Tag Archives: Arrested development

Podcast — Love and Order

Love and Order

Related:

Music:  The Jonas Brothers, “Sucker”
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A landmark study

Stress in low-income families can affect children’s learning

I am very excited about this.

This is, as far as I know, the first study to attempt to measure the degree of chaos in the home.

The researchers in an earlier-mentioned study (Related:  Poor children have smaller brains) speculated that “poor families tend to live more chaotic lives, and that stress could inhibit healthy brain development.”  The current study seems to indicate that it is directly so.

As of this writing, my hypothesis has become as follows:  the chaos of a growing child’s environment causes comparatively more resources to be devoted to the limbic system and less to the cerebral cortex, resulting in a body with reduced capacity to learn.

Related:  A MUST-READ CONCERNING JUSTICE AND POVERTY
Related: Chaos overwhelms the poor
Related: Wisdom teaching in poor black homes

(Originally posted 2015-07-08; reblogged 10/13/16.)

Where trees thrive, people thrive

This thinking goes back to 1973.

I was a senior in high school, running an errand in the family car.  I must have been listening to WKSU.  This 5- or 15-minute segment came on.  A female spokesperson for the ACLU said that, under the compulsory school attendance law, a minor can only be in one of two places: a school, or a penal facility.  In her view there was no real difference.

I was an honors student and deeply convicted that education is the answer to poverty.  Thus her remarks left me incensed.  More than that, whereas I’ve never been a conservative, it seemed to me that the ACLU and other, like-minded movements were bent on destroying all order in society.  The family unit was under attack.  Marriage was under attack.  The schools were under attack.  Change for its own sake, which seemed to be what these people were after, isn’t good.  Nothing can be built on a foundation of chaos.  A child needs to root oneself in earth that will be in the same place today as tomorrow.  A tree can’t grow in quicksand.

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The self-loving reptile

This post has been a long time coming.

Many people in my world are fundamentally reptilian.

This largely accounts for their social marginalization.

The question is how to, for want of a better word, humanize them.

ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.

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Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy

This is the first of three posts about entitlement:
Today – “Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy”
07/19 – “How I became homeless”
07/26 – “When needs are met”

Let’s get rid of (the term) entitlements

“In 2012, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone represented 44 percent of spending; all entitlement programs were 63 percent. But it’s hard to control entitlement programs because their constituencies are so large.”

It makes sense to me that, as Samuelson proposes, we should discard the term “entitlements” as naming portions of the federal budget that are untouchable. No program should be sacrosanct.
Continue reading Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy