Small reasons the world doesn't suck completely #17

I have worked with people younger than myself since fourth grade. One of the things that I have always found striking was how often I was told by a parent that a kid couldn't do something or didn't like something only to watch the kid prove her wrong within hours. Not always, but often enough. Kids learn quickly, quickly enough to surpass our awareness. I think it has happened most often with kids on the autism spectrum. Kids perform to expectations, and raising expectations has the power of changing behavior. Easy to say but sometimes difficult to do, especially in the face of a diagnosis like autism. So when I encounter a story like that of Jason McElwain I can't help but be touched. I'm a huge fan of stories of human potential. stories like this make me question the ways in which I limit myself. At the end of the report they assume it's his last game, but that just seems silly.

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'Anti-racism', All Trap, No Honey: A Discourse About Discourse

One of the things that prevents me from writing more often is the sense that I'm just writing the same thing repeatedly from a slightly different angle. In a nutshell, all I'm saying is that moral idealism substituted for material goals will not lead to justice, but is an argument against materialism. I'm a dumb person's low rent Adolph Reed Jr. translator. I'm a "class reductionist" who understands that when the discourse is reduced to just class there's nothing as important as food, water and shelter that's left out. I often find myself contending with people who insist that there is, unable to name anything. They don't understand that they're making an argument against economic redistribution, or they don't care. There are no concrete manifestations of systemic racism or any oppression that are not dealt with through economic redistribution. When people say that economic redistribution won't end racism, what they mean is that

Was it deliberate malevolence or just criminal incompetence?

i began this blog a while ago, hoping to find something constructive to do with the anger, frustration and sense of helplessness i felt during and after katrina. i had some ideas and thoughts that i wanted to write out in long form, but due to events in my life i laid it all down for a while. i've been wanting to begin again but with the torrent of criminal behavior from this administration and its allies it's been difficult to decide where exactly to begin. then i saw a clip of historian doug brinkley on msnbc's scarborough country talking about bush's failure in leadership in leaving the gulf coast essentially a wasteland. people are expressing surprise at this apparent failure instead of realizing that failure is the man's middle name (the w is silent). the title of this entry comes from a chris floyd post about the federal declaration of emergency in louisiana prior to the hurricane and how it failed to cover the coastal counties (illustrated here ).

The Cuckoo Movement

A reed warbler raising a common cuckoo chick it hatched from an egg surreptitiously placed in its nest by the cuckoo's parent “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”― George Orwell Parasite to Virus Brood parasites are species that manipulate other organisms to raise their young for them. Among the best known of brood parasites is the cuckoo. A number of cuckoo species have specialized to lay their eggs among hosts whose eggs theirs mimic closely enough to provide protective camouflage. The eggs hatch sooner than host eggs, the chicks grow faster, and they often eject the eggs or hatchlings of the host from the nest. The cuckoo chicks begin to mimic the cries of the host young to encourage the fostering birds to keep up with their growth to the detriment of their own young. Following one of the first documented cases of computer espionage in the mid 80s, the concept of brood parasitism was applied to malware.

the bastards' last stand

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