FEMA Follies

 My friend Susan posted:   "News broke yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had advised federal emergency workers to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, because of concerns about their safety after Trump and MAGA Republicans spread the false rumor that federal agents are forcing people off their land to start lithium mining projects. The alert came after the U.S. Forest Service sent an email to federal responders saying that National Guard troops had encountered armed militia saying they were “hunting FEMA.” FEMA officials will no longer go door-to-door with disaster assistance, but instead will stay in fixed locations." Heather Cox Richardson

I commented:   In a recent call to a radio program, a caller revealed that he and his wife were deeply worried about his father-in-law. They did not live in Florida and so could not help him. His home had been severely damaged by the hurricane, he had no power, and he was going hungry. When they told him to get aid from FEMA, he informed them that FEMA was trying to give him money, but he refused  to take it because he had heard on right wing media that if you take aid from FEMA they will steal your home

The caller concluded that this is a cult in action.

The Dumbing Of College

I really hate to contradict myself, even an earlier self, but I must admit that the prevalence of screens in the lives of younger generations has had a disturbing impact on the ability to read effectively. Of course, a huge portion of the culpability is a direct result of the inanity of no child left behind and other educational atrocities we have inflicted upon our children.

Competition for scores makes no sense in the collegial and highly social setting of education. It's as if we told doctors that we would pay them according to how many of their patients recovered (or survive,) so that they would hide the secrets to their success in order to can earn more money by letting the patients of their competitors die.

I can give my 40 year younger self a pat on the back for having recognized the stupidity of competitive based education and standardized testing abused as a measure of teacher and school effectiveness; which greatly contributed to the inability of our younger generations to read it understand lengthy and complex texts.

Still, I think screens are playing a part in all of this.  

>Educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core "emphasized informational texts and standardized tests for over two decades," said The Atlantic. As a result, teachers shifted from reading books to short passages, "mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests." Shifting toward truncated reading was meant to help train kids to better synthesize information from texts, Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, said to the outlet. But in doing so, we’ve "sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long-form texts in general."<

https://theweek.com/education/college-students-read-books