Alabama Students File Protest Against White Wing Indoctrination in Class

Now they want to teach hate and racism in public schools –

Alabama students confront school board over right-wing teacher who compares Obama to Hitler

Students are revolting at one Alabama high school over the right-wing lesson plan pushed by a government teacher.

Baldwin County School Board members heard complaints Thursday from students about Spanish Fort High instructor Gene Ponder, who assigned at least five books by right-wing talk radio host Michael Savage and compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler in one lesson, reported AL.com.

The students complained Ponder relied on outdated published materials and blog posts to back up his political claims the in the AP class and used unscientific reasoning on issues such as gun control.

“This is not a small group of students misinterpreting or challenging a viewpoint,” said student Julia Coccaro, who also raised concerns about Ponder’s summer reading list last year.

The school system pulled that assignment in June, after students complained the reading materials promoted one viewpoint without offering a challenging contrast.

“The taxpayers of Baldwin County are not paying for their children to be indoctrinated,” said Coccaro, who chairs the Alabama High School Democrats. “They are paying to be educated, and we are not being educated in that classroom.”

Parents, local residents and former teachers spoke out against Ponder, who declined to comment.

“The lesson plans I examined appear to be totally extracurricular,” said Cynthia McMeans, a retired teacher. “No teaching materials based on a legitimate course of study in the social sciences would rely on and include information from websites, blogs, articles and interviews found on conspiracy theories and logical fallacies. None of the lesson plans come from reputable sources.”

Another former teacher was more succinct.

“We are teaching hate in our school systems,” said retired teacher Sandra Page.

Superintendent Eddie Tyler said the board would consider some of the suggestions offered, such as having an academic supervisor examine the lessons, but he said some speakers “engaged in character assassination” against the teacher.

One local man defended Ponder, saying he had attended one of the government teacher’s classes.

“I was looking for something to tell me that this teacher was bias (sic) and I didn’t hear it or see it,” Eugene Maye of Fairhope. “We want to believe our kids. But my take from that class is that I didn’t see anything wrong.”

 

Skipland Redefined – Radio Garden Lets You Listen to Radio Around the World

Those of you old enough to remember AM Radio, will remember when just after nightfall you could get literally hundreds of channels from nearly halfway across the country at night. This was before radio became homogenized and MTV-ized into the same pablum top 40 or so format in every city. So listening to radio from NYC or Philadelphia was totally different from that in Charlotte or Atlanta. As a kid I would sit with my transistor radio and listen to the big hits and latest music from what were then to me far away locations. The ability to do this had to do with AM Radio’s physical property that the radio waves bounced off the Troposphere at night, and based on weather conditions could land hundreds, and in some cases a thousand or more miles away. Sometimes the connection would last for hours – sometimes only a few minutes. We called it “Skipland” because the signals would move around based on weather, and it was unpredictable where they would land. As such you might get a perfect signal at your home, but lose it in a trip to a friends house a few miles away.

A new ap lets you do just that now, only it covers just about the whole world.

The Map That Lets You Listen to the Radio Everywhere

Radio Garden is a meditation on connectedness and what broadcast technology does to local culture.

…Radio Garden, which launched today, is a similar concept—a way to know humanity through its sounds, through its music. It’s an interactive map that lets you tune into any one of thousands of radio stations all over the world in real time. Exploring the site is both immersive and a bit disorienting—it offers the sense of lurking near Earth as an outsider. In an instant, you can click to any dot on the map and hear what’s playing on the radio there, from Miami to Lahore to Berlin to Sulaymaniyah and beyond.

The project, created for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision by the interactive design firms Studio Puckey and Moniker, was built using an open-source WebGL globe that draws from thousands of radio stations—terrestrial and online-only streams—overlaid with Bing satellite imagery.

The result is the best kind of internet rabbit hole: Engrossing, perspective shifting, provocative, and delightful.

The Golden Record is now more than 12 billion miles away from Earth, somewhere in interstellar space. Here on Earth, Radio Garden allows you to travel not just through space, but through time—or at least time zones. So when it’s 5:08 a.m. in Nome, Alaska, and the local radio station is playing “Mercy Came Running,”—a song by the Christian trio Phillips, Craig and Dean—it’s also 5:08 p.m. in Moscow, where Haddaway’s 1993 hit “What Is Love” is on the radio.

At the same time—as in literally at the same time—you might find Bruno Mars’s “Grenade” playing in Rome, where it’s 3:08 p.m., and Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” playing in Honolulu, where it’s 4:08 a.m, and The Talking Heads’s “Wild Wild Life” playing in Buenos Aires , where it’s 11:08 a.m. (That’s in addition to all the songs in languages other than English playing everywhere from Ghana to Egypt to Mexico.)

Looking at (and listening to) the planet this way can leave you feeling paradoxically detached while still connected—like an omniscient observer finding familiar sounds in unfamiliar places. For one thing, radio as a medium often has a similar sound. That’s not just because American pop music in particular is a global export, but because of similarities in how radio is produced around the world. Local stations, wherever they are, often broadcast a mix of music, ads, traffic, and weather reports—and deep-voiced announcers adopt a similar tone across cultures. The aesthetic of the Radio Garden site—which uses satellite imagery rather than maps with political borders—helps further promote this feeling of connectedness. That was deliberate: Jonathan Puckey, who runs the interactive design firm Studio Puckey, told me that he and his colleagues wanted to leave people with the sense that “radio knows no borders.” (Besides, he points out, click around enough and you’ll find you can “tune into an Ethiopian spoken station in the middle of Kansas and an American station in the middle of South Korea.”)…

 

A Trumpazoid Filter For Your Browser

Sick of the MSM’s fawning over the Trumpazoid filling up your pages with racist, misogynistic, and neo-fascist shit?

