Harriet's Fictional America Post Agenda 21

I spent endless hours, days, weeks, and months researching and reading U.N. Agenda 21 documents and statements by its architects and advocates. I watched countless hours of conference videos and documentaries made and narrated by elites pushing global communism under the aegis of environmentalism, pretending to save the planet from manufactured man-made destruction.

There are too many people on the planet, Agenda 21 architects say; we must reduce them to under a billion. We consume too much and we own too much, we have to spread the wealth and technology to everybody else in the name of social justice.

We take up too much space and land has to be restricted, taken away, given back to wilderness, while we are relocated in tightly controlled zones and corridors. Too many roads cross wilderness areas; they must be closed to public access, while we are forced to use railroads, public transport, walk, or bike.

Our homes are too big and spread out, we must be stacked in cooperatives downtown in crowded areas where our existence can be better regulated and controlled.

We use too much electricity and fossil fuels; we must cut back by 80 percent. If we don’t, Smart Meters and the Smart Grid can force us to be good stewards of electricity and natural gas. High gasoline prices would force us to drive much less or to buy compact and dangerous sardine cans on wheels.

We use too much water so our use must be curtailed and tightly controlled through higher prices, interdictions, Smart Meter water control, and blowing up dams, returning rivers to their intended natural flow.

We eat too much; the government must control our diets by denying health care if we are overweight, portion control, and interdictions of fatty foods, sodas, and salt.

We think too independently and too selfishly, we must be indoctrinated in schools how to think the right way, in the vein of the collective, for the common good, for global citizenship with government imposed new Common Core standards.

We cling too much to our guns and to our Bibles; the government must confiscate private guns and curtail our use of places of worship to spread unapproved “hate speech.” We are not accepting enough of LBGT so we must be enrolled in sensitivity training or else.

Our agriculture produces too much food, uses too many soil and water polluting chemicals, and raises too many flatulent cows. We must cut back to subsistence levels.

We must de-industrialize the economy to long-ago levels in order to allow others to catch up. Once they do, we must arrest our economic development, lest we destroy the planet.

U.N. Agenda 21 must force everyone around the globe into Sustainability, Green Growth, and renewable energy that will ultimately destroy the capitalist economy and move us into a new type of governance by the global elites who will control everything.

I made speeches; I wrote books and articles on these topics, offering links to the actual documents. The above-mentioned plans may seem fictional but are very real. However, nothing prepared me for the deep sadness I experienced when I read Harriet Parke’s and Glenn Beck’s novel, Agenda 21.

The grey and gut-wrenching existence of the fictional character, Emmeline, struck a familiar chord.  Placed somewhere in the dystopian America, post Agenda 21, she lives in a desperate and devoid-of-humanity world preoccupied with energy generation and the protection of all animals at the expense of civilization.

Based on solid research and documentation of actual plans that are already implemented around the world under Sustainability and Green Growth, the fictional novel provides a frightening glimpse into the totalitarian Agenda 21 world – what it will look like, feel, and smell in the not so very distant future if the regionalism and relocation plans of ICLEI’s visioning committees are not stopped in each state.

There are two classes of humans, the ruling elite and those who generate electricity on their energy boards. The electricity is rationed for the renewable energy slaves who walk their boards daily to produce electricity, sleep on mats, but never complain why the Authority does not live the same lifestyle. The concrete cubicle dwellers receive just enough water and nourishment cubes to survive each day. They live in walled compounds guarded by gatekeepers and surrounded by the stench of re-cycling.

They’ve been trapped in a maze-like existence for so long that most have forgotten what it was like to be free, what the outside world looked like. The younger energy slaves have never known freedom or their history because books had been banned and confiscated long time ago.  The dwindling young survive under the fear of the Enforcers, in their tiny Living Spaces, pliably bending to the unquestionable will of the Central Authority.

The Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), if ever ratified by the United States, will be administered by an elite United Nations group called the Authority. They will have the power to control, harvest, and tax any activities on the seas, oceans, and rivers.

The story is told through the voice and prism of Emmeline, a child raised in a real home, with parents, a house, land, sunshine, and freedom. But her idyllic existence ended at a very young age and she had little memory of the good life or of the place where she was born in Kansas. She lives through her mother’s stories until both parents are disappeared by the Central Authority.

Unlike Emmeline, the majority of young people have never seen or known their parents, having been taken away at birth into the care of the Republic. They live in the Children’s Village, a subtle reference to Hillary’s “it takes a village.” Nobody knows what is beyond the walled compounds of the circular village. An occasional parade of soldiers assures the inhabitants that there is an army of black clad drones.

Once children hit puberty, they are moved to compounds with tiny spaces, regularly inspected for compliance, paired for reproduction, streamlined for bare existence, devoid of love, feelings, direct eye contact, and with sparse human interaction. It was this drab existence with color-coded uniforms and scarves that brought tears to my eyes and memories of my former life under communism.

When thousands of families could not afford to house, feed, and dress their children, the state stepped in generously and promised to take care of them, while removing mom and dad’s parental rights and making the children wards of the state. These babies were put into dirty orphanages, cared by state employees who were barely paid and did not care much for the orphans. They were left unclothed, cold, unwashed, wallowing in their own urine and feces, and wanting for human touch. Without cuddling, touching, and holding, neglected babies, who cried themselves to sleep for hours every day, grew into toddlers who rocked themselves back and forth, back and forth in their cribs in search of self-comfort. The sight of these impaired children was heartbreaking. They grew into severely damaged humans, lost to society.

A masterful writer, Harriet Parke paints with her stylus many shades of darkness, punctuated by the occasional ray of sunshine, the dreary existence of her main character, Emmeline, and the forced enslavement of the children of the future in the Central Authority’s quest to preserve the Republic as environmentally pristine as possible, beholden to its symbol, the shiny Globe, a planet populated by revered wildlife and supported by human slaves who generate clean energy by walking and biking.

Will the human spirit and the quest for freedom prevail?

 

 

"Volunteer" Forced Student Labor

As we loaded the bus, there was standing room only. There were no seats on the open truck, just sides to protect the cargo from toppling over. The only reason we didn’t fall over is that we were packed like sardines. When the moving truck hit a pothole, and there were many of those along the way, the entire mass of humanity swayed back and forth, leaning a lot of weight on each other and squashing momentarily those along the edges. There was nothing to hang on to, so we clung to each other for dear life. The dust swirled around, chocking us, mixed in with the Diesel exhaust fumes. Once we left the city, nothing was paved. We were only going about 9 miles, however, under those conditions, it felt like 90 miles.

