Sunday, May 11, 2008
	May

Public School Menace

Monday, May 05, 2008

Democrat Jellyfish, Republican Lemmings

by Joel Turtel

I never in my life thought I would be rooting for Democrats to get some spine. I despise the liberals’ and Democrats’ fascist-socialist steal-your-money and regulate us to death philosophy. But they are now the only power we have who can stop this sick, meaningless war in Iraq. Yet the Democrats are jellyfish.

What dopes we were to start this war. We played right into the hands of the terrorists. We are fighting on their ground, in their territory, in their kind of guerrilla war, in a tribal, religiously fanatic region of the world. We have now spent over $500 billion on this war, draining the life-blood and hard-earned taxes of average Americans, with no end in sight.

Thousands of young Americans have already died to give “democracy” to fanatic Islamic millions whose mullahs and religion preach hatred against the very concept of democracy. They practice a religion that detests democracy and individual liberty, a religion that demands absolute obedience to their god and Islamic law.

The only way this war will end is if Democrats get the spine to cut off the war funds, now. I have given up hope on the Republicans. Like lemmings, they just follow the President over the cliff, taking the American people with them.

President Bush is playing a huge bluff game with the Democrats. He dares them to cut off the funds, and thereby “endanger our troops,” and the Democrats have once again caved in to the bluff. They have just passed the President’s newest request for another $95 billion for the war.

Democrats in Congress, here’s what would happen if you cut off the spigot. Without money for the war, the President would have to withdraw the troops. He would never endanger our soldiers in the field. He would withdraw the troops, then rant at Congress for making him do this. But Democrats, if you don’t call his bluff, he will never end this war. He is on a messianic mission to “spread democracy” to a democracy-hating Middle-East, and is in complete denial about the futility of such a mission.

Democrats, our Founding Fathers gave you the ultimate weapon to stop a President who endangers our country with useless wars. That weapon was the power of the purse. If you don’t use it, you and the Congress you control are just utterly useless to the American people and to our security.

The Democrats will say, “we have tried to stop the war, but we don’t have the two-thirds majority to overturn the President’s veto. That’s why we had to pass the new bill giving President Bush another $95 billion for the war.”

No, Democrats, you did not have to capitulate. You did not up the ante in this power poker game. Your strategy should be to refuse to pass ANY spending bill until the President stops this war. If necessary, bring the government to a halt. Cut off all funding to every department, every bureaucrat, every recipient of a government check. Hell, even stop the President’s salary and the salary of his cabinet members.

Oh, how government-union employees will howl when they don’t get their weekly paychecks. Oh, how Social Security recipients will howl when they don’t get their Social Security checks. Post office employees might even go on strike. Take away the billions of dollars that millions of Americans get from government paychecks and you will see how fast this war stops. Millions of Americans will demand President Bush’s resignation or impeachment if he doesn’t stop the war immediately (Social Security recipients—don’t worry. With your help, the war should end in about a week, and you’ll then get your checks).

But do you Democrats have the spine to do this? Do you have the nerve to take away government paychecks from millions of government-union employees that voted you into office? What do you value most, your own power in office, or stopping this war? Care to up the ante?

We constantly hear from the President and his fellow Republicans that there would be horrendous consequences if we withdrew from Iraq. OK. What consequences? If we left Iraq tomorrow, here’s my guess on what would happen. There would be a blood-bath civil war between the Shiites, Sunnis, former Saddam’s Bathe party militia, Al Qaida terrorists, Iranian infiltrators, and a dozen other fanatical groups, all at each others’ throats. It would be like another Palestine, where Fatah and Hamas terrorist groups are now at each other’s throat for power.

Does it really matter who wins this civil war? Most of the groups there are either secular or religious fanatics, and the group that wins will probably create a dictatorship as bad as Saddam Hussein’s. When we hung Saddam, we just ousted one sick dictator, only to make room for another. In the Middle East, from past experience, what more can you expect?

Then what happens when this new secular or Islamic dictator is in power? He will not disrupt our oil supply (which is all we really care about), because oil is the only thing that keeps these Middle-East countries from descending back into the Middle Ages. It is their only resource. Did Saddam cut off our oil? Does Iran stop selling us oil, even though they hate our guts? Do they want to lose their billions of dollars in revenue? I don’t think so.

Moreover, it might be the best thing that happened to us if Middle-East countries cut off our oil. What we need is a massive, alternative-energy “Manhattan project” like the Manhattan Project in World War II that created the atomic bomb in record time. We already have the technology to become oil-independent.

