CNN Banner tonight: The US is Under Attack From Within

CNN tonight, across its website, is seemingly in a panic and it needs to be as should the American public considering what is our ongoing nightmare of murder on a mass scale in the open where ever some crazy person wishes to take it.  The idiot president, as he returned to DC from his golf course resort kept repeating the words “mental health” and pronounced the two shooters “mentally ill” without knowing anything about who these shooters were, implying, of course, that guns were not to blame because…  Because why? Because only the mentally ill would do such things and this should not mean that sane people should not be able to possess assault weapons, as though it is possible that people who want or need to possess assault weapons are not insane.  That is, of course, coming from a many who is himself insane, a man who just yesterday pronounced the insane leader of North Korea sane.  He cannot know who is sane and nor can anyone know if another is insane until there is reason to believe it true and the act that proves it just might be a deadly one.  So what the fuck does sensed does the mental health not the gun argument mean besides that whoever uses it is doesn’t know what the fuck he or she is saying because the logical conclusion that they wouldn’t wish anyone to come to is this: that, because it would be impossible to determine if a person is not mentally healthy enough to use good judgement when in possession of a deadly weapon, to insure that only the mentally healthy could possess lethal weapons, that person would have to prove his or her sanity.  Since even a sane person, as has been proven on many occasions, can in a moment lose his or her sanity, to possess a gun would necessitate that all who want one would have to prove that they will never have such momentary loss, this being impossible.  No one, then, would be able to pass the mental health test and no one would be allowed to possess a gun.

Maybe we should follow such logic?

Pfizer executive Sally Susman to host 2020 presidential fundraiser for Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand

Sometimes same is insane and quite a while back we entered an era of insane so pervasive and so often renewed that what we live with as regular would be irregular if we could come to grips with the fact that the present is may be abhorrent  but it is not aberration in comparison to the day before or the past month or year or many years.  We live in an abhorrent normal that should be intolerable that is now tolerable because it is so normal in the context of what constitutes our recent and our now.

They will play baseball today.  A full schedule.  People will go about their Sunday business and then their Monday business as though nothing extraordinary has happened and nothing extraordinary has happened if you compare it to the day before or the past month or year or many years.

Radically changing the cycle to which we have become accustomed, seeing the levels of inhumanity we accept in order to avoid changing the system and being outraged both by the inhumanity of it and our tolerance of it is the difficult step that must be taken to begin a much needed humanitarian revolution.  We are, as we are, not a good society despite what we have decided to tell ourselves to keep ourselves going.  To stop going where we have been going will be disruptive and difficult.  Our lives are likely to be changed by the changes that we need to bring about to bring sanity to our society.  Quintin Tarantino movies, in a sane society, would never have been needed to have been made.

This is in response to an article posted by Diane Ravitch on her blog site by Mercedes Schneider that reviews an article by Richard Phelps.

I read the article and find the complexities exposed by it to be fascinating, as it portrays an organization I have opposed from the moment I discovered its existence by looking into who Checker Finn might be and finding him on a Hoover Institute site where he constantly published articles concerning fear of the professionalization of teachers, this from an authoritarian fool, as I found him to be, who wanted education to be by authoritarians and for the purpose of insuring that neither teachers or their students would have the rights and sensibilities to properly challenge his authority or those who were his friends, for example, members of the Bush administration who were trying every which way to keep the American public from knowing what it was doing or why (torturing people, for example) such as Cheney and Rumsfeld.

At the time I despised Diane Ravitch, with good reason, I still think, because of the way she bolstered their cause by signing onto the team. I am still somewhat cautious in trusting Dr. Ravitch for her’s was not but an affiliation with the wrong people but people she of whom she had to know their motives, motives that were absolutely disgusting and who actions were so incredibly ugly as to cause me to think that the United States was beyond redemption. That said, I have been on the wrong side of the Common Core debate according to this article. The whole of the argument against the CCSS is based upon who is affiliated with the Core and, as is often the case in debates regarding the Core, with no reference to what the Core documents say, what they call for or why it is that they are being condemned as bad goals for students of a democratic society. I have sent many people specific Core examples and asked them to tell me what it is that is wrong with them and I, truthfully, have not had a single response to my request for explanation. i have tried to determine what it is about the Core that has so rattled people–amongst them teachers and teachers organizations and some scholars like Diane Ravitch and, too, off to the right conservative groups and individuals. What I have come to believe is that this is nothing of an alliance.

Of course it is not. The conservatives, a good number of them of the religious right, do not want schools to cause students to think for themselves and possibly, probably with a good education, come to challenge the ridiculous and impossible “truths” they are taught by their parents and their preachers. As for the teachers and their associations, I think the problem with the CCSS is that, considering what they know and the ways they have been TRAINED to teach, the Core is an existential threat because it focuses so much on the development of thinking abilities when most who have been in education for any amount of time are ready only to teach a static content that an educator does not have to think much about to teach. It is teaching of a kind that allows for some success in classrooms far to large to allow for real and meaningful conversation between thinking people and, while some teachers complain about this situation, some only because of the work load it places upon them, it makes absolutely impossible the kind of interaction between people that powers the development of critical thinking ability.

The school curriculum that most teachers teach IS an authoritarian one and it does far too little to help individuals find the power of their individual minds, a mindfulness if allowed for, or, god forbid, encouraged would make it necessary for teachers to be responsive educators rather than conduits for the predigested garbage that is the stuff of most textbooks. I ask here to have my analysis challenged because that would begin a needed conversation concerning the nature of education as it now, as it would be if a common core curriculum was to be implemented to serve the goals stated in the CCSS and as it might be if the real focus of those involved in the educational decision making process focused first on what was best for students and, by doing so created a means for evaluating both students and teachers based on criteria other than easy to teach and easy to assess.

Police in El Paso, Texas, are responding to an active shooter

When does it come to be that daily occurrences and ongoing conditions become what matters in defining a society?  Principles not enacted practically mean nothing, should be’s that should, if good, should make people made because of what the tell us about what is not.

What both the left and the right get wrong about my neighborhood in Baltimore

Analysis by John Blake, CNN

America is not “already” great and probably not very good. The Wire might be used in classrooms to help students understand something about their country that explains more about what it is really about than any of the textbooks ever will.

“Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”