Texas School Demands Students Submit Intrusive Census Form
Infowars.com
May 11, 2010
An Infowars.com reader has sent an email with an attached scan of a “State of Texas Census Report” distributed to students.
The 7th grader who received the form was promised an “A” if he completed it. In addition, students were subjected to “a pep talk on how it is their duty as American Citizens to complete” the census form and submit to the school and presumably Texas authorities.
•“Sound pretty nosy, doesn’t it?” a paragraph at the bottom of the form states. “But a census is very important. The information is used for all kinds of purposes, including setting budgets, zoning land, determining how many schools to build, and much more. The census helps Texas leaders plan for the future needs of its citizens. Hey, that’s you!”
The U.S. Census — to say nothing of school districts in Texas or anywhere else in the country — does not have constitutional authority to ask the sort of questions included in the form below. The Constitution calls for a simple enumeration every ten years in order to apportion the number of seats in the House of Representatives. Period.
“Unless a census taker can show me a constitutional requirement, the only information I plan to give are the number and names of the people in my household,” Walter E. Williams wrote in February. Williams quotes Thomas Jefferson: “Whensoever the General Government (Washington) assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
The same applies to Texas or any other state that insists it has a right to be nosy, as the form below admits.
It is especially pernicious when the government attempts to brainwash children into the belief that the government has the authority to demand personal and private information from citizens.
Not only do parents need to tell the state to stop inculcating their children, they also need to if possible pull their children out of public schools that have become centers of indoctrination in worship of the state.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
THE VERNON COUNTY, MISSOURI CEMETERY DIRECTORY IS HERE !!
Nancy Thompson, Neoma Foreman and at least 30 volunteers from the Tri-County Genealogical Society contributed thousands of hours over the past six years to get this tome completed. The work is published by the Vernon county Historical Society.
Days were spent trudging through muddy or dusty cemeteries, fighting flies, mosquitoes, spiders and snakes to discover every tombstone.
Some stones were resurrected from beneath the sod. Some graves were discovered that had no stones at all.
This two volume set has more than 700 pages of burial listings. The index includes maiden names for the women (when known) and adds more than 200 pages of information to the first volume.
You can get copies of the book by contacting the Tri-County Genealogy Society at their website, or drop in at the Bushwhacker Museum where the Vernon County Historical Society has some available for sale.
Days were spent trudging through muddy or dusty cemeteries, fighting flies, mosquitoes, spiders and snakes to discover every tombstone.
Some stones were resurrected from beneath the sod. Some graves were discovered that had no stones at all.
This two volume set has more than 700 pages of burial listings. The index includes maiden names for the women (when known) and adds more than 200 pages of information to the first volume.
You can get copies of the book by contacting the Tri-County Genealogy Society at their website, or drop in at the Bushwhacker Museum where the Vernon County Historical Society has some available for sale.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
CENSUS WORKERS DENIED JOBS BECAUSE OF JAIL RECORD
We Can’t Tell You Why The Census Bureau is hiring a million or more people to assist with the 2010 count. It is temporary work, but it pays well. With national unemployment at nearly 10 percent, it looks like an excellent opportunity. That is unless you are one of the nearly 50 million Americans with any arrest or conviction on record.
A new class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of applicants who say they were unfairly turned down for census jobs based on an opaque screening policy that relies on F.B.I. checks for any criminal histories. Those checks are notoriously unreliable. A 2006 federal report found that half of them were inaccurate or out of date.
The Census Bureau is vague about what makes someone ineligible. In Congressional testimony, it suggested that it is excluding people who have been convicted of crimes involving violence and dishonesty. The bureau’s Web site seems to say that applicants whose background checks turn up any arrest — no matter how trivial, distant in time, irrelevant to the job — receive a letter advising them that they can remain eligible only if they produce “official court documentation” bearing on the case within 30 days. Incredibly, the letter does not identify the alleged criminal activity. Applicants must prove eligibility, even if they don’t know why they were flagged.
Official court records are often unobtainable for the millions of people whose convictions have been sealed or expunged or for people who have been arrested and released because of lack of evidence or mistaken arrest. This problem falls heaviest on black and Hispanic communities where stop-and-frisk policies and indiscriminate arrests are common.
