Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-08-21

  • Your drain on drugs: Meth seeps into Baltimore’s streams – CNN.com

    Here’s why: These plants and bugs are the base of the aquatic food web. Birds eat the bugs, as do frogs and fish. As emergent contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and endocrine disruptors become more common in ground and drinking water, they could affect humans. Scientists say the direct health effects are pretty much unknown, and more research will need to be done.

    h/t Jon Becker

  • Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter – The New York Times

    A month later, Alabama required the teaching of cursive in public schools by the end of third grade by way of “Lexi’s Law,” named for the granddaughter of the state representative Dickie Drake; Mr. Drake believes “cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do.” In other words, our script reveals something unique and ineluctable about our inner being.

    For most of American history, cursive was supposed to do the opposite. Mastering it was dull, repetitive work, intended to make every student’s handwriting match a standardized model. In the mid-19th century, that model was Spencerian script. It was replaced by the Palmer Method, which was seen as a more muscular and masculine hand suitable for the industrial age — a “plain and rapid style,” as Austin Palmer described it, to replace the more effeminate Spencerian. Students who learned it were taught to become “writing machines,” holding their arms and shoulders in awkward poses for hours to get into shape for writing drills.

    It was also believed that mastering the Palmer Method would make students better Christians, immigrants more assimilated Americans (through its “powerful hygienic effect”), “bad” children better (“the initial step in the reform of many a delinquent”) and workers more industrious (because the script had fewer curlicues and strokes than Spencerian).

  • Press This for The Events Calendar, custom WordPress Plugins

    Useful for custom press this example and if you use The Events Calendar

  • Generators Archive – GenerateWP

    save yourself some time . . .

  • Covert Action Information Bulletin No 42 Fall 1992 : Covert Action Information Bulletin : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

    Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy
    Joel Griffiths
    The debate has raged for decades between the “right-wing loonies’ and the “sane voices of science.” Missing has been an analysis of who really profits from fluoridating public water supplies.

  • NO! I Will Not Buy Your Damned School Supplies! — Medium

    I will not help teachers commit suicide by supporting these feel good attempts to turn basic public school funding into an act of charity. Each time educators normalize deprivation and substitute charity as social justice withheld, they will find themselves with fewer classroom resources. Such actions also spurn greater public school privatization and devaluing of teachers.
    Q: You know who should pay for school supplies?
    A: Tax payers!
    Perhaps corporations and pop stars could begin paying their fair share of taxes so that Katy Perry isn’t forced to enrich Bain Capital’s Mitt Romney’s Staples.