Government

Your Parental Responsibility

I support people who want to homeschool. I don’t agree that parents can’t get others to instruct their children. As parents, we should all want our children to be at least as successful as we were, perhaps even more so. That frequently means letting or hiring others to teach our children things that we cannot.
There are simply some subjects that I don’t feel qualified enough to teach others. So I subcontract it out.
The problem with today’s education is that parents have abdicated much of their parental duties to teachers. School has become more of a babysitting service than it has a place of learning. Parents need to be involved in their children’s education. They aren’t. Even most of the ones who think that they are involved aren’t involved in their education, they only care about their child’s GRADES, and that is not the same thing.

  • What are your kids learning in school this week?
  • Do you know the names of their teachers?
  • Is your child behaving? Who are his friends? Does he hang out with one of “those kids?” Is your child one of “those kids?”
  • Have you seen his text books? If you are in Florida, schools involve parents in the selection of textbooks. Did you know that? If you did, have you participated in that process?
  • Did you know that most teachers maintain a web page that lets you know what your child is studying? Do you check it frequently?
  • Most schools have online gradebooks. What grade did your child receive on his last 5 assignments in each of his classes? If you don’t know, do you at least know where to find out?

Or do you just wait for report cards to come out, and make sure his grades look good?

Look, after the seven years I spent as a teacher, I can tell you that there are many problems with our kids’ education. Yes, there are poor teachers. Yes, there are poor schools, and poor school boards. The way that we got there was through parents not being truly involved in the lives and education of their children. This didn’t happen overnight.

I had parents who were surprised at the end of the year to learn that their child was failing my class. Every week, I would call the parents of students who were failing my class, so we could work together to salvage their grades. I couldn’t get ahold of most of them. Some even deliberately gave the school the incorrect phone number so they wouldn’t be bothered by “all of those phone calls from the school.”

You are the single best advocate for your children. No one cares more for them than you do. So act like it. If your school involves parents in the selection of textbooks, get involved. If your teacher has a website explaining what is going on in the classroom this week, read it. Learn the names of your kids’ teachers. Go to open house. If you can’t be bothered to spend two hours a week being involved with your child’s education while he is in school, you sure aren’t going to be any better at homeschooling.

By Divemedic, ago

The FBI lies?

It’s looking more and more like the FBI staged the entire pipe bomb incident last January 6. Read this from American Greatness for more details. The summary?

So, either the Secret Service missed the device in clear view outside the DNC headquarters that day before the arrival of Kamala Harris or there never was an explosive at either location and the FBI is not telling the truth. Again.

I know where I am going to put my money.

By Divemedic, ago

Important SCOTUS case

A restaurant owner filed a complaint about a Federal cop with that cop’s supervisor. The cop responded by getting other Federal agencies (including the IRS) to place the owner under a microscope. The restaurant owner sued, and now that case is headed to SCOTUS.

If SCOTUS holds that this cop is immune from lawsuits, even while he is willingly and knowingly violating someone’s Constitutional rights, expect police behavior to get worse. We all know that SCOTUS is likely to support the cop’s behavior.

It’s almost like we live in a police state where the only way you can get justice is to mete it out yourself.

By Divemedic, ago

Pull the Other Leg

Florida has a bill winding its way through the Legislature that would prohibit schools and teachers from discussing LGTBQ matters with children in kindergarten through third grade. Students in eleven different Seminole county schools decided to “spontaneously” walk out of class in protest. With no prompting from the school district. Right.

So you are telling me that 12 year old kids care so much about teachers being able to talk to five year old children about homosexuality that they monitor the state legislature for pending laws and then organize a mass protest with no input whatsoever from teachers or staff?

While we have nearly half of our students unable to read at their grade level, there are teachers who are fighting to be allowed to discuss sexual intercourse with five through nine year old children. Maybe they should be concentrating on teaching their students what they are supposed to be teaching them, instead of trying to have sex with kids.

By Divemedic, ago

Police Dogs

JKB over at GunfreeZone and Wirecutter over at Knuckledraggin My Life Away each posted an article about a woman who had her scalp removed by a police K9. Now I don’t feel sorry for that particular woman, but the comments over at Wirecutter’s took a turn into whether or not police should be using dogs for law enforcement. I found the topic to be interesting enough for its own post.

