Archive for February, 2010
Televised Healthcare Debate – I
The GOP is saying that Americans object to the mandate that you must purchase health care and that since they object, they shouldn’t be forced to buy that insurance.
What a bunch of bullsh. Americans don’t want to buy car insurance, either. So why don’t the GOP senators remove that? People who do NOT buy insurance will STILL get sick/old. And you cannot predict illness or injury (like a car wreck that just happens in an instant) for yourself or your family. So when they do get sick and hurt and they “chose” not to buy insurance…the cost for all of us who have insurance goes UP. So they need to just say “Look, my campaign was funded pretty heavily by the insurance execs and being in Washington is really great and I want to stay here.”
They don’t want to pay taxes, either. But you need to – and why? Because we all have to share. We all have to share the roads, we share the water systems, we share the protection buy the army, and we share the rising costs and decreasing coverage of insurance.
Good Ole Public Schools
Advocates say with Detroit’s unofficial unemployment rate nearing 50%, jobs at Walmart are a golden opportunity.
Critics are outraged. “They’re going to train students to be subservient workers. This is not why parents send them to school.”
Hmmm…they send them to school to get prepared for life outside the nest. If you live in Detroit and you’re in an American public school – you’re training for a factory or Wal-Mart.
But on the other hand….being born in Detroit doesn’t mean you have to stay in Detroit. It’s not Berlin 1980, after all. And another curiosity…what class(es) did you remove in order to fit Wal-Mart training into the schedule? Is it the job of the state (public school system) to train kids for jobs? To take this another step, would they not be even better equipped to work at Wal-Mart if we removed sophomore science classes? Or junior Language Arts classes? Or consider this: What if school curriculum in more cities was to be chosen by private companies? (In Texas it’s being chosen by fundamentalist churches, but that’s another story). Does this not smack of Costco and Gatorade in Idiocracy??
This is all besides the obvious problem that with Detroit continuing to crumble, training for a job at Wal-Mart in the Detroit area might be as productive as training for Wal-Mart jobs in schledder-madoo. After all, how many Wal-Mart’s can a shrinking city support? What I mean is that if we’re going to train them for menial labor, aren’t there better choices?
http://www.good.is/post/detroit-high-schools-teach-how-to-work-at-walmart/?gt1=48001
Teen Abstinence Pledges
Interesting article by By Alan E. Kazdin and Carlo Rotella:
One common intervention especially beloved by moral crusaders and supported by government funds asks teenagers to formally promise not to engage in behaviors that place them at risk. The focus has been on sexual activity. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t work, and occasionally it makes things worse. A recent study by Janet Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University evaluated the effect of pledging abstinence (the “virginity pledge”) versus not pledging among teenagers and then followed them for five years to evaluate the impact on sexual activity. Five years after the pledge, the results indicated that pledgers and nonpledgers did not differ in amount of premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, anal or oral sex, age of first sex, or number of sexual partners. Pledgers had used birth control and condoms less often than nonpledgers in the past year or at last sex. In short, the intervention was effective only in decreasing precautions taken during sex. As an ancillary but not irrelevant finding, five years after taking the virginity pledge 82 percent of the pledgers denied having ever pledged.
Go Earth! 