Education

The Supremes declared that the cops must cop a search warrant from a judge before copping the blood of a drunk driving suspect.

Still under consideration at the high court, since February, is whether the state can swab our DNA without a warrant or without our explicit consent.

"You have to wonder about Nevada sometimes," Sheila Leslie wonders in her article's opening paragraph. "You'd think a libertarian state, proud of its history of quickie divorces and legalized prostitution, would not be squeamish about providing comprehensive sex education as part of its school curriculum."

She quickly concludes, "You'd be wrong."

A grand old classical-liberal masterpiece has been adapted, updated and made eminently available and relevant for today's modern young libertarians.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has remade Leonard E. Read's I, Pencil as an animated film, released on their website Thursday.

In an article about soaring gun sales MSNBC explained why Americans are buying guns in record numbers this way:

"Many point to fears stoked by gun-rights advocates that President Barack Obama, if elected to a second term, will push legislation to rein in gun ownership."

Notice the typical collectivist groupthink in that sentence. People don't buy guns after thinking about it; they rush to buy guns because their fears were "stoked by gun-rights advocates."

The great Texas book battle is over for now.

The point of the battle, a periodic Texas Board of Education brawl fought along political lines, is to make Texas textbooks less liberally biased by making them more conservatively biased.

Libertarians will agree with some changes (Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek were added as champions of free-market economic theory) and reject some ("Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right.")

(All quotes are from the New York Times article, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change.)

When one looks at you he or she sees not a person but a thing to be used, consumed, and disposed of. They are all around you and you need to know how to recognize them behind the smiling face.

For children, education is an issue between their parents and the instructors they choose for them. For adults, education is a matter between student and teacher.

Education is never the business of government; brainwashing is the business of government.

All tax-funded education falls under the definition of brainwashing because taxation is coercion.

Voluntary education is not brainwashing because, by definition, it doesn't involve coercion.

Contrary to the coercive public education monopoly (where are those "Trust Busters" when you need them?) banishing government from all classrooms would cause opportunities for education to explode.

In case you still suffer from the delusion that your children are yours, as opposed to being pawns of the public schools or mere marionettes owned and operated by the federal government, the plans your elitist rulers have for "their" youngest subjects should educate you to the contrary.

The Obama administration plans to look sideways at the nation's child labor laws, a control mechanism otherwise beloved by big guv busybodies, and use the army of tiny tykes to pester their parents about the 2010 census.

"McCain's falsehoods on health care, oil companies, trade, taxes and worker training were egregious and covered up his pro-corporate positions."

"Under McCain's Plan, Health Insurance Benefits Would be Taxed For The First Time, Resulting In A $3.6 Trillion Tax Increase On Working Families. McCain's health care plan would eliminate the payroll deduction on health care benefits, which would have the effect of raising taxes on working families by $3.6 trillion. [New York Times, 5/1/08]"

As the Olympics wind down, I am amazed at how things change every four years. Many Americans were glued to their televisions to watch the excitement from Beijing, and also heard announcers wax nostalgic with memories of times when the Soviet Union was the USA's biggest competitor for Olympic gold. There was a time when it was unthinkable that a government as powerful as that of the Soviet Union's could possibly crumble, yet crumble it did. The irony is that the strength of the Soviet government was also its weakness, as no country, no economic system can remain strong under the crushing burden that is central planning.

Central Planning is sold to a hopeful people as a way to solve societal problems, to right wrongs, and bring about perfect justice and equality. Central Planning promises you everything you are entitled to. As a bonus, goods and services produced by others are added to the list of commodities that everyone has a "right" to. Suddenly everyone is entitled to healthcare, housing, education, food, et cetera. It might sound nice that the state will magically provide all these wonderful things, but these rosy promises mask a dehumanizing, ugly reality. The other side of these entitlements is that now the doctor, the builder, the teacher, the farmer are slaves to the all-powerful state. No longer do they serve patients, students, or customers. They work in complete obedience to the state, their only customer.

Newspaper article: Los Angeles – A California judge ruled that parents without teaching credentials cannot legally homeschool their children, and then asserted, "Parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children." News conference: "Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, thank you for attending our Posturing and Image Management Event today. I will now turn the proceedings over to our Chief Legalcrat, Sue Pantzoff, Commissar of the Department of Unjustified Prosecutions for the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia." "Thank you Mr. Flack.

As one might expect in today's virulently aggressive politically correct culture, a movement is afoot to rewrite history, which includes "amending the plaques, statues, and memorials of historical figures to reflect their racist sentiments." (Christian Science Monitor). One movement afoot is to footnote a bust of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney as a racist because he wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case ... For another example, some South Carolinians want to tack a plaque on the base of the big bronze statue of Reconstruction-era Governor and US Senator Ben Tillman who, according to the Charleston City Paper, had a hand in rewriting the state constitution that "disenfranchised blacks and established the segregation laws which stood for 70 years" and, incidentally, advocated lynching Negroes."

"I was wondering if you are aware of what goes on in the Clark County school system in regards to the treatment of students, ... policies and actions that border on something straight out of a prison.

"Students who are deemed 'behavior' problems are expelled from regular school and sent to something called 'behavior school'. Once there they can expect to be strip searched -- strip searched. I still find this hard to comprehend. The system apparently treats children as some sort of enemy, to be controlled, to ensure docile compliance.

Global warming and cooling, according to our more down-to-earth earth sciences scientists, seem to occur in 1500-year cycles. People's lifespans, something like 35 years or so for century after century before capitalism came along and, much to the chagrin of lefty hollowhead Marxist anti-capitalists who still blindly deny it, extended the average life expectancy out to 70 or 80 years or so, was just too short for people grubbing in the ground for their grub in the form of grub worms to take much notice of these great climate shifts.

'In a recent class at Abraham Clark High School in Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte LLP.

'"Consider a career you may never have imagined," the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."