SM1'S BLOG 4 U

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

19 Shocking Examples Of How Political Correctness Is Destroying America

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 07:07 PM PDT

If you say the “wrong thing” in America today, you could be penalized, fired or even taken to court. Political correctness is running rampant, and it is absolutely destroying this nation. In his novel 1984, George Orwell imagined a future world where speech was greatly restricted. He called that the language that the totalitarian state in his novel created “Newspeak”, and it bears a striking resemblance to the political correctness that we see in America right now. According to Wikipedia, Newspeak is “a reduced language created by the totalitarian state as a tool to limit free thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, peace, etc. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct is classified as ‘thoughtcrime.’” Yes, people are not usually being hauled off to prison for what they are saying just yet, but we are heading down that path. Every single day, the mainstream media in the United States bombards us with subtle messages about what we should believe and what “appropriate speech” consists of. Most of the time, most Americans quietly fall in line with this unwritten speech code. In fact, most of the time we enforce this unwritten speech code among each other. Those that would dare to buck the system are finding out that the consequences can be rather severe. The following are 19 shocking examples of how political correctness is destroying America…

#1 The Missouri State Fair has permanently banned a rodeo clown from performing just because he wore an Obama mask, and now all of the other rodeo clowns are being required to take “sensitivity training“…

But the state commission went further, saying it will require that before the Rodeo Cowboy Association can take part in any future state fair, “they must provide evidence to the director of the Missouri State Fair that they have proof that all officials and subcontractors of the MRCA have successfully participated in sensitivity training.”

#2 Government workers in Seattle have been told that they should no longer use the words “citizen” and “brown bag” because they are potentially offensive.

#3 A Florida police officer recently lost his job for calling Trayvon Martin a “thug” on Facebook.

#4 “Climate change deniers” are definitely not wanted at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Interior Secretary Sally Jewellwas recently quoted as making the following statement: “I hope there are no climate-change deniers in the Department of Interior”.

#5 A professor at Ball State University was recently banned from even mentioning the concept of intelligent design because it would supposedly “violate the academic integrity” of the course that he was teaching.

#6 The mayor of Washington D.C. recently asked singer Donnie McClurkin not to attend his own concert because of his views on homosexuality.

#7 U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer is calling on athletes marching in the opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year to “embarrass” Russian President Vladimir Putin by protesting for gay rights.

#8 Chaplains in the U.S. military are being forced to perform gay marriages, even if it goes against their personal religious beliefs. The few chaplains that have refused to follow orders know that it means the end of their careers.

#9 The governor of California has signed a bill into lawwhich will allow transgendered students to use whatever bathrooms and gym facilities that they would like…

Transgendered students in California will now have the right to use whichever bathrooms they prefer and join either the boys’ or girls’ sports teams, thanks to landmark legislation signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday.
The law amends the state’s education code, and stipulates that each student will have access to facilities, sports teams, and programs that are “consistent with his or her gender identity,” rather than the student’s actual biological composition. A male student who self-identifies as female could therefore use the girls’ bathroom, even if he is anatomically male.

#10 In San Francisco, authorities have installed small plastic “privacy screens” on library computers so that perverts can continue to exercise their “right” to watch pornography at the library without children being directly exposed to it.

#11 In America today, there are many groups that are absolutely obsessed with eradicating every mention of God out of the public sphere. For example, an elementary school in North Carolina ordered a little six-year-old girl to remove the word “God” from a poem that she wrote to honor her two grandfathers that had served in the Vietnam War.

#12 A high school track team was disqualified earlier this year because one of the runners “made a gesture thanking God” once he had crossed the finish line.

#13 Earlier this year, a Florida Atlantic University student that refused to stomp on the name of Jesus was banned from class.

#14 A student at Sonoma State University was ordered to take off a cross that she was wearing because someone “could be offended“.

#15 A teacher in New Jersey was fired for giving his own Bible to a student that did not own one.

#16 Volunteer chaplains for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department have been banned from using the name of Jesus on government property.

#17 According to a new Army manual, U.S. soldiers will now be instructed to avoid “any criticism of pedophilia” and to avoid criticizing “anything related to Islam”. The following is from aJudicial Watch article…

The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of “taboo conversation topics” that soldiers should avoid, including “making derogatory comments about the Taliban,” “advocating women’s rights,” “any criticism of pedophilia,” “directing any criticism towards Afghans,” “mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct” or “anything related to Islam.”

#18 The Obama administration has banned all U.S. government agencies from producing any training materials that link Islam with terrorism. In fact, the FBI has gone back and purged references to Islam and terrorism from hundreds of old documents.

#19 According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against criminals because it has a “disproportionate” impact on minorities.