We also have huge, untapped supplies of our own oil, gas, and coal if we stop strangling our energy companies with “save-the-earth” environmental regulations that stop us from drilling all over the Arctic, Alaska, and offshore. If we combine an alternative-energy “Manhattan project” and take the strangling shackles off our oil and gas companies, we soon won’t need Middle-East oil anymore. When that happens, these countries will go bankrupt, their economies will shrivel up, and they’ll have no more money to fund the terrorists.

What about the poor people of Iraq? I feel truly sorry for them. But if they can’t get their act together to defend their own liberty, should we waste the lives of thousands of Americans and bankrupt ourselves in a never-ending war to “spread democracy?” Should we strangle Americans’ freedom, turn America into a police state with “Patriot” acts and massive surveillance of Americans by our own FBI, to protect the “freedom” of Iraqi muslims?

If we left Iraq now, we could use part of the hundreds of billions of dollars we save to hunt down Al Qaeda terrorists all over the world. They were the original and still worst threat to our security. We could also build a high wall between us and Mexico to keep out Middle-East terrorists, and pay for surveillance equipment at airports and all our harbors to check every package and container coming in.

We could also threaten Iranian leaders that we will decimate their power like we did to the Taliban in Afghanistan if they continue to support terrorists who try to attack America. We don’t need nuclear weapons. We can level their power centers and infrastructure with massive bombings like we did against Nazi Germany. To win, we can’t get sucked into a guerrilla war on their territory, far from our supply lines. Instead, we could bomb them into the Stone age so they could no longer support terrorists. I just hope the good Iranian people overthrow their current rulers before we have to destroy their country one day.

But none of this will happen with our Democrat jellyfish. This war will go on and on, sucking the lifeblood from America like the barbarians sucked the lifeblood from ancient Rome. Instead of hoarding our strength to fight the real enemy, the Al Qaeda terrorists, we now squander our strength in a useless civil war in Iraq. God forbid, will we have to elect a Democrat President to end this war?

Friday, April 18, 2008

Wow! — 54 Unique Benefits of Homeschooling

by Joel Turtel

Parents, is homeschooling the right choice for you and your children? Maybe you think you don’t have the time to homeschool because you work. Perhaps you don’t have confidence in your ability to teach your kids because you never took “teaching” courses.

But consider the alternative. Public schools can destroy your children’s self-esteem, destroy their ability to read, strangle their love of learning, put them in physical and moral danger, and wreck their future.

In contrast, here’s 54 unique benefits homeschooling can give you and your kids, as written and explained by Laura B., a smart, wonderful wife, mother of three, homeschooler, and business owner who works from home and still focuses on her family!:

1. Be with Your Family
2. Set Your Own Schedule
3. Vacation When You Want
4. Choose curriculum that best suits the needs of your child
5. Be totally aware of the state and progress of your child's education
6. Keep your child away from un-necessary peer pressure
7. Keep your child away from the bad influence of other children
8. Love, nurture, and teach your child the character and morals you value most
9. Make learning fun
10. Make learning as "experiential" as you want
11. Don't have to get up at the crack of dawn to get your child dressed and fed and off to school where they're so tired they don't learn well anyway.
12. Break up the day however you want to fit your child's learning attention span
13. Teach your child without any "assumed limitations." Teach multiple languages, develop one skill or subject--the sky's the limit
14. What you teach an older child naturally filters down to the younger child(ren) making learning must easier and faster for siblings
15. Teach at the pace and developmental stage appropriate for your child
16. Avoid educational "labeling"
17. Keep your child as far away from drugs as possible
18. Never have to worry about bomb scares or mass shootings
19. Allow your child to do think, discuss, and explore in ways not possible in a classroom setting
20. Constant positive reinforcement and gentle correction. No abusive words or actions that scar your child's psyche
21. Don't use the school system as a babysitter. You only need a few hours a day for learning--the rest of the day is filled with unnecessary "busy work"
22. Develop life skills such as cooking, cleaning, and organizing that are easily learned with the additional time spent at home
23. Spend as much time outdoors as you want to enjoy nature and the world around us
24. Teach the value of responsibility by providing daily jobs
25. To make money management as natural as breathing by allowing even small children to do tasks, earn money, save it, and spend it in an appropriate manner.
26. Never have your child beat up by a bully. Teach self-defense skills that will enable him to deal with any situation but not until he is mature enough to handle the emotional aspects of confrontation
27. No pressure or set "expectations" from teachers on a younger sibling that follows an older sibling in the same school
28. Be around when your child needs to talk
29. Take a break when your child needs a break
30. Bond as a family through family group activities
31. Pass on your religious beliefs and morals to your children and stay away from the "indoctrination" of other school systems
32. Teach sex education when and how you want
33. Develop your child's imagination and teach diverse problem-solving skills instead of one institutionalized method of thinking
34. Unlimited possibilities for extra curricular activities that interest your child having to live up to the expectations or skills of others.
35. Develop the individualism of your child
36. Avoid traditional school "group activities" that may leave one student doing all the work or ruining it for everyone else.
37. Never have your child feel the failure, embarrassment, or teasing from "failing" a grade
38. To keep your children out of the care, custody, and control of people you don't know and who naturally teach their philosophy of life to your kids, whether they realize it or not
39. No opportunity for your child to "sluff off", "snow-blow", or "just get by" with academics
40. To have your child learn initiative naturally, as there's no peer pressure or fear of embarrassing himself
41. Allow your child to have input and say in subject matter and style
42. Allow your child to focus on growth and development--not following the latest fad or being in a certain group
43. So your child will only be surrounded by people who love him, encourage him, and want the best for him.
44. Make sure your child doesn't end up graduating without knowing how to read or knowing other basic skills due to educational failings of your local schools.
45. Keep your child out of private schools that have peer pressure, teacher criticism, drugs, sex, and alcohol that your child never needs to be around
46. Avoid grading scales and testing that gives no positive benefit to your child
47. Not to give the state or federal government control of your child that they assume is theirs
48. To easily pass on your unique heritage or language to your child
49. So your child is not limited by "age" or "grade" to advance or explore academics in which they are interested or gifted
50. To teach your children to enjoy life
51. To allow your children to go to work with Mom or Dad when you all want--not just on the one "go to work with a parent holiday"
52. As many field trips as you want, to places that interest your child
53. To just take a day off when everyone feels like it
54. Flexibility to switch or experiment with different curriculum

