Olympic protests begin on opening day

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games promises to be one of the most controversial of all time. We are in for a wild ride.

As expected, the protests against China’s treatment of Tibetan protesters began in earnest at the Olympic torch lighting ceremony in Greece, despite heightened security, with three separate incidents.

Moments before the torch was lit, Chinese Party Secretary Liu Qi spoke unfazed to the audience while, immediately behind him, security apprehended a lone protestor attempting to display a banner depicting the Olympic Rings as handcuffs.

China state television cut away from the scene in an attempt to keep the Chinese people ignorant of what the rest of the world thinks and, over fear of losing their jobs or worse, Chinese television commentators did not mention the demonstration.

Also, during Liu Qi’s speech, two men carrying black flags ran onto the field of the stadium. And three men in the audience, representatives of Reporters without Borders, an advocacy group for press freedom everywhere in the world, unfurled the ‘new’ Olympic banner.

In a separate incident, while the torch was being carried on its 85,000 mile journey from Olympia to Beijing, a Tibetan woman covered herself in red paint and lay in front of the runner while other protesters chanted "Free Tibet" and "Shame on China”.

The focus of the demonstrations is China’s latest human rights violations centering around a demonstration that turned violent on March 14 in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The resultant heavy-handed crackdown by Chinese military and heavily armed police have lead to a disputed number of dead. China claims 22 while Tibet says 80 Tibetans and another 19 in subsequent violence in Gansu province were killed.

More protests are expected and planned when the Olympic torch is carried through Tibet and to the top of Mount Everest leading up to the August 8 opening ceremony.

China is a house of cards and it is only a matter of time before the Chinese people rise up against the picture of ‘false harmony’ the Chinese government wishes the world to see. The Chinese government has been at this game for a very long time and it won’t end soon. Perhaps the Beijing 2008 Olympics is just what is needed to get this house to fall.

Many people consider a sporting event as off limits to political protests but when world leaders do nothing to bring action against such a ‘bully’ for its treatment of its citizens except to sit on the sidelines talking about how terrible it is then it is up to the world’s citizens to stand up and do something. I back these protests one hundred percent.

Let the games begin!

Sources: CNN, Newsvine, Reporters Without Borders

Grow up and help us

This is appalling! I am against the war too, but you should be ashamed of yourselves for calling on our fellow Americans to kill themselves for doing the bidding of a misguided, underhanded, illegal, self-serving federal administration.

Put the blame where it is due. Not on the common foot soldier who most likely joined the military because they couldn’t find a decent paying job in this dysfunctional economy that is in the toilet due to the greed and misguided policies of those buffoons in Washington.

Turn your protests around onto the self-indulgent fossil-sucking fools who covet the wasteful oversized SUV’s and monster trucks, the Ford Excursions, the Chevrolet Suburbans, the Hummers, the Cadillac Escalades, etc that are driving gas prices up and destroying the very environment we all live in while the rest of the country tries to actually do something to help save it from ourselves.

Focus on the greedy home lenders who allowed vulnerable under-qualified home buyers into the housing market that inevitably fell on its face due to their reckless search for more financial profit and then walked away with wads of cash and not one bit of culpability for the damage they did.

Put your energies on ferreting out the many low-life scum bag child molesters, rapists, and drunken drivers that live amongst us masquerading as polite good-guy friends and neighbors. Turn these people in and demand they get treatment so they stop preying on the innocents among us.

Expose the self-serving politicians and bureaucrats who think taxpayers are their personal ATM machines.

Lets keep our priorities straight people. A bunch of bong smoking hippies do not speak for the majority of this country. Now go run back into your parents basements into your shallow little world of self-piety and try to concentrate hard enough, between bong hits, on how your next little laughable anarchistic foray out into the real world is going to insult the rest of us.

We tried protesting in the 60’s, before you were born. It didn’t work. Come out of your drug addled minds and do something positive. Help the world fight corruption and greed, don’t just throw tantrums and expect the world to wake up and suddenly ‘do the right thing’.

Short attention span society

Wait. What? A post on Daily Writing Tips called Web Usability Revisited says that I have to resort to trickery to get you to read past this first paragraph. The inference is that a large segment of our society is too busy, or too jaded, to read more than the first paragraph of anything written. And that in order for me to get you to move on to the second and subsequent paragraphs I should use crutches like bolding, sub-headings and bulleted lists. And that I should place the conclusion of my post here in this first paragraph.

I believe the problem is that we have been conditioned to have short attention spans and that since we are inundated and bombarded with so much information at such a tremendous rate, most of it remarkably inane, from the moment we climb out of bed until we fall asleep again, we don’t know where to spend our time. And our ability to learn new things is suffering.

Does this mean that since we don’t read past the first paragraph we are forming opinions on that post based on just those first few words and accepting it as fact? Does it mean that we are absent mindedly surfing the information super highway without any thought process at all, stopping only on flashy graphics?

If so, why am I continuing to write this post since the majority of web surfers have already moved on either with or without the possibility or learning some new insight into our society? Indeed, what is the point of ever writing anything longer than one sentence if it doesn’t describe some awesome photograph or scream out some supermarket-rag headline like Brittney and Paris are having my alien babies?

Information overload is affecting us in ways that we are not even conscious of yet. Our brains absorb what is thrown before us and because of the amount of information we are exposed to, we expect it to be as condensed as possible, and presented as efficiently as possible, in order to take in the maximum amount of data in the shortest amount of time.

Television delivers short programming segments interrupted by a series of shorter segments during commercial breaks, and I believe that this constant barrage of short segments from the time we are infants is conditioning us to have short attention spans. As a result, we expect every bit of data to be delivered in short bursts, and if it isn’t able to grab our attention quickly then the chance of receiving it is lost.

