"59% Think Most School Textbooks Put Political Correctness Ahead of Accuracy."

A Rassmussen poll.

It’s important to note that the question did not define the phrase "politically correct." The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated,” and it has come to be understood by many as prohibiting critical comments about politically sensitive topics and groups....

Conservative voters are nearly twice as likely as liberals to think most textbooks put more emphasis on political correctness than on accuracy. Military veterans are more skeptical of those textbooks than those who have not been in uniform....

Of course, everyone actually wants a certain type or amount of political correctness in schoolbooks. They just tend to think of the term "political correctness" when they picture their political opponents  inserting ideology that they think doesn't belong. Conservatives want the Founding Fathers to be presented in a favorable light, and they may want to soft-pedal the downside of industrialization and to stress individualism, optimism, and opportunity.

Anybody putting together a schoolbook has to think about inspiring children and building ideals and character. I'm saying that even though I lean strongly in the direction of straightforward, factual information, and I think that it's a serious moral wrong to use compulsory education to indoctrinate children.

Brilliant animation, beginning with the story of a boy getting the nickname "Pork Chop."

This is very fast-moving and will be especially cool if you don't know where it's going:



(Details about the video here.)

"Welcome to Atlanta, where the players play/And I hope you can make my Bar Mitzvah day..."

(Via Metafilter, where the post just went up, so you can't tell yet whether people are going to trash this kid or love him.)

"Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because..."

"... men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore."

Time for everyone to recognize the great gift of the women's movement:  Everyone needs to buckle down, work hard, and follow rules. 

No wonder they had to drop the word "liberation" from "women's liberation movement." Who could have imagined, circa 1970, that what we'd end up with was grim drudgery for all?

Except the guys won't play along, will they? Consider the strategies. An obvious one is to scale down, never marry, never have children, and live a circumscribed life with a not-too-challenging job, and enjoy however much sex you want via online dating services. Meanwhile, the women can work for their entire lives as hard as they worked in school, just keep going and going, shoehorn in a couple children, work harder and harder to pay for everything they need, including childcare. Work work work.

Grim!

If I were a young woman, I'd be tempted into exactly what I was tempted into when I was a young woman: a life that values beauty, love, and freedom over work. I'm thinking of the hippie movement and — a book I read in the 1970s — "Your Money Or Your Life" (which I see is "Revised and Updated for the 21st Century" — not sure what that means).

"Officials said a woman in a Muslim veil had taken the girl out of class..."

"... while posing as her mother, who wears the chador and niqab."

Philadelphia police have arrested the alleged kidnapper of a five-year-old girl whose report of a talking bird helped lead them to the suspect....

Police say the victim was brought to a nearby home where a man was waiting.... The girl was found 18 hours later at a nearby park, shivering and wearing only a t-shirt. She told her rescuer: "I've been stolen."

In this story, we see 2 distinctive risks. The real mother, by wearing a veil, created an opportunity for a villain to impersonate her. The villain, by keeping a talking bird, created an opportunity for a tiny child to track her down.

"Willow was supposed to be doing 'Annie,' we got Jay-Z to do the movie, got the studio to come in..."

"... and Willow had such a difficult time on tour with 'Whip my Hair' and she said, 'You know Daddy, I don't think so... I said, 'Baby, hold up!' I said, 'No, no, no, listen; you'll be in New York with all of your friends and Beyoncé will be there. You will be singing and dancing,' and she looked at me and said, 'Daddy, I have a better idea, how about I just be 12.'"

"Grandma called very worried that you would get lost in the snow and eaten by penguins."

"Give her a call to reassure her if you get the chance. Stay warm."

Have you expressed sufficient concern over your East Coast adult children?

And make sure they know not to eat yellow snow:

It's a very important point.... Let me explain this to you.  Snow is white.  That is, until cars drive on it, and of course they just turn it black and dirty like they do to the environment anyway.  But sometimes when you're in the snow where cars haven't been, and it's just lovely, beautiful and white and you're walking in it, which again you shouldn't do.  Don't go outside.  But if you do, and if you've stretched and if you're not exerting yourself, you're walking and you might see a patch of yellow snow, and say, "Whoa, what is that?"

It might look like a natural snow cone to you.  Don't eat it.  Do not scoop it up and eat it.  Yellow snow is not good for you.  It is sterile, I mean, you can rest assured that it is sterile.  But you know what the problem with this is, though?  It's like when I say, "Don't think pink," what are you doing?  You're thinking pink.  Don't eat yellow snow, people are gonna go, "Oh, yellow snow, Limbaugh said don't eat it. I wonder why."  Just don't.

Purchase of the day.

Yesterday, February 8. "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster" [Kindle Edition] Jonathan V. Last (Author) (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.90)

P.J. O’Rourke quipped of this book: "A powerful argument that the only thing worse than having children is not having them. I'm reading What To Expect When No One's Expecting aloud to the three little arguments for birth control at my house in hope they'll quit squabbling and making messes and start acting so cute that all my neighbors decide to conceive."

Thank you to all who used the Althouse portal yesterday to make a total of 60 purchases and caused the blogger to think, they like me... they really like me!

