ActivistPost.com
By Simon Black, Sovereign Man
March 6, 2020
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity… and on occasion, poetic justice.
Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal Just Rose From the Dead
Ignorance of the law is no excuse for you or me.
But somehow when Hillary Clinton broke the law while Secretary of State, it was her intentions that mattered.
As everyone knows by now, Clinton stored confidential, top secret emails on a personal, unsecured email server while she was Secretary of State.
She got off the hook because she claimed that she didn’t intend to violate the law… she didn’t realize that what she was doing was totally illegal.
That’s why she’s not rotting in a prison cell, even though you or I would be turning big rocks into little rocks in a DayGlo Orange jumpsuit if we had committed an equivalent crime.
But a group called Judicial Watch wasn’t as quick to let it go.
Using Freedom of Information Act requests, they continued to uncover more and more details of the case and bringing it all to court. And as the judge in the case commented, “With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers.”
Therefore a federal judge has permitted another round of discovery. This means Hillary Clinton will be forced to sit for an interview with government officials to answer “significant questions” about her violation of the law.
Police in Scotland have a list of people who tell offensive jokes
Scottish Internet users better be careful of the jokes they tell online– you might end up on a government watchlist.
A Freedom of Information request revealed that 3,300 “non-crime hate incidents” have been logged in a police database.
Hundreds of people were added to the list last year for making offensive jokes or rude comments online.
Police say they track these individuals just in case their humor crosses the line into illegal territory.
For example, a couple years ago a Scottish YouTuber was arrested and convicted for teaching his pug a Nazi salute.
They guy may have been way too sophomoric… but when did it become a crime to be immature and offensive?
And now free speech is being monitored for signs of criminality.
Plus, with certain types of background checks, potential employers could see that these innocent people have been logged social media posts deemed to be offensive by the government.
School forbade kids from saying no when asked to dance
I just love it when wokeness contradicts itself.
A middle school in Utah was gearing up to host its Valentine’s Day dance. And in an effort to make sure that all students felt “welcome, comfortable, safe, and included,” the school adopted a policy forcing the kids to dance with anyone who asked them.
And sure enough, when an 11-year old girl was asked to dance by a boy who creeped her out, the principal forced them to dance together.
This is pretty much the opposite of #MeToo.
And in their ridiculous effort to make sure that no student was upset or offended, they violated one of the most basic consent rules in our society.
This is the paradox of wokeness: it’s absolutely impossible to prevent people from feeling upset, offended, excluded, or rejected.
Update: woman pleads guilty to being topless in her own home
We’ve been following the case of Tilli Buchanan who was charged with sex crimes for being topless in her own home.
She and her husband had removed their shirts after installing insulation. Because her step-children saw her barechested, Tilli was charged with “child sex abuse” under Utah criminal code 76-9-702.5(2)(a)(ii)(B) for exposing “the female breast below the top of the areola. . .”
That left her facing the possibility of having to register as a child sex offender.
Originally she tried to challenge the law itself under equal protection grounds, since it treated male and female nipples differently.
But when she lost that case, she opted to take a plea deal. The charges were downgraded so she won’t be considered a sex offender.
Tilli will pay $600 and the case will be dismissed in a year if she doesn’t commit any crimes.
It’s pretty pathetic that she was ever charged in the first place, and sad that this is what the justice system wastes resources on.
San Francisco – Schools across the country are increasingly using technology to spy on students at home, at school, and on social media. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a new Surveillance Self-Defense guide for students and their parents, so they can learn more about how schools are watching them, and how they can fight back.
“Some administrators argue that they need to use this technology to keep schools safe, yet there is little evidence that it works,” said EFF Activism Project Manager Lindsay Oliver. “Instead, surveillance can make people second-guess everything they do or say. When we are constantly spied on, we censor the way we express ourselves. That’s known as the ‘chilling effect.’ Students need space to experiment and learn without being monitored and recorded by their schools at every turn.”
School discipline disproportionately targets students of color, and it’s reasonable to think that additional, and more comprehensive scrutiny of their lives will only add to that injustice. As a criminologist told Vice, LGBTQ+ students, who tend to look for support online as they explore their orientations and gender identities, “find they’re under so much surveillance that it affects them in ways that shuts them out of those resources. They learn not to look. They learn not to trust online public spaces.”
