Chicago Public Schools provides "safe passage" maps for school kids...

... to help them deal with new school assignments after the closing of 47 schools and to soothe parental worries about children crossing rival gang territories and vacant buildings and lots.

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said... “This is nothing new.... Kids have been crossing gang lines for years to go to school. We have a program in place that’s very clearly worked. We’re doing more of it this year based upon the school closings."...

Because so many schools closed this year, CPS added nearly $8 million to the program and is hiring an additional 600 people to escort students along designated safety routes....

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"Feminism, in short, doesn't just empower women. It empowers me."

"It allows me to take on roles that have traditionally been associated with women. It gives me more flexibility in my career. As a man, feminism has had a huge positive effect on my life. It seems like the least I can do in return is own it."

Writes Noah Berlatsky under the heading "All the Selfish Reasons to Be a Male Feminist," posted at Slate's XXfactor. He's certainly not telling us all the selfish reasons, since I can think of at least one additional reason: You can get your free-lance writing published at Slate's XXfactor.

Berlatsky talks about having a wife with a full-time job and health insurance benefits and his own role as primary caregiver for their child while he does his writing, and that catches my eye, because it's the family life I had from 1981 to 1987. He says:

There was a time not so long ago where doing any of those things would have made me the object of ridicule, and quite possibly self-loathing as well. Today, though, it's no big deal — and the reason for that is feminism.

Well, there was feminism back then too, but it didn't save men from the inner turmoil of switching traditional gender roles. We thought we were really sophisticated, advanced, hip, and evolved in the early 1980s. Does that come as a surprise to you, Noah? You say, "it's no big deal," but you're writing at XXfactor, where it's in your interest — you have a selfish reason — to say that. But these things work until they don't work, so don't be smug, and good luck. Have you really thought deeply about your masculine self-esteem? Because, to my ear, your thanks feminism sounds shallow.

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"Booker's stake is a bribe."

"He gets money, the bribers er 'donors' or 'partners' get control and access over public policy, at the expense of the voters. This is blatant graft and of a type that used to be common in the late 19th century, which in so many ways our politics and economy seem to be moving back to."

That's the comment ranked highest by readers of the NYT's embarrassingly puffy piece on Cory Booker, "Tech Magnates Bet on Booker and His Future."

Here's the second-highest-ranked:

“Cory is the inspiration architect,” Ms. Ross said. “He really is the thought-leader soul part of the business.”

Translation: he does nothing but we're throwing money at him to buy influence.

And really? Yet another video sharing platform? The tech sector - which I suppose now includes 99% of everyone under 25-years-old - just keeps going deeper and deeper into the well in an endless feedback loop of self-aggrandizement but what they produce becomes less and less relevant or important to society. But they sure can market junk, can't they?

Here's Waywire, by the way(wire), so check for yourself if it's haywire. You can't tell from one look how long these items have been at the top, but the timelessness of the subject matter makes me think: a long time. I mean: "7 Great Beatles Performances," "Top 15 Most Patriotic Songs," "30 Best Summer Songs"...? These seem to pre-date the Internet! But let's be fair and watch "Top News, August 8," which appears in the upper left-hand corner of the grid. It starts off (for me, now, anyway) with a grainy 38 seconds of a guy in a suit drawing all the pingpong balls for a set of Powerball numbers. (That fits with "betting on Booker.") It then proceeds to another video, a minute of Obama on Leno, then another (showing "Suffering in Syria"), then something about Egypt, something about Dustin Hoffman, something else about Egypt, and ending the run through the top news that you need to know today, August 8th, with "Toddler Beaten to Death by Foster Mother." We see her sad face in a thumbnail.

I'm drawn back to the NYT article, which blithely drops the news: "Waywire has put Andrew Zucker, 15, the son of Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, on its advisory board and given him stock options." Kid luck. It's a crapshoot.

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"I’m polyamorous, which means I believe you can love multiple partners at the same time."

"I’m in a relationship with my husband of nearly 17 years, and my boyfriend, with whom I celebrated my second anniversary in May. (In polyamorous lingo, our relationship is known as a 'V; I’m the 'hinge' of the V and my two partners are the vertices.)" So writes Angi Becker Stevens in Salon, complaining that "the world at large" condemns them.

My boyfriend and I met through our leftist politics...

My daughter, who will be 10 next month, has known that her father and I are non-monogamous for nearly as long as she can remember. She certainly isn’t exposed to sexuality any more than children of monogamous relationships are; she sees child-appropriate displays of affection between me and both of my partners, and she lives in a stable, loving home. I often talk to her about the fact that society frowns on families like ours, and whenever I mention the claims that polyamory is bad for children, she rolls her eyes and says, “Oh no, kids having more people to love them! How horrible!”

