Our Future Will be Hunger Games USA

[cwo_ghwebb]

The nation is already accustomed to watching “reality shows” where ordinary folk — their foibles and failures — are served up as entertainment. And we’re already comfortable with an idea of separate standards for the elite folk who fly private jets to global warming conferences and the rest of us, who are meant to stay home and hang out the wash.

So, these two headlines crawling across my twitter timeline, one right behind the other, did not surprise me at all:

1) Most Literate City is Washington DC: well, that’s not really surprising. People with degrees from good schools (who have both connections and student loans) need to go where the jobs are, and our expanding government has created lots of excellent-paying jobs with good benefits. Lots of bureaucrats need to be put in place to oversee and enforce all of the new rules-for-little-people being signed into law.

2) California No Longer Requiring Eight Graders to Take Algebra. The reasoning is, the kids can’t do it, aren’t ready for it, particularly minority kids. So, rather than find ways to help bring them up to speed, let’s just make it easier, and deliver the message that we don’t expect much from them, anyway.

I read that and think back to the nuns who taught us in elementary school — and our classes usually had between 40-50 kids. We were not all “great learners”; some of us were coming from very dysfunctional home situations — alcoholism, abuse, neglect, scant funds — but they made sure we learned. They expected us to, and because that message was clear, we did.

Our Future Will be Hunger Games USA

This woman is really observant and worth reading daily.

[BOP]

Not the best quality video, but it's the message that's important.

[Lurk]

. . .out of a good education.



To followup up on your post.

[GURPS (Premo)]

from a link out of your linked article ....

The New Age of Falsity
Four legs good, two legs better.

If an unemployment rate of 7.9 percent and the economy shrinking by 0.01 percent a year — with a fifth consecutive $1 trillion annual deficit — are indicators of recovery, what would the old 5 percent unemployment, 4 percent growth in GDP, and $300 billion annual deficits mean? Or do the meaning of words and the nature of “facts” depend on who is in the White House at the time, or rather on whether the president is trying to make us more equal or to enrich the 1 percent?

At key points, whole controversies vanish without a trace. Suddenly, about four years ago, Guantanamo was no longer a gulag. Then it became no longer much of anything — in the manner that renditions, preventive detention, tribunals, and drone assassinations likewise disappeared from public discourse even as they became institutionalized.

We can scarcely remember now that the country tore itself apart over the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists, as it snoozes through its government blowing apart 2,500 suspected terrorists — and anyone caught in their general vicinity when the drone missiles hit. I think the logic must have been that a reactionary George Bush wished to waterboard a few confessed terrorists more just to bend the law than to derive any information that might save Americans — whereas Barack Obama actually reads the great ethical philosophers as he “reluctantly” signs off on targeted assassinations that have no doubt saved more people than he ordered killed. And we have to understand that if we were to object to such a kill tally, we would thereby be endangering the greater good to come at home over bothersome details abroad.

[tommyjo]

Originally Posted by cwo_ghwebb

Our Future Will be Hunger Games USA

This woman is really observant and worth reading daily.

"Observant"? You must have a different definition of the word.

Your "woman...worth reading daily" is flat out wrong on point #1.

Any one who actually reads the employment report and checks historical data (your "observant woman" obviously doesn't) knows this. But those pesky facts don't fit with the "Hunger Games" theme do they?

[thurley42]

Originally Posted by tommyjo

"Observant"? You must have a different definition of the word.

Your "woman...worth reading daily" is flat out wrong on point #1.

Any one who actually reads the employment report and checks historical data (your "observant woman" obviously doesn't) knows this. But those pesky facts don't fit with the "Hunger Games" theme do they?

Waiting your data to back up your claims.