I AM thinking hard about education, about the corporate control of my state, WA, the corporate control over the pathetic NPR, the absolute pukes for politicians, the control of my own destiny because of the sham of IT, Coders, iPads instead of classrooms, teachers, face-to-face butcher paper work, facing all those people that populate the world, even the gated communities, the urban decay, the bankrupted cities (bull, Detroit, bankrupted?).
John Stanton’s piece is right on, and I write this hurriedly after a 24-hour stint as an on-call teacher and house and medicine and safety watcher over 5 adults with developmental disabilities. The whopping $9.25 an hour, and believe me, I have applied, and still am applying, to hundreds of Portland, Oregon-based outfits.
They are smarmy, rotten to the core coders and lovers of social media wonks, and want all people to be lock-step with Facebook, with following some party line (especially the lefties, they want lock-step, no guy like me, decades as a journalist, as an educator, as a writer, activist, and, well, even community planner).
Why am I in a hurry? Because I am heading 288 miles from my home to Richland, WA, to help with the downwinder panel, the one that all Nuclear Nerds and Nuclear Proponents Want to Go Away. Read Part one, and this new one, part two, of my series.
I am doing this on my own dime, not associated with any outfit, because it TAKES getting off your app-loving asses to shut the redneck, hipster, tragically dead zone NPR loving and the other network nuts out there who have no history, no care for questioning power, who believe history is in a box of Cracker Jacks, who will never-ever question Monsanto, question Intel, Nike, Gates, Bezos-AmmoZone, not the spying state, not the Jewish power pushing their ideology and fears and urbane and backward half-journalism of citing faculty from Georgetown, American University and other East Coast jokes.
News about the I-522 in WA, to force labeling of GMOs, which was 66 percent, in the polls, ahead, but, $17 million later and unconscious reporting and fearful docs and faculty hiding, well, the Monsanto and bio-tech and Gates Foundation has won – it’s not just lost 20 points, down to 46, this iinitiative is nowu on the glide to defeat.
It all comes back to the core that Stanton brings up – we have industrial education, one locked into corporate and government control of the little us, the 80 percent, holding down those 7 percent of all savings, salaries and wealth (sic).
Education? The NPR All Things Tech, and the goofy girl-woman, just guffawing over those social responsible apps, that in the ends, how can you try and screen your purchases for slavery, environmental hell, exploitation of animals, men, women, children. Hah-hah, no way Jose and Josefina. We are all Consumers, and all webs are tangled up in the junk of this society’s grand exploitation and pollution of people, planet, places.
The very idea of Facebook, and DV is on Facebook. We dropped Amazon (dot) kill, but, what about PayPal, what about Facebook? That company, that little Eichmann Zuckerberg, that Zionist and laughing trillionaire chimp, he is someone we want to support?
We are entangled, and Stanton wants some big changes in education, connected, holistic, commercial-free, multivariate, but we pay for drones, pay for subsidies for IT, Energy, War, Education Privatizers, and, well, we are asking for a revolution. And it is almost impossible, when we are bombarded by Consumopithecus Anthropocene. How can we when faculty are going the way of on-line distribution points. Every think why we spend all this time on-line? Anyone get that yet? Uh?
So, here I go, to Richland, and the idea is that maybe the nuclear pukes will be out telling people with thyroid cancer, who saw all family members dead or dying from radionuclide cancers, telling them that radiation and plutonium is like, just like, eating a mushroom. More radiation in your dental x-ray, brick house, basement.
The National Putrid Radio just reported that at the Hanford facility, the unnamed company on the US gravy train just emptied out a single-hull tank of the radioactive shit, to be put into a double-hull tank. Oh, man, one tank out of 177. The story was flat, dead, no real people interviewed, and the Oregon Public Radio reporter just was that empty-voiced person of interest, afraid to identify the company getting millions of dollars to do this? Oh, hail to the robot scrubber that cleaned this insane tank. Oh, 55 million gallons to go . . . .
It’s a world of dispassionate, uneducated, proudly consumerist America, where the Oregon governor gets the Just Do It swoosh and $10,000 from Knight of Nike. Have this schmuck run for how many terms? Intel is dumping air pollution and fluoride into Oregon, but, hell, jobs, jobs, more apps, more iPads.
