It's long overdue, but cursive writing is losing its grip, so to speak.
Hawaii is joining several states across the country that are dropping cursive writing from mandatory school curriculum . . . The Aloha state has adopted for this school year the national Common Core State Standards, a set of education standards that omits cursive but includes keyboard proficiency.
Jimmy Kimmel's idea was simple. Convince your small child that you ate all of his or her Halloween candy while they were sleeping, and videotape their reaction.
Glenn Greenwald comments on what the media establishment cares about:
[General David Petraeus] has left a string of failures and even scandals behind him: a disastrous Iraqi training program, a worsening of the war in Afghanistan since he ran it, the attempt to convert the CIA into principally a para-military force, the series of misleading statements about the Benghazi attack and the revealed large CIA presence in Libya. To that one could add the constant killing of innocent people in the Muslim world without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight. Yet none of those issues provokes the slightest concern from our intrepid press corps. His career and reputation could never be damaged, let alone ended, by any of that. Instead, it takes a sex scandal - a revelation that he had carried on a perfectly legal extramarital affair - to force him from power. That is the warped world of Washington.
Many Americans I know assume that voting is the only method by which they participate in their government. This is incorrect. As Howard Zinn stated, "Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens." ["Election Madness" The Progressive (March 2008)] Politicians are highly susceptible to pressure asserted by social movements and by corporate power. If social movements are weak or non-existent, politicians will fall completely into the arms of corporations. Exhibit A is the rapacious yet mostly legal conduct of Wall Street banks over the past decade. Amy Goodman raised this point of the need for ordinary citizens to get involved in social movements to keep pressure on the president in a recent article at Common Dreams:
Someone asked [Barack Obama] what he would do about the Middle East. He answered with a story about the legendary 20th-century organizer A. Philip Randolph meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Randolph described to FDR the condition of black people in America, the condition of working people. Reportedly, FDR listened intently, then replied: “I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it.†That was the message Obama repeated. There you have it. Make him do it. You’ve got an invitation from the president himself. For years during the Bush administration, people felt they were hitting their heads against a brick wall. With the first election of President Obama, the wall had become a door, but it was only open a crack. The question was, Would it be kicked open or slammed shut? That is not up to that one person in the White House, no matter how powerful. That is the work of movements.
The space station is the third brightest object in the night sky. If only you knew where to look to find it . . . And now, a new NASA website will tell you exactly where to look, based on your particular location. Here's that website.