Tag: private

Leave Them Kids Alone

education, school, panic, hysteria, play, gun, toy, private, competition

This just in: oblivious little boys still play cops and robbers.

Just as in days of old.

Wait. Hold on. Breathe. Just breathe. This sociological fact doesn’t mean that we’re a nation of incipient international terrorists but for the galumphing grace of grumpy zero-tolerant schoolmasters.

Common sense says you don’t suspend toddlers from school for wiggling their fingers as if wielding a gun, or for sculpting a “gun” out of a slice of Wonder Bread or Freihofer’s. Yet evidence continues to mount that all too many teachers and administrators are immune to considerations of reasonableness when it comes to kids who misbehave. (Or “misbehave.”)

Such enemies of childhood innocence must be hindered. So let’s give two and a half cheers to Ohio lawmaker Peggy Lehner, who proposes to legislate an end in her state to suspending children in the third grade or younger who aren’t threatening anybody. (I’m not sure why kids in grades later than third can’t catch the same break.)

A new, probably imperfect government regulation is not the only way to counter blunderbuss government-school policies. The most fundamental alternative is the free market.

Ideally, no public-school monopoly plagued by mandatory insane rules would exist. Ideally, all K‑12 (and university) educational offerings would be provided by an unregulated market economy, making it much easier for families to drop insane schools and patronize sane ones. The pressures of market competition would encourage school officials to become students of common sense.

We are not there yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags competition, education, gun, hysteria, panic, play, private, school, toy

Accountability crime and punishment government transparency moral hazard national politics & policies

New Standards?

harassment, sexual, assault, public, private, training, Al Franken, John Conyers

“This is a country trying to establish, and certainly a U.S. Senate trying to establish new standards for acceptable behavior,” Peggy Noonan told her fellow panelists on Meet the Press yesterday.

She is at least half mistaken.

Groping a woman who is stuck posing for a photo with you at the state fair, as Sen. Al Franken (D‑Minn.) was accused, has never, ever been publicly viewed as “okay” or “nice work if you can get it.” And believe-it-or-not, Americans are not ambivalent about the propriety of Congressman John Conyers (D‑Mich.) taking meetings in his underwear. Nor do folks find it fathomable that members of Congress such as Rep. Blake Farenthold (R‑Tex.) paid off their accusers with our tax dollars.

The standard has always been that such behavior is 100-percent wrong. And yet Ms. Noonan is correct to suggest a new official standard for … both houses of Congress.*

But in a recent video for Breitbart, actor Jackie Mason mocks the idea of sexual harassment training. “When you’re three years old, you learn how to behave with people. You learn how to control yourself,” Mason rants. “Now Congressmen, who are 67 years old and 98 years old, are being told they have to take training at this age to learn how to behave with women.”

We see that, in media, in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley and among the corporate elite, credible allegations of sexual abuse are met with swift action: firings, dismissals, contracts voided. Out!

Our “representatives” should be ashamed not merely of their loathsome colleagues, but of being “out-democracied” by corporate America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The current House system protects powerful politicians and staffers with secrecy and even uses taxpayer money to pay off victims.

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Tags Al Franken, assault, harassment, John Conyers, private, public, sexual, training

free trade & free markets individual achievement

Not Just a Recycled Rocket

SpaceX, Space X, space exploration, private, privatization, Elon Musk, landing, rocket, spaceship

Last Thursday, SpaceX successfully re-used a previously flown rocket to launch a payload into orbit.

Sure, NASA had re-cycled rocket parts before. That is, the U.S. space agency had recovered spent rockets.* But those were rebuilds.

SpaceX’s most recent triumph was to launch a “stage one” rocket that had gone into space before —and returned. Last April it delivered a payload to the International Space Station and then safely touched down vertically** — just like in 1950s sci-fi!

You could see the evidence: the weathered look of the rocket fuselage.

This Falcon 9 rocket not only placed its Luxembourg-owned SES-10 into orbit last week, it then returned — again! — to its ocean “drone ship” platform.

A new age in space commerce thereby hit a new landmark.

Or would that be “spacemark”?

Re-using a rocket is like how airlines re-use jet aircraft. Less waste, expense. Making the whole industry more viable. The technology and expertise to safely land and recover the rocket is astounding.

Alas, videocasting of the most amazing part of the effort, the landing and recovery of the Falcon 9 rocket, failed — noticeable by its lack in both the live Periscope feed and the YouTube archive. But we had seen that very same rocket land last April, onto SpaceX’s charmingly named droneship, Of Course I Still Love You.

Ocean mark? Drone mark? It hit the mark, whatever you call it.

Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, had every reason to breathe a sigh of relief, as well as engage in some apt exultation, after the mission.

We can, too. Space industry privatization and progress? Actually happening.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The Space Shuttle was a different technology entirely, a re-usable spacecraft. What we are talking about today is the powerhouse stage-one booster rocket, like the old Saturn V that the Apollo program famously exploited.

** The Space Shuttle, remember, landed horizontally, like an airplane. Future re-usable manned spacecraft will no doubt do this. A private return-entry spacecraft, like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two, put into orbit by a re-usable Falcon 9 rocket, would be the next logical new achievement. Though, obviously, these are different companies with tech that is not, I think, meant to work together.

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