Education

'In a recent class at Abraham Clark High School in Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte LLP.

'"Consider a career you may never have imagined," the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."

While some people don't believe in evolution at any speed, other people, such as the scientific types at the National Academy of Sciences, claim that human evolution is speeding up. Indeed, an article on the libertarian International Society for Individual Liberty website that linked to The Raw Story that linked to Agence France-Presse that published an article headlined "Human Evolution Speeding Up" sums up the accelerated alteration phenomenon in the following snippet: "The pace of change has increased 100-fold in modern times compared to our distant past, and most notably since the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, and has led to increasing diversification between the races."

Congress is re-convening this coming week and I would like to take this opportunity to give my legislative forecast for the coming year. Here are a few things we can expect to see from Washington .

First and foremost, we will see ramped up spending for the warfare/welfare state. There is no resolution or end in sight on the Iraq occupation. While the American people try repeatedly to communicate to Washington that enough is enough, there still remains little political will in Washington to bring the troops home. The war will continue to require mountains of taxpayer and newly printed dollars, and our economy will sink under the burden. If we are manipulated into a second war, the effects on our economy will be truly devastating. Welfare and entitlement programs will also be ramped up as the economy flounders and budgets in American households are strained.

Our children are at risk because of government schools. They are being processed there to become cogs in a system that intends them to work and consume; never think for themselves, never escape from the grids that pump money into the pockets of corporations and income into the coffers of the state. We can change direction for ourselves and for our children in ways that open new worlds. You need to know.

People have voluntarily stupidified themselves because they've bought into assorted cultural caca, ideological concepts frequently abetted or opportunistically manipulated after the fact by the nation's political donkey dung dishers and elephant effluvia flingers. Libertarians are uniquely positioned to snicker, sneer and snort at this ongoing social stupidification because they don't subscribe to the lefty-righty fakery of political correctness.

Green Corn Project as Whole Foods Market Nonprofit of the Month

Shop at Whole Foods Market from October 1st – October 28th and support Green Corn Project! Whole Foods will be collecting donations for Green Corn Project at every register. Tips from all food venues will also go to support GCP.

This week Congress is again grasping for more control over the health of American children with the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Parents who think federally subsidized health care might be a good idea should be careful what they wish for.

Despite political rhetoric about a War on Drugs, federally-funded programs result in far more teenage drug use than the most successful pill pusher on the playground. These pills are given out as a result of dubious universal mental health screening programs for school children, supposedly directed toward finding mental disorders or suicidal tendencies. The use of antipsychotic medication in children has increased fivefold between 1995 and 2002. More than 2.5 million children are now taking these medications, and many children are taking multiple drugs at one time.

The creation of the American public schools has to be acknowledged as a well-meant effort to ensure that all children receive a decent education. Or must we? Born of Protestant "freemen" interests and oriented around Prussian or militaristic motifs, is it a movement to not only teach basic skills and socializing children but also now a powerful and collectivist force? It is certainly far from any Objectivist or Libertarian ideal. The result of compulsory education by this institution is generation after generation of twisted minds unable to think critically, relying on social consensus and obedience to authority for establishing knowledge, rather than rational thinking about reality. It would be ironic if, now that communism is believed to be dead, maybe socialism or faschism is on the rise again. The future of this country depends on properly raising and educating our young. Adopting a sound conceptual and rational educational program would both link us with America’s founders and prepare us for the future as a free and creative people. It is a requirement for humans to be fully human that reason is encouraged to be exercised and this in turn requires both a real education and freedom to use it.

The Right Start Child Care and Education Act of 2007 is a comprehensive reform that increases the existing child care tax credit to $5,000 (from $2,400) for the first child and $10,000 for the second. It also increases the current business tax credit for providing child care services at work from $150,000 a year to $225,000. And it creates the “Right Start Child Care Professional” tax credit to encourage college graduates to choose child care as a profession.

Students interested in attending the International Society for Individual
Liberty's 26th world conference in Williamsburg Virginia (August 11 thru 15th)
are encouraged to contact ISIL Scholarship Chairman Richard Venable.

The event will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of America at
Jamestown and feature speakers addressing and offering solutions to current US
problems, plus additional input from overseas speakers and other
participants.

American teens have long been in chaos, suffering high rates of depression, suicide, crime, substance abuse, pregnancy, and other serious problems. Until about a century ago, however, the teenage years were relatively benign, and adolescence as we know it barely existed. Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions and artificially extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the twenties or thirties. It's likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood. Between a quarter and a third of young people who enter our school systems never graduate from high school, and for blacks and Hispanics, the proportion is closer to one-half.

Soundbite from a TV commercial for a new channel:

FOX Reality
All reality all the time,
because you just can't get enough!

Does that scare you as much as it does me? How insane has the general US public become?

The Earth is warming but physical evidence from around the world tells us that human-emitted CO₂ (carbon dioxide) has played only a minor role in it. Instead, the mild warming seems to be part of a natural 1,500-year climate cycle (plus or minus 500 years) that goes back at least one million years. The cycle has been too long and too moderate for primitive peoples lacking thermometers to recount in their oral histories. But written evidence of climatic change does exist. The Romans had recorded a warming from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 600, registered mainly in the northward advance of grape growing in both Italy and Britain. Histories from both Europe and Asia tell us there was a Medieval Warming that lasted from about 900 to 1300; this period was also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum because of its mild winters, stable seasons, and lack of severe storms. Human histories also record the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. But people thought each of these climatic shifts was a distinct event and not part of a continuing pattern.

Thought of the moment:
Please go sign the SMU petition one way or another. It's time to know if this country supports atrocities and illegal activities, or if it has a backbone enough to stand up and speak out against evil.

- Current Article: -
SMU: The Battle of Petitions, by The Melinda
http://www.reasontofreedom.com/smu_petitions_battle_referendum_bush.html
At Southern Methodist University the spectre of a George W. Bush Library is awakening Methodists to the horror of living cheek and jowl with someone who endorsed torture. This has brought on line petitions that allow Methodists - and all Americans to speak their minds in plain sight, rendering an effective referendum on the Bush presidency.

Why is it necessary to try to destroy Capitalism just because a corrupt Republican is President at this time? Do our schools even mention Capitalism as money making form of economics? Even as a child, I realized that being born a female in the early 30s put limits on my employment record and I probably would never be able to look forward to retirement unless I married a wealthy man. That was a "given" in the early 50s and even with a college degree the glass ceiling was always there.

I remember complaining to someone in my family about this and he told me in no uncertain terms that America was a Capitalistic Nation and I could indeed make money through investments. In fact would be the only way I could become self-sustaining. I took some classes at the local business college and learned to use all the office machines developed at that time. My first job was writing obituaries and book reviews for our local newspaper. I married, had some kids and found myself divorced and my office skills way out of date. I could not make enough money to even rent a house for the family. My ex-husband bought me an old car and then took off with his secretary and expected me to support all of us. What a damn fool I was not to go to college. I could cook and sew but that would never pay for anything. I would rather have died than go on welfare and I borrowed some money to make a down payment on a cabin (not even by the stretch of the imagination could this dump be called a home) and we moved in and discovered it had no heat, no gas lines and no sewer. My grandmother paid the tuition for my girls and convinced me that doing so would be the best investment possible.