Month: September 2014

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.

The
American foreign-policy elite seems to have no idea what it’s
doing. Americans may believe the government — especially the
foreign-policy side — is at least minimally competent, but when one
surveys decisions from the last few decades, one has to wonder. The
current crop of policymakers, like earlier ones, know what
they want to do: make the world safe for
American leadership — or, less euphemistically, American hegemony:
No rivals for American influence or access to resources and markets
can be tolerated. As President George H.W. Bush said, “What we say
goes.” Even by that standard, writes Sheldon Richman, the policy
architects and executors look incompetent — or unbelievably
cynical. No better evidence exists than the policies that led to
the so-called Islamic State and President Barack Obama’s response
to it.

View this article.

“Finally: Robot Bartenders Who Pour Stiff Drinks!” is the latest
video from Reason TV. Watch above or click on the link below for
video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more
Reason TV clips.

View this article.

What does it say about the
state of Americans’ relationship with their own government that its
largest tech company can use the ability to conceal private
information from authorities as a selling point?

Apple isn’t really focusing on marketing its latest mobile
operating system that way (they’re more about bragging about how they don’t
sell info about your personal habits to advertisers), but they
aren’t shy about pointing out their resistance
to rolling over and accepting government data demands. Observant
tech journalists have noticed something big in their latest privacy
notes. Apple has changed its encryption so that the company itself
cannot access the data on its users’ phones and iPads without the
passcode. Thus, if police or the feds come to Apple with warrants
to grab potentially useful private data off a device, they couldn’t
comply even if they wanted to. Ars Technica
explains:

Previously,
as we reported in May 2014, if law enforcement came to Apple
with a seized device and a valid warrant, it was able to access a
substantial portion of the data already on an iPad or iPhone. But
under the latest version of iOS, even that will be impossible.

“On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos,
messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history,
iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection
of your passcode,” the company wrote on its website Wednesday
evening. “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode
and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically
feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the
extraction of this data from devices in their possession running
iOS 8.”

To be clear, though, this is not perfect protection. The
Washington Post
notes that this won’t protect data stored elsewhere, like on
cloud services. So as certain naked celebrities have recently
learned, if there’s stuff on your phones or iPads you don’t want
other people getting their hands on, maybe don’t send it up to the
cloud.

The polls are open in Scotland, where voters have a very simple
“Yes” or “No” choice on the very complicated question of whether or
not they want to leave the United Kingdom, of which they have been
a part of for more than 300 years, and become an independent
country.

With current polling showing a razor-thin margin in favor the
“No” vote, there is speculation on what the referendum will mean
for Northern Ireland, comprised of the six northern-most counties
of Ireland, which are also part of the United Kingdom. The three
decades of constant violence between Catholics and Protestants (and
the British Protestant-dominated government) known as “The
Troubles” ended in 1998 with the
Good Friday Agreement, but it has always been a fragile and
shaky peace, one which has shown recent signs of fraying.

Unlike in Scotland, where the independence movement is
alternatively driven by
opposition to the U.K.’s nuclear weapons, support for an

increased socialist welfare state, as well as
nationalist pride, Northern Ireland’s divisions are so deeply
ingrained that the upheaval caused by Scottish independence could
fast track a
similar referendum there. 

Recent polls have shown that the ever-increasing Catholic
population of Northern Ireland would rather remain part of the U.K.
than join the other 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland. To
this,
Michael Brendan Dougherty of TheWeek.com asks:

But would they remain committed if Ireland’s economy rebounds
and the U.K.’s deteriorates? What if the broader project of the
United Kingdom decomposes in the face of Scottish nationalism? And
why would pro-union Catholics vote to stay in the union, when
unionism will be championed by parties that attract zero Catholic
votes?

Another question may be more disquieting to loyalists: Does
England even want Belfast? The same polls showed that a smaller
percentage of English people are committed to keeping
Northern Ireland. For many years, it has received the most
public money per capita in the union, while generating the
least. And many English find Northern Irish politics exasperating,
its style of unionism oafish.

Even Thatcher seems to have contemplated cutting
Northern Ireland off during the Hunger Strikes. Similar threats
were made by Westminster in order to broker the 1998 Good Friday
agreement. It’s hard to imagine David Cameron or his successor
giving emotional speeches about the role of Northern Ireland in the
United Kingdom, as Cameron and his associates have done for
Scotland.

Northern Ireland’s status in the union has been
scrambled for some time. At the 2012 Olympic Games, Northern
Irish athletes were not automatically made part of team “Great
Britain,” since Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, only
the United Kingdom. Seven of its athletes competed for Great
Britain, while 13 represented the Republic of Ireland.

A major element of the Good Friday Agreement was the required
disarmament of paramilitary groups like the Catholic Irish
Republican Army (IRA) and the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force
(UVF), but this has never been fully implemented.

In November 2013, following the shooting of a teenager, the

Police Federation of Northern Ireland warned that the UVF
were “engaged in murder, attempted murder of civilians,
attempted murder of police officers. They have been engaged in
orchestrating violence on our streets, and it’s very clear to me
that they are engaged in an array of mafia-style activities.” The
UVF has also been accused of
racist mob attacks on non-Irish ethnic minorites in
Belfast. 

On the other side, fringe elements of the IRA
have sent letter bombs to government buildings, and Sinn
Fein leader Gerry Adams has warned that the
peace agreement is in danger of collapse over disagreements
pertaining to welfare reform (which could be seen as a sign of how
far we’ve come since The Troubles).

Adams himself was recently forced to revisit one of the darkest
periods of The Troubles, when he was
arrested in May and held for questioning for four days over new
evidence tying him to the murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10
accused by the IRA of collaborating with the British army. Though
Adams was released without being charged, and vigorously denies any
involvement with the murder, his arrest demonstrated how old wounds
are never too far from the surface in Northern Ireland.

None of this means that widespread sectarian violence will
return to Northern Ireland, nor does it mean that a referendum is
inevitable. But if the choice to leave the U.K. does present
itself, it has the potential to be far more divisive and painful
than Scotland’s.

The polls are open in Scotland, where voters have a very simple
“Yes” or “No” choice on the very complicated question of whether or
not they want to leave the United Kingdom, of which they have been
a part of for more than 300 years, and become an independent
country.

With current polling showing a razor-thin margin in favor the
“No” vote, there is speculation on what the referendum will mean
for Northern Ireland, comprised of the six northern-most counties
of Ireland, which are also part of the United Kingdom. The three
decades of constant violence between Catholics and Protestants (and
the British Protestant-dominated government) known as “The
Troubles” ended in 1998 with the
Good Friday Agreement, but it has always been a fragile and
shaky peace, one which has shown recent signs of fraying.

Unlike in Scotland, where the independence movement is
alternatively driven by
opposition to the U.K.’s nuclear weapons, support for an

increased socialist welfare state, as well as
nationalist pride, Northern Ireland’s divisions are so deeply
ingrained that the upheaval caused by Scottish independence could
fast track a
similar referendum there. 

Recent polls have shown that the ever-increasing Catholic
population of Northern Ireland would rather remain part of the U.K.
than join the other 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland. To
this,
Michael Brendan Dougherty of TheWeek.com asks:

But would they remain committed if Ireland’s economy rebounds
and the U.K.’s deteriorates? What if the broader project of the
United Kingdom decomposes in the face of Scottish nationalism? And
why would pro-union Catholics vote to stay in the union, when
unionism will be championed by parties that attract zero Catholic
votes?

Another question may be more disquieting to loyalists: Does
England even want Belfast? The same polls showed that a smaller
percentage of English people are committed to keeping
Northern Ireland. For many years, it has received the most
public money per capita in the union, while generating the
least. And many English find Northern Irish politics exasperating,
its style of unionism oafish.

Even Thatcher seems to have contemplated cutting
Northern Ireland off during the Hunger Strikes. Similar threats
were made by Westminster in order to broker the 1998 Good Friday
agreement. It’s hard to imagine David Cameron or his successor
giving emotional speeches about the role of Northern Ireland in the
United Kingdom, as Cameron and his associates have done for
Scotland.

Northern Ireland’s status in the union has been
scrambled for some time. At the 2012 Olympic Games, Northern
Irish athletes were not automatically made part of team “Great
Britain,” since Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, only
the United Kingdom. Seven of its athletes competed for Great
Britain, while 13 represented the Republic of Ireland.

A major element of the Good Friday Agreement was the required
disarmament of paramilitary groups like the Catholic Irish
Republican Army (IRA) and the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force
(UVF), but this has never been fully implemented.

In November 2013, following the shooting of a teenager, the

Police Federation of Northern Ireland warned that the UVF
were “engaged in murder, attempted murder of civilians,
attempted murder of police officers. They have been engaged in
orchestrating violence on our streets, and it’s very clear to me
that they are engaged in an array of mafia-style activities.” The
UVF has also been accused of
racist mob attacks on non-Irish ethnic minorites in
Belfast. 

On the other side, fringe elements of the IRA
have sent letter bombs to government buildings, and Sinn
Fein leader Gerry Adams has warned that the
peace agreement is in danger of collapse over disagreements
pertaining to welfare reform (which could be seen as a sign of how
far we’ve come since The Troubles).

Adams himself was recently forced to revisit one of the darkest
periods of The Troubles, when he was
arrested in May and held for questioning for four days over new
evidence tying him to the murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10
accused by the IRA of collaborating with the British army. Though
Adams was released without being charged, and vigorously denies any
involvement with the murder, his arrest demonstrated how old wounds
are never too far from the surface in Northern Ireland.

None of this means that widespread sectarian violence will
return to Northern Ireland, nor does it mean that a referendum is
inevitable. But if the choice to leave the U.K. does present
itself, it has the potential to be far more divisive and painful
than Scotland’s.