Battlestar crew goofs off on Letterman March 31, 2008
Posted by Zack in Off Topic | 4 commentsThis may seem off topic, but…actually there’s a hook. Battlestar Galactica has a deep theological subplot. The humans (descended from ancient earthlings) are polytheists, the robots (who are kind of more human than humans) are monotheists. There are all kinds of arguments about the true nature of God. In this fourth and final season we may *meet* God!
If you haven’t gotten into Battlestar, there’s still hope for you. Go buy Season One and watch just the first episode. Then, you’ll be hooked. You’ll have one week to catch up before Season Four starts on Sci-Fi channel on Friday April 4.
It’s almost the best show ever (after Firefly): a really deep, complex political & theological thriller. With spaceships!
I just went to the site, and here’s their promo photo for the new season. See: I’m not exaggerating the religious (er…sacrilegious) component…
Heartland Innovators update November 12, 2007
Posted by Zack in Off Topic | write a comment
I want to enlist the help of everyone reading this blog for a project that Elizabeth and I have been working on, called Heartland Innovators. It’s a little hard to explain—but basically its an experiment in raising the profile of local successful leaders who are actually solving America’s biggest problems.
If you can suggest anyone who fits that description, please email us at info@heartlandinnovators.org
For example, American education is broken and neither politicians nor policy experts seem to know how to fix it. However, there are people in every community—teachers, principals, school staff, parents and students—who are fixing schools or at least classrooms, or building programs to educate children outside of broken schools.
So the idea of the Heartland Innovators project is to create a high-profile forum where those fixers can write about their success, and write their based-in-experience analysis of the failures of the system.
The hope is that such a forum would eventually begin to compete with the chattering nonsense (Elizabeth will probably make me take that out) of the policy establishment—and begin to inform and influence sincere politicians.
As for the INsincere politicians who don’t really care about fixing problems—the hope is that this process would eventually identify Heartland Innovators who could run for office and replace them.
(There is precedent for this. In a certain corner of the political world, a broad community of progressive activists have been having a huge influence on the Democratic party and elections over the last few cycles—and their power is founded on public forums (blogs) where they have successfully competed with the Democratic party establishment and mainstream political journalists.)
We started this project in September. For two months, in between our other work, we experimented with various ways of locating those local, successful leaders. It’s hard, because a teacher who is saving her students and holding back the tide of violence and apathy all around them—she doesn’t a have PR person, no newspaper has written about her success, she doesn’t have a website where she documents her work (but she should, and that’s the point of this project!). So we experimented and found various ways of drilling down into communities and finding these folks.
Now, moving in to phase two, we’re announcing the Heartland Innovators community policy blog. This is where the teacher gets a space to document her work. It will launch April 8, 2008. We’re inviting many of the leaders we’ve met over the last two months, but we’re going to have to find a lot more over the next five months for the blog to succeed. It may be that we decide to focus on one policy area to start (e.g. education) if that’s where most of our good submissions are coming from.
Here’s more detail on the community blog idea from the Heartland Innovators site.
And here’s the first sample post, from one of the first local leaders we met on our trip in September. I think Rev. King’s post is just the perfect example of a voice that needs to be heard by the policy establishment in her field.
Tag: Heartland InnovatorsCoasting October 1, 2007
Posted by Zack in Off Topic, North Carolina | write a commentMet a guy from Ghana this morning on our way to the Charlotte airport. He graduated from college in Accra last year, where he studied economics. Now he’s driving the airport shuttle. It was 6:00 AM but he was very talkative. I asked him how he was liking Charlotte. Somehow the conversation came around to a comparison of Ghanaian and American education—and his surprise at how bad American schools seemed to be.
I said, “Yes, it’s a disgrace. We need to do better.”
He said, “Well, in America, you’re already where we in Africa want to be. Back when you were developing, then you had a reason to try to be educated. But now, you’ve built your whole economy. Now anyone with just a high school degree—or not even—can run this machine. You just have to read the manual or something, you don’t need to build it. You can just coast now.”
