Archive for December 2017

Utah’s Board Set to Approve Common Science MOA Jan. 3.   Leave a comment

I apologetically interrupt your Christmas and New Year’s festivity– and mine– to post this public service announcement.

Common Core science, aka national NGSS science, is poised to pass. It will be the “truth” guide for your child and mine, without input from locals, starting this Wednesday in Utah– unless many speak up, fast.

Despite years of promises by Utah superintendents, past and present, that Utah would never jump on the common science standards wagon because of the philosophical and political mindset gap, the Utah State School Board is set to approve a memorandum of understanding this coming Wednesday that will align Utah’s science test question bank with NGSS (national, common science standards: Next Generation Science Standards.)

Below is a screenshot of the consent calendar item, available at the Board website.

Also relevant is this video, where science standards were promised by superintendents and high ranking bureaucrats –in face to face public meetings held by interrogating legislators and local school board members– never to become nationalized and common in Utah classrooms.  (Posted below.) It’s a powerful documentary of Utah’s science standards’ lies.  Please watch it.

It’s time to contact the board and your bulldog friends in the neighborhood and in the legislature.

The superintendent and her bureaucrats will tell you that it’s old fashioned to resist common core science standards and testing; I say that scientific intellectual freedom, and my empowerment over my own children’s locally directed education, are more real than the “modernity” of just the left wing’s version of “science”.

The real question is,  as it always has been, “Who gets to decide?” Whose version of reality and science is the most reliable?  Even if NGSS had it right,  which it doesn’t, do you want to hand over the reins of control to NGSS,  any more than you wanted to hand over the reins of math and English to Common Core 1.0?

Contact:  Board@schools.utah.gov

 

 

Screenshot_2017-12-30-11-26-28.png

America, Learn from Rwanda and Jamaica – the Price of the Loss of Privacy   3 comments

 

 

National I.D. cards in Rwanda, like the one above, (see PreventGenocide.org) cost hundreds of thousands of innocent people to lose their lives in 1994, since certain tribal affiliation was cause for slaughter by the Rwandan government, and the government had access to all that ID information.

This week, in Jamaica, the big news is rollout of a mandatory, national ID card.  This ID system, hastily and without vetting, became law, despite concerns, protests and a 60,000 signature petition.

Today in the United States Congress, there are bills poised to create a system of national identification of individuals, being promoted by Republicans and Democrats.  I have listed them in bullet point form at the bottom of this article.

See what is happening in Jamaica, where national I.D. cards are suddenly now mandatory for all.  Below, watch this current-event (video).  A Jamaican student, Daniel Thomas, gets shouted at by his prime minister, after politely asking Prime Minister Holness to consider the 60,000 signatories of the petition against the ID, and to consider waiting for three months, to allow for discussion of both the pros and cons of having a national I.D. card, rather than to force the decision so quickly and without “ventilation”.

At minute 6:55, the Prime Minister says, “You know what I reject? Do you know what I reject? I reject the view that somehow you have a higher moral authority on this matter than I do. I am not here to create— and I make that point very clear– I am not here to create the system that is going to deprive Jamaicans of their freedom. And ..”

Student Daniel Thomas breaks in:  “But the bill does.”

He gets ignored and the prime minister goes on, “I am not hiding from consultation.  I am here facing the questions and answering them…  And I will go to every church in Jamaica, I will go to every room, every house, and I will answer them.  Because I am not trying to take away anybody’s rights.  And I find that this discussion is disingenuous, unfair, and untruthful.  And I will tell you, Jamaica, that I am not going to hide from this.”

 

Daniel Thomas of Jamaica

 

 

 

Holness denies trying to take away citizens’ freedoms.  But the bill has already passed.  Citizens did not get to discuss and debate it beforehand.  Holness seems to have persuaded himself despite facts.

Dear Prime Minister Holness, there are, as you know, penalties for failing to register for the Jamaican national I.D.  Jamaicans who don’t sign up will not be eligible for government handouts, and will be fined $100,000, or at a judge’s discretion, may be given “community service” to match the fine.

And how will the prime minister be able to control what happens with citizens’ data after he is no longer the prime minister?

I guess the  prime minister is shouting at the student because of the $68M grant from the Inter American Development Bank that Holness would lose if he failed to get the national ID card movement rolling in Jamaica.

Money, to the promoters, seems to follow the loss of liberty, everywhere you look.  The Inter American Development Bank gave Jamaica $68 million  to create this database of personal information on every Jamaican Citizen. Similarly, in 2009,  to promote common education standards and common data standards, the US federal government granted states a few millions each, to establish federally-interoperable student databases (SLDS systems).  And there are also smaller “grants” given to individual citizens, aka handouts/ benefits to Jamaican citizens who give up their data to the government.  This is happening in some places in the U.S. too.

How cheaply and carelessly some people sell other people’s lives/data, calling it not theft or and resale but progress, partnering, or “sharing”.

Right now in the U.S., though, people are probably more aware of and annoyed by corporate snooping than they are about the increase of government snooping.  But do they know that public-private partnerships combine corporate and government snooping!?  Facebook and the U.S. Department of Education have teamed up to make digital student badges.   Congress and corporate researchers teamed up to promote the FEPA bill (federal-state-corporate pii access) that sits in the Senate today. (S.2046).

Some folks see well-intentioned “research” as outlined by the Commission of Evidence Based Policy, or they agree with some “re-educating” of citizens about the “violence of patriarchal order” via the U.S. Department of Peacebuilding.  Understandable, I suppose.

But do they agree with the flat-out death to citizens who were pegged (via national I.D.) as dangerous in Rwanda?   –Or do they stomach the death of citizens in Germany and elsewhere who were pegged (via both identification documents and by the yellow star) as enemies of their government?  Should government have that much power to potentially weed us out– even if they “never would”?  Should they have the power to make that kind of choice?!

How would a survivor of the Rwandan genocide or the Jewish German genocide advise a Jamaican citizen, or a U.S. citizen, today?

Register for the ID, or pay the $100,000 fine?

Make a call to the U.S. Senate, or just keep eating Christmas cookies?

Here are a few of the data-grabbing and freedom-harming bills that must not pass into U.S. law.

 

  • Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch is pushing his College Transparency Act, S1121.  It would remove the prohibition against sharing student pii (personally identifiable information) with the federal government.
  • Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy pushed HR4174/S2046, The Foundations of Evidence-based Policymaking Act, which passed the House but still hasn’t passed the Senate.  It would mandate the sharing of personally identifiable information on citizens (without their knowledge) between agencies, both federal and state, as well as to private groups who define themselves as researchers.  This is a non-centralized, easily accessible, hackable, federal database of pii (personally identifiable information) collected without consent.
  • The Keeping Girls in School Act, S1171, from New Hampshire’s Senator Sheehan, would tax the U.S. an extra $35M per year to promote common education standards and data mining of foreign girls in foreign schools without their informed consent.  (Privacy of data is a joke in that bill: it promises, but contains no enforcement mechanism, to disaggregate students’ data “to the extent practicable and appropriate“. -i.e., not at all.)
  • The HR1111 The Department of Peacebuilding Act of 2017 makes a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding, requiring an office of “peacebuilding information and research” that will “compile studies on the physical and mental condition of children” and “compile information” and “make information available” because it requires the “free flow of information”.

Who gets to define children’s peace?  The Department of Peacebuilding. The bill creates that department, as well as a “peacebuilding curriculum” to be taught in pre-k, elementary, secondary, and beyond.

Among other things, students are to be taught that violence is: “the patriarchal structure of society and the inherent violence of such structure in the shaping of relationships and institutions“.

I think:  traditional family can be called a patriarchal structure.  Christians build lives on the words of 12 male apostles and Jesus Christ, and pray to a patriarchal Heavenly Father.  Are these institutions and relationships “inherently violent”?

Will the Department of Peacebuilding “compile information” and “make available” the “mental condition” of family life, a patriarchal order, as “inherently violent”?  Will my children be “rescued” from this “physical and mental condition”?

The concerns I am outlining would be nothing more than empty fears IF local decision makers were not gathering and sharing daily data on most school children, in response to grant opportunities— but they are!

The concerns I am outlining would be nothing more than empty fears IF corporate and federal agents were not able to access that personally identifiable student data, IF congress smartly nixed bills like the ones mentioned above– but why would they, when they are already ramming bills like these down our throats:  See here.

The concerns I am outlining above would be nothing more than empty fears IF decision makers locally chose not to use technologies that mine children’s social and emotional learning (SEL) and their “mental conditions”–but SEL and CES mining and labeling children’s social, emotional, sexual and religious “conditions” is growing.

The concerns I am outlining above would be nothing more than empty fears IF the United Nations was not promoting its own global ID system, in its I.D. 2020 program, and influencing nations to write bills/laws that will permit global identification systems of individuals, reasoning that there is a “critical importance of identity as an enabler of economic opportunity and explore the role that technology could play in providing a solution.”

Remember Rwanda.  Look at Jamaica.  Just say no to the U.N.’s, Congress’, and corporations’ looting of our kids’ data. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

%d bloggers like this: