The Largest Minority

May 23rd, 2008 by Allison Kilkenny

Last Wednesday more than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx refused to take another standardized test. The students boycotted the test not out of laziness or fears of failing, but because they are sick of being dragged out of their classrooms to be treated as lab rats in the No Child Left Behind rotten matrix.

These tests don’t affect their grades, nor are they always actual tests. You see, sometimes the students are issued “practice tests” that have no real meaning. The companies are merely experimenting on the children with their shiny, new tests and if they fill in the right bubbles, the test companies ship off their crates to white schools in the suburbs.

The Bronx kids are sharp, determined pupils so they didn’t just sit around, bitching and moaning. Instead, they created a petition complete with specific grievances. The students declared themselves to be aggravated with the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”
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October 7th, 2007 by Manila Ryce

First Lieutenant Jon Anderson and 1,161 of his fellow Minnesota National Guard members served in Iraq for 22 months, longer than any other ground combat unit, only to be ungratefully screwed over once they return home. Anderson and his fellow guard members’ orders were written for 729 days by the Pentagon, exactly one day short of the 730 days required to earn the education benefits promised under the GI bill.

Had they been written for just one additional day, the soldiers would be earning an extra $500 to $800 a month. “It’s pretty much a slap in the face,” said Anderson, who had hoped to have the money to pay for a master’s degree in public administration. “I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership… once again failing the soldiers.” Anderson says he promised to take care of the soldiers under his command, and will not stop doing so “until this is solved”.

John Hobot is Anderson’s fellow platoon leader, who needed the money for a degree in law enforcement. “I would assume, and I would hope, that when I get back from a deployment of 22 months, my senior leadership in Washington, the leadership that extended us in the first place, would take care of us once we got home,” Hobot said. Senators Amy Klobuchar, Norm Coleman, and six of Minnesota’s members of the House have asked the Secretary of the Army to look into the incident. The Army has not yet commented.

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September 25th, 2007 by Manila Ryce

On Sunday, President Ahmadinejad said that the American people have been denied “correct information”. Unfortunately, Lee Bollinger’s introduction the next day proved just that. Before his speech at Columbia, Ahmadinejad said, “The US is a big and important country with a population of 300 million. Due to certain issues, the American people in the past years have been denied correct and clear information about global developments and are eager to hear different opinions.”

By passing Neocon and Zionist propaganda off as academically valid points of contention, President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger denounced the President of Iran with an introduction wrought with misinformation and character assassination. Perhaps he thought he was auditioning for Condi’s job. This incident was even more of an affront to free speech and free thought on college campuses than the incident with the tasered student at John Kerry’s speech simply due to the fact that this hostile attack came directly from the president of the university and not just a group of campus police, which you could argue do not represent the academic establishment.

Bollinger was more interested in hurling insults and getting the audience to join him against the speaker than in providing a forum for discussion. He attempted to shape the opinion of his audience by leaving out certain bits of information which ran contrary to his political agenda. Bollinger also stated outright lies, such as the mistranslation that the President of Iran called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, and pretended it was a direct quote. It’s also rather telling that nearly all of the objections posed to Ahmadinejad were concerning Iran’s relationship with Israel, not its relationship with America.

It’s inexcusable for a professor like Bollinger to pepper unverifiable and utterly false information in with true offenses like public execution and the oppression of women and gays. Though there are valid human rights violations to be addressed, it’s safe to assume that the same level of disrespect would not have been delivered to Ahmadinejad had he been a greater criminal like Blair, Olmert, or even Bush. Judging by the applause the Iranian President received from the audience during his speech, it’s safe to say that a fair percentage of students were not swayed by his bias.

The rest of the videos are embedded below the fold. By the way, Ahmadinejad’s speech is pretty boring and uncomfortably religious in nature to our secular Western ears. He does start to raise some good points about sanctions and nuclear rights around video 5 or 6, but the beginning is fairly long and painful.

