Millions waste the afternoon fondly daydreaming of getting the hell away from other humans.
If one was curious as to how one might bury a major breach notification, check here. According to RSA, the victims included five major defense contractors; four major telecommunications providers; 10+ western military organizations; more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies; 24 banks and financial institutions; and at least 45 higher educational institutions.
The San Diego district attorney’s office has allegedly missed a deadline to file foreclosure on the funds seized from Med-West, and from the personal accounts of company owner James Slavic, his wife and two step-daughters. The law affords them one year to do so, and in California Superior Court on November 15, 2016, deputy district attorney Jorge Del Portillo told judge Jay Bloom that the state had until February 2017 to file a petition of forfeiture against the money in bank accounts belonging to James Slatic and his family. The DA’s position has since changed. “We believe it is the seizure that starts the [statute of limitations] clock and not the freeze order,” says Tanya Sierra, DA spokesperson. “We do not consider [a search warrant to freeze a bank account] a ‘process’ within the meaning of asset forfeiture laws.”
According to White House officials, McCain is believed to have somehow gained access to the content of President Donald Trump’s private, classified telephone calls with world leaders. “He has been given transcripts or actually listened to the calls and is sharing what he has heard,” an administration insider said. “There is no doubt. He is one of the major leaks.”
Astronomers have discovered seven Earth-like planets orbiting a star 40 light-years away from Earth.
After spending $24 billion on infrastructure and hosting for the 2016 Olympics, at the cost of de-valuing the Brazilian currency via unsupported inflation, Brazil’s new sporting venues stand empty and are rotting to ruins. Current figures may not include future upkeep and maintenance costs.
And in the really important news: MLB arranges to change intentional walk to a dugout signal. The thunderous shaking you felt across the internet were a million voices suddenly raised in Bronx cheers, and suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Howard Root, founder and CEO of Vascular Solutions, was found not guilty on federal charges spearheaded by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Yes, that Sally Yates. The actions of the federal government under her control were described by one juror as “nothing short of criminal”.
By the gram? That’s how you know it’s bad for you.
Kerrygold butter, one of the premier dairy products on the market, cannot be sold in Wisconsin. I’m sure there are perfectly legitimate and logical reasons to protecting consumers from a noted dairy established in 1961, and protecting the Wisconsin dairy farm lobbying interests had nothing to do with it.
Daniel Crowninshield was sentenced to 41 months in prison for “unlawfully manufacturing firearms”. Special Agent in Charge Jill A. Snyder, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said that Crowninshield “owned and operated a machine shop where he allowed customers with unknown backgrounds to use his machinery to unlawfully manufacture firearms for profit. That activity posed a very dangerous threat to the safety of our communities.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” Much has been waxed, wroth and poetic, about that phrase since it was first penned by Edwin Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. At first blush, it is a sterling statement as to the power of the written word; to entertain, to persuade, to transport the minds of men into other shoes and allow them to walk roads previously unknown and unknowable.
I still prefer my laptop.
At second blush – and second blushes are best blushes, since they are so unexpected – it is a testament to the ability to control. The sword can only kill a man; the pen can make him into something fit to make his mother cringe in horror.
Words are thought. Language makes up so much of who we are and how our brains work that a native language can be expressed with not merely a linguistic accent, but also a physical accent. Blind humans who have never seen the common body language of the speakers of their native language, will both use physical gestures to communicate and will also use similar gestures as those who can see them. Words are not merely things of our lips and tongue; they go down to the bone.
The ability to control the words of others is a blueprint to change their very thoughts. Society is rife with examples of altering what words mean or which words must be used in an effort to steer the conversation. Gun “safety”. Pretty much all of the media coverage of Trump’s campaign. The loss of perfectly functional terminology and colloquialisms: “-splainin’”, racist, fascist, liberal, feminist, Nazi.
Remember the push to stop calling people illegal aliens? It doesn’t matter which word one uses as much these days, as it’s all been lumped under the broad tent of immigration, of which one is either for or against. And being against immigrants makes the Statue of Liberty cry. You meanie.
We’re not banning homeless people, gods bless you sir, no! We’re just banning urban camping. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Insidious propaganda is insidious.
When words have been altered, taken – molded, primped, shoved into a tight dress and forced to pimp themselves on the streets for their masters – there often comes a push-back. Satire, mocking and Poe’s Law come into play. Frequently, the objects of this linguistic assault retake the word by embracing it and celebrating it. Pick the derogatory demographic slur, activists and cultural music will use it in earnest if given time.