It would be hard to overstate the power that all of this relentless “thought training” has on all of us. And young people are particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion. If you doubt this, just check out this video of a little boy praying to Barack Obama as if he was a deity…

It would be a huge mistake to underestimate the power of the mainstream media in America today. As I mentioned the other day, Americans watch an average of about 153 hours of television a month. When Americans go to work or go to school, the conversations that they have with others are mostly based on content that the media feeds them. And about 90 percent of what we watch on television is controlled by just six gigantic corporations.

But the media is not the only source that is telling us what to think. The truth is that the messaging that comes from all of our major institutions (the government, the media, the education system, etc.) is remarkably consistent. The establishment wants to control what we say and how we think, and they have a relentless propaganda machine that never stops working.

The way that we all see the world has been greatly shaped by the thousands of hours of “thought training” that we have all received over the years. Understanding what is being done to us is the first step toward breaking free.

O is MIA or on Vacation...

More Fast and Furious guns surface at crimes in Mexico - CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57598487/more-fast-and-furious-guns-surface-at-crimes-in-mexico/

It's the Chicago Way...

Both Jacksons Going To Prison For Misusing Campaign Funds « CBS Chicago
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/08/14/judgment-day-arrives-for-jacksons-as-they-face-sentencing-today/

One Citizen Speaking...

PROGRESSIVES: ACADEMIC EXCUSES FOR BLACK PROMISCUITY OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE -- LACK OF UNION JOBS?

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 05:29 PM PDT

Sometimes I wonder about the socialist infiltration of educational institutions, and the socialist rhetoric used to justify the progressive socialist democrat agenda …

Notice how the study’s author suggested that the decline of stable, unionized full-time jobs with health insurance and pensions is the proximate cause of declining marriage and other social ills. Considering that there are far fewer union members than non-union members in the United States, one must wonder about the validity of this study as the sample size was ridiculously small, and the individual cohorts in sub-segments even smaller.

Perhaps I would have been more comfortable if the author talked about the disappearance of stable full-time jobs instead of inserting “union” into the conversation. Or did not carry forward the current union meme of attacking Wal-Mart and other big box stores by stating: “Increasingly the jobs available to those without a college degree are service-sector jobs, many of which are short-term and/or part-time and lack benefits.” The next result of which appears to make this study description read like union propaganda and the justification for the unionization of service sector jobs.

Read it for yourself …

Love and Work Don’t Always Work for Working Class in America
The decline and disappearance of stable, unionized full-time jobs with health insurance and pensions for people who lack a college degree has had profound effects on working-class Americans who now are less likely to get married, stay married and have their children within marriage than those with college degrees, a new University of Virginia and Harvard University study has found.
The research, “Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial Landscape,” will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York City on Aug. 13 at 10:30 a.m.
“Working-class people with insecure work and few resources, little stability and no ability to plan for a foreseeable future become concerned with their own survival and often become unable to imagine being able to provide materially and emotionally for others,” said Sarah Corse, an associate professor of sociology in U.Va.’s College of Arts & Sciences and the study’s lead author. “Insecure work changes peoples’ non-work lives.”
The study was conducted through direct interviews and surveys with more than 300 working- and middle-class men and women in the U.S. The study participants were white, African-American, Asian and Latino, between the ages of 18 and 70, and with a range of educational histories. They were married, single, divorced, cohabitating and widowed, as well as being biological and adoptive parents and non-parents.
The researchers found, generally, that educated middle-class workers are better able to recover from the destabilizing effects of insecure work than the working class, and therefore can seek and find stability in relationships.
“Marriage is becoming a distinctive social institution marking middle-class status,” Corse said.
People who are living in an unsecure and unstable situation have difficulty being trustful of possible partners because of the risk of betrayal, noted Harvard sociologist Jennifer Silva, Corse’s co-investigator, who earned her sociology Ph.D. at U.Va. They also find it difficult to meet material or financial obligations and may feel that the emotional and psychological commitment required by marriage is too great a demand on top of other challenges.
“Marriage has lost its relevance as a marker of adulthood,” said Silva, author of the book “Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,” to be published in August by Oxford University Press.
People with college degrees, however, tend to work in stable jobs with better incomes allowing for the emotional and material commitment of marriage and having children within marriage. Middle- and upper-middle class people, as a result, express high expectations for their marriages, centering on self-fulfillment, deeply engaged parenting by both parents and psycho-emotional awareness. They also “insure” themselves against marital complacency, conflict and dissolution through private material and emotional “investments,” such as therapy and special “date nights,” Corse said.
According to Corse and Silva, wages for the non-college-educated have fallen dramatically in the United States as manufacturing work has been outsourced to other countries, greatly reducing the number of high-paying union jobs with good benefits.
Increasingly the jobs available to those without a college degree are service-sector jobs, many of which are short-term and/or part-time and lack benefits, they said.
“These are foundational changes in the labor market for the working class and they broadly affect people’s lives,” they said. “Our interviewees without college degrees expressed feelings of distrust and even fear about intimate relationships, and had difficulty imagining being able to provide for others.”
College-educated middle-class workers, with material, cultural and intellectual resources, are more resilient, however, when faced with the effects of possible insecure work in tough times, and therefore are more able to commit to marriage and to planning families.
Source: Love and Work Don’t Always Work for Working Class in America

Bottom line …

Look for stories in the progressive mainstream media citing this “study” – a survey actually – to justify the increasing unionization of service sector employers such as Wal-Mart or the demand for a so-called “living wage.”

