Thursday, December 29th, 2016
Siobhan Fenton, - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: The main reason the Theocratic Right likes Charter Schools is that it allows religious schools to suck on the public tax teat, so that you and I pay for their efforts to indoctrinate rather than educate children. This gets almost no coverage in the American corporate media, so I had to go to a British paper to get an accounting. When you realize that 21% of Americans already read at or below 5th grade reading level you can easily see that we face a future where more and more Americans basically aren't really educated at all, and are thus easily manipulated. Note also the typical sexual and gender dysfunctionality that is one of the hallmarks for the Theocratic Right.
Schoolgirls in a Pennsylvania religious school
Christian fundamentalist schools are teaching children creationism is fact, that gay people are “unnatural” and that girls must submit to men, (emphasis added) according to a series of claims.
Former pupils and whistle-blowers have told The Independent that the schools, which originated in the US but are now dotted around the UK and registered as independent or private schools, teach children at isolated desks separated by “dividers” from other students. It is thought more than a thousand children are being taught at dozens of schools, although little is known about them.
“No one outside the schools knows about what happens inside them, that’s why they’ve been able to go on like this for so long,” a former pupil said.
More than a decade after leaving, she says she is now horrified at the education she received.
Called Accelerated Christian Education schools (ACE), the schools originate from an education system developed in southern Baptist states in the US which has developed off-shoots around the world including in Britain. […]
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Thursday, December 29th, 2016
Stephan: I don't think many people think about food choice as a class issue but the research says that it is, and we need to understand that if we are ever to get a handle on America's growing obesity problem. This article lays out the relevant issues.
Source:
PNAS, 2016. DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1607330114 
It’s well established that people with low economic status are the hardest hit by the current obesity pandemic, as well as related health problems such as diabetes. Poor healthcare, stress, unhealthy lifestyles, and a cornucopia of cheap junk food are all thought to play a role. But a new study suggests there’s a subconscious component, too.
When researchers merely prompted study volunteers to consider themselves low-class, they were more likely to prefer, choose, and eat larger amounts of food, as well as higher-calorie foods. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, echo what’s been seen in a variety of animals—from birds and rodents to nonhuman primates. Thus, the authors speculate that the mental glitch may be an evolutionary holdover intended to boost survival by compensating for a lack of social and material resources.
More important for humans, the findings suggest that we may not be able to tackle obesity by just improving access to healthier foods and promoting exercise. (emphasis added)
For the study, psychology researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore recruited nearly 500 healthy participants for a series of four experiments. In the first, the team had 101 […]
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2016
Stephan: Stephan is experiencing issues with his computer and will be offline until it has been repaired.
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2016
Michael Bader, DMH, Psychologist - Psychology Today
Stephan: Because of the four under-discussed international meta-trends I have been writing about and the effect they have had particularly on the psychology of the people of United States, I see the Great Schism Trend in this country growing almost daily.
Our profit above all other considerations social order, with little concern for individual, family, community, national, or planetary wellbeing has created social damage that it make take several generations and untold misery to reverse. And then it will only happen when individuals make a commitment to be an agent of change towards a more compassionate and life-affirming society.
The Still Face Paradigm experiment.
Credit: Dr. Edward Tronick
In 1978, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry that demonstrated the psychological importance of the earliest interactions between a mother and her baby. The interactions of interest involved the playful, animated, and reciprocal mirroring of each other’s facial expressions. Tronick’s experimental design was simple: A mother was asked to play naturally in this way with her 6-month-old infant. The mother was then instructed to suddenly make her facial expression flat and neutral—completely “still,” in other words–and to do so for three minutes, regardless of her baby’s activity. Mothers were then told to resume normal play. The design came to be called the “still face paradigm.”
When mothers stopped their facial responses to their babies, when their faces were “still,” babies first anxiously strove to reconnect with their mothers. When the mothers’ faces remained neutral and still, the babies quickly showed ever-greater signs of […]
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2016
Joseph Natoli, - truthout
Stephan: Two of the main things I think we are going to see in a Trump administration is uninterest in climate change, indeed hostility. Trump and his staff and cabinet seem completely indifferent to actual facts. The other is a drive to privatize anything done by the government that can be privatized -- prisons, schools, roads, whatever. That is just another way of saying profit is the only social priority. Unfortunately, based on the outcome data most privatization that has occurred while profitable for the people who are the owners for everyone else ends up being more expensive, less productive, and produces inferior outcomes. Detroit is an example of what I mean.
Weeds and grass overtake the run-down Campbell Elementary School, one of the many closed schools in Detroit, July 19, 2013. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, argued that the Detroit’s public schools should simply be shut down and the system turned over to charters.
Credit: Nathan Weber / The New York Times
Privatization of all things public has slammed Detroit as gentrifying investors seek to put price tags on what was previously public domain. In predatory fashion, privatizers are targeting the city’s struggling students as a new frontier for profit.
How weak and vulnerable is public education in Detroit? The Nation’s Report Card, published by an independent federal commission, named Detroit Public Schools the country’s “lowest-performing urban school district” in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. In 2011, a Republican state legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Snyder repealed a statewide cap on the number of Detroit charter schools. The floodgates were opened and privatizing predators rolled in.
Bankruptcy following the collapse of the jobs that fueled the “Motor City” has exposed Detroit to the dynamics described by […]
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