#sputnik V

[stone-cold-groove]

Belka + Strelka.

[dig1taldrift3r]

Не могу точно оценить, ибо контуры будущего ещё не определены, но мы живём в великие времена, компадрес. С Днём Победы!

[apas-95]

People who act like Laika's sacrifice was some unique soviet cruelty are being silly and need to re-evaluate how history's been presented to them. Animal testing of flight exploration has always been the norm, and the reason has always been that it is dangerous and could easily lead to death. Two-thirds of the monkeys the US launched on its repurposed Nazi V-2s died. The dogs the USSR launched into space before Laika were recovered, and were in fact the first higher animals to be recovered from a spaceflight, as all the US's monkeys so far had died - not a single monkey would survive US spaceflight until two years after Laika's flight. These animals were all sent into space, but only briefly, in a ballistic trajectory. Laika was sent into orbit. Laika's ship was the second ever to reach orbit, after Sputnik 1. It was not possible at the time to recover anything from orbit. The next Sputnik flight with animal passengers, Korabl-Sputnik 2, successfully recovered the first ever animals from orbit. Laika was the one lone point at which recovery was not planned - the pivotal one, where we had finally been able to reach orbit, to be able to stay in space, not just pass through it; but could not yet bring anything back. If survival were impossible up there, it may not have been worth it to continue. Yes, they knew Laika would die - but, empirically speaking, so did the US for each and every monkey it had launched. Survival was not the norm, and was a feat achieved so far only a few times, by the USSR. It is sad, yes, and perhaps unethical - but it was in no way unique.

[sovietpostcards]

V. Ilyichyova, an employee of a glass ornament factory, with the new Sputnik ornament. Photo by A. Cheprunov, D. Sholomovich (1959)

[vestaignis]

Стратовулкан Фуэго ("вулкан огня") - один из самых активных в Гватемале. Он находится неподалеку от города Антигуа на высоте 3763 м над уровнем моря. Вулкан является частью Тихоокеанского огненного кольца, района, известного своей интенсивной тектонической активностью и многочисленными действующими вулканами. Его постоянная деятельность и близость к населенным пунктам сделали его предметом большого интереса для ученых, геологов и органов по чрезвычайным ситуациям.

 Вулкан Фуэго имеет долгую историю, которая насчитывает тысячи лет. Его извержения были задокументированы со времен испанской колонии, и он остается одним из самых активных и опасных вулканов в Центральной Америке. Как и другие стратовулканы, он состоит из чередующихся слоев вулканического материала, включая потоки лавы, пепла и пирокластических обломков.

Фуэго извергается в среднем каждые четыре-пять лет, при этом выбросы газа и пепла достигают 10-километровой высоты. В 2018 году в результате извержения реки лавы хлынули по его склонам, опустошив деревню Сан-Мигель-Лос-Лотес, убив 215 человек, еще столько же пропали без вести. Вулкан также извергался и в 2021 году. После извержения были предприняты усилия, чтобы помочь в восстановлении поврежденной инфраструктуры и оказать поддержку тем, кто потерял свои дома и близких. Кроме того, извержение привлекло внимание к оценке вулканического риска и важности просвещения общественности о вулканической опасности для повышения устойчивости населения перед лицом будущих извержений.

The Fuego stratovolcano ("volcano of fire") is one of the most active in Guatemala. It is located near the city of Antigua at an altitude of 3,763 m above sea level. The volcano is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area known for its intense tectonic activity and numerous active volcanoes. Its constant activity and proximity to populated areas have made it a subject of great interest to scientists, geologists, and emergency management authorities.

Fuego Volcano has a long history that dates back thousands of years. Its eruptions have been documented since the Spanish colonial era, and it remains one of the most active and dangerous volcanoes in Central America. Like other stratovolcanoes, it is composed of alternating layers of volcanic material, including lava flows, ash, and pyroclastic debris.

Fuego erupts on average every four to five years, with plumes of gas and ash reaching heights of 10 kilometers. In 2018, an eruption sent rivers of lava flowing down its slopes, devastating the village of San Miguel Los Lotes, killing 215 people and leaving another 215 missing. The volcano also erupted in 2021. Following the eruption, efforts were made to help rebuild damaged infrastructure and provide support to those who lost their homes and loved ones. In addition, the eruption brought attention to volcanic risk assessment and the importance of public education about volcanic hazards to build community resilience in the face of future eruptions.

