Life's An Education.

Strider has learned several things since I've pregnant. Here are two that particularly caught his attention.

1) My sense of smell really is much stronger. When he considers that the apartment is smelling fine, I'm ransacking the kitchen to find the one tiny bit of something that smells off to me and is making me sick.

2) I look hysterically funny when running.

G-20 riots in Toronto

Pictures from the rioting in Toronto over the G-20 meeting.

Apparently smarting from the public's outrage over their non-response, the next day the police showed up to harass people who were not rioting.

My theory is the same theory I have for why social workers harass good parents and leave the scary psychopath parents pretty much alone.  Because wouldn't you prefer to deal with unarmed, milque-toast, normal citizens than scary psychopaths?

More here- including two short video clips- one of citizens taking down a looter, and hooray for them, and one of Toronto ninja-robocops chasing down citizens for the peaceful crime of singing O, Canada.

Maybe they were off key.

Why is Gun Control an Ideological Issue in the First Place?

Dr. Zero, Awakening from the Collective Dream- must reading

And on the 70th Day

The President finally agrees to accept a wee bit of help in dealing with the oil spill, and a tropical storm halts the work. A Daily Kos diarist snarks that Governor Jindall will blame Obama for not putting up an umbrella big enough to stop the storm. That would be ridiciulous, of course, but could we agree that maybe, just maybe, the President could have agreed to do something about the oil spill, oh, 60 days ago?
Could he maybe have waived some EPA regs that truly are the enemy of the best in this situation?
Or maybe he could have quit interfering with success in Alabama (Valerie Jarrett gets props for her response here)?

Check the video footage out here:

NASA has produced a series of images from space which show how a quick response of booms, burning and skimmers could have contained the damage. Watch in horror as the first month, the most important month, slips by us and the oil slick grows...

Success...

and also a failure of sorts. 

I am often more than a little conflicted over our dealings with Blynken and Nod because on the one hand I have strong convictions about not undermining parents, and on the other hand I am so often placed in a position where actively supporting parental standards is absolutely untenable.

Let's take bugs, for instance, as an example of smaller sort.  The boys have been taught to be terrified of bugs.  This terror is actively encouraged.  Furthermore, Blynken has been told that if he gets seven mosquito bites, he could die, and Nod has been told he is fatally allergic to spiders.  Neither of these things are remotely true, and I absolutely cannot in good conscience even pretend to believe this nonsense.  Nor am I the sort of warm, sympathetic and tenderly empathetic person who can get all worked up over insects because somebody else does.  I am the sort of mean, no-nonsense person who will scream as much as the next person if I see a great hairy spider where it doesn't belong, but who will still grab a shoe and smash it even while doing the spider dance with curling toes.

I used to try simply changing the subject when mosquitoes and spiders came up so we didn't have to have a head to head confrontation about this, but we live in the country and we do not spray for bugs, and we have a pond and a creek on our property, as well as a horse trough.  These things are all breeding grounds for mosquitoes.  This means that the conversation was coming up on a regular basis, like, oh, 20 times a day.  I can't be that creative about changing the subject.

So Blynken and I have had a lot of conversations like this:

Blynken, excited in a nervous and not at all good way: There's a mosquito, get it out, get it out!  I am allergic to mosquitoes and if I get seven mosquito bites I could DIE.

Me, in a bored but firm, none of that my boy tone: No.  You won't.  Because you are NOT any more allergic to mosquitoes than anybody else.

Blynken: Yes I am, my mother told me so.

Me: Perhaps that was true when you were a baby, but you are certainly not going to die from seven mosquito bites now.

Blynkent, indignant: How do YOU know?

Me: Because you have 20 mosquito bites right now, and the last time you came I counted 30, and the time before that you had 17 and the time before that you got 12 in less than an hour, and you didn't even know it.

With Nod the conversations go something like this:

Nod, in great excitement and very proudly: There's a 'pider and I tood die toz I is allergic to 'pider bites.

Me: Leave it alone.  Spiders eat other bugs, and that is a good thing.  And everybody is allergic to spiders, not just you.  It's nothing special.

Blynken and Nod, all indignation together, insist that just Nod is allergic to spider bites, that Blynken is allergic to mosquitoes, and that Nod could go to the hospital if he gets bitten.

Me:  Yep.  Lots of little kids have to go to the hospital if they get bitten, because ALL spider bites are venomous, so don't stick your fingers in the spider's mouth.

The boys: Everybody is not allergic to spiders, just Nod.

Me: That's just silly.  Spiders are venomous, that is how they paralyze their prey.  But because they are small and their prey is small, they usually only have tiny amounts of poison, so the bigger you are the safer you are.

Boys: they pester me with questions, what does venomous mean, what's a prey, what does paralyze mean, what do spiders eat.

Me, privately gloating, because this is exactly what I wanted them to do- be distracted from the 'oh, no, I am going to DIE' response to spiders and get interested in spiders as a species.  I answer some of their questions and offer to get library books on spiders next time we are at the library (we take the boys to the library every Wednesday).

The failure part is the part of me that doesn't believe in undermining parents feels like I should probably feel guilty about this, but I don't.  Being a first born child who has always known that everything is her fault, I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty.

The success?  Blynken has quit telling us he could die from seven mosquito bites.  We do not know if we convinced him this was errant nonsense or if he just has decided we don't care.

Better yet.  Last night I read them one of the spider books from the library.   This afternoon Blynken came running downstairs all full of the good kind of excitement shouting at me, "I just saw an orb spider!!!!  I think it's spinning its web!!"

Choctaw Recipes?

This summer The Common Room folk have worked out an arrangement where indoor pow-wows and parties are hosted at the Common Room Central as the house itself is large, and out-door to-dos find themselves going on in the bigger, more level yard of Shasta and The Equuschick's otherwise much smaller house.

The Equuschick thought a great while ago that it would be really fun to skip the whole hot dogs and hamburgers of traditional Independence Day celebrations and go with what she has chosen to call the Melting Pot Potluck where everyone has to bring a dish from their own ethnic background.

But in true Equuschick style she got busy with other stuff, and lo, the Fourth of July is almost upon us and she doesn't know what she's making yet. Since she and Shasta both share a Choctaw in their different genealogies she had decided that much, and she's been researching recipes.

And that's where you all could come in if you have any information, to guarantee authenticity as it were. She doesn't even know what she's looking for. Parched corn? Sounds good. Persimmon cake? (And where do you get pulped persimmon, anyway?) The yummy-looking recipes for better-than-grilled steak sound suspiciously contemporary and touristy, and yet how would The Equuschick know? And for another, where she would go to get authentic recipes?

Do help her, if you can.

Political Wheel and Deal making

President-Elect Obama in December of 2008:

"I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening," Mr. Obama said. "And as I said it is a sad day for Illinois. Beyond that I don't it's appropriate to comment."

In the Blagojovich trial in Chicago, top Union leader Tom Balanoff testifies under oath that Obama had already contacted him the night before the election, saying he was going to contact the governor:

"Tom, I want to talk to you with regard to the Senate seat," Obama told him.
Balanoff said Obama said he had two criteria: someone who was good for the citizens of Illinois and could be elected in 2010.
Obama said he wasn't publicly coming out in support of anyone but he believed Valerie Jarrett would fit the bill.
"I would much prefer she (remain in the White House) but she does want to be Senator and she does meet those two criteria," Balanoff said Obama told him. "I said: 'thank you, I'm going to reach out to Gov. Blagojevich."