We tried to keep a cheery disposition; we tried to think of it as an impromptu field trip, getting away from the drudgery of daily communist indoctrination and rigorous classroom work. At least we were outdoors in the sun, dust, and heat, not stuck behind an uncomfortable wooden bench in the classroom.

We were going to pick grapes in the hills of the nearby cooperative farms, a misnomer of sorts. There was no co-operation at all. The laborers were supposed to own the farm collectively, but the land had been confiscated from small farmers, who were quite successful in their operations, and the communist party received the majority of the crop; the remainder was divided evenly among the many villagers who actually put in the back-breaking work every day for the entire season. It was barely enough to justify their existence. And the free labor from students each fall and spring was an added bonus to the communist party. They subtracted the amount of labor from what was owed to the villagers.

We arrived at the sprawling vineyard. We were instructed how to cut the grapes off the vines. We were told that unless we brought our own food and water, there would not be breaks to eat or drink. We thought about eating grapes but they were sprayed with a whitish chemical to keep pests and disease from destroying the harvest. After an entire day of starvation and thirst, I found an old glass bottle, filled it with water and fixed a piece of bread with a slice of Parizer, a fatty type of cold cuts. Back then there were no disposable water bottles, sodas, or coolers. Ice was unheard of for the masses. Thermoses were way too expensive for ordinary people, the proletariat – it was a month’s rent. The elites rolled in money, food, and luxury but the rest of the people suffered.

My relatives no longer live this way in Romania since communism was rejected in 1989 by a revolution. But there are still people around the world existing under some form of tyranny, dictatorship, and/or communism.

The youth today seem to be mesmerized by empty communist rhetoric, indoctrination, and social justice/equality promises by deceptive elitist governments and environmental groups who claim doom and gloom, planetary destruction unless we save ourselves from the man-made global warming/climate change.

Cuba still sends school children today to pick crops for two months out of the year. It is forced and abusive labor. There is nothing “volunteer” about it. The American naïve fools, who repeat that education in Cuba is free, have not seen the student slaves who pick or put in the crops so that Castro, his family, and the elite commies can stash away billions in Swiss banks. Older students are forced to pave roads or work in construction. Without this “volunteer” work, students could not attend the university.

Sure, American students volunteer for community service in their respective schools but they do it because they want, in their hearts, to make a difference, they are not forced to do so, away from their families and with little food and water. And now, we are going to copy Castro’s shameful model of uncivilized society because low information young Americans have voted for the fundamental change of our society, including our stellar healthcare. With millions of unemployed Americans, the highest number of welfare recipients in history, and the national debt galloping to its $19 trillion point of no return, how is that working out so far?

Butler on Business, July 24, 2013 Common Core

My weekly commentary with Alan Butler, July 24, 2013. Topic: Common Core Standards in Education. I come on at the 40 minute mark. (12 minutes audio)
http://host1.cyberears.com//20114.mp3

Common Core Teaches Community Organizing for the Collective

Do we still teach in public schools our common culture, common identity, common true history, or values such as hard work, charity, morals, virtue, and the rule of law? With the exception of home schooling and a few private schools, the answer is no. We do teach secular education, “green” environmentalism, the new religion of Mother Earth, and now Common Core Education.

Few parents actually know what Common Core Education is. Teachers who are finding out do not seem to care, let the state fight it out. For teachers, it is a means to an end; the end translates into keeping their jobs and a paycheck coming in this tough economy which the current administration celebrates as a “recovery” from a self-induced coma.

Although touted as a means to improve education standards, the Brookings Institution said, “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.”

The Department of Education paid two Washington, D.C., organizations, the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices and The Council of Chief State School Officers, to come up with the Common Core national standards. (Pioneer Institute)

According to Lance Izumi, author of Obama’s Education Takeover, the President “strong-armed the states into adopting these Common Core standards through a number of devices, principally through the Race to the Top competition through federal grants.”

The Race to the Top $4 billion “historic” grant scheme was awarded to states “leading coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform.” The grant was authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Department of Education at the federal and state levels had developed many experimental programs that promised to be breakthroughs in education but were discarded later as giant wastes of time and taxpayer dollars while the achievement levels had continuously declined.

Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, described Core Standards as an important tool for international competitiveness, access to high quality education, and a way to prepare “all students for college, work and citizenship. These standards are an important foundation for our collective work.” I emphasized “collective” because that is what Common Core is about, indoctrination into the “collective” mindset.

In spite of the fact that we have different brains, IQs, learning styles, and God-given talents, Common Core standards insist that “all children can and should learn to high achievement standards based on a “universal design for learning.” This would be achieved by having different sets of standards based on race, ethnic background, socio-economic background, and disability, a type of “separate and unequal” education. All students will receive the same diploma but for “unequal” work in mathematics and reading and for “unequal” achievement.

Furthermore, a video surfaced that shows that wrong answers in math are acceptable under Common Core standards as long as students can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it. http://www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-common-core-shill-says-new-education-does-not-require-students-to-have-right-answers-only-that-they-explain-how-they-got-answer/
 

The states who adopted the Common Core Standards were excused from the detested No Child Left Behind Act which set the standards too high for low achievers and low motivators who are not really interested in education. It is criminal and sad to see semi-literate individuals receive diplomas when they cannot actually read or write, cursive or otherwise, very well and are glorified by the MSM for speaking Ebonics.

“Beginning this fall, Alabama public schools will be under a new state-created academic accountability system that sets different goals for students in math and reading, based on their race, economic status, ability to speak English and disabilities.” (Tuscaloosa News)

The English Arts Curriculum textbooks used in Utah, called “Voices, Literature and Writing,” emphasize the Democracy Plan, preparing students for community organizing. The German poet Goethe, a classical liberal, warned us that democracy is incompatible with liberty. He said, “Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are psychopaths.” Even Hans Hermann Hoppe of the Ludwig von Mises Institute said, “Political centralization would lead to the destruction of the culture.”

The Utahans Against Common Core has mounted an opposition. A short video shows the first grade textbook, Voices, Literature, and Writing, that teaches nothing about literature or writing.  Instead, “In the Voices of Democracy theme, students use their voices to advocate solutions to social problems that they care deeply about. They are engaged in learning the following theme-related social knowledge and skills: social role models, social advocacy, and respect for each other. They learn to develop a Democracy Plan in which they develop ways to help people in need.” My six-year olds thought about recess and play, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Is this what first graders do now, they think about ways to organize people in their communities to fix social problems? This is community organizing; this is communism, not literature and writing. http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/usoe-recommends-social-justice-curriculum-materials-for-1st-grade/

In the same series of books, educators are directed to teach first graders about emotional words of anger and fear in order to accomplish their social justice goals. The workbook gives the following example, “My mom_____ (tells) (nags) me to clean my room.”  Students are supposed to choose “nags” because it is an emotional word of anger. If a student chooses “tells,” the answer is incorrect. Students are taught about feelings instead of logical thinking and parents are marginalized as some annoying individuals who nag their children. Would the collectivist village take over the rearing of our children?

