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The Darker Side of Jason Mraz

by Travis6964 Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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It was the early aughts and the American pop scene was closing out the chapter on a decade of boy bands. Singer-songwriters were up to bat, as John Mayer and Jack Johnson crooned their way up the charts and into the hearts of a nation weary of synchronized dance moves and contrived collaborations.

Armed with an acoustic guitar and an aptitude for wordplay Jason Mraz fit the profile when he burst onto the scene in 2002—and he came with his own distinctive flavor. Hailing from small town Virginia, he cultivated his talent at a New York City conservatory before rounding out the edges in the San Diego coffeehouse scene. He blended these experiences into an eccentric but charmingly optimistic persona—in his debut video he dons a trucker hat, sport coat, an “I love sex” pin, and bunny slippers, and is accompanied by an entourage of chickens.

Alhough he has stopped showcasing his Southern roots (and has dropped the cheeky sexual undertones), the attitude and style captured in “The Remedy” came to define him. “I won’t worry my life away,” he belted between verses originally intended to highlight the silver lining of his best friend’s cancer diagnosis. It was more than just a chorus: Positivity became his doctrine.

In the albums to follow, Mraz cemented his feel-good image and continued to highlight his playfulness. Whether performing at sold-out stadiums or little coffee shops, he charmed audiences with charismatic banter, eagerly and effortlessly connecting to his crowds. He called his fans “friends” and featured them on his website. It’s been a winning way. Over the years, Mraz has taken home two Grammys, two Teen Choice Awards, a People’s choice award, and he’s sold millions of records.

Jason Mraz in San Francisco. Gabrielle Canon

Now, 12 years since that debut album, he’s been busy touring to promote his latest release, Yes!, a collaboration with the band Raining Jane. And while he hasn’t abandoned the positivity thing, he’s become more nuanced about it. Sure, the album is about positivity, he says, but that’s not because he’s an overly happy person. These days, he admits, finding happiness can be a struggle for him. Mraz has recast his carefree mantra as a sort of defensive tactic to cope with his worries.

“I tend to wake up and feel somewhat pessimistic,” he told me. “I will look at the schedule and think ‘Oh my gosh, look at all this I have to do today. There’s not going to be enough time for myself. Am I going to have enough time to put the show together? Is the show going to be great? Probably not? I have already used all my great stuff.’ So anyway, I have this default mode that makes me feel less than—or makes me feel that something is missing.”

Yet while he uses music to drown out those feelings, Mraz doesn’t want to put out songs that won’t make people feel good. His darker compositions don’t make the cut: “What goes on an album is something that I am going to tour. Something that I am passing along to listeners that I think could be valuable music. I don’t want to release music that is a total bummer.”

The persona he’s cultivated over his career, in other words, no longer quite fits. “When I released that first album,” he explains, “my motivations were probably on ego and celebrating my vocabulary and showing off my irregular imagination. Obviously, you read more books, see more documentaries; you’ve had more trials and errors, been in love a few times—had failures. So certainly the perspective changes.”

Even so, Mraz is inclined to give fans what they expect. A few months back, at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, he put on a great show, complete with improvisational interludes, audience participation, and even footage from an excursion to Antarctica, where he performed for environmental scientists. But at moments he let his sentiments show.

After playing a few songs with Raining Jane, he took the stage for a solo version of “The Remedy,” which he had recast as a slow, hauntingly beautiful rendition, disguising the familiar upbeat tune. Later in the show, he introduced “Three Little Things,” a peppy song about what he does to recover when his “life falls apart.” People, he griped to the crowd, accuse him of being happy all the time.

The following afternoon, at a fan meet-and-greet hosted at his favorite local restaurant, Gracias Madre, Mraz smiled minimally, performed mechanically, and seemed almost bored to be there. Sandwiched between two big shows, the event was meant to mimic the intimacy of the coffeehouse scene he came up in. The fans, most of who were there thanks to their participation in a local radio contest, didn’t seem to mind, even when he lectured them on the importance of eating local. This was, after all, Jason Mraz in the flesh, clad in his signature, slightly askew trucker hat and belting out their favorites. Apart from some laugh lines around his eyes and a goatee that added a few years to his boyish features, he looked the same as always.

