yurbud
yurbud's JournalScientology taught at public funded charter school
Teachers at public funded charter schools have to use scientology teaching methods and watch videos praising L Ron Hubbard.
My guess is that the politicians granting the charters do not give a rat's ass about what these guys teach as long as their donation checks clear.
We have to figure out how to make this corrupt education reform radioactive so that in spite of the personal financial temptations for politicians, they will know their career is over if they push this agenda.
At the encouragement of the superintendent Robert Duffy, many of the kids at the six schools, which serve 1,000 students, are taught using Applied Scholastics, a teaching method researched and developed by Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
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Katie Donahoe, a teacher who used to work at Robert L. Duffy High School in Phoenix, spoke to NPR about her training in Applied Scholastics at the organization's headquarters. She said:
"They didn't start off talking about instruction. They started off talking about L. Ron Hubbard," says Donohoe, who was there at the urging of her new superintendent. Later that fall she would start teaching English at Robert L. Duffy High School in Phoenix. But first, she was asked to get familiar with Hubbard's methods.
"The next stop was to watch a video talking about how great Applied Scholastics was," Donahoe says. Among those in the video were Isaac Hayes, Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/03/27/scientology-schools-sneaking-into-classrooms
GREENWALD: Bush speechwriter Frum latest to admit Iraq War for OIL
Probably the only insider who has talked about this in much detail is Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who laid out the broader agenda of controlling the world's oil.
But I would like to hear somebody in leadership in the Democratic Party be as honest and as detailed as Wilkerson and stop talking to us like children or pretending that they were simply "misled" themselves.
Anyone old enough to remember the Cold War with an IQ over room temperature should have known that even if Saddam had NUKES, he could never dare use them on us or give them to terrorists who might because he knew (like every other world leader), that the result would be his entire country being reduced to a radioactive parking lot.
Money talks in Washington, and it's time our elected representatives tell us what exactly it demanded of them before the Iraq War and what the outcome was they wanted.
"I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those 'others' was Vice President Cheney, it didn't matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to US dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia."
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Yet few claims were more stigmatized in the run-up to the Iraq War, and after, than the view that oil was a substantial factor. In 2006, George Bush instructed us that there was a "responsible" way to criticize the US war effort in Iraq, and an "irresponsible" way to do so, and he helpfully defined the boundaries:
"The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/18/david-frum-iraq-war-oil
Great Indian ad campaign on intervening in domestic violence without confrontation
This is cool. A group in India made this ad campaign about how to intervene in domestic violence without getting into a conflict yourself.
It's one of a series and I had to watch them all in one sitting (they're only about a minute each).
I stumbled across it in an article on interrupting date rape violence like Steubenville, and it's similar to the most effective approach to curb bullying, which tackles the "bystander effect" when most of the bystanders disapprove but do nothing to intervene.
Here's the article with links to all the videos.
http://prospect.org/article/stop-rape-culture-ring-bell
ARGO v. Reality: Iran's then president wanted hostages free, Reagan campaing didn't
I have a feeling the real narrative is eventually going to win out.
Iran Contra started before Reagan was even president with a behind the scenes deal to delay the release of the hostages until after the election.
For some reason, Democrats never put this knife in the ribs of the GOP.
Or maybe if they tried, the media would suddenly become very interested in some celebrity's dysfunction, violent videogames, or steroid use by Dancing with the Stars contestants.
“Overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against [the hostage-taking]. Hence, the movie misrepresents the Iranian government’s stand in regard to hostage-taking. It also completely misrepresents Iranians by portraying us as irrational people consumed by aggressive emotion.”
The October Surprise
However, after becoming president on Feb. 4, 1980, he found his efforts to resolve the hostage crisis thwarted. Bani-Sadr said he discovered that “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
Though Bani-Sadr has talked and written about the Reagan-Khomeini collaboration before, he added in his commentary on “Argo” that “two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini’s regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad, the Islamic Republican Party, and the Reagan administration.”
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/07/october-surprise-and-argo/
Michigan teachers say paycheck cuts qualify them for food stamps
Do you think this will make future college students want to become teachers?
People don't go into education for the money, but we do expect to have a roughly middle class standard of living and not have to stand in line for food stamps to feed our families.
Too many Democrats seem to agree with Republicans that the only time the bucks should flow to education is when some hedge fund manager trust fund baby stands to make a profit from it.
We've got to change that.
The second-grade teacher at Grand Rapids Public Schools’ Burton Elementary was among nearly 150 teachers summoned by their union’s crisis team to pressure school officials Monday, March 4 to settle a pending contract and do something about applying a state law limiting what school districts and other public employers pay for employee health insurance premiums.
Since Feb. 15 when the district began deducting back health insurance premiums over what it’s allowed to pay under the state’s Publicly Funded Health Insurance Contribution Act of 2011, Ratliff said morale among teachers has suffered dramatically and a sort of depression has set in. Some are losing $300 per pay check.
“I am a five-year teacher who brings home $555.39 for two weeks and who currently qualifies for a Bridge Card,” Ratliff told the school board Monday to loud applause from her colleagues. “How is this possible?"
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2013/03/grand_rapids_teachers_say_sala.html
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