Thursday, December 15, 2016

It's true

Reason.com has yet another example of how the US child care and protection authorities are horribly overreacting.

A mom, dad, and their preschooler went to Home Depot in Valley Stream, Long Island, last Saturday to get some Christmas lights. The boy fell asleep in the car, so the parents cracked open the sun roof and let him snooze while they ran their errand. A passerby saw the boy and called 911 to report a child in a car, "unconscious."
When the parents came out about 20 minutes later (the lights had been hard to find), they found a huge commotion at their car. Cops! Firemen! An ambulance! A fireman had smashed open their rear passenger window and was extricating their son as if the car was on fire.
Then, rather than seeing that the boy was startled but fine, the safety kabuki began.
I was just thinking, there is no way I would leave a child sleeping in  a car for twenty minutes when  I read the following:

"Now, maybe you wouldn't let your child wait in the car for 20 minutes. But chances are that your parents did that with you, because this was once universally acceptable."
It's true. As children we were always left in the car when my mother did the supermarket shopping. She would not have dreamed of dragging us around with her. And she was a teacher.


Monday, December 12, 2016

Another example of academic reconstructionism

The DomPost today ran a piece which is part of a series entitled, "Private Business, Public Failure: Inside Our Prisons".

Something caught my eye and got the BS detector buzzing:

Dear Editor,

'Incarceration Nation' (DomPost, December 12) featured Auckland University sociologist Dr Tracey McIntosh claiming that from the time of European settlement "...there was a desire to incarcerate significant numbers of our people", 'our people' being Maori.

This is simply not true. According to the Official New Zealand Yearbook of 1900, of the admissions to prison in 1898, Maori numbered only 134 of 1,724 - or 7.8 percent. That year more women than Maori were admitted to prison.

The significant growth in the Maori prison population share - 51 percent at September 2016 - came with urbanisation and welfarism.