Even if Mraz’s mentality has undergone a shift, his songs speak for themselves. If anything, just focusing on the intentions behind his latest album would overshadow how good it actually is. Yes! may even be his best one yet. He has put aside styles he experimented with awkwardly in the past—notably scat and rap—and created an album with catchy songs, great harmonies, and enough lyrical complexity to make you actually feel something. And even if he recorded only the most uplifting material, the less blatantly positive tracks are among the album’s best.

Jason Mraz in San Francisco. Gabrielle Canon

Yes! reveals what we’ve always known about Mraz: He knows how to write a great love song—and that may be his greatest legacy. “My story must be love,” he told me. “Whether it is trying to fill in some lack of love that I think I didn’t experience when I was a kid, or a lack of love that I might feel like I am experiencing right now. I have been able to use art as an opportunity to fill that hole.”

It’s hard to say what’s next for Mraz. He’s not quite sure himself. With one album remaining on his Warner Bros. contract, he has hinted that the next one might be his last, and that he’s entertaining the idea of retiring.

Maybe he’ll spend more time tending to his five-acre Avocado farm in Southern California—you can find Mraz avocados at local farmers markets—or focusing on his charity. He’s outspoken about LGBT rights, and uses his music to advocate for other causes, including human trafficking and environmental stewardship. That Antarctica trip was intended to raise awareness about climate change, and the resulting video for “Sail Away” features penguins and spectacular views. His future might also include parenting, he says.

But Mraz wants people to know that his core philosophy will never change: He’s still a dreamer who, despite himself, wants to make people smile. “We are born into society’s dream. We wake up here on this modern earth, and while it may seem unfair in some areas, at least—” He pauses here for a long moment. “At least we have the opportunity to keep dreaming.”

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The Darker Side of Jason Mraz

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Rand Paul Is the Best-Dressed Man in Washington

by AlbertoGurney Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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With election day less than a month away, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is hitting the campaign trail to stump for Republican candidates. On Wednesday he’ll be in Virginia with Senate candidate Ed Gillespie and congressional hopeful David Brat. He’ll be in New Hampshire on Thursday with former Sen. Scott Brown. He’s been in North Carolina with Rep. Walt Jones and Senate nominee Thom Tillis, and Kansas with Sen. Pat Roberts and Gov. Sam Brownback.

But for Paul, fall is about something more than just laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential campaign. It’s turtleneck season.

He’s taken his licks in the past. An otherwise flattering profile in Vogue mocked his “dad jeans” and “notorious sartorial taste.” That’s one way of looking at it. Another—more accurate—way of looking at it is that Rand Paul is the leading fashion visionary of DC, nay, the world. The Nebuchadnezzar of Normcore, Sultan of the Sartorial, the Thelonius of Threads.

Here’s a quick guide.

Pleated khakis, blue-grey Polo Ralph Lauren sweater, black turtleneck, in October 2010:

Billy Suratt/Apex MediaWire/ZUMA

Black blazer, black turtleneck, button, January 2012:

Charles Dharapak/AP

Blazer, black turtleneck, Ray-Bans. Burger by In-N-Out. En route to the Reagan library in 2013:

Rand Paul/Facebook

Olive-green sweater vest, black turtleneck, button, while discussing the mythical NAFTA Superhighway in Montana, winter 2008:

fatkidinabucket/YouTube

Trenchcoat, split-pea vest, black turtleneck:

Metallic tan blazer, black turtleneck, while discussing taxation on Kentucky Tonight in 2008:

Kentucky Tonight/YouTube

Pleated khakis, black blazer, metallic blueberry on creamsicle, fall 2010:

Charles Bertram/Lexington Herald-Leader/ZUMA

Royal denim shirt with gold-standard combo:

Billy Suratt/ZUMA

Christmas:

Boston Liberty Project/YouTube

Technicolor dreamcoat while grabbing lunch with Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), August 2014:

Matt Hildreth/YouTube

Blazer, tie, JNCO jeans, 2012:

Charles Dharapak/AP

Candy-striped belt with JNCOs:

Jeff Blake/The State/ZUMA

So where does he get his style from? We’ve got one guess:

Charles Dharapak/AP

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Rand Paul Is the Best-Dressed Man in Washington

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Friday Cat Blogging – 8 August 2014

by JanisEasley Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week you could barely see Domino’s face, so this week we get a close-up. Here she is outside in the summer sun enjoying a chin smooch from Marian.

