“The Picture - Salon” plus 1 more |
| Posted: 25 Feb 2010 07:48 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The Picture By David Glenn Cox
I want you to look very closely at this picture and try and keep it in your minds eye. This was a perfectly healthy twenty two-year-old young man who in the service of his country got half of his head blown off. I think that's important, I think that's newsworthy. Let me tell you how newsworthy I think it is. I think that it's more important than chocolate cake recipes and far more important than comic book reviews. It is more important than who fell and whose swell at the winter Olympic games. It is far more important than any self-serving load of crap banged out by Pseudo doctor Amy. It is more important than American Idol or Lost or any other mindless goat droppings the public chooses to chew on. This is some American mother's son, her little boy, he may be gay or straight or transgender but his life is fucked forever. How did this come to happen to this poor mother's son? It came to happen because the people in the media who are supposed to foster a public debate on such public issues as war instead used their franchise to promote articles about chocolate cake and comic book reviews. They see their free press as free to choose not to look when bad thinks happen. They feel no need to explain to his parents or to anyone that the war that blew off half of this poor boys head was based on out and out lies. It was a war perpetrated by people who hoped to gain from it be it in oil or pipelines or service contracts and like the media they don't care that this mother's son is mangled and mutilated. Do you care? I've been married twice for a combined twenty-five years and in that time I doubt my wives ever baked a chocolate cake. I don't read comic books or watch goat crap TV but you see I've got a son about this boy's age. My heart aches and my mind fills with rage because the people that have the power and authority to show this picture would rather talk about American Idol and from where I sit that makes them an accomplice to a war crime. Because not content to ignore the current victims they support more crimes and call for more wars. Several years ago in Iraq parents waited for their children at a bus stop. An errant coalition missile struck the bus stop and blew the elementary school age children to pieces. Needless to say this wasn't widely reported but the parents in a frenzy began fighting over the body parts of their children. Little arms and legs, little headless torsos identifiable only by the shirt or dress they were wearing. Imagine the horror, imagine the type of people who could do such a thing. How do they live with themselves? How do they sleep at night? They do it by watching Lost and American Idol and by eating chocolate cake. They read comic books and watch sports. It makes life easy because the media will not intrude on their fantasy world but instead will promote the fantasy. Oh, but who won the gold metal in curling and who was eliminated on American Idol. Iraq war Coalition Deaths 4,696 Injured 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and injured, 1,366,650 Afghanistan coalition Deaths 1,659 American taxpayers bill as of today $964,044,305,874 Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Montreal Mom Launches Website to Get Kids Reading - Market Wire Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:54 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwire - Feb. 25, 2010) - Twelve months ago, Montreal mom Michelle Skamene was unhappy about the fact that her two boys, then aged 8 and 9, spent very little time reading. Video games and computers were too much competition for their books. She and her husband, Emmanuel Greciet, decided to put a system in place whereby their kids had to earn TV or game console time by reading: 1 minute TV time for every minute of reading. An IT consultant working in field of website design, Mrs. Skamene set up a program for them to log their reading and TV time to help everyone keep track. When friends asked if they could use it for their own children, Mrs. Skamene expanded the website to allow parents to set up their own rewards for their kids, and included a number of mini-games and features that the children could activate by reading and reading alone. The kids loved it, and it worked! They are no longer the reluctant readers they once were. "The thing is to get them started. We just needed that little extra motivation to get the ball rolling, and turning their TV time into a reward was the key. Once they made reading a regular part of their routine, and found books they liked, the incentives, really, were no longer necessary." says Mrs. Skamene, who also created a page to help kids choose the right books. The basic concept is simple. Children log on to the site, and add information about their reading (what, when and how long for). An interface with Amazon.com's databases makes this easy. Email notifications get sent to their parents, who must validate the entries via a simple click. This allows the children to earn points ("RR Miles"), which they can redeem for fun and sometimes-silly things on the site. Children also connect to their friends, thus being able to share valuable information about their reading. When they read, they can also play mini-games together in a Fun and Games section. All of this actually makes reading 'cool', and has been a great reading incentive in pilot groups so far. Access to the site had been restricted, but it is now finally open to the public. Teachers can also join and set up groups, targets and rewards for their classes. When kids join the group, they all share centralized book lists, book reviews and reading logs. A great reading incentive in the classroom! The result? A fun, safe, and free social network for kids built around reading and encouraging reading that also features tools for teachers and librarians. A Montreal-based site, it is available in both English and French. Additional information can be found by visiting Reading Rewards at www.reading-rewards.com (or www.ptits-bouquineurs.com in French) Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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