LL Cool Bae

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own” - Audre Lorde Pro - Black, Fat, Trans, and Queer blog. My ideologies align with the liberation of all peoples from the crushing oppression that is the imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchy.

[moonlightsdreaming]

[sacred-portal]

[smileyfaces]

i saw this video elsewhere and wanted to post it here —

wind turbine that got struck by lightning near Cromwell, TX

[smileyfaces]

i saw this video elsewhere and wanted to post it here —

wind turbine that got struck by lightning near Cromwell, TX

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Moon perfectly centered in this Nubian ibex's curved horn.

Photo Tiki Ozer Photography

[seenvisions]

[mariacallous]

[curvesandconfidence]

[dankmemes23]

[assiraphales]

one of the many victims of streaming is the dvd homepage where they included lil games, bloopers, director commentary, and behind the scenes. I miss u gurl

[thechanelmuse]

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

[mysteryteacup]

For those of us who aren't from the states, what - apart from apparently a shitty law - is that?

[kethsposy]

A law passed by Bush that cut funding to public schools whose students didn't improve every year on a set of standardized tests- meaning not that each student was supposed to improve during their time in school, but that this year's first graders had to do better on the tests than last year's first graders, and next year's had to do better still. Obviously this was really difficult over the short term and completely impossible over the long term.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

The program also incentivized schools to cut their losses on struggling students, expelling or encouraging them to drop out to bring the test averages up instead of being able to spend the effort to actually help them.

[anyroads]

No Child Left Behind was an absolute disaster for education, poorly hidden behind an insidious name. The real goal of it was not just to defund education (in order to reallocate those funds to appease Republican lobbyists), but to stop teaching critical thinking. Not only did struggling students get left behind, but by prioritizing students who did well on standardized tests, the focus shifted entirely to teaching students memorization without understanding context, and how to guess their best on a test in order to pass. The focus became passing tests, not actual learning. In the process, students were taught that they don't need to understand the material, they just need to know how to follow directions and give the answers deemed correct by the school boards. They were deprived of agency in their own educations.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

No Child Left Behind was devastating. We knew it then and we see it now.

[i-am-spark]

Forgotten Valley 11/∞

[thedopestthrill]

[lizbethborden]

[pocket-deer-belly]

honestly advertising is so fukcing wasteful not even just in the convincing you to buy shit you never actually wanted but like

how much electricity is wasted displaying ads that could've gone to keeping houses warm. How much paper is produced just to be turned into pamphlets and ads that will just be thrown away. how much internet bandwith is wasted just on the amount of ads that are on the internet nowadays. How many hours worth of labor went into producing ads that are going directly into my adblocker or my waste bin that could've been time spent doing literally ANYTHING useful?

[toastpiercer-deactivated2020080]

[argumate]

could it be...? a good political cartoon?

[ranked-competitive-sexhaver]

The artist is Clay Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a veteran of his craft. Here’s some more of his work: 

[socialistexan]

The wire hanger one hit me like a ton of bricks.

[t3sticles]

Can someone explain the last one to me

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

@t3sticles it's a reference to coat hanger abortions, because defunding Planned Parenthood doesn't stop abortions, it just means that people are forced to seek dangerous back-alley solutions

[t3sticles]

Ohhhh that makes sense, thank you

[cynicalclassicist]

OK, those are some pretty good political cartoons. That elephant... it makes me shudder.

[librarycard]

the ship of theseus wikipedia article in 2003. 20 years later, after 1792 total edits, 0% of its original phrasing remains. (x)

[ospreyonthemoon]

And yet it's still the same article, the article designated to be about theseus' ship. Debate solved i guess

[creepymutelilbugger]

easy as fuck . were they stupid?