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Thought of the Day: S.C. Lt. Gov. Bauer likens people on public assistance to ’stray animals’
South Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer said Saturday he could have chosen his words more carefully when he compared people who take public assistance to stray animals Friday. [...]
Friday, Bauer said giving food to needy people means encouraging dependence. It also gives the recipients a license to have children who will also be dependent on public aid, he said.
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. “You know why? Because they breed.
“You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”
At 4:30 PM MST Jim Groom an Instructional Technology Specialist and adjunct professor at the in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Has been working for over a decade in education with a consistent focus on the development of teaching and learning in higher education. In addition to his extensive experience teaching at the college level, for the past four years he has worked primarily in the field of instructional technology.
His experience as an instructor coupled with his extensive collaborations with faculty and students with a specific focus on curricula, pedagogical and technologically enhanced projects has informed many of the innovative work he have been a part of in the field of instructional technology over the last several years.
He writes regularly about the work as an instructional technologist–in addition to several other interests such as film, the EduPunk Movement, literature, and media of all kinds–on his personal blog, Bava Tuesdays.
…It’s a movement away from what has become of the mainstream edtech community – a collection of commercial products produced by large companies. Edupunk is the opposite of that.
It’s DIY. It’s hardcore. It’s not monetized. It’s not trademarked. It’s not press-released. It’s not on an upgrade cycle. It’s not enterprise. It’s not shrinkwrapped.
It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers.
… But, the key to edupunk is that it is not about technology.
It’s about a culture, a way of thinking, a philosophy. It’s about DIY. Lego is edupunk. Chalk is edupunk. A bunch of kids exploring a junkyard is edupunk. A kid dismantling a CD player to see what makes it tick is edupunk. … – D’Arcy Norman on Jim & EduPunk
At 5 PM MST Christina Esquivel Research Associate from COHA returns to discuss her research
Bleak Prospects for Haitian Recovery: To Avoid Repeating Past Mistakes, US Role Must be More Than Rhetorical
“As the days go by, it has become almost impossible to exaggerate the untold devastation left in the wake of the massive earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday, January 12, with its epicenter just southwest of the capital city of Port-au-Prince.
The quake, registering a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale and followed by over thirty serious aftershocks, left what is likely to be well over 200,000 dead and millions more injured.
Many additional victims remained trapped in the rubble of homes, schools, hospitals, and government buildings as the primary three-day window for search and rescue ran out. Early this morning, a major aftershock registering a magnitude of 6.1 wreaked yet further havoc on the island.”
At 6 PM MST Elijah Wald, the author of Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrilla.
Elijah Wald has been a musician since age seven and a writer since the early 1980s. He has published more than a thousand articles, mostly about folk, roots and international music for various magazines and newspapers, including over ten years as “world music” writer for the Boston Globe.
In the current millenium, he has been devoting most of his time to book projects, including volumes on such disparate subjects as Delta blues, Mexican drug ballads, and hitchhiking.
Ruling party’s proposals could mean three years in prison for people whose work glamorises criminals
Mexican musicians face jail for songs glorifying drug trafficking
A new proposal by Mexico’s ruling party could result in musicians being sent to prison for performing songs that glorify drug trafficking.
The proposed legislation would mean sentences of up to three years for people performing or producing songs or films that glamorise criminals.
“Society sees drug ballads as nice, pleasant, inconsequential and harmless – but they are the opposite,” Oscar Martin Arce, a National Action party MP, told the Associated Press.
The ballads – known as narcocorridos – often describe drug trafficking and violence and are popular among some norteño bands.
After some killings, gangs pipe narcocorridos and threatening messages into police radio scanners.
Martin said his party’s proposal, presented to congress on Wednesday, was also intended to combat low-budget films praising druglords. It remained unclear when it would be voted on.
“We cannot accept it as normal. We cannot exalt these people because they themselves are distributing these materials among youths to lead them into a lifestyle where the bad guy wins,” Martin said.
Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the invention of the Blues By Elijah WaldRobert Johnson’s story presents a fascinating paradox: Why did this genius of the Delta blues excite so little interest when his records were first released in the 1930s? And how did this brilliant but obscure musician come to be hailed long after his death as the most important artist in early blues and a founding father of rock ‘n’ roll?
Elijah Wald provides the first thorough examination of Johnson’s work and makes it the centerpiece for a fresh look at the entire history of the blues. He traces the music’s rural folk roots but focuses on its evolution as a hot, hip African-American pop style, placing the great blues stars in their proper place as innovative popular artists during one of the most exciting periods in American music. He then goes on to explore how the image of the blues was reshaped by a world of generally white fans, with very different standards and dreams.
