Indoctrination in Public Schools A Film You May Not Have Heard About

Have you heard of Story of Stuff? Story of Stuff is a film that is being shown in 7000 public schools and churches across the Country. Some students already saw the film last year.

Jim and I watched Story of Stuff , Jim and I both noticed numerous errors in their scientific and economic claims in the film. Jim thought the errors were so blatant that people would catch them. I reminded my genius husband that people were not as smart as he. I digress there is a 4 part series of videos debunking the story of stuff on You Tube. I have given you a link to the first one. Once on You Tube you can locate the other three in the series of four. If you don't have access to high speed internet please visit your local library. I personally feel the Story of Stuff is propaganda and your children must hear the truth.

Please go to the links and view the debunking of Story of Stuff. If your child has seen this video at school it is important to show him the debunking video and clarifying both the scientific and economic errors in the videos.

Quote of the Day - "What matters is not what any individual thinks, but what is true. A teacher who does not equip his pupils with the rudimentary tools to discover this is substituting indoctrination for teaching."
-Peters, Richard Stanley
Ethics and Education.

Update 9/24/09 I saw this Fox News piece after my post yesterday. This piece debunks more of the Story or Stuff video.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

No Wonder Our Country is in a Tailspin

The Following Piece appears at Tulsa World.com. It is no wonder we have become a country that accepts socialism as normal.

If you google citizenship test you can take the test yourself to see how you would do. Both Jim and I have taken the test he of course scored 100%, I scored 88%.

Cathy

3 in 4 high schoolers can't name first U.S. president

By Staff Reports

Oklahoma high school students are ill informed on the constitution, and only one in four can name the first president of the United States, according to a recent survey.

The survey was conducted to find the students' level of basic civil knowledge. It took 10 questions from the test candidates for U.S. citizenship take. It was sponsored by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs think tank to coincide with Constitution Day on Thursday.

The passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8 percent, compared to 92 percent of candidates for U.S. citizenship.



"In that miracle at Philadelphia 222 years ago, the Framers gave us a document which they hoped would secure our freedoms," OCPA Vice President Brandon Dutcher said in a statement. "But they knew that only a well-informed citizenry could remain free. If these survey results are any indication, we are very much a nation at risk."

OCPA promotes public policies favoring free enterprise and limited government.


Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

In case you missed it - SAU 43 students didn't watch Obama's Speech

The following piece appeared in the Valley News on September 15, 2009.

Newport, Croydon
Students Weren't Allowed to Watch
Obama's Speech
By Alex Hanson
Last Tuesday morning, Charen Urban was planning to watch President Barack Obama's address to the nation's schoolchildren with a Running Start college-level sociology class she teaches at Newport High School.

But during the first block of classes, an announcement came over the loudspeakers that the speech would be taped and shown at a later date, and that teachers were not to screen it live in their classrooms.

Urban was surprised. She had planned her lesson for the Running Start class around the speech. She did download and print the text of the speech and she had her students read it and discuss it, but that's not the same as having the president talk to you.




“I thought that it was an opportunity lost,” Urban said.

Marilyn Brannigan, interim superintendent of Newport and Croydon schools, told the Valley News last Tuesday that she supported the message of the president's speech. “Is encouraging kids to study hard and do their best bad? People say it's political, but I don’t know. Encouraging kids to study hard, work hard, is a good thing,” she said.

She also said the schools were offering the option to any class or students who would like to watch the speech. But early in the school day, Brannigan preempted the live broadcast.

Newport and Croydon students will see Obama's speech as part of this Thursday's Constitution Day activities, Brannigan said in an interview Friday.

“We didn't have time to do any planning” before the speech aired, Brannigan said, noting that students had been out of school the previous Friday and Monday. The delay will give teachers time to prepare, she said.

“We also had 10 parents call and say, ‘You can't show it to my kids,' ” she said. She and the school principals “decided on the morning (of the speech) that we hadn't had the opportunity to preview” the president’s remarks. “We didn’t know how many people were out there” who objected to having their children watch and discuss the 15-minute speech, she added.

Preparation time, and not pressure from parents, was the prime reason for the delay, Brannigan said.

Croydon School Board member James Peschke was among those who questioned whether the district should show the speech live. He sent an e-mail to Brannigan, and posted his objections on the blog he and his wife write on behalf of Croydon Citizens for Reasonable and Fair Taxes.

“I don't know if my letter altered their plans in any way,” Peschke said. Brannigan cited the letter in a conversation with the Valley News.

Peschke opposed the speech on several grounds: It isn't the president's job to talk to students, schools and parents wouldn’t have adequate opportunity to review the speech beforehand, and the speech was directed at students in kindergarten through 12th grade, too wide an age range.

