Teach meth-making and pimp-math!

Public school students in the nation’s largest cities, many from low-income households, trail their peers elsewhere in the United States in a test of science proficiency, said a report released on Thursday.

Fourth- and eighth-graders in most of the 17 participating urban districts typically scored lower than the national average, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress Science.

The analysis, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, Trial Urban District Assessment, tested between 900 and 2,200 students in each grade in school districts from San Diego to New York, including students in Atlanta and Boston public schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Demographics of the participating urban districts vary from both the national average and between districts.

Some districts report that English is not the first language of up to 40 percent of their students. Anywhere from 47 percent to 100 percent of students in the urban areas are from lower-income families, according to the report.

Uh huh. Well, that’s a whole other problem that fuzzy-bunny multiculturalism and open borders policies have failed to address. I was an above-average reader in elementary school, and felt very held back by the ESL and black kids. Yes, the black kids. Their parents didn’t seem to have a lot of time for bedtime stories or ABCs. It’s a cultural thing, and should be addressed by schools instead of being swept under the rug of political correctness.

“Even for students who don’t enter careers requiring some science competence, as citizens they will soon be involved in issues like climate change, energy policy and medical research,” said Friedman, a former director for the New York Hall of Science.

Oh good god. The educators aren’t upset because the system is churning out functional retards - they’re upset that they can’t push popular social policies and pseudo-science like climate change to kids that can’t even fathom what a “climate” is. Stalin would be proud.

All in all, the problem with every school subject needs to be dealt with at the very base - literacy. Once you get kids reading and comprehending, then you can teach the other subjects. But if a kid can’t do his ABCs or can’t read above second grade (or not in English), you might as well toss the rest of the subjects right out the window.

Once they are reading, then and only then you can start to experiment with ways to make the subjects engaging. Teach science from a cooking or cause-and-effect perspective. Lots of hands-on experiments for the video game generation, who are very visually oriented. Teach physics by using gun shots as a way to explain velocity. But for god’s sake, teach literacy first.

I wrote last week about how kids aren’t getting out enough, and this article just proves my point.

Young people no longer participate in time-honoured pastimes like conkers, hopscotch and marbles with over half of kids saying their favourite game is the Nintendo Wii.

Nearly three quarters of children aged four to 11 who took part in the study by Persil have never played the playground favourite hopscotch, with ten per cent of kids thinking it was a soft drink.

And 93 per cent of children surveyed said they would never play marbles and half had never even heard of the small glass balls.

In addition, three quarters of kids never play ‘tag’ and 87 per cent have never heard of or played ring-a-ring-a roses.

Even more surprisingly, a quarter of children also said they never make up their own games or invent characters.

An honest 38 per cent of kids said that playing conkers would simply not interest them – with one in ten preferring online games.

Ok, this is a British newspaper, so some of these games aren’t relevant (my ex patiently explained conkers to me when I lived in Scotland), but seriously! Get off the couch you fat little fucks!

Childhood play and imagination is the drive behind adult creativity - whether it is in arts, sciences, technology or beyond. If some kid hadn’t played spaceman when he was young, he may not have grown up to write the science fiction novels that inspired scientists to send a man to the moon.

If a lonely kid never had an imaginary friend, she might not have grown up to write books with rich, developed characters.

Sitting on the couch playing X-box puts kids in the creation of someone else’s imagination, not their own. Like watching television, playing video games makes you zone out. You can’t create or imagine anything if it’s all presented to you in graphic 3-D. Where’s the inspiration in that?

Ok, maybe on the back of my last post, an article about pedophile hysteria seems a little odd, but what can I say? I’m quirky.

These days, fewer and fewer people want to take the risk of working with children, due to the belief that everyone is a pedophile. And now, people don’t even want to help children for fear of some stupid legal repercussion.

I remember when I was a kid in the ‘burbs, there was a Block Parent sign in every other window. When I was a toddler in the gutter tenements of Montreal, the Greek and Italian grandmothers sat on the porches and all the kids - regardless of who owned them - were under their domain. Get in a fight, someone’s baba whacked you across the back of the head and marched you home. Fall and cut yourself, and you were taken into someone’s kitchen and patched up before being given a hug and some juice and sent on your way.

Those days are over.