The result is a view of the blues from the inside, based not only on recordings but also on the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, and original research. Wald presents previously unpublished studies of what people on Delta plantations were actually listening to during the blues era, showing the larger world in which Johnson’s music was conceived. What emerges is a new respect and appreciation for the creators of what many consider to be America’s deepest and most influential music.
Wald also discusses how later fans formed a new view of the blues as haunting Delta folklore. While trying to separate fantasy from reality, he accepts that neither the simple history nor the romantic legend is the whole story. Each has its own fascinating history, and it is these twin histories that inform this book.
Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas
available in both English and Spanish editions from Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing, 2002 Latino Book Award winner as “Best Arts Book”
This is the first full-length exploration of the contemporary Mexican corrido, blended with a travel narrative and digressions on Mexican and Mexican immigrant culture. The corrido is one of the most popular music styles in the Latino market, both in the US and points south. While the Anglo media pretends that the boom in Latin music sales is driven by salsa (a style that is wonderful, but currently not very popular in the Latino community), most US Latin sales are of Mexican music, and a large proportion of these are drug trafficking ballads, played in polka or waltz rhythms by accordion combos or full brass bands. Many of these ballads are in the classic Medieval style, and they are an anachronistic link between the earliest European poetic traditions and the world of crack cocaine and gangsta rap.
Narcocorrido is a series of visits with corridistas, from the most popular narco writers to rural singers documenting current events in their communities. It was researched over roughly a year, traveling all over Mexico and the southwestern US, largely by hitchhiking. I went up into the drug trafficking regions, searched out the foremost composers in their homes, and listened to every cassette the truck drivers threw on their tape decks. This book should be available from all better bookstores, but if your local store can’t get it for you, you can buy it online by clicking this link for the hardcover, or here for the paperback
“Through the stories of the corrido-crafters themselves, Wald uncovers a world desperate for heroes. At once tragic and hopeful, the result of his journey holds a mirror up to life on both sides of the border.” -Louie Perez, of Los Lobos
“Narcocorrido is more than an exposé of a musical genre and a contemporary problem, it is a journey into the complex nuances of Mexican social and cultural history. Wald’s book is a most significant contribution to the bibliography on travel literature by foreign observers to Mexico since colonial times. It will be of interest to a wide range of specialists in diverse fields, as well as to the casual reader who will enjoy the pleasure of a rich narrative of adventure and detective work.” – Guillermo E. Hernández, Ph.D., Director of the UCLA-Chicano Studies Research Center
There is a common thread to my interest in primate behavior, human evolution, religion and science, and developmental processes. It involves my wish to understand relationship processes of primates as centered in meaning-making as created by dyads, small groups, and communities. Monkeys, apes, and humans all have different ways of meaning-making, but in few cases are these grasped by a focus only on gene-based models or the simpler kinds of theories in evolutionary psychology.
My newest work involves the prehistory of human religion. My book Evolving God (Doubleday, 2007) explores the deepest roots of the human religious imagination, using the behaviors of African apes (including empathy and compassion) as clues to the behaviors of early human ancestors, then tracing the development of religious ritual through the Neandertals through the cave artists of our own species.
Her previous books include Evolving God (2007) and The Dynamic Dance (2004). She has studied the behavior of apes and monkeys for many years. She lives in Virginia where, together with her husband, she cares for feral and abandoned cats.
She also writes a regular column at BookSlut.
Being with Animals
by Barbara J. King
What do Mickey Mouse, our beloved furry pets, and the Aflac duck have in common? They all represent human beings’deeply ingrained connection to the animal kingdom. In Being With Animals, anthropologist Barbara King unravels the complexity and enormous significance of this relationship.
Animals rule our existence. The omnipresence of animal beings in our lives–whether real or fictional–is something so enormous that people often take it for granted, never wondering why animals remain so much a part of human life. It has continuously maintained a powerful spiritual, transcendent quality over the tens of thousands of years that Homo sapiens have walked the earth.
Now, King looks at this phenomenon, from the most obvious animal connections in daily life and culture and over the whole of human history, to show the various roles animals have played in all civilizations.
She ultimately digs deeply into the importance of the human-animal bond as key to our evolution, as a significant spiritual aspect of understanding what truly makes us human, and looks ahead to explore how our further technological development may, or may not, affect these important ties.
