NATIONAL SECURITY

WE NEED HAM RADIO OPERATORS

#EdTech ALERT #STEAM INTERDISCIPLINARY CURRICULUM TOTAL #FAIL

EXPLAIN WHY K12 HIGH SCHOOLS DO NOT  HAVE #HAMRADIOS AND OPERATORS IN TO HELP WITH #SECURITY AND HURRICANE #FLORENCE FOR THEIR COMMUNITY RIGHT NOW!!

#STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math
#STEAM: Science, Technology, English, Arts, Math

THIS IS THE PERFECTLY INTEGRATED #STEAM SCHOOL PROJECT!
#Civics #edtech #edchat #edtechchat #HamRadio #science #math #code

OfficeofEdTech #EmergencyCommunication #SECURITY
The Office of Educational Technology (OET) provides leadership for maximizing technology's contribution to improving education at all levels.

State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA)

EVERY K12 DISTRICT TECHNOLOGY COORDINATOR SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO BE A LICENSED HAM RADIO OPERATOR TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR EMPLOYMENT IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT.

K12 District Educational Technologists Are Our Civil Defense front line of our Community

GO LOW TECH IT ALWAYS WORKS IN A DISASTER ! ! !

EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN MORSE CODE

NEED TO  TEACH STUDENTS MORSE CODE AND HOW TO OPERATE A HAM RADIO IN EVERY HIGH SCHOOL IN THE US, PUERTO RICO, AND AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS AS THE FIRST LINE OF CIVIL DEFENSE FOR AMERICA.

Every State should mandate that each K12 Educational Technologist they employ be required to Know Morse Code and prove they have their Ham Radio License.

HAM RADIO FORUMS

Why doesn't every K12 School District and High School have a ham radio and operator?

WIFI Wireless Wide Area Networks for School Districts FAQ

What Is Ham Radio?

Garden School ham radio club connects loved ones in storm-battered Puerto Rico
Ham radios do not require use of a power grid and can run off a small generator. Garden’s Amateur Radio Club has teamed up with Amateur Radio Emergency Services to help relay messages to and from locations on the stricken islands that have lost power and cell phone service.

American Red Cross Asks ARRL’s Assistance with Puerto Rico Relief Effort

Find an Amateur Radio License Exam in Your Area

PUERTO RICO REPEATERS: Oscar Resto works with another volunteer to pass along information at the Red Cross headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico. "I have the responsibility to establish the required emergency communications that the American Red Cross needed for understanding the needs of the citizens impacted by the hurricane," said Resto, a section manager for the American Radio Relay League, which boasts 160,000 members. Two ham volunteers, Raul Gonzalez and Jose Santiago, set up a radio control hub run by generator power in Monacillo, near San Juan, and other centers quickly followed suit. There, ham operators work shoulder to shoulder with public safety and utility officials to transmit information to other ham operators working with teams in the field.

Amateur Radio Callsign Lookups Database

Port of SAN JUAN (PR SJU) details - Departures, Expected Arrivals and Port Calls | AIS Marine Traffic

Drupal - Puerto Rico Recovery is increasingly urgent - can you help in mobilizing the virtual/real communities?

94% of School Districts Have High-Speed Broadband
Verizon to pay $17.7 million to resolve school broadband probe

The 4 C's needed for success in college, career and life.

Communication, Collaboration, Critical thinking, and Creativity

Google finds STEM skills aren’t the most important skills By Lou Glazer Michigan Future Inc. January 5, 2018
This, of course, is consistent with the findings of the employer-led Partnership for 21st Century Learning who describe the foundation skills for worker success as the 4Cs: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. And the book Becoming Brilliant which adds to those four content and confidence for the 6Cs. And consistent with the work on the value of a liberal arts degree of journalist George Anders laid out in his book You Can Do Anything and in a Forbes article entitled That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.

EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN MORSE CODE

GUN LAWS:

@JRehling #TXSenateDebate
Ted Cruz said that school shootings take place because we removed "God from the public square." Texas is 93% Christian and has a fatal school shooting every year. Japan is 2% Christian and has never had a school shooting. Worst theory ever.

David Hogg We got the highest youth voter turnout of any midterm in American history in 2018 Then we got the highest youth voter turnout ever in American history in 2020 Now we turnout again, combat youth voter suppression, hold politicians accountable and start running for office in 22.

WHAT IS YOUR K12 SCHOOL ACTIVE SHOOTER PLAN?

OASC Guidelines: Active Shooter and Kidnapping Response Tips PRINT

U.S. private-sector organizations that operate in a variety of environments and face active shooter and/or kidnapping threats may find these tips useful.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) PDF

Provides products, tools, and resources to help you respond to an active shooter incident. To contact the active shooter preparedness team for Active Shooter Preparedness Workshops email ASworkshop@hq.dhs.gov

The Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education studied every American school shooting from 1974 to 2000 and found 37 separate attacks  63 page report in 2009

2018 Gun deaths in US rise to highest level in 20 years, data shows': Forty thousand people were killed in shootings last year amid a growing number of suicides involving firearms, CDC reveals. The CDC’s Wonder database shows that in 2017, 39,773 people in the US lost their lives at the point of a gun, marking the onward march of firearm fatalities in a country renowned for its lax approach to gun controls. When adjusted for age fluctuations, that represents a total of 12 deaths per 100,000 people – up from 10.1 in 2010 and the highest rate since 1996. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-deaths-levels-cdc-2017

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Underlying Cause of Death 1999-2017 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released December, 2018. Data are from the Multiple Cause of Death Files, 1999-2017, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html on Dec 19, 2018 9:33:29 AM

"Understanding school violence is the first step to finding effective prevention strategies." ~ Dr. Nadine Connell, associate professor of criminology in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, at The University of Texas at Dallas said the National Institute of Justice project aims to fill a need for reliable data on gun violence on school campuses.Connell is creating a database that tracks shootings at K-12 schools in the United States going back to 1990.

David Hogg @davidhogg111  Student Activist
Inside the Teen Movement That’s Changing the Conversation About Guns

Folklife Projects - K12 Student Walkouts Protesting Gun Control Law
Hashtags #calloutlawmakers #neveragain @davidhoagg111 #BanBumpStocks

- David Hogg recounts the horrifying shooting that killed 17 of his classmates and teachers.
Florida School Shooting survivor. Hogg and many of his classmates have been outspoken about the need for stricter gun laws since they witnessed the massacre that killed 17 students and staff members at their Florida high school. Hogg's experience is similar to what happened after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 dead -- most of them young children. http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/599770/

@SenBlumenthal  9/7/18 asked Aalayah Eastmond, a Parkland survivor, what she would say to Judge Kavanaugh in response to his opinion that assault weapons can’t be banned under the 2nd Amendment. This was her answer.  Thank you Aalayah.

How about we let kids get a good night's sleep?

#RECESS We’ve already known for years that the loosely defined parameters of playtime allow children to explore teamwork, competition, rule formulation, and conflict resolution, all developmental building blocks that help them to grow into healthy and functional members of society.

HOW  DARK MONEY FROM CITIZENS UNITED PROTECTS THE NRA

Since Citizens United, over $800 million in “dark money” has poured into federal elections.
Donald Trump was with Chris Cox (L), Executive Director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action and Wayne LaPierre (R), Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, were at the National Rifle Association's NRA-ILA Leadership Forum during the NRA Convention at the Kentucky Exposition Center on May 20, 2016 in Louisville, Kentucky.

The source of these funds is largely untraceable for the public because it has been funneled through secretive nonprofits, such as the NRA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The FBI is investigating the National Rifle Association to determine whether Russians illegally funneled money through the organization to help the Trump campaign. Foreigners are not allowed to spend in American elections — not in presidential races, not for state or city officials, not for dog catcher. But a nonprofit playing this dark money shell game could easily hide an illegal foreign source of money as just another anonymous donor and that would be akin to money laundering.

THE NRA

The NRA is among the largest "dark money" organizations, reporting the greatest amount of campaign spending without revealing the source of the funds — over $35 million in the 2016 election cycle alone. Still, this amount was just a fraction of the over $175 million in reported campaign-related spending that came from unknown sources. NRA spent $30 million on Trump, now did every one of their 5000 members pony up $6000.00?

The National Rifle Association continues to wield immense influence over American legislators, primarily through enormous campaign contributions. When it comes to funding, the NRA may have finally gone too far: the FBI recently launched an investigation to determine whether a Russian central banker, and Putin ally, illegally funneled money through the organization to help the Trump campaign. These allegations have prompted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission and an effort by Sen. Ron Wyden to obtain documents from the Treasury Department and the NRA. 

Sen. Ron Wyden is requesting further information from the @NRA after the organization admitted to accepting foreign contributions. 

HOW GOOGLE HELPS DARK MONEY AND THE NRA WITH THEIR SEARCH ADS

THE NATIONAL NARRATIVE VS. FACTS FOUND ON GOOGLE

Advertising Money gets spent on propaganda disguised as "balancing information", it isn't accurate information, but is used to keep that REAL INFORMATION out of view.

We know from lawsuits that people will pay much more to put an advertisement on a page where the user has just searched for their competitor, it is fairly intuitive that this would be the case, the upstart just wants a shot at convincing you they have a better product, the incumbent wants to be sure you never learn that there is an alternative choice.

We also know that rounded to the nearest billion, none of Alphabet's businesses make money except search advertising. It isn't a stretch to guess that the tension to take the money might be overwhelming other forces inside of Google.

[1] The average price per click (CPC) of advertisements on Google sites has gone down for every year, and nearly every quarter, since 2009. At the same time Microsoft's Bing search engine CPCs have gone up. As the advantage of Google's search index is eroded by time and investment, primarily by Microsoft, advertisers have been shifting budget to be more of a blend between the two companies. The trend suggests that at some point in the not to distant future advertising margins for both engines will be equivalent.

SEARCH RESULTS AS PROPAGANDA

The Devil Baby 1910 

Fake News on TV 1982

ART AS PROPAGANDA

WHAT IS ART?
Jacques Ellul observes When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom. -Marshall McLuhan

1995 Modern #art was #CIA #'weapon' unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning got used in cultural Cold War 

Political Control - Video "Oh Dear" by Adam Curtis Import ideas from conceptual #art into the heart of politics Power Strategy -- just keep them all confused .... 

Book Review America's Secret Weapon
Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of #Arts and Letters Video

WARNING Salon.com will crash your computer. You’re watching Pentagon propaganda: “American Idol,” “Ice Road Truckers” and the truth about your favorite shows.

Jazz is the Secret Weapon was not Fake
NewsUS has sonic secret weapon - jazz (NYTimes, November 6, 1955) "America's secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key" or better "European approach to jazz as seen by Americans". In 1955 NY Times US has sonic secret #weapon - #jazz  a blue note in a minor key" or better "European approach to jazz as seen by Americans".

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PROTECT DEMOCRACY

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”

#SocialJustice

Protect Yourself: Search online anonymously use a search engine that doesn't track you! DuckDuckgo.com

Find Your Unknown Culture Maker / Community Scholar

The Two Codes Your Kids Need to Know. The College Board came up with a surprising conclusion about keys to success for college and life which are learn to code, and learn the constitution.

LINK TO YOUR VIDEO PROJECTS

In 2019 We mark the 243nd year of our great Nation’s birth, let us remember the words of our 1st President, George Washington:  "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions." Hear voices say the Declaration of Independence while you read along.

Of Politics and Survival:

America is not a person. A President is not a King or Queen. A President is not the State. A President is not God or Ordained by God. A President can and will be subjugated to the will of others. "I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service." --Scott Pruitt, in resignation letter to Trump. This sounds like he's addressing Henry VIII, a king who is also head of the church. America will consume itself in political squabbles. You can tell a story about  out of control greed, power, and money.

TRACK THE GOVERNMENT BILLS THAT EFFECT YOUR LIFE 

KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON: Just a bunch of kids, right? What do they know?

Age in 1776: 

• Marquis de Lafayette, 18
• James Monroe, 18
• Henry Lee III, 20
• Aaron Burr, 20
• Nathan Hale, 21
• Alexander Hamilton, 21

1/25/17 The U.S. Was Just Downgraded from a 'Full' to 'Flawed Democracy

'While U.S. citizens could once claim to be part of the 9% of people in the world governed by a “full democracy,” they’re now part of the nearly 45% who live in a “flawed democracy.” That downgrade is based on an analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit. 

NORTH CAROLINA IS NO LONGER CLASSIFIED AS A DEMOCRACY
12.31.17 By ANDREW REYNOLDS

In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth – Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan and Yemen, among others – my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.

In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy — Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project — all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy.

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

First, legislative power does not depend on the votes of the people. One party wins just half the votes but 100 percent of the power. The GOP has a huge legislative majority giving it absolute veto-proof control with that tiny advantage in the popular vote. The other party wins just a handful of votes less and 0 percent of the legislative power. This is above and beyond the way in which state legislators are detached from democratic accountability as a result of the rigged district boundaries. They are beholden to their party bosses, not the voters. Seventy-six of the 170 (45 percent) incumbent state legislators were not even opposed by the other party in the general election.

Second, democracies do not limit their citizens’ rights on the basis of their born identities. However, this is exactly what the North Carolina legislature did through House Bill 2 (there are an estimated 38,000 transgender Tar Heels), targeted attempts to reduce African-American and Latino access to the vote and pernicious laws to constrain the ability of women to act as autonomous citizens. [snip]

Americans are Vulnerable to Despotism. 

2018 Betsy Devos met with the Michigan State University president days before her department rolled back Title IX regulations and her family have donated to MSU in the past. We’re requesting documents clarifying her relationship to the school.

Dewey tells us unequivocally in School and Society, that the reliance on listening “tells the story of the traditional education”. He repeats this indictment in Democracy and Education:

“Almost everything” about the traditional education, he states there, “testifies to the great premium put upon listening (and) reading . . . It is hardly possible to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of active contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground . . .” ; the fundamental distinction between traditional and progressive education lies may be said to lie in the latter's attempt to recreate the communicative conditions of homes, playgrounds and workplaces.

As one-way, straight-line communications leaves no room for response, listeners habituated to them remain passive and lax, irresponsible, thoughtless, fickle, emotionally susceptible, shortsighted, amusement-seeking, and shiftless, imbued neither with courage or energy to speak nor intellectual power to say anything worth listening to. 

2016 $100 billion for K–12 education. 
The new money was to be spent over a two-year period, with some of it devoted to compensatory education or special education, the rest to district priorities. Federal aid to K–12 and preschool education jumped from $39 billion in 2008 to a high of $73 billion in fiscal year 2010 (0.49 percent of GDP). The following year, $66 billion in federal funding continued to flow. Much of the aid targeted urban districts with heavy concentrations of low-income and special-education populations. For two years, local school districts enjoyed a generous flow of federal cash.

The Role that Folklore Plays Against Fascism

American Mythologies: Creating, Recreating, and Resisting National Narratives.

Myths and narratives are constructed, reconstructed, and resisted not only through written texts but in every form of media and within every kind of community. America has been and still is consistently defined and constituted through national myths and narratives.

Mountaineers

PROPAGANDA / MIND CONTROL

'Classic Propaganda': Sinclair Broadcasting
Pushes Aside Fox News to Become 'Trump TV' “It’s unheard of to have one company pushing one specific agenda reaching so many people and doing it in a way designed to evade local input”  by Common Dreams staff. 
David D. Smith built Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. into the largest owner of television stations in the U.S. after taking over his father's television company (with his brothers) in the late 1980's. With David as president and CEO, the Sinclair Broadcast Group blossomed to 59 stations in less than a decade. By 2014, that number had nearly tripled to 162.

Sinclair - Youtube video This Is What Mind Control Looks Like

The erosion of gravitas matters for the erosion of the office of president around the world.

Kushner: We struck deal with Sinclair 
With a combined total audience of over 2.1 million prime time viewers, Fox News has had an incredible impact on the country’s political discourse. They’ve presented misinformation and glorified propaganda to households across the country, which in turn has affected how people behave when they vote. Fox News has gaslit the American people for over two decades, with disastrous results.

Fox News’ European outlet was coordinating with Putin’s propaganda machine to push pro-Russia content. They just ended their agreement after this news broke. Fox News’ ties to the Kremlin keep getting deeper.

APRIL 20 2018 Fox News Finally Realizes It's Not Cool to Follow Russian Propaganda Guidelines  
The international edition of Fox News airing in Latvia was translated according to Russian censorship guidelines,​​ Latvia's public broadcaster ​reported Wednesday. Fox issued a ​statement ​on Friday that it will discontinue the practice.​ As it turned out, Fox News content was indeed "softened" in accordance with Russian government censorship. Commentary critical of the Russia's administration or military, as well as any overt conversation about homosexuality, had to be expurgated. The cleaned-up version also went soft on prurient topics like drugs, sex, death, and political extremism.

Fox News Actual research shows their viewers to be the most misinformed and least knowledgeable group of television viewers. 

