Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Pretty cool site:

http://www.hardcorehalloffame.com

Another fav of mine....

http://www.musicvideomonster.com/movies/2774jkxg.asx' type='application/x-mplayer2' width='300' height='300' ShowControls='1' ShowStatusBar='0' loop='true' EnableContextMenu='0' DisplaySize='0' pluginspage='http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/Downloads/Contents/Products/MediaPlayer/'>
http://www.musicvideomonster.com'>Music Videos & Codes - MusicVideoMonster.com

http://www.musicvideomonster.com/movies/3498ghdw.asx' type='application/x-mplayer2' width='300' height='300' ShowControls='1' ShowStatusBar='0' loop='true' EnableContextMenu='0' DisplaySize='0' pluginspage='http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/Downloads/Contents/Products/MediaPlayer/'>
http://www.musicvideomonster.com'>Music Videos & Codes - MusicVideoMonster.com

Lots of indie films to watch. I'm watching one about BB King right now.  :tup:


http://www.folkstreams.net/

Howdy you little punk no pussy gettin bitch. I bet you feel real good and extra tuff making death threats to me. Bring it on you little 2 inch dick peice of shit. I'll make sure that crowbar gets shoved so far up your ass it comes out your mouth ripping that sick tongue out of yours if you try to harm me.

You used to be funny as Animals, but you went off the deep end posting death threats to people and their families.

Go ahead and spam this board with my name you little bitch. My dad is a 6"6 tall Marine, and a Hell's Angel that served in Vietnam and will shred your ass to pieces. Oh and guess what he lives in Florida just like you, you sack of shit. Keep talking your fuckin shit and I suggest you post your address you no pussy gettin freak so I can have my dad come pay you a visit.

BTW, I'll be saving your death threats bitch just in case you try to call the police on my dad. Oh yeah my "little" brother is 6"7 and 320 lbs and would wup the shit out of you if you so much as ever try to put your slimey hand on me.

Bring your crowbar bitch. You ain't met anyone like my father!!!!

You fucked with the wrong bitch. Get some balls and post your address bitch because my dad is far crazier than you could only hope you were.

Long, but great read.

http://www.mihomeless.org/mcahdocuments ... meless.pdf

(Long read, but worth it)

http://campusprogress.org/features/552/ ... than-kozol


Five Minutes With: Jonathan Kozol
By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress
Monday, September 19, 2005

Jonathan Kozol isn?t subtle. He is angry. A veteran of 40 years spent on the frontlines of education reform, his new book is titled Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. The book, told primarily through the voices of teachers and students, vividly exposes the ways that the American educational system has betrayed lower-income inner-city children. Kozol describes schools that are separated by a 15-minute drive but that offer educational opportunities that are light years apart ? primarily white schools that offer drama club and AP classes and primarily black schools that require classes like hairdressing. One teacher at a South Bronx elementary school who Kozol spoke with pointed to one of her students and said that after 18 years of teaching, the child was ?the first white student I have ever taught.? Kozol, a Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, author of books including Savage Inequalities and former public school teacher, talked with Campus Progress about race, education, and Shame of the Nation.

How do we activate liberally minded young people who may graduate with a lot of debt and who are wavering between Teach for America and a lucrative career at Goldman-Sachs? What do you say to those students?

First of all, I think there?s a myth most college students are selfishly inclined to earning money quickly or so determined to make their way in the corporate world that they don?t have any time or inclination to go out and do the decent things that are needed to change the world. In fact, I find thousands of college students, tens of thousands, wherever I go, packing the auditoriums wherever I speak, and then typically 200 of them will keep me up for another two hours asking me exactly where they?re needed. They are not willing to suppress their sense of justice or postpone their activism until some later time in life until after they?ve established a lucrative career. They want to do it now and they?re right to have that feeling because if they postpone the moment of ethical action for another five years, the likelihood is that they?ll never return to it. Once they go on to law school or whatever career it may be, they almost never return to that state of mind where they?re willing to take risks for the cause of justice.

Secondly, a lot of young people are frightened by their parents or by the older generation because older people will say to them, ?Hey, you might ruin your careers if you do something decent first,? or ?you might never be able to pay off your college debt.? Typically for young teachers out of college, I know thousands of young people who go right into public school as soon as they?re certified to teach. Virtually all of them want to protest the conditions that they see within but some of them are scared; again their parents say, ?don?t take a chance on speaking out; you might lose your job.?

What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later. The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.

And what do you say to those who aren?t interested in getting involved or who feel like this is a problem outside of themselves?

Some young people will tentatively say to me, ?well maybe I oughtta get involved.? Well I say, ?You don?t have any choice; you?re involved already. Even if you never do anything about this, you?ve benefited from an unjust system. You?re already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start. If we did not have an apartheid school system in America, what is the chance you?d walk into this college so easily? It would have been a lot harder because there would have been a far larger applicant pool of highly capable minority kids to compete with you.

