Category: Teaching

There is a years long grisly struggle between ethnic groups in Darfur — with one government-backed militia brutalizing civilians with ethnic connections to the guerrilla rebels they fight. There is a refugee crisis, starvation, drought, and horrible violence.

The conflict in Darfur is complicated. It has several causes, and the people who fight sometimes do so for different reasons. Sudan is riddled with deep ethnic divides, fueled by the colonialism that favored one ethnic group over others. There is political posturing and finger pointing in Khartoum that might occupy a handful of doctoral theses on the subject before we understand it all. But at least two of the reasons this conflict persists are rooted in ecojustice: desertification and oil. And that oil doesn’t even lie under Darfur.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

Welcome to a new but old series that is all about photography. Do you have any photos or information about photography to share?

Yesterday’s diary was about snow pictures on a perfect blue sky day in Van Cortlandt Park. Tonight’s represents something a bit more challenging, trying to capture the snow as it is falling.

It’s not so easy and I really should have worn a hat and some gloves.

So if your in the mood for another snowy park, than take a walk below the fold for a park in a blizzard.  

I have never been a stranger to admitting when I have been wrong.  My philosophy is that is better to be wrong than to have no opinion.  Since I write many of my thoughts here and at Kos, I am never short for feedback to show me how I am wrong, and I actually appreciate it.  I always strive for accuracy, and welcome any corrections.

I have been very wrong about Limbaugh.  I started listen to him around 1993 (please do not ask why, because the answer is extremely convoluted and very personal, [thanks, Cruz]) so we will not go there.  Please follow my thoughts.

There seem to be more adverts on the TeeVee than content.  I guess that is why it only costs from $20 to $50 a month for “free” TeeVee.

Some adverts are amusing, some are less than amusing, and some are just insulting.  Please keep with me as I look at a few that I find in each category.

originally posted by Will Urquhart at Sum of Change

Last week, we introduced Kenyon Farrow of Queers for Economic Justice, Calvin Williams of the Generational Alliance, and Althea Erickson of the Freelancers Union. They shared with us a brief summary of how their organizations had adopted some online tools.

This week, they delve into some of the challenges they faced along the way, and some insight into how they overcame them:

Some say that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. But what do we know about our early universe and how we got here? How do we know that our ideas about the early universe are right? What is dark matter and dark energy and why do we think it exists in the first place?

All of the matter in the universe expanded from a single point. It doesn’t matter much what that means, though. To beg the question is to ask what happened before time began. And because of events that happened during the the inflationary epoch, we can no longer see all of the details of how the universe looked at the beginning of time.

But we won’t ask those questions today. Here we will talk about the current state of cosmology given by The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe — the reigning Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation [CMBR] experiment that gives us our best data from the early universe. Within a year, though, we expect a new and improved data set from The Planck Satellite.

Cheney is on a lying tour about torture again.

Mr. Cheney said interrogators should have had the option to use the “enhanced interrogation techniques” his administration approved-including the use of simulated drowning, or “water-boarding.” He called himself “a big supporter of water-boarding,” which critics say amounts to torture.

“Now, President Obama has taken [those techniques] off the table,” Mr. Cheney said. “He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake.”

Enhanced interrogation techniques aren’t torture — the Bush Administration approved them, right???

Well, I am back now.  I had planned to provide an installment last week, but I had a bad cold and just did not feel much like setting at the keyboard.

Personally, I do not mind the coughing nor the sneezing, or even the sore throat.  The one thing that bothers me the worst is to lose my ability to thermocompensate, such that I feel either cold or hot when I should be in my comfort zone of temperature.  Aspirin assists me to regulate a bit better, but being well is the better feeling.

I guess that I am one of those “elite eggheads” that Rush Limbaugh (college flunkout and several times divorced, in addition to being a self proclaimed drug addict), Sean Hannity (college dropout), Glenn Beck (college dropout and divorced, and a self proclaimed alcoholic), Bill O’Reilly (who has a BA and and MA and a settled case of sexual harassment), Greta van Susteren (with a law degree from Gerogetown, and returned to teach law there), and the mighty eye candy Gretchen Carlson, the Miss America whose nanny was not any other than the bizarre Michele Bachmann, now in Congress from the diverse state of Minnesota. By the way, Carlson has a degree in the liberal (socialist) field of Sociology.

So the radical right goes from the ignorant to the well educated.  I guess that I do not fit in well.

We see images of Darfur on our computer screens, with people like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Don Cheadle raising awareness about the mounting humanitarian crisis in that region of the Sudan and Chad. But to make the story clear, they tend to speak of Darfur as an isolated conflict inside Sudan; the greater context of the crisis does not change the dire need for aid and intervention.

But the reasons behind the conflict in Darfur are complicated, and they cannot be separated from Sudanese civil war history. The conflict in Darfur started as an uprising against the Sudanese government by the Fur and other farmers in the region because they were marginalized and excluded from the peace negotiations toward ending the Second Sudanese Civil War…

Book review: Garrison, Mark J.  A Measure of Failure: The Political Origins of Standardized Testing.  Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2009. 140 pages.

Essentially Garrison’s book critiques standardized testing in the public schools as a power trip — what type of power trip a particular test is for, Garrison argues, depends upon the standards which are erected and the purposes to which the final scores on the tests are used.  It is argued, then, that standardized tests have had different purposes in different historical periods.  The high-stakes testing regime of the No Child Left Behind Act (of the Bush administration) is argued to be destructive (in this regard) of public schooling in general.

(Crossposted at Orange)

originally posted by Mitch Malasky at Sum of Change

This week, we are going to follow up on last week’s post on the numbers you need to win your election.  This week, we’re looking at special circumstances and unique elections and how that may or may not effect how you set your numbers.