The hiring problem is not limited to the Census Bureau. After 9/11, Congress required port workers to undergo F.B.I. background checks to keep their jobs. Last year, a study by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for workers, found that the government had mistakenly denied credentials to tens of thousands of those workers.
States and cities are wisely revising employment policies. The federal government needs to develop a fair and transparent screening system for job applicants and a more effective appeals process. Congress must also require the F.B.I. to verify the criminal records — and find missing data before issuing background checks.
A new class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of applicants who say they were unfairly turned down for census jobs based on an opaque screening policy that relies on F.B.I. checks for any criminal histories. Those checks are notoriously unreliable. A 2006 federal report found that half of them were inaccurate or out of date.
The Census Bureau is vague about what makes someone ineligible. In Congressional testimony, it suggested that it is excluding people who have been convicted of crimes involving violence and dishonesty. The bureau’s Web site seems to say that applicants whose background checks turn up any arrest — no matter how trivial, distant in time, irrelevant to the job — receive a letter advising them that they can remain eligible only if they produce “official court documentation” bearing on the case within 30 days. Incredibly, the letter does not identify the alleged criminal activity. Applicants must prove eligibility, even if they don’t know why they were flagged.
Official court records are often unobtainable for the millions of people whose convictions have been sealed or expunged or for people who have been arrested and released because of lack of evidence or mistaken arrest. This problem falls heaviest on black and Hispanic communities where stop-and-frisk policies and indiscriminate arrests are common.
The hiring problem is not limited to the Census Bureau. After 9/11, Congress required port workers to undergo F.B.I. background checks to keep their jobs. Last year, a study by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for workers, found that the government had mistakenly denied credentials to tens of thousands of those workers.
States and cities are wisely revising employment policies. The federal government needs to develop a fair and transparent screening system for job applicants and a more effective appeals process. Congress must also require the F.B.I. to verify the criminal records — and find missing data before issuing background checks.
FACE TO FACE WITH THE 'LOST' 85 DIGGERS OF FROMELLES
He calls her Marples and she affectionately refers to him as Sherlock. He's a determined, quiet cop with a forensic background; she's a chatty grandmother with degrees in social research and 30 years' genealogy experience.
They live vastly different lives but West Australian Sandra Playle and Victorian Tim Lycett are united by a singular passion: to give identities to the men buried in the shadow of Fromelles' tiny Pheasant Wood. These men, even boys, died on July 19-20, 1916, in what the Australian War Memorial calls Australia's ''worst 24 hours''. In a battle intended in part as a diversion to the Battle of the Somme, 80 kilometres to the south, Australians saw their first action on the Western Front; 5533 of them were killed, wounded or captured.
Playle and Lycett have spent two years hunched over computers, slogging through papers, microfiche, tromping in rural cemeteries and poring over photos of headstones in a bid to build family trees for the 191 men whose bodies are believed to be those buried in eight mass graves dug by the Germans in a field below the Fromelles church.
Now they believe they have the paperwork to prove that another four men are probably buried in those pits but have yet to be added to the official working list.
Like Lambis Englezos, the Victorian school teacher who doggedly argued to have the Pheasant Wood graves officially investigated, it has been so-called ''amateurs'' like Playle and Lycett who have sifted through service records and military papers not only to find living relatives and descendants but in some cases to alert them to a relationship with a missing soldier they may not have known.
In Britain, two fellow ''amateurs'' - London lawyer Melvyn Pack and historian-researcher Victoria Burbidge - have also rigorously checked what remains of the British records and have locked horns with the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre over the accuracy of the British working list. They are attempting to force the removal of 23 British names after proving that the men were not in the 61st Division - the only British division in that battle - and therefore nowhere near Fromelles at the time of their deaths. They have also argued for the addition of one new name which should be on the list, but isn't.
The professional link, however, is Peter Barton, the esteemed British historian whose work in the Bavarian archives located the crucial records needed to show that the Germans had interred Australian and British men in the pits by Pheasant Wood.
His 600-page report as the Fromelles Project historian in 2007 secured Australian approval and British financial support and launched the formal archaeological investigation to prove Englezos's theory.
