Monday, September 20, 2010



Students booted for giving teachers Krispy Kremes

Legal team explains principal wants 'Christian' acts halted

A New Mexico school principal who has demanded that a team of students cease their "Christian" acts has suspended three after they gave fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts with Bible verses to their teachers, according to a complaint from a legal team.

"Some teachers are worried about their students giving them bullets, and this school suspends students over a Bible verse," said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University School of Law. "These students are living their Christian beliefs by showing kindness," he continued. "It is outrageous that the Roswell school officials are mean to these students solely because they are hostile to their Christian faith."

A WND request to the Roswell school district for comment did not generate a response. But according to Liberty Counsel, the action came from Principal Ruben Bolanos, who also was reported to have said he wanted the students to cease their "Christian" acts. "I don't like Christians. All they do is smile at you and then stab you in the back," the legal team's announcement reported the principal said.

The retaliation followed the outreach by the some 25 students who are members of a group called Relentless in Roswell. Liberty Counsel said the students wanted to express their appreciation for their teachers by giving them doughnuts that are not even routinely available in Roswell.

"Since the closest Krispy Kreme shop was in Texas, some of the group drove almost six hours round trip, stayed overnight, got up at 3:00 a.m., filled their car's back seat with fresh doughnuts and got back to school on time to deliver the doughnuts," Liberty Counsel explained.

"When the doughnuts were handed out, a Scripture verse was included," the explanation continued. "One student was immediately sent home and two others were forced to spend a Saturday morning sitting alone in the classroom for four hours as a punishment."

Pastor Troy Smothermon, of the Church on the Move, said, "Our motives were not rebellious. If they were, we would have just bought a box of doughnuts down the street. The whole purpose was to encourage those in the school. We are challenging the constitutionality, but our motive here was to love. Faith without works is dead. We want them to know that we love them and that Christ loves them."

The reaction to the doughnuts is not the first situation that has developed between the school and its students, Liberty Counsel said. There already is a lawsuit pending over the issue of freedom of religion after students distributed abstinence wristbands and plastic models of babies at 12 weeks gestation – to bring attention to the unborn, Liberty Counsel said.

The legal team said in the past, the same student organization has handed out sandwiches, hot chocolate and candy canes to members of the student body and faculty. They also have helped staff with the trash and fellow students with lunch trays, LC said. "They also distributed rocks with affirming words like 'U are wonderful' painted on one side and 'Psalm 139' on the other," the organization's report said.

Liberty Counsel said when the plastic babies were handed out school officials said, "It's time to shut this down. Some people are getting offended."

Yet it was that same morning, Liberty Counsel reported, that one student who had decided to commit suicide over a decision to abort got a model baby with the Scripture "You are fearfully and wonderfully made," and cried and prayed with the students and her life was saved, the report said.

SOURCE





More on the Sociopath Professors

“We are terrorizing ourselves.” So says Fawaz Gerges, professor at the London School of Economics. To him, someone who esteems himself capable of seeing beyond what ordinary mortals see by virtue of the powerful method of “deconstruction,” Americans’ fear of al Qaeda is based on the same kind of fear that motivated us in the 1950s. The “American imagination” has been “reshaped” since 9/11, claims the professor.

On CNN, talking to Fareed Zakaria, on the day after the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the professor concluded, “The terrorism of al Qaeda which no longer exists as . . . it used to be since the 1990s now has replaced the red scare.”

Thus do academics build on the historical lies about the “Red Scare.” See, there is no threat from al Qaeda or any Islamic terrorists, just as there was no threat from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

These are the lies that are told to students, who then grow up to, not surprisingly, question the threat of Islamic terrorism, some going so far as to become “9/11 truthers,” attributing the attack to the U.S. government.

I saw such lessons being dispensed in 2009 among hundreds of AP history teachers who, after a long day of grading exams, listened to a lecture by Professor Betty Dessants of Shippensburg University. Dessants was one of several historians brought in as part of the evening’s activities. She spoke on the Cold War. Her contribution to the historical research on this period was the theory that the ranch houses that became popular were built as a kind of defense mechanism against this largely imaginary threat.

The history teachers in the audience, for the most part, just nodded along. When I asked Professor Dessants how many people had died at the hands of communists she said she didn’t know.

This is the Howard Zinn school of history, a history of often unsubstantiated ephemera in the service of a grand theory—in Zinn’s case that the U.S. is rotten to the core because it is built on the murderous greed of capitalism. Thus the late history professor’s analysis of the Cold War from his bestseller, A People’s History of the United States:

“When, right after [World War II], the American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization and disarmament, the Truman administration . . . worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. . . . The Truman administration . . . presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat.

