%^$#@! Students forbidden from wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. In America.

Okay, it's in California, so technically it's not really America. But still. If this doesn't make your blood boil then I have to question whether you deserve to be an American.

From the esteemed and invaluable Volokh Conspiracy Blog in the Washington Post:

Today’s Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School Dist. (9th Cir. Feb. 27, 2014) upholds a California high school’s decision to forbid students from wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.

The court points out that the rights of students in public high schools are limited — under the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. School Dist. (1969), student speech could be restricted if “school authorities [can reasonably] forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities” stemming from the speech. And on the facts of this case, the court concludes, there was reason to think that the wearing of the T-shirts would lead to disruption. There had been threats of racial violence aimed at students who wore such shirts the year before:

On Cinco de Mayo in 2009, a year before the events relevant to this appeal, there was an altercation on campus between a group of predominantly Caucasian students and a group of Mexican students. The groups exchanged profanities and threats. Some students hung a makeshift American flag on one of the trees on campus, and as they did, the group of Caucasian students began clapping and chanting “USA.” A group of Mexican students had been walking around with the Mexican flag, and in response to the white students’ flag-raising, one Mexican student shouted “f*** them white boys, f*** them white boys.” When Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez told the student to stop using profane language, the student said, “But Rodriguez, they are racist. They are being racist. F*** them white boys. Let’s f*** them up.” Rodriguez removed the student from the area….

...This is a classic “heckler’s veto” — thugs threatening to attack the speaker, and government officials suppressing the speech to prevent such violence. “Heckler’s vetoes” are generally not allowed under First Amendment law; the government should generally protect the speaker and threaten to arrest the thugs, not suppress the speaker’s speech. But under Tinker‘s “forecast substantial disruption” test, such a heckler’s veto is indeed allowed.

...Yet even if the judges are right, the situation in the school seems very bad. Somehow, we’ve reached the point that students can’t safely display the American flag in an American school, because of a fear that other students will attack them for it — and the school feels unable to prevent such attacks (by punishing the threateners and the attackers, and by teaching students tolerance for other students’ speech). Something is badly wrong, whether such an incident happens on May 5 or any other day.

And this is especially so because behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. The school taught its students a simple lesson: If you dislike speech and want it suppressed, then you can get what you want by threatening violence against the speakers. The school will cave in, the speakers will be shut up, and you and your ideology will win. When thuggery pays, the result is more thuggery. Is that the education we want our students to be getting?

This is life in Obama's America.  And the sad thing is that no one knows about it.  Do you think immigration reform would have a chance in hell if the media actually covered the news?  Not only would there be no immigration reform, but an awlful lot of Mexicans would be headed back to Mexico post haste - and a not insignificant number would be making the trip in pine boxes.

Can you imagine having this conversation with Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower?  Hell, how about John Kennedy?

If republicans weren't such morons they'd make this a centerpiece of their 2014 campaign.

The road to hell is being paved daily in this country.  On the bright side, however, it kind of proves that Obama is at least good at one thing.

Some Facts I'll Bet You Did Not Know

From Reason Magazine - a libertarian view on the budget.  These should be facts every American knows, yet I'll wager that less than 5% actually do. 

Why do you need to know stuff like this?  Because you need to know that most of our elected officials and most of the media are nothing more than goddamned liars who should rot in hell for eternity after they are hung.

But that is my opinion. 

You read it and make up your own mind.

“With the 2015 budget request,” The Washington Post reported last week, “Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency.”

[Would a nuclear strike on the Washington Post be justified now? Discuss.]

Well, it’s about time! The end of austerity cannot come soon enough, as far as your humble correspondent is concerned. And a quick look at the historical budget tables shows why: In 2008, the federal government spent just a hair under $3 trillion. After six years of President Slash-and-Burn, spending has shrunk to almost $4 trillion. If we keep cutting like this, it will be down to $5 trillion before you know it.

These savage reductions have taken place in nearly every major federal program. Take defense spending: The year before Obama took office, it stood at $594 billion. It’s now $597 billion. Back in 2001 it was almost $300 billion. Even if you adjust for inflation, it’s clear that defense spending has shrunk at an alarming rate.

