See King Cake, Vegan. Cook your red beans without salt. When they have softened, add vegetable bouillon instead of sausage or whatever omnivores put in their red beans.
The only time I ever put beans in a crockpot overnight is for Mardi Gras. Make the king cake early, start the rice before Zulu, and I’m done.
This is My Fun Time. Go have good, harmless fun and watch out for bulging pockets.
_____
photo courtesy of dsb nola, used under this Creative Commons license
See I Survived…I Survived…I Survived…, July 1, 2011, for background.
1. For women: When a man threatens with a gun or knife and tells you to do what he says and he won’t hurt you, he will hurt you whether you comply or not.
1A. “You won’t get hurt” doesn’t count rape, gang rape, or being beaten. It means, and only temporarily, that you will not be killed.
1B. Whether you resist or not, you have a 50% or so chance of surviving. You lose nothing by resisting or saying no, running or fighting with whatever you have.
1C. Begging for your life means nothing. If he wants to and has come to kill you, no appeal to humanity, not his and especially not yours, will change the course of events.
2. If you are taken away from your original location, it is unlikely that you will be returned to that location, alive or dead.
3. If you are lost in a blizzard or dangerous cold, eating snow may satisfy your thirst but it will lower your core body temperature and make you more vulnerable to hypothermia.
4. If your gut tells you something is wrong, with a situation, a person, an open door, a light that shouldn’t be on, do not second-guess yourself. Back away, leave the car locked, hide. Don’t think you can talk your way out of it. Don’t ignore your fear. Too many stories begin with a survivor double-guessing herself or himself, sensing danger ahead, dismissing it because of ____ [I know this man, he looked clean-cut, she always seemed nice, I was tired, I didn't want to be rude, etc.] , ending with the survivor in a trunk or bleeding or blacking out with hands around the throat.
5. People are capable of evil. You cannot tell by looking at someone whether he or she is evil or not. Heed lesson #4.
6. An animal predator may give up the attack if you make it harder for it to kill you [blows to its head or eyes, a hard fight, someone nearby also fighting, etc.]. At some point, it may decide you’re not worth the struggle and simply walk away.
7. You cannot prepare for evil. Evil happens.
I knew this before I Survived.
8. Hope can be regained in even the most dire moments. Thoughts of family, goals, a brief pause in the abuse, an appeal on TV that family is looking for you and don’t give up, a shower, dawn. Any shard of hope is enough.
9. Most people will not help, even if, and especially if, you are covered in blood, holding a gunshot wound, or naked and bleeding. Cars slow down and speed off. People don’t believe their eyes or fear their lives will be in danger if they stop or help. They call 911 on you. They tell you, I’m sorry but I can’t open the door, I’m so sorry.
10. Think. Survivors are thinkers, plotters, schemers, those who can keep a corner of clarity in the mind, who resist the panic as much as they can, who don’t jump into the icy water but scan for the best option using whatever they can muster or remember.
10A. You can fall apart later, when you hear the police at the door or outside the trunk, see the headlights, hear the paramedic or police officer or son or neighbor speak.
10B. Though it may not prevent you from getting hurt, being a bit smarter than your attacker can save your life.
10C. Also, being more determined than your attacker. See #6.
11. You will lose something. A foot. A best friend. Safety, temporarily. Childhood. Hikes in the woods. But not everything, or what is most important.
__________
Screenshot: Biography, I Survived videos: Kaye: Intruder.
Bobby Jindal Is Mooning LA–CenLamar
Jindal’s voucher plan is comically infeasible and impractical. From The Times-Picayune:
Under Jindal’s plan, about 380,000 students would qualify to receive state aid for tuition at a private or religious school, (Senator) Landrieu pointed out.
But even if every private elementary school in the state could immediately grow its enrollment by 10 percent to accommodate an influx of voucher recipients, only about 8,000 seats would be available. Include private high schools and that figure rises to about 11,200.
Jindal, by the way, did not dispute these numbers. He didn’t dispute that his voucher plan cannot and will not work, that there is no possible way he could ever deliver on his promise. Instead, his spokesperson said that Senator Landrieu was “missing the point.” No, no, she’s not. She’s speaking precisely on point: Jindal cannot deliver right now.
