GCAA: New public arts school in St. Louis spreads its wings

[Bias Warning: My 12-year old daughter happily attends the school I'm about to describe; this article might also serve as an invitation for you to learn more about Grand Center Arts Academy, especially if you have a 6th, 7th or 8th grade student in your home and you live in the St. Louis area]. About a year ago, my wife and I attended a meeting at which a calmly enthused woman named Lynne Glickert stood in front of a group of 15 families, waved her hands in the air in the process of describing a brand new art school she was trying to put together. The name of this new public school was to be Grand Center Arts Academy. Ms. Glickert, formerly a music teacher who was to become the school's first principal, continued:  The new school would start with only the 6th and 7th graders; it would add the 8th grade in the Fall of 2012 and it would continue to add a grade per year until it reached the 12th grade. It would be a public charter school, meaning that those eligible to attend (including any resident of the City of St. Louis and residents of many of the St. Louis suburbs) would do so without paying any out-of-pocket tuition. This new school would focus heavily on the arts, including theater, dance, music and visual arts. It would attract a lot of good students who were serious about the arts, she said. It would have a dedicated staff of teachers, who she was still in the process of hiring, she said. It would someday have a building of its own, though the school would initially be housed in the classrooms of a nearby Baptist Church. She urged that the arts would be taught by high quality professionals, who would accept children who had no formal training in the arts, as well as students who did have a head start. She urged that the core curriculum would be extremely important as well (Communications Arts, Principal Lynne Glickert: Social Studies, Math and Science). Ms. Glickert urged that in addition to everything else she promised, this school would cultivate a direction for the art produced by its students; this would also be a school that maintained a focus on "social justice." The notable thing about this school, Ms. Glickert said, is that the students would receive at least two hours of intense art each and every day. Glickert introduced a quiet-spoken man named Dan Rubright, an accomplished musician and composer, who indicated that he would be involved in cultivating "Partnerships" with many St. Louis area arts organizations, including the St. Louis Symphony and many of the other arts organizations located in Grand Center, the Arts District of St. Louis. [More . . . ]

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Famous Bible verses that never actually appear in the Bible

People make all kinds of claims about Bible verses that don't actually appear in the Bible. These phantom verses are the topic of this CNN article. Here's an excerpt:

These phantom passages include: “God helps those who help themselves.” “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” And there is this often-cited paraphrase: Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden. None of those passages appear in the Bible, and one is actually anti-biblical, scholars say.

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Payday Loan song

To put this topic in perspective, think of the terrible old banker, Mr. Potter, featured in the Christmas classic, "It’s a Wonderful Life." Mr. Potter drove a very hard bargain, but he wanted customers to actually pay off their loans.  Keep in mind that Mr. Potter was lending out money at about 2%. If Mr. Potter could have charge as much as many credit card companies, he would want to stretch out his repayment plans. And if he could charge 500%, he might not actually ever want his loans to be repaid. Welcome to the world of payday lending. During the day I work as a consumer lawyer at the Simon Law Firm in St. Louis, Missouri. My firm has filed several class actions again payday lenders based on their outrageous lending practices--on many occasions they systematically ignore the weak state laws that ostensibly regulate their conduct.   At my firm, we've met undeniable facts demonstrating that payday lenders make most of their money from people they would term "repeat customers," but these people should more accurately be referred to as people who are trapped in high interest loans or 400% or even 500% interest.

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“Retard” and other disability-insults.

The word "retard" possessed dual meanings for a long time. First used as a term for intellectual disability in 1788, the word took on a pejorative sense in the 1970s. For thirty years the two meanings curiously co-existed. Universities had "Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability" Departments and students who drunkenly called one another 'retards' for lobbing bad beer-pong balls, and the two existed in tandem. But once medical and social service experts finally disavowed the word 'retard', it vanished from official usage with amazing swiftness. The Special Olympics ceased using the 'r-word' in 2004, initiating the trend. In 2006, the (former) American Association of Mental Retardation changed its name to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. By 2008, Special Olympics turned the abolishment of 'retard' into a full-time effort and launched R-word.org. The site protested the derogatory use of 'retard' (including a protest campaign against the 2008 film Tropic Thunder, which featured a lengthy discussion on 'retard' roles in film). Special Olympics and R-word.org also pushed for their fellow disability-service organizations to drop the term. In 2010, 'retard' was legally banished from the professional lexicon. On October 5 of last year, Obama signed "Rosa's Law", which banned the use of "retard" in all federal health, education, and labor policy. "Intellectual disability" and "developmental disability" became the approved nomenclature. Non-federal organizations followed hastily: in Ohio, Google directs you to the "Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities", but the website itself has already been scrubbed of the R-word(even if the url still has the dreaded 'r' in it). It's official: 'retard' has no place in formal usage. Once a medical term for someone with an intellectual disability, it lives now only as an insult. One that means, roughly, unintelligent. Like moron, which began as medical terminology for one with a mental age of 8 to 12. Or imbecile, which meant 'a mental age of 6 to 9'.

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Will China’s moonshots rejuvenate America’s respect for science?

China has already sent two unmanned lunar probes to the moon, and China has bold plans to send several astronauts to the moon by 2017. While those Chinese astronauts are on the moon, they plan to mine helium 3, an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion.  We can assume that when Chinese astronauts step onto the moon, video cameras will be bringing beautiful images back to the world, which will then applaud China’s great technological achievement, to America’s begrudging dismay. Thus, China is about to a space exploring nation in a dramatic and visible way. This is exactly what American needs. Why? China’s highly visible lunar program comes at a time when American is dramatically cutting its space ambitions (including the Shuttle program). America is being subjected to systematic campaigns disparaging science, much of it driven by religious leaders, corporate disinformation and government attempts to manipulate data.  At the same time, anti-science religion is thriving in many American classrooms. The United States is essentially a warmongering nation; we lurch from war to war. Americans apparently need an enemy to make sense of things. For us to get our heads back into science and math, we apparently need a math and science “enemy,” someone to intellectually challenge our standing as a technologically "advanced" nation. [More . . . ]

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