An insightful and provocative expose’ on the sorry state of our educational system, by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto is no stranger to this issue, and his radical analysis does not come lightly, being the former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author of ‘The Underground History of American Education’.

This was published back in 2003 in Harpers Magazine, and is must reading for anyone involved in the teaching profession or concerned about the future of American education.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.

Read The Complete Article

John Taylor Gatto’s website

Here’s a possible theory as to why empires always fall, or any large-scale human endeavor, for that matter.

Iranian Moolah
By Farouz Farzami
The Wall Street Journal
October 26th, 2006

TEHRAN — Killing time the other day on my way to meet my boyfriend, I walked through the long narrow passages of the House of Artists in the vicinity of the old U.S. embassy, when I came upon a graceful exhibit of books published in America.

The books had been imported by a company called Vizhe Nasher (”special publication”), which is authorized, as it must be, by the government. Most concerned the visual and architectural arts, photography, sewing and cooking, and there was a wide variety offering weight-loss techniques, but I came across one I was startled to find: “The Daily Cocktail: 365 Intoxicating Drinks,” by Dalyn A. Miller and Larry Bonovan.

I live in a country where alcohol is officially banned, but where the art of homemade spirits has reached new heights. Sharing my astonishment about the cocktail book with some friends with better connections to the Islamist regime, they explained the government has a silent pact with the educated and affluent in Iran’s big cities, who render politics unto Caesar, provided that Caesar keeps his nose out of their liquor cabinets.

In other words, the well-to-do Iranian drinks and reads and watches what he wishes. He does as he pleases behind the walls of his private mansions and villas. In return for his private comforts, the affluent Iranian is happy to sacrifice freedom of speech, most of his civil rights, and his freedom of association. The upper-middle class has been bought off by this pact, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy.

The accommodation runs both ways. A friend who has made a small fortune in the pharmaceutical business told me that recently that the enforcers of Islamist law appeared on the roof of his condominium in the northwest Tehran suburb of Sharak-e-Qarb to seize all the satellite dishes. Every household received an order to attend a hearing of the revolutionary court, where the magistrate — typically a mullah — will levy fines. The fines help feed the friends of the courts, while for my wealthy pharmacist friend, erecting another satellite dish is as easy as refueling his car — and even the inconvenience of replacing the dish will not be necessary for long. Technology is more than up to the challenge posed by the morals police. “I have heard there is a state-of-the-art dish made of invisible fiberglass that I can install on the window pane of my apartment,” my friend told me. “I’m going for it.”

Many Iranians believe the occasional crackdowns are being organized by corrupt officials who secretly own interests in the new generation of satellite dishes. The confiscations just create markets for newer products.

The issue illustrates the larger pattern. My friend’s luxurious apartment is worth more than four million tomans, equivalent to about $4,000 per square meter. He owns a pharmacy downtown and is in the comfortable upper-middle class. These are the kind of people who can afford mansions in Shahrak-e-Qarb or in Lavasan, up in the desirable hills where former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his ilk live.

“I can afford yearly two or three months’ vacation in Dubai, Europe or even America,” my friend said. “Why should I bother to organize a protest against seizing our satellite dishes? We may be forfeiting our freedoms, as you say, but when the price of avoiding the authorities is so affordable, why would we risk everything to take on the regime? We have to wait until society itself is disillusioned, and the masses open their eyes.”

In this world, it is only the principled intellectuals of moderate means who suffer, like my friend Farid Nazari, who courageously speaks his mind on all occasions and who operates a stall that sells banned books. He has had his inventory seized several times in the last two years. “We live in a circus,” he said. “We, as the people of culture, are victims of official idiosyncrasy. The authorities act impulsively based on whimsical assessments of risk. Their actions defy common sense and logic, so are completely unpredictable. It is that unpredictability that leads to panic and intellectual paralysis. That’s the secret of the current Iranian despotism.”

That, and hypocrisy. The well-to-do are paying a price for their comforts, and I wonder sometimes if they understand what it is. How can you have a revolution when everyone is watching TV?

“Farouz Farzami” is the pseudonym of a journalist who is forbidden to publish in Iran.

The Bushevik war on public knowledge along with scientific inquiry and data as a benchmark for sound policy plows on…

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun closing its nationwide network of scientific libraries, effectively preventing EPA scientists and the public from accessing vast amounts of data and information on issues from toxicology to pollution. Several libraries have already been dismantled, with their contents either destroyed or shipped to repositories where they are uncataloged and inaccessible.

The scientific information contained in the EPA libraries is essential to the agency’s ability to make fully informed decisions that carry out its mission of protecting human health and the environment. Members of Congress have asked the EPA to cease and desist dismantling these libraries.

Please call EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson at (202) 564-4700 either today or Monday and tell him how much scientists rely on data and literature. Urge him to immediately halt the dismantling of the library system until Congress approves the EPA budget and all materials are readily available online.

Sincerely,

Michael Halpern
National Field Organizer
Scientific Integrity Program

The Age of Reason is over. As much as I admire the effort to call Mr. Johnson to pressure him to change this course of action, the fact that we are not living in a democratic republic, but rather are subjects of a corporate state, makes such actions seem next to useless. Mr. Johnson doesn’t take his marching orders from “We The People”, unfortunately.

Go to The Union of Concerned Scientists for more.