In other cat news, click here to read about Coco, the lovely Siamese Wi-Fi sniffing cat from Virginia. If I tried this with Domino, she would sniff out my Wi-Fi and….that’s about it. She doesn’t roam much, and these days even less than usual. I don’t think she’s ventured more than ten feet from a doorway in years.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 8 August 2014

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Glenn Beck Tells Common Core Activists They Shouldn’t Mention His Name

by Luz67Wegjv Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, 40 minutes into Glenn Beck’s nationally broadcast “night of action” targeting the Common Core education standards being implemented in schools across the nation, a North Carolina activist named Andrea Dillon announced live that her state’s governor had just signed a law directing the board of education to rewrite its standards—a step shy of jettisoning North Carolina from the initiative outright. A murmur went through the audience of two dozen or so parents and kids at the cinema in Ballston, Virginia where I was watching, one of hundreds of theaters around the country that was broadcasting the interactive event, dubbed “I Will Not Conform” (a nod to Beck’s new book on the standards, Conform). Beck offered a few words of congratulation, and Dillon patted her allies on the back: “North Carolina’s got a lot of gumption.”

It wasn’t the biggest political story of the night—that would be either David Perdue’s victory in the Georgia Republican Senate primary, or President Barack Obama’s consumption of multiple cheeseburgers, depending on your point of view. But Tuesday was a big day for opponents of the Common Core State Standards, a set of math and language-arts guidelines adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia in 2010, and, of late, an object of obsession for Beck and his army of parent activists. North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory became the latest once-supportive governor to hop the fence in opposition to the standards. Last week, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker called on his state to repeal Common Core, echoing an earlier move by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to extricate his state from the standards. (That effort has turned the state board of education and Louisiana’s lieutenant governor against Jindal, and is now mired in litigation.) Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Republican officials in the state have previously been staunch supporters of the standards, an anti-Core teacher holds a narrow lead in the Republican primary for state superintendent—a position with broad powers for Core implementation.

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Glenn Beck Tells Common Core Activists They Shouldn’t Mention His Name

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Why David Brat is Completely Wrong About Climate Science

by Myrna Posted on June 11, 2014

At a campaign event, he repeated the myth that climate scientists used to think we’re headed into a new Ice Age. David Brat. Steve Helber/AP David Brat, the Virginia economics professor and tea partier who just beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Republican primary, is a staunch libertarian. And these days, that doesn’t just mean thinking the free market should run most things, from the energy sector to healthcare. It also often means denying the reality of global warming. In a recent campaign event video (which has since been made private), Brat explains his free marketeer perspective on environmental and energy problems. Naturally, he believes that American ingenuity will lead the way to a cleaner environment. But he also hints at a disbelief in the science of global warming, and alludes to a well-worn myth that has been widely used on the right to undermine trust in climate scientists—the idea that just a few decades ago, in the 1970s, climate experts all thought we were going to be going into “another Ice Age.” Here’s how Brat put it: “If you let Americans do their thing, there is no scarcity, right? They said we’re going to run out of food 200 years ago, and then we’re going to have another ice age. Now it’s, we’re heating up…” At this point, Brat waves his hand dismissively. I reached out to the Brat campaign to ask if he believes in human-caused climate change; they did not immediately respond. Regardless, the myth that climate scientists, in the 1970s, all thought a new Ice Age was coming has been widely asserted by conservative and libertarian types ranging from George Will to Michael Crichton. And no wonder: It serves their political goals. It makes climate scientists seem quirky, wishy-washy, leaping from one conclusion to another. But it’s highly misleading. In 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a full article dedicated to debunking this myth. Here’s a short excerpt: …the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent.…A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then. So where did this odd idea—that within relatively recent memory, climate scientists were all worried about cooling, not warming—come from? After all, as far back as 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee detailed the risk of global warming due to fossil fuel burning in an extensive appendix to a report on the environment. Concerns about warming were prominent even then. Nonetheless, the 1970s were part of a temporary cooling trend, at least in the northern hemisphere, and some journalists caught on. Some scientists also fanned the flames. Perhaps most notably, in 1975 Newsweek magazine ran a story entitled “The Cooling World.” This is arguably the most frequently cited piece of evidence for those who claim that scientists, at the time, thought global cooling was coming. That’s even though the story’s author, Peter Gwynne, has himself set the record straight, writing, “Several atmospheric scientists did indeed believe in global cooling, as I reported in the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek. But that was then.” And even then, this was certainly not a consensus position in the scientific community. The American Meteorological Society paper shows, through a scientific literature review, that from 1965 to 1979, “only 7 articles indicated cooling compared to 44 indicating warming.” Sure enough, by 1979, a major National Academy of Sciences report could be found highlighting the global warming threat and stating that if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere double, we could see a warming of between 1.5 and 4 degrees Celsius. So no, scientists didn’t unanimously say, “We’re going to have another ice age.” And getting this right really matters. Because it shows that contrary to what Brat suggests, climate researchers are not mercurial, and were not all wrong just a few decades ago. And that, in turn, underscores the reality that their current conclusion—that humans are causing global warming—is based on a long-running and extremely well established body of research and thinking. Originally from:  Why David Brat is Completely Wrong About Climate Science ; ;Related ArticlesThis Is Why You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts9 Things You Need To Know About Obama’s New Climate RulesChina To Limit Carbon Emissions for First Time ;

