Bernie calls out class warfare

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I won’t be happy until every rich fuck is looking over his shoulder:

Later Sen. Sanders ripped Republicans for claiming that the problem is that children get too much help from the federal government, “These are the same people who want to eliminate the estate tax, which applies to only the top three tenths of one percent of all Americans, which is the richest of the rich, then they are going after kids. The politics of this, Al, is what they are trying to do is deflect attention away from income and wealth inequality. Attention away from the fact that the rich are doing extraordinarily well, and tell their supporters that the real problem in America is that children are getting too much help from the federal government, and that’s the kind of mentality that we have got to fight back against.”

Sen. Sanders nailed it. This is a classic case of Republicans trying to blame the victims of their policies. Republicans crashed the economy, threw millions out of work, then blamed the unemployed, and their children for needing assistance. While the GOP tries to take the food out of the mouths of those who are struggling, the rich continue to get richer.

The Koch brothers won’t have less money if children continue to get free school lunches. The issue is that the people at the very top continue to see their wealth grow while nearly everyone else is struggling to survive.

That’s the dirty little secret that Bernie Sanders exposed.

Republicans refuse to limit themselves to encouraging the wealthy. They are on a mission to take everything away from everyone else, and give it to the rich. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been leading this new smokescreen with a war against the poor that has been disguised as budget cuts and poverty studies.

Ryan and his millionaire Republican brothers are running a shell game. They are trying to convince the American people that the income inequality that is obvious to everyone isn’t a problem. Instead, they want the country to focus on the fact that poor people need to eat.

At least I did this right

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Homework Help!

As a parent, I spend a lot of time feeling guilty. So I was happy to read this.

I wasn’t involved with my kids’ education — not the way parents today are. But I always had a pretty clear idea that homework was for the kids, not me, and all I did was check to make sure it was done. I didn’t go over it with them, and I didn’t coach them. I told them if they really didn’t understand something in their homework, they were to ask the teacher the next day.

And no, I never volunteered at their schools, although I did join the PTO.

Many of my friends are appalled when I tell them this, and it made me feel guilty. It honestly didn’t occur to me to be any other way, but my kids are both smart people and I don’t think anything I did changed that. Okay, maybe a little.

What I did do was expose them to a lot of politics, art, music and culture, and kept a lot of different reading material around the house. They knew I cared about how they did in school, but that was their job and there was no hovering. I was working 50-60 hours a week, there was no time to hover. The only time I ever intervened was when one of my kids had learning difficulties.

And fortunately, my hands-off approach turned out to be the right thing:

One of the central tenets of raising kids in America is that parents should be actively involved in their children’s education: meeting with teachers, volunteering at school, helping with homework, and doing a hundred other things that few working parents have time for. These obligations are so baked into American values that few parents stop to ask whether they’re worth the effort.

Until this January, few researchers did, either. In the largest-ever study of how parental involvement affects academic achievement, Keith Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Angel L. Harris, a sociology professor at Duke, mostly found that it doesn’t. The researchers combed through nearly three decades’ worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. In an attempt to show whether the kids of more-involved parents improved over time, the researchers indexed these measures to children’s academic performance, including test scores in reading and math.

What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.

Do you review your daughter’s homework every night? Robinson and Harris’s data, published in The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement With Children’s Education, show that this won’t help her score higher on standardized tests. Once kids enter middle school, parental help with homework can actually bring test scores down, an effect Robinson says could be caused by the fact that many parents may have forgotten, or never truly understood, the material their children learn in school.

It’s interesting, go read the rest.

The brutal ageism of tech

~ susie

Three VCs
It’s not just tech. Many organizations think middle-aged people are too boring to have in their “cutting edge” shops:

Twenty years ago, when Matarasso first opened shop in San Francisco, he found that he was mostly helping patients in late middle age: former homecoming queens, spouses who’d been cheated on, spouses looking to cheat. Today, his practice is far larger and more lucrative than he could have ever imagined. He sees clients across a range of ages. He says he’s the world’s second-biggest dispenser of Botox. But this growth has nothing to do with his endearingly nebbishy mien. It is, rather, the result of a cultural revolution that has taken place all around him in the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.1 And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.

Don’t drink the diet soda

~ susie

#diet #coke #cocacola #100th dis month... :p
Just in case you needed a reminder — oh, and don’t forget the only reason it got approved was because of Donald Rumsfeld:

“When aspartame was put before the FDA for approval, it was denied eight times. G.D. Searle, founder of aspartame, tried to get FDA approval in 1973. Clearly, he wasn’t bothered by reports from neuroscientist Dr. John Olney and researcher Ann Reynolds (hired by Searle himself) that aspartame was dangerous. Dr. Martha Freeman, a scientist from the FDA division of Metabolic and Endocrine Drug Products, declared, “The information submitted for review is inadequate to permit a scientific evaluation of clinical safety.” Freeman recommended that until the safety of aspartame was proven, marketing the product should not be permitted. Alas, her recommendations were ignored. Somehow, in 1974, Searle got approval to use aspartame in dry foods. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. In 1975, the FDA put together a task force to review Searle’s testing methods. Task force team leader Phillip Brodsky said he “had never seen anything as bad as Searle’s testing” and called the test’s results “manipulated.” Before aspartame actually made it into dry foods, Olney and attorney and consumer advocate Jim Turner filed objections against the approval.

“In 1977, the FDA asked the U.S. attorney’s office to start grand jury proceedings against Searle for “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements in aspartame safety tests.” Shortly after, the U.S. attorney leading the investigation against Searle was offered a job by the law firm that was representing Searle. Later that same year, he resigned as U.S. attorney and withdrew from the case, delaying the grand jury’s investigation. This caused the statute of limitations on the charges to run out, and the investigation was dropped. And he accepted the job with Searle’s law firm. Stunning.
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