This is not always as effective as intended. If in doing so we accept the new interpretation foisted upon us by those who seek to control the conservation, embracing a slur as a badge of honor is to win the battle but lose the war
Remember, the good football tackle doesn’t aim for the shoulders. Aim for the knees.
The first return for nationalism offers a definition as patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts. Wikipedia first line on it is: Nationalism is a complex, multidimensional concept involving a shared communal identification with one’s nation. Dictionary.com’s first two definitions are 1) spiritoraspirationscommontothewholeofanation 2) devotionandloyaltytoone’sowncountry;patriotism. Merriam-Webster dubs it thusly: loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially: a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.
Excuse me, I have bad news for you.
Google Trends shows that searches for nationalism have followed an identifiable pattern since 2004. Searches peak in November-ish and again in the spring before falling to an apathetic doldrum by summer. Searches have been trending upward since the summer of 2012, and sharply upward since spring of 2016.
You know what else follows that pattern? Election coverage in the MSM. And maybe searches for the weather too, sometimes the pattern isn’t as important as first blushes imply.
It would make sense that the language of the nation is particularly captured by nationalism when electing its national leaders. For the concept described in the aforementioned definitions, one can find it culturally expressed by the immortal Lee Greenwood, and no wonder politicians are so fond of borrowing nationalism’s evocative imagery.
What a surprise it must have been to the average voter to find the word in the media as a derogatory slur. Being a nationalist was bad and basically like Nazis. (TW: Scare quote abuse. It’s brutal.) Nationalism is gonnagetchoo. It’s quite confusing, because sometimes it might not be bad? Context and qualifiers are key to understanding, since white nationalism is… well, you’d think it would be nationalists who are also white but let’s see what Wikipedia has to say this time.
White nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism which holds the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white national identity. Its proponents identify with and are attached to the concept of a white nation.
Well, that escalated quickly.
When everything is Hitler, nothing is.
As a propaganda tool, it couldn’t have a worse basis in logic. Every redneck, pool player, bar rowdy and biker who ever closed out Karaoke Night with a communal Greenwood sign-along for all those left standing hears the message loud and clear: Look, nationalism is bad enough, but if you’re white and a nationalist, you’re this guy.
Say it insistently and often enough, and what’s the logical reaction? A hue and cry of white Americans shouting as one diversity-approved voice, “No! And we say again – no! We reject our heritage and traditional ideals, and the very familiarity bias with which all humans are afflicted, if the only other option is to be that guy!”
My word. It is to laugh. Some of them will just shrug and say, “I guess, sure, if that’s what it means now, then I must be a white nationalist.” In a linguistic climate which seeks to normalize the idea that being born pale says all it needs about the content of one’s character, whites have been called worse and it’s exhausting to try to correct the barrage. Plenty attempt to argue, but true thinkers know that this is just the rationalization of lesser minds at work and pay no heed. Heeding would be actively harmful, in fact, since the white voice is over-used and the construct of whiteness is complicit in oppression.
Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive. It likely would have been more accurate and fostered proper communication to describe Richard Spencer et al. as white-nationists. That might not have served the correct interests, however, and branding white nationalism dove-tails so handily with the efforts to cultivate racism as an actual significant problem, useful to those who would control us all.
Reject it. This land is our land, and those words are our words. It’s a fucked-up land, to be sure; like an old broken-in boot – comfortable, ugly as sin but still bringing a sigh to your lips when the worn leather molds around you knowingly, as few things can. We’ve stepped in shit more than we meant to. These things happen to us all, we’re only human. The soles are sturdy yet, though, and there’s life left in the good leather and craftsmanship.
Globalism is a fine concept when it comes to marketplaces. When it comes to ethereal communal ties, telling people they aren’t allowed to enjoy particularly the land of their birth is akin to an announcement that following any one NFL team is discriminatory and verboten. Good luck with that strategy. Let us know how it works out. American society is highly and vehemently tribalized. It’s astonishing that people can be reliant on tribal ties in virtually every aspect of society, from politics to clothes and wine, and yet a familiarity bias for the country we were trained to pledge allegiance to is the one tie it ought to be unthinkable to feel.
Unthinkable? It’s practically reflexive. Are we trying to give people a complex?
