People in Honduras' predominantly Indian Mosquito coast region burned down government offices and demanded that U.S. drug agents leave the area, reacting angrily to an anti-drug operation in which they say police gunfire killed four innocent people, including two pregnant women.

skreendreamz1 · 5 days

People need to come to term with the fact that the US is literally an imperial power and has been throughout the twentieth century through a process of creating an elaborate network of overseas military bases.

The exact size and scope of this military empire is huge. The US has 725 overseas military bases. Each one extracting vast resources from the American taxpayers and promoting hatred against the US among the local people who have to deal with the typical bullshit one experiences living next to a military base. Chalmers Johnson, a long-time CIA consultant who eventually turned against the military and wrote a series of books outlining the enormous scope of the America's overseas military empire explained that incidents like 9-11 are a direct result of this military empire.

If you want to understand why we're there and how our military empire got so enormous, you might want to find a copy of Blowback by Chalmers Johnson.

skreendreamz1 · 5 days

Well you see many of those posts but you also see people like me defending the destruction of property as a legitimate protest tactic that falls within the realm of non-violent protest.

digital · 7 days

Well thanks for the upvote.

Nonetheless, I'd like to point out what I think really underlies your concern about teachers, that is fairness. You are concerned with what's fair and you believe that this is the fundamentally important issue at hand.

This same issue of fairness is also at the core of the opposition to any form of social welfare. Sure, in theory we all want to help the poor but the problem is what about those freeloaders who don't deserve it. If we let them get away it's just not fair so we need means testing to make sure they're really poor or better yet just eliminate those programs as much as possible because they inevitably create an unfair situation.

Again, the focus is on the concept of what is fair.

I would argue that this concern over what is fair is a topic that has been covered quite thoroughly throughout history by the greatest thinkers and writers who have ever lived and that to see it as a stumbling block is quite contrary to the teachings of the great minds that have gone before us. We can disagree with them but we should do so in an informed manner and not out of ignorance.

Ghandi pointed out that "An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind." Hammurabi's code from 3800 years ago was actually intended to limit retribution not promote the seeking of vengence. It was the contrary. The purpose of it was not to say that everything must be equal in society for it to be just but to say that if someone calls you a queer then you've got no right to stab them in the chest. It was a limitation on revenge, not an invitation to seek equal damages in each case.

If you look at the etymology of the word "fair" in English what you find is that the original opposite or antonym of fair was not "unfair" as we would imagine it today but rather "foul" as in a "foul ball" in baseball. But at the time, foul also had a much stronger connotation of dark, dirty and disgusting. This complicates the matter even further.

But what I really want to draw attention to with this whole concept rather than the word fair itself but to the concept that can also be extended to words like just or equitable or correct or right is how they are all part of a fundamental teachings of the worlds early religions and what they taught about these ideas and how the can do more harm than good.

The really key concept of Buddhism is not karma or reincarnation or nirvannah. The key concept is none of those things. The key is letting go of hang-ups. This is the really key point and it's where eastern philosophy comes to inform modern psychological therapy when it comes to ideas like addiction treatment or facing death of a loved one or even your own death.

This, I would argue, is the real problem with the idea of fairness by any name. It's a hang up. It's about comparing your world to that of others and seeking to measure yourself by others standards. I don't mean to be hurtful when I say this but I have to say that the obsession with comparing oneself to other is a kind of mental illness. The only way to get over it is to just drop it. It goes nowhere. There is no satisfaction in comparing oneself to others. It is a bottomless pit of despair that eventually leads to depression.

The point of living is to love, not to compare yourself to others. Comparisons simply get in the way of the real purpose of life which is to love yourself and others and show compassion to the world. If you believe that comparisons are more important than this, I would ask you to reconsider or at least to engage yourself more deeply in literature and the arts. Perhaps learn to play an instrument or study a foreign language. I believe all these things will lead you away from the tendency to focus on comparison with others as a basis for finding meaning in your life.

Hating teachers is easy. Teachers are the representation of an institution that all too often resembles a prison. However, the teachers are a very small part of what actually happens in the classroom. The majority of what happens is not about the teacher or the text, it's about the students themselves.

