Republican generosity in Michigan

Republicans in Michigan are cutting families off of food stamps and assistance programs, with this result:

Last week, while working on a documentary about hunger in Michigan, Russ Russell had an experience that left him speechless.

I was visiting with this family and one of the little boys said he wasn’t going to eat,” said Russell, development director for Forgotten Harvest, a Detroit-based nonprofit that rescues and redistributes fresh food. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m not eating dinner because it’s my brother’s turn tonight. Tomorrow is my night.’”

But the GOP in Michigan generously does provide GED programs. I'm sure this little boy thanks Republicans for their generosity in providing GED books every time that he goes to bed hungry. Or maybe not, since little boys need food, not GED books, the little ingrates.

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Rats are more empathetic than Republicans

When a rat hears another rat in distress, that rat will immediately go to help the rat in distress. Furthermore, if they had a chocolate treat, they'd share that treat with the rat that they helped.

So what happens when a Republican sees someone in distress? Well, the first thing they do is ignore the person in distress. See previous post. Next, if they're feeling particularly generous, they might install a switch to allow the person in distress to escape his trap -- a switch which is *outside* the trap, which the person caught in the trap can't reach (e.g., offering mental health services to the mentally ill... out of reach of the person *inside* the trap of mental illness). But that's the end of any empathy. Past that point, it's "get a job, bum!" or "it's your own fault you got caught in a trap, don't whine to me for help!" and a shrug of the shoulder and move on. And if the cries of distress on the part of those caught in the trap become too disturbing, they dispatch the popo to beat the shit out of those in distress in order to shut up that annoying whining from people who are dying. Because as far as lizard people from planet Sociopath are concerned, human beings are just another kind of vermin, and if vermin makes untoward noise, well. Beat it until it's no longer capable of making noise, right?

Sad, isn't it, that rats are more empathetic than a large percentage of Americans?

-- Badtux the "Guess I have more in common with rats than I thought!" Penguin

CBS commits journalism

It's only life.

Just something got in my eye and a case of the sniffles, that's all.

Poverty

I was going to write an article about the new numbers that came out that show that 16% of Americans live in abject poverty, the sort of poverty that is utter misery as vs. the paradise depicted by the right wing, but it's too goddamned depressing. You just know that the right wing is gonna start whining that our poor aren't *really* poor 'cause they're not starving to death because they get food stamps, so there. Doesn't change the fact that being poor in America sucks. I've been poor, and believe me, I much prefer being *not* poor. Asswipes making fun of the poor are just assholes and bastards who ought to immediately have their trust funds revoked, their bank accounts seized, their homes and Mercedes Benzes repo'ed, then thrown on the street in some far away city to make their way. I can guarantee you that after a few months of living on the street they won't think the same about being poor.

- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

The Coming Epidemic, redux

If you search the box at the top left of the screen, you'll find I've already talked about the coming epidemic multiple times. We're making a lot of poor people and forcing them to live under horrific living conditions with poor nutrition and in jobs that pay no sick leave so they go to work sick all the time and spread their contagion. But the biggest reason we're going to have an epidemic is not because of the poor living conditions and poor nutrition of our poor. The poor in hundreds of other countries have it even worse. It's because we give them just enough healthcare to stay sick, whereas in other third world countries they die. This provides an incubator for mutation of germs to resist antibiotics and antivirals, since the poor cannot afford a full course of either and thus breed resistant germs.

This is a problem. It's a problem that needs solving. So how do various groups solve this problem?

1. The GOP solution: If you're sick and you're poor, die quickly.
2. The Democratic solution: If you're sick and you're poor, patch the current broken system with band-aids and rube goldberg contraptions and pretend it works, except it won't and can't, so nothing changes.
3. The solution if you're not a sociopathic lizard person: Free access to healthcare for all, paid for by a payroll and/or income tax dedicated to healthcare. This solves the problem of access, mostly.

But we are ruled by cold-blooded lizard people from Planet Sociopath, so that last one -- the solution that any caring human would support -- will not happen.

