HOW’S THAT SMART DIPLOMACY WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): L.A. Times: Putin says he can’t guarantee Syria will turn over chemical weapons.
Archive for 2013
September 20, 2013
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY ON HELICOPTER PARENTING: What Your Neighborhood List-Serv Tells You About The Demise of America: When did mowing the lawn become a bridge too far? Tricycle helmets for all!
ROBOCOPTERS TO THE RESCUE: The next medevac helicopter won’t need a pilot. This will seem quite familiar to readers of Fred Saberhagen’s Empire Of The East — which is, by the way, a great book.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Food stamp usage rising as families struggle to put food on the table.
#GREENFAIL: More Flops In The Electric-Car Industry.
THOUGHTS ON the theology of Breaking Bad.
DOCUMENTARY: Unfair: Exposing The IRS.
IT COULD HARDLY BE OTHERWISE, I’D THINK: CDC Threat Report: Yes, Agricultural Antibiotics Play a Role in Drug Resistance. I wonder if they’re also promoting obesity by affecting gut bacteria?
THE PLAY DEFICIT: Children today are cosseted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never truly grow up. “In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways. Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing.”
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS HAS MORE ON THAT OVERTURNED LOUISIANA POLICE PROSECUTION: Top DOJ Officials and Jim Letten, Dean of Tulane Law, Knew for Months DOJ Lawyers Were Secretly Blogging. “The current dean of Tulane Law, former United States Attorney Jim Letten, knew for months that lawyers in his office were secretly blogging at the Times Picayune website to influence the outcome of a criminal case. Yet Letten never instructed his lawyers to inform United States District Judge Kurt Englehardt about their shenanigans, and never did so himself for months.”
Jim Letten? That name sounds familiar. Oh, yeah — the guy who was screaming threats at James O’Keefe. Not one of Tulane’s best hires. To be fair, he’s a dean at Tulane, not the Dean, I believe.
PHIL BOWERMASTER: Automation, Subordination, and the Future of Employment.
NEW STUDY: There Probably Isn’t Life On Mars.
This is actually great news.
OOPS: NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration. “The country’s scientific stockpile has dwindled to around 36 pounds. To put that in perspective, the battery that powers NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is currently studying the surface of Mars, contains roughly 10 pounds of plutonium, and what’s left has already been spoken for and then some. The implications for space exploration are dire: No more plutonium-238 means not exploring perhaps 99 percent of the solar system. In effect, much of NASA’s $1.5 billion-a-year (and shrinking) planetary science program is running out of time. The nuclear crisis is so bad that affected researchers know it simply as ‘The Problem.'”
SO AFTER LAST WEEK’S RECOMMENDATION OF THE BRIEFCASE THAT OPENS INTO A BULLETPROOF SHIELD, now Amazon is recommending this unbreakable “self-defense” umbrella.” I’d like to see these combined, for proper James Bond utility, into one: An umbrella with bulletproof Kevlar so that when you open it it becomes a bulletproof shield. Ideally, there should be a small loophole built in to make it easy to shoot out of. I wonder if such a product is even possible? Then again, I was surprised by the bulletproof-shield briefcase, so clearly my imagination is lagging behind the real world.
I just hope the Amazon ‘bots aren’t trying to tell me something.
OBASTEMIC CLOSURE: It explains a lot, that the New York Times is the only paper Obama reads.
CAR-SHOPPING 101: Test Drives Matter. “I’m not just talking about taking out a car that you might buy one day, and then test driving another car you might buy a few weeks later. While that’s better than no test drive at all, the true value of a test drive lies in your ability to compare cars within hours or days of each other. When you drive cars back-to-back, you are much more likely pick up on certain nuances, personal preferences, and, most importantly, shortcomings, than if you were to test a car on its own. Sure, it’s hard to block out an entire day or weekend to test drive all the cars in a segment, but it really is the best way to car shop. You might be blown away by the quality of a new sedan only to find that the competitor you drive later in the day has even more refined interior styling or driving dynamics.”
LEFTIES SAY THIS KIND OF THING A LOT: ‘May your children all die’: Comms. Chair of Sacramento Dems attacks Amanda Carpenter.
ED DRISCOLL: From Bauhaus To Barack’s House. “Modernism was youth culture. It had the same old predictable motivation: down with Daddy.”
IN THE MAIL: From Larry Correia, Monster Hunter Legion.