Much like immigration is now a broad subject one can only be for or against, nationalism is being used as a linguistic tool, a buzzword to steer the conversation. White-nationists such as Richard Spencer have been vaulted to the limelight as the media cries wolf about scary racists/nationalist for their own ends. This is how easily we are distracted from the real work at hand. We cannot do what we should be doing, we cannot talk about what needs to be addressed, because we are too busy discussing the will-o’-the-wisps the mainstream media and politicians would have us chasing. Just because someone has offered you poison, doesn’t mean you have to drink it.
Judge slams litigation-trolling for cash. ““Plaintiffs sought relief they could not possibly obtain, with false and inflated damage numbers, in order to obtain settlements,” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said. Following the ruling, the Attorney General’s Office has announced plans to file sanctions against the disability group. If granted, AID must pay back the state and the businesses it sued for all their legal expenses.
We ought to have anticipated this. Former child actors never seem to go out quietly.
The current administration has not pledged allegiance – and uninterrupted, generous funding – to scientists. “This is the most frightening and serious threat we have faced in my lifetime,” Prof Nancy Kanwisher told BBC News. Well, I’m sold.
Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, died suddenly today in New York.
Two spaces after a period, Pluto is a planet and the Stone Temple Pilots are not classic rock! *runs to room sobbing*
What can I say. Sometimes the choice is easy. Even the North Korean judge would give this a 10/10.
Closely snapping at the heels of a post that will probably live on in Glibertarian legend – no mean feat – comes Cuffy Meigs in the Friday Night Links. From the top ropes!
And as we head into the bottom of the ninth, it’s the Glibs 197, the Noids 146. Leading off for the Noids is John K. The Noids’ second baseman is batting .137 with a ground-out, two strikeouts and a hit by pitch. The windup…the pitch…strike one. John is jawing with home plate umpire Chemjeff…now he’s back in the box…the 0-1 pitch…strike two! And now John is really going at it with Chemjeff! Noids manager Gilmore is out of the dugout and standing between Chemjeff and John, trying to keep his struggling second baseman in the game while giving Chemjeff a piece of his mind…the 0-2 pitch…STRIKE THREE! And John is out of control! Both benches have cleared and there is pandemonium in H&R Memorial Stadium!
I shall watch Cuffy Meigs’ career with great interest.
At the risk of getting him labeled teacher’s pet, most insightful comment of the week also goes to trshmnstr. It’s not that he’s definitely the most insightful of us, as much as I was impressed that he wrote an entire multi-paragraph comment in English, and I didn’t understand a damned word. Well done, that man. I am in awe, and a little frightened. From the Saturday Night Fever… er, Links:
Higher priority is stuff like getting an options element set up to allow the user to toggle all of the features, change view mode, etc.
I was thinking about maybe tackling a “newest first” view while keeping the threading in tact, as well as converting links into pics/embedded video.
There are a few bugfixes to be done, such as making sure all of the siblings of a new comment are shown when old threads are hidden, getting rid of “COMMENT” when you click an HTML tag button without typing text, and adjusting the spacing of the comments without a reply button.
Low priority is user blocking, comment promotion (highlight a different color after a certain number of +1 and “This. ” replies), reply by clicking anywhere on the comment, and a zillion other small things that have been suggested.
One thing I would love to attempt is a client-side dynamic refresh of the comments. Unfortunately, I haven’t made much headway on that, yet.
Making the rounds on the outrage circuit is this latest update into the continuing saga of Trump – Oh, What An Ass.
‘‘This is what it’s like to be with Trump,’’ Christie said. ‘‘He says, ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’’’
The big take-away we’re supposed to have is that Trump is such dickhead. How Dare He. The choice of supper entree for an enormous fat man already the subject of one failed lap banding is none of your business, sir – he has agency, you know!
Pardon me if I hesitated to clutch my pearls. As many times as this story has been passed from shocked ear to shocked ear, people missed what I found to be the pertinent lede to the story, which defined a damning study in character itself.
Trump and Christie discussed the nation’s opioid epidemic during the lunch.
Christie on Wednesday signed a series of bills he requested to address the crisis, including a five-day limit on initial prescriptions for opioids and mandating state-regulated insurance plans cover treatment.
I’m sorry, were we discussing agency here? The agency of someone afflicted with a self-inflicted morbidity known to cause early death, disorder and severe limitations on quality of life?
