The last period of open war on the Korean peninsula cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 million lives, including nearly a million soldiers on both sides (36,516 of them American) and 2.5 million civilians in the North and South. What did the American taxpayer get in return for three years of fighting, tens of thousands of Americans dead, and nearly $700 billion (in 2008 dollars)?
Tag: money
Not All Molestation is Sexual
Your “polite” neighbors believe cops have a legitimate function: to molest bad guys by stopping them from hurting people or violating property. And if they actually did that without molesting the rest of us, I wouldn’t be completely against policing. But they don’t– because they can’t. Molestation is built into the “job” and is a result of every encounter with them.
Putin’s Plan for America
Perhaps we should just ignore the non-threat from a country that is not doing well economically and knows full well that any attack on the US would lead to complete destruction of its own country. We need not worry.
Hippies With Money
The fact that massively influential multimillionaires (sometimes billionaires) in the soon to be dominant crypto space spend time on Twitter calling each other names, using coarse language, and angrily arguing on live YouTube broadcasts is a radical deviation from past generations of leaders in business, tech, and finance.
Not Even Slaves Would Waste Time Recycling
I have a bit of a vendetta against recycling. Maybe not against all recycling. If you are homeless and you wish to collect the state taxed redemption value … Okay, I get it. But for us people who value our time, space, and resources … recycling is a waste of time.
Why “Archation”?
You have no right to initiate force or violate property rights. You have no right to govern, murder, rob, rape, trespass, defraud, or kidnap. Those acts are all the same, ethically. You have no right to archate.
The Freedom to Quit
The freedom to quit is an essential aspect of an unschooling lifestyle. Frankly, I think a four-year-old should be able to quit anything, whether he’s unschooled or not. That’s about gentle parenting, not any education philosophy. But for unschooling, the freedom to quit–as long as that freedom does not negatively impact someone else–is a vital part of Self-Directed Education. We should connect our children to resources in their wider world, expose them to new and different opportunities, and be very clear about participation policies when signing up for things so we have the freedom to quit.
Is Education Worth It? My Opening Statement
Is the education system really a waste of time and money, as my new book claims right on the cover? This is a strange topic to debate with Eric Hanushek. Why? Because if Hanushek had absolute power to fix the education system, education might actually be worth every penny. Hanushek is famous for focusing on what schools teach rather than what they spend – and documenting the vast disconnect between the two. If you haven’t already read his dissection of “input-based education policies,” you really ought to. Hanushek, more than any other economist, has taught us that measured literacy and numeracy are socially valuable – but just making kids spend long years in well-funded schools is not.
“Peace Through Strength” Is a Racket
“I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody — absolutely nobody — is gonna to mess with us,” Trump says. On other occasions he’s said similar things: “We want to defer, avoid and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military strength” (same link) and, a year ago, “Nobody is going to mess with us. Nobody. It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history.”
Dawkins’ Religious Error
I know Dawkins is famous for his atheism, but you and I know he isn’t an atheist because he still believes in The State due to his superstitious belief in “authority”. You can’t be an atheist, by definition, if you believe in any gods whatsoever and believe in any religion. Statism is not only a religion, it’s the most popular religion on the planet by a wide margin.