position:elementary school

  • Inside the Elementary School Where Drug Addiction Sets the Curriculum - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/us/opioids-ohio-minford.html

    Encore des descriptions terribles et lacrymales. Quand on sait que cette crise a été causée de prime abord par la cupidité et le cynisme des groupes pharmaceutiques...

    MINFORD, Ohio — Inside an elementary school classroom decorated with colorful floor mats, art supplies and building blocks, a little boy named Riley talked quietly with a teacher about how he had watched his mother take “knockout pills” and had seen his father shoot up “a thousand times.”

    Riley, who is 9 years old, described how he had often been left alone to care for his baby brother while his parents were somewhere else getting high. Beginning when he was about 5, he would heat up meals of fries, chicken nuggets and spaghetti rings in the microwave for himself and his brother, he said. “That was all I knew how to make,” Riley said.

    Riley — who is in foster care and who officials asked not be fully identified because of his age — is among hundreds of students enrolled in the local school district who have witnessed drug use at home. Like many of his classmates at Minford Elementary School, Riley struggles with behavioral and psychological problems that make it difficult to focus, school officials said, let alone absorb lessons.

    “If you’re worried about your parents getting arrested last night, you can’t retain information,” said Kendra Rase Cram, a teacher at Minford Elementary who was hired this past academic year to teach students how to cope with trauma. Over the past nine months, she led several classes a day, and met every week in one-on-one sessions with up to 20 students who have experienced significant trauma.

    “We have all these kids who are in survival mode,” Ms. Cram said.

    Minford Elementary is not like typical schools. At this small campus in rural southern Ohio, there is a dedicated sensory room stocked with weighted blankets, chewable toys and exercise balls. Children who were born dependent on drugs, as well as others with special needs, can take time to jump on a trampoline or calm down in a play tunnel, sometimes several times each day. In class, students role-play in lessons on self-control, such as blowing bubbles and then waiting to pop them, and anger management, while also learning calming strategies like deep breathing techniques.

    But the pastoral landscape belies a devastated community. In this county, long considered ground zero in Ohio’s opioid epidemic, nearly 9.7 million pills were prescribed in 2010 — enough to give 123 to each resident, the highest rate in the state, according to official statistics. Over the years, as opioid prescriptions have fallen, many drug users have moved on to heroin and fentanyl .

    #Opioides #Addiction #Enfants #Ohio #Ecole

  • Tribute to Ruby Bridges #droits_civiques #racisme #états_unis

    14th November 1960: Ruby Bridges, the first African-American to desegregate an elementary school - YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzkGJQL08OI

    14th November 1960: Ruby Bridges, the first African-American to desegregate an elementary school

    –— ---

    Activist Ruby Bridges on Racism in America Today | Season 2018 Episode 05/03/2018 | Chicago Tonight | PBS
    https://www.pbs.org/video/activist-ruby-bridges-racism-america-today-2g2lfs

    Activist Ruby Bridges on Racism in America Today

    Clip: 05/03/2018 | 11m 50s

    Ruby Bridges, the first black student to attend an all-white New Orleans school, joins us to talk about civil rights activism and persistent racism in the U.S.

    –— ---

    Ruby Bridges Shares the Key to Overcoming Racism - YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvW10_kvKDA

    Ruby Bridges Shares the Key to Overcoming Racism

    –— ---

    Freedoms’s Legacy: A Conversation with Ruby Bridges Hall - YouTube

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvnxYDZ4ymY

    Freedoms’s Legacy: A Conversation with Ruby Bridges Hall

    –— ---

    Ruby Bridges — Wikipédia

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges

    Ruby Bridges Hall, née le 8 septembre 1954 à Tylertown au Mississippi, est une enfant afro-américaine connue pour être la première enfant noire à intégrer une école pour enfants blancs en 1964, à l’époque où la ségrégation prend officiellement fin aux États-Unis. Pour son premier jour d’école, elle fut escortée par la police car de nombreux manifestants racistes et favorables à la ségrégation protestaient contre le fait qu’une enfant « de couleur » aille dans une école « de blancs ». Son image est passée à la postérité grâce au tableau de Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With.

  • Un intéressant éditorial du New York Times contre les tentatives du Sénat américain de criminaliser BDS

    Opinion | Curbing Speech in the Name of Helping Israel - The New York Times

    A Senate bill aims to punish those who boycott Israel over its settlement policy. There are better solutions.

    By The Editorial Board
    The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/opinion/editorials/israel-bds.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    One of the more contentious issues involving Israel in recent years is now before Congress, testing America’s bedrock principles of freedom of speech and political dissent.

    It is a legislative proposal that would impose civil and criminal penalties on American companies and organizations that participate in boycotts supporting Palestinian rights and opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

    The aim is to cripple the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as B.D.S., which has gathered steam in recent years despite bitter opposition from the Israeli government and its supporters around the world.

    The proposal’s chief sponsors, Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, and Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, want to attach it to the package of spending bills that Congress needs to pass before midnight Friday to keep the government fully funded.
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    The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading pro-Israel lobby group, strongly favors the measure.

    J Street, a progressive American pro-Israel group that is often at odds with Aipac and that supports a two-state peace solution, fears that the legislation could have a harmful effect, in part by implicitly treating the settlements and Israel the same, instead of as distinct entities. Much of the world considers the settlements, built on land that Israel captured in the 1967 war, to be a violation of international law.

    Although the Senate sponsors vigorously disagree, the legislation, known as the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, is clearly part of a widening attempt to silence one side of the debate. That is not in the interests of Israel, the United States or their shared democratic traditions.

    Critics of the legislation, including the American Civil Liberties Union and several Palestinian rights organizations, say the bill would violate the First Amendment and penalize political speech.