I seriously doubt that even the worst imaginable teacher has it in their ability to do the damage you believe they do. Rather than focusing hate on those supposedly hateful teachers, I would ask you to consider more broadly what makes life meaningful and how great an education could be and how it could enrich your life to the end and fill it with meaning. I think if you consider it carefully you can come to the conclusion that perhaps rather than attacking the people trying to make-do with what they have we should be actively promoting a far stronger educational system with resources that exceed those of the defense budget.

Even if there are bad teachers, tests don't necessarily identify those things that make them bad. I've been a professional test writer as a matter of fact. I spent years writing tests. I can tell you that test writers are actually very limited in what they can deduce about the subjects that take their tests. The worst teachers are not the ones who can't pass a test but the ones who are mentally ill and depressed. More tests are not going to improve those people. Perhaps legalizing marijuana would help in some cases but tests aren't going to do it.

Anyway, my real message is about your desire for accountability to prove that things are fair. It's okay for you to hate your teachers. Teachers are like parents in that way. Kids are going to hate them no matter what they do and that just goes with the territory. But really, please consider that there is a deep flaw in this idea of seeking fairness. It is a hang up that is hurtful to yourself and to others.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Think about it.

digital · 8 days

Well, I think the obsession with measurement is part of the problem. An education is not the same thing as training. You can train a cat or a dog and easily measure the effectiveness of your training but education is something that is unique to users of symbolic language systems and a proper education is worthy beyond any measure. A good educational system should be one in which the participants feel satisfied.

Let me give you an example. Let's take a basic English conversation class for students coming from a non-native English background. It may not be the most exciting topic but it's the bread and butter of many colleges. There are, broadly speaking, two ways you can teach the class. One is to use a multiple choice test and a textbook lecture with recorded examples of English speakers. This way you can put a hundred kids in one class and save money. You can get a high test score too but the kids will hate it and so will the teacher. It will have an environment like a prison.

Another way to teach the class is to have the students actually practice conversations in English with each other. But guess what? In a room of a hundred kids, that's not going to work. A conversation peaks out at about fifteen participants. So, you can reduce the class size to a maximum of fifteen and I guarantee that class will be focused and the kids will improve quickly no matter what the test scores say.

Test scores don't show the difference between these two because you can teach to the test and even get advance copies of the tests to coach the kids so that as a teacher you will get higher marks but it is simply masking the fact that one solution leads to genuine improvement in English where the other simply increases the suicide rate on campus.

digital · 8 days

And here's a little tip for Bill Gates:

Good test scores do not necessarily represent a good education.

Kida89 · 8 days

It's true. I tell my students all the time that they can only blame themselves if they feel they got a lousy education. We've all had abundant access to the great works of literature and philosophy for decades and yet few people avail themselves of these resources. I was listening to a BBC production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline on the way to work today. I choose to spend my free time with works of that nature and my students are free to do the same but they don't. It's a choice they make without realizing they have made a choice.

But my point is that I can't play that BBC production in the classroom legally without paying exorbitant fees. This is not something that the schools have created but something that has been thrust upon the schools by the business community.

Part of the reason why school costs so much is due to the absurd fees that are created by corporate welfare. People just have no idea how much money schools spend on software licenses for instance. This is absurd. Clearly the schools should be using open source software and they could easily do so. The problem is that the business community has infiltrated the schools as a kind of corporate cow that is easy to milk. This is not the fault of the schools as much as it is a sign of their vulnerability and the need for government leadership to stand up to the business community and send the money changers out of the temple. Schools can be about learning but they are burdened by the parasites that cling to them all in the name of intellectual property. The book stores, the software licenses the fucking clickers with their proprietary systems and the blackboard shit that wants to manage the entire "enterprise" this is where schools are sick. The cancer of the business community is upon them.

MrBoombastic117 · 8 days

Peace be with you.

MrBoombastic117 · 8 days

We could do it too. At first it sounds like a big project but then you have to realize that so far we're only using the surface of the planet. If you were to extract material from the sub-surface of the moon you could easily double the surface area exposed to the sun in the form of artificial satellites that could become homes for endangered species.

