That’s what a “jobless recovery” looks like. My prediction: it’s going to get much, much worse.

Gabe is the CTO of our small startup company (Izeni), and our team has built, and continues to build, some pretty cool projects based on these (and other) open source telephony technologies.

Some of the recent FreeSWITCH customization projects we’ve built for our clients include a custom call center that can handle up to 100 concurrent agents on commodity hardware, and a distributed SIP load tester that’s capable of pushing thousands of concurrent SIP calls (suitable for stress testing extremely large telephony infrastructures).

But those are just 2 examples of the many ways a company can customize a free software phone switch to enhance their current products or services with open source telephony. Whether you need a hosted IVR (Interactive Voice Response) solution, or just some method to bridge phone calls, record calls, make outbound calls, etc; FreeSWITCH and Asterisk are up to the task.

Anyway, if you’re in Utah and are interested in learning more about Open Source telephony, you should come by tomorrow to check out the discussion. You can also can review the (expansive) FreeSWITCH and Asterisk feature sets. And if you need some phone-related development done for your company, that kind of work is highly specialized, easy to outsource, and right up our alley. We’d love to help!

Along those same lines is something that’s been on my mind lately: I’d be interested in starting a Utah FreeSWITCH Users Group, originally meeting in only in Utah Valley, but hopefully spreading as the FreeSWITCH project comes into more common usage. If you’re local and would be interesting in participating (or leading), please let me know.

And if you think of some way you’d like to have your product interact with phones, text messages, even IM –that’s just what we do. We’d love to help you work through it –even if it’s just to help you see what’s possible.

My favorite comment: “That must be the new ‘Future Czars of America’ class.”  Too true.

(Link via Campaign for Liberty.)

A quote from the clip:

“Right now we’re saying we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to some kind of eco-capitalism where at least we’re not, you know, fast tracking the destruction of the whole planet.

Will that be enough? No it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond systems exploitation and oppression altogether; but that’s a process.

And I thing what’s great about the movement that’s beginning to emerge is that the crisis is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence, and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both very pragmatic and very visionary.

So the green economy will start off as a small subset, and we’re going to push it, and push it, and push it, until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”

Yes, that’s the guy Barack Obama picked for his green czar. Any clues as to what made him so attractive? But he’ll just be replaced by somebody with like ambitions –only the next guy will not have made the mistake of divulging the specific game plan.

Sadly, the rhetoric employed by the likes of Van Jones discredits the whole green movement, which undoubtedly has some real merit.

Now, just a couple comments about the quote itself:

1. It’s interesting to see that saving the planet is not enough. What’s even more interesting is that the end game, a moratorium on capitalist “exploitation and oppression altogether”, actually has nothing to do with the initial pretenses at all.
2. It’s interesting to see Van Jones revel in delight at the size and scope of the crises. After all, the bigger the crises, the more heavy-handed the solution can be.

Lastly, this crisis-mongering reminds me of a couple favorite quotes (via quoty):

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”

Author: Rahm Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff under Barack Obama), Source: Inteview with CBS News program “Face the Nation”

‘We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.’

Author: David Rockefeller, Source: Statement to the United Nations Business Council, 1994

Here’s the video they showed in school assembly (which included 1st graders).

Overall, I thought there were several inappropriate parts (including a part about flushing “deuces”), but perhaps the most dangerous lines were:

“I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama.”

and

“I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind.”

Remember these are first graders here: impressionable sponges (and not too discerning). We ought to be indignant.

But those quotes seem to be in line with Obama’s compulsory service plan:

“Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.” (emphasis added)

I would be very surprised if Obama’s September 8th’s in-school address to students didn’t have similar sections, intended to grease the skids on the “Community Service” draft.

Regardless, we should never pledge allegiance to the president –particularly when that president willfully reneges on his presidential oath to uphold and defend the constitution. To me, this projection of blind subservience into the classrooms of our unsuspecting youth is profoundly disturbing.

“When an opponent declares,
‘I will not come over to your side.’
I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…
What are you? You will pass on.
Your descendants, however,
now stand in the new camp.
In a short time they will know nothing
else but this new community.’”

–Adolf Hitler

PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students Across America

Produced by Teaching Ambassador Fellows, U.S. Department of Education

September 8, 2009

Before the Speech:

• Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions:
  • Who is the President of the United States?
  • What do you think it takes to be President?
  • To whom do you think the President is going to be speaking?
  • Why do you think he wants to speak to you?
  • What do you think he will say to you?
• Teachers can ask students to imagine being the President delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States. What would you tell students? What can students do to help in our schools? Teachers can chart ideas about what they would say.
• Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

During the Speech:

• As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
  • What is the President trying to tell me?
  • What is the President asking me to do?
  • What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?
• Students can record any questions they have while he is speaking and then discuss them after the speech. Younger children may need to dictate their questions.

After the Speech:

• Teachers could ask students to share the ideas they recorded, exchange sticky notes or stick notes on a butcher paper poster in the classroom to discuss main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty.
• Students could discuss their responses to the following questions:
  • What do you think the President wants us to do?
  • Does the speech make you want to do anything?
  • Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
  • What would you like to tell the President?

• Teachers could encourage students to participate in the Department of Education’s “I Am What I Learn” video contest. On September 8^th the Department will invite K-12 students to submit a video no longer than 2 min, explaining why education is important and how their education will help them achieve their dreams. Teachers are welcome to incorporate the same or a similar video project into an assignment. More details will be released via www.ed.gov.