    The hard-line policies of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, including expanding settlements and an obvious unwillingness to seriously pursue a peace solution that would allow Palestinians their own state, have provoked a backlash and are fueling the boycott movement.
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    It’s not just Israel’s adversaries who find the movement appealing. Many devoted supporters of Israel, including many American Jews, oppose the occupation of the West Bank and refuse to buy products of the settlements in occupied territories. Their right to protest in this way must be vigorously defended.

    The same is true of Palestinians. They are criticized when they resort to violence, and rightly so. Should they be deprived of nonviolent economic protest as well? The United States frequently employs sanctions as a political tool, including against North Korea, Iran and Russia.

    Mr. Cardin and Mr. Portman say their legislation merely builds on an existing law, the Export Control Reform Act, which bars participation in the Arab League boycott of Israel, and is needed to protect American companies from “unsanctioned foreign boycotts.”

    They are especially concerned that the United Nations Human Rights Council is compiling a database of companies doing business in the occupied territories and East Jerusalem, a tactic Senate aides say parallels the Arab League boycott.

    But there are problems with their arguments, critics say. The existing law aimed to protect American companies from the Arab League boycott because it was coercive, requiring companies to boycott Israel as a condition of doing business with Arab League member states. A company’s motivation for engaging in that boycott was economic — continued trade relations — not exercising free speech rights.

    By contrast, the Cardin-Portman legislation would extend the existing prohibition to cover boycotts against Israel and other countries friendly to the United States when the boycotts are called for by an international government organization, like the United Nations or the European Union.

    Neither of those organizations has called for a boycott, but supporters of Israel apparently fear that the Human Rights Council database is a step in that direction.
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    Civil rights advocates, on the other hand, say that anyone who joins a boycott would be acting voluntarily — neither the United Nations nor the European Union has the authority to compel such action — and the decision would be an exercise of political expression in opposition to Israeli policies.

    Responding to criticism, the senators amended their original proposal to explicitly state that none of the provisions shall infringe upon any First Amendment right and to penalize violators with fines rather than jail time.

    But the American Civil Liberties Union says the First Amendment wording is nonbinding and “leaves intact key provisions which would impose civil and criminal penalties on companies, small business owners, nonprofits and even people acting on their behalf who engage in or otherwise support certain political boycotts.”

    While the sponsors say their bill is narrowly targeted at commercial activity, “such assurances ring hollow in light of the bill’s intended purpose, which is to suppress voluntary participation in disfavored political boycotts,” the A.C.L.U. said in a letter to lawmakers.

    Even the Anti-Defamation League, which has lobbied for the proposal, seems to agree. A 2016 internal ADL memo, disclosed by The Forward last week, calls anti-B.D.S. laws “ineffective, unworkable, unconstitutional and bad for the Jewish community.”

    In a properly functioning Congress, a matter of such moment would be openly debated. Instead, Mr. Cardin and Mr. Portman are trying to tack the B.D.S. provision onto the lame-duck spending bill, meaning it could by enacted into law in the 11th-hour crush to keep the government fully open.

    The anti-B.D.S. initiative began in 2014 at the state level before shifting to Congress and is part of a larger, ominous trend in which the political space for opposing Israel is shrinking. After ignoring the B.D.S. movement, Israel is now aggressively pushing against it, including branding it anti-Semitic and adopting a law barring foreigners who support it from entering that country.
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    One United States case shows how counterproductive the effort is. It involves Bahia Amawi, an American citizen of Palestinian descent who was told she could no longer work as an elementary school speech pathologist in Austin, Tex., because she refused to sign a state-imposed oath that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel. She filed a lawsuit this week in federal court, arguing that the Texas law “chills constitutionally protected political advocacy in support of Palestine.”

    Any anti-boycott legislation enacted by Congress is also likely to face a court challenge. It would be more constructive if political leaders would focus on the injustice and finding viable solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than reinforcing divisions between the two parties and promoting legislation that raises free speech concerns.

  • A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States — so She Lost Her Job
    https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/israel-texas-anti-bds-law

    A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas, alleging a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech.

    #bds

    • But this year, all of that changed. On August 13, the school district once again offered to extend her contract for another year by sending her essentially the same contract and set of certifications she has received and signed at the end of each year since 2009.

      She was prepared to sign her contract renewal until she noticed one new, and extremely significant, addition: a certification she was required to sign pledging that she “does not currently boycott Israel,” that she “will not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” and that she shall refrain from any action “that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israeli or in an Israel-controlled territory.”

      The language of the affirmation Amawi was told she must sign reads like Orwellian — or McCarthyite — self-parody, the classic political loyalty oath that every American should instinctively shudder upon reading…

  • Mailbox Money
    https://hackernoon.com/mailbox-money-83b8a93f9b96?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    I had the opportunity to talk with a very successful businessman as part of this NursePass story. He provided some great advice, as well as introduced me to a colleague of his that helped us secure our first patent. Looking back at the notes from that conversation, I had written in darker ink than anything else… “Mailbox Money”: simply launching NursePass for the sake of collecting a check in my mailbox. His point was about the “exit” and just collecting my stake.It sounded appealing. I’ll be honest. I’m very “green” to #entrepreneurship. My previous #startup experience was secretly selling Bubblicious gum in elementary school at recess and on the bus. I had a display and everything, but I’ll save that story for later. The idea of just walking to my mailbox to find checks…it sounded dreamy. Dreamy (...)

