By BobbiV

I told you a few days ago about the Prescott, Arizona K-5 school that decided it was a good idea to change the color of the children on a school mural to white.  This was even though the children pictured on the mural are actually students at the school and their skin colors were true to life. It appears the racism of the wing nuts and tea baggers knows no bounds.

Now the school has changed its collective mind about lightening the skin colors of the children on the mural.  They are going back to the original concept and say they just “made a mistake.”  However, it is telling that they would consider doing this in the first place.  Imagine how those children must feel.

It is also telling that they did not decide to change what they were doing on their own.  The nastiness and pure racism of their action came to national attention. They got a lot of negative attention and feedback and that is why they changed their minds.

It seems that the loudest fringe of the Republican Party is behind the Arizona papers law and they are showing their full racist views now in public.  With the school mural, they went too far, even for Arizona.  I personally think this law was brought up to intimidate Latino voters and keep them away from the polls.  But again, national outrage has brought them a raft of unanticipated problems.

Because they appealed to the worst of their base with their bigoted law, it emboldened the true racist groups living in the state.  They were the people who forced the decision to lighten skin color on the mural.  They are the element in the state that is going to bring them down if they don’t get some legislation in place to tamp down the fringe element.

You don’t have to be a genius to see there will be confrontations as a result of the Republicans in Arizona deciding to play dirty politics with race.  I hope they remember where to place the blame if people are killed.  They probably won’t learn anything from this, but they certainly should.  It may turn out to be the perfect example of ‘be careful what you wish for.’

Following is a video of the school principle and the superintendent telling a crowd outside the school about their change of heart.  is it just me, or do they seem a little uncomfortable?

ByBobbiV

I thought Arizona went completely over the edge when they came up with their Naziesque  policy toward illegal aliens.  Of course, I already thought that Arizonans were a bunch of narrow minded hypocrites.  In my mind they had to be since they kept a racist sheriff like Joe Arpaio around.  You vote for what you believe in and to vote for this man, prejudice has to be ingrained in your belief system.

But now from the same state that is trying to give us this regressive law comes a new travesty. This racist bunch of crap is given to us by Prescott, Arizona.  I certainly hope the Republicans are proud of their tea bagger and wing nut fringe.  This is not conservative , but it damn well is racist.

You all should be so proud, you beat down a bunch of K-5th grade students and their school.  What a bunch of old, prejudiced, bloviating bullies.

From Wonkette;

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.

This is America, in 2010, and there’s a dozen more states and endless white-trash municipalities ready to Officially Adopt this same Official Racist Insanity.

Read more at Wonkette.

For God's sake Arizona, THINK. Now you are picking on little kids.

At one time, California had a good state education system….really, they did, its true!  But that was before Prop. 13, before taxpayers decided not to really support schools and before two or three previous budget crises.  Now it seems that the California education system is on the verge of collapse.

Now understand there are schools for the wealthy that are not suffering and in fact are well resourced.  There are also schools for the poor.  But these schools are starved for cash and barely surviving.  All this has led to what the Guardian in the UK is calling the California Education Charade.  After reading their well resourced and insightful article, I have to agree with their description and I find myself wondering how long the system will go on before it collapses entirely.

From the Guardian;

What’s insane about this is that everyone knows California’s heading in the wrong direction here, yet the financial crisis is so vast, and the options for raising taxes so limited at this point because of the toxic politics around the issue, that nobody can see light at the end of this particular tunnel.

By most measures, California already performs poorly when it comes to educating its 6 million-plus public school students. It spends far less per kid than the national average – thus largely negating the arguments of conservatives who say that California’s schooling crisis is all to do with overpaid, over-benefited teachers – it has higher student-teacher ratios, it has below-average test scores for maths and reading, and it has higher than average high school drop-out rates.

In fact, over the past several decades anti-tax revolts have turned a once-vaunted public school model into one characterised by cascading crises and growing gaps between well-resourced schools in affluent neighbourhoods and starved-for-cash schools in poor communities. Mediocre numbers from a decade ago, regarding spending per student, have been replaced by truly awful numbers as the financial crisis has worsened.

Ironically, barely a week before LA announced the likelihood of mass layoffs, students from three low-performing schools in low-income neighborhoods sued the school board because of earlier rounds of layoffs which removed thousands of teachers and school personnel statewide in 2008 and 2009. The class-action lawsuit alleges that the cuts resulted in such chaotic learning environments that quality education became well-nigh impossible.

And that gets at the nub of what is happening here: the education setting for increasing numbers of poor Californians is becoming little more than a charade.

Read the rest here.

As more and more states cut back on their education budgets, more and more students get left behind.  One is forced to wonder where the American leaders ,mathematicians and scientists in the future will come from and just how well educated will they be.  Or will this educational collapse just lead to a further division of the American society into rich versus poor and educated versus uneducated.

One thing for sure is this does not bode well for the future of the United States.  Another sure thing is that this situation must get straightened out very quickly or it will be too late to correct for thousands of American children.

Will this be the future of American schools? No teachers will lead to no students.

Hi!  I’m Brian’s mom and I told him I would fill in for him while he is in Las Vegas for his job orientation classes.  Just to let you know before you read any further, I am a proud liberal (or progressive if you would prefer), I have closely watched or been deeply involved in Democratic politics for forty years, I don’t suffer fools gladly, I will hold Democratic feet to the fire just like Republican feet if they deserve it and I am a Buddhist.

Now with all that out of the way, I will start to blog for my son.  I have written a few posts for him before, so long term readers will be familiar with me.

I ran across an article on CNN.  It hasn’t seemed to get a lot of attention, but I found it really intriguing so I wanted to bring it here.  In short, it seems people who are liberal and/or atheists have higher IQs.  This also seems to be true for men who practice sexual exclusivity, but not women (thanks for that).

I won’t get into all the reasons stated in the article, except to say, I just knew this was the case.  Just watch and listen to a conservative and Christian teabaggers gathering, then contrast it to a gathering of liberal and progressive peace activists.  Look at the spelling and even the words on the signs.  Listen to the speakers.  I think you will draw the conclusion that the liberal gathering is generally smarter although sometimes not by much.  Or contrast a speech by the two party icons Reagan and Kennedy.  The truth is Kennedy was far more intelligent than Reagan and in my book had much better ideas for our society in general.  As far as George W Bush and Obama, well you get the idea.

From the CNN post;

(CNN) — Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people’s behaviors come to be.

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

Read the rest here.

Okay, I know this is controversial.  But don’t all you slaves to your religion out there try to ‘save me’ or get me ‘born again’.  I told you at the outset I am a Buddhist.  We don’t get born again, we get recycled.

Republicans like to natter on about liberal teachers and professors. Maybe they are professors because they are SMARTER. That's okay, let the less intelligent teach your kids, that's the way to get them ahead in life.

This will be the only post for Lunacanus today.  Things have grown terribly hectic and  we needed some time to get a few personal things taken care of before we delve back into politics and environmental discussion.

First, I will be out of town until Friday.  This is a good thing.  I have gotten a temporary job and must go to Las Vegas for orientation.  Second, I received word that my Pell Grant was approved, so I will begin taking college courses on the 9th of the month.  I am going for a Bachelors Degree in Environmental Studies.  This is more good news.

While I am gone, my mom will be filling in for me.  You can trust her.  She is an old sixties hippie liberal and she keeps an eagle eye on politics.  So she will be kicking the butts of Republicans and conservatives all over the map.  She also will not be easy on Democratic lawmakers who are too far out there.

I really hope all of my readers had good news like I received this last week.  I encourage any of you who are unemployed and think you are getting too old to learn new things to think again.  There are a lot of retraining programs out there that you will probably qualify for.  You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to at least check it out.

I certainly would not have believed two weeks ago that I would be a forty plus student.  But it really feels good now that I am.

I will leave you with a picture I have been saving for quite some time.  We all need a laugh and I think this is pretty funny.  I will be posting again after I return from Vegas.

Isn't this appropriate. After all, it is where he drove the country. He needs a library that honestly reflects his presidency.

Hey all you parents out there, did you know that Texas controls a lot of what is printed in your children’s school texts?  If they want to teach creationism and not evolution, we have to follow.  Right?  Yes, unless a whole lot of us stand up and say absolutely no way. 

Not only do they want creationism taught, they want your children to be taught dinosaurs roamed the earth with humans and the Founding Fathers intended this to be a nation of Christians.  They have a lot of other craziness they would like children to be taught too.  I don’t want to see the kids of this nation dumbed down any further and I surely don’t want lies taught about the founders of this nation.

But, as I said before if the conservative Christians and Republicans of Texas have their way, your kids are going to be taught to be the next generation of teabaggers and wingnuts.  That is, unless we all stand up and say NO.  Education is just too important to be messed around with.  This country is already way too far behind in math and science.  If these people have their way, science will be a thing of the past.