In a sense, those of us ? and I?ve had a privileged education, too ? those of us who have those benefits have to live with the uncomfortable knowledge that all our victories in life will be contaminated by the fact that we were winners in a game that was never played on a level playing field.

Your new book focuses on what you call apartheid in the American educational system. A lot of people think of apartheid as a term referring to a moment now relegated to political history. How do you see it happening here and now?

I think a lot of people don?t have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students. An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there?s no longer segregation in America?s schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true. Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance. During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed. But since 1990 when the Rehnquist court started ripping apart the legacy of Brown, the court has taken the teeth out of Brown. During these years our schools have rapidly segregated and the gap in skills between minorities and whites has increased again. I just visited 60 public schools in 11 different states; if you took a photo of the classes I?m visiting, they would look exactly like a photograph of a school in Mississippi 50 years ago.

You mention that one of the most segregated school systems is in New York and you particularly single out Martin Luther King High School, which I grew up near. It was located in a primarily white neighborhood with almost no white students.

There?s the greatest irony of all: If you want to see the most segregated school in America today, ask to see the school named after Martin Luther King. Or Rosa Parks, or Thurgood Marshall. New York City has a school named for Jackie Robinson. Is this an integrated school that represents the ideals for which Jackie Robinson is honored? Of course not. It?s a 96 percent black and Hispanic school. There?s a school in New York named for Langston Hughes that?s 99 percent black and Hispanic. The principal of Martin Luther King High School even said to me, ?Honestly, here we are at Lincoln Center in New York in a school that?s named for Martin Luther King and I have to hunt around the building to find my eight white students.?

Young people in college need to make up their minds whether they want to live in a nation that lives up to the dream of Dr. King or whether they want to live in a divided nation. And if we agree to trample on the dream of Dr. King then I don?t think we have the right to celebrate his birthday every year; it?s hypocrisy.

But the problem you care about isn?t just that schools are racially segregated but that they don?t offer the same quality of education.

The words of Brown v. Board of Education were clear: Even if segregated schools could ever be made equal in physical facilities, faculty, etc., as schools attended by white children, they would still be destructive to the souls of segregated children by the very fact of segregation in itself. We have placed them in isolation because we don?t want you to contaminate our own schools. It sends a destructive message for young blacks, and they recognize it very well. One teenager in Harlem said to me, ?It?s like if they don?t have room for something and don?t know how to throw it out they put it back in the garage.? I said, ?Is that how you feel?? She said, ?That?s exactly how I feel.?

And these schools are not simply segregated; they?re wildly unequal. Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools. In NYC, to give a dramatic example, there are kids in the South Bronx who get about $11,000 a year towards their education while right next door in the white suburb of Bronxville, they get $19,000. Kids that I write about are treated by America as if they were worth half as much as children in the white suburbs.

I often hear privileged white people say, ?Well, that doesn?t sound quite fair, but can you really buy your way to a better education for poor kids?? Typically people who ask that question send their kids to Andover and Exeter. And still, the parents who spend $30,000 a year to guarantee their child a royal road into the Ivy League have the nerve to look me in the eyes and ask me about buying your way into a better education.

And the segregated schools that you write about really seem to be failing their students by not preparing them for college and higher education in some pretty shocking ways.

While writing this book, I met a student in L.A. named Mariah, at a school with 5,000 people in it, who was forced to take sewing classes the previous year even though she wanted to go to college. This year they told her she had to take hairdressing. I said, ?What would you rather take?? and she said she wanted to take an AP course in English; then she started to cry. ?I already know how to sew; my mother works in a sewing factory. I want to go to college; I don?t need to know how to sew to go to college. I hope for something more.? I call it the cognitive decapitation of inner-city children. We?re locking them out of the competition for empowerment from the very beginning.

In some schools it starts even earlier. In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school. The parents would fire the principal overnight. We tolerate this for children of color because we don?t genuinely value their intelligence. I?ve heard business leaders say, ?We need these inner city children to be trained to be our entry-level workers.? They would never use the word ?train? when they speak of their own children ? they want their own children to be educated, to run the corporation someday, or to be doctors or lawyers or preachers or teachers or musicians or whatever else they choose to do in life.

It seems like part of what the press loves is reporting these stories of individuals who ?beat the odds.?

I call those the ?hero children.? There?s always that handful of children who are given special favors by rich people who happen to meet them, and the press loves to report how successful these kids are. But all that is the consequence of random acts of charity. Charity is not a substitute for systematic justice.

Katrina for a lot of people seemed to lay bare a lot of realities about race and class in America, but I?m guessing for you a lot of the things we all saw weren?t surprising to some extent.