This is interesting.

As the country attended memorials and revisited painful memories of 9/11, the reflection also opened our collective mind once again to the many unanswered questions, legitimate concerns and conflicting evidence in the official description of those events.

For us at the Daily Tidings the event served to open discussion among us about this complex subject, about the conspiracy theories that abound in Internet chats, blogs and so-called investigative reports and most importantly, the questions regarding the media’s role in this ongoing issue.

A month later we have found very little we all agreed on. We especially disagree on the role of the media. Since the Tidings doesn’t cover New York City, Washington, D.C. or the federal government, the ambiguity is shaded with absolution.

Nevertheless we are each members of the fourth estate, an essential conglomeration of individuals who adhere to professional guidelines, and who care passionately about this demanding and often thankless opus. With that membership — we can all agree on some level — comes a responsibility to giving the public the accurate information it needs to make informed decisions. Thus, somewhere in all the banter, we stumbled on one thing we at the Tidings’ truly can agree on.

Regardless of one’s take on the veracity of the questions regarding the attacks of September 11th - who perpetrated them, how, why - I believe most rationale people who study the issue will agree that the fact that so many questions regarding this seminal event is shameful, and that the nation needs a truly independent and qualified investigation into all aspects of this, regardless of the political consequences of where it leads and who it may touch.

Read The Complete Editorial from the Ashland Daily Tidings

We hardly knew ya, old buddy…

Quite a report, and an clearly drawn indictment of the true costs of modern consumerism.

Think of it as a vast experiment in human biology. Put millions of people in a limited space, then crank a few levers: increase the hours they work, and increase the distance they have to travel; tempt them with material goods but undermine their sense of security about the future; allow them almost unlimited access to food, but subtly direct their choice by making grease and sugar most accessible. See what happens.

The results are nearly in. Half a century of postwar growth - driven by escalating production, and flavoured by hard-core consumption and mass migration to cities - is yielding a consistent global pattern.

The population’s physical health is starting to degrade. The body, overfed and under-exercised, stacks on weight; those extra kilograms turn on their owners, unlocking diabetes, kidney disease and cancers from a genome that evolved with little experience of carrying fat. Psychiatric illness increases as unbarred competition between individuals excludes and denigrates the more vulnerable.

Weight gain, says Dr Michael Booth, is a physical portrait of consumerism, an externalisation of our value system. “We do need to do something about ‘I will give myself pleasure whenever and however I please and not think about the consequences,”‘ he says. “It’s a problem that comes with greater and greater wealth. We see the world as the range of things available to us. Virtually anything is there for the taking. We’ve lost the notion that we should be denied anything.”

Read The Full Article

I guess this is one way to tell the lying sacks of shit who are manipulating you in your name to go to hell.

Budepest, Hungary - Protesters clashed with police and stormed the headquarters of Hungarian state television early Tuesday in an explosion of anger over a leaked recording of the prime minister admitting his government had “lied morning, evening and night” about the economy.
- Fox News, 9/19/06

The Hungarians certainly don’t need this crap. They put up with nothing but abject lies, delusionary propaganda and social deprivation for 40 years, and it looks like they aren’t too happy about the prospect of being used the same way again. I spent a few weeks in Hungary back in the 80s, while the Russians were still there, and it was an experience. I certainly carried the pretension that there is no way our society could ever become so blatantly corrupt and oppressive as like that under Soviet domination. Of course, I never imagined the rise of the neo-cons and severly ‘misunderestimated’ the depth of ideological depravity that is the Busheviks.

The Australian reports…

Hungary’s left-of-centre leadership was on the verge of collapse today after a public radio station broadcast the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, admitting that he had lied repeatedly about the state of the economy.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Hungarian parliament building in Budapest demanding the resignation of Mr Gyurcsany after he acknowledged that a tape recording broadcast yesterday was genuine. President Laszlo Solyom said the country was in “moral crisis”.

Can you imagine how they would have reacted had they been told lies, not about the economy, but about sending their soldiers off to war under false premises? Or would have had information and evidence as to the governments role in handling such catastrophes like 9/11 or Katrina covered up or distorted?

Now they are attacking TV stations? I guess that is one way to challenge the corrupt media.

Infowars has a report on this as well Here

The secretary of the Air Force wants to make US citizens his weapons guinea pigs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

Read The Full CNN Report Here

But this isn’t really new as you can see Here. They used to use ‘volunteers’ for this kind of thing. What is new is the live fire testing application proposition that Gen. Buck Turgidson is recommending here.

And that is the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Here is another exhibit in the courtroom of reality.

Is the world finally waking up a bit about GM crops not being the promised panacea that they were claimed to be?

By 2004, the GM cotton farmers were using just as much pesticide as their conventional counterparts and were spending far more because GM cotton seed is three times the price of conventional cotton seed.

The findings will undermine claims by the biotechnology industry that GM technology can boost food production without necessarily damaging the environment with pesticides.

Scientists from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, carried out the study which involved interviews with hundreds of Chinese farmers who had switched to cotton that had been genetically modified with a gene for a bacterial toxin.

The toxin - known as Bt - is secreted by the GM cotton plant and is highly effective at stopping the growth of bollworm, a major pest of the crop that can cause millions of pounds worth of damage.

Read The Complete Independent U.K. Article Here