Thanks to StumbleUpon, those short bursts can be delivered even quicker than ever before. We can sit in front of our computer monitors for hours and have access to millions of websites just for the pure joy of accessing as many as we can. If our attention is so short then this type of browsing experience would serve no other useful purpose than to add quantity to our web experience. The sites that get the most thumbs up are the most graphically intense.

As a result of our short attention span, reading rates are falling along with reading comprehension. The National Endowment for the Arts recently published findings that show the literacy rate for the general public was less than 50%. Reading books for entertainment or as a source of information is becoming a thing of the past. And I cannot imagine that reading on the internet is taking up the slack. As a result of less reading our language and writing skills are abysmal.

Articulation is suffering and therefore the ability to communicate in an ever more complex and technologically advanced world is suffering. The English language is butchered on a daily basis and this new hybrid is being accepted as the norm. There simply is no desire to be articulate. This is why so many mediocre authors are able to get their books published. Without good writing to stimulate people into becoming educated, adaptive, logical thinkers our future is looking very dim.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

- Ray Bradbury

Certainly, we have some great authors writing some fantastic prose today, but the big money is in motion pictures. Why? Because the majority of people would rather watch the movie than read the book. How much crap do you suppose is accepted as entertainment because it is flashy and graphic?

Our libraries are becoming little more than museums to books that get read by an ever decreasing number of our society. Who checks out books from libraries? Students for class assignments, mostly. And a handful of people who still want to experience the richness of the written word, but the body of that satisfying richness is dwindling. A best-selling author can only hope to sell a mere 135,000 copies to a public of 300 million!

We buy magazines loaded with pretty pictures and after viewing them the magazine is tossed onto a pile and collects dust without the articles being read.

The relationship between the internet and the media is a perfect match for our attention-depleted public because we only have to read one line in the highlights section to get ‘up to speed’ on current events. Try talking to someone about any news topic, they will probably say “yeah, I heard about that but I didn’t get the details”. You know why they only ‘heard’ about it but didn’t get any ‘details’? Because they skimmed the headlines without clicking to the story. This has become the new ‘USA Today’ approach to getting the news. Remember when USA Today first began publishing? Their novel approach to getting the news out was to put as many headlines and pictures on the front page as they could because most people did not want the details. They could just skim over the front page on the way to their jobs.

While we allow ourselves to be dumbed-down by not taking the time to read the rest of the world is surpassing us in education, technology and industry. American eighth graders rank ninth worldwide in science scores--and 15th in math, behind students in Estonia, Hungary, and Malaysia. And for years, U.S. students have been migrating away from hard sciences--which tends to be the source of cutting-edge new products and other innovations.

We are just not hungry enough anymore. We have grown complacent with being number one for so long that we have taken this fatal attitude that we can sit back and watch the number two’s grovel to keep up. I’ve got news for all of you. Number two is getting smarter and hungrier by educating themselves, by reading. And they are not doing it by watching television or surfing the internet for cool pictures.

We need to get our children motivated enough to get our education level back up in order to compete with the world again. We need to reopen our minds and get those creative and innovated juices flowing again. We need to get our stagnated free-thinking logic working on technology that will allow us to survive the major problems facing us today and in the future.

The best way to do all of this is to read everything we can get our hands on. Effective communication with the rest of the world depends entirely on literacy. We cannot afford the luxury of watching life go by without finding and celebrating the intelligence that we could find if we would only take the time to read it.

What is the price for friendly relations with China?

Chinese troops and police in riot gear are roving the Tibetan countryside in an attempt to squelch protest against their authority. Tourists are forced out so there will be no witness to the brutal response that China bears on anyone who dares protest against her. Accounts of deaths differ widely between Chinese officials and civilians living in the area. China disables internet access to the rest of the world.

This is the reality of China. This is the private face their leaders try not to show the world. The ugly face that emerges whenever the inconvenience of human rights flares up.

This is the China the world helps support via hundreds of billions of dollars in trade for her products, some tainted with toxins, some produced by child labor, many manufactured under horrendous working conditions.

This is the China that the United States trade deficit displaced production that could have supported 2,166,000 U.S. jobs.

This is the China that the International Olympic Committee chose to expose the world’s most beloved amateur athletes to.

Why did they do that? Why do we support China?

They are a part of the family of man. They are part of the fabric that makes this world complete. Altruistic reasons. But so too are terrorists, racists, bigots, authoritarians, murderers, rapists, and the list goes on, all members of our family. We shun these characters. We lock them up and execute them for their deeds. But an entire government, that is a different matter. Iran is boycotted for refusal to submit to U.S. requests to stop developing nuclear power. North Korea is ostracized for wanting to keep to themselves and developing nuclear power and a missile delivery system. We declared war on a sovereign nation under false suspicion of weapons of mass destruction. But when it comes to a country who already has nuclear power AND floods our shores with cheaply made products, we ignore their suppression of human rights and send our athletes and money to them.

It is better to have them as a friend than a foe. They outnumber us 4 to 1.

So, how do we tolerate a family relative who beats and kills his family members and sends us gifts? We pretend to not see through their veiled attempts at human rights while they imprison and kill monks demanding freedom for themselves and we increase our trade deficit with them.

When is the price of human rights high enough to stop trading with China? Are we willing to continue to support policies that kill protestors?

For the answer go to your neighborhood Wal-Mart and try to find a product not made in China. They are in every neighborhood now, right? Oh look, a cute little toy for junior and it’s only 99 cents! What a bargain!

Gun control vs. Privacy Rights

The government gave us the right to bear arms. There are people living amongst us that should never have access to arms. The system has failed us by allowing these persons access to arms. Criminals will always find a way to get arms. We need the right to bear arms because the government cannot protect us. This collection of true statements best sums up the thorny issue put before our Supreme Court.

Regardless of our forefathers intentions when wording the Second Amendment, today’s society, being as violent prone as it is, should hold greater sway over our right to bear arms.

Our police force is not of a sufficient size to protect the citizenry. Therefore we need to do it ourselves.

In the absence of verifiable training and competency in handling a weapon capable of dealing out death, no one should have access to any handgun. In an ideal world, no mentally unstable person would have access to a handgun. But that is not our currently reality. We have to be able to protect ourselves. If a person chooses to own a handgun they should be allowed to but only after extensive education, training and background checks.

The need for background checks is not debatable. The requirement for more stringent and reliable screening, along with even tougher penalties for anyone selling a handgun used in a crime by a person determined to have been a high risk, is not debatable. The base issue for achieving more stringent and reliable screening revolves around the ability to collect all pertinent information on every individual living in this country and the ability to share data between states. Without the ability to collect and share this data you cannot expect a thorough and complete examination of an individuals past history.

Americans value their privacy and laws have been enacted to ensure that they continue to have their privacy protected. So, just how far are the citizens of this country willing to go to keep handguns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill?

Criminals, of course, will always find a way to get a handgun. The mentally ill has in far too many cases bought handguns legally. The everyday law-abiding citizen, who is most at risk from the other two groups, is more often refused a handgun permit due to lack of proof of the need for one.

The majority of citizens are law abiding, good people and permitting them to carry a handgun is not going to instantly turn them into criminals or embolden them to the point that they will resort to using it. The real test comes when faced with road rage or some other heated moment of passion that could lead to a greater chance of serious injury or death, to their intended victim and/or innocent bystanders, if a handgun is at the ready. These situations are the most worrisome and illustrate the paramount importance of the utmost care in determining a persons mental, moral and ethical health before being given a gun. But even careful scrutiny will not guarantee public safety.

An extreme but very real example: a jittery, nervous single mother expecting retaliation from someone she is protecting her neighborhood and home from expecting someone to break into her home could possibly be more likely to shoot at anything that moves and ask questions later. This makes this type of person a serious threat to the public.

Another very real example: the misinterpretation of the motives of someone trying to get your attention to save you from some other threat that you may not be aware of could be shot as an intruder or antagonist.

The right to bear arms should definitely be given in times of national emergency so we can assist the police and military, granted not a likely scenario but possible. The right to bear arms otherwise should also be allowed but only after thorough background checks and training. We have a long way to go in balancing privacy rights with the rights to bear arms before we can prove we will not become an even greater threat to ourselves by giving everyone handguns.

The bottom line is we have allowed the worst common denominator among us to dictate the need to carry a weapon. And in this undeniably violent society we are not addressing the very real need for anger management to help us control our violent urges. Nor are we addressing the moral and ethical issues needed to respect one another. Until we address these issues none of us is safe from ourselves, whether we carry a gun or not.

Earmarking is a drive up ATM

Do you know what an earmark is? A member of Congress submits a request for money to fund a pet project by attaching the request to some bill, any bill, that is up for vote. The bill does not have to be related to the request. Does the bill have to be approved? I haven’t been able to get an answer to that question.

This latest method of requesting funds has become very popular over the last couple of years due to the fact that the House Appropriations Committee, who is tasked with determining what federal programs should receive funding, and how much they should get, has become so overburdened with requests and oversight duties that it is quicker and easier, and more likely assured, for Congress members to get their money using this new method. Because there are so many earmark requests, over 30,000 last year, many of them are granted without any oversight and without any follow-up as to whether or not the money was spent as declared.

This is like a family with 535 children, all repeatedly asking Dad for money. Dad becomes overwhelmed with the children’s demands that out of pure exasperation, he gives in and lets them all have whatever they want.

The bottle-neck between requests for money and the receiving of that money has been successfully bypassed by the use of earmarks.

Is the money well-spent? Come on, this is the U.S. Congress we’re talking about here. Nobody other than the recipients of these funds knows, and they most likely don’t know either.

And just who are the recipients? Lobbyists, special interest groups, politicians families? The biggest benefactors are the politicians requesting the funds and trading them for future votes.

Why is this bleeding of our tax dollars allowed to continue? Because the very people who benefit from this system are the ones who vote on its existence. What a marvelous system we have here.

Shouldn’t the spending of our tax dollars be scrutinized to validate the merit of a project? Is there verification of who is actually receiving these funds and that the funds are being spent as requested? Are we certain that our tax dollars are not being frivolously or unnecessarily spent on personal projects?

In the banking world, depositors money is spent to benefit the banking establishment, usually to cover loans and for capital investment. The use of that money is approved by a board of directors or some other appropriate committee. But these are private businesses. In the case of congress, the taxpayers are the board of directors. Sure we send representatives to speak for us but sometimes a Randy Cunningham gets involved. Sometimes a Ted Stevens gets involved. Congress has the money to spend because federal law says we have to give it to them, and then they get to decide who gets it based on what, seniority or merit or who scratched who’s back?

Last year, Congress approved more than $18 billion in spending through earmark requests. This may not sound like very much money compared to the projected 2009 budget of $3.1 trillion dollars, but where is our share?

I would like to get onboard this gravy train. Where do I signup to get money to study how congress spends our money. I want an earmark to get funding to educate people on why changing our driving habits will help conserve what fossil fuel resources we have left. I want money to fund a program that would re-direct our tax dollars to a better health care system, fully funded daycare for single working parents, beef up our social security system, give all teachers a huge raise, repair our dilapidated infrastructure. But most of all I want money to go back to the common taxpayer. You know who I’m talking about. The people who fund these projects while struggling to pay their monthly bills and put decent, healthy meals on their families tables.

Clinton backs rule breakers when it benefits her

Senator Hillary Clinton on Wednesday warned that millions of people in Florida and Michigan "are in danger of being excluded from our democratic process" if their votes are not counted.

Notice how she presents this situation as a true injustice to millions of Americans? The Democratic National Convention stripped Florida and Michigan of their delegates back in January because they illegally held their primaries early. Michigan and Florida both knew they would lose their delegates but went through with the primaries anyway.

When they broke the DNC rules, she said nothing, when they discovered they will lose their delegates, she said nothing, when she learned that by them losing their delegates she would fall far behind Obama in their race to be the democratic nominee, she is now all over it.

This illustrates her motivation for anything she does now and will do if elected. It is not for the common good that she is fighting, it is for her own good. These states broke the rules knowing full well the consequences and now she is lobbying for them to not have to suffer the consequences, because it will benefit her. She is not being altruistic here. She is fully committed to the belief that rules do not have to be followed.

How do you suppose she would handle this if it was Obama who would benefit by having the DNC decision overturned?

What happens, if while president, she is confronted a with situation in which a corporation, a state or a foreign government decides they don’t want to play by the rules and by shunning those rules she will benefit personally but harm will come to our country if they are not punished? She is giving us an insight into how she will react right here and now. Pay attention people.

Clinton didn’t even consider Florida important enough to campaign in when they held their early illegal primaries on January 29. But now that she sees how their delegates would benefit her, she wants them counted.

She wants the fact that rules were ignored to go away, and she wants to benefit from it.

Florida Governor Charlie Christ’s comment, "It's unconscionable to me that some party boss in Washington is not going to permit the people to be heard. That's not what America is all about, and it's wrong", is not well thought out. Both states knew the rules, and knew the consequences and forged ahead anyway. These are the facts. By allowing these states to break the rules and benefit from breaking those rules is not what America is all about. It is very conscionable that some ‘party boss in Washington’ is following the rules. Live with it.

Prostitutes for thousands of dollars??

This is insane. I may be a little naïve here, but when did hookers begin commanding this kind of money?

The recent scandal with New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with high class hookers was truly shocking. I mean how can anyone justify spending thousands of dollars for something they can get for much less elsewhere?

Have we really fooled ourselves into believing that one woman is worth more than another?

The news story pretties it up by calling her an escort. She’s a whore, plain and simple. This activity is illegal and she won’t even be charged with any crime?

What is it that puts these kind of women into this degrading life? Her story is pretty typical from what I understand. A broken, abusive family life, leading to drug and sexual abuse. That tired old cliché ‘If I never went through the hard times, I would not be able to appreciate the good ones’ is pure bull#*%t. I can guarantee you that I have had plenty of good times without degrading myself to her level. And I appreciate every good time I have ever had.

Where do people like get the idea that they cannot make something of themselves before getting into drugs and promiscuity? I obviously do not understand any of this.

Race doesn’t matter in the presidential office

Throughout this entire presidential campaign Barack Obama has garnered most of the African-American vote (why do we still use the term African-American? The very use of terms like this keeps the racial division alive). Hillary Clinton has received her largest support from white Americans (why aren’t whites labeled European-Americans?)

And the greatest racial division exists in the ‘old south’. Boy am I surprised. The three states that have shown the greatest polarization is Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.

To choose someone for our highest office based solely on race is a wasted vote, in my opinion. These are politicians. Haven’t you been paying attention to what elected politicians do to our country. What makes you think race is going to change anything?

One person doesn’t decide our future anyway. It’s the group of ‘expert advisors’ that the president surrounds himself/herself with. The president is not going to look out for one race over the other. The president will still be pulled from all sides to give special favors to whoever throws the most money at them. And if we have learned anything at all from American politics it is that big money always gets what it wants. It makes no difference if you are white, black, red or yellow. Money will win out.

When that phone rings at 3 AM do you really think that race will determine its outcome? It will be a crisis and the president’s background or race won’t amount to anything in how you deal with it. What does matter most is how you deal with foreign nations to prevent that phone call from being made.

Let us not forget, the president is only a figurehead put in place for us to focus the blame and the glory. The people who truly run this country are the group of advisors he/she surrounds themselves with. Look at the group of people George W. Bush surrounds himself with. They are a bunch of corporate-backed, opportunistic millionaires who saw an opportunity to make even more money by supporting a war in Iraq. Instead of taking the moral high ground to actually help the people of Iraq they decided to play the military card as a means of helping themselves make more money.

These people are politicians first and foremost. They will say anything to get elected. Someone please enlighten me as to how many years you have to go back to find the last president who actually gave a damn about the common man and was able to change our lives for the better.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain are millionaires. Do you think they care about the plight of the minimum wage grunt whose tax dollars go to pay the salaries of that other group of millionaires collectively called Congress? They care only so much as to do what it takes to keep that money flowing in their direction.

If any one of these three had been sitting behind that desk in the oval office when the twin towers were destroyed, do you think their decision to declare war on terrorism would have been any different than George W. Bush’s? Maybe, just maybe, we would not have declared war against Saddam Hussein, we will never know. But I can assure you that our day to day lives would have changed anyway.

Will there be fewer political scandals under Clinton’s presidency or Obama’s presidency? How about McCain’s presidency?

Will the moral and ethical character of this country be uplifted more by having one millionaire with corporate America in their pocket over the other?

Will the price of gasoline and food come down quicker under the presidency of a black president or a white president?

Will our dilapidated infrastructure, our rapidly depleting social security and healthcare systems be repaired quicker under one over the other?

Does race have anything to do with answering any of these questions?

Race doesn’t amount to squat when it comes time to facing a nuclear backed government bent on our destruction.

Please, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas in particular, and the rest of country in general, do not waste your vote on things that don’t matter. Vote for the character of the person based on that person’s past performance. Let’s try to get it right this time, for everyone’s sake, not just yours.

Home schooling vs. public education

A California judge could possibly rule that parents who teach their children at home must be credentialed by the state or return their children to state approved schools.

Upon first reading this I was infuriated that yet another judge could take away another of our individual freedoms and thereby create a larger burden on the majority.

Home schooling has been an acceptable practice for families not wanting to enroll their children in public schools since colonial days.

When I first heard of home schooling I thought it was a bad idea due mostly to my not understanding how parents, who most likely hated school themselves, can instill in their children the love of learning that makes teaching so much more rewarding. How are they motivated to give their child every benefit of education they deserve? They are setting their children up for failure!

I decided to learn what I can about home schooling to see how it works and how it compares to public education. Over my course of research and discovery I have learned that home schooling offers some unique benefits not found in public schools. I have learned that there is a system in place to ensure home schooled students maintain a comparable level of education with their peers in public schools.

My personal prejudices aside against the inefficiency and stagnation of creativity that takes place in public schools, I have learned that home schooling is superior to public education in some ways and not so much in others. Home schooling is not for everyone.

History of home schooling.

In colonial America, home schooling was naturally the only system of learning available, aside from on the job training, as it were, to learn what you need to survive. Formal classroom settings were slow in arriving. Most children were taught at home by their parents in their spare time between doing the everyday chores related to survival.

Education developed into religious training as many of the universities in the Ivy League were established to train ministers. Eventually, communities and states began to establish schools supported by government funds; however, these schools continued to have a very distinctive religious flavor as evidenced by the use of the New England Primer which was so popular at that time. In fact, the Catholic parochial school movement began in this country as a response to what Catholics perceived as the overt Protestant nature of the public schools.

By the late nineteenth century many communities felt that the state had a compelling interest to make sure that every child received an education so that they might be productive citizens. Others felt that requiring their children to go to a state sponsored school was eroding the authority of the parents by making the state the final authority rather than the parent. One by one states passed compulsory attendance laws, but public schools continued for some time to have a distinctly Christian character.

In the early 1960s, the United States Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that would dramatically change the face of public education in this county and set the stage for a return to home schooling. The U.S. Supreme Court declared that it was a violation of the Constitution to read the Bible, pray, or even post the Ten Commandments in a public school.

As a direct result of these changes, private Christian schools began to spring up all over the county. The proliferation of such schools was an attempt by parents to give their children an education integrated with the values that they held. Ten years later, the circle was completed as parents began to teach their own children at home.

Benefits of home schooling

Home schooling provides relief from the overcrowding that is inherent in public schools. The ratio of students to teacher is growing annually and is greater than ever. A parent, teaching several children at one time can afford more time per student than a public school teacher with as many as 50 students or more.

Overcrowding creates a stress not likely to be found in the home. Frustration felt at not getting the proper attention can lead to a student to give up on doing their best or, in the worse case, even trying. The feeling of being lost in the crowd stifles many students so that if they do get through high school and enter college, they are not as likely to fully participate in the education process and therefore society as a whole misses out on another possible brilliant contributor to our general well-being.

Due to the more relaxed and flexible atmosphere in the home, the extra attention given a student can lead that student to a greater appreciation of the educational process. They are allowed to more thoroughly savor the ability to learn, even though they don’t consciously realize it, the desire to learn is becoming ingrained in them. The process of new discovery is a heady experience that should never be restricted, it should be allowed to soar unfettered in order to open new avenues of discovery leading to new opportunities that will further encourage their inquisitive nature.

Areas of interest are more likely to be pursued without arbitrary rules set up for the purpose of crowd management, as is the public school setting.

Being home schooled strengthens the bonds between parent and child. Something that I personally feel is sorely missing in today’s society as this lack of familial bonding contributes directly to a host of society’s ills.

Remaining at home for longer hours reinforces valuable behavior and deemphasizes undesirable behavior in a natural manner.

Children don’t bring home as many illnesses when they aren’t exposed to the crowds of other school children.

Being at home allows children to see what adult life is about. They develop an interest in what adults do and how they interact with one another. This only serves to increase their curiosity in what is available for their future.

Drawbacks of public schooling

One myth is that socialization of children will suffer. On the contrary, the individual attention given a home schooler instills a sense of pride and the strength of individualism that allows the student to think and make decisions on their own without the peer pressure that is so evident in public schools. The cliquish behavior of school age kids tends to too often alienate others and interfere with education.

Public schools don’t recognize the difference between learning-disabled and learning-delayed. If a student is unable to maintain the level of education that their age dictates, according to public school guidelines, then the child is recommended for drug induced special-education for the learning disabled. School systems are the leading cause of Ritalin addled children.

This system tries to be everything to everyone. We are unfairly placing more and more responsibility on the public schoolteacher. Sex education, should be taught in the home. Responsibility for oneself should be taught in the home. Respect for one another and yourself should be taught in the home. A duty to your family and society as a whole should be taught at home. Religion should be taught in the home and at church. We have blurred the lines between teacher and parental responsibilities and far too many parents have welcomed shirking these important duties and putting them off onto the overburdened school teacher.

Children are forced to stay within their age group rather than move on along with their classmates. I.e., a fourth grader might be learning at a fifth grade level but must, due to age, stifle their learning in order to satisfy this archaic school system requirement. Likewise, too often a student who is falling behind his/her peers is pushed into the next grade level to make room for the next group. This process stigmatizes students to the point many give up on school or they resign themselves to being outcasts. We are doing a grave disservice to both of these students and society.

In forcing our children into the public arena at such an early age we are socializing them into peer dependency, a social cancer in which students lose family closeness and values and provide a precise breeding ground for drugs, ill-advised sex, etc. Many public schools acknowledge this.

Individual interests are squelched at the expense of a uniform rate of learning that produces a sameness, a vanilla-flavor of education.

Schools only teach children how to take tests. They memorize what they need to pass the next test and then throw it out to make room for the next list of items to memorize for the next test. Granted, some of this memorization sticks with the student but the experience becomes viewed as a waste of time and is so distasteful to some students that they drop out of school.

The artificial structure of the classroom setting, does not prepare the student for the real world where the demand to “think outside the box” creates frustration for those who have acclimated themselves to the classroom structure and expect real-life to match their expectations. We are setting them up for failure or to be relegated to that group of timid souls who never exercise their individualism and whose opinion will never be heard because, through peer pressure and fear of being laughed at, they were taught to never think for themselves. Welcome to middle-class America where the silent majority quietly and obediently perform their day-to-day functions as good little taxpaying, couch-sitting, television-watching, fast-food-eating, consumers who never get ahead because their individualism has been stifled by a public school system that told them they never will.

Our schools are overcrowded, the teachers are underpaid and have been handed the extra duty of being mommies and daddies to children who have not been properly taught in the home how to behave in public. Many of their efforts to teach are stifled by a top heavy and bloated administrative structure that spends way too much time and effort on politics than actual administration. There are outstanding teachers who put their students learning ahead of everything else, just as there are those who only go through the motions for a paycheck.

I come away from this research convinced that home schooling is by far superior to our public school system but only if the parent is educated enough to take the place of the public school teacher. Good intentions can get you only so far. If you don’t feel you can provide a better educational experience for your child, even with the safeguards that ensure your child is not left behind his/her peers, then please don’t get into this.

Home schooling is just one philosophy of teaching our children. Another is the Montessori method. Public school system includes Charter schools and Magnet schools. For more information see below.

Our children deserve, and our society deserves, to be well-educated so no matter which avenue you choose to educate your child please be involved to ensure they are getting a good education. Don’t just assume the teacher is doing everything possible.

Center for Education Reform (Charter Schools)

About Montessori schools

Public School Review

Nothing makes good neighbors like Waterboarding

“The U.S. does not torture prisoners!” Yeah right. Our illustrious, benevolent leader, in mustering all of his stupefying logic just vetoed a bill that would ban waterboarding.

President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks. So in his wisdom, the ends justify the means, whether it is illegal or immoral.

“The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. "So today I vetoed it," Bush said. The bill he rejected provides guidelines for intelligence activities and has the interrogation requirement as one provision. It cleared the House in December and the Senate last month.

How about we just allow the outright killing of any suspected terrorist? Will that make certain that we got them all? Why not just allow this stellar form of terrorist eradication, Mr. President? I’m waiting for your answer.

This guy’s lunacy continues to amaze me. He admonishes Congress for outlawing “practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe”. How dare he use “keeping America safe” as reasoning for resorting to illegal and immoral interrogation techniques? Oh, yeah, he lied to get us into this illegal war which increased terrorist activities against us which in turn prompted him to ask for more funding to fight his “war on terror” which further increases terrorist activity against us. So, yes, I see where the precedent has indeed been set.

How recent was it that he flatly denied even using waterboarding as a technique for interrogation? And now he proclaims our use of it as the most important technique to keep U.S. citizens safe. His audacity knows no bounds. He can’t even keep his lies straight so he can at least try to prevent them from coming back on him.

Please tell me how sinking to the level of these terrorists is going to make us any better.

He tries to make the distinction between “lawful combatants captured on the battlefield” and “hardened terrorists” as basis for using life-threatening procedures against a terrorists suspect and expects to get truthful responses. This means that if you wear a uniform in fighting against the U.S. then we will only declare you a prisoner of war and treat you better for it. If you don’t wear a uniform and fight against us then you will be tortured unmercifully until you tell us something that we still need to verify. If in doing so we cause more people to hate us and take up arms against us then so be it.

We have been through all of this before. Torture does not guarantee a truthful answer to the torturers questions. The person being tortures will say whatever is necessary to stop the torture.

The use of torture relegates us as hypocrites in that it undermines the U.S. when arguing overseas for human rights and other moral issues. It also places Americans at greater risk of being tortured when captured.

By vetoing Congress’s obvious condemnation of inhuman tactics, George W. Bush has single-handedly snubbed international and U.S. law, again. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 includes a provision barring cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for all detainees in U.S. custody, including CIA prisoners, which covers waterboarding.

Bush and his advisors have proven once again that they have no interest in seeking an end to hostilities with the world. In their use of animalistic and barbaric methods, by using military might and torture tactics instead of diplomacy, in order to force their policies onto the rest of the world, we are no better than the terrorists that Bush repeatedly insists is necessary for us to fight against.

The U.S. military specifically prohibited waterboarding in 2006. The CIA also prohibited the practice in 2006, and says it has not been used since three prisoners encountered it in 2003.

So, why did Bush veto practices that have already been abandoned? I think it is very possible that he is telling some other organization, that has not yet been exposed by the media, that it is okay to continue their use of it.

I hate the fact that this administrations past deviousness feeds my skepticism of anything this man does. I want to believe that we American’s are better than this. But I am constantly shown by this group of individuals that I am probably wrong.

I greatly detest George W. Bush’s vision of America. He must relish our rapid decline towards the bottom of the list of civilized nations. He has done so much to cement our position once we get there. We now grovel at ground level of what is considered acceptable human rights while demanding others ‘do as we say, not as we do’. Our only good quality is that we do not hesitate to send money to aid natural disaster victims. And even then we degrade ourselves through the mismanagement, greed and graft of the ‘helpers’ siphoning off as much money for themselves as they can.

The only way for me to understand this dichotomy of good American and low-life politician is to keep in mind that this immoral, poor excuse for a humanitarian does not represent me as an American.

Spend money to give money?

What a total and asinine way to waste money! Our U.S. government does more to waste everything it touches, that it is no surprise they will throw away money to tell us something almost every American already knows.

The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan. Duh! Who hasn’t heard that checks are going out to us? And who doesn’t know that if you didn’t put anything in then don’t expect to get anything back?

Oh, maybe this is part of the stimulus plan! That’s it! $168 billion dollars isn’t enough so the IRS is doing their part.

Why can’t they use the media to get the word out? The internet reaches how many people? How much did it cost to have main stream media tell us the letters were coming? How about sending one letter along with the check to explain the check? That way you only have to spend the money one time. What a concept!

Who the hell is running this organization?

I just read the explanation of the stimulus package, actually several times over the past several weeks, and I don’t need a letter from the IRS to tell me what I just learned. This is ridiculous. Spend my money on more useful things like catching tax cheats. Better yet put my share toward improving education or healthcare.

This pat on the back for George works out to about 32 cents to print, process and mail each letter. It doesn't include the tab for another round of mailings planned for those who didn't file tax returns last year but may still qualify for a rebate.

We are in the information age people. Put the tools we have to better use than this.

For those people who don’t bother themselves to watch the news in of its various forms, won’t they be surprised to get a check!

True cost of Iraq War

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has calculated the total cost of the first four years of the Bush/Cheney illegal war on Iraq. Their lies and schemes cost American taxpayers $720 million per day. This figure takes into account interest on the war debt and long-term care for the wounded.

The American Friends Service Committee has analyzed what America could buy with only a single day's worth of the money we're spending on this mightmare. For $720 million, we could:

* Provide health coverage for a year for 424,000 children.

* Build 84 brand new schools.

* Buy school lunches for a year for 1.2 million needy kids.

* Provide 6,482 units of affordable housing.

* Pay for a year of renewable-energy electricity in 1.3 million homes.

* Pay the annual salaries of 12,500 new classroom teachers.

* Put 35,000 students through a 4-year state college.

Any of these could be had for just one day of war funding. One week of spending at this rate would pay for every item on this list.

As if the money alone isn’t atrocious enough, as of March 4, 2008 we have lost 3,974 of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors so that Bush, Cheney and their cronies in the military industrial complex and the new military intelligence complex could bolster their financial bottom line.

Iraqi citizens, who only pleaded for help in removing Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical family from power, has paid for this ‘service’ with over 38,000 of their fellow neighbors lives. Over 2.5 million have been forced out of neighborhoods that they will never be able to move back into. Jobs and careers have been unalterably changed. The entire social/economic/religious complexion of the entire country and the Middle East has been changed. All because Americans wasteful thirst for more oil and money.

Iraqi citizens are still deprived of adequate water supplies, sewer systems, and electricity in their homes. Do you think maybe they are sorry they ever asked for our help?

All of this is currently going on in a country that never threatened us directly, but since they had oil the U.S. felt ‘obligated’ to move in, ‘just for their own protection’.

I would say that the balance sheet in this ‘we help you, you help us’ scheme is just a bit unbalanced.

How much money are Bush’s buddies making off of us?

From the Boston Globe March 6, 2008

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

Need more proof that Bush/Cheney look the other way while their buddies siphon money from U.S. citizens while lining their own pockets?

Halliburton has been accused by the Pentagon of overcharges in the amount of $1.4 billion.

Congress has found that $10 billion has been mismanaged and wasted.

$9 billion of U.S. taxpayers money and $549.7 million in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors remains unaccounted for. Also, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.

$1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment provided to the Iraqi security forces is missing.

Pentagon auditors have determined that of the $20 billion paid to Kellogg Brown & Root to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items, $3.2 billion is questionable or unsupportable.

Will anything be done to prosecute or even conduct meaningful investigations into this mismanagement, theft, graft, deceit and lies surrounding this illegal war? No!

Need more proof that George W. Bush and company doesn’t give a damn about the welfare of his fellow citizens? His 2009 budget to Congress will give $515 billion to the Pentagon and slash spending on healthcare programs, Center for Disease Control, low-income energy assistance, and family literacy.

Health, education and welfare continues to take a backseat to military funding. Why? Because there isn’t enough money to be made on health, education and welfare. His fellow citizens mean nothing more to him than warm bodies to put in harms way so he and his buddies can reap billions in profits while our nation’s infrastructure falls into disrepair, our social security program remains underfunded, our healthcare system dies a slow death, and the value of our dollar recedes into oblivion.

Bush’s answer to ease our suffering due to his ruinous economic policies is to throw us a meager bone, in the form of a $300 check, with a grin while telling us that we are free to spend it on whatever we want. Gee, thanks George. This brings to mind Marie Antoinette’s famous line ‘Let them eat cake’ when she learned the peasants had no bread to eat.

And what can we spend this surprise windfall on? Products made by foreign governments so that all of this ‘free’ money goes directly to stimulating their economies. Great plan George! Here’s an idea, how about bringing back some of the New Deal economic recovery plans that Franklin D. Roosevelt put into action to help the country through the depression? Oh, but then, you would have to admit that our economy is not as resilient and fundamentally healthy as you and your cohorts proclaim it to be. If you would just view the exercise as ensuring you had healthy young men and women available for your dirty little war, you just might be willing to try it.

U.S. government as military/business state

This may not be much of a surprise to anyone who follows national politics but the military-industrial complex has become the military-intelligence complex. There used to be a joke floating around that said “Military intelligence is neither”. Meaning our military had gotten weak and they were far from intelligent. However, the Bush administration, under the guidance of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, changed that.

They devised methods of financially profiting from a military role in Iraq while at the same time guaranteeing the continued need for a bigger, more technologically advanced military presence throughout the world. This administration saw this great opportunity for profit in Iraq and was just brazen enough and unethical enough to put their plan in motion. Their only hurdle to more profit was the fact that the U.S. public will not stand for the return of the draft. War profiteers salivate over having a draft because a larger military means more support staff, more supplies and more weapons which translates to more profit.

But this did not deter them in their profit scheme. They simply hired professional private soldiers, such as Blackwater USA, but did it in such a way as to create a financially symbiotic relationship.

Training Future Private Contractors

Blackwater USA founder, Erik Prince started out in the service of his country and soon learned how to turn his U.S. military training into profit, for himself. Their website states that "Blackwater Training Center was founded in 1996 to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.” “Anticipated” and “outsourcing” are the key operative words here. Erik Prince did not create this company in ‘hopes’ that the federal government would need his services. He had assurances that his company would become another tool in our governments design for continued world dominance. The U.S. government hires Blackwater USA to train military personnel. Did the U.S. military become ineffective in training their own? Or is this part of a scheme to spread money around to their cronies?

Top CIA and Pentagon officials have taken up high positions in Blackwater USA and retain close working relationships with our government in order to profit from our self-declared ‘war on terror’. A war that we perpetuate in our continued ambition to remain the world’s dominant nation.

Stephen Cambone, once undersecretary of defense for intelligence and longtime aide to Donald Rumsfeld was hired by QinetiQ (pronounced kinetic) North America (QNA), a major British owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia who has also profited from hiring former high-ranking Pentagon and intelligence officials.

Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, was once the director of the National Security Agency. Between the two positions he received a seven-figure salary at Booz-Allen Hamilton, a major intelligence contractor. The Intelligence community and contractors have become so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests are identical.

Dependence on Private Contractors

Intelligence gathering is becoming privatized and therefore less controlled and scrutinized by politicians. Awarding lucrative contracts to the private sector for intelligence gathering allows the Pentagon more control of their operational outcome by having quicker and more complete access to intelligence. No longer are they dependent on what the CIA decides to pass on.

The proliferation of these private enterprises will not cease after the war is over. The hunger for more and more intelligence cannot be quenched once we have the technology to allow us to gather it. An atmosphere of distrust between citizens and their government officials will always ensure that private citizens will be spied upon.

The Bush administration is already building the case for the need to spy on us under the guise of their war on terror. This legislation is not going to go away after the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The so called war on terror will continue as long as America pushes its policies onto an unyielding and unreceptive world.

High-tech devices such as military drones and robots, low-flying satellites and jamming technologies will not be relegated to storage after the war. They will continue to be used, this time on us. Civilians will not be able to go anywhere without someone watching.

Private military, disguised as private security forces, will be used much as NATO forces are used throughout the world. They will be used to supplement the National Guard just as they were during the Katrina aftermath.

Failing Diplomacy

Doug Brooks, president of International Peace Operations Association, an association of private military firms, says his members can help ‘where governments have failed’. The failing point of any government to prevent war is when diplomacy fails. Have we lost the art of diplomacy? Have we become so much more eager to resort to violence rather than address our differences at the conference table?

The recent Colombian military incursion into Ecuador, to attack the rebel group FARC, brought condemnation by Ecuadors president Rafael Correa and Venezuelan president Victor Chavez. Why wasn’t the action discussed with Ecuador before the raid took place in order to prevent the condemnation and perceived attack on Ecuador’s sovereignty? Venezuela took the action as an attack against them by the United States! Why? Because Venezuela backs FARC, a group that resorts to violence, kidnapping, rape and murder to get what they want. And Venezuela, who represents itself as ‘the peaceful path’, will jump at any opportunity to condemn the U.S. over anything the U.S. does or backs. Missed opportunities at diplomacy that leads to the misinterpretation of actions and supports the misplaced perception of arrogance, can be deadly which is exactly why diplomacy and open, truthful conversation is necessary for the world to move toward peace.

The need for acceptance and understanding is at the core of the ongoing friction between Israel and just about everyone else.

As long as the inability to maintain meaningful diplomatic relations exist between governments there will be wars, and the need for sophisticated intelligence networks.

Donald Rumsfeld understood this, so with Cheney’s support, he set out to modernize the U.S. military into a high-tech, computerized fighting force as a means of covering up what was really going on, the building of intelligence networks through the use of private contractors. The uniformed military and the defense industry were not pleased. Both objected to Rumsfeld’s network centric policies and the accompanying cuts imposed on Cold War-era weapons such as aircraft carriers and artillery systems. But the September 11, attacks served to galvanize the country and provided the opening for Rumsfeld and his allies in the administration to make intelligence the centerpiece of their new “war on terror.” Yes, those attacks proved very fortuitous indeed.

As a result, we attacked a nation that had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks, we have been instrumental in the murder of countless Iraqi citizens and contributed to the spread of terrorism which ensures that private contractors will always play a major role in the spread of America’s form of democracy and profiteering.

We have become a cancer. We are pushing our government/business model onto the rest of the world through war profiteering. Using our military might where we used to rely on diplomacy serves only those who are in a position to be financially rewarded. People like Stephen Cambone, Doug Brooks, Michael McConnell, Dick Cheney and Erik Prince are war profiteers and as such do not have America’s best interests at heart.

The privatization of what used to be the domain of the military brings about the question of ethics. Once you become private, you take the defense and protection of the American public out of the equation. Now you are no longer concerned with defending this country. Your outlook changes from the altruistic ‘fighting for your country’ to one of fighting for your financial health.