The solar wind is clipping along at a brisk 408 km/sec and The sun is peppered with spots, but
not one of the eight numbered sunspot groups on the solar disk has the type of unstable magnetic
field that poses a threat for strong flares. Solar activity is low. NOAA forecasters estimate a 15%
chance of M-flares today, decreasing to only 5% tomorrow. On Wednesday morning, Oct. 8th,
there will be a total lunar eclipse. Observers across the Pacific side of Earth can see the
normally-pale full Moon turn a beautiful shade of red as it passes through the sunset-colored
shadow of our planet. The Moon first dips into Earth's shadow at approximately 9:15 UT (2:15
a.m. PDT), kicking off the partial phase of the eclipse. Totality, when the Moon is fully
immersed, begins at 10:25 UT (3:25 a.m. PDT) and lasts for nearly an hour.
The Global Warming that Wasn’t
Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Dr Peiser said: "What has happened is that the public
has become more skeptical because they were told we are facing Doomsday, and suddenly
they realize ‘Where is the warming that we were promised?’"
"They say we can predict the climate and the reality is that they can’t."
Because of this so-called "global warming hiatus", Dr Peiser says climate change is not as
pressing of an issue as it once was, a fact that should be embraced by the scientific community.
"The reality is that they are quite relieved in a way, and we should all be relieved that it isn’t
such a big problem at present.
"We might have much more time than many people once told us."
However, the reason behind the current pause in rising temperatures remains a mystery, and
there are said to be more than 30 theories attempting to decipher what caused this stability.
Some scientists suggest the heat may have gone into the ocean, but Dr Peiser remains
unconvinced by this theory.
"Something is clearly balancing out the warming effect of the CO2 [carbon dioxide]," he
explained.
"It might be natural factors, it might be the ocean, no one knows for sure.
"It [the warming] could start anytime - and that is an indication that we don’t fully understand the
climate.
"That’s a reality that most climate scientists are reluctant to admit."
A host of world leaders gathered last month to discuss the topic of global warming at the UN
Climate Change Summit.
US President Barack Obama said it was an issue "that will define the contours of this century
more dramatically than any other" - but Dr Peiser could not help but notice there were a few
faces missing from the meeting.
A handful of countries - including China, India and Canada - did not attend the summit,
something that did not surprise Dr Peiser.
We the People Vote for Mayberry
Residents of an Idaho town are asking their city council to return an armored vehicle to
the federal government and just say no to militarization.
John Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, said he was contacted by a
group of residents from Nampa, Idaho, and asked to urge their elected leaders to send
the town’s military-grade equipment back where it belongs — to the Pentagon. Of
particular concern is a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP, acquired
with grants from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The discussion of whether local police need machine guns, night-vision scopes or an
armored vehicle needs to engage the entire community, and should not be unilaterally
decided by the federal government, the military, or law enforcement, Whitehead said.
“Whenever this kind of armament is brought into a community, it should only be done
with the knowledge and consent of the citizenry,” Whitehead, a constitutional attorney
based in Charlottesville, Virginia, said in a statement released to WND.
John Whitehead
Law enforcement agencies across the country have quietly returned more than 6,000
unwanted or unusable items to the Pentagon in the last 10 years, according to a report
by Mother Jones.
And the trend seems to be gaining steam since the August unrest in Ferguson,
Missouri. That’s when many Americans got their first glimpse of camouflage-clad cops
roving the streets in tanks and armored vehicles, blurring the lines between police and
soldiers.
Recently, in response to a local outcry over aggressive policing tactics, San Jose,
California’s police department announced plans to return its MRAP, and the Los
Angeles school system police department has agreed to return its three grenade
launchers.
Whitehead said military recycling programs carry hidden costs and result in heightened
risk for the community by transforming local police into extensions of the military.
The Rutherford Institute’s letter to Nampa Mayor Bob Henry can be read here:
While local police departments often argue that MRAPs and other military hardware are
essential “tools” in the fight against drug crimes, the reality is that violent crime
nationwide is at a 40-year low, Whitehead says in the letter.
“Most of this equipment is not only largely unnecessary but is completely incongruous
with the security needs of smaller communities,” the letter states.
Nampa, in Canyon County, Idaho, has a population of just over 97,000.
Whitehead says 17,000 local police departments are equipped with military equipment
ranging from Blackhawk helicopters and machine guns to grenade launchers, battering
rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and
armored vehicles. Some have tanks and others have drones.
Whether or not the use of such sophisticated military equipment is justified, many local
police feel compelled to use it once they have it.
The misuse of military gear by police is a growing problem that has been documented in
books such as Cheryl Chumley’s “Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare is
Becoming Our Reality:” and Radley Balko’s “Rise of The Warrior Cop.”
Heavily armed SWAT units were introduced in the 1980s for the purpose of handling
highly volatile hostage situations and confrontations with active shooters. But now they
are rolled out for the most routine police procedures such as serving warrants.
SWAT raids, which numbered about 3,000 a year in the early 1980s, now occur over
80,000 times per year across America, according to research by Professor Peter
Kraska, chair of the graduate program at the School of Justice at Eastern Kentucky
University and author of the book “Militarizing The American Criminal Justice System:
The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police.”
WND previously reported on an incident in rural Habersham County, Georgia, in which
a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade into a home where they believed a drug
dealer was hiding out. The grenade landed in the crib of a 19-month-old boy and blew
open his face. The toddler spent five weeks in the hospital following the May 28 incident
which the local sheriff called “a mistake.”
Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh was permanently scarred by a SWAT team in
Habersham County, Georgia.
Little “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh has had to undergo multiple reconstructive surgeries,
including the reattachment of his nose, and is still badly scarred. The drug dealer was
arrested later that same night at a different house and the family maintains they have no
involvement in illegal drugs. A Habersham grand jury has been meeting for the past
week to consider a possible criminal indictment against the Sheriff’s Office.
“While we all want our law enforcement officers to be able to do their job, which is to
maintain the peace and uphold the Constitution, and we want them to be safe and
protected while doing so, we cannot afford to sacrifice our freedoms in the process,”
said Whitehead, author of “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police
State.”
He believes it will take local citizen activists stepping up to roll back the police state.
“The American police force is not supposed to be a branch of the military but exists for a
sole purpose: To serve and protect the citizens of each and every American
community,” he said. “Thus, it now falls to local governing bodies to restore the rightful
balance between the citizenry and those appointed to safeguard their freedoms.”
Local police agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participate in the
Pentagon’s 1033 “recycling” program, and the share of equipment and weaponry
delivered to local communities each year continues to expand.
Since 1990, the 1033 program has transferred $4.2 billion worth of military weaponry
and equipment from the Pentagon to domestic police agencies, much of it in the name
of fighting the war on drugs.
The MRAP is an intimidating part of this “recycling” program. Weighing in at 20 tons, an
MRAP is built to withstand everything from small arms fire to IED bomb blasts that were
common during the Iraq War but unlikely to be encountered during domestic policing.
And, as many small cities have discovered, the costs of maintaining an MRAP can
quickly add up.
“While supposedly acquired for little up front, these $733,000 battering rams come with
hidden costs that can add up to tens of thousands of dollars yearly in maintenance and
repair,” Whitehead said.
However, as Whitehead notes in his letter to the city council, when Homeland Security
launched its 1033 surplus military equipment program, it laid the groundwork for a
transformation of local law enforcement into extensions of the military, “upsetting a
critical balance established by our Founding Fathers who warned against establishing a
standing army that would see American citizens as potential combatants.”
