“Spanking”: This is what’s wrong with it

. . .even when it’s legal and sanctioned by School, Church and/or State.

It ruins relationships and trust. It distorts and destroys love, lives, mental health, reputations and careers. It creates monsters more often than curbing or curing them. Indeed it’s pretty much the opposite of “discipline” considering that the justified, disciplined and accountable person in any physical bullying drama tends to be the suffering, subjugated victim, not the calculated inflicter of pain and humiliation.

Teen daughter beaten by Texas-Judge Dad

See also:

Jessica Alba’s Idea of Award-worthy Parent Performance

Can you go all day without hitting a child?:

Can anyone really deny that we are perpetuating and endorsing the lesson of “might makes right” when we rule over our children using physical punishment?

Stop every kid-hitter you can — teach ’em a lesson!

Thinking about hitting and children

Child abuse is not home education:

Spankings were a minor part of the allegations. Hitting with objects and. . . in anger, yes, but there is much more to this story than that. . .

Beep Won’t Like This: Iraq War Vet Critical After Police Violence at Oakland Occupy Protest

The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas on Occupy Oakland demonstrators Tuesday night as they marched through downtown, determined to reclaim the camp that officers destroyed that morning. As the marchers zigged and zagged in search of safe ground, authorities bombarded and barricaded the activists into a drawn-out stalemate that resulted in further arrests.

The local police’s use of force seriously injured an Occupy activist and Iraq War veteran.

Scott Olsen, 24, remains sedated on a respirator, in stable but critical condition at Oakland’s Highland Hospital after being hit in the head with a police projectile.

. . .New video posted to YouTube suggests that Olsen was hit [in the face] at close range with a tear-gas canister. After demonstrators rush to Olsen’s aid, an Oakland cop waits a few beats before lobbing a second tear-gas canister at the crowd. They are attending to Olsen when the canister explodes, sending smoke everywhere.

No, Beep won’t like it.
I don’t like it.
No one should like it.
WTF America . . .

Asking Candidates About Their Faith (and Extraterrestrial) Beliefs

“God chose me for that moment!” she thrills . . .

Following up after the GOP debate controversy around asking Rep. Bachmann about the implications of her bible-based wifely submission beliefs should she become President:

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans.

Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are both affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity — and Rick Santorum comes out of the most conservative wing of Catholicism — which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

And let’s not skip too quickly over

From Sue in Texas — Shall We Forgive Her?

😀

USA: Uneasy State of America This Fourth of July

The Culture War and Cultural Chasms
. . .And so real hatred and resentment blooms thanks to a war by proxy between two groups pretending to be what they are not, but making everyone else pay for their lack of a core identity or any genuine skill of their own. Trash vs Posers.

Beep IS deep. 🙂

Or maybe it’s like an autoimmune disorder wherein the body turns on itself. Our defenses so revved up that we can no longer tell who the enemy is. At times I get caught up in this too. It’s so easy, with the ease at which groups are demonized these days, the constant fear being pumped into our society for the purposes of mass emotional manipulation.

Beep really got my mind going with this (more than I can do justice at the moment, with burgers and corn on the grill.) America is a strong, rich, diverse nation by any measure. We define ourselves by successful competition in every one of those measures — we’re Number One, we’re Number One! Otherwise, who would we be? (WOULD we be, at all, or would America cease to be? )

Isn’t THAT our number one fear, that as we celebrate again for having won the world in the 18th century and defended our title through the the 19th and 20th, that our dominance is behind us, our glory days done, that USA doesn’t mean Number One anymore?

This year, intramural culture wars don’t feel like America’s existential threat most to be feared, more like

Serious T-Shirts, Hats and Saggy Pants All Trumped By My UTERUS!

Uterus.

Uterus, uterus, uterus!

Uteri aren’t just for Floridians anymore. Did you know half of all Americans carry concealed uteri with us everywhere we go, even [gasp!] in public policy debate?

“Uterus” has a Facebook page, Twitter hashtags and — because it’s politics — pink buttons.

But most important, Democrats looking for a unifying theme amid dour legislative prospects have found it in a single, unlikely word. House Democrats have started wearing pink buttons that say uterus in capital letters.

Saunders, the minority leader, warned members at a Wednesday caucus meeting not to wear the buttons on the House floor.

If I hear one more professional political operative of any

Woe is me, Wobegon is gone . . .

