OK, everybody feel guilty now so the state can spend millions on pre-school without us raising a squawk:
Gov. Mitch Daniels and Republican lawmakers want teachers and schools evaluated on student performance and parents to have more options, but experts say preschools and other early childhood learning have more impact on success in the classroom.
This is the national conversation we should be having:
"Statist" sometimes seems a more apt label than "liberal" or "progressive." Blind acceptance of whatever the government orders "for our own good" is the default position. Case in point, the forehead-smacking dumb editorial in this morning's Journal Gazette:
Purdue University pharmacology professor David Nichols makes chemicals similar to ecstasy and LSD so he can study how parts of the brain function. He publishes the works for other scientits, hoping the work will one day lead to treatments for things like depression and Parkinson's disease. And he has an ethical dilemma:
If a test shows you have a greater risk of Alzheimer's, should the doctor tell you? Would you want to know? Those are two different questions. On the first question, notes The New York Times, five different consensus statements by ethicists and neuorilogists were all in favor of no, do not tell. But in a study of people with a first-degree relative suffering from Alzheimer's, most people wanted to know.:
So maybe I have this really tiny amygdala, but just shut up about it and leave me alone, OK?
Do you spend time with a lot of friends? That might mean a particular part of your brain is larger than usual.
It's the amygdala, which lies deep inside. Brain scans of 58 volunteers in a preliminary study indicated that the bigger the amygdala, the more friends and family the volunteers reported seeing regularly.
A marriage made in hell:
Is Arnold Schwarzenegger angling for a job in the Obama administration?
I've made fun of Newsweek more than once here for being a bible of leftist orthodoxy. But I've also linked to articles from it -- once in a while, it publishes something both interesting and provocative.
President Obama challenged the "Mythbusters" people to examine the ancient legend of Archimedes' solar death ray -- the supposed use of giant mirrors to reflect sunlight toward attacking Roman ships around 212 BC, setting them aflame:
Those of us who don't want to see space exploration slow down have had to take President Obama's word on some things, such as a commitment to Mars without returning to the moon first and the proposal to privatize shuttle-like missions. But at least we know the private sector can handle the assignment:
