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The Eight-Year Jersey City Crossing Guard Who Lost His Heart

I do a lot of walking in New York City and Jersey City.  There’s one particular corner in Jersey City that always strikes fear deep in my heart and stabs me down betwixt my toes with absolute pity and terror:  The “crosswalk” — angularly located at the bisection of Nardone Place and John F. Kennedy Boulevard West — spans five lanes of traffic, at least six turning car angles aiming straight at you, and a long walk that means you actually must run as fast as you can to make it safely across the street.

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Why We Must Always Be Learning: New Media Methods and Social Aestheticism

It is important we are always learning and always keeping our minds keen and inquisitive.  There are some evil efforts among us to dumb us down, to keep us complacent, and to make sure we cease to question authority and just place our blind belief in certain people to lead us.

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Three Strikes and You’re Out as a Bad Parent

There are three pernicious events that have been reported on the news this Summer that convinces me that the “entitlement generation” have now moved into the misnomer realm of parenting.

No rules apply to them or their children!  They do as they please when they please!  Their wish is our every command!

Here are the Top Three indicators — from this Summer alone! — that you might just be a Bad Parent… and if you happen to tumble into all three… then please give up on your lack of parenting skills and turn your kids over to someone who more rightly knows how to care for them within the terms and conditions of the rest of us.

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Mugshots at the Doctor’s Office and Other Biometric Poisonings

The NSA scandal has me thinking a lot about how other PRISM identifying marks of us — on the biometric side — are, in fact, also poisoning our privacy.  Here’s a comment I made in a recent article thread concerning the loss of our biologic privacy:

Yes, we’re all stuck! The fact that they now want our weight is a new metric. Our height rarely changes, so once they have that number they have us in adulthood — but weight can fluctuate like crazy for some people — so having our weight “re-evaluated” and remarked down with every medical visit is an important identification portrait for them. All of our doctors now scan our insurance card and also take a photo of us — to prevent medical fraud — uhm…. riiiiight… so our MDs now have our mug shots, height, weight… quite a lovely new arm of the NSA, eh? Some doctors even want palm scans!

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Petting the Mainstream Middling Mind: An Indictment Against Standardized Testing

I have never been a fan of standardized testing in schools.  There’s too big a variable at play — missing the wild mind — and these tests praise and condone only the middle.  If you don’t do well on these tests, you are not moved forward or thought of as a significant thinker.  The system doesn’t mind if your wild view of the world matters.  The only thing the test givers care about is finding, and approving, the mainstream, middling, mind to guarantee, and impress, conformity.

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The Need for Recess

When I was young my mother told me that as children, our minds were like sponges and that we could absorb much knowledge that our teachers gave over to us. An important thing that I would like to add to that, however, is that the transfer of information from teacher to student cannot be the only thing that happens from the time the student arrives in school until they go home for the day. Recess, it turns out, is an extremely important part of the children’s day.

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Tracking Students with RFID

When I was in school, there were no metal detectors greeting us at the door nor armed police — and children were in their classrooms at the expected times. Those that were not got detention and eventually were suspended from school. We knew that in order to get an education our rears needed to be in our seats, attention on the teacher.

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