Monday, April 25, 2016
Television and Violence
link
JAMA, June 10, 1992--Vol 267, No. 22
Special Communication
Television and Violence
The Scale of the Problem and Where to Go From Here
Brandon S. Centerwall, MD, MPH
IN 1975, Rothenberg's Special Communication in JAMA, "Effect of Television Violence on Children and Youth," first alerted the medical community to the deforming effects the viewing of television violence has on normal child development, increasing levels of physical aggressiveness and violence.1 In response to physicians' concerns sparked by Rothenberg's communication, the 1976 American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates passed Resolution 38: "The House declares TV violence threatens the health and welfare of young Americans, commits itself to remedial actions with interested parties, and encourages opposition to TV programs containing violence and to their sponsors."2
Other professional organizations have since come to a similar conclusion, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association. In light of recent research findings, in 1990 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement: "Pediatricians should advise parents to limit their children's television viewing to 1 to 2 hours per day." Rothenberg's communication was largely based on the findings of the 1968 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence5 and the 1972 Surgeon General's report, Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence.6Those findings were updated and reinforced by the 1982 report of the National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, again documenting a broad consensus in the scientific literature that exposure to television violence increases children's physical aggressiveness.7 Each of these governmental inquiries necessarily left open the question of whether this increase in children's physical aggressiveness would later lead to increased rates of violence. Although there had been dozens of laboratory investigations and short-term field studies (3 months or less), few long-term field studies (2 years or more) had been completed and reported. Since the 1982 National Institute of Mental Health report, long-term field studies have come into their own, some 20 having now been published.8
In my commentary, I discuss television's effects within the context of normal child development; give an overview of natural exposure to television as a cause of aggression and violence; summarize my own research findings on television as a cause of violence; and suggest a course of action....
All Canadian and US studies of the effect of prolonged childhood exposure to television (2 years or more) demonstrate a positive relationship between earlier exposure to television and later physical aggressiveness, although not all studies reach statistical significance.8The critical period of exposure to television is preadolescent childhood. Later variations in exposure, in adolescence and adulthood, do not exert any additional effect.23,24 However, the aggression-enhancing effect of exposure to television is chronic, extending into later adolescence and adulthood.8,25 This implies that any interventions should be designed for children and their caregivers rather than for the general adult population....
Thursday, April 14, 2016
What's Happening to American Democracy?
link
I am not for Trump at all unless it comes down to him or Hillary. Cruz is the most Constitutional, intelligent, genuinely conservative, courageous and top integrity person right now.
But this entire report is SO slanted, SO distorted, SO unfair that it is sickening. Al Jazeera, are you in cahoots with Bill Moyers, DemocracyNow!, and Occupy Democrats?
Brookings Institute. What about Hoover Inst., Cato Inst., or American Enterprise Inst.?
"Citizen's United v. FEC" did not change the rules. The case overturned the unConstitutional "rules" of the administrative state that denied Free Speech to citizens who combined to express political opinions. Those "rules" were illegal. The case was brought by Hillary Clinton against a well-made and damning documentary made exposing her background by Citizens United. CU had complained to FEC about Michael Moore's hit piece "911" released to hurt the Bush campaign right before the 2004 election. FEC through out their case. Then they decided, "If they can do that to us then we can do that to them."
They did in 2008 and Hillary went ballistic, as she is wont to do. FEC sided with Hillary this time and had to be chastised, corrected, punished, and humiliated by the Supreme Court's affirmation of Free Speech.
They did in 2008 and Hillary went ballistic, as she is wont to do. FEC sided with Hillary this time and had to be chastised, corrected, punished, and humiliated by the Supreme Court's affirmation of Free Speech.
It sure hurt the Democrats and--according to this report--the Republicans, too. So the case reduced the ability of party bosses to control the debate and the distribution of funds and advocacy advertising. Poor babies! This is a GREAT thing.
The 1965 Selma voting repression was entirely the work of DEMOCRAT elected and party officials. It is totally a piece with other Democrat Party policies like the Dred Scott decision, the unprovoked attack on Ft. Sumter, the Civil War, the murder of Lincoln, voting rights violations during Reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynching, the KKK, military segregation, school segregation, vagrancy ordinances, framing blacks and renting them out for prisoner labor, the criminalization of interracial marriage, segregated water fountains and men's rooms in FDR's Pentagon, and every other social program destroying, hobbling, and killing the black communities and family. How does this reporter get to blame that on Republicans? He must have believed the curriculum in the Government Schools.
Citing "Republican" Gerrymandering, the reporter decries problems with Latino representation in Texas, but just a paragraph earlier, he opines that requiring proof of citizenship to vote is "racist." Gerrymandering has been used to ghettofy voting districts to ensure black, latino, Jewish, Italian, Irish, Greek, Russian, Puerto Rican elected officials since Gerry was a Founding Father--about 100 years before any Republican Party! It is part of the game, but needs to be even-handedly reformed.
Armageddon is a Republican (Karl Rove) scare tactic? Is that worse than Global Warming as a Democrat (AlGore) scare tactic?
Harry Reid's bogiemen, The Billionaire Koch Brothers are demonized once again in the piece while the Billionaires George Soros, Barbra Streisand, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen, AFL-CIO, Bill Gates, Jon Corzine, Robert Rubin, General Electric, Alec Baldwin, Steven Spielberg, Vernon Jordan, Michael Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton, Goldman Sachs, Hugh Hefner all get a free pass?
Stanley Greenberg is an honest expert? At least he has the decency, or carelessness, to display a Democrat donkey behind him signalling that he is a Democrat mouthpiece, spin doctor, and one-sided propagandist.
This story is a great example of crooked, advocacy "journalism," propaganda really, omitting essential facts and elements, and giving false ammunition to demagogues and charlatans on the Left. Articles like THIS are what is wrong with the US political system. And, we are NOT a democracy. We are a representative republic. Learn civics much?
Flame away, my fellow Americans.
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Putin Say Panama Papers are a US Plot to Destabilize Countries
First to go is the PM of Iceland.
link
My View:
The US is the only nation known that imposes income tax obligations on all Americans irrespective of their residence. British, German, French, Swiss, Lebanese citizens pay no tax on their overseas income or employment. But a US citizen employed in Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai, Panama, or Paris, a child of a foreign US missionary in China, a US doctor with Doctors without Borders, a US person that owns a tourist retreat, restaurant, hotel, or American Bar in Casablanca must file and pay US taxes. Every year every US Embassy hosts visits by IRS agents (paid for with tax dollars) to get resident Americans to file and pay income taxes.
US Treasury has bullied foreign financial institutions with Draconian, punitive fines to disclose identities and details of the accounts of US citizens resident outside the US. What country does that? This is not about drug smugglers, blood diamonds, or white slavery. This is about TAXES, and the US bully asserts extraterritorial jurisdiction whenever and however it can.
Russian claims that this leak comes from US Intelligence to destabilize Russia might have veracity. Treasury is part of the Intelligence Community which has means to hack these servers. Hillary thought she could destroy her email evidence with a re-format, but Wikileaks could find them elsewhere and the FBI has them now. Treasury has a ruthless agenda with no oversight.
This International Registry proposal is financial Big Brother on the scale of One World Government. Shell companies today, your credit card transactions, phone calls, and grocery lists tomorrow. Snowden is a hero.
Taxation is Theft.
https://youtu.be/lA_Yl_JCdFg
https://youtu.be/MGWNg-pCiSE
https://youtu.be/BKZtHvwzEfw
https://youtu.be/JEagFTVzIBs
https://youtu.be/0ne16Le-hq4
Try this freedom lovers: http://tinyurl.com/NoSpies33
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Manchester Guardian take on Panama Papers
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Huge leak reveals how the powerful exploit secretive tax regimes – and widen the gulf between rich and poor
They are known as the CDOTs – the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories – island states such as the Caymans and the British Virgin Islands.
On maps they appear no bigger than a full stop, but each year billions of dollars in capital sail into the global banking system along the warm currents of the Caribbean.
Economists are charting an unrelenting, escalating transfer of wealth, enabled by the offshore system, often from the very poorest to the very richest nations.
The money is sometimes spent in obvious ways – funding super-yachts, private jets, fine art auctions and, of course, property. But there is the unseen damage. It harms the ecology of vibrant cities by making them unaffordable to ordinary people.
The cash is also a shot in the arm to the financial system. Lawfully injected into London hedge funds and Wall Street trading rooms, it funds high-stakes investments and, in the good years, big bonus pools.
The movement of this offshore money is an industry made possible in part by the secrecy on sale in tax havens, led by the UK’s substantial network of offshore enclaves. The Panama Papers lift the veil on how this world works – and the people who use it.
While much of the leaked material will remain private, there are compelling reasons for publishing some of the data. The documents reveal a huge breadth of unseen activity.
At one end of this spectrum, the papers simply reveal the vast number of people who use offshore to protect their wealth. There is nothing unlawful about doing this. It is not illegal to be a director, shareholder or beneficial owner – the real owner, even though their name may not appear on the shareholder register – of an offshore company. But the financial advantages these structures provide are not generally available to the ordinary taxpayer.
Since the 2008 crash, there has been a clamour for everyone to pay a fair share of the tax burden.
Unsurprisingly, the public is questioning – perhaps more than ever – whether a system that provides advantages only to the wealthy is immoral. And the political climate that once tolerated this inequality has changed decisively.
At the other end of this spectrum there is, frankly, what could be described as offshore pandemonium.
In the files we have found evidence of Russian banks providing slush funds for President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle; assets belonging to 12 country leaders, including the leaders of Iceland, Pakistan and Ukraine; companies connected to more than 140 senior politicians, their friends and relatives, and to some 22 people subject to sanctions for supporting regimes in North Korea, Syria, Russia and Zimbabwe; the proceeds of crimes, including Britain’s infamous Brink’s-Mat gold robbery; and enough art hidden in private collections to fill a public gallery.
Just as importantly, we will shine a spotlight on the role of the facilitators: the well-paid lawyers, accountants and private bankers in financial centres such as London and Geneva, whose expertise lies in moving money offshore.
Behaviour revealed in the Panama Papers highlights the failures of regulatory regimes that were either oblivious to, or unwilling to act against, Mossack Fonseca, the law firm from whose database the documents have been leaked.
Yet at least one underling in the firm recognised the jeopardy. He emailed the head office in Panama to ask: “Is there any kind of indemnity that stop[s] us as employees of Mossack Fonseca from being prosecuted? We are getting a bit worried …”
The disclosures have been made possible by the biggest data leak in history – 11.5m documents detailing the activities of more than 200,000 offshore companies, about two-thirds of the total incorporated by Mossack Fonseca.
Obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with other media organisations, the files are a mine of emails, shareholder registers, bank statements, internal reports, passport scans and company certificates.
Though the source of the leak is not known to the Guardian, there can be no doubt as to the files’ authenticity – and potential impact.
The offshore industry may say there are good reasons for sheltering assets in tax havens. Big corporations often argue they have a duty to their shareholders to pay as little tax as is legal. But they are swimming against the tide.
Research group Global Financial Integrity puts the figure for illicit financial outflows from developing countries at $1tn a year and growing.
No wonder then that some world leaders are now taking a stand.
In June 2013, at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland, Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, promised to fight the “scourge of tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance”, with transparency, in particular “transparency about who owns which companies”.
World leaders, including Barack Obama, signed up to the plan, which stated: “Companies should know who really owns them and tax collectors and law enforcers should be able to obtain this information easily.”
The details from the Panama Papers will contribute to an important public debate – not just in the UK but across the world – about what offshore activity can be tolerated, and what should not.
Can you have transparency if some activities are kept secret, and others not? And who makes that judgment? These are huge questions that governments have not been able to answer.
