RON BAILEY: Stopping Crime Before It Starts: Predictive policing helps police protect citizens. It could also be used to oppress them.

AT AMAZON, Digital Deals.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Educated Waiters Up 81%; college-educated janitors up 87%.

Not exactly shocking.

GOVERNMENT REPLACING THE FAMILY: “The government is more your family than your family.”

WOMEN ARE PRETTY DOWN WITH POSTPARTUM SEX: “In fact, the majority of women’s sex drives are restored to pre-pregnancy levels just one month after giving birth. While most TV sitcoms and movies make light of this situation, showing new dads hounding their wives to get back to getting it on until they give in, behavioral endocrinologist Sari van Anders found that stereotype to be false.”

KYLE PRUETT on fatherhood.

How central are fathers to childhood development?

It depends on whom you ask. If you ask the child they would say, absolutely essential. You ask a mother, she’ll say, if he does it the right way he’s really important. If you ask the father he’s likely to say, I’m not sure but I think probably pretty important. If you ask the experts, the answer will depend on how much they know about families and child development. I don’t mean to be elusive in my answer. . . .

Children grow up, just like puppies. Their needs change profoundly. Children have a hunger in them. If you choose to raise a child without the father in their life, some day that child is going to come to you for an explanation and you better be prepared for it. The absence of the paternal figure is going to be a powerful psychological entity in the life of that child. It could turn out to be a time bomb, or it could turn out to be a little firecracker.

Women can’t be all things to all children. It’s not that women can’t do a wonderful job, be incredibly loving, willing to make all the sacrifices necessary and have kids who turn out fine. They can. Women come to me and say: I want to have this child and I’ve never had a man in my life that I trusted, what do I do? Although I don’t give advice on how people ought to live their lives, I can say that if you want to avoid the negative outcomes of unrequited father hunger, including the idealisation of the guy whose sperm you have used, then get men in your life that you do value close to the child, keep them there, and let the child understand what the fathering experiences feels like from people you trust. But it’s a myth that one person can do it all. You can’t.

Read the whole thing.

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Surprise: Kids Say School Is Too Easy.

HELPING WOUNDED WARRIORS: Project Valour-IT.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Phantom iPhone buzz. “According to a study of medical workers at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, 76 percent said they’ve experienced ‘phantom vibration,’ that insistent buzz from an imagined text or phone call. Scientists speculate it’s the result of random nerves firing, biochemical noise that our brains tuned out until they were reconditioned by the iPhone.”

AT AMAZON, new releases in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

SAXBY CHAMBLISS raps Eric Holder again over SWATting.

PARKINSON’S DISEASE ONSET preceded by other health problems.

25 REAL-LIFE NAMES that will leave you happy with yours.

“IT WAS SO HOT, ERIC HOLDER WAS SMUGGLING WATER PISTOLS!” Jay Leno mocks Obama.

SO I GOT AN EMAIL FROM JULES CRITTENDEN recommending Jack McCall’s Pacific Time on Target: Memoirs of a Marine Artillery Officer, 1943-1945, and I replied “yeah, he’s one of my former students.” He’s been working on this project for a long time. He’s also the author of Pogiebait’s War: A Son’s Quest for His Father’s Wartime Life, which is terrific.

ONWARD AND UPWARD! Yale Launches First PhD in Law. They tried this with the DCL years ago and it didn’t work. Is now a good time to try it again?

IS A FOOD PRICE SPIKE ON THE WAY? Perhaps it’s time to revisit strategic shopping.

ROMNEY TO NAACP: Romney to NAACP: Obama made it worse for you ‘in almost every way.’

UPDATE: Related: Lapdog Media play up NAACP boos for Romney, ignore applause for support of traditional marriage. NAACP members hating Romney because he’s white — fits the narrative. NAACP members opposing gay marriage — doesn’t fit the narrative.

HARRY REID, RACIST OBSTRUCTIONIST: Senate Democrats Block Vote On Obama Tax Plan.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Top 9 Passive-Aggressive Things To Say To Your Husband During A Road Trip.

WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING, a website about Facebook’s privacy settings.

Here’s the site.

THEY’RE INSTALLING A NEW GIGABIT SWITCH FOR THE SITE, so don’t be alarmed if it goes into standby for a bit. Gotta keep up with the traffic.

TOM RICKS: Let’s Bring Back The Draft. “Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.” I’d take that deal, if it meant minimal taxes and regulations too, but notably he omits that stuff.

But I’d recommend instead the Robert Heinlein Starship Troopers solution: Limit the vote to veterans of military and similar service. The idea is to insure that voters are willing to sacrifice for the common good, not just suck at the government teat. Of course, we’d probably just end up with a class of voters even more entitled than the ones we have now.

Or we could limit voting to people who pay income tax. The more you pay, the more votes you get. I’ve explored some related ideas here. But I agree with Heinlein’s rather negative take on conscription, and I note that the European countries Ricks mocks mostly have it.

As for his claim that a draft would make us less likely to go to war, one of the arguments for ending the draft was that that would make us less likely to go to war, since unpopular wars would produce lower enlistment levels.

UPDATE: Comments from Don Boudreaux and from Moe Lane.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco.

CHANGE: Californians Break With Unions On Pensions.

Voters want to limit and reform the pension system, and proposals like salary caps and a higher retirement age—proposals that public unions consider horrible, unfair barbarities—get solid support from Golden State voters.

To be sure, Californians haven’t embraced the Scott Walker agenda. By and large, they don’t want to make public unions illegal. Further, while there is much less support for raising pensions than there is for cutting them, there isn’t a majority for either position.

Nonetheless, this poll is very bad news for the unions. Their key demands in the pension fight have been resoundingly rejected. Voters want a salary cap for determining benefits, they want to raise the retirement age, and they support a hybrid pension system that mixes in elements of a traditional, defined-contribution plan.

What makes this all very much worse from the unions’ point of view is that if (and when) a truly major and prolonged statewide budget emergency comes, attitudes are likely to harden against them even more. When voters “get” just how much of a tradeoff they face between services for kids and old people vs. paying pensions, then sentiment will likely harden on the pension front. Better schools for your kids, or better pensions for people who taught other peoples’ kids twenty years ago?

Indeed. Meanwhile, in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, the pensions are 100% funded. . . .