How atrociously disgusting! Yes, it does remind me
of the Communist and Fascist situations. If they do
it, I hope the kids run away, vandalize the place,
and burn it down.

Not surprising in the least.

People fail to take care of there kids and want someone else (this time around; science and government) to do it for them.

Yes. I agree with most all of what you say. Some more thoughts:.
- I'm concerned about Zenphamy's slippery slope wrt taking away children. I just don't have an answer on this.
- Maybe our end goal is not alms for kids w/o meals or clothing, but achieving the goals you talk about mean *someone* being the parent and providing those things.
- It's not just a racial thing. This cycle exists in all races. Maybe in the past it was racial, but from what I've seen it's individuals making bad choices, or rather operating on a bad autopilot and doing things that result in problems without even any conscious decision-making process.
- The large philosophical thing that will reduce the stupid rioting behavior like in Baltimore is for people to feel like part of "We the People," with gov't not a source of alms with an alphabet soup of programs for their mom, and not something jailing their fathers for non-forcible drug offenses. The more intrusive gov't is, the more it feels like a thing offering a carrots and sticks trying to manipulate people. Even people who can't articulate that don't like this.

Isn't it?

Good Heaven How Scary. -- j

Taking children away from parents is not an answer, because once you give statist an excuse for one group of kids, they'll use that to expand it to others. The answer lies in your suggestions for AFDC, but that's not enough. I've forgotten the real numbers, but there exists at least dozens of programs for welfare and dozens more in the works. While I find a lot of fault with those on the dole, I find more fault with those that put the damn thing in place and allow it to stay in place and even grow.

I agree that the problem to be solved is not school lunches and proper clothing--it's a family that values education and achievement, but we won't get that by giving authority or responsibility to government or trying to 'solve the problem'. We must take power and money away from government, not give to. I'm sorry for those children, but they and their conditions of life are not my responsibility. If we can get government out of our lives and out of our pockets, nature and reality of being human will take care of those children. They don't deserve charity, nor altruism, nor someone to take care of them. They are no more nor no less human than am I and my children; they simply need to face the same rules of reality that I had to, growing up. And succeed or fail as all humans must.

I agree that individual liberty is not about garnering anyone else's approval or OK.

Not as long as I still have the ability to breathe!!! BUT, I would say there are considerable wounds... not yet fatal.

I've been advocating for a long time that AFDC (aka TANF) be abolished, or at least strictly time-limited to a few months per household. After that, if you can't support your kids, they should be taken away (for neglect) and placed with foster parents. This would achieve two things: it would give those kids a future (by getting them out of the welfare cycle and giving them good role models), and it would remove the incentive for useless people to reproduce (because they'd no longer be paid for doing it). The latter is the important benefit; 30% of all births in the US today are out-of-wedlock, it's certainly because of the subsidy, and guess where Obama got his voter base!

(Of course the problem I'm trying to solve is not kids coming to school without meals or proper clothing. It's kids coming to school who don't bother to learn, and don't want to let others learn either, because they and/or their parents have the "Al Sharpton attitude" (whitey owes us a free living). Then when they don't get everything they want, either as teens or so-called adults, they make the kind of trouble that is going on in Baltimore right now.)

And no, Zen, I'm not a "progressive" or socialist. If you have a better alternative, I'd love to hear it.

As far as the proposal in this article: obviously state-run parenting is going to be worse than foster parents or just about anything privately run. But it is probably better for the kids than leaving them with a welfare mother.

When I was in public school, oh, so long ago, the schools taught the basic subject matter. They taught how our political system worked, but they did not teach a political ideology, other than what would be required for a constitutional republic with a democratic base. If public schools still did the same, I would not have a problem with public boarding schools. Since public schools no longer teach subject matter, but ideology, I would favor abolishing the public school system entirely. A voucher system that gave all students vouchers, and in which the only funding for public schools came from the vouchers, would hasten the end -- or the reformation -- of the public school system by applying the principles of the free market to it.

Yeah. And scary.

Don't you think those rights are already a long way along the path to evaporation?

I think people proposing this are progressive socialist!

Sounds like Mao to me. He wanted kids under government influence as early as possible, to keep parents from passing on their ideas. Are we sure the unions won't also be part of the project in Buffalo, more union jobs? Teachers have done a great job of indoctrinating kids into being against parental values, and an equally lousy job of teaching academics. Kids will not learn until they learn respect, for others and themselves - teachers have pretty much short circuited that idea, then complain when they can't control them either. More government schooling will create hostile sheep, not psychologically healthy.

You think our's wouldn't?

Herb, I think education's already a punishment there. As to their families and poverty, as long as we put the blame where it belongs, I have no problem in talking about the problem. LBJ and his progressive ilk started the inner city projects and subsidized housing, all centralized, to move families on welfare where they were given incentives by the government to become exactly what they've become. If a father's in the home, they don't qualify for Aid and assistance and all the other goodies, the more children they have the more money they get, on and on. And they're all concentrated into one or two neighborhoods which gets their children out of suburban schools and they overwhelm the inner city schools.

By throwing racism into the argument, those wanting these boarding schools, will have an argument to go out and find white, latino, indian, and asian children to pull into the web the web as well and take more children for indoctrination.

It's all a progressive socialist's wet dream.

Well common core isn't working real well.

Amazing similarity isn't it?

Yes, and they didn't even tell us. We have to learn about it in a science newsletter.

Yes like good little Socialist robots. I saw a video on the History channel about 10 to 15 years ago. It portrayed Hitler in Austria surrounded by a dozen 10-year old girls in white dresses singing of him as God and Savior. What is this urge to raise psychopaths to gods?

Oooo, Marxist reeducation camps rearing their ugly heads.
I guess it was only a matter of time.

This is all done "FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE!" Did you not realize that?

I thought we already had boarding schools for troubled teens. I understand that they call it reform school and when they grow up, prison. Boarding school is another way to milk the public that don't have troubled youth.

There is a big problem in most of the statistics on single parent homes and children. In virtually all of these overviews, no distinction is made between causes due to low economic condition and causes due to single-parent family. Indeed, one study (http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publi...) that normalized the economic conditions showed that, "When controlling for other differences in family characteristics, such as race, level of parents’ education, family size, and residential location, McLanahan and Sandefur found little difference in outcomes for children according to whether the single-parent families were a result of non-marital births or divorce. However, children of widowed parents do better than children of other types of single-parent families with similar characteristic."

There is no 'putting Humpty Dumpty back together again' with respect to enduring marriages. As long as both members of the relationship have the ability to support themselves, you are going to get a higher rate of divorce than in a society where half of the family was economically dependent.

Another thing is that I was a day student at a prestigious Catholic boarding school. We day students noticed that the boarders did not have any trouble getting drugs (from their politician or actor families, probably). The dorm had a problem with drugs (mostly pot; some cocaine I think). Anecdotes from other people in boarding schools recount similar experiences. As Wm is fond of saying, "If you can't keep drugs out of prisons, how do you expect to keep them out of the rest of society?"...in this instance, boarding schools.

Jan