The truth of the matter is that use of vouchers is yet another blow against our urban schools, precisely the ones that need the most help. It is another vote against the city, against a sustainable lifestyle based on dense living patterns. (I’m not even going to touch the church-state issue.) In the same manner that a laissez-faire value system does not work for corporate accounting practices (a la WorldCom, Enron, Rite Aid, etc.), it will not work for America’s public education system. (NYT; user name: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

As citizens, we need to think long-term and be willing to allocate the tax revenue necessary to create an egalitarian and superior (by world standards) public education system serving every American youth. Oh, wait, but that would create a meritocracy…we don’t want that, do we?

A few quotes from people against the Treaty:

Republican Jesse Helms: "It is a terrible treaty negotiated by radical feminists with the intent of enshrining their radical antifamily agenda into international law." Radical, man, radical. Drat those radical feminists!

Lester Munson, spokesman for minority Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Why are we wasting our time supporting an institution that is so obviously irrelevant, when we have real foreign policy concerns to address?" Wow.

We have been re-thinking the Gatherings, and are trying to design a better way to implement them that is not as top-down as the current structure. Thanks for all your input and suggestions. We will most likely have this worked out by early July, so stay tuned!

… Human beings did not suddenly become materialistic. We have always been desirous of things. We have just not had many of them until quite recently.

By adding value to material, by adding meaning to objects, by branding things, advertising performs a role historically associated with religion. … If we craved objects and knew what they meant, there would be no need to add meaning through advertising. We would gather, use, toss out, or hoard based on some inner sense of value. But we don’t. We don’t know what to gather…

—Adapted from James B. Twitchell, For Shame

...interesting...and good. Also...

...interesting...and bad.

Now that graduate school is complete, and over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll be making some long-overdue refinements to the website. We hope you enjoy them, and we hope they make our lives a little more manageable. Remember, we’re not web people here—the internet (small “i,” I insist) is not anywhere near the center of our focus or interest. We simply use it because it’s a good medium.

It’s sometimes hard to keep up with people who spend all day on the internet, because we don’t. We’ll sure try to keep our comments interesting and thoughtful, however we can’t assure you our thoughts will always be nice. We reserve the right to be didactic, and you should too. You can trust that we’ll never lose our desire or ability to think critically (and cynically) about this beautiful, nonsensical world. Unfortunately, we can’t promise that we’ll always be able to link to our observations.