Imagine, it's not just minerals that we could import from space. We could grow endagered species like sandalwood trees which are parasitic and require a specific type of ecosystem. That's no problem, we can do that in space. Vast plantations of sandalwood floating off in the sky like new little stars in the night sky. Or the trees that are used for making frankinsence or vanilla. Fresh organic vanilla and frankinsence in unlimited supplies.

A new home for lions and tigers and elephants, entire continents could be theirs with no humans at all. Floating oceans filled with freely roaming blue whales in their millions.

We can do these things. What we need to do is to stop fighting and worshipping competition. We just need to learn to cooperate and we can do anything. Human intellect gives us power to be as gods if we can only learn to treat each other with compassion.

Kida89 · 8 days

Hah! Free information?

Perhaps if you're a home internet user and you don't mind taking your chances but at a university information is anything but free and it's because of the laws that make it cost an arm and a leg.

You want to show a DVD in a class? Hell, buying it retail doesn't even come close to what the corporate shake-down artists have in store for educators. No, in education you get a "special" public performance license. Look to pay several hundred bucks for an episode of The Wire for instance.

Don't blame the schools, blame the corporate lawyers and their conservative friends in the Supreme Court and all the Republican voters that put them there. Those school costs are encoded in the laws that those assholes put on you like a yoke on a slave.

Don't blame the schools for what the lawyers have done. America voted for that shit. Blaming the educators is not gonna fly.

JKastnerPhoto · 8 days

Those cars are expensive because of the batteries.

The batteries are expensive because of patents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate#LFP_Patent_Wars

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries

Imaginary property is the meta-bubble.

rockdweller · 10 days

Certainly, the tax rate on incomes that high in the late sixties was still around eighty percent. GDP has actually risen nearly every year since. The US is not a poorer country at all, it is simply a less equally divided economy. There is enormous wealth at the top and if it was taxed at eighty percent it would bring in many trillions of dollars.

However, the magic in the way this question is phrased is that no modern government would want to pay off its debts. Take the Chinese for instance. China has a debt of around 20% of GDP. But actually, they have a budget surplus that could easily pay off their debt. So why do they run a debt?

The purpose of debt for a governments is for multple reasons but the key one is not to the pay the bills. The key purpose of government debt is to prevent price controls. You see, instead of price controls, a government can opt to become the largest debtor in the market and thereby control interest rates. Debt gives governments leverage over private capital without resorting to price controls. All modern sovereign economies do this including China which has huge surpluses. It's just the way it's done. It is desirable no matter how much surpus you have because it's the de facto politically easy way for governments to control markets.

Most people don't understand this. They think the government debt is analogous to household debt and should be eliminated. The Republicans play upon this ignorance and use the debt to scare the voters. This is why the poll would get such high numbers if it was worded that way. It would be playing upon the polticial capital that the Republicans have invested in this theme.

rockdweller · 11 days

There's lies then there's statisitcs then there's polls.

If you ask the question right, I'm sure you will find a huge majority supporting far higher taxes on the wealthy in the US.

For instance, try a poll question like this one:

Would you support returning taxes on those individuals earning more than US$250,000 to levels similar to the Nixon administration if it would rapidly pay off the debt and lead to a balanced budet?

I bet you could get over ninety percent. Polls don't mean shit because it's all about the wording.

UlkeshNaranek · 12 days

This is such a straw man. I realize it's a response to some guy saying the sponges are getting smaller. Whatever. The rip off isn't the size of the feakin' cartridges or the sponges, it's the entire business landscape in which the consumers are treated like drooling sheep that take what they are given and better like it and shut the fuck up.

There is no technical reason why even the cheapest inkjet can't be fed off of gallon sized bottles of ink. And there's no technical reason why that ink should cost more than the chemicals it is composed of cost by the ton which is jack shit.

This boot licking article even goes so far as to suggest that printers are sold at a loss. That's a crock. The printer market is a classic case of corporate welfare enabled by regulatory capture.

It all comes down to imaginary property. Can't have folks printing books for the price of paper, now can we. Conveniently the bullet is averted with clever business practices by the printer makers. Well that clever shit is not going to last. This house of cards is going down.

Are we really being ripped off by the printer manufactuers? Hell fucking yes we are. And it's been going on for way too fucking long.

antdude · 13 days

This is not really a problem.