Nazi's in Charlotte VA 2017 Learn to Spot the Secret Signals of Far-Right Fashion

Skinhead style has fragmented into a set of subtle subcultures."I think it’s a way of blending in, of evading notice, of not being as obvious.”

A new sociology book explores how the style of right-wing youth subcultures has evolved in Europe and what's come to replace the racist skinhead.

Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you'll remember. By Amy Siskind Jan 13 2018

Innumerable shocking and important developments, including:

         • 9/19/17 Facebook Won’t Reveal if Russia Targeted You During the Election 
         • 10/23/17 A Suspected Network Of 13,000 Twitter Bots Pumped Out Pro-Brexit Messages In The Run-Up To The EU Vote
         • 10/23/17 Twitter investigation initiated by Former Louisiana Attorney General: Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC Investigates the Officers and Directors of Twitter, Inc. 11/29/17 
         • 11/29/17 @mattblaze will be testifying before House Government Reform https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/cybersecurity-voting-machines/ on "Cybersecurity of Voting Machines"
         • 12/21/2017 Unauthorized Review of Private, Privileged Materials by the Special Counsel’s Office 
         • 1/7/2018 Roughly 10 Percent of Amazon's Ohio Workforce on Food Stamps
         • A new tax law passed that will enrich the 1% and put the US in more debt. Paul Ryan Collected $500,000 In Koch Contributions Days After House Passed Tax Law which is peanuts compared with what the Koch brothers will save. Americans have faced “aggressive rent hikes, fee gouging & high rates of eviction” as Wall St has been buying up rental housing.
         • 1/20/18 Congress shut down the federal government! 
         •  Palm Beach Post - Donald Trump’s multi-decade tax scam to intentionally hide material information about the Mar-a-Lago Club from the IRS in an illegal multi-million dollar tax shelter scheme.
         • The US Department of Justice recommends that every company create a vulnerability disclosure policy
         • Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, negotiated a secret $130,000 payment to payoff an adult-film star Stormy Daniel whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. for her silence days before the 2016 presidential election.
         • Senator Dianne Feinstein released 300 pages of Fusion GPS testimony on the Steele dossier, days after her Republican colleagues had unilaterally issued the committee’s first criminal referral to the FBI, implicating Steele. 
         • Proposed changes to Medicaid, exempting Florida from offshore drilling, and waiving fines for five megabanks, including Deutsche Bank — all of which, in a week of sheer bedlam, got little or no attention. Deutsche Bank flagged “suspicious transactions” concerning Jared Kushner’s family accounts. The bank said it’s willing to turn information over to Mueller.
         • Trump’s “sXXXhole” countries statement prompted worldwide condemnation and questions of whether he is eroding US moral authority — while concerns about his fitness for office continued to swirl.
        • WAPO reported that Trump has made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims in his first 355 days in office — on average, 5.6 claims per day.
        • The Twitter account for the House Committee on Natural Resources attacked outdoor apparel company Patagonia in a tweet with a graphic referring to the company as “lying” and “hiding.”
        • Contradicting Trump regime talking points, Sebastian Gorka said he was told to cooperate with Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff, but said after meeting him in Reince Priebus’s office he got a bad feeling and did not. Steve Bannon was set to meet with Wolff after him. 
       • Bannon apologized for his role in Wolff’s book in a statement given to Axios — expressing “regret” to Trump, praising Donald Jr., and adding, “There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch hunt.”
        • Axios reported according to a copy of his real schedule, Trump’s time in the Oval Office has shrunk to 11am to 6pm, then he’s back to the residence. During the day he also has blocks of “Executive Time.”
        • Axios reported Executive Time means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence. Trump schedule also lists 8 am to 11 am as Executive Time in the Oval Office, but most is spent at the residence.
        • CNN reported in early 2016, before Bannon and Trump became allies, a watchdog group led by Bannon tried to shop anti-Trump research alleging ties between Trump companies and organized crime.

What you need to know about influencer fraud

DOES YOUR SCHOOL HAVE A GARDEN?

"GUARDIANS NOT GARDENERS" 
YOU ARE THE GUARDIANS OF THE PLANET

Find a little bit of land AT YOUR SCHOOL or use the roof to grow food for your community.  

In the US 20.5% of children are living in poverty (OECD).

Ask your librarian for help to get these materials.

