The Courier Post had a nice little article about a movie coming out called “The Cartel”. It’s about the education system we have here in Jersey and just how stinking corrupt it all is. Considering my coworkers think I should get a Wiley Coyote style sign that says “IT’S A RACKET!” to hold up during our lunchtime debates over these issues, this movie looks promising. The movie will be premiering at the Hoboken International Film Festival in Teaneck, of all places, May 30th. I’d love to go up and visit friends and see it, but unfortunately I have a prior engagement. More information and a trailer here.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on the floor.

The responding officers – eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 – face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots – BAM! BAM! – fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and masks affixed.

“United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!” screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued.

It is all quite a step up from the square knot.

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence – an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”

“Our end goal is to create more agents,” said April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent and mentor at the session here.

The law enforcement posts are restricted to those ages 14 to 21 who have a C average, but there seems to be some wiggle room. “I will take them at 13 and a half,” Deputy Lowenthal said. “I would rather take a kid than possibly lose a kid.”

Just as there are soccer moms, there are Explorers dads, who attend the competitions, man the hamburger grill and donate their land for the simulated marijuana field raids. In their training, the would-be law-enforcement officers do not mess around, as revealed at a recent competition on the state fairgrounds here, where a Ferris wheel sat next to the police cars set up for a felony investigation.Their hearts pounding, Explorers moved down alleys where there were hidden paper targets of people pointing guns, and made split-second decisions about when to shoot. In rescuing hostages from a bus taken over by terrorists, a baby-faced young girl screamed, “Separate your feet!” as she moved to handcuff her suspect.

In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. “If we’re looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like,” he said, “then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don’t know, would you call that politically incorrect?”

This is seriously fucked up. YAY fascist police state Hiter youth brigade!

http://www.cato-unbound.org/…

by Peter Thiel:

As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.

As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920-21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

1. capitalist democracy is an oxymoron in practice. Read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
2. libertarian politics has always been grim. Politics can help legitimize libertarian beliefs to some people but a libertarian society can never truly exist within a traditional political system.
3. What the fuck are you hoping to do by saying that women are naturally more statist? The argument can be made (and has) but the reality is that it must be made by a woman. We all know how the MSM and statist liberals would react to such a statement… that’s how I found this article in the first place.

From http://valleywag.gawker.com:

Peter Thiel, foremost among Silicon Valley’s loopy libertarians and the first outside investor in Facebook, has written an essay declaring that the country went to hell as soon as women won the right to vote.

On the side, though, his pet passion is libertarianism and the fantasy that everything would be better in the world if government just quit nagging everybody. But, now he’s given up hope on achieving his vision through political means because, as he writes in Cato Unbound, a website run by the Cato Institute, all those voting females have wrecked things:

So there you have it: The problem with women is that they don’t vote like their menfolk tell them. We would have so much more freedom, Thiel suggests, if only we’d deprived women of it.

Yes… because voting who your slave master is is freedom.

And it seems that sarcasm is lost of these people. He is speaking of drugs in relation to bothering to proselytize free markets. That it was smarter to do drugs rather than waste time with trying to convince the unconvincable.

http://i.gizmodo.com/…

Today, President Obama officially named his nominee for the new position of Chief Technology Officer: Aneesh Chopra, current Secretary of Technology for Virginia. We’ll explain who Chopra is and what his new responsibilities will be.

The CTO position is linked with that of the Chief Information Officer (the recently-named Vivek Kundra), but they are two distinct jobs. The White House explains:

The responsibilities of the CIO are to use information technology to transform the ways in which the government does business. The CTO will develop national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, reducing administrative costs and medical errors using health IT, and using technology to change the way teachers teach and students learn.

Essentially, the CIO is responsible for the general strategic aim of information technology, whereas the CTO is the one who really gets his hands dirty with the specific architecture. In particular, Obama has listed health care and education in today’s YouTube address as the two areas most requiring the efforts of the CIO and CTO, and we (along with most others) think Chopra is the right guy for the job. Here’s why.

Aneesh Chopra is not a CEO. He’s not a thinker like Negroponte, or a businessman like Gates, or a showrunner like Jobs. He’s a governmental agent. This is important because the CTO is, after all, a government job, and Chopra won’t have to adjust his strategies to work within a governmental system. Right now, he’s the Secretary of Technology for Virginia, and has shown huge success in the field. Last year, Virginia was ranked 1st in Technology Management, a direct reward for Chopra’s work.

Further, he’s made significant achievements in health care and education, which, you remember, is just what Obama wants. He’s gotten the nation’s first open-source textbook approved, initiated competitions for the state’s students to create iPhone apps, and designed a social network for physicians in remote areas.

Most importantly, Chopra’s achievements are forward-looking (Web 2.0, social networking, open source) but fervently grounded in the practical. He’s not pushing for the sake of pushing, he’s using the best tools we have in the best way he can.

“develop national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, reducing administrative costs and medical errors using health IT, and using technology to change the way teachers teach and students learn.”

So more government distortion of the market, more government chosen technologies sure to be wrong, greater monopolization of products, increased risk of privacy leaks, more redirected resources and more promises regarding education which won’t pan out.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…

Every teenager will have to do at least 50 hours of community work before the age of 19, Gordon Brown has announced.

The Prime Minister believes youngsters would be less likely to turn to crime if they had a sense of citizenship.

The scheme, a form of ‘national service’ for teenagers, will ensure they spend a minimum of 50 hours working with charities and vulnerable groups such as the elderly or disabled.

Forming part of Labour’s next election manifesto, it will be woven into plans to make everyone stay in education or training until the age of 18 by 2011.
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