Recently in American Decline Category

This is the funniest story I have heard in a long time. lol!

Did your parents tell you anything useful about sex? What did you tell your kids?

It seems that parents never actually talk to their kids about sex in any kind of useful way, even the few that try. Which is why we need schools, not parents, to provide sex education.

Youth Radio

Young People and Sex: Parents, Can We Talk?

by Johanna Greenberg

Morning Edition, March 8, 2007

Listen to it here

Many young people are no longer having "the sex talk" with their parents. They're filled with information, including what they learn from TV or the Internet. But they're still interested in what Mom and Dad might have to say — however awkwardly.

Johanna Greenberg reports for Blunt Radio in Portland, Maine.

I have heard surprising little about this massive buyout offer by GM. I think this is a big deal because the main issue at stake is the cost of pensions and healthcare for retirees. I believe I heard that GM has 100,000 employees but benefits to over 300,000 retirees! Ouch.

With these people off the company balance sheet, they will join the Federal and State balance sheets. Will this finally precipitate some attention on healthcare? Maybe not since a $10B loss for a company demands change but $10B of our tax dollars is only 1 month of our occupation of Iraq... But it might be a start.

And this is sure to have an impact on the economies of the Midwest states.

They say that humans are hard-wired to notice sudden changes but have difficulty noticing slow changes.

That said, this article on "helicopter parents" shocked me. Have we changed so much that this kind of parent-child relationship seems normal? 10 phone calls a week!?

100 years ago 13-year olds went to work in the factories to support their parents and siblings. These days it seems like kids never grow up.

It is always a pleasure to hear other people say something you agree with (and already talked about), which is the case with this article on school reform.

My previous argument revolved around tenure for K-12 and the inability of principals to actually manage a school because they are not allowed to hire or fire. I dont care if it is lead by a Democrat or a Republican but I hope someone will lead real, not rhetorical, change in our ailing school system. Our kids need science and math, not prayer, if we ever hope to compete economically.

Toyota was in the paper no less than three times today.

There are times when the system is so entrenched and so lousy, incremental changes will never bring about improvements. Major structural changes are your only hope of improvement, painful as it is to do.

Speaking of entrenched and lousy, I just listened to a news story about the mayor of Los Angeles and his struggle to improve the LA Unified school system.

Forget the debate about intelligent design or sex education. The problem with public schools is the business structure of schools. If you dont change the structure of schools, the results will never change. And changing the structure will take a huge amount of political power because you will have to fight the teachers unions and the tax payers.