Daily Archives: April 25, 2014

04/25/14

Journey to the Center of the Common Core – Pt. 1

By: Brent Parrish
The Right Planet

There has been a lot of talk and news lately about Common Core (CC)—specifically, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), i.e. national standards for education. Whether you have children in school or not, CCSSI affects every American, in one way or the other. One could say Common Core represents a radical bureaucratic “revolution” in education. Although proponents claim Common Core is a States’ or local initiative, it is, in many ways, a great “bait and switch” that flew underneath the radar of many Americans.

There are several reasons I decided to write on the subject of Common Core standards. The primary reason was to ask the who, what, why, where, when and how. I know a number of people don’t know much about Common Core. As a matter of fact, the other night I heard Bill O’Reilly say on his show on Fox that he didn’t know much about Common Core standards. Ironically, O’Reilly was also discussing the possibility of Jeb Bush as a potential presidential candidate in 2016. Jeb Bush is a prominent figure behind Common Core, which I will get into later.

A well-informed and educated populace tends toward a well-informed electorate. A sick culture will produce a sick body politic. Teaching children and young adults how to think, and not what to think, is what I believe the goal of learning and education should be. But the very paradigm and definition of “learning” is being redefined in the Common Core standards. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” The authors of Common Core understand and comprehend Lincoln’s words quite well.

Secondly, I discovered quite a bit of interlock in my research into the philosophy and ideology of Marxism with the current proposed Common Core standards. Additionally—and some would say, naturally—I experienced this same interlock phenomenon in examining the aims and goals of the United Nations—specifically, the goals of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), among other U.N. initiatives, particularly those concerning “climate change” and “environmental sustainability,” i.e. Agenda 21.

Continue reading →

04/25/14

Cliven Bundy racist? Not

By: James Simpson
DC Independent Examiner


The Black Sphere

The Left adores its “racism” narrative. It is practically the only narrative they have left, and they have used it repeatedly like a cheap prostitute at a party for sex addicts. One of the cheapest political whores on the national scene is Dirty Harry “Cleanface” Reid, the ignoble, utterly corrupt U.S. Senate Majority “Leader.” Harry has now added his wormy voice to the cacaphony of leftist sluts calling Cliven Bundy “racist.” Let’s get our facts straight.

The Left is able to promote this narrative for two main reasons: 1. they lie. 2. the media repeats the lie. So let’s dissect their lie about Bundy. How did they lie? As usual, they edited remarks to create the perception they want, using only that portion of Bundy’s remarks where he intimated that blacks were better off under slavery. They carefully left out the portion that put the statement in context.

Let’s also acknowledge something the Left never will in their vicious campaign to slander people who have the audacity to threaten their franchise. The Left cares little about the target individual, or the inconvenient facts that may humanize him somewhat. You can’t cultivate sympathy for one you want to destroy. Cliven Bundy is not a wealthy man. He is not an educated man. He has not had decades in the practiced art of prevarication that is the Left’s stock in trade – in fact one of the only things the Left does well. He is a simple man who simply expresses his opinion, without careful word crafting, without considering that there is an entire industry out there with nothing better to do than put his words under a microscope so they can misrepresent them for their own unscrupulous purposes.

In fact, Bundy was trying to say what many have said for decades, i.e. that the Left has created a nightmare for the black community, and that many blacks are much worse off today than they were before the great liberal welfare experiment of the 1960s. The welfare state is primarily responsible for destroying the nuclear black family, and endemic crime, drug addiction and unemployment are the direct result. Prior to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” welfare expansion, the unemployment rate for young blacks was lower than that for whites. Out of wedlock pregancies were a fraction of what they are now, and crime and drug addiction, while problematic in inner cities, were nowhere near today’s levels.

Democratic politicians justify the burgeoning welfare state as reflecting compassion for the “poor and oppressed,” but the fact is that the Left created the welfare state deliberately and specifically to capture the minority vote forever. The infamous socialist authors of the “Crisis Strategy,” Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, had much to do with this, and they admitted as much, saying, “If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors.” It worked. In 1960, only 58 percent of black voters were Democrats. By 1968, 92 percent were Democrats and only three percent were Republicans.

In 1961, Cloward co-founded an experimental welfare program called “Mobilization for Youth.” Presidents Kennedy and Johnson used his model to envision a massive federal infrastructure that would both fund leftwing activism and buy off minorities. What followed was President Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the Office of Economic Opportunity created to implement it. OEO financed “10,000 organizations employing several hundred thousand people” to radically transform U.S. policy outside the political process, according to conservative activist Howard Phillips, who ran OEO in 1973. He identified Cloward and Piven as OEO’s “ideological architects.”

If you have not read Cloward and Piven’s treatise on the Crisis strategy, you should do so now. Once Johnson established the welfare state, Cloward and Piven pointed out that government could never meet promises it had made if everyone who qualified for welfare demanded it. They stated that minorities could precipitate systemic crisis and collapse, creating the pretext for a “guaranteed annual income,” i.e. socialism. This was Cloward and Piven’s real goal all along, and they helped found the National Welfare Rights Organization and ACORN to execute it. The rest, as they say, is history, and today’s epidemic of welfare fraud, waste, crime, overspending and decaying inner cities can be laid directly at the Left’s feet. So Bundy’s remarks were not far off.

Bundy is not a polished pundit. His statement about slavery was clumsy, but that’s it. He qualified it by saying that “we’ve progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and we sure don’t want to go back,” and further qualified it by describing his compassion for the blacks who are victims, not perpetrators. Under welfare, he said, they have no purpose, and “that’s all government, it’s not freedom.” Of illegal immigrants he said “They’re here, and they’re people, and I’ve worked side-by-side with a lot of them. Don’t tell me they don’t work and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes. And don’t tell me they don’t have better family structures than most of us white people.” Sadly, that is a true statement.

Bundy is no racist. Here are the words of a black man who knows him personally. The photo he refers to is posted above:

The media distorts information to the point of social division. This is a photo of myself and the resilient, often charismatic, and maybe not so tactful Cliven Bundy. He’s a cowboy and a helluva family man, not an orator. One thing he definitely isn’t – a racist. I found his comments to not only be NOT racist, but his own view of his experiences. Who the heck are we to determine another man’s perspective on the world around him?! Just because Picasso’s view of the world was abstract, does it negate the fact that his art was genuine? Furthermore, if you take the time to do your own research, you’ll find that his statements about some black Americans actually hold weight. He posed a hypothetical question. He said, “I wonder IF” … Hell, I’m black and I often wonder about the same about the decline of the black family. Bottom line is that we are all slaves in this waning republic, no matter our skin color.

Sorry, lefties, Bundy’s are not the words of a racist. They are the words of a simple, honest man speaking his mind. That he can’t use 50 cent words may be an advantage for the Left, but as usual, it is only because the Left is willing to stoop so low in its never-ending rhetorical war with America. The liberal plantation is a slave state that the worst slave-owners couldn’t have imagined, because they at least wanted their slaves to work. All the Left wants is votes, and the only way to guarantee that is to keep minorities, and increasingly the rest of us, in perpetual poverty.

The corrupt hypocrite, “Cleanface” Dirty Harry Reid, and many fellow leftists, stand to gain personally from the solar power developments planned for that part of Nevada. BLM land surrounding the Bundy ranch is to be used as a sanctuary to mitigate the ill effects of the environment-killing solar farms. Reid’s ulterior motives are shamefully obvious.

04/25/14

The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watchers Council Results – 04/25/14

The Watcher’s Council


SatireWorks.com

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and we have the results for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.

“So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there’s no way you’re gonna find out what it means.” – Frank Zappa

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.” – John Dewey, one of the founders of American public education.

This week’s winner, The Right Planet’s Journey to the Center of the Common Core – Pt. 1, is a great analysis of something few of us know much about, but should because of the radical effect it will have on society. Here’s a slice:

There has been a lot of talk and news lately about Common Core (CC)—specifically, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), i.e. national standards for education. Whether you have children in school or not, CCSSI affects every American, in one way or the other. One could say Common Core represents a radical bureaucratic “revolution” in education. Although proponents claim Common Core is a States’ or local initiative, it is, in many ways, a great “bait and switch” that flew underneath the radar of many Americans.

There are several reasons I decided to write on the subject of Common Core standards. The primary reason was to ask the who, what, why, where, when and how. I know a number of people don’t know much about Common Core. As a matter of fact, the other night I heard Bill O’Reilly say on his show on Fox that he didn’t know much about Common Core standards. Ironically, O’Reilly was also discussing the possibility of Jeb Bush as a potential presidential candidate in 2016. Jeb Bush is a prominent figure behind Common Core, which I will get into later.

A well-informed and educated populace tends toward a well-informed electorate. A sick culture will produce a sick body politic. Teaching children and young adults how to think, and not what to think, is what I believe the goal of learning and education should be. But the very paradigm and definition of “learning” is being redefined in the Common Core standards. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” The authors of Common Core understand and comprehend Lincoln’s words quite well.

Secondly, I discovered quite a bit of interlock in my research into the philosophy and ideology of Marxism with the current proposed Common Core standards. Additionally—and some would say, naturally—I experienced this same interlock phenomenon in examining the aims and goals of the United Nations—specifically, the goals of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), among other U.N. initiatives, particularly those concerning “climate change” and “environmental sustainability,” i.e. Agenda 21.

The interlock between Common Core and educational goals and initiatives laid out earlier in the Twentieth Century by progressive educators like John Dewey, Charles Hubbard Judd, George Counts, Stanley H. Hall—and even Soviet psychologist Lev Vykotsky, whose theories on learning are based on the communal process (now lovingly referred to as “collaborative learning“)—is quite compelling.

Writing this article has been challenging on several fronts. Not only are there numerous educational issues surrounding CC, there are also a plethora of social, cultural and economic issues swirling around the debate on Common Core. Many of these social, cultural and economic components have already been folded into the Common Core curriculum, hence the controversy.

When one studies who the major players are behind Common Core, I would say more on the left support CC than on the right. But you really have to throw out the right-left paradigm, in my opinion, when it comes to CC. Common Core is not a right-left thing, per se; it is a progressive, globalist, collectivist thing. There are members from both the right-side and the left-side of the aisle who have a stake in pushing Common Core standards, for various reasons and motives. Some of them might be described as the “usual suspects,” but others might surprise you, as we will see later in this article.

Since my intent is to try and provide a detailed, yet concise, overview of the who, what, where, when, why and how on Common Core, while exploring a bit of the philosophy and historical origins behind CC standards, and the corroboration of CC standards with the aims and goals of Marxists from my own research, I decided it might be best to structure the article by stepping back into time from the present to the past—meaning, by first looking at the who, what, where, when, why and how of Common Core, and then exploring its origins, aims and goals.

Much more at the link… read and be informed.

In our non-Council category, the runaway winner was Mark Steyn with The slow death of free speech, submitted by The Noisy Room. It’s Steyn at his best, writing about how big government and progressive fascism is encroaching on our traditional liberty, a subject he knows about first hand.

Okay, here are this week’s full results. The Independent Sentinel, Simply Jews and Rhymes With Right were unable to vote this week, but only Rhymes With Right was affected by the mandatory 2/3 vote penalty.

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in… don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that!

04/25/14

Weekly Featured Profile – Ash-Lee Henderson

KeyWiki.org


Ash-Lee Henderson

Ash-Lee Henderson is a Chattanooga, Tennessee activist. She has been active in the Chattanooga People’s Platform, a coalition to “raise demands of marginalized members of the Chattanooga community,” but has been recently working as a Regional Organizer at Project South in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ash-Lee Henderson describes herself as an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian), working class woman.

Henderson attended East Tennessee State University, majoring in English and minoring in African and African American Studies. She has served in positions of leadership, including being the former Organizational Liaison for the Initiative for Clean Energy at ETSU, former vice-president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, past president of the Black Affairs Association and was a co-founder of the Progressive Students Alliance at ETSU.

Henderson has extensive knowledge of the use of community organizing and is a former staff member of the Chicago (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) History Project.

Henderson has served on the board of directors/coordinating committees/core leadership of United Students Against Sweatshops, the Student Environmental Action Coalition, Concerned Citizens for Justice of Chattanooga and the Highlander Research and Education Center, a communist aligned training school whose famous alumni include Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. She has been arrested twice and cited once in protests to end mountaintop removal coal mining and coal related disasters, and to protect workers rights to organize.

She has organized in the movement to end racial oppression, the feminist/womanist movement, the environmental justice movement, the LGBTQUI movement and more.

Ash-Lee Henderson is also active in the Communist Party USA splinter group, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

At the 2013 Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism conference, Henderson addressed a plenary session on climate change.

She spoke about the impact of pollution and toxic waste in Tennessee. “Heavy metals from mining and mountain top removal,” she explained, “are having a profound effect on jobs and health.” The environmental inequities are creating movements advocating justice. There are concrete ways to force change – marching, demonstrating, lobbying the EPA. “The left needs to figure out how to impact regulation of the climate industry now,” she urged, certainly if there are only five or so years left.

(more…)