And lest the rich think they can simply stock up on antibiotics and antivirals and survive the epidemic -- the whole point is that the epidemic bug will be resistant to any existent antibiotic and antiviral. So they'll get sick and die just like everybody else. But because lizard people have lizard brains, apparently they think being cold-blooded sociopaths will save them. It is to laugh.

- Badtux the Warm-blooded Penguin

Viciousness vs. practicality

Two problems regarding the homeless have recently gotten attention here in the Silicon Valley:

1) The problem of homeless people living in run-down motor homes parked by the streets and dumping their raw sewage into the street drains that run to the Bay.

2) The problem of homeless people living on the shores of local streams and crapping in places where rains will wash their crap directly to the Bay.

Needless to say, both of these present water quality issues for San Francisco Bay. So what should we do about them? Here's two possibilities:

1) We can create public dump stations for the motor home people to dump their sewage into and refill their water tanks from, and we can set up porta-potties near homeless encampments so they have a place to shit into rather than directly into the streams, or

2) We can go out and arrest people and throw them into jail for dumping their crap into street drains or shitting into streams.

Which of the above two alternatives do you think would be cheaper? Well, porta-potty rental and weekly cleaning service is around $250/month (deliberately overstating), so figure $3,000/year. A public dump station could be installed near a sewage lift station for fairly cheaply, figure around $5k total, and would basically require no maintenance after that because the incremental costs of processing that sewage are lost in the noise. So figure that for around $50K/year total, you could completely do away with the issue of raw sewage flowing into the bay due to homeless people crapping in the water or dumping their tanks into street drains.

*OR*... you could put ONE SINGLE HOMELESS PERSON into jail for a year for that $50K/year total. And the reality is that you'd need to put HUNDREDS of homeless people into jail to deal with the problem of homeless people crapping into water or dumping their tanks into street drains.

So which alternative do you think the local governments have chosen? Any takers on that one?

Hint: It's the vicious solution, not the practical solution. As usual.

-- Badtux the "Americans are such a vicious bunch of motherfuckers" Penguin

Looters

Me: “I’ve been reading in the newspaper about all the looting going on. It’s a disgrace!”
RWNJ: “Amen, brother. They need to put all those looters in jail!”
Me: “No, jail’s too good for them. We need to bring back the gallows and hang’em all! The nerve of those criminals, stealing people’s properties, destroying everything that people have worked for in their entire lives, taking every bit of money that people ever had!”
RWNJ: “Forget about hanging, that’s too easy for them! Let’s flog’em all, then hang them upside down from a cross until the crows peck their eyes out and they die!”
Me: “Yeah! That’ll teach those bankers!”
RWNJ: “Uhm… wha?”

All snark aside: There's been a fair amount of discussion about the criminality of the current looting/rioting going on in Britain. But whenever you start talking about the causes of the looting, Brits go all Sgt. Shultz on you, "I hear nothing, I hear nothing, nothing!" and accuse you of making excuses for criminals.

Uhm, no. No more than I am making excuses for tornadoes when I describe why tornadoes happen. In both cases, if the conditions are correct, the tornado -- or the rioting and looting -- happens. That's reality. You may whine about reality, you may wish for something different, but reality simply *is*.

And what is reality: Well, it has little to do with current austerity measures which are at best a spark laid into tinder that long predates it. The UK has long had a very stratified society, as you would expect of the only major European nation which still possesses an active royalty. The Thatcher administration pretty much fixed those stratifications in stone by destroying the labor unions and imposing strict classification schemes upon the schools, wherein children are filtered into different tracks early on in their school career based upon how middle class they are err excuse me "standardized tests" which just *coincidentally* measure things that only middle class kids would know. Combine this with the fact that the upper classes go to private ("public") schools that provide a much different education from that provided by the government schools, and the end result is the UK has the worst social mobility of the 20 developed countries in the OECD. If you're born poor in the UK, there's over a 50% chance that you will die poor in the UK. And in certain neighborhoods it's even worse than that. In heavily minority communities there is basically no hope, no future, nothing to lose. There is no respect for the law because there is no respect for them from the law -- for example, over 300 people have died from police beatings over the past ten years without a single British police officer convicted of a crime, meaning that all they see of the law is that it beats them down and kills them. And when there is nothing to lose, when there is no respect for the law, all it takes is a spark, a single spark, and then all hell breaks loose.