Balanoff went to Blogojevich and recommended Jarrett for the job, and Blagojevich said he was already in talks with the Madigans about it. Blago wanted to angle for a cabinet position for himself in exchange for appointing Jarrett.

And... the President's nominee for Supreme Court Justice thinks it's okay to have laws banning books. Take a look at the reasoning here, but make sure you swallow your coffee first, because this is a sputter maker.

We need more of these American People In General.

(tombstones in the same cemetery as Benjamin Franklin's grave)

"It is become fashionable to call me 'The Venerable.' It makes me think fo the venerable Bede...or the venerable Savannarola...Don't call me 'Godlike Adams,' "The Father of His Country,' 'The Founder of the American Republic,' or 'The Founder of the American Empire.' These titles belong to no man, but to the American people in general.'"
~ John Adams, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, quoted in American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic

News

Kevin Costner's oil spinning machines appear to be working well- this is really an interesting and exciting story. He ran into quite a few road blocks with the Federal Government along the way.

Andrew Breitbart is offering $100,000 for the full membership list and archives of Journo-list. I sympathize with this:

The fact that 400 journalists did not recognize how wrong their collusion, however informal, was shows an enormous ethical blind spot toward the pretense of impartiality. As journalists actively participated in an online brainstorming session on how best to spin stories in favor of one party against another, they continued to cash their paychecks from their employers under the impression that they would report, not spin the agreed-upon “news” on behalf of their “JournoList” peers.

The American people, at least half of whom are the objects of scorn of this group of 400, deserve to know who was colluding against them so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised.

But I don't sympathize with it to the point of thinking offering 100,000 for the archives of a membership list whose members expected their participation to be private and protected is the right thing to do.

Catching a politician in an act of blatant hypocrisy is not as much fun as it used to be (Diane Feinstein on judicial inexperience then and now)

Russian Spies: In America. This is like a MacInnes novel. Only more serious.

DailyKos put a lot of faith in Research 2000 poll results, which were, not surprisingly, uncomplimentary towards conservatives. DailyKos finds that they have been defrauded, that no Research 2000 poll results can be trusted- to the point that DK is hiring lawyers. Good for them for owning up, and in a very big and admirable way. Kos also recommends that anybody who has relied on R2k's poll results as posted at Kos withdraw such articles. Kos' poll results are often published by the MSM, and R2K claims:

Some of our [R2K's] most active media clientele include the Bergen Record, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Concord Monitor, The Manchester Journal Inquirer, The New London Day, The Reno-Gazette, The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, The Spokesman-Review, KCCI-Television in Des Moines, Iowa, WRAL-Television in Raleigh, North Carolina, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and KMOV-Television in St. Louis, Missouri.

Our Polls can be seen on CNN'S "Inside Politics" and are also mentioned frequently in the National Journal's "Political Hotline", The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Wall Street Journal

According to ReasonOnline (linked above), Kos was writing a book making a bunch of negative claims about Republicans and conservatives (the usual stuff- racists, bigots, etc, we're The American Taliban), when challenged, he hired this polling group to do some polling, which, surprise, confirmed what Kos already believed. He says the book is unchanged because none of his premises are based on R2K polling, and I believe him, because he could not more plainly say that formed his premises before he did any data collecting.

When your confirmation bias comes back and bites you, it's worse than karma.

Mann says his hockey stick icon was 'misplaced.' Overemphasized.

Politicizing medicine- Kagan, Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, got the the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to alter their statement on Partial Birth Abortion- to the point of turning it upside down, on the basis that their original assessment of the procedure would be 'politically disastrous.'


This cracks me up. Remember when the Democrat talking point over the whole thuggish 'who are you peons, anyway' Etheridge response was to malign the two young men who asked a question as 'plants' with an agenda? Missing the point that it did not matter whether or not they hoped to catch an embarrassing moment, they didn't do anything but ask an elected official a civil question. So here's the new Democrat response:

The Democratic National Committee is seeking “Macaca” moments. The party today is opening a website, www.accountabilityproject.com, designed to recruit and display embarrassing audio and video of Republican candidates, as well as information about their schedules and copies of their mailers.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/39148.html#ixzz0sHJhVz2D

I'm fine with this, btw. I think politicians are fair game for that sort of thing (and so are reporters), and I trust people to assess well enough whether anything that turns up is just a bad day, or evidence of something deeper. I just think the double standard is hilarious.

Barzun on Culture

In the book of cultural commentary titled Darwin, Marx, Wagner by Jacques Barzun, Barzun explains that he is critiquing a culture, a heiritage, not so much the specific works of the three figures he believes most strongly influenced 20th century culture.  As he explains, a culture is influenced not just by its great thinkers, movers, and shakers, but by what the large population makes of those works, how society at large understands, interprets, and applies their works.  This is an important distinction.

Some of the reviews at Amazon criticize Barzun for his comments on Darwin and a weak focus on Darwin's science, but for Barzun's purposes, Darwin's science is not as relevant as what society at large made of what they understood of that science.   It isn't  Darwin Barzun critiques as much as Darwinism as understood and applied to 20th century culture.  This is an area over which Darwin himself had little influence.

That's how I understand Barzun, anyway.  So in the following selection it's important to recognize that when Barzun talks about how cherishing is foreign to the nature of things Darwinian or Marxist, while this may or may not be true of Darwin and Marx, that's not really what Barzun is addressing.  He's talking about the synthesis of Darwin's and Marx's work by society, and that synthesis may or may not be a strictly accurate rendering of their work, but that is a different book. 

In his introduction Brazun writes:

So far the twentieth century seemingly belongs to Darwin, Marx, and Wagner.

If there should be any doubt on this score, it would be easy to invoke the authority of the great American who first perceived the fact. I refer to Henry Adams. Readers of the Education [Education of Henry Adams] will remember that that painful process consisted in getting used to a Marxian, Darwininan, and Wagnerian world for which Adams's native environment had not prepared him. He got used to Wagner, he accepted Darwin, and he feared Marx, but the burden of his misery was that the world which he saw as the fief of these three was an alien, cold, and chaotic world.

The reason was that Darwin and Marx as scientists and Wagner as artist had seemingly made final the separation between man and his soul. Their labors had shown that feeling, beauty, and moral values were illusions for which the world of fact gave no warrant. Man was no longer a cherished creature of the gods, first because there were no gods, and second, because cherishing was foreign to the nature of things...

[...]

The result of making matter the only reality was plain, a premium was put on fact, brute force, valueless existence and bare survival.

Yet, as I write (1940) the world is being told be some of its most conscientious scientists that the familiar unit of matter, the atom, is nearing the intangible and that the sun creates energy. In the explanation of the latter phenomenon, we are told that at a certain point in the chain of events, "a miracle happens."

...In our mind and speech the world is still Darwinian, Marxian, Wagnerian, but beneath the thick crust are the fires of new thoughts which must modify or destroy the old."

...the great danger is that under the pressure of new facts and new insights we shall swing back from materialism to an equally dangerous idealism, or even worse, to a know-nothing irrationalism.

I find this interesting because I think we are well into that pendulum swing into know-nothing irrationalism.   People easily believe six impossible things before breakfast, but what is really disturbing is that they are also mutually exclusive things.