For the sake of greater transparency, accountability, and oversight when it comes to
police acquisition and deployment of military-grade equipment, Whitehead said The
Rutherford Institute is recommending that the Nampa City Council adopt a policy of
direct oversight to ensure that if local law enforcement acquires such weapons, they do
so with the blessing of the community
18 Months After NSA is Outed
It's been a year and a half since Edward Snowden revealed to the world just how much private
information the National Security Agency has been collecting on just about everyone. The
massive spying operation raised privacy and Constitutional concerns and set off alarms with
reports that some employees had used the system to keep tabs on their love interests.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, the government has done little to reform the program and reassure
the public. Even relatively weak legislation that fails to address core concerns has stalled in
Congress.
Action has come, however, from Silicon Valley. The new Apple iPhone 6 includes an encryption
program that could take years to break. Even more important, Apple won't have access to the
password. That way, it will be impossible for government officials to pressure the digital giant to
violate their customer's privacy.
The importance of that protection was recently revealed in court documents showing that
government officials threatened Yahoo with a $250,000 daily fine if they didn't turn over user
data to the NSA. The fine was set to double every week.
Public demand for action on privacy issues led Google to quickly announce that it, too, would
offer smartphone users additional protection. The Washington Post notes that this "is part of a
broad shift by American technology companies to make their products more resistant to
government snooping."
Many government officials are aghast at the notion that a private company would offer such
privacy protections to consumers. The head of the FBI suggested it might prevent officials from
finding a kidnapped child. Others raise concerns about terrorists.
A number of security experts dismiss those concerns, particularly because the agencies can
access so much other information. But discussing only the law enforcement angle misses the
larger point. The privacy issue is not just about catching bad guys; it's about the threat to good
guys as well.
Seen from that perspective, the cost of giving government agencies easy access to everyone's
smartphone data is extraordinarily high. Smartphones carry all the details of our daily lives in the
form of pictures, texts, contact lists, emails and more. That includes fond memories and great
moments, but embarrassing gaffes and painful mistakes are also recorded.
In the wrong hands, such information could be used for a variety of nefarious purposes. To grasp
the potential harm, your imagination doesn't have to stretch beyond those NSA officials spying
on love interests and ex-spouses.
In fact, it's easy to imagine that giving government agencies unrestricted access to the digital
lives of more than 300 million Americans would lead to far more crimes being committed than
solved.
Seen from that perspective, the iPhone 6 is providing a valuable public service.
This entire episode highlights an often overlooked part of the public policy debate in America.
Change does not come from political leaders or the political process. It comes from popular
culture and technology. Politicians lag behind. By the time any NSA reform legislation passes
Congress, technology advances will have already addressed the key issues.
In the case of the privacy debate, those key issues eventually come back to what kind of society
we want to live in
Common Core is full of Common Criminals
A new front has opened in the Common Core wars — over testing contracts.
The high-stakes battle is undermining one of the Obama administration’s most prized initiatives:
its vision, backed by more than $370 million in federal funds, of testing students across the
country on a common set of exams in math, reading and writing.
Continue Reading
The administration wants children in Mississippi to be measured against the same bar as children
in Massachusetts or Michigan. But now a testing revolt is spreading across the country, adding to
a slew of troubles for the Common Core initiative, which began as a bipartisan effort but has
come under fire from parents and teachers across the political spectrum.
(Also on POLITICO: Jindal lawyer backs Common Core cut)
Four years ago, about 40 states expressed interest in using shared tests. But at least 17 already
have backed away from using them this spring, including several of the most populous states,
such as New York, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Often, the pushback has come from state legislators furious at the expectation that they would
appropriate tens of millions for a test developed with federal funds and controlled by a faceless
consortium — without a chance to consider competing products. “Alarm bells were going off in
everyone’s district,” Michigan state Sen. Phil Pavlov said.
More defections may loom in a half-dozen states, among them Louisiana, Missouri and perhaps
New Jersey.
Even states that are still officially committed to the shared exams are flexing their independence.
Several are using the federally funded exams just for third through eighth grades and using
different tests for high school.
(Sign up for POLITICO’s Morning Education tip sheet)
The rebellion ensures that “the Common Core will certainly be an Obama legacy — though
probably not the one he had in mind,” said Frederick Hess, an education policy analyst at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Indeed, Common Core opponents are gleeful at the prospect of fanning concerns about the
exams to drive more states away from the standards.
“We’re really at the beginning of public scrutiny of these testing consortia,” said Emmett
McGroarty, a leader of the anti-Common Core movement at the American Principles Project, a
conservative think tank. “This is by no means over. It will continue to snowball.”
Even some Obama allies are angry at the administration’s decision to pour money into
developing new exams years before most teachers began introducing the academic standards into
their classrooms. They say it made the Common Core feel scary and punitive rather than an
exciting new way to challenge students to achieve.
(Also on POLITICO: Jindal lawyer backs Common Core cut)
The National Education Association this week will consider launching a lobbying push to
dramatically reduce federally mandated testing — which could undercut the administration’s
Common Core goals even further. The other big union, the American Federation of Teachers,
has also been outspoken on the issue.
“The federal government has a lot of blame here,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. “This
fixation on testing is just wrong.”
Dorie Nolt, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the administration invested in
developing new exams “in response to governors, school chiefs and educators who wanted to
move away from the bubble tests of the past.” She noted that Secretary Arne Duncan has called
for “a common-sense middle ground on testing and test prep.”
A ‘big time’ concern
Planning for Common Core tests began in earnest in 2010, when the Education Department
granted $186 million to each of two consortia — groups of states that agreed to work together to
develop high-tech exams that would be far more challenging than the typical fill-in-the-bubble
multiple choice. The two consortia, known as PARCC and Smarter Balanced, paid testing
companies to do most of the work in consultation with state officials and educators.
(Also on POLITICO: The fall of teachers unions)
As plans solidified, complaints began to simmer.
For one thing, the tests would be long. And there would be a lot of them.
PARCC estimates its exams will take eight hours for an average third-grader and nearly 10 hours
for high school students — not counting optional midyear assessments to make sure students and
teachers are on track.
PARCC also plans to develop tests for kindergarten, first- and second- graders, instead of
starting with third grade as is typical now. And it aims to test older students in 9th, 10th and 11th
grades instead of just once during high school.
Cost is also an issue. Many states need to spend heavily on computers and broadband so schools
can deliver the exams online as planned. And the tests themselves cost more than many states
currently spend — an estimated $19 to $24 per student if they’re administered online and up to
$33 per student for paper-and-pencil versions.
(Also on POLITICO: Finland's low-tech take on education)
That adds up to big money for testing companies. Pearson, which won the right to deliver
PARCC tests, could earn more than $1 billion over the next eight years if enough states sign on.
States can make minor modifications in the Pearson contract. For instance, the contract
anticipates a shift to grading student essays by computer algorithm, assuming the technology
pans out, but lets states pay more to have them scored by a human reader. PARCC officials,
however, said they expected member states to adopt the contract largely intact.
That lack of local control is a “big time” concern, Arizona state Sen. Chester Crandell said.
Then he repeated it, voice rising: “Big time, big time.”
He’s not alone in that frustration.
In January, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear withdrew from the PARCC consortium, citing a state
law that “requires a fair and equitable” competitive bid process. Tennessee and Arizona soon
followed. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has announced plans to do the same.
Those states could, in theory, still pick the PARCC exam after examining bids from several
companies.
But it’s unclear if they will be able to do so because a legal dispute in New Mexico has tied the
PARCC testing process in knots. The dispute could drag on for months, derailing the timetable
for delivering the common exams and driving away still more states.
Arkansas, for instance, plans to go its own way on testing if the dispute isn’t resolved by midJuly, said Kimberly Friedman, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Education.
The other consortium has had defections, too. In Michigan, state Sen. Pavlov led a bipartisan
effort to cancel the state’s plans to administer the Smarter Balanced test next spring. Instead, the
state will seek bids for a new exam.