At this point comes the tsk tsking, "no, it's not so!" All I'll point out is that these riots don't occur in places like The Hamptons where people have a lot to lose if they riot. These riots occur in the roughest areas where there is nothing to lose. You don't have to believe me. Use your own bloody eyes, for crying out loud. Do you see middle and upper class youths out on the streets looting and rioting? No? Exactly.

So what to do? For Britain to fix the issues that led to this rioting would require either a) a time machine to go back and un-elect Margaret Thatcher and her fixing of the class stratification in Britain into stone, or b) much hard work resolving those issues today, which would require Brits who are not of the lower classes to admit that class is a significant issue and that opportunity must be provided for all or the results will not be good. But in my experience talking with ordinary middle-class Brits about class, the typical reaction is “tosh, you know those lower classes simply lack the drive / intelligence / whatever to succeed.” Apparently the Netherlands, Norway, etc. have more intelligent lower classes? That’s all I can conclude based upon such comments.

Now, in the article above about OECD statistics regarding social mobility, look at who is 3rd from last on that list. Yeppers, the land of (little) opportunity, the United States, which isn't much above Britain on the social mobility scale. Our elites have been doing their own bit of social stratification here in the USA, attempting to create an aristocracy of their own, and apparently feel that Americans are too timid, too cowardly, too... bought... for there to be unrest here like there is in Europe right now. But their current actions, such as the unwise application of the Austerity Fairy's magic Wand of Proctology Job Creation that magically creates jobs out of application of said rough and jagged wand to anal regions of a most unwilling citizenry (or so the Austerians say, even though it has never happened), risk creating a large number of people who have no hope, no future, nothing to lose from rioting. And once that happens all it takes is a spark...

- Badtux the Class Penguin

Poor kids shouldn't go to college

At least, that appears to be the opinion of the editorial writers at Reason. Like most Libertarians, they're of the opinion that if kids are poor, it's because they chose the wrong parents. The poor kids should have just been smart enough to choose comfortably off parents like their own. Duh.

That said, the problem involved here is real: by basically handing out government-subsidized student loans to everybody, not just to poor kids, the Feds basically caused massive tuition inflation as colleges competed to buy the most gilded equipment for their labs and the biggest research names for their faculty. The colleges could not have done these massive tuition hikes if not for the fact that students could now not only be allowed to take out student loans to pay for them, but basically could be *forced* to take out student loans to pay for them, since a year of college is now beyond the financial means of any family that is not independently wealthy.

Furthermore, by shifting aid for poor kids from grants and scholarships to non-dischargable student loans, poor kids are being punished disproportionately when they default on the loans. Poor kids will have a harder time finding a job out of college for reasons out of their control -- poor kids' parents don't have the connections that rich kids' parents have (e.g., my parents were on a first name basis with the owner of a local gas station, not with the CEO of a major computer company like Bill Gates's parents), and because they grew up poor, they don't "dress right" or "talk right"(i.e., like a rich preppie) because that's not how people dress and talk in the 'hood so they have no experience doing it and when they try, they suck at it. The end result is that a poor kid has to be twice as smart as a rich kid to get a job out of college. For the rest, they're condemned to a life on the edges, because with that non-dischargable and too-big-to-ever-pay loan on their record, they can't get a real job (because their wages would get garnished), they can't get a credit card (thus meaning they can't ever use the Internet to purchase things, and given the shift from brick-and-mortar to Internet sales, that basically means they're cut off from a huge swathe of the consumer culture), they can't ever retire and get Social Security (because of a. no work record due to having to take off-the-books jobs, and b. even if they did put in enough on-the-books time, so much of their pitiable $14K/year Social Security allowance would get garnished as to make it impossible to live on).