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Why David Brat is Completely Wrong About Climate Science

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Rand Paul Holds Conference Call With Tea Partier Who Says Obama "Has Muslim Sensibilities"

by TobyTheodore Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the guest speaker on Rev. E.W. Jackson’s semi-regular conference call, during which Jackson, a tea party activist, said that President Barack Obama has “Muslim sensibilities” and that gay Americans “want to destroy us.”

Jackson, who was the losing Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia last year, is known for his many offensive and outlandish statements about gays, lesbians, non-Christians, and Obama. Jackson has warned that yoga leads to Satan, Obama is using NASA to expand Islam, and the Democratic Party platform is “an agenda worthy of the Antichrist.”

During the call, Paul generally gave routine answers to questions on abortion, border security, and the size of the military. One caller did ask Paul if he supported Obama’s recent declaration that June was LGBT Pride Month and if he believed homosexuality is an illness. The question was reminiscent of a tweet Jackson wrote in June 2009, when Obama designated June as Pride Month: “Well that just makes me feel ikky all over. Yuk!”

“I don’t think that there’s really a role for the federal government in deciding what people’s behavior at home should be one way or another,” Paul said. “It’s not something the federal government needs to be involved in.”

After Paul left the conference call, Jackson said he suspected the caller who asked about Pride Month was trying to harass them. “Thank god he was respectful,” Jackson said. “But I just want to encourage everybody, that they are going to talk about us like we’re dogs because all they know is hatred, because all they know is anger and bitterness, because there’s something wrong with them on the inside…And by the way, they also want to destroy us…We are in a fight for our very lives, for our survival.”

Jackson then discussed Obama’s announcement of the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier captured in Afghanistan. He said that the president “could not help but smile” when Bergdahl’s father, Robert, said “allahu akbar—or whatever it is they say” at the press conference.

Jackson continued: “I have been roundly criticized for saying the president has Muslim sensibilities. That’s not my statement—that’s just a statement of fact…In this situation you would think he would have restrained himself. But he could not help but smile when that man said ‘Praise be to Allah.'”

(Bergdahl actually said “Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim,” which translates to “in the name of Allah, most compassionate, most merciful.”)

Jackson has a history of extreme statements. In two interviews in October 2012 with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality—which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group—Jackson accused homosexuality of “killing black men by the thousands.” He added that liberal activists who support gay marriage “have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and slavery and Jim Crow ever did.” Of gay people, he said:

Their minds are perverted, they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex. So they can’t see clearly…Homosexuality is a horrible sin, it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies.

In those interviews, Jackson also said that the president “seems to have a lot of sympathy for even radical Islam, unwilling to call it terrorism, unwilling to deal with it.”

On the campaign trail last year, Jackson denied making the anti-gay statements, which were recorded.

