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>>If parents would actually PARENT, maybe we wouldn't need so much of a "Nanny" state. But until that happens, comparisons to 1984esque totalitarianism is absurd. /sign
Technology, money and legislation can't replace parenting. This country is going to hell because nobody believes in being a good parent.

You didn't see 5 news stories a week about kids killing or nearly killing each other and adults in the 80's and before.

80% of people who are incarcerated came from a single parent home.

Think about it...

Hint: just earning the paycheck or paying your child support isn't enough.

This about sums it up (from http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3448276.html):
"A free society needs people with consciences. The vast majority of people must obey the law voluntarily. If people don't conform themselves to the law, someone will either have to compel them to do so or protect the public when they do not. It costs a great deal of money to catch, convict, and incarcerate lawbreakers -- not to mention that the surveillance and monitoring of potential criminals tax everybody's freedom if habitual lawbreakers comprise too large a percentage of the population.

The basic self-control and reciprocity that a free society takes for granted do not develop automatically. Conscience development takes place in childhood. Children need to develop empathy so they will care whether they hurt someone or whether they treat others fairly. They need to develop self-control so they can follow through on these impulses and do the right thing even if it might benefit them to do otherwise.

All this development takes place inside the family. Children attach to the rest of the human race through their first relationships with their parents. They learn reciprocity, trust, and empathy from these primal relationships. Disrupting those foundational relations has a major negative impact on children as well as on the people around them. In particular, children of single parents -- or completely absent parents -- are more likely to commit crimes. "

If you are a paycheck parent you need to read this article or your kid will end up killing his classmates, on drugs or other bad places. You are responsible for your progeny and everything they do because you shape their behavior.

-AC

I found an article about the Chinese government efforts to bring back overseas Chinese professors - apparently it's been going for a few years now.

Without public campaign financing, candidates rely on "donations" (read: bribes), tell you they are interested in alternative energy, yet provide oil companies with record profits and state-sponsored corporate welfare.

Or we could cut taxes, close down numerous government departments, replace the lobbyist-designed federal tax code with the Flat Tax, and otherwise reduce the amount of loot for "special interests" to fight over. It'd make life easier for small businesses who don't have K Street lobbyists on retainer to protect them from the federal government too.

Let 'em take all the campaign donations they want, just have full and immediate disclosure on the Internet.

Yes! This is absolutely correct. If the socialists out there desire a more detailed explanation of why this is correct then I whole heartedly recommend the following article: by Milton Friedman

Thanks for TFA link.

Thanks!

"As opposed to the US, where the top 5% pay 58% of the total income tax collected, and the top 10% pay 71%.

http://www.hoover.org/research/factsonpolicy/facts/6771827.html [hoover.org]"

Interesting! I had no idea. Wonder what those numbers would be in Sweden. Anyone with a link?

If I recall correctly there are about 150 people in sweden with a private fortune over SEK1000,000,000, ie about USD 150,000,000.

Wow I'm really starting to hate Europeans.

You'll have to deal with a lot of people who actually know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're". And you might even have to learn a whole new language to deal with those who don't.

It's pretty easy to get that right when you learn English from a (printed) textbook. If they were learning from spoken English, like everybody in the US does, they'd make the mistake just as often.

Don't plan to get rich - Even billionaires have to pay taxes here.

As opposed to the US, where the top 5% pay 58% of the total income tax collected, and the top 10% pay 71%.

http://www.hoover.org/research/factsonpolicy/facts/6771827.html

Gun-toting rednecks are few and far between, so don't expect much interesting company. And forget about monster trucks!

Yeah, the US has the South. But Europe has Greece, so let's just call this one a wash.

The Germans, Russians and Italians are just waiting for their chance - Don't let all this openness, good food/drink, and friendly faces fool you!

Germans, (most) Russians and Italians are all Europeans... so... yeah. But in the US column, we haven't had a war with any of our (immediate) neighbors since 1812, so we're doing pretty good on that front.

Most people prefer Belgian or Swiss chocolate to Mars bars, Belgian, Polish, German or Czech beer to Bud, and pasta, sauerkraut, fondue or smoked salmon to a Big Mac.

Too bad there's no gourmet chocolate in the US: http://www.ghirardelli.com/
Or good beers: http://www.nwmicrobrews.com/

And I forgot that Belgium and Switzerland don't have any McDonalds: http://www.mcdonalds.be/ http://www.mcdonalds.ch/de/Default.asp?flash=true

Smoked salmon? I live in Washington State, come on!

In rural places a lot of people don't even lock their doors, so naturally theft, rape and murder are rampant.

In rural places in the US, a lot of people don't even locks their doors. Hell, I'm in a city (albeit a small one) and I don't lock my doors.

The taxpayers' money is spent on lots of useless stuff - Schools, health insurance and those too lazy to work.

The US has all of those, sadly. I'd much prefer our money didn't go to those too lazy to work, and I'd also like it if the money currently going to health insurance did so in a more rational fashion. But at least I don't troll message boards and post about the US like our shit don't stink.

For example, when psychologist Angela Neal-Barnett in 1999 asked some focus-group students to identify acting-white behavior, they listed actions that ranged from speaking standard English and enrolling in an Advanced Placement or honors class to wearing clothes from the Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch (instead of Tommy Hilfiger or FUBU) and wearing shorts in winter!

You think I'm making this up? If "Freedom Fries" is the only thing a pundit can point to in the U.S. as being anti-French, that's pretty thin. France has a long history of being an obstacle to U.S. influence in the world - unless they benefit from it. Depending on which snapshot of time you look at, the sentiments change and the French people may not necessarily agree with the stance of their Government toward the U.S.

France has had an active anti-Americanization policy for a long time, mostly cultural. More importantly, it has meddled in countless delecate situations involving the U.S. without invite. The French Government's ego gets damaged if it isn't included in important world affairs. That's why you'll find French diplomats popping up when there's a conflict brewing with the U.S. and anyone else. They play themselves for "good cop" and cast the U.S. as "bad cop". They're heros for the little guy if they hold off the U.S. somehow, and they'll wish them luck and stand aside if it doesn't work. During the first Gulf war when Iraq invaded Kuwait, French diplomats were circumventing embargoes against Iraq supplying them with aid and advice until the shooting started. Then there's that "Food for Oil" thing with French in the middle and the result of propping up Saddam in spite of the fact he was the biggest danger to the Middle East at the time (lets invade Saudi Arabia and split the spoils). No, there weren't any Weapons of Mass Destruction found later. France, Germany Britain and others all believed they had WMDs but France tried several times to get the inspections stopped. France would happily poke a stick the the eye of the U.S. at any opportunity - except for now when they actually are getting fearful of Iran. Does France fear the Iranians getting nuclear weapons or do they fear going down yet another notch on the International Influence Circuit? Hard to tell.

Here's some reading from an outfit that knows more than most about this. I also learned a little more from this article. Draw your own conclusions.

That article lists a number of incidents. I don't see a policy or any conservative folks endorsing it though. It's certainly something to watch carefully and deal with to preserve freedom of the protesters and non-protesters alike.

On the other hand, the left does similar things and worse to anti-abortion protesters. And, of course, sometimes protest groups (including sometimes "liberal" ones) are violent -- violence by protesters infringes the freedom of the people assaulted or silenced by them.

Even when peaceful protesters block streets and infringe on the freedom to travel of the other users of the streets, who wins? Can you come up with a way of dealing with that situation where no one can claim their freedoms were harmed?

I'm not seeing how this makes conservatives anti-freedom.

Meanwhile though, there's the story of Tang Ming-Lin who was arrested for plowing his own land in 1994 because of claims that endangered rats and lizards were were on his land.

Wow, finally someone on Slashdot who 'gets it' when it comes to the high costs that Americans are paying for healthcare. This guy hits all of the major points:

1) Socialized medicine *can* control costs, but at the expense of a great deal of patient dissatisfaction, through rationing, waiting lists, less technically complex (and possibly inferior) procedures and drugs, etc. Of course, the dead are no longer able to complain so the problems sort of take care of themselves eventually in a macabre sort of way.

2) Liberal people (with no financial sense) say, "I will pay anything for that!" and they are shocked when somebody actually supplies it and then hands them the bill. The system should take all reasonable steps to save your life, but we have to draw the line somewhere and that means no super-experimental massive cost procedures at public expense that have no reasonable expectation of success other than, "hell lets try this because maybe there is some outside chance that it will work and you will die if we don't and well...you're worth it."

3) Malpractice lawsuits are certainly a big factor here in the United States (we spend 4% of our GDP on lawsuits each year in this country and that is a LOT of lawsuits). There are some states that have begun instituting maximum damage caps to restore some type of sanity to the system (which the trial lawyers naturally oppose vehemently), but the lawsuits continue, the lawyers extract their pint of blood (pun intended), and the rest of us collectively pick up the increased tab.

