***
Driver is ok.

I’m aware of him, because I’ve been spending 3+ hours per day working on learning languages myself for the last couple of years, in anticipation of a lot of travelling during my retirement. He discusses the time investment required for this, hitting on a couple of my favorite topics–the Pareto Principle, and the 10,000 Hour Rule.

Boring for most, perhaps, but interesting for some:

***
Selectively edited? Just a few crazies? A Newsweek survey released Monday found that a majority of Republicans believe that Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.”

I suspect the other half of the Republican party is embarrassed by this. Again, I have much respect for the historical Republican Party–but they have jumped the tracks.

http://www.doveworld.org

***

All this talk about the mosque reminds me of two things I heard growing up in Nebraska.

I had a 6th grade teacher who referred to American Indians as “sneaky redskins” and our enemies in the Pacific as “dirty Japs.” This abated somewhat after I asked one day in class, “Mrs. G., do you think our parents would like to know that you teach race prejudice?” She faded three shades.

The rest of that year was difficult….[Rest of article]

***
He did go on to appreciate and perform a good protest song or two himself…

***

Preacher, leave them kids alone!

I like it.

It’s causing a lot of controversy, for obvious reasons, seeming, at first glance, to glorify domestic violence somehow. Naw. That’s Rihanna there, folks. She’s the poster girl for being against domestic violence.

So why is she the Greek Chorus for the Megan-Fox-Crazy-Bitch-Be-Askin’-For-It character?

Because she identifies.

I’m glad she didn’t get back with Chris Brown, like it almost looked might happen early on. (Thank you, Oprah, for pointing out that “He will hit you again”. Charlie Sheen, take note). I hope that singing this song was good therapy for her–acknowledging that these abusive relationships can be exciting and intense…but that this, girlfriend, ain’t love.

This song is why I’ve always liked Eminem: intelligent rap and his own kind of self-therapy, getting his dirty laundry “out there” to deal with. Nice job, Marshall:

I disagree. PANIC!!!!!!!!!!

And then buy this book.

I read it in college, during a brief flirtation with going into elementary education.

It is all about phonics. That’s the best (read “only”) way to teach kids to read, and I still have fond memories of my first days at school and having the teacher “unlock the code” to reading with her little phonics flashcards.

As I have written of before here (perhaps ad nauseum), I taught all 3 of my boys to read with this book. Soon after their 4th birthdays, each boy and I sat down alone together (that’s the key–and we enjoyed every minute of it, Mr. and Ms. Busy Parent) and went through the phonics word lists in the back of the book. We only spent 10 minutes or so at a time in sporadic sessions, but when we finally completed with the lists I started bringing home preschool “primers” from the public library and working through them.

End result: By the start of kindergarten, they were reading at 3rd grade level.

Interestingly, John Rosemond, who has a weekly column that runs in the WORLD HERALD and nationally–and who I generally agree with–maintains that this is harmful in this last week’s column. I have written him asking for his sources for his statement that “…[t]he research is clear that teaching reading before age six greatly increases the possibility of later learning problems and underachievement….”, but received nothing back. (I also ordered THE HURRIED CHILD, by David Elikind, which he references in his column).

I don’t necessarily disagree with the statement that the rest of the kids eventually catch up with the early readers. So why go through all of this?

First of all, it was fun–nice, quality one-on-one time with my kids. They all remember these sessions and appreciate the time spent with them and the headstart it gave them. They were able to begin kindergarten with 1) their teacher thinking they were one of the “smart kids”; 2) the other kids thinking they were one of the “smart kids”; and 3) they themselves thinking they were one of the “smart kids”.

Nothing wrong with all that.

So when you read that article in the WORLD HERALD this morning, fellow Nebraskans (assuming you can read it, heh-heh), do be concerned. Read WHY JOHNNY CAN’T READ and spend some time with your children and grandchildren.

And maybe someday your kids will be as terrific as mine are. Good luck with that!

STRANGER IN MY OWN TOWN from Marc Campbell on Vimeo.

***
Ya gotta love the “Mohammad’s a pig” chants, huh…? Jesus is so proud of his sheep.

***
UPDATE: More video via Al Jazeera. I’m just “ballparking”, but I’m going to estimate a difference of 20 years in the average ages of the anti-mosque angry white people and the pro-mosque folks. That is why I continue to be optimistic about the future:

***
Hey, I’m all about the First Amendment but this terrible singing really should have been censored…

1. America missed a golden opportunity to showcase its Constitutional freedoms. The instinctive response of Americans should have been the same as President Obama’s: Muslims have every right to build there. Where one religion can build a church, so can all religions.

2. The First Amendment comes down to this: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” It does not come down to: “The First Amendment gives me the right to shout the N-word 11 times on the radio to an inoffensive black woman, and when you attack me for saying it, you are in violation of my First Amendment rights….” [Rest of blog entry]

***
I could see these in use by every student in every hole-in-the-wall school in every country–with all of their textbooks for all of their school years on board. Internet connections in the middle of the jungle (Get those satellites up there, boys and girls!) for video teaching, etc.

This could change everything.

