Author: admin

With speech codes
chilling free expression on college campuses and Twitter
warriors presiding haughtily over online speech, it seems a bit
gloomy out there for fans of the First Amendment. But a new survey
from
the Knight Foundation finds teen support for free speech
is high. For the first time in a decade, U.S. high-school
students are more into the First Amendment than adults, and their
appreciation for it goes up with their level of online media
consumption. 

The national survey of 10,463 high-school students found 90
percent think “people should be able to express unpopular opinions”
and only 24 percent think “the First Amendment goes too far” in
guaranteeing free speech, free assembly, and freedom of religion.
Asked the same question in a recent Newseum Institute study, 38
percent of American adults wanted less free expression.

“This marks a shift: 10 years ago students (35 percent) were
more likely than adults (30 percent) to say that the First
Amendment goes too far,” the Knight Foundation notes. And in 2006,
45 percent of teens and only 23 percent of adults thought
so. 

Millennial teens are now more likely than their teachers to
support free expression also, particularly when it comes to school
matters. Of the 588 teachers simultaneously surveyed by the Knight
Foundation, the majority disagreed that First Amendment rights
should apply to school activities. Fifty-seven percent of the
teachers said student newspapers shouldn’t report on controversial
subject. And a whopping 67 percent said students shouldn’t be
allowed to express anti-teacher or school administrator sentiment
on Facebook without penalty. 

Despite teachers’ anti-free speech feelings, students who had a
class explaining the First Amendment were more likely to support it
than those who had not. Free speech support also grew with a
student’s digital media consumption. “The most supportive students
of all are heavy digital media users who also have had a class
explaining the First Amendment,” said Eric Newton, senior adviser
to the Knight Foundation’s president. 

Digital media consumption is, unsurprisingly, huge among
high-school students, with the number who read news online daily
jumping from 31 percent in 2006 to 71 percent now. The proportion
of students who consume digital content daily through a mobile
device jumped from 8 percent to 62 percent. Other survey
highlights: 

• Less than one-third are “very concerned” about the privacy of
  information they post on the Internet (compared to 48 percent of
  adults), while 42 percent are “somewhat concerned” and 21 percent
  are “not too concerned”. 
• 83 percent of high-school students sgree that “people should be
  able to send online messages and make phone calls without
  government surveillance” 
• 60 percent don’t think the government should be allowed to spy
  on digital messages or phone calls even in the process of
  “identifying possible terrorists”

Ken Paulson, president of the Newseum Institute’s First
Amendment Center and dean of Middle Tennessee State University’s
communication school, said the study “reminds us of the need to
pro-actively teach what young people engaged in social media know
intuitively: First Amendment freedoms are at the heart of the
American experience.” 

In
her latest
column conservative provocatuese Ann Coulter is demanding that
all conservatives and libertarians vote Republican this November.
In her latest column, Coulter delcares:

For the next six weeks, nothing matters more to the country than
Republicans taking a majority in the Senate. When it comes to
politics, conservatives need to learn one thing from liberals: All
that matters is winning.

As if conservatives in Congress have done anything to rein in
overweening government, reduce the budget, cut programs, or protect
civil liberties.

More amusingly, she writes:

“If you are considering voting for the Libertarian candidate in
any Senate election, please send me your name and address so I can
track you down and drown you.”

In Virginia, I am voting for the Libertarian candidate for U.S.
Senate Robert Sarvis
this November.

So O.K. Ms. Coulter, come give drowning me a try. My home
address in Charlottesville is marked on the map. Google Map
directions to my house from your digs in Palm Beach are below. See
you soon.

In
her latest
column conservative provocatuese Ann Coulter is demanding that
all conservatives and libertarians vote Republican this November.
In her latest column, Coulter delcares:

For the next six weeks, nothing matters more to the country than
Republicans taking a majority in the Senate. When it comes to
politics, conservatives need to learn one thing from liberals: All
that matters is winning.

As if conservatives in Congress have done anything to rein in
overweening government, reduce the budget, cut programs, or protect
civil liberties.

More amusingly, she writes:

“If you are considering voting for the Libertarian candidate in
any Senate election, please send me your name and address so I can
track you down and drown you.”

In Virginia, I am voting for the Libertarian candidate for U.S.
Senate Robert Sarvis
this November.

So O.K. Ms. Coulter, come give drowning me a try. My home
address in Charlottesville is marked on the map. Google Map
directions to my house from your digs in Palm Beach are below. See
you soon.

One week ago, courtesy of
MuckRock’s
enormous database, I highlighted the fact that the Los Angeles
Unified School District Police Department acquired
three grenade launchers along with other military gear, and
questioned how well this squares with the department’s mission to
“provide a safe and tranquil
environment in which the educational process can take
place.” 

This week, due to mounting pressure, the cops who serve the
nation’s second-largest school district are giving up some
equipment. The Los Angeles Times has
details:

In a letter to the Department of Defense’s logistics agency, a
coalition of education and civil rights groups said the presence of
weapons on campuses will only intensify existing tensions at
schools and exacerbate punitive atmospheres that criminalize and
stigmatize students of color.

Deborah Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, a social
justice nonprofit, said in a statement that other more common
weapons used by officers and security guards, such as Tasers and
pepper spray, have been misused in schools. Much of this excessive
force is targeted at students of color and those with disabilities,
she said.

So, the department said uncle and has agreed return the
grenade launchers. The cops are not budging on the other stuff they
got, though. They insist that the mine-resistant ambush-protected
vehicle and 61 M-16 rifles they’ve got in the playground arsenal
are “essential life-saving items,” so those are here to stay.

One L.A. school officer who declined to be named
assured Reuters that the MRAP, a vehicle that weighs upward of
14 tons and was designed to fight
asymmetrical warfare against Iraqi insurgents, would be used
only in “very specific circumstances.” He wouldn’t elaborate.

Schools and small towns acquire all these sorts of war toys
through the Defense Department’s 1033 Program, which since 2006 has
for the cost of shipping given domestic law enforcement
some 80,000
rifles, 12,000 bayonets, $3.6 million worth of camouflage, and
much more. In total, the program has transferred over $5
billion worth of surplus military equipment.

Reuters notes that “President Barack Obama ordered a review of
the program out of concern at how such equipment had been used
during racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting
death of a black teen by a white policeman last month.” Likewise,
from the
Associated Press, Congress is “considering doing more to
monitor and hold accountable police departments across the United
States that obtain sophisticated military equipment from the
federal government.” 

In the fall of 2012, Justin
Robinson, 15, strangled Autumn Pasquale, 12, both of Clayton, New
Jersey, when she came over to trade BMX bike parts. He plead guilty
to aggravated manslaughter and received 17 years in
prison. But
now, writes Lisa Belkin, Autumn’s dad, Anthony Pasquale,
is filing suit against Justin’s parents (who are divorced). She
quotes Pasquale saying:

 “Parenting comes with responsibilities, and one of those
is to raise your kids right, to pay attention and know when they’re
a danger to someone else. That’s a parent’s job.”

To fail at that job is a crime, he believes. He’s recently taken
his certainty to court, suing Justin Robinson’s parents for,
essentially, being bad parents.

….In addition to his civil suit, Anthony is urging a change in
criminal law. Dubbed “Autumn’s Law,” at the moment it is just an
idea — a
Change.org petition, which currently falls 12,000
signatures short of its 20,000 goal. Its point is
simple: If parents knew they would go to jail for
their parenting, Anthony says, they would do a better
job.

Bold face mine, because: Really? Not that we don’t try to
keep our kids on the straight and narrow —99.999 percent of us
parents do—but it is obviously impossible to control our children’s
every move. What’s more, we shouldn’t want to live in a society
that requires this.

Criminalizing parents for raising law-breaking children would
not only reinforce the idea that good parents are always on top of
their kids (even in their teens), it would also enshrine
“worst-first thinking” as the law of the land: If parents aren’t
constantly imagining the worst-case scenario first—”Gee, my son
seems moody today. I hope he doesn’t stab his playdate”—they would
be guilty of not paying enough attention.

A policy like
“Autumn’s Law” should also seem ridiculous when anyone considers
brothers like David and Ted
Kaczynski. One was the Unabomber. One turned him in. If the
parents created the murderer, how did they also create his brother,
who worked as a youth counselor and then, after making the
difficult decision to turn his brother in, became an anti-death
penalty activist and eventually director of
a Tibetan Buddhist monastery?

Parents cannot program their children or predict their every
move. So while I can’t even imagine the sorrow and horror that
Autumn’s parents have gone though, I hope they do not win their
lawsuit. Parents already face enough criticism and blame for their
child-rearing. (“Why did he eat the extra cookie?” “Why is he so
scared to eat one extra cookie?”) Heaping more criticism and
blame on them will not make them parent better. It will only make
them more paranoid.

That’s not a quality most parents today are lacking.

“Oh, you’re doing that, too?,” the building
contractor asked when he walked in while my son was working on his
Literature lesson. “My youngest daughter is taking high school
online. They were bullying her at school.”

While he undid something interesting my wife had done to the
garbage disposal and then measured for book shelves, he added, “It
looks like she’ll already have her freshman year finished in
December.”

Just weeks after signing on to home-based schooling, and two
days into formal lessons, we’re running into a fair number of
kindred spirits who also opted out of brick and mortar schools.
Some are using traditional homeschooling methods from a variety of
sources, others (like us) are paying for online private schools,
and the majority use virtual charter schools, which are an easy
option in Arizona.

My sister has been homeschooling one of my nephews with a mix of
offline and online resources for a year.

They all tell us that the initial learning curve is steep, but
it eventually settles in. That’s good news, because my wife and I
feel like we’re back in school ourselves, prepping lessons and
mastering the school’s tools. Anthony, for his part, took to the
new school like a fish to water. The fact that he looks forward to
his lessons is a hell of a nice change from our experience over the
past year.

Much of that enthusiasm, I’m convinced, comes from the fact that
the pace can be tailored to him. He’s already tested out of
material that was too basic, and he doesn’t have to sit at a desk
waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. “It feels like
they’re trying to help me, not bore me to death,” he told my
wife.

We move him through assessments until he hits a challenge, and
then we get down to actual learning. Even then, the goal is
mastery, not just putting ink on worksheets. If he learns the
information, we move on.

And we no longer have to wade through answers of “he’s doing
fine” when we’re curious about Anthony’s progress, only to discover
that “fine” can have a surprisingly broad range of meaning. We
track the lessons and approve assessments ourselves.

Our contractor is having a similar experience with his daughter,
as evidenced by her conversion of freshman year into a semester. My
11-year-old nephew is sufficiently well along that he could
probably educate some of his old instructors.

It’s too early yet to call our experiment in schooling at home a
success; I suppose we could stiill fuck this up. But for the first
time in a long time, my son is enjoying learning.

Aficionados of anti-Scottish-independence scaremongering should
enjoy The Weekly Standard‘s
contribution to the genre. Especially this part:

It is not at all far-fetched to imagine Vladimir Putin
offering financial aid to a post-independence Scotland that will
inevitably face severe economic challenges.

The price for that aid might include, among other things, basing
rights for Russian military and naval forces. Certainly there would
be little or nothing that the United Kingdom could do if an
independent Scotland decided to rent its deep water submarine port
at Faslane to Russia’s Northern fleet or if it let Russian maritime
air patrols fly out of former RAF air bases.

That would essentially mean a shifting of NATO’s frontier hundreds
of miles to the West and a revolutionary change in the balance of
power in Europe.

I’m inclined to support Scottish independence, but I don’t have
strong feelings about it; it’s the Scots’ business, and I won’t
complain if they vote No. But watching all the Serious People
line up against the idea, and seeing the sheer hysteria required to
bring up this reheated ’80s imagery of Russian subs threatening the
West, I have to admit my smile will be pretty wide if Yes wins.

I am an avid consumer of artificial sweetners; my
favorite is Splenda. An intriguing
new study published in Nature yesterday found that the
sweeteners boost blood glucose levels in mice. They suggest that
the sweeteners may be contributing to the increase in human obesity
and type II diabetes. How? The Israeli researchers think that the
sweeteners don’t themselves spike blood glucose; instead they
somehow effect the microflora growing in the human digestive tract
in ways that do that. The researchers found that consuming
saccharin boosted glucose levels in four out seven human test
subjects. From the abstract:

Non-caloric artificial sweeteners (NAS) are among the most
widely used food additives worldwide, regularly consumed by lean
and obese individuals alike. NAS consumption is considered safe and
beneficial owing to their low caloric content, yet supporting
scientific data remain sparse and controversial. Here we
demonstrate that consumption of commonly used NAS formulations
drives the development of glucose intolerance through induction of
compositional and functional alterations to the intestinal
microbiota. These NAS-mediated deleterious metabolic effects are
abrogated by antibiotic treatment, and are fully transferrable to
germ-free mice upon faecal transplantation of microbiota
configurations from NAS-consuming mice, or of microbiota
anaerobically incubated in the presence of NAS. We identify
NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host
susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar
NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human
subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis
and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of
massive NAS usage.

With regard to the human experiment, Medscape (registration
required) reports:

Artificial sweeteners caused changes in glucose tolerance in
humans, as well, but only for some participants the investigators
consider to be “responders.” A group of 7 healthy volunteers who do
not normally consume artificial sweeteners were given saccharin for
6 days at a dose that met the US Food and Drug Administration’s
maximum acceptable daily intake of saccharin for humans. No
participants saw improvements in glucose tolerance, but 4 showed
impairment.

Even before the experiment began, the microbial ecosystems from
the 4 responders were different from those of the 3 nonresponders,
suggesting their microbiome was somehow more susceptible. These
results, said Dr. Elinav, “point to the personalized nature of our
food responses and the need to understand this personalized effect
in order to fight the
metabolic syndrome, which as we all know, is one of the most
common and serious epidemics in all history.”

Bacteria from responders, sampled at the end of the trial, were
able to induce glucose intolerance when introduced into germ-free
mice (P < .02), whereas baseline samples from the
responders (taken before they had consumed the artificial
sweeteners) did not have this effect, nor did bacteria from the
nonresponders.

The Washington Post
reports that the researchers are not recommending that people
shift toward eating sugar. The Post notes:

Researchers [Eran] Segal and [Eran] Elinav insisted that their
findings are preliminary and shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation
on whether people should reconsider using artificial sweeteners.

“We do not view that as our role,” Segal said. “Rather, as
scientists, we simply point to the immense body of experiments that
we carried out in both humans and in mice. . . . This study and
these results should prompt additional debates and study into what
is currently a massive use of artificial sweeteners.”

Elinav added: “This issue is far from being resolved.”

Yes, indeed. Keep in mind that this not an “I-told-you-so”
moment for most food scolds who were
chiefly claiming that the sweeteners increased the risk of
cancer.

For what it’s worth, my BMI is now 24.3 (although it’s been as
high as 30) and my blood glucose levels couldn’t be more normal, so
I will continue to dose my coffee and iced tea with Splenda. Of
course, I may change my tune as further results are reported.

Hat tip to Felix, the first commenter to send me links to
the study. Thanks to everyone else. Keep them coming.