In the new guide, EFF shows students and concerned parents what kind of technologies to watch for, how they can track you, and what it means for privacy. For example, some schools are tracking students’ locations, ostensibly to automate attendance or track school bus ridership. This monitoring can be conducted through tools ranging from students’ cell phones to ID cards with tracking chips, and it can easily continue when you are off campus. Location information is extraordinarily sensitive—it can reveal who your friends are and what you do when you see them, as well as what kind of medical appointments you might have or what sort of meetings or groups you attend regularly. In some cases, student data is reported to school resource officers or the police, and it can be kept over time, creating a granular history of a student’s actions.
But what can students and concerned parents do? Often, the best solution is to simply not use the systems that schools have set up, if you’re able to, and encourage your friends to do the same. But the new guide also shows students how to gather information on what’s happening and how to talk to adults about it.
“Being under constant surveillance at home and school teaches kids to accept that people they should trust are spying on them—and that’s a lesson that will serve them poorly in later life,” said EFF Associate Director of Research Gennie Gebhart. “If authority figures for youth say constant surveillance is OK, what happens when a romantic partner wants access to every message on their phone? Or an employer wants your social media password? Invasive monitoring isn’t acceptable, no matter who tries to do it, and personal privacy matters.”
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
Man fined almost $7 million for painting his own property
In 2002, the owner of some dilapidated warehouses in New York City decided to make use of the property.
He hired an artist to decorate the warehouses with graffiti, and curate graffiti art from others. Soon it became a bustling art hub, with artists renting out space to do their work.
But after eleven years, the owner decided to demolish the warehouses to make way for luxury apartments.
That’s when the artists sued to protect ‘their’ graffiti.
But the owner of the property went ahead and whitewashed the artwork while the lawsuit was ongoing.
After years of legal battles, the court sided with the artists and demanded the owner pay $6.75 million to the artists whose work he destroyed. And now on appeal, another court affirmed that decision.
Turns out, you don’t have the same property rights when it comes to art.
New York has a Visual Artists Rights Act. It doesn’t matter who owns the art, or the building it’s affixed to. Artists still maintain certain rights to their work, even if it is sold (or they never owned the canvass).
So in New York, you better be careful who you let decorate your property. It may become their property.
Now California will refer to “at risk youth” instead as, “at promise youth.”
Legislation went into effect at the beginning of this year which changed the state’s legal term for children at risk of entering the criminal justice system.
The point is to change the negative connotation of the phrase “at risk”.
Uplifting, right? But these people always fail to understand that changing words doesn’t change reality.
Progressive parking tickets could make rich pay more
Boston, Massachusetts tickets drivers as much as $40 for an expired parking meter.
Boston collected over $61 million worth of fines in 2018, the same year it began increasing parking fines. Now some parking tickets run up to $120.
But a new city councillor is concerned that some Boston residents may have to decide between paying a parking ticket, and putting food on the table.
She has introduced rules that would scale the cost of a parking ticket based on the violator’s income.
So rich people will still face huge fines for tiny infractions – maybe even higher than they are currently. But low-income folks will pay lower fines for parking illegally.
The proposal says, “for some a $40 parking ticket is simply the cost to park illegally while for others it is a major financial setback.”
So, as usual, the solution is to redistribute the wealth.
“From each according to his means,” to pay parking tickets, as Karl Marx would say.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project — a curriculum that makes the fantastical claim that a primary cause of the Revolutionary War was the colonists’ desire to protect slavery — has been adopted in 3,500 classrooms across all 50 states.
For this reason, some of the nation’s most renowned historians have called for The Times to correct this and other factual errors.
The Pulitzer Center, which is partnering with The Times to promote The 1619 Project, recounted in its 2019 annual report, “Good journalism, innovative educational resources, and deep community engagement are absolutely essential to bridging the divisions that threaten to rip our democracy apart. It is this belief that has driven the Pulitzer Center for the last 14 years.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Times’ lead writer on the project, argued in her introductory essay to it, “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’
“But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.”
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones wrote.
The reporter is honest enough to admit that slavery in America predated the nation’s founding by over 150 years.
However, she alleges by 1776, Britain “had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution.”
There were calls to abolish slavery, which “would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones wrote.
Slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833 — over a half-century after the founding of the United States.
Also working completely against Hannah-Jones’ narrative is the fact that almost all the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had voted to abolish slavery by the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.
The preposterous notion that protecting slavery was one of the “primary” reasons the American Colonies declared independence is not supported by the documentary evidence from the period, either, as my research for my book “We Hold These Truths” made clear.
Any middle school history student should be taught that the Stamp Act in 1765, followed by the Declaratory Act in 1766, were what began rallying colonists against Mother England.
In the Declaratory Act, Parliament claimed the legislative body held “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever.”
The rallying cry in the Colonies became, “No taxation without representation.”
Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, made the case against King George III and Parliament in his 1774 essay “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” pointing to Britain’s tax and trade policies toward the Colonies, the decision to suspend the New York legislature and the imposition of martial law in Massachusetts as unjust acts that must be opposed.
Thomas Paine, in his widely read political pamphlet “Common Sense,” published in January 1776, did not list a fear that Great Britain would end slavery in the Colonies as a reason for declaring independence.
Over 500,000 copies of the pamphlet were published just three months after its release at a time when the entire population of the 13 Colonies was only 4 million at most.
Paine was an abolitionist who wrote the preamble to Pennsylvania’s abolition act in 1780 (during the heart of the Revolutionary War), which freed 6,000 slaves in the state, according to History.com.
The Declaration of Independence itself, which lists dozens of grievances the Colonies had against the king and Parliament, makes just a passing reference to slavery by pointing to England’s efforts to “excite domestic insurrections.”
Jefferson’s original draft submitted to the Continental Congress included a condemnation of the king’s support for the African slave trade, writing it was a violation of the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
This language was struck from the Declaration’s final text out of deference to South Carolina and Georgia, which wanted to continue the African slave trade, according to the Claremont Institute’s Founding.com.
“The British had encouraged slave and Indian revolts against the colonists,” the institute reported. “For example, in 1775, [British Governor] Lord Dunmore of Virginia, swore to members of the Virginia House of Burgesses that if ‘any Injury or insult were offered to himself’ he would ‘declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.’”
So the issue for the British rulers in America wasn’t really a desire to free to slaves, but to wreak havoc in the rebellious Colonies.
Some of the nation’s top historians sent a letter to The New York Times in December taking The 1619 Project to task for claiming that protecting slavery was a primary cause of the Revolution.
Among the signers of the letter were Princeton University American history professor emeritus James McPherson, Brown University history professor emeritus Gordon Wood and Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz.
McPherson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era,” while Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for his work “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”
Wilentz was a Pulitzer finalist for his book, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.”
So by Pulitzer’s estimation, these historians know what they are talking about when it comes to American history.
In their letter to The Times, the academics applauded The 1619 Project’s desire “to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history.”
“Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it,” they wrote.
“On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue.’ This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”
The historians went on to list their concern that this and other unsupported claims were “offered as an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times.”
Woods told RealClearInvestigations the only way The 1619 Project should be used in the classroom is “as a way of showing how history can be distorted and perverted.”
The New York Times Magazine’s editor in chief, Jake Silverstein, issued a response last month disputing the charge that The 1619 Project contains “significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding.”
“The project was intended to address the marginalization of African-American history in the telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life,” Silverstein wrote.
In a December radio interview, Hannah-Jones said, “When my editor asks me, like, what’s your ultimate goal for the project, my ultimate goal is that there’ll be a reparations bill passed.”
“If you read the whole project, I don’t think you can come away from it without understanding the project is an argument for reparations,” she told the Chicago Tribune in October.
The Atlantic reported in December that Hannah-Jones has not “budged from her conviction that slavery helped fuel the Revolution.”
“I do still back up that claim,” she told The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, but she conceded her essay phrased it too strongly to make readers think slavery was universally supported in the Colonies.
“I think someone reading that would assume that this was the case: All 13 Colonies and most people involved. And I accept that criticism, for sure,” Hannah-Jones said, while promising to better contextualize the claim when The 1619 Project is published in textbook form by Random House.
That promise does not sound too reassuring when the entire proposition is bunk.
Further proof against Hannah-Jones’s claim is in the Constitution itself, which rather than protect slavery put it on a path to extinction, Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists like Frederick Douglass argued.
The Constitution specifically authorized the federal government to ban the importation of slaves in 1808 (approximately 20 years from the date the document was ratified).
Congress did so in 1808, and President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill into law.
An additional compromise that the Founders reached was counting three-fifths of the state’s slave population when calculating the overall population for determining how many representatives a state would have in Congress.
The Southern states wanted to count their entire slave populations for representation purposes, but the Northern states did not allow it.
The impact was to lessen the number of votes slaveholding interests held in the House of Representatives.
Both of these constitutional provisions were a recognition that slavery was a present evil but not something many of the Founders wanted to see continue in perpetuity.
Finally, one other triumph in the fight against slavery during the founding period took place right across the street from the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
The Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which established the laws governing the territorial land encompassing the future states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. The ordinance outlawed the introduction of slavery in the territory.
All of these facts from the founding era demonstrate that slavery was not a primary reason the Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, and our nation’s students should not be taught that it was.
Not satisfied to push their liberal ideological perspective in reporting current events, The Times has moved on to propagate false narratives about America’s founding.
What motivated the founding generation to pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor was not to protect slavery but to secure their God-given right to liberty.
“Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”[1][Bold & Italics Emphasis Added]
“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of the system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.”[2][Bold & Italics Emphasis Added]
BreakawayIndividual.com
Zy Marquiez
February 22, 2020
There are individuals out there that whittle facing the storm, and there are those who challenge the storm. The late John Taylor Gatto is one of the latter.
Gatto is the former NY City and NY State Teacher of the year (1991), where he inspired his students to achieve some amazing results through his nontraditional methods of instruction.
Not only has Gatto been relentless in detailing many of the inherent issues within the public school system for quite some time now, but he’s had the courage to take it a step further and detail that all of the issues within public schooling are not mistakes, it is done by design.
To illustrate this, an excerpt of John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons Of Mass Instruction will follow below.
Within Weapons Of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto breaks down Alexander Inglis’s book Principles of Secondary Education, which:
“..makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrated into a dangerous whole.”[3][Bold Emphasis Added]
Furthermore, Gatto notes that Inglis, who has an honor lecture in education named for him in Harvard, breaks down the natural purpose of schooling into 6 basic functions,” which are as follows:
The adjective or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority…It is also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2. The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a larger labor force.
3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper role in society.
4. The differentiating function. Once the social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races…Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will be quietly taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.” [xviii-xix][Bold Emphasis Added]
And just in case some wonder if Inglis was alone in these thoughts, he was certainly not. Horace Mann, James Bryant Conant, George Peabody, and many others shared the same sentiments.
What we witness above is nothing more than the employment of Social Engineering from the bottom up, at a national scale, beginning with the most malleable minds in the land – those of children. It doesn’t get any more cut and dry.
John Taylor Gatto is one of the few individuals out there whose wisdom seeps into all societal strata, given that education, and the lack there of affects all of us. His timeless words should be heeded, because the issue is only exacerbating year after year.
In life, an individual can choose to write their own script, or be part of someone else’s.
As we can gather, if those in control of the system carry out their plans of mass conformity and control, children, an all future generations, will never write their own authentic scripts unless they breakaway from those proverbial shackles.
BreakawayIndividual.com
Zy Marquiez
February 20, 2020
In the following video, Charlotte Iserbyt speaks at length about the real history of public education and its ties to systemic corruption within the public schooling system. As a former Senior Policy Adviser for the Office Of Educational Research & Improvement during the Reagan Administration, she was in the heart of the beast, and as so, knew the system well. Her words should be ruminated upon seriously. For further research, Charlotte Iserbyt’s book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America, gets at the heart of the matter.
Charlotte Iserbyt also became a whistleblower about the major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms.
While working there she discovered a long term strategic plan by the tax exempt foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they’re told.
This is a must see for anyone who wants to truly know why the public schooling system is deliberately crafted to produce human drones with no critical thinking whose only skills are to be subservient, trust authority and follow orders
Tonight, on History… So It Doesn’t Repeat: we discuss the past, present, and future of public schooling, with Charlotte Iserbyt, former Sr. Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Education. We’ll discover the root cause of the Deliberate Dumbing Down of Americans. Learning’s the answer. What’s the Question? It’s all coming up on History… So It Doesn’t Repeat!
