new project: This Earth Nature Blog
I have decided to go another way, and have launched a new project: This Earth Nature Blog. Hope to see you there sometime.
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The End is Come.
Farewell, my friends.
I have realized that TRC has run its course, and your humble blogger has decided to end the project. This is the second blog that I have kept faithfully and the readership that took 4 years of blogging to build on Remember the Midwest took only about 7 months at TRC.
So thanks to all of you readers who have made this time as pleasant as it has been. It has been exciting to see readers join and page links grow all why maintaining the derisive comments of my closest friends who were there from the start. You know who you are.
Anyway. I love blogging. And already have begun thinking about what my next project will undertake*, whenever that happens.
But it is time for TRC to come to a close. My weekly column at Precipitate will continue to show up on Tuesdays, so I hope to see you over there.
*Hint: It will not be politics.
homeschooling and educational neglect
TRC doesn’t have strong opinions of homeschooling. It is up to families to decide how they want to pursue education, and when (or if) I have children, I want to be able to make those decisions with my wife and not with the government. I know many very intelligent, socially adept individuals who were homeschooled.
That said, ensuring that children receive a primary education is not optional. Education is a right for all children, and in the US, primary education is compulsory. Homeschooling is of course a viable and valid option for a child’s education. As long as children are receiving an education.
With those quick thoughts, I recommend Barely Literate? How Christian Fundamentalist Homeschooling Hurts Kids, by Kristen Rawls at Alternet. I’m less interested in the Christian Fundamendalist part than I am in the difficulty of evaluating and understanding homeschooling. The piece is mostly anecdotal, and according to the author, that’s because there’s really no other way to discuss homeschooling.
Given the scarcity of numbers on this issue, the best one can hope for at this point is anecdotal information about the problem. But because homeschooling is such a highly politicized issue, it is often difficult to get a clear sense of what is happening from homeschooling parents themselves. And because many parents see themselves as advocates of homeschooling, they are not always very eager to discuss potential gaps in homeschooling education.
If you home school your children, you obviously believe in the practice, and are unlikely to admit if you are failing. So how can we know how well parents are doing? This problem has nothing to do with Christian fundamentalism. But it is the real problem presented here, in my opinion.
Of course, there are problems to be mentioned in the Christian Fundamentalist homeschooling movement. As one former homeschooling parent described it, “We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God.” That’s hard to hear. Not because I want every to become humanists and atheists, but because parents don’t have a right to sacrifice their child’s education on behalf of religion.
And stories like this are deeply troubling. But hopefully the minority:
Their parents never taught the three other children about sex, and Diegel Martin remembers giving her 21-year-old sister “the talk” the week before she got married. She also had to intervene to ensure that her younger brothers learned about sex.
As for herself, when she completed her schooling, she says her parents did not allow her to obtain her GED as proof of high school graduation. Their reason? “The girls weren’t allowed to get a GED because we were told we wouldn’t need it. It would open up opportunities that were forbidden to us. We would work in the family business until we got married, and then become homemakers.”
how do we protect our castle without allowing murder?
Here’s a story that I’ve been following a little.
A 17 year old kid, Trayvon Martin, went to the store to get some Skittles. He was walking in the rain on his return, when a 26 year old neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, saw him.
Zimmerman didn’t like the look of the kid, in his hooded sweatshirt in the rain. Zimmerman called a non-emergency dispatch, who told him to wait in the car. Then Zimmerman chased after Martin, who ran. He caught him, and the two fought.
Someone shouted for help, there was a gunshot. People showed up to the scene, where Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, and Martin was dead. Zimmerman told the crowd and the police that it was self-defense.
That’s the story. Under the Stand Your Ground laws in Florida, Zimmerman cannot be arrested unless there is evidence that Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is wrong. Said the local Sheriff: “Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don’t have the grounds to arrest him.”
This is so sad. But what can the cops do? This is the law in Florida. There is no witness to the shooting and no evidence other than the survivor’s word. A kid went out to buy Skittles, was pursued, fought with a man, and that man shot and killed him. Maybe, after the fight started, it really was self-defense. Or, maybe Zimmerman wouldn’t have needed self-defense if he didn’t chase Martin in the first place, like he was instructed.
Then you start reading the news coverage, and you start to lose your faith in what’s happening. In the cops. In the laws. You think, a white man killed a black kid, and now what will happen? You follow this thinking, knowing it too is not fair.
But you read:
After the shooting… a narcotics detective and not a homicide detective first approached Zimmerman. The detective pepppered Zimmerman with questions, the source said, rather than allow Zimmerman to tell his story. Questions can lead a witness, the source said.
Another officer corrected a witness after she told him that she heard the teen cry for help.
The officer told the witness, a long-time teacher, it was Zimmerman who cried for help, said the witness….
The Sanford Police Department refused to release 911 calls by witnesses and neighbors.
and you think, what the hell? Why not follow the rules on the scene? Take down the story, take down the witness testimony, release the calls.
You read:
Lee publically admitted that officers accepted Zimmerman’s word at the scene that he had no police record.
Two days later during a meeting with Trayvon’s father Tracy Martin, an officer told the father that Zimmerman’s record was “squeaky clean.”
Yet public records showed that Zimmerman was charged with battery against on officer and resisting arrest in 2005, a charge which was later expunged.
And you think, why would you tell that to the father whose kid was just killed. And what does this matter anyway?
In Minnesota, we have the Castle Doctrine, meant to protect one’s home and family against threats or perceived threats. Just this month, legislators passed an expansion of the protections offered by the Castle Doctrine, which was thankfully vetoed by Gov. Dayton.
Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws are based on the same philosophical underpinnings. But they are broader and offer more protection upon killing an individual. The statute protects a person who is “presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril” to one’s self or another. I don’t know how one can ever disprove a person’s presumed reasonable fears. The statute only requires that a person have “reason to believe” that an unlawful act had occurred or was occurring. Really. I’m not a lawyer, but this is bad law, that will have a sad legacy.
I have no idea what actually happened in the confrontation between Mr. Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. But it seems the tools at hand, and the rules as created, are more interested in protecting someone who shot a youth than ensuring that justice is served.
62 Percent of Americans are now Radical Environmentalists.
That’s the only conclusion I can reach after reading Rick Santorum’s piece at Red State.
After admitting a tepid support for air and water and parks, Mr. Santorum contrasts his “good stewardship” with “radical environmentalism,” which “has a blind devotion to the promotion of a radical agenda that ignores the interests and property rights of people. Global warming became the litmus test of this movement.”
So. Radical environmentalism promotes a radical agenda and the basis of that radical agenda is: Global warming. Also, Watch out! RADICALS!
Anyway.
According to recent polling, approximately 62% of Americans answered Yes to the question: “Is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer?”
And, as of last March, 52% of Americans believe that the cause of those increased temperatures is “pollution from human activities.”
We are swimming in Radical Environmentalists. What’s a Santorum to do?