Category Archives: Culture

Washington Times Communities: Reagan’s home could become a parking lot for Obama’s library

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You know, I almost want them to do this. Then we can visit the parking lot and ignore the Obama museum.

A new Cold War is brewing here in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and it has nothing to do with the frigid temperature.

The apartment building at 832 E. 57th Street was once the Chicago home of a boy who would become a President.

No, it’s not Barack Obama of Hawaii. It was at the apartment’s first floor window that a young Ronald Reagan looked out upon the world.

But some powerful Chicagoans are planning to demolish Reagan’s historic home. Is it politically motivated? Is Mayor Rahm Emanuel behind the move?

Reagan as a child.

It was a different world back in 1915. Reagan’s family had moved here from Tampico, Illinois. His father had gotten a job at the famed Marshall Field’s – now only a memory. A coin-operated gas lamp was the only home’s only source of heat.

But it didn’t stop a young “Dutch” Reagan from dreaming.

via Reagan’s home could become a parking lot for Obama’s library | Washington Times Communities.

Teachers flip for ‘flipped learning’ class model – Yahoo! News

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When Timmy Nguyen comes to his pre-calculus class, he’s already learned the day’s lesson — he watched it on a short online video prepared by his teacher for homework.

So without a lecture to listen to, he and his classmates at Segerstrom Fundamental High School spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking quizzes, explaining the concept to other students, reciting equation formulas in a loud chorus, and making their own videos while teacher Crystal Kirch buzzes from desk to desk to help pupils who are having trouble.

It’s a technology-driven teaching method known as “flipped learning” because it flips the time-honored model of classroom lecture and exercises for homework — the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice.

“It was hard to get used to,” said Nguyen, an 11th-grader. “I was like ‘why do I have to watch these videos, this is so dumb.’ But then I stopped complaining and I learned the material quicker. My grade went from a D to an A.”

via Teachers flip for ‘flipped learning’ class model – Yahoo! News.

Los Angeles’s School Nightmare: Another Sex-Abuse Scandal – The Daily Beast

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The LA school district is probably the most risky place for sexual abuse in the country. What about keeping our kids safe from these teachers?

Fifty-seven-year-old Robert Pimentel, who taught at George De La Torre Jr. Elementary School in Los Angeles, has so far been charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse and lewd acts on a child. Prosecutors allege that he inappropriately touched students under and over their clothing from September 2011 until he left his job in March 2012. Before that time period as well, Pimentel had been the subject of parents’ complaints.

Just last year, in a scandal that set off an avalanche of lawsuits, another veteran teacher of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Mark Berndt, was accused of feeding his students spoonfuls of semen as part of a twisted ritual he called a “tasting game.” He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

“We are stunned here,” LAPD Detective Gus Villanueva tells The Daily Beast in the wake of the latest arrest. “We are dumbfounded. It just doesn’t stop.”

via Los Angeles’s School Nightmare: Another Sex-Abuse Scandal – The Daily Beast.

Hackers take over gov’t website to avenge Swartz – CBS News

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I don’t support Anonymous in any way, nor do I approve of their methods. But I will not argue with this. I’ll have more to say about the issue in a future post.

The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”

via Hackers take over gov’t website to avenge Swartz – CBS News.

Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday | TechNewsDaily.com

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You idiots asked for it.

The clock to unlock a new mobile phone is running out.

In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on January 26.

via Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday | TechNewsDaily.com.

David Mamet: Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm – Newsweek and The Daily Beast

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Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife. It awakens anxiety, passion, fervor, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery, both in pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to relieve us of the burden through their personal or ideological excellence, those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply confidence men. Their emergence is inevitable, and our individual opposition to and rejection of them, as they emerge, must be blunt and sure; if they are arrogant, willful, duplicitous, or simply wrong, they must be replaced, else they will consolidate power, and use the treasury to buy votes, and deprive us of our liberties. It was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government.

Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

via David Mamet: Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm – Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Victor Davis Hanson – Women at the Front

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One way or another, we have now apparently made a number of assumptions: that in the next war we will see overtly gay men and women fully integrated in small ground units amid firefights and carnage at the front; that this will not affect negatively, but more likely improve, U.S. combat efficacy;and that those intolerant reactionaries who object and feel less safe or simply less comfortable will shun the military — and that the military will not suffer as a consequence of their absence, but more likely improve. If all true, then we are onto the brave new world!

via Women at the Front – By Victor Davis Hanson – The Corner – National Review Online.

College Degree, No Class Time Required – WSJ.com

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This is the future:

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.

No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

Elsewhere, some schools offer competency-based credits or associate degrees in areas such as nursing and business, while Northern Arizona University plans a similar program that would offer bachelor’s degrees for a flat fee, said spokesman Eric Dieterle. But no other state system is offering competency-based bachelor’s degrees on a systemwide basis.

Wisconsin’s Flexible Option program is “quite visionary,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, an education policy and lobbying group that represents some 1,800 accredited colleges and universities.

In Wisconsin, officials say that about 20% of adult residents have some college credits but lack a degree. Given that a growing number of jobs require a degree, the new program appeals to potential students who lack the time or resources to go back to school full time.

“It is a big new idea in a system like ours, and it is part of the way the ground is shifting under us in higher education,” said Kevin Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, which runs the state’s 26 public-university campuses.

Under the Flexible Option, assessment tests and related online courses are being written by faculty who normally teach the related subject-area classes, Mr. Reilly said.

Officials plan to launch the full program this fall, with bachelor’s degrees in subjects including information technology and diagnostic imaging, plus master’s and bachelor’s degrees for registered nurses. Faculty are working on writing those tests now.

via College Degree, No Class Time Required – WSJ.com.

From Bobby Jindal’s speech to the Republican National Committee in Charlotte | via WashingtonExaminer.com

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Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.

We don’t believe old, top-down, industrial-age government becomes a good idea just because it agrees with us or because we are running it.

We must focus on the empowerment of citizens making relevant and different decisions in their communities while Democrats sell factory-style government that cranks out one dumbed-down answer for the whole country.

This means re-thinking nearly every social program in Washington. Very few of them work in my view, and frankly, the one-size fits all crowd has had its chance.

If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers.

We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.

If we created American government today, we would not dream of taking money out of people’s pockets, sending it all the way to Washington, handing it over to politicians and bureaucrats to staple thousands of pages of artificial and political instructions to it, then wear that money out by grinding it through the engine of bureaucratic friction…and then sending what’s left of it back to the states, where it all started, in order to grow the American economy.

What we are doing now to govern ourselves is not just wrong. It is out of date and it is a failure.

 

Full text: Bobby Jindal’s dynamite speech to the Republican National Committee in Charlotte | WashingtonExaminer.com.

Ryan Smith, WSJ: The Reality That Awaits Women in Combat

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When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

via Ryan Smith: The Reality That Awaits Women in Combat – WSJ.com.