Parents, if you are disgusted with public schools and want your children to have the great education they deserve, why not consider homeschooling? Millions of parents now homeschool their kids, and many of these parents are only high-school graduates.

In the last three chapters of my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” you’ll find many ways to homeschool your kids or use internet private schools, even if you work. Homeschooling can be a lot easier, and take a lot less time than you think. It can also bring you great joy in teaching your children.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Parents — Do You Want Dumb, Non-Reading Children? Keep Them In Public School

by Joel Turtel

To teach children how to play the piano, you first have to teach them the basics of music — keys, notes, chords, melody, and harmony. With these tools learned, your kids can experience the joy and sense of accomplishment from playing their favorite songs on the piano.

To most of us, driving a car seems effortlessness. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving when we were young. Remember back to your father’s driving lessons? He taught you how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, those of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive “automatically” and with skill.

The same process applies to another skill—reading. Read a book or a newspaper and it seems effortless. Yet such skill comes from constant use, from constant practice of basic skills learned at an early age.

What are these skills? To read, you have to recognize words on a printed page, yet there are millions of them. Enter the wonder of the alphabet and phonics. It is by recognizing letters and their sounds that a child puts letter-sounds together to form words. Since all words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task becomes greatly simplified. The child need not memorize the word, only sound it out, read it, and find its meaning in a dictionary.

As in driving a car, reading is difficult at first. But, once learned, the skill becomes automatic, unconscious, effortless, and we read quickly without sounding-out every letter of every word. In the end, with practice, we read effortlessly, and all the knowledge of the world is open to us. Without learning the basic skills, however, reading is not possible.

Enter educrat “experts” who think otherwise. “Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word,” they ask ? “So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be “joyful” if literature becomes drills?,” they say. “Why wound children’s self-esteem and self-expression with tests and standards and high expectations?”

“If we have children memorize whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds, all this pain is gone,” they chime. “Do not teach them to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the whole word looks like—teach them word-pictures, teach them hieroglyphics, so they “recognize” the word in a book. Have the child read “Dick and Jane” learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so the child comes to “recognize” it. Do this for each word.”

“If the child can’t grasp a new word because he cannot sound it out, teach him “pre-reading” strategies,” they expound. “These “strategies” will help him “guess” what the word is. Have him look at the title of the story. Have the child look at pictures, look for “clues,” look for “patterns” in the story that make sense. Or skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Or finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher. Anything,” say the learned educrats, “except actually sounding out and reading the word.”

This, the educrats say, is the “centered,” “self-esteem-enhancing” way to teach reading. Meaning and context—not basics. Group discussions—not letters, sounds, drills, and independence.

This is your whole-language method (now called “balanced literacy” or some other deceptive name). This is the hieroglyphics of Egypt transported to your children’s classroom. This is our educrats’ pet “reading” theory, foisted on 45 million public-school children-victims across the country.