"This is the single most significant battlefield find of human remains since searches ceased in 1921,'' says Barton. ''The way the project has been carried out sets a precedent for any future project … if someone produced a dossier as persuasive or even more persuasive than the Pheasant Wood case, it is difficult to see how the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or government authorities could turn down a request to investigate."
For Lycett, it was a chance meeting with Englezos that fired up the history sleuth in him. Passionate about World War I, he had embarked on the Fromelles descendants' project when he decided to take leave without pay from the Victorian police force. With time on his hands, he offered his services:
"It dawned on me that someone was going to have to find the descendants," he says. "Obviously, Defence were going to ask for relatives to come forward as well as use the media, but not everyone knows they are related so if someone could actually start on pulling the information together."
Lycett had made contact with Playle via the Great War Forum, an internet site for historians and military buffs. An experienced genealogist, she was already well into a project to photograph and document war graves in the south-west of Western Australia. With Major General Mike O'Brien's imprimatur, they began to work through the men on the working list provided by CWGC.
"As we worked through the list in the beginning, we realised that we had a talent to work together,'' says Playle.
"He is a policeman, he knows how to talk to people, whereas I can't deal with family where an old man is crying on the telephone. But Tim knows what questions to ask, how to pinpoint facts. That became his role while mine is the genealogical and records access research skills."
Slowly, meticulously, they examined each man's service record, finding next of kin, cross-checking with birth records, marriage registers, death notices of family and photographic records of headstones. They had thousands of pieces of a 93-year-old jigsaw. They began to put it together.
In one case, they managed to put together the history of Jack Joyce, an older man who was born illegitimately. Little is known of any surviving family. They found the only known photograph of him, kept fondly by a nurse sweetheart who was denied his medals because she wasn't a relative. The medals are unissued to this day.
Robert Courtney Green was found to have surviving descendants and an identification tag apparently bearing dried blood, a potential DNA source. (see story below)
But the real eureka moment was Lesley Leister: "It took months,'' says Playle. ''We had nothing but an adoptive name as a starting reference and still we uncovered the truth about his illegitimate birth, identified his true parentage, established his birth name and located his descendants. Oh, we did a little jig with that one!"
Playle says the researchers were not prepared for the effect these stories had on them. ''They have become far more than just names," she says.
Cross-matching paperwork with cemetery records and information on headstones has been a critical theme of the research. James Gordon was 15 - apparently the youngest Australian killed in action. "This boy had no living descendants … Such is life," says Playle.
Barton warns no archival research can provide a battle's definitive picture. "Until I visited the archives in Munich, we had only looked at the battle through the prism of the Commonwealth archives. In fact it was the German resource that gave us a completely different narrative and different account and contained far more than anybody ever expected. This body of work has been added to by visits to the Ingolstadt, the Bavarian army museum, and hugely augmented by the International Red Cross archives in Geneva."
The Australians say there are 191 names on the Australian working list and the DNA specialists have suggested that if 30 can be identified that would be a good result. Says Lycett: "They have all these experts, anthropologists, archaeologists, DNA experts. But they are missing a cog in the wheel without genealogists. They are simply relying on requests to families to provide details and while a proportion of them will have correct information, we know a couple at least that are not correct and many others who don't have a knowledge of their family history at all."
They live vastly different lives but West Australian Sandra Playle and Victorian Tim Lycett are united by a singular passion: to give identities to the men buried in the shadow of Fromelles' tiny Pheasant Wood. These men, even boys, died on July 19-20, 1916, in what the Australian War Memorial calls Australia's ''worst 24 hours''. In a battle intended in part as a diversion to the Battle of the Somme, 80 kilometres to the south, Australians saw their first action on the Western Front; 5533 of them were killed, wounded or captured.
Playle and Lycett have spent two years hunched over computers, slogging through papers, microfiche, tromping in rural cemeteries and poring over photos of headstones in a bid to build family trees for the 191 men whose bodies are believed to be those buried in eight mass graves dug by the Germans in a field below the Fromelles church.
Now they believe they have the paperwork to prove that another four men are probably buried in those pits but have yet to be added to the official working list.
