Posts from — January 2005

In Response to President Bush’s federal “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB), it is proposed that students will have to pass a test to be promoted to the next grade level.

In the hope that this proposal will be uniformly adopted by all of the states, the new test will be called the Federal Arithmetic and Reading Test, or FART.

All students who cannot pass a FART in the 2nd grade will be retested in Grades 3, 4 & 5 until they are capable of passing a FART score of 80%.

If a student does not succesfully FART by grade 5, that student shall be placed in a seperate English program known as the Special Mastery Elective for Learning Launguage or SMELL.

If, with this increased SMELL program, the student cannot pass the required FART test, he or she can still graduate to middle school byu taking another one semester course in Comprehensive Reading and Arithmetic Preperation or CRAP.

If by age 14 the student still cannot FART, SMELL or CRAP, he or she can earn promotion in an intensive one-week seminar known as the Preperatory Reading for Unprepared Nationally Exempted students or PRUNES.

It is the opinion of the Department of Instruction for Public Schools (DIPS) that an intensive week of prunes will enable any student to FART, SMELL, or CRAP.

This revised provision of the student component of the House Bill 101 should help “clean the air” as part of the “No School Left Standing” Act.

(email – thanks Willow!)

America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville

Liberty and justice for all. It’s an American ideal. Let’s remember it. Let’s meditate on it, ponder it, breathe it in and out. Liberty. Justice. For All. Here’s what I think of – what comes to your mind?!

Liberty
Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness without interference so long as you respect the human rights of others. Unfettered, not enslaved, not imprisoned, not a subject of rulers or the rich, not a slave to any other or to any entity. Not a hostage. Not a prisoner. A government by and for the people – non-autoritarinan, non-fascistic, non-dominating. Creates and sustains self-governing, sovereign agents of politically free lands. Freedom of assembly, the press, speech etc. Evokes the statue of liberty and its history and ideals.

And
Inclusive conjunction, not only one or the other, but both liberty and justice.

Justice – Doing what is fair and right in every case after careful consideration of all points of view and hearing representative voices. Accountability, fairness. Preventing human rights abuses. Ensuring adherence to local, atate, national, and international law. Applying principles of moral rectitide equitable and equally. Render to each what is due. Punishment that fits the crime. Reparative justice for wrongdoing. Careful consideration of all points of view, equal representation. Fair treatment. Obviously, no hate-mongering, no adverse or preferential discrimination unless on the basis of merit. No one is above or below the law – all treated equally.

For
Done to benefit somebody, or done on somebody’s behalf. Intended to be received or used by, to benefit somebody. In the service of. The reason why something is done. Indicating the purpose.

All
Mega-rich, Upper-class, middle-class, blue-collar, pink-collar, white-collar, no collar, no hope for a collar, no desire for a collar. Citizens, non-citizens, visitors, business contacts. All races and ethnicities and backgrounds and regions. All points of every spectrum – all ideologies, all rationalities, all beliefs, all positions. From the hyper to the slothful, from sea to shining sea, in bogs, on plateaus, in concrete jungle, behind glass or security devices. For everyone – you and me, whether we’re OK or not, every single person!!!!!

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
-Thomas Jefferson

Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.
- John Quincy Adams

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end.
- Lord Acton

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
- Mortimer Adler

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities….
- Lord Acton

For somehow this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friends.
- Aeschylus

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
- Lord Acton

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.
- Samuel Adams

And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.
- Samuel Adams

Believe in no other God than the one who insists on justice and equality among men.
- George Sand

Justice has no independent existence; it results from mutual contracts, and establishes itself wherever there is a mutual engagement to guard against doing or sustaining mutual injury.
- Epicurus

Justice without force is powerless force without justice is tyrannical.
- Blaise Pascal

Justice is truth in action.
- Joseph Joubert

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.
- Sophocles

Revenge feels right only to those directly involved. Justice feels right even to outsiders.
- Marilyn Vos Savant

Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops. We will ask questions and we will defend our democracy.
- US Senator John F. Kerry

Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
- Thurgood Marshall, former Supreme Court Justice

I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.
- Albert Einstein

[Constitutional guarantees in the 4th amendment] apply to all invasions on the part of government and its employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging in his drawers, that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty and private property.
- Justice Joseph Bradley

The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.
- U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.
- John F. Kennedy

“I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.”
-Nikos Kazantzakis

My son Ben suddenly stopped calling his stuffed animals “lovies” and started calling them his “sleeping partners.” John and I raised our eyebrows at this. I talked to him about it and he says that’s what they now call them at the church preschool. Very odd.

I explained that sleeping partners are not stuffed animals, but real live people that you sleep with.

His response? “Well, then if you stay with me when I have a bad dream, are YOU my sleeping partner?”

“Um…no,” I say, thinking fast and furious. I imagine him talking to a teacher – “Mommy, my sleeping partner…” No no no.

OK, I try again.