Homework activities include practicing being upset and angry because “feelings cause people to act.” Is there any wonder that we have the Occupy Wall Street mobs, angry mobs, flash mobs, and people talking over each other? Liberals are taught to be ruled by feelings and not by logic.

Are these curriculum materials limited to first grade? No, all grades have the same theme, the Democracy Plan. By third grade teachers must “measure attitudes, believes, and dispositions,” making specific notes on the Student Observation Form whether “growth and change in individual students behavior and attitudes is observed. One rubric asks, “Does the student use the plural “we” and “our” to advocate ways to solve social problems?” In other words, I and my, individualism, are frowned upon. Behavior and attitudes are measured in each grade and teacher check marks are made for each student under the rubrics, Beginning, Learning, Proficiency, or Mastery.

I remember receiving pass or fail grades under communism for good or bad behavior at the end of each semester. Parents were called in, humiliated and criticized in front of everybody if their child had a bad grade in behavior. Both parents and child had to undergo an attitude adjustment in line with the communist propaganda.

According to Michelle Malkin, the 2009 stimulus package contained a State Fiscal Stabilization Fund offered to states for a “longitudinal data system (LDS) to collect data on public school students” such as health, family income, religion, and homework. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343040/common-core-trojan-horse-michelle-malkin

The Blaze described a 44-page Department of Education report which indicated the possibility of implementing through Common Core monitoring techniques such as “functional MRIs” (scanning and mapping a child’s brain function), “using cameras to judge facial expressions, electronic seats that determine posture, pressure-sensitive computer mouse, and a biometric wrist wrap.” http://theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/27/indoctrination-and-data-mining-in-common-core-heres-why-americas-schools-may-be-in-more-trouble-than-you-think/

Is this what we are trying to do with Common Core standards? Force every student into a government-dictated and enforced mold, dumbing down the curriculum so much that everyone appears equally intelligent, equally capable, equally trained, equally able? The focus will no longer be education, the classics, language, government, mathematics, science, history, chemistry and individual achievement in those fields but social justice, activism, and community organizing for the socialist collective?

 

 

 

 

Silvio Canto Jr. 7-22-13 Detroit Bankruptcy

Thirty minutes on the Detroit Bankruptcy, how it relates to Agenda 21, and will it be coming to a town near you?
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cantotalk/2013/07/23/todays-message

Dental Floss and Castro Care

The economy is not experiencing scarcity yet but I did notice lately that the range of choices for various goods has diminished. It has been three months or longer since my favorite dental floss and toothpaste have been missing on store shelves. They finally reappeared recently, to disappear again, an obvious sign of manufacturing shortage. This prompted me to check out the new sonic care air flossing gadget. The price alone could buy 40-80 rolls of floss, not to mention the need of electricity to make it work.

People don’t realize how important their teeth are. There is a direct correlation between the health of one’s teeth and the overall body health stemming from the ability to chew and eat nutritional foods, including the health of one’s heart, which can be adversely affected by oral bacteria and decaying dentition.

I am not sure when flossing was revealed as a necessary dental hygienic tool. Anthropologists found evidence that ancient peoples and even isolated tribes used sticks for interdental cleaning. Credit for inventing the dental floss goes to a New Orleans dentist in 1815.  In 1896 Johnson & Johnson patented its silk version produced out of the same thread used for surgical stiches.

Some toothless 45-50 year old Europeans might have saved their teeth and the troubles of finding a dentist who would properly fit them with dentures if they had known about flossing. Come to think of it, the Eastern Europeans, in their utopian socialist/communist states, did not have floss and had difficulty finding toothpaste and toothbrushes, much less adopt a daily brushing routine. On my last trip, young women were selling Crest toothbrushes and handing out leaflets in a strip mall with instructions on how to properly brush your teeth, including the tip that it had to be done daily. When I asked her if I could photograph her booth, she refused.

Growing up in the village, Grandma and Grandpa had two toothbrushes made of rough and uneven bristles, stored outside by the water pump, hanging on a wooden board with nails for hooks. The tube of gritty toothpaste hanged in a cloth bag. The water coming out of the ground was as cold as a mountain spring. Each family member used the same two brushes once a week, making sure they were properly hanged on the hooks. Flies loved to land on them during the day. After a year of two, when the bristles were so bent out of shape or have fallen, a new toothbrush was purchased.

The socialized medicine dentists who were paid the same as everybody, a miserable salary decided by the communist elites, could not care less about the people’s dental hygiene or keeping their teeth. They got paid the same whether they did their job well or poorly. Anesthetics were non-existent. I had root canal at the age of 15 without any anesthetics, howling and wriggling in the dental chair, and the torturous “treatment” stretched over six months, at the end of which he had to pull the tooth out anyway.

When braces became popular, a close relative, who is a dentist and had terrible misaligned teeth herself, chewed me out for putting braces on my two young daughters. “What kind of ignorant mother are you, did you not know that braces cause cavities and ruin people’s teeth?” Thank God, her “stellar” socialist medical training was wrong, my beautiful daughters have gorgeous pearly-whites.

Western European dental care did not fare that much better. There is a good reason why so many Brits have yellow and bad teeth. Their national medical care rations healthcare and the waiting period is so long for many procedures, tests, and labs, including dental care, that people pull their own teeth out after weeks and months of agony while waiting to be seen by a doctor.

I can still see my dentist, buy floss, see my doctors; I can have a needed test within a reasonable amount of time because capitalist competition works well. Come 2014, under the “new and improved” unaffordable socialist and misnamed Affordable Care Act, our medical care will more closely resemble the care we used to get under socialist medicine – rationing, special polyclinics for the elites, black market for needed drugs, empty pharmacy shelves, bring your own drugs and syringes to the hospital, and shortages of basics, either over the counter drugs, vitamins, and prescription drugs.

Lauren's Success and the Failure of Common Core

Lauren was really proud of her accomplishments. She belonged to the baby boom generation who had experienced hardship. She valued land and working with her hands. Every extra dime she saved, she invested in agricultural and forested land. When she won a coveted $25,000 award in the early 1990s, she bought more pasture land.

She worked hard to become a teacher, a black female in a male dominated field; Lauren got her doctorate in biology at a time when few people wanted to stay in college and graduate school so long, it was easier to go out into the world and make money. Few wanted to teach because the pay was low, the hours were long, and parents seldom expressed gratitude to good teachers for a job well done.