Источник:/korzik.net/video/167201-v-gvatemale-vo-vremja-izverzhenija-vulkana-fujego-nachalsja-shtorm-s-molnijami-kotorye-bili-prjamo-v-zherlo.html, //ru.geologyscience.com/стихийные-бедствия/извержение -вулкана/вулкан-де-фуэго/,/sputnik-georgia.ru/20180609/strashnoe-izverjenie-vulkana-v-gvatemale-kadri-s-mesta-bedstvija-240787586.html,/fishki.net/2439490-fotografii-izverzhenija-vulkana-fujego.html, /aif.ru/society/gallery /izverzhenie _vulkana_fuego_v_gvatemale,/vsegda-pomnim.com/vulkany/6011-vulkan-fujego-71-foto.html.

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson 11.15.24

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

[crazy-so-na-sega]

pare che sia un "obbligo ebraico" (modello halakhico)

pare che le case farmaceutiche siano in mano loro

Bourla e  Sally Susman = Pfizer

Leif Johansson e Pascal Soriot = AstraZeneca

Stéphane Bancel amministratore Moderna

Alex Gorsky presidente Johnson & Johnson

Stanley Erck presidente Novavax

Alexander Gintsburg, direttore dell’Istituto di Ricerca di Epidemiologia e Microbiologia di Mosca e creatore del vaccino Sputnik V.

Tuttavia, ci si domanda: come ha fatto un “obbligo ebraico”, le cui caratteristiche sono paragonabili a quelle di una mitzvah, a divenire un obbligo per tutto l’Occidente e per tutto il mondo? Di chi sono le responsabilità?

----

da masticare piano...:-)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guy Venables

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 16, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 16, 2024

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[pansy1993]

2, 10, 17!🖤

hiii ty :)

2. Did you reread anything? What?

i did! two books actually, i re read rant by chuck palahniuk which i bought and read when i was 15 and adored and adored it now 16 years later haha and lmao i re read sputnik sweetheart by haruki murakami! i was a huge fan of his in my teens and early 20s and had a sense of nostalgia for that book specifically in the middle of summer. it scratched an itch in a way!

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

i actually didn’t read any new releases but the newest book i read was ponyboy by eliot duncan, which was gifted to me by rosie and i absolutely devoured it when i stayed over with her earlier this year!! i recommend it 100%

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

manhunt by gretchen felker-martin was a wildly good time! unsure if i was surprised by that as it was a recommendation from rosie but i was thrilled while i read it! i rly think it also pairs v nicely with rant as a joint read or a back to back (which is what i did!)

book asks <3

[saintjoanofgunpla]

I didn't get to finish Dom today, but I finished the last tiny bit of RG Mark 2

he's a little rough, had trouble cleaning nub marks and used 6E guitar string for the backpack pipes, as bandai shorted me on the wire lol. I also somehow lost his v fin, and had to make a custom one from modded and painted EG parts. but overall it was fun, he looks great, and is a solid poser.

also, this is my cat Sputnik, AKA stinky 🧡

[ddlcaskblog]

*cracks knuckles*

All right, Monika. I didn't want to have to do this, but you've given me no choice. Since you're so eager to know what our reality is like, it's time to show you...THE TRUTH.

*shows her footage and reports of the Hindenburg*

*shows her footage and reports of Pearl Harbor*

*shows her footage and reports of D-Day*

*shows her footage and reports of FDR's death*

*shows her footage and reports of V-E Day*

*shows her footage and reports of Hiroshima*

*shows her footage and reports of the end of WWII*

*shows her footage and reports of Harry Truman's upset 1948 presidential win*

*shows her footage and reports of Douglas MacArthur's firing*

*shows her footage and reports of Sputnik's launch*

*shows her footage and reports of John Glenn's orbit of Earth*

*shows her footage and reports of Marilyn Monroe's death*

*shows her footage and reports of the Cuban Missile Crisis*

*shows her footage and reports of JFK's assassination*

*shows her footage and reports of Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination*

*shows her footage and reports of Lyndon Johnson dropping out of the 1968 presidential race*