Pavlov said he wants Michigan officials, not a distant consortium, to oversee the tests and have
the power to demand changes if problems arise with the way the questions are phrased or exams
are scored. “Our priority has to be to put Michigan kids first,” he said.
Yet some teachers complain that kids could end up the losers as political jockeying over the tests
intensifies. In Michigan, second-grade teacher Julie Brill says she and her colleagues are
expected to spend the coming year teaching Common Core standards — while preparing kids for
a non-Common Core test that measures different skills entirely. “It’s just so crazy,” she said.
And in Florida, which broke with PARCC last year, third-grade teacher Mindy Grimes-Festge
says she’s glad to be out of a Common Core test she believed was designed to make children fail
— but she has only the most minimal information about the replacement exams.
Common Core is a set of national math and English standards, which most states, including
Oregon and California, have adopted because of the funding incentives and strong-arm tactics
used by the Obama Administration. There have been many “big picture” criticisms of Common
Core: the lack of transparency and public input when Common Core was developed, the
middling quality of Common Core, the high cost of implementing Common Core, and
nationalization of education under Common Core. Yet, these critiques are now being
overshadowed by the anger of parents at how Common Core is negatively affecting the learning
of their children.
Columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has written that Common Core’s
Achilles heel is implementation: “implementation―how a thing is done day by day in the real
world―is everything.” Take, for example, new Common Core-aligned curricula and associated
teaching methods.
Core Connections is a Common Core-aligned math curriculum that is starting to be implemented
in classrooms and which emphasizes the use of cooperative learning. The curriculum tells the
student: “Learning math [through cooperative teamwork] has an advantage: as long as you
actively participate, make sure everyone in your study team is involved, and ask good questions,
you will find yourself understanding mathematics at a deeper level than ever before.” While such
utopian pronouncements sound impressive, the reality is quite different.
Bryce is a sixth grader at a public school in Northern California. He is a very bright student,
achieving several perfect scores on the state’s math exam and consistently receiving A+ grades
in math. Yet, Core Connections has had a discernible negative impact on Bryce.
Under Core Connections, Bryce and his fellow students are organized into teams of three to four
students. Bryce says that there is unequal participation among team members, with more
advanced students being more involved and carrying more of the work.
Further, not all the groups finish at the same time. Those that finish early can’t go on to harder
problems, but have to wait until other teams finish. Oddly, Bryce says that his teacher doesn’t
want early finishers to read because that’s English language arts, and not math.
Since the teamwork method started, the class usually doesn’t finish math lessons in time, and
sometime it cuts into their science time or the math is simply not completed. Bryce emphasized
that this situation happens a lot. When asked if the class starts the next day where they left off the
day before, he answers “no,” saying that the class simply goes on to the next new concept.
When asked his thoughts on the new teamwork method, Bryce said that he thought that working
in teams was distracting: different ideas were talked about at the same time; there was too much
noise from other groups; and, worst of all, much of the conversations were not about math.
Whereas his prior math curriculum allowed him to do math at his own pace, so he was doing
eighth-grade math while still a fifth grader, now Bryce says he has to spend a lot of time
explaining his answers and go at the same pace as his team.
Bryce’s frustrations with the new Common Core curriculum are having a negative impact on his
achievement. According to his mother, for the first time Bryce’s grades are starting to falter,
which is worrying her greatly.
Bryce’s problems with the new Common Core curriculum are not unique. Children and parents
across the nation are up in arms over the confusion inherent in Common Core curricula. A recent
PACE/University of Southern California poll found that 41 percent of Californians surveyed
were opposed to Common Core, while only 32 percent supported it, a flip from the poll numbers
recorded last year.
As Peggy Noonan observes: “Life isn’t lived in some abstract universe; it’s lived on the ground,
in this case with harried parents trying, to the degree they can or are willing, to help the kids with
homework and study for tests.” Parents seeing their children struggle under Common Core’s
liberal teaching methods and philosophy are rebelling, and that rebellion likely spells eventual
doom for Common Core.
an underexplored aspect of this problematic national education reform is the massive financial
incentive that certain textbook and standardized test companies have to keep the U.S. on board
with it. The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss provided a good example of Common Core's
crony corporatist side in a recent article.
There are two large, multi-state partnerships tasked with implementing Core-aligned
standardized tests, and one of them—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College
and Careers (PARCC)—recently invited curriculum companies to compete for the contract to
design the tests. Textbook giant Pearson won the contract, surprising no one. Pearson, a British
company, is the largest publisher of education materials in the world.
A PARCC press release described the selection of Pearson as the result of a "competitive bidding
process." But it's hard to tell whether the process was truly competitive, given that Pearson was
the only company to even submit a bid.
Now, another corporation is alleging that the process was unfairly biased toward Pearson from
the start, according to Education Week:
A protest of the contract was made by the nonprofit corporation American Institutes for
Research, which alleged that that the bidding process conducted by the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) was biased in favor of Pearson and
that is why AIR did not submit a bid which it otherwise would have done, Education Week
reported. The protest was made to officials in New Mexico who were serving as a representative
of PARCC in making the call for proposals from companies to win the contract.
Judge Sarah M. Singleton of the Santa Fe First Judicial District issued a ruling last week putting
the Pearson contract on hold while officials reviewed the contract bidding process.
Keep in mind that the contract is worth so much money that officials haven't even attached a
formal price tag. Instead, they have used the phrase "unprecedented in scale."
Common Core's most fervent defenders might not see the problem with any of this. They might
even say it's a good thing that the biggest testing company on the planet is the one designing the
exams for Common Core.
But it certainly undermines the notion that this is a "bottom up" education reform when state and
federal lawmakers are colluding with mega corporations to dictate the tests to local school
districts. Students in some states are already serving as guinea pigs for the new testing regime.
Indiana Leads the Way Home
Indiana has become the first state to retreat from the Common Core standards, as Governor Mike
Pence has just signed a bill suspending their implementation.
A great deal has been written and spoken about Common Core, but it is worth rehearsing the
outlines again. Common Core is a set of math and English standards developed largely with
Gates Foundation money and pushed by the Obama administration and the National
Governors Association. The standards define what every schoolchild should learn each year,
from first grade through twelfth, and the package includes teacher evaluations tied to federally
funded tests designed to ensure that schools teach to Common Core.
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Over 40 states hurriedly adopted Common Core, some before the standards were even written, in
response to the Obama administration’s making more than $4 billion in federal grants
conditional on their doing so. Only Texas, Alaska, Virginia, and Nebraska declined. (Minnesota
adopted the English but not the math standards.)
Here is my prediction: Indiana is the start of something big.
Just a year ago Common Core was untouchable in Indiana, as in most other places. Common
Core had been promoted by conservative governor Mitch Daniels, and the state superintendent of
public schools, Tony Bennett, was a rising GOP education star.
How did the bipartisan Common Core “consensus” collapse?
It collapsed because some parents saw that Common Core was actually lowering standards in
their children’s schools. And because advocates for Common Core could not answer the
questions these parents raised.
In Indiana, the story starts with two Indianapolis moms, Heather Crossin and her friend Erin
Tuttle.
In September 2011, Heather suddenly noticed a sharp decline in the math homework her eightyear-old daughter was bringing home from Catholic school.
“Instead of many arithmetic problems, the homework would contain only three or four questions,
and two of those would be ‘explain your answer,’” Heather told me. “Like, ‘One bridge is 412
feet long and the other bridge is 206 feet long. Which bridge is longer? How do you know?’”
She found she could not help her daughter answer the latter question: The “right” answer
involved heavy quotation from Common Core language. A program designed to encourage
thought had ended up encouraging rote memorization not of math but of scripts about math.
Heather was noticing on the ground some of the same things that caused Stanford mathematics
professor R. James Milgram to withhold his approval from the Common Core math standards.