Professorships on the other hand were paid much better and hard to come by - one had to be a die-hard liberal with socialist or Marxist leanings.  But the work load was much easier – five hours a week in the office, teach 3 classes, attend the self-aggrandizing lecture and conference circuit, develop a “I love myself” resume, have graduate students to grade students’ exams and/or teach during the professor’s scholarly absence, and he/she had it made. But Lauren was not that kind of person, she was too conservative and conscientious for that, she was passionate about her work, her students, and it showed. She chose to teach gifted students.

A petite and graceful black woman, Lauren was outraged by affirmative action, a payback for the slavery of the past. She was bothered that the public could attribute her well-deserved success not to her hard work but to the color of her skin. Lauren wanted affirmative action to end, it had a good run, she used to say.

Lauren hid her conservative values - she only shared her views with few friends and relatives. It was un-American in the South to be black, a female, single, a teacher, and not be Democrat and a union member.

Before her premature death from skin cancer two years ago, Lauren worried about the direction our country was taking. She was upset by the academic monopoly liberals had around the country in all universities. She feared that race baiters and trouble makers who were inciting race division and class warfare would devastate the middle class and particularly the black middle class.

The government was doing a pretty good job of destroying the black family by becoming welfare daddy to millions of unwed black young women. Who needed a daddy to stay around and take responsibility for the life they’ve created when the financial rewards from government dole were greater in single households? Yet the children, boys especially, desperately needed fathers as role models to keep them away from crime.

The millions of abortions since Roe v. Wade saddened Lauren because many of the aborted babies were black babies. Planned Parenthood was thriving by killing the innocent unborn, teaching mothers-to-be that fetuses were an inconvenience and a choice.

Lauren ran an activities center associated with her church to steer young men and women in the right direction and keep them out of trouble. She also ran the donation center that raised money to pay for scholarships for black kids in the community. She never married or had children of her own but she had many students and neighbors whose kids needed advice and help with homework.

Every year, liberal academics invented new teaching methods, models, and adopted new goals to advance their agenda, defining and redefining themselves. They were social engineers, social justice enforcers, manipulators, and imposers. Parents and the public were paying scant attention – everyone was too distracted by life, work, family, entertainment, and sports. Nobody was “watching the watchers.”

Lauren wanted to visit Africa someday, not because she considered herself African American, she always said, “I’ve never been to Africa, I was not born there, how can I be African American? I was born in the South; I am American through and through.” But there was a curiosity flaming inside her to visit a place that seemed so alien and foreign to her yet so many considered themselves more African than American although they had never set foot in Africa.

She was a prophetic visionary in her own way, fearing and worrying about the future because she witnessed the opportunity to succeed in this country after college become dimmer for all groups. The opportunity for the American dream, which is what brought millions of immigrants to this country, was growing more distant.

Lauren’s role model was George Washington Carver (1864-1943), “The Black Leonardo,” a genial scientist, inventor, botanist, and educator. He thrived at a time in history when it was very hard for a black man to succeed, especially the son of slaves born in Missouri in 1864.

Lauren’s lab walls were covered with posters about Carver’s accomplishments in alternative crops such as peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and how he taught farmers to rotate crops in order to avoid the devastating effects of cotton crop-destroying boll weevils. Among the many products made from peanuts he developed and promoted were cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.

During one of her conference tours, Lauren visited Ames, Iowa because that is where Carver studied botany, at Iowa State Agricultural College. He received his B.S. and Master’s degree in plant pathology and mycology in Ames and was the first black faculty member there. Booker T. Washington, the first principal and president of the Tuskegee Institute, invited Carver in 1896 to be the head of its Agriculture Department - he taught there for 47 years.

Lauren would have been terribly disappointed and heartbroken to see how things have changed in the last five years and how fast. All the progress made since the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal” and its subsequent repudiation in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education, is now being reversed by the Common Core national standards imposed around the country in education. She worked so hard to shape and inspire the next generation of black teachers, biologists, zoologists, botanists, doctors, and researchers!

Sending white and black students to separate but unequal schools harmed children in so many ways, not the least being the undisputed fact that it made black students feel inferior. The federal Common Core bases standards on race and holds minority students to a lower standard from K-12. Is this not discriminatory, harmful to students, and labeling them into separate but unequal groups for the rest of their education? Why dumb down education even more?

It is embarrassing when the MSM glorifies an obviously mal-educated young woman who speaks Ebonics and cannot read cursive writing, excusing her glaring lack of education as something hip. It is a sad example of the state of education today when social promotion has become the norm and semi-literate people receive degrees.

The Tuscaloosa News reported that “Beginning this fall, Alabama public schools will be under a new state-created academic accountability system that sets different goals for students in math and reading, based on their race, economic status, ability to speak English and disabilities.”  Alabama’s Plan 2020, adopted in November 2010 and replacing the No Child Left Behind, has different standards for American Indians, Asian/Pacific Islanders, blacks, English language learners, Hispanics, multi-racial students, students below the poverty level, special education, and whites. http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130630/NEWS/130629743

The problem is that the new educational Common Core mandates did not come from the states, they came from the federal government which strong-armed states into accepting grants via The Race to the Top competition, and allowing states to replace the hated No Child Left Behind with the federal Common Core and Universal Design for Learning, the brain child of two think-tanks in D.C. I wrote two articles on this topic in 2012 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44875 and 2013. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/54196

Lauren would have been proud that The Alabama Federation of Republican Women strongly opposes “race-based standards in student achievement” but sad that education in this country has fallen so low.