It?s simply the most recent, most dramatic example of how easy it is to ignore the humanity of people when we live in a segregated society. The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society. It?s easier to be brutal to people when you lock them out of sight. When you don?t know them. It is a perfectly dramatic example of what happens every day in our nation?s public schools, but the destruction is not as sudden nor as dramatic, but no less brutal, because it goes on every single day of the year.

What about solutions? Are there successes that you can point to?

We haven?t even lived up to the promises of Plessey v. Ferguson. American schools today are separate and no one would even pretend they?re equal. Every expert has a new plan for creating successful segregated schools, and the white society loves to hear these stories because they let us off the hook completely. There?s a whole host of books with titles like ?seven ways to fix the urban schools? or ?seven ways to turn it all around in inner-city schools.? For some reason they always list seven items; I don?t know why. Each plan is usually boosted for a few years, then they?re declared a failure and abandoned. They?re recipes for what you could call successful segregation. I refuse to play the game of polishing the apple of apartheid. It doesn?t propose seven ways to create happy segregation ? it calls to abolish segregation in America.

I devoted the last chapter of the book to inner city schools I loved ? schools that are fighting the intolerant testing mania and still teaching kids well. Schools in which teachers and principals manage to do a good job and give kids a chance to enjoy their childhood. It?s my favorite chapter in the book, and if anyone who reads the book gets depressed, tell them to read that chapter first.

Does anyone here hate the fact they are too damn sensitive from being in straight? I feel like an emotional basket case at the moment. I hate having feelings about everything. I cry easily to this day. I thought I did a pretty good job of having a hard outer shell and not crying before I was locked away.

I was "ripped" by a former staff member today because I used the word empathy and was called brainwashed. Funny I was never brainwashed to join staff. But hey, I really can't fault anyone for what they did in that place as we were all kids just trying to cope the best way we could figure out. The brainwashing comment hurts still though and my stomach is in knotts just like it used to be everyday as soon as I entered the building.

I let some things keep me in straight after copping out twice and deciding to "work my program". I'm sick of all the brainwashing insults thrown around by lots of people as if somehow they are more superior because they may have done something different. I even felt like I deserved to be punished back then and somehow being in that place was my repentance for all the horrible things I did.

I had some host parents that I felt truly loved me and I could actually communicate with them. My father threw me away like yesterday's trash before I went there. For years I had been mentally abused my this man and physically and mentally abused by my step mom. My father and step mom were shitty parents and I had anxiety issues because I felt like I was constantly walking on egg shells and one wrong move could get me an ass beating at any moment. My mom worked all the time and went to school so the days I was to live at her house I spent at childcare. The person that "took care of me" was neglectful and mentally and physically abusive as well. I should also mention I was forced to be outside everyday until it was dark, fed the bare minimum and was not allowed to sit on her precious furniture. I started stealing from stores in the first grade because I was so hungry all the time.

Eating at my dad's house was not much better. The first week of each month was when the food stamps came and we would get some snacks. Other than that me and my 5 siblings ate just meals which many times consisted of beans. There was always money for my parents to get high and drunk though.

I would later bounce from relatives to friends, to group home and then full time with my father. At this time my father became a religous zealot and kept me prisoner in the house.I was sent to an abusive school run by Baptists. My dad decided we were not allowed to have junk food anymore but didn't buy any healthy snacks so I was still left hungry all the time. Where those food stamps were going was beyond me. We had financial aid to attend this shitty private school. We were probably the only family on welfare and we were coldly embraced yet my father was so wrapped up in that place.

I finally got to move back home with my mom only to soon be sent to a psychiatric hospital and straight directly after. Why? Because my mom caught me having sex at my "druggie b/f's" house high and drunk and beat my ass and sent me away.

So my dirty and lost soul sought comfort in some things at straight. I had 2 parent host homes. I had 2 host parents that loved me. I had someone to be my dad that didn't tell me I was no longer his daughter and didn't cut me off. I got to eat good meals in my host homes. My host parents weren't beating each other up, breaking things, and throwing furniture around like my real parental homes.

For the first time ever I lived in suburbs and attended 2 excellent schools. I made lots of friends at school and my teachers believed in me. Before straight I was the kid all the parents forbade their kids to hang around with. They would call or send notes to the school telling the teacher and principal to keep their kids away from me. My teachers and principals before straight are evil bitches. They taunted me, shook me, hit me, pushed me and made me a scapegoat for anything that went wrong. It was no wonder I attended school maybe 30 days all together in 8th grade.

So yeah maybe I was brainwashed to some degree, but I was already hurting and all alone before I got to straight. My stomach would always hurt in group, but I actually looked forward to going home to my host parents, going to school, and going to my job. I focused on what things were good for me and that's what kept me going. My mom has since apologized for things in my childhood, but I can't help but be haunted from all this shit.