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When A Public School Becomes the Bully
Jason Bedrick
We expect our schools to keep our children safe from bullies. But what should parents do when their assigned government school becomes the bully?
That’s what happened to the parents of Eileen Parkman, a Hawaiian second-grader who courageously stood up to several fifth-grade boys who were kicking and stomping a defenseless autistic child as he was curled up in the fetal position. The bullies then set their sights on Eileen, whom they threw to the ground and stepped on. The Maui Autism Center gave her an award for her bravery, but the boys continued to hit and kick her and throw balls at her face on several subsequent occasions. School officials at Kamali’i Elementary in Maui were apparently unable to stop the bullying, so Eileen’s parents decided to pull her out of the dangerous environment.
That’s when the school officials became bullies themselves:
It took Sean Parkman a while to remove Eileen from enrollment at Kamali’i. After the first incident, he was told the situation would be remedied, he said. But when Eileen endured more retaliation, Parkman said he received no help from school officials. He and his mother offered to help serve as school field monitors, but they were turned away, he said. Parkman said school officials told him that if he pulled Eileen from the school, then officials would report him to Child Protective Services because he could be violating school attendance policies. So, he held off. But after taking Eileen to doctors several times after getting beaten, doctors warned Parkman that Eileen was not safe. He then removed her from the school.
In other words, the school officials gave the Parkmans an untenable choice: keep your daughter in an unsafe environment, or men with guns might come take your daughter away. After a few trips to the doctors, the Parkmans decided to risk the possibility of the latter rather than have their daughter continue to face the certainty of the former.
It’s impossible to know why exactly the school officials behaved as they did—they clammed up when reporters started asking questions—but it would not be surprising if the officials were at least partly motivated by the state’s school funding formula, which allocates money based partially on enrollment. Fewer students mean fewer dollars. If they can’t please parents who want to leave, school officials can threaten them with a parent’s worst nightmare.
If Hawaii had had a school choice program, most of the grief following the initial incident could have been avoided. If the school officials knew that the parents had other options, they would have had to remedy the situation in order to keep Eileen at their school, and they would have had no recourse to threats. Fortunately, the Parkmans had the resources to provide a tutor for their daughter, but many families don’t have that option. Discussions of school choice often revolve around academic performance, but there are other reasons that a family might want to choose another school and bullying is one of them.
Unfortunately, this bullying incident is far from unique. Bullying, especially of students with special needs, is abhorrently pervasive:
Sixty percent of students with disabilities reported being bullied compared to 25 percent of the general student population, according to a 2008 citation from the British Journal of Learning Support, which was cited in the 2011 report, “Walk a Mile in Their Shoes: Bullying and the Child with Special Needs.” According to the book “Insights from across Fields and around the World” (2009), only 10 studies have been conducted in the U.S. on bullying and developmental disabilities. All studies found that children with disabilities were two to three times more likely to be victims of bullying than their nondisabled peers.
School choice is not a panacea for all the challenges facing our education system, but it can mean the world to a child who can escape from her tormentors and learn in a safe environment.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Gold and Silver • China becomes world’s largest consumer of gold
Chinese gold imports double-up on a year ago as China becomes world’s largest consumer of gold
Posted on 06 February 2013 with no comments from readers China replaced India sometime last year as the world’s largest consumer of gold and gold imports to mainland China from Hong Kong are presently running at more than twice the amount recorded a year ago.
According to data produced by Bloomberg gold imports from Hong Kong jumped by 94 per cent to 834.5 tonnes in 2012 with a monthly record of 114.4 tonnes in December. China is also the world’s largest gold producer but that has not been enough to satisfy its ravenous appetite for the yellow metal.
New gold champions
It was only a year ago that gold traders in the Sharjah Old Gold Souk told ArabianMoney that their biggest buyers were the Chinese looking to get out of the US dollar (click here). Gold is also a diversification against the risk that the Chinese economic miracle will one day run out of steam and local asset bubbles deflate.
We don’t really accept the argument offered by Bloomberg that the surge in gold consumption is simply down to the fact that the Chinese are getting wealthy. GDP growth is a fraction of the advance seen in gold consumption last year.
The Chinese read the same financial pages as everybody else and want to hedge against the rising risk of a bond market crash, just like many other investors. Their central bank has been pushing for gold to be included in a new IMF super-currency.