Oh, no, kids having more adults showing them how to be sarcastic! How horrible!

When my daughter talks about same-sex marriage or polyamorous relationships, she always looks perplexed and says, “I don’t understand why anyone is angry about people being in love and not hurting anyone.” And I long for a world where everyone is able to see it so simply.

You complicate your own life and then call upon others to be simple as they think about your complications.

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"It's just upsetting to have lost that way. I don't know why it would have counted as the wrong answer."

This is a case study in teaching a child to be a sore loser. Thomas Hurley III lost his $3,000 bet on "Jeopardy" because he wrote "Emanciptation Proclamation" instead of "Emancipation Proclamation."

The judges make their rulings for reasons that obviously have to do with consistency across a broad range of decisions. Quit damaging this kid by letting him blind himself to the explanation and encouraging him to feel like a victim.

Not only did he lose $6,000, but he lost the opportunity to appear in public as a courageous loser, which — over the course of a lifetime — would have been worth more than than $6,000.

How important is spelling? Well, it depends. There are spellings where one adds or omits a silent letter or substitutes a letter for another that sounds the same. Dan Quayle reinforced the typecasting that he was dumb when he prompted a child to add an "e" at the end of "potato." And yet it raised no suspicion that he would have pronounced the word incorrectly.

But the spelling "Emanciptation" raises the supicion that Hurley would have pronounced it "e-man-cip-ta-tion." Many words — like "implementation" — end in "-tation." If it hadn't been final jeopardy, and he'd said "e-man-cip-ta-tion," there's no question the answer would have been rejected. By contrast, misspelling "Proclamation" as "Proclaimation," wouldn't be so bad.

The question was a good final jeopardy question for kids in part because they had to get out 2 big words. He missed one. Don't miss again by playing the victim.

And, by the way... Emancipation Proclamation. That's a clue to get a sense of proportion about the misfortunes that befall human beings.

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The Queen's WWIII speech.

Revealed, because in Britain, they reveal these things after 30 years. I'm struck by the reliance — imagining utter doom — on family:

"It is this close bond of family life that must be our greatest defence against the unknown.

"If families remain united and resolute, giving shelter to those living alone and unprotected, our country's will to survive cannot be broken."

Nuclear devastation — "the unknown" — is about to descend, and what can the country's parental voice say to the millions who are suddenly hearing that they're almost all about to die? Maybe some can survive, and for all that can hear the message, at least a few moments remain. There is, at this dire point: family. For the poor souls without a family: Anyone with a family should see how terribly unfortunate you are — amid all the misfortune — and take you in.

There was no WWIII, not back then, at least. Is the Queen's speech a weird relic? No. It's a vivid, striking message of something we know that we know even if we mostly live as if we have forgotten: The core of human life is family.

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"It’s not that I don’t love my dog. It’s just that I don’t love my dog."

"And I am not alone. A very nonscientific survey of almost everyone I know who had a dog and then had kids now wishes they had never got the dog. This is a near universal truth, even for parents with just one child...."

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The movie industry is "laying down too many big bets without anything else on the agenda."

Said Steven Gaydos, of Variety magazine. "They have to kick their dependency on $300m blockbusters. If they don't, they're going out of business." But it's not going to happen:

"Look at Comic-Con and then tell me if you think Hollywood is going to cut back on its comic-book dependency.... Look at how that event was covered by the critical establishment.... By and large, people are not looking for intelligent, edgy, mid-range movies. They're looking for superheroes and special effects. They're looking for amusement rides. They're like the kids in Pinocchio who still want to go to Pleasure Island. They're voting to be donkeys."

Coming up: Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Thor 2, Fantastic Four 3 and another Godzilla.

Looking at this from the distance — I am old, and I haven't gone to the movies in a year — I think: Good, I hope they fail. Why should I care if these studios collapse of their own rot? I try to summon up some empathy. In the last post, I was surprised by empathy for the soldier fly, bred inside a closed appliance for the purpose of food. (I refuse to consume non-free-range larvae.)

Who are the workers of Hollywood, that we should care? They seem quite awful. Maybe Hollywood should make more movies about the good people who work behind the scenes. A fantastic 4 of The Gaffer, The Grip, The Best Boy, and The Seamstress. We mainly see the snobbish bastards who — as movies have taught us — inspire our lust to gaze upon downfall.

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How can you expect to edit your own life, when it's "just life," with "lots of twists"?

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"State law says that no school’s nonwhite enrollment can deviate from the districtwide average for schools with the same grade levels by more than 25 percentage points."

Race-balancing in Connecticut.

In addition to New Lebanon and Hamilton Avenue Elementary, the two schools on the western edge of town with too few white students, two schools on the far eastern and northern sides of town are flirting with imbalance of an opposite kind: having too few minority children... The imbalance was created by a steady increase in black and Hispanic residents on the western side of [Greenwich]...

Susie Ponce, whose parents are from Colombia, moved to western Greenwich from Queens in 2007. She thinks Hamilton Avenue Elementary, which her two children attend, could have more white children, she said, but it has an array of nationalities.

“If I had a choice, I would keep my kids where they are right now,” said Ms. Ponce, who until recently was the school’s parent coordinator. “Because not only are they getting a great education, they are getting the social-emotional intelligence that I grew up with, just being exposed to other children from different cultures.”

Once the state law is in place, complying with it takes precedence. Who knows what choices would be made without it? But the situation that Ponce likes, that is threatened with change to comply with state law, came into being while that state law was in force. We never get to see what would have happened without that law, which (in some form at least) dates back to the 1960s.

It's easy to think: Why must we talk about "too few" white/nonwhite children? And: If "too few" has important meaning, what is the chance that meaning is well-expressed by a law that defines "too few" in terms of the racial balance happens to be in other places rather than any idea of the classroom benefits of diversity? The Connecticut statute attempts to control the effects of choices about where different people live — choices based in part on affluence and, in some unknown part, on race. It dictates a concept of "too few," and it does so intentionally to block people from thinking about "too few" in a deeper, more substantive way.

By the way, after following the George Zimmerman trial, it's interesting to see the NYT repeatedly and confidently write "Hispanic" as if everyone knows it's a race. The Hispanic woman Susie Ponce speaks of the need for "more white children," and we're not supposed to get confused and think: Aren't her children white? White Hispanic?

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When Mitch Daniels took aim at Howard Zinn.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In a message sent on February 9, 2010, [Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the governor of Indiana at the time, now president of Purdue University], asked top state education officials for assurance that the works of Howard Zinn, the longtime Boston University historian and political activist, were not "in use anywhere in Indiana."

Zinn had died less than 2 weeks earlier.

"This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away," Mr. Daniels wrote, referring to Mr. Zinn. "The obits and commentaries mentioned his book 'A People's History of the United States' is the 'textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.' It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"

It seems low to kick the man just when he dies, but Daniels admits to picking up the information about the "execrable" book from the obituaries, which makes the timing less mean and just ignorant.
Who didn't know about "A People's History of the United States"? And it sounds so lame to demand that "someone" "assure" him that it's not being used "anywhere in Indiana." Why didn't he already know how history is taught in Indiana schools? Instead of going hysterical about banishing a book he just heard about, why wasn't he already taking care to ensure that the children of Indiana were receiving sound, valuable reading materials in their history classes?

If there's one thing that disgusts me, it's compelling children to spend their days trapped in school buildings and then not serving their best interests. Zinn tried to do what — in his view — he deemed worthy, which was to supply the counter-story to conventional high-school-level American history. It was up to the education professionals and the politicians who supplied them with their endless flow of vulnerable little clients to perform what was and is a moral duty to give them an excellent education, in history and everything else. Belatedly railing about Zinn is a pathetic revelation of how miserably these people abused children.

I really don't give a damn about how this idiotic material is used against Daniels in his role as president of Purdue. The old politico can fend for himself. What's important is that those with a duty to the children failed — as they fail in all the other states and have failed for a long, long time.

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"I guarantee, if you home school your kids for eight hours a day every day, they’ll be in college at age 12, too."

So says a mother, presenting a conundrum: I'd be inclined to say that you can't make such a huge inference based on the experience within your own family, since you don't know what part of the achievement is based on the teaching method and what part is the skill of the parent and the inherited ability of these children. And yet if the skill of the parent and inherited ability are an important part of the daughters' achievement, why does the mother lapse into this huge inference and make a grossly unsupported guarantee?

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"A somewhat dismissive response."

Instapundit says, somewhat dismissively. 

I suspect he wouldn't want to hear my truly dismissive response, but if you search the comments at my somewhat dismissive response... and over here... you can extrapolate what it would be. I'll cherry-pick some clues as to what I would say if I chose to go hard-core on this subject.

Quoting a commenter who said — about my proposal that health insurance pay for vasectomies and men freeze their sperm in order to provide males with reproductive autonomy — "Point of order, the woman has a right to seek an abortion. There's nothing about anyone having to provide it to her or having Other People pay for it," I said:

That's true, and that is something that makes the proposal in my post not neatly about equality.

But there really can never be equality about pregnancy and childbirth. It is the woman's special burden, and the policies have to be arranged to make sense around that basic inequity. I'm not trying to punish men by imposing a corresponding inequity, I'm just not impressed by the whinings of males who were profligate with their sperm. They are not the backbone of society.

