Tag: social studies
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“No Notice” Evictions
Watching a piece on Las Vegas in which “no notice” evictions are taking place. The renter has been paying on their rent while the owner of the property has been going through foreclosure proceedings and not notified the renter. Then the bank sends out the police to kick out the tenants with no notice whatsoever,…
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Boy Scouts Bring to Mind “Cabaret”
I thought this kind of bizarre, Boy Scouts (well, an affiliate) being trained to confront terrorists, run down illegal immigrants and raid marijuana fields, using kids as young as 13 and 1/2. A competition is described where “looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like” and authenticity being their goal, a…
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Prurient
So, the pentagon has up to 2000 pics of prisoner abuse, 44 of which will be released through actions of the ACLU (bless ’em). The CIA called the ACLU’s push to release the photos “prurient”. Prurient? Prurient??? Is that really the word they were looking for?
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Torture Memos: Waterboarding
Waterboard Torture Memo set to music. I opened it in several different windows and played it simultaneously in staggered layers while reflecting on the many individuals upon whom the torture techniques were used. The walls kind of fall in, but then they’re supposed to.
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Discovery Channel Invites You to Discover Yourself
No joke. Military.discovery.com (Discovery channel) offers this quiz. “If you were a gun, what kind would you be?” The quiz begins with romance and champagne. It is too bizarre. So I took the quiz to see what the questions would be. The first question, as mentioned above, frames the gun as a romantic partner. After…
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In Which I get Justice John G. Roberts’ Number Pegged
I was reading on another blog a post asking if readers’ kids had watched the inauguration and events at school. The most common reply was yes, they’d taken a 1/2 hour out of studies and they saw nothing wrong with it as it’s history. A half hour? Hell, we took the whole day. We started…
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We’re Going to Need Some Good Music During the Long Walk Back
Yesterday afternoon I spent quite a long time talking on the phone to an old friend who lives half this continent away while H.o.p. was with Marty touring the Jim Henson exhibit at the Atlanta History Center. She was adamant I bring up NPR on the radio and listen to the concert at the Lincoln…
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Holiday Spirity (update: now with video!)
Courtesy Pandora Internet Radio we’ve had mucho Christmas music around here the past few days. If you look for “Holiday” in their genre stations, they offer choices of Christmas blues, jazz, rock, classical, folk, Motown, R&B/pop, swingin’, country and peaceful. We’ve mostly stuck with the folk option, but today created a station that will hopefully…
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You've heard this, right? (and still, I will blog about it and tomorrow you will have a chance to cast your vote against four more years of edge-of-your-seat Palintertainment and at this point even MccCain is secretly hoping you will do just that)
Over a million listens on Youtube, so you’ve heard this, right? A couple of Quebec comics, the Masked Avengers, managed to get hold of Palin on the phone and had her believing she was speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Palin was so taken in she scarcely seemed to blink as the conversation departed the…
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I’ve got two fly swatters. I’ll loan you one…
I’m not a Flybaby but I can tell who likely is because I’ve recently been reading her list with the same interest I had in Tammy Faye Bakker and her Fundie drones way back in the day. And there’s a lot of you Flybabies out there, open and closet, because when Flylady says, “Clean your…
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Watch "The Story of Stuff"
Head over to Youtube and watch every chapter of “The Story of Stuff”–the Intro, Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption, Disposal and Another Way. Or view the film at The Story of Stuff website.
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THERE IS NO ICE IN GOLF HEAVEN
Holy hell. The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at a record low, scientists said last night. Experts said they were “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as Britain disappearing in the last…