*requeue

>> ^jonny:

Really? So, you'd be ok with local school boards deciding that their basic science curriculum should include the alternate theory of the sun revolving around the earth?

Yes. Teachers and communities should be able to choose what they want to focus on. My experience is that if you hand a teacher a curriculum he doesn't believe in, he'll just do a half-assed job and skip to what he thinks is important.

Also, the market has ways of regulating quality and correcting bad decisions. One is criticism from outsiders. If that fails, low standardized test scores, rejection letters from colleges and job applications will make parents get the message and demand better quality.

>> ^rembar:
If you want to follow a strict constitutional viewpoint, carry it to its logical conclusion: NO state and NO government under the United States Constitution whatsoever has the right to use its power to deny teaching scientifically-accurate material to students in public schools. Decisions about teaching scientific curricula, or any other public school curricula for that matter, should be left up to the only people qualified to make such decisions, and we happen to have already hired those folks. Those people are teaching our children in public schools every day. Decisions over teaching evolution are not for the federal OR local governments to make, it's for the teachers and school officials, the people who are required to be educated on the topics they teach, to decide.

You've just made the case for the libertarian platform of limited government. Libertarians defend that the government should be shrunk down to the bare essentials because politicians are completely incapable of making competent technical decisions.

When Ron Paul says that the federal government should stay away of education, he's not implying that "states rights" will fix the problem. If you watch the New Hampshire Town Hall Q&A session (which aired along with that Fox debate RP wasn't invited to), you'll see him making the point that parents and teachers should be responsible for each child's education. Just like the federal government should delegate functions to the states, the states are expected to further delegate and keep regulation to a minimum.

I'm an engineer who took an interest in education, so after I got my pure mathmatics degree I also became a licensed math teacher. I'm completely opposed to government interference in education. To me, Brazil (my country) represents a textbook example of education central planning gone wrong. 9th grade public school kids read and write at 5th grade levels, consistently finish last in international benchmarks and each government decision actually makes things worse by providing cosmetic solutions and more regulation.

*kill

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I support Ron Paul, and I agree with what Mike Gravel said. I'm also a Christian, and I believe church and state should be kept separate.

What I don't understand is the focus that some people have on evolution. The president shouldn't be in charge of choosing between teaching evolution or creationism, or string theory or anything else. That's for the local governments to decide, so this is a moot point.

Evolution should only be a make or break issue to people who believe the president should act like a king. The US Constitution is responsible for limiting the federal government's powers, and if followed strictly, it turns the evolution debate into a non-issue.

What happens when you have a current account deficit, add the "biggest tax cut in history" and "expand America's military"?

Bush did the last two, and back then the US actually had a surplus.

Oh, and my profile also list 4 sift talk posts. As far as I can remember, I've only had 2 talk posts (3 if you include the Orca video).

*findthumb

Oops. Feel free to discard when you're done (I'm not doing it myself because I don't know if it will kill the discussion thread).

Thanks.

I'm glad that you liked it

In reply to this comment by MINK:
thanks for that analysis.

In reply to this comment by flavioribeiro:
I wonder how much Bernanke can actually do. The only instrument the Fed has to immediately act on the stock market is the interest rate. But back in December, Bernanke and everyone else knew that cutting interest rates would promote inflation and another credit bubble. So he decided against it, just like the European Central Bank decided this week.
[...]

I wonder how much Bernanke can actually do. The only instrument the Fed has to immediately act on the stock market is the interest rate. But back in December, Bernanke and everyone else knew that cutting interest rates would promote inflation and another credit bubble. So he decided against it, just like the European Central Bank decided this week.

But the market tanked, because traders don't give a damn about inflation. Actually, they can't even care about long term perspectives, because if they did the market would crash. They want to see stocks rising in the short term, and it's up to Bernanke to keep the music going.

Back in December, Bernanke made the responsible choice of controlling inflation and preventing further long-term damage to the economy. Bernanke was hoping Bush's tax rebate proposal would have some effect, but it didn't. On MLK day, world markets took a dive and the forecast for the next day was a historic plunge on the Dow. It was already being called the Black Tuesday.

So Bernanke and the board of the Fed convened and decided on a 0.75% emergency rate cut, because the way they saw it, they could either have a crash right then or worry about the dollar some other day. They decided to postpone the problem, and made the cut.

It worked for a day. The Dow closed lower, but it didn't crash. On Wednesday, it degenerated during trading hours and it was pretty obvious that traders were going short. In came the PPT, the Plunge Protection Team, also known as the Working Group on Financial Markets. Created by an executive order by Reagan, these guys give recommendations to the private sector for "enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of [United States] financial markets and maintaining investor confidence". No one knows what the hell they talk about in their meetings, no one has access to the minutes and they respond to no one -- not even to Congress.

The rally on Wednesday afternoon had all the signs of concerted stock manipulation originating in the futures market. The rise started tentative at best, but the index was propped up by very well timed buying over an essentially perfect trendline. The first leg of the rise scared the folks who were short, but a lot held on. But they couldn't handle the second leg, closed their positions and made the stocks surge up with incredible volume.

The panic is over, at least for now. But the market's pricing in a 0.5% cut for the Fed's next meeting, which happens in a week. If they don't cut, the markets will fall AGAIN.

Ron Paul said many times that the credit problem is like an addiction, and I can't think of a better description.

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by Kreegath:
http://www.videosift.com/video/US-Civil-War-in-4-min

*kill

I'm glad to be of service.

Does the science channel get perpetual motion sifts often?

I'd like to see someone claim to extract zero point energy on TV. Magnets and resonance get boring after a while

In reply to this comment by rembar:
Thanks for taking the time to jump up on this sift, I haven't been on VS enough to catch this in time. Feel free to message me whenever you see another perpetual motion sift, or anything of the sort, that needs booting from the channel.

In reply to this comment by flavioribeiro:
This is a textbook case of a bogus free energy claim.

It has the inventor without a scientific background, the engineer with no credentials, zero technical information and a clueless reporter talking about magnets.

I glanced at this guy's patent application, and all he describes is a crude, specific way of controlling a motor in order to alternately operate it as a motor and a generator.

The Australian Skeptics is a group dedicated to investigating claims such as this, and they've investigated Lutec (this inventor's company) in 2001. Here's the executive summary: the people at Lutec don't even know what the physical definition of work is, they didn't properly calculate this device's efficiency and are most likely trying to con small investors into wiring money to an account in Singapore: http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/2001/3_lutec1.pdf