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July 24th, 2007 by Manila Ryce

June 16th, 2007 by Manila Ryce

Corporations in the Classroom is a one-hour documentary exploring the increase of corporate influence on public education in North America. It asks why we pimp the curriculum of future generations out to big business. Capitalist heart-throb Ronald Reagan cut public education funding in the 80’s, allowing corporations to pick up the slack for under-funded schools. Canadian schools faced a similar budget shortfall about 10 years later.

This new form of capitalist propaganda is currently a 2 billion dollar industry, which proponents say helps children become discriminating consumers. With little or no regulation, corporate marketing campaigns continue to indoctrinate students with tailored classroom lessons. Business “donations” turn into investments, and teachers turn into ventriloquists.

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June 12th, 2007 by Manila Ryce

Stephen took aim at Bill Clinton last night� literally. Colbert expressed his disapproval with Knox College for giving Bill Clinton the same honorary degree as himself by throwing his into a giant sheet of foamcore, hitting Bill in the gut (the one place that has more nerve endings than the head).

Colbert then moves on to praise the Albanians, who are apparently more American than we are for being able to overlook the Iraq war, the congressional page sex scandal, the Abramoff scandal, illegal wiretapping, secret prisons, the torturing of detainees, the outing of Valerie Plame, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the no-bid contracts, the federal reaction to Hurricane Katrina, and the US attorney firings.

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April 28th, 2007 by Manila Ryce

A schoolteacher from Haverfordwest, Wales claims that Fadi Sbano, a 38-year-old airline pilot, tricked her into having sex with him on several occasions. In 2000, she discovered a rash of white spots and feared that the typhoid she contracted some years earlier had returned. Allegedly, Sbano claimed to talk with a gynecologist who suggested a certain cream be applied to his penis and administered inside his friend�s vagina.

Sbano �would thrust slowly or quickly for anything from one to ten minutes,” during specific sessions depending on the �doctor�s advice�. A clock was kept on a bedside table to keep track of each session which the woman claims were “not at all erotic”. Eventually, she was instructed by her doctor to find out the identity of the gynecologist Sbano had consulted, but he “became evasive and never gave his name” beyond the word “Ibby”. Her eureka moment came when a gynecologist named Ibby was found who had no knowledge of the treatment. Her lawyer says, “It began to dawn on her that he had devised this treatment in order to have sex with her on his terms.”

Sbano was arrested and claims the entire story is a fabrication. He faces nine charges of rape and eleven of obtaining money by deception. The source doesn’t say what subject the prosecution teaches, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it’s not Health or Sex-ed.

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February 3rd, 2007 by Manila Ryce

Dispelling any remaining doubts over human involvement in global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body comprising 2,500 climate experts convened by the UN, said that the evidence for climate change caused by fossil fuel combustion was �unequivocal�. The report, which took six years to complete, is the most authoritative ever produced on climate change. It predicts a rise in 3 degrees Celsius globally by 2100, and was agreed upon by all UN members, including the US and China.

Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, said, �You can see [from the report] what the costs of inaction are. Everything is [included in the report] by consensus, so the implication is that it has the stamp of acceptance by all governments in the world.� Yvo de Boer, secretary-general of the UN climate change secretariat, said work should now begin on a successor to the Kyoto treaty. The European Union�s environment commissioner urged governments to agree to the European Commission�s proposal of reducing emissions by 30 per cent by 2020. French President Chirac proposed a new worldwide environmental organization to spearhead action on emissions. However, the world�s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the US, has failed to take action on mandatory emission cuts since the report came out.

As the IPCC report became public, the British government announced that An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore�s movie about global warming, would be distributed to all secondary schools in England. The film will be part of a global warming information pack. Environment Minister David Miliband said, “The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over, as demonstrated by the publication of today’s report.” Meanwhile, the British government is drafting a Climate Change Bill to set the self-imposed target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent by 2050.

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