DISCUSSION
GROUP
The search was a surprise. The high school lacrosse team in Easton, Md., had boarded its bus when the principal and other administrators arrived, announcing that gear bags would be checked. A tip had come in about athletes carrying alcohol.
Sun
29
Apr
2012
White Killer Whale: Scientists Prepare To Find 'Iceberg,' Thought To Be Albino Orca (VIDEO)
A team of scientists from Russia is preparing for an expedition to track down a rare all-white killer whale that hasn't been seen since it was spotted 18 months ago.
Sun
29
Apr
2012
Global malaria elimination is at a crucial juncture
From UN WIRE
Some 3.3 billion people are at risk of contracting malaria, a preventable disease that killed 655,000 and afflicted 216 million in 2010, primarily in the developing world. On World Malaria Day, the world is at a critical juncture in its massive effort to halt and reverse malaria in what former British Prime Minister Tony Blair calls the "most achievable" of the Millennium Development Goals.
For more see Voice of America (4/24), The Huffington Post (4/24)
Sun
29
Apr
2012
In Maryland, a rare reversal of suspensions for two lacrosse players
Sun
29
Apr
2012
May Day
May Day
Noam Chomsky, Reader Supported News 29 April 12
eople seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of
America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called "Law Day" -- a day of jingoist fanaticism,
like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement's organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and
perhaps eventual revolution.
Sun
29
Apr
2012
With Bo Xilai’s ouster, China’s premier pushes more reform
From The Washington Post By ,
BEIJING — Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has seized upon the ouster of his Communist Party rival Bo Xilai to reinvigorate what had until recently seemed a lonely campaign for Western-style economic liberalization and a battle against corruption.
Fri
27
Apr
2012
Fighting Senate gridlock through self-restraint
Washington Post Opinions
by Carl Levin and Lamar Alexander
Carl Levin, a Democrat, represents Michigan in the Senate. Lamar Alexander, a Republican, represents Tennessee in the Senate.
The U.S. Senate — one-half of one branch of our government and an institution crucial to resolving serious issues before our country — is routinely described as dysfunctional, gridlocked and broken. We feel obligated to do something about it.
That’s why we went to the Senate floor last week to encourage our colleagues to embrace a classic virtue: self-restraint.
Fri
27
Apr
2012
Borders
A very instructive series of examples of various borders:
http://www.quackit.com/html/codes/html_borders.cfm
Fri
27
Apr
2012
Bulletin Board
****
Check to see if you have a malicious virus on your computer
****
For an article about the virus, seeing if you have it and fixing it if you do.
More directly - a list of URLs to test if you have the virus
Thu
26
Apr
2012
BP Blamed for Ongoing Health Problems
Truthout Saturday, 21 April 2012 11:49 By Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera English
Gulf Coast residents and clean up workers have found chemicals present in BP's oil in their own bloodstreams. For the full story press here
Thu
26
Apr
2012
Bo Xilai scandal: China president 'was wire-tapped'
From BBC News
Bo Xilai ran a wire-tapping system that extended as far as China's president, the New York Times has reported.
Thu
26
Apr
2012
A princeling's fall in China
Tue
24
Apr
2012
How Can I Avoid Being Infected with Badware?
Badware takes advantage of technical vulnerabilities and human behavior to find its way onto personal computers. While nothing can guarantee absolute security, the following steps can reduce your computer’s exposure to badware. At the bottom of this page, you will see links to websites with additional information.
Tue
24
Apr
2012
UN to investigate plight of US Native Americans for first time
From The Guardian
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Sunday 22 April 2012 12.20 EDT
The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.
The human rights inquiry led by James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples, is scheduled to begin on Monday.
Tue
24
Apr
2012
WARNING
****
Check to see if you have a malicious virus on your computer
****
For an article about the virus, seeing if you have it and fixing it if you do.
More directly - a list of URLs to test if you have the virus
Mon
23
Apr
2012
American Nuns Reject Vatican's Orders
23 April 12
Last week, the order came down from the Vatican. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization that represents 80% of the nuns in the US, was chastised for "focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping ‘silent' on abortion and same-sex marriage."
