VIDEO:  BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, THE EARLY YEARS.

WOW, SERIOUSLY? Ron Paul says he would not have ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

SHIP OF FOOLS: Not to mention two magazines in one. As Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com notes, The Nation will be having their annual Caribbean cruise in December:

You can’t imagine the thunderous LOL that emanated from my office last Saturday when I opened my copy of the April 11th issue of The Nation. Yes, you read that right — The Nation, that long-time voice of American comrade-ism.

Casually flipping through the pages looking for some environment-related screed with which to have some good ol’ JunkScience.com fun, I came upon a full-page ad for — get this — The Nation‘s 14th Annual Seminar Cruise to the Caribbean (December 11-18, 2011) with stops in Grand Turk, San Juan and St. Maarten…

Anyway, just two days earlier, The Nation, ran an online article entitled “Six Ways to Green Your Spring Break,” in which readers were advised to:

“Take a “staycation.” Staying at home instead of traveling can be a really inexpensive and relaxing way to enjoy your time off. In fact, it’s probably the “greenest” travel option there is. It will save you money, make less of an environmental impact, and allow you to explore your immediate surroundings.”

But since the crusin’ comrades have already opted for shuffleboarding in the Caribbean over staycationing, they’ll need to get to the port of departure (Ft. Lauderdale) somehow. The Nation gives cruisers the choice of making their own air arrangements or working with the cruise lines’ travel agent. Unfortunately, The Nation‘s Six Ways to Green Your Spring Break” advises to:

“Travel green. Your transportation has perhaps the biggest effect on the environment. If you’re flying, try to avoid flying at night. The contrails of a plane at night have a bigger impact on global warming than those left in the day. As an alternative to flying, you can also take a train overnight while you sleep, carpool, or take a road trip with a rented hybrid car.”

Yet somehow I doubt that The Nation‘s child-of-privilege publisher, Katrina vanden Huevel, will be road-tripping in a rented hybrid from her tony Upper West Side digs down to sunny south Florida.

Milloy asks, “How did I miss the previous 13 cruises and who knew that you could plot against the free world and enjoy all-you-can-eat steamship round at the same time?!”

Au contraire, my capitalist friend, The Nation has a long seafaring history — recall that it was a Nation magazine cruise back in 1982 that P.J. O’Rourke tagged along with up the Volga, in the Soviet cruise ship Alexander Pushkin. During which he wrote the classic line about the passengers on the cruise,  “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.”

Speaking of which, while Van Jones is scheduled to be on the upcoming cruise, no word yet if Sheryl Crow will, as well.

WHEN HEZBOLLAH SAYS “We know where you live,” it makes an impression that’s hard to forget.

DEATH TO HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS: I broadly agree with the article, but have a very specific concern, as a parent with a child going through the exit from high school.  My perception is that our finest high school English programs are still essentially about literature.  Which is okay, so long as it’s not too wacky.  But what students need, so far as I can tell, is not training in either the reading of literature for substance (most of it fiction and poetry, not non-fiction of the kind that most of the rest of life consists of). Or training in the tropes of literary analysis (metaphors, similes, the logic of analogies, which, I grant, is important; innovation in anything is often metaphor, the metaphorical leap later shown to be true of the world).

What most students – oh, let’s not cavil, my kid and her friends – need is training in logic.  Not necessarily symbolic logic, though that’s good, but informal logic in written language.  The problem with even very well taught English classes is that they teach as though there were nothing but Aristotle’s Poetics … and no Logic.  (One very useful, and spreading textbook, is Everything’s an Argument.) Put another way, the author of the Salon article acknowledges that she will not possess the technical skills of science, math, or engineering. (Although we trust that she will make the effort to understand the output of these fields sufficiently to connect them to society and the world, even without possessing them as technical skill sets.  We trust also that she will take at least a class in basic calculus and basic statistics and basic accounting, sufficient to make it through a not-so-great MBA program, and that she will make an effort to keep those basic skills alive through numeracy in everyday life.)

Past those things, however, pretty much the only skill that’s left is the ability to engage in clear and persuasive logical reasoning, including the sometimes inelegant and even brutal, but essential, apparatus of logic, deductive and inductive, in written communication.  It is not so great if you don’t possess that one, either.

Update: I have received quite a lot of interesting emails about this, both endorsements and some pushback.  I’ve asked one high school teacher I personally know, Mary McConnell (bio below), to expand her views into a short post that I’ve put below the fold.  This is an important debate for parents, students, and teachers, and my thanks to her for letting me post this:

(more…)

THE TIME TUNNEL STARRING…MIKE HUCKABEE? “Nothing necessarily wrong with teaching kids about Ronald Reagan, but this video is so painful to watch one would think it’s produced by someone out to sandbag Huckabee.”

AT AMAZON, new releases in Kindle eBooks.

DON’T WRITE LIKE IT’S 1999: Kristine Kathryn Rusch on seismic changes in the publishing industry.

NOAM CHOMSKY is, as always, a hard-boiled anti-American monomaniac.

CURTIS BRADLEY EXPLAINS case in which the Supreme Court agrees to decide whether the Executive has the Constitutional power to decide what goes on a child’s US passport under place of birth: Jerusalem or Israel.  As with many Constitutional cases, the legal issue is not the political argument on the surface – in this case over Israel and Jerusalem – but the separation of powers question, here pertaining to the recognition of foreign governments.

DERIVATIVES MARKETS’ PAYMENT PRIORITIES IN BANKRUPTCY: Harvard Law School’s Mark Roe summarizes his new article in this blog post.  “Stanford Law Review recently published my article, The Derivatives Market’s Payment Priorities as Financial Crisis Accelerator, in which I analyze the Bankruptcy Code’s role in undermining the stability of systemically-vital financial institutions.” The key observation, I think, having finished the article last night, is the role provisions of the bankruptcy code play in making certain derivatives accelerants in spreading systemic risk, by promoting the derivatives-holders to the front of the pack in bankruptcy.  The Dodd-Franck bill is, well, a work in progress; Michael Lewis’s The Big Short is a pretty good place to begin on derivatives and the financial crisis.

VIDEO: FAKE TEA PARTY CANDIDATE ASSAULTS CAMERAMAN: “The Davis camp is denying the allegations, of course, but that position may prove to be a hard sell with this floating around…”

GUNS & ROSÉS: INSTAVISION AT THE NRA CONVENTION:

Do guns and wine mix? InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds talks with Nick Perdiew of the NRA Wine Club at the Annual NRA Convention in Pittsburgh, PA and their fundraising efforts to support gun rights.

“A lot of people stereotype the NRA as not including wine connoisseurs.” — Nick Perdiew

Pour yourself a nice Cabernet and tune in here; approximately three minutes long:

KEITH OLBERMANN’S FIRST SLATE OF CONTRIBUTORS ANNOUNCED: “Looks like he’s going to take on MSNBC from the Left,” Greg Pollowitz quips at NRO’s Media Blog.

Or will he…?

BLOGGER BURNOUT AND THE TEN THOUSAND RULE, at the Belmont Club.

IS COLLEGE A ROTTEN INVESTMENT?: Some pushback on the college-is-not-worth-it meme from Annie Lowrey at Slate.

CREEPY/COOL abandoned Soviet war monuments in the former Yugoslavia.

RANDY BARNETT ON THE MANDATE HEARING YESTERDAY: Volokh also has more back and forth with Orin Kerr, Jonathan Adler, and others; Barnett was at the Fourth Circuit hearing and comments on the oral argument.

WHERE THE JOBS WERE LOST.  I’m not sure we have a good theory as to why low-wage workers bore the brunt of unemployment.  But I think we need one.

AN ARMY OF WARGAMERS: Navy Taps the Crowdsourcing Power of Online Gaming to Fight Somali Pirates.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

JONATHAN COHN compares RomneyCare to the killing of Bin Laden.  My husband explains why this is not a comparison that makes RomneyCare look good.

John Hawkins interviews Warren Farrell about his book Why Men Are the Way They Are.

TEN MISTAKES THAT RESTAURANT OWNERS MAKE.  This guy is talking his book–he sells financial consulting services and software–but from my experience with small businesses, these are real problems that people need to think about–especially restauranteurs, who tend to be in love with food, not accounting.

MIXED MESSAGE OF THE DAY: Or perhaps a brilliant advertisement for the notion of Peace Through Strength?

QADDAFI COMPOUND HIT IN TRIPOLI. I can’t help but wonder if we’re targeting him even though we say we are not. And reading between the lines in that article, it looks like (surprise!) Qaddafi is using civilians as human shields.