The backbone of society is the married, committed couple who channel their sexuality into making and growing the next generation. Those who do other things are free to make choices, but we as a society have no reason to facilitate their choices, especially their destructive choices.

I know people like their free sex, but the expectation that the rest of us will save them from consequences is pathetic. I heartlessly laugh in their face. 

Quoting a commenter who said, "Your logic is correct for our pathetic society, but that doesn't rob from how pathetic it is," I said:

Yeah, but that's my point. My real prescription isn't [the vasectomy/frozen sperm proposal]. This is a fall-back now that we've become pathetic.

Really, men need to keep track of their genetic material. One way or another.

Don't be a splooge stooge.

Quoting a commenter who said "Women are just as responsible themselves..." I said:

I never said they weren't.

Both are fully responsible.

And, on the earlier post, quoting a commenter who said "Let's try applying your logic the other way. Women are free to freeze their eggs and then have their tubes tied. That way they have perfect choice not to get pregnant. So that does away with the case for abortion, right?" I said:

The fact is, once a woman is pregnant, she has a right to use abortion to get out of the physical process that has begun, but it is too late for the man to exercise a right, because his rights relate to his body, not hers.

The man must take responsibility for himself, not seek to control the woman.

I know you men would like to have your fun and freedom and not be troubled by risks, but your body is yours and her body is hers.

Reacting to all the many, many comments from men who have taken Instapundit's invitation to victimology seriously, I said (punctuation corrected):

There are some really sad beta posturings in this thread.

Where is the self-respect?

Where is the awe over procreation?

Lame little men, whining about their meager money.

No one cares about you, because no one should!

Where is your aspiration? Where is your altruism?

Why do you leave the house?

You have your porn and your masturbation.

The alternative is true manhood, but is that something you are capable of? Apparently not!

I laugh in your scrunched up crying little face.

Another commenter said "You are also forgetting that even if a condom is used and the woman fishes the condom out of the trash and uses a turkey baster to impregnate herself, the man is still held responsible. If a woman takes a used condom from a man having sex *with a different woman* and impregnates herself, the man is held responsible. If a man and woman only engage in oral sex and the woman saves the sperm for later use with a turkey baster, the man is held responsible. None of that means that the man has any actual *rights* in regards to the child." Which made me say:

I am absolutely not forgetting about that.

Men need to value and guard their genetic material.

The lameness of men who throw this stuff around is mindboggling. Don't be [a] splooge stooge.

Now, I think women shouldn't want to invest their reproductive effort in such idiots, but that's the other side of the story.

And (emphasis added):

The men who are saying: I want something because women have something.

You guys...

If you don't have the wherewithal to realize what you are... you are no longer men, and women should be rejecting you. I can't account for all these women, but at least, if they become pregnant, they take on an immense burden. They feel that.

You guys... I wonder if you feel anything at all.

You are unworthy. The reason something ought to save you from becoming fathers is that you are unworthy, but unfortunately, it seems that some women do still choose to have sex with you and even to bear your children.

And that -- THAT! -- is what you complain is your misfortune.

Amazing blindness. Your misfortune is so much worse than that.

And somebody said: "Then there are cases like the one (likely more than one...), where a woman who performed (only) oral sex with a man, using a condom, retrieved the condom and inseminated herself, and successfully sued for child support. IMO if a man does something that physiologically cannot produce conception without the woman's deliberate and willfully deceptive action, he is not responsible in any way for the conception." And I said:

I don't know why a woman would invest her reproductive effort in carrying forward the genes of such a man, but I have no sympathy with him at all.

Your phrase "physiologically cannot produce conception" is obviously wrong, since it did.

I fear for the future of humankind, with such stupidity in our inheritance.

The man is an idiot, and the woman is an idiot. Maybe the child can rise above it.

But sympathy for this man who has no love and no self-respect? Why don't you save your compassion for someone who deserves it?

This men's rights stuff was old-hat in the 1980s. Recycling it now is the lamest thing I've seen in a long, long time.

If you really cared about men, you'd try to do something to elevate them, as I am trying right now. Instead you are inviting them into a downward spiral. This is worse than The Life of Julia.

The whining and crying about what victims men are these days continued way into the night. In the morning I saw a comment that began with the burnt-out old internet expression "sigh": "Sigh. And yet a wife can make the choice to abort her kid without even telling her husband. Shoudnt they be consulting their husband?" I had to take another shot:

Yes, and that's exactly the reason Planned Parenthood v. Casey gave for striking down a statutory requirement that a woman consult her husband.

Think about it.

And stop your sighing.

Picture me singing that last line like this:



UPDATE: Glenn responds to this here, and I respond to that here.

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