It is STILL snowing here, and we are really starting to get buried. It's beautiful, though, and I'm going to try to enjoy it before it gets all dirty and gray.
Below the fold are more still images of the winter weather, as well as a strange but wonderful story and a video of Dudley from this weekend.
The arrow in the above picture points to where I took a faceplant in the snow earlier today while walking Dudz, lol. (It's so bright and white outside I couldn't tell exactly where I was aiming the camera!) There's a huge hole which isn't visible under the snow, right near the street in front of our neighbor's house, and I was just thinking, "Ooh, I'd better be careful because that big hole is right arou—MOTHER FUCKER!"
No damage. Just a lot of snow coverage. And Dudley gave me this look like, "See? I TOLD you we shouldn't be outside in this shit!"
Video Description: Dudley was having NONE of being outside while it was sleeting on Saturday, and did not even want to leave the veranda at the dog park. We still managed to find a way to have fun, though: Iain and I stood at either end of the veranda, and Dudley ran between us, or ducked out the exit in its middle, and ran around for maximum fun-time with minimum exposure to the elements, lol.
Re: the fleece coat Dudley is wearing at the beginning of the video... The other day, before the big storm hit, I'm out walking Dudley, and he's not wearing his coat because it was poop-time and he won't do poop business while he's wearing it, I believe because the material is kind of noisy when he squats, which freaks him out. I'm thinking about how we need to get him a fleece coat when this guy comes walking up to me carrying what looks like a blanket. (He got out of a running pick-up truck parked in a nearby drive-way, and I don't know if he lives there—it's neighbors we don't know—or if he just pulled into the driveway because he was passing by.) Anyway, he holds out what I think is a blanket and says, "These are two fleece coats I made for my greyhound. He died and I thought you might be able to use them."
Me, gape-mouthed and babbling: "Thank you so much! I'm so sorry about your dog. This is just so nice of you. I was literally just thinking I need to order a fleece jacket for him. I can't even tell you how appreciative I am!"
He told me he hoped I could use them, but if they didn't fit to go ahead and give them away to another greyhound. I was so shocked, I barely knew how to respond, except to sputter thank you like a half dozen more times. He just smiled and pet Dudley's head and said, "I still miss my greyhound every day." And then he turned and walked away.
So Dudz has been wearing his new handmade fleece coat, and guess what? He totes does his poop business while wearing it!
Where were we? It's been a while, so maybe we need to get caught up. Oh yeah, Molly slipped Noah a mickey and he just now woke up, some days later. (Elsewhere, Bailey and Kearns are off to sell their nuclear warhead, but that's not important in this chapter.)
Noah showers, puts on some clean clothes, and heads to Darthur's office. Darthur is there, "long fingers knit together." I wish he'd been doing this, but c'est la vie.
Charlie Nelan, Gardner family lawyer, is there, though no longer looking like the fancypants he is. (From chapter thirteen: "No matter where you happened to see him, he always looked as though he'd just stepped out of the 'Awesome Lawyers' issue of Gentlemen's Quarterly.") But tonight, he's a mess:
Charlie Nelan was standing by the window. He looked over, then shook his head almost imperceptibly as Noah met his eyes. Charlie seemed worn-out and wired at the same time, his wrinkled shirt undone at the collar, sleeves rolled up to the forearms, no necktie. This was far from the lawyer's polished public face; it was the look of a man who'd been awakened from a sound sleep to help fight a five-alarm fire.
So, you know things must be really bad if Nolan's shirt is wrinkled. Noah pops some pills the doctor gave him "to counteract the lingering effects of that anesthetic patch she'd peeled off his chest when they found him." Okay.
Also there is "the boss of the firm's security service, an ex-mercenary hard guy named Warren Landers." Yay for new characters! boo for ex-mercenary hard guys. No offense to any ex-mercenary hard guys in the audience, but that is just a clunky, and seemingly disingenuous, descriptor.
Landers was the bully in the schoolyard who'd grown up and found himself an executive job where he could dress up and get paid for doing what he still loved to do. There was always an undertone when he spoke, a smirk in his eyes as if something about you was the punch line of a running joke he was telling in his head.
That is certainly a timely, if unfortunate, choice of words from our author. Anyway, Darthur is glad Noah wasn't hurt, but there are more important things to discuss.
"How did you find me?"
"The same way I found you last Friday night, at the police station," Charlie said. "We found your cell phone. They'd taken out the battery, but someone put it back in and turned the phone on about an hour ago."