Extension of the Speech: Teachers can extend learning by having students

• Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily.
• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.
• Write goals on colored index cards or precut designs to post around the classroom.
• Interview and share about their goals with one another to create a supportive community.
• Participate in School wide incentive programs or contests for students who achieve their goals.
• Write about their goals in a variety of genres, i.e. poems, songs, personal essays.
• Create artistic projects based on the themes of their goals.
• Graph student progress toward goals.

This is dangerous, in my opinion.  I don’t care what party a public leader is from, they should not have direct access to children in their classrooms.

But this is what happens when your tax dollars are filtered through the leviathan state.  It inevitably uses them against you.

Why are we subsidizing this stuff?  And why do we not have a decent way to opt out (and into a private school) without incurring additional –dare I say punitive– costs?

All this reminds me of a couple of quotes I’ve used before:

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.

–Milton Friedman, Economist. Awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”

Karl Marx – Father of Communism (1848)

If nothing else, the video repudiates any notion that the NEA and its affiliates –the same labor unions that convinced Utahns to kill education vouchers– are really looking out for you and yours.

Some choice quotes:

“… Why are these conservative and right-wing bastards picking on NEA and its affiliates? I will tell you why: it is the price we pay for success. NEA and its affiliates have been singled out because they are the most effective unions in the United States, and they are the nation’s leading advocates for public education and the type of liberal, social, and economic agenda that these groups find unacceptable.”

No argument there! But, it wouldn’t be near so bad if that liberal, social, and economic agenda wasn’t constantly trickling into the classrooms!

Another:

“And that brings me to my final and most important point, which is why, at least in my opinion, NEA and its affiliates are such effective advocates. Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas; it is not because of the merit of our positions; it is not because we care about children; and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have POWER. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us more hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year –because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees. [Standing applause]

This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary, these are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay!

Wait, so collective bargaining (protecting your pocketbooks at taxpayer expense), and due process (making it difficult to fire bad teachers) are more important than having good teachers –teachers who are actually successful at educating children?

Think about that, seriously. They say protecting teachers is more important than reducing the dropout rate –the very minimal standard of educational achievement. What kind of backwards priority is that? Is it any wonder the US is getting is getting lackluster results?

Continuing:

When all is said and done, NEA and its affiliates must never lose sight of the fact that they are unions; and what what unions do, first and foremost, is represent their members.”

Yeah, tell me about it. If only there was some organization that represented schoolchildren and their parents… Oh wait, there is!

If you didn’t watch the video, please watch it! I’m afraid that much of the smugness just can’t come across in plain text.

I saw this picture on the unnecessary quotes blog and thought, “Nope, those quotation marks are definitely necessary.”

There’s nothing quite like an accidental jab at the Federal Reserve Banking System’s legalized monopoly on counterfeiting to make you want to laugh and cry at the same time. :)

Congressman Ron Paul has written a bill, HR 1207 – The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, that would go a long way to remedying some of our problems by (essentially) subjecting the Federal Reserve System to audits. As it stands we can’t even see how much of our inflationary bailout money (and credit) is going to whom, but this bill would fix that.

Anyway, the bill is getting serious momentum and now has 165 co-sponsors. If your Congressmen (not Senators) are still not on that list, please contact them and ask them to co-sponsor the bill. Here in Utah, both Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop have signed on as co-sponsors, so only Jim Matheson remains.

Frankly, I’m outraged by the tax and spend policies that BOTH major parties have been adhering to lately. Actually, most Republicans prefer the “borrow and spend” method, which is even more insidious: passing our debt to future generations and incentivizing inflation as a “cheap” means of paying that debt.

I think Jefferson said it best:

We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds… [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers… And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]… till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery… And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Although Daniel Webster was more succinct:

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

If you agree with either of those statements, you should join us!

Here’s the most complete set of Utah locations I have found so far:

City: Salt Lake City ~ 1st Event
When: April 15, 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Where: Federal Building Plaza, 125 South State Street
Program
Activist and Author Candace Salima
Attorney General Mark Shurtleff
Congressman Jason Chaffetz (3rd District)
Congressman Rob Bishop (1st District)
For more information, contact Adam Gardiner at agardiner14@gmail.com (801-814-8963).

City: Logan
When: April 15, 4:00pm – 6:00 pm
Where: 241 North Main Street (south of Logan Library/City Hall)
For more information, contact Susan Southwick at susanksouthwick@gmail.com.

City: Salt Lake City ~ 2nd Event
When: April 15, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Where: US Post Office Salt Lake City, 1795 W 2100 S
For more information, contact David at saltlaketeaparty@gmail.com (801-377-8224).

City: Provo
When: April 15, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Where: Old Utah County Courthouse at the corner of University and Center
For more information, contact David at saltlaketeaparty@gmail.com (801-377-8224).

City: St. George
When: April 15, 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Where: Vernon Worthen Park, 300 S 400 E
For more information, contact Rinda Hunter at rinda.hunter@washco.utah.gov.

City: Vernal
When: April 15, 5:00 pm
Where: 150 East Main Street
For more information, contact Susan Southwick at susanksouthwick@gmail.com.

City: Richfield
When: April 15, 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Where: City Park, near 300 North and Main Street

I hope to see you there!

By the way, I’ll be spending most of my time protesting inflation: the hidden tax.  I’ll do a post illuminating the disasterous effects of inflation later.