Purchase of the day.

Yesterday, February 5. "'Fenris Unchained' is a dark comedy with a splash of horror, taking Norse mythology and putting a 21st Century spin on it." (Earnings to Althouse blog = $1.00)

Honorable mentions:

Sakkas Mens Cotton Blend Ribbed Dress Socks Value Assorted 6-Pack (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.98)

Life in a Bucket of Soil (Dover Children's Science Books) [Paperback] Alvin Silverstein (Author), Virginia Silverstein (Author) (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.42)

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Mac (Earnings to Althouse blog = $45.50)

And 51 other items. Thanks!

"By all accounts, a 5-year-old in Alabama endured an unforgettable horror..."

"Held for a week in a closet-size bunker underground, a captive of a volatile killer, his only comforts a Hot Wheels car and other treats passed to him by officers."

Yet after being whisked to safety by federal agents in a raid that left his kidnapper dead, the boy appeared to be acting like a normal kid: He was running around, playing with a toy dinosaur and other action figures, eating a turkey sandwich and watching “SpongeBob SquarePants,” relatives and Dale County Sheriff Wally Olson said.

Resilience. Where does it come from?

"To think that I would go on a national TV show and get away with continuing a lie so big... is ridiculous."

Says the "extremely remorseful" Matthew Farmer, who went on "American Idol" and told a story of military combat service replete with exploding IED, brain damage, and PTSD. In fact, though he was in the army, he never saw combat.

Soldiers who served with Farmer claim that Farmer's injury came from mixing Accutane, a prescription medication for acne, and alcohol.

Farmer denies allegations that he was sent home for unauthorized use of medicine. He blames the producers of "American Idol" for distorting his story through editing.

The contestant, who sang Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" for the judging panel, blames "Idol" for focusing on his war stories rather than on his little girl, who accompanied him to the audition.

Farmer accuses the editors of "chopping up" parts of his interview and focusing unduly on his story of being medically evacuated from Iraq.

He meant to exploit the child, not the military service. Watch the clip at the link. The poor child looks exceedingly displeased with her father, as if she knows he's shaming himself, lying.

7-year-old Wilson Reyes "deserved to be cuffed," said his purported victim....

... Seth Acevedo. “He acts like an animal.... People are trying to say, poor Wilson, but he’s nothing but a big bully.”

Yikes. Quite aside from the way the police handled this case, why is the press naming and showing photographs of these 2 young boys? Acevedo is pictured — in the NY Daily News — with tears running down his chubby cheeks and his mother caressing and comforting him.

“I would have handcuffed him, too,” snapped the boy’s mother, Janet Ramos.

Reyes's mother is shown wearing bright pink pants with the words "kiss" and "flirt" written all over them.

Meanwhile, lawyer for Reyes is talking about suing the city and the police department for $250 million.

CORRECTION: To put the right woman in the kiss pants.

ADDED: The original NY Post piece has the headline, "Cops handcuff and interrogate boy, 7, for hours over missing $5: family." Key word: family. The police side of it is: “We responded to a 911 call of a robbery and assault . . . Eventually, [Wilson] was taken back to the precinct and placed in the juvenile room.... He was charged with robbery. The allegation was that he punched the kid and took his money. He took the money forcibly. The kid came into the precinct a little bit after 3 p.m., and he was out by 7:45 p.m. . . . That’s standard for a juvenile arrest."

"At-Home Dads Make Parenting More of a 'Guy' Thing."

From the Wall Street Journal:

At-home dads... take pride in letting their children take more risks on the playground, compared with their spouses. They tend to jettison daily routines in favor of spontaneous adventures with the kids. And many use technology or DIY skills to squeeze household budgets, or find shortcuts through projects and chores, says the study, based on interviews, observation of father-child outings and an analysis of thousands of pages of at-home dads' blogs and online commentary.

"Just as we saw a feminization of the workplace in the past few decades, with more emphasis on such skills as empathy and listening, we are seeing the opposite at home—a masculinization of domestic tasks and routines," says Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, an assistant professor of marketing at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and lead author of the study. "Many men are building this alternative model of home life that is outdoorsy, playful and more technology-oriented."

"Should you get divorced in order to make your children better people?"

"What a good parent you are for asking, but, no, of course not: There are easier ways to get the benefits of being non-religious to your children than going through a divorce."

"Acting requires some intentionality on the part of the actor, some conscious effort to adopt a persona other than his or her own."

"Even adult actors who get criticized for 'playing themselves' are engaged in a series of more or less conscious decisions about how best to be themselves onscreen."

A young child, meanwhile, likely isn't thinking at all about how to be herself, let alone a character. She's a kid, and she just "is." This is, of course, a big part of what we're responding to when we watch Wallis: her innocence and her lack of self-consciousness. She feels genuine precisely because she's incapable of being otherwise.

From an article in The Atlantic a month ago titled "Sorry, Quvenzhané Wallis, but Best Actress Oscar Nods Are for Big Kids."

This morning, Quvenzhané Wallis got that Best Actress Oscar nod.

