Isn’t It Time To Euthanize Reid’s Wife? |
| It sounds to me like she’s pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with. Aren’t we at least going to get a vote on it? |
I realize her crook of a husband and his pals in Congress have excluded themselves from the mess they’re going to compel everyone else to join, but we’re still paying the bills, are we not? I don’t see that she’s worth it at this point, frankly. I can’t recall her ever doing anything for me. |
What Beres found was a quiet community that willingly allowed him onto their property, although he made sure to point out that it’s built in “a clearing of trees” and is “very remote.” One person even joined Beres and Stewart County Sheriff John Vinson — who has said that there is no terrorist activity going on in Islamville — to show them around. What Channel 5 found: |
| Frankly, there was not much to see. |
| It’s a place of prayer, five times of day, and Sheriff Vinson believes that is the focus of what they do: pray, not train terrorists. |
| Nevertheless, that didn’t stop the station from airing a two-part report and lending credibility to the dangerous claims of “Homegrown Jihad.” |
The Dull New Global Novel |
Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.
If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position |
| What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary cultureRead more at blogs.nybooks.com |
Hecht reflects on the suicide of her friend and colleague, poet Rachael Wetzsteon. On Suicide [by Jennifer Michael Hecht] |
| So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear. |
| I’m issuing a rule. You are not allowed to kill yourself. |
| When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means that every suicide is also a delayed homicide. You have to stay. |
| Sobbing and useless is great! Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead. |
I know this is kind of old news by now, but just in case anyone doesn’t get this yet: if you use Facebook for business, your Rolodex is now open for public viewing. Easily View Hidden Facebook Friend Lists |
when Facebook rolled out their new privacy settings, many analysts complained about the list of who a user had “friended” becoming part of what Facebook classified as Publicly Available Information. In response, Facebook added a setting to remove the lists from a user’s profile, a move that seemed to quell some of the criticism.
But Facebook also made one point clear about friend lists: “This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications” |
| Replace USERID in the following URI with a Facebook user’s ID number (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg’s is 4) and load the URI: http://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead_friends.php?u=USERID&__a=1 You’ll see a chunk of JSON that includes a list of the user’s friends, including names and profile links. |
| By the way, you don’t even need to be logged into Facebook for this trick to work. |
Good Night and Tough Luck |
Getting a good night’s sleep is actually a lot more complicated than one would think. |
Usually the trouble starts with my having to use the bathroom. Even though I am 38 years old, I still find myself hoping the urge will just pass. Which it doesn’t.
|
Next up: a visitor from the kids’ room. They start all sweet and cuddly, but their little bodies become more brazen by the minute.
|
To make things worse, our kids always insist on sleeping ON TOP of our blanket, creating a whole new set of problems.
|
| The one thing I haven’t really figured out is where the person in the back is supposed to put that bottom arm. |
To summarize what we’ve learned so far: |
GetReligion’s MZ Hemingway on a recent NYT editorial in the Times by Peter Singer. In the op-ed, Singer discusses the idea of “rationing” health care, saying that it is basically inevitable, whether the rationing is done by the government or by insurance companies. Hemingway identifies this, somewhat bizarrely in my view, with a new vogue for “eugenics.” I find the post (like all Hemingway’s posts) to be little more than a conservative opinion piece, and I don’t get how it jibes with GetReligion’s mission. But it’s worth thinking about. I think that what Hemingway (and many other critics of the current health-care reform discussions) finds objectionable is the idea that the rationing process will be made visible and intentional, instead of being left to impersonal (and basically invisible) market forces — or, more to the point, instead of being left to the fictional “individual” who supposedly is now in charge of his or her own care. Everyone knows that individuals’ health-care decisions are dependent on financial considerations, and that rich people get better care than poor people. Apparently, though, that state of affairs, for Hemingway and others who hold similar views, is somehow fairer than launching an open, values-based discussion about how health care ought to be distributed. Instead, using the language of rationing and individual rights, they seem to be implying that under the current system, health care is essentially unlimited — everyone can have as much as they can afford — and that individual people are making fully-free decisions about their care, unaffected by material constraints. Yet it seems as if eugenics is back big time. It’s not just the sex-selective abortions or the 90 percent rate of abortions for children diagnosed with Down Syndrome, although those are great examples. In last week’s New York Times, reporter and abortion rights supporter Emily Bazelon interviewed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who talked about abortion in the context of “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” And in this upcoming Sunday’s New York Times, Princeton professor Peter Singer was given more than a few words to talk about the inevitability of government rationing of health care under President Obama’s reform plan. And, in no surprise to people who know anything about Singer’s views, he’s all for it: Read more at www.getreligion.org |
I think this is actually a pretty good summary of some important traits for teachers to cultivate. It’s based on observations of a small group of award-winning primary teachers, but it has broad applicability, I think. Sure, it’s a little vague, and it’s kind of predictable, but sometimes bullet-pointed lists can be handy things anyhow. The source has more quotations and more detail. The seven secrets behind great teaching |
2. They’re not afraid to make difficult decisions |
4. They’re good communicators |
5. They’re non-conformists |
Teachers may get frustrated with pupils who insist on asserting their individuality at every opportunity, but it turns out that they are just as averse to conforming: 87 per cent have a low or extremely low preference for conformity as a personality trait. |
6. They thrive in the company of others |
|
Education policy: who should be making the decisions? Thoughts from the 2009 Teacher of the Year
This year’s Teacher of the Year, Andrew Mullen, an ex-cop who started a new career teaching kids who’ve been thrown out of traditional school systems, sits in on a conversation between senators, governors, and other “education experts” and gives us his thoughts. Thanks to José Vilson for posting this.