And finally, the rise of virtually-unregulated private schools funded by all this student loan money and targeting poor kids has had a devastating effect upon poor kids. Poor kids don't have the ability by and large to get into elite colleges, due to lack of decent schools in their neighborhood and lack of exposure to the middle class culture needed to score well on standardized tests (which are basically tests of, well, how middle class you are, there is no -- ZERO -- evidence that standardized tests have any correlation to any fundamental intelligence, just that they accurately predict how middle-class you are and thus how well you will perform at a college that expects a middle-class background). State colleges are overcrowded and often require you to show up year after year to stand in line in hopes of getting one of the few precious slots allocated to in-state students (because they can charge middle-class out-of-state students full price, thus state governments have been cutting in-state slots at state colleges all over the nation to plug their higher education budget holes). What's a somewhat bright but naive poor kid supposed to do?

Well, we know what they do -- they get scammed. In other words, Reason is right that the current system sucks donkey dicks. But you know what Reason's solution the problem is going to be. They're going to say that the Free Market Fairy waving her magic wand all over the higher education field will fix everything -- even though that never happened before the GI Bill educated a generation of Americans who otherwise would have never had access to higher education. In short, Reason's lack of, well, simple acquaintance with actual objective reality makes the Free Market Fairy smile:

Yes, that's one smiling fairy all right...

Oh yeah, solutions?

1. If student loans default because the graduating students can't find jobs within the unemployment deferral period, require the private colleges to pay the loans back, rather than the students. We've told our kids that college is how you get a good job. If we are lying, why should the kids pay the price? (Oh, why do public colleges get a pass here? Because a. they're cheaper than private colleges, and b. it'd just be moving taxpayer money from point a to point b anyhow, so what's the point?)
2. Eliminate federally guaranteed student loans for middle class students. I'm not joking. They're poison. They're financial crack. Middle class parents can do without a new BMW and delay buying that McMansion for a few years to pay their kids' tuition, which, BTW, would be far less because otherwise colleges would have to shutter their doors because nobody could afford to pay out-of-pocket at current tuition rates.
3. BRING BACK FULL TUITION / BOOK GRANTS FOR POOR KIDS. When I was a poor kid going to college, 100% of my tuition and textbook costs were covered by federal grants, and 100% of my room and board for the first year was covered by a state scholarship for gifted and talented students. After that the only thing that I took out loans for was incidental expenses, working multiple part-time jobs was sufficient to handle room and board. The end result was that my final student loan tally was quite modest -- I think I ended up owing something like $5,000 at the end of my college career, not peanuts by the standard of a poor community but hardly something that was going to hang over me for my entire life. But now we're expecting poor kids to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans JUST FOR TUITION AND BOOKS! Which is utterly nuts, given the extremely high chance that they'll never be able to pay it back.
4. Make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy court(and non-reportable for credit purposes) after five years of non-payment. This imposes much the same penalty as bankruptcy for non-payment of student loans -- you won't be able to get a credit card, you won't be able to buy a new car, and so on and so forth -- but there is at least the knowledge that at the end of the period, you can get out from under a debt that's unpayable because Weerip Youoff College didn't provide the education and training that you paid them for. Otherwise we're condemning a huge number of kids to life on the margins, with dire consequences for the future of this nation. And by having that delay, we get rid of the problem of the freshly-minted lawyer or doctor immediately declaring bankruptcy to have his debt discharged, when it's clear that within a few years his income is likely to be sufficient to pay the debt...

So anyhow, that's my solution, as vs. the magic fairy dust wishful thinking of the loonie Libertarian right, whose ideas have never worked in the real world but, like the ardent Marxists, they claim that this is because their ideas have never been properly implemented. Marxists, Libertarians... both loons whose ideas have never worked in the real world, but they still insist, "but they will work this time, for real! We promise!". Uhm, yeah. Forgive me if I roll my eyes and chuckle...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

We already have socialized medicine in America

It's called "Federal Prison". And one man was in such pain that he robbed a bank just to be sent to prison, because that was the only way he could get health care.