We’ve moved from our stellar education system prior to the establishment of the Department of Education in 1979-80 under Jimmy Carter to “everyone is a winner” education, to “let’s be more sensitive to illegals” education, to “let’s coexist” education, “to let’s shove sex education, condoms on bananas, abortion pills, and sexual preferences down our throats” education, to “let’s dumb down education and graduate everyone as idiots” education, to “let’s worship Gaia and environmental stewardship” education, to the current Common Core values of “let’s graduate everyone who gives wrong answers in math and everything else as long as they can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it” education. http://www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-common-core-shill-says-new-education-does-not-require-students-to-have-right-answers-only-that-they-explain-how-they-got-answer/

My suggestion would be to place all these liberal educators who are eager to adopt Common Core standards on an airplane, in a building, or on a bridge designed by students who were taught that it does not matter that they got wrong answers, all that matters are the feelings and the explanations how they arrived at the wrong answers. Still, if they don’t understand what they are doing to public education, perhaps liberal teachers should undergo laser surgery performed by a graduate of Common Core standards or take drugs developed and measured by such students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Butler on Business, 7-17-13, Immigration and education

My weekly radio segment with Alan Butler on immigration and education. I come on at the 40 minute mark.
http://host1.cyberears.com//20054.mp3

How to Lose Weight in 21 Days, "Naked and Afraid"

You don’t have to back away from the table, you don’t have to exercise, all you have to do is agree to appear naked on camera, “survive” 21 days in a remote location such as an uninhabited tropical island paradise, a jungle, or an African country with inhospitable terrain to city folk, fend for your own meals, water, and shelter, while trying to stay away from major predators, sun burn, sun strokes, bugs, snakes, crocs, caimans, scorpions, lions, hyenas, water-borne diseases, and other creepy crawlers. At the end of your weight loss, you will be picked up and brought back to civilization svelte, tanned or ultra-burned, smiling and dirty, a new and improved you with a higher survivability rating than when you first started.  What a fantastic diet!

In the quest to shock and to titillate our bored senses, reality TV has pushed the envelope a tad further with its newest show, “Naked and Afraid” on Discovery Channel. I don’t know about you, just dreaming about being naked in public makes me wake up in a cold sweat. Being naked with a total stranger of the opposite sex in a dangerous environment for 3 weeks and in front of millions of viewers is enough to give anybody a panic attack or worse, a heart attack.

A carefully selected couple, perhaps someone with no inhibitions about nakedness and lacking the component of fear is dropped in the middle of Africa, let’s say, Tanzania, on a deserted island in the Pacific, or an island in Costa Rica or Panama.  A male and a female must survive naked for 21 days, providing their own food, shelter, and water. Each “survivalist” has prior experience in outdoor challenges in the U.S., comes with one chosen implement, and a camera to film each other’s misery while the crew is at a distance, enjoying the spoils of civilization, making sure that nobody dies.

The challenges include fighting hypothermia, sun burn, proper shelter, proper nutrition, proper hydration, fighting off predators, building a fire, maintaining it, keeping warm, keeping clean, building tools to fish with, capturing animals and killing them for a protein-rich meal, sending smoke signals, and building a raft that will withstand flotation for two people in preparation for the escape to the much maligned civilization.

The producers rate the Adam and Eve’s adaptation techniques and give them a score before and after the show. I can understand the shock value in ratings and the interest to make money on the part of the producers and the interest in ratings for the cable channel. I am interested in the motivation of the participants in this odd experiment.

It does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that the naked explorers want their hour of fame, publicity, possible future gigs, and a career in television.  Perhaps some honestly want to challenge themselves and their endurance, adaptability, survivability, and to earn bragging rights to the world. I am not sure how much set up and editing goes on behind the scenes, or how much of the time the two adventurers are actually totally alone in the wilderness.

Could it be an insidious attempt to indoctrinate people into the liberal mantra of “living simply,” getting us used to live with less food, houses, cars, roads, land, medicine, doctors, civilization in general, in an attempt to implement the environmental preservation Shangri-La dreamed up for decades by environmental alarmists who decry man-made bio-diversity destruction, and advocate for population reduction, one of the tenets of Agenda 21?

The reality show appears unnecessarily dangerous, nonsensical, and contrived at the same time. Take for instance the case of the couple dropped in Tanzania. He does not figure out that even the natives do not walk barefoot in areas overgrown with thorny bushes and plants. He fashions sandals out of tree bark after a long thorn embeds in the sole of his foot. Only the intervention of a doctor who stops the show, drains his severely infected wound, and treats him with antibiotics, saves him from certain death from septicemia.

Is the show meant to portray men as the weaker of the two genders when faced with unusual challenges? One very fair-skinned man suffered severe sun-burn from day one. His olive-skinned partner was able to withstand the tropical sun’s punishing rays much easier.

Do they work together in spite of the nakedness and fear to overcome the dire circumstances? Did the producers try to say that we, as a society, are too soft, fat, and civilized and would thus be unable to compete or survive in the harsh environment that native populations adapted to?

When the couple finishes the ordeal and is picked up at an agreed location marked on a map, they are weighed. Each participant loses anywhere from 18-40 pounds depending on their arrival weight and their gender. What a torturous and unhealthy way to lose weight fast! Protein deficient, dehydrated, sun-burned, infected, and bitten so bad by sand flies that one participant looked like a pin cushion with swollen feet the size of the Michelin Man, this seems to be a dangerous way to lose weight. I can only hope that no tropical flies deposited eggs under their skin. They may have some unpleasant parasites to deal with later.

I promise to stay away from chocolate and lose weight, just in case someone decides to drop me off “naked and afraid” on a tropical island paradise full of sand flies, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, dangerous reptiles, and other poisonous critters.

Breathtaking Natural Bridge

“So beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable.  It is the most sublime of Nature’s works.”
- Thomas Jefferson, Note on the State of Virginia

Walking down 147 steps along a tiny creek cascading gradually to a larger bed, huge rocks surround us on both sides. I wondered in anticipation, where is this Natural Wonder? And suddenly, the view opens and a grey mammoth arch covered with lush green vegetation rises out of the wet and moss-covered rock. Rivulets of water flow on all sides of the limestone, constantly carving.

The 215 ft. high arch is 55 ft. taller than Niagara Falls, 40 ft. thick, 100 ft. wide and spans 90 ft. above the massive walls, a bridge made of Ordovician rock, 500 million years old. The tool was water and the master who carved this masterpiece 1160 ft. above sea level was a simple mountain stream, Cedar Creek.

The Monacan Indians, an eastern Siouan nation, who lived in the area for an estimated 10,000 years called the Natural Bridge, “Mohomony,” “The Bridge of God,” or “Great Mystery.” Monacan men, women, and children, chased by enemies, came upon a big chasm between two large boulders and, faced with impending doom, closed their eyes and prayed. When Monacan warriors opened their eyes, a narrow rock bridge had materialized across the gorge and they were able to fight the chasing enemy crossing the Natural Bridge.

Four centuries ago, Monacans could be found in the western and central parts of Virginia, as “far west as the Falls of Richmond, where John Smith and his Jamestown settlers first made contact with the tribe.” There are still 1,400 Monacans living in Virginia in the Bear Mountain region near Lynchburg.

Nobody claimed the 157-acre close to Glasgow, Virginia, because it was not suitable for agriculture.  Following a trail on horseback from Paxson’s Tavern in nearby Glasgow, Thomas Jefferson discovered on August 23, 1767 the massive Natural Bridge.  He purchased the land on July 5, 1774 from King George III for the modest sum of $160.

