On October 20 and 21st, 2007, Blumenthal attended the Value Voters Summit, “a massive gathering hosted by the Colorado-based Christian right mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, and its Washington lobbying arm, the Family Research Council.”

I admire Blumenthal’s work.  He sticks his nose under the tent to allow us to see what ordinary and celebrity neocons really think.  We get access to unvarnished ultra-conservatism at the click of a “Play” button, thanks to his persistent digging.  

This particular convention, the Value Voters Summit lets you see the far right the way they see each other.  It’s not the diluted version that they present when the national news shows come calling.  

For other videos by Blumenthal, see here (The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour) and here (his personal effort to draft College Republicans).

[If you found Blumenthal's video interesting, check out this 2007 Bill Moyers video regarding yet another ultra-conservative convention]

Here’s another of those memorable videos making the rounds on Stumbleupon.com.  It’s well worth a viewing or three or five. 

I have a seven year old daughter. It would be fun to watch her play the drums as well as this seven year old guy, but that will never happen. Not that I’m at all disappointed!

This is a truly extraordinary exhibition. This video left both of us shaking our heads. It is a performance originally aired on the Johnny Carson Show many years ago. I don’t know the specifics, and I can’t quite make out the name of the drummer. I’m wondering whether he ended up making a living as a professional drummer . . .

What does “No Child Left Behind” mean in real-life classrooms? I’ve discussed this topic with several grade school teachers. They are uniformly distressed that NCLB narrows the focus of classroom instruction to the point where children are too often “taught” factoids, ephemeral bits of information that will allow them to pass a test without significantly advancing their ability to understand the world around them.

Jonathan Kozol writes passionately about this point at this Huffpo post:

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation’s schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic “teaching to the test” it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

When I ask them why they’ve grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it’s the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of “state of siege,” as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

“I didn’t study all these years,” a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me — she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses — “in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems.”

Kozol raises the issue of what to do about the many dysfunctional inner-city schools. It is, after all, a tragedy that we have so many buildings that look like schools but don’t function like schools. I happen to live near several dysfunctional inner-city schools. No thoughtful parent with options to do otherwise would willingly send their kids to such “schools.” I wrote about one teacher’s experience in one such school. I invite you to read the words of this conscientious teacher, who I called “Geri Anderson.” The epilogue to that troubling story is that “Geri’s” contract was not renewed. I have heard it over and over (from teachers and ex-teachers) that inner-city school teachers who show heartfelt enthusiam and creativity can expect to burn out or get fired in short order. In fact, one of my neighbors volunteered to tutor at that same school for several years. She spoke up last year when she noticed that a 2nd grader was getting none of the special education he required (and that school documents indicated he was getting). Epilogue II: My neighbor, the volunteer, was consequently “fired” (told that her services were no longer needed).

How do we fix these problem schools? I hate to sound like a broken record, but media reform is a big part of this problem (and most other big problems too). Stories of what it’s really like to go to these types of schools should be on the front page of local newspapers every day until we address the situation with real changes. We do have lots of available space on the newspaper front page–it’s often filled with advertising disguised as articles and other feel-good stories such as how to purchase a special Halloween-theme leash for your dog. Advertisers don’t like stories about failing schools, though. It makes people feel that they should tax themselves enough to fix the problem. It makes them feel guilty about buying those diamond bracelets, sporty new cars and the other non-essentials advertised in the paper.

Depriving children, our next generation of adults, of real education is a bill we will pay, within our lifetimes, with the high costs of prisons and social services. That’s the message that should be front and center every day.

Kozol is correct, in my opinion, that one important way to help the schools is to quit foisting NCLB onto teachers. Great teachers and good teachers don’t teach in ways that obsess with the narrow-minded tests required by NCLB. After all, when they grow up, these kids aren’t going to find jobs that require them to take trivial quizzes. They will need to know how to think so that they can continually tool up to meet the needs of jobs that don’t even exist today.

Kozol goes further, advocating a new round of inter-district busing, a system not based on race. I’m wary of such an approach for many reasons, however. Mainly, it’s an approach that doesn’t force bad schools to become better. Why not spend limited money on more teachers and better teachers rather than bus drivers? Politicians advocating another round of busing have no chance of getting elected in most of the U.S.

