Andy’s whereIstand Blog

I’m no on this issue with this caveat: the public school system would NOT be improved under THIS federal government. The No Child Left Behind Act is a ridiculous farce and any federal fix for the state-run education system is currently not working:

Of the 315 Shelbyville students who showed up for the first day of high school four years ago, only 215 are expected to graduate.

In today’s data-happy era of accountability, testing and No Child Left Behind, here is the most astonishing statistic in the whole field of education: an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly one out of three public high school students won’t graduate, not just in Shelbyville but around the nation.

For Latinos and African-Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50 percent. Virtually no community, small or large, rural or urban, has escaped the problem.

There is a small but hardy band of researchers who insist the dropout rates don’t quite approach those levels. They point to their pet surveys that suggest a rate of only 15 percent to 20 percent.

The dispute is difficult to referee, particularly in the wake of decades of lax accounting by states and schools. But the majority of analysts and lawmakers have come to this consensus: the numbers have remained unchecked at approximately 30 percent through two decades of intense educational reform, and the magnitude of the problem has been consistently, and often willfully, ignored.

That’s starting to change.

During his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush promised more resources to help children stay in school, and Democrats promptly attacked him for lacking a specific plan.

I went to school two towns away from Shelbyville, and even when I graduated six years ago I realized that something was wrong with the Indiana school system - every year in elementary school we took a standardized test called I-Step to monitor progress, then in high school, I-Step passing became mandatory to graduate high school. The problem is that with any comprehensive test, students feel pressure to learn the test rather than the things the test is supposedly designed to gauge. Also there’s this: the I-Step was on a curve so something like 30% of students who took the test were failed sophomore year and had to retake it junior year, and senior year was the last chance. So regardless of credits, students could potentially not graduate high school, and when they retake the test they are competing with the class below them for that 70% of passing slots.

This seems like a defeatist system, but I don’t think this federal government could do better - in fact No Child Left Behind seems to have upped the ante on I-Step.

This has been Andy D.

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• Would the public school systems in America be improved if they were federalized?

Hey if a bunch of celebrities don’t want to scream while in labor, it seems like no problem to me:

Hollywood stars John Travolta and Anne Archer are publicly backing fellow Scientologist Tom Cruise and fiancee Katie Holmes’s plan to give birth to their highly anticipated baby in silence.

Cruise and Holmes, together dubbed "Tomkat" by the popular press, are preparing to welcome their first baby into the world any day now using the church’s "quiet birth" method, which has been the object of media derision.

But as Cruise and Holmes completed their last-minute baby shopping, a constellation of celebrity Scientologists has came out in support of the birth method in which the mother, father and medical staff in the delivery room are strongly discouraged from speaking.

The church’s founding father, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, believed that babies, like other people, can subliminally soak up words shouted around them at birth that could come back to negatively influence him later in life.

Hey that could all be true, and if Katie can suffer labor in silence, then more power. But unless the doctors know sign language, Tomkat best hope nothing goes wrong because the silence will be broken really fast if the little bastard is breached.

This has been Andy D, minion of Xenu.

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There is no way I could watch all of the Oscars. I can’t stand the Hollywood wankery, and I hadn’t seen enough of those films nominated for any of it to matter to me - I’m glad "It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp" won for best original song. I decided instead to go see a film that I hadn’t seen yet - Capote. It was good.

What I’m really glad to see is Clooney win Best Supporting Actor for Syriana. He has been making a bevy of political movies all while remaining a reticent Hollywood materialism. And yeah it’s Hollywood politico, but at least the little heart throb is trying something and not "Michael Moore-ing this shit" (from an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine).

Most press can’t stay away from commenting on his looks over his politics, but I think that’s what he’s really all about - being a Neo-Rat-Packer that happens to be political. He certainly won’t pull a Ronald Reagan anytime soon.

This has been Andy D.

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Is it gonna be Paula and drugs forever? Not only was the American Idol Judge/Sweet Late-Eighties Pop Star totally incoherent on American Idol this week (see it here folks), she also got in trouble with the Homeland Security peeps by bypassing security at the airport because she almost missed her flight.

She is sooooo my new hero.

This has been Andy D.

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Okay, if you are a politician that doesn’t know the Daily Show is a political satire show by now, then either turn on the TV or fire your publicists and handlers:

Blagojevich says he didn’t realize "The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled governor.

"It was going to be an interview on contraceptives … that’s all I knew about it," Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday’s editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was ‘the gay governor.’ "

The interview focused on his executive order requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for emergency birth control.

 

 

I totally remember seeing this episode, and I thought it was damn funny. It just gave me added giggles knowing that at least on some level it was just a little more authentic.

This has been Andy D.

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• Is the media politically biased?

Big Brother doesn’t become the government until the corporate world gets a shot first:

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them.

RFID chips – inexpensive radio transmitters that give off a unique identifying signal – have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit.

The technology’s defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory. But critics say any implanted device could be used to track the “wearer” without their knowledge.

VeriChip – the US company that made the devices and claims to have the only chips that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration – said the implants were designed primarily for medical purposes.

So far around 70 people in the US have had the implants, the company said.

It doesn’t take much to be alarmed at this occurrence. In fact, I’m pretty sure anyone who invests in this "emerging technology" is evil. This is worse than the splitting of the atom as far as the ultimate good versus the ultimate evil it could wreak upon humanity.

This has been Andy D.