Oh yes. I went there.
Chris Christie believes there is an opioid epidemic. Is he correct? Possibly. To what ends? His own. If the opioid epidemic were a problem for the consumers of opioids, they’d be proposing their own solutions. They might even be doing so – we don’t know, since Top Men and the mainstream media do not appear to have invited them to the discussion. But the real problem here is that Christie ate meatloaf when he might have chosen something else. Sure.
As detailed in my earlier article, Finding the Why, humans have a talent for spotting malfunction as defined through their own worldview. We apply self-serving corrections, and then when our best-laid plans end up tattered wrecks, we blame everyone else for the failure.
I, personally, believe Chris Christie needs to put the snacks down and take the stairs more often. I am fully confident that if he does not do so, his life will be needlessly shortened and suffer a loss of quality. I might even be right. So, tell me, America – at what point do I get to override Governor Christie’s agency in order to apply my corrections to his choices?
In my opinion, I don’t.
If he wants to be a great big fat bastard, that’s his problem. Nothing to do with me. But what about his elevated healthcare costs, due specifically to his bad lifestyle choices and now foisted onto the backs of taxpayers? Who, exactly, paid for Governor Christie’s surgery; the one that didn’t work?
Red herring. If we all eat enough of them, we’ll be thin as rails. The problem isn’t that Christie has a sweetheart Cadillac healthcare plan exempted from Obamacare’s onerous health-damaging idiocies, at the expense of people who lack such privilege. The problem isn’t even that he uses this sweet privilege to rectify the self-inflicted abuse of his body. The problem is that government picks my pocket to enrich people who think lunch should be not merely free, but an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those who rob Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul.
Is the analogy too subtle? Perhaps it is. In the abundance of articles about poor, poor Christie’s stolen agency, not one thus far to mine eyes has pointed out these astonishing parallels. Christie is upset at the loss of his own agency, while taking others’ agency away with both hands and the expectation of applause.
Governor Christie is the very thing against which he rails. He merely has trouble seeing this clearly, since he is as convinced of his own narrative rightness as every other human on the planet. He is the good guy, because that’s what his head tells him is so.
Being the good guy isn’t a side, a team. It doesn’t come with the proper hand-waving to paper over what you did with a thin veneer of respectability and concern. It’s an action. Those who do bad things are not the good guys. Everything from there is rationalization.
Prediction: If an opioid epidemic exists, it will not be cured by talking at opioid consumers coupled with the proper removal of just exactly the right set of agencies from the correct people, handing that power over to some bureaucrat whose claim to fame is a bachelors degree in fine arts and a cushy job divorced from the requirement for functional results. What we’ll get then is another set of dysfunctions, and more people insistent that more money and and more power to the people who caused the new problems are the next sole best solution.
If there is an opioid epidemic, we’d be best served to start with finding the why.
Why are more people consuming more opioids? If consumption has reached levels causing individual health concerns, why has that individual come to the conclusion that this was the most effective cure for their pain despite the risk-reward calculation? Lest anyone labor under the delusion that only people making good and proper social normie choices make risk-reward calculations, allow me to disabuse them of that notion. Everyone makes risk-reward calculations. The man drinking himself to death knows it. This choice nevertheless appears, to his mind, to be the most effective option available. If this calculation fails to make sense, I’d suggest asking him to explain it rather than assuming we know everything about the matter and can solve that problem for him.
Chris Christie post-surgery is still grossly obese. If you want to know why, don’t ask his surgeon; ask Christie.
Therein lies our real solutions. Taking away the proper agencies and handing more power and money to people ill-equipped to use them will solve nothing. Such actions have, in fact, gotten us to this state of disorder and chaotic whack-a-mole with accompanying enormous and rising costs; both fiscal and societal.
We need to start involving those who we purport to assist. Not at them and to them, but with them, will these problems be solved. Every individual has agency, and re-labeling people as sub-human and otherwise lesser-than to excuse our actions in taking away their individuality does not make us the good guys.
The… characteristics referred to as antisocial personality in the FBI report were as follows: sense of entitlement, unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful of others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior, disregardful of social obligations, nonconforming to social norms, irresponsible. These… were not simply persistently antisocial individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for ASPD; they were psychopaths- remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends.
We are eating the very people we claim to help because it feeds our narrative and increases power and money in one direction only. The stated goals are never reached, and the subjects loathe us for our efforts; this is natural, since we are not helping them, that’s just our rationalization of our bad choices. This is tribal monkey behavior with evolved vocabulary, not civilized humanity.
California Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez introduced a bill to make California a “shall-issue” state.
“It is our Constitutional right to defend ourselves,” said sponsor Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, a
Trump is calling contractors to discuss height requirements for his wall as we speak.
Republican from Lake Elsinore. “Californians should not be subjugated to the personal beliefs of one individual who doesn’t believe in the Second Amendment. If a citizen passes the background check and completes the necessary safety training requirements, there should be no reason to deny them a CCW.”
The always-worthwhile Don Boudreaux made a post yesterday at Cafe Hayek, calling out Dr. Keith Ablow from Fox News.
It’s true that the pace of introducing new labor-saving techniques has magnificently quickened in the past two hundred years. This fast pace continues today. Yet still we encounter no evidence that labor-saving techniques permanently increase unemployment.
You’ll reply “This time is different!” Perhaps, but I doubt it. And I’m so confident in my prediction that I’ll put $10,000 of my own my money where my mouth is.
I will bet you $10,000, straight up, that in not one of the next 20 years will the annual U.S. labor-force participation rate, as measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fall below 58.1 percent – which is the lowest rate on record at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Maybe one has to have a mathematical bent to see it thus, but if one happens to do so (and I do), that was glorious. Don Boudreaux consistently hits the right notes on a free market tune. If we have the luxury of educated Millennials with a basic grasp of capitalism and markets, however tenuous, it may well be thanks to him.
BUT.*
Galileo was convinced the tides were caused by the Earth’s rotation and solar orbit. In 2011, OPERA scientists announced they had recorded neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light; this was later corrected by plugging their GPS in properly and calibrating a clock. Edwin Hubble attempted to calculate the age of the universe and faceplanted hard enough to make people wince eighty-eight years later.
Even the greats can overlook something. I propose exactly this has happened.
Innovation and automation are not causative to permanent unemployment gains and overall economic job loss. When economic models are reliant on false scarcity, they consistently fail. Imminent starvation due to human overpopulation was overturned by the green revolution. Peal Oil fell to fracking and exploration. What we “know” about production capabilities has been revised, over and over ad infinitum.
On the left, the Apollo space module. On the right, more processing power than the Apollo space module.
For an explanation of why this is so, we go to the oft-cited buggy whip industry. The advent of the automobile decimated this established industry, along with just about everything else related to horse-drawn transportation – once a major industry. Yet the lost of this sector resulted in a widespread economic gain. The automobile added enough real economic growth that the costs of industry sectors removed through obsolescence were still vastly outstripped by the generated economic output. In real ways, the former buggy whip makers were materially better off without their old jobs.
Innovation and machinery were behind the explosion in the clothing industry. We can now buy more clothing, for cheaper, than we could in the days when middle-class women owned four dresses plus a Sunday-best.
Subject put on her Sunday best to have picture taken. It’s a lovely hat.
Imagine what that did for closet-makers. Innovation and automation are the reason we have access to more, cheaper and a better variety of fresh produce than we did even twenty years ago.
This is what progress looks like; not the “progress” which regulates and strangulates the markets to put ordinary necessities such as eyeglasses, antibiotics, clothing and transportation out of the reach of the common man in the name of his own best interests, but the kind of progress which puts a TV in every middle-class home and a personal automobile in the driveway of even the common laborer. Notions that used to be astonishing in our grandparents’ day but were the reality for our parents, recall.
Boudreaux is correct about economic models dependent on a false scarcity that is not there. The math is sound, the economic theories well-explored, for all that the same are missed by more mainstream and “enlightened” economists. What Boudreaux misses, I theorize, are another kind of failed economic modeling: those dependent on ignoring a true scarcity.
Pensions which calculated annual rate of returns only truthfully deemed reasonable in the Magical Land of Not Gonna Happen and underfunded thereby. The housing bubble of the late Oughts can be condensed in layman’s terms to the battle between those who said they aren’t making any more land vs those who postulated there might be fewer available buyers if the price went high enough.
The assumption of growth will not be borne out in economic models reliant on ignoring true scarcity.
Our economy is adding people to the economy at a faster rate than it is removing obsolete jobs and retirees. The scarcity being overlooked is job creation. It isn’t happening fast enough.