In 1927 a surveyors cross still visible today was found with the initials “GW” on a stone in Cedar Creek.  The story goes that George Washington, an athletic teenager, had scaled the south face of the Natural Bridge and carved his initials there.

The teen George Washington was working for Colonel Peter Jackson, Thomas Jefferson’s father, who was surveying the Indian trail, called “Big Path” to measure the boundaries of the 157-acre plot. The representative of the King of England, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, ordered the survey in 1750 in order to build a road between Winchester and Buchanan.

George Washington never mentioned this story in his writings, nor is the survey work formally documented. They are mentioned in written descriptions dating back to 1830s.

Jefferson visited his property during annual “rambles;” there are four records of such visits. A two story stone and log cabin was built in 1803 on the present day location of the Natural Bridge Hotel.  Jefferson and his guests would stay in this cabin during his visits, tended by Patrick Henry and his wife Luisa. There was a visitor guest book but was lost in the cabin fire in 1845. According to museum archives, some of the more famous visitors were:  James Monroe (fifth President), Andrew Jackson (seventh President), Martin Van Buren (eighth President), John Marshall (fourth Chief Justice), Henry Clay (Kentucky statesman), Daniel Boone (American pioneer and explorer), and Sam Houston (first Governor of Texas).

Jefferson owned the Natural Bridge until his death in 1826, leaving it to his family. He used the caves around the bridge for the production of ammunition during the war. There is plenty of saltpeter (potassium nitrate) in the caves, the essential ingredient for black gun powder (75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulphur). However, in 1816, Jefferson provided a custodian for its natural preservation, leasing the land to Patrick Henry, a man freed from slavery. With his wife Luisa, Patrick Henry farmed 10 acres, watched for vandals and trespassers, took care of Jefferson’s cabin, and cared for Jefferson’s many guests.

John Sallings, who built a cabin and settled in the area after six years of Indian captivity, was “probably the first white man to see the bridge.”  From his diary, “Colonel John Buchanan preserved the earliest record of the bridge.” (Museum Archives)

In 1834, the second owner of the bridge, Capt. Lackland, devised a hexagonal iron cage, hoisted up and down by strong men working a hand windlass that carried courageous individuals up to view the bridge from the air for the price of $1 per person.

The subterranean waters have carved caves; some were enlarged by human blasting to the size of caverns and to a passable depth of 350 ft. Long time ago, the bridge was actually the ceiling of a large cavern that had collapsed, resulting in the breathtaking bridge that we see today.

In 1812, workmen who extracted nitrate from the Saltpeter Cave heard the water rumblings of the Lost River. They blasted an opening to allow the Lost River to flow outward. Several attempts to locate the source of the underground water have been made with color dyes and flotation devices, all unsuccessful.

I likened the visually arresting and breathtaking experience of seeing the Natural Bridge for the first time to being mesmerized by the thundering Niagara Falls, another majestic monument built by the power of nature and God. As Dr. Norman Vincent Peale said, it “is something like being in a church. It almost brings tears to your eyes.”

Cedar Creek, originating 180 miles away in the Allegheny Mountains, plunging 50 feet in an elegant plume of white water, the Lace Waterfalls, flows under the Natural Bridge and then joins the James River a mile away. The water seems deceptively calm, lazy, and cool on my bare feet. Rev. Andrew Reed described it so poetically in 1835, “Oh, it is sublime – so strong and yet so elegant – springing from earth and bathing its head in heaven.”

The town of Lexington, just north of the Natural Bridge, was the recruiting area for the southern army during the Civil War. One of the nation’s first tourist attractions, during the Civil War both Union and Confederate officers saw the Natural Bridge and recorded their impressions in letters and public documents.

The bridge was so famous that Confederates detoured from their march after the Battle of Lynchburg to see it. Assistant Surgeon Thomas Fanning Wood of the 3^rd North Carolina Infantry wrote in his memoirs, “On the 23^rd started on the march towards Lexington, and on the same day I got permission to visit or go by the Natural Bridge. … We had pointed out to us the letters G. Washington carved in the stone, which were once quite plain, but time has nearly effaced the last vestige of them. … The story was that George Washington had climbed this ledge to the top. None of us tried this experiment, but we learned that Henry MacRae [of the regiment] … climbed to a very dangerous point, and finding he could not get to the top, had to be rescued by a rope let down from above.” (Museum Archives)

Some of General David Hunter’s Union troops, after burning down the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, while marching to Lynchburg, detoured to see and cross the famous Bridge.

“We passed within three miles of the Natural Bridge. Officers were much disappointed by not being able to see it. Lieutenant Meigs and some others did go by that road.” (Museum Archives)

The Natural Bridge was also used as a “shot tower” during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. To make a “shot,” molten lead was dropped through a copper sieve high above a pool of water, in this case, the Cedar Creek.  Surface tension and the cooling of droplets as they fell created a perfect ball which cooled in the water below. Different size holes in the sieve created different size balls.

Today, the Lee Highway, U.S. Route 11, still crosses over the ultimate natural wonder bridge, painted, drawn, visited, and admired by many, and built by the erosive power of water over millions of years.

You Tube Book Review of my Amazon best seller book, U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy

Political book review on YouTube of my best seller book, U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy
http://youtu.be/-uIO50d61Yo

Butler on Business, July 10, 2013, Liberty Radio Express

Discussions on my book, Liberty on Life Support, global warming alarmism from 1922. I come on at the 40 minute mark.
http://host1.cyberears.com//19941.mp3

Liberal Doom and Gloom 90 Years Ago

If you told me in 1922 that global warming was going to drown the planet because of melting icebergs, or that “at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared,” replaced by moraines of earth and stones, or that seals vanished, I might have believed you. 

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” said the Washington Post on November 2, 1922, citing a report to the Commerce Department received from Bergen, Norway. This report was based on statements by fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers; “soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.” Additionally, the report said that “scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.” As a logical thinker, if this were true, I would have definitely considered the Gulf Stream a possible cause of the alleged warming, not the greenhouse gases, or the currently maligned CO2.

The Washington Post continued in its 1922 article, “Within a few years, it is predicted that due to the ice melt, the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.”

John Lockwood, who found the above-mentioned article said, “This was one of several such articles I have found at the Library of Congress for the 1920s and 1930s. I had read of the just-released NASA estimates that four of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. were actually in the 1930s, with 1934 the hottest of all.” (www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/aug/14/inside-the-beltway/81073443/#ixzz2YeDw8i6n)

If you told me in 1977 that the earth was in danger of freezing, and, after seeing the Time Magazine cover picture of a penguin surrounded by solid ice with the caption, How to Survive The Coming Ice Age, I might have believed you.