*shows her footage and reports of MLK's assassination*

*shows her footage and reports of RFK's assassination*

*shows her footage and reports of the Apollo 11 moon landing*

*shows her footage and reports of the Apollo 13 crisis*

*shows her footage and reports of the Kent State Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of the Munich Olympics crisis*

*shows her footage and reports of Richard Nixon's resignation*

*shows her footage and reports of the fall of Saigon*

*shows her footage and reports of Elvis Presley's death*

*shows her footage and reports of the Iran Hostage crisis*

*shows her footage and reports of John Lennon's assassination*

*shows her footage and reports of Ronald Reagan being shot*

*shows her footage and reports of the Challenger explosion*

*shows her footage and reports of the fall of the Berlin Wall*

*shows her footage and reports of the beginning of the First Gulf War*

*shows her footage and reports of the Rodney King Riots*

*shows her footage and reports of the Waco standoff*

*shows her footage and reports of the O.J. Simpson saga*

*shows her footage and reports of the Oklahoma City bombing*

*shows her footage and reports of the Flight 800 explosion*

*shows her footage and reports of the Atlanta Olympics bombing*

*shows her footage and reports of Princess Diana's death*

*shows her footage and reports of Bill Clinton's impeachment*

*shows her footage and reports of the Columbine Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of JFK Jr's death*

*shows her footage and reports of the 2000 presidential election controversy*

*shows her footage and reports of 9/11*

*shows her footage and reports of the beginning of the Iraq War*

*shows her footage and reports of Hurricane Katrina*

*shows her footage and reports of the Virginia Tech Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of the 2008 Great Recession crash*

*shows her footage and reports of Barack Obama's 2008 election*

*shows her footage and reports of Michael Jackson's death*

*shows her footage and reports of Osama Bin Laden's killing*

*shows her footage and reports of the Sandy Hook Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of the Boston Marathon bombing*

*shows her footage and reports of the Pulse Nightclub Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of Donald Trump's upset 2016 presidential win*

*shows her footage and reports of the Vegas Country Festival Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of the Parkland Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of Donald Trump's first impeachment*

*shows her footage and reports of Kobe Bryant's death*

*shows her footage and reports of the COVID Pandemic*

*shows her footage and reports of George Floyd's killing*

*shows her footage and reports of Jan. 6th*

*shows her footage and reports of Donald Trump's second impeachment*

*shows her footage and reports of the fall of Kabul*

*shows her footage and reports of the Uvalde Massacre*

*shows her footage and reports of the Maui wildfires*

.

.

.

Keep in mind, Monika, that this is a VERY small sample size of what our world--indeed, my native nation in the United States--has had to deal with over time. This is just some of the stuff we humans in this universe have been able to capture on live film or tape, and we've been around for MILLIONS of years.

If you STILL feel brave enough to want to traverse this world, well...there's not much I or anyone else could probably do to stop you. But you deserve to know the truth--what it was you were ACTUALLY driven to kill the other club members for.

If you need some time alone to reflect and gather yourself, I understand. If you need someone to talk to, I get that too, and I'm here if you need me.

Take care and be good to yourself--and the other club members. <3

M: "..."

M: "Just...Don't show the girls."

[misfitwashere]

November 16, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 17

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

[personneato]

Unfun History Facts

TLDR: We had people in space before we let women open a bank account all by themselves

1636 Harvard opened (Calcus wasn’t taught because CALCUS WASN’T INVENTED UNTIL 1672 and wasn’t taught at Harvard until 1797)

1776 USA USA USA

1886 Statue of Liberty was unvieled 

1904 NYC Subway was first opened

1914 WWI began

1918 WW! Ended

1919 Prohibition

1920 Women had the right to vote

1927 the first movie with spoken dialogue

1928 sliced bread first sold

1939 WWII began

1941 Mount Rushmoore completed

1945 WWII Ends

1946 Trump born

1946 Bill Clinton born

1947 Hillary Clinton born

1947 Cold War begins

1949 First American Female Ambassedor appointed Helen Engenie Moore Anderson

1952 1st HBomb detonated

1955 Vietnam War begins

1955 Bill Gates born

1957 Sputnik 1 launched

1960 US Embargo of Cuba

1960 Women allowed to open a bank account with their husband’s signature

1961 Obama born

1962 Eleanor Roosevelt died 🙁

1962 Cuba Missile Crisis

1965 1st Pope to visit USA

1969 Moon landing

1973 Watergate

1973 Roe v. Wade

1973 1st USA Space Station (Skylab) launched

1973 Picasso died

1974 ECOA= banks have to let women open a bank account in their name without a man’s signature

1975 Microsoft opened

1975 Vietnam War paused indefinately

1980 John Lennon died

1983 1st cell phone sold

1991 Cold War ended

1998 Google invented

[txt-oona]