“The lack of review was my largest concern,” Peschke said in a phone interview, adding, “I had concerns that (the speech) was propagandistic in nature.”

Asked to clarify how the president's speech, which urged children to stay in school and work hard, might have contained propaganda, Peschke said, “You could make the case that ‘stay in school' is propaganda.” It might be for a good cause, “but it's still propaganda,” he said.

“My personal view is that parents should make that individual decision” about whether their children should watch the president's speech, Peschke said, noting that he “would do that for any president.”

Peschke said he has read the speech and found it “relatively harmless.” Still, he's glad the district taped it.

Not all parents share Peschke's views.

“If it was a speech directed to the young people, then I thought they should be able to hear it,” said Rick Cota of Newport, who talked to a reporter while watching the Newport High School girls soccer match on Saturday. Even watching a taped speech wouldn't have the same impact as a live address, he said. “It's when it’s live that you’ve got everybody talking about it,” said Cota, who has a third-grader and an eighth-grader in Newport schools.

“I thought it was absolutely ridiculous,” said Lisa Clivio-Wentrup, a guidance counselor at Indian River School in West Canaan and the mother of two daughters in Newport schools.

“It's a prime example of how divided our country is,” said David Clivio-Wentrup, Lisa's husband and a teacher at Newport High School. “I'm 56 years old and I’ve never seen it as bad as it is now,” he added.

Would most Newport and Croydon students still have a chance to see the speech?

“I think everyone is planning to show it in some form,” Brannigan said.

“I guess we'll see,” David Clivio-Wentrup said. “Why wasn't it done in the first place, knowing for how long this speech would be done?” The White House news release about the speech was dated Sept. 2, the Wednesday before.

Brannigan said that the timing of the speech, on the Tuesday after a four-day weekend, left school officials with little time to plan. In the absence of central planning, teachers made their own plans to watch the speech.

“My principal and I had conversations via e-mail about it over the weekend,” said Debra Beaupre, a fifth-grade teacher at Newport's Towle Elementary School. Teachers “were thinking we could do what we wanted,” she said in a phone interview.

“I was looking at this as a gimme, a free little pep rally from the president of the United States,” Beaupre said. For some children, the speech might be one of those times when they might say “I remember when… .”

“The thing that was frustrating was I thought that we missed a chance to celebrate a free moment,” she said.

Showing the speech on Constitution Day, as the district now plans to do, doesn't hold the same appeal. “Maybe there's a point there, but I don’t see it,” Beaupre said, adding that as of the end of last week, there had been no talk in the school of curriculum in which to situate the speech.

Urban, who has made a point of reaching out to students in poverty, said she doesn't know what the plan was for showing the speech. She was ready last Tuesday. “I feel it was a very appropriate part of my curriculum,” she said.

Why I love Croydon

Yesterday was the annual Croydon days event. The event was lovely and Burt Smith was missed. I hope these pictures show why I love Croydon so much.

Anastasia and Jim canoeing on the lake.






Alexander getting his face painted and Anastasia feeding Tom Howard's goat.

Cathy

Teachers who get it.

Sorry for the lack of frequent posts we had a visitor and then I was not feeling well.

If you have not heard Teachers' Unions have contributed over 1.3 million dollars to ACORN. ACORN has been involved in illegal alien home loan racket. ACORN has been advising people to commit fraud on their taxes and ACORN has been defunded by the House and Senate check out BIG Government.com to learn more. Some teachers not agreeing with the NEA agenda decided to leave.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Yes Taxes Are Immoral

The following piece appears on Townhall.com. I totally agree that taxes are immoral, I have found that most people who support taxes either live off them via wages or welfare.

Quote of the Day - “There is no such thing as a good tax.” - Winston Churchill

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

The Left Is Right -- Taxes Are a Moral Issue
by Dennis Prager

One principle that all those on the left hold is that taxes constitute more than an economic issue; they are, first and foremost, a moral one. Economists on the left may argue for higher taxes on economic grounds but they and we know that at bottom, higher taxes, especially "taxing the rich," is what they believe morality demands.

For example, there are obviously only two possible ways to reduce government deficits: reduce spending or increase taxes (or some combination of both). The left advocates the later; the right advocates the former. Left-wing spokesmen, such as New York Times economics columnist and Princeton University professor of economics Paul Krugman, may offer economic arguments for raising taxes in order to lower government deficits, but their real motivations are moral: reducing economic inequality (by redistributing income) and expanding government (because government is the most effective way to help all citizens).