After Time magazine told us again in 2006 that we should “Be Worried, Be VERY Worried,” with the picture of a lone polar bear walking through water, presumably the melted ice, I would have thought twice before I believed the special report on global warming. I would have seen a pattern of misinformation emerging.

When Al Gore, the authority who narrated the 2006 documentary titled, “An Inconvenient Truth,” with questionable data for which he subsequently received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, I definitely considered it global alarmism, an agenda pushed by environmentalists who were and are interested in making money on renewable energy and on the newly emerged market of carbon taxes, swaps, and credits.

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Agenda 21 arm of the United Nations and Al Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/

By now, if the doom and gloom alarmists were right, we should have either drowned in melted ice or should have frozen to death. They must have missed the science class experiment with ice cubes floating in a full glass of water - when the cubes melt, water does not overflow the glass, it simply replaces the mass of the ice cubes.

The “science” of global warming is not settled at all, it is just a media publicized “consensus.”  Yet the coal-generated energy which produces 49% of our electricity is under attack by environmentalists, the EPA, and policy-makers alike, a deliberate and concerted effort to bankrupt those who use coal instead of its clean, renewable, and expensive cousins, solar, wind, and biofuels to generate energy.

There is a vast effort to minimize the size of cars and the type of fuel used,  by replacing gasoline-driven and hybrid cars with electric cars although the electricity generated to recharge these electric cars still comes mostly from coal.

President Obama’s moratorium on domestic drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, scarce new drilling permits on land, and the blocking of the XL Keystone pipeline are evidence of the war on oil and coal, the war on American economic prosperity.

There is an abundance of oil, the earth keeps generating it. “The idea that petroleum is formed from dead organic matter is known as the ‘biogenic theory’ of petroleum formation and was first proposed by a Russian scientist almost 250 years ago.  In the 1950's, however, a few Russian scientists began questioning this traditional view,” postulating that petroleum could form naturally deep inside the Earth” and not necessarily from fossils. (http://www.livescience.com/9404-mysterious-origin-supply-oil.html)

OPEC should be worried because vast reserves of new oil have been discovered in tar sands. If extraction is allowed and perfected to minimize ecological damage, there is enough oil to change the dynamic of the crude oil market. North Dakota’s economy is already booming.

The emissions of the much maligned CO2, the cause of the alleged man-made global warming/climate change must be reduced, according to the EPA new rules, to no more than 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour of production from new fossil-fuel plants with a capacity of 25 megawatts or larger. (Congressional Report Service, R42496, June 10, 2013)

According to Peter Folger, the new rule proposed under Section 11 of the Clean Air Act, should be easy to satisfy by new natural gas-fired combined-cycle power plants without additional costs. However, new coal-fired plants would only be able to meet the standards by installing carbon capture sequestration (CCS) technology.

Although Congress appropriated $3.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for research, development, and demonstration of CCS large-scale deployment by 2020, “to date, there are no commercial ventures in the United States that capture, transport, and inject industrial-scale quantities of CO2 solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration.” (Peter Folger, June 10, 2013, CRS R 42496, Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Research, Development, and Demonstration at the U.S. Department of Energy)

A Department of Energy Inspector General audit found that only a small fraction of the $3.4 billion appropriated for research and development of carbon capture sequestration (CCS) has actually been used so far.

The EPA has missed its April 2013 deadline to issue the final rule on fossil fuel power plants because it has to review more than 2 million comments received from the public.

To modify or block the EPA’s proposed new rule, Congress can use legislation such as H.R. 2127, prohibiting the EPA from issuing any rule limiting the emissions of CO2 from any existing or new source utility that uses fossil-fuels to generate electricity until carbon capture sequestration (CCS) becomes economically and technologically possible.

EPA’s new rule considers CCS the only “essential technology” if new coal-fired power plants are to be approved and built in the U.S. However, there are other important factors that are not taken into account: costs of competing fuel sources such as natural gas, electricity demand, regulatory costs, infrastructure, rail, and electric grid development.

According to Dr. David Sponseller, “Some sequestration occurs in the oil industry, which injects CO2 down hole in order to enhance the flow of oil from some wells. They cannot inject air because the 21% oxygen in the air would burn with the oil and/or gas due to the high temperatures below. But with CO2 the oxygen is already fully combined with carbon and can no longer react when it encounters the hydrocarbons down hole.”

On June 6, 2013, Oklahoma’s Burbank oil field started carbon dioxide injection. Chaparral Energy, Inc. is moving CO2 from a fertilizer plant in Coffeyville, Kansas, to Burbank through an 8-inch, 68-mile pipeline. A 23,500-hp compressor station in Coffeyville feeds the CO2 to Burbank, Oklahoma. (Oil and Gas Journal, July 1, 2013) http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/volume-111/issue-7a/general-interest/carbon-dioxide-injection-starts-in-oklahoma-s.html

From the alarmists worrying about the imminent flooding of coastal cities in 1922, flooding that never occurred, to the “ice-age” doom and gloom predictions of 1977, which also never happened, and back to the unfounded fear of rising oceans today, the main stream media seem all too eager to scare the public into accepting draconian policy measures that implement the latest expensive fad, costing billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies and higher energy costs passed on to consumers.

Dr. David Sponseller stated that “Only 130 ppm CO2 have been added to our atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This increase is dwarfed by the 210,000 ppm of life-giving oxygen.”

It would be far wiser to admit that man’s activity on earth has little influence on natural temperature cycles or on calamitous weather events. Big government and its expanding bureaucracy should leave its citizens alone to live their lives without oppressive and costly control of energy production.

 

 

Broken Immigration or Broken Laws That Are not Enforced?

Americans are bombarded daily by radio and television ads and politicians of both stripes, repeating at nauseam, “Our immigration system is broken.” What exactly is broken? The fence and the laws are broken? What is broken about the system? The fact that laws are not enforced? Why can we not fix that? Why do we have to import 11 more million people into a broken system? The system is not broken if we follow the rules, if we follow the law.

Lindsay Graham said that if we fail to pass comprehensive immigration law right now, come 2016 the Republican Party is dead. As if legalizing 11 million new Democrat voters is going to help the Republican Party. Hispanics don’t vote Republican, most vote Democrat because they believe in big government as a source of wellbeing and family welfare.

One of the few people who read the 850 pages of the Comprehensive Immigration Bill is Betsy McCaughey, former New York Lieutenant Governor. A pro-legal immigration advocate, she points out that the first 155 pages deal with immigration, the remainder address issues dear to everybody’s heart except what “Joe Q. Citizen,” the average American, wants.