America. Where prison, shower-room rapes and all, looks good compared to the alternative. U S A! U S A! U S A! Fuck yeah!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The lizard people's war on children continues

I once wangled my way into one of the Houston Republican Party get-togethers back during the early 90′s and figured out just what they were the moment one of the prominent members started talking about how he was tired of paying his tax money to educate other people’s children (this was a short while after complaining about how he could not find good employees for his business), how public schools were socialism and how people who could not afford to send their children to private schools, as he did, simply shouldn’t have children. I interjected, “but the children didn’t choose to be born, why should they be punished for what their parents did?” He simply sneered “they should have chosen richer parents then.” There was nothing I could say to that, since the man was obviously deranged. You would not know this man, who prefers to stay behind the scenes, but you would know the man he got elected as a Congressman from Houston, a man by the name of Tom DeLay…

They are not only sociopathic scum, but they are utterly deranged, living in an alternate universe where there is no cause and effect relationship between cutting education and not being able to find good employees for your business, an alternate universe where children choose what parents they are born to and thus foster children clearly chose to be born as what they are. The fact that these utter psychopaths are running our nation, more or less, is chilling. Yet: Every single one of these lizard people, these sociopathic scum, got elected by the majority of voters in his or her district. Every… single… one. Does that say that the majority of American voters are evil? Are idiots? Are brainwashed fools? I don’t know, I just don’t see any hope for America. I mean, who would vote for people who propose that we send foster children to school in rags (presumably so that *our* children will know not to associate with them)?

Oh yes, the latest outrage in the lizard people's war on children... homeless woman arrested for THEFT for crime of enrolling her child in school. Because, you see, she didn't have a permanent address in the school district. Or anywhere, for that matter, which is why the federal McKinney-Vento law protecting the right of homeless children to an education was written in the first place, which basically says the school district can't expel homeless children for not having a permanent address in the district. But that didn't stop Republican Mayor Richard Moccia of Norwalk, Connecticut. If you cannot stop the children, he reasoned, then arresting the parents would get those unseemly homeless kids out of the Norwalk schools lickity-split.

Lizard people. Emotionless, empathyless, cold-blooded, with no morality other than greed and avarice. Lizard people. Any person who would arrest a homeless parent for enrolling her child in school is lower than knee-high to a caterpillar. And a *majority* voted for these lizard people! Whether through stupidity or evil…. doesn’t say much for America and Americans. Either we’re too stupid as a nation to continue to exist, or too evil.

-- Badtux the Maudlin(*) Penguin

(*)Who, perhaps fortunately for his liver, is currently unable to drown his sorrows in herring sauce due to recovery from recent stomach disorder, sigh.

GOP Senator proposes "Final Solution"

Ever wonder what the GOP wants to do with all the mentally ill people once served by the mental health programs that their policies have gutted? Well... wonder no more. State Senator Martin Harty (R) of New Hampshire has the solution for that problem -- the *FINAL* solution. As in, the same solution as Hitler's for "defective people": Exterminate them.

Sad to say, the rest of the GOP is likely to publicly cluck in horror, while privately laughing and agreeing with him. How *dare* those defective mentally ill people use *our* tax money to keep themselves somewhat functional and alive! They should all be exterminated, because Jesus said that anybody who wasn't perfect like Him was, like, an untermenschen and stuff, and not worth living. Or somethin' like that. I'm sure I'll find that verse somewhere in my Bible, hmm, maybe in Leviticus 25:35 ... yeah, that's the one :).

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Note: Have now been informed he's a state representative, not a state senator. Mia culpa, I should have checked out a few more links before posting...

Homeless man starves to death in front of Wal-Mart

And nobody notices for days that he's dead, until, likely, a tow truck driver is sent to remove the van, and the smell of dead rotting human causes them to call the police.

This is America. This is what America is like today. Forget all the bullshit about community and charity and compassion and helping hands, if you're poor you have the cooties, the only hand you'll get is the grudging one you get from pestering people until they give you money to go away, if not the back of a hand across your face. And heavens help you if you have too much pride to pester people asking for assistance...