But they do appear to have been opportunist in taking advantage of the bargain gold prices available last year, with gold off its all-time high of $1,923 set back in October the previous year. The smart money has been moving into real assets (they are also buyers of Dubai property, for example) to diversify risk and the central bank will almost certainly emerge as the biggest buyer of gold.
Undercover buyers
Chinese gold buying is inscutable and often kept hidden for as long as possible. Bloomberg’s economists have done well to collate this data now to show this major change in global gold consumption.
Where do we go from here? Will the Chinese consumption of gold double again this year? Will it impact on the gold price? Well the trend is definitely up and not down and China is likely to get its first gold ETFs this year (click here).
As we have remarked before the advent of ETF investment for gold is likely to be big news for China’s 1.3 billion population. But as it happens gold imports have already doubled in advance of the gold ETFs.
http://www.arabianmoney.net/gold-silver … r-of-gold/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Feb 06, 2013 12:45 am
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Amendment 64 Becomes Law in Colorado
By Tim Lynch
Yesterday Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed an executive order that essentially certifies the election results in that state–and that means Amendment 64, which legalizes marijuana possession for adults, is now a part of the Colorado state constitution. Following Washington state, Colorado is now the second state to change its law so as to make the recreational use of marijuana legal for adults.
This means we now have a delicate legal situation where marijuana is legal under state law, but illegal under federal law. The Justice Department is reportedly considering a legal challenge to the new state laws based upon the legal doctrine of federal supremacy. In a new Cato paper, entitled “On the Limits of Federal Supremacy,” law professor Robert Mikos argues that such state laws, and most related regulations, have not been–and cannot be–preempted by the federal government. Here’s the executive summary:
The American Constitution divides governmental power between the federal government and several state governments. In the event of a conflict between federal law and state law, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) makes it clear that state policies are subordinate to federal policies. There are, however, important limitations to the doctrine of federal supremacy.
First, there must be a valid constitutional basis for the federal policy in question. The powers of the federal government are limited and enumerated, and the president and Congress must always respect the boundary lines that the Constitution created.
Second, even in the areas where federal authorities may enact law, they may not use the states as instruments of federal governance. This anticommandeering limitation upon federal power is often overlooked, but the Supreme Court will enforce that principle in appropriate cases.
Using medical marijuana as a case study, I examine how the anti-commandeering principle protects the states’ prerogative to legalize activity that Congress bans. The federal government has banned marijuana outright, and for years federal officials have lobbied against local efforts to legalize medical use of the drug. However, an ever-growing number of states have adopted legalization measures. I explain why these state laws, and most related regulations, have not been—and cannot be—preempted by Congress. I also develop a new framework for analyzing the boundary between the proper exercise of federal supremacy and prohibited commandeering.
Although I focus on medical marijuana, the legal analysis applies to any issue pitting permissive state laws against restrictive federal regulations. Recent referenda in Colorado and Washington that legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults will likely prompt federal officials to respond by touting the supremacy of the federal ban and challenging the constitutionality of state efforts at legalization. Such state reforms should carry the day in the event of such a legal challenge.
Tomorrow, Professor Mikos will be addressing this subject here at a policy forum. Former DEA head, Asa Hutchinson, will also be here to offer his thoughts on the interplay between state and federal law and the future direction of drug policy.
Amendment 64 Becomes Law in Colorado is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Gold and Silver • Gold Becomes a Tier 1 Asset Class for Banks
Gold Becomes a Tier 1 Asset Class for Banks
TDV Golden Trader Posted on Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Misdirection by MSM as Gold Moves Towards The Banking System
Despite what the Main Stream Media (MSM) or “Financial Pundits” tell you, the gold bull market is far from over. In fact, it is just starting, in our opinion. While the misdirected financial world tell you that gold is in a bubble and it has burst, the central bankers and government organizations all know it is far from over. In fact, gold is moving towards the banking system and not away from it. We all know that many central banks are now net buyers of gold and their holdings are increasing as their need to diversify away from risky assets and foreign bonds only grows.
Central banks around the world are continuing to stock up on gold. We can now add Kazakhstan’s central bank to the grow list of bankers wanting to hold gold as a part of their currency reserve. The Kazakh central bank intends to have 20% of reserves in gold, this is up from the current 14-15% currently held. They plan to purchase 20 tonnes of gold this year, mostly from local producers. They also mentioned a few weeks ago that they would cut their Euro holding to 25 % from 30%. We can also add Kazakhstan to the growing number of central bankers which are building up gold holdings including China, Russia, Mexico, Colombia and South Korea.