***

***
More here.

Why the enthusiasm? Two reasons: Firstly, it has an “X” in its symbol. Everybody knows that if you have an “X” in your symbol it just has to be a great stock. Secondly, how cool of a name is that–”Cyberonics, Inc.”?! Sure, right now they only make medical implants for epilepsy (”…medical devices that provide vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) therapy”–which sounds like something my mother would never allow me to read about), but tomorrow they’ll almost certainly be making Terminator T-3000s and Silent Black Helicopters.

So…2/3 of my investment dollars will go into CYBX and I’m going to put the rest of this month’s money into Buckeye Technologies (BKI), which makes nice, boring wood and cotton products.

***
A little update on my long-term performance as measured by Marketocracy: While I haven’t been in their Top Ten “M10″ for well over a year now, I do continue to have not one but two funds in their Top 100. You can take a closer look at their returns (which mirror my real world holdings) here and here.

Mr. Stevens went on to have quite a lengthy musical career–mostly novelty songs, like “Guitarzan” and “The Streak“. He did actually have one very nice “normal” song in “Everything Is Beautiful”.

So what the heck happened to the guy?:

***
UPDATE: Jeez, I just listened to his “Everything Is Beautiful” again–it being an all-time favorite song–and am just shaking my head over its celebration of diversity, then comparing it to the message of the video above. How does the same guy sing both of these songs?

***
ANOTHER UPDATE: Tipped off by a commenter, I found another anti-Immigration song that Mr. Stevens has done:

So my senior year, I made a bet with a buddy that I could get “straight A’s” for one semester. He gave me 4 to 1 odds. I did it and pocketed a cool twenty bucks. Went on to conquer the world.

And so it was interesting to come across this story about gambling on your grades (Hey, it worked for me!):

Technology brings us all kinds of advances in the world of education: as well as the basic software stuff, such as B&N’s NookStudy, there’s Nature Publishing’s social media-savvy Scitable. And then you move along to how stuff such as the iPad and iPhone is helping the newest generations, while the Internet is improving the undergraduate experience (just ask Mark Zuckerberg). And then you come to Ultrinsic, and you think, college kids and gambling, now why didn’t anyone else think of that?
So, let’s explain. Ultrinsic, currently in beta form, allows students at 37 colleges to gamble on their grades in each of the classes they take. The student hands over money to Ultrinsic–as well as access to his or her official school records–as a wager that they will attain a certain grade. If they get it, Ultrinsic pays out on a sliding scale.
A pilot scheme in place at both Penn and NYU over the last academic year had some takers, including one guy who won $150, although the serious money is to be made by high schoolers as they head off to university. Then, if you bet $20 on getting a 4.0 GPA, then you’ll walk away with $2,000 should you succeed. That, apparently, is what motivation looks like….[Rest of article]

***
While we’re on the topic of education, I must be the last guy to have watched this video (it has almost 4 million hits on YouTube), but I saw it for the first time yesterday and found it thought-provoking. In case you haven’t seen it either:

***
I want to personally apologize for the fact that the 70s actually ever happened.

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn’t sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn’t ponied up. Inglis’ task: Get them back on the team. “They were upset with me,” Inglis recalls. “They are all Glenn Beck watchers.” About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, “They say, ‘Bob, what don’t you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.’” Inglis didn’t know how to respond….[Rest of article]

***
Hey, Laura–what if it was Laura Bush that had proposed this? (You remember her, right? Nice white lady?)

***
Smoking boys and girls, you can chew all of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in the world between smoking and kissing us, but we still think that you stink.

***
Full decision here.

Tribute to Escher in Barcelona

***
Just try and sit still (or spin plates) listening to that.

P.S. My benefactor has his own website, I see, and is a heck of an artist. Please visit him at MichaelGoattee.com and buy something and maybe I can get out of this whole cup of coffee thing (’cuz I’m sure he’d insist on Starbucks).

***
UPDATE: Never mind on the second contest, I found out the plate-spinning guy’s name is Erich Brenn. There’s finally a video up at Youtube of him doing this, but I’m not allowed to embed it in the blog so you can watch it here. (But it’s got the WRONG MUSIC!!)

From the NY TIMES:

As national attention remains focused on Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, opponents of a similarly tough measure passed last month by the local government of a small Nebraska city plan to rally on Saturday in Omaha.

Conor Oberst, a Nebraskan singer-songwriter best known for his role in the band Bright Eyes, has organized “a Concert for Equality” to protest an immigration ordinance approved by voters in the nearby city of Fremont in June. A statement on Mr. Oberst’s Web site explains that there will be two shows — featuring Bright Eyes, Cursive, Desaparecidos and Lullaby For The Working Class — on Saturday: … [Rest of article]

***
Conor’s website here.

He has also organized a musician’s boycott in Arizona, but since Glenn Miller is dead anyway…

***
Like the Infallible Word Of God says, “And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home…”

1 Corinthians 14:35

I’m recommending (again, without much enthusiasm) three different stocks this week–but only because they showed up on my “screen”, and I’m not finding much in the way of “new stuff” during the last couple of runs of the screen. The three are Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones Provida SA (PVD), of which I still haven’t quite figured out what business it’s in but I do know that it’s located in Chile, NewMarket Corp. (NEU), which makes petroleum additives, and AmTrust Financial Services, Inc. (AFSI), which is in the property and casualty insurance business. Again, due to a lack of enthusiasm, I’m taking smaller positions in all three rather than a large position in a single stock.

