After months of planning, research, writing songs and exercises and drawing (thanks Erica!), Singing Lessons for Little Singers is finally up for Print on Demand! I cannot tell you how excited I am about this because it means that I now have the resource for teaching my young voice students that I sought for years ago and could not find. I hope that others teachers and parents of small children will also find it just the thing they needed to teach their little singer how to be a wonderful singer and performer.

The book can be purchased through me, or online at Pitch Perfect Publishing.

Please, drop me a line and let me know what you think!

-Teacher Greg

Dear Friends,

In the aftermath of the recent election, we may find ourselves oddly on the defensive regarding our support for the Yes on Proposition 8 cause. Our young people have been especially subject to mean spirited comments by high school friends and teachers. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We did nothing wrong. In fact, we did everything that a civic minded American can and should do. I have put together a few facts that help me to appreciate our position better. For example:

1. Mormons make up only 2% of the population of California. There are approximately 750,000 LDS out of a total population of approximately 36 million.

2. If one estimates that 250,000 LDS are registered voters (the rest being children), then out of a total of 5,661,583 yes votes, LDS voters made up 4.4% of the Yes vote and 2.3% of the total Proposition 8 vote (11,050,301).

3. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) donated no money to the Yes on 8 campaign (except for a nominal, and legal, in-kind donation of $2,078.97, to cover the travel expenses of leaders coming from Utah for a meeting). Individual members of the Church were encouraged to support the Yes on 8 efforts and, exercising their constitutional right to free speech, donated whatever they felt like donating.

4. The No on 8 campaign raised more money than the Yes on 8 campaign. Unofficial estimates put No on 8 at $38 million and Yes on 8 at $36 million, making it the most expensive non-presidential election in the country.

5. Advertising messages for the Yes on 8 campaign are based on case law and real-life situations. The No on 8 supporters have insisted that the Yes on 8 messaging is based on lies. Every Yes on 8 claim is supported.

6. The majority of our friends and neighbors voted Yes on 8. Los Angeles County voted in favor of Yes on 8. Ventura County voted in favor of Yes on 8.

7. African Americans overwhelmingly supported Yes on 8. Exit polls show that 70% of Black voters chose Yes on 8. This was interesting because the majority of these voters voted for President-elect Obama. No on 8 supporters had assumed that Obama voters would vote No on 8.

8. The majority of Latino voters voted Yes on 8. Exit polls show that the majority of Latinos supported Yes on 8 and cited religious beliefs (assumed to be primarily Catholic).

9. The Yes on 8 coalition was a broad spectrum of religious organizations. Catholics, Evangelicals, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims - all supported Yes on 8. It is estimated that there are 10 million Catholics and 10 million Protestants in California. Mormons were a tiny fraction of the population represented by Yes on 8 coalition members.

10. Not all Mormons voted in favor of Proposition 8. Our faith accords that each person be allowed to choose for him or her self. Church leaders have asked members to treat other members with "civility, respect and love," despite their differing views.

11. The Church did not violate the principal of separation of church and state. This principle is derived from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." The phrase "separation of church and state", which does not appear in the Constitution itself, is generally traced to an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson, although it has since been quoted in several opinions handed down by the United States Supreme Court in recent years. The LDS Church is under no obligation to refrain from participating in the political process, to the extent permitted by law. U.S. election law is very clear that Churches may not endorse candidates, but may support issues. The Church has always been very careful on this matter and occasionally (not often) chooses to support causes that it feels to be of a moral nature.

12. Supporters of Proposition 8 did exactly what the Constitution provides for all citizens: they exercised their First Amendment rights to speak out on an issue that concerned them, make contributions to a cause that they support, and then vote in the regular electoral process. For the most part, this seems to have been done in an open, fair, and civil way. Opponents of 8 have accused supporters of being bigots, liars, and worse. The fact is, we simply did what Americans do - we spoke up, we campaigned, and we voted.

-- 84 percent of those who attend church weekly voted yes.

-- 81 percent of white evangelicals voted yes.

-- 65 percent of white Protestants voted yes.

-- 64 percent of Catholics voted yes. Catholics accounted for 30 percent of all voters.

"This week Dante Atkins, [elected delegate to the California State Democratic Convention,] writing on the Daily Kos, a politically liberal Web site, published a link to a list of Mormon donors and encouraged people to "use OpenSecrets to see if these donors have contributed to . . . shall we say . . . less than honorable causes, or if any one of these big donors has done something otherwise egregious."

