Sometimes a military buildup is the best way to avoid a war, its a common tactic that has been used from before recorded history – it is often effective.

Lol. I need a best friend who is this good at being an apologist.

Not that there is anything wrong with gay porn…not…at…all.

MUST protect Israel at all costs because…DON’T YOU ASK WHY!

Not the only reason the criminally insane US will murder Iranians, just one of the biggest.

The DC budget is here: http://cfo.dc.gov/cfo/frames.asp?doc=/cfo/lib/cfo/budget/fy2013/FY2013_Volume_3_Chapters_Part_2.pdf

The DCPS budget for 2012-13 is $802 million. Projected enrollment is 47,174. That works out to $17,000.89 per pupil. A boatload of money, to be sure. Highest in the country. The DC charter school system is separate, they have a budget of $490 million for 31,768 students, or $15,424 per student. Again, a lot of money.

But put that in perspective. I send my kids to private school in DC. Tuition is over $32,000 per year. Actual spending per student is around $37,000 per student, with the rest made up by fundraising and income from the endowment.

Seller’s market?

Yeah, I think I’ve seen some variant on the “light at the end of the tunnel” story about a dozen times now–what we were doing before was all wrong, but now we have the right general and strategy, and there are some (cherry picked, preliminary) signs of success. And six months or a year later, the same story, but with new cherry-picked preliminary signs of success, new words used to decribe the new counterinsurgency strategy (inevitably some combination of buying off one set of bloodthirsty warlords while blowing up another set, along with a couple feel-good cosmetic stuff and an interview with a woman happy to emerge from the 13th century all the way into the mid-14th century, but with better weapons). We’re about due for another one of these rashes of stories soon, I think.

If media organs had memory, they would point out that this is the Nth time we’ve been within a couple Friedman units of success in Afghanistan. But of course they don’t, so we get the same damned story.

No, it isn’t. It means stop thinking that money will solve these problems. The problem is that parents in these districts have no choice in where they send their kids to school. So there’s no competition to provide a better education. Which is why administrators can spend a half million dollars on office renovations with no consequences.

Look at the top educational institutions in the private sector. Exeter, Harvard, etc. Do they ever make wasteful expenditures?

Yes, they do. And a huge part of the reason why is that the federal government has created a buyer’s market with college loan subsidies. It’s also a little absurd to compare the spending habits of a private secondary school students attend voluntarily and a primary public school students are compelled to attend.

Socialized schools don’t necessarily need more money in the aggregate, but there does need to be per pupil spending parity . . .

Private schools spend much less money per pupil than public schools. Look it up. Washington D.C. spends more money per student than any big city in the country, and it’s one of the worst public school systems.

The “small government” right doesn’t exist, it’s nothing but a conservative myth. Their only “small government” when compared to the left but big conservative government is ok as long as it’s in the name of “safety. fighting terrorism, promoting christian values” and other bullshit. Conservatives only complain about big government when they’re not in charge. Like clockwork we hear “conservatives have lost their way” no it’s that you lost your way conservatives, your just as statist scum as the left but like the left you get enough people to buy into your bullshit for enough time to get elected.

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/brainpolice/archive/2008/01/10/i-hate-conservatism.aspx

Simplistic thinking apparently leads to tired metaphors, too. I’m not talking apples and oranges. I’m just talking apples (cell phone bans) and a philosophy that would defend one (in theaters/to ensure silence) while deploring the other (on roads/to reduce accidents). And hey, I get it. Don’t want to be coerced by the government….

But what’s sad is that one must be “coerced” by “the government” into responsibly operating a vehicle.

–This redistribution of money would certainly involve giving a lot more money SPECIFICALLY to schools LIKE BALTIMORE SCHOOLS.–

Left out a couple important words. No edit fcn = grrrrrrr.

I know that he wrote “stop throwing money.” Its coded language for : “starve the beast.”

Socialized schools don’t necessarily need more money in the aggregate, but there does need to be per pupil spending parity, at least within states if not nationally (and nationally is probably better — that way the kids of Mississippi and places like that can actually be competitive at a national level when they grow up).

This redistribution of money would certainly involve giving a lot more money to schools.

Look at the top educational institutions in the private sector. Exeter, Harvard, etc. Do they ever make wasteful expenditures? Engage in conspicuous consumption as a way of making school seem cooler thn it is? Sure they do. Way, way, way, way, way more than Baltimore ever did.

The message to the kids in the ghetto should be clear: stay in school and you get nice stuff by doing that. Part of that is making the schools nicer than they have to be. This might sound like a pipe dream, but suburban soccer mom dollars go a long way in low income neighborhoods. And this is exactly what should happen, instead of continuing to breed the permanent underclass that we have started to breed ever since the middle class moved away from the poor people in American cities. They have a right to go, but their payments into the socialized education fund need to still go, primarily, to the neediest — and that hasn’t really been happening.

Unless one wants a more-and-more skewed division of wealth over time. Because that is what is happening and has been happening. It ain’t a good state of affairs.

I fully expect the people who don’t think a turnover made out of oranges sounds very tasty would have no problem whatsoever eating an apple turnover – mostly thanks to simplistic “apples vs oranges” type thinking.

And you’re right, a driver’s circumstances never change while they’re en route. That’s just a silly notion cooked up by non-politicians.

As to the GPS example….why not figure out where you’re going before hand? They say technology is making us lazy. It also apparently leads us to make poor choices.

Yea, do that first.

False – while it is true that the vast majority of child “abductions” are related to custody disputes, the Milk Carton kids are generally cases of stranger abductions or cases where the abducting parent is considered a threat of somekind.

All I’m suggesting is that if Obama is prepared to ignore these people, maybe the next time they get paraded before us as examples of “Mainstream opinion”, we should do likewise.