“In a series of moves abroad and at home, it established a climate of fear—a hysteria about Communism—which would steeply escalate the military budget and stimulate the economy with war-related orders.”

The bestseller status of this piece of propaganda results from the fact that many high school and college students are forced to use it as a textbook, albeit often as a “supplementary” text, as one former AP high school teacher told me.

But the denial of over 100 million deaths by communist regimes is a deliberate rewriting of history that has implications today. The people writing such histories ignore, deny, or minimize deaths of very real people.

Yet, like Zinn, they claim to speak for the “people.” But Zinn, who claimed that, among others, the Yugoslavian “people” welcomed communist rule certainly did not speak for my “people,” the Yugoslavs (specifically Slovenians) buried in unmarked pits for the crime of defending their homeland from communist invasion.

The hallmark of a sociopath is the ability to lie, and to, indeed, make one doubt reality. He will attribute justified fears to irrationality. “It’s all in your head,” he will say.

The sociopath likes to target the emotionally vulnerable and naïve. That’s why so many of the liars about history can be found in schools.

Many of today’s students are too young to remember 9/11. Their school lessons are full of injunctions against “intolerance” and “xenophobia”—fears that kept al Qaeda-inspired Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan on as an Army psychiatrist, in spite of evidence that he had the murderous intentions which he did carry out. Another guest on CNN on 9/12, former White House Homeland Security Advisor Richard Falkenrath, accused Florida pastor Terry Jones of “intolerance and xenophobia.” Former CIA official Bob Baer, worried that the “popular view” of “us against the Islamic world” is “verging on racism.” The language of the academy has entered our governmental institutions. Neither one of these men corrected Gerges’s claims about the “red scare.”

After claiming that 90 percent of al Qaeda members have been wiped out, Gerges came back to his grand theory: “Yet, when I come back to the state of mind, how do you deconstruct a state of mind that basically we, as Americans, we constantly believe we are under imminent threat?”

After saying “We are terrorizing ourselves,” Gerges indeed did reveal his own complicity in the strategy of the jihadists: “The strategy has been to embroil the United States in a greater clash, a big front with the Muslim world, to create a clash of civilization.” Indeed, Professor.

SOURCE





Money is not what schools need

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: "Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone ... ."

Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years? Give me a break!

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That's a fraction of 1 percent in each case.

Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year's allocation. But that's not what bureaucrats mean.

"They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year's spending," Coulson writes. "What they're doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having."

So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut. "Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars)," Coulson says.

Taxpayers need to understand this sort thing just to protect themselves from greedy government officials and teachers unions.

It was on the basis of this fear and ignorance that President Obama got Congress to pass a "stimulus" bill this summer that included $10 billion for school districts. The money is needed desperately to save teachers from layoffs, the bill's advocates said. We must do it for the children!

When you look at the facts, the scam is clear. "Over the past 40 years," Coulson writes, "public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment. There are 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees."

But isn't it just common sense that schools would be better if they had more money? As a wise man said, it's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know that isn't so.

Consider the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Calif. It was once a failing school, but now it's one of the best in California. Ben Chavis turned it around without any additional money. His book, "Crazy Like a Fox," tells how.

Chavis' experience exposes the school establishment's lies for what they are. Nearly all of Chavis' students are considered economically disadvantaged (98 percent qualify for free lunches), yet they have the fourth-highest test scores of any school in the state.

"In Oakland this year, on the AP (advanced placement) exam, we had 100 percent of all the blacks and Mexicans in the city of Oakland who passed AP calculus," Chavis said. "There are four high schools, and we're the only ones who had anyone pass AP calc."

Yet Chavis accomplishes this without the "certified" teachers so revered by the educational establishment. His classes are as big as, and sometimes bigger than, public school classes, but only a quarter of his teachers are certified by the state.

Money, he insists, is not the answer. "My buildings are shacks compared to their schools, but my schools are clean, and we'll kick all their asses."

He scoffs at the establishment's solutions to the education problem, such as teacher evaluations.

"I don't do no teacher evaluations. All I do is go into a class, and if the kids ain't working, your ass is fired. (Most principals) sit for hours and say, 'Is he meeting this goal, is he meeting' -- I just go to class, and if the kids are not working ..."

It's time we threw out the "experts" and exposed the schools to real competition by people with common sense.

SOURCE

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