a subset of derek

“This land’s not you’re land,
This land is my land,
We’ll jack you for it
Simply be-cause we can,

For corp’rate int’rests
we have bent ooooooover
This land was taken em’nently”
-sung to the tune of “This Land”

Bitch. Ph.D. has a great post on the need of African-American history in schools. In Philadelphia, it has been mandated as such. I think this is a great move because African-American contributions (outside of those of Dr. King, Malcolm X and a select few others) have been excised from American history when they are just as much a part as, say, Patrick Henry. Every American is part of American history. Teaching African-American history is a way to correct the “whiting out” of African-Americans.

This CNET article has a considerable slant to it. They attempt to characterize the opposition to the blocking of municipal / regional internet access as “liberal” when much of the motivation is apolitical. Cities and regions look into this option because their outlying and poorer areas are underserved (and overcharged) by the bigger telco outfits.

“Our focus is that 75 to 85 percent of our population in our low-income and minority areas that don’t have access,” said Dianah Neff, Philadelphia’s chief information officer. “When we talked to them and we did surveys with them, they said 76 percent of the time that cost was the No. 1 reason why they didn’t have access to the Internet.”

This shows that there is quite a bit of hypocrisy in our economy. Schools have to have competition but big telco behemoths do not? Total bull.

I got into an intersting convo today at the Barking Spider after Tuesdays@REI (Good presentation, Sudhir!). One thing that came up, among talk about Cleveland’s education and future (both ladies I was with are in the employ of CMSD) was that there are the ignorant, the dumb and the stupid.

Let’s break this down:

The ignorant: They just aren’t informed. Many of them would like to be informed. For some reason or another, they miss out. Once they are up on things, they lose the ignorant tag and move up or they become…

The dumb: These are the people that know better but they don’t acknowledge it. Not much to say about them. Maybe it’s fear that drives these people to shy away from what they know is true…if they develop a complex where they want to make sure other are either ignorant or dumb, they become…

The stupid: The stupid (a) keep people ignorant, (b) encourage stupidity and (c) threaten those who fight against (a) and (b) and now we get to the crux of the point I wanted to make…

Ohio’s governments are teeming with stupid people. From Governor Taft to Bob “Freedom Fries” Ney to Emanuel (how do you say “show me the money” in Nigerian) Onuwar, we probably have more dumb ass “civic / state leaders ” per capita than any other state. These people must not get elected!

Damn…

Put the term liberal portions into Google and see what you get. Awesome!