Instead, why not publish a constant steam of media stories about what it’s really like to attend class in a dysfunctional school. Cut the classroom photo ops and show the citizens that too many of the kids in the classroom are not getting a meaningful education. Do it until people can’t stand to see these articles anymore. If people stop reading the papers because they don’t want to do anything about this massive problem, then we have a much bigger problem, indeed. Especially in light of the fact that it makes economic sense to address this problem. Fixing this problem should appeal the self-interest of everyone.

In the meantime, Kozol is right that the status quo is intolerable. We need to put an end to fake education; no more bandaids. No more big government programs that actually make education worse. NCLB is a fraud being perpetrated on the public. It defrauds parents who send their kids to the horrible schools and it defrauds a public that assumes that other people’s kids are being educated when they are actually being turned into resentful robots. Those kids are being taught to be turned off by anything that goes by the name of “education.” That’s the state of education in all too many of our public schools.

I realize I’m on a Youtube kick these days. But there are some pretty amazing things to see. For instance, this impressive collection of tornadoes.

Visit this site and enjoy a lush minute of sites and sounds from BBC Motion Gallery.

I caught this on Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Daily Dish.

The premise? What if Mary Poppins was made into a horror film? Here’s what:

Long before political Bush-bashing became popular, or even widely accepted, critics still jabbed him repeatedly for his speech. Books of “Bushisms”, videos of Bush’s misspeakings spliced together, and comedic reproductions of the man’s halting, confused language have always dominated the pop culture reception of the President.

I use the word President specifically because Bush didn’t always speak this way. As Governor, he had at least a modicum of eloquence, and certainly much more speech-giving poise. How could a skilled and well-prepared speaker become the awkward cannon-fodder mess of a President we have today?

Back in 2004, James Fallows, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, weighed in on the Kerry/Bush debates. Fallows ended up ruminating, however, on the great disparity between Bush’s past speaking ability as Governor, and his blundering debating skills of the present. The initial, layperson’s diagnosis held that perhaps Bush had developed some kind of dyslexia.

But dyslexia doesn’t just pop up, out of nowhere, to plague a middle-aged man. Upon viewing the in-depth comparison of young Bush’s and old Bush’s speaking skills, some physicians saw the clear signs of presenile dementia. The connection broke when one such physician sent a letter to The Atlantic, saying:

“Bush’s problems have been developing slowly, and that just a decade ago he was an articulate debater, ‘artful indeed in steering questions and challenges to his desired subjects,’ who ‘did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones.’

Consider in contrast, the present: ‘the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid,’ ‘Bush’s recent faltering performances,’…’his stalling, defensive pose when put on the spot,’ ’speaking more slowly and less gracefully.’

Slowly developing cognitive deficits, as demonstrated so clearly by the President, can represent only one diagnosis, and that is ‘presenile demential’!”

This informal diagosis shook up the blogosphere, and inspired a few other doctors to give an opinion on Bush’s degenerating language ability. These distant, unofficial conclusions can tell us nothing for certain, of course, but they nonetheless pose an interesting matter to consider. To witness the “evidence” of presenile dementia yourself, check out this video, which compares speeches given by Governor Bush with President Bush.

If you Google “Paris Hilton Jail” you’ll get 15 million hits. If you Google “Downing Street Memo” you’ll get only 800,000 hits. A terrifying real-world topic, “Greenland ice sheet,” will only return 900,000 hits. I suppose it’s because there are no videos of memos or glaciers having sex.

What brought me to the topic of Paris Hilton (other than my world salad mood) might be my fascination with how folks use Google. It astounds me whenever I notice the sexually graphic search strings that bring some people to this site. I don’t know who you are (the feds know who you are, but I don’t). Website traffic software, however, allows me to view your search queries if you click on a Google result that brings you to this site. Lots of kinky stuff. I hope those of you who stumble onto this site in that manner won’t be disappointed, even though you really won’t find the kinds of things for which you are apparently looking. I’m not trying to be preachy, but maybe you can afford to take a break from all that stuff, at least once in a while, and come to this website on purpose.

I really don’t know anything about Paris Hilton, other than that she is famous because of a sex video and that she is otherwise famous because she is famous. Those millions of Google hits (the jail episode involves merely one small slice of her life) really speak to the power of vapid celebrity. But this is a word salad post, so I am at liberty to move on to discuss the next thing that comes to my mind.

