Some Questions to Ponder

1. Why do we set federal emissions standards based on the standards of the state with the top 6 counties in a list the nation’s 26 most polluted counties and none in the top 25 cleanest counties?
2. Why do homeschools require the oversight of an education system that is failing to properly educate the students directly under their tutelage by doing things like using math texts where the authors admit in the teacher’s manuals that they “do not believe it is worth students’ time and effort to fully develop highly efficient paper-and-pencil algorithms for all possible whole-number, fraction, and decimal division problems. Mastery of the intricacies of such algorithms is a huge endeavor, one that experience tells us is doomed to failure for many students. It is simply counter-productive to invest many hours of precious class time on such algorithms. The mathematical payoff is not worth the cost, particularly because quotients can be found quickly and accurately with a calculator.” (as excerpted on Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth; the video is just over 15 minutes long, but well worth the watch… if you can stomach it)?
3. Why should we casually accept the idea that global warming is an impending crisis from the same people who told us thirty years ago that global cooling was an impending crisis?
4. Why do we spend an average of 24 hours (check page 81 of your 1040 instruction booklet) and a bottle of TUMS collecting and filling out paperwork to prove that we are not hiding any potential sources of government revenue while that same government runs a deficit in the trillions and frequently circumvents its own budgetary rules by hiding pork barrel projects in legitimate appropriations bills?
5. Why does the average American work 84 days (it’s 133 days if you include all levels of government) to earn enough to pay taxes to a government in which the members of Congress worked a total of 103 days in 2006?
6. How could a weather-forecasting rodent with an accuracy rate of only 40% spawn a national phenomenon and a major motion picture?