THE TROUBLE WITH EXCELLENCE IS THAT IT MAKES THE LESS-EXCELLENT FEEL BAD ABOUT THEMSELVES: Library director says 9-year-old should ‘step aside’ to let others win reading contest. “A 9-year-old who has won five straight reading contests at a New York library now has a new challenger to his throne – the library’s director, who says the young reader ‘hogs’ the contest prizes each year and should ‘step aside.'”
Harrison Bergeron, call your office.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Top 5 Reasons Why Sex Makes You Look Younger.
FASTER, PLEASE: Dialing back treg cell function boosts the body’s cancer-fighting immune activity. “By carefully adjusting the function of crucial immune cells, scientists may have developed a completely new type of cancer immunotherapy—harnessing the body’s immune system to attack tumors. To accomplish this, they had to thread a needle in immune function, shrinking tumors without triggering unwanted autoimmune responses.”
HOSNI MUBARAK’S Muslim Brotherhood prophecy.
BEAUTIFULLY SAD PHOTOS of a dying airline.
UPDATE: David Kirkham emails: “I saw those photos of LAB and those photos were eerily identical to what I saw in Poland 18 years ago. Socialists ultimately destroy everything they touch. See Detroit and our school systems.”
YA THINK? Christina Hoff Sommers: School Has Become Too Hostile To Boys.
Girls occasionally run afoul of these draconian policies; but it is mostly boys who are ensnared. Boys are nearly five times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls. In grades K-12, boys account for nearly 70% of suspensions, often for minor acts of insubordination and defiance. In the cases of Christopher, Josh and Alex, there was no insubordination or defiance whatsoever. They were guilty of nothing more than being typical 7-year-old boys. But in today’s school environment, that can be a punishable offense.
Zero tolerance was originally conceived as a way of ridding schools of violent predators, especially in the wake of horrific shootings in places like Littleton, Colo. But juvenile violence, including violence at schools, is at a historic low. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2011, approximately 1% of students ages 12 to 18 reported a violent victimization at school. For serious violence, the figure is one-tenth of 1%. It does no disrespect to the victims of Columbine or Sandy Hook to note that while violence may be built into the core of a small coterie of sociopathic boys, most boys are not sociopathic.
On the other hand, millions of boys are struggling academically. A large and growing male cohort is falling behind in grades and disengaged from school. College has never been more important to a young person’s life prospects, and today boys are far less likely than girls to pursue education beyond high school. As our schools become more risk averse, the gender gap favoring girls is threatening to become a chasm. . . .
.Across the country, schools are policing and punishing the distinctive, assertive sociability of boys. Many much-loved games have vanished from school playgrounds. At some schools, tug of war has been replaced with “tug of peace.” Since the 1990s, elimination games like dodgeball, red rover and tag have been under a cloud — too damaging to self-esteem and too violent, say certain experts. Young boys, with few exceptions, love action narratives. These usually involve heroes, bad guys, rescues and shoot-ups. As boys’ play proceeds, plots become more elaborate and the boys more transfixed. When researchers ask boys why they do it, the standard reply is, “Because it’s fun.”
According to at least one study, such play rarely escalates into real aggression — only about 1% of the time. But when two researchers, Mary Ellin Logue and Hattie Harvey, surveyed classroom practices of 98 teachers of 4-year-olds, they found that this style of play was the least tolerated. Nearly half of teachers stopped or redirected boys’ dramatic play daily or several times a week — whereas less than a third reported stopping or redirecting girls’ dramatic play weekly.
One reason for this is that teachers are overwhelmingly female. That’s why we need Title IX-style legislation to narrow the educational gender gap. . . .
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Having Sex With A Fat Guy Changed Me.
SON, LAST TIME WE HAD A LEAK THIS BIG, NOAH BUILT HISSELF AN ARK: In classified cyberwar against Iran, trail of Stuxnet leak leads to White House.
COULD ELECTRIC CARS threaten the grid?
Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in California—where the largest number of electric vehicles are sold—scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages.