The results were inevitable—half the nation’s high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule. Businesses lose $40 billion a year for remedial reading classes for new employees fresh from high school. Thirty percent of Americans functionally illiterate. The child who is taught phonics is able to read thousands of words in a few semesters. The “whole-word” child-victim is able to “recognize” only a few hundred words. Thus we have the crash in reading skills, the dumbing-down of our kids, the millions of frustrated teens who drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can’t get a decent job.

Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, the educrats turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. In the face of reality — massive denial and rationalization.

Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and the educrats have many.

Educrats think phonics believers are extremist Christian Rightists or education simpletons unable to understand the “complexity” of the educrats’ so-called learning theories. Yet, let reality be the judge. The children who learn phonics read far quicker and better than the “whole-word” readers. And the “complexity” educrats proclaim is a self-serving fantasy of their making, designed to ward off competition. Educrats think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don’t know how to teach phonics to your kids any longer, or don’t want to bother.

Educrats claim that phonics and rules will turn kids off to the joy of reading. Just the opposite is true — when a “whole-language” victim-child tries to read the many words he was not taught to “recognize,” he will give up in frustration. His frustration will end his reading and his ‘joy” in reading. The phonics-trained child can read any word and any book, and the joy of reading follows from his skills

This learning of basic skills need not be a struggle. What turns kids off? The insufferable boredom, the mediocrity of the educrats’ teaching methods, unchanged for 50 years.
Children learn the alphabet and letter sounds with delight at home. Sesame Street, “Hooked on Phonics,” the Internet, learning channels on cable TV, creative reading books especially made for kids by learning entrepreneurs can make learning letters and sounds a delight.

Phonics and drills are a drudge in government schools because educrats don’t have the time, skill, desire, or imagination to make them otherwise. Rather than blame themselves or their government-run system for failure, they blame everyone else. They now claim it is the child’s fault (he has attention-deficit disorder!), the parents’ fault (they don’t get “involved!”), or “society’s” fault (racism or “not enough money for the schools!”).

Educrats also say that drills and basics, tests and standards, are “unfair” to kids, cause them stress, and threaten their self-esteem. Just the opposite is true—real self-esteem comes from achievement, not from a teacher’s hot-air, feel-good compliments. Achievement needs tasks, content, ever-increasing complex skills children learn with guided effort. Joy, not stress, is the result of achievement. And what is more important than for children to learn that rewards come from effort and perseverence?

Educrats hate phonics and true reading skills because their teacher colleges don’t train them in the phonics method. Teachers who are not taught the phonics method will naturally feel inadequate to teach phonics to children. It is not the teachers’ fault. Rather, the fault lies with educrats, teacher colleges, and educational theorists who have contempt for phonics.

Phonics and drills requires a “teacher-centered” approach in the classroom. This approach requires greater effort and responsibility on teachers and schools to create lesson plans that show real progress in reading skills. The teacher-centered approach requires teachers and educrats to constantly test and evaluate both students and themselves.

The “whole-language” reading method, in contrast, is allegedly “student-centered,” meaning that kids get to sit around in circles and talk about their feelings rather than learn to actually read. With “whole-language” reading, educrats can claim there are no standards, no way to test reading skills and achievement. There are few rigorous tests, low standards, and no failing grades.

“Whole-language” reading therefore achieves the educrats’ ultimate goal—if there are no standards or objectivity, no one can blame them, no one can question them, no one can hold them accountable for their failure to teach our children to read.

The educrats don’t want to grade their students’ performance because it allegedly hurts the kids “self-esteem.” I believe this attitude is merely a projection of the educrat’s primal fears—they do not want parents judging their performance and holding them accountable for teaching their kids to read. The educrats don’t want their fragile self-esteem threatened by angry parents who expect public schools to do one simple thing—teach their kids to read.

Government schools are designed to assuage the educrats’ terror at being judged by parents, and being forced to compete in a free-market education system. Government (public) schools’ ultimate purpose is to be a full-employment program for educrats—to give them guaranteed jobs without accountability to parents. It is to placate these fearful educrats that our government schools dumb-down our children and turn them into illiterates with bleak futures.

So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by government and their educrats, they will never change. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I tell parents about wonderful new education alternatives to public schools, such as accredited, low-cost internet private schools. Parents, I urge you to look into these alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, “reading” instruction.

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31
Wow! - 54 Unique Benefits of Homeschooling The Death Lists --- Why Baby Boomers Should Be Terrified of the Democrats Franklin Bremmer stared at the death lists, and saw his mother's name. His face turned white. He moaned, "Oh, God, mother! Oh, No. Oh, God, no!" Why Do We Need You? "You must pay Social Security," said the government man. "Why?" I replied. "I can walk to the bank and save my own money or get an annuity with an insurance company. I don't need you to steal money from my pay check every week, then hope I live to 67 to get some of my hard-earned money back."
Post \| Liberty Books Store