Good luck!

***

Like any 12-year-old, Jamelia was excited at the prospect of a plane journey and a long summer holiday in the sun. An avid reader, she had filled her suitcases with books and was reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when her mother came for her. “She said, ‘You know it’s going to be today?’ I didn’t know exactly what it would entail but I knew something was going to be cut. I was made to believe it was genuinely part of our religion.”

She went on: “I came to the living room and there were loads of women. I later found out it was to hold me down, they bring lots of women to hold the girl down. I thought I was going to be brave so I didn’t really need that. I just lay down and I remember looking at the ceiling and staring at the fan.

“I don’t remember screaming, I remember the ridiculous amount of pain, I remember the blood everywhere, one of the maids, I actually saw her pick up the bit of flesh that they cut away ’cause she was mopping up the blood. There was blood everywhere….” [Rest of article]

This movie has been out for number of years, but I just happened to watch it with my visiting brother this morning to kill some time before returning him to the airport (the movie being available via “Watch Now” on Netflix).

I wasn’t expecting much because the critic reviews were pretty lukewarm–but we both loved it.

It is, as you’ll see from the trailer above, a fictional “mockumentary” (but not funny) hypothesizing the assassination of George W. Bush–who was President at the time the movie came out.

Anyway, I think some of you might like it. We really enjoyed it: the insertion of actual footage with staged footage is remarkable and fascinating, and the acting is terrific. It’s not a particularly “Bush-bashing” movie. Well done!

“Young people, I want you to know: when you are true to what God wants you to do, the path just opens up, and things just come come to you, you know. God is good, I can tell you that.

When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. But you know God will show you things, and he’ll put things in your paths so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people. You know, the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I knew what he was doing, but he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time tryin’ to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was goin’ to give him.

I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with havin’ to help a white person save his farmland. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture — and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer that had attended some of the training we had provided, because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor vs those who have, and not so much about about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not, you know, it opened my eyes. Because I took him to one of his own, and I put him in his hands and said “okay, I’ve done my job.” But during that time we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and so they couldn’t foreclose on him, and I want you to know that the County Supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they’ve done to any other farmer black or white, and what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine, I’m thinking he’s being taken care of by the white lawyer, and then they lifted the injunction against USDA in May of ‘87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice.

He called me.

I said, we’re going to make an appointment at the lawyer, let me know when it is and I’ll meet you there. So we meet at the lawyer’s office on the date they had given him, and this lawyer had sat there — he had been paying the lawyer, that’s what got me — he had been paying the lawyer since November and this was May — and the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, “well, you all are getting old, why don’t you let the farm go.”

I could not believe he said that. So I said to the lawyer, I told him “I can’t believe you said that! It’s obvious to me if he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclosure, you have to file an 11.” And the lawyer said to me, “I’ll do whatever you say, whatever you think.” — that’s the way he put it. But he’s paying him! He wasn’t paying me any money. So the lawyer said he would work on it.

Then, about seven days before that land would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn’t doing anything. And that’s when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think of to try see and help me find a lawyer who would handle this, and finally I remembered that I had gone to see one only forty miles away

[tape edit, reportedly due to tapes being switched]

but working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have vs those who have not. They could be black, they could be white, they could be hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.

I want to just share something with you and I think hit helps to — you know when I learned this I’m like ‘oh, my goodness.’ You know back in the late 17th and 18th century, there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants. And they all would work for the seven years and get their freedom. And they didn’t see any difference in each other — nobody worried about skin color, they married each other, you know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat. They were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had the opportunity to work their wayout of slavery. But then, they started looking at the injustices that they faced, and started — the people with money, they started the poor whites married each other and lived together, they were just like we would be!

And they started looking at what was happening and decided “we need to do something about this!” The people with money, the elite decided “we need to do something here to divide them.” So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And it started working so well, they said “gosh, we’re glad we’ve come across something there that could last generations.”

And here we are, over 400 years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only difference is the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care, or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power. It’s always about money, y’all.

I haven’t seen such a mean spirit in people as I’ve seen lately about healthcare. Some of the racism we thought was buried — didn’t it surface? Now we endured eight years of the Bushes, and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president.

I wanted to give you that little history, especially to young people. I want you to know they created it not just for us, but we got the brunt of it because they needed to elevate whites just a little bit higher than us to make them think they were so much better, and then they would never work with us to try and change the situation that they were all in.

But where am I going with this? I couldn’t say 45 years ago, I couldn’t stand here and say what I will say to you tonight. Like I told you, God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people. And I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate. As my mother has said, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts we’d probably be dead now. But I’ve come to realize that we have to work together. And it’s sad we don’t have a room full of whites and blacks here tonight, because we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where as Toni Morrison said, “race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

***
FOX News again proves that they are evil and have no shame. Nice editing, slimeballs.