Professor Milgram was the only math content expert on the Validation Committee reviewing the
standards, and he concluded that the Common Core standards are, as he told the Texas state
legislature, “in large measure a political document that . . . is written at a very low level and does
not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving
countries give dramatically better results.”
The Common Core math standards deemphasize performing procedures (solving many similar
problems) in favor of attempting to push a deeper cognitive understanding — e.g., asking
questions like “How do you know?”
In fact, according to a scholarly 2011 content analysis published in Education Researcher by
Andrew Porter and colleagues, the Common Core math standards bear little resemblance to the
national curriculum standards in countries with high-achieving math students: “Top-achieving
countries for which we had content standards,” these scholars note, “put a greater emphasis on
[the category] ‘perform procedures’ than do the U.S. Common Core standards.”
So why was this new, unvalidated math approach suddenly appearing in Heather’s little corner of
the world, and at a Catholic school?
Heather was not alone in questioning the new approach. So many parents at the school
complained that the principal convened a meeting. He brought in the saleswoman from the
Pearson textbook company to sell the parents. “She told us we were all so very, very lucky,
because our children were using one of the very first Common Core–aligned textbooks in the
country,” says Heather.
But the parents weren’t buying what the Pearson lady was selling.
“Eventually,” Heather recalled, “our principal just threw his hands up in the air and said, ‘I know
parents don’t like this type of math but we have to teach it that way, because the new state
assessment tests are going to use these standards.’”
That’s the first time Heather had heard that Indiana had replaced its well-regarded state tests,
ISTEP (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress–Plus) in favor of a brand-new
federally funded set of assessments keyed to Common Core. “I thought I was a fairly informed
person, and I was shocked that a big shift in control had happened and I hadn’t the slightest
idea,” she says.
Erin Tuttle says she noticed the change in the math homework at about the same time as Heather,
and she also noticed that her child was bringing home a lot fewer novels and more “Time
magazine for kids” — a reflection of the English standards’ emphasis on “informational texts”
rather than literature.
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These standards are designed not to produce well-educated citizens but to prepare students to
enter community colleges and lower-level jobs. All students, not just non-college-material
students, are going to be taught to this lower standard.
I want to pause and highlight the significance of Heather and Erin’s testimony. Heather Crossin
and Erin Tuttle did not get involved in opposing Common Core because of anything Michelle
Malkin or Glenn Beck said to rile them up, but because of what they saw happening in their own
children’s Catholic school. When experts or politicians said that Common Core would not lead
to a surrender of local control over curriculum, Heather and Erin knew better. (Ironically, the
leverage in Indiana was Tony Bennett’s school-choice program, which made state vouchers
available to religious schools, but only if they adopted state tests — which were later quietly
switched from ISTEP to the untried Common Core assessments.)
A STEALTH CAMPAIGN TO BYPASS PARENTS
At first Heather thought maybe her ignorance of Common Core was her fault. Maybe, with her
kids (as she imagined) safely ensconced in good Catholic schools, she hadn’t paid attention.
That’s when she and Erin started contacting people — “and we found out something more
shocking: Nobody had any idea,” Heather told me.
A friend of Heather’s who is a former reporter for a state newspaper and now a teacher didn’t
know. Nor did her state senator, Scott Schneider, even though he sat on the state senate’s
Education Committee. (In Indiana, as in most states, Common Core was adopted by the Board of
Education without consulting the legislature.) Nor, evidently, did the state’s education reporters
— Heather could find literally no press coverage of the key moment when Indiana’s Board of
Education abandoned its fine state standards and well-regarded state tests in favor of Common
Core.
“They brought in David Coleman, the architect of the standards, to give a presentation, they
asked a few questions, there was no debate, no cost analysis, just a sales job, and everybody
rubber-stamped it,” Heather said.
So began an 18-month journey in which these two mothers probably changed education history.
One reason the media ignored the implementation of Common Core is that the Indiana education
debate was dominated by Governor Daniels’s high-profile effort to expand school choice. But as
my colleague at the American Principles Project (APP) Emmett McGroarty pointed out to me,
nationalizing curriculum standards quietly knifes the school-choice movement in the back. As
McGroarty puts it, “What difference does it make if you fund different schools if they all teach
the same basic curriculum the same basic way?”
Common Core advocates continue to insist that Common Core does not usurp local control of
curriculum, but in practice high-stakes tests keyed to the Common Core standards ensure that
curriculum will follow.
Emmett McGroarty turns out to have been a very important person in the journey that Heather
Crossin and Erin Tuttle made to take down Common Core.
Heather and Erin were helped by many people and groups along the way, including the Pioneer
Institute’s Jamie Gass, the Hoover Institution’s Bill Evers, and the Heritage Foundation’s
Lindsey Burke. Many Indiana organizations played key roles, beginning with the indispensable
leadership of the Indiana Tea Party. Other natural allies Heather and Erin contacted and educated
in order to build the movement include the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Indiana
Family Institute, and the Indiana Association of Home Educators.
But Heather told me that what McGroarty and his colleague Jane Robbins at the American
Principles Project did was unique. “I call him the General of this movement,” Heather says. “He
strategizes with people in every state. Day or night, Saturday or Sunday, Emmett’s there if you
need him.”
The 2012 white paper, co-sponsored by the American Principles Project and the Pioneer
Institute, that urged the American Legislative Exchange Council to oppose Common Core
became Heather and Erin’s bible. “That white paper is the most important summary; we gave
copies to people and said, ‘Read this. If you can’t read the whole thing, read the executive
summary.’ Because it covered all the bases, from the quality of the standards to the illegitimate
federal data collection to the federal government’s involvement in promoting Common Core,”
Heather told me.
But even more influential than its message development was APP’s willingness to give in-depth,
hands-on, intensive help whenever Heather and Erin requested it. “Usually you call up a national
organization, and they are really nice, they say they are with you, and they send you some
helpful research and say, ‘Good luck with that,’” Heather explained. But APP did much more.
“All along the way APP has been the greatest source of support mentally, emotionally, and with
research that a grassroots organization could have had.”
A big break came in June 2012, when the local tea-party council asked Heather and Erin to
develop a flyer that it could use to spread the word to tea-party meetings all across the state; the
two women turned to Emmett and Jane to help draft it. The first time Heather and Erin were
asked to appear on a local radio show (something they had never done before), they asked
Emmett if he would fly in and do the show with them. APP staff would fly out to attend rallies,
do local radio shows with Heather and Erin, help them prepare to meet with editorial boards, and
act as sounding boards and strategists each step of the way as the grassroots movement grew.
THE FIRST TIME FAILED
In 2012, it looked as if Heather and Erin had failed: Prodded by Governor Daniels, the Indiana
legislature voted down a bill to withdraw from Common Core.
Heather was ready to give up. Without hands-on support, she told me, “For sure, I would have
given up. But Emmett told me this was just the beginning.”
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So Senator Schneider agreed to introduce the bill again, and Heather and Erin went to work
crisscrossing the state that summer for rallies and meetings that drew large crowds. The media
reluctantly began to take notice.
And then something magical intervened: an election.
Tony Bennett’s reelection as state superintendent of public schools was supposed to be a slam
dunk. His opponent, Glenda Ritz, was a Democrat in a deeply Republican state, and she had no
name recognition and almost no money; she ended up being outspent by more than 5 to 1 as
Bennett’s war chest swelled to $1.5 million with major gifts from Michael Bloomberg’s PAC,
Walmart heiress Alice Walton, and other national players.
But Bennett was also the highest-profile public defender of Common Core, while Ritz was
raising concerns about it.
When the dust had settled on election day, Bennett had lost, badly. It was the upset of the year.
When Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which
backs Common Core), found out late on election night that Bennett had been unseated by the
unknown, underfunded underdog Glenda Ritz, he wasn’t happy: “Tony Bennett! Sh*t sh*t sh*t
sh*t sh*t,” Petrilli told Huffington Post writer Joy Resmovits. “You can quote me on that.”
Well, something had clearly hit the fan.
Bennett’s defeat marked a decisive turning point, making every Indiana politician aware how
deep voter discontent over Common Core was.
In Indiana, as elsewhere, Common Core proponents have responded to public criticism by
accusing the parents of being stupid and uninformed or possibly lying. Common Core, they say,
is not a curriculum; it is not being driven by the federal government; it will not interfere with
local control of schools.
A few days before Senator Schneider’s anti–Common Core bill passed, the Indiana Chamber of
Commerce (which had spent more than $100,000 in ads opposing the bill) lashed out in
frustration at the outsized effect Heather and Erin had had on the legislature: “Two moms from
Indianapolis, a handful of their friends and a couple dozen small but vocal Tea Party groups.
That’s the entire Indiana movement that is advocating for a halt to the Common Core State
Standards,” the Chamber of Commerce fumed.
This is not accurate, given the opposition by many education experts, including Professor
Milgram, Professor Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas, Professor Diane Ravitch of
New York University, Professor Chris Tienken of Seton Hall, and former assistant education
secretary Williamson Evers at Hoover.
But never underestimate the power of a mother, especially one who is defending her own child’s
future.
What started in Indiana is not staying in Indiana.
Legislation opposing Common Core has been introduced in at least seven other states, and large
crowds are turning out at public panels and rallies in states from Tennessee to Idaho. Last month
the Michigan state house voted to withhold implementation funding, despite Republican
governor Rick Snyder’s support for Common Core; the Missouri senate this week approved a bill
calling for statewide hearings on Common Core.
In April the RNC passed a resolution opposing Common Core as “inappropriate overreach to
standardize and control the education of our children.”
On April 20, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R., Mo.) sent a letter — co-signed by 33 other
congressmen — to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, asking for a detailed accounting of
changes in student-privacy policies associated with the new national database the Obama
administration is building as part of its Common Core support. The letter pointed out that the
Education Department had already made regulatory changes — without consulting Congress —
that appear to circumvent the 1974 law that limits the disclosure to third parties of any data
collected on students.
“The Common Core places inappropriate limitations on the influence of states and localities,
while burdening them with additional, unfunded expenses,” Representative Luetkemeyer told me
via e-mail.
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Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is taking the lead nationally in shining light on the Obama
administration’s key role in promoting Common Core. On April 16, Grassley was joined by
seven other GOP senators (including major presidential contenders Ted Cruz and Rand Paul),
who signed a letter calling on their colleagues to stop funding the implementation of Common
Core, which, they point out, appears to violate federal laws that explicitly forbid the Education
Department to influence curriculum or assemble a national database. “I voted against the
Economic Stimulus Bill that essentially gave the Department of Education a blank check that
was used for Race to the Top, and I have been very critical of how the Department of Education
used those funds to push a specific education policy agenda from Washington on the states
without specific input from Congress,” Senator Grassley told me via e-mail.
The recent announcement by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of
Teachers, that the AFT wants to delay implementation of the Common Core tests in New York
put a bipartisan nail in the coffin of consensus.
And more moms are following the trail Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle blazed.
One major objection to the Common Core standards is that they are not evidence-based. Their
effect on academic achievement is simply unknown, because they have not been field-tested
anywhere in the world.
But moms have a more elemental objection: The whole operation is a federal power grab over
their children’s education. Once a state adopts Common Core, its curriculum goals and
assessments are effectively nationalized. And the national standards are effectively privatized,
because they are written, owned, and copyrighted by two private trade organizations.
“Legislators are incredulous when they learn the standards and assessments are written by two
private trade organizations — the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and
the Council of Chief State School Officers. This creates concern why public education is now
controlled by two private organizations,” says Gretchen Logue, a Missouri education activist and
one of the co-founders of Truth in American Education, a network of activists and organizations
opposing Common Core. “They also don’t like that the standards and assessments are
copyrighted and cannot be changed or modified by the states.”
So why are so many good conservatives, from Jeb Bush to Rick Snyder, supporting Common
Core? Many conservatives signed on to a clever strategy that asked them to endorse, not the
specific standards, but the idea of high “internationally benchmarked” national standards. It is a
principle of psychological persuasion that, once you act, in however small a manner, you will
feel cognitively compelled to justify your action. Many business leaders with no experience or
expertise in education reform have come on board.
This is as good an explanation as any for why so many conservatives are aggressively promoting
a set of national standards about which we know, for sure, four things:
a) They are not internationally benchmarked. In fact, for math in particular, they are
exactly contrary to the kind of national standards used in high-performing countries.
b) The two major experts on content who were on the Validation Committee reviewing
the standards backed out and repudiated them when they saw what the standards actually
are.
c) State legislatures and parents were cut out of the loop in evaluating the standards
themselves or the cost of implementing them.
d) The Common Core standards are owned by private trade organizations, which parents
cannot influence.
These objections, among others, led Diane Ravitch to call on her blog for backing out of
Common Core, as the standards were “flawed by the process with which they have been foisted
upon the nation.”
Ravitch went on: “The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the District
of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of the nation despite
the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers or schools. We are a
nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.”
I asked Heather how she felt on that historic day she saw the very first anti–Common Core bill in
the nation pass. “I was elated!” she told me. “We were up against so many powerful groups with
so much money. We fought against all odds, tons of money, a slew of paid lobbyists. All we had
was the truth, the facts, and a passion to protect the future of our children. Our victory is proof
that our American system of government still works.”
The Southern Border
It lays there in the dark like a sinuous black python 20 miles long. It crawls from the surf
of the azure blue Pacific Ocean, up the glistening white beach and then on to the east -over the rolling hills and toward the high mountain peaks at the southern extremity of
California's Sierra Nevada mountains. It is all that stands between the health, beauty
and wealth of America and the drug inspired violence of Mexico.
A million tons of concrete and steel. For 20 miles this barrier is all that protects America,
and it isn't enough.
The only parts of the US / Mexico border that are actually protected are those few miles
near our 16 official Ports of Entry. Of the 1,945 miles of southern border only about 60
miles are actually guarded.
The 20 miles of US / Mexico border at San Diego is the most fortified border in all of the
United States. There are no parts of the US / Mexican border more secure or fortified
than here.
There are some parts of The Wall which are in three layers. It was discovered that
illegal aliens and drug smugglers would crash even ten cars through the fence at one
time and force a clear path. To stop this the US Border Patrol installed a triple barrier.
First there is the steel barrier above, then another barrier and then a last defense of 20
ft high concrete posts pounded deep into the ground.
The drug smugglers have tried to attack the border by tunneling beneath it. In some
places along The Wall, drug smugglers have built tunnels even half a mile long. In other
places their efforts have been discovered before it was too late.
The illegal aliens and drug smugglers still can get through the various barriers. To
defend us against these invaders, they must be detected. Even ancient methods are
employed. The Border Patrol Agent will drag this behind his vehicle at the start of his
shift so that he can come back and see footprints in the dust.
Mexico is in utter disarray. It is no longer possible to discern what is drug cartel and
what is Mexican Government. The American government has always told its citizens
that Mexico was a monolith -- with a singular direction and purpose. This was especially
true under the quasi-dictatorship of Mexico's PRI political party that ran the country for
70 years. But today, Mexico has fractured and is held together only by Mexican Army
bayonets.
Mexico has a population of over 100 million but more than 25% of these people do not
speak Spanish - instead they speak one of almost a hundred different Indian dialects.
Most of these dialects are some form of Mixteco or Zapoteco - pre-Columbian tongues
whose structure makes it extremely difficult for these people to transition to Spanish let
alone English. Many of these Indians speak other even more primitive languages including Triqui and Mam.
