Everything is Terrible! is a Chicago-based video blogging website that features clips of VHS tapes from the late 20th century. The project was founded in 2000 by a group of friends while at Ohio University. “Every weekend or free afternoon they get,” according to NPR, they search at thrift stores, garage sales, and “bargain bins” for the worst and most outrageous VHS tapes to share with each other. The website was launched in 2007 in Chicago….In 2009, the website released a video titled Everything is Terrible! The Movie, which featured the same type of VHS clips that would be featured on their website. The A.V. Club called the video “a portal into a world halfway between showbiz and real life—a look at how the people who make entertainment for a living think the rest of us saps actually live”, adding that it’s “simultaneously enlightening, hilarious, and deeply sad”.
A lot of interesting analysis has been coming out recently about the problematic education system, and it’s not just on obvious longstanding issues such as lack of funding and overcrowded classrooms. Peter Gray of Salon.com wrote in his article “School is a Prison – and damaging our kids”:
Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.
But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.
School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.
David L. Kirp of Slate.com writes about three new books which pick apart arguments for charter schools and vouchers in his article: The Wrong Kind of Education Reform
Black Agenda Report recently posted two excellent commentaries on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. More specifically, the hypocrisy of the corporate media’s treatment of King and his ideas after his death, and the Obama administration’s desecration of the commemoration on the eve of another war.
The week spent commemorating :”the Dream” is a great way to forget the real past, ignore the real present and avoid responsibility for the future. It’s a great excuse to assemble stars and celebrities and politicians, to pretend that the rise and prominence of the black political class was the foreordained outcome of the historic Freedom Movement in which the real Dr. King lived, worked and died. It’s a great distraction from the fact that apart from their own careers, the black political class, right up to and including President Obama, have achieved very little in the way of substantive victories for our people in the last four decades.
For me, one of the lessons of Dr. King’s career and that of “the Dreamer”, who was born after the flesh and blood man was murdered, is the willingness of establishment media to rewrite history even as it’s being made, to blunt popular consciousness, to erase past sins, to stunt and limit our vision of the better world we know is possible. The Dreamer is a zombie, immortalized in a monumnet paid for by Wal-Mart, Boeing, Bank of America, British Petroleum and other corporate criminals. The folks I ran with four decades ago, and run with today disagreed with Dr. King, but we admire him. We never had much use though, for “The Dreamer.”
Just before launching yet another unprovoked war to preserve the empire, Barack Obama stopped by the Lincoln Memorial to star in the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington. He was joined by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the men most responsible for pulling the Democratic Party deep enough into the corporate camp to afford the billion dollar elections that brought Obama to power. The pretense was that the presidents were there to show solemn respect for the Movement that defeated official American apartheid. The truth is, they came to take possession of the occasion – a gift from their minions in the Black Misleadership Class, who believe nothing has value until it is blessed and possessed by Power.
…It is inconceivable that Dr. King would share the stage with a president who was at that moment preparing a savage and illegal attack on a sovereign country. Dr. King’s voice has been censored and his dream vandalized, repackaged and presented as a gift to a corporate agent with a Kill List.
Black Agenda Report also just posted this episode of Black Agenda TV, an example of a independent journalism far superior to corporate cable TV in terms of substance and professionalism. One of the highlights is an in-depth interview with Dr. Cornel West.
After the Crash 