inspire people

A great summary of a great lady.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/washington/01ivins.html?ei=5087&en=6a9711941967ca5a&ex=1185944400&adxnnl=1&excamp=GGGNmollyivins&adxnnlx=1170516285-/GEU9cotCazEdFdjrWmgSA

read Conversations with God and then get back to me about it. Or don’t.

Don’t be put off by the “God” in the title.
Early thoughts on this. Some of the ideas in this book will blow you away. Did this guy really have a conversation with God? Well, no one can say for sure but here’s my hunch. I’ve seen him talk, he’s not that smart. But some of the ideas in this book are amazing even though they are coming through his “regular guy filter”.

Go see this movie if you want to really feel what it’s like to be teetering on the edge. I’ve lived some of this. This movie was fucking unrelenting. Will Smith should get an oscar for it. I hope it will help people see poverty differently.

WHY JUST ASK THE DONKEY

Why
Just ask the donkey in me
To speak to the donkey in you,

When I have so many other beautiful animals
And brilliant coloured birds inside
That are all longing to say something wonderful
And exciting to your heart?

Let’s open all the locked doors upon our eyes
That keep us from knowing the Intelligence
That begets love
And a more lively and satisfying conversation
With a Friend.

Let’s turn loose our golden falcons
So that they can meet in the sky
Where our spirits belong-
Necking like two
Hot kids.

Let’s hold hands and get drunk near the sun
And sing sweet songs to God
Until He joins us with a few notes
From His own sublime lute and drum.

If you have a better idea
Of how to pass a lonely night
After your glands may have performed
All their little magic
Then speak up sweethearts, speak up,
For Hafiz and all the world will listen.

Why just bring your donkey to me
Asking for stale hay
And a boring conference with the idiot
In regards to this precious matter-
Such a precious matter as love,

When I have so many other divine animals
And brilliant coloured birds inside
That are all longing
To so sweetly
Greet
You!”

Hafiz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPPKSWSPP1E

Big man on campus
Author Jeremy Iversen went undercover as a high school student. The experience taught him about text messaging and steroids—and the failures of U.S. education policy.
By David Kent Randall

Oct. 03, 2006 | For most adults, the thought of going back to the algebra- and angst-ridden days of high school sounds like a punishment. But to Jeremy Iversen, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate, the prospect of masquerading as a 17-year-old and enrolling in a suburban high school seemed like the chance to fulfill a dream: to live the life of a John Hughes movie.

Iversen didn’t have a chance to be a part of any breakfast clubs the first time around. After attending one of the nation’s most prestigious boarding schools and glimpsing a future pointed straight to a corporate boardroom, Iversen started to feel like he was becoming trapped by the adult world, without any real adolescence to look back on. So shortly after graduating from college, he began meeting with assorted school boards and principals—and soon found himself enrolled in a public high school in Southern California with a fake name (Jeremy Hughes), pretending to be a senior transfer student while taking notes for the book that became “High School Confidential.” Only the principal knew that he was an impostor. And he was bound by only two rules: He would initiate no illegal activity, and he would have no intimate contact with any student.

While at first glance “High School Confidential” might seem like a knockoff of Cameron Crowe’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” - the 1981 book in which the then-Rolling Stone writer went incognito at a high school in San Diego - Iversen sets himself apart from his predecessor by writing not just about teen drug use and parties but also about the far weighter issue of American education policy. From the inside, he casts a critical eye on the pressures and hurdles facing his peers, and tries to initiate a tough discussion about why schools still fail to produce passionate learners. Salon talked with Iversen about the trials of becoming a teenager again and the lessons he learned the second time around.

What was your first - real - high school experience like?

I started off going to a combination high school/junior high school in New York City, Hunter High School. That was a very urban experience. We had things like crushed crack vials in the playground. When I was 14, I went to Phillips Exeter Academy, which was a completely different experience. We wore ties, and had class on Saturday. But neither time, did I have a “typical” American high school experience.

For your research, you had to impersonate someone six years your junior. How did you make yourself seem younger?

A lot of it was acting. One of the main differences is just attitude. Most high schoolers don’t have the same self-confidence that adults have. They sort of slump over a little bit, with this “Oh God, what’s the world going to do to me now?” sort of attitude.

How did you report this book? Did you act like you were taking notes in biology class while you were really writing down what other students said?

The irony is that I would have liked to sit there and pretend to take notes and take down what everybody was saying—but the problem was that nobody else was taking notes so I would have stood out as the only human being writing something down. I had a couple methods: The first was that I would take out my French book and pretend I was doing my French homework so I’d write down numbered questions, and for the supposed answers, I’d write down what everybody was saying. Sometimes a teacher would say, “Mr. Hughes, put away the French book, what class are you in?” So then I’d have to doodle a picture, and write really tiny in the margins little keywords on what people were saying. And then every night, I’d take notes for two or three hours on what people were saying while it was still fresh in my mind.

When you were at parties and saw student sex or drug use, did you ever feel the duty to stop people from what they were doing?

I did. But pretty quickly, once I had a role in the community, it stopped making sense—like, “Why is the 17-year-old new kid suddenly trying to stop us from hooking up?” I tried a few times as far as I could. One of my best friends was 15, and he was interested in using steroids. I had to say things like, “No, dude, don’t do it, your dick will drop off.” I couldn’t give a great speech like in the movies when a person pops up on the table and yells, “Stop, what you’re doing is wrong!” I think there were other students who felt things were wrong, too, but felt almost impotent to do anything.

Most people think high school drug use involves beer and pot, and maybe cocaine if it’s a wealthier area. But in your book, one of the biggest drug issues is steroids.

I was very surprised by the steroids. That was something we didn’t have at boarding school. And the school year after I did this project, the big drug was speed.

With text messaging so popular now, it seems like students are writing more than ever, but not necessarily in a substantive way. Did you see an effect of that casual writing style in students’ work?

“Talk to you later” becomes “t2ul”—that’s the way people communicate with each other, in that type of abbreviated language. And it doesn’t translate over into structuring an essay. That’s where you start to see the failures. It’s not that this generation can’t think, it’s just that when no one is ever asking you to defend an argument or anything like that, you’re going to develop a weakness.

In your book, you blame teachers for that weakness.

Absolutely. We were never assigned to write a paper longer than a page, we were never asked to find a source beyond the textbook. No one ever said, “Find an opinion and defend it with proof.” The best you got was, “Regurgitate the textbook in full sentences.” And what ends up happening is that you get people who aren’t able to ask challenging questions or find independent answers, so they just repeat what they hear around them with increasing conviction.

Do you think that there’s anything educators can do to make the learning experience more effective?

After [I finished the book] I talked to teachers and I asked them what they saw as the problem. They said, “It’s absolutely the students; they’re not prepared, they don’t want to learn.” But as a student, I have to say, you wonder why a teacher sits in the corner of the classroom talking about her weekend with four kids while everyone else sits around and text messages each other. Why don’t they care whether anyone is learning, why aren’t they making sure people are engaged, involved and up to the task? I think that there’s no accountability in the classroom. Once the teacher is there, they get tenure after two years—at which point you really can’t fire them. So what’s going to make them teach?

Education is spoken of as the great equalizer, the system that allows upward class mobility. Does that notion seem ludicrous to you now?

I saw basically two types of students—Path 1 students and Path 2. Path 1 students were marked as going to a four-year college or beyond, and getting a competitive professional job in the global economy; Path 2 students were marked for a local service job where they drifted in and out of community college for a little while before they gave up. It was as though when they arrived freshman year, everybody was marked.

Education is supposed to be the great leveler, but what I saw just perpetuated destinies. The teachers didn’t seem to care, the system didn’t seem to care, nobody ever tried to intervene and say, “Hey, your parents are on welfare but you don’t have to be. Let’s get you motivated and excited and introduce some wonderful opportunities.” That never happened, ever. Instead it was just, “This is a bad kid, let me kick him out of the room.” Teachers rarely bothered to intervene to get Path 2 people onto Path 1. The counselors didn’t either - they were vastly overworked - and everyone generally acted like kids had simply chosen not to succeed. And it broke down almost entirely along class lines.

Despite those criticisms, you still seem to sympathize with school administrators.

People don’t give them personhood a lot of the time. But the students are doing the exact same thing to the administration. I was with 2,000 kids who hated the administration and saw them only as people placed there to torment them. Meanwhile, the administration saw the students as this big bored herd of statistics that had to be funneled through the system endlessly. Of course, the reality - on both sides - is more complex.

Did your immersion in high school make you see your private school experience in a different way? Did you wonder, “If I had gone here, how would I have ended up?”

I wondered that very much. I appreciated the education I got at my boarding school—it took people of all different stripes, put them through the meat grinder and turned out bright-eyed young professionals. But we didn’t really have very much fun.

—By David Kent Randall

I heard this guy speak at my church and then I read the book he sends out to prisoners that teaches them about meditation and ultimately how they have the opportunity of a lifetime to do advanced spiritual growth even though they are in prison.
He says it’s become socially acceptable for us to hate people in prison. Who is this serving? How is that helping?

His book (one of them) is called “We’re All Doing Time”.
You might be surprised to read how intelligent some of these guys letters are.

http://www2.lifeonpurpose.com/Project%20Purpose/the_kindness_cure.html

I attend a Unitarian church. They always give me something to help me grow, they make me feel like a person who matters. People say hi and use eye contact. The music is always beautiful. Today they invited another church group to come in and do a one act play about the life of Margaret Sanger. It was called “Thank You Margaret Sanger” and chronicled her work as a nurse in the poorest New York neighborhoods in the early part of the 1900s. She knew that poverty was directly linked to people being able to control their fertility. She watched women needlessly die, literally worn out from pregnancy after pregnancy. Women and their husbands begged, begged for her to tell them the “secret” to keep from having more children.She wrote a simple pamplet to educate women about their bodies and was arrested for distributing obscenity. If you’ve never heard of this fantastic woman read about her courageous life here.
http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/sanger.html

http://www.romancatholicwomenpriests.org/

http://www.slate.com/id/2146621

The tone of this article is smartass, but admittedly funny. Still I can’t help but like this truth speaking Republican and feel sad that the general consensus is that he’s going to be crucified.

Steele Shovel
How to dig a giant political hole.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, July 27, 2006, at 5:55 PM ET

When in a hole, stop digging. This is good advice in life and crucial advice in politics. Unfortunately, no one seems to have shared it with Michael Steele, a Republican candidate for the Senate from Maryland. Steele’s slogan appears to be: “More shovels!”

Steele, who is the leading Republican for his party’s nomination, committed a gaffe, according to Slate founding editor Michael Kinsley’s classic definition: He accidentally said something true in public. During a 90-minute lunch with Washington reporters, Steele said the R for Republican next to his name was like a “scarlet letter.” He went on to say the GOP-controlled Congress should “just shut up and get something done,” that the Iraq war “didn’t work” and “we didn’t prepare for the peace,” that the response to Hurricane Katrina was “a monumental failure of government.” He said having his party leader President Bush campaign for him would be a disadvantage. He said these things “on background,” agreeing with reporters that he would not be quoted by name. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post attended the lunch and published the remarks, attributing them to a “GOP Senate candidate.”

The papers had barely landed in suburban driveways before even Starbucks baristas knew that Steele was the source. It was obvious the speaker wasn’t in Congress, and there are only a handful of “competitive Senate races” from which a sleuth could divine the identity. Once outed, Steele produced a variety of responses, all of them bad. They have been so bad as to constitute a kind of minitutorial on what a candidate shouldn’t do when caught telling a truth:

1) Fib. Steele says the lunch was off the record. Participants at the steakhouse say it was clear that the discussion took place under the ground rules that Milbank used. Steele’s press secretary seems to have known this, too. Political analysts agree that it’s best to hold off on spectacular fibbing until you’ve actually been elected.

2) Say it was a joke. Asked on Maryland radio about the “scarlet letter” remark, Steele said: “So I was making a joke about the fact that in this political climate, in Maryland, being a Republican is like wearing a scarlet letter. That’s all it is.” Phew, that clears that up. It’s good that Steele didn’t say something really hilarious, like being a Republican in Maryland is like having an inoperable disease or losing a few limbs in the shredder.

3) Look like a weasel. Steele could have embraced his gaffe and won political points for speaking the truth about an unpopular war and an unpopular party. It might be refreshing to have someone who spoke that plainly wander into the Senate cloakroom. By backing away from his remarks, Steele wins no points from anyone. He looks sneaky for only speaking truth under the protection of anonymity and dishonest for trying to disown his remarks once he was identified as having made them.

John Dickerson is Slate’s chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com .