-- Badtux the American Penguin

If the poor didn't exist, we'd have to invent them

The primary use of poverty in America is as a means of social control. That is why the poor here in America must be kept in a situation of abject misery with inadequate housing, education, transportation, and nutrition, and treated like trash, even though our society is clearly wealthy enough to provide enough for the poor that they could live a decent life. But living a decent life would be missing the point of having the poor around. If we didn’t have the poor, we’d have to invent them as a warning to our children, “see, behave in school and study hard or you’ll end up like *them*!” It’s all about social control. The harder we can make it for the poor, the more we can use the threat of being poor as a lever to control our children and our employees. Don’t report corruption to the Feds, ’cause they’ll leak it to us and we’ll black-ball you in this industry and then you’ll be one of them.

The middle class hasn’t forgotten this lesson, that keeping the poor around miserable and downtrodden is both a threat over their own heads (“spout the official ideology, pretend that the bullshit we’re spewing actually means something, or else”) and an opportunity for themselves when it comes to their own children and subordinates. But our oligarchs seem to have forgotten. That’s the only thing I can think, given that they appear intent upon creating far more poor people than are useful or necessary for that object lesson / threat to hang over people’s head. Perhaps they’ve decided that they have sufficient armed thugs in their employ (many wearing badges) that they no longer need more subtle ways of control. Hosni Mubarak thought that too. Just sayin’.

- Badtux the Orwellian Penguin

Are charter schools the solution for urban schooling?

That is a question that Andrew Sullivan asks. And the answer is... no. And yes.

I got to see how charter schools work first-hand when I lived in Arizona. Basically in Arizona if you can afford to hire a certified principal (or are a teacher willing to take the courses for administrator certification) and have a pulse, you can start a charter school. The only regulation is that you a) accurately tell the state how many pupils you have so they send you the right per-pupil monies, and b) actually spend that money educating kids, rather than embezzling it for yourself.

So did it work? The answer is... well, mixed. The horrible things the liberal doomsayers said about charter schools didn't happen -- charter schools did not become modern "segregation academies" for white children, charter schools didn't cherry-pick only the best students and leave the worst for the public schools, etc., what happened was that a lot of teachers of "at-risk" children decided that they could do a better job outside the public schools and started charter schools focused specifically at kids at the lower end of the scale, so there was a wide variety of charter schools formed, not just the segregated academies. The doomsayers also said that charter schools would suck money out of the public schools. That happened, but because the charter schools get less per-pupil monies than the public schools, it turned out that the money taken away was less than what it would have taken to educate the kid in the public schools. Given that the public schools in Arizona were overcrowded because growth had outpaced school construction for years, the net effect was minimal on public school budgets -- they just let the lease lapse on some of their temporary classrooms and the normal turnover of teachers handled the rest.

The problem is, few of the great things that advocates of charter schools promised happened, either. Charter schools in Arizona, on the whole, turn out to educate children no better than the public schools did. And while there were thoughts that large educational companies would come in and start for-profit charter schools even though Arizona has one of the lowest per-pupil funding ratios in the nation and charter schools get even less than that, because "private enterprise is more efficient than public", that turned out to not be true. A couple tested the water, couldn't make money on the per-pupil funding provided by Arizona, and closed up shop in Arizona within a couple of years.

So why didn't charter schools provide a better education in Arizona? Part of the problem is churn. Charter schools proved very prone to "founder burnout". Charter schools were largely formed by master teachers who wanted to teach a specific group of children (say, homeless kids). Handling all the aspects of running a charter school *and* teaching simply sucked the life out of them over the years, and after they burned out and went back to teaching in public schools, the charter schools they founded largely fell apart and disintegrated by the end of the next school year. A bigger part of the problem, however, is institutional. Charter schools don't have the institutional memory of public schools. That's the point, that they would be able to do things better because they were starting out fresh and new without all that baggage. But it turns out that the institutional memory of public schools is important. Those teachers who've been there 28 years turn out to have something to contribute after all, not to mention the decades of textbooks, teaching materials, lab equipment, classroom buildings, sports facilities, etc. that public schools have accumulated over the years. All of which turn out to be more important than public school detractors thought.

