An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study concludes that using computers in the classroom hurts student performance instead of improving it. I wish I heard more from conservatives about things like this -- after all, wouldn't they be the ones preferring classics to moderns, novels to television, and Tennyson to Twitter? Then again, I don't hear much from conservatives at all these days -- and I hear more than enough from the reactionaries who claim to be conservative, who seem down for whatever makes their corporate paymasters more money, which computerized classrooms certainly do.
Michelle Goldberg asks if child protective services have "gone too far" -- a question the "liberal" media seems more eager to ask, Ms. Goldberg notes, now that relatively affluent white folks (not just working poor minority folks) are getting caught up in CPS webs. It may seem ironic that, as we've allowed governments to abandon responsibility for keeping the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, that we've gone mad over keeping children supervised at all times -- ironic, that is, until you remember that Tha Bush Mobb couldn't save New Orleans from drowning but could wiretap your phones.
Alec MacGillis at ProPublica describes how over 200 Indiana miners and families "with no direct connection to Patriot Coal" somehow lost their retirement health care benefits as a result of the Patriot Coal bankruptcy in 2013. Their employer passed on the responsibility for their health care years ago to a subsidiary that may well have been "set up to fail." This is why we shouldn't let corporations own other corporations, and it's also why we shouldn't let the bankster economy rule our lives.
Beenish Ahmed at Think Progress wonders if abandoned European villages could help house the world's refugees. Villages are dying out all over the continent, after all -- a lot of hamlets sell so cheaply that you or I could almost buy one -- and an influx of refugees could boost flagging economies. But you would hope European corporations wouldn't take advantage of these refugees and pay them in dung pellets, because that would be cruel (and, as it happens, doing so wouldn't stimulate local economies very much, either).
Finally, FAIR catches a Washington Post writer "analyzing" Bernie Sanders's platform. Read the whole thing and digest all the ignorance, scare numbers and the unspoken hypocrisy of the Sanders haters, but note well also: "government control" is your control, because this is your government, regardless of who's President or which party controls Congress. Why do I have this nagging feeling that you acting like your government belongs to you is what the "liberal" media really fears?
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