The Smithian

May 15th, 2013

We’ve kind of enlisted the help of the gangs…If your goal is not gang eradication, which none of us knows how to do, but instead violence reduction, and you enlist the gangs as aids, then you begin to change the physics of the neighborhood…We’re doing it with the cooperation of the gangs because they’re so powerful—they control some of the neighborhoods. We get them into classes and training, and we say, if you help us stop the violence, we’re not going to hold your past against you. Everyone agrees we should keep the kids safe… [bloodshed wasn’t just the result of gang identification and drug disputes, but also personal grudges and simply] the power of the barrel of a gun…If you don’t give them a way to exert power legitimately, they’ll do it another way.

Connie Rice, Los Angeles civil rights attorney

In 2003 police brass asked Rice to help them formulate a new strategy for coping with LA’s…gang violence. The effort resulted in the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development, an initiative housed in the LA mayor’s office that includes recreational programs at night in city parks, intervention with preteen youth in neighborhoods with high gang membership, and appeals to former and current gang leaders to stop retaliatory violence. There’s…an experiment underway to offer…children of gang members a…college education if the kids stay out of gangs.

May 10th, 2013

thesmithian

It is a new thing, a big social experiment…we’ve accidentally decided to engage in…Let’s send a whole class of people out into their professional lives with a negative net worth. Not starting at zero, but starting at a minus that is often measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. Those minus signs have psychological impact, I suspect…

Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based research group

re the

millstone of student-loan debt, which recently exceeded $1 trillion in total…

May 8th, 2013

thesmithian

When it comes to economic gaps between whites and communities of color in the United States, income inequality tells part of the story. But let’s not forget about wealth. Wealth isn’t just money in the bank; its insurance against tough times, tuition to get a better education and a better job, savings to retire on and a springboard into the middle class. In short, wealth translates into opportunity…

Less than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation, from the Urban Institute’s Opportunity and Ownership project

May 7th, 2013

thesmithian

'A female science student conducts an experiment with chemicals that explode in a classroom, causing no damage and no injuries. Who gets to be the adventurous teenage genius mad scientist and who gets to be the criminal led away in handcuffs facing two felonies to juvenile hall?'

May 4th, 2013

thesmithian

I’m surprised at how much of our time is spent trying to divide up the spoils between various economic interests. I had no idea. I thought we’d be focused on civil liberties, on education policy, energy policy and so on…The fights down here can be put in two or three categories: The big greedy bastards against the big greedy bastards; the big greedy bastards against the little greedy bastards; and some cases even the other little greedy bastards against the other little greedy bastards…

[a] moderate Democratic senator [who requested] anonymity so as not to alienate any of the bastards, regardless of size.

May 4th, 2013

thesmithian

Central and northern Nigeria exemplify what happens when a country abandons certain regions so completely, failing to provide adequate education, social services, development, employment, and transparent political culture: extreme results rise up. In Plateau, I have spent time with a Christian who makes and sells guns, a reflective twenty-two-year old man with melancholic eyes who once thought he would go to college and start his own business, until his hometown became an undeclared war zone.

Alexis Okeowo, in the New Yorker

April 26th, 2013

thesmithian

All this makes me question if we’re living in my grandmother’s South. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina want to roll back many of this country’s civil rights achievements with a political agenda that is anti-democracy and anti-justice. They attack poor people, women and the LGBTQ and immigrant communities. If you’re not white, male, straight and Christian, you’re not safe with our state Republican lawmakers. Despite their actions…Every day I feel inspired by North Carolina’s rich history and legacy of freedom struggles…You can’t talk about the civil rights movement and freedom struggles in the United States without talking about North Carolina—the Greensboro sit-ins, SNCC, civil rights icon and pioneer Ella Baker and the Wilmington 10. State lawmakers…ought not forget how our grandmothers fought for freedom and taught us to fight for it too…These lawmakers don’t speak for anyone I know. They don’t speak for the social work students whom I teach and study…They don’t speak for my family of friends in North Carolina, who pay taxes here and who have raised children who are commited to building on what their parents and grandparents started.

Crystal Hayes, at North Carolina’s Indy Week

April 25th, 2013

thesmithian

The website theydontworkforyou.org is designed to make you mad.

more.

April 24th, 2013

thesmithian

While the NFL preaches patience/temperance, a new exec MBA program at George Washington University—the first…designed especially for pro football players—takes the opposite approach. Called STAR, an acronym for Special Talent, Access, and Responsibility, the program treats entrepreneurial inclinations not as a frailty to be reined in but as a weapon to be honed and deployed.

more.

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art: painting by Dave Choate

While the NFL preaches patience/temperance, a new exec MBA program at George Washington University—the first…designed especially for pro football players—takes the opposite approach. Called STAR, an acronym for Special Talent, Access, and Responsibility, the program treats entrepreneurial inclinations not as a frailty to be reined in but as a weapon to be honed and deployed.

more.

+++++

art: painting by Dave Choate

April 24th, 2013

thesmithian

‘You don’t see…Repub hashtags blaming the president for cutting housing vouchers to 140K low-income families, which has begun…’

…There aren’t any angry tweets about the 70,000 Head Start slots about to be eliminated, which is forcing some school districts to distribute these valuable services by lottery…Or the 11 percent cut in unemployment benefits for millions of jobless workers.The voiceless people who are the most affected by these cuts can’t afford high-priced lobbyists to get them an exception to the sequester, the way that the agriculture lobby was able to fend off a furlough to meat inspectors…what was cut in order to keep those inspectors on the job? About $25 million from a program to provide free school breakfasts…Both Senate Democrats and the White House have proposed budget plans that replace the sequester with a much better mix of spending cuts and revenue increases.

bold, ours. more, here.

April 22nd, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

‘The president is the kind of person who, the day before the final exam, would open the book, read it, and get an A. The First Lady is the kind of person who, the first day of class when they were discussing dissertations, would plot out how to finish hers.’— Valerie Jarrett, senior White House advisor

‘The president is the kind of person who, the day before the final exam, would open the book, read it, and get an A. The First Lady is the kind of person who, the first day of class when they were discussing dissertations, would plot out how to finish hers.’— Valerie Jarrett, senior White House advisor

April 20th, 2013

thesmithian

Universidad del Valle de Guatemala

April 12th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

In conjunction with other conservative groups attacking the “liberal” judiciary and the press, they continued to shore up the movement’s populist credentials by identifying an elite to which conservatives could stand opposed — a task that grew in importance as populist elements within the Republican Party gained even more prominence. They continued to provide a vocabulary for conservative college students (and their parents) to express frustration with their higher education experiences. And they helped to call into question the credibility of academic knowledge, which made the growing number of conservative intellectuals in think tanks working on topics like taxes or energy policy or financial deregulation seem more reliable and trustworthy by comparison.

more, from an excerpt, here.

In conjunction with other conservative groups attacking the “liberal” judiciary and the press, they continued to shore up the movement’s populist credentials by identifying an elite to which conservatives could stand opposed — a task that grew in importance as populist elements within the Republican Party gained even more prominence. They continued to provide a vocabulary for conservative college students (and their parents) to express frustration with their higher education experiences. And they helped to call into question the credibility of academic knowledge, which made the growing number of conservative intellectuals in think tanks working on topics like taxes or energy policy or financial deregulation seem more reliable and trustworthy by comparison.

more, from an excerpt, here.