In May, the UK is planning to host an anti-corruption summit. Offshore tax havens are to be discussed – and after the Panama Papers disclosures they are likely to be top of the agenda.
Panama Papers reporting team: Juliette Garside, Luke Harding, Holly Watt, David Pegg, Helena Bengtsson, Simon Bowers, Owen Gibson and Nick Hopkins
Saturday, April 02, 2016
Friday, April 01, 2016
The Failure of Modern Public Education
THE PSYCHOPATHIC SCHOOL
John Taylor Gatto
He came to the conclusion that the government education system is broken, unfixable, and he was quitting. He then wrote the book, The Underground History of American Education, a classic on the tragedy happening in American education. He documents the takeover by socialist, centralized-government people who were not interested in honest education, but in mind-control. (On that subject, see also two books by Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary? and NEA: Trojan Horse in American Educationlink
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.
Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.
Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.
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Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.
But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:
- Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.
- According to recent reports children watch 55 hours of television a week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.
- My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours.
- During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space.
It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice.
- That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours per week.
But these activities are just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it.
Get The Book!
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor GattoFor Gatto's superb The Underground History of American Education, call The Odysseus Group, in NYC, 212 529-9397.
Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson.
| ©Gene Zimmer 1999 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED |
Walking Targets
eBook (PDF), 301 Pages
Price: $7.95
America gave up the three R's and got back the three I's: ignorance, illiteracy, and illegitimacy.
Parents of the postwar years wanted a “kinder and gentler nation.” Americans were vulnerable to the arguments of behavioral psychologists. These came at them through articles and books touting appealing but unworkable philosophies of child management that denounced adult guidance and leadership. These messages were later repeated through colleges of education in the form of courses in "educational psychology.''
Today’s schools promote success without achievement, ethics without religion, and character without morals. Clinical-sounding labels such as “emotionally handicapped” may make failure more palatable. They certainly make it more permanent.
"As you may be aware, data-mining is presented to the public as strictly for security purposes. Not exactly: These screening instruments, which I first exposed as “psychographics,” are calculated to predict attitudes through invasive surveys and questionnaires masquerading as “tests” and, if possible, to modify opinions early on via left-wing school curriculum, “enrichment” activities and textbooks.
"In 2003, the Education Department, among others, continued to deny that it was collecting, sharing and storing psychological (“politically sensitive”) data on schoolchildren and families. Today, federal agencies actually brag about their data-collection activities — the same psychological evaluations and lesson plans I described in my 1998 book. With new legislation recently passed, there is nothing now to stop these assessments of political correctness, under the cover of "mental health," from landing on the desktops of company executives, law enforcement agencies or university admissions officers. This gives new meaning to the term "career screening," and it can prevent your child, whatever his or her grades, from aspiring to a position of leadership or influence."
"For the past decade students have had to plow through not only quasi-tests called "assessments," featuring all sorts of questions about their parents and home life, but a multitude of intimate and personal surveys, nearly all of them computerized, as part of their class work. Where do you think newspapers get statistics like "12% of students say they have had intercourse by age 15," or smoked a joint in the last 6 months, or dislike their parents?
"But, of course, these responses are anonymous, you say.
"Dream on. Surreptitious "slugging," "bar-coding," "sticky-labeling," and "embedding identifiers": All these techniques, and more, are described at length in the testing contracts and literature, should anyone bother to read them.
"Children have always been the consummate sources of data, notoriously undiscerning about the kinds of information they disclose. Like all computerized facts and figures, youngsters' responses can be cross-matched with everything from medical and health insurance records to credit card transactions. But no legislation or guidelines have emerged from our hallowed regulative bodies to sufficiently put the brakes on the tremendous upswing of such activity over the past two decades. The 80s and 90s were spent largely in denial. If anything, our leaders made it worse by swallowing malarkey about the supposed benefits of mental health profiling, personality inventories and behavioral screening - to identify potential troublemakers and ensure public safety. Society's reward? More Columbine-like atrocities - and a near-perfect political weapon, now neatly in place."
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