Archive for 2014

PHOTOS FROM THE ONSET OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IN WISCONSIN. I’m happy to see it, though I’d rather it came out via democratic processes rather than raw flexing of Gentry Class judicial power.

NEW FROM SARAH HOYT: Wings. Seventeen short stories on Kindle, currently — for just about ten more hours — just 99 cents for the whole anthology. How can you afford not to buy it?

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Girl, 10, not allowed to bring sunscreen on field trip due to ‘toxic’ nature.

Sunscreen is one of the best protectors from the sun, but North East Independent School District parent Christy Riggs said her child wasn’t allowed to bring sunscreen to campus and suffered the burning consequences.

Riggs said her 10-year-old daughter went on a school field trip recently and came back sun-burned. Riggs said district policy didn’t allow her daughter to bring sunscreen to reapply.

“When you have a school field trip or a field day (in) which they’re out there for an extended period of time, they should be allowed to carry sunscreen and reapply,” said Riggs.

Riggs said skin cancer runs in her family and her father recently passed away from it.

But, NEISD spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor said sunscreen is considered a medication, something children need a doctor’s note to have at school.

“Typically, sunscreen is a toxic substance, and we can’t allow toxic things in to be in our schools,” Chancellor said.

Oh, they’re toxic already. Is it turning into parental malpractice to send your kids to public schools?

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Obama’s Post-Presidency Has Already Begun.

According to Politico, Obama’s Italian dinner party illustrates the paradox of his second term. “Stymied at home and abroad, Obama recognizes that he is less in control of the Washington agenda than ever in his presidency,” write Budoff Brown and Epstein. “Yet his newfound realism has also given him a palpable sense of liberation.” I find nothing paradoxical about Obama’s recent pattern of behavior, nothing mysterious about the golfing, partying, traveling. It is quite obvious: Obama has given up.

He knows that his agenda is now limited to executive orders and bureaucratic regulation, and that even these measures are likely to be in the courts for years. He knows that his foreign policy agenda of engagement with the enemies of America will prove controversial and unpopular. He knows his staff has been ducking-and-covering ever since Lois Lerner announced the IRS had targeted Tea Party groups, and that they have been playing defense through Edward Snowden and Syria and Healthcare.gov and Crimea and the VA and now Bowe Bergdahl. He knows there is a chance that the Republicans will control Congress next January, and he has said, according to Politico, that this “would make his last two years in office unbearable.”

Obama, Politico says, is “giving more thought to his post-presidency than his aides like to suggest.” But there is nothing really for Obama to think about. His ambitions in this office, just like his ambitions at Harvard, in New York, in Chicago, and in the Senate, are now exhausted. America has disappointed him, and it is time to look to the next challenge worthy of Barack Obama. His post-presidency has already begun.

It’s sad that we haven’t lived up to his rosy expectations of 2008.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Nude selfies lead to rape rap against Saugus mom. “A married mom betrayed her family’s trust by having sex with her daughter’s teenage friend in a hotel room and a parked car before swapping the nude selfies that were her undoing, authorities said. Heather Salines, 38, has pleaded not guilty to six counts of aggravated rape of a child, one count of enticement of a minor and one count of dissemination of pornography to a minor. She confessed to two instances of sex and sending photos, according to police reports. . . . ‘(W)hen I looked at him, he did not act like a 15-year-old … he acted like a grown man,’ she told police.”

When you think about it, she’s really the victim here.

“THE DATA SHOW RAMPANT GRADE INFLATION AT VIRGINIA:” Virginia Inadvertently Reveals Grades, Class Ranks of All Judicial Clerkship Applicants.

Grade inflation is a mixed bag for students. Yeah, your GPA is higher — but a single B can plunge you many, many places in the rankings. Of course, it’s also an arms race among schools in which it’s perilous to be too far out of step as employers tend to assume that a 3.7 average means more or less the same thing everywhere, even though that’s not necessarily the case at all.

DEVOLUTION: Vintage Chemistry Sets Show We Used to Be Way More Chill About Chemicals. “In the early to mid 1900s, there was growing optimism that science could solve many of the important problems facing the world, Frederick-Frost says. Chemistry kits reflected this enthusiasm, featuring what was new and exciting at the time: Plastics! Atomic Energy! Outer Space! It was common for the box of a kit to feature both an image of a young boy playing with the kit and an image of a scientist in his lab—the man the boy would grow up to be.”