Single most useful thing Trump could do next week or so is take a few shots at Jill Stein.
Pick a fight, do the media magnet thing, and then have her bask in the reflected attention, all over TV and the internet branding herself as The Progressive Alternative to Trump, promising all the sort of stuff Bernie did but Hillary won’t.
Interesting article, but I say that coming in knowing the context. If you didn’t, I suspect the fact that a famously liberal American city is in 2016 proudly trying to maintain designated schools for black students seems a little underexplained.
Okay. So in the 1960s Portland moved to desegregate its schools. Like other cities, it attempted to create rough parity among schools’ racial makeup despite huge residential segregation by busing students to schools far from their home neighborhoods. Like other cities, there was serious resistance from parents and the program proved politically unsustainable, collapsing by the late ‘70s.
So far so America, but the novel thing here is it was the black parents taking the lead in resisting bussing and returning to neighborhood schools.
For one, with the black population representing a sliver of the district’s total (a resource extraction economy isolated from Dixie, with a white nationalist “free soil/free labor” heritage, Portland missed out on the manufacturing-driven Great Migration and remains the whitest major city in the US) and concentrated in the redlined Albina neighborhood, their children were disproportionately the ones being dragged on hourlong commutes across town.
For another, well, integration proved unsatisfying. After years of seeing their children spread so thinly they represented a critical mass nowhere, under a district making a point of giving them the same education it gave white students, the black community began to appreciate the virtues of black schools embedded in black neighborhoods under the influence of black parents where black teachers-cum-role-models taught students amid an atmosphere of proud and enthusiastic blackness.
(Similar desires on behalf of black Brooklynites turned into a huge shitshow a decade earlier in New York - after attempts to set up schools under autonomous black neighborhood control, the United Federation of Teachers went on a devastating and successful months-long strike in defense of the prerogatives of its (heavily Jewish) membership, shattering the city’s black-Jewish-labor social democratic coalition just in time for the ‘70s debt crisis and ultimately spurring the development of neoconservatism.)
So, a bit over a decade after black Portland’s leadership pushed for school integration under the NAACP, it ended up pushing black schools for black kids, this time under the Black United Front. A great example of the contemporary turn in black activism from equal rights and civic inclusion to black pride and nationalism, tbh.
And as far as I can tell people seemed more or less satisfied with the outcome and no one particularly wanted to tear the system down and it’s continued like that since, and now you know.
@randomdaisy dear herbologist what the fok is this corn dog plant
OH MY GOODNESS I SAW THIS ON TWITTER AND I WAS LIKE “OH NO…. DUDE… DUDE NO”
this plant is, in fact, a cattail (Typha genus, probably either Typha latifolia or Typha angustifolia). what’s ironic about this person’s encounter is that almost every single part of the cattail is edible– the rhizomes are starchy and, although tough, can be made into a nutritious flour; the stems can be peeled and used like asparagus; the pollen can be gathered and used to extend or supplement flour; and even the green flower spikes can be boiled and eaten like corn-on-the-cob, so this person sort of had the right idea.
the thing is, what this person has in their photo is a BROWN flower spike, meaning that it’s starting to go to seed and is probably a tasteless mouthful of either fiber or fluff. regardless of whether the post is a joke or serious, out of all the edible parts of the cattail, op managed to pick one of the ONLY parts of the plant that isn’t. and i still can’t get over that.
As a side note, rubbing that part of the plant makes an absolutely ridiculous amount of fluff come out (which is how it disperses the seeds). I highly recommend it but it’s probably best to do that when no one else is around
are you saying i can jack off this plant and it will nut
The real effect of Twitter on journalism is – well, the “spare-time bullshit, take as peer group, social-climb, brown-nose for career advancement” relationship journalists used to have with their sources? Now instead they have it with each other.
