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Reason TV: Teachers Union and NAACP sue NY Charter School
March 23, 2012 — xanthippa
How is this for co-parenting….
Get all the smart kids together – then expose them to lead, mercury and asbestos
March 21, 2012 — xanthippaOh, sometimes, I just want to give up…
Broadview Avenue Public School in Ottawa is one of the best schools around. It is one of only 3 locations in Ottawa which has a program for students who have been identified as not just gifted, but exceptionally gifted. Broadview houses both the English and French language versions of this most excellent program.
Now, I am not saying that super smart kids are better than other kids and deserve better conditions. No kids should be exposed to these conditions!
However, to select kids specifically for intelligence and then put them into a school filled with chemicals known to decrease intelligence…that is not the most constructive course of action…
While my older son attended that school, he developed chronic fatigue – and environmental factors were suspected. We even had our house tested for everything, from heavy metals to mold – and came up clean. After years of this, with no way to help him, I was close to despair!
The problem resolved itself once he started high-school. Now he is away at University and his health is perfect!
I guess now we know what had made him sick…
Dan Hannan: Common law, not EU law
March 20, 2012 — xanthippa
This is something very important – something we do not pay sufficient attention to: common law.
It is the basis of our freedoms: the legislature with all its lawmakers are not the source of our rights and freedoms – they do not grant them to us from above. Rather, core rights and freedoms are something we are born with, not something that comes from the state.
Yes, we recognize that in order to co-exist with others, we may agree to put some restrictions on our freedoms: that is the role of our elected representatives.
In common law, there is the explicit recognition that rights come from within each individual and that governments – all governments – are there to restrict these freedoms. The less (smaller) the government, the fewer restrictions on our rights and the more free we will be. The bigger th government, the more restrictions and the fewer freedoms….
This is a philosophy which views each human being as an individual, full of potential and free to fulfill this potential or not.
It is in sharp contrast to the view that every person is born as a cog in a machine, a member of a society which has the ultimate power over her or him. Under this philosophy, it is the society which is the source of right in as much as it permits each member of the society to fulfil a role it deems most beneficial for the society. In this type of a set up, one only has the options that the society opens for them, no freedoms to choose things or actions outside of what the group would benefit from. This is called the civil law…
We must never forget the distinction between the two – and we must never give up our heritage of freedom for the gilded cage of civil law.
Just last night, I was reading to my son a 19th century traveller’s description of the Magna Carta Island – and the writer had permitted his imagination to float back across the centuries to that unforgettable June morning in 1215 when King John was brought there and forced to acknowledge this principle – already old then, but in danger of being eroded…
Sure, the Magna Carta is an imperfect document – as all human products are. But, it is the source of – and vastly superior to – all further re-tellings of it, from the US Constitution to the Canadian one, and so on. Along the way, the documents have become more and more cumbersome and less and less perfected…so we can trace just how much of our birthright we are permitting ourselves to give up in order to live in ‘civilized’ society.
But, do not lose heart!
Precisely because from Magna Carta on, all these documents are mere affirmations of our pre-existing rights, it is our rights that are supreme should there ever be a disagreement. Precisely because it was the rights that were pre-existing!
Now, if we could only have judges who see it as clearly as this!
Tim Hudak in Caledonia on 13th of March, 2012
March 15, 2012 — xanthippaIt starts out pretty ‘vanilla’, but then it gets more colourful…
For those not familiar with Ontario politics: for the last 6 years, the community of Caledonia has been torn apart by violence as a native land claim had led to armed occupation, division of the municipality, violence and police response where law-abiding citizens were arrested for wanting to go home, because this might provoke a violent reaction from armed native occupiers. The non-native residents of Caledonia were not the only victims: as armed ‘warriors’ from across Canada flooded to Caledonia to flex their muscle, the law-abiding citizens of the 5 Nations Reservation were equally victimized as incidents of rape and other violence were swept under the rug while the armed thugs bullied the community…
Mr. Hudak himself is a bit of an enigma…
He is very charismatic in person – that much is undeniable.
Still, the last election was his to lose – and he did lose it, spectacularly.
On the same issue that his predecessor did: religion in schools.
Conservatives in Canada must learn to separate religion from their policies or they will never be trusted by voters enough to be voted into power. Mr. Hudak failed there and handed the despicable McGuinty the election victory.
Still, coming into conflict-riddled Caledonia took a lot of guts – and Hudak has raised my opinion of him both for going there and for what he had said.
Unfortunately, Mr. McHale – the man who has led the fight in Caledonia for equality before the law and against race-based policing – he behaved badly (in my never-humble-opinion).
Perhaps he was disappointed that a politician did not behave like an activist….just like his expectations that Mr. Hudak could rid us of the Ontario Human Rights Commission while he was a leader of the opposition were just a little outside of what was possible. He certainly did not come across as the reasonable warrior for equality whose speech in Ottawa I liked and whom I admired.
Merlin – the vet who was interviewed at the end of the video – he got the measure of the situation just right!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 