(I have no time to phoneticize this, much tho I'd like to.)

Willful Misrepresentation. ABC News, and others, have completely and deliberately misstated the case in claiming that 'the schools are failing' because huge numbers of kids drop out. Huh? How can the schools teach kids who don't attend? The fault in dropping out is NOT in the schools but in the kids, the families, and last, if at all elsewhere than on the individual students and their parent(s), society at large, not the schools. Even 'good', suburban schools with all-white student bodies have dropout rates of around 20%! No one can get thru to these kids, and even schools that have entirely restructured themselves, as one school hilited in an ABC report this evening did, STILL have dropout rates of 1 in 5!
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Stop blaming the schools. You can have the best school in the world, but if kids don't GO to it, it won't do a damned thing for them. As a society, we had to forbid parents from pulling their kids out of school before age 16. Perhaps we have to simply forbid kids to drop out before graduating. Give them no option but to finish school, and they will finish school. Oh, we could give them an alternative: the military, in time of Permanent War.
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Crushing Big Oil. Oil company executives testified before Congress today, defending their obscene profits. I could lower prices charged the public in one day. All we need do is grab every one of those criminal executives responsible for price-gouging, take them directly from the hearing room to a whipping post, strip them to the waist, and flog them 100 lashes each, one exec at a time so that those not yet flogged become more and more panicked as their turn approaches. Forbid them medical attention, but put them into a jail cell for several days so when they heal, they will have a permanent souvenir of their experience in the form of scars that will tell the world, for the rest of their lives, that they were enemies of humanity, and humanity struck 'back'. (Cosmetic surgery to remove such scars would be illegal, punishable by FLOGGING of the surgeon, or amputation of the offending hand.) And tell TV cameras that every executive of every price-gouging oil company, from chairman to senior vice president, will in turn be flogged if they do not stop gouging the public. Thru TV cameras we could as well warn that any shareholder (the executives of any corporate shareholder, the individual shareholder him- or herself) that insists on price-gouging will as well be seized and flogged. End of problem.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:56 PM