This is why we shouldn’t send them in the first place. Even if you think we’re fighting one of the so-called “good wars,” training thousands of men to suppress their humanity to be more effective killing machines does have its effect on people, as those of us old enough to have seen the long-term psychological carnage of Vietnam can attest.
War is evil. That’s why we should only do it when we have to. Problem is, politicians would rather fight a war to get oil than piss off their oil buddies by seeking alternatives. Oh well!
I didn’t realize that when it came to aviation workers and union elections, not voting meant “no.” Under rule changes made last year, their union votes became majority rule, just like every other election.
Last year, 53,000 children in the state attended full-day kindergarten funded in part with the grants, which began under Gov. Ed Rendell in 2004-05.
Now Gov. Corbett, who campaigned as a supporter of early-childhood education, has proposed eliminating the grants to save $260 million. Last year, about $200 million of that went to early-education programs, including to expand kindergarten to full-day.
Enrollment in full-day kindergarten has grown from 35 percent of students to more than 68 percent since the state started the grants, according to Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. Philadelphia could lose $55 million in block grants, of which the city used about 90 percent to fund full-day kindergarten for nearly 13,000 students.
Corbett wants to cut funding for public schools by 11 percent, a prospect that leaves districts scrambling to figure whether they can preserve full-day kindergarten.
In a part-day program, Citerone said, there was not enough time to do much writing. The difference by the end of the year is dramatic, she said. Previously, Citerone said, she might have one student in a class reading by the end of the year.
“I didn’t have readers for 22 years,” she said. “Now, over 80 percent go into first grade reading on level or above level. There’s really no comparison. I never thought I’d have children reading.
Joe Bageant, author, blogger and fire-breathing class warrior, died yesterday after a short bout with cancer.
The financial success of Joe’s first book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, shocked and, I think, embarrassed him. He tried to give away as much of the money as he could, as fast as he made it, but felt compelled to hang onto at least some of it because he figured sooner or later, his drinking and smoking would catch up with him and he’d be at the mercy of the American healthcare system.
He was right.
I don’t think I ever felt so comfortable, so fast with anyone as I did with Joe. We were fans of each other’s work, and corresponded back and forth for years. I still remember our first phone call, which lasted a couple of hours and covered everything from class stratification to the consciousness-raising wonders of LSD. I always intended to visit him, either in Winchester, Virgina where he was first born and returned decades later, or in Belize and then Ajijic, Mexico, where he’d been spending a lot of time and was trying to lure his many friends down to form a community of like-minded ex-pats. But I never had a reliable car, or enough money to travel.
And then he got sick.
After a vibrant life, Joe Bageant died yesterday following a four-month struggle with cancer. He was 64. Joe is survived by his wife, Barbara, his three children, Timothy, Patrick and Elizabeth, and thousands of friends and admirers. He is also survived by his work and ideas.
According to Joe’s wishes, he will be cremated. His family will hold a private memorial service.
Did I mention that Joe was, in fact, an actual socialist? He wrote so powerfully about the tyranny of owning things, but also had a deep well of compassion for fellow Americans who were caught on the wheels of the economic machine. He was always urging me to stop looking for a job and “just write, goddamnit!”
He was my friend, a mentor, and a fellow traveler on the road to enlightenment. He was no doubt easier from a distance, but really, aren’t we all?
I have a review copy of his latest book, Rainbow Pie, sitting on my desk. I’ve been edging my way toward it, sad because I knew it was his last book. I think I’ll read it this week, in his memory.
Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”
So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
According to the researcher, Yukinobu Okamura, and the records of a government council where he made the warning, TEPCO asserted that there was flexibility in the quake resistance design of its plants and expressed reluctance to raise the assumption of possible quake damage citing a lack of sufficient information.
”There should be ample flexibility in the safety of a nuclear power plant,” said Okamura, head of the Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. ”It is odd to have an attitude of not taking into consideration indeterminate aspects.”
Okamura had warned in 2009 of massive tsunami based on his study since around 2004 of the traces of a major tsunami believed to have swept away about a thousand people in the year 869 after a magnitude 8.3 quake off northeastern Japan.
He had found in his research that tsunami from the ancient quake had hit a wide range of the coastal regions of northeastern Japan, at least as far north as Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture and as far south as the town of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture — close to the Fukushima Daiichi plant — penetrating as much as 3 to 4 kilometers inland.