    #health-technology #mailbox-money

  • Why Did a Major Paper Ignore Evidence About Gender Stereotypes? - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-major-paper-ignore-evidence-about-gender-stereotypes

    Some scientists may be motivated to support compelling narratives—social psychology has a long and checkered history that includes cherry-picking results, studies, and publications in order to advance them.Photograph by Everett Collection / ShutterstockLet’s start with a quiz.Who was more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, men or women?Who is more likely to commit a murder, men or women?Who receives higher grades in high school, boys or girls?Who is more likely to be labeled as having some sort of behavior problem in elementary school, boys or girls?The answers are, respectively: men, men, girls, boys. Is it that surprising? If you got at least one right, without resorting to flipping a mental coin, you have just demonstrated to yourself that not all beliefs (stereotypes) about (...)

  • 50 years of U.S. mass shootings: The victims, sites, killers and weapons - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/mass-shootings-in-america

    he death tolls change, the places change: 26 at a church, 26 in an elementary school, 49 in a nightclub, 58 at a country music festival. The faces in the memorial photos change every time.

    But the weapons are the common denominator.

    Mass killings in the United States are most often carried out with guns, usually handguns, most of them obtained legally.

    There is no universally accepted definition of a mass shooting, and different organizations use different criteria. In this piece we use a narrow definition and look only at the deadliest mass shootings, beginning Aug. 1, 1966, when ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, then climbed a 27-story tower at the University of Texas and killed 14 more people before police shot him to death. The numbers here refer to 132 events in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (or two shooters in three cases). An average of eight people died during each event, often including the shooters.

    #armes #armement #états-unis #armes_légères #massacres

  • Oromo-Somali conundrum: Can Ethiopia tame the Liyu police? - OPride.com
    https://www.opride.com/2017/09/26/oromo-somali-conundrum-can-ethiopia-tame-liyu-police

    Ethiopia says hundreds of Oromos killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced from their homes in still ongoing violent clashes in the Eastern part of the country.

    Conflict along the border of Ethiopia’s Oromia and Somali states is not new. The two states have seen sporadic episodes of clashes and raids along the common border for more than a decade. But tensions escalated earlier this month after dozens of ethnic Somalis were killed in the city of Awaday in Eastern Oromia. In response, the Somali State’s paramilitary force known as the “Liyu Police” launched revenge attacks and began mass expulsion of ethnic Oromos from the state.

    The Ethiopian government on Monday said more than 3,000 long-term Oromo residents of the semi-autonomous Somaliland were also illegally displaced. At least two Oromos were killed in revenge attacks in the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa earlier this month.

    Locals in Oromia have complained for months about cross-border attacks and killings by the Liyu police. Yet, its attacks on civilians and expansionist raids have gone largely unreported, including a recent grenade attack at an elementary school in Miesso and the massacre of several dozen civilians in the town of Chinaksan.

    #éthiopie #conflit #territoire

  • Facebook’s war on free will | Technology | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will

    All the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves and form their own opinions.

    We can’t entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the world, even in the US, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to organise themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait.
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    In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.

    Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of governments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of individuals – or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”. The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. With the looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we’ll behave better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revelations will prod us to become more tolerant of one another’s sins. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

    There’s another way to describe this historical progression. Automation has come in waves. During the industrial revolution, machinery replaced manual workers. At first, machines required human operators. Over time, machines came to function with hardly any human intervention. For centuries, engineers automated physical labour; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the brain redundant. Or, as the former Google and Yahoo executive Marissa Mayer once argued, “You have to make words less human and more a piece of the machine.” Indeed, we have begun to outsource our intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should learn, the topics we should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These companies can justify their incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte articulated: they are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on human life.

    Algorithms can be gorgeous expressions of logical thinking, not to mention a source of ease and wonder. They can track down copies of obscure 19th-century tomes in a few milliseconds; they put us in touch with long-lost elementary school friends; they enable retailers to deliver packages to our doors in a flash. Very soon, they will guide self-driving cars and pinpoint cancers growing in our innards. But to do all these things, algorithms are constantly taking our measure. They make decisions about us and on our behalf. The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines.

    Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behaviour can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That’s always been a danger of the engineering mindset, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and begins to design a more perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in the grand design.

    #Facebook #Algorithme #Société_calcul #Ingénierie

  • How the Pentagon’s Handling of Munitions and Their Waste has Poisoned America
    https://www.propublica.org/article/military-pollution-open-burns-radford-virginia

    Internal #EPA records obtained by ProPublica show that the Radford plant [i.e. the nation’s largest supplier of propellant for artillery and the source of explosives for almost every American bullet fired overseas] is one of at least 51 active sites across the country where the Department of Defense or its contractors are today burning or detonating munitions or raw explosives in the open air, often in close proximity to schools, homes and water supplies. The documents — EPA PowerPoint presentations made to senior agency staff — describe something of a runaway national program, based on “a dirty technology” with “virtually no emissions controls.” According to officials at the agency, the military’s open burn program not only results in extensive contamination, but “staggering” cleanup costs that can reach more than half a billion dollars at a single site.

    [...] Our examination found that open burn sites are just one facet of a vast problem. From World War I until today, military technologies and armaments have been developed, tested, stored, decommissioned and disposed of on vast tracts of American soil. The array of scars and menaces produced across those decades is breathtaking: By the military’s own count, there are 39,400 known or suspected toxic sites on 5,500 current or former Pentagon properties. EPA staff estimate the sites cover 40 million acres — an area larger than the state of Florida — and the costs for cleaning them up will run to hundreds of billions of dollars.

    The truth is that those materials litter the American landscape like no other industry or source of pollution ever has. “The Pentagon is the most prolific and profound polluter on the planet,” said Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national whistle-blower support organization that has chronicled insider reports of pollution and failed cleanups on military sites for decades.

    #DoD #armée #armes #pollution #sols

  • Pipeline to the classroom: how big oil promotes fossil fuels to America’s children | US news | The Guardian

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/15/big-oil-classrooms-pipeline-oklahoma-education

    his story was a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and StateImpact Oklahoma, a reporting project of NPR member stations in Oklahoma.

