The Necropolitan Sentinel

Now it is “associated with” ADHD. Secondhand smoke ‘could increase risk of ADHD in children by 50%’:

Children exposed to secondhand smoke in the home increase their odds of developing common mental and behavioral disorders by 50 per cent, experts say.

Passive smoking is already known to increase the risk of cot death, asthma, meningitis and middle-ear infections among children.

Punchline:

Although the team have found a strong association between secondhand smoke and neurobehavioural disorders they haven’t proved that one has caused the other.

However, they wrote in the latest edition of the journal Pediatrics: ‘Assuming a causal relationship, 274,100 excess cases of these disorders could have been prevented had the children not been exposed to second hand smoke in their homes.’

Emphasis added by me. That lack of causality makes a bit of a difference, no? You’d think the authors of the study would take the utmost care to emphasize the critical distinction between causality and correlation. But no. Instead, they’re trying to use an “association” as an excuse for Big Brother to insert his foot in the door:

They added that it could ease the burden on children’s mental health services.

The study, co-authored by Dr Gregory Connolly, concluded: ‘Health and economic burdens might be reduced significantly if voluntary smoke-free home policies are rigorously introduced.’

My emphasis again. There’s something about “voluntary” and “rigorously introduced” that doesn’t quite jibe.

I detest cigarette smoking, but that’s beside the point. The statists will use any excuse they can find to extend their micromanagement of our lives.

Cross-posted at P&P.

The fraud in the Atlanta Public Schools was pervasive, extensive, and of long duration, involving, according to the report issued by the governor’s appointed investigators, “178 educators, including 38 principals.” No word yet on whether these underpaid public servants were forced to supply their own erasers, or how many of these were consumed by the tireless educators in their efforts to raise their students’ test scores.

A Washington Post article on the recent NEA convention quoted a retired union member who referred to “the teacher who works her tail off for 14 hours a day.” If you’re a parent in Atlanta, you’ve got to wonder: how many of those teacher’s hours were spent erasing and filling in those little ovals on her illiterate, innumerate students’ standardized tests? Let’s pause in appreciation of her efforts, because all that erasing can really make your hand tired. And those teachers in Atlanta were doing this thankless job, improving their students’ work the only way they knew how, on their own time!

At Gideons Elementary, teachers sneaked tests off campus and held a weekend “changing party” at a teacher’s home in Douglas County to fix answers.

Cheating was “an open secret” at the school, the report said. The testing coordinator handed out answer-key transparencies to place over answer sheets so the job would go faster.

Was that labor-saving device required by the union?

At Venetian Hills, a group of teachers and administrators who dubbed themselves “the chosen ones” convened to change answers in the afternoons or during makeup testing days, investigators found. Principal Clarietta Davis, a testing coordinator told investigators, wore gloves while erasing to avoid leaving fingerprints on answer sheets.

But we can be sure they did it because they care about our children.

Oh, wait. This doesn’t help kids at all. In fact, it does them grievous and often irreparable harm. But it props up government schools and keeps over-paid bureaucrats and teachers’ unions in clover. Politicaljunkie Mom puts it this way:

These kids have been cheated. Robbed of an education. But the union shills still got their loyal dues.

Backyard Conservative notes the inevitable thuggish aspects, always present whenever unions are involved:

For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue.

“APS is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t. [. . .]

Principal Gwendolyn Benton, who has since left, obstructed the investigation, too, the report said, when she threatened teachers by saying she would “sue them out the ass” if they “slandered” her to the GBI.

The explanation for this decade of corruption is that the standards imposed on the schools are impossibly high: Debatable. A system becomes corrupt if the people who constitute it are corruptible. Seems to me that their most important standards are abysmally low. This scandal throws into relief one of the real purposes of government “education,” which is lining the pockets of those who profit from keeping the system going—and students be damned.

Exit question: How many other school districts’ “success” is based on fraudulent test scores? A Young Conservative wonders about that, too, and encourages students as well as parents to take matters into their own hands:

As students, it’s time to say we’ve had enough. We’re not buying any more of the “it’s for the kids” crap. Any high school student in his right mind should be begging his parents to put him in private school or homeschooling. And parents should be wary of allowing the broken system to ruin their kids.

Right. Nothing is more important than your children, and it just might be that the government’s idea of what’s good for them isn’t, at all.

[Eraser image courtesy of Photography of Grace.]

Cross-posted at P&P.

I’ve been pretty rough on President Obama, but I have to give him credit for one thing: when he gets in front of an audience and opens his mouth, he never disappoints; you know it’s going to be god-awful–and it is.

If you’ve got the time and the perverse inclination, you might wade through the transcript of yesterday’s press conference, which is filled to overflowing with Obama’s special brand of demagogic, narcissistic weirdness:

The president made six–count ‘em!–six references to “corporate jet owners.” Among them:

Republican leaders need to ask their constituents if they are willing to sacrifice the safety of their children for a tax break for a corporate jet owner.

You didn’t realize, did you, that corporate jet owners, enabled by the GOP (well, not exactly), are siphoning money away from every essential government program, casting the young, the old, the sick, the disabled, and the ignorant adrift, to scrape by on contaminated food and sub-par weather forecasting.

Obama assured us of his reluctance to engage in “scare tactics,” after saying this:

Moreover, which bills are we going to decide to pay?  These guys have said, well, maybe we just pay the interest on — for bondholders. So are we really going to start paying interest to Chinese who hold treasuries and we’re not going to pay folks their Social Security checks? Or we’re not going to pay to veterans for their disability checks? I mean, which bills, which obligations, are we going to say we don’t have to pay?

He tried to make an analogy involving red and yellow traffic lights, but apparently he isn’t familiar enough with the quaint custom of driving a car to quite carry this off:

Jessica, let’s be clear. We haven’t given out four different dates.  We have given out dates that are markers for us getting into trouble. It’s the equivalent of–you’re driving down the street, and the yellow light starts flashing. The yellow light is flashing. Now, it hasn’t been a red light yet.

And they said George W. Bush mangled the English language!

Part of Obama’s flailing performance can be attributed to his discomfort with being challenged, however gently.

But the worst part of his performance yesterday stems from his disturbingly casual attitude toward the responsibilities of the office:

They’re in one week, they’re out one week. And then they’re saying, Obama has got to step in. You need to be here. I’ve been here. I’ve been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let’s get it done.

“Doing Afghanistan”? This is how the Commander-in-Chief speaks of a war in which he’s sending Americans to risk their lives? Being the POTUS isn’t just the plum role in a competitive game to be played with Congress and the media; it’s a grave responsibility. That he speaks of it so lightly is even more disturbing than his incessant demagoguery.

As for corporate jets, this is the man who once decided it was necessary to take Air Force One in order to get to Colonial Williamsburg–110 miles away. And that particular “corporate jet” is the one we all pay for, to the tune of over $56,000 per hour of operation.

The President is the ultimate fat cat.

As Independence Day approaches, it’s time for a little Thomas Sowell to remind us what those fireworks are all about:

Not only did July 4, 1776 mark American independence from England, it marked a radically different kind of government from the governments that prevailed around the world at the time– and the kinds of governments that had prevailed for thousands of years before.

The American Revolution was not simply a rebellion against the King of England, it was a rebellion against being ruled by kings in general. That is why the opening salvo of the American Revolution was called “the shot heard round the world.”

Autocratic rulers and their subjects heard that shot — and things that had not been questioned for millennia were now open to challenge. As the generations went by, more and more autocratic governments around the world proved unable to meet that challenge.

Some clever people today ask whether the United States has really been “exceptional.” You couldn’t be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create your fundamental document — the Constitution of the United States — by opening with the momentous words, “We the people…”

Those three words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as if they were simply human livestock, destined to be herded and shepherded by their betters. Indeed, to this very day, elites who think that way — and that  includes many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs — find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us.

Read the rest. Prof. Sowell goes on to dismantle the recent TIME cover story on the Constitution (also critiqued here).

Now fast forward to 2011, when our minders, this time in the form of the TSA, detain and search a frail, gravely ill 95-year-old woman for 45 minutes, ultimately requiring her to remove her adult diaper. Mark Steyn puts it in perspective:

There is a term for regimes that submit law-abiding wheelchair-bound dying nonagenarians to public humiliations without probable cause and it isn’t “republic of limited government.” . . . George III wouldn’t have done this to you.

Back to Prof. Sowell, who finishes his piece on a cautionary note: