“And the pundits call Ryan’s plan “serious.” Yes, it is very serious. It is a serious plan for taking tens of trillions of dollars from low-income and middle-income people and giving them away as tax breaks to the rich and to the health care industry. It is about as serious as a robber with a gun pointed at your head.”

LOLz

But there’s something about teaching English that keeps pulling at my intellectual heartstrings. That something is the readings I’ve done over the past few years from E.D. Hirsch, Neil Postman, Alfred North Whitehead (a math teacher, incidentally), and Stanley Fish. Language is the foundation for all of our thought and learning. The more we command our language, the more we command our thought; as we become clearer thinkers, we become better communicators; and as we become better communicators, we – and everyone around us – become better learners.

That’s a powerful idea, one that far outstrips the (admittedly high) ideal of exposing students to the best thinking and writing of the Western Tradition. It’s more compelling than the image of quality speaking and writing as a necessity to economic or social advancement. And it has more potential to raise achievement at all levels and in any subject where verbal communication is necessary (that would be all of them).

evilteabagger:

cashforsoul:

evilteabagger:

icansmellthegasoline:

nottodaymegatron:

flyflyfly:

markdavid:

evilteabagger:

You know who should pay for abortions? Women who want abortions.

You know who shouldn’t be forced to pay for other people’s abortions? Everyone else.

Guess who’s going to pay for all these babies whose moms can’t afford to take care of them? 

Zing.

pow. right in the kisser.

These kids aren’t smart enough to have a blog.

This kills me.

Hahahah I’m surprised I haven’t seen these yet.

But that furthers my point about taxes. The whole point of having a child is starting a family. If you aren’t prepared to have a child maybe you should make the choice to not have sex, or to wear a condom, or to get birth control, or take Plan B before you abort your fetus? We are breeding a society of people who feel everyone else will just cover their ass if they make a mistake.

I made the choice to wait. I made the choice to talk to my partner about protection and consequences. When i was ready, guess what? The condom slipped off. Because in sex(i wouldnt be surprised about you lack of experience on the subject) things ge messy. Things get a little unpredictable., The next day my boyfriend had to pay $80 for the plan B pill. I am lucky to live in a city where it was so easily available to me. I am lucky that my boyfriend had the funds to save our future. Not every state is so forgiving. There are plenty of 16 and 17 or 18 year olds who did everything hat they could to be safe. And don’t give me that “they should have waited till marriage” shit, because your sexual identity is part of growing up learning what you are comfortable with and learning who you are. There are also some states that make it so that 12, 13 and 14 year old are forced to be kept in the dark about their bodies and preventative measures. If you want to advocate celibacy feel free to have a meeting with every rapist in the country and give them a list of people who have decided not to have sex. Ask them to be so kind as to comply with their needs. See if anyone will fucking listen. Go back to your land of unicorns and rainbows and ‘fetuses are living things’

When you have sex you accept the risks that that will produce a child. This is called life and everything has a consequence. The consequence of sex is parenthood. And for the record, I’m pro-choice to week 24, which is the age of viability.

I was raised, and I would hope everyone else was raised, to take responsibility for their actions. I understand their are extenuating circumstances like rape, but if you live in a low income household in a shitty part of town then maybe sex isn’t the best idea. Just like if you live in a low income household in a shitty part of town maybe going out and buying a Macbook isn’t such a good idea or any other action that you don’t have the funds for. Would you go out and buy a puppy if you didn’t have a healthy environment or enough funds to sustain it? And please refrain from labeling me as some abstinence only bible thumper. I’m a very big supporter of comprehensive safe sex education, but it’s important to get the message across that the only 100% effective method of not having a child is not having sex.

Nate, you’re the first pro-choice person I’ve known to (1) admit that abstinence is the only guaranteed method of birth control, and (2) accept it as a viable option. Cheers.

I love reading Michael Crichton’s speeches about science and global warming. He blows me away. A few years ago I read “Aliens Cause Global Warming”, which has a lot to say about scientific “consensus” and junk science. Included is this statement about secondhand smoke:

In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was “responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults,” and that it “impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people.” In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA, or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen. This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that “Second-hand smoke is the nation’s third-leading preventable cause of death.” The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent. In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had “committed to a conclusion before research had begun”, and had “disregarded information and made findings on selective information.” The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: “We stand by our science…there’s wide agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings…a whole host of health problems.” Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn’t even a consensus of scientists that Browner evokes! It’s the consensus of the American people.

Before I go on, I’ll mention that the court ruling was vacated in 2002, not because the ’98 ruling was wrong, but because the report had no regulatory weight. Anyway, my quote of the minute is this:

Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.

Secondhand smoke stole my wallet!