Your Shampoo Will Kill Someone

NYT Blog Post: “The Airport Security Follies”
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html

consider for a moment the hypocrisy of T.S.A.’s confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away. The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you accept it or you don’t fly.

The rest is equally worth reading.

New century, old education?

So this NYT opinion article on primary/secondary education makes a couple of really excellent points, the first as quoted below:

The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th … [our kids] need something better than a post-World War II system in a post-9/11 world…

We are certainly climbing a steep technological-advances curve. My grandchildren will almost certainly play videogames with their minds alone (see this article from the NYT, or this one from the Washington Post - I also saw one about chimps and radio cars, but I can’t find it now…). They’ll play with robots, live much of their lives online, and I’m pretty sure they won’t even need cellphones any more. Instant communication and information access will be a given. Annnnd so on.

That being the case, education will have to look different, no? What should it look like? I’ll put my two cents in here (what else is a blog for, after all?!?)

… wouldn’t it be better to return to the three R’s and history (world history, ladies and gentlemen!), make school days shorter, and then have some other kind of learning after lunch? Art/painting/sports/etc etc etc. ? The problem with a lot of modern education, seems to me, is that we specialize too early, in sports, in education, in whatever you like. I vote, hand out basic skills, allow one or two ‘additional’ classes in highschool, and encourage activities for the rest.

I’ll have to ask my sister (doing CityYear in a tough city, highly impressive) if this would even remotely make sense in the average school system … but I guess I’m voting for a return to a simpler education – perhaps even a Montessouri approach in lower school. I’ll have to ask, but I suspect one runs into crowd control issues in a crowded school where parents are either uninterested in discipline, discipline destructively, or aren’t around to discipline in the first place ….) So yeah.

The second issue quoted is about teacher quality – which (to me, at least) seems to come down to incentive.

A president for 9/12

Check out this NYT Opinion article by Thomas L. Friedman.

I often feel Friedman is simplifying things a bit too much, but I really agree with him here:

… I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12 … our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance … Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are.

This is a recurring pattern in U.S. politics; political candidates – especially Presidential candidates – tend to run on past military service (Vietnam and WWII anyone?!?) and on past crises solved. The public tendency to vote viscerally rather than intelligently only exacerbates the problem. Herd mentality produces herd results, yadda yadda blah. Ain’t going to change this time around, right? Still, check this out:

Look at our infrastructure. … We used to be the gold standard. We aren’t anymore. Last July, Microsoft, fed up with American restrictions on importing brain talent, opened its newest software development center in Vancouver. That’s in Canada, folks. If Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can’t America?

So again, lotsa rhetoric (I’m not sure Disney World has too many issues with people trying to blow it up..) but the main points hold. The US is slipping up here. Personally, I suspect it’ll be a good thing for us, overall, not to be running the world, but I hope our (next?) Executive branch has the sense to accede to the inevitable without turning things into some kind of nuclear holocaust …

So what’s the point?

1. The US is losing world dominance
2. We can’t keep running on past issues
3. We may have to admit that a “war on Terror” is really a war on ideas – and ideas are notoriously hard to kill with bullets… ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/opinion/30friedman.html?em&ex=1191384000&en=3038778814600735&ei=5087%0A

Women: Reason, Rants, Rights, and Responsibilities

There are an incredible number of comments about this article in the NYT:

September 25, 2007, 8:53 pm

A Happiness Gap?

There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women. Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.

What has changed – and what seems to be the most likely explanation for the happiness trends – is that women now have a much longer to-do list than they once did. They can’t possibly get it all done, and many end up feeling as if they are somehow falling short.

Why do you think men now appear to be happier than women?

With 600ish comments and counting, I’m seeing:

• The blame game (men/women/Bush/society/history/religion)
  • These people are mostly crazy, in my opinion. …
• The no-stress peeps (they see it, but they’ve sidestepped, so why is this such a problem?)
• The WTF?!?!?! folks.
• The arch intellectuals.

I’ll let you figure out which category i fall into :P

.. .. seriously, though, I do believe that one person can’t have/do it all. I’m just not sure this means I should give up my dreams/interests/intellectual abilities to start raising children because i suspect i’ll have wanted to.

My opinion: Compromise, not compulsion or capitulation, ought to rule our lives.

This is scary

I’ve pasted the article below in the case of it becoming unavailable via this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/opinion/19mon3.html?em&ex=1172034000&en=a62c4d8c568f28fc&ei=5087%0A

~**~

NYT Editorial

Making Martial Law Easier

Published: February 19, 2007
A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president’s use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.

The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”

Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation’s governors.

There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation’s governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.