After work, I commute home past a stadium where the St. Louis Cardinal Baseball team plays. I often do wonder whether baseball fans are more out of shape than football fans or basketball fans. Here’s a thought experiment I’ve never run because I don’t want a broken jaw: Try greeting every single fan who comes through the baseball stadium turnstiles by saying, “You need to lose 25 pounds. You would be correct 60%of the time. If anyone want to run this experiment, I’ll be happy to watch.

People often excel at what they do most often. If people sit, eat and watch athletes that mostly stand and spit, that has real-life consequences. Fans who engage in this activity much of the time really get good at sitting, eating and watching. Ironically, in my experience, most fans don’t actually pay attention to the baseball game even after paying lots of money for a ticket to get into the stadium. It must be all of those distracting advertising posters and videos, I assume.

Now don’t get all bent out of shape. Professional baseball athletes are capable of doing many things I will never be able to do. They are exquisitely skilled. But here’s the irony: most professional baseball players don’t exercise much during the competition. Only when it’s “time out” do they get busy taking practice swings, taking ground balls, stretching, running sprints and coming in and out of the dugout. When it’s time in, however, there really aren’t many calories burned on the field. Just stare at the outfields and all of those guys sitting in the dugout and you’ll see that I’m correct.

There can’t be much debate on this lack of exercise issue. But now, answer this: Playing what sport will burn the fewest calories? Baseball loses hands down. No question. Therefore, we sign up our kids to play soccer and basketball over tee-ball, right? Not in this town. We can’t wait to take our kids out to a baseball diamond to get very little exercise, well before their little muscles can even function well enough to make a match meaningful. That doesn’t matter to the parents, who come to cheer the kids on. Human beings are great creators of meaning.

Uh-oh. Another transition. Damn that National Geographic! The June 2007 issue features “The Big Thaw.” There are too many dramatic photos of water flushing down and out of Greenland at an incredible rate. The message is clear: If we don’t do something drastic, “the ice will likely disappear.” The only polar bears will live in zoos, just like it already is for tigers and many other endangered animals. The photos and statistics are numbing (see pp. 56 – 71). Go look, if you dare. As I was reading this depressing news about global warming, at least for a few seconds, I felt like a Republican. I was irritated that all of those uppity scientists and writers were telling me devastating things that won’t stop unless all of us dramatically change our lifestyles. That must be what Republicans feel when they decide that it’s easier to deny than to do something meaningful about a problem. All of this environmental damage is going on under the watch the most powerful man in the world, yet he doesn’t give a crap. Well, actually, he does care enough to allow his minions to falsify scientific reports to assure us that everything is OK. Lots of people voted for him, because they like that approach.

Voting? That topic reminds me of a haunting letter to the New York Times Magazine (June 10, 2007): “Today’s manipulation of the uninformed and illogical voting public by puerile ‘sound bites’ and bumper stickers has gotten us into lots of trouble.” What do we do about our big problems? We elect people who make us feel good about not doing anything at all. Nonetheless, many people still claim that that our voting system is a system that has proven its worth. It’s better than any other voting system in the world. There’s no need to actually make a factual comparison. We just know it.

But let me bring this full circle, in a word salad sort of way. Yes, all of us do like to watch videos. We especially love underdogs. Would you like to watch the opposite of Paris Hilton? If you’ve seen this video of Paul Potts before, you’ll thank me. If you’ve never before seen this video, you’ll really thank me. May this be a complete antidote to my frustration and cynicism . . .

Bill Clinton’s Commencement Speech at Harvard - June 6, 2007

The former President explained much societal dysfunction when he asked a simple question:  Should we focus on what human beings have in common or should we obsess about their minor differences? 

The outcome of this simple choice determines innumerable personal and political agendas.  To the extent that we choose incorrectly, the resulting contentious rhetoric has the capacity to mushroom into oppression and violence that can displace, maim and kill millions of people.  It has done so repeatedly.

Many of our political and moral disputes stem from this basic low-level perceptual choice: whether to focus on differences or commonalities.  Here is how Clinton captured the issue:

So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent?

For at least six years, the air has been thick with violence, bigotry and oppression  because too many people are making the wrong choice up front.  The current Administration excels at choosing badly. The result? A de facto national policy that anyone who is different is suspicious. 

