littlelazer's tumblog

It means that the future leaders of your country, I say your ‘cause I’ll have long decomposed, are gonna be people that have absolutely no experience with actual confrontation. Thirty years from now the President of the most powerful country in the world is going to be some little shit who sat at his computer and hurled insults three feet away from his mommy’s tit like it was no big deal. I don’t condone fighting, but when a human being understands that his or her actions might result in a giant fist up his or her ass, he learns a thing or two about acting before he speaks. All I’m saying is, I’m glad I’m gonna be dead.

“One day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich.”

Wow.

“If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different. You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college, but molested you.”

© Chris Rock

I think Chris forgot to mention that the uncle continues to hit on you after you graduate.

That didn’t take long.

As we’ve gotten around to casting votes to select a Republican presidential nominee, the antiblack rhetoric has taken center stage.

You just have to love (and despise) this kind of predictability.

And people wonder why so many black people reliably vote for Democrats? I feel like, by actually addressing these statement seriously, he gave them more respect than they deserve.

The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?

A pretty thorough takedown of Waiting for Superman and the current movement toward charter schools in general. This piece takes me back to where I was originally—skeptical of charters schools in so far as they are looked at as a magic bullet that will solve everything that ails our educational system. What ails the educational system is the same thing that ails America as a whole—gross inequality. And the solutions to that issue are far too revolutionary in some respects and nuanced in others. I can’t claim to have much faith in this country to deal with it in either way at this point.

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Absolutely fantastic speech. I think I may reread it a few times to let it sink in.

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.

—The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz

In October, Colbert offered the Republican Party in South Carolina $400,000 to defray the cost of the presidential primary there in January in return for naming rights — he wanted the ballots, the lanyards, the press credentials to say “The Stephen Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Primary” — and for a nonbinding referendum question that asked the voters to decide whether “corporations are people” or “only people are people.” This issue has been Colbert’s hobbyhorse since August, when Mitt Romney told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend,” and needless to say, Colbert too is on the side of corporate personhood. “Just because someone was born in a lawyer’s office and is incorporeal doesn’t mean he should have no rights,” he likes to say.

“I figured that if they’d sell me the naming rights, they’d probably be willing to sell me a referendum,” Colbert told me. “I always assume that anything that could be for sale probably is.”

Amazingly, the South Carolina Republicans were on the point of agreeing to Colbert’s proposal, and ballots were printed that included the referendum question, when the state Supreme Court ruled that the counties, not the party, had to pay for the primary and that the ballot could not include referendum questions. When the Republicans declined to pursue the matter, Colbert made the same offer to the state’s Democrats, who filed an appeal. Even Colbert seemed a little surprised, pointing out that he had repeatedly warned both the Republicans and the Democrats that his aims were satirical and that their very willingness to negotiate with him could become a joke on the show. “It turns out that both sides are happy to take my money,” he said.

What he’s doing is absolutely amazing. I feel like 20 years from now people are going to be studying and looking back at everything he’s done to revolutionize satire over the past 6 or 7 years.

Tyson compared the elemental composition of our bodies to the abundance of elements in the universe: a close match. This union between ourselves and the cosmos could offer some solace for the feeling of insignificance astrophysics could bring. “The universe is in us,” he said. After ninety minutes, Tyson was at last done. The audience gave him a standing ovation, after which he was hustled from the auditorium to a pavilion, where people who had bought a ticket could eat their Portobello mushrooms in the same room as Tyson, and ask him still more questions—whether the laws of physics can change over time (probably not), whether the universe was fine-tuned for our existence (no, the universe is out to kill us).

I’ve been saying for a while now that nature is trying to kill us. Apparently it’s even bigger than that. I’m a little sad that I don’t have kids old enough to hear and be inspired by him right now. Hopefully he’ll still be around for a long time to come.