Yep, the Oregon schools and Vancouver schools, the reports say, are just going ga-ga over the iPads, all that an-apple-a-day-kills-a-child-teacher shit now the rage. The teachers telling fourth graders that the iPad is to be protected like a puppy. Parents getting insurance for the iPad’s at home?
Oh, what is Stanton calling for, what am I calling for? I just took an on-line training for the Canvas on-line system to use for my face-to-face classes. What absurdity. The more time on Canvas, the more time I spend teaching, at, well, golly, $1900 a class. College-level. Composition, one of the most important in college really.
And it’s Campus Equity Week, where adjuncts and contingents rally on campuses, playing nice, that is, and tell students and parents we are the majority and the most underpaid. Even the Guv of WA signed an adjunct and part-time faculty appreciation declaration. Right there with the garbage collector (yes, important, and should be public, not PRIVATE).
Teachers flailing against unions that are against part-time faculty because full-time faculty thing their shit don’t stink and that they deserve overloads and extra classes, the part-timers be-damned. Not all, maybe not a majority, but Campus Equity Week is supposed to bring attention and media spotlight.
Whatever that does in this hipster society, this law and order and surveillance society, one that is made up of students and matriculated ones who would give a pinky for a job, who would put in CCTV and RFIDs in their homes and bodies for an extra line of credit.
So, thanks, Stanton, and the web is webbed, for sure. It is almost done. All that information out there, almost meaningless unless you have people organizing, protesting, striking, and stopping the consumer shit.
This is the big news on Fuck-You-Book –
The revolution itself may not be televised, but on last night’s edition of the BBC’s Newsnight, viewers may have witnessed the start of one.
Actor-slash-comedian-slash-Messiah Russell Brand, in his capacity as guest editor of the New Statesman’s just-published revolution-themed issue, was invited to explain to Jeremy Paxman why anyone should listen to a man who has never voted in his life.
“I don’t get my authority from this preexisting paradigm which is quite narrow and only serves a few people,” Russell responded. “I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity.”
And with that, the first shots of Russell’s revolutionary interview were fired.
Over the course of the following ten-or-so minutes, Brand and Paxo volleyed back and forth over subjects ranging from political apathy, to corporate greed, to gorgeous beards.
Throughout the interview, Brand repeatedly dodged Paxman’s efforts to trivialize his message — at one point Paxman literally called Brand a “very trivial man” — until finally, even the entrenched newsman appeared to relent against the rushing tide of Brand’s valid arguments.
After Brand reminded Paxman that he cried after learning that his grandma too had been “fucked over” by aristocrats, the Newsnight host was stunned into silence.
“If we can engage that feeling and change things, why wouldn’t we?” Brand crescendoed. “Why is that naive? Why is that not my right becaus
“I’m an ‘actor’? I’ve taken the right. I don’t need the right from you. I don’t need the right from anybody. I’m taking it.”
Now go to the comments and see these retrogrades, dead from the neck up. The BBC, what a joke, aligned with National Propaganda-Pesticide-Petroleum-Privatizing-Radio.
Haeder giving it to Stanton:
One front would include the destruction of the industrial education practices that dominate in America. Assembly-line educational practices that segment into K-8, 9-12, 13-16, 17+ must be eliminated. For example, at the K-12 level, common campus settings that allow older students to interact closely with younger students should be the norm. The notion that “I am a senior and you are just a freshman” needs to go away. This is training for corporation management, not mentoring/teaching. Another front would see the destruction of non-interdisciplinary studies. Humanities and the Sciences, integrated and competently taught, would provide a far more dynamic learning environment for students who government and industry typically malign. A barricade around the Internet and World Wide Web must be built before dominant corporations, politicians, academics and technocrats manage to kill the flow of uncensored information that undercuts their power.
Proposed national education standards such as the Common Core Standards supported by President Obama (and Bill Gates) or those represented in the No Child Left Behind Act (President Bush) are nonsensical in a world where both global corporations and the US national security community are, themselves, asking for people who can act and think across time, place and culture. Teaching to a multiple choice test in these times is about as relevant as an IBM punch card. For what purpose is a fact without context and framing?