The price of gold is now hitting all time highs in India, one of the biggest buyers of gold around the world. Prices have reached an all-time high of $544.74 US (Rs 30420) per 10 grams. With a slowing economy and low demand for the Indian rupee, it has been losing value lately and still remains weak. However, gold demand is still robust even at these elevated prices as investors in India still consider gold a safe haven as it counters the effects of inflation and exchange rate fluctuations.
Over the past five years, gold has provided Indian investors with a 27.19% annualized return versus a pathetic 2.67% in the equity market. This trend and move to gold has only grown in the last year. Gold assets under management by funds have increased almost 100% $1.83 billion by April 2012, last year the value was $981 million. In 2011, the gold ETFs in India saw a net inflow of $725 million. For thousands of years the Indian culture has had an affinity for gold, and that will never change, and neither will their demand for physical at elevated prices. Why? Indians understand that gold is money and a true form of saving. It’s the only way to protect assets and wealth from government theft, something the West is still learning.
Even the good ol’ USSA is starting to recognize gold as a tier one asset class. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) just issued a notice regarding a new policy proposal on how banks should revise the measurement of risk-weighted assets by implementing changes made by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) to international regulatory capital standards and by implementing aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act. Under the proposal the following assets would carry a zero percent risk weighting, notice how gold bullion is listed as the second item:
A. Zero Percent Risk-Weighted Items
The following exposures would receive a zero percent risk weight under the proposal:
?Cash;
?Gold bullion
?Claims on certain supranational entities (such as the International Monetary Fund) and certain multilateral development banking organizations
?Claims on and exposures unconditionally guaranteed by sovereign entities that meet certain criteria (as discussed below).
So regardless of what the MSM says, we continue to see more central bankers buying and hoarding gold. New proposals by government banking agencies are being introduced into the system and gold is included as a tier one asset to hold with ZERO RISK. All the signs are in place and what the MSM hasn’t been told yet is that gold is coming back into the banking system.
We are in a world where currency wars are being fought daily, and as the system continues to collapse under its own weight of paper printing, gold will be the go to asset and possibly the last man standing. Don’t be fooled by what the MSM says, they rarely know what they are talking about and are paid to misdirect the puppets. Gold is here to stay.
European Capital Controls and a Flight to Safety
The Greek Elections are over and the pro-bailout New Democracy party won with approximately 29.7% of the vote. By winning the popular vote, they were given a 50-seat bonus. This combined with the support of the Pasok Socialist (who took 12.3% of the vote), will have 162 seats in the 300 seat parliament. Combined, they have the ability to pass government policy with a majority vote, so they can now rig policy for keeping with the Euro.
The Euro experiment may have been saved from breaking up for now, but the bailouts will continue for the foreseeable future. Since the socialists are realizing that austerity is not working, a new movement and calls for a policy of growth are afoot. We can expect lots more money printing coming out of Europe now and in the foreseeable future. While in a normal world that would hurt the Euro, the markets relief that the Euro will not collapse immediately should stop the downward pressure on the Euro. In fact, we could see a slight bounce off the recent lows from this news, but I suspect that will be short lived. None of the problems have been addressed and printing money to fund the bailout will still be the cure central bankers will prescribe to the Euro financial system mess.
Capital controls are already in place within Euroland and this trend is growing quickly as the hot days of summer go on. Recently, major Italian banks have given notice that customer’s accounts would be frozen for one month because of financial difficulties. This caught many bank customers off guard and completely unaware that they would not have access to their funds. This should not be startling news for TDV subscribers as we have been warning for months that capital controls are coming and Europe is fast out of the gates in implementation. For weeks, Europe has been planning bank withdrawal restriction to deal with Greece exit, the only one that hasn’t told you about it is the MSM.
Recently, a businessman was stopped at the Swiss border with £1.6m worth of gold in his car only to have it confiscated by the authorities and was subsequently charged with smuggling. Italians know very well that the trend of confiscation by the “Mafia” government has only grown recently. They have been exporting gold to Switzerland and this trend has grown 35% year over year in February 2012. About 120 tonnes of gold have left Italian boarder in 2011, that is up 65% from 2010. The Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has been promising a crackdown on tax evasion as he continues to fight the trend of people wanting to avoid paying extortion fees (taxes). It was estimated that more than £96 billion [€119.6bn] in taxes were dodged in Italy during 2009.
As much as we like gold as an investment and store of wealth, you must take the necessary precaution of protecting your gold from confiscation. As desperate European governments continue to steal your wealth via inflation and outright theft, you must create a plan of protecting your gold. Keeping it close at hand where only you have access to it is the first step.
Secondly, you should consider diversifying your precious metals holding internationally, which seems to be more difficult as capital controls in Euroland become stricter. At TDV, we saw this trend coming a long time ago and have been warning subscribers to plan ahead. Earlier this year, we published a 100 page report on how to diversify and internationalize your precious metals holding called Getting Your Gold Out Of Dodge (GYGOOD). If you live in Europe and are interested in protecting your precious metals, this report is something you should consider getting right away; your time to act may be limited by your own government.
Gold Update
The price of gold is still consolidating. The price needs to stay above support at the 50 dma of $1615. If this support holds, then it could move toward resistance at $1675 and the 200 dma. A break below $1610 could trigger selling and the price could still see one more wave of selling to test support at $1530 or slightly lower again. If we do get one more wave of selling, I suggest you consider backing up the truck as this could be that last time we see prices this low, possibly forever.
http://www.tdvgoldentrader.com/blog/201 … banks.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Jun 22, 2012 9:34 pm
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Police State • Obama Becomes O’mobba
March 28, 2012
Obama Becomes O’mobba
By James Lewis
In another historic first, President Obama’s backers are actively whipping up mobs. Not just the Occupoopers of Wall Street, but also Twitter mobs, Facebook mobs, and flash mobs.
Every active conservative should spend some time on social media sites to see liberals whipping each other into a frenzy. Know your enemy — and if you don’t like the word "enemy" (I don’t), consider what Saul Alinsky calls you. You may not consider yourself their enemy, but that’s how they think about you. Ignore it at your peril.
The Obama campaign loves to boast about its use of Facebook and Twitter to push The One over the top last time. With Facebook claiming 700 million members, the potential for political mayhem is huge.
This is David Axelrod’s specialty of astroturfing. Obama has become O’mobba: he is the first president in history to give his official public blessing to "idealistic" anti-capitalist mobs.
There is no doubt that these organized "spontaneous" mobs will be used in the election campaign. Be prepared to face nasty, vicious lowbrow mobs with iPhones and iPads.
The poopers last week dumped a tub full of their diapers’ products in a Chase ATM vestibule in Lower Manhattan. They have finally discovered their bottom line.
They are now talking about the revolutionary necessity for violence. An Occumobster from Austin, TX recently wrote to USA Today promising to "take up … guns and storm Wall Street and our nation’s capitals." Don’t doubt that this is a deliberate, purposeful campaign, designed to frighten and dehumanize normal people (like Tea Party members) in order to keep the radical left in power.
That USA Today letter comes from Richlatte, a fitting moniker for a rich, latte-drinking thirty-something kid who has decided to wage war on productive Americans. We have millions of spoiled-rotten offspring of the rich, young and old, and they will be bringing hard muscle to bear on Obama’s election campaign. After all, Bill Ayers is the son of a millionaire. The Wall Street Occupy kids were not able to utter a single coherent word to explain their "idealistic" campaign; nobody had scripted them. "What are we here for? I dunno! Somebody tweeted at me on my iPad. Police brutality! Eff the Pigs!" It was Radical Chic turned into Radical Sick.
In fact, Occupoopers are the first Obama mobs, set up by billionaire-funded outfits like The Ruckus Society.
"Spontaneous demonstrations" is what communist agitators used to whip up attacks against their scapegoats, from Moscow to London. They were the storm troopers of the left, and they still are.
The discredited old "communist agitator" has now been laundered into the noble "community organizer." The first communist agitator was Karl Marx, a child of Prussian wealth. David Axelrod made his PR millions by organizing phony grassroots campaigns. The coming year will see astroturfed flash mobs harassing decent and honorable Americans for their political beliefs.
Take a good look at the Ruckus Society website, because you will see them again, smashing windows and fighting cops wherever media cameras gather. These are the kids of the powerful starting their own political careers, the way John Kerry did during Vietnam by accusing his Navy Swift Boat buddies of committing war crimes.
It’s the career path for leftist demagogues from Hitler to Lenin. Germany’s biggest Green politician, Joschka Fischer, started out in 1968 as a black-clad anarchist fighting cops in the streets of Frankfurt, where one cop was killed. It’s a career path for these people. This stuff goes back to the mob demagogues of Greece and Rome, as described by Plato and staged by Shakespeare.
Technology changes, but human nature stays the same. Which is why the U.S. Constitution is not "out of date." The Constitution is designed precisely to deal with mobs and their demagogues. Obama is not new. He is old, old, old. The Founders knew about scores of Obamas, from Napoleon to Oliver Cromwell, all the way back to the Caesars. The world has always been bubbling over with Obamas and their cults.
Bill Ayers was the son of a millionaire; Penny Pritzker and her Stalinist brother come from billionaire stock; Schwartz Györgyi, aka George Soros, is one of the richest billionaires in the world, and he loves to stir up revolutionary fervor among the brain-dead suckers of the left. These are the wealthiest and most politically connected people playing phony Marxist revolution. Soros is not against the rich; he is himself the richest of the rich, agitating against his biggest competitors, the other rich, the ones who are trying to become as rich as he is.
These people are big Obama donors, making billions of dollars from Obama’s whacky "energy" schemes — from Solyndra to the electric car, the green economy, the Chicago Climate Exchange, windmill farms to stop nonexistent global warming, and the campaign against U.S. oil-drilling. The Saudis are the biggest beneficiaries of Obama’s sabotage of domestic oil, which keeps the oil monopoly in the hands of OPEC. Al Gore, who hates oil and coal, is the bloated heir to an Occidental Petroleum stock. Re-electing Obama will keep their Crony Capitalist gravy train chugging along. The Wall Street sucker mobs are their obedient tool.
It’s telling that the Occupy mobs started pooping all over Wall Street at the very time the NYSE was going online. They were protesting brick and mortar, precisely when the stock exchanges were moving into the cloud. They could have been picketing Amazon.com. This was pure agitprop symbolism. Without eager media applause, these kids would be pooping at Mom’s on the Upper West Side.
Crony capitalists use coercive socialism to keep down their rivals, using the power of government and the controlled media. In Hitler’s time, it was called "syndicalism," the alliance of the really rich with rabble-rousing demagogues. Europe today comes very close to syndicalism. There’s nothing "progressive" about it.
Capitalists like Steve Jobs are the real revolutionaries. Demagogues hop on the gravy train to squeeze capitalist inventions for their own benefit. Today they will use Google to abolish your privacy and brainwash your children. If Obama gets re-elected, you can kiss web privacy and free speech goodbye.
Obama’s radical friends in Hyde Park are millionaires. Michelle Obama’s biggest campaign is against poor kids who eat too many McDonald’s hamburgers. Think about that. For the first time in history, "the poor" are the people who eat too much. When the Obamas talk about "the poor," the only individuals they can think of are the ones who can’t afford arrugula. Damn that capitalism!
Communists are never workers or peasants; they are always café intellectuals who spend their lives feeling envious and enraged, ready to terrorize productive people to fuel their rise to power.
The Obamas could have used the American presidency to do something about true misery and poverty, hunger, violence, African slavery, and genocide. They haven’t taken even a single step to solve the disaster of inner-city education. It isn’t trendy enough. It won’t help Obama’s career. He needs black rage to run again. If you’re a Democrat, you’re not supposed to talk about women and children living in slavery in Muslim households around the world, under threat of "honor killing" if they try to escape. By empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s mullahcracy, Obama is imprisoning millions of women. The Arab Spring is the sound of millions of jail cell doors being slammed on hundreds of millions of women, children, and yes, men who want to live free. As for the plight of blacks domestically, it is now worse than before Obama’s election.
Those facts should be obvious to a child of six, but it’s those funny prisms the left wear over their eyes that make it impossible to see straight.
Here is how the first big "anti-colonialist," VI Lenin, ran his mobs:
Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. …
1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain from them.
4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks".
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
Find some truly hard people.
Mob manipulation is always the same.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/ … z1qOBmPmmf
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Mar 28, 2012 12:10 am
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