The dream is over. The only thing holding Mexico together today is -- truly -- the
Mexican Army.
Unfortunately, the Mexican Army is up to its eyeballs in drugs, murder, kidnappings and
more -- and is on the verge of collapse. There will soon be another revolution in Mexico.
Today, there are civil wars raging in a dozen Mexican states. Mexico is dying -drowning in its own citizen's blood. Mexico's future can only be 1930's style Chinese
Warlordism -- but these warlords may also be drug lords. It's just a matter of time.
And America is running out of time.
Along the western 20 miles of America's southern border, Mexico's violent convulsions
and terror slam into America's only defense -- The Wall -- and then over the top and into
the soft unprotected underbelly.
The American border is unguarded and open.
Each year, as many as 400,000 Mexican illegal aliens are captured someplace along
just these massively fortified first 20 miles of America's border with Mexico -- The Wall.
Along just the first five miles of The Wall -- in what the Border Patrol calls the Imperial
Beach sector -- there were more than 118,000 illegal aliens captured by Border Patrol
agents in one recent year alone.
Violence is rampant for nearly two thousand miles.
It is not a border or "border town" problem, because the problem exists in the Mexican
enclaves in America as well as in Mexico itself. Mexico City, Monterey, Veracruz,
Acapulco, Guadalajara (where Mexicans even machine gunned a Cardinal of the
Catholic Church) and Tijuana are all awash in blood.
In Tijuana there are -- on average -- six murders of policemen each year. This statistic
includes the murder of Federico Benitez Lopez theTijuana Chief of Police and Alfredo
de la Torre Marquez -- the next Tijuana Chief of Police.
On just one average day in Tijuana there were three completely unrelated acts of
extreme violence: two gun battle / bank robberies -- one in the fashionable "Zona Rio"
area of town and another in the La Mesa commercial district plus a shoot out right at the
US / Mexican border between two Tijuana policemen (Antonio Garcia and David Cruz)
and three gunmen. The policemen died.
Tijuana -- a city with only the most primitive of sewer systems, minimal running water
and no piped in natural gas -- averages more than 35 murders a month. Certainly, even
the Mexicans do not enjoy living in a world of such violence - so they come to America.
We must understand that for all of the "We Are All One" that comes from American
liberal media, the people of Tijuana have other ideas. One of the great honors that can
be granted between two cities is "sisterhood". What this means is that the two cities
share so many common interests that they are as if born as one -- sisters. Tijuana,
Mexico is now to become "one" with a sister city: Havana, Cuba. Cuba has been a
haven for drug smugglers and drug cartels for at least 30 years, and the real link
between Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Lee Harvey Oswald -- the assassin of our
president John F. Kennedy -- is known and very real.
As a Tijuana Friends of Cuba Association spokesperson said: "Cuba is a worker's
nation, and we identify with it through many customs and historical aspects." Cuba and
Mexico share a common history of U.S. intervention, and many Mexicans admire
Cuba.....
Every night possibly a thousand Mexican campesinos wait in Tijuana for their chance to
clamber over The Wall's steel plates and into the underbelly America. About a third of
those crossing are actually caught. Many of those captured are then imprisoned for
crimes that they had committed on some previous run into America. Most of the
remainder are simply returned to Mexico. Those who are returned just rest a bit and try
to cross again.
In some places the situation is so bad that even America's public roads have been set
with anti-climb fencing right down the middle and between the lanes to stop the illegals
from crossing and being struck by speeding cars.
In some places the illegals have invaded en masse' -- hundreds in a single stampede -and they hit this road fencing with such force that it collapses and they cross this last
barrier and are deep into America.
Yes, the US border with Mexico is about 1,945 miles long and this northbound
stampede occurs every night along the entire border.
To the north of The Wall lies San Diego, California -- the sixth largest city in the United
States. To the south of The Wall lies Tijuana, Baja California -- the third largest city in
Mexico. Because of this collision of First World and Third World populations the United
States has built this barrier to slow the inexorable northward attack on America -- The
Wall.
Along The Wall itself -- in what the Mexicans call "La tierra de nadie" or "no man's land"
-- and within sight of San Diego's skyline and civilization, the crime is wanton and
unchecked.
And the violence occurs night, after night, after night. There are constant shoot-outs
along the border between the US Border Patrol and Mexicans. The rules of engagement
require that the Mexican shoot first -- and several times -- before the US agent can
respond. In one recent engagement two Border Patrol agents expended more than 60
rounds in a fire-fight with Mexicans. In another, an agent was shot twice while he sat in
his car. These murder attempts on Border Patrol Agents occur so frequently at one spot
along the border that an armored car has been permanently parked as a "bullet
catcher."
Because of the "feel good" policies of California's senators Boxer and Feinstein, all the
Border Patrol can do is place this armored car between their Agents and The Wall to try
and save them from hails of rifle fire.
The murder rate for the City of San Diego is made public each year. A region called
"Otay Mesa", which is home of to The Wall -- has had even 3.72 murders per 1,000
residents a year. Along this part of the U.S. / Mexican border in any given year you can
have better than one chance in 269 of waking up dead. Otay Mesa has sometimes had
a higher murder count than entire European countries.
There is no way of knowing how many more of the dead and dying are taken south
across The Wall and back into Mexico - never to show on US crime statistics. The
numbers of rapes along The Wall are in the thousands and even more are never
reported -- because a report means US Border Patrol involvement and deportation of
the victim.
Thousands of the illegal aliens who are wounded in this perpetual bloodbath and too
enfeebled to escape are carried to American hospitals for emergency care and are
nurtured back to health at American taxpayer expense. The US government throws the
expense for treating illegals onto local communities by refusing to arrest the wounded allowing them instead to be eventually discharged from the city's hospitals and often
onto the streets of America.
Don't think that illegals are mistreated if they finally are caught and imprisoned.
California spends about $4,000 a year just on medical care for each prisoner. The
federal government spend even more. How much do you spend on your own personal
medical care every year?
Tijuana is acknowledged as the world's biggest migrant camp. Campesinos from all
over Mexico and Central America come to Tijuana and build their own cardboard
colonies while waiting for a chance to invade America. Some of these colonies limit their
residents to villagers from a distinct region. This allows the residents to pass their
cardboard homesites on to successive waves of their own villagers. These "colonias"
are not small. Some have as many as 150,000 residents.
The largest of the "colonias" occupies a triangle of land five miles on a side. To the west
is the United States Border Checkpoint and its monstrous 24 lanes of cars slowly
edging forward to cross into the United States. To the north is The Wall. To the east is
Tijuana's Abelardo Rodriguez International Airport. To the south the "colonia" melts into
the gray-brown dirt of Tijuana itself.
This "colonia" is the most squalid and dangerous place in all of Mexico. To the United
States Border Patrol the area is called "E2". To its residents it is called "Colonia
Libertad".
It was born in the depths of the American depression -- when the United States
Government still thought American jobs should be reserved for Americans. In 1934,
Mexican nationals were scooped onto trains and pushed out of California and back into
Mexico. The US government paid the Southern Pacific Railway $14.70 for each
Mexican they dumped over the Mexican border. Don't think that these Mexicans were
getting the harsh treatment. The average American of 1934 earned only about $7.00 a
day so this was more than two days pay.
More than one half million Mexicans were sent deep into Mexico -- far south of Mexico's
barren and arid desert states - to discourage their return. Others were simply pushed
back over the border and into Tijuana. Some of the Mexicans forced back over the
border near Tijuana purchased land on a hillside to the east of Tijuana's downtown
business district. The lots were 18 by 50 meters and cost 75 pesos. Colonia Libertad
was born.