This isn’t easy to see. Imagine the BLS is playing a great game of Find the Lady with job creation. One can examine charts and run the math with calculator, pencil and paper until one’s eyes cross. It doesn’t add up until one remembers how Find the Lady really works.
“…workers in the U.S. business sector worked virtually the same number of hours in 2013 as they had in 1998—approximately 194 billion labor hours.1 What this means is that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year period.
…The most important thing we know about those 194 billion labor hours is that the mix of labor supplied to the US economy deteriorated drastically during that 15 year period owing to the sharp decline of the goods producing economy in the US and its replacement by the low productivity HES Complex (health, education and social services).
… Accordingly, there is every reason to believe that real GDP growth has been considerably lower than reported. That is, it has been more consistent with a stagnant economy that generated zero labor hour growth in the business sector; a pick-up in food stamps and disability dependency from 23 million to 60 million over the 15 year period; and which saw real household income fall from $57k to $52K or by 8%.
The circumstantial evidence has grown since Stockman wrote this in 2014.
Labor participation rate (Boudreaux’ own standards, of which I fully approve) is near 40-year lows.
Despite spending more on health care than any other country, American life expectancy decreased for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. This was attributable in part to a sharp increase in deaths of white men and women in their prime working years lacking higher education, and driven by suicide and drug abuse; deaths of despair in a demographic which once enjoyed higher employment numbers.
Correlation is not causation; I’m just sayin’.
The natural mathematical result of innovation and automation is an improvement in economic function which streamlines processes and frees capital to slosh about in the system until it is soaked up in ways not available previously. As computers got faster, they got smaller and lighter and cheaper. The average American now has at their fingertips for trifling sums what was once available only to the scientists and engineers of NASA.
The average American is also in economic decline; making less, with fewer opportunities and less mobility.
These two statements show something within the system is malfunctioning. Badly. America added just shy of 46 million people to the economy since 1998 and 0 labor hours for those people. The rising government dependence,
This is what full employment looks like. No, really.
the increasing deaths, credentialism, licensing schemes (25% of today’s workforce, up from just 5% in 1950), declining labor participation, entrepreneurship, incomes and mobility could not exist simultaneously in a rapidly-innovating free market such as economists claim we have.
One of these assumptions must be false. The math does not work. The natural formula of innovation is being subsumed and arrogated, and the numbers proving so only worsen as our population rises.
This points to jobs being removed from the economy at a faster rate than new job creation plus new population.
If my theory holds, Don Boudreaux will indeed lose his bet. Labor participation will reach 58.1 percent via mere attrition unless the innovation formula is allowed to resume it’s course. Further, if my theory holds, then at our current path the labor participation rate will not reach 66 percent (last seen in the ancient bygone days of 2008) in any of the coming two decades.
Fredrick Hess, former social studies teacher, asked on EducationNext this morning whether educational scholars are afflicted with a bias. He ponders that the movers and shakers of our nation’s schools may have an anti-conservative bent which leaves masses of the ruralvolk and their ilk cold, if not blocking them out of the conversation entirely.
This is what inclusion looks like. No, really. See how diverse?
He would like you to judge for yourself.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA), an Affiliated Group of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), invites proposals for its Annual Conference, which will be held on November 15-17, 2016, in San Francisco, CA. The theme of this year’s NCSS conference is Expanding Visions/Bridging Traditions. In the spirit of this year’s theme, the CUFA 2017 program will challenge presenters and attendees to (re)envision the future of social studies while also responding to the present conditions of the field. CUFA 2017 will look at what social studies can make possible in turbulent times when settler colonialism, systemic and systematic racism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, free speech and voter suppression, socioeconomic disparities, sexism, environmental destruction, and the corporatization of PK-12 and teacher education (to name a few) continue to threaten each and every one of us, both personally and professionally, in the United States and around the world. Social studies education must be(come) a driving force for social change.
As Program Chair, I challenge you to disrupt status quo discourses, practices, and methods in your paper and session proposals. I ask you to consider the following question: How does your research and/or teaching work to transform social studies education in our local, state, national, and global communities?