Whut? They tracked his cell phone on Friday, too? Wasn't he supposed to be on a date on Friday? Do they always track his cell phone on his free time? Is that how they gauge his outstanding record of success with the ladies? Or did they know something was up from the beginning? And if they knew something was up on Friday, why'd they let all that business of breaking into to office happen Saturday? Jebus, that makes no sense.
Even assuming they had no clue on Friday, after Noah was arrested with the teabaggers, you'd think they'd have kept an eye on him and not let him break into the conference room and steal the Powerpoint presentations.
I must say, The New World Order's security team does not impress me very much.
"The first piece," Landers said, "was that we figured out who leaked that government document to the press last week."
"Who was it?"
"It was scanned and sent out from right here. About two hours after it came into the mailroom."
Whoops!
The next four pages or so detail how Molly infiltrated Doyle & Merchant, got herself close to Noah, and then used him to steal the Powerpoint presentation.
Noah looks at the dossier on Molly Ross, and it is apparent she sent out the document, and did her best to hide that fact.
"Keep going," Landers said. "It gets better."
And by better, Landers means, quite obviously, "even more ridiculous":
The next page was a photo of her in some academic environment, and it took Noah a few seconds to recognize all the things that were different. She wore glasses, thin half-rim frames and subtly tinted lenses. Her hair was longer and lighter, almost blond. But the changes went beyond her appearance. There was a sophistication about her in this photo, a style and a seriousness that he'd either overlooked or that she'd somehow hidden in their short time together.
In another shot she appeared to be at a rally of some kind, with her mother on one side and the ubiquitous Danny Bailey on the other, his arm around her waist and hers around his as they all pressed together for the camera.
The next picture seemed more recent. Molly was alone, wearing aviator sunglasses, a backward baseball cap, cut-off Daisy Dukes, and a camouflage tank top. In her hands was what looked like a military-grade automatic rifle with a drum magazine, held as if it were the most natural accessory a pretty young woman could be sporting on a bright summer day at the gunnery range. For whatever reason he was reminded of that famous shot of Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard, holding his radical newspapers in one hand and his murder weapon in the other, just a few months before his appointment with JFK at Dealey Plaza.
Seriously? Cut-off Daisy Dukes and a military-grade automatic rifle? What garbage.
"The way we figure it," Landers said, "these people wanted to get some dirt on the government, our new clients, specifically, and they identified our company as a weak spot in the security chain. So they sent this girl to a temp agency we use, and you can see right there"-he tapped one of the papers in the open folder-"she wrote up a résumé that made her look like a perfect fit for a job here, and talked her way in. This Ross girl, she can be a charmer, I understand.
"But it wasn't enough just to get into the mailroom," Landers said. "Oh, it gave her some limited access, but to do the kind of damage they wanted to, they needed some inside help."
Whoops!
And blah blah blah, Molly had been sent in to put the moves on Noah, teabagger style. She used "his Facebook profile, his Twitter history, his full set of responses from a variety of questionnaires at his online dating sites, the rambling, soul-searching posts from his personal blog, even his browser history from a number of recent consecutive weeks" to get inside his head, as it were, and sidled right up to him.
"You didn't stand a chance, Noah," Charlie said. "She came here specifically to get close to you and then make the most of it."
Blah blah blah Molly copied the key to Noah's apartment while he was asleep and then used it to break into his place later. ("We'll know pretty soon if they planted something there, but it doesn't look like they took anything.") Then, after she drugged him, she took the teabaggers back to Doyle & Merchant to steal the rest of the Powerpoint files, which Noah just showed her how to do. Whoops again, Noah.
Noah "had a brief impulse to ask how Landers had managed to gather all of this" information, and it seems a really good question. Well, sort of. I mean, if Landers found out all this info so easily, why the fuck didn't they do this before she made her way into the mailroom?
I get that this is just a mailroom clerk form a temp agency, but still. You're trying to enact the New World Order or whatever. Wouldn't everyone get a background check? They just caught a fucking janitor stealing secrets, right? You think they'd tighten up security just a bit after that. (Nevermind that the woman the janitor called (Molly's mother) appears in the very fucking dossier everyone is mulling over right now.)
Like I said: The NWO's security detail: Less than impressive.
"They cleaned out that squatter's apartment where we found you," Charlie said, "but they left some conspicuous incriminating evidence behind: some radical wing-nut literature, a couple of weapons, and some other assorted contraband. They were probably going to call the police to the place with an anonymous tip."
"Why would they do that?"
"We think they wanted you to be found there with that stuff, so you'd be implicated as an accomplice in this whole thing. That way we'd want to keep it quiet to protect you, and we'd be less likely to make a federal case out of it."
That makes even less sense. They wanted to frame Noah for stealing files from work? To keep it quiet? Huh? Oh, who cares.