Mon
23
Apr
2012
The Unlearned Lessons of the BP Gulf Disaster
21 April 12
The BP disaster reminded the American people about some essential truths relating to corporate behavior, the need for regulatory controls over corporations, the need for effective sanctions.
Sun
22
Apr
2012
Gulf Aquatic Wildlife Deformities Alarm Scientists
Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause.
By Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera English |
New Orleans, Louisiana - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."
Sun
22
Apr
2012
Culture of India by Rajs (QQ: Learning Paradise)
Rajs introduced Learning Paradise to the country of India by quoting the following:
From HubPages.com By JYOTI KOTHARI
India is a big country with diverse topography and climate that allows variety of wild life to grow. Indian province Rajasthan has multi-variety wild life because of its typical geographical conditions. There is Thar desert in Rajasthan at one side and Vindhyan track at another. Aravali, the oldest mountains in the world passes through Rajasthan. There are many sanctuaries, bird sanctuaries and National parks in Rajasthan including Ghana, Ranathambore, Sariska etc.
Sat
21
Apr
2012
How Malawi Fed Its Own People
The New York Times
By JEFFREY D. SACHS
Published: April 19, 2012
President Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi died on April 5 of a heart attack at the age of 78. His countrymen, suffering a massive economic and political crisis, seem to have declared good riddance. Some of his rogue allies apparently tried to hold on to power after his death, but democracy prevailed with the installation of the vice president, Joyce Banda, to the presidency. President Banda inherits an acute crisis much of which was Mutharika’s making.
Sat
21
Apr
2012
A letter from my Senator: Carl Levin
Levin, McCain: GAO report shows China is failing to crack down on bogus electronic parts Monday,
March 26, 2012
WASHINGTON – A government investigative report released today provides further evidence that China is failing to crack down on the flood of bogus electronic parts making their way into U.S. military systems and endangering the safety of U.S. troops and U.S. national security.
Fri
20
Apr
2012
'Huge' water resource exists under Africa
From BBC NEWS
By Matt McGrath
Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a
vast reservoir of groundwater.
Fri
20
Apr
2012
After Bo's fall, Chongqing victims seek justice
Wed
18
Apr
2012
Quotes Ra to Rz
Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady, USA
October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962
An astute politician, dedicated feminist,
and champion of the rights of minorities
Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual,you have an obligation to be one.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945
President of the USA 1933-1945
We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we now know that it is bad economics
- - - -
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the
abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
- - - -
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
- - - -
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
- - - -
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.
- - - -
It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
- - - -
When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.
- - - -
When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
June 19, 1947 -
British Indian novelist and essayist
The real adventure in 'Moby Dick' is the one that happens inside Captain Ahab. The rest is a fishing tripBertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970
British philosopher, logician,
mathematician, historian, and social critic
and Nobel Laureate
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
- - - -
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
Wed
18
Apr
2012
Quotes Ha to Hz
Nathaniel Hawthorne
July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864
American Novelist and Short Story Writer
Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Evelyn Hines
Middle School Teacher
Often, when reading assigned text, students ask me what they should be "looking for.
My reply is always the same:
If you already know what you're looking for, then that is all you will find.
Hippocrates
460-377 BCE
Father of Medicine
Walking is man's best medicine.
Eric Hoffer
July 25, 1902-May 21, 1983
American writer on social issues
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Billie Holiday
1915-1959
American Jazz singer and Songwriter
You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
Wed
18
Apr
2012
Quotes Ma to Mz
Henry Maudsley
1835-1918
American Psychiatrist,
Philosopher and Entrepreneur
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.
H.L. Mencken
1880-1956
American Journalist, Essayist,
Magazine editor, Satirist,
Critic of American Life and Culture,
And A Scholar Of American English
Known as the Sage of Baltimore
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
Michel de Montaigne
1533-1592
French Essayist
Was one of the most influential
Writers of the French Resistance
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
John Muir
1838-1914
Scottish-born
American Naturalist and Explorer, Author,
and Early Advocate of
Preservation of Wilderness
in the United States
The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
Wed
18
Apr
2012
Quotes Na to Nz
Ogden Nash
1902-1971
American poet well known for his light verse
I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.
Reinhold
Niebuhr
1892-1971
American theologian
and commentator on public affairs
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.