    Jennifer Merritt’s first graders at Jefferson elementary school in Pryor, Oklahoma, were in for a treat. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the students gathered for story time with two special guests, Republican lawmakers Tom Gann and Marty Quinn.

    Dressed in suits, the two men read aloud from “Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream,” a parable in which a Bob the Builder-lookalike awakens to find his toothbrush, hard hat and even the tires on his bike missing.

    #lobbies

  • Dylan Moriarty
    https://dylanmoriarty.github.io/blog/foggy-spaces.html

    Above is a mental map of the route I would take to elementary school as a kid. Between the ages of 2~10 this was “the know world” to me. Sure, I knew there was an Olive Garden somewhere in the aether, but where it was relative to my home and how to get there were beyond me. Here’s 1996 Janesville according to six year old Dylan

    #cartographie #enfance

  • 100 Chinese translations of foreign publications which had strong influence in China, Thomas Kampen
    http://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/md/zo/sino/institute/staff/kampen/kampen_100_translations.pdf

    Between 1840 and 1949, millions of Chinese students, academics and
    politicians were influenced by Chinese translations of Western books. But for a long time it was difficult to find details about the publication of these translations and biographical data of the translators.

    In 1996, the Chinese scholar 鄒振環 Zou Zhenhuan (Fudan University, Shanghai) published a book introducing one hundred Chinese translations of foreign publications that had strong influence in modern China (影響中國近代社會的一百種譯作 Yingxiang Zhongguo jindai shehui de yibai zhong yizuo, Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fan yi chuban gongsi, 1996). This book provides important information for studying Western influences in China as well as literary, philosophical and political trends in modern China.

    Contents

    The book includes an impressive selection of novels (Defoe, Dumas, Scott), detective stories (A.C. Doyle), plays (Schiller, Shakespeare), poems (Byron), as well as historical, religious, sociological, philosophical and political studies (Einstein, Huxley, Kropotkin, Marx, Nietzsche, Rousseau). Most of the original worksare from Europe and about Europe; there are about a dozen Japanese books, but most of these are also based on western publications; there is also a small number of Western books about China, including Pearl S. Buck’s Good Earth and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China.

    Zou Zhenhuan provides information about
    – the original works and authors,
    – the Chinese translations and translators
    – the impact of the translations in China.

    Getting “The Good Earth”’s Author Right: On Pearl S. Buck, By Charles W. Hayford
    https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/getting-the-good-earths-author-right-on-pearl-s-buck

    ... the seven pirated translations of The Good Earth into Chinese sold more copies than any other foreign book had up to that point.

    Once denounced, now honored—discovering Pearl S. Buck, BookPage Behind the Book by Anchee Min
    https://bookpage.com/behind-the-book/12261-once-denounced-now-honored-discovering-pearl-s-buck

    I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China, where I lived for 27 years. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending middle school in Shanghai.

    I was raised on the teachings of Mao and the operas of Madam Mao. I became a leader of the Little Red Guards in elementary school. My mother had been a teacher—she taught whatever the Party asked, one semester in Chinese and the next in Russian. My father was an instructor of industrial technique drawing at Shanghai Textile Institute, although his true love was astronomy. My parents both believed in Mao and the Communist Party, just like everybody else in the neighborhood. I became a Mao activist and won contests because I was able to recite the Little Red Book. In school Mao’s books were our texts.

    Trying to gain international support to deny Pearl Buck an entry visa (to accompany President Nixon to China), Madam Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.”

    I followed the order to denounce Pearl Buck and never doubted whether or not Madam Mao was being truthful. I was brainwashed at that time and had learned never to question anything. And yet I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I wished that I had been given a chance to read The Good Earth. We were told that the book was so “toxic” that it was dangerous to even translate. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: “Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China.” “She hates us therefore is our enemy.” I was proud to be able to defend my country and people.

    Pearl Buck’s name didn’t cross my path again until I immigrated to America. It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, Red Azalea. Afterward, a lady came to me and asked if I knew Pearl Buck. Before I could reply, she said—very emotionally and to my surprise—that Pearl Buck had taught her to love the Chinese people. She placed a paperback in my hands and said that it was a gift. It was The Good Earth.

    I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author. I remembered how Madam Mao had convinced the entire nation to hate Pearl Buck. How wrong we were! I had never encountered any author, including the most respected Chinese authors, who wrote about our peasants with such admiration, affection and humanity.

    A Guide to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth | Asia for Educators | Columbia University, A Summary of The Good Earth
    http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_earth.htm

    The story begins on the day of Wang Lung’s wedding. Wang Lung is a poor young peasant who lives in an earthen brick house with his father, who has arranged for him to marry a slave girl named O-lan from the great family of the House of Hwang. After Wang Lung brings his quiet but diligent new wife home, she works side by side with him in the fields until their first child is born. They are delighted with their son, and at the New Year O-lan dresses him up and proudly takes him to the House of Hwang to show him off. She discovers that due to ostentatious waste and decadence, the Hwang household has squandered their fortune and is now poor enough to be willing to sell off their land. Since Wang Lung, with the help of O-lan who continues to join him in the fields, has had a relatively good year, he determines to extend his prosperity and better his position by buying some land from the House of Hwang. Although they must work harder with more land, Wang Lung and O-lan continue to produce good harvests; they also produce a second son and a daughter.

