It's the education, stupid.

"Federal meddling in education has been an abject failure, so the Democrats' plan is to keep doing more of the same."

Same old story.  If some of something makes a problem worse than doing nothing at all, try using even more.  It's got to work sooner or later, if you just use enough.  ...Right?

Unfortunately, this is a case when we're between the devil and the deep blue sea.  One side wants to smother actual teaching under layer after layer after layer of bureaucracy and "facilitators", "coordinators", and "empowerers".  The other side wants to "permit" (read: require¹) prayer in school and allow schools to teach that the Biblical account of creation is literally true and evolution is "just a theory".  Who, if anyone, speaks for the vast mass of us left stuck in the middle between the two opposing camps of zealots?

Can we PLEASE get the political agendas out of our schools and get back to, you know, actually focusing on teaching useful knowledge and preparing kids for the real world?

[1]  Because when prayer in schools is "permitted", the zealots-to-the-right will expect it of everyone — for their own good, you know — and look suspiciously at anyone who doesn't wish to take part, because the only reason you wouldn't join in public [Christian] prayer is if you're a Godless Commewnist or something worse, like, say,a zealot to-the-left.  (Or, say, Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or Hindi, or Baha'i, or Zoroastrian, or agnostic, or atheist.  Or maybe you just think communing with your chosen deity is something private between you and your deity, not a public ritual so that everyone else can see you're right-thinking and upstanding and Just Like Them².)  I had the misfortune to be sent³ to a school where there was a mandatory⁴ morning assembly every day with hymns and prayers and sermons and ... crap on a flaming diesel-powered crutch, is this a SCHOOL or a CHURCH?  There was exactly one teacher who tried to break the mold and get some kind of a secular lesson about life and the world into morning assemblies.  They let him get away with it exactly twice in six years.

[2]  Because there is this about zealots of every stripe:  It's not good enough for them that they should be allowed to live as they wish.  YOU must live as they wish too.  They have no concept of "live and let live."  There is One True Way, and it is THEIR way.

[3]  My parents were quite convinced that they knew better than me which school I'd want to go to.  They were quite certain I'd be happiest at the boys-only traditional English grammar school founded in 1558 and don't you ever dare for one second of your life forget it.  I wanted to go to the nice modern Nobel School.  But what did I know about it?

[4]  There was precisely one person in the entire school of 2,000-plus who had permission to sit out the religious parts of the morning assembly.  He was either a Jehovah's Witness or a seventh-day adventist (I don't remember at this point).  One guy who believes in a slightly different version of the same basic faith gets to skip it.  But you don't believe in any of that, you think it's all a bunch of complete and utter tommyrot?  Oh, you have to sit through the lot.  Yeah, that makes perfect sense...

Passport RFID cloning with $250 of off-the-shelf parts

Those new secure¹ RFID passports?  The ones that the US Government is so certain can't be faked?

Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses.

The $250 proof-of-concept device - which researcher Chris Paget built in his spare time - operates out of his vehicle and contains everything needed to sniff and then clone RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags.  During a recent 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, it successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.

Got two passports just driving randomly around SF.  Now imagine how many you could get, sitting in the vicinity of the international departures lounge at SFO innocently reading a book, or sitting in the parking lot across the street from the DMV office...

Because the technology employs no encryption and can be read from distances of more than a mile, the tags are highly susceptible to cloning and tracking, researchers have concluded.

[...]

Paget's device has a range of about 30 feet, making it ideal for discretely skimming the EDL and passport card tags of people who pass by his vehicle.  With modifications, Paget says his device could read RFID identifiers that are more than a mile away.

[1]  According to the government...

Hi ho, hi ho ...

...The driveway's clear of snow.

Again.  More or less.  (It's still snowing sporadically.)  And the berm across the driveway of the house across-the-street-and-one-downhill removed.  And what was left of the berm of the house across-and-two-down, after pushing the folks from Massachusetts and their minivan with "all-season" tires back out into the road so that I could clear the berm they were stuck in so they could make it up the driveway.

Lesson one of driving in northerly climes:  All-season tires aren't.