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Homeschooling Ruled Illegal in California–Seriously

Last month I posted about a proposal in Nebraska that would mandate testing to homeschooling families.  Today, thanks to Reason, I read an article in the LA Times stating that homeschooling has been ruled illegal by a California appellate court.

“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court.

Hold on.  WHAT?!  Excuse me?  Did I read that correctly?  They don’t have the constitutional right?  Pause for a second to digest that.

You know who loves this ruling, right?

Teachers union officials will also be closely monitoring the appeal. A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said he agrees with the ruling.

“What’s best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher,” he said.

Credentialed by the State, right?  No conflict of interest there.  Relax Teachers Union people.  Good teachers have been in demand since ancient times, way before unions.  They’ll always be in demand and are in no danger of ever being out of work.

Notice something I’m not discussing here is religion, which the Times article mentions frequently.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to make this a religious issue, which it obviously isn’t.  It just so happens that many people homeschool their children for religious reasons, but that’s not the only reason.

This will surely be overturned, but is it something the State would be willing to take to the limit.  Are they willing to line up tanks outside of someone’s home and threaten them with bullets for refusing to send their kids to gov’ment indoctrination camps schools?

California, if you’re still wondering why the rest of the country unfairly labels you a bunch of crazies…

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Racist Graffiti And A Paper Noose

This not only appears on the KNS, it’s on the AP Wire.

The Sumner County Sheriff’s Department is investigating a possible hate crime after racist graffiti defaming a black school administrator were found with a paper-towel noose.

Graffiti in a restroom?  *gasp*

A noose made out of paper towells? *oh no!*

Congratulations news outlets.  The juvenile morons who did this just got way more attention than they could’ve ever hoped.  This is nothing more than some immature, ignorant kids expressing their ignorance and stupidity while they take a dump.

We may not like the fact that they are immature and ignorant, but a hate crime?  Let’s hope these dangerous criminals are apprehended before Halloween.  If not they may graduate to stealing pumpkins or maybe even TPing a yard or two.

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Hold On…Let Me Get My Gun!

The Missus and I an ongoing disagreement. Disagreement is probably too strong of a world. It’s more like a difference of opinion–when is the right time for a child to have a gun, shoot a gun, be around guns, etc?

We both have a healthy respect for what they can do, but hers is more like a fear. She sees them as weapons, but I see them as tools. I think this difference of perspective comes mostly from the fact that she’s never been around guns, but I’ve been around them my whole life. In my mind, this experience gives me a much more educated opinion.

It came up again when we were watching Superbad and saw the scene where the kid is fascinated with holding and shooting a gun. To me, a 16 year old who’s full of adrenaline over the prospect of holding a gun is a much scarier proposition than an 8 year old who thinks it’s no big deal.

She asked once when I first shot a gun. I honestly don’t even remember when that was. To me that’s like asking when you first used a screwdriver. But I do remember being drilled constantly by my dad on the rules of gun safety. Those rules went for any gun at our house. When I hear people now talk about having BB gun wars as kids, I can’t help but imagine what would have happened to us if we’d done that. Honestly, punishment would have been the least of our worries–we could both actually shoot. There’s no way I’d want my brother drawing a bead on me.

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How Would DLR Raise My Kids?

As I’ve said before, I often pause when I’m at a crossroads in my life to ask myself WWDLRD–What Would David Lee Roth Do?

I guess it’s reasonable to suspect that my perspective would change once I decided to unleash version 2.0 of this gene package onto the world. Then again, when have I been reasonable?

I remember reading an interview with DLR a long time ago where he described what his parents called “monkey hour” when he was a kid. He, being DLR, would act like a total lunatic for an hour.  According to him, he took Monkey Hour and turned it into a career.

I like the idea of Monkey Hour, and I think I want to have that at our house. One hour of anything goes madness (confined to one room). No rules–throw whatever you want at whatever you want, turn over the furniture and jump off it, leg drop of doom your younger siblings–whatever. Get all that energy out before bed (or a trip to the emergency room).

But at the end of the hour we have to clean up everything. Making them clean up will ensure that they don’t end up like DLR. Then again, they may just end up like one of his roadies instead, huh?

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Wine At The Grocery Store?

HT to Michael Silence for this.

Sen. Bill Ketron and Rep. Randy Rinks introduced a bill (SB3139/HB3451) at the beginning of the legislative session. The proposed legislation would allow wine sales only in municipalities that currently allow package sales.

Just another one of the many things I don’t understand:  we need legislation to allow wine sales in grocery stores?  I understand the concept of legislation that disallows something, but I don’t get the need for laws that allow things.  Why not just repeal the law that keeps grocery stores from selling wine in the first place?

And what was the original purpose of keeping wine out of groceries?  The only benefit I can see is for the liquor stores have the market cornered currently.

Yeah, I know we live in the Bible Belt and that’s just the way things are, but was there a problem with people showing up to church wine-drunk on Sundays because they stopped to get bread and eggs on their way and were seduced into buying a bottle of cabernet?

Apparently there’s a mini-movement going on to expand wine sales to food retailers.  I’m not much of a wino–the headache just isn’t worth the great taste, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy some high gravity beers now and then without having to make an extra stop.  Either way, what do I care if someone else buys wine?  How does that affect me?

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Sort The Viewers, Not The Movies

My buddy IB sent this article to me…very interesting.  Netflix is running a contest for data crunchers and offering $1M to anyone (or any team) that can beat their current recommendation system by 10%.  One of the leaders is a psychologist working by himself who is looking less at raw data and more at human nature.

One such phenomenon is the anchoring effect, a problem endemic to any numerical rating scheme. If a customer watches three movies in a row that merit four stars — say, the Star Wars trilogy — and then sees one that’s a bit better — say, Blade Runner — they’ll likely give the last movie five stars. But if they started the week with one-star stinkers like the Star Wars prequels, Blade Runner might get only a 4 or even a 3. Anchoring suggests that rating systems need to take account of inertia — a user who has recently given a lot of above-average ratings is likely to continue to do so.

I think this guy is onto something, and I’d like to see this move a step further.  Associating movies using k nearest neighbor is relatively straightforward, but attacking the other side of the equation (the viewer) is a lot tougher.  Here’s an example…

“The Outlaw Josie Wales” is one of my favorite movies, but that doesn’t mean that an algorithm could spit out a bunch of westerns and give me something I like.  Clint Eastwood movies wouldn’t do it either, but it would be a little closer.  The real way to suggest movies for me would be to look at some other factors that aren’t so obvious.  You need to be able to draw conclusions from my other favorites–“Fight Club”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Smoky and the Bandit”, and “Swingers”.  You may peg all of these as “guy movies”, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to like “Gladiator”.  In fact, I hated “Gladiator”.  A movie like “Thelma and Louise” is a much better suggestion for me than “Gladiator”.  Why?  Because it is much more quotable, and that’s something my favorite movies suggest that I like.

Just an example, but that’s the direction we’re going.  In order to make a powerful suggester for anything (books, movies, music, raincoats, etc.), it is now necessary to consider the individual making the purchase instead of a one-size-fits all approach.  How else can you help a guy like me who hates sci-fi but loved “The Matrix” and can’t stand to watch horror flicks but has seen “Scream” several times?

I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but this is a very difficult problem.  You’re basically tasked with generalizing a solution which has to consider literally millions of individual problems within the problem.  It’s very tough to quantify so many parameters in so many dimensions.

What amazes me most is that this is such a simple task for us to complete in our heads.  Computers are still so far behind us in our ability to do something as simple as watch a movie and think to ourselves, “That movie sucked, but my buddy really likes movies like this…I think I’ll suggest it to him.”

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Me a Social Entrepreneur? Well, Kinda Sorta

This weekend we took advantage of my newly found unemployment opportunity for real advancement by traveling over to the midstate to visit some friends and my parents. I seldom read the Tennessean (much improved site), but I saw this article at my folks’ house this morning, and it almost describes something The Missus and I have been working on lately.

Several surveys have found that many people in this generation don’t believe that government is the most effective means to solve many of today’s social problems — the private sector offers more efficient and effective solutions.

They no longer believe that massive programs work. Instead, they hope to create solutions that solve one small problem at a time.

That pretty much describes us. The only difference between what we’re doing and what is described in the article is that we aren’t going the non-profit route, at least not yet. Are we being unrealistic to hope that we can make a living working from home while helping people all at the same time? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Besides, if we fall short of that goal and end up only helping thousands of people and only supplementing our income doing so, that’s not such a bad thing either, right?

The issue we’re addressing is education, and our project involves putting a huge amount of educational power into parents’ hands. Right now we’re gathering information from groups of parents about what they really need and building content. One thing that is becoming evident to us in this process is that no matter how much free information is out there–it is out there, and it is free–the web is really lacking qualified people who can gather up that information and put it into an easily digestible form for everyone else.

By the way, sorry for any perceived secrecy. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know about our project. Quite the opposite, I want to make sure we’re good and ready before we open it up for launch. I promise you guys will be the first to know, and you’ll probably hear more about it than you ever wanted to!

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Me! My Favorite Meme Ever!

Taylor tagged me with a meme.  In her post she mentioned that she was celebrating her 6 month anniversary blogging, and I realized that I let my one year anniversary slip.  Oh well, I don’t put much stock in that kind of stuff anyway.  Here are the rules to the meme…

** Post about the meme and link back to the person that tagged you.

** Go back to your archives and link to your five favorite posts.

Link One: must be about family
Link Two: must be about friends
Link Three: must be about yourself
Link Four: must be about something you love
Link Five: can be anything you choose

** Tag five other people (at least two must be new acquaintances so that you can get to know them better).

A post about family:  I almost feel bad claiming this post as my own, because I didn’t write most of it, and definitely didn’t write the best parts of it.  It’s all about my grandfather’s Thanksgiving day in 1945.

A post about friends:  it happened ten or so years ago, but I just posted last year about my buddy Eaton Beavers

A post about me:  in September I was busy damning Scrubs straight to hell.  The writing is corny and contrived, but the clips of highlights at the end of the post make it all worthwhile.

A post about something I love:  I wrote one in in December about the abandoned practice of exchanging emails with My Favorite.  I love My Favorite, and I love exchanging emails with her too…especially the kinds we’ll never ever ever show our kids.

A past about anything I choose:  Back in July, before I had the HUGE following I enjoy today, I wrote a post about Fury Face.  A tale of a terrifying mask or a cartoon character who is perpetually showing his anger?  Nah, just a group of educators who can’t spell.

So I think I’ll tag….

SVD, who is currently enjoying an Instalanche and riding the wave of success.

The Wookie at Total Diatribe, who will probably have something mean to say in every post he chooses

My Favorite, who is very starved for time to write, so everything she writes is very important

Hungry Mother, who has a plethora of interesting posts about every one of these topics.

NewsComa, who probably doesn’t even have time to participate because she’s churning out great posts one right after another.