    But soon Wang Lung encounters difficulties. His selfish and unprincipled uncle is jealous, and demands a portion of Wang Lung’s new wealth, while Wang Lung, obsessed with his desire to acquire more land, spends all the family savings; a drought causes a poor harvest and the family suffers from lack of food and from their envious, starving neighbors’ looting of the little dried beans and corn they have left. O-lan has to strangle their fourth child as soon as she is born because otherwise she would die of starvation. Desperately poor and hungry, Wang Lung sells his furniture for a bit of silver to take his family south, though he refuses to sell his land. They ride a firewagon to a southern city, where they live in a makeshift hut on the street. They survive by O-lan, the grandfather, and the children begging for food and Wang Lung pulling a jinrickshaw (or rickshaw) for the rich, or pulling wagonloads of cargo at night.

    In the southern city, Wang Lung perceives the extraordinary wealth of westerners and Chinese aristocrats and capitalists, and he is interested in the revolutionaries’ protests of the oppression of the poor. He watches soldiers seize innocent men and force them to carry equipment for their armies. Yet Wang Lung’s overriding concern is to get back to his beloved land. He gets his chance when the enemy invades the city and the rich people flee; Wang Lung and O-lan join the throng of poor people who loot the nearby rich man’s house and get enough gold and jewels to enable them to return north. They repair their house and plough the fields, having bought seeds, an ox, new furniture and farm tools, and finally more land from the bankrupt House of Hwang.

    There follow seven years of prosperity, during which the sons grow and begin school; a third son is born with a twin sister, and the harvest is so plentiful that Wang Lung hires laborers and his loyal neighbor, Ching, as a steward. When a flood causes a general famine in the seventh year, Wang Lung is rich enough not to worry about survival yet, while his lands are under water, he becomes restless in his idleness. Bored with his plain and coarse wife, he ventures into a tea shop in town operated by a man from the south where the rich and idle spend their time drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes. There he begins an affair with Lotus, a delicately beautiful but manipulatively demanding courtesan whom he desires obsessively. Wang Lung is cruel to his wife and children and spends his fortune on Lotus, finally using up much of his savings to purchase her and build an adjacent courtyard for her to live in as his second wife. Here Lotus indolently lies around in silks, eating expensive delicacies, and gossiping with the deceitful and opportunistic wife of Wang Lung’s uncle.

    But discord arises immediately. O-lan is deeply hurt and angry, which makes Wang Lung defensively guilty and cold with her; there are conflicts between O-lan and Lotus’ maid Cuckoo who had mistreated O-lan when she was a concubine of the old master in the House of Hwang. Wang Lung’s old father protests the decadence of catering to a “harlot” in the house. Finally, Lotus is intolerant of Wang Lung’s children, especially his favorite daughter who had become mentally disabled due to malnutrition during the famine. As a result, Wang Lung’s passion for Lotus eventually cools, and when the flood recedes and he returns to his farming work, he is no longer obsessed with love.

    In the last third of the book, Wang Lung experiences a succession of joys and sorrows in his family relationships and in his farming. Seasons of good harvests are punctuated by occasional bad years, due to a heavy flood, a severe winter freeze, and a scourge of locusts. Yet on the whole Wang Lung continues to prosper. His wealth, however, also brings a series of discontents. His first son is idle and interested only in women; Wang Lung is furious when he finds the son has visited first a local prostitute and then his own Lotus, so he arranges a marriage for him. Moreover, Wang Lung’s good-for-nothing uncle, with his wife and son, force themselves on the family with their demands for money and their morally corrupting influence; Wang Lung must be kind to them because the uncle is a leader of a band of robbers, from which Wang Lung’s prosperous household is protected for as long as he provides for the uncle. He eventually renders the uncle and his wife harmless by making them addicted to opium.

    Family affairs continue to have ups and downs. O-lan’s sickness finally overpowers her, and Wang Lung’s tender solicitousness to her on her deathbed cannot fully compensate for the insults she received when Lotus moved into the house. She is content to die only after her first son’s marriage is consummated, so she can expect a grandson. Wang Lung’s father dies immediately after O-lan, and the faithful steward Ching is buried next. But these losses are accompanied by new joys: the first son produces grandsons and granddaughters, and the second son — a successful grain merchant — and the second daughter are also married and have children.

    As Wang Lung ages, he rents out his farm land to tenants. His eldest son persuades him to buy the old estate of the House of Hwang in town, both as a means of moving out from the place where the disgraceful uncle and his wife live, and as a symbol of Wang Lung’s elevated social position. Wang Lung is gratified that now he can take the place of the Old Master of Hwang who once intimidated him so much. But although Wang Lung is head of a three generation extended family who live in luxury with numerous servants, he cannot find peace. The two older brothers and their wives quarrel; the youngest son refuses to become a farmer as Wang Lung had intended and instead joins the army. The uncle’s malicious son causes more trouble when he brings his military regiment to camp for six weeks in Wang Lung’s elegant house. And Wang Lung, long tired of the aging Lotus, finds some comfort in taking the young slave Pear Blossom as his concubine.

    Finally, Wang Lung returns to the earthen house of his land to die. Material prosperity has brought him superficial social satisfaction, but only his land can provide peace and security. Even his final days are troubled, when he overhears his two older sons planning to sell the land as soon as he dies.

    #Chine #USA #histoire #politique #littérature

  • Learning Chess at 40 - Issue 36: Aging
    http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/learning-chess-at-40

    My 4-year-old daughter and I were deep into a game of checkers one day about three years ago when her eye drifted to a nearby table. There, a black and white board bristled with far more interesting figures, like horses and castles. “What’s that?” she asked. “Chess,” I replied. “Can we play?” I nodded absently. 
There was just one problem: I didn’t know how. I dimly remembered having learned the basic moves in elementary school, but it never stuck. This fact vaguely haunted me through my life; idle chessboards in hotel lobbies or puzzles in weekend newspaper supplements teased me like reproachful riddles. And so I decided I would learn, if only so I could teach my daughter. The basic moves were easy enough to pick up—a few hours hunched over my smartphone at kids’ birthday parties or waiting in (...)

  • The Battle of School Curricula (1): Oppression and Mayhem | SyriaUntold | حكاية ما انحكت
    http://www.syriauntold.com/en/2016/02/the-battle-of-school-curricula-1-oppression-and-mayhem

    There are now more than 5 different curricula taught to Syrian students outside regime schools, as too many sides have decided to chip in each with their own curricular standards.

    Syrian Opposition Interim Government Curriculum: Taught mainly in the rebel-held north and mid-northern areas. It is very similar to the regime curriculum, with pro-Assad content removed and selected religious classes amended. Similar, locally-carved up textbooks are also taught in areas hard to reach by the Interim government, such as the besieged Ghouta in rural Damascus. They sometimes include additional practical trainings on safety and first aid, as well as extra-curricular activities for emotional and social skill development and psycho-social support.
    Islamic Opposition curricula: Such as that of al-Tawheed Front or Al-Cham Committee. These curricula include an increased amount of religious classes, both theoretical and practical. They are also free of pro-regime content but have occasionally also cancelled classes viewed as unorthodox from a conservative religious perspective, such as music or philosophy. More extreme Islamic groups such as Al Nusra Front have “secret” curriculum in their schools with little information available about its content to anyone outside those schools.
    UNICEF “Virtual School for Education in Crises”: A project still under development, “designed to provide children and adolescents affected by conflict in the region with the opportunity to continue their education and receive certification for their learning”. Apart from the obvious access challenges to Internet, electronic devices and electricity altogether, it is still unclear what the content of this curriculum will be exactly, as it has been stated that it will focus only on “Arabic, English, Math and Science”.
    Kurdish curriculum: In northern areas under the rule of Kurdish autonomous government and “Syria’s Democratic Forces” of the PYD party, new textbooks for the first 3 grades of elementary school have been printed in Latin alphabet Kurdish. The possibility of learning Arabic at schools in those areas still vary from one town to the next. This curriculum is the first to introduce Yazidi religious classes in its religion curriculum, alongside those of Christianity and Islam. However, much opposition has faced this curriculum from both Kurds and non-Kurds due to the overt PYD/PKK ideological indoctrination in it, as well as the consequences of the Assad regime closing down public schools that teach this curriculum by cutting off staff salaries and denying them accreditation.
    ISIS schools: Accurate information about education under ISIS is scarce. Back in 2014, the organization used amended regime curriculums in public schools of areas under their control, sometimes completely omitting entire subjects like music, arts, philosophy, history and even chemistry. It was later rumored that they have designed and printed their own curriculum from scratch, the cover front pages of which were leaked recently from their stronghold town of Raqqa through twitter by the media activist group “Raqqa is being slaughtered silently”. The visual aesthetic quality of those books surpasses anything ever published by Assad regime, while content, as the Raqqa group told SyriaUntold “is nothing but blatant warmongering. A simple math problem for grade school would be something like this: If we had 5 Kalashnikovs and 3 grenades, how many weapons do we have in total?”
    Other sources indicate that ISIS are only teaching religious subjects, in addition to practical lessons in martial arts and basic weapon use. Public school teachers were discharged at first, then they were made to attend a “repentance” course of ISIS theological indoctrination as a condition to returning to their work. Those who refused are then declared as infidels, “legally” charged and in some cases have even had their property confiscated or risked facing imprisonment or execution in an attempt to drive them all out. Even private lessons are facing encroachment by ISIS, which puts a whole generation of children in grave danger in these regions.

    #syrie #éducation

  • Le fondateur de Facebook devient papa et annonce le don de 99% de ses actions
    http://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_le-fondateur-de-facebook-devient-papa-et-annonce-le-don-de-99-de-ses-act

    Ah ?

    Le patron-fondateur de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg et son épouse Priscilla Chan ont annoncé mardi la naissance de leur premier enfant, une fille, ainsi que le don au cours de leurs vies de 99% de leurs actions à une nouvelle fondation, la « Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ».

    Ah OK...

  • Proportionate Israeli Revenge - par Amira Hass - Nov 18, 2015 4:42 AM
    http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.686710

    AFP A Palestinian woman walks amid the rubble of a house after Israeli security forces demolished the homes of two convicted Palestinian terrorists in Jabal Mukaber in East Jerusalem, October 6, 2015.

    Revenge has many fathers, and even mothers. Some are known by name: their honors Justices Miriam Naor, Hanan Melcer and Noam Sohlberg; head of the army’s Central Command Roni Numa; commander of the Binyamin Brigade Yisrael Shomer (the names change, but not their positions or their roles in the chain of vengeance).

    The High Court of Justice ruling that authorized demolishing the houses of people suspected in the recent murders of Jews isn’t called revenge, but deterrence. Well, that is intriguing. After 50 years of Israeli rule that was forced on the Palestinians, and which has included every possible type of “deterrent” action, how is it that those dimwits still haven’t learned that they’re supposed to be deterred? So let’s dispense with the wrapping paper and call things by their proper name.

    Most of the fathers of revenge aren’t known by name: for example, the numerous soldiers serving in the Binyamin Brigade, the Duvdevan undercover unit, the Shaked Battalion and the engineering corps who invaded the Qalandiyah refugee camp sometime after midnight on Monday. Their assignment was to demolish an apartment in the Al-Jabal neighborhood, the home of Mohammed Abu Shahin, who is accused of murdering Danny Gonen at a spring in the West Bank village of Deir Ibzi’a.

    Accused, mind you; his guilt hasn’t yet been proven. And we, poor fools, learned back in elementary school that he is innocent until proven guilty. What’s surprising here is that when the suspect is a Palestinian, the High Court justices don’t even tried to conceal the gross violation of this basic legal presumption.

    The honored justices and the officers are acting on the government’s orders to take revenge, and they make haste to do its will. A lynching has many faces. The lucky ones, and those with refined tastes, don’t have to soil their hands with blows and blood. They need only sign orders and cite previous, nicely wrapped verdicts.

    Revenge is not sufficiently sweet without knowing the graphic details: the tear gas and the sounds of the explosions that once again invaded dreams and rooms, the helplessness of the parents, the fear of the children who live in Al-Jabal, who were awakened by blows on their doors and calls over the loudspeaker to leave their homes and gather on the soccer field (41 percent of the camp’s approximately 13,000 residents are up to 14 years old.)

    “I believe there’s no reason to conclude that the planned demolition is disproportionate,” wrote Naor, and her learned colleagues concurred.

    True, it’s crowded in the camp (343 dunams housing refugees who originated from Lod and 51 destroyed villages). Houses touch each other; upper-story apartments are just an arm’s length from their neighbors; alleys are only 1.5 meters wide. Naor, the author of the High Court’s decision, believed the state’s assertion that “the demolition will be carried out under the supervision of an engineer, who will ensure that all necessary steps are taken to prevent collateral damage.” Fifty years of rule, and the state and the honored justice and the engineer truly don’t know that it’s impossible to blow up a flat in a refugee camp without causing collateral damage?

    And now for the collateral damage: At least nine other apartments were damaged in the explosion. Here the damage totaled tens of thousands of shekels, there it was merely thousands. Cracked supporting walls are in danger of collapsing.

    These people worked in Israel, built for Israelis, removed Israelis’ trash and saved for years to build a multistory home in which the overcrowding could be forgotten — one with an air conditioner and pictures of Disney characters in the children’s rooms. The lynchers can rub their hands with glee: It’s not just the family of the accused that is paying for the murder, but also 50 or 60 of its neighbors.

    Revenge in the guise of deterrence may work in the short term. For a month. For half a year. But in the long term, it creates new generations of Palestinians who will conclude they have no future with Israel and the Israelis.

    #Amira_Hass

  • Inglis, Florida: home to the 1,000th US mass shooting since Sandy Hook | World news | The Guardian

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/mass-shooting-florida-1000th-sandy-hook

    Just before sundown on Thursday 1 October, an old man charged across the main street of the little town of Inglis, Florida. He was expecting trouble. Someone had recklessly fired a pistol in public, and Buzz Terhune intended to have words about it.
    ’Leave us in peace’: Anti-gun control protesters greet Obama during Oregon visit

    The horror that unfolded in the next few minutes has become so mundane, so everyday, that it no longer makes national news. Terhune was marching headlong into the 1,000th mass shooting in the United States since the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre almost three years ago.

    #états-unis #armes #armements #meurtres #crimes

  • A Train Journey From Communism to Freedom, Almost Ended in Hungary - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/world/europe/a-train-to-freedom-almost-ended-in-hungary.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Home

    Yet that day 36 years ago also marked a fissure in my life: There was a “Before,” a time when I felt secure and deeply loved, and where I knew my place in the world; and there was an “After,” when nothing could ever be taken for granted again. Despite the fact that I speak fluent English, own a home in America and attended elementary school, high school and college here, the nice lady at Chase whom I called yesterday to ask about a charge on my account still begins the conversation with: “What an unusual name; where are you from, honey?”

  • Anti-manuel sexuel

    (vu dans la Check-List du Monde ce matin)

    Le nouveau manuel d’éducation sexuelle pour les écoles de Corée du Sud ne contient pas seulement des éléments faux et sexistes. Il semble aussi excuser le viol : « Un homme ayant dépensé de l’argent pour un rendez-vous attend une compensation » de la part de la femme. Le Korea Herald s’indigne. Sex education in schools

    http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150827001012

    The Education Ministry’s newly issued national standard on sex education should be thoroughly reviewed by experts and revised before it is used in schools.

    It took the Education Ministry some two years and 600 million won to prepare the manual on sex education that is being heavily criticized by experts and civic groups for its false information, misleading remarks and blatantly sexist bias.

    The sex education material for first and second grade elementary school students states “(male) sexual desire can arise quickly on impulse, regardless of time or place.” Not only is the age-appropriateness of the material doubtful, the statement makes it appear as if it is alright for men to express their sexual desire “regardless of time or place.”

    The sexist attitude of the authors is clearly displayed when the manual for teaching high school students states that “from the perspective of a man who spends a lot of money on dates, it is natural that he would want a commensurate compensation from the woman. In such conditions, unwanted date rape can occur.” The writers seem to be condoning date rape or at the very least justifying date rape for men who bear the costs of dating.

  • Can You Die From a Broken Heart? - Issue 23: Dominoes
    http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/can-you-die-from-a-broken-heart-rp

    Ruth and Harold “Doc” Knapke met in elementary school. They exchanged letters during the war, when Doc was stationed in Germany. After he returned their romance began in earnest. They married, raised six children and celebrated 65 anniversaries together. And then on a single day in August 2013, in the room they shared in an Ohio nursing home, they died. “No relationship was ever perfect, but theirs was one of the better relationships I ever observed,” says their daughter Margaret Knapke, 61, a somatic therapist. “They were always like Velcro. They couldn’t stand to be separated.” For years, Knapke says, she and her siblings watched their father’s health crumble. He suffered from longstanding heart problems and had begun showing signs of dementia. He lost interest in things he once enjoyed, (...)

