Speak Up When Pro-Child Politics Are Attacked as Anti-Parent

Here we go again. Families, child-rearing and home education publicly
stereotyped as conservative extremism and anti-human rights, sigh. If
you parent and/or educate children and don’t fit this stereotype, make
your voice heard too. Don’t let this define your principles.

Parental rights rally on Washington planned: Your stories needed!
November 11, 11:01 AM
by Lynda Ackert

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations on the 20th of November 1989. As part of a celebration, internationalists backing this UN Convention have
declared November 20th of this year as ‘Children’s Day.’

In response, ParentalRights dot org will rally in Washington, D.C. on that day. The rally will be held at the U.S. Capitol from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., on the East Lawn across from the Rayburn House Office building.

Speakers during the rally will include Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Sen. Jim
DeMint, the lead sponsors of the Parental Rights Amendment; Gerard
Robinson with Black Alliance for Educational Options; William Estrada of
Homeschool Legal Defense Association; Dean and Julie Nelson of National Black Home Educators; and Steven Groves of Heritage Foundation.

Whether you homeschool or not, parental rights have been and are
continuing to be under attack.

Want your voice heard? ParentalRights.org wants to hear from you. If you have experienced any assault or threat to your parental rights, make your story known by emailing ParentalRights. . .

Homeschooling is a parental right…Let’s keep it that way!

Source: ParentalRights dot org

For more of JJ’s thoughts on the UN and this political meme setting up “parental rights” in opposition to child and human rights, start with:

Homeschool freedom fighting: It’s so not about the UN

Parental Rights and responsibilities: Parenting sex and parenthood

Latest Homeschool Freak-out from World Net Daily

Tough case: Church v State for the life of Daniel Hauser

More About Young Son’s Shakespeare Saturday

Here’s the power of story for Young Son’s Shakespeare scenes coming up this Saturday:

FALL WEAVERS FESTIVAL

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

10AM – 4PM

MILLSTONE PLANTATION / MILLSTONE INSTITUTE

6500 OLD MILLSTONE PLANTATION ROAD, TALLAHASSEE, FL
(off Thomasville Rd)
$5.00 Admission for Adults
Children under 12 Free

EVENTS for the DAY INCLUDE:

Seven Hills Handweavers Guild Demonstrations
Spinning, Carding, Dyeing and Weaving
Yarn and Weaving Suppliers from N. Florida and S. Georgia

Live Outdoor Theater
Selections from  A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III

Live Music – bluegrass and bagpipes!

Hands-On Activities for Children of All Ages
Weaving
Maskmaking

AND A FALL PARADE!!

Parking is Limited, Please Carpool!
Bring a picnic and blanket and enjoy the day!

Sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State,  Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

It is to be a place for the study and teaching of traditional arts and crafts, methods of farming and gardening and stewardship of the land, going all the way back to the prehistoric occupants of the land, some 12,000 years ago.

Among the areas of activity specifically listed in the Institute’s Articles of Incorporation are raising fiber producing animals — shearing, spinning, weaving — and the encouragement of fiber arts; traditional and experimental organic horticulture and agriculture, based in the philosophy of a self-contained, sustainable farm; growing and use of culinary and medicinal herbs; manufacture and repair of traditional implements, tools and furniture.

These are not meant to be exclusive, but to

Sunday Afternoon Doing Shakespeare in the Park with Llamas

The first annual weavers’ and art fall festival at Millstone Plantation happens here Saturday the 14th, and Young Son’s Summer of Shakespeare group will be reprising their Richard III all day. Today for on-site rehearsal, they had the bright, beautiful, breezy lake setting all to themselves — except for the resident llamas, who seem to just love the Bard and wanted to be right in the thick of the action.

It was glorious.

Beef Jerky Action Cam??

I am not making this up. Here I am, watching the big college football game of the week on tv — LSU v Alabama — suddenly wondering how I can be so riveted by any meme that involves a “beef jerky action cam!”

Pure Dead Brilliant — Jon Stewart Channels Glenn Beck

more about "Pure Dead Brilliant — Jon Stewart Ch…", posted with vodpod

Rice Krispies No Health Food, Much Less Medicine Magic

And that goes for Cocoa Krispies too, no matter what outrageous corporate “colors” the First Amendment might hold its nose and permit to be inflicted upon our evermore-poorly educated populace.

Rice Krispies Are No Substitute For Swine Flu Vaccine:

Cereal giant Kellogg said it’s dropping the eyebrow-raising claim that a box of Rice Krispies or Cocoa Krispies, “Now helps support your child’s IMMUNITY.”

. . .health guru Marion Nestle of New York University: “Yes, these nutrients are involved in immunity, but I can’t think of a nutrient that isn’t involved in the immune system,” she told USA Today. “. . . it’s cases like this that prove ‘in the absence of FDA action, food marketing is allowed to run rampant.’

Over the years, food makers complained that if supplements could use such claims, they could too. At first, the FDA issued warning letters to food companies using structure-function claims. It stopped after the courts ruled that food companies could make claims for the health benefits of their products on First Amendment grounds.

Now FDA says

Capitol Hill Mad Hatters Show Up for More Tea Partying

Tea Partiers Hit Capitol:

They arrived as early as 8:30 a.m., by bus, car and plane — from Bluffton, S.C., Des Moines and Dorris, Calif. — to rally with conservative lawmakers and possibly roam the halls of Congress.

“Can you hear us now!” they chanted from the foot of the Capitol, as they awaited the arrival of their heroine — [Michele] Bachmann.

“She’s very brave,” said Nancy Holmberg of Dorris.

“Palin/Bachmann 2012,” came a shout from the crowd. The crowd is also chanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s name and demanding that she come address them on the steps of the Capitol.

. . . Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) shook hands at a wall line like a presidential contender.

“This is too great,” he said.

Btw I heard this fellow Rep. King, on MSNBC this morning hyping the event. He specifically said it was a show of force meant to make moderate Democratic reps “more afraid of their constituents than they were afraid of Nancy Pelosi.”

Well, okay. At least we’ve now clearly established in your own words that the Republican goal is not good governance but FEAR. Now we’re just haggling over the price . . .

Campaign in Poetry, Govern in Prose

Matt Frei for BBC News on this first anniversary of the historic election:

The old saying that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose was only partially true for Obama.

By late summer of 2008, he had already switched to prose. The cautious and calculating pragmatist who now runs this country was beginning to unpeel himself in those heady days.

Obama is not nearly as radical as some on the right like to make out and many on the left liked to think.

Maine Repeals Gays as Human; Public School Parent Protests Gays as Animals

Dan Delong of Carlinville, Ill., at teacher at Southwestern High School in the nearby town of Piasa, will face a school board hearing November 2, after being suspended from teaching. A parent of one unidentified student thought the optional reading assignment was inappropriate for her child . . .

When this and this coincide in the same week, what are kids actually learning do you think, about the values woven into America’s power of story?

The teacher’s disciplinary hearing was Monday night, and perhaps there’s a better lesson in how it ended than in how it started, a fitting lesson of today’s American president as true to yesterday’s American precedent:

See Google This Morning and Smile!

Then call any handy family members over to share the smile.
I just did.

UPDATE: See CSM’s favorite video clips from the 40-year run. And here’s one of mine, as a sax lover:

Mike Lux on America’s “Historical, Hysterical Conservatives”

They have used the same arguments — for tradition and states rights, against “big government socialism” — in every era. In those past eras, history was not on their side. It is not in our time, either.

. . .These conservative arguments have always been tinged with more than a little hysteria, just like today. And no matter what, conservatives always insisted they owned the moral high ground.

Related news reinforces the Lux WorldView: the former governor of my state now accuses President Obama of attacking American capitalism. Jeb Bush does this not just publicly but apparently for calculated effect not on capitalism or the economy’s current crisis, but his own political prospects.

He needed to make the news he’s been so out of and must re-control if his plan to resurrect any of his traditional dynasties — the Bush family, GOP, Roman Catholic Church — with himself anointed to lead, has a prayer.

Young Son the Political and Cultural Cynic

So you know he’s been reading Les Miserables, all 1,400 pages.

I guess it makes sense he would relate the author’s social themes to his own present reality as synched up with his own favorite social commentary artists by night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and as opposed to the years of rantings and vitriol he’s heard by day from Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity on the car radio.

He chortled over a narrative passage (I think describing the Thenardier family) last night, reading it aloud to the whole family and marveling that Hugo had somehow anticipated the third-millennium GOP!

I probably wouldn’t have blogged it except then this morning, I saw he had posted it to FaceBook:

“There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life, rather than advancing in it;
using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.”

– Victor Hugo, sound like anybody you know of?