As eloquently stated by Bill Clinton, the alternative would be to focus on the fact that humans are 99+% the same (I’ve written on this sameness in many places, including here and here).  Perhaps it’s tempting to resist this thought in a country where we so often stress individual liberties and where our moral system is so rooted in personal responsibilities.  We aren’t as different as we’d like to believe, however.

I agree with Bill Clinton that to the extent that we fret about minor human differences we can expect massive societal dysfunction.  It’s difficult to turn this all around, though, because focusing on differences sells media ads.   We are currently living in an environment created by media corporations that are spraying out stories involving accusations, threats and paranoia.  What’s more interesting, a news story where people get along or a news story where people threat each other?  Massive societal dysfunction is thus the price we must pay to sell lots of jeans, perfume and cell phone plans.

Bill Clinton commencement address is extraordinary, well worth the 30-minutes it will take you to view it.   I also enjoyed several of the terrific speeches by several Harvard grads, all part of this same video.  If you’d like to go straight to view Bill Clinton’s speech, you can pick it up here (at Andrew Sullivan’s site), then start viewing at about 1:36:00.  You’ll find the transcript of Mr. Clinton’s speech here.  Below, I’m printing my personal “best of” excerpts “below the fold,” based upon this transcript. 

(more…)

I just finished viewing this six-minute video. It makes a good point with meticulous video and a terrific soundtrack. While watching it, I kept thinking, “We just can’t help ourselves.” Without further ado,

On Wednesday evening, Bill Moyers’ Journal presented “Buying the War,” a terrific special describing the failure of the U.S. media during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.   If you missed it, you can watch the entire show here.  

Here’s the official description of the special:

Four years ago on May 1, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln and delivered a speech in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner. Despite profound questions and the increasing violence in Baghdad, many in the press confirmed the White House’s claim that the war was won. How did they get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 continue to go largely unreported?  

Moyers devastatingly exposed the deeply rooted failures of the corporate media, point by point.  The alleged October 6, 2003 “White House press conference” has to be one of the lowest and most embarrassing moments in American media history.  You’ll have your chance to squirm through that event during the first five minutes of Moyers’ special.  

Did I say that “Buying the War” vividly exposed the failures of the corporate media?  Indeed.  For me, the most telling part of Moyers’ special was the announcement of the list of sponsors at the very beginning.  There were nine sponsors to “Buying the War” and all but one (Mutual of America) were private non-profit foundations. 

Moyers will be back every Friday night with another one-hour show.  Tonight, Moyers’ show will feature Jon Stewart, the topics being “Why do so many get their news and analysis from his fake news show?” Also, blogger Josh Marshall will give his perspective on role of politics in the recent firings of federal prosecutors.

It is wonderful to see the true center of American Political spectrum given some air time.  I write “center,” because Moyers has a long and established history of inviting guests representing points all along the spectrum of political opinion. 

Having the opportunity to view the terrific journalism of Bill Moyers’ Journal made me wonder whether Moyers could ever have had a chance to bring his show back to PBS had the Democrats not taken back Congress.

I found this eight-minute video on reddit.com tonight. It was “Penned, Shot, chopped, and Scored by Jamin Winans.” I enjoyed it for it’s clean execution and thoughtfulness. According to this site, Spin has been the “winner of 35 film festival awards worldwide.”

While watching this video, I couldn’t help but think of chaos theory:

chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under certain conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect).

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A site called “The Invisible American” contains links to four disturbing slideshows (about 8 to 10 minutes long each) documenting “the other side of the American Military in Iraq.” As indicated by The Invisible American, these images tell a dark and troubling story. 

I sat down to watch one of these slideshows, but I felt utterly compelled to view all four.  The slideshows consist of images gathered “from a wide array of sources including soldier blogs, photo-sharing websites, right-wing apparel websites, video game forums and other sites.”

By placing the link to these four slideshows on this site, I am not suggesting that these slideshows present the full story.  I sincerely believe that many thousands of our troops have always acted with dignity and as professionals throughout the Iraq occupation.  But I am also aware that the Bush Administration has put the members of our military into a situation that was horribly ill-thought-out, making much of the outcome entirely predictable.

These images need to be viewed to understand the full story of America in Iraq.  These images illustrate the attitude and behavior of members of our President and our military that are “far too seldom told by the mainstream media and its embedded reporters.”  They also tell the story of the disproportionate and harsh burden of the Iraq occupation that has fallen on our military families.