Thus far, unfortunately, teacher unions and the superintendents are playing right into Jindal’s hands. The teacher unions are harping on teacher pay and benefits; the superintendents, who stand to gain even more discretionary powers, are distancing themselves as quickly as possible, hoping to appear as apolitical as possible. I wonder, though: Are any of these people aware of the end-game here? Because Jindal’s proposals about performance-based pay and tenure are just window-dressing. On their own, they’re radical, to be sure, but not nearly as radical as Jindal’s end-game. Ultimately, Jindal’s goal, as The Wall Street Journal notes, is not merely to create the country’s “largest voucher program;” it’s about using taxpayer dollars to establish an undemocratic, unprotected parallel education system.
Jindal is not concerned with the results for human beings in this scheme but how he’ll play nationally as the first governor to impose all the privatization and voucher schemes out there to destroy public education as an entity. If it takes almost 7 years to attempt to make the school application process “easier” for parents, you cannot even begin to tell the lie that Jindal cares about students and education. If he did, he’d keep his narcissistic ass out of it.
Read the whole righteous skewering.
National School Choice Week? And the kickoff was a “party,” all flash, no substance?
That noise you heard was dry heaves.
5 Biggest Lies about the Right-Wing, Corporate-Backed War on Our Schools, Alternet, 1/23/2012
The lies? That school “choice” is “about racial justice and equal opportunity,” that the aim is to make public schools “stronger,” that it supports teachers and their work, that it’s about parents getting what “they want,” and that the privatization movement is bipartisan and secular. If you’ve been paying attention to NOLA schools, you’ve seen these lies in action.
But ALEC isn’t the only right-wing supporter of School Choice Week. Conservative organizations like the Goldwater Institute, New Jersey Tea Party Caucus, Heritage Foundation, Alliance for School Choice, Friedman Foundation, Heartland Institute, Reason Institute, and many other right-wing groups are also behind this week’s school choice celebrations. Despite some liberal support, its primary backers are deeply conservative activists whose goal is to dissolve public education in the United States. That’s why school choice bipartisanship is a myth – that is, its advocates use their few liberal supporters to obscure the real political base.
“School choice” covers up the real movement, the privatization of public schools, dismissing as irrelevant the resegregation of public schools and the de-professionalization of the K-12 teaching profession. No one asks who actually benefits from this privatization. If they did, they’d see it’s not teachers, parents, or their children. [No, your child's school being a great fit for your family does not mean that privatization "works." It means you got lucky.]
originally posted January 22, 2000
Read I’m Pro-Choice and I Fuck. I just wish I’d come up with the title first. It so sums up my feelings and philosophy….
According to Cristina Page, vice president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, pro-life groups not only want to end all abortions they are also “opposed to anything that leads to people having sex and not having a baby.” They are anti-abortion and anti-sex and see abortion as “birth control” (as a conservative WASPy male student once told me—he never made that damn mistake again), as women getting away with sex, as women being cold-blooded and slutty. That sex is bad and good people save sex for babymaking. When in 2002, data indicated that the rate of abortion had risen among low-income women, pro-choice commentators saw it as a sign that low-income women faced obstacles getting contraceptives and therefore had more unintended pregnancies while a spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee, Laura Echevarria, said that conclusion was “probably a bit of a stretch” and added “I’d like to see what their educational levels are, how many of them have access to educational material, how many of them understand childbirth.” As if only stupid women who are afraid of labor have abortions, as if an abortion has anything to do with that.
I’m pro-choice and I like to fuck and the first time I was pregnant I was in a grad program I desperately hated and a brand-new relationship (that I liked) and made $6K/year in a southern state with right-to-work laws and a stingy welfare system. Labor pains were not the issue. I had 2 college degrees, more, I am sure, than Ms. Echevarria, and had access to plenty of educational materials on childbirth, abortion, breastfeeding, diaper changing, anal thermometers and how to clean almost anything and none of that information had anything to do with my abortion. I am grateful every time I fuck and don’t have to worry about getting pregnant and I know how damn lucky I am. Not everyone is.
Like I tell my students—if you’re against abortion, don’t have one, but you cannot tell me or anyone else what to do with her body and the rest of her life b/c of your “belief.” Those 9 months are no walk in the park (from serious complications to annoyances) and are nothing compared to the next 20+ years. It is not something any man, woman or other should be forced into.