To LDS blogger Lowell Brown, that is tantamount to religious intimidation.

"If you are a Mormon and you donate to Prop 8, thousands of strangers will try to smear you, in the hope of intimidating you and others into not exercising your right to freedom of speech." 

<http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2008/10/for-mormons-californias-prop-8.php>

(10-26) 14:40 PDT OAKLAND -- about 50 protesters came to the Mormon Temple in Oakland this morning to speak out against the religious group's support for an anti-gay marriage ballot measure.  Holding signs that read "No to Mormon Bigots" and "tax church property and investments," the protesters said they'd come to make a statement.[...]

Several Mormons said at the temple this morning that the definition of "marriage" is sacred.  "They have their right to make their cause known, just like the Yes on 8 folks do," said Rand King, 60, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is a member of the Protect Marriage Coalition. "They obviously want to portray us as haters of them. We're not at all. We just want to protect traditional marriage."

<Original story taken down from SFgate.com, first part can be found at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=221x85156>

"Recently, we have seen organizations such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State send letters to churches in an apparent effort to suppress the speech of churches and pastors on critical social issues. Churches are implicitly or even directly threatened with the loss of their tax-exempt status if they don’t “toe the IRS line” as to permissible speech.
Some groups go so far as to file complaints with the IRS, occasionally leading to IRS investigations. The resulting (although very remote) chance that a church could lose its tax exempt status is used to silence Christians inside their own churches."

<http://www.protectmarriage.com/files/churches_and_politics.pdf>

"Several Bay Area Mormons said they would support the right of gay and lesbian unions to have all the rights of married couples. But the word marriage was sacred, pivotal to their concept of families, who can be "eternally united" in the afterlife. A key church document - "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" - says that "marriage between man and a woman is essential to His eternal plan." They also believe that children are entitled to be raised by a father and a mother."

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/27/BAP113OIRD.DTL&tsp=1>

Someday when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a parent, I will tell them:
And someday when your children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates parents, you will tell them:
I think that is what's wrong with the world today:

It just doesn't have enough mean moms.

China's War of Terror: 2008 Olympics

There is no weapon more powerful than ignorance.  It is a self-defeating power.  Sure, you say, we have enough to worry about in the U.S.: a recessive economy, a quagmire in the Middle East, an incompetent school system, etc.  We've successfully ignored Tibet's crisis for decades, so why should it come up now? We've lived with the inhumanity of the Chinese government for so long (the female infanticide, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the quelled peasant uprisings), and Tibet is of no political-economic significance to us, so why politicize the Olympics?  Because allowing brutal totalitarian rule and inhumane atrocities to go uncondemned adds to the cloud of fear that is seeping into the new international culture.  Evil only prevails when good men do nothing, and so we are contributing to evil if we stand idly by.

Anyone who thinks that the Olympics Games has historically been an oasis from political maneuvering is ignorant of the facts.  Each Olympics in history has had explicit political overtones.  It has always been a competition between countries to see who is the strongest, richest, most influential.  If an athlete wants nothing more than world-class competition s/he can enroll him-/herself in one of the many sport tournaments that are held all over the world, but the moment s/he steps on the world's stage and represents a government it becomes unavoidably political. 

Sometimes, however, much more serious issues are brought to the world's attention through the Games.  The USA strongly considered boycotting the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi-controlled Germany due to the openly racist and militant propaganda ordered by Adolph Hitler himself.  The USA, Canada, China and several other countries boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in protest of the USSR's military occupation and treatment of Afghanistan.  The Russians in turn boycotted the 1984 Summer Games and instead organized their own counter-Games.  Eight years ago Cathy Freeman was given permission to display the Aboriginal flag as a political protest while running in the ceremonial torch relay to protest their mistreatment.  

Such "political" statements are not being tolerated this time around, however.  In Paris, London, San Francisco and other places, both local police and elite Chinese guards have personally escorted each and every runner in this year's torch relay, regularly changing routes unannounced and beating back protesters that have attempted to extinguish the torch and unfurl Tibetan flags in protest of China's nearly 50-year history of oppression and human rights violations in that country.  It was painful to watch American cops literally throw American torch runner Majora Carter into the gutter, interrupting her run, grabbing away the torch and stealing the Tibetan flag she unfurled.  Though her action was identical to Cathy Freeman's she will likely be barred from the games, as will others who dared speak against the host of this year's Games.  China and the other local cooperating authorities defend their actions as efforts to keep the Games free of political interferences. 

