officialssay:

Shep Smith, observing that: “Politics is weird. And creepy. And now I know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality.”

9:18 am  •  3 May 2012  •  109 notes

allcreatures:

Captain Owen Beynon Brown from the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery holds his dog Lord Percy, a resident at the barracks up for Tango his horse to greet, at Wellington Barracks in London, Thursday, April 19, 2012. The King’s Troop on Thursday were preparing for an inspection in Hyde Park, in preparation for 2012 ceremonial roles in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Trooping the Colour and London 2012 Olympics.

Kirsty Wigglesworth | AP (via Day in Pictures - The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, California)

4:11 pm  •  20 April 2012  •  468 notes

People I love — people who regularly exhibit qualities I admire — have in the past said things like “She should watch out dating a black guy; they tend to be unfaithful to their wives,” or “The Walton Scholars (Central and South American students at my university) are all kind of rude,” or “Happy Robert E. Lee’s birthday” (said on Martin  Luther King Day).

These are people I love, but they transform so quickly into some shadow of themselves — something juvenile and selfish in nature. Something that, I think, mostly reflects their ignorance, their hasty conclusions, their misguided resentment toward those who tell them they’re wrong, or their appeasement of their peers in an excessively conservative environment.

The article in the link above contains some satire related to a particularly offensive text containing advice on how to deal with minorities. The satire isn’t the kind that bites, and I appreciate that. It’s just highly educational. So if you’re a tacit racist, like some of the people I love tend to be — meaning that you wouldn’t call yourself a racist, but you find yourself getting uneasy when you enter a room full of people who look different from you — consider challenging yourself.

I saw an interesting quote today by Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Meaning their guilt in the Holocaust translates into projection, and the Germans may seek victimhood to “even the score.” You’ve made me feel guilty about my mistakes, but look at what you’ve done to me! In the same way, will white Americans ever forgive black Americans for slavery and Jim Crow laws?

2:57 pm  •  12 April 2012

What if the idea of sending your child to “the best schools” was preposterous because all the schools were “the best?”

This article bears one distinct flaw, as far as I can tell. It isn’t in vogue to use “equality” in this way. The word “equitability” is preferred, referring to the equal distribution of opportunities as opposed to the unattainable status of “equality” for individuals. This article would likely turn off a lot of my conservative friends just because of this usage, but they should see the truth beyond it. Income equality is a fantasy, but educational equitability is necessary and possible, especially in a system that values people over profits. Private institutions get a bad rap sometimes, and sometimes they deserve it, but there are many schools that value privacy because of the failures of the State, and these same schools normally offer easily-accessible scholarships to lower-income or disabled students.

The USA doesn’t need to abolish private schools. It just needs to give freedom and responsibility back to public schools, similar to Finland’s example. One size doesn’t fit all. Punishing and ignoring the weak for failing at standardized tests doesn’t work. Hiring teachers with no training in ethics or assessment doesn’t work. Micro-managing curricula from a legislative office 1,000 miles away from the students doesn’t work.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students’ performance if you don’t test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master’s degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal’s responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: “Real winners do not compete.” It’s hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland’s success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

11:28 am  •  10 January 2012  •  8 notes

oldhollywood:

Rooftop view of the filming of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931, dir. Rouben Mamoulian) & art director Hans Dreier’s studio recreation of the gas-lit streets of Victorian London.

Photo by Gordon Head

(via)

2:41 pm  •  26 October 2011  •  480 notes

allcreatures:

A cavalryman of the British historical re-enactment team of the 17th Lancers reacts as his horse gets too close to spectators during the Fort Rinella Military Festival at Fort Rinella coastal battery in Kalkara, Malta. Picture: REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi

That horse just caught a glimpse of his nemesis in the crowd.

9:15 am  •  25 October 2011  •  211 notes

2011 White County Fair in Searcy, Ark.

7:56 am  •  20 September 2011

inothernews:

BRUTALISM   A residential housing development in the New Territories region of Hong Kong. (Photo: Mike Clarke / AFP-Getty via the Wall St. Journal)

This would definitely make some elves vomit. I hope such a thing never becomes representative of how I live my life – or how anyone I hold dear lives theirs. If I must live in an overpopulated area, I prefer mainland China’s anarchic, smudgy city-scapes to cold uniformity. Is that irrational? Probably.

8:55 am  •  14 April 2011  •  178 notes

(Watch this for atmospheric reference, and then watch the ending, though it’s filmed via a camera pointed at a TV screen, so the sound is abysmal.)

Cause of death: obsession. And Peter O’Toole can play madness and obsession like no one else. Just look at that bug-eyed wacko. I think he’s one of my favorite actors.

