Read more news (and history) then. Hitler and Mussolini were elected too, you know. Chavez has shut down opposition newspapers, thrown political opponents into jail, supported the leftist-cum-terrorist operations of FARC in Columbia, is best buds with the Castro brothers, etc. All of which adds up to me as dictator-like behavior. He first came to notice after a failed coup attempt in 1992 - and when he did come to power, became one of the leaders of the OPEC cartel, reducing production to boost oil prices.

See http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/presidentsofsouthamerica/p/09HChavez.htm - a generally sympathetic view of him as a leftist reformer, but his dictatorial aspirations are clear.

Plus, he's just a lying SOS and enemy of the US, just on general principles (or lack thereof). Most recently, he accused US of being responsible for the Haiti earthquake ( http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583588,00.html ) using some magical new weapon no one else has heard of. Evidence of the paranoid style and demonization of some "enemy" which is page one of the dictator's handbook.\p>

No such law - just custom, nearly universally observed, but there are exceptions.

I note the parent post did not mention antibiotics, but just killing bacteria. Which Pasteur did pioneer, thus the term "Pasteurization".

You don't have any teen-aged daughters, do you?

This is the one branch of fascist thinking that hasn't been officially eradicated or possibly even seriously challenged in Germany. The attitude is that children belong to the state and it goes back a long way - at least to the Kulturkampf in Bismark's time and the origin of Kindergarten as a means to pry children's allegiance away from parents and local culture (especially Catholic).

The essential question is who is really responsible for the children? My answer is the parents - the state makes a lousy surrogate. The kids need to be loved and guided - if the guidance is a bit off, then they can think for themselves later. Parents are often lousy at it, but somehow most parents fumble their way to reasonably well-adjusted kids. Nobody should be empowered to subvert the parent-child bond, except in extreme cases of neglect.

Absolutely correct. There is no useful "tech" fix for education - it's all in the wetware connection between the one giving the instruction and those receiving it; hardware just does not apply.

I really don't mean this as a troll, but, really, do Teacher's colleges (or Education departments) really teach anything significant at all? I was an undergraduate 40 years ago and education majors were not exactly considered the brightest on campus then and, as far as I can tell, still aren't (from my kids in college).

Personally, I believe that when women with intelligence could become anything they wanted, the teaching profession lost its most reliable source of decent practitioners. I hasten to add that I don't think we should turn the clock back on that, but it would be nice if teaching attracted more of the highly competent women that now go into business or other professions. How to do that is another issue and there are serious cultural as well as financial problems to overcome here.

And yes, I will plead guilty to holding the probably sexist notion that intelligent women are better at handling younger children (say before middle school, at least) than equally intelligent men, on average. That's just the way it is (in my not so humble opinion).

Which means precisely nothing. He is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. That doesn't give him any rights at all with respect to avoiding that judgement in the proper jurisdiction.

If anything Hitler was against Christianity, but felt that the time to deal with Christians was to be left to a time well after the other "lesser races" were dealt with. There clearly was anti-Christian bias in some of the letters and writings of Hitler, and a sort of psuedo-religious cult that came up in the form of Nazism that transcended Christianity.

Certainly the anti-Jewish sentiment in Nazism was not grounded in Christianity, but rather in something far more profound and a sort of religion in its own right.

As for being hard-pressed to look for any incident where a bunch of avowed atheists have explicitly killed those harboring religious beliefs as their only "crime"? I don't think you have looked hard enough. Millions have died at the hands of atheists, or at least governments that have sought explicitly to purge religious thought. Both Mao and Stalin were involved in that killing, and both professed official atheism. It wasn't merely "the greater good", but that was indeed the rationale. It also involved more than just these two men.

Even today in China, if you tried to open a church or express your religious beliefs in a public manner without formal state approval you will get arrested and possibly even killed on the spot for what in most "western" nations would be considered a non-violent protest. I'm not talking twenty or forty years ago, I'm talking today. People are still being killed today in the name of atheism, or because they don't disavow their religious beliefs.

What educational system are you talking about? Rote memorization was the mainstay of the educational system up until the 60s when we started getting all warm and fuzzy and stopped caring about facts. Rote learning provides the basis for critical thinking (which is best done at the college level) by grounding the individual in facts. I'm afraid what we've been producing for the past 30 years are students who mostly avoid the hard work of thinking that the hard sciences require and instead go for MBAs to make money as painlessly as possible. That probably has a lot to do with the decline in basic science work, as well.