UPDATE: A response to a short-sided (short-thought-ed, to be more accurate) bit by Mr. Mark Joseph on The Huffington Post site:
You must be kidding. This is sarcasm right? Let me see, a young white male whose target audience is Christians is judging the sentiments of a woman nearly old enough to be his mother who has clearly lived life. Yes, you are judging. I seem to recall your Christ in your Bible saying something to the effect of Judge Not, Lest You Yourself Be Judged. The Native Americans say a smiliar [sic] thing with a similar thread, Don’t Pretend To Understand Me Until You Have Walked A Mile In My Moccasins. Being married to a woman who had an abortion before we met I have had a glimpse into the mind of a scared 18 year old whose male friend shared their fun then disappered emotionally when that yielded a fetus. I have seen a life that could have gone one way go another completely. To this day she is firmly pro-choice but I doubt would consider another abortion unless there was [sic] health risk involved. The emotional scars she carried from that have affected her sexuality and the rest of her self-esteem. It has taken literally decades to get to a sense of balance in her. She is now in her 50′s so the decision to ever face again is soon moot. But, ask our two daughters if she made a mistake 35 plus years ago. My point is that there are women who are for abortion and those opposed. Men, who make the laws, execute the laws, for the most part, judge the propriety of the laws and run the religious institutions are in the weakest position to opine the merits of abortion. I find nothing in the Bible to support an anti-abortion stance, nor do I find anything to support the opposite. I find science which I believe to be God-given which says a fetus can no more exist outside the body than I can flap my arms and fly to the moon. So, to me, the fetus is an extension of the mother host and, if left to thrive, could one day BE a life when it can draw breath on its own and live outside the womb. I have had the opportunity to work with the poor in this country, with parents of children with mental illness, mental retardation, autism, birth defects galore. I have seen abandoned babies, crack babies, infants doomed to early death or lives of need that their families are unable to fill and the rest of us, through our government, unwilling to fill. I am not convinced that is better. I have many Christian friends who profess sorrow and compassion at such situations but oppose government spending because it requires their incomes to be taxed and minimizes what they can buy for themselves or for their own healthy children. I direct their thoughts to the Epistle of James and the difference between faith and works. I know it is unfair to use their precious Bible to call their attention to what their Christ says they ought to do as opposed to what they are doing but, really, Christians and the rest of the world would be better off if they actually tried to emulate the behaviors of Christ rather than use some of the words from the book as a bludgeon on those of us who don’t measure up and as a wedge between factions of this society. So, I am decidedly pro-choice. But, that is the opinion of a Man and I have stated it is something to which I am entitled but not something which I carry the authority to complel any woman to believe or on which to make her own decision to let the fetus grow or to stop it. Neither do I feel I have the right to judge her decision when made. And, I certainly don’t have the right to consider her outrage at the opinions of those of us who don’t have those rights as a showing of intolerance. To say the concept of abortion, for her, is visceral is understatement at a cosmic level.
Posted by: ReformedRepublican on February 19, 2006 at 07:45am
Thanks, ReformedRepublican. I am sorry, though, that your wife comes from a generation that feels guilt about abortion. Men have always had the privilege to do what they “have to do” (read: whatever the fuck they feel like doing at the damn time). Women, who face real consequences and responsibilities and risks, make the really hard decisions.
originally posted Jan. 20, 2006
Part of the flak over Nagin’s chocolate city comment (he said it when he testified in front of Congress and no one seemed to notice though that time he did smile as he said it) is that no one has a sense of humor when they are looking for a fight. No one seems to know about the Funkadelic song or that other cities (DC and Detroit especially) have also been referred to as chocolate cities and there were no white riots. The only commentary I’ve seen that even slightly understands the humor and truth and joy in being a chocolate city is Sam Smith. My favorite part:
But to this white DC native, Nagin’s worst offense was to try to rip off our nickname.
Having lived much of my life in the real Chocolate City, I find myself far more bothered by people who become irate at the impolite subtexts of those who haven’t done as well as they in the American system, and who not only regard the suffering as inevitable but believe it should be endured with silence and gentility.
