In his post “Excellence vs. Mediocrity“, James Frederick Dwight demonstrates part of the problem with today’s schools society:

I should say here, clearly, that I do not blame any of the above changes on my friends who ran/run the program and who, to a person, are people I admire deeply. Rather, like any good institution, they have been offering what their customers demand. In this case their customers (the parents) want to be told their children are special or at the very least don’t want to hear the opposite. I should also add the guts of the program remain exceptional and unchanged; it’s only the publicly visible portions of the program that have been hammered.

The election was supposedly one about values. Well here’s a couple of values for you – I value excellence and I value honesty. As a program our hands were tied because the parents didn’t feel the same way. And little will change in our schools until that changes.

The whole post is worth a read.

I completely understand the desire to hear that someone you care about is exceptional, but demanding that schools (which nurture and grade only one or two of the plethora of possible ways one can be exceptional) recognize every student as exceptional is absurd. After all, as was pointed out twice during the movie The Incredibles, when everyone is exceptional, no one is.

I don’t see what the harm is in letting people have a solid understanding of what their potential is in certain areas. Everyone has their own strengths. Some people are exceptional in the area that school systems are designed to recognize, and those students should be recognized in school. Should the school system, ostensibly designed to educate students, be responsible for recognizing those students whose strength is an exceptional empathy for their fellow man? What about those who are simply very, very good at managing the strengths they have and putting them to their best possible use? A good sense of humor?

Parents need to learn (and teach their children) that just because children aren’t exceptional in those areas that a school is fit to recognize doesn’t mean they aren’t important, nor does it mean that they’re not exceptional in some other way that a school isn’t fit to recognize. We need to understand that not being exceptional isