Politics
June 27, 2006
Two Stories That Upset Me, and One That Didn't
First, the good news--at least, I think it's good news: the so-called "boy crisis" isn't really happening.
According to this article in the Washington Post, there is no huge crisis threatening the future of America's young boys. In fact, a recent study concludes, "over the past three decades, boys' test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor's degrees."
The bad news within this particular story is that SOME boys are doing very poorly--boys in socially and economically disadvantages groups--and so are their female counterparts:
"There's no doubt that some groups of boys -- particularly Hispanic and black boys and boys from low-income homes -- are in real trouble," Education Sector senior policy analyst Sara Mead says in the report. "But the predominant issues for them are race and class, not gender."
What I found most interesting in the article is the fact that in certain areas--reading and writing--girls have always done better than boys, but in recent years, boys have gained rather than fallen in those areas shrinking rather than widening the gap. A graph at the bottom of the article illustrates the fact.
Now, the stuff that really upset me, and they both have to do with selfishness and greed.
First of all, the rich are getting richer--really rich. According to this article from the Independent,
The rise of the moneyed elite over the past few years is quite astonishing. A fortune of £60m would have granted entry to the top 100 of the Sunday Times Rich List in 1989. Now it takes £605m. "Britain's super-rich have seen their wealth soar in recent years," summarises the list's compiler, Philip Beresford.
Get that? In 16 years, the amount of money it takes to be "super-rich" has increased ten-fold. Guess all those policies to help big business and protect the personal assets of the very wealthy are working.
Anyway, if you've got all that money, London is a great place to spend what you can of it; the article also reports on what "ultra high net worth individuals" spend their money on. I didn't finish the list--reading about department store sandwiches costing more than 85 pounds kind of turned my stomach, so I didn't bother to learn all about the yachts, but you can bet that some of them are appointed with mahogony.
And this story reports on the harm being done both to the rain forest and to remote tribes in Peru in the quest for mahogony, though the article states that most mahogony ends up in the US, destined to become "luxury dining room tables, household trimmings and automobile dashboards." Who the hell needs a mahogony dashboard?
Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2006
Playing The Clash Made Him a Terror Suspect
Here's a story I would have only imagined could appear in something like The Onion, but according to The Daily Mail (which I admit sort of reminds me of The Onion), it really happened.
Some British guy got hauled off an airplane and questioned for three hours because he played London Calling by the Clash and Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin in a taxi, and these songs scared the taxi man. I admit the lyrics to "Immigrant Song" are scary, but only because they're so incredibly silly--I included a link to the lyrics so you can see for yourself in case you're unfortunate enough not to be thoroughly familiar with Zeppelin III.
Read it and weep: all you need now to be to be suspected of terrorist sympathies is a fondness for classic punk and rock.
Thanks to Spike for sending me the link.
Posted by Holly at 09:50 PM
April 04, 2006
US Criticizes Foreign Dude Who Fails to Care for His Own Country First
Here's an article in the NY Times criticizing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for--get this!--spending all kinds of money to fix things in foreign countries when there are still poor people in Venezuela. Thanks to this article, we learn that
Mr. Chávez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country," said [Bush appointe] John Negroponte, the American director of national intelligence, in February at a Congressional hearing in Washington.
Can you imagine?! A president of some resource-rich country in the Americas, spending lots of money abroad while people in his own country go hungry, cold or naked, while there are children who are uneducated, people in their prime without work, and old people who are sick and alone? What would it be like to live in such a country? And what would it be like for citizens of other countries to know that their lives are shaped by the hypocritical meddling of a government eager to buy influence abroad, even at the expense of its own citizens' well-being?
p.s. Here's a response from Counterpunch that's pretty insightful.
Posted by Holly at 09:50 AM | Comments (3)
September 03, 2005
Katrina and the Waves
Anybody remember that 80s song, "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves? I always liked that song, but the band name has become a really sick joke.
One reason I suffer so from insomnia is that I have always been a worrier. I sometimes wake up out of a deep sleep, my heart racing and my mouth dry with panic over melting polar ice caps and destruction of wetlands. My primary obsession is the environment and I admit I think it should be everyone's because if our world is uninhabitable, what does the rest of it matter?
I became concerned with the environment because I started paying attention to it, after a couple of decades of being trained to think of the earth as a combination self-replenishing piggy bank and bottomless toilet: anything you want, take from it, because there will always be more; anything you don't want, just dump it someplace where you can neither see nor smell it and that's it, it's gone. Realizing how thoroughly f*cked up that approach is was a big deal for me, and one that caused as much conflict in my family as my departure from the Mormon church. One of the ways my Mormon Republican father earned a living was suing the likes of the Sierra Club whenever they did anything that would inhibit the right of farmers to suck as much water as they wanted out of the local river, or inhibit the right of timber companies to cut down trees on our mountain, or inhibit the right of ranchers to kill any and all wildlife they didn't like. He was not happy when I joined the ACLU, but he said, "Just so long as you never join the Sierra Club."
I've lost track of how many environmental organizations I belong to (including the Sierra Club) but I feel it's a losing battle.
In early 2003, when it became clear that we were going to war no matter what, I became a news junkie. I began spending two to three hours every day reading half a dozen online newspapers, trying to understand what was happening in our world, as if understanding it could somehow mitigate its destructiveness.
And then, after the elections last November, I forced myself to cut back. I got rid of my online subscription to the Washington Post and a few other newspapers. I even canceled my subscription to my local paper, which had endorsed George Bush for president. I felt so impotent and enraged and hopeless that I just couldn't bear it.
At the beginning of the summer, I did some traveling. I had limited access to a computer and could do little more than scan the headlines. And when I got home, I stayed with that. I'd see if anything new or different or more dire was going on, read an article or two, and call it a news day. But this week I've been back to my pre-election quota, and the main lesson I draw from my reading is that WE SUCK at our primary job as human beings, which is to take care of one another.
It's unacceptable. And I'm trying to think of more effective ways of dealing with all the waves of destruction and horror that Katrina has hurled over all of us, than merely giving money to the Red Cross and feeling shitty and anxious about the future of the world. I'm not much one for volunteering any more--my mission kind of killed that impulse--but perhaps I must force myself to do it anyway.
I don't know what to do.
Posted by Holly at 09:54 AM