 ⠀❅ ⠀⸺  basics. 

BIRTH NAME : lee oona ( 이우나 ). 

BIRTHDAY : february 12th, 2001. 

PLACE OF BIRTH : incheon, south korea

ZODIAC SIGN(S) : aquarius + snake. 

ETHNICITY : south korean. 

NATIONALITY : south korean. 

LANGUAGES : korean ( fluent ), english ( fluent ), japanese ( conversational ). mandarin ( conversational ). french ( basic ).

 ⠀❅ ⠀⸺  career. 

STAGE NAME : oona ( 우나 )

OCCUPATION  : idol / member of txt 

YEARS ACTIVE : 2019 - present

TRAINING : one and a half years

COMPANY : bighit / hybe labels

 ⠀❅ ⠀⸺  physical. 

FACE CLAIM : jang wonyoung ( WONYOUNG FROM IVE )

GENDER : cis female

PRONOUNS : she / her

PIERCINGS : 5 piercings ( double lobe / both ears. belly button. )

TATTOOS : none yet.

SCARS : n/a.

HEIGHT : 159 cm ( 5 feet 7 inches )

BLOOD TYPE : o negative

 ⠀❅ ⠀⸺  facts. 

She was born in Incheon, South Korea, but growing up Oona moved around Korea a lot. She stayed the longest in Daegu due to her staying with her grandparents for a while.

Was the last member to be revealed. Like Beomgyu she was revealed as a secret member and shocked everyone with her gender.

Oona’s lucky number is 2. 

Her family consists of : Her mother, her step-father, her older step-sister, her older step-brother, and her poodle, “Muffin”.

Her father died when she was young ( 14 ) and her mom remarried to a man with two kids. One of which is her step-brother, Jeno of NCT.

Is actually childhood friends with Beomgyu. The two met in secondary school and have been friends ever since.

So far she has no tattoos but has a couple in mind for when she turns 21.

Known as “The Nation’s Little Sister”, "TXT's Snow White", & “Dream Girl” by most TXT fans and a huge majority of Korea.

Oona was actually an ice skater up until she met Beomgyu. She honestly hadn’t even thought about dancing until she met Gyu.

Very athletic. Oona has liked working out and running for a while. She has a schedule she adheres to that she likes.

Funnily enough, due to her being taller than average, most issues with height, choreography wise, are virtually nonexistent for TXT.

Nowadays Oona has said she likes to make bracelets to pass time.

Known as the link between SM and the now HYBE Labels.

Oona would like to go to Versailles, France if she ever had an overseas holiday with her members ( Fansign 140319 ).

Owns a matte white mic with piano key IEMs.

Many idols and staff members say she is very wise and people tend to think it's because she has had many lives before this one.

Out of the entire group, she and Beomgyu spent the least time training. She beat him out by a few months, of which she took a break to study for her finals.

Oona has said that she still keeps in contact with a few friends from school. 

Oona has her own room in the TXT dorms. She used to share with Beomgyu, until they moved into their new dorms.

The name Oona is a girl's name of Irish origin meaning "lamb". As her father had stayed in Ireland for a few months just before meeting her mother and in naming her Oona he wanted to combine his love of the country and her mother.

Oona is adept at blending into different groups based on the vibe and energy she perceives and has made many friendships because of this. Some examples being BTS’ Jimin && V, Mamamoo’s Solar, && Wheein, SVTN’s Wonwoo && Woozi, and etc . . .

According to the TXT members, and most fans, her smile can light up a room.

Oona has said that her favorite song of theirs has to either be ‘Dear Sputnik’, ‘Blue Hour’, or ‘FROST’.