WASHINGTON — It’s long been known that America’s school kids haven’t measured well compared with international peers. Now, there’s a new twist: Adults don’t either.
In math, reading and problem-solving using technology – all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength – American adults scored below the international average on a global test, according to results released Tuesday.
Privacy – Henrik Alexandersson: US corporations routinely ignore and abuse the strict privacy rules of European private citizen data, which they have accessed under the “safe harbor” agreement of the European Union. This surfaced in this week’s Europarl hearing on mass surveillance, causing the European Parliament’s rapporteur to call for a complete scrapping of the safe harbor arrangement right in the middle of the hearing. This is a further erosion of already-brittle trust in privacy respect by the United States.
Koch Brothers and Boehner Plot to Take Down – or Over – the Government
The government shutdown and debt ceiling crises is getting wilder and more dangerous by the day. Here's writings, if true, showing very rich right-wing extremism at work behind Boehner:
“The Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens, especially those with darker-colored skin. Their “masters of the universe” world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies were the ones who “built America” and, thus, it’s their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries — if the country’s less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class. Oil billionaires David and Charles Koch. That is what we’re watching now, what might be called the Koch Brothers’ “Samson Option,” pulling down the temple to destroy their enemies even if doing so is also destructive to them and their fortunes…Now, in 2013, the Republican Right has doubled down on that strategy, merging a government shutdown with an impending credit default in an effort to extort more concessions from Obama and the Democrats. But the larger goal is to create a new constitutional structure in which the Right, regardless of its minority status, gets to dictate what the federal government can and cannot do. To make this strategy work, however, requires a readiness to play Samson and to pull down the temple on your enemies as well as yourself. That appears to be the extreme option that the Koch Brothers and their fellow right-wing billionaires have chosen. If they can’t rule America, they will reduce the country to economic rubble through a fiscal crisis and a premeditated financial collapse. Then, perhaps out of the rubble, a chastened American people will emerge to accept their subordinate position in this new plutocratic structure. In the future, they will know better than to do something that the Koch Brothers and their right-wing friends don’t like. All that stuff about a government of the people, by the people and for the people will finally have perished from the earth.
When I read this interview I was stunned. I have never thought much of Scalia. Like Clarence Thomas I have always thought of him as first and foremost an ideologue, and as with Thomas there are also growing ethical issues involving him. But I really had no idea how very inappropriate it is for this man to be an Associate Supreme Court Justice. This is like having your crazy un! cle oversee your rearing of your children. Read this interview and ask yourself: Would I even like to have this man as a neighbor?
This is why it matters who wins the Presidency, and why voting is important.
When I read this interview I was stunned. I have never thought much of Scalia. Like Clarence Thomas I have always thought of him as first and foremost an ideologue, and as with Thomas there are also growing ethical issues involving him. But I really had no idea how very inappropriate it is for this man to be an Associate Supreme Court Justice. This is like having your crazy un! cle oversee your rearing of your children. Read this interview and ask yourself: Would I even like to have this man as a neighbor?
Corruption – Henrik Alexandersson: In the upcoming extradition request against Gottfrid Svartholm-Warg, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Danish judicial authorities are disregarding an important acquittal in Swedish courts. This is remarkable, as European courts are bound to respect each others’ verdicts. It’s not hard to get the gut feeling that the establishment unites against the troublemakers and pushes all its safeguards aside, letting rights only apply to the Goliaths and not the Davids.