Watch the video as The Young Turks explain how this is happening.  Then please take the time to let your local school board know you are not going to go for this craziness.  Thinking people in Texas need to stand up too.

Science has never been on of my strong suits.  Like most of us I did okay in my high school science classes but when you start talking about string theory and quantum mechanics my eyes will get a glossy look to them.  The majority of what I do understand on these topics came to me via sci-fi shows like ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Stargate’.  One movie that has always made me stop and think about life was ‘The Matrix’.

If you are not familiar with this movie let me send a little 411 to the rock you have been living under for the last fifteen years or so.  The basic concept behind the story is that the reality we experience is not real but simply a computer generated program that we perceive as reality.  There is a lot more to the story than that but that is the bottom line message sent in this great movie.

You can imagine my surprise when I learned that some leading physicists have long thought along those lines.  You can most likely imagine my shock when I read at NewScientist that the first evidence that supports the theory that our entire universe is nothing but hologram has been discovered!  I was more than a little blown away.

At a project that looks deep into outer space in Hanover Germany called “The GEO600 Experiment” they did not find what they were looking for but something else entirely.  While searching for gravitational waves they discovered that our universe gets a little grainy around the edges.  Kind of like zooming in too close on a photograph.

From this they have theorized that our reality is a projection of some sort.  This is the point where it all gets a little to big brain for me but it does make for a very mind blowing read.

If you want to find out more, visit the news about it at NewScientist by clicking here.

I do warn you to put on your thinking caps!

I think I will chalk this up in the oddities depsrtment and go back to watching politics.  Although complicated, the Senate and the House are easier for me to understand.

Commander Data and Neo may understand this , but I do not.

We all know that times are tough in this economy for working Americans.  Unemployment rates though declining, are high.  In some areas, much higher than others.  We recently posted about 85% unemployment amongst some American Indian tribes but another fact is that some American cities, like Detroit Michigan,  face unemployment rates as high as 50%.

Like school districts across the country and in worse shape than many, the Detroit school system has already shut down 29 schools and is planning the closure of yet 40 more.  They have even gone as far as forcing a long term loan from the teachers union and are deducting the loan from the teachers paychecks.  Needless to say that after school programs are ancient history and the school district is more interested in staying open than the education of students.

It appears though, the students in some of Detroit’s schools will  get job training offered as for credit classes and new after school programs from a corporate sponsor.  Imagine the joy in the hearts of these hard working parents when they heard the news!  After all with no sports programs there are no athletic scholarships.   With no music programs there is no chance for any child, no matter how talented to attend a place like Julliard.  With little in the way of funding you can almost guarantee that if the next Einstein or Beethoven was in your school they would never get an academic scholarship.

Not being a parent myself I am forced to wonder how joyous it must be to hear your teen child tell you they were lucky enough to get into one of these training classes.  The happiness would soon fade for me though, when I was told the class being offered trained them in the highly skilled and competitive work force of Walmart.   Yes!

Mom and dad!  I have a career path open for me through new classes at school!  I’m going to spend the next forty years of my life working at Walmart!  It is such a challenging job and will utilize my talent and skills as I greet people at the door or stock the shelves!  Are you proud of me?

This may sound like some sort of twisted joke, but I assure you it is becoming reality.  No high skilled training for these kids.  No art, no music, no sports, no training in the manufacture of the future cars at the Detroit auto plants.  No computer corporations offering training in computer programming or repairs.  No energy corporations offering training in solar and wind power construction and maintenance.  Nope, none of that.  These kids get classes in our public schools to be the blue vested, twenty hour a week, low paid, peddlers of cheap imported goods our nation laps up at Walmart.

I am sorry but I find a few things terribly, terribly wrong with this scenario.  We are basically taking a whole generation of our youth and telling them this is the best they can hope to achieve with their lives.  It is wrong, it is sad, and it represents the worst in our corporate run society today.

In one of our public school districts we are now crushing the dream that is America.  The dream, if you work hard you can be anything you want, has been replaced.  In place of the American dream we will now tell these children that not only are you not worth teaching, but the best our country can offer you is this go nowhere future.

Not only is this a sad day for our nation and our schools, it is another step leading our country to third world status.

You can read more at Raw Story by clicking here.

This tag not only represents what these kids will be selling, it also shows what we sold our country and their futures for, everything at 50% off or more.