Maggie's Farm

Brit Nanny State and Schools

How wonderful to live in a place where adults can be children, and the State can do all your thinking for you. Brit school bureaucrats complain about parents' involvement in schools.

And the US Public Schools vs. Charter Schools

Debra England:

"Despite wave upon wave of touted educational “reforms” over the past several decades, this failed government monopoly has succeeded in producing a sclerotic bureaucracy that has flatlined American K-12 academic achievement for the past 35 years.  Interestingly, this same timeframe has seen the birth and rapid growth of modern teachers’ unions and a nationwide explosion in average annual per pupil spending, which has more than doubled since 1970 - from $4,700 to roughly $10,100 today in constant dollars. Basic economics tells us that when expenditures increase by more than 100% while outputs remain unchanged, we are witnessing a huge productivity decline in the public education sector. Money is clearly not the problem"

Read entire.

"We're smart, you're dumb" Politics

Gelerntner, via RCP.

Steyn: Blair will win, but...

"At one level, Tony Blair is an absurd figure: In the jurisdiction he's supposed to be governing, the hospitals are decrepit and disease-ridden, crime is rampant in the leafiest loveliest villages, in the urban areas politics is fragmenting along racial and religious lines, and the IRA have been transformed with the blessing of Blair's ministers into the British Isles' homegrown Russian Mafia. But, in the jurisdictions for which he has no responsibility, Blair flies in and promises to cure all. He's particularly keen on Africa: Genocide? AIDS? Poverty? Don't worry, Tony's got the answer. He can't make the British trains run on time, but he can save the world." Read entire Steyn piece.

Nuclear Energy

Is anyone opposed to it anymore, except for skittish utilities and their insurance companies?

Scopes Trial Redux

Wake up, Kansas. You make believers look like dopes. And when God needs help getting appreciation for creating evolution, I'm sure He'll ask for it.

News = Entertainment: Al Gore Speaks

See the video of Gore at Move On last week, on Jackson's Junction.

A Bainbridge Two-fer

His casual regard for immigration laws is ticking people off. Well, that's what blogging is all about. Diversity. Debate. Fun. The stuff that the MSM has been missing.

And interesting info re wines from the Prof.:

"Contrary to wine's male image, in which men score vintages and then hoard them in cellars, women buy 77 percent and consume 60 percent of the wine in America."

New England Values

Michelle is on the story about the homosexual movement in grade school. At Maggie's, we like gays as much as we like anyone else, but come on! Geez.

A New Dem Hero: Hugo Chavez

What does this tell us? Thanks, LGF.

The Sacred UN: The One Hope for Humanity

Mugabe appointed to UN Human Rights Commission. Thanks, Right Wing Nuthouse.

Horowitz on the Job

If Dave didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. His campaign for Academic Freedom is worthy of support. Have to quote his piece:

"Today, I am grateful to my Columbia professors for their professionalism, for the fairness with which they treated me as a student and for their faithfulness to the educational concept. They did not regard the classroom as a place for airing their political prejudices or where students were expected to adopt opinions their teachers regarded as politically correct. As I set out on my campaign of academic reform in the year 2003, the educational environment I experienced at Columbia in the 1950s was the gold standard of what I wanted to achieve.

It is my view based on thirty years of experience around college campuses, that American universities are less intellectually free today than they were in the McCarthy era. The difference is that then the commissars of political correctness were political figures who were outside the university community and whom the university community regarded with hostility as well as fear. Today, the commissars of political correctness are an integral part of the university itself. They are professors and administrators who think it is the university’s place to train students in “progressive” attitudes and ideas, and enlist them in the armies of “social change.” But the university is not – and should not be – a political party. As the liberal scholar Stanley Fish put it in a well-known article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Save The World On Your Own Time.”  "

Read entire.