When the NY times covered similar pushes to regulate ride-sharing apps as taxis, they noted that the majority of stranger rapes in London were committed by unlicensed taxi drivers. Letting ride-sharing apps knock licensed taxis out of business would create a safety problem.

Dick Cheney's response to Obama's civil liberties speech in May 2009 was notable for putting forth the same claim, that the Bush administration prevented any terrorist attacks after 9/11, also failing to mention the anthrax attacks, which probably did more to frighten people than the 9/11 attacks.

Some people would like the fact that a number of people were killed and congressional mail service disrupted for months by someone who has yet to be unidentified and who the FBI concluded used biological weapons from a US government research facility to disappear down the memory hole. The house judiciary committee, which oversees the justice dept. and thus the FBI, was highly skeptical of the FBI's claim that Bruce Ivins was the sole individual responsible. Check Grassley, a Republican, was openly skeptical that Ivins was even involved. (Ivins did work at a biological weapons lab, but he didn't have access to the strain that was used in the attacks.)

Remember, facts are now judged not only by their truth and relevance, but also by their political significance.

"In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s?"

Because in the 70's, climate scientists pretty thoroughly established that if the patterns of the previous 36 ice ages still holds (and they are remarkably regular in their duration and frequency with an almost exactly 100,000 year cycle), then we have a thousand years or so to go on the current ice age. That's why there was all that speculation about sudden glaciation; they didn't know whether there could be cold surges when exiting an ice age. Their research held up, but the speculation was killed by more facts entering the debate. There was never a consensus about sudden glaciation, but our position in the ice age cycle is pretty well established by now. The consensus view is that we're too far from the peak cold to benefit from it and it will be at least a thousand years or so before natural warming starts to occur, and the current warming is human caused.

"It "works" in Sweden with a horrendous tax load on the working people of Sweden."

um, the "horrendous tax load" in Sweden includes their entire health care cost. If you add US health care costs (currently 15% of GDP) in to make a realistic comparison, the US has a higher load than Sweden.

"The US media is mostly liberal, not conservative and anyone acknowledges that if they are intellectually honest. "

bullshit. The US media is primarily corporate and the number of corporations has been shrinking fast. In the 80's, 98% of all US media was controlled by 37 corporations. Today it's 8. (For those of you with comprehension problems, that means 8 conservative billionaires control the bulk of US media.) Anti-corporate messages are simply not allowed on US media, and the "liberal" end of the US mainstream media market is only the left wing of the permissible corporate thought. Speakers or programs that attack corporatism as a concept are simply not mentioned. That's not liberal. The fact that you would treat support for Barack Obama, one of the most corporate Democrats, as a marker of liberalism shows how out of touch you are.

The US media is corporate, not liberal.

I'm currently teaching as my second career; I spent 15 years as a programmer/programmer-analyst/systems administrator/consultant.

Many school boards and school administrators are pushing for more use of technology in the classroom without any evaluation of whether it benefits learning. I think that's one problem.

More relevant to the article that started this discussion, I've had serious problems trying to use donated computers in one particular classroom because they were simply too different from each other to support easily. *Any* change in the software was likely to touch off a time-consuming round of fiddling with one or more machines to get it to work the same way as on the others. Teachers do not have copious amounts of time. (I work much longer hours now than I did when I was in IT.) If the poster is going to support the machines once they're in place, that's a plus, but a diverse collection of quirky older hardware might be more of a curse than a useful gift.

Having computers is nice, but if they don't come with support, they'll either draw time from the instructor or collect dust.

If the instructor does get them working and in use, there are a number of potential pitfalls that need to be dealt with. For elementary kids, basic keyboarding skills are an issue. Time spent teaching keyboarding is time not spent teaching something else. (It takes about 20 hours of teaching/practice to get upper elementary kids up to speed on keyboarding. That's a significant chunk of the language arts time for a year.) The extra effort to use an unfamiliar writing device can seriously interfere with a developing writer's progress actually writing. (If the work is simply too hard, the kids *DO* *NOT* *LEARN*. Making tasks harder can shut down progress with the kids who need practice the most.)

I've had trouble with lessons that depended on the kids having certain basic computer knowledge that I found they lacked and had to devote a great deal of effort to playing catch up. (Want to guess the percentage of 8th graders I had who tried to cite "google.com" as the source of an article in the website section of a bibliography? Would you like a long analysis of why it's amazingly difficult to teach teenagers the difference between the location bar and the search bar? (Many of them have used the search bar to input URL's for so long that the habit is thoroughly ingrained and unteaching a wrong idea is much harder than teaching something correctly from the start.)

Sorry, I started to switch topics there. Computers in the classroom can be helpful, but they're not always good and in certain cases they detract from learning. I've seen good lessons that used them, but those took a tremendous amount of preparation and required well-maintained computers. Most classroom computers are under-utilized because there aren't enough techs/admins keeping them usable. Donating admin time is probably more useful to a district or school than donating machines, but your girlfriend might appreciate the machines if you do the work to make them useful.