There’s an AP for that!

Someone Made a Google Chrome Filter to Block Donald Trump From Your Internet

Few people have dominated the media — particularly online — in 2015 like Donald Trump has. Mentions of the business mogul and Republican presidential candidate are nearly impossible to escape on the Internet, but a new Google Chrome extension called the Trump Filter aims to change that.

The add-on is available in the Chrome web store and has three adjustable levels of filtration — mild, aggressive and vindictive — for the level Donald Trump references that it finds and eliminates from one’s web browsing experience, CNNMoney reports.

The filter was created by Brooklyn-based self-proclaimed “Internet Mathemagician” Rob Spectre, who says he created it not at the behest of any political entity (or anyone else) but “out of a profound sense of annoyance and patriotic duty.”

Spectre’s goal behind the extension’s creation is reportedly to transfer the spotlight from Trump to other candidates, as well as the issues America is facing in the lead-up to next year’s presidential election.

“I hope folks will take this opportunity to learn more about the wide field of candidates out there,” he told CNNMoney. “People are looking to turn him off.”

 

Driving While Black? There’s an Ap for That!

The Original DWB Guide

One of the common misconceptions out there is that DWB only affects young black males. Looking at the number of stops by Police in some areas and the vast differential between black motorists being stopped and whites… It really is an issue which cuts across all economic, professional, and educational lines. The anger and frustration being expressed by the tens of thousand marching in the streets isn’t just about the murder of young black men like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown – it is about systemic discrimination which impacts the lives of many black Americans.

Driving While Black? App Developers Offer Advice

Though the developers of the soon-to-be released “Driving While Black” smartphone application want motorists to download their product, there is a time when they definitely don’t want users searching for it.

“Do not reach for your phone when you are talking to police,” stressed Melvin Oden-Orr, one of two Portland lawyers creating the app.

Avoiding moves that could make police think you’re reaching for a gun is just one tip included in the app that educates drivers about how to safely deal with police during traffic stops.

Despite its attention-grabbing name, Oden-Orr said the app due for release in late December will provide common sense advice to motorists of all races and outline what civil rights you have during a stop. With the phone hopefully in a hands-free device, the app allows drivers to send an alert to friends and family that they have been pulled over. There’s also a recording function to document the interaction with an officer.

The app is coming to market as protesters around the country keep attention on instances of deadly encounters with police in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City. Similar apps also are aimed at helping people navigate interactions with police.

Three Georgia teenagers created “Five-O,” an app released this summer that lets people rate their interactions with law enforcement. And last month, American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in four states unveiled “Mobile Justice,” an app that allows users to take video of police encounters and upload the video to the ACLU. It’s modeled on “Stop and Frisk Watch,” an app released for New Yorkers in 2012.

“It’s obviously in the forefront of everybody’s mind; the police know they are being recorded and people in public know they can record,” said Sarah Rossi, director of advocacy and policy for the ACLU Missouri affiliate. “I think the benefit of this app (Mobile Justice) specifically is it goes straight to the ACLU and we can review it for any due-process violations.”

The apps also include a “Know Your Rights” section that informs people about their rights when contacted by police.

Portland attorney Mariann Hyland got the idea for “Driving While Black” after learning of an app for drivers suspected of drunken driving. She approached Oden-Orr in April, and the two have been working on the app since summer with software developer James Pritchett.

The term “driving while black,” perhaps unfamiliar to some, is common among African-Americans. A Justice Department report released last year, based on a survey of those stopped by police in 2011, suggests blacks are more likely than whites to be pulled over and have their cars searched. Moreover, African-Americans are much more likely to believe a traffic stop is not legitimate…

 

Vatican Nixxes “Pope in a Phone” Ap

The real Pope...Not Pope Jobs!

Dang! And here I thought the Vatican was joining the 21st Century by using the power of the Internet…

Thought this was fairly cool for “Sinners on the go.” Can you imagine if the Corleone Family had this in the Godfather!

“Yo! Pope Jobs – Sorry about that dead horse in the bed thing…”

Can’t wait for the AT&T versus Verizon TV ad on this one. “Only our network allows you to lie to your significant other… And be absolved at the same time! There’s an ap for that!”

Vatican: You Cannot Confess by iPhone

So much for instant absolution: The Vatican today emphatically stressed that Catholics cannot confess by iPhone, one day after news of the “Confession: A Roman Catholic App” emerged, reports the AFP. “It is essential to understand that the rites of penance require a personal dialogue between penitents and their confessor. It cannot be replaced by a computer application,” said a Vatican spokesman. Should that not be clear enough: “I must stress to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to ‘confess by iPhone’.”

It’s worth noting, however, that the company that created it did explain that the app—approved for use by Catholics by an Indiana bishop—walks users through the process of confessing and offers a “personalized examination of conscience,” but did not say that it replaced the confessing-to-a-priest part.

 

 

 

Growth in Number of Interracial Marriages Slows

Until 1967, when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia struck down the last of the anti-miscegenation laws in this country, interracial marriage had been illegal in 16 states and was widely considered a social taboo. The folowing diagram is from a PEW Research Study done in 2002/3 illustrating the attitudes of different age groups –

Interracial marriage still rising, but not as fast

WASHINGTON (AP) — Melting pot or racial divide? The growth of interracial marriages is slowing among U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians. Still, blacks are substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000.

The latest trend belies notions of the U.S. as a post-racial, assimilated society. Demographers cite a steady flow of recent immigration that has given Hispanics and Asians more ethnically similar partners to choose from while creating some social distance from whites due to cultural and language differences.

White wariness toward a rapidly growing U.S. minority population also may be contributing to racial divisions, experts said.