3) The cost insulation effect is the really *big* issue in skyrocketing health care costs. Third party payer is really the single most directly contributing factor to high health care costs in the United States and the reason is simple...to paraphrase Milton Friedman, "Nobody spends someone else's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own."

Further Recommended Reading: How To Cure Health Care - by Milton Friedman

FTA: Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integrity.

Funny how they never complained when the White House was doing far worse stuff than this under Al Gore...

ROBINSON Again and again you will hear that we've tried, the Western world has already tried laissez-faire, let her rip economics and it ended up with the London that Charles Dickens portrayed "dirty, filthy, child-labor" just a terrible mess. What do you do..how did that come to be?

FRIEDMAN It was a terrible mess but what cleaned it up?

ROBINSON Disraeli and his social...the child labor laws...

FRIEDMAN No, no what cleaned it up was the progress of private enterprise because you had a...the reason it was so messy was because you had to burn coal and the kind of coal that was available in Britain was very smokey and messy. And once you were able to use oil, natural gas, better furnaces, all of those things is what it made it possible to clean London up. Now so far as child labor is concerned..what happens is, what happens in the picture that's drawn of Britain in the 19th century is that there's no image of what went before. Of why is it that all these people from the farming, from the rural areas came to the city. Did they come to the city because they thought it would be worse? Or because they thought it would be better? And was it worse or was it better? In the early days, you know there are very few things that are 100% black or 100% white, there are various shades of grey. And what we aim for is the least shade of grey that's possible. I'm not going to say that all was rosy in Britain at the time, it wasn't. But look around the world today. Where is it least rosy? -In those countries where things that are run by the government not in those countries where private enterprises are. And the same thing was true in Britain, the conditions in the rural areas, on the farms, were far worse than conditions in the city, but they were not visible, they were hidden, nobody saw them. [ROBINSON Dickens didn't stroll around the countryside..] Right..

This was explained in the second link. Basically, they examine students' test results two years in a row. If scores for a class soared one year, then went down (relative to the average) the next, it is likely that the teacher cheated. Also, there tend to be patterns to cheating by teachers, such as correcting a group of questions in a row for the class. If both of these occur, then it is very likely that cheating occurred, and evidence for that group is looked at closely.

This is just a rough explanation. Read the article for more.

As Jonathan Adler wrote in the Washington Times on July 27, 1994:

"Concurrent with Mr. Lancaster's attack on Mr. Singer, Mr. Gore himself led a similar effort to discredit the respected scientist. Mr. Gore reportedly contacted 60 Minutes and Nightline to do stories on Mr. Singer and other opponents of Mr. Gore's environmental policies. The stories were designed to undermine the opposition by suggesting that only raving ideologues and corporate mouthpieces could challenge Mr. Gore's green gospel. The strategy backfired. When Nightline did the story, it exposed the vice president's machinations and compared his activities to Lysenkoism: The Stalinist politicization of science in the former Soviet Union."

In fact, the 2/24/94 Nightline edition which Adler refers to included a segment-end wherein the host, Ted Koppel, said (jaw-agape emphasis mine):

"There is some irony in the fact that Vice President Gore, one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White House in this century, that he is resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis."

.......

In an interview with Mike Miliard of The Phoenix, he recalled:

"Gore would run star-chamber hearings and invite the heads of funding agencies while he would try to get scientists [who doubted climate change's severity] to recant. . . . Everyone in the eld knows [that] when the funding went up to $2 billion a year under Bush the elder, that money didn't come because people thought climate was a wonderful thing. It came because of alarm."

Lindzen himself explains how "global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence" in his 4/12/06 article, "Climate of Fear":

"Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis."

So, effectively, Gore's intimidation tactics over the course of the last decade and a half have achieved his desired goal through a menacing combination of politics, words and financial control. At a glance, it would certainly appear that a significant number of American scientists have been molded into obedient, PC puppets.

.....

Just so there is no misunderstanding, I do agree that Mr. Gore along along with a myriad of other politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle are men of principle. The one principle they cherish and have indeed adopted as their own was first espoused by H.L. Mencken:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed----and hence clamorous to be led to safety----by menacing it with a series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

I studied and researched global warming as a student some 12 years before Al Gore discovered it. At least then, the scientists and researchers could admit that their results were inconclusive or even ran counter to conventional wisdom in this arena without fear of losing their funding. It was, simply, because it was not an emotional politicized panic button issue the way it is today.

As