re: anti bad parent and unruly student rant...

My kids are little angels too, of course, but some of their friends are just like that. and their parents! Storming in to the principals office and demanding A's!! Little Johnny won't get into the good schools if he doesn't have A's!! Oh I know, traditionally you have to work hard for A's, but our family is rich! Those rules don't apply to us!

The rant regarding poor parenting might have been a bit emotional, but he is right. Study, after study, has shown the number one indicator of student success is how involved the child's parents are in the education. Being involved does not mean letting your kid flout school rules, it means helping with homework, instilling discipline, supporting teachers when bad behavior crops up, and showing to your kids with word and deed that you think education is important.

Coming from a place where only university profs get tenure, how hard it is to fire a truly bad teacher seems crazy. Our teachers are unionized, but bad teachers get fired after all the proper procedures are followed. BUT the parent described in the rant pretty much guarantees an uneducated child.

Today's cars are much, much more reliable than the cars I grew up with. Modern cars don't need yearly tuneups. There are no points to adjust. No crappy, complicated, and finicky carburetors to rebuild, today's spark plugs last for 100,000 or more km, etc...

So that isn't an issue.

We have always had mandatory insurance up here so that isn't an issue.

But none of my three kids drive, only one even bothered to get a learners license while I was at the drivers license office 5 minutes after I turned 16. Lots of my kids friends don't drive. Part is public transit is better, and part is it is easier to arrange real life meetings when everyone has a cell phone.

I used to drive to three friends places and pick them up. My kids all converge on their meeting spot, always in contact with each other, no wondering where the hell Bill got to.

Banks were not forced to lend to people who could not pay. Banks paid big bonuses to people to sign up as many people as possible, whether they could pay or not, then repackaged those bad mortgages as financial instruments that the rating firms then rated as AAA when they were junk, sold to investors, and laughed as they made big bucks while the economy crashed.

Greed and deregulation caused the crash.

I guess it depends where you live, but up here in Vancouver BC, healthy fresh food is quite a but cheaper than processed food, fast food, and junk food. You have to be able to cook, but cooking is so easy you teach your average 12 year old in a few months.

I do recall a visiting consultant being amazed at our selection of fresh fruits and veggies at the local grocery store, and it was a store with a pretty small selection. Seems in a lot of places in the USA just finding healthy fresh food can be hard.

Isn't it immoral to starve people when you don't need to?

Plus your math is wrong. Each year, you generate $15b in costs over 10 years so each year you get $13b in the hole.

I don't collect stamps. Is everything I do militant not collecting stamps?

Being an Atheist is like not collecting stamps. The non stamp collector doesn't want the stamp collectors passing laws that make non stamp collectors second class citizens, but most of the time the non stamp collector is not obsessing about not collecting stamps.

Capitalism is a good system to allocate scarce resources, and it has created wealth for a lot of people, but raw, unfettered capitalism is a disaster for the average person. For a just society to work with our current level of technology capitalism and free markets are an important part of a mix of policies that should include socialist elements to ensure everyone has at least a minimally satisfying life.

Believing there is only one true way to run a society, for example dog eat dog capitalism, or strict communism, generally leads to disaster. A mix of elements that has been shown to produce the best result for the most people should be used. And that best mix has been shown to be a mixed economy like those in northern Europe, France, and somewhat in Canada. The more laissez faire capitalism of the USA is a failure compared to these countries when you look at objective yard sticks like life expectancy, income disparity, social mobility, average salaries, access to medical care, education, etc...

Economic dogma is just as bad as religious dogma.

As an atheist I often recommend that my religious friend read the bible. Most haven't read the "good book", and most find actually reading it a much better argument against being religious than anything I could tell them.

god allows suffering because god doesn't exist.

It is long past the time when any religion should expect the government to take any notice of its beliefs in a secular society. A secular society should ignore religion because if you don't, how do you draw the line? Should I be allowed to stone my neighbor to death if he doesn't observe the Sabbath? Allow my child to die from an easily cured malady because I believe in faith healing?

Religion has no place in making the laws of a secular nation.

As a Canadian, it seems that the only policy the Republicans have is "vote no to anything Obama or any Democrat proposes". We don't care that Obama won the presidential election, we will thwart the will of the people for our rich masters. We will do our best to raise taxes on the poor and middle class while giving the rich tax breaks. We will reduce food stamps to the poor. We will do our best to ensure the middle class have the worst access to health care of any western nation. We will continue to show we say we are Christians while doing exactly the opposite of what Jesus preached.

That last bit of hypocrisy is particularly galling.

This is another very good example why a single payer system is better. Is it any of your employers business if you are using contraceptives? I would say no - even if you are a nun. With a single payer system only you and your doctor know what medical treatments you are using.