A modest proposal

The schools have gone completely insane. Suspending a kid for a Pop-Tart gun (it goes 'pop,' right?) or, as Chris Plante (a national treasure) talked about today, suspending another kid because he wanted to defend his school from a Sandy Hook Elementary-type massacre...wow. It seems 90-year-old brownshirt nuns have taken over the school system.

And what did you expect? For the past twenty years, the school system has waged a massive behavioral modification campaign to change little boys and little girls into little robots: ve are goink to eliminate ze violence in ze system. Make tag and pointy-gun-finger a capital offense. Promote homosexuality to give the little girls shopping partners, not eeeevil beer-swilling oppresive male husbands. Tart up the little girls and teach them about condoms so pedophiles will have an easier time of it. Dispense Adderol like candy.

And, really, it's so far advanced and ingrained in the entire public school system that no amount of lawsuits, outrage, and pulling your kids out is going to fix it. Noting can fix the public schools, which have become expensive, intrusive, and incapable.  

So, shut down public education. All of it.

Oh no! How will our precious little children ever learn about Dick and Jane? There'll be anarchy! Ignorance! Illiteracy! Dogs and cats living together!

 

Well, no.

After you've tossed the Marxist educational apparatus out the window, you pass two very simple laws: (a) no one can obtain a driver's license without a high school diploma, and (b) no one can work more than 10 hours a week without said diploma.

What??? WHAT?? How can someone get a high school diploma without a school to go to??? How can you deny a 16-year-old the joy of getting a license?? And how in the heck is McDonald's going to staff the front counter???

Easy. Get your GED. Then you're set.

Imagine. All across your town, hundreds of different schools would pop up. Some would just be bare bones Mom-and-Pop operations run out of a garage, teaching just enough to pass that GED. Others would be lovely institutions in (former) public school buildings, teaching Latin and Chemistry and Calculus to those who want more than a GED; you know, all those kids who wants to be doctors and lawyers and physicists. If all you want to do is join Daddy's roofing business, then great, go get your GED by the least expensive and fastest means possible, at 12 years old, if you can. But, let's face it, any 12-year-old who can pass the GED probably wants to do more than roofing, maybe be an archeologist, instead. So he enrolls in the Latin school.

But it'll be too expensive! No, it won't, it'll be pretty cheap. First, these schools need your kids to enroll, so they're going to have to keep their tuitions reasonable. And you'll have more money to pay for it because taxes will plummet. You'll be paying for only your school, not every other school in the county like you do now, whether you have kids or not.

And. boy, wouldn't this radically alter the colleges? Instead of an outrageously expensive four-year Communications degree just to learn how to run a recording studio, you could, instead, go to a much less expensive community college and get a certificate to do exactly the same thing. Without all the ridiculous courses that raise your tuition by, oh, say 1000%. In fact, the universities would have to get downright serious because they'd be competing against cheaper, faster, better ways of getting a great job. They'd actually have to become places of research and thought, instead of diploma mills and centers of Marxist indoctrination.

Utopia, people.

What it takes to be President

They're all abuzz on the radio today about Condeleeza Rice. I love Condeleeza Rice. She is a brilliant Soviet scholar who can stand toe-to-toe with Putin and his gang of thugs. I would pick her for National Security Advisor or Secretary of State again. But VP? Nope. Waste of her talents.

Amidst all the buzz, some pundit asked if Rice, or Rubio or Pawlenty or whoever, had the experience to be President. That one heartbeat away thing and all.

Experience to be President? Where, exactly, does one get such experience?

Oh, c'mon, Schlub, that's easy— you get it from being a Senator or Congressman or mayor or governor, yeah, especially governor, 'cause that's like being a minature President.

Uh, no.

All that "experience" makes you a better politician. And politicians are the LAST persons who should be President. Indeed, all the people you think should be President, shouldn't.

Let's take Ronald Reagan as an example. Guy should never have been President. I mean, an actor? With chimps? Divorced? Didn't go to Harvard, either. A governor, sure, but you know, California, the Twilight Zone. Wore a cowboy hat, too, so just not the sophisticated brie-eatin' Foreign-Affairs-published sophisticate we want to elect so Europeans will stop calling us rubes.

Won in a landslide, yes, but only because of the same "infected toe" situation we are in today: running against Jimmy Carter, who was Obama Lite. Besides, winning by a landslide is no measure of Presidential stature, as the current situation proves.

It's what you do afterwards.

Reagan was an astonishingly brilliant President, the best one of these modern times, a hero, a wonder. And he shouldn't have been, given professional politicians' criteria for leading. So, why was he?

Simple. He regarded these truths to be self-evident:

a. The individual is more important than the mass.

b. The United States is an aberration, historically unique, and while this model serves as example, it only works here. Be grateful, be awestruck, that you are an American.

c. Nothing can be accomplished through government. Indeed, government must diminish so the individual can flourish.

d. Rights are inherent, not granted.

Find me that person. Don't care how old they are, what their job is, where they live. That person is a President.

Perspective

Do you know which administration was very successful in creating jobs? Hitler's. Stalin's, too.

They even gave people places to live.

Cut or amputation

Virginia Foxx raised some ire by saying Obamacare will do more damage to us than a terrorist attack. She's right. We can recover from a terrorist attack. We can't from Obamacare.

What's the rush?

For health care and stimulus and klunker cash and cap and trade and greenery and czars and business takeover and fines and fees and taxes and Afghanistan? well, we can take our time on that and Olympics Olympics Olympics!

The Cloward-Piven strategy, that's why.

Torture

Torture doesn't work. Everybody's pretty much known that since, oh say, 1066. It's worthless for eliciting information. Oh, you can elicit information through torture, all right, but it's unreliable. I mean, when someone's shoving bamboo shoots under your fingernails, you'll say anything.

But, Schlub, waaait a minute! Iron maiden, the rack, the Spanish Inquisition, those weren't exactly tickle fests. Right, Torquemada was in there torturing from dawn to dusk. But, he wasn't interested in information; he wanted a confession, whether true or not, immaterial. Politics, man. You need heretics to confess, rip a couple of fingers off and, presto! confession. You need someone to admit being Anne Boleyn's lover, couple of hours on the rack, there's your lover.

But if you need accurate information, like the location of enemy troops and when they plan to attack, then torture isn't a good choice. See, you just can't believe the information you get by ripping someone's nose off. They'll tell you anything, and that just might get your army massacred. What's better is persuading the enemy to give up his info voluntarily. Well, how do you do that? By proving them wrong.

In Vietnam, the guys used to take captured VC and put them in a room with a working television, get them some food, and leave. About three days later, they're spilling their guts. Why? Because, the TV showed them everything they believed was a lie. The West was prosperous and happy, not filled with anguished wage slaves, like it is now. I always thought the easiest way to win the Cold War was load up a squadron of B-52s with Levis and drop them on Moscow. Week later, no more Soviet Union.

BUT…

…there IS a situation requiring torture: when you already know some of the information, you have the person with the rest of the information in your custody, and you are running out of time. Say, your daughter has been kidnapped, she is strapped to a bomb that will go off in 30 minutes, and you've got the kidnapper in your hands. So, time to start peeling skin off faces, right? Wrong. You need to use something else, something that the craphead knows will not kill him or leave him marked, but will make him freakin' miserable and will not end until he provides the info you need.

Something like waterboarding.