Like Lambis Englezos, the Victorian school teacher who doggedly argued to have the Pheasant Wood graves officially investigated, it has been so-called ''amateurs'' like Playle and Lycett who have sifted through service records and military papers not only to find living relatives and descendants but in some cases to alert them to a relationship with a missing soldier they may not have known.
In Britain, two fellow ''amateurs'' - London lawyer Melvyn Pack and historian-researcher Victoria Burbidge - have also rigorously checked what remains of the British records and have locked horns with the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre over the accuracy of the British working list. They are attempting to force the removal of 23 British names after proving that the men were not in the 61st Division - the only British division in that battle - and therefore nowhere near Fromelles at the time of their deaths. They have also argued for the addition of one new name which should be on the list, but isn't.
The professional link, however, is Peter Barton, the esteemed British historian whose work in the Bavarian archives located the crucial records needed to show that the Germans had interred Australian and British men in the pits by Pheasant Wood.
His 600-page report as the Fromelles Project historian in 2007 secured Australian approval and British financial support and launched the formal archaeological investigation to prove Englezos's theory.
"This is the single most significant battlefield find of human remains since searches ceased in 1921,'' says Barton. ''The way the project has been carried out sets a precedent for any future project … if someone produced a dossier as persuasive or even more persuasive than the Pheasant Wood case, it is difficult to see how the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or government authorities could turn down a request to investigate."
For Lycett, it was a chance meeting with Englezos that fired up the history sleuth in him. Passionate about World War I, he had embarked on the Fromelles descendants' project when he decided to take leave without pay from the Victorian police force. With time on his hands, he offered his services:
"It dawned on me that someone was going to have to find the descendants," he says. "Obviously, Defence were going to ask for relatives to come forward as well as use the media, but not everyone knows they are related so if someone could actually start on pulling the information together."
Lycett had made contact with Playle via the Great War Forum, an internet site for historians and military buffs. An experienced genealogist, she was already well into a project to photograph and document war graves in the south-west of Western Australia. With Major General Mike O'Brien's imprimatur, they began to work through the men on the working list provided by CWGC.
"As we worked through the list in the beginning, we realised that we had a talent to work together,'' says Playle.
"He is a policeman, he knows how to talk to people, whereas I can't deal with family where an old man is crying on the telephone. But Tim knows what questions to ask, how to pinpoint facts. That became his role while mine is the genealogical and records access research skills."
Slowly, meticulously, they examined each man's service record, finding next of kin, cross-checking with birth records, marriage registers, death notices of family and photographic records of headstones. They had thousands of pieces of a 93-year-old jigsaw. They began to put it together.
In one case, they managed to put together the history of Jack Joyce, an older man who was born illegitimately. Little is known of any surviving family. They found the only known photograph of him, kept fondly by a nurse sweetheart who was denied his medals because she wasn't a relative. The medals are unissued to this day.
Robert Courtney Green was found to have surviving descendants and an identification tag apparently bearing dried blood, a potential DNA source. (see story below)
But the real eureka moment was Lesley Leister: "It took months,'' says Playle. ''We had nothing but an adoptive name as a starting reference and still we uncovered the truth about his illegitimate birth, identified his true parentage, established his birth name and located his descendants. Oh, we did a little jig with that one!"
Playle says the researchers were not prepared for the effect these stories had on them. ''They have become far more than just names," she says.
Cross-matching paperwork with cemetery records and information on headstones has been a critical theme of the research. James Gordon was 15 - apparently the youngest Australian killed in action. "This boy had no living descendants … Such is life," says Playle.
Barton warns no archival research can provide a battle's definitive picture. "Until I visited the archives in Munich, we had only looked at the battle through the prism of the Commonwealth archives. In fact it was the German resource that gave us a completely different narrative and different account and contained far more than anybody ever expected. This body of work has been added to by visits to the Ingolstadt, the Bavarian army museum, and hugely augmented by the International Red Cross archives in Geneva."
The Australians say there are 191 names on the Australian working list and the DNA specialists have suggested that if 30 can be identified that would be a good result. Says Lycett: "They have all these experts, anthropologists, archaeologists, DNA experts. But they are missing a cog in the wheel without genealogists. They are simply relying on requests to families to provide details and while a proportion of them will have correct information, we know a couple at least that are not correct and many others who don't have a knowledge of their family history at all."
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