Monthly Archives: August 2013

“If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person”

Lovely headline! This is one of the steps that every socialist endeavor takes: finding scapegoats (saboteurs) for their failure.

open quoteEveryone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)
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www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/private_school_vs_public_school_only_bad_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html

Why are we droning exactly?

WHY ARE WE DRONING, EXACTLY?

Honest question here. The policy is so magnificently, impossible, devastatingly reprehensible, it’s hard to imagine the dynamics within the military bureaucracy which support it.

Here are my guesses escalating up the conspiracy spectrum:

1. Some soldiers and officers are looking for job security in their specialty. They enjoy blowing things up, and can’t hear anything else above the sound of their awesomeness.

2. As I’ve written before, when the military has two ways of solving a problem, it’ll choose the way that involves paying large sums of money to a military industry.

3. There are psychopathic people in this world (including a world leader or two) who openly preach death to all Arabs. Droning is part of that campaign.

4. Someone is promoting an inter-civilizational conflict, either because “war is the health of the state,” or because they want the Middle East in turmoil.

Other guesses welcome.

Harvard study reveals gun control counterproductive

open quoteOnce again, a study from an organization that you would never accuse of being “gun-loving” or “right-wing” seems to disprove the myth that the availability of handguns increases murder rates. In fact, it doesn’t.

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates.

Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study. ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.” In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates. Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.”close quote (Read more)

Feds Threaten To Arrest Lavabit Founder For Shutting Down His Service

open quoteThe saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order. The feds are apparently arguing that the act of shutting down the business, itself, was a violation of the order:

… a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison’s lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered — stating that Levison may have “violated the court order,” a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.

That same article suggests that the decision to shut down Lavabit was over something much bigger than just looking at one individual’s information — since it appears that Lavabit has cooperated in the past on such cases. Instead, the suggestion now is that the government was seeking a tap on all accounts:

Levison stressed that he has complied with “upwards of two dozen court orders” for information in the past that were targeted at “specific users” and that “I never had a problem with that.” But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service. He likened the demands to a requirement to install a tap on his telephone.

It sounds like the feds were asking for a full on backdoor on the system, not unlike some previous reports of ISPs who have received surprise visits from the NSA.close quote (Read more)