On Using Dogs as Weapons

Dogs are unreliable as weapons. They frequently bite those that they shouldn’t, and refuse to stop biting when commanded to stop. As a medic, I had two memorable wrong bites. One was a female police officer that was bitten high up on her thigh when a police K9 bit her during a foot pursuit, instead of biting the suspect that she was chasing.

The second was a guy who was fleeing a traffic stop. When his vehicle got stuck in traffic, he fled on foot. The pursuing officer released the K9, and it caught up to him a quarter of a mile later. During the several minutes that it took for the handler to arrive, the dog removed the suspect’s right but cheek. Was that a proportional use of force?

Constitutional Rights

A dog can’t read the Constitution. It can’t understand the finer legal issues involved in the use of force or probable cause. All the dog knows is that if it pleases its handler, it gets a reward. It doesn’t know that if it removes a suspect’s butt cheek for nothing more than running from a cop, that this level of force is legally lethal force. The dog’s cop handler would know that, but he is sometimes blocks away. If a cop isn’t authorized to shoot someone, why should they be permitted to sic a body deforming fur missile on them?

Dogs Want Treats

Dogs are very good at reading people. They know that if they give their handler what he wants, they get a reward. If the cop wants the dog to alert on a car, the dog will alert on a car. There was one study that actually supported that, but once the study was published, cops have refused to participate in any more studies unless those studies are being performed by pro-policing organizations.

Cops don’t even keep records of how often dogs alert to drugs and then no drugs are found. The police say:

“There’s been cars that my dog’s hit on… and just because there wasn’t a product in it, doesn’t mean the dog can’t smell it,” says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer with the Walla Walla Police Department. “[The drug odor] gets permeated in clothing, it gets permeated in the headliners in cars.”

The problem here is obvious- even giving the dog the benefit of the doubt, probable cause means that the search is being done because drugs are probably there. What the cop in the above quote is saying is that by alerting, the dog is indicating that drugs may have been there at some time in the past. The dog indicates the odor of drugs, but not the presence of drugs. That isn’t the same thing and shouldn’t be enough to trigger a warrantless search of someone’s property.

So in short, I think that dogs should not be used to attack people or manufacture probable cause. I would be OK with them being used in bomb or cadaver detection (as long as they don’t trigger warrantless probable cause searches of people’s property) and in tracking people, rescue work, and searching for missing people or bodies. K9’s have been misused and abusing people’s rights for too long.

By Divemedic, ago

FEMA on Fallout

In keeping with my post on fallout, FEMA has come up with some “helpful” advice concerning shelter from radioactive fallout. I am not kidding, this is the newest plan from the Federal Government agency that is in charge of disaster response:

Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them.

I did take the liberty of bolding the dumbest part.

They go to tell you what supplies you should bring with you:

If you are able to, set aside items like soap, hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol, disinfecting wipes, and general household cleaning supplies that you can use to disinfect surfaces you touch regularly.

Again, I was going to bold the stupid parts, but I decided to leave their links in place.

If you have to take shelter from nuclear fallout, whatever else you do, make sure that you don’t expose anyone to the illness that 99.6 percent of the public manages to survive.

By Divemedic, ago

Entrapment

Remember when I said “How do you spot the Fed or the police informant? He is the one urging you to break the law?”

This is proof of how far the cops will go to frame people:

By Divemedic, ago

Sad, but Necessary

It isn’t time yet. The people who would oppose government don’t have enough popular support to win the fight. Yet. That is why scenes like this, as sad and infuriating as they are, have to happen:

The average American isn’t going to take sides unless one side or the other overtly plays the cowboy in the black hat. Scenes where frail old ladies with walkers are trampled by horses and cops butt stroke unarmed protesters who actually ARE peaceful will have to be played dozens of times before support rises to the point where things turn.

Every time a scene like this happens, a few people change their minds. The cops aren’t doing themselves any good by being this heavy handed.

By Divemedic, ago

You Must Pay

Let’s say that your Florida house has solar installed. Your system is so good that you have enough power to be completely off the grid. You don’t need outside power, so your house only uses about $5 of electricity each month. Too bad for you, because Florida utility companies have recently instituted minimum billing. Even if you don’t use their product, you have to pay them for it.

You can’t even disconnect from them, because Florida law requires all homes to be connected to the electric grid.

This is one of those times where Florida law is a bit too draconian for my taste.

By Divemedic, ago