A David Johnson, of many.
It’s a rare thing for a book to conclude and your biggest complaint be that there quite wasn’t enough of it. Yet, that’s what Darnell L. Moore accomplished with his memoir No Ashes in the Fire.
It’s an impressive work of introspection, family heritage, and the intersectionality of race, sexuality, gender, and even faith, all the more so because it’s done in beautiful prose.
Fifty Million Rising by Saadia Zahidi is that rare book that does everything it sets out to do then goes beyond it.
Zahidi’s look at the cohort of “The Generation of Working Women Transforming the Muslim World” (239 pages / Hatchette) doesn’t contradict itself, but golly is it large and containing multitudes. It couldn’t be anything less and still true, spanning as it does 30 Muslim-majority countries from North Africa all the way to Southeast Asia.
HUMAN 1
1. Lack of education means a lot of people can’t actually determine what economic policies are good for them or bad for them.2. People who can’t discern the effects policy decisions will have on them latch onto any explanation that sounds adequate by people they trust and believe.
3. Politicians who wish to manipulate the uneducated and ignorant tell these people what they want to hear rather than present sound policy decisions because these people do not understand policies.
4. Once people have heard a politician tell them what they want to hear they will associate the policy decisions these politicians advocate for as being good for them.
5. When no one understands the effects certain policy decisions will have you can pretty much argue any policy decision as being good for anybody as long as you sound convincing. For example: “We should lower taxes to create jobs. With lower taxes more companies will have more money to create jobs.” People want to hear how they will get more jobs. Lowering taxes does mean companies will have more money so they could hire more people this ought to work.” Then people assume the job tbey get will be a good job so they don’t worry about social programs since they won’t need them once they have a job which lower taxes will get them.
If you’re saying education, you’re missing a step.
Southerners could have improved their school systems long ago.
White Southerners, and rural people in general, are voting for their interests. They’re just voting for their interests relatively instead of absolutely.
To feel like you’re doing better, you need to be doing better than someone else. It’s more important to put a floor under you and have people in a status you can never descend to—a status they can never climb from—because then you have security.
Continue reading “‘Why are people in the south Republican when they should be fiscally liberal?’”
Continued from racism and inequality.
HUMAN 1:
I think there is a misunderstanding on what the inequality with college is. It isn’t the cost. There are scholarships and people of color have easier access and thanks to affirmative action often easier standards to get in. The money isn’t the problem. The problem is affirmative action, scholarships, whatever, don’t do anything because they don’t address the problem of why they need to curve downward to increase enrollment in the first place. Which is impoverished environment. It is that they started out poor that put them behind. By the time college rolls around it is already too late. If we legit want to help poor people and minorities we need to get them out of poverty. The current system is useless.
That’s part of it, sure. We agree. And attending schools with the materials and funding to provide quality education, and being in a socio-economic life situation where you even can focus on doing homework instead of other concerns. Yeah, this is an issue that’s over-determined, absolutely.
But specifically with wealth, there are not nearly enough scholarships available that will cover the cost of tuition, books, housing, and other living expenses at a quality university. Continue reading “The model makes the minority”
Mother’s concern of ‘divided nation’ forces school to pull classic books
ACCOMAC, Va. (WAVY) —Two classic American novels have been temporarily pulled from book shelves in Accomack County Public Schools.
Superintendent Warren Holland confirmed to 10 On Your Side that a parent filed a complaint about “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
POLL: Should Accomack County Public Schools ban “To Kill A Mockingbird” & Huck Finn? The novels are currently suspended due to racial slurs.
— Katie Collett (@KatieCollettTV) December 1, 2016
Continue reading “We have to grade the past on a curve but not the present”
An analysis of Silicon Valley’s 2015 economy released this week by the think tank Joint Venture found that on average, women in the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties earned far less than men even when comparing similar educational attainment.
This wasn’t a surprising result, but the extent was: men in Silicon valley are paid 61 percent, or $34,000 more per year, than women when both have bachelor’s degrees, versus San Francisco proper (men are paid 20% more), California (41% more), and the U.S. as a whole (48% more), by the index authors’ measure.
I know how you people are, so I know after the first 50 words, you stop reading my column and end up mistaking me for columnist Nathaniel Miller at the grocery store.
So this week, I want you to know you have a homework assignment. Go to Facebook.com/OAeducation, like the page and do your best to answer the STAAR exam questions education reporter Caylor Ballinger posts to the page each day. You will not be graded, but you may have the satisfaction of being able to say you’re smarter than a ninth grader. Maybe.
Continuing:
The other day, Ray Bradbury died at age 91.
Continue reading “Neal Stephenson is the LeBron James of sci-fi”
In my younger, more mentally virile days I could have written a very, or at least somewhat, sophisticated allegory using President Obama to represent all the various recent abuses of local-government transparency as opposed to open records laws written and intended.
Continue reading “This is a democracy; we get the government we deserve”
ADJ 