But besides numerous examples of past political influences in the Olympics, it was the International Olympic Committee themselves that brought up China's destructive politics in the first place.  Hesitant to offer the Games to China, the IOC made them promise to clean up their human rights record before they were formally announced as the hosts of the 2008 Olympic Games.  Now that China's actions have actually gotten worse, the IOC says it isn't an issue, making their obviously politically-motivated solidarity with China clear:  They are now declaring that civil disobedience in protest of China is "abusing Democratic freedoms." What happened to the so-called Olympic spirit of world freedom and unity?

Anyone who thinks that our nation's relationship with China has been open and friendly is likewise ignorant.  China attacks our national security and interests daily.  They now have nuclear submarines that play strategic war-games with our naval ships, subs that they built with libraries of nuclear technology they stole from us.  Due to their unfriendly trade regulations, their currency continues to rise as ours deflates. They frequently participate in e-espionage attacking Pentagon computers.  They of course condemn our foreign policies in the Middle East, even though the new Iraq's first oil shipment went entirely to China. Politically, militarily, economically, ideologically, China has actively threatened all democratic nations for some time.

Now that China's traditional brutality has progressed to outright genocide of the Tibetan people it's unthinkable anyone would support them.  With the great threat to the free world that China represents, why on earth are some American conservatives actually criticizing pro-Tibetan protesters?  Follow the money.  NBC has invested billions in the Olympics, as have other powerful media groups.  In order to end the decades-long ban on international media presence in Tibet (which China did to mask what was really going on there), the Associated Press had to publish dozens of Chinese-approved talking-points (naturally excluding and criticizing any Tibetan perspective) before China granted them exclusive access to report in Tibet.  (As soon as the pro-democracy civil-disobedience demonstrations recommenced, however, China quickly ushered them out of the country again.)  Coca-Cola, also heavily invested in the Beijing games, had the audacity to say, "It's unfortunate that Ms. Carter used an invitation to participate in the torch relay as a platform to make a personal, political statement." With such strong business opposition to "rocking China's boat," along with fear of China's economic and military power, it is no wonder that our government has remained neutral (if not pro-Chinese) on the issue. You'll be hard pressed to find an op ed in any major media or government organization that condemns China and calls for a free Tibet.  This is the scariest aspect of this silent war: our corporations and leaders are already bought by the enemy.

It is only by overstepping the compromised major media channels through certain independent and international media sources and actual video footage of China's actions posted by individuals on sites like YouTube that we can get an unadulterated look at just exactly what China is doing. Despite the mainstream media's silence, exposés that the Tibet riots were an inside job are pervading the internet, with convincing arguments that Chinese agents instigated the violence. China's intolerance for free speech only accelerates this trend as the Chinese people question their brainwashing government. It was Chinese bloggers who first revealed to the world it was really a Chinese agent dressed up as a Tibetan that attacked the disabled Chinese torch carrier, a video clip that the Chinese media widely circulated as proof of Tibetan terrorism.

China's state-run media's tales of Tibetan violence--"monks pouring boiling lime on police," "monks forcing people to loot stores," "monks burning piles of innocent people into skeletons", "monks trained in guerrilla camps entering Tibet's south border to plan bomb attacks", etc.--are an organized attempt to make the peaceful protesting monks of Tibet sound like the desperate, inhumane terrorists of the Middle East with which we have become so familiar.  China wants us to see Tibet as another Iraq and feel justified with their brutal strikes against its citizens.  For months I've detailed China's ridiculous allegations, which are full of flip-flops, lies, logical fallacies, and emotional propaganda.  China is counting on the vast population inside and out of the U.S. that believes that Bush "duped" us into "the wrong war at the wrong time" to believe it hypocritical for us to condemn China for simply stamping out domestic terrorism when we are doing the same thing. No wonder Bush is reticent to act.

China knows that it doesn't really matter if our war is justified and theirs is not. What matters is the appearance of how brutally we crackdown on the terrorists, setting a precedence for others to do so.  China is attempting to quell the Tibetan independence uprising while at the same time discrediting the United States' anti-terrorist actions by kicking all journalists out of Tibet but their own so that they can lie about the situation and then criticizing anyone who reports whatever they don't like, calling their reports baseless. Then they slaughter hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent monks and their brainwashed people cheer on their war on "terrorism," while they slam western media for cropping an image in a way they don't like.

