I can't believe that came from your mouth!
Posts tagged liberalism
Reason 932 to HomeSchool: Kid Won’t Need a Hall Pass for Tuesday
Sep 3rd
Several of my friends and colleagues have been talking about either keeping their kids home next Tuesday, September 8th, or scheduling them for alternate activity at the school during Obama’s planned indoctrination speech. Michelle Malkin even has a downloadable Hall Pass, which I have hotlinked below:
From HallPassOnThat.Com here:
The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition announces “Hall Pass on That,” the alternative to President Barack Obama’s September 8th address to school children across the nation. The group asks that schools who choose to participate in the president’s September 8th program offer an alternative to students and families who do not wish to view, or have their children view, a partisan address or participate in activities that did not follow proper educational protocol or obtain parental consent.
Personally, I think its kinda neat to have the President address the classrooms, but the problem here is not that the President wants to urge the children to stay in school- its that the teachers and liberal teachers’ unions will use the opportunity to push their radical agenda on the kids- such as socialist slavery (aka volunteerism), eco-religious service, and propaganda on the healthcare debate.
So I would urge all parents to try to use this hallpass to get their kids out of class during the address. If for no other reason, it shows the teachers that parents are deeply concerned about political indoctrination and will not tolerate even the threat of it.
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Loading ...Stupid Anti-Smoking Laws
Jan 2nd
I quit smoking long ago, but I still think laws targeting smokers is an assault on freedom. Stopping people from smoking by government decree just shows how easy it is to use the government to bully people. And if the issue was really about the health of the smokers, the government would ban tobacco outright rather than keep it around as a revenue-generating enterprise.
In Portugal they banned smoking in public nationwide. And the minister of Foods and Standards, the agency that enforces the ban, was photographed in a casino smoking a cigar. Once again, laws liberals make apply to everyone but themselves.
From Reuters here:
The head of the Portuguese agency responsible for enforcing a new ban on smoking in public was seen lighting up at a New Year party, breaking the law on the first day it came into effect.
Antonio Nunes, president of Portugal’s food standards agency, was photographed by the daily Diario de Noticias smoking a cigar at a casino on the outskirts of Lisbon.
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...OLPC Laptops to be Cow Powered
Oct 25th
Everyone who is familiar with this blog knows I have a er… “beef” with the OLPC program. It is a monumental waste of 1 Billion dollars to give inoperable technology to poverty-stricken children. Children in poor countries need running water, ready and abundant power, and sturdy roads for transportation. Once basic infrastructure is in place then do-gooders can worry about educating the masses.
Now I hear that the crank mechanisms that are supposed to be used to power the crappy laptops may not be enough. So they are working on an alternative source of electricity. Cow Power. They are going to take an old generator out of a used car, run a bunch of belts and pulleys and use it to power the laptops in one Indian village. If this “Rube Goldburgery” isn’t proof of the foolishness of OLPC backers, nothing is. If a village has no power, why not donate money to purchase a diesel generator or run electricity to the village? Idiots.
From Infoworld here:
The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows.
“We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle,” wrote OLPC’s Arjun Sarwal, in an e-mail dated Oct. 21 and posted to one of the group’s discussion lists.
Sarwal and others are now finalizing the design of the cow-powered generator.
The goal is to develop a low-cost energy source that can be used in Indian villages. Working in a village close to Mumbai, Sarwal said the group considered using solar energy but sunlight near Mumbai was not “consistently strong.” There was not enough wind or running water nearby to use these as sources of power, and the cost of running a gas-powered motor was too high.
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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 6) Loading ...OLPC Computers Price Still Rising
Sep 14th
I guess its just the high price of good intentions. Yeah right. I call it the price of failure. They haven’t even begun to crank out the crank-up computers and the costs are still rising, now to 188 dollars each. The device was originally supposed to cost only a Benjamin.
Even if they get them working, I can guarantee that no one will come up with a viable education system that will use the devices, nor will there be any support to keep them running. And as written previously, kids just use it to download porn.
From the AP here:
The vaunted “$100 laptop” that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept.
Leaders of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child that was spun out of MIT acknowledged Friday that the devices are now slated to cost $188 when mass production begins this fall. The last price the nonprofit announced was $176; it described $100 as a long-term goal.
Spokesman George Snell blamed the increase on a variety of factors, including currency fluctuations and rising costs of such components as nickel and silicon. He said the project was committed to keeping the price from rising above $190.
I thought silicon was just sand? Oh well, while they waste money on these stupid devices, the children in the countries they want to help keep dropping dead from malaria. More at the OLPC blog.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Poor Kids Need Porn Too
Jul 23rd
This is so funny I laughed out loud when I read it. The stupid program, OLPC, or One Laptop Per Child, which is a waste of a billion dollars, is a bleeding heart effort by liberals to give technology to the world’s poorest children.
So when these little skulls full of impoverished mush get their multi-cultural hands on the windup laptops, what do they do with them? Read a new novel? Learn math? Surely they use the devices to learn a foreign language? Nope. They download porn.
From Reuters here:
Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.
NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children’s laptops.
“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials,” NAN said.
A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.
The rep from OLPC lied through his teeth with the claim of a filter. The devices do not have enough memory to store the comprehensive lists of porn sites on the Internet. Only gateway filters will work to eliminate the “thirst for knowledge” these kids crave.
Next thing you know these brats will be sending Nigerian 419 spam scams and updating their myspace page.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...OLPC Laptop Costs Rise to $175
Apr 27th
The world’s crappiest laptops, designed to punish the already poverty-stricken children of the world, will now rise past the $150 mark reported here, all the way up to $175.
And it seems that if the governments of these poor countries do not pony up over half a billion dollars to get the first 3 Million of these beasts manufactured, the whole project may collapse. Somehow, Citibank has been swindled into fronting the money for these impoverished countries to buy these laptops, on the hopes that Citibank gets paid back some day.
From the AP here:
The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.
Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying “we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life.”
That’s partly because at least seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white “XO” computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash. The project needs orders for 3 million machines so its manufacturing and distribution effort can get rolling. (That’s 525,000,000 Dollars!)
The ever-optimistic Negroponte didn’t sound worried, however: He expects mass production to begin by October, and he said many other countries, including Peru and Russia, have been inquiring about taking part.
Even so, the machine — which boasts extremely low electricity consumption, a pulley for hand-generated power, built-in wireless networking and a screen with indoor and outdoor reading modes — now costs $175. The One Laptop project takes an additional $1 to fund its distribution efforts.
XO’s software is highly original, in hopes of making the computer useful as a collaborative tool and intuitive for children who have never before encountered a computer. There are no windows or folders, but rather an interface heavily reliant on pictographic icons.
What happened to Google funding this project? Or was that just the development? And notice how the story’s author uses words like “optimistic” and describes the software as “highly original?” I think its code for “doomed project” and “unusable software.”
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