There is a curious connection between NOLA and DC. They are both cities that early had an unusual number of free blacks. Segregation operated under local ground rules, sometimes at odds with the larger southern standard. There were an atypical number of black Catholics. Class distinctions intermingled with – and sometimes surpassed – ethnic ones both within the black community and its relations with whites. There were an atypical number of whites who grew up with cross cultural experiences and an atypical number who found it part of the pleasure of the place.
Dan Baum, in his remarkable description of the New Orleans police in the New Yorker, writes:
“Everything is viewed through a racial lens in New Orleans, but it refracts differently there than elsewhere in the South. Louisiana was colonized first by the French, whose Code Noir encouraged intermarriage between whites and their black slaves to create a buffer class that might prevent insurrection; and briefly by the Spanish, whose custom of coartacion let slaves buy their freedom. By the time the United States took over, in 1803, the two customs had helped to create a large educated middle class of black freemen and black French Creoles that divided itself socially according to skin color. The Americans who poured into Louisiana made no such distinctions and generally treated all of them as inferiors, which rankled especially in New Orleans, where the most privileged blacks and Creoles lived.”
The plagiarism aside, Nagin’s comment seemed to me perfectly normal. It was the sort of thing I had heard in DC for years. And I didn’t mind it because it was my Chocolate City too. It still seems odd to many whites, but you really don’t have to be in the ethnic majority to love a place.
The whites who live in New Orleans proper, not the suburbs, love this city just like that, without having to be the majority and able to appreciate and mingle and second line and eat red beans on Monday and take down Christmas decorations on January 6 and only eat king cakes between King’s Day and Mardi Gras. Few whites that I have talked to, who really love the city, who really live in the city, who really appreciate the city, took offense. Most nodded, many smiled and kept trudging through the New Normal. New Orleans IS different. That’s why I moved back 9 years ago, that’s why I came to Jazz Fest every year when I didn’t live here, that’s why I lived New Orleans even when I wasn’t in New Orleans.
Instead of giving Nagin shit when he’s trying to counteract some of the bullshit the New Orleans diaspora hears and trying to tell folks to come on home, it’s still home, people need to ask the Red Cross where all that money they collected is, ask why Mississippi has gotten more money, trailers and insurance payouts than Louisiana, get the men in trucks back to work. No offense but people not from here who can’t get with the program need to stay the fuck out.
Ones that make salient points that may be ignored, or never seen, by most, especially in our top-down state education system with the absolute complicity of mainstream local press in that so-called system.
First, though I read it second, and is only a few days old, comes John White Appointed Chief of Louisiana Schools, Sean Cavanagh, January 11, 2012 at Education Week’s State EdWatch blog:
“Improving our educational system will require bold leadership and innovative ideas,” [LA governor Bobby] Jindal said in a statement, “such as empowering parents with more choices, rewarding highly effective teachers, and giving our schools the flexibility to pursue the most effective reforms for students in their communities. John is just the type of passionate, competent, and committed educator we need as superintendent to build on our record of reform.” [emphasis added]
So everyone in the state gets “flexibility” at the community level except NO? Outsiders are only problems when they don’t agree with Jindal?
I cannot be the only one to feel anxiety when a governor gets this micromanaging ["Gov. Jindal...backed House and Senate candidates and gave them political contributions before the election..../The governor will also have a heavy hand in selecting committee chairmen and committee members....It is obvious he isn’t going to take 'no' for an answer when it comes to having his way."] about schools, since the push to privatize has not been successful statewide. The majority of schools chartered/privatized since 2005 have been NO schools. And if This Is The Solution to failing schools, why has it not been shoved down the throats of other parishes?
And even worse comes Arne Duncan’s endorsement, again:
Duncan, a native Chicagoan, called White “a visionary leader who has done great things in New York City and New Orleans,” and said he was “confident he’ll do the same for the whole state of Louisiana.”
A Chicagoan attesting to White’s “visionary” work in NYC and NO where he’s been since May? I know I miss a lot but what’s been “visionary” so far? And whose vision exactly?
Second, and which is months old [See? I keep saying stop looking at this drivel and go read something for real], is Why Teach For America Is Not Welcome in My Classroom, Mark Naison, July 18, 2011 at LA Progressive:
Three years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was “use teaching in high-poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.
and
TFA has done nothing to promote income redistribution, reduce the size of the prison population, encourage social investment in high-poverty neighborhoods, or revitalize the arts, science, and history in the nation’s schools. TFA’s main accomplishment has been to marginally increase the number of talented people entering the teaching profession, but only a small fraction of those remain in the schools where they were originally sent.
But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America—other than its contempt for lifetime educators—is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged in the rapidly expanding educational-industrial complex, which already offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well-connected. An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.
Yeah, you right. Using black people, poor black people, desperate school systems and parents and superintendents, to get into B School, to get a 6-figure job in educational administration or testing, or a sweet job at a think tank geared toward, and only toward, privatization of public education. When it’s put that baldly, it is pretty nauseating. And you have to ask what they unwittingly, unconsciously, or subconsciously impart to our struggling black children. Explain why there has “been little progress in the last fifteen years in narrowing the test score gap by race and class, but income inequality has become greater…than at any other time in modern American history” to them, and why two years is more than enough time to spend in “the new Peace Corps,” and what these TfAs will do with what they encountered in those 2 years at these jobs that pay more than the teachers they leave behind can ever hope to earn in multiple years added together. And why these black students being “served” by TfA, no matter how high they strive or attain, will be unlikely to be chosen to be TfAers. Serve? Instead of “whom” we have to, but never ask, “what.”
John White appears poised to be named state schools superintendent this week
No surprise here. This has been wanted since 3 days after he became superintendent of RSD. [Even now, no one in public has asked, or questioned, why.] Now that the privatization forces have BESE in their front pockets, we in NO will have a completely privatized system.
Who voted for that, you might ask.
Problem is when schools like this get their charters pulled or denied. What happens is that the number of seats in city schools goes down, and charter schools are NOT obligated to take students whose schools close or implode.
And this new “systems” is better how exactly for whom?
Or an expert.
I know that’s hard for some Americans to believe. Or, rather, feel because the equating of material wealth with spiritual, moral and other types of worthiness is not a thought but a gut feeling/mass delusion.
In Waiting for Superman, Bill Gates is referred to as an “education expert.” What qualifies him as such? The Gates Foundation money poured into charter schools and related entities? Or is it this TED talk from February 2009 in which he compares malaria to education, comparing one “simple solution” to another?
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers….So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out of it.
So what’s the problem? Education is not a disease, or disease process, with a single cause and predictable course and effective singular cures. It is one thing to reduce exposure to mosquitos, and therefore malaria, but several things to improve teachers, classrooms, schools and entire systems where the cause is not situated in a single insect and the key to progress is reduction to exposure. Gates’ “logic” is like the “plot” of a reality TV show—only loosely associated with the word. Mosquitos and malaria are not equal to, or in any way analogous to, schools and test scores, and for that you must restrict education to “schools” and “test scores.” This kind of oversimplification still plagues the privatization movement—run it like a business, “solve” it like malaria, find the singular heroes and make googly-eyes at them and struggle to hold your shit together when near their awesomeness. A student is not an isolated unit and cannot be “solved” with one test or one book or two young “heroes” people want to love. Children, students are far more complex than malaria and mosquitos and KIPP is not analogous to a mosquito net.
For one thing, mosquito nets are pretty standardized. KIPP schools are not. Some act like standalone districts, others work collectively, some admissions are more open than others, and KIPP schools can open at almost any grade in K-8, making it more difficult for any researcher to study or compare, either KIPP schools to each other or KIPP schools to other charter and traditional public schools. KIPP is not as simple as a mosquito net, and does not in any way function like one.
With this kind of flawed logic and reasoning—Gates is not the first or the last—it is no wonder the privatization movement only looks good while they glamour us.
The G Bitch Spot
Nothing on this blog has anything to do with the views, practices, needs, or pet peeves of any employer, association, profession, product, school of thought, clan, family member, or BFF.
The G Bitch Spot by G Bitch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
1. This is MY blog. It is not public space but personal space. I am not obligated to publish or keep any comment I deem misinformed, misplaced, missing the point or just plain, in my not-so-fucking-humble opinion, asinine.
2. All comments will be interpreted as written, i.e. pay attention to what words you put where and when. Don't tell me you meant x when you typed that you fuck goats.