The atrocities of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were destructive to humanity is so many ways. In addition to the millions of lives that were lost in wars and executions, the fact that derivitive white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and oppressive communist governments still continue is proof that their totalitarian-communist philosophies continue to haunt and hurt the world. Countries today like Iran and North Vietnam that continue the legacy of Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia have been referred to as the "axis of evil" for their current (as well as threatened) oppressive actions. But they are nothing compared to China. China's "People's" government was the true evil empire from the very beginning when Mao killed over 20 million of his own people and
offered 10 million of his women like cattle to Henry Kissinger so that their babies would not be his problem. China's government continues to oppress its billions by keeping all but its party members in poverty and encouraging the slaughter of untold millions of unborn girls in order to raise workers/soldiers. They are the greatest enemies of democracy in the world by far, menacing over the freedom of Hong Kong, murdering patriots in Tibet, harvesting organs from innocent Falon Gong members, killing Vietnamese fisherman and threatening Taiwan. (We can never know the true extent of their evil because so much has been censored.) Their own news agency has stated their reasons for wanting control of Tibet:

Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location astride the border with India, Washington's newest anti-China ally in Asia. Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet has large timber reserve. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region.

On the Tibet Autonomous Region's border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a "treasure basin." The Basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China. And situated as it is, on the "roof of the world," Tibet is perhaps the world's most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia's greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people. He who controls Tibet's water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.

Source: Chinay Daily

Michael Moore said the American war on terrorism was really just a campaign to instill fear into the American people in order to extend more control over them.  Whether or not that is true, clearly that's the name of the game for China: fear all around.  Their war with us is a war of terror, and our leaders are terrified.  China holds so many of our interests, so much of our economy, and has their hands in so many of our pockets.  It seems that there is little individuals can do in such a vast power-play.  What will it take before you or I boycott anything made in China?  Would it even make a difference?

Just as when USSR oppressed Poland, East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe, it is our moral duty as the most powerful free nation in the world to again stand as defenders of democracy. China's genocide in Tibet and surrounding Muslim areas, and their war of words against our western media is just the next step in their power-play. In our age of progress to greater democracy and individual ethical responsibilities a global dictatorship must not be tolerated. It's clear that our government won't give us another Reagan any time soon to tear down China's great walls. We have the "straight-lies express" and the empty "hope and change" suit. But we the people of the United States and of the world have what no one had in Reagan's day. And this is the reason why Tibet isn't just another hushed-up Tianenman Square. It's the digital age and our voices count. We the people have the power to find out what is really going on and to organize powerful protests to shake up the powers that be. Though our government may be hesitant to take a stand now, they cannot remain inactive when the majority of the people demand something to be done. Already a coalition ranging from independent conservative Michael Savage to liberal democrat Barack Obama is demanding that China stop their oppression of Tibet. A republic is a government in which the leaders act according to the will of the people. Though China's claim to be a "People's Republic" is obviously false, ours is not. We have the power to change things for the better.

China promised to clean up their human rights record in exchange for hosting the games but it has only gotten worse. The sympathetic government agencies' and International Olympic Committee's Gestapo scare tactics against those who oppose them have made it clear that the Games are nothing more than a coming out party for China's rise to international power. Just like China's population has done for decades, we are supposed to fall in line and cheer the ushering in of the evil empire. However, I do not believe that the true Olympic spirit lies in remaining neutral and letting China have its brutal way with Tibet. The modern Olympic logo consists of five interlocking colored rings, representing the freedom and unity all people of the five continents, over a white field representing the world. The Olympics represent peace and brotherhood, the ability to come as equals and participate in healthy competition. I believe that the true Olympic spirit lies in the few who risk their careers and even lives to stand up for humanity. It lies with those monks who dare peacefully protest for their God-given rights and get tortured and killed as a result. It lies with all people around the world who show their support for Tibet and make it clear to their leaders that this must not be tolerated. Once the United States stands up and protects the pro-Tibetan cause, we will be able to regain our status as champions human rights, putting human lives before dollars and yen, and Chinese people will be able to start breaking loose of their oppressing, brainwashing government. For ourselves and the world community, we will finally be able to break free of the strong distrust and criticism of our government's post-911 anti-terrorism wars and activity. Terrorism in all of its forms must be opposed.

-B