Same deal for food stamps: Under President Barack Obama, spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has gone from $40 billion to $78 billion, in constant dollars. And that’s after it went from $20 billion to $40 billion under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. Spending cuts like that are simply barbaric.

[It's only fair to point out that in many ways Bush was just as bad.  Well, Bush was bad.  Obama is bad on steroids.]

But they are par for the course. Using inflation-adjusted, 2012 dollars, federal spending on K-12 and vocational education has gone from $41 billion in 2002 to $100 billion in 2012. During the same period, Medicare spending has gone from $293 billion to roughly $500 billion. Transportation spending? It went from $86 billion to $138 billion. Medicaid and related programs? $223 billion to $327 billion. Energy? Half a billion to $9 billion.

[For an extra $8.5 billion I'd expect a little progress on the energy front.  Instead we've just invested in a bunch of "green" energy companies that have all gone bankrupt.  Good thing none of them were big Obama donors.]

If we keep hacking away at federal spending like this, pretty soon we won’t have any federal government left! No wonder the economy has been so sluggish: We obviously need more stimulus.

Clearly, trends like these cannot go on. You can’t cut your way to prosperity; America needs to be building up, not tearing down. We need more investment in basic research — research like an important new project being funded by the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is giving $175,000 to a grant recipient who will use the money to study “the Swimming Abilities of Native Stream Fishes in the Northern Rockies-Upper Great Plains Regions of Montana.”

Studying the swimming abilities of fish is precisely the sort of research the federal government is best at. But if we don’t wise up and start spending money faster, we might have to do without it. Then where will we be?

It’s not just America. There has been a lot of austerity in Europe, too. Just ask Paul Krugman, the great economist who writes for The New York Times. “You see,” he patiently explained last week, “some but not all members of the euro area … were forced into imposing Draconian fiscal austerity” during the recent economic downturn — the results of which were “nasty, in some cases catastrophic, declines in output and unemployment.” (Krugman has been explaining this patiently for some time. In his 2012 piece on“Europe’s Austerity Madness,” he pointed out that “with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far.”)

Just how bad has the European austerity been? According to a piece in the Financial Post last May, in 2007 government spending consumed 45.6 percent of the GDP of countries in the European Union. By 2012, that percentage had shrunk to a shockingly low 49.4 percent. No wonder the economy over there stinks.

Clearly, we cannot allow any more of those darn foreigners to enter America and bring any of that austerity nonsense with them. Unfortunately, we are going in the wrong direction on border control, too. A decade ago, we had almost 10,000 border-patrol agents. Now we have more than 21,000. Border fencing, meanwhile, has increased 370 percent. Deportations are at an all-time high. It’s like we don’t even care about sealing the border any more.

One more data point should clinch the case: In January 2013,The Washington Post reported that “Congress funded Customs and Border Protection at $11.7 billion — 64 percent more than FY 2006 and $262 million more than in FY 2011, despite the new climate of austerity.”

Yes, the new climate of austerity. Thank heavens we’re putting an end to that.

Understanding Racism (Courtesy of Joe Biden)

Thanks for clearing that up:

Explaining why schools in Iowa are performing better than those in Washington, D.C., Biden told the Post, "There's less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with."

 "When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there's no books, where the mother from the time they're born doesn't talk to them - as opposed to the mother in Iowa who's sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300 word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom," the Delaware Democrat added.

The paper reports Biden's office quickly sought to clarify the remarks, saying in a statement that the senator was not making a "race-based distinction" but rather a "socio-economic" one.

Of course, everyone knows Uncle Joe – who by the way is definitely not uninterested in running for President – is kind of crazy and is well known for “misspeaking.”  But he is definitely not a racist.  Because as we all know:

 

It’s not racist to imply that all blacks come “from dysfunctional homes.”

 

It’s not racist to imply that all blacks “from homes where there [are] no books.”

 

It’s not racist to imply that black mothers “never talk to their children.”

 

It’s not even racist to imply that all blacks are poor.

 

This story makes me extremely angry:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Would you ever consider the question ‘Whom do you want to be president?’ to be asked of your third grader during a math class (or any class)?

Would you expect your fourth grader to be asked to create a chart of presidents along with their political persuasions? Or, how about a discussion on whether the 2000 presidential election resulted in a “fair” outcome? Or, what if the teacher for your sixth grader was advised to “be prepared” to discuss the “politically charged” 2000 election - all during math.

Common Core aligned, of course.

A curriculum developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics includes all of the above, all provided on the illuminations.nctm.org website, which claims to be the

“primary contributor of resources for teaching and learning mathematics for grades pre-K—12.”

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics will be holding a conference April 9-12 in New Orleans where they will be discussing

“such crucial issues as formative assessment in the common core state standards, number and operations, social justice, teaching computational fluency with understanding, leveraging technology, and supporting new teachers.” [Emphasis added]

Social Justice? During math?

Delving into a couple of lessons just a bit:

In a lesson on Histograms vs. Bar Graphs, teachers are advised to “Start the lesson by engaging students in a discussion about the Presidents of the United States.” Then,

“if no students suggest party affiliation and age at the time the person enters office, bring these characteristics into the discussion.”

The recommended website to gather data is Presidents — Infoplease, where a list of presidents and their political parties and religious affiliations are listed, as well as the their ages when they entered office and when they died.
Abraham Lincoln’s religion, by the way, is listed as “liberal,” whatever that means.
The presidents are all linked to pages that describe their respective presidencies, and some of the revisionist history is jaw-dropping.
For example, Ronald Reagan’s page reads in part,

“Over strenuous congressional opposition, Reagan pushed through his ‘supply side’ economic program to stimulate production and control inflation through tax cuts and sharp reductions in government spending. However, in 1982, as the economy declined into the worst recession in 40 years, the president’s popularity slipped and support for supply-side economics faded.”

What an interesting way to avoid the economic boom and massive reduction in unemployment that took place between 1983 – 1989.

Isn’t this a math class???

Another one of the lessons points to a CNN worksheet that explains the electoral college.

It says (falsely!) in part,

“Some of the Constitution’s authors did not trust the ability of the common voter to make the ‘right’ decision, so they devised the Electoral College as one way of lessening the power of the popular vote.” [Emphasis added]

This statement is embarrassing. And blatantly false.

In fact, the founding fathers were highly critical of a pure democracy, which has been referred to as a “Tyranny of the Majority.” A great example of how a majority can lead to tyranny is the how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently revoked the 200-year-old senate filibuster rule known as the “nuclear option.” The founders’ vision of checks and balances was relabeled as “obstructionism” and the tyranny of the majority has raised it’s ugly head, as the founders warned, and as discussed at Liberty Unyielding.

In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison explains,

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” [Emphasis added]

The founding fathers are repeatedly misrepresented. The only way to really understand their intent is to read their actual words.
 

Mathematics and Social Justice

After searching “social justice” on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics website, one finds that it is quite a popular phrase, with 130 results. Some random clicks include such language as,

• “Educators increasingly recognize the important role that mathematics teaching plays in helping students to understand and overcome social injustice and inequality.” 

• “This case study examines the practice of a full-time mathematics teacher and social activist working in a secondary school with the twin missions of college preparation and social justice.”

Those are two examples, out of 130. It is overwhelming.

Admittedly, this author is not an expert on Common Core standards or the new “radical math,” but just a cursory look at these lesson plans indicate that “math” is not the only thing elementary school children are learning

When I read this I was naturally skeptical, but the author links all of her claims to the actual website.  Check it out for yourself.

I am mindful of Heinlein's admonition that we should not attrbute something to the forces of evil when it could just as easily be explained by stupidity.  There is no question whatsoever, at least in my mind, that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics are incredibly stupid, ignorant and dangerous people.  But this goes beyond those labels.

This is a war that has been waged in relative secrecy for decades, and the bad guys are winning.  On a moral level, this is the equivalent of fighting Nazis.  And Nazis were evil. (Yeah, I know I just violated Godwin's law, but sometimes a Nazi reference is the only way to make your point.)

This strain of liberalisim is a virus that has infected American education and must be eradicated.  The evidence is overwhelming that American education has been failing both its students and our society.   It's time to fight back.