So, yeah, that's chapter thirty, more or less. The good news here is that this has brought us over the two-hundred page mark. So, yay for there being only eighty more to go! Though, that is gives us precious time for something to actually happen.
CNN is reporting that a federal judge has ruled parts of the healthcare legislation unconstitutional. "The key issue of contention was the "individual mandate" requirement that most Americans purchase health insurance by 2014." The Justice Department is expected to appeal.
UPDATE: You can read the whole decision here (pdf).
Steve Harvey is back with more of his wisdom about men and women and relationships. (If you're not familiar with this guy's shtick, here is Renee's "Steve Harvey" archive.) And, like all the rest of his gender essentialist, heterocentrist, deeply misogynist claptrap, this "men and women can't be friends" garbage is about as fresh as pterodactyl droppings. It's also one of the key narratives of the rape culture.
[Transcript below.]
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Remember in the classic movie "When Harry Met Sally," and the character played by Billy Crystal insisted, "Men and women can't be friends!"…? Well, hugely popular syndicated radio and talk show host Steve Harvey agrees—in a big way. In his latest book on relationships, "Straight Talk No Chaser," Harvey tells me face-to-face why women who think he's just a friend are delusional. This kind of frank talk is why expectations are high that "Straight Talk" will rival his first breakthrough best seller. [begin videotaped interview] So where'd this come from—
STEVE HARVEY, ENTERTAINER/AUTHOR: I mean, it's a blessing, true enough, but really it was just me sitting down being honest. All of my friends are men. I don't have female friends. I don't. I'm incapable of that.
WHITFIELD: Why? What do you mean?
HARVEY: Well, because, you know—
WHITFIELD: Because you have a wife?
HARVEY: Well, I have a wife and I don't really have female friends because, look— Okay, let's get rid of this myth right now—
WHITFIELD: [laughing] I want to know why!
HARVEY: OK, let me tell you this. Let's get rid of the myths. You're an attractive woman. There's some guy somewhere saying, yes, we're friends. No, that's not true. He's your friend only because you have made it absolutely clear that nothing else is happening except this friendship we have. We remain your friends in hopes that one day there will be a crack in the door, a chink in the armor, and trust and believe that guy you think is just your buddy…? He will slide in that crack the moment he gets the opportunity. Because we're guys.
WHITFIELD: [laughing] And you think most men think this way?
HARVEY: Ninety-nine point nine percent of us think that way. And you tell this to a woman and it just blows her back. "No, I have male friends." You have male friends because they know it can be nothing else right now. I'll tell you what, all your male friends—just ask them in a friendly way: "If I wanted to date you, would you be okay with that?" And watch—WATCH!—the fireworks. Watch! I'm telling you.
As a good companion piece to Rep. Weiner's comments, Paul Krugman notes Beltway Myth becoming reimagined fact in real time, in response to Dana Milbank's terrible piece in which he claimed that "a protracted debate on the public option" delayed the passage of the insurance industry giveaway healthcare legislation. Observes Krug:
Um, that's not what happened — and I followed the health care process closely. The debate over the public option wasn't what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican "moderates" weren't negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.
So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.
The worst of it is that I suspect Obama's memory has gone down the same hole.
Yes, well, it's certainly easier to be indignant at your ungrateful base if you imagine you tried valiantly to get them everything they wanted and failed, rather than treating the primary goal as your first bargaining chip.
As you might have heard, we're having quite the blustery snowstorm here in the Midwest. I managed to get a few shots before the wind picked up this afternoon, giving us the white winds of a lake effect blizzard.
A few days after Amber Yust visited the Department of Motor Vehicles in San Francisco to register her sex change from male to female, she got a letter at home from the DMV employee who had handled her application.
Homosexual acts, he informed her, were "an abomination that leads to hell."
The same day, Yust said, a DVD arrived from a fundamentalist church warning of eternal damnation for anyone "possessed by demons" of homosexuality. The DMV employee's letter had referred her to the church's website as a source of "critical information for your salvation."
What's more, the DMV had kept the employee on in 2009 even after he refused to process another transgender woman's name-change application, Yust said in a damage claim filed with the state, the precursor to a lawsuit.
...[Thomas Demartini] expressed no objection while processing her application, Yust said. But she believes he took down her name and address and shared them with his church.
The letter she received four days later was filled with biblical condemnations of homosexuality, including the passage in Leviticus that says two men who have sex "must be put to death," and implored Yust to change her mind about her sex change.
The letter also referred her to the website of the Most Holy Family Monastery, whose name was on a parcel that arrived the same day. It contained the DVD warning of damnation and a grisly leaflet showing hearts torn from bodies, said Dolan, her lawyer.