Paul has made controversial remarks about same-sex marriage. After the US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013, he said, “It is difficult, because if we have no laws on this, people will take it to one extension further—does it have to be humans?” Paul later said he was joking.

Paul’s office did not reply to requests for comment on Jackson’s claim Obama possesses “Muslim sensibilities.”

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Rand Paul Holds Conference Call With Tea Partier Who Says Obama "Has Muslim Sensibilities"

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Inside a Florida School District’s Same-Sex Classes: Perfume for Girls, Electronics for Boys

by SoonSullivan Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few generations ago, American families could send their daughters to private, all-girl finishing schools, where they learned how to sit properly and nab husbands. Today, Florida families have the option of sending their daughters to all-girl public schools, where girls get perfume for doing tasks correctly, and educators are taught that girls “struggle with abstract thinking,” “use relationships as weapons,” and prefer to read about “emotional agonies” over spaceship how-to books, according to a Title IX complaint filed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU alleges that the Hillsborough County public school district—which includes Tampa, has more than 202,000 students and a $2.8 billion budget, and operates both single-sex classrooms in coed public schools and single-sex magnet schools—is implementing teaching methods that discriminate on the basis of sex. Galen Sherwin, staff attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, says these methods may soon spread to other parts of Florida.

The ACLU filed its complaint one day after Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a little-noticed bill that requires school districts that establish same-gender programs to mandate that educators participate in special training. Sherwin says that without federal or state intervention to ensure training programs do not promote sex stereotypes, it’s likely that other schools will follow Hillsborough’s model. (A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education says that she can’t comment on the complaint, but noted that, according to the law’s language, the school districts are in charge of training.)

So what does the Hillsborough program look like? According to the complaint, “trainings relied heavily on stereotypical emotional differences between boys and girls,” such as the idea that “girls do not like to take risks and believe success is from hard work,” while boys “show love through aggression.” The complaint lists techniques employed in classrooms across the district: One teacher gave each girl a dab of perfume on her wrist for doing a task correctly, teachers comforted girls when they made a mistake, and teachers “spoke in a firmer and more authoritative and loud voice with the boys.” Boys were also instructed to do jumping jacks before math and were allowed to bring their electronics to school if they behaved.

According to the complaint, the teachings also rely on the controversial idea that schools should be tailored based on innate biological differences between male and female brains—for example, that girls struggle with abstract thinking as it relates to math. “The assumption that such differences are innate or ‘hardwired’ is invalid,” noted Scientific American in 2009. “Experiences change our brains.”

Gender-based educational programs are not unique to Florida. The ACLU has filed complaints against school districts in other states, including West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Idaho. The National Association for Single Sex Public Education, which supports these kinds of programs, notes, “We understand that some girls would rather play football rather than play with Barbies,” and “girls in single-sex educational settings are more likely to take classes in math, science, and information technology.” Sherwin, from the ACLU, says she doesn’t see anything wrong with single-sex schools that don’t use different teaching methods for boys and girls. But she adds, “Whenever you make sex the most salient category for grouping children, it certainly sends a message about sex difference.”

Steve Hegarty, a spokesman for Hillsborough schools, says that that no one is assigned or zoned to same-sex programs. “You have to apply, if you think it would be a good fit for your son and daughter,” he says. He wouldn’t comment specifically on the complaint, but notes that in Florida at least, parents are enthusiastic about the programs: “They seem to be really popular.”

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Inside a Florida School District’s Same-Sex Classes: Perfume for Girls, Electronics for Boys

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Germany’s Key to Clean Energy Is…This Coal Mine?