This is a clip from the 1971 film “Murphy’s War” about an Irish sailor who survives his ship being destroyed by a Nazi U-Boat near the end of World War II. He lands on a remote island and continuously obsesses over taking his revenge on the U-Boat, using whatever resources he can scrounge together. This isn’t a story about a man’s courageous struggle against the forces of evil, but a story about a man who banishes all that’s worth living for from his heart in order to satisfy his idea of justice … maybe. This movie can be taken several different ways, and it raises a lot of questions.

For example, are the Nazi’s more noble because they were unwilling to fight after the end of the war? They justified their violence in saying that violence is worth the perpetuation of their country’s (or party’s) way of life. Ostensibly, that’s how all “civilized” war is justified — you’re protecting the interests of the ones you care about, especially if you think the enemy intends to oppress, hurt or kill those who would be unable to defend themselves. Murphy’s justification comes through raw emotion, mostly, but it can still be logically explained — violence, for him, is worth it as long as things are made equal: aequitas, justice, is upheld. They took his eye, so he’ll take theirs, figuratively speaking. It’s one of the most ancient logisms around. In the end, he joins the Nazis in death — just another body to count.

I look back at the previous paragraph and realize — I do so love to use em dashes.

Anyway, I’ve noticed that only a select few people really seem to understand the military. Too many have educated themselves solely with the likes of Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan. Also, too many who call themselves patriots only think they understand, and I am probably still one of them, but I’m pretty certain about this:

Soldiers don’t go to war to die for their country, they go to war to kill for it, and, for a real human being who doesn’t see life as a stupid video game, killing is a huge sacrifice. Soldiers with consciences are heroes because they own each life that has ended because of them. So far, I haven’t met any who could be called similar to the two-dimensional, bloodthirsty characters in bad ’80s action movies. I know they are out there, and I pity them, but the soldiers that keep their humanity alive — they are true soldiers. A soldier without conscience is just a mercenary; without compassion, a terrorist.

Also, the military isn’t all blood and guts. It’s a set of jobs with a whole culture built around it, a culture sometimes much cleaner and more egalitarian than what you might be used to in civilian life (it depends on the base, really). Most people in the military are just trying to live peaceful, productive lives with occupations that are dedicated to the nation’s security. Violence doesn’t govern their hearts.

At the end of Murphy’s War, violence doesn’t seem to govern the Germans’ hearts. They had been looking forward to the end of the war. Murphy’s deepest inclinations, however, were violent to the bitter end.

If you haven’t seen these war movies, you’re missing out: Sergeant York, Mister Roberts, The Bridge Over the River Kwai (prepare to be depressed for days), The Sea Wolves, Beau Geste and, of course, Murphy’s War.

3:58 pm  •  28 July 2010

Why I Left and Why I’ll Return No. 2

This picture was the first taken with my new camera, bought soon before I left Wuhan, the successor to my poor point-and-shoot that froze to death on the wintry beaches of Qingdao. (All I lost were some images of the beer factory, but I also missed out on personally documenting a trip to Japan.) What you see is a scene from the electronics section in the Carrefour on Wang Jia Wan, shot on an unusual day when only a few people can be seen shopping. Never go to Carrefour on Saturday, unless you love standing in lines for hours and practicing the traditional “Wuhan elbow-in-the-ribs” technique.

Maybe this is an “everyone should be like me” comment, but I can think of few things more conducive to the mental liberation of a person than living in an alien land, separate from all past connections, and forcing oneself through something as mundane as a grocery store, learning the unspoken etiquette of each aisle, pronouncing and re-pronouncing the names of various oddly-packaged goods, and putting on the best face possible, since at least one out of every five people will be staring at it — or at least the hair, if it’s fair.

There are four times as many people in China as in the USA, so uncomplicated tasks quickly and frequently become complicated. Some Yanks go ape, unable to hold back their uptightness, but those who are worthy (like me, of course) learn to snuff out the flames of rage.  A city like Wuhan is full of “whatevers” and “mei guanxis,” and if a man gets mad at the little things, he’ll be mad every hour of every day. So a guy got on the bus with a full dinet set that digs into your ribs and prevents you from getting off at your stop? Think nothing of it. So the woman who runs your building is also spying on you for the local police and delayed an appointment with a friend? Just think about the future. So a student says “Ugh! Fat!” when looking at a picture of one of your loved ones? Just focus on her cross-cultural education. It’s silly to assume one’s homeland is the only place on earth that makes sense, and it’s deceptively easy to compare the negatives of a foreign place to the carefully selected positives of a known place.

Independence means putting away one’s defenses and smoothing down the hackles. It also means accepting that one must depend on strangers. I hate to think how difficult my life would have been if I had not learned enough Chinese to effectively ask for help. There are four times as many Chinese as there are Americans, and there are four times as many who are willing to help a weird-looking stranger.

I regret every time I did not put on a friendly face, and I hope to make up for it when I return.

* Notice that there are three workers in that small mobile phone kiosk. I wish I had more pictures of Chinese supermarkets’ tendency to employ many more people than seems necessary.

4:19 pm  •  19 July 2010