I loathe movies that exploit our instinctive urge to protect and care for children. The child is automatically that sweet and innocent character, whom the author sadistically torments for our sick pleasure.

Polyamory on the march.

"It's all based on a really high degree of love and trust," says the wife.



I love the look on the face of the moderator at 1:57.

"And then, after a while, it didn't really bother me," says the goat-bearded husband.

Something about the music track — so cheesily happy! — makes me especially dubious about the actual happiness achieved by this exemplary couple.

The wife looks way happier than the husband. Check the look on her face at 2:11 as she pops some food in his mouth (enacting the supposed charms of domesticity).

Oh, wait... there are 2 different women here, but they look kind of alike. I notice this halfway through, at which point, I don't really care who's getting sexual satisfaction where, because I simply don't believe their protestations of pleasure. You can't believe what regular, closed-marriage couples say about themselves either. It's all perfectly smarmy until a marriage breaks up, not that you can believe what the broken-up halves of erstwhile marriages have to say about what happened.

By about 4:42, my impression of what I might be looking at here is gay people who want to live in nuclear family units, with their own biological children. This would be something entirely different from the "polyamory" model that is being pitched in the media. That is, 2 homosexual couples could reorganize into 2 married opposite sex couples for the production of children, whom they would live with in one household. The married couples wouldn't have a sexual relationship (beyond producing the children), and they would have an enduring, happy sexual relationship with their homosexual partner. The 2 couples could live nearby and serve in an uncle/aunt role toward each other's children.

"The Ultimate Amenity: Grandparents."

A NYT article about highly affluent couples who are spending their copious money to purchase housing for their own parents, so that their immensely privileged children will have the ultimate amenity: grandparents in their daily life.

Published the very next day in the NYT is an article — charting at #1 on the NYT most-emailed list — "For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall." ("Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death.") Proposed alternate title: The Ultimate Privation: No parents.

Are "lockdown" drills traumatizing schoolkids?

Catherine Crawford used to think so.

[R]epresentatives from the Department of Education unexpectedly showed up and announced that they would be conducting a special drill to prepare students in the event of a gunman in the building.... “All the kids were corralled in the block area out of sight, the classroom doors were locked, blinds drawn, and they all had to be quiet. They were so quiet. I couldn't believe it. Obviously they had done it before. Then, the DOE guys came and jiggled the door, kind of pretending to get in, and the kids had to stay quiet through that as well. You would have been really proud.”...

According to my 7-year old, it all felt like a game and was kind of “exhilarating” — her word.

"Listen I don’t necessarily think having an armed guard outside every classroom is conducive to a positive learning environment."

Said Gov. Chris Christie when he was asked to respond to the NRA's proposal about school safety.

Not that NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said there should be an armed guard outside every classroom. That's an interpretation imposed by Christie for the purpose of rejecting the proposal. Christie conceded that he didn't "know the totality of the proposal," but he seemed to think that "from a law enforcement perspective," you’d have to have an armed guard outside every classroom since schools have so many doors. But isn't that like saying there's no point having police officers on the street unless there can be one on every corner? Wouldn't an armed guard somewhere in the school be able to rush to the scene of a disturbance anywhere in the school within a few seconds? That would be better than waiting for the police, wouldn't it? And consider the deterrent value. A school with an armed guard wouldn't seem like such an obvious soft target, and that might make all the difference to the sort of coward who would murder children.

Christie says: "You don’t want to make this an armed camp for kids. I don’t think that’s a positive example for children. We should be able to figure out some other ways to enhance safety it seems to me. I think that’s the easy way out."

Okay, what are the other ways? It's good to be open to other ways, but, ironically, Christie only perceives one way to implement the NRA proposal. He sees the school looking like an "armed camp" with a guard displaying a gun at every door. That's the easy way to dismiss the NRA proposal. Why not consider positive ways to bring armed security into the school — at least before rejecting the idea? Claiming you're resisting the "easy way" when you refuse to do that is pure sophistry.

The monster in Peggy Noonan's childhood closet was... Abraham Lincoln!

Writing about childhood fears (post-Newtown), she reveals:

One night when the moon was bright and the wind was moving the trees, I looked from my bed into the shadowed closet . . . and suddenly the clothes and the things on the shelf above had transformed themselves into Abraham Lincoln, in top hat and shawl, staring at me and waiting to be shot. That fear came every night for years. At some point a neighbor saw my nervousness or overheard my obsession, asked what was wrong, came to my house, opened my closet and announced triumphantly "See? Lincoln isn't there!" I knew she meant well, but how dumb can you get? Lincoln only came at night.

She also talks about a child who was afraid of ET, so I was expecting a parade of Spielberg characters tormenting kids: the "Jaws" shark, a T-Rex, TinTin, Oskar Schindler... But here's where she's going with this:

Newtown, like 9/11, reminds us of "the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are." The world is imperfect, broken, "with cracks running through it." A central fact of our lives... is that "We are all vulnerable. Anything can happen to anybody at any time."...

We attempt to respond to tragedies politically.... But there is no security from existence itself. The only answer is to "plunge into" life. "We have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails, or we won't be alive at all."