A few years ago, I was on my way home from the subway station. A mom with a baby in a pram and a toddler on a Big Wheel were on the sidewalk with me. Toddler wheeled on ahead of mom, keeping pace alongside me, while mom frequently stopped to check baby’s soother or bonnet. As Mr. Big Wheel and I were about to pass a driveway from one of the condo buildings, a car lurched out over the curb. I automatically grabbed the kid across his chest and prevented him from being hit. He just glared at me, as I had broken his hard-earned momentum. I turned to his mother, quickly catching up to us, and said “I’m sorry.” After all, we’ve been conditioned in the last 15-20 years not to touch another person’s children. Obviously the mother laughed at me for apologizing, but I was saddened that the apology was as instinctive as the rescue had been.

Life is very different from what it was when I was little:

Many people fear helping a child in need in case witnesses think an attempt is being made to abduct the youngster, a UK survey suggests.

A total of 44% of men and 28% of women told researchers they would be wary of helping a child for this reason.

The research also suggests 79% of adults believe community spirit has weakened since they were children.

The survey of more than 2,000 adults and children was carried out by ICM for children’s charity Play England.

Nearly half (47%) of the adults questioned said it was unsafe for children to play out without supervision, while one in three parents said they were concerned they would be judged by their neighbours if they let their children play out in this way.

No wonder kids are fatter today than they were a generation ago. I’m a prime example of this: When our cottage was sold, I didn’t swim or bike or frolic as much as I had before. The pounds started to pile on. It’s been a struggle ever since. Parental paranoia is a major factor when it comes to childhood obesity.

So is multiculturalism. Or at least, modern multiculturalism. These days immigrants don’t make any effort at all to integrate, which means neighbors can go years without ever introducing themselves to one another. The days of the Greek grannies on the front porches are over in many neighborhoods. So if neighbors don’t know one another, they don’t trust each other with their kids.

Not every neighborhood suffers in that way, but many do. I’ve seen Asian and Jamaican families readily assist lost or injured kids from other cultures. Other cultures are more insular, including Arabs and Eastern Europeans. This isn’t a study; it’s my own observation. I wonder what the answer is. What will give kids more autonomy and security to play?

No, that’s not a line from the Koran. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for years, ever since the rise of Ritalin. Dr. Dawg has a series of posts this week on the drugging of children into obedience. While he may not necessarily agree with the language I use, Dawg is from a much earlier generation than I am, and will probably recognize a lot of what I’m saying here.

First, they came for the strap, and I did not speak out, because I myself had never been strapped. Teachers were no longer given any power to deal with unruly and sometimes violent behavior in the classroom.

Then they came for the mothers, and I did not speak out, for I have no mother. Child rearing became a second level priority behind making money. Mother had every right to be a man, if she so desired, so she worked long hours, came home tired, fed the kids pre-packaged meals and ignored them. She sat them in front of the television instead of reading to them or chatting about the day.

Then they came for the fathers, and I did not speak out, for I have no father. When mother became a working man, father went out to find a more feminine woman to share his bed with. Divorce became the rule, instead of the exception. Children were shuffled between homes, with parents each vying to be the best loved in their game of emotional tug of war. The rod was spared, and the child was spoiled.

Then they came for our innocence, and I did not speak out, for I was born in sin. It became dangerous to let our children out to play in the street, because of the specter of the pedophile. News reports and movies, after-school specials and magazine articles all served to enforce the idea that there was a pervert behind every tree. Our kids should stay cocooned in the house, playing video games, instead of expending natural childhood energy in the park or at the baseball diamond (after all, was the baseball coach not also a sex offender?).

Then they came for the belt, and I did not speak out, for I was never belted. Spanking became verboten. Parents who once told teachers to give up the strap - that discipline was a parents’ job - were now themselves handing that right over to a bureaucrat.

Finally, they came for the sanity, and I could not speak out, for I was mad. Children were diagnosed with disorders, and drugged until they became glassy-eyed, obedient, drooling retards. The pills now performed the duties that parents and exercise and school play once performed.

Update: As if to prove my point, here are two articles from the Daily Mail, just posted to their website:

Parents’ safety fears keeping children indoors

European human rights body calls on Britain to introduce total ban on smacking

And we all see how wonderful British children have turned out…

Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) gave a speech on the senate floor yesterday to push for “Rosa’s Law”. Rosa’s law is a piece of legislation that mandate the phrase “mentally disabled” be used in place of “mentally retarded” when referring to such citizens on health and education paperwork.

“In changing the language, we believe it will be the start of new attitudes towards people with intellectual disabilities.”

-

This madness must end. America is in the middle of two strenuous wars, and we have an economy on the brink of total collapse, yet we have a senator who seems preoccupied with the use of a certain descriptor used in government documentation. Yet again, another bleeding heart Democrat who is more concerned with feeling good, rather than doing good for the nation as a whole.

Now, before I get chastised for being heartless by those who would accuse me of standing in the way of a little girl’s supposed happiness, I would like to disclose the following:

I am physically disabled. I have Cerebral Palsy, which prevents me from walking without the assistance of an orthopedic device or another person. I have been called many things, such as “disabled”, “differently-abled”, “handicapped”, “handi-capable”, “crippled”, and a few other words along the way that can’t be shared here.

Guess what?

In spite of all the labels that have been assigned to me and others like me, one thing has remained constant:

My condition has never changed. People need to learn that while words do have meaning, which is important, context is also a key component in this equation. For instance, “retard” means to slow or hinder. It does not mean “stupid”, and the modifiers “mental” or “mentally” refers to the type of impediment. It is not, in and of itself, an attempt at ridicule or character assassination. Referring to someone as “mentally retarded” in official paperwork is not the same as yelling it in anger toward the person who cut you off at the intersection. It just isn’t. The words have a benign meaning. It’s the context in which they are used that can change them.

Quite frankly, when one looks at this objectively, this proposed law is nothing more than a time wasting exercise by those in our legislature, which will change nothing, except maybe making a few self-loathers feel better about themselves.

For the Record, the namesake of this legislation, Rosa Marcellino, has Down’s syndrome. She is, for all intents and purposes, mentally retarded. She is also 7 years old. With that in mind, one could probably say with a high degree of certainty that Rosa has no interest in official health and education paperwork at this point in her life. So, it stands to reason that this crusade was most likely started by a family member looking for attention, and Rosa is to be used as a face for it.

Honestly, that is just sad.

More than that, has anyone thought of the road this could lead us down? This is one step away from thought policing. How long will it be before legislation is introduced which will prevent us from saying certain words? It may very well be just around the corner. Such measures may never pass, but the mere possibility of such things being proposed should frighten any freedom-loving American.

We should be more concerned with today’s truly pressing matters. There are circumstances today which threaten our very way of life, yet some of our legislative officials seemed more concerned with how you feel, and more importantly, how they feel about themselves. The future of America is too important. We shouldn’t be wasting time on this drivel.

Words are just words. The only powers they have to offend are the ones that we decide to give them.

That’s right. Perhaps we could even send them to “residential schools”. You know, give them a fair shot at becoming a more integrated part of the Canadian cultural mosaic.

No? Bad idea? Unconstitutional? It will never fly?

Why not? These kids in many (if not all) cases are being taught to hate Canada, hate Canadians, hate infidels, loathe Jews, commit acts of violence…

HADITH Sahih Bukhari [4:52:176] : Allah’s Apostle said, “You (i.e. Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.’ “

How dare we discriminate on the basis of faith, belief or color of flesh? If these parents (abhorrent though they may be) can have their daughter taken away for learning and espousing their belief system, then certainly all children raised in Muslim homes are in danger.

Disagree? Why?

In the UK, a young boy aged just 13 years old became a father via his 15 year old girlfriend. Well, at least they think he’s the father. It could be one of the other six guys she was shagging.

To add insult to grievous injury, parents are now being told by leaders of Britain´s Department of Children, Schools and Family that they shouldn’t try to instill sexual values in their children. Instead they should “NOT tell their children what is ‘right or wrong’ about having sex,” but simply serve up information about methods of contraception.

It’s as if Britain has given up on its kids as kids. They are sexualized little adults now, running around the Isles humping and breeding like bunnies.

However, Britain’s shoulder shrugging where child sexuality is concerned isn’t consistent. And that’s what bugs me.

A 15-year-old schoolgirl earned almost £100,000 a year working as a high-class prostitute, it was revealed yesterday.

By day the teenager attended classes but at night she was regularly paid hundreds of pounds for sex.

The girl, who cannot be identified because of her age, is believed to have been working for an escort agency based in Newcastle.

She lied about her age before going on to earn £1,700 a week, meeting dozens of men on school nights and at the weekend.

Her double life was exposed in November when a suspicious teacher searched her schoolbag and found condoms, a card with the name of her pimp and details of the agency she worked for.

The school alerted police and officers later searched the £200,000 family home in South Tyneside, finding £8,060 in cash hidden in the loft, a court heard.

She obviously comes from a decent family, à la Amy Fisher. She keeps up with schoolwork and isn’t a bad child in the sense we know. But she’s underage - an innocent.

Most of you, my readers, know of my past in the sex industry. What you don’t know is that in my teen years, I was using that same entrepreneurial spirit to get what I wanted. It wasn’t cash, but there was definitely a barter system in place. I’ll give you this if you give me that. It’s actually how I passed math. I looked after my body and my sexual health, never got pregnant, never sat around popping out illegitimate brats in a council estate on the taxpayer dime.

So was I an innocent? Or was I sexualized at a young age? I think we all know the answer to that one.

So from an objective perspective, knowing what we know of the way Britain is encouraging its children to hump indiscriminately, what did this 15 year old girl do that was so bad? Was it that she didn’t get knocked up and collect welfare? Was it that she may not have been a victim at all? I sure wasn’t. She followed the rules: used condoms, kept up with her “real life”… the only thing she did wrong was to not depend on the state or cry victimhood.

Britain needs to decide whose side it’s on when it comes to kids and sex. Because right now, their message is more than a little mixed.

N.S. mom given probation for improperly dressing baby for cold

If she were one of Canada’s protected and exalted natives and had actually allowed her babies to freeze to death in the snow, she would have been given a sentencing circle and a new feather.

She is a drunk though, so she’ll be chucked into rehab. Hmmm… do our sterling natives ever get chucked into The Betty? Or is getting wasted and stupid/violent just part of the “culture”?

Funny, I never remember my grandfather or his brothers even having a beer. What’s up with that? Are shiftless drunken Injuns a new phenomenon?

Anyway, back to this stupid woman.

She takes her toddler outside in sub-zero temperatures, dressed in ill-fitting pajamas.

According to one article:

“She’s as mystified as everyone else as to why she did not put the clothes on the baby,”

In both cases - that of this woman, Kerri Jean King, and that of the Saskatchewan drunken Injun, Christopher Pauchay - there’s no jail. She gets probation and rehab, and has had her daughter taken away. A good start, I’d say. But why haven’t Mr. Pauchay’s remaining children been taken into care, as well?

More double standards. Hang ‘em both.

I knew deep down the other day that my off-hand comment about peanut allergies and other designer suburban diseases in my post about bad journalism would elicit a response. Specifically, I knew that the moveon.org of the nut hunters would be out scanning the internet for heathen words like mine, which would threaten not only Little Joey with the anaphylaxis problem, but that also threaten their very belief that they should be telling anyone’s children what they can and can’t take for lunch. Seriously, with the exception of a cigar and a beer, the kids should have the right to whatever the parent packs.

But I digress. The third comment on my post was from Nutzi scold Dad Ken, telling me about his terrible wind from that piece of cheese he ate in 1973. Poor bastard. I feel sorry for him. No, not because he’s bloated, but because he has nothing else to do but scour the internet looking for comments from people like me that turn his world order on its ass.

That said, one of Kathy’s readers put is all into perspective.

So a few months ago my annoying relative with her peanut threatened hellspawn decided she was going to drum up support to make the nearby town “peanut free”. One of her acolytes wanted to know if my business would support the initiative. “Without reservation” said I. And then I thanked her for setting the precedent.

“What precedent?”

“Well, you see, I’m an alcoholic. I cannot drink it, I cannot be around it, and even having alcohol for sale where I live places me in jeopardy. My doctors will have no problem attesting to this as it’s essentially a life threatening allergy. So once you get peanuts banned, you’ve established a legal precedent for me to have all alcohol removed from [name of town]. I will get the bars closed, the liquor stores shut down, and the town declared an alcohol free zone.”

“You can’t DO that!!!” [She's almost bug-eyed -- this is the dumb @#$% who shows up at family events like baseball parties thrown for our kids with four cases of beer in the back of her SUV, because it's good for kids to see their parents getting @#%-faced and then drive home with them after they've consumed 10 beers apiece.]

“Why not? What makes peanuts so special? You don’t think there aren’t children being put at risk by alcohol? How many children have to die so you can drink a Bud on a Friday night?”

Way to fuck ‘em with their own dick.

All Canadian taxpayers are. Isn’t that wild? This year, Canada is funding a queer child porn, via my tax dollars and yours. Thanks to Blazing Cat Fur for bringing this little business venture to my attention.

At this year’s InsideOut, Toronto’s Gay & Lesbian film fest that took place in May, a movie called “Babysitting Andy” was screened.

What do you do if you’re nine and nobody will tell you what ’fellatio’ means? When Andy’s uncle and his boyfriend arrive to babysit, she corners them with a Supersoaker and they can do nothing but comply.

Well, I’m going to contact cybertips.ca and turn myself in. I urge all Canadians to do the same. Turn yourselves in and take your lumps as child pornographers.

As an aside, when Ezra prints cartoons of Mohammad, that’s a hate crime. But when the government funds child pornography, that’s “art“.

While these poor kids’ mother is hardly a brilliant parent, if, as Dawg conjectures, the rule is “teach hate, lose kids” then her capacity as a parent is not in issue one way or another. So on that basis the Khadr’s would have lost their kids the instant the authorities became aware of the jihadi views of the parents. I certainly hope Mohamed Elmasry doesn’t have kids because his political/religious views might count as hatred. Anti-Zionist? Lose your kids. Black mother in the Jane Finch corridor blaming whitey for black peoples’ problems - better watch her step. Catholics and fundamentalist who teach their children that abortion is murder and abortionists murderers…no kids for you! Environmentalists who tell their children that the people who run big corporations are killing the Earth and should go to jail…kidless.

But, and one cannot help but notice what this lame brained mum did, maybe we should set the standard higher. Perhaps the test should be that you have to actually do something like draw on your kids. (Frankly I’d start with the parents of the cringing little moppets who are stuck having their faces painted for National holidays.) For example telling your female children that they have to wear a head scarf (or a sack) or Uncle Ali will be over to behead them? Perhaps it would make sense for teachers, as soon as they see a little Muslim girl wearing the hajib to ask if Fatima really wants to wear it and to keep pushing until they are absolutely certain Fatima is not being coerced at home.

I can’t help but think there are far more dangerous parents in Canada who should never have been able to hang onto their children. But then again, that would be politically improper to say, wouldn’t it? Easier just to go after the crazy white bitch.

A 12-year old girl hasn’t yet hit puberty, but because she’s threatening to hold her breath till she turns blue, her mother and doctors will give her whatever she asks for. In this case, a sex change.

The girl is one of the youngest patients in Australia granted permission to begin a sex swap.

The court was told early intervention was needed because the child was stressed and anxious at the prospect of starting her period and had threatened self-harm.

Sounds like she needs a good spanking, followed by a talk about the birds and the bees, instead of a complete gender reassignment. First of all, the mother is afraid of her own child, and of standing up to her. Second, what ever happened to the notion of tomboy? Most girls who prefer to be boys grow up to marry boys. And what of the ones that don’t? Well, when they are 25 or whatever, they can make the decision to become boys. But not at 12.

A few things that weren’t permitted to me over the years: I could not get laser eye surgery before I was 21, because my eyes had not yet finished developing and changing. I was not permitted tubal ligation under the age of 35, in case I changed my mind (which I have done - and she may do so too). Voting. Marrying Gordie from across the street when I was 4.

Now, I may have whined and stomped my feet, or even held my breath till I turned blue, but these things just weren’t going to happen. Not unless I found an unethical quack to do them. And frankly, who wants their life in the hands of an unethical quack?

This story sounds more like failed parenting as the result of a divorce than any inherent need in the child. She’s crying out for attention, and her mother is indulging her whims. Why not just get her a pony and be done with it? Or better yet: Instead of giving her everything her confused little heart desires, why not give her some discipline and some boundaries?

H/t: Kathy

Are your children happy? In one of the grossest displays of nanny-statism, British schools are introducing “happiness tests” for children as young as four years old.

Children as young as four are to take “happiness tests” in a controversial drive to force schools to improve the well-being of pupils, it has emerged.

Thousands of youngsters are expected to be quizzed on whether they are feeling optimistic, confident, loved and interested in other people.

They will be set questionnaires similar to the self-help quizzes found in women’s magazines to check they are “feeling good about myself” and “dealing with problems well”.

Tellingly, the article does not advise what happens if a child is deemed “unhappy”. I assume the Labour-government thought-police will saunter in to remove the child from his unhappy environment and send him to a Labour Youth training and indoctrination camp. Chilling.

The Government’s £20million emotional literacy initiative encourages activities such as “worry boxes”, where pupils write down their anxieties and post them into a box, and “emotional barometers”,

If I were still paying taxes in Britain, I’d want my money back.