“A sleeping partner is a grownup who sleeps with another grownup. You have to be all grown up to choose a sleeping partner. Little boys and girls don’t have sleeping partners. But you have something perfect for kids – a whole bunch of sweet little lovies to hug and to help you have sweet dreams. (pause) They aren’t partners because partners have to be equals.”

“What’s an equals?”

Sigh. Every try to explain equality to a 4-year old?

“OK, equals are people that respect each other and know that they aren’t any better or worse than the other person.”

“I’m stronger than [his latest buddy].”

“Well, maybe that’s a little hard for me to explain right now – let’s get back to the sleeping part.”

“Are they still my lovies?” asks he.

“Yes, they are still your lovies. And you have lots of lovies.”

“What do I do if they call them sleeping partners at school?”

“Tell them your mommy says they aren’t sleeping partners.”

End of discussion.

So then I talk to the people at the school. They are trying to move the vocabulary away from babytalk. I understand that at a certain point you don’t announce you have go to “poop,” that you then “go to the bathroom.” We all get training in euphemisms as part of the civilizing process. They evidently don’t hear the multiple resonances of “sleeping partners.” Rather than try to explain it to them, I just simply said that it was innappropriate and perhaps they could just call it what it is – whether stuffed animal, lovey, huggie, by name, or whatever. In any case, I informed them Ben was not going to be calling them “sleeping partners” – under any conditions. When he has a sexual partner one day, I don’t want him thinking of Simba and his blue teddy and Barney!

What on earth are they thinking?

MSNBC – Dream On America

Used to be, the American dream…and the dream of America…was a beacon to the world. Not a “fire”, folks – a beacon. Big difference.

This is a great article, so go read it – here is my as-you-go commentary.

Don’t hold your breath for the next student radicals in a repressive regime to put up a little Statue of Liberty as part of their demonstration. We’re over as a symbol of freedom and liberty. No matter what we want to believe, we just aren’t a model for those things anymore, and it’s all because of W and his henchpeople.

In a recent BBC poll (see link of title)

“58 percent in the BBC poll see Bush’s re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America’s traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India viewed Bush’s second Inaugural positively.”

That’s all bad enough – but worse than anti-Bush feeling is anti-Americanism and a rejection of american economic and political models (the article adds social models, but I don’t seriously think that many countries ever admired that to begin with and have seen us as simply in denial about things like class, unable to enjoy a good meal, lacking in real social cohesiveness, etc). Meanwhile, people turn to the European Union more and more – it sounds pretty good to me too since it is “based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that’s caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics.”

People don’t look to our constitution to write their own. Money “talks too much” in our system, socal welfare and issues of equality aren’t important enough, our system is no longer progressive. They don’t like our death penalty, the disintegration of our privacy. Americans don’t take care of their own. We don’t honor international agreements like the Geneva convention, and we won’t endorse an International Criminal Court. Don’t even get started on environmental issues. Our country officially doesn’t even recognize global warming.

Although our per capita income is still high, our system is based less and less on merit and individual opportunity. Other economies are growing faster and are more dynamic what’s so great about our system now? Northern European social democracies are more “robust” says this article, “not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it.”

We may pay less in taxes and have less “regulation” – but we work far longer hours and have far less vacation time. We have a lousy primary education system that is getting worse and worse as we teach to questionable testing. We have much less job security. We have in many ways that count a less desirable quality of life. Oh, of course we all have a lot of debt – but then, there’s Walmart right?

That flunky monkey Tony Blair is even doing much better for his people – instead of building military systems that will never work, his government spends a lot more (in percentage at least) on the public’s social welfare – an inspiration from Sweden, not us.

Actually Sweden – except for the cold and dark – is looking pretty good to me. I have some swedish blood in my mongrel body and I am pleased to know that in that country “universal child care, education and health care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately, economic productivity.”

This statistic I already knew – it’s shocking:
“Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today he pulls in 1,000 times as much.”

Heath care? We may have the best doctors and supplies and equipment, but we are the only democracy without a universal guarantee for access to it.

“U.S. infant mortality rates are among the highest for developed democracies. The average Frenchman, like most Europeans, lives nearly four years longer than the average American. Small wonder that the World Health Organization rates the U.S. healthcare system only 37th best in the world, behind Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia (26th), and on a par with Cuba.”

Too many of our citizens in jail, race problems, sky-high child-poverty rates. We’ve made foreign students less welcome here – watch the brain drain. My own experience is that my education’s primary purpose has been to pay for my education. My own personal debt is staggering – lit. it makes me stagger to think of it. In most countries, much or all of my education would have been paid for.

We like to spread our “ideals” with guns. We aren’t the first, of course, but it’s so backward and vulgar and horrific to continue. We lack all subtlety in foreign relations now. Why would anyone look to us for advice?

We talk and talk about freedom and liberty, but it’s all lies. Our actions and our nation no longer represent those ideals.