In a dramatic reversal of the Lake “Woe-Begone” Effect, in which all the kids are above average, we now labor under the Lake Woe-Is-Me Effect, in which all the kids are failing . . .

Sec of Ed Arne Duncan: 82 Percent of Schools Could Be ‘Failing’ This Year

Yes, JJ knows the correct spelling and is playing with words to make a point:

[Garrison] Keillor says the town’s name comes from a fictional old Indian word meaning “the place where we waited all day in the rain [for you].” Keillor explains, “Wobegon” sounded Indian to me and Minnesota is full of Indian names. They mask the ethnic heritage of the town, which I wanted to do, since it was half Norwegian, half German.”

The English word “woebegone” is defined as “affected with woe” and can also mean “shabby, derelict or run down.”

A point that reminds her of Minnesota’s many-minnie quaint confusions again . . .

Psy-ops of “Strategic Communications” Busted Wide Open by Rolling Stone

Read first.
Then discuss.

“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes.

Power of story. This exposes and then explains everything we’ve ever talked about here imo.

According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.” The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” he demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?”

JJ Spending This Week With Economist Jeffrey Sachs

Free! — no admission, registration, tuition. Materials not included and I may need to buy a book or two, maybe not. We’ll see.

It only took a cup of coffee, some battery power and less than ten minutes to get started with a world class professor (see his vita at end of post):

“Both [parties] are completely unrealistic . . . what’s happening in this country? . . .Both parties are financed by wealthy people . . . everyone caters to the top. . .
American influence is waning, American infrastructure is crumbling . . .except if you’re rich and you have a lot of money to invest, you’re investing in China. . . our politics is SO ODD right now, because it’s driven just by the very top. . .pure propaganda [of] Big Oil . . . food prices are at all-time highs, there’s instability all over the world. . .energy crises, food crises, do we talk about any of that in our country? Absolutely not.”

‎Next I found a short profession of his thoughts on education. Real education, not schooling: education to help our kids learn about the real world IN the real world, to “Think Big”, to experience and understand what’s being systematically twisted and lied about for the basest motives, in our textbooks and classrooms and broadcasts, even in the hallowed halls of the capitol buildings and courthouses we built to express and effect our American Dreams. So what does the Doctor order? Unschool them in the real world and encourage every opportunity for them to get out in it and unschool themselves:

“The irony is not that we are at an abyss that is unavoidable . . .it’s almost the opposite. We’ve unlocked the ability to promote economic development in all parts of the world. We have at our hand, the ability to end extreme poverty. We have before us either already existing or within reach, technologies . . .the question is whether we can BRING KNOWLEDGE TO BEAR on these solutions and then

New Power-of-Story Acronym Thinking Parents Had Better Think About

While over at Killing the Buddha, this caught my eye and then made me catch my breath.

As a schoolchild I originated a jolly, homegrown, completely benevolent version of “do it for the story” — first to get myself through dreaded necessities like family reunions or hospital stays, and then because it had helped me endure and often, even frame an entertaining bright side, I shared my approach with our kids. Now I just feel dirty . . .

Forget China’s Tiger Mom, Import Swedish Pay-to-Plays Instead??

I was pondering the hot new documentary blaming teachers for charter school lotteries with a fellow Thinking Parent (Lynne) the other day. Not necessarily for-profits, just all charters and the desperate lifeline they represent in a rigged system and why that should be so, and who the real villains are, what the real solutions might be.

Then today I’ve been talking with another fellow Thinking Parent (Daryl) about the odd results of GOP mayors and governors seeming to be against the public in fact but all in the name of public service! See Chris Christie, Rick Scott, Rudy Giuliani, for example. See also how universities and even community colleges are being forced into more private funding as for-profits get more and more from the “public.”

Then along comes a story that both fits right in and warps the narrative further out of whack:

“What the Vitriol is Actually About”

“If this tragedy is going to be a teachable moment,
the lesson won’t be found by determining whose vitriol is warranted.
It will be found instead in what the vitriol is actually about.

And that, as Sheriff Dupnik nailed it, is “tearing down the government.”

From “The Vitriol in Our National Bloodstream”
Marty Kaplan
Director, Norman Lear Center and Professor, USC Annenberg School
Posted: January 9, 2011 07:38 PM

**************

UPDATE:
Something I was just sent, about tone not being enough to change: