They had a “hot” time in a Glasgow High School chemistry class last Friday with an experiment that turned out to be “all wet.”

The Glasgow Daily Times reports (subscription for full article) that a silly experiment to ignite clouds of natural gas in a classroom (lighting fires in a classroom – what a great idea – NOT!) did the inevitable – triggering the sprinkler located right overhead.

That wound up soaking all sorts of technology devices and eventually flooded numerous classrooms.

This silly stunt got caught on video.

And then came a demonstration that anything caught in a computer – such as sensitive data schools collect on students – can live forever. You see, the original video was removed from You Tube, probably at the request/demand of the school. However, copies of the video keep cropping up in You Tube like mushrooms, anyway.

This crazy science stunt scorched the new school’s ceiling (nice show of respect for taxpayer provided facilities) and probably shortened the life of a nearby electric light fixture, just to name a few other unintended consequences.

Of course, someone had to cough up for water damage treatment from this silly stunt.

The video of this nutty affair got posted on You Tube under the title “Teaching Fail!! Chemistry Teacher Experiment Goes Wrong.” The Times says the video got 313,000 views between last Friday and Monday.

But, here’s the rest of the story.

Apparently, someone didn’t like that video. Today, I could not find a You Tube under that title with anywhere near so many viewings. I did find a You Tube announcement that said a video with this title had been removed by the user.

However, this video is far from dead. Numerous other videos with the same title are now on You Tube. They all seem to contain the same material (check here, here, here, and here (for just a few examples).

Apparently, other people made copies of the original video as soon as it hit the Internet and posted those copies to You Tube.

The original video is gone, but it lives on anyway, perhaps forever.

That brings us to an important lesson about anything that winds up in computers. The lesson: once things get into a computer, they can spread like fungus. The original owner of the material can lose all control.

Keeping this You Tube sample lesson in mind, parents should think very carefully about plans afoot to share all the sensitive data your local school collects on your child in its computer system with all sorts of other groups. Groups angling for or already having access to that information include the Kentucky Department of Education, other Kentucky agencies, federal agencies and even private vendors of school services and materials.

Furthermore, the ever increasing data collected about your child – and you – in these school databases get backed up somewhere in the Internet “Cloud” on still other computers, often owned by private companies. Sure, the data won’t be posted on You Tube (at least not until someone unauthorized gets access), but multiple copies of your child’s sensitive information are flowing around all over the place. Sensitive data about your child is going to live on – forever – somewhere.

With all sorts of sensitive stuff like credit card information and social security numbers and even military secrets getting hacked in the Internet, exactly what kind of assurances cans anyone give you that what happened to this You Tube won’t happen to your child’s data, as well.

Think about it.

Think about it a lot harder than some science teacher did before he lit off uncontained flammable gas clouds directly underneath a sprinkler head in a public school. And, stay tuned. I’ll have more to say about the enormous database some school people want to set up for your child.

Let’s get real, shall we?

Does anybody in their right minds even entertain the notion that professional politicians are going to pull the rug out from under more than 300,000 lower-income individuals who will soon be added to the Medicaid doles? If voicing the simple, commonsense notion to make even modest reforms to entitlement programs is considered political suicide, then removing entitlements from over 300,000 Kentuckians  must be the political equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb.

What’s worse, the type of bold leadership in line with free market principles that would be necessary to shrink Medicaid to reasonable levels is simply not present in Frankfort. No professional politician is going to remove 300,000 people from an entitlement program unless he or she is preparing for a permanent retirement for politics.

Even if we want to venture through fantasy land and pretend that Gov. Beshear or his successor would have the intestinal fortitude to make such a bold move, it’s unclear that it would even legally be permitted to do so. According to legal experts, Robert Alt and Dan Greenberg:

“[I]n fact, there is substantial reason to believe that when a state chooses Medicaid expansion, it is something like a decision to go down a one-way street” and that “legislators are mistaken to ignore the possibility that expansion cannot be abandoned as easily as it was entered.”

WHAT: Debate on the Intrastate State Coal and Use Act, hosted by TACKLE

WHO: Jim Waters, President of the Bluegrass Institute, and Tom Fitzgerald, Director of Kentucky Resources Council

WHEN: Tuesday, May 21 from 6 to 8:45 PM

WHERE: Heeren Hall, 2nd floor of Cooke Hall, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at 2825 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40206

The Intrastate Coal and Use Act is a piece of model legislation sponsored by the Bluegrass Institute and unanimously approved by the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Task Force on Energy and the Environment. If passed, the bill would protect Kentucky’s constitutional rights to regulate all internal commerce, specifically any coal mining operations in which the coal is mined, sold, and used exclusively within the borders of the commonwealth.

Such a law would push the EPA monkey off our backs for the one-third of Kentucky coal that stays within the borders of the commonwealth, allow for a more sensible and locally-driven environmental program, restore thousands of mining jobs, and protect our majestic wildlife and waterways.

So come on out tomorrow to this important discourse and voice your support for Kentucky’s constitutional rights!

“Utah GOP Anti-Common Core Resolution PASSES”

The Utah resolution is heavily researched and referenced. It is very interesting reading for anyone regardless of political affiliation.

Listen live online here.

One myth which the states are particularly fond of is the idea that somehow, since it’s paid for by the feds, expanding Medicaid to over 300,000 extra Kentuckians is completely free to denizens of the commonwealth. It’s as if the resources to provide healthcare to families at up to 138% of the federal poverty level (granted, low-quality healthcare) miraculously came down from the heavens and came to rest right here in the commonwealth, just waiting for a sickly child or two to consume them.

Of course, as inquiring Kentucky minds know, the feds can’t provide anything whatsoever to Kentuckians that hasn’t been taken from someone else, and the resources taken to fund expanded Medicaid will in large part be taken from Kentuckians right here at home.

The fact that the resources are funneled through the federal government does nothing to change this fact.

In fact, according to a recent Heritage report, Medicaid expansion will add $638 billion dollars to government spending over the next 10 years, and that’s spending from a government already $16 trillion in the hole and counting.

What’s worse, by 2017, Medicaid expansion won’t even be free to Kentuckians in federal fantasy land, because the state governments are legally required to pick up a chunk of the bill.

And all this assumes the feds actually keep their promises to fund the state’s endeavors with your federal tax dollars. Who knows when the changing tide of politics will turn this whole funding charade on its back, leaving the states completely responsible for the even more bloated Medicaid catastrophe, and the hundreds of thousand of citizens made to depend on it.

The story goes that in 1689, local inspectors warned that the town hall would crumble without additional support. Rather than fight City Hall, Wren, England’s greatest architect – who disagreed with the inspectors – fooled them by building four pillars that offered the illusion of more support but which did not even reach the ceiling.

Stunts deceiving observers by illusion are not, of course, relegated to 17^th century building inspections. They can occur in outright wallet-crushing fashion today.

Take, for example, Kentucky’s Medicaid shanty.

Inspectors have carefully examined the leaning structure and determined that adding 300,000 new enrollees into the Obamacare program – which Gov. Steve Beshear announced he will do – would add an unbearable financial weight to a structure that’s already crumbling.

Four fake pillars have been erected by Obamacare’s great architects in Kentucky offering the illusion of sustainability:

• Expanding Medicaid will ensure improved health for currently uninsured Kentuckians.

Jason Bailey of the left-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy advocated for expanding Medicaid, telling reporters “it will make us healthier.”

Bailey apparently wasn’t asked for any supporting material for his claim, and he sure didn’t offer any.

Nor did he mention a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The report revealed that while 6,000 previously uninsured individuals placed by random lottery into Oregon’s Medicaid program in 2008 used the health-care system more frequently and spent significantly more money through their new coverage, they were not significantly healthier than those in the sample group not chosen by the lottery.

• Federal funding is “free.”

Senate Minority Leader R.J. Palmer, D-Winchester, told “Pure Politics” that he fully expected the governor to go along with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion because the federal government will pay the bill for the first three years.

“I think he’s always intended for the first three years to implement the expansion because it’s free,” Palmer said.

Am I, then, to believe that aliens from outer space swoop down each April 15to cover our federal income tax payments in order to cover Medicaid expansion?

This illusion is easily discovered by looking at your latest pay stub.

• The state can pull out in the future if it’s too costly.

Beginning in 2017, the state will be forced to start paying a portion of the Medicaid expansion.

Not only has Beshear offered no acceptable plan for where the state is going to come up with the hundreds of millions of additional dollars, he also casually suggests that Kentucky will just pull out if the cost is too high.

Call this illusion by delusion.

What happens to all of those new recipients who, in some cases, have left private plans to join Medicaid under the worst illusion of all: that having an insurance card in the pocketbook ensures access, more choices and better care?

• Deciding to expand Medicaid was made after careful consideration driven by facts.

After Obamacare was upheld by the United States Supreme Court, the governor’s office said it would “determine the best course for the state after we have gathered the facts.”

Well, the facts show that Medicaid is a broken program that no longer serves those for whom it was created, and that it no longer has the confidence of doctors – many of whom have not even been accepting new Medicaid patients before the expansion.

What Kentuckians need are health-care professionals unimpeded by the red tape of our federal masters, not political illusions and cheap tricks.

Jim Waters is acting president of the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Reach him at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com. Read previously published columns at www.freedomkentucky.org/bluegrassbeacon.

Citizen Education Seminar Panel from Bluegrass Institute on Vimeo.

Recently the Bluegrass Institute partnered with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to host its Citizen Education Seminar at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Lexington. The event included both Bluegrass Institute and Mercatus scholars discussing the most pertinent barriers standing in the way of Kentucky’s economic competitiveness.

Today, we present the final segment of our weekly series delivering exclusive video footage from the event. Featured is a panel discussion and Q&A session with all three of the event’s keynote speakers, including the Mercatus Center’s distinguished visiting scholar Maurice P. McTigue and senior research fellow Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D., along with John Garen, Ph.D., the Gatton Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky and chairman of the Bluegrass Institute Board of Scholars.

The conversation was wide and varied, but whether the questions concerned the importance of new media in the liberty movement or revisiting the dependency trap, the audience in attendance had all of their queries answered by these three learned economists.

Other topics included the prospects of growing our economy from “the bottom, up,” the success of the Brazilian economy, Maurice McTigue’s fantasy agenda for his first day as governor of the commonwealth, and even the possibility of turning arid wastelands into fertile oases by planting trees in the desert.

Learn all about it inside this video.

This coming Tuesday in Louisville, Jim Waters, President of the Bluegrass Institute will argue for the Intrastate Coal and Use Act, a bill which would guarantee to Kentuckians sovereignty over the one-third of all Kentucky coal that is mined, sold, and used exclusively within the borders of the commonwealth. Such commonsense and constitutional defenses are what we need in the commonwealth if we are to succeed in fending off the federal behemoth that is the EPA.

And we need these weapons now more than ever.

Last year alone, Kentuckians lost more than 4,000 coal mining jobs or 22 percent of mining employment. Eastern Kentucky and Appalachian miners were explicitly targeted by the EPA, and experienced a 30 percent decline in employment. Overall, mining production in the commonwealth was down by 91.4 million pounds.

No doubt, Jim Waters will reference a new report from the Bluegrass Institute that shows how – in no small part due to EPA regulation – energy prices are set to increase by 20 percent over the next ten years. These increases in energy costs will not only be a direct burden on Kentucky families, they’ll also chase business from the commonwealth, which relies so heavily on low energy and operating costs to lure industry to set up shop.

So come on out to 2825 Lexington Road in Louisville, KY at 6 PM to voice your support for the Intrastate Coal and Use Act.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Next, play this You Tube:

Now, write a comment for us about what you think about this CCSS aligned English Language Arts material for first graders. Be sure to mention whether you believe CCSS protects students from such stuff. Use of emotional terms recommended in the CCSS aligned first grade material is optional.