Among Betsey McCaughey’s objections to the amnesty bill: (http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/09/six-big-problems-with-the-immigration-bill-from-someone-who-has-actually-read-it/#ixzz2YtofSZgq)

-          Severe impact on the over-crowded public schools compounded by the inability to assimilate too many people

-          The necessary doubling of the legal immigration cases that are currently backlogged for 19 years, an impossible task, in order to absorb illegal aliens in the proposed ten year time frame of the amnesty bill (section 245c(c), the so-called back of the line provision)

-          People with green cards are entitled to Obamacare subsidies, deductibles, co-pays under exchanges, $9,000 per year, per person, an additional $100 billion to the cost of Obamacare, an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office.

-          Attorney Generals’ office will pay legal bills for asylum seekers, including individuals such as the Boston bombers.

      -          “Community organizations become the 5^th estate” – they guide illegal aliens through the    entire process without any public scrutiny or accountability, even registering them to vote, undoubtedly Democrat; same community organizers are also navigators for Obamacare, becoming very powerful decision makers in the community. Organizations like Acorn will receive a steady stream of permanent funding through Obamacare exchanges – revenues from healthcare exchanges go back to community organizers. “They will have the power to give out amnesty, voting, indoctrinating people, healthcare, etc. Lenin did this to favorite community organizations in the Soviet Union.”

-          The Amnesty bill weakens our national security.

-          Border agents are placed under the Office of Civil Rights at the DOJ

-          Every provision of The Amnesty Bill is given the status of emergency, thus funding will never stop.

There are 101 million Americans on some form of assistance, more than the 97 million who are actually working. Should these Americans not be put to work first before we amnesty and bring in more illegal aliens?

Conservatism is dead in public policy, liberalism and democrat party rule, everything they wished to accomplish or do to this country has been done or is being currently done. The Republicans and Democrats are two branches of the same diseased tree, the tree of elitist power and control totally divorced from the will of the people.

“Mexico is outsourcing its poverty to the U.S.” Mexicans and other foreign nationals are pouring over the southern border. There are signs in every language possible, primarily in Spanish, teaching people how to come across the border, how to get food stamps, and many other benefits in the United States.

The open borders crowd is elated, including former President George W. Bush. In ABC News “This Week,” he commented, “I think it is very important to fix a broken system, to treat people with respect, and to have confidence in our capacity to assimilate people.”

1.      Yes, we are a nation of immigrants but we came here legally, we did not sneak across the border, breaking the law. We also did not have anchor babies, did not expect the state to pay for them, and we assimilated into the American culture.

     
      2.      The system is not broken. The enforcement of our laws is broken.

3.      Illegal aliens are disrespecting our laws by breaking them and taking advantage of our generous welfare; they disrespect our borders, us, and our culture.

4.      Illegal aliens who are invading our country do not wish to assimilate into our culture, learn English, history, and become citizens. La Raza has promoted the Reconquista for decades.

How is the Gang of Eight going to enforce learning English, with the English police? How are they going to test 11 million illegals?  Most are uneducated, are already or will be on the welfare rolls, and make, on the average, $40,000 a year. Any such applicant will retroactively receive earned income tax credit.

Sen. Rubio and the Gang of Eight are doing the bidding for corporations and farmers who want cheap labor and for Democrats who want new voters, a glaring reflection of a “confluence of elitist interests.” Open borders policy invites the invasion of our country by unwanted illegal immigrants.

Adding to the problem of overcrowded and underfunded schools, illegal children are not immunized, spreading diseases formerly eradicated into schools and bringing down the overall achievement because nobody speaks English at home.

Sen. Rubio stated that we must give illegals amnesty first, so they can start paying taxes and thus pay for the border protection. This is a disingenuous statement. Most illegals who do pay taxes, receive more benefits in public assistance, Social Security, WIC, SNAP, EBT, Obamacare exchange subsidies, and other welfare benefits. Most illegal aliens on proposed amnesty will be an immediate liability to the U.S. taxpayers.

Illegal aliens are not in the shadows, they are not afraid, they are not mistreated, they live around us, in our churches, communities, they shop at gas stations, grocery stores, malls, and are at the welfare office, ERs, doctor’s office, and Social Security office with interpreters in tow. They are hired first because they accept lower wages. Even lower wages are better than the wages south of the border. They bring gang violence with them, a culture of dependence on government, and an entitled mentality which progressives are more than happy to accommodate.

During the Braceros program of 1942-1964, 4.6 million guest worker contracts were signed with Mexicans. The Braceros program was scrapped in 1964 - people on both sides of the isle made pro and con assessments of the program.

A good proposal was made at CPAC 2013 in which a $5 electronic card, embedded with biometric information of a legal national, can match potential guest workers with employers, based on salary, qualifications, and the needs of a particular employer who cannot find Americans willing or able to do a job as is often the claim. Perhaps there is some truth in that statement, why pick a farmer’s crop when the federal government daddy is giving some type of assistance to 101 million Americans? Why bother to work?

Lisa Miller of the Washington, D.C. Tea Party chapter, described the frustration of the majority of Americans when the government no longer listens to the will of the people. This past Saturday “Arlington County government had a citizenship application drive for illegals. Our government is working hard against the American people as we suffer from the lowest labor participation rates since the 70s.”

Democrats and progressives from various Washington D.C. lobbies have infiltrated the Tea Party and conservative groups in northern Virginia with a platform of “immigration conservation and the environment.” Has anybody visited the border with Mexico to witness the mountains of trash and human waste left behind by illegals crossing the border into the U.S., causing severe environmental degradation? Others, posing as conservatives, have infiltrated school boards and boards of supervisors pushing immigration amnesty, more Spanish classes, more welfare, Latina Power, more after school programs, free child care, and other La Raza driven programs.

The 4 million LEGAL immigrants who have been waiting patiently in their countries the resolution of their status should be the topic of discussion. They deserve to come here first because they want to be Americans, are educated, and are interested in making positive contributions to our society, not changing America into the failed, impoverished society they are trying to escape.

Nobody blames LEGAL immigrants for taking jobs from Americans, but ILLEGAL immigrants, who have broken the law, have taken jobs away from lower skilled Americans and have contributed to the decline in wages. We are a nation of immigrants but law-abiding legal immigrants. There is a point of no return when our country can no longer absorb economically the mass invasion of illegals and their quest for financial assistance from the overly generous American welfare system. Multiculturalism is a failure and has broken Europe financially.  We are watching our future unfold in the same manner that the socialist European Union bankrupted its member nations with its open border policy and unchecked immigration.