After more than sixty years of Mexican style development Colonia Libertad still has no
running water and no gas and sewer lines.
The people of Colonia Libertad are so violent that they attack every sign of authority.
Even Tijuana police cars entering the colonia are stopped, rolled over and set on fire.
Tijuana police -- wearing double-thick Kevlar vests and military style helmets -- now
travel the area on dirt bikes -- vehicles maneuverable enough to escape most
ambushes and attacks.
The people of Mexico have been told how the Norte Americanos have stolen their
country's land and wealth. For all the years of their schooling their teachers repeat the
stories of how Mexico has the right to reclaim its land. They have been told of how their
brothers and sisters were winning the battle and that they soon would take back
California, Arizona and New Mexico.
And that it was all being done one small step at a time. And the truth is….. they really
are doing it.
First there is US citizenship for any Mexican child born in any American hospital of an
illegal alien mother (and in Los Angeles County 66% of all births are to illegal alien
mothers). The average Mexican woman averaged 6.8 children in 1970 and although this
number is believed to have dropped since then it remains a bio-bomb of cataclysmic
proportions. Honduran females today average 5.2 children, Guatemalans 5.1 children.
Demographers describe the average of 2.1 children per woman as the ideal
"replacement level" - the point where births equal deaths. The birth rate for White
females in the United States is about 1.3.
America's hospitals are incubators for the seeds of America's demise -- funded by the
US taxpayer. Then there is free housing and free food. And then free medical care
beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Million dollar heart transplants are free in America -and yes, foreigners from Mexico are given priority over Americans. This sometimes
means the death of Americans who have to wait as foreigners are put at the front of the
line. Impossible? Incredible? It happens almost every day. There have been well
publicized hearings on the matter but nothing is done.
The children born to illegal alien mothers are immediately eligible for Aid To Families
With Dependent Children - AFDC. Illegal alien mothers can and do receive even $2,000
a month in benefits - it depends upon how many US citizen children she has spawned.
San Diego has tried to force these illegal alien mothers to perform some kind of work to
get this money. The illegal's present Modus Operandi is to have the checks mailed to a
US Post Office box at the border and have someone collect the checks for them. In
Mexico she can live like a queen on $2,000 a month. How well could you live on $2,000
a month…. in Mexico?
The City of San Diego government has discovered that trying to make these illegals
work for their $2,000 a month is a federal crime! It is a federal crime to hire an illegal
alien - so making these illegal aliens work for their welfare money is thus - illegal.
In most parts of California you can register to vote even if you can't speak English. And
even if you can's speak English, it is illegal for the clerk to ask for proof of citizenship.
Mexico's presidential elections were marred on March 23, 1994 by the Tijuana
assassination of Mexico's contending presidential candidate Sr. Luis Denaldo Colosio.
The assassin finally convicted of the crime was Mario Alburto Martinez. It was
subsequently discovered that Mr. Martinez -- Mexican National -- was fully registered to
vote in Los Angeles, California, USA, in all of the local, state and US elections just as if
he was a US citizen.
The American media call even people like Mr. Martinez "undocumented workers", or
"undocumented immigrants". The term "Illegal Alien" is considered so racist that it
cannot be used even by the police. Yet Mr. Martinez and all those of his kind have a
name for themselves - "Los ilegales" - The Illegal Men.
The final destination for many of these illegal aliens is the huge Mexican colonia in
south central Los Angeles -- which has become the second largest "Mexican" city in the
world -- second only to Mexico City itself. And this populous new Mexican city is in
California -- in the United States of America. The Mexican colonia in Los Angeles is a
very violent place.
There is at least one murder in this colonia every night. It is so violent that even
weddings are dangerous and about once a year a wedding in the colonia is marred by a
drunken fight that ends in gunfire and murder.
If we review the transcripts from one of the largest crime trials in Los Angeles history - in
the court of US District Judge Ronald Lew - we discover how violent and pervasive the
Mexican is in our prison system. Thirteen Mexicans were tried on charges of killing or
trying to kill 22 people. Much of the Mexican gang population in the US operates under
the name "La Eme" - which is the Mexican phonetic pronunciation of "M" for mafia.
La Eme was formed by illegal aliens held in California prisons - to create what they
described as "the gang of gangs". When out on the streets they call themselves
"carnales" - which is a streetwise term for brothers.
There are tens of thousands of "carnales" on the streets of America.
There are also thousands of Mexican gangs scattered all over the US. One is called the
"Eighteenth Street Gang" of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department admits
that this gang has more than 9,000 local members and that it controls a sizable portion
of south central Los Angeles. The gang members are not only responsible for hundreds
of drive-by shootings, tens of thousands of acts of property damage and over a hundred
murders, but the gang has become so bold that the members block traffic on the streets
of Los Angeles for hours at a time and extort money from drivers - a "transit tax". One of
the gang's most popular acts of defiance is massed public urination.
The 300 "Eighteenth Street Gang" members of just the half square mile area of Los
Angeles called Pico-Union kill about three people a month. What's worse is that they
use radio scanners to listen in on 911 calls and threaten to (or actually do) kill those
who report crime to the police.
This gang is all talk when compared to the Mexicans of Mar Vista -- a tiny neighborhood
near the adjacent Los Angeles city of Venice. There, gangs wounded more than 20 and
killed six in just one month.
Then there is the "Avenues" gang of Los Angeles. Three members of this gang Messrs. Rodriguez, Rosales and Gomez - were recently convicted on five counts of
attempted murder in the death of a three year old infant that they slaughtered with
volleys of gunfire as the child's parents made a wrong turn off a freeway and into the
gang's Los Angeles turf.
We all are aware of the terrible civil strife in Northern Ireland. Almost every week we
hear of new atrocities and murders plaguing that land. The total number of deaths over
the last 20 years from all the strife in all of Ireland is "only" 3,000. In those same 20
years more than 7,000 people have been killed by Mexicans just in south central Los
Angeles alone.
The magnitude of the Mexican crime plague in Los Angeles is a well guarded secret.
More than 87 percent of people of Mexican decent now residing in the United States are
not US citizens -- holding instead resident alien status or illegal alien status. In addition,
the largest immigrant group of all the immigrant groups in the United States are
Mexicans under the age of four.
It may be of interest to note that while Washington D.C is certainly not a nice place to
live, Mexico City is the only city in the world where dried particles of human feces float
in the air like brown snow.
The Mexican assault on America is blatant, bloody and continuous. The Calexico,
California Border Checkpoint is a good example: It had a drug-crazed Mexican-involved
shoot-out with US Border Patrolmen inside their office, a bomb, and a 100 mile high
speed chase all in one day. The Mexican shot one Border Agent in the face and another
in the chest before being killed in a hail of gunfire. The bomb was in the pedestrian
tunnel providing passage between Mexico and the United States. The pickup truck
carrying 17 illegals plus a driver crashed through the border checkpoint and then raced
more than two hundred miles from Calexico to south central Los Angeles before running
out of gas. There, the cargo of illegals ran in all directions and most were never caught.
All of this was during a single eight hour shift at the Calexico, California border crossing.
The Mexicans have discovered our weakness. First, they demanded that chasing a car
full of illegals be considered a hate crime and so now these criminal packed cars are no
longer chased by any state, or local police or federal officers. But that was not enough
so now the smugglers will fill a car full of illegals and then drive down the opposite lanes
of a freeway -- with other cars crashing into each other to get out of the way. Still
nothing is done because in stopping these criminals some of them might be injured.
This Mexican invasion and its terrible toll is America's best kept secret.
One of the most incredible secrets hiding in plain view is our need for US Border
Checkpoints 60 miles inside our own country. Thanks to unbridled illegal immigration,
nearly 120,000 square miles of the southern United States of America have become the
"property" of the illegal aliens. The United States of America has had to set up a second
"border." When you move northwards from the Mexican border on any road or highway,
the US Border Patrol will be there to check to see if you are an illegal alien. Here is a
photo of the actual America's second border checkpoint 60 miles inside our own
country.