The experience issue is especially important here. A teacher with a lot of experience in the public schools is not going to leave for a charter school because he or she is putting in the years for retirement. That means most charter schools are going to be staffed with new teachers either fresh out of college or only a few years on the job. But I'll tell you a secret that's not really a secret: Most new teachers suck. I know. I was one, once. New teachers go into the classrooms and haven't a clue as to how to teach. Our schools of education don't have a clue as to how to teach teachers to teach, and most of a teacher's training in how to manage kids and get kids to understand material happens on the job as he or she tests various techniques and finds out, after a number of years pass, what works based on his personality and the abilities of the children he's teaching. We have studies on this -- basically if you look at student achievement gains and adjust for the socio-economic status of the students, on average experienced teachers simply show more gains than inexperienced teachers.

But by their nature charter schools are churn. The chance of any specific charter school being there 30 years from now is basically nil. The founders will get tired and fold up the school, or it'll lose its lease on its building and fold, or so forth. So at least in Arizona, they're being used by young teachers as their "tryouts" for better public school districts than the one they got a job with just out of college. Sick of teaching inner city kids in South Phoenix? Want to teach rich kids in North Scottsdale but you don't have the years yet to do that? Well, a charter school might just be the place for you!

So what *is* the solution for inner city schools? Well, they have to be institutional changes in how schooling is organized there, which is why charter schools have failed to do any better there -- charter schools have no institutional memory and thus by their nature cannot foster institutional changes. Furthermore, any changes will take *money*. Poor kids come to school lacking a lot of the background of rich kids. The culture shock of being a poor kid in a rich school was pretty dramatic on my part, here's these kids talking about their vacation to Aruba and their psychiatrists and stuff, while in our neighborhood vacation was piling the kids in the rusty third-hand station wagon and taking them to visit relatives who lived 50 miles away and psychiatric help was a belt across the mouth and a "quit talking crazy, fool". We can't take poor kids to Aruba to give them the same experiences as rich kids, but we definitely need to widen their horizons beyond the circumscribed world of no money that they live in.

But in the end, any such changes aren't going to happen as long as the United States continues its current war on the poor. Which means, if you were born to a poor family today, tough luck, kid. You're going to be spat upon, kicked, and treated like shit for the rest of your life, so just get used to it. I was lucky to be part of the last generation of poor kids to come up before Reaganism got a full hold on things, I got an education courtesy of Uncle Sam and the taxpayers and as a result now pay a large amount of taxes every year that I don't mind paying because if it wasn't for other people paying their taxes, I wouldn't be in a position to pay taxes. But the poor kids coming up today... they don't get that. They instead get the opportunity for permanent debt bondage with "student loans", which are actually slavery contracts today because they are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and the banks and government tack on fees forever that make them unpayable if you are currently unable to pay. And poor kids might be poor, but that doesn't make them stupid enough to sign slavery contracts in large numbers... which means they stay poor, which means the U.S. stays poorer because poor kids as smart as me choose other professions like, say, drug dealer, instead, and we're all the worse for it. But hey, kicking the poor when they're down and making sure that not one dime of white people's money goes to them is more important than a strong United States where all smart kids, rich and poor, have a chance at the education needed to contribute to the nation's economy, so...

WASF. And if you're poor, you're doubly-fucked. And we're all the poorer for it.

-- Badtux the Education Penguin

A woman's place is barefoot and pregnant in the home

That, apparently, is what the Republican commissioners of Frederick County, Maryland say.

Note that a woman staying home with the children, in today's day and age, is very much an upper middle class affectation. Nobody who's in the bottom 90% of income can afford it. Simply buying a house in most of the country requires two wage earners, because the median salary in most of the country won't even pay the mortgage note even with today's lower home prices.

So let's get this straight: Republicans in Frederick County, Maryland, just told 90% of the people in the county "yo, go live on the street, you bums." Because you can't afford to live in that (fairly expensive) county on a single wage-earner's income... well, unless you're a corrupt Republican politician in the top 10% of wage earners, anyhow.

