Commentary – Page 7

Allan J. Eastman, Aged 19

March 29th is Vietnam Veterans Day. It marks the day the last American combat troops were finally withdrawn from Vietnam, forty years ago.

Well, not all of them. 1600 troops are still officially missing in Vietnam.

I grew up with Vietnam hanging over my family. My grandmother was a Gold Star Mother, which is what the government calls you when you’ve lost a child in war. She never rode in the Veterans Day parades on that sad float with all the other mothers in Belmont, Massachusetts (not Mitt Romney’s side of town) who had lost their sons. But Uncle Allan’s name is etched in granite in the town square. Continue reading →

Anonymous Angst from the Online Journals of Your Youth – Part V

Reading your old LiveJournal posts is way worse than looking at that picture of yourself as a freshman with a bad perm. Your words look into the truth of your little emo heart, that perm was just a bad decision that you’ll grow out of. Collected here are the anonymous journals of your youth brought forth from the depths of LiveJournal and Xanga. Instead of mashing them all together I’m going to string them out over a few posts. Continue reading →

Anonymous Angst from the Online Journals of Your Youth – Part IV

Anonymous Angst from the Online Journals of Your Youth – Part III

Anonymous Angst from the Online Journals of Your Youth – Part II

Anonymous Angst from the Online Journals of Your Youth – Part I

If Progressive Caucus’ ‘Back to Work Budget’ Gets Ignored, Does it Even Exist?

While my NPR station was blathering on about fake Serious Person Paul Ryan and his masturbatory homage to Ayn Rand and the slightly more realistic budget coming from Sen. Patty Murray and Senate Democrats, the House Progressive Caucus quietly (in media terms) released its Back to Work Budget this week.

Contained within is a whole host of liberal red meat: Tax increases on the wealthy! Infrastructure investments! Investment income taxed like wage income! Initiatives to target climate change! It also has a healthy dose of unintended irony.

Continue reading →

20 Year-Old College Dropout Thinks Alternate Experiences Beat Going to College, Encourages Students to “UnCollege”

20 year-old Dale Stephens dropped out of school in the 5th grade because he was bored. In his observation, school wasn’t really a place for learning — it was a place to discuss Pokémon. Determined to embrace his idea of learning he then created his own curriculum in lieu of a formal education. In subsequent years he’s gone on to build a library in his hometown, live in France, and work in Silicon Valley — despite having dropped out of school again. This time college. He now runs uncollege.org, a site for those seeking unconventional education, and has just published a book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will, that tells millennials college isn’t the only way to gain success — it’s all about experiences outside the classroom.

Is this notion a stroke of simplistic genius or detrimental? Continue reading →

Canadian Senate Mired in Ever Deepening Scandal

The Senate of Canada is, as randyfmacdonald pointed out two weeks ago, a useless appendage of the state, which has become a resting place for party bagmen to get paid to do not much of anything. As he noted at the time, two Senators were embroiled in a scandal over expenses (and in one case alleged criminality). Since then, the scandal has both deepened and widened. Many more Senators are facing allegations that they claimed expenses to which they were not entitled, and in some cases are facing allegations that they are ineligible to even sit in the Senate in the first place. Continue reading →

New York City: The Crack Years

I got to thinking about the heavy crack days. New York’s, not mine. Crack was like a tidal wave crashing across the city. I lived uptown, in the 120s. You know how, when you walk in the country at a certain time of year, you hear the leaves crunching beneath every step? It was like that in my neighborhood. Not leaves, though, crack vials.

I would get the train at the valley of 125th Street most mornings, at the only elevated stop on the original Manhattan IRT lines, thanks to the island’s sudden dip in altitude between Morningside Heights and Hamilton Heights. I was usually the only person not jumping the turnstile. Continue reading →