Now, as it happens, not only is there is nothing wrong with being animated by moral concerns -- we should all be. The problem with the left's advocacy of higher taxes is not that it is rooted in moral concerns. The problem -- actually the two problems -- are these:

First, higher taxes are rarely morally defensible. In fact, on purely moral grounds -- in other words, even if they did effectively reduce the deficit without paying an economic price for doing so -- they are usually not moral. More on this below.



Second, higher taxes are usually economically counterproductive. This does not matter to the left, however, because economic growth is not what most interests the left. Since Karl Marx, the left has always been far more interested in economic equality than in economic growth. It is true that liberals such as John F. Kennedy were more concerned with economic growth than with economic equality -- which is why he advocated lowering taxes -- but for much of the last century, unlike today, there was a major difference between liberal and left.

Now to return to the moral arguments, my difference with the left is not that I oppose morality dictating economic policy. I believe, in fact, that virtually all social policies should be rooted in moral concerns. My difference with the left is that I am convinced that moral considerations dictate lower, not higher, taxes.

It is too bad that libertarians and conservatives rarely take on the left on moral grounds because the left's moral foundations are as weak as their economic foundations.

The very notion of an income tax is morally debatable. On what moral grounds can the state force a citizen essentially at gunpoint to give away his legally and morally earned money? Why isn't taxation a form of legalized stealing? The obvious answer is that common sense dictates that citizens have the moral right, even the moral obligation, to vote to give money to, at the very least, enable a government to fund a police force, sustain a national defense, and help those incapable of helping themselves or of being helped by others.

But at some point beyond that, taxation becomes nothing more than legalized stealing. Obviously, people will differ over where exactly that point is, but no rational person disputes that such a point exists. No one could argue that a 100 percent tax -- even if it paid for every need every member of the society had -- was moral and not simply a form of theft.

So moral problem No.1 with taxation is the morality of forcing other people -- under threat of violence -- to give their money away.

A second moral problem is having some people give at a greater percentage rate than others. The biblical notion of tithing, for example, is entirely universal -- everyone gave a tenth what he had. No one was forced to give half while others gave a tenth.

A third moral problem is allowing those who pay no tax (such as the federal income tax) to vote on how much others will be forced to pay. It is quite difficult to morally defend the fact that about half of Americans pay no federal income tax, yet they determine how much the other half will be forced to pay.

A fourth moral problem is that the higher the taxes, the more decent people become cheaters. One of the leading religious ethicists of our time, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of two volumes of Jewish ethical law, told me years ago when he lived in Israel during the height of its socialism with its correspondingly high taxes that he witnessed the finest citizens, religious and secular alike, having to cheat on taxes or be rendered impoverished. I have never forgotten that.

I know no one in America today -- and I know extraordinarily honest and generous people, liberal and conservative -- who does not in some way "cheat" on taxes -- as, for example, reporting expenses as business expenses that are not really so. I place the word cheat within quotation marks because not all cheating is illegal. Some people figure out how to avoid paying what the law demands through completely legal, but ethically questionable, means.

At a certain level of taxation, virtually every honest person is reduced to cheating either legally or illegally.

A fifth moral problem is that the higher the tax rate, the lower the charity rate. This is universally true. The more people give to the state, the less they give to their neighbor -- and even to members of their family -- in need.

And sixth and only finally because of the limitations in size of a single column, the higher the taxes, the less people are inclined to work hard. Why should they? At a given point, people just conclude that work is for suckers.

And I haven't even begun to discuss the economic failings of higher taxes.

So, next time someone on the left advocates higher taxes, remember two things: He or she is coming from a moral, not an economic, position. And the moral case against higher taxes is far more powerful than the moral case for them.

Little old Croydon had one of their very own at the 9/12 March in Washington, DC

Waiting for an update of one of Croydon's very own at the 9/12 March in Washington, DC. I wanted to go myself but my mother-in-law was in town.

Someone from Newport sent me the following email. "Brian and I went to the Tea Party in DC yesterday. What a great day and tremendous crowd of patriots. Don't believe the news reports that give attendance numbers in the "tens of thousands". Baloney. DC Police had the crowd at 1.2 million and other estimates went as high as 2.7 million, yet there was little coverage of the event by our great news media. Michelle Malkin has some photos (on her website) of the crowd stretching from the Capitol steps to the Washington Memorial."



Sadly much of the media choose to ignore the event and the media is distorting the numbers present. Surprisingly the media overseas covered the event better than in America.

America Thinker has a great article about the rebellion triggered in America. They article makes a great point, "Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural address in 1801 described what he called the sum of good government as, "a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." But Jefferson also warned, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

I am not a praying person, but lately I have been praying for the survival of the Republic, our Constitution and our Country.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.