by Myrna Posted on April 25, 2014

A German engineer wants to turn an old mine, half a mile underground, into a giant battery. Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk Germany is in the midst of a fierce battle against climate change and is making an aggressive push to get at least 80 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2050. But with nearly half its power still drawn from some of the world’s dirtiest coal, there are plenty of bumps in the road ahead. One of the biggest is how to store renewable energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, a problem that has tormented clean-energy advocates around the globe. One engineer thinks he’s found the solution—half a mile underground. Most of Germany’s coal is a low-grade form called lignite, which is dug out of sprawling open-pit mines and fed into carbon-spewing power stations. Lignite is dirtier than the hard coal more commonly found in the United States in places like Wyoming and West Virginia. Germany has its own hard coal, too—Steinkohle, in local parlance—but costs for the deep-shaft mines needed to get at it run so high that the industry has historically relied heavily on federal subsidies. Those are set to expire in 2018, and when they do, they’ll take Germany’s three remaining hard-coal mines with them. One of these mines is Bergwerk Prosper Haniel, about an hour outside the bustling northwestern city of Cologne. It’s a stark contrast from the open-pit lignite mines that consume entire landscapes: The squat industrial building where I meet André Niemann, an engineering professor at the nearby Universität Duisburg-Essen, looks like any small factory and gives no hint that it sits atop one of the deepest hard-rock mines in the world. We climb into a rattletrap elevator and drop down into the mine as Niemann describes his plan to turn the tunnels beneath us into a giant experiment in clean energy. (Watch the video below for an inside tour of the mine.) “If we want to integrate renewables as a major part, we need energy storage systems,” he says. “The energy storage solution is not solved yet.” Engineers across the globe are scrambling to design batteries that could soak up extra power and feed it back at night or on windless days. And four US states are scrambling to get picked as the site of a $5 billion battery factory Tesla plans to break ground on later this year. But traditional batteries aren’t the only option. So-called “pumped storage” uses renewable energy that isn’t needed at the time it’s produced to pump water into an elevated reservoir; to get the power back later on a cloudy or windless day, the water is drained back downhill through turbines, turning the whole system into a huge hydraulic battery. This illustration shows how the system works: The basic idea isn’t new: There are a number of these systems spread across the world already, including a few in Germany and several in the United States, that together account for nearly all existing bulk energy storage capacity. But Niemann would be the first to build one out of a coal mine, using Prosper Haniel’s preexisting, 18-mile network of tunnels. With hard coal in its waning hours, Niemann says, “now we have access to this deep ground.” His plan is still on the drawing board; until its closure in 2018, Prosper Haniel will continue to pump out 4 million tons of coal per year. But working with the company that owns the mine, RAG, Niemann wants to coat the tunnels’ grimy walls in concrete and fill the place up with water—up to 35 million cubic feet of it, roughly the volume of the Empire State Building. Renewable power would pump some of the water back to the surface, and then gravity would take care of the rest, draining the water back into the mine through an energy-producing turbine. Altogether, the system would have enough storage capacity to power up to 410 typical German homes. Niemann thinks projects like this could be adopted widely to repurpose unused facilities, to build a new energy system on the framework of the old. “Times are changing,” he says. “Mining is temporary, but now we want to establish a permanent solution.” More here:  Germany’s Key to Clean Energy Is…This Coal Mine? ; ;Related ArticlesEl Niño Could Grow Into a Monster, New Data ShowWatch Live: Darren Aronofsky Discusses “Noah” and Climate ChangeJared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114 ;

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Germany’s Key to Clean Energy Is…This Coal Mine?

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Not Everyone Needs to Learn Programming, But Every School Should Offer It

by p9zyztu Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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From the Washington Post:

In a world that went digital long ago, computer science is not a staple of U.S. education, and some schools do not even offer the course, including 10 of 27 high schools in Virginia’s Fairfax County and six of 25 in Maryland’s Montgomery County….Across the Washington region’s school systems, fewer than one in 10 high school students took computer science this academic year, according to district data.

That first stat surprises me. My very average suburban high school offered two programming courses way back in 1975 (FORTRAN for beginners, COBOL for the advanced class). Sure, back in the dark ages that meant filling in coding sheets, which were sent to the district office, transcribed onto punch cards, and then run on the district’s mainframe. Turnaround time was about two or three days and then you could start fixing your bugs. Still! It taught us the rudiments of writing code. I’m surprised that 40 years later there’s a high school in the entire country that doesn’t offer a programming class of some kind.

The second stat, however, doesn’t surprise me. Or alarm me. It’s about what I’d expect. Despite some recent hype, computer programming really isn’t the kind of class that everyone needs to take. It’s an advanced elective. I’d guess than no more than 10 percent of all students take physics, or advanced algebra, or art class for that matter. Ten percent doesn’t strike me as a horrible number.