  • The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED
    http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation
    By Adrian Chen

    The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of these companies’ most important work is being done 7,000 miles away, on the second floor of a former elementary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics’ stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13 miles southwest of Manila.
    Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies.
    So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.
    This work is increasingly done in the Philippines. A former US colony, the Philippines has maintained close cultural ties to the United States, which content moderation companies say helps Filipinos determine what Americans find offensive. And moderators in the Philippines can be hired for a fraction of American wages.
    Here in the former elementary school, Baybayan and his coworkers are screening content for Whisper, an LA-based mobile startup—recently valued at $200 million by its VCs—that lets users post photos and share secrets anonymously. They work for a US-based outsourcing firm called TaskUs. It’s something of a surprise that Whisper would let a reporter in to see this process. When I asked Microsoft, Google, and Facebook for information about how they moderate their services, they offered vague statements about protecting users but declined to discuss specifics.
    I was given a look at the Whisper moderation process because Michael Heyward, Whisper’s CEO, sees moderation as an integral feature and a key selling point of his app. Whisper practices “active moderation,” an especially labor-intensive process in which every single post is screened in real time; many other companies moderate content only if it’s been flagged as objectionable by users, which is known as reactive moderating.
    A list of categories, scrawled on a whiteboard, reminds the workers of what they’re hunting for: pornography, gore, minors, sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/images, racism.
    While a large amount of content moderation takes place overseas, much is still done in the US, often by young college graduates like Swearingen was. Many companies employ a two-tiered moderation system, where the most basic moderation is outsourced abroad while more complex screening, which requires greater cultural familiarity, is done domestically. US-based moderators are much better compensated than their overseas counterparts: A brand-new American moderator for a large tech company in the US can make more in an hour than a veteran Filipino moderator makes in a day. But then a career in the outsourcing industry is something many young Filipinos aspire to, whereas American moderators often fall into the job as a last resort, and burnout is common.
    “Everybody hits the wall, generally between three and five months,” says a former YouTube content moderator I’ll call Rob. “You just think, ‘Holy shit, what am I spending my day doing? This is awful.’”
    But as months dragged on, the rough stuff began to take a toll. The worst was the gore: brutal street fights, animal torture, suicide bombings, decapitations, and horrific traffic accidents. The Arab Spring was in full swing, and activists were using YouTube to show the world the government crackdowns that resulted. Moderators were instructed to leave such “newsworthy” videos up with a warning, even if they violated the content guidelines. But the close-ups of protesters’ corpses and street battles were tough for Rob and his coworkers to handle. So were the videos that documented misery just for the sick thrill of it.
    “If someone was uploading animal abuse, a lot of the time it was the person who did it. He was proud of that,” Rob says. “And seeing it from the eyes of someone who was proud to do the fucked-up thing, rather than news reporting on the fucked-up thing—it just hurts you so much harder, for some reason. It just gives you a much darker view of humanity.”
    In Manila, I meet Denise (not her real name), a psychologist who consults for two content-moderation firms in the Philippines. “It’s like PTSD,” she tells me as we sit in her office above one of the city’s perpetually snarled freeways. “There is a memory trace in their mind.”

  • Can You Die From a Broken Heart ? - Issue 15 : Turbulence
    http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/can-you-die-from-a-broken-heart

    Ruth and Harold “Doc” Knapke met in elementary school. They exchanged letters during the war, when Doc was stationed in Germany. After he returned their romance began in earnest. They married, raised six children and celebrated 65 anniversaries together. And then on a single day in August 2013, in the room they shared in an Ohio nursing home, they died. “No relationship was ever perfect, but theirs was one of the better relationships I ever observed,” says their daughter Margaret Knapke, 61, a somatic therapist. “They were always like Velcro. They couldn’t stand to be separated.” For years, Knapke says, she and her siblings watched their father’s health crumble. He suffered from longstanding heart problems and had begun showing signs of dementia. He lost interest in things he once enjoyed, (...)

  • 5 Ways U.S. Democracy Is More Rigged Than You Think | Cracked.com
    http://www.cracked.com/article_20705_5-ways-u.s.-democracy-more-rigged-than-you-think.html

    None of you are naive or think government works exactly the way you learned it in elementary school. We all know there are backroom deals and bribes and blackmail and probably, like, orgies and shit behind the scenes.

    But what many people don’t realize is that the most unfair and outright broken parts of the system we have in the USA aren’t a result of people breaking the law. No, the craziest, most overtly bullshit practices are perfectly legal .

    #5. Your Congressional Representative Has Already Been Chosen for You

    ... the party in power simply finds all of the most loyal voters on the map and draws the district around them. That’s how we wind up with the complete madness that is Illinois District 4:

    #4. The Two Controlling Parties Actively Sabotage Their Competition

    the current two parties in the USA are also in charge of setting the rules for ballot access for third parties. As such, these rules are roughly as fair as a cage match between a toddler with particularly large ears and a hungry Mike Tyson. Take Carl Romanelli of Pennsylvania. He wanted to run for a congressional seat as a member of the Green Party. Under the rules enforced by the major parties, Republicans and Democrats needed 2,000 signatures to attain ballot access and be allowed into the election. Romanelli, on the other hand, was cheerfully informed he would need slightly more. How slightly? Try 67,000. Shockingly, he didn’t make it.

    #3. The Government Can Kill Any Court Case by Claiming It’s a State Secret

    The privilege’s high profile recognition hails from a McCarthy-era lawsuit in 1953, when a B-29 crashed and killed the crew on board. Three widows tried to sue the government over their deaths, but the case was thrown out when the government stated that revealing some of the evidence would be damaging to national security and invoked the privilege. Fifty years later, researchers uncovered said “dangerous” evidence and found out that the only thing it would have damaged was the government’s own ass. They were just covering up for their own negligence that ultimately caused the crash.

    #2. Who Decides if the Supreme Court Has a Conflict of Interest? They Do

    #1. The Minority Party Can Keep Anything from Getting Done

    #Etats-Unis #démocratie_dévoyée