Last year in the United States, only about 50,000 electric cars were sold. And researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have calculated that the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States. But there’s a catch. While power plants and transmission lines have excess capacity, things can get tight when it comes to distributing power to individual neighborhoods. And this is especially the case since electric vehicle sales aren’t evenly distributed. In California, for example, they’re taking off in Silicon Valley and places such as Long Beach and Santa Monica.
So install a gas generator to charge your electric car. Problem solved! Right? Right? Plus this: “Utilities say that the upgrades they’ve performed so far would have been made anyway as part of routine grid modernization. But telling the utility that you are buying an electric vehicle essentially brings your neighborhood to the top of the list. The upgrades are paid for by all rate payers, not the electric car owners.”
So people who buy Teslas — basically the 1% — are being subsidized by the 99%. Funny how often things work out that way. . . .
THE PERILS OF OVERDIAGNOSIS: What If What You ‘Survived’ Wasn’t Cancer?
THE MAN CAN DRAW A CROWD: Check out the line of people waiting to have Mark Levin sign their copy of The Liberty Amendments. There’s grassroots interest here.
HOT RODS AND SPEED FREAKS: Reporting from Bonneville Speed Week.
ANYTHING YOU CAN DO I CAN DO META: Dave Chappelle Is On The Cover Of Prince’s New Single.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Barbara Skolaut, 10 Quick Craft Fair Bestsellers You Can Sew Using My “Home Production” Techniques. $2.99 on Kindle.
CHARLIE MARTIN: Buddha And The Elephant.
AND NOW FOR THE REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS: Yes, there will be a gold iPhone.
IN THE MAIL: From Humberto Fontova, The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle East.
President Obama has had a rude awakening in the Middle East. The region he thought existed was an illusion built on American progressive assumptions about the way the world works. In the dream Middle East, democracy at least of a sort was just around the corner. Moderate Islamists would engage with the democratic process, and the experience would lead them to ever more moderate behavior. If America got itself on the “right side of history,” and supported this hopeful development, both America’s values and its interests would be served. Our relationships with the peoples of the Middle East would improve as they saw Washington supporting the emergence of democracy in the region, and Al Qaeda and the other violent groups would lose influence as moderate Islamist parties guided their countries to prosperity and democracy.
This vision, sadly, has turned out to be a mirage, and Washington is discovering that fact only after the administration followed the deceptive illusion out into the deep desert. The vultures are circling now as American policy crawls forlornly over the dunes; with both the New York Times and the Washington Post running “what went wrong” obituaries for the President’s efforts in Egypt, not even the MSM can avoid the harsh truth that President Obama’s Middle East policies have collapsed into an ugly and incoherent mess.
Yeah, that’s how it looks.
NEWSPAPER THAT ENDORSED OBAMA ADMITS THE TEA PARTY WAS RIGHT: Chicago Tribune: How President Obama is flouting Obamacare: More reasons to delay and rewrite this ill-conceived law. “Granted, any president may decline to enforce statutes he believes are unconstitutional. But Obama is making no such claim here. Basically, he is admitting that parts of law are impossible to enforce on the deadlines imposed by Congress — deadlines he signed into law. He’s also admitting he doesn’t want to have Congress make these changes, for fear that if lawmakers get their mitts on this unpopular program, they would at least debate far more extensive changes than he’d like.”
THE ATLANTIC: Is America Having A Libertarian Moment? “Libertarian ideas are very deeply rooted in America. Skepticism about power and about government, individualism, the idea that we’re all equal under the law, free enterprise, getting ahead in the world through your own hard work — all of those ideas are very fundamentally American. Obviously, from a libertarian point of view, America nonetheless has done a whole lot of things, from slavery to Obamacare, that offend some number of those libertarian values, but the core libertarian attitude is still there. And a lot of times when the government suddenly surges in size, scope, or power, those libertarian attitudes come back to the fore.”
Note that, despite the speculation, Rand Paul doesn’t have to be elected President to change the direction of the country.
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