-- Badtux the "Well, at least it wasn't cake" Penguin

Never had a chance

Life, and death, of one of the "beneficiaries" of "trickle-down economics".

-Badtux the Sad Penguin

The Party of Rape

The Republicans have introduced a bill that will change the definition of rape as used to determine whether an abortion can be funded. Under the new definition of rape as proposed by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), rape isn't rape unless you have the bruises to show it. But I'll let someone else tell you about it -- "Under the proposed law, for example, women who become pregnant after being drugged and raped would get no assistance. And children molested by sexual predators would get no assistance unless they were sufficiently beaten."

Yes, I just linked to Charles Johnson's disgusting right-wing blog Little Green Footballs. When a bill is so disgusting that even Chuckles is disgusted by it, you know it's disgusting.

The Republican Party's message: Sorry foster kids, you got raped, you gotta bear your rapist's baby to term unless ya got the bruises to prove it. That's just plain wrong. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

The Obamapublican Plan

Preznit Hopey Changey is shocked, shocked I say, that his base hates his giveaway to the rich. Looking at the graph above (courtesy of DKos), I have NO idea why he would be so shocked....

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Natural causes

In case, as time goes along, you're wanting to know how many Americans are starving, freezing, or otherwise dying because of the failure of Austerian economics at the zero bounds, look for two words: "Natural causes". Those are words that coroners always put on the death certificate when someone starves to death or dies of exposure here in America. Because, y'know, telling the truth might offend someone, yo.

BTW, this is not new. This has been the code for at least 100 years. When people at the end of the 19th century couldn't find work and starved to death (no food stamps or anything like that back then, y'know), that's what was on their death certificate: "natural causes". Reminds me of those folks hawking "all-natural supplements"... arsenic and cyanide are natural too, y'know?

-- Badtux the Helpfully Snarky Penguin

An encounter

I first notice her vaguely on the bread aisle as I steer my grocery cart around her where she is standing looking at bread -- a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, healthy and beautiful in the way of 60's folk-singer girls with straight light-brown hair down to just below her shoulder blades and a clear complexion. She is standing slightly splay-footed in the flat multi-colored sneakers that are the current fad, and wearing clearly second-hand tight jeans and t-shirt. I move on to the frozen foods aisle. Then after I pick up my frozen pizza I round the corner and she is looking at the display of birthday cakes with an expression on her face that I have a hard time placing. It is not a happy expression, but it is not an expression of yearning either. Then I place it from my own childhood, it is an expression of unhappy acceptance that fancy expensive store-bought birthday cakes are not in her present or in the foreseeable future as see-able by a young child. It is the expression of a child standing outside the front window of an expensive store that she knows she never, ever, will be able to walk into and buy something.

Someone calls her and I notice a young man who looks more like her big brother than her father. He has the scruffy look of a handy-man, a resident of a world that most people who live in the Silicon Valley know nothing about. She follows him, with an expression of her face that is as joyless as the most forbidding desert, and I think to myself, "This is a girl who has not known much joy in her life." Which seemed a shame, because she was so young and healthy and beautiful in a wholesome sort of way. They walk towards the express lane as I push my cart to a regular lane.

As I push my cart out the front door of the store towards my Jeep, I notice them getting into a rusty old pickup truck that looks like it's being held together by rattle-can spray paint that has painted it in a vaguely camouflage pattern of various colors of primer. The truck starts up with a cloud of blue smoke and heads for the exit from the shopping center. I put my groceries in my Jeep, take my cart back to the front of the store, and head back to my Jeep and go out a different exit. My exit has a green light. I look to my left and see that their exit had a red light. I suspect that their exit always has a red light, regardless of which exit they pick. I turn right onto El Camino Real and head east. Their light turns green and they head east too, in the left lane whereas I am in the right lane. Their truck turns left into a place I know, a cheap hotel where a local homeless agency occasionally rents by-the-week hotel rooms for homeless families. I go straight, now knowing why the young girl had such a joyless air about her.

Just another day in the Silicon Valley -- the richest area of the richest nation on the planet Earth. Just another day.

-- Badtux the Observant Penguin