Snipped from AlterNet.org.

With Mitt Romney rising in popularity as a Presidential candidate, my antennae go up. For those who think that values or faith don’t play a part in politics are naive and gullible to the campaign rhetoric trying to convince you that it doesn’t. All it takes is to look at President Bush’s administration which is rife with policy based on faith, to see that it does. The Iraq war is a perfect example. In a series of articles entitled What the White House Doesn’t Want You To Know, I presented evidence of a man whose foreign policy is based on a “Mission From God” wherein he stubbornly presses ahead with a failed policy because he feels like it’s a mandate from God. Well, the same can be seen in Bush’s AIDS initiatives as well. I recently wrote an article entitled Sex, Religion, Conservatives and Hyprocrisy in which I outlined the far right’s position on abstinence only in the global fight against AIDS. Well, now we have it again crop up, now in our domestic sex education policy. I came across an article entitled The Mounting Failure of Abstinence Education on alternet.org which spells out the Bush domestic “faith-based” initiatives for which millions of dollars have been spent on something that has already been documented not to work.


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In a short article pertaining to daydreaming in the new Scientific American Mind, April/May ‘07, it discusses the cause and physiology behind daydreaming and how our brains are designed to wander. According to the new study, humans have portions of the brain that are dedicated to wonderment and daydreaming. This region of the brain is turned off and on while our focus changes throughout the day.

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As we all know, Einstein was a genius. However, those who unsuccessfully tried to mold him into a product of the typical assembly line, education system found that he was impossible to control. He was impertinent, a nonconformist and especially had a distaste for dogma. These are all the things that would ensure failure in our current “No Child Left Behind” education system. I dare say that if Einstein had been required to take the TAKS test during his time, we might be surprised as to what the result would have been.

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Ever asked, “Why is Common Sense Such a Rarity?”

How certain are you that we get smarter as we age? Wiser? More intelligent? Well, this common adage is now being tested with scientific tests that gauge one’s cognitive performance with causal relations. One such test was in the previous article called Do We Get Smarter As We Age?” The results are quite shocking. The test was pulled from an article in Scientific American Mind, Feb/March 2007 called Jumping to Conclusions. Here is what they found…

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We all know about the unrelenting meddling of the Neo-cons in aggressively promoting their brand of democracy to foreign nations, but when it comes to education, their meddling has gone too far. The effects of their “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) policy sounds good on the outside, but when you consider where the slogan comes from, it has no place in our children’s classroom. Yes, this is a military slogan wherein the battle cry on the field of war for a fallen comrade is “leave no man behind”, but we are talking about our children here, not fallen soldiers.

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When I look at President Bush mulling over America’s fate in Iraq and demanding no less than victory, I can’t help but get extremely annoyed at the fact that neither he, nor any of his military geniuses, have learned anything from the past. In the history of this area, and particularly Iraq, there exists a very troubling, turbulent and volatile era lasting for hundreds of years sustained by never-ending tribal warfare. Due to this tumultuous history, European nations such as Britain and France found out through much pain and sacrifice, that the Arabs of the region were basically ungovernable.

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When asked what happiness is, a fifth-grader in Japan said:

“Scratching an insect bite and enjoying it so much that at the moment you don’t enjoy anything else, is only one petal on the flower of happiness.”

Gareth Matthews, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of Dialogues With Children, says that children are not only capable of raising interesting philosophical issues, but should be encouraged to do so. I believe this is a very important element lacking in America’s educational system today — self-inquiry or critical thinking.


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