..."I feel really vulnerable," Yust, a 23-year-old software engineer, said Thursday. It's "scary that someone who's part of a government agency is able to take my personal information and get in touch with me. I don't think anyone could feel safe going to a DMV where they knew someone like that was working."
I have but two questions: 1. Why does this guy still have a job? 2. Why has he not been arrested for harassment?
This is currently on CNN's front page. Even as "entertainment news," this is some grim stuff. In fact, I can't even wrap my head around how the eating habits of the the mother of Prince William's fiancée qualifies as "entertainment," except at the intersection of the commodification of celebrity, the increasingly expansive definition of what constitutes celebrity, and the unimaginably twisted narrative that what women do with their bodies can be classified as entertainment by virtue of women's bodies being purposed for public display and consumption.
"I was doing Six Feet Under, and I was playing a gay character, and I had some love scenes that I did on that show—I would go home and they'd be like, 'Yeah, yeah, we've seen the show, we've seen the show, it's good, it's good.' And I got home after doing Dexter and people were just like jumping out of their skin. They're, like, so much more comfortable with me killing people than kissing men. It's not that surprising, I guess. Sad."—Actor Michael C. Hall, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon [at 27:25] earlier this week, observing the total fuckery of getting a better reception playing a sociopathic serial killer than a sexually active gay man.
[Trigger warning for sexual violence, male supremacy, misogyny.]
Below is video of a recent speech given by Tony Porter at TEDWomen. It is extremely powerful. His naked honesty about being a boy, a man, a son, and a father in a patriarchal rape culture is brutal, revealing, difficult, and effective.
I've written before about the void of a progressive men's equality movement; Tony Porter is providing a hell of a road-map here.
[Full transcript below.]
My thanks to everyone who sent in this link.
I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we was taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating, no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger, and definitely no fear. That men are in charge, which means women are not. That men lead, and you should just follow and just do what we say. That men are superior; women are inferior. That men are strong; women are weak. That women are of less value. Property of men. And objects, particularly sexual objects.
I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as The Man Box. [shows graphic of box containing classic masculinity tropes] See, this Man Box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now, I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man—while at the same time there's some stuff that's just straight-up twisted. [laughter] And we really need to begin to challenge, look at, and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.
This is my two at home—Kendall and Jade. [shows picture of two children, a girl and a boy] They're 11 and 12; Kendall's 15 months older than Jade, and there was a period of time, you know, when my wife, her name is Tammy, and I, we just got real busy, and whip bim bam boom, Kendall and Jade. [laughter] And when they were about 5 and 6, 4 and 5, you know, Jade could come to me, it didn't matter, come to me crying, you know, it didn't matter what she was crying about, she can get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out, Daddy got you, that's all that's important.
Now, Kendall, on the other hand, and, like I said, he's only 15 months older than her, he come to me crying, it's like, soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off, you know; I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds. Which means by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "Why you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what's wrong. Tell me what's wrong! I can't understand you while you crying!" And out of my own frustration, of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man, to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defined in this Man Box, I would find myself saying things like, "Just go in your room! Just go on—go on in your room! Sit down, get yourself together, and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a"…what? [audience: "Like a man."] Like a man. And he's five. years. old.
And, you know, as I grow in life, I would say to myself, "My god. What's wrong with me? What am I doing? Why would I do this?" And I think back, I think back to my father. [shows picture of his family] There was a time in my life when we had a very troubled experience in our family. My brother Henry, he died tragically when we was teenagers.
We lived in New York City, as I said—we lived in the Bronx, at the time—and the burial was a place called Long Island—it was about two hours outside of the city—and as we were preparing to come back from the burial, you know, the cars stopped at the bathroom, you know, let folks take care of themselves, for the long ride back to the city, and the limousine empties out—my mother, my sisters, my aunties, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine. And no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. He didn't want to cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground—something I just can't even, I just can't even imagine.
The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me. And at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying.
You know, I come to also look at this as this, this fear that we have as men, this fear that just have us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this Man Box.
I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you, you were playing like a girl?" Now, I expected him to say something like, "I'd be sad; I'd be mad; I'd be angry," something like that. No, the boy said to me, the boy said to me, "It would destroy me."
And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?" [applause]
It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old—I grew up in tenement buildings, you know, in the inner city, and at this time, we're living in the Bronx—and in the building next to where I lived, there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old, younger guys, and he was hanging out with all us younger guys, and this guy, he was up to a lot of no good; he was the kind of kid parents have to wonder, "What is this 16 year old boy doing with these 12 year old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good; he was a troubled kid, you know, his mother had died from a heroin overdose, he was being raised by his grandmother, his father wasn't on the set, his grandmother had two jobs, he was home alone a lot.
Well, I gotta tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude, man. He was cool. He was fine—that's what the sisters said; he was fine, right? He was having sex. You know, we all looked up to him.
So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something, just playing around, doing something, I don't know what. He looks out his window, and he calls me upstairs. He said, "Hey Ant—" (they called me Anthony growing up as a kid) "—hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call; you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant, because for me, growing up at that time, and our relationship with this Man Box, "Do you want some?" meant one of two things: Sex or drugs. And we weren't doing drugs.
Now my box, my card, my Man Box Card was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that, as men; you only tell your dearest, closest friends, sworn to secrecy for life the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we been having sex since we was two. There ain't no first time. [laughter] The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. You know, that's even worse. We supposed to be always on the prowl; women are objects, especially sexual objects.
So anyway, I couldn't tell him any of that, so, like my mother would say, to make a long story short, I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room; on his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She is what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times; at others, we had a whole choice—words, you know, inappropriate names for her… [he drifts off; he looks pained]
Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her—well, he actually raped her, but he said he had sex with her, because while Sheila never said "no," she also never said "yes."
So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same, so when I go in the room, I close the door—folks, I'm petrified. I stand with the back to the door, so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything, and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm gonna do; I'm trying to figure out how I'm gonna get out of this room.
So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the living room, and, lo and behold, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys, like, you know, like the waiting room at the doctor's office. And they ask me, "How was it?" And I said to them it was good. And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.
Now, I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear of getting outside the Man Box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my Man Box Card, than about Sheila, and what was happening to her.
See, collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women.
[shows a graphic reading: "The Collective Socialization of Men: Less Value + Property + Objectification = Violence Against Women."]
We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this, this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves as separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property, and objectification is the foundation, and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution, as well as the problem. The Centers for Disease Control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions—it is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.
So quickly, I'd just like to say, you know, this is the love of my life [shows picture of daughter]—my daughter, Jade. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving—I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men. That it's okay to not be dominating. That it's okay to have feelings and emotions. That it's okay to promote equality. That it's okay to have women that are just friends and that's it. That it's okay to be whole.
That my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman. [applause]
I remember asking a 9-year-old boy—I asked a 9-year-old boy, "What would life be like for you if you didn't have to adhere to this Man Box?" He said to me, "I would be free."
Pretty much everyone in the omniverse (or in the US. Whichever.) has already written about No Child Left Behind. I've also gotten to the point where I have a really hard time discussing the state of my current home. But let me lay some amazing local news on y'all:
High school graduation rates in Syracuse aren't what we might hope. Because of No Child Left Behind and the cult of accountability, there are arbitrary goals for this (and any number of other things that can be quantified), and punishments enhanced reformation measures that the district has to take when it fails to meet them.
Last year one Syracuse's four main public high schools was on New York's list of “persistently lowest achieving” schools. This year, the other three joined it.
So.
The Syracuse City School District will likely fire the principals of these schools. The district also has to, um, remove a large number of the teachers at each school. They won't necessarily lose their jobs, the district just needs to find them positions at schools that aren't on the State Department of Education's list.
Four of Syracuse's four public high schools are on the list.
Um.......
So there's the economy.
And the closure of pretty much every manufacturing facility in the region.
And massive numbers of foreclosed properties.
And a property tax base that contains a massive number of churches and abandoned buildings.
And we use property taxes to fund schools.
And the extent to which federal and state governments have funded are schools has declined.
And so the Syracuse City Schools are facing a $50 million budget deficit for next year alone.
And teachers are getting paid a lot less than they should, when they're not being laid off.
And new teachers aren't exactly flocking to the district, what with the lack of openings and the high probability of getting blamed for students' failure to graduate.
And the Rockefeller drug laws.
And the prison-industrial complex.
And violent crime, oh is there violent crime.
Only one of which is being temporarily and insufficiently addressed by No Child Left Behind (the district gets $2 million for each “failing” school that it “reforms”).
So yeah, perfect sense.
I can only assume that more and more parents can afford to send their children to private schools or move to the suburbs will do so, which will undoubtedly do wonders for the district's budget and graduation rates. Death spiral huzzah.
Which is not to say that there won't be corporate interests around to collect the grant money that will suddenly appear to teach children who couldn't be taught without it. Or that everyone who matters will leave the district so to hell with it. Or both. And there'll be hugs but not drugs and enough bootstraps for everyone. So there's that, I suppose.
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