As you prepare your proposals, please consider the following areas of relevance for social studies in PK-12 and higher education settings:
Intersectionality Decolonization Anti-Oppressive, Anti-Racist, and Critical Pedagogies Subversive Social Studies Teaching Methods Indigenous Studies Gender Studies LGBTQ+ Studies Critical Race Studies Critical Media Literacy Environmental Justice Technology Economics Education Geography Education Global Education Politics, Power, and Policy in Social Studies Education Research Methodologies (Qualitative, Post-Qualitative, Quantitative, Mixed Methods) Social Studies Advocacy and Outreach Citizenship Education History Education
This year’s program will include individual papers and roundtables, symposia, contemporary issue dialogues (CIDs), invited speakers, and CUFA/NCSS co-sponsored Research into Practice (RIP) sessions. I am also working closely with NCSS event staff to offer CUFA pre-conference workshops on the morning of Wednesday, November 15. CUFA 2017 will continue to also feature an unconference space and the Java Networks lunch.
I encourage colleagues preparing symposia and CID proposals to explicitly create space(s) that talk across theories, methodologies, and practices where everyone is seen, heard, and can contribute to new visions for social studies. I urge colleagues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to submit their work. Accepted proposals will be linked to presentations through the open conference system. Authors will have the option of uploading their completed papers to replace the proposal after the program is finalized.
The submission deadline is 11:59 pm PST, Tuesday, February 28, 2017: http://www.socialstudies.org/cufa2017/openconf.php. No submissions will be accepted after that time and date.
For those of you on Twitter, please tweet about the conference using the official conference hashtag: #CUFA17. I will also post regular updates about the conference on CUFA’s Facebook groups.
If you have any questions about the call, proposal submission process, or reviewer sign-up process, please contact me at [email redacted]. Thank you for your hard work and commitment to the social studies education community.
In Solidarity, Sarah
Sarah B. Shear, Ph.D. CUFA Program Chair, 2017 San Francisco Assistant Professor, Social Studies Education, Penn State Altoona Faculty, The Graduate School, The Pennsylvania State University
Mr. Hess made efforts to discuss this with his fellow educators and colleagues, and the response was, in part, to ask whether any possible bias was a “product of his imagination”.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
A dozen airport and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees have been arrested for their alleged involvement in a massive cocaine smuggling operation in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
Which one of the preamble clauses do you think government drug smuggling and trafficking is? It must fall under one of those clauses, since that’s what the government is for and this is what the government is doing.
Logic, how does it work. Like this, clearly:
An Airport Aviation Services worker, who was a baggage handler and ramp employee, is charged with paying TSA employees to clear the suitcases stuffed with cocaine; taking the suitcases to their designated flights; and giving a drug trafficking organization member the “all clear” for mules to board the plane.
“These individuals were involved in a conspiracy to traffic massive quantities of illegal narcotics to the continental United States,” Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez, U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, said in a statement. “These arrests demonstrate the success of the AirTAT initiative, which has successfully allocated a dedicated group of state and federal law enforcement officers, whose mission is to ensure that our airports are not used in the drug traffickers’ illicit businesses.”
Emphasis added for effect. A government agency charged with providing for the common defense requires yet another government initiative and a dedicated team to police it to also provide for the common defense violated by the first agency.
Children sing of an old woman who swallowed a dog to catch a cat that she’d swallowed to catch a bird that she’d swallowed to catch a spider that she’d swallowed to catch a fly. As analogies go, this works quite well.
(Spoiler: no one knows why she swallowed the fly. Analogy still accurate.)
It remains unclear how much it will cost to swallow the buffalo to catch the cougar needed to catch the goat, and it seems unlikely we can comfortably swallow the elephant currently being eyeballed. In the old days, before modern medical innovations, the patient usually died but one must keep in mind the profession only had horses to rely upon. We’ve learned so much since then.
What a good thing the entire affair is such a demonstrated success.
The TSA has dealt with a number of high-profile security lapses at airports in recent years, including a gun-smuggling operation uncovered at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in 2015.
Well. This is probably far preferable to and not even remotely similar to bathrooms and cloths and million-dollar birthday gifts. Sound off in the comments to explain which clause this feels like to you.
The problem isn’t that Christie has a sweetheart Cadillac healthcare plan exempted from Obamacare’s onerous health-damaging idiocies, at the expense of people who lack such privilege. The problem isn’t even that he uses this sweet privilege to rectify the self-inflicted abuse of his body. The problem is that government picks my pocket to enrich people who think lunch should be not merely free, but an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those who rob Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul.
What we’ll get then is another set of dysfunctions, and more people insistent that more money and and more power to the people who caused the new problems are the next sole best solution.