Much more recently, Barzun wrote From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present


I am delighted to point out that this erudite scholar loves mysteries as well:
The Delights of Detection

A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres

Nod Sings

Nod is 3. He is extremely articulate and small for his age. He is very musical as well. He sings along with us in church where or not he knows the song, and he is pretty much in tune and on key every time. He sings about everything he does, too.

This Sunday he was sitting in Pip's lap singing away with all his heart during the congregational hymn singing.

Then suddenly, both his pitch and his words changed, and he sang at the top of his lungs, to some tune of his own making:
"Hey, are we going to Strider's and the HG's house after church?"

I have mentioned in the past that one of the primary functions of this blog is as a space to pull the covers up over my head. And spackle. This continues to be spackle.

I have mentioned this less as blog posts go by not because it is less true (if anything, it is more true), but because it is boring and tedious and I feel like a bit of a tease because I do not foresee a time in my life ever where I will talk about precisely why I need so much spackle in my life. I will only tell you it is real. It is not a medical issue, and it's not my family.

I go to sleep every single night with an iPod in my ears or earbuds and a movie in the laptop because laying in the dark and closing my eyes so I am alone in my own head is an absolute horror to me, an unbearable horror. And I usually do not go to sleep until well after midnight because I need to be that tired before I can face the idea of trying to go to sleep.

A friend of mine who knows the reason for the spackle and who also understands that I would if I could, but I cannot talk about it, referred to it once as the elephant in the living room. This summer, for no reason I can tell, the elephant has become a T-Rex. An elephant would be downright cozy by comparison.

Yesterday we celebrated my dad's 73rd birthday. He didn't know it was his birthday. When I wished him happy birthday, he told me 'the same to you. ' When my mother told him it was his birthday he got annoyed and said it wasn't, he'd already had his birthday, ages ago. When the HG greeted him, he called her Grandma, and then got confused and asked, "You are still a grandma, aren't you?"

I found him trying to read an old Jacques Barzun book he owned, and he'd written strange, cryptic notes in the margins.

My mother got out some old photo albums to look at while we were there. One of them had pictures of a family vacation some 43 years ago. We'd gone to visit my grandparents and there were three of us kids in the pictures- at the creek, looking at the chickens, ducks, geese, goats, and horses on the farm.
The three kids are me, my middle brother, and our foster sister Patty. Patty lived with us for, I think, almost two years. When we were getting ready to go on that vacation, my father went to the Children's Welfare department to talk to them about it- since we lived in Canada at the time and my grandparents lived in the states, he wanted to make sure he could take Patty with us.

The folks at the office were astonished. They'd assumed that he was coming in to make arrangements for Patty to stay with another foster family while we were gone. It was my dad's turn to be astonished. He couldn't imagine taking a family vacation and dropping Patty off with strangers. We were her foster family, and for my parents, the emphasis there was on the family part. My parents knew that meant they probably would not get to keep her (they did ask), but they were making a commitment to be her family for as long as the state would let them.

Patty was their foster daughter, a human being. She was not a puppy that they could board elsewhere for two weeks while they took a family vacation.

Keeping Blynken and Nod is not always easy. It's not always fun. They are smart, cute, hilarious and they are fun, but they are also at times obnoxious, disagreeable, argumentative, destructive, and rude. They are always a lot of work and they come with baggage.

I am also obnoxious, disagreeable, argumentative, destructive and rude at times. I definitely come with a lot of baggage.

Our lives would be simpler and easier in many, many ways if we did not keep the boys. I only have a very limited supply of spackle for my own needs, and keeping the boys means that other things suffer.

And, in fact, we have started trying to set more limits- currently we pick up the boys Saturday nights and bring them home Wednesday nights, refusing all requests to keep them longer. We do get those requests every single week, and not from the boys (unless they are told to ask us, and we can always tell when that's happening). Nine days on with two days and one night off was just getting to be too much.

I should also be very clear here that it would be absolutely, completely impossible to do what we do with the boys without the help of all the Progeny at home.

I do not always have a cheerful attitude about it (and neither do the Progeny), and I don't even want to begin to tell you the thoughts I think at times about the adults in their lives. Many things in our lives would be easier, simpler, quieter, without these two responsibilities.

We do not keep taking the boys every single week because we are noble, wonderful, unselfish, practically perfect people, although that description comes closer to describing some of my Progeny than me.

The thing is, we made a commitment- not a legal one, but a binding one nonetheless, to these boys. And they are boys, human boys with needs, feelings, hearts and souls. They are not poodles. Neither are they projects that we can pick up or put away at will, when it is convenient.

Laundry, floors, bathrooms, the garden, dusting, the books I want to read but don't, multiple other worthy projects, all these things and more- they are not as important as people.

One hundred years from now

It will not matter what kind of car I drove,

What kind of house I lived in,

How much money I had in my bank account,

Nor what my clothes looked like.

But one hundred years from now

The world may be a little better

Because I was important

In the life of a child.

~Dr. Forest E. Witcraft

Oh, That These Reflections Still Held True!

"The nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive government; it may also be said to govern itself, so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they emanate."

~ ~ ~
"[in America there are]...two governments, completely separate and almost independent, the one fulfilling the ordinary duties and responding to the daily and indefinite calls of a community, the other circumscribed within certain limits and only exercising an exceptional authority over the general interests of the country."

~ ~ ~
"Nothing is more striking to a European traveler to the United States than the absence of what we term the government, or the administration. Written laws exist in America, and one sees the daily execution of them; but although everything moves regularly, the mover can nowhere be discovered."

---- Readings from Democracy in America

News, Views, and the Media

RIP, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat, West Virginia

High Court rules that the second amendment applies to states as well as the Feds.

How the media covers events with real violence as opposed to coverage of events with only hypothetical or imagined violence

The bloom comes off the rose in England.

European Court on Human Rights rules there is no right to gay marriage, although states may create that right if they choose, but the EU's human rights charter does include gay couples under family life.

NYT reports that Gitmo has faded as a priority for the Obama administration, and that it is unlikely Obama will close it during his first term. It will be very amusing if he attempts to use closing Gitmo as part of his campaign for a second term. Just a reminder- Obama promised to close Guantanamo by January of 2010. Insiders are pretty much blaming everybody else:

“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue.

Well, no, he can't. But did he not know that before? He made a promise, and he made it sound like this was much more than your garden variety lying campaign promise, and now his people want to blame voters for believing him? This sounds like "It's not our fault you were so stupid you believed the President meant what he said. You should have known better than to expect him to do what he said he'd do."

And speaking of broken promises, ''unusal circumstances' just might require the President to further break his promises about no new taxes for those over a certain income level. Ed Morrissey explains those circumstances:

Ah, yes, the “extraordinary circumstances” of raising annual federal spending from $2.7 trillion in FY2007, in effect when Democrats took control of Congress, to over $3.8 trillion in just three years. In other words, enacting the Democratic agenda — which Obama assured voters would not require middle-class tax hikes — has become the “extraordinary circumstance” that Democrats need as an excuse to impose them.

How much is enough?


The Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression

Tourist is disappointed by Harry Potter theme park because it's not really magic. Plus the people there speak American or something. And they sell tacky stuff.

Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands is so serious that police have taken to wearing skullcaps while walking about in order to catch the thugs who have been spitting on, pushing, and otherwise assaulting Jews. The left objects to the police wearing skull caps because, it seems, looking Jewish 'provokes' a crime.

Journo-List and David Wiegel is probably, I realize, a story that interests only popcorn from a comfy armchair political/media spectators like me. But I submit there's a lot more to this story that ought to interest all Americans.
Ezra Klein is shutting it down now because 'it's being used as a weapon' and jobs (yes, jobs, plural) are at risk.
Whoa.
We've already seen from at least two of Weigel's exposed posts that it was already being used as a weapon against the American public- it was being used as a propaganda arm of the Democrat party where at least some journalists thought it appropriate to discuss together how best to frame the news to deliver Democrat talking points. Wiegel saw that undercover advocacy as his proper function and role.
And when Klein declares that he's shutting it down because it's being used as a weapon and jobs are on the line (no kidding!), he is standing there exposing journo-list to the world every bit as obviously as a kid whose mouth is smothered in pumpkin pie insisting he didn't eat any pie.
He's telling us that journo-list archives and ongoing discussions contain much more of the same about other journalists.
It's just another bizarre example of just how insulated he is from the world outside the beltway that he doesn't even recognize that's what he's telling us. However good the intentions were, Journo-list had plainly become a place where journalists discussed how to frame their reporting to best serve the Democrat party, and they think this was a big secret. The sad thing is, their reporting already made it obvious to those who spend a lot of time staying informed that this was their agenda.


I am sure there is something deeply Machiavellian going on here that I just can't untangle, but according to Armbinder, McChrystal not only voted for Obama, he banned Fox news from his headquarters. So why the anti-Obama Rolling Stone interview? Well, maybe because that's how bad Obama's strategy has been? I've said since before the election that the people Obama has to fear the most are his 'own,' because their expectations were so high- and the flames of those expectations was deliberately fanned by Obama and his team- that the disappointment was bound to be keen and sharp.

Aid for maternal and infant health is being held hostage over the abortion issue- by the Obama administration.

The President's first words as he stepped off the helicopter for the G8 conference. Wow.

Vice President Biden gets a surprise request from the manager of a custard shop.

When politicians meddle in things they really do not understand- like business:

During the campaign, Barack Obama promised to bankrupt any new coal-burning plants in the US through his global-warming policies. Congress has followed suit with a cap-and-trade bill that Harry Reid keeps promising to revive. One firm in Wisconsin shows exactly what happens when politicians intervene to attempt to conduct social engineering in the energy sector. Bucyrus just lost a $600 million project for a new coal-burning electricity plant in India, thanks to a decision by the Congressionally-funded US Export-Import Bank to deny the Wisconsin firm credit, based in part on Barack Obama’s policies...

More at the link, including just how much carbon this will keep out of the air (hint: zero).

Biden says all those lost jobs are gone forever, there's no way to get them back.

Being green didn't mean sending a bomb after all.

David Wiegel explains why he did what he did. I have two huge problems with this very long excuse.
The first is that he seems to be saying being mean and ugly about people is just the way to make friends and influence people. But the problem here is that there is no evidence that he was an equal opportunity offender here. All the nastiness is directed one direction only, toward conservatives.
The second is his very lame article about the thuggish elected Representative Etheridge and his bullying response to a young man who merely asked him "Do you support the Obama agenda?" Wiegel referred to the head lock as a 'hug' and tried to make the focus of his article all about the identity of these nefarious commoners who dared to question an elected official.
As a Reason commenter pointed out by Ace tried to explain to him (more at the link):

...The problem is that your instinctive first hot-off-the-pixels response was NOT to act as someone who really cares even a whit about "liberty" -- which is something we would have expected from a man who self-identifies as libertarian and once worked for Reason. Your locution was almost painstakingly chosen, rather, to MINIMIZE the ridiculous thuggery Etheridge displayed here. You called it a "hug." You reduced it to "people behaving strangely."

And you INSTANTLY diverted the question away from "WTF is this scumbag Congressman doing?" to the question of 'who hired these guys and what conservative conspiracy are they a part of?' Which, just coincidentally I'm sure, was the lead thrust of the Democratic Party talking points memo on the Etheridge affair (as posted by Ben Smith of POLITICO) being forwarded around to bloggers like yourself today. You, quite literally, seem to have "gotten the memo" on how to spin this into "those Nixonian conservative dirty tricksters!" rather than "Holy ****, now Congressmen are attacking random strangers rather than answer for their votes!"

Wiegel also reveals far more about his fellow journalists than he realizes. He basically says he called conservatives and tea party types 'rat-f*****s' and the like in order to 'fit in' with the cool kids in journalism and politics, the big names.

He also gives the impression that he was let go at Reason over his voting record, which is emphatically not so. Reason corrects that as well as misleading points made by the WaPo in their explanation on how Wiegel got hired to do a conservative gig in the first place.

He's still trying to tell us he's a conservative, but he voted for Nader, Kerry, and Obama in the last three elections. This is kind of like Blynken telling me he did not ring the doorbell and run away, it must have been a bug.

Not buying it, and more importantly, I resent the very juvenile assumption that I'm stupid enough to buy it.

More media bias at play here.


And here (why David Frum is not a conservative).

There are some very interesting questions here.

College Reading Lists for the Summer

I didn't agree with all the opinions expressed in this article, but it was an interesting read:

A new study by the National Association of Scholars has found that 70 percent of the summer reading books assigned to incoming college freshmen in the U.S. show a liberal bias and are not academically challenging, setting off a storm of debate in educational circles.

The report, "Beach Books: What Do Colleges Want Students to Read Outside Class?", surveyed 290 colleges and categorized their summer reading lists in broad terms, such as "multiculturalism, immigration and racism" (the most common category chosen by colleges), or "environmentalism, animal rights and food" (the second largest liberal category selected by colleges). The study found that "the choices by and large reflect leftist political perspectives."

You can see the list here.

Menu plan for week of 28

Make sure foods used get crossed off of the freezer inventory.

Breakfasts:


Biscuits and Gravy, the gravy made from the pan drippings from a beef brisket we had previously

Dutch Puff

Skillet Granola with raw goat's milk (we have a lot of jars of goat's milk in the freezer) or yogurt


German pancake (scroll down to bottom of post)

Lunches

leftovers or:

Tofu 'cutlets' (make extras of these for freezing for other meals)

Summery Chip Dip and home-made tortilla chips (or store bought, if we have them)

Walnut basil pasta salad (we make it with almonds instead of walnuts)

Cuban Mojo Tofu with Yellow Rice, Make our own yellow rice. Use the rice cooker.

TVP burgers


SUPPERS

Tex-Mex Pasta Skillet- this is fairly quick and easy if you remember to defrost the sausage ahead of time


Mystery Meal : There is a rectangular Tupperware container with an unlabeled mystery meal in the top shelf of the big freezer


Chop suey

Corn Timbales and Egg fu Yung

Crockpot oxtail stew (you need to start this the night before)


Beef Florentine Pinwheel (you can make this in advance and freeze it)


Chinese Cabbage and tofu


This post linked at Organizing Junky's Menu Plan Mondays

AZ Gov. Brewer Asks the Prez When He's Going to Keep His Promises

Here's an excerpt, more at the link:

Mr. President, the need for action to secure Arizona’s border could not be clearer. Recently, my office received a number of calls from constituents concerned at reports of new sign postings in interior counties of Arizona warning residents not to access federal lands due to criminal activity associated with the border. These warnings signal to some that we have handed over portions of our border areas to illegal immigrants and drug traffickers. This is unacceptable.

Instead of warning Americans to stay out of parts of our own country, we ought to be warning international lawbreakers that they will be detained and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We ought to be establishing measures to ensure that illegal traffic of any sort is kept to an absolute minimum, and that Americans are safe and secure within our own borders.

When we visited, you committed to present details, within two weeks of our meeting, regarding your plans to commit National Guard troops to the Arizona border and expend $500 million in additional funds on border security matters. You also discussed sending members of your senior staff to Arizona to discuss your plans. While I am pleased the 28th has been set for a meeting time and we have reviewed a copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Southwest Border Next Steps” Press Release, I am still awaiting details on National Guard deployments and how the proposed additional border security funding will specifically affect Arizona (and the other Border States).

I am in favor of more open immigration, but I agree that there's a serious problem with addressing criminals at our borders by warning citizens to keep away from areas of their own country.

Advice for Blynken and Nod

1. When you are playing that game where you dash up to the door, ring the doorbell and run off, you should be sure your exit route does not take you directly across the large picture window right next to the door. You know, the one where all the grown-ups in the living room have a clear, unobstructed view of little boys who think they are being sneaky when they ring the doorbell and run away. Right across the picture window.

Yeah. Glass? It's transparent. And so you are you. I don't mean that in a good way.

2. When Tea-Tea comes outside to remind you that there are babies sleeping inside the house so please don't ring the bell and make the dogs bark, do not then go all indignant and wounded dignity of the unjustly charged and slandered innocent and try to tell her you did not ring the doorbell, you did not go anywhere near the bell, in fact, you didn't even come within twenty hundred eleventy feet of the door, because really, you were sitting right there on the swing set in another part of the yard the whole time, including when the doorbell that you did not ring rang, but you think maybe, probably, that the bugs on the wall by the door rang the doorbell.

You may think you should not do this because Tea-Tea hates lies, and this is true, but what she hates at least as much as being lied to is having small children treat her like she has the I.Q. level of a Styrofoam cup. Tea-Tea is sensitive that way.


3. Opening those big brown eyes of yours really wide while you tell me this taradiddle does not make the bugs ringing the doorbell story any more believable. You're cute kids, but not that cute.

4. Nobody is that cute.

It Does Not Work That Way

Nod, 3, came downstairs the other night with a pretty sturdy dowel rod (I think it formerly held a flag) in one hand and a scowl on his face.

"Tea-Tea," he said darkly, "My brother hit me with the ball and all I did was hit him in the head with this stick. Tell him to stop it."

Things That Change, Things That Stay The Same

A couple of summers ago, you would have found me relishing in the freedom of summer vacation. Extremely appreciative of my history professors and the excellent college experience they gave me, I also appreciated the onset of summer break when I could be the one making my reading decisions.

My reading list for June, 2008 consists of a mix of history, fiction, and books on lifestyle. Although I took issue with some of his statements about the modern conservative movement, I mostly enjoyed Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. I fell in love with The Historian. And, along with a book on the Bible and a re-read of a Narnia book (no year is complete unless you've read some Narnia in it), I read Jennifer Lamp's His Chosen Bride: Applying Proverbs 31 as a Single Young Woman. At that point in my life, learning how to apply that passage as a single woman was a strong interest of mine. The book, however, was a keen disappointment. If there are young women out there wanting to read something to help them make the most out of life, I recommend leaving this one alone and picking up a copy of Mere Christianity. Where I found Lamp soft and shallow and badly written, Lewis is deep and thought-provoking and not one to leave a grammar-conscious reader wincing in pain.

Glancing over my reading list two summers later, it is easy to see which factors of my life have stayed constant and which are radically different. History is still there. Funnily enough, I'm reading another Joseph Ellis book. Somehow I missed American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic when it was first released; I suspect this is because of those beloved history professors and their hundreds of pages of Assigned Reading. Now they're a thing of a past (and in one of life's gentle ironies, I miss them, but don't regret being finished with college) and I'm free to read the history I want, when I want.
Joseph Ellis isn't the only history on the docket this month, though. Slowly (very slowly) I am working my way through de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. One of my professors grew up in Argentina and knew what it was to live under the rule of a dictator. Although the class I had with him was one on Great Figures in Latin American history, he also spent a great deal of time strongly encouraging all of us to take the time to read Democracy in America as soon as we had the chance. He said every American needed to read it. Thanks to the DHM, I'd already heard an abridged version on tape (it's amazing how much listening time there is when you're driving across the American West), but that was two decades ago. Now I'm reading the full thing closely, with pen to hand. There are many things to mull over in that book.

And what has replaced the Jennifer Lamp book? The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer. Our midwife has this in her lending library; I checked it out because I realized I needed a clearer understanding of some of the most common medical interventions, just in case an emergency happens and we end up in the hospital. Some reviewers on Amazon seem upset at Goer's bias; this surprises me, as she makes it clear in her introduction. She does believe a more natural birth is better. What I find valuable is her clear and direct approach in this book: c-sections get a chapter, epidurals get a chapter, etc. She includes large amounts of research for each chapter, something else I appreciate. I haven't finished the book yet, but so far consider it a valuable read.

A friend has recommended reading Penny Simkin's book on pregnancy and childbirth, so I'll probably do that soon too. Any other recommendations from blog-readers as I start this decidedly new phase of life?

I Got Nothing

Empty. Zip. Nada. Writer's bloc extraordinaire.

What do you want to talk about?

Don't leave me hanging here, all dry and empty.

Yah. Not too proud to bed. beg.=)

Measuring Wealth

In 1964... the average American worker could buy one pricey stereo from Radio Shack after working 152 hours.

Today for the same number of working hours, the average American can buy nearly a dozen high end electronic items of hipness. Cool beans, baby.

There are different ways to measure wealth:

The wealth of nations, according to Adam Smith, the founding father of the market economy, is not measured in GDP or cash reserves. Rather, it “consists in the cheapness of provision and all other necessaries and conveniences of life.”

By that standard, American wealth in general, and the wealth of poor Americans, has skyrocketed in the last half-century, and the government had relatively little — though certainly not nothing — to do with it.

There are a couple of areas where prices are higher, but as a general rule, even then the quality is improved and the percentage of average income they cost is reduced.

Baby On Board

HG, 15 Weeks

An American Hero

We need more citizens like this:

The blockade is being led by Jamie Hinton, the local volunteer fire chief who, at one point, was faced with the possibility of being jailed for violating the federal and state chain of command.

His resourcefulness is a parable not only of how desperate Gulf Coast communities have become to save the shorelines on which their lives have taken root, but also of the confusion that can consume and undermine such a massive relief effort.

In the end, Magnolia Springs did not need BP or Mr. Obama or the governor in Montgomery. It needed the grit and determination of the people themselves – people like Hinton, who says he will stand chest-deep in the waters of the bay, linked arm in arm with his neighbors, if that’s what it takes to stop the encroaching oil from despoiling the sublime latticework of bogs and bayous that he calls home.

And a lot fewer of these:

When he first began gathering resources, county officials told him he was blowing things out of proportion, that it was just sweet crude

Or these:

Others told him the government would handle it.

Or these:

BP workers arrived with their own plan: They laid a straight line of boom across the bay, tied it to pylons with rope, and left. Hinton tried to tell them the pylons were encrusted with barnacles, but no one listened. He knew the tossing waters would cause the sharp shells to sever the rope, and he was right. The boom floated away, and Magnolia Springs was left defenseless once more.

And these:

Last Wednesday, that moment came. Hinton called the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and told them the time had come to deploy the
barges.

“They acted as if they’d never heard about it,” he says. “We started jumping through hoops to get the plan approved again.

Politics

Governor urges MA school to rethink its policies on handing grade school kids prophylactics without parental consent or knowledge.

White House finds a way to meet with lobbyists without letting the public know. I am sure they are not the first, but this administration was supposed to be so transparent, so different.

Priorities: Congressional Parking Garage study got more funding than the deficit reduction panel.

The President and Congress have plans to be put in place after the elections when the lame-duck Congress will finish enacting Cap and Trade:

Think cap and trade is dead? Think again: Politico’s Mike Allen reports that Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership have a plan, a continuation and deepening of the disregard for the American public they so amply demonstrated through the process by which they passed the despised HCR bill:

Phil Schiliro, the White House congressional liaison, has told the Senate to aim to take up an energy bill the week of July 12, after the July 4 break (and after the scheduled final passage of Wall Street reform). Kagan confirmation will follow, ahead of the summer break, scheduled to begin Aug. 9. The plan is to conference the new Senate bill with the already-passed House bill IN A LAME-DUCK SESSION AFTER THE ELECTION, so House members don’t have to take another tough vote ahead of midterms.

The rest of the piece goes on to make it clear that this plan has the full support of President Obama, who himself does not face re-election until 2012 and wants cap and trade passed before the year is out.

Faux Conservative WA-PO Reporter Wiegel Revealed as Democrat Advocate: Resigns

In this post this morning I wrote about so-called 'conservative' Wa-Po blogger David Wiegel revealing he's not only NOT a conservative, he despises them in no uncertain terms.

He's now resigned, after more of his hate filled and really quite vulgar rants against the right have surfaced.

Ace has quite a bit to say about it- language warning, not for Ace's post, but for the things Wiegel likes to say about the citizens he's supposedly covering from an 'inside' point of view.

...whenever a controversy breaks, Dave Wiegel is Johnny On the Spot for reproducing leftwing blog memes.

But of course that's what the Washington Post wanted. They don't want an actual conservative writing this blog; such a person would be very much up on conservative thought, but such a person would also be eager to transmit such thought to Post readers, and that's not what they want.

The Post created this position begrudgingly and for the sake of appearances. And that's precisely what Wiegel delivers. A begrudging repetition of a few headlines he saw on the right side of the aisle, for the sake of appearances only.

Ace feels bad for the guy for having to resign- he points out that this is really Wa-Po's responsibility because they hired him and marketed him as a 'conservative,' when he never has been. There's a lot more worth reading at Ace's post, check it out.

I don't feel quite as badly for Wiegel as Ace does, because, while certainly the Wa-Po bears the greater responsibility, he had to have known that when his blog says 'inside the right' that the implication is he's conservative, or at least neutral, so he is party to the deception.
I also don't feel too badly for him because the things he says about conservatives are vile, violent, and truly just nasty and ugly, and the grotesque double standard here just continues to just make my head implode. He (Weigel) has frequently smeared the right as fostering violence, but I have never heard anything from conservatives at approximately Weigel's same level of influence approaching the level of spittle sputtering vindictive that Wiegel spews amongst his liberal journalist pals.

And it's not just that Wiegel clearly hated the people he was supposed to cover 'from the inside,' but he's an advocate for the Democrats- that's how he sees his job. He claims his reporting speaks for itself:

“my reporting, I think, stands for itself.”

“I’ve always been of the belief that you could have opinions and could report anyway …. people aren’t usually asked to stand or fall on everything they’ve said in private.”

But he's not being asked to stand or fail on everything he's said in private. He's failing because what he said in private expressly reveals that he has a specific agenda- to advocate for Democrat policies:

After Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat, threatening to kill the health care legislation by his presence, Weigel stressed how important it was for reporters to highlight what a terrible candidate his opponent Martha Coakley had been.

“I think pointing out Coakley’s awfulness is vital, because it’s 1) true and 2) unreasonable panic about it is doing more damage to the Democrats,” Weigel wrote.

Imagine how it would play if another reporter was caught explaining that a story needed to be covered a certain way and a particular point stressed specifically to achieve the goal of helping Republicans.

Weigel voiced these opinions regularly on the liberal journo-list, yet liberal reporter Ezra Klein got him hired at the Wa-Po as a conservative writer- there's no way Klein didn't know better.
The media behavior here has been completely disgraceful, but it's not a surprise at all.

Being Green Means Sending Death Threats

From Ace, where there is much more to read than this:

Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.
Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside … they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.
The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:

Ace's more media-friendly headline is pretty snort worthy.

Judge who lifted Obama's dishonest oil drilling moratorium is now receiving death threats.

Another Day, Another Journalist Caught

Update: Weigel Resigns

The Washington Post hosts David Wiegel's blog as an inside look at the Republican Party and Conservatives.  David Wiegel is on the well-known "secret" list-serve for liberal journalists known as journo-list, and he feels that's the best place for him to download and vent among 'friends.'  These are the sorts of things he felt comfortable saying among his close friends:

- "This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire."

This was because Wiegel defended the thuggish head-locking response of Rep. Etheridge to a college student politely asking him a question, and Drudge pointed out that is what he had done.He referred to Etheridge, I kid you not, as 'hugging' the college student, and he linked to the video footage showing Representative in the best light- until called on it, when he posted the second video.

Wiegel posted several other hate-filled rants, which he now apologizes for in a typical non-apology form- 'I'm sorry BUT...' followed by repeated self-justifications and further insults.  Naturally, his fans insist there is nothing wrong with him wishing Drudge would set himself on fire, but as one commenter points out, there's something more important that Wiegel's antics expose about himself:

What is more revealing is that Weigel posts his most private thoughts on liberal sites while pretending to be a conservative who covers conservatives. WaPo obviously is gleeful to have lied to us all about Weigel's creds. And Weigel was happy to attempt the subterfuge.

Posted by: infuse | June 24, 2010 4:10 PM

Contrarian Libertarian says much the same thing:

...The point here is that Weigel was hired to be the Post's beat reporter on the conservative movement. And these comments (particularly considering where they were made) would make it appear that he's anything but an idle observer of the movement.
Again, it's just a truth-in-advertising thing. I have no problem with the Post hiring somebody to be a beat reporter on the conservative movement. I do, though, have a problem if that person presents themselves publicly as neutral and objective on that subject, but goes to liberal listservs and says things like this outside the public view.
Weigel just needs a different assignment, that's all. And they should hire somebody who actually is objective and neutral in all of this...if such a person exists.
If not, then at least hire somebody who's up front about their own opinions...rather than trying to hide them behind closed doors....

 And again:

Imagine it this way. The Washington Post hires somebody to cover the progressive movement. Not a cheerleader for it, not a detractor of it. Just somebody to report honestly and fairly about what's going on.
Then we learn that this reporter takes part in private chit-chats with conservative pundits and bloggers and disparages people like Markos Moulitsas or Jon Stewart or Keith Olbermann or whomever.
Do you see the problem here?
It's not that he doesn't have the *right* to do this. It's that such a person can't possibly be objective in his capacity as a journalist.
Pretty simple.

 Indeed.

Joyful Frugality

I've posted a list of ways to celebrate life while living frugally over at Frugal Hacks. Take a peek, and share your own ideas, because spending money just isn't the only way to have a good time and take joy in our families and surroundings.

This has got to be humiliating

In Milwaulkee they are discussing whether or not to boycott Arizona over their immigration law.  One county supervisor Peggy West demonstrates how her public education has failed her completely:

“If this was Texas, which is a state that is directly on the border with Mexico, and they were calling for a measure like this saying that they had a major issue with undocumented people flooding their borders, I would have to look twice at this. But this is a state that is a ways removed from the border..."

So now that she's learned a teensy bit of geography, will she look twice?  If Texas passes a similar measure, will she support them?  Has she even read the bill?  Why should she, though, when Napolitano and Obama are criticising it unread?
She's also on the Executive Committee of the Milwaukee Democratic party.


Via Hot Air where there is much more, including video of the poor dear sharing her ignorance.


Police officers in Nogales, Arizona, a border town, have been boldly threatened by a Mexican drug cartel, by the way, and warned that they will be shot if they arrest anybody while they are off duty.

Five Television Shows

Updated to add this:  Check the links below very carefully- links for movies change, and even when they don't, some of these are used by websites trying to attract you to darker, nastier sites.

We spent years happily unplugged from popular culture- no television, no cable, we don't even listen to the radio except on occasion when driving. We went to the movies about once a decade.

Occasionally the family would go to the theater to a movie, but these occasions were free movies- when a theater would have a free matinee, sometimes we went. This means the second movie some of our kids remember seeing on the big screen is It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colburn. The first? Hello, Dolly.

Then, I joined swagbucks, and got a free trial membership in Netflix in return for enough swagbucks to buy a five ten dollars in Amazon gift cards.

We used our free Netflix to good purpose and cancled the membership in time, so the movies and the five or ten bucks at Amazon were free. Only the Progeny enjoyed the Netflix so much that Pip and Jenny went in together to buy another membership, and we watched a few more movies.

Then they canceled theirs, but Shasta and the Equuschick bought one- and they don't have the internet, so they had to sign up on my computer, which means they get the movies mailed to them, but I can watch a number of free movies on my laptop. I have had trouble getting to sleep at night for as long as I can remember. Lying down, closing my eyes and being alone with my thoughts has just never, ever been a good place for me, not since I was a small child and going to sleep to a movie happens to be my sleeping pill of choice. Some people need white noise to soothe them. I need white noise inside my head in order to sleep. I just wasn't able to do that for years because the HM can't sleep that way. But with the laptop, earbuds, and the HM in a sleep mask, Oh, yeah, baby.

Here are a few of our recent addictions, but please be advised that our family's standards may not be yours, and all of these shows have problematic elements and we preview them before the 11 and 14 year old can watch.  They are all in the murder, mystery, suspense genre.


Castle: Online episodes here. 
Fun, frothy, with a bit of a Moonlighting vibe to it.  The main characters are highly successful mystery writer Richard Castle (played by Nathan Fillion, formerly of Firefly) and NYPD Detective Kate Beckett (played by Stana Katic). Castle has an amusing lush of an actress mother and a teen-aged daughter who both live with him, two ex-wives, and a host of friends in high places and low.  Bored with success, he's just killed off his main detective when a serial killer starts killing his victims using methods from Castle's books.  Kate Beckett recognizes the techniques and questions Castle.  He gets involved and helps solve the crimes and decides to start a new series based on Kate.  Since he's good friends with the mayor, he gets the mayor's approval to shadow Kate Beckett on murder cases, much to her dismay.  And off they go- wise-cracking, sparks flying, solving crimes, and growing secretly ever more fond of each other.  Richard's daughter is a sweetheart, not the usual brash, obnoxious teen of the genre.  She's the grown-up in her family- when her dad tells her to be home by midnight, she says "It's a school night Dad, I'll be home at 9."  The family dynamics are warm and sweet, it's usually fairly clean (Castle is known for signing autographs on women's chests at book publishing parties), and the dialogue is generally amusing and witting.

Lie to Me: Watch online here.   
According to Amazon, "Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth), a deception specialist, believes that "the truth is written on all our faces." Unlike the psychics of Medium and The Mentalist, he reads body language rather than minds or dreams to crack cases, from murders to business matters, for a variety of law enforcement agencies. His team includes Eli Loker (Brendan Hines), Ria Torres (Monica Raymund), and Dr. Gillian Foster (The Practice's Kelli Williams). Though the show opens with the disclaimer that "the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event," Lightman often looks to real life for reference, so archival images enter into each episode, sometimes resulting in cheap shots at political figures, like Richard Nixon ("I am not a crook"), but their contradictory gestures can be instructive."
I enjoyed the first season, but find it grows more tedious.  Lightman isn't really very likable to me- he's got a bit of a skeevy, bullying feel.   Lightman has a teen-aged daughter as well, but her character and relationship with her dad isn't as believable as the one in Castle.  In fact, I don't know if it's the actor or what, but there's something creepy to me about the interaction between Lightman/Roth and the daughter.  The body language and micro-expressions stuff was interesting at first, but it also grows old and is overstated as well.


Bones: Watch episodes online here. 
This is probably the darkest and most graphic.  I never let the 11 and 14 year old watch it and have told the 19 and 21 year old they probably wouldn't enjoy it.
What I like: the science, the witty writing,  and the interaction between the Bones/Booth characters.  They have real chemistry, both characters are fascinating and likable.  Booth is a hero through and through, and I love Bones' literal, somewhat autistic take on the world. 
I really liked another character before they turned him into serial killer's trainee, and I enjoyed Stephen Fry in a few episodes as an FBI psychiatrist, and I like the bugs and slime conspiracy theorist guy.  There's a lot of fun stuff here..
What I don't like: The really confused theology, the general worldview, frequent fornication, gruesome graphic bodies (I look away).  Christianity is a stupid superstition, but a tarot card laying fortune-teller has unexplained abilities to tell secret details of stranger's lives.

Example of the confused world view- one of the main characters lived with a man for two years, when his daughter was 4-6 years old.  The man was unfaithful, so the main character walked away, out of their lives for good.  Ten years later, he dies, and she becomes the girl's foster mother.  She insists that she has always loved that girl just as devotedly and with all her heart as any 'real' mother would have, and we are all supposed to believe this.  But no 'real' mother who loves her daughter would ever walk out of her life for ten years.
Another example- one of the main characters is so promiscuous that in real life she'd have an STD and cervical cancer by this stage in her life, instead we're all supposed to admire her for her comfort with her self and her freedom loving ways, when in reality, she is a self-centered, selfish hedonist who plays with other people's hearts like shiny baubles.  All the things wrong with Dr. Quinn, which the Equuschick blogged about here, are wrong with this show, it's just got much better writing and I think Bones (Dr. Brennan) is a more likable character than Dr. Quinn.
But Bones and Booth are totally addictive.

Numb3rs: Watch online here 
Two brothers who never got along growing up start working together as adults. One is an FBI agent, one is a math genius and professor. He uses math to help his brother solve his cases.
What we like: The relationship between the brothers, the warm family dynamic with their father, the way it's okay for the dad to keep living with his son and vice versa, the intelligent scripts, the humor, the acting.
What I don't like: Some of the girl cops are clearly only there to take off their uniforms.  They just are not believable as tough FBI field agents- they'd be too worried about breaking a nail or mussing their hair.  We always preview this one.  Sometimes we don't let the younger kids watch at all, and sometimes we just skip a few scenes.  Sometimes it's too gruesome, and the theology/worldview are likewise confused at times, but you're not slapped in the face with this in nearly every episode.


Leverage: Watch online here 
According to Amazon:

TNT's Leverage takes a Robin Hood approach to criminal justice. After losing his son, ex-insurance investigator Nathan Ford (Timothy Hutton) reinvents himself as an avenging angel who rights wrongs for victims of organized greed with the skilled support of thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf), hacker Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge), grifter Sophie Devereaux (Coupling's Gina Bellman), and retrieval specialist or “hitter” Elliot Spencer (Angel's Christian Kane).

There's a Mission Impossible touch to this, only with better characterization and more back story. It's totally implausible and utterly delightful. We do preview it first, and occasionally there's a scene we skip, but I don't think we've had to skip an entire episode.  I love the quirky characters, the amusing dialogue, and the twists and turns of the cons.

Problematic- they are thieves and crooks, and just because they are stealing from and conning big bad business men doesn't make it right, but they sure do make it funny.

Massachussets School Board Sniffs at Mandatory Reporting Laws

They aren't even mentioned in this really disturbing, and not too family friendly policy.

The school board has decided that all the children in the school system, including those as young as six, should be given condoms if they ask the school nurse- without informing the parents.

The age of consent in MA is 16 for girls, 18 for boys, if this is still true. If you cannot legally give consent, then school personnel, who are mandatory reporters of suspected abuse, have no business facilitating consent- they ought to be calling in to report suspected child abuse.

And when the school board chairman Peter Grosso is referring to elementary aged school children and says the school should pass out condoms to the kids without reference to their parents because there's 'no set age for when sexual activity starts-' he is, whether he means to or not, protecting child abusers, law-breakers, and facilitating the abuse of children.

And I am being really disingenuous when I say 'whether he means to or not,' because frankly, I find it impossible to believe any decent man can truly say in good faith and with the best interests of children at heart that kids as young as six should have access to condoms.

More here, including this:

"The thing is, sexual activity starts younger and younger," Peter Grosso, chairman of the health advisory committee, tells the Times. "We don't know what age that is. So we just said, 'We'll make it available to all of them.' We didn't want to pick an age, and I really don't believe we're going to get first-graders asking for a condom, as a practical matter."

Then why so chary about putting an age limit on it?

Minorities apparently aren't good Americans?

Democrat Representative Paul Kanjorski:

We’re giving relief to people that I deal with in my office every day now unfortunately. But because of the longevity of this recession, these are people — and they’re not minorities and they’re not defective and they’re not all the things you’d like to insinuate that these programs are about — these are average, good American people.

Video footage at the link. I think his hyperbole got tangled in his bigotry.

Peer Based Review

Article here; excerpt here:

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year. The impact strikes at the heart of academe.

Fascinating:

The pace of publication accelerates, encouraging projects that don't require extensive, time-consuming inquiry and evidence gathering. For example, instead of efficiently combining multiple results into one paper, professors often put all their students' names on multiple papers, each of which contains part of the findings of just one of the students. One famous physicist has some 450 articles using such a strategy.

Comments are interesting, too, especially those that disagree with the solutions offered by the authors.

Information overload: it's everywhere, it's everywhere.

Expert and Earnest Domestic Labor

I love books;: Why, what, how, and when we should read,by John Snider, was first published in 1942, and by the time my copy was published in 1948, it had been through eight reprints.  Within its pages I found this quote:

" Out of the curricula of American colleges a dynamic movement is upheaving ancient foundation and promising a way for revolutionary thought and life. Those who are not in close touch with the colleges of the country will be astonished to learn the creeds being fostered by the faculties of our great universities. In hundreds of class rooms it is being taught daily that the decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus; that the home as an institution is doomed; that there are no absolute evils; that immorality is simply an act in contravention of society's standards; that democracy is a failure and the Declaration of Independence only spectacular rhetoric; that the change from  one religion to another is like getting a new hat; that moral
precepts are passing shibboleths; that conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as styles of dress; that wide stairways are open between social levels, but that to the climber children are incumbrances ; that the sole effect of prolificacy is to fill tiny graves, and that there can be and are holier alliances without the marriage bond than within it. ...These are some of the revolutionary and sensational teachings submitted with academic warrant to the minds of hundreds  of thousands of students in the United States. It is time that the public realized what is being taught to the youth of this country."

Mr. Snider gave no source for the quote, apparently he felt it was well enough known to need none.  Naturally, I googled, and I found the quote repeated in a book called "Bolshevism: Its Cure," online as an etext, with this reference:

The nine years since the time when Mr. Bolce passed several weeks in attendance at the lectures in one after another of more than one hundred universities and col- leges have gradually raised the wind to the threatening violence of the whirlwind. 

This book is by David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery, and was published in 1919.

A magazine called The Herald of Gospel Liberty, in the August, 1909 number, contains an article with the same quote, introduced thus:

In recent numbers of the Cosmopolitan, beginning with the May number, Mr. Howard Bolce has a series of articles purporting to give an authentic statement of many of the radical ideas that are being taught by leading educators in some of the greatest universities of this country.

And then I found the original magazine article itself at Googlebooks.  Bolce says that the false teachings in American colleges can be sorted into three categories, and the second is:

.. the scholastic conception of politics and political economy, the citation of democracy as a failure, and the academic labeling of the Declaration of Independence as "a work in spectacular rhetoric." The surprises in this division of the general subject of college teaching—which includes such doctrines as the one promulgated by Prof. E. I,. Bogart, of Princeton, who said that the public is benefited when an inefficient competitor is forced out of business by the superior trust—are no less absorbing than the new preachment on morality. Formerly the best man in the community was the good Samaritan, but now, as Professor Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania, contends, "society owes its debt to the wealthy and far-seeing citizenry that paves and lights and polices the road to Jericho."

The article makes for sometimes quaint, and sometimes startling reading. At the University of Syracuse, Professor Earp teaches:

The professor delivered some interesting lectures in regard to the home. "The servant problem," said he, "is every year growing more difficult to solve. The modern home is in myriads of instances inefficiently run. Unless some great change comes to solve the question of obtaining expert and earnest domestic labor society must inevitably turn to the central kitchen and the institutional home. It would be far better for the people of one block to share a common cuisine, conducted scientifically, than to struggle along as at present, contracting debts and dyspepsia. An expert French cook to-day gets infinitely more wages than a teacher of romance French. It is impossible for an ordinary family to secure the services of such a chef, but it would be easy enough for the people of a block, where everyone is now spending money on an inefficient cook, to combine and get the services of a master of the culinary art."

 I find it fascinating that it did not occur to Professor Earp, and a number of other professors Boyce mentions, that a family might prepare its own meals in its own home without need of 'expert' domestic labor.  The emphasis on that 'common cuisine, conducted scientifically' is also intriguing, as is his rather blindered opinion that 'everyone' was then spending money on inefficient cooks.  I wonder what sort of dinners he got at home.


I've blogged before about how, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, business co-opted science and the cult of the expert really took hold of every area of life, including the family kitchen, as the numerous cookbooks recommending the healthful properties of corn syrup will attest (corn syrup- purer than honey!).You can get some ideas about just high a regard turn of the century America had for science in the kitchen (at least that portion of America publishing, and presumably reading, books) by browing through the vintage cookbooks available online here.

 

It's fascinating to ponder the fact that Professor Earp and company undoubtedly viewed as backward idiots anybody who disagreed with them, who favored cooking their own meals in their own homes however 'unscientifically.'