Utopia, you are standing in it!

As most of you would be aware by now US anti-vaccinationist Sherri Tenpenny is heading Down Under to share her evangelical horror – with another anti-vaccinationist, Norma Erickson – at a series of seminars being run by Stephanie Messenger, the author of the despicable children’s book, Melanie’s Marvelous Measles. My original post contains the contact details of the venues we are urging community members to contact. Diluted Thinking also has a startling in-depth investigation of the individuals behind the anti-vaccine seminars.

I wanted to list the media where the story has now been taken up, as well as add a series of screenshots which give a clearer picture as to why there is so much opposition to these childhood infectious disease advocates. The media, so far:

– Pro-vaccine lobby fight to stop US anti-vaccination campaigner Sherri Tenpenny lecturing in Australia – The Daily Telegraph.

– This woman is a danger…

Yet more concerns have come  to light regarding New Zealand’s charter school system.

One of the first five schools, that started up in February 2014, has had huge problems.  Te Kura Hourua ke Whangaruru, a bilingual secondary school for years 9-13, has a dropping school roll, up to a third of students absent on any one day, poor planning, serious internal issues, and fighting and drug problems with students.

A Ministry-appointed facilitator was appointed, working there almost daily for hours at a time, and he stepped back only “after a local Child, Youth and Family manager was seconded to the job of executive principal.” Source

Radio NZ’s Morning Report piece can be listened to here. (approx 5 minutes long)

So far, the school has cost up to 500% what it costs to fund a state school pupil.  Needless to say, principals and teachers at state schools are furious that…

Public education all over the world is under attack from corporate entities that wish to turn our schools into profit-making centres for their own benefit.

On January 9th and 10th 2015, let’s raise our voices together.  Join parents and educators worldwide in this thunderclap to say with One Voice:

NO to the global education reform movement (GERM)

Join the Thunderclap here

Be heard

https://www.facebook.com/BadassTeachersAssociation
https://www.facebook.com/SaveOurSchoolsNZ

The Topic: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Guest: David Dunning

The Episode:Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

A scene from NBC’s “The Office”

This episode is brought to you by Stamps.com – where is the fun in living in the future if you still have to go to the post office? Click on the microphone and enter “smart” for a $110 special offer.

This episode is also brought to you by Lynda, an easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. Try Lynda free for 7 days.

Here’s a fun word to add to your vocabulary: nescience. I ran across it a few months back and kind of fell in love with it.

It’s related to the word prescience, which is a kind of knowing. Prescience is a state of mind, an awareness, that grants you knowledge of the future – about something that has…

Yesterday, Clancy Sigal, of the Guardian, cited my research (with Michael Heaney) on the antiwar movement as evidence that the left has dropped Obama:

Meanwhile, Obama’s contribution to the left has been to weaken it. From the day of his inauguration, antiwar activity in the US collapsed. In a little noticed study last April, a University of Michigan survey, by professors Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas, concluded that the movement evaporated because its mainstay Democrats, lulled by Obama’s “second coming”, withdrew almost in a body. As Heaney said, “the election of Obama appeared to be a demobilising force … even in the face of his pro-war decisions.”

A few thoughts. The antiwar movement, at various points in history, has often occupied a central place in American politics. My own view is that antiwar issues were dominant in the mid-2000s. Most historians would argue that antiwar sentiment was strong…

NPR has run an article on the disappearance of the antiwar movement. A few choice clips:

At least since the stormy 1960s, whenever America has gotten involved in deadly combat on foreign soil, large crowds of peace-promoting citizens have gathered in Washington and other cities to demonstrate against war.

It happened in 2007, when tens of thousands congregated on the National Mall and heard actors Sean Penn, Jane Fonda and Danny Glover speak out against President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. It happened in 1991, when throngs rallied against U.S. involvement in the first Gulf War. And it has happened more than a dozen other times since the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam in 1965.

Now, despite the U.S. military’s concurrent and costly entanglements, the National Mall is quiet and the streets of Washington are pretty much protester-free.

The lack of noise and the…

Fabio

An Organizational Map of the American Antiwar Movement by Skye Bender-deMoll. Click to see it enlarged.

In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I draw your attention to my research on the anti-Iraq war movement conducted with Michael T. Heaney of the Florida Political Science department.

• You can read our two published pieces here and here. The first is an ethnographic piece on framing at Qualitative Sociology and the second is a quantitative study of how partisanship shapes the anti-war movement, forthcoming at American Politics Research. We have more papers in the works.
• Above, you will see an organizational co-membership diagram created by Skye Bender-deMoll, network visualization guru. Nodes are political organizations and two groups are linked if they both contacted one person in common to show up at an anti-war demonstration. Thanks, Skye!
• NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story last week on the anti-war movement…

For the last eleven years, my friend Michael Heaney and I have conducted a longitudinal study of the American antiwar movement. Starting at the 2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York City, we have been interviewing activists, going to their meetings, and observing their direct actions in order to understand the genesis and evolution of social movements.  We’ve produced a detailed account of our research in a new book calledParty in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. If the production process goes as planned, it should be available in February or early March.

In our book, we focused on how the antiwar movement is shaped by its larger political environment. The argument is that the fortunes of the Democratic party affect the antiwar movement’s mobilization. The peak of the movement occured when the Democratic party did not control either the White House…