming scrambled their brain cells. the only person you have to sell is yourself. (lol. antony robbins, piss off.)
the census taker just tried to test me. I ate his liver w/some fava beans & a nice chianti. almost. those questions went on for an hour. i almost got out my hannibal lector creepy mouth guard mask to scare him off. dangerous job. why don’t people trust the guvmint again? can’t think of any reasons…
the policy of de-education is not just about money. a stupid populace is easier to control. of how much more value is big pharma when people have zero basis for reflection on grief, impotence, frustration, etc., etc.? know only the victory narrative of US triumphalism? hear only about the land of opportunity? all hail Amerika! where everything is great in the history books and no one has heard of Dr. Pangloss. and any asking why the terlets don’t flush or there are no pieces of chalk, only chalk dust filler in the lunch room vegetable catsup packets (isn’t tomato a fruit?), any wondering about the metal detectors & cameras merits an F on the standardized testing regime.
a little pick me up. it’s like crack-infused meth. pop rocks for the soul. imo.
yes, i do remember your admonitions against claiming some behaviors, professed beliefs, money making schemes seem authentic. i have no idea what erik prince might believe, save possibly that he is the uber-USian soldier-savior, but the devoses ring true to me. and sure, it’s all by way of ‘the fambly bidness’, thus self-reinforcing. isn’t it often said that members of any religion try to convert others so that it proves that they are *right*?
yep, ‘they want you stupid!’ (george carlin). and yes, tomato is a fruit, oddly. so are (mexican) tomatillos, relatives of the ape may gooseberry, and dammit, our stores no longer carry them, even canned!
(i had to choose a different font; apparently wordpress deleted the one i used to use. i’ll either get used to it, or keep trying others.)
thank you for the ludwig. ‘crack-infused meth. pop rocks for the soul’. heh.
both for ted haggard & to be slightly rewritten for oprah’s rape squad, maybe. I could see ted playing this as his rentboy lover put X on his Johnson for ted to so tastefully remove…
it will take a hundred men to drag me off of you…hurry boy…frightened of this thing I’ve become…
liszt couldn’t figure out how to transcribe the vocal part also for only 2 hands. I love the piano & am in awe of some of what liszt did w/these symphonies, incl. this. some of it not so much. lvb himself showed the way, cuz his symphonic etudes are a piano study clearly in prep for the 3rd symphony. liszt’s arrangement of the finale of berlioz symphonie fantastique…truly wicked.
meth-infused crack…jay dyer at his oft silly site has a pretty hilarious & insightful review up of the original Point Break. yes, this is relevant for our topic, education. He suggests that, as is indisputably true of the crack “epidemic”, the meth/opioid epidemic is CIA-managed. no doubt the big pharm is making a killing off of it, but something else going to?
the black lodge in twin peaks is the place where men (mostly men, and nikki haley) go to seek darkness for its own sake, power over others for no end outside of power over others. a boot on a human face forever, the completion of the Great Work, the eradication of human consciousness (the grand inquisitor).
I see myself even now crossing the infernal plain…there is an element of sheer psychopathy in men like g. khan, Julius Caesar, alexander, lemay, McNamara.
there was a poor but wise man who saved his city and died. He was immediately forgotten. this too is vanity & grasping after the wind-ecclesiastes. the purpose of education is to forget the poor man & exalt the conquering monstrosity. to control the social construction of memory. the quest for truth is in so many ways the desire to remember the dead.
Fascinating stuff, J. I appreciate y’all’ses embracing my Bubya coinage — accentuating His oneness in duality, the Holy Dinity. Tho’, as word of caution, I keep with the appellation in the singular, for I reckon before I’d add the s to include His Might Rama — given the latter’s damn-near literal status as godly, I’d just stick his whole name on there: Bubya Bo Rama. And Poppy just smiles from above, showing that for every Leo Johnson, there’s a Windham Earl. Some would have it that GHWB is Magog, but he knows he’s only channelling him. I’ll bet even Poppy believes that behind the red curtain lurks an unseen energy that Bobgog just cannot do injustice to. White Sands. Who’d’ve thunk it for the dastardly beginning of the final gallop?
i’m not quite done w/the series, please don’t spoil it. bubya bo rama. nice. except in his personality o-buttass isn’t a bubba. we’ll have to work on that one…
even scarier tho’t: earle:poppy:: jones: dubya. (in the show, earle uses leo jones as his evil pawn; brain trauma helps) in a smaller or larger way, the kind of “manly” “boy, poppa’s gonna take you out to the woodshed to make a man of you” intergenerational competitiveness is a kind of trauma based conditioning. no doubt about it. as is the manufactured scarcity of NCLB & the race to the topmost floor of the psycho ward.
I feel somewhat at a loss this a.m., reading on the wsws both about the muslim travel ban and the house anti-immigrant bill…my tho’ts turn bloody. but i’m more of Melville’s “fighting Quaker, Quaker with a vengeance” than a…black panther. for better or worse.
mostly treacly crap imo (sure, i liked it in my salad days but please strike the set & fire the cast cuz I can’t bear to hear most of this one more time.) but I do like this (except the axis of private love vs public duty is kind of b.s., esp. when you & your love & the world are all staring over the edge into the abyss, one of them false twosome thingies)
‘Can More Disinformation and Fresh Illusions Save Charter Schools?’ by Shawgi Tell / June 28th, 2017, dissident voice
“These are some of the news headlines that appeared when searching for “charter schools” in GoogleNews in June 2017:
1. Stop bashing charter schools. The Tennessean.
2. Charter school parents to Legislature: Hands off. The Sacramento Bee.
3. Here’s how charter schools ‘could’ succeed: Mac Gordon. The Clarion-Ledger.
4. Guest Essay: Charter school overcoming barriers. The Democrat & Chronicle.
5. Another success for the schools de Blasio detests. New York Post.
i’d say it’s a barn-burner of a capitalist profiteering indictment, but it may be too long for that to be so. more later on your last, j (she sayed hopefully).