Sunday 3 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
If we’re to believe the hysterics, a 2.3% cut in the largest budget ever in the history of humanity is the difference between an America that is prosperous, and one in which planes will spontaneously fall out of the sky and children will go starving in the streets. Don’t be a chode.
Comments Off on 2.3% :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-03 :: madlibertarianguy
Sunday 3 March 2013 - Filed under Authoritarianism + Education
Schools criminalizing behaving like a child.
It used to be that getting in a schoolyard fight meant a trip to the principal’s office—detention, maybe. But in Florida, more than any other state, that schoolyard fight can lead to the student’s arrest and even felony charges. Last year 12,000 students were arrested 13,870 times in Florida public schools, the Orlando Sentinel reported. The arrests are meted out unevenly. Black students are just 21 percent of Florida youth, but make up 46 percent of all school-related referrals to law enforcement, according to the Sun Sentinel.
The majority of the arrests, 67 percent, were for infractions like fist fights, dress-code violations, and talking back—schoolyard misbehavior that, in Florida and elsewhere, increasngly results in misdemeanor criminal charges. “The vast majority of children being arrested in schools are not committing criminal acts,” Wansley Walters, secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, told the Orlando Sentinel.
While Florida is not alone in turning to police to discipline young people, it has the distinction of being the nation’s leader in school-based arrests. Last year, Florida produced the highest documented number of school-based arrests in the country—and that number was an improvement over previous years. In 2005, Florida made 28,000 arrests in school. It has logged a 39 percent drop in school arrests over the last seven years, according to the Department of Juvenile Justice.
In most cases, 69 percent, the juvenile justice system ultimately dismisses or otherwise diverts the charges. But experts say getting hauled away from school in handcuffs nonetheless has a lifelong impact.
David Utter, director of the Florida Youth Initiative at the Southern Poverty Law Center, notes that getting arrested is, at a basic psychological level, a “highly traumatic” experience for young people. It can precipitate the breakdown in trust between young people and the adults in their lives, making what should be a welcoming and nurturing environment a hostile place.
The arrests also carry more measurable costs. Even when the arrest doesn’t go anywhere because, say, the state chooses to drop the case, a child is forever forced to answer affirmatively when asked on job and other applications whether they’ve ever been arrested. Statutes allow a child to have his or her record expunged, but expungements are not automatic, said Utter, and the state still holds onto personal data about a child. “It’s pretty damn permanent,” Utter said.
Forced to endure a life of questioning an arrest for talking back to a teacher as a sophomore in high school is fucking cruel. I won’t have my child subjected to the penal system for contempt of teacher, especially when, in my experience of 13 years in government schooling, the vast majority of them deserve nothing but contempt.
Comments Off on Reason 1,254,995 :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-03 :: madlibertarianguy
Friday 1 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Students being suspended from school for eating their pop tart in to the shape of a gun. Inadvertently.
7-Year-Old Joshua was suspended this morning from Park Elementary School in Brooklyn Park. Joshua says he was eating a pastry during snack time and trying to shape it into a mountain, the teacher said it looked like a gun and took him to the principal’s office. Joshua’s parents were called, he has been suspended for two days.
Full retard doesn’t even begin to explain this.
Comments Off on Reason 1,254,994 :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-01 :: madlibertarianguy
Friday 1 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
This is the kind of bombardment that most of us wouldn’t mind being under.
Mexican police have confiscated an improvised cannon that they say was used to fire packages of marijuana across a border fence into California.
The makeshift cannon was made of plastic pipe and powered by compressed air sourced from an old car engine, police in the border city of Mexicali said. The device was able to fire cylinders packed with up to 30 pounds of pot.
Fire in the hole!
Comments Off on Bombardment :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-01 :: madlibertarianguy
Friday 1 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Learning from the mistakes of others.
In the country that has some of the most restrictive firearms legislation in the world, law-abiding citizens must obtain police permission before purchasing a gun and subject themselves to public ridicule, surprise searches without warrants, arbitrary confiscation and burdensome government regulations.
It’s a fate that could befall America, some warn, if citizens willingly surrender their firearms – and with those guns, an entire nation’s hard-won freedom.
Australian Josh Coughran, who was forced to turn over his pistols and license when increased work commitments prevented him from completing burdensome gun-range attendance requirements, cautioned that gun “reform” is a slippery slope.
“It’s a viral epidemic that starts small and eventually envelops its host, often resulting in death,” he said. “The devil is in the details, and our story bears true to that old adage. What started as a small attack by a minority on semi-automatic rifles is now what it is today.”
His message to Americans?
“Do not surrender a single one of those rights that have been purchased at such great cost in blood,” he warned. “I still wonder how the country my forefathers fought and died to defend became the instrument which took away my rights.”
When Australia enacted some of the world’s strongest gun-control measures in 1996, it was never anticipated that the following headlines would be splashed across the nation’s major newspapers in just the last month: “Sydney is a city under fire,” “Fists give way to firearms,” “Customs failing to stop the entry of illegal guns into Australia,” “Aussies own as many guns as before 1996,” “Firearms control thrown in spotlight as gun numbers rise” and “Middle East squad to work on gun crime.”
These media stories reflect the complex and sobering tale of Australian gun-control efforts, a journey that travels from the vast borders of the Australian coast to the suburban streets of its most populous city and documents the failings of seemingly unrelated matters of immigration and multiculturalism.
With this coinciding with the renewed gun debate in America in the wake of Sandy Hook, Australian gun control advocates, far from undeterred, are energized and appear determined to revisit the past. One headline on the nation’s most popular news website declared, “New gun buy-back scheme needed: Gun-control advocates.”
Despite mushrooming gun crime and gun numbers in Australia, there remains little appetite in the nation’s populace – or political will for law repeal in the parliaments – for a return to the days prior to 1996.
Firearms today have no part in Australian culture, with an entire generation of citizens having never held one.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Australia’s transformation from gun nation to gun-hating country is a tragic tale, often misrepresented or inaccurately told. It is a story of treachery, timing and constant political cunning – one that has moved the agenda of gun control away from guns and ammunition to mandatory attendance and gun ranges. And those organizations best placed to campaign for gun rights have been bought into silence.
We can only hope.
Comments Off on Learning :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-01 :: madlibertarianguy
Friday 1 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Another “hiccup.” Marketwatch:
Companies have a new solution to rising health-insurance costs: Break up their employees’ marriages.
By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health.
While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, last year, 6% of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5% in 2010, as did 4% of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer. These “spousal carve-outs,” or “working spouse provisions,” generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse’s plan.
Obamacare. Fucking married couples everywhere since 2010.
Comments Off on And Another One :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-01 :: madlibertarianguy
Friday 1 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Obamacare has been law for nearly three years, with its anniversary approaching on March 23. And while the major provisions (exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion) aren’t slated to begin until 2014, Obamacare is already having devastating effects on Americans and their health care.
Recall that fateful Presidential promise, made on several occasions during the health care reform debate, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
Despite the President’s promise, Heritage warned that many provisions in Obamacare would encourage employers to drop health coverage for their workers[.]
Another hiccup in a long line of “misrepresentations” of Obamacare.
Comments Off on Just as Expected :: Share or discuss :: 2013-03-01 :: madlibertarianguy
Wednesday 27 February 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Do you hear an echo? You should.
Comments Off on What’s Old is New Again :: Share or discuss :: 2013-02-27 :: madlibertarianguy
Wednesday 27 February 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
I guess it’s just coincidence that California’s schools went to shit in the immediate aftermath of then Gov Brown (during his first stint as Governor) signing compelled union membership amongst the state’s teachers which pushed the teachers union to the forefront of deciding California politics.
“Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children,” California Gov. Jerry Brown said in his January State of the State address. “If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify.”
Bad news, governor: California is already failing its children. And it wasn’t always this way.
According to RAND Corp., as late as the 1970s California’s public schools still had an “excellent” reputation. Then, in 1975, Brown (in his first stint as California’s governor) signed the Rodda Act, giving government unions the power to take money directly out of government employees’ paychecks.
The California Teachers Association quickly poured this new revenue stream into an organizing drive, more than doubling the union’s ranks. The Golden State’s politics have never been the same since — nor has the quality of its public schools. Between 2000 and 2010, the CTA spent more than $211 million to influence California voters and elected officials. That is more money than the oil, tobacco and hospital industries combined.
The CTA’s first big political victory came in 1988, when it helped pass Proposition 98, which amended the California Constitution to mandate that at least 39 percent of the state budget be spent on K-12 education spending. Since then, California teacher salaries have skyrocketed and are now among the highest in the nation (only Massachusetts and New York pay more).
At an average salary of $69,434 per year, a family of two teachers would bring in almost $140,000 in income per year. That is almost triple the state’s $57,000 median family income — and teachers get summers off.
But all of that money for teachers salaries hasn’t helped students in the classroom. By 1992, the first year for which state-by-state comparisons are available, California ranked second to last among states tested (ahead of only Mississippi), in reading proficiency among fourth-graders.
Since then, California per pupil education spending has continued to rise, and student test scores have not. In 2011, the most recent year available, California eighth-graders finished 48th in reading, ahead of just Louisiana and Mississippi, and 48th in math, ahead of just Alabama and Mississippi. Perhaps California should change its state motto to “Thank God for Mississippi.”
Swelling the ranks in order to consolidate power and fatten up the paychecks were all for the children.
Comments Off on Coincidence :: Share or discuss :: 2013-02-27 :: madlibertarianguy
Tuesday 26 February 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
There’s no way that liberals in the post-racial era would manipulate an election to ensure that someone black receives the vote. Just no way. Because liberals totally aren’t racist.
Illinois congressional candidate Toi Hutchinson dropped out of the special election race for disgraced former Rep. Jesse Jackson’s seat on Sunday and endorsed rival Democrat Robin Kelly.
Hutchinson’s withdrawal means Kelly, the Cook County chief administrative officer, will head toward the Feb. 26 election as the strong favorite in the race for the Chicagoland seat. Hutchinson and Kelly, who are African-American, had been dividing the support of the district’s black voters, a circumstance that could have handed Debbie Halvorson, a white former congresswoman, a win.
In exiting the Democratic primary, Hutchinson, a state senator, cited a desire to keep the seat in the hands of an African-American representative. African-Americans make up a narrow majority of voters in the district, which spans Chicago’s South Side and several nearby suburban counties.
If white republicans manipulated an election so that a white person was virtually guaranteed to win over a black candidate, this would be more “proof” that all non-liberals are racist.
Comments Off on Conspiracy :: Share or discuss :: 2013-02-26 :: madlibertarianguy