If the author was honest, she may have noted that socialism features the collective over the individual and that marriage, like employment, is an individual choice that cannot be explained or excused by collective reasoning. In the case of marriage, why marry when your peer-group neither values marriage nor shames inappropriate relationships. As for education, perhaps one should have stratified the data by degrees – since most of the non-science degrees are merely pathways to mediocrity in government, education, and other progressive-dominated areas. As for unions, has anyone noticed that the teachers unions are turning out functional illiterates. Here in California, 40% of more students are underachieving in science, math, English, and social studies. So where is the union benefit to our children in return for those well-paid union jobs with healthcare and pensions?

This is nothing but tripe – progressives stroking progressives to advance their toxic socialist agenda. And, if one were to look closely, it was the author who employed class rhetoric by dividing Americans into college-educated and non-college-educated groups; even though a large-enough sample of the non-unionized trades might produce contrary results.

In the final analysis, it is not the group dynamic – it is individual responsibility and choice that matter. And, studies like this one only provide protective coloration for bad behavior, bad choices, and the inability of workers to rise above working for others into the ranks of the entrepreneurial class. How does one even begin to account for the dysfunction of workers operating in a unionized government environment?

-- steve

California education is a joke ... and no amount of spin can justify the poor performance of California teachers ...

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 02:32 AM PDT

I think noted comic Argus Hamilton has it 100% right – “Californians were furious Friday over test scores that show drastic drops in student test scores in English and math. The opinion of the education establishment is unanimous. The only thing that will solve this problem is a twenty percent bump in teachers' pensions.”

Here is the happy spin from the State School’s Chief …

State Schools Chief Tom Torlakson Releases 2013 STAR Results – Statewide scores slip slightly amid budget cuts, transition to Common Core

Scores on the annual Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments slipped by a fraction of a percentage point this year as schools dealt with ongoing budget reductions and the transition to the Common Core State Standards, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced today.
Students managed to hold on to the vast majority of gains posted over the last 11 years, with a majority of students statewide continuing to achieve at the proficient or advanced level in mathematics and English-language arts. Only one student in three achieved proficiency in 2003, the year that the STAR tests became fully aligned to the former state content standards.
Torlakson also noted that schools across the state continued to deal with the effects of years of budget cuts and financial uncertainties throughout the 2012-13 school year. Led by Governor Brown, voter approval of Proposition 30 in 2012 averted $6 billion in further cuts to education budgets.
The California Standards Tests, the major component of the STAR program, were given to approximately 4.7 million students in grades two through eleven in 2013. Students attain one of five levels of performance for each subject tested: advanced, proficient, basic, below basic, and far below basic.
The 2013 STAR results show that a significant achievement gap continues to exist for African American, Hispanic/Latino, low-income, and English-learner students, compared to their peers.
Statewide, 51.2 percent of students posted a score of proficient and above in mathematics (Table 1), which was 0.3 of a percentage point lower than last year.

Translation: In mathematics -- 48.8% of students were deficient.

In English-language arts, 56.4 percent of students scored proficient and above, 0.8 of a percentage point lower than in 2012.

Translation: In English – 43.6% of students were deficient.

In science, 59.1 percent scored proficient and above, 0.4 of a percentage point lower than the 59.5 percent achieved in 2012.

Translation: In Science – 40.9% of students were deficient.

Students showed gains in history-social science, with 49.4 percent scoring at least proficient, an increase of 0.6 of a percentage point over last year's 48.8.

Translation: In History-Social Science – 50.1% of students were deficient.

Full results can be found on the California Department of Education (CDE) Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Results Web page.

STAR Results for 2013 - Year 2013 (CA Dept of Education)

Administrators, Teachers, and Unions are failing the students of California …

What multi-billion dollar enterprise should accept a failure rate of 40% – 50% without making drastic changes in personnel and business models? This are abysmal scores that cannot be easily explained away with “happy talk” and a false comparison with last year’s numbers.

