Couple of points:

1. The teacher is a representative of the school. It reflects poorly on the school when their employee goes around demeaning their customers in a public forum. If you did this in any other business, you'd be fired by any half-intelligent employer. The teacher is being paid to provide a service, namely to educate kids. That position includes behavioral expectations so that they are not detracting from the educational mission. If they can't handle the job, they should be fired.

The kids and their parents, on the other hand, are customers (not to mention that they are customers being compelled to pay for, and attend, a particular school by force of law, simply by virtue of where they can afford to live). Customers should expect to be treated with civility, not personal insults.

2. Kids are required to attend, as well as to follow the instructions of the teachers. Because we give teachers authority, it is reasonable to hold them to a higher standard.

Well, if you have a "public" school, then the public gets to decide what is taught. If this concerns you, then advocate for school choice, so you don't have to subsidize beliefs you disagree with, and can choose a school for your kids that will do a better job.

It's not just Texas that influences textbooks - California does too, and its has its own pet ideologies for textbooks too. We won't break this cycle unless we address the cost issues associated with designing textbooks for many small markets. Maybe moving to electronic formats would help. Maybe open-sourcing textbooks could help. But I suspect as long as what's in textbooks is mandated by the state, you will find the contents to be politically-driven crap.

No, the problems start when we give power to such people. An idiot without power has a limited ability to do harm. An idiot with the force of government behind his idiocy can do a lot of harm, indeed.

At least "dumb shits" in business are often (not always) a self-solving problem: their stupidity drives them out of business. Unless, of course, they can find an idiot in government to bail them out. And idiocy in government is practically speaking permanent, given the lack of accountability or competitive pressure.

And therein lies the problem. These "boards of educators" are generally politicians who are directly elected or are political appointees. They are not necessarily even experts in the subjects. They are chosen to a significant degree based upon their ideological leanings.

No, it's up to the elected True Believers (TM), whether they thump Bibles or their own chests, to do that.

Sounds like a good description of the schools we get when we let politics design our curricula.

If they followed up those examples with "and now let's see how we could test/falsify these theories", such alternate options would be fantastic. A theory that the moon is made of cheese is wrong, but is scientific because you can test it to see if you're wrong. Scientists come up with wrong theories all the time, but then they test them, find out their hypothesis was wrong, and move on.

So by all means, tell the kids the moon is made of cheese, and then ask them how they'd prove you wrong.

Well, in an ideal world where our schools were not micromanaged by government fiat, teachers would teach the kids how science really works. Namely that you have a hypothesis and try to falsify it.

Do this first with a non-controversial topic, so kids can be taught the scientific method without all the emotional and religious issues around evolution. Find an example simple enough that kids can propose their own theories of how something works, then design little experiments to try to prove those theories wrong. This lets teachers explain that theories must be falsifiable before you get to any hot-button topics.

Once they're used to following a disciplined, scientific approach to problems, THEN introduce evolution and let the kids think it through for themselves.

If we're waiting until high school biology class to teach kids fundamentals of the scientific process, we're doing it wrong.

IANAL, but it seems there are things the prisons could do:

1. For existing facilities: Pay the licensed carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc) to install custom cells at the prison. Give the base station low power, and program it to only allow pre-determined cell numbers to connect to anything other than 911. Because it is low power, cells outside the prison will choose to use higher-power signals from nearby real cells instead, so there is no interference with neighbors. Yet inside the prison, it will still be the highest power signal, and thus all the prison phones will use lock to it. Because it's a real cell operated by the licensed operators in that spectrum, there shouldn't be the legal issues associated with jamming.

You've now rendered all the smuggled phones useless to prisoners. Guards can still use cell phones by having their phone registered (and calls monitored so they don't just sell/rent the phone to prisoners).

2. For new prisons, you could build shielding in. The government knows how to make facilities that block a lof of radio-frequency transmissions - they use it for national security all the time. So you keep landlines for the guards, and the prisoners can't get cell reception. Less flexible than solution #1, but it'd probably be sufficient.

3. At least use detection devices to locate cell phones as they enter the grounds. Such things do exist.

Density is almost certainly a factor.

Poverty level, though - is the poverty the cause of the crime, or crime the cause of the poverty? Or are both the result of a 3rd factor, such as people with poor self-control? A lot of folks assume the first, but the other two seem just as, if not more, likely.

Libertarians are not against "all regulation". That's anarchy, not liberty. Statists just like this strawman argument because it lets them dismiss the real arguments of libertarians. Don't fall for it.

The practical problem is that regulations, to be effective, need to be enforced. Enforcement is done by those human beings we call "regulators". Being human beings, many of them lack maturity and competence, just as many folks in the general population do. So the more regulations you have, the more regulators, and the more immature tyrants are given their own little fiefdoms. This is compounded by government rules that make it hard to fire the incompetent, and that dissuade many talented professionals from seeking government employment.

You can't separate out such bad behaviors as being "not an example of regulation". There may be a theoretical distinction, but in practice, they are an inevitable consequence of granting power to real-world, flawed human beings.

These sorts of issues are exactly why libertarians are always trying to find solutions that create a system of incentives for voluntary transactions rather than government force. Lack of power over each other means we need to cooperate. Power means one person can (and often will) abuse the other. If you can design a system which lacks extreme power imbalances, you can avoid the need to create more government bureaucracies and the ills that come with them. This is not always possible, but it's worth trying to do so before creating the next bureaucratic fiefdom.

Lead.

You're right it's not easy. You're right the situation is complicated. You're right we can't browbeat the Chinese government into treating their people decently. To me, that says the only thing we can realistically do is lead by example. Show the peoples of the world that America still believes in something more than expediency of the moment.

Unfortunately, for far too long, under far too many Presidents, we have done little of that. We coddle dictators as long as they give us something in return. China finances our debt and sells us cheap goods. Egypt gave us aid against terrorists. Ditto for the Saudis. For years we aided Saddam Hussein. All because it was expedient in the short-term, never mind that such dictatorships foster unrest and radicalism. Never mind that this makes these peoples feel we care nothing for them and undermines our future diplomacy.

The hardest part is that Congress is not of one mind on the subject. Most politicians don't think beyond the next election, and aren't likely to go out on a limb unless they have cover. That's why you need leadership. Unfortunately, we haven't had it for a while.

If the goal was to recognize contributions to peace, free speech, or knowledge of government actions, Wikileaks is a poor candidate.

Wikileaks didn't tell us anything about the big-picture actions of the US government we didn't already know from the press. This was no Watergate with its revelations of duplicity. The US government has, in fact, been doing exactly what it's said it was doing. Those US actions have angered a lot of people, but we knew that before Wikileaks. So much for informing the public - we already knew what we needed to know to hold our leaders accountable.

What we did see is a bunch of diplomatically damaging commentaries, such as US ambassadors' assessments of the character flaws of foreign rulers. If you undermine diplomacy, you make war MORE likely, not less. So much for peace.

Finally, the most likely result of this scandal is that the free speech laws will become MORE restrictive. Historically our country has relied upon publishers to exercise some discretion about disclosure of classified information, so as not to risk our soldiers or allies on the battlefield. The press has generally tried to balance the public good against the public harm, even while it's disclosed quite a bit. Wikileaks however, by publishing names of Afghan informants, put lives at risk and gave the country a reason to consider stricter laws.

And what did Wikileaks hope to achieve by recklessly disclosing anything it could get its hands on? Other than notoriety, or vandalism of US diplomatic or anti-terror efforts, that is? It's not like the Taliban Assange aided are any friends of free speech, or of transparent and accountable government.

Actually, having a lot of children is the only thing that is going to keep the welfare state funded, as an ageing population places increasing demands upon it. We need more young people to fund all those entitlement programs.

Why do you say that? Our population is at record highs, we protect the environment more than ever, and our society is far more just than previous ones. We polluted a lot more during the Industrial Revolution, for example, and nobody would want to live in that society rather than today, where we have less discrimination, etc. Having greater population leads to greater specialization of labor (not everyone needs to be a farmer), which produces greater wealth and technology, so that we are both technologically and economically more able to protect the environment.

I think he's suggesting that many pro-choice people find it hard to identify with a fetus as being fully human. Thus they are reluctant to use the law (which is force) to defend the fetus against the mother's decision to kill it.

But if you start to realize the fetuses could be killed because of a human quality - a quality they share with you - that may change your perspective. Imagine the reaction on Slashdot if scientists found a "geek" gene and non-geek parents started aborting such fetuses because they didn't want their kids to turn out "like that". That's the situation gays are going to face once we discover which genes predispose one to homosexuality (I say "predispose" because genes aren't a guarantee - identical twins are not always the same orientation, just more likely to be).

It's not pro-lifers that are going to abort the gay kids. It's the moderate, middle-class pro-choice folks who don't want their kids to have certain "undesirable" traits - whether it's mental retardation, being gay, having whatever gender the parents don't want, etc.

I agree the electrics aren't compelling yet, but I disagree with your conclusion that subsidies are necessary for this problem to be solved. If such a chicken-and-egg dilemma were really true, then we would never have had automobiles to begin with. Before the car was invented, there were no buyers of cars, and there were no models. Just horses. But businesses, such as Henry Ford's, invested their money and brainpower in new products in anticipation of future buyers. They didn't need government subsidies.

The reason why these companies want subsidies is precisely because they don't have something compelling to offer consumers, such that consumers would give up their hard-earned money voluntarily.

100% agreed. I was quoting a particular source and had been too lazy to find an alternative source with phrasing to distinguish wealth and income.

However, since then I got over my laziness, and posted stats from the NY Times here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1953940&cid=34909250