#SCHOOLGARDEN find some plants for your school garden
https://www.wildflower.org/plants-main

Mary Reynolds undertakes the design of gardens that marry the needs and wishes of the land's guardian with the needs and wishes of the land itself. Mary seeks to create spaces that are healing, truthful and magical.

Watch her TedX Lecture - What Can I Do? Design a School Garden

Watch her movie Dare To Be Wild This focuses on the magical story of Mary’s journey to build a gold medal winning garden at the Chelsea flower show. 

STORYMAP PROJECT: Tell us about your school garden and LINK to your project from your school page project info.

TEACH ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE 

#Hurricane Florence is a Science Denying Warning for North Carolina and every other state that won’t vote for climate change law.

@Greta Thunberg

16-year-old Swedish climate activist#ClimateStrike #FridaysForFuture - Ted Talk

THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OVER WATER 

July 22, 2017 Nestlé’s water privatization push
Across the globe, Nestlé is pushing to privatize and control public water resources. Nestlé’s Chairman of the Board, Peter Brabeck, has explained his philosophy with “The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.” Around the world, Nestlé is bullying communities into giving up control of their water. It’s time we took a stand for public water sources.

• 11/11/16 Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

• NASA Watch the growth of tropical storms, the movement of icebergs & more on our web-based app: Worldview. This easy-to-use map allows you to pan-and-zoom into any area of the globe & make an animated GIF to share on social media.

• Nearly a Quarter of US Now in Drought

• August 13, 2016 Resnick’s bought H2O $28 sold $196 to CA during drought $30 million profit.
  According to an investigation by the Contra Costa Times, between 2000 and 2007 the Resnicks bought water for potentially as little as $28 per acre-foot (the amount needed to cover one acre in one foot of water) and then sold it for as much as $196 per acre-foot to the state, which used it to supply other farmers whose Delta supply had been previously curtailed. The couple pocketed more than $30 million in the process
   
• The Resnicks’ Kern County Water Bank water deal.
  A legal cloud has long shadowed the Resnicks’ water deal. The Kern County Water Bank was originally acquired in 1988 by the state to serve as an emergency water supply for the Los Angeles area—at a cost to taxpayers of $148 million in today’s dollars. In 2014, a judge ruled that the Department of Water Resources had turned the water bank over to the farmers without properly analyzing environmental impacts.
   
• Wasted Water: The Crappiest Places in America — Literally America’s waters are contaminated by poop and bacteria. Use our maps to find the worst waste locations near you. The top 10 percent most contaminated locations in America.
  https://archive.li/nXpxu
  Water Quality Data

How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches By HIROKO TABUCHI Dec 29 2017

Groups that reject established climate science can use the search engine’s advertising business to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims.

Type the words “climate change” into Google and you could get an unexpected result: advertisements that call global warming a hoax.

“Scientists blast climate alarm,” said one that appeared at the top of the search results page during a recent search, pointing to a website, DefyCCC, that asserted: “Nothing has been studied better and found more harmless than anthropogenic CO2release.”

Another ad proclaimed: “The Global Warming Hoax — Why the Science Isn’t Settled,” linking to a video containing unsupported assertions, including that there is no correlation between rising levels of greenhouse gases and higher global temperatures.

(In reality, the harmful effects of carbon dioxide emissions linked to human activity, like rising temperatures and melting sea ice, have been acknowledged by every major scientific organization in the world.)

America’s technology giants have come under fire for their role in the spread of fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign, prompting promises from Google and others to crack down on sites that spread disinformation.

Less scrutinized has been the way tech companies continue to provide a mass platform for the most extreme sites among those that use false or misleading science to reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Google’s search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it.

Not everyone who uses Google will see climate denial ads in their search results. Google’s algorithms use search history and other data to tailor ads to the individual, something that is helping to create a highly partisan internet.

A recent search for “climate change” or “global warming” from a Google account linked to a New York Times climate reporter did not return any denial ads. The top results were ads from environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

But when the same reporter searched for those terms using private browsing mode, which helps mask identity information from Google’s algorithms, the ad for DefyCCC popped up.

“These are the info wars,” said Robert J. Brulle, a Drexel University professor of sociology and environmental science who has studied climate advocacy and misinformation. “It’s becoming harder and harder for the individual to find unbiased information that they can trust, because there’s so much other material trying to crowd that space.”

After being contacted by The New York Times in mid-December, Google said it had removed an ad from its climate search results, though it declined to identify which one. An ad from DefyCCC was still turning up at the top of searches days later. As of Wednesday, no ads at all were turning up for Times reporters and editors running these searches.

The climate denialist ads are an example of how contrarian groups can use the internet’s largest automated advertising systems to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims.

Google allows companies to bid on search terms, and displays paid content at the top of its search results in the same blue font used for unpaid content. (For example, a candy maker might bid on the term “Christmas candy” so that its ads pop up when someone searches for those words.) Google identifies ads in its search results with an icon below the link. [snip]
 

THE ARTICLE ABOVE

and all of the DuckDuckGo 'Don't Bubble Me' collateral discuss the challenges of tailored information.
~Chuck McManis January 2, 2018

This sort of effect is why publications, as recently as the the early 21st century, had a very strict wall between editorial and advertising. It compromises the integrity of journalism if the editorial staff can be driven by the advertisers. And Google exploited that tension and turned it into a business model.

If you have an AdSense account (they are free and used to be the go to way for people to monetize their web site) you will periodically receive mailers from Google suggesting you use AdWords (another Google product of course) to 'get your message out there.' When people started using Google as an 'answer this question' machine, and then Google created a mechanism to show your answer first, the stage was set for what has become a gross perversion of 'reference' information.

To put this in context, consider the challenge of Google's eroding search advertising margins[1].  

Google traditionally reported something called 'CPC' or (Cost Per Click) in their financial reports. This was the price that an advertiser paid Google when that advertiser's ad was 'clicked' on by a user. In a goods economy, it might equivalent to the 'average selling price' or ASP for the widget. But unlike a goods economy, Google could (and to date has) made up for this price erosion by increased ad volume. If you look at Google sites (web sites that are hosted on the google.com domains) there are more paid placements on those pages than there has ever been. On the search page, Google's bread and butter so to speak, for a 'highly contested' search (that is what search engine marketeers call a search query that can generate lucrative ad clicks) such as 'best credit card' or 'lowest home mortgage', there are many web browser window configurations that show few, if any organic search engine results at all!

Google has scrambled to find an adjacent market, one that could not only generate enough revenue to pay for the infrastructure but also to generate a net income . Youtube, its biggest success outside of search, and the closest thing they have, has yet to do that after literally a decade of investment and effort. As a result Google has turned to the only tools it has that work,  it has reduced payments to its 'affiliate' sites (AdSense for content payments), then boosted the number of ad 'slots' on Google sites, and finally paying third parties to send search traffic preferentially to Google (this too hurts Google's overall search margin)

The result is that you have a company which is painfully addicted to the high margins of search advertising, and is the defacto source of answers for a large chunk of the population, you put it into the position of choosing survival (sell the top search result slots to anyone who will pay) or integrity (return the best answer possible).  

Nothing like having your fiduciary duty to the shareholders conflict with your moral obligations.

In many ways it reminds me of the lawsuits against the cigarette makers. The cigarette makers certainly could not serve there shareholders by endorsing the view that their product was killing the customer, even if it was the morally correct thing to do.

Google isn't "killing" people by giving out results that have been shaped by third parties but their rationalizations (both internally when I worked there, and externally) seem to echo the same themes that Phillip Morris espoused when they argued it was a person's choice if they wanted to smoke or not. Google will argue that their job is just to show you where things are on the Internet, and match up people who want to share with people searching for a particular topic. They (Google) cannot take responsibility for people who don't bother to check their sources (which they could even do on Google!).  

I have run a world wide, nationally accessible, English language index search engine, Blekko, <NOW PART OF IBM> and I know what they "could" do, but don't do with regard to misrepresented information and false narratives.

2/21/18 Fake news may be hard to spot, but fake arguments don’t have to be. 

How to Inoculate Yourself Against Climate Denial Misinformation Climate Change  with Six steps to evaluate contrarian climate claims.

2018 Foxconn just got permission to start draining Lake Michigan to make LCD screens The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved a request to divert 7 million gallons of water a day to the area where Foxconn is building its new plant. Flint Michagan still does not have clean water.

​​​​​Environmental Research Letters on a critical thinking approach to climate change denial  by Peter Ellerton and The Conversation

We applied this simple method to 42 common climate-contrarian arguments, and found that all of them contained errors in reasoning that are independent of the science itself.  In the video abstract for the paper, we outline an example of our approach, which can be described in six simple steps.