There is little or no doubt in my mind that California schools are rife with corruption. Everything from playing politics and pandering to special interests at the Board of Education level, to the acceptance of gross incompetence at the school level. Primarily to blame for the huge budget shortfalls are ambitious building programs that serve the special interest developers, purchasing programs that purchase unnecessary and unusable supplies, and the great increases that are flowing to the unions in terms of pension and healthcare contributions.

Californian’s should demand that all union dues be suspended and no contributions made to any union health or pension fund unless the children drastically improve their scores – and I am not talking about dumbing down the tests or tolerating the cheating that seems prevalent elsewhere in school systems. I am talking about a court-appointed monitor to investigate and supervise education in the State of California – much as was done for the State’s prison system.

It is time to switch to school uniforms, deal harshly with discipline problems (and not the zero tolerance crap when some child points a finger and goes bang-bang at another student.) Public employees and their unions should not be allowed to “own students.” Students should be given vouchers to give tax money directly to the schools that have a record of performance. Be they public, parochial, or private. No more political activities on school property or using children as political tools. No more teaching anything other than traditional reading, writing, arithmetic, history, civics, and motivational achievement. No overt sexualization of students. No revisionist history. Building a dual track system that recognizes that not every student will be going to college and offers a trade alternative. In my junior high and high school we had a wood shop, metal shop, printing shop, drafting shop, and electric shop. Enough training to use all of the basic tools and to never fear simple household repairs. In high school this should be extended to useful trades and turn out students ready to work.

Bottom line …

Our dipshit governor, governor moonbeam – and his controlling wife – need to realize that speeches will not prepare students to compete in a global economy. Hell, most of them can’t even compete in their own neighborhoods. This slavish pandering to the corrupt unions must end. Education is not a joke – and I am educated enough to know that a 50% graduation rate means 50% of the students are NOT graduating and have a bleak future. Time to hold parents and politicians responsible for the next generation.

The educational system has turned out a decade or more of functional illiterates who can’t read, can’t add and subtract without a calculator, and can’t write a book report without cutting and pasting copy from a Google search.

And, we should no longer import additional illiteracy into the schools. Side-tracking students until they are proficient and performing at grade level before mainstreaming them into schools and reducing all students to the lowest common denominator. And while we are at it, how about rewarding the best and brightest with additional time and attention rather than trying to change a low-achiever into a mediocre achiever.

-- steve

Was Embassy Closure an Expensive Public Relations Campaign?

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 01:04 AM PDT

Following the deliberate lies told about the 9/11anniversary attack on Benghazi, President Obama and his cadre of fellow travelers appears to have lost all credibility when it comes to official pronouncements …

U.S. embassies in Muslim world reopen amid still-murky threats
Eighteen of the 19 U.S. embassies and consulates reopened Sunday after being shut down for a week across the Islamic world because of a terrorist threat. Even as the diplomatic posts inched toward normal operations, and as Muslims celebrated the end of the holy month of Ramadan, questions lingered about how pressing the danger had been and whether the threat had yet passed.
The U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, the same nation from which a threat from an al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula earlier this month spurred the State Department to close its facilities, remained closed.
And the U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, initially among the consulates open after U.S. officials announced that an unusually high number would be closed, remained shuttered indefinitely. U.S. officials evacuated personnel there Friday after receiving “specific threats.” The nature of those threats or who they aimed at remains unclear. A worldwide travel warning to Americans overseas remains in place through the end of August.
In Yemen, some government officials are dubious about the threat posed to U.S. facilities. A Yemeni official claimed earlier this week that the country had thwarted an al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula plot to take over cities and oil and gas installations in the eastern province of Hadramawt.
Yet other Yemeni government spokespeople, noting that the Islamist group maintains a foothold in the province, publicly pushed back against such claims. They said that the militant group lacks the intention or capability to launch such a plot.
A high-ranking Yemeni security official speaking on the condition of anonymity told McClatchy that the claims of a foiled plot had no basis in fact. That source bemusedly attributed media reports about imminent terror strikes to a single official’s comments, which he cast as a misguided attempt at shifting public opinion in the face of increasing and unpopular American drone strikes.
Indeed, Yemen has remained at a relative normal – except for increased security measures that sent spy planes over the skies of Sanaa and flurry of apparent drone strikes to points farther afield. The most recent drone attack killed at least two suspected militants in the southern province of Lahj Saturday evening.
Read more at: U.S. embassies in Muslim world reopen amid still-murky threats | McClatchy

Bottom line …

As citizens, you know our country is in trouble when you can’t trust the President of the United States, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and the United Nations Ambassador to the United Nations to tell the truth to the American public. Deliberately lying to the American people – and then engaging in a cover-up to hide the people and events associated with a terrorist attack.

Time to clean the Washington cesspool and demand that Congress take action or face the consequences in the 2014 congressional election cycle.

-- steve