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The Fourth Estate functionality of the media has been in the decline for the better part of the past century, since the explosion of yellow journalism. I once was a journalist, a journalism major, but a series of events culminating in a media class I took freshman year of college that exposed the obvious corporate ownership of American Media. When I realized that journalism is a business, one concerned with selling paper and ink disguised as objective truth, or at least striving for objective truth in a "fair and balanced" multi-faceted way, I promptly switched my major to Anthropology.

I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to be a writer and journalists purportedly do nothing but write, so it made sense for practice if nothing else. That I am more interested in writing fiction makes sense as most journalism is a fiction of sorts - sound bites taken out of context, or re-contextualized to spin a story is hardly objectivity, but this is what I see all the time - sound-bite journalism. It’s creative writing. This is why James Frey isn’t all that guilty. This crap happens all the time.

NBC will never talk about a scandal at GE because GE owns NBC and that would be against corporate interests. This is how the free market fails us. The Press becomes PR.

Now I’m a part of the Fifth Estate - the blogosphere - at least a chance at democratic media that doesn’t even try to be objective, fair or balanced, and doesn’t bill itself as such.

In fact CNN is the only news source I trust domestically, and I barely trust it at all. The BBC is actually my most favorite- unfettered by US bias and ownership, and still in the English language. It seems, however, that globally, Arab news may soon trump the US:

Arabic-language media have an unprecedented chance to take over as the world’s premier news source because trust in their US counterparts plummeted following their "shameful coverage" of the war in Iraq, a conference heard today.

The US media reached an "all-time low" in failing to reflect public opinion and Americans’ desire for trusted information, instead acting as a "cheerleader" for war, said Amy Goodman, the executive producer and host of US TV and radio news show Democracy Now!, at a news forum organised by al-Jazeera.

Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief, Christopher Dickey, said the US media were dying because of cutbacks and weren’t interested in covering the world outside America.

Its also painfully obvious that the US Media is mired in our politics, hence the dirth of Arabic world coverage, or any other world coverage, and the shoddy distance from the war that simply didn’t exist in Vietnam, but which was quite explicit by the First Gulf War.

BBC World Mother Dumbs!

This has been Andy D.

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Just when I thought CNN had given me enough reason to rail against the FDA, I see this bit:

The first inhalable version of insulin won federal approval Friday, giving millions of adult diabetics an alternative to some of the regular injections they now endure.

The Food and Drug Administration said the Pfizer Inc. insulin, to be marketed as "Exubera," is the first new way of delivering insulin since the discovery of the hormone in the 1920s.

So now Diabetics don’t have the track marks of junkies, but still have to look like they are doing poppers all the damn time. No, really this is humane and good. I’m glad about this, if it really works. Diabetes is a hell of a disease, and I don’t swish on anyone except my worst enemies, but I also wish Herpes and Cancer on them.

This has been Andy D.

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One of my least favorite institutions in the world is the Food Industry. The stuff they sell us and feed us, well the stuff they are allowed to sell us and feed us checked only by FDA regulations is the fodder for books like Fastfood Nation and Docs like Supersize Me and nutjob snake oil salesmen like Kevin Trudeau, and quite frankly curls my toes.

So when I see something like the FDA finally making food manufacturers list the use of a red dye extracted from beetle butts, I get even queasier about what else this agency is being lax on making the industry disclose to consumers:

The Food and Drug Administration proposed Friday requiring food and cosmetic labels to list cochineal extract or carmine if a product’s ingredients include either of the two red colorings that have been extracted from the ground bodies of an insect known since the time of the Aztecs.

Release of the proposed rule came after the FDA received 35 reports of hypersensitivity to the colorings, the agency said. A 1998 petition by the Center for Science in the Public Interest asked that the FDA take action.

"Why not use a word that people can understand?" said center executive director Michael F. Jacobson. "Sending people scurrying to the dictionary or to Google to figure out what ‘carmine’ or ‘cochineal’ means is just plain sneaky. Call these colorings what they are: insect-based."

The FDA said comments on the proposed rule are due April 27. The FDA plans to tackle the labeling of prescription drugs that include the colorings in a separate rule.

How about those prescription drugs pumped out by Big Pharm that are targeted to consumers directly, kicked back to doctors prescribing them, and then make all who take it have chronic nose bleeds and insanity (accutane) and die (Vioxx)? Where is the FDA then? So yeah the red bug dye freaks me out, but the idea of the active ingredients in the drugs that obviously aren’t always properly tested freaks me out more.

I mean I know it’s really hard work laundering all those bribes, but do you think they could just spare like a couple of interns at the FDA to get the food industry to tell us what is really in the "natural flavors", "artificial flavors", and the other dyes known only as colors followed by numbers (wasn’t red 5 a problem awhile ago?). It’s weird what these people can get away with putting in our foods without telling us.

I’m not contemplating a hunger strike or anything, but free-range and organic whenever possible - expensive but good.

This has been Andy D, wanting to have sex with Whole Foods.

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The academic factory has finally self-censored itself over a cliff:

An alumni group dedicated to "exposing the most radical professors" at the University of California at Los Angeles is offering to pay students $100 to record classroom lectures of suspect faculty.

The Web site of the Bruin Alumni Association also includes a "Dirty Thirty" list of professors considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing members of the UCLA faculty, as well as profiles on their political activities and writings.

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale on Thursday denounced the campaign as "reprehensible," and school officials warned that selling or distributing recordings of classroom lectures without an instructor’s consent violates university policy.

Not only is this horribly gross, but the implications of the use of any of this information and the subjectivity in the question of "most radical" is just creepy. Like our laureates will start curbing their views in the classroom to avoid suspicion. McCarthyism was evil once, and would be again.

This has been Andy D.

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