USA Politics

Yea that's pretty lame, though I suppose it's fair to want state funding to be stopped.
 
I can see arguments to limit state funding of this sort of thing, the fair should be able to turn a profit or at least break even on its own. But I would not cut it over this.
 
Today I heard there's a strong chance that there will be more "drugs judges" in the USA, who will have the power to get drug addicts out of prison or prevent them from going in prison and instead send them to an institute to get better. Simply because years of trying that on a smaller scale proved that it works. Less people in prison, and people can live their lives and have faith in themselves again. Naturally money needs to be invested but I'd say it's worth it.
 
The US Sentencing Commission has voted unanimously to begin a sweeping review of federal sentences for drug dealers in a move that could herald long-awaited reductions in America’s prison population.

Just days after attorney general Eric Holder called for a new approach to the so-called “war on drugs”, the commission met in Washington to agree a new policy priority that potentially goes far further than the Department of Justice can in lowering sentences.

If you don't want to see all this, just go from the 16th minute and behold the absurd proportions between population and prison population. The US has 25% of all prisoners in the world. Also, what's been said about people of colour is astonishing. Black male offenders have received sentences nearly 20 percent longer than those imposed on white males convicted of similar crimes!
 
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I think Holder is a horrible attorney general, but I agree with him here. This would have some more force if the President would come out in favor of this and if the justice department would stop raiding medical marijuana clinics at a higher rate than they did under President Bush.

Also, without the force of law, this is pretty meaningless in the long term. It is time the US realized that "Wars on XXXX" where XXXX is anything except another country do not work, are total wastes of money, and reduce individual liberty
 
bearfan said:
Also, without the force of law, this is pretty meaningless in the long term. It is time the US realized that "Wars on XXXX" where XXXX is anything except another country do not work, are total wastes of money, and reduce individual liberty
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This. One place we absolutely, completely, totally agree.
 
That's besides the point. There's a big difference between going to war with a country and going to war with an ideal.
 
Contraire --that was the point made (--& quoted & agreed with.) Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam --all didn't "work", all a waste of money, none delivered much liberty to the civilians of those countries. Bush, for example, wasn't "going to war" with Iraq; he was going to war against some sort of ideal. Just not his ideal. That axis. That evil. Not so different really. But, yes, off topic...
 
That's why those wars failed, they were fights against ideals, not countries. So XXXX really doesn't apply to countries in those cases.
 
If we are going to go to war and ideally we will not anytime soon, if it is valid you can fight an effective war with an endpoint against another country

You cannot have a war on drugs, poverty, whatever. They are all failures and doomed to be in the future. It is essentially a code word for running over people's rights and spending unlimited amounts of money and that the success and progress "war" will be measured in dollars spent versus any actual results.
 
Yeh, but it's the word "war", & all the negative connotations that one associates (or should associate) with that word, which is the issue --you can spend money on tackling drug addiction (& drug associated social ills & drug associated crime, etc) & poverty if you want. It's not spending money on these that's a failure & doomed, it's the pointless labelling of this money spending as "a war on". I assume that's what you mean (--& not that spending money, on tackling these issues, is pointless.)

And, Mosh, when do countries just fight countries?
 
Certainly the government can spend money on certain issues. The "war on" or for that matter "it's for the children" mantras just leads to spending it foolishly and in ever increasing quantities with minimal positive results to go with an equal to greater amount of negative results.
 
I don't think the words themselves "lead" to foolish spending, they just disguise a lack of real vision & actual policy i.e. it's just talk, with little substance.
 
Perhaps, it is generally a gut reaction to some real problem with no actual solution except throw money at it and chip away at rights "for the greater good"
 
The war on literature marches on .. from the Huffington Post.
Concern is growing among teachers and parents that literary classics will go the way of the dinosaurs under a set of new national curricular standards.

The Common Core State Standards, academic benchmarks that have been adopted by 46 states, call for 12th grade reading to be 70 percent nonfiction, or "informational texts" -- gradually stepping up from the 50 percent nonfiction reading required of elementary school students.

The Common Core standards focus on teaching fewer subjects in greater depth, replacing a melange of educational expectations that vary wildly across districts and states. Proponents of the standards, like the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say too many students are not college or career-ready because they have suffered from years of easy reading and poor trainingin synthesizing more complex reading materials.

But the new guidelines are increasingly worrying English-lovers and English teachers, who feel they must replace literary greats like The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye with Common Core-suggested "exemplars," like the Environmental Protection Agency's Recommended Levels of Insulation and the California Invasive Plant Council's Invasive Plant Inventory.

Jamie Highfill, an eighth-grade English teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, Ark., and 2011 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, told the Washington Post she's already had to drop short stories and a favorite literary unit to make time for essays by Malcolm Gladwell from his social behavior book The Tipping Point.
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Teaching people to read novels means teaching them to read *anything*. The average student won't understand stuff on levels of insulation if they aren't functionally literate. Novels remain the best option to teach anyone how to read and comprehend.
 
Honestly, for both novels and papers, I would be in favor of letting kids guide some of their own reading. With my kids, I really did not care what they read, so long as they were reading. I might have made an exception if books were too mature for them, but that never came up. If a kid wants to read Harry Potter or a Jay Z biography, I say let them read it.

They used to have reading time during school. When I was in late elementary and Junior High School, there was a mandatory 20 minute class every day before lunch where everyone had to read something, the something could be whatever they wanted. They should revive that. I went through a fair amount of books that way.
 
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