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Not Everyone Needs to Learn Programming, But Every School Should Offer It

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15 Years After Columbine, How "Never Again" Became "Oh Well"

by DallasCopland Posted on April 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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On April 20, 1999, two teenagers walked into a suburban high school outside of Denver and shot 13 people to death. The massacre at Columbine was not the first mass shooting in America. It was not the first mass shooting at an American school. Indeed, Peter Jennings began the news that night, “The reaction of so many people today was ‘oh no, not again.'” But Columbine was different. It became a national trauma in a way the others hadn’t. Yes, it was the deadliest American school shooting on record at the time—though it is no longer—but what really amplified its significance was the fact it was the first mass shooting that played out in real time on television. The shootings began at 11:19am. By noon, local television stations had broken into regular programming with uninterrupted media coverage. Millions of people across the country turned on CNN and watched the story develop.

Here’s how America watched the chaos of Columbine: There were reports of a shooting and it was at a school and the body count began going up and witnesses said they were two shooters with shotguns and rifles and pistols and there had been an explosion across town and it had been a diversion maybe and pipe bombs, something about pipe bombs, and the body count kept rising, and booby traps, and then Clinton gave a speech and then the shooters were in a mafia that wore trench coats and maybe there were more than two and then no there were only two and they were dead and the bomb squad finished the initial sweep of the building at 4:45pm and it was over, but not really because then there was the CCTV footage, the witness interviews, the search for motive, they had been bowling, they had been bullied, they had said something about Hitler and they listened to Marilyn Manson and they wanted to one up Timothy McViegh and What Does It All Mean?

Studies show that following breaking news events can itself be traumatic. Following Columbine certainly was. Parents hugged their kids a little tighter that night.

After Columbine there was a general sense that something had to be done. That kids getting killed at school was a thing we weren’t going to be ok with. “Never again,” the saying goes. It wasn’t some fanciful impossibility. The British did it after Dunblane. And so we did that. Everyone got together and passed sweeping gun control legislation and there was never another mass shooting in America.

Except not really. Because the “never again” response—though shared by many—was not shared by all.

On May 1, Charlton Heston came to Denver and made a much-discussed speech where he said, “We have work to do, hearts to heal, evil to defeat, and a country to unite. We may have differences, yes, and we will again suffer tragedy almost beyond description. But when the sun sets on Denver tonight, and forever more, let it always set on we the people, secure in our land of the free and the home of the brave.” Say what you will about that speech, but as far as predictions go it was spot on. It’s a fait accompli. There were more shootings. We mourned and then did nothing because we seem to have accepted that occasional mass murder is the cost of America.

Both responses, “never again” and “don’t bother trying,” offer statements about the USA. The former says “America is the greatest country on Earth. We went to the moon. Surely, we can stop kids from getting shot to death at school! If the Brits can do it, so can we. ” The latter says, “No, we can’t. We’re America. The greatest country on Earth and the cost of the liberty that makes us so is that our kids may get shot to death at school.” It goes further, “Kids in other countries may get shot to death at their schools too, but we know that after kids get shot to death in our schools that there will be no significant reforms to prevent more of our kids from getting shot to death at more of our schools. Their death will, in a very real sense, be utterly meaningless.”

Every time there is another mass shooting and nothing happens it becomes a little easier to believe that the “don’t bother” crowd is right.

Nothing changed after 13 people were killed at Columbine, or 33 at Virginia Tech, or 26 at Sandy hook. Each of those tragedies came with the same breaking news coverage as Columbine, but none generated the same sense of action because fewer and fewer people actually believed things could change. The last 15 years have been a lesson in how “never again” can be cowed into “I need a drink.”

And that’s insane. It’s an insane thing to have to accept that problem as an inevitability. It’s an insane reality to have to shrug off.

So, 15 years after Columbine rattled America to its core, people still get shot while they’re at school. People get shot while they’re at work. People get shot eating. People get shot drinking. People get shot watching movies, shopping, driving, swimming, skipping and playing baseball. It’s 2014 and in America people get shot doing basically any goddamn thing you can think of.

They don’t have to.

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15 Years After Columbine, How "Never Again" Became "Oh Well"

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