Although this invasion has gone on for years nothing is done. Americans live in a
country controlled by "One Worlders" -- people who do not believe in borders. Their
fantasy is being paid for with American blood and maimed American children. Today it
is fine to fear a foreign threat like the al Qaeda or Iraq. When those very same people
reach our southern border they become "undocumented migrants" and whatever they
might be carrying they are allowed to cross into the United States almost with impunity.
Mexican illegal aliens have a name for themselves -- "Reconquistas" -- the reConquerors. They are reconquering American and turning it into a place just like the
Mexico of today. Their symbol is an image of the original American flag -- with thirteen
stars.
This flag is used by them to signify how they intend to push the "gringos" back to the
original thirteen states. Over this flag they place the word "Cuidadania" which means
citizenship. It is through American citizenship that they will become permanent
conquerors of our lands.
The situation is extremely grave and the greatest threat to our America comes from
what crosses our border from the south
The Dollar is About to Collapse
Silver guru, David Morgan, says forget about the manipulated price suppression of the yellow
and white metals. It’s only a matter of time before the debt and derivative markets crash,
catapulting precious metals prices exponentially higher. Morgan explains, “The bigger
problem all exists in the debt markets, and the debt markets is where the problem is really.
When that problem blows up, there’s going to be a run to gold unlike anything in the
history of mankind. . . . The spillover into silver will be phenomenal, as well, because once it
(debt markets) starts down, everyone that understands what’s going on, which will be very few,
will be running to gold. They will try to get gold in any form that they can, and again, a huge
spillover into the silver market. All of a sudden, even at the retail level, and at the wholesale
level or commercial level, or the futures market or bar level—it’s over. A big ETF type or silver
holding company will call up and say I want to buy $50 million of silver, or $150 million or
$200 million, which is peanuts compared to the bond market. . . . The answer is going to be ‘we
don’t have it.’ When that happens, it’s over.”
Morgan goes on to say, “These types of events are anomalies. . . . Few people see them coming,
and with the silver price being so low the last three years, a lot of people who once believed us
are going to say that these guys just can’t be right. The paper manipulators are going to keep
prices under control forever, but they won’t. It will be an event that will be unlike anything we
have seen.”
On the recent strength of the U.S. dollar, Morgan says, “John Exter’s upside down pyramid
explains it very well. The derivative markets blow up, and you go down the pyramid of
liquidity. The step above the run to gold is the U.S. dollar. Most people who are under educated
about money think if you have physical dollars under your mattress, you are in the safest position
you could possibly be in. If you have all of your savings in physical greenback, you don’t have
to worry about a bank failure. That is the most important step until that doesn’t work. When
that doesn’t work, faith in the dollar is lost or being lost, then where do you go?
The answer is you go to money that has lasted for 5,000 years. So, to see the dollar have all this
strength and look good, that’s just the step before you go to the last step, which is a run to gold.
So, it (the strength of the dollar) doesn’t surprise me. It’s part of the process . . . and the run to
the dollar is a precursor that is absolutely necessary before the next step down the pyramid. . . .
This is the big picture, and I see how things narrow down and why precious metals are so
important in today’s financial system.”
Morgan admits that his low of $18.17 silver did not hold and now thinks that the next “price
spike” for silver “will be going lower.” Morgan explains, “This means we would get a spike
down of maybe a dollar or something like that, from $18 to $17 or maybe even in the $16 range.
I think that would be a spike that would be a dramatic drop. . . . It would be primarily a paper
driven situation, and it would take place in a short duration.” Morgan goes on to predict, “Silver
will be back in the $20 per ounce range, and the high $1,300 per ounce range for gold by the end
of the year. That just presupposes that the system, as it is, continues, and the paper markets
continue, and the derivative markets continue, and the powers that be are able to manage this
price as they see fit with the derivatives. In the event that something happens, that whole
scenario could go away very, very rapidly. That’s why you really want to be 6 months too early
than 6 minutes too late.
Nenner makes a prediction.
On the U.S. dollar, Nenner predicts, “Timing is our business, and we’ve always said the
dollar is going to collapse in end of 2014. There are different reasons for this. The government
has loans outstanding that are very short term. If interest rates only go up a half a percent, they
are already in trouble. Also, the United States doesn’t have the power to force a lot (of Treasury
bonds) on other countries because the United States has decided not to be a power anymore. So,
of course, the dollar goes with it. Oil is going to be much higher, and inflation is going to start
moving its tail. This is the start of inflation. Five years from now, you will see inflation started
in 2014. It’s not that everything happens in 2014, it’s just the beginning.
What happens when the dollar collapses?
Many things, most of them bad. When foreign investors and central banks stop demanding
dollars, U.S. bond prices will fall, which is another way of saying that U.S. interest rates will
rise. Mortgage and credit card rates will soar, sending the U.S. economy back into recession. The
U.S. government will respond by opening the monetary floodgates, printing as many paper
dollars as necessary to keep the economy from collapsing. This surge in supply will send the
value of the dollar through the floor. Prices for most things will skyrocket, and people whose life
savings are in cash, bank CDs, or dollar-denominated bonds will be wiped out. Many U.S.
financial and manufacturing companies will be ruined, along with their stockholders.
THEN the Dollar Disease will go global. The only reason Japan or Europe have been able to
generate their current meager rates of growth is the willingness of U.S. consumers to buy their
Hondas and BMWs. As the dollar plunges, Asian and European goods, priced in suddenlyappreciating currencies, will become prohibitively expensive for U.S. consumers, who will
respond by buying U.S.-made alternatives or nothing at all. Correctly interpreting this change in
buying patterns as a threat to their vital export sectors, European and Asian leaders will respond
with the only weapon they have left: monetary inflation. They’ll cut interest rates and buy dollars
with their currencies, flooding the world with euros and yen the way the U.S. now floods the
world with dollars. The result of these “competitive devaluations” will be a death spiral for all
major fiat currencies, in which European and Japanese bonds will, eventually, fare as badly as
their U.S. cousins.
Why will gold go up when the dollar goes down?
Until very recently, gold was humanity’s money of choice, for one very good reason: It exists in
limited supply, and governments can’t make more of it, so its value tends to be stable. As paper
currencies collapse, the world will look for alternatives, one of which is sure to be gold. Massive
amounts of global capital will start chasing a very limited supply of gold, sending its value
through the roof.
Silver is currently selling for $19 an ounce, and less if you buy in some quantity. This is the lowest price
for silver I have seen in four years. The sudden 25% drop in the price of silver is consistent with what we
have been telling you. JP Morgan holds more than 30 thousand short contracts on Silver. If Silver goes
down, they stand to make billions. If it goes up too soon, before they can cash in on the short contracts,
then they lose billions. Once the short contracts have been satisfied, the price is free to float to the market
value, which is designed to be about 1/20th that of gold. Gold is less than $1,200 an ounce today, so that
would be mean $240 Silver if the price was normalized.
Keep in mind that Gold is expected to drop another $300 an ounce, as investors dump the metal to reclaim
their liquidity, which they think will save them. This places the currency basis in the hands of savvy
investors who will scoop up the metal at bargain prices. When the crash is fully engaged, they will step in
and increase their real holdings for pennies on the dollar. If you have been to the rich man’s seminar, you
are already prepared for this. If you’re not rich, you can become more wealthy if you listen to what I an
saying.
Actually, the value of the dollar will plunge at about the same time through hyper-inflation as the
government will attempt to print its way out of the crash. It always does. Having dollars won’t mean
much at that time. You must have something else, preferably not paper money. Silver or Gold will be the
universal currency.