The education minister can tweet stuff about “based on data and not on perceptions,” but the data show that she didn’t do her homework and has effectively cut off education for most of Panama’s poorest schoolkids.
Education: selfish advice
trumps the nation’s future
When the pandemic first hit us, the advice that the Chamber of Commerce gave was not to invest in public education because that might interfere with their kids’ private education. Nito took that advice.
Now a school year begins, with “learning at a distance” online instruction and nothing at all done to make the Internet available to all school kids in Panama. None of the new infrastructure that would be needed, nothing to curb the rapacious telecom companies that have dramatically raised the price of wireless Internet service. Nothing to provide every student with a suitable computer.
The epidemic is far from having run its course, but the ferocious class confilcts about who bears the cost of this national disaster are well underway. They will get worse. This was the choice that the president made.
“Captain Portland,” US Navy veteran Chris David: “I felt these gentlemen were violating their oath of office, and I wanted to talk to them.”
Resisting paramilitary thugs and their boss
Donald Trump was a serial fraud artist – a racketeer within the meaning of the federal RICO statute – well before he ran for the presidency. Now he has graduated from stealing from a chlldren’s cancer charity, running a bogus university and cheating many of the people with whom he did business to more violent sorts of crimes.
And it took a calm US Navy vet in Portland, on a weekend when the nation mourned Congressman John Lewis and Reverend C.T. Vivian, to show us the way. Vivian got bloodied insisting on voting rights in Selma, Alabama. Lewis got his skull cracked in that same campaign. David has two broken bones in his hand.
No calls for burning, looting or sniper fire. Courageous nonviolent resistance. And the knowledge that despite broken bones, eyes put out, days spent in jail and some lives lost for the cause, the hoodlum Trump regime will fall. When it does, we need to be determined that it never happens again. That means removing and barring from federal employment every member of Trump’s goon squads. That means putting the men who beat Mr. David and the intellectual author of their crime, one Donald J. Trump, on trial for what they have done.
And more immediately, as the critical element of our nonviolent resistant, that all eligible US citizens register, vote and insist that our votes be counted.
In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.
Gro Harlem Brundtland
Bear in mind…
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
Sir William Bragg
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