born live love die

When I was a kid, being from a “broken home” was a stigma.  These days, it is closer to becoming the norm.  Before I was divorced, I thought people who crapped on their marriage vows because they are bored to be a lower form of life.  That view hasn’t changed.  I know that there are a lot of reasons that people divorce, but anyone who says, “I felt like I was stifled” or “I needed to find myself” and ran out of a marriage and kids gets no quarter from me.  When you have kids, they come first.

After divorce, I read a lot about the effects of divorce.  One of the things I had noted before divorce is when I saw a news story about kids who had been victimized in some way, it seemed like they always came from a divorced household.  Maybe I was more sensitive to it, but after divorce, I seemed to see the ill effects of it in every story of a person’s victimhood.  I resolved to not let those things happen to my kids.

The one kind of victimhood that really lept out at me was how kids from divorced households seemed to fall victim to predators of all stripe.  Kids gone missing?  They were always from single parent households.  I read this article in Texas Monthly and it turned my stomach.  Boys who were susceptible to contacts with other particularly adult males, had gone missing and then the truth about their deaths became known.  Divorce opens kids up to a lot of contacts that intact households do not have.

In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.

What are the odds that my kids would fall victim to something like this?  I don’t know.  I didn’t leave this area, even when job prospects are poor, because I was not going to let my kids be victims.  I need to be here to watch over them.

Read the whole horrible article here.

This guy is a real DIY guy.  He has a lot of great projects at his site.  This is the one that drew my attention.

A DIY scanning electron microscope.  See the video there.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Everyone talks about education reform, but no one does anything about it.”, except that people are always launching education reform of one sort or another.  And except that none of the reforms work.  Ask Bill Gates.  His foundation spent $9 billion on education reform and had almost no impact.

Part of the problem is trying to figure out what the metrics are.  Most education “reformers” come to the problem with solutions in hand and try to find data to support their position.  Other times, the “reformers” have more than solutions in hand.  They have products in hand and are looking to sell said products.  But I digress.

Michelle Rhee made a lot of headlines in the Washington DC schools.  Scores were up.  Way up.  But there might be a problem.  It seems that the cameras used  by McGraw-Hill to grade the tests can also record erasures.  And the Washington DC schools that showed the greatest improvements also showed the greatest number of erasures.  Almost all of them from incorrect answers to correct answers.  How anomalous was that?

McGraw-Hill’s practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman’s terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.

Four standard deviations is a lot of standard deviations.  And the classrooms in question were beyond that.

Was there wide spread cheating in certain schools?  Fraud?  Don’t know.

Read the whole thing.

Tom Toles nails it.

Who are these people in the Justice Department and IRS?

Read the whole thing.

Once upon a time, the Republicans were the party of sturdy responsibility.  A combination of Northeast liberals and Western agriculture interests, they preached liberty and probity.  These days, not so much.  I’m not much of a Chris Matthews fan, but I think he has a point here:

I started to write about the “devils you know”, but then we have always known what kind of devil Qaddafi was.  There wasn’t much we could do about him.  There was a balance in the tension between the Arab states, so they were okay with him.  But there was an evilness there that we tolerated because there wasn’t much we could do about it.

A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli Saturday morning and fought off security forces as she told journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of the Qaddafi militia. After nearly an hour, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.

Dragged away by whom?

For the members of the foreign press here as guests of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — and largely confined to the Rixos Hotel except for official outings — her intrusion was a reminder of the brutality of the Libyan government and the presence of its security forces even among the surrounding hotel staff. People in hotel uniform who just hours before had been serving coffee and clearing plates grabbed table knives and rushed to physically constrain both the woman and the journalists.

What did she have to say?

“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to came from binding around her hands and feet.  She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”  She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here they are going to take me to jail.”

“They swore at me and they filmed me. I was alone. There was whiskey. I was tied up,” she told Michael Georgy of Reuters, the only journalist who was able to speak with her at length.“I am not scared of anything. I will be locked up immediately after this.” She added, “Look at my face. Look at my back.” Her other comments were captured by television cameras.

And then she was gone.

A wild scuffle ensued as journalists tried to interview, photograph and protect her. Several journalists were punched, kicked and knocked on the floor. A television camera belonging to CNN was destroyed in the struggle, and security forces seized a device that a Financial Times reported had used to record her testimony. A plainclothes security officer pulled out a revolver.  Two members of the hotel staff grabbed table knives to threaten both Ms. Obeidy and the journalists. “Turn them around, turn them around,” a waiter shouted, attempting to block the foreign news media from having access to Ms. Obeidy. A woman on the staff shouted, “Why are you doing this? You are a traitor!” and briefly put a coat over Ms. Obeidy’s head.

There was a prolonged standoff behind the hotel as the security officials apparently restrained themselves because of the presence of so many journalists, but she was ultimately forced into a white car and taken away.

There is an evil that seems to accompany Islam and Arab culture that is greater than that which accompanies Judeo-Christian culture.  The latter, despite many and horrible examples to the contrary, seems to be working toward more toward universal justice than does the former.  Muslims need to need to acknowledge that the patriarchy that is central to their religious beliefs fosters an environment that is at odds with social justice.

Read the whole thing.

I had checked out metafilter.com before but hadn’t really engaged in it.  There are so many web sites and memes and movements, it is sometimes difficult to know which one to follow (I was a member of facebook very early on, but didn’t do anything with it for about four years.)  I read the article about how metafilter members organized a rescue.

Late on a windy May night in Manhattan, Kathrine Gutierrez Hinds, a 24-year-old psychology student, rambled around her apartment, unable to sleep. Firemen had rousted her from slumber earlier in the evening, bursting into the building to fight a basement fire. At least she didn’t have to evacuate in her pajamas, she told herself, as she logged on to her laptop. That’s when she discovered an astonishing drama unfolding on the Internet—in real time.

A guy who occasionally blogged on one of her favorite sites, MetaFilter, had posted a call for help: “A Russian friend of mine may be in a dangerous situation in Washington, D.C.”

He explained that two young Russian women, ages 18 and 21, had just landed in D.C. He knew one of them from teaching English in Russia a few years back. The women had come to the U.S. for summer jobs arranged by a Russian travel company. The problem: The jobs—lifeguarding at Virginia Beach—had fallen through. So the women had been told to call a man named George upon landing for instructions on new jobs.

George told them to do something that sounded sketchy: Hop on a bus to New York and go to a nightclub on Coney Island in Brooklyn, at midnight. Jobs as “hostesses” awaited them.

Daniel Reetz, the 28-year-old North Dakota blogger who issued the online alarm, didn’t like the sound of that. He told the women not to meet George. After all, who conducts job interviews of jet-lagged 18-year-olds in a bar, at midnight, on Coney Island? And who hasn’t seen those Law & Order episodes about foreign women tricked into prostitution?

Read the whole thing.

I think I need to visit metafilter more often.