As the article points out, it's normal for kids to be interested in sex and there is no such thing as "normal" sexuality. Every individual needs to make their own choices. Gay sex, anal, BSDM. . . those are all personal choices that people need to be allowed to make.

Parents need to have non-sexual relationships with their kids. That means explicit porn needs to be kept out of the public area in a home with children. But by the same measure, invading a kids privacy to seek out their porn is inapproiate behavior for parents.

So, parents just say no porn in the house and that's it. Searching for it or setting up traps is going too far. Just say no and that's that. Obviously the kids are still going to do it but the parent is doing their job if they say no. Anything more than that is going too far.

The really disturbing thing about this topic is how easily people get confused between kids looking at porn and kids being in porn. This line was intentionally blurred by the Meese Commission organized by the Reagan Adminstration. The report intentionally confused the two in order to increase government surveilance powers and increase public support for a crackdown on legitimate adult video producers.

stubob · 13 days

Isn't it strange? It's the kind of thing that you think must be some kind of subjective illusion but I've noticed it over and over. And I notice that neighborhood cats and dogs all like to come and just hang out in our yard. I assume it's partly because our trees are healthier so we have more birds but it's not just that they come over and kill the birds and leave. It's like they want to hang out and just take a nap.

And I noticed after I started peeing on the trees that I felt like the trees that everything in my yard seemed more friendly to me. Like I was under a tree and a bug fell on my shoulder and it would just sort of look at me like --hey man, what's up pee guy?

stubob · 13 days

I started doing this about four years ago when we were in a drought and my wife was complaining about water usage. I put a plastic jug under the sink in the bathroom and peed in that.

I took it out undiluted and poured it on some trees in our front yard. At first I was worried the neighbors would notice the smell since our lots are small but I found that just pouring a quick rinse of the jug on top seemed to wash away the smell right away.

But what happens is more complex than that. There is a urine smell right as I pour it out and then when I pour some rinse water it subsides quickly and then this other smell comes out as if the trees or the soil bacteria are producing some kind of perfume-like reaction. It actually smells sweet.

Anyway, I've been doing this for four years or so. Those trees were about five meters high when I started. They're now very near twice as tall and amazingly thick at the trunks. It looks like our trees were planted decades before our neighbors tress. Their trees are all still kind of scrawny but our yard is like a forest. We get more birds and critters of all sorts as well. This, then, attracts all the cats and dogs in the neighborhood as well.

I don't dillute it at all except to flush it down with some rinse water that I use to clean out the piss jug. I have a compost pile too but I wouldn't waste precious urine on that, the compost pile is already rich as can be. It seems to me it would be a waste to add urine to it and the trees would certainly be disappointed.

In fact, I recently had to cut a bunch of branches off of my trees in the front yard because they had grown so fat they were taking off half-way across the street. These trees were only planted twenty years ago and most of the trees in this community are still quite small. Mine were too until I started feeding them urine.

davidreiss666 · 13 days

No, see it pays for itself. The money is paid out in wages to defense contractors who them go and buy goods stimulating the economy. It's a bottom up stimulus and it really works and Romney and his supporters know it works.

So, let's just do the same thing without the military spending. Instead we'll just give everyone in the country a guaranteed minimum income.

trevdak2 · 13 days

That's a screwed up thing to say ProximaC. I eat animals and I've killed chickens, sheep, pigs and other animals and butchered them myself. But I don't try to justify it by saying that those animals can't comprehend life. That is a seriously disturbed attitude to have.

I am damn sure that you, yourself do not comprehend life either. Nor do you know the "meaning of it all." Nobody does. Nobody ever will. Human language is a kind of elaborate mental cage that we stare out of at the world bemoaning how ignorant the rest of them all are for not living in our cage.

Sure, no animals live in the symbolic cages that we call intellect. But to think that this means that they have no emotional presence in the world is the best evidence of all that simply posessing intellect makes one no better than the lowest worm.

maxwellhill · 14 days

The bar is lower according to you. In fact, the consequences of a shitty failed attempt at democracy are real. Masking it behind the facade of representation is simply hiding from the absence of a democracy.

But I'd go back to my rhetorical question at the bottom of my previous post about who the voters chose last time in California. That's the best evidence I can possibly imagine to demonstrate that this idea that choosing a representative is easier and therefore a better way is a false assumption.

It may indeed involve less decisions but if those decisions are simply being made in a kind of beauty contest fashion there is no democracy happening. A beauty contest was won, that doesn't mean that democracy is functioning. It's a red herring. It's a big sham that misleads people into complacency.

If the people don't have time for democracy then that's fine. Let's not pretend we're in a democracy though by suggesting that choosing from two losers that nobody likes every four years is close enough that we can just fake it. That's not democracy, that's just a convenient way to mask a lack of democracy.

maxwellhill · 14 days

But if you're so busy doing slave work to float above water in the economy that you can't be relied on to make responsible choices in a referendum then how is it that you can be expected to make a good choice of a representative. The issue doesn't go away. The problem is slaves are not members of a democracy.

Whether it's a representative democracy or direct democracy through referendums you can't escape the fact that slaves can't be responsible members of a democracy. Electing a representative takes just as much thoughtfulness and infomed opinion as voting on a referendum. Selecting the most handsome or the toughest looking guy does not. That's what we have. That's not democracy. That's just a popularity contest among slaves.

Who was the last governor of California one more time? Refresh my memory.

maxwellhill · 14 days

Those are fucked up examples but that doesn't prove that referendums are the problem. These things are partly unique to California's culture.

Prop 13 and the real estate situation is about the role of real estate in the history of California. It's not just about referendums, it's about real estate.

Prop 184 the three-strikes bill is another fucked up law but you can't blame referrendums. I don't know if you were there or not but then Republican Governor Pete Wilson was leading the charge for the same thing in the legislature after the high-publicity murder of Poly Klaas. The Poly Klass Foundation was awash in funds and going to pass a bill through the senate anyway. It happened to pass by referendum because there was a similar referendum that happened to be collecting signatures and it rode the wave. You can't blam referendums for a screwed up get tough on crime policy in California in 1994. But you can blame Bill Clinton for helping to fuel the fire.

Prop 8. That was about Obama turning out the black vote. These aren't referendum specific issues. These are just sad points in California poltiics.

maxwellhill · 14 days

I would say it's even better than that. It's about stimulating the economy. An economy is a kind of circulatory mechanism. The ultimate stimulus is to put money in the hands of those who would spend it.

The reality is that this money will find its way right back to the top in no time anyway because the spending will take place at the facilities owned by the capitalists.

It's also about eliminating the hatred of the government that has become such a cancer on democracy. The people who want us to hate government would have us believe that in order to cater to the needs to the socially disenfranchised we inevitably create a nanny state. For example, welfare payments tied to drug testing. The idea of basic income shows how the one doesn't have to follow the other. We can use the government to insure basic needs without having intrusive government.

The rhetoric of fairness is crucial in this whole debate and what can be fairer than everybody getting the exact same sized slice.

maxwellhill · 14 days

Exactly, what makes no sense at all is crap like the earned income tax credit. The people who need money the most are the ones who don't even file their taxes.

maxwellhill · 14 days

Well that same argument works for representative democracy as much as it does for referendums.

If you go back to the origins of the word democracy in Greece you see that Plato made note of Socrates criticism that democracy cannot exist without slaves. This, he pointed out, was because if people are struggling just to make a living they are not actual participants in the political process. The only way it can exist is with slaves doing the work.

In the French Revoution in the eighteenth century this was ignored and it was assumed that somehow the slavery requirement could just be skipped over but it is a fundamental stumbling block that still holds true.

Marx recognized that machines could become the new slaves and finally make a genuine kind of democracy possible although it would require taming capitalism first. We're still in the middle of this evolving story.

We won't have real democracy until we have a replacement for the Greek slaves. That day will be here when humanoid robots are legitimately employed as sexual objects. We may be getting close but we're still not quite there.

maxwellhill · 14 days

The disaster in California has jack to do with referendums, the problem in California is that the Republicans put in a fix so that you have to get 60% to pass anything after they gerrymandered all the districts to insure they would never get less than 40% so they could simply stall everything.

The referendums have been the source of many good things. Legalization of marijuana for recreational use missed by three percent in an off-year in which Republican turnout was way higher than Democrat. A referendum will pass legalizinng marijuana for recreactional use in California. That process is not broken.

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