Ah, probably. I’m pretty sure I still have an Instagram account, haven’t remembered to kill it yet. The Beehive link should work.
It didn’t used to, but it does now.
The giant Zucking sound.
Ha! Right…
Looks like meat’s back on the menu!
Apologies for not having read the whole thread (I am about 400 posts behind) but here is a story of a person whose face is being nibbled:
I’m on the board of a “friends of the charter school” organization. The board chair is a Trump supporter, something the rest of us don’t understand, but whatever.
So today the chair had to report on the progress of several federal grants that the organization was awarded.
Gosh - imagine our surprise when he said, “well, this grant may never come through because it had “environmental education” in the title and funding is probably being pulled for things with that kind of language … and they’ve fired the staff who were in charge of administering this one, so who knows if we’ll ever get the money.”
I hope he recognizes that his vote contributed to what’s happening to the grants he personally worked hard to get to help the kids at the school.
If it’s a charter school in the sense I am used to (a scam whereby private industry siphons off tax dollars from public schools), then it’s not surprising at all to me the board chair would be a Trump supporter.
Sorry.
I’m seeing the flaw in his reasoning.
The guy who lost money with a casino. The guy selling crummy frozen steaks, Chinese-printed Bibles, and golden sneakers. The guy whose catch-phrase twenty years ago was, “You’re fired.” That guy?
I have no fucks to give.
Don’t forget the airline!
The list is long and I evoked the rule of three.
A quote from Heather Cox Richardson,
On Monday, James Marriott of The Times , published in London, noted that the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain “an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists.”
“Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable,” Marriott writes. “Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state.” Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it. And, Marriott adds, those who are cheering the rise of autocracy in the United States “have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government.”
What I’m hearing is that we’ve had it so good we’ve forgotten how bad it can get. I think a lot of us have been saying some variation of that for a while. Vaccinations and other medical advances have made life so good for us we’ve forgotten a time when parents were terrified their kid might get Polio, the serious damage a childhood disease like mumps can do, and I was born just a few short years after the smallpox vaccination stopped being routinely given in the United States.
One of my local Trumpers had no idea that any of that ever happened, when I asked him about the “businessman president” bit when he used that as a reason why he likes Trump.
What makes it worse is how he was also bragging about how many websites he reads, and how he knew so much more than I did. Missed one key thing, though, didn’t he??
I definitely have. I had group of older sceptic friends, who had a project to collect oral histories from their contemporaries about what life was like during the polio scare days, and how much the dear of polio affected their lives. Their theory was too many people had never heard about it, and the living history was starting to die out with their generation starting to pass away.
I’ve thought about this from another perspective, with the whole “invade Canada” thing. None of us in North America have ever seen what happens to a city we know when the bombs start dropping. How are we actually going to feel when the CN Tower in Toronto shows up on TV as a burnt-out stub of itself?
A scam? Seriously? Because it is a school in Hawaii with “charter” in the name?
In my experience, which is reasonably in-depth, it’s an amazing place that serves mostly Native Hawaiian students from difficult backgrounds, offering them incredible opportunities to experience meaningful educational experiences related to relevant topics like music technology and agriculture, among other topics.
A very random selection of videos related to what the school does (maybe not the best examples, I just picked a few without looking specifically for some of the best ones I’ve seen):
A “scam”? Sure, if you think kids from low-income, non-white backgrounds don’t deserve a decent education.
Sorry for the double post. When I tried to edit the post above, I got “you can’t embed media images in this post” error messages. Clearly a bug of some sort, since those media images are embedded in the non-edited post, but whatever.
Anyway, I wanted to edit my post to be a little less harsh. Maybe charter schools in the continental US are scams. I wouldn’t know. As it happens, at our meeting today there was some discussion of whether Hawaiian schools are typical of charter schools in most states.
The board chair observed that Hawaiian charter schools tend to have a lot in common with charter schools in Puerto Rico but are very different from mainland charter schools in most states. He said that Colorado charter schools are a bit more similar.
I have no idea, because I am not an expert on charter schools in general. But please don’t go assuming that the school I’m associated with is a “scam.” I’ve seen up close and personal that the staff are incredibly dedicated and they offer astonishing opportunities to kids, some of whom really don’t have a whole lot else going for them.
Bah.
What you’re describing is different from charter schools I’m familiar with in North Carolina; some of the ones in this area are run by for-profit education companies, which makes the use of tax dollars seem a bit sketchy to some people. Even though many charter schools seem decent enough, with a strong focus on STEAM or college prep, the for-profit aspect seems to have given all of them a bad name.
Of course, it has the potential to get even worse, with the Supreme Court now weighing in on whether or not charter schools can be religious.
Well… New York City, particularly around Manhattan, might have some notion… even if those 16 acres have been rebuilt.
But the rest of the country? Especially the asshats in MAGAland? No fuckin’ clue.
The sheer idiocy and historical illiteracy of those who think they’re safe because they voted for Trump! SMHS 
While there are some excellent charter schools as you describe the other poster was probably talking about their experience, which may have been negative. In my area there are two types of charter schools. One is highly focused on basic academics, often started/run by minorities, and turns out well-educated students. The other is “Christian” (with apologies to Christians who are NOT members of this stereotype) that emphasizes the Bible and turns out students with shaky grasp of the basics, almost no knowledge of science or recent actual history, but who are loyal Christian soldiers.
Unfortunately, there are enough bad charter schools that they give the good ones a sullied reputation.
I wasn’t aware there was even a question, given how many religion-based charter schools there are in my neck of the woods. Well, maybe on paper they aren’t so much but in practice they certainly are.
That’s exactly what I was about to say. For a large chunk of the US that only really knew about Trump because he’d randomly pop up here and there in the media, I think most of us just assumed he was a rich business guy that’s had a bunch of businesses. We had no reason to dig into his life any more than that. Then when he got into (right wing) politics, we heard all these stories about his failed businesses, while Fox leaned into the ‘most bestest business entrepreneur ever’ thing and they’re just waiting for him to run the government like one of his businesses…which he has, they just don’t realize it.
Also, FWIW, I’m saying this as someone that never saw a single episode of Apprentice, so if that show made any of his business failings more public, I would’ve missed it.
Hell, I’ve known about that asshole since the 80s, before he had a reality TV show. I never watched a single episode of the Apprentice either, mainly because I already knew he was a huckster con artist at that point.
It was out there for people to see if they paid even modest attention outside their bubbles. Which, it is clear most people just don’t.
I am convinced that this is a large part of the reason NYC doesn’t have more Trump supporters.Most people I know who voted for him didn’t vote for him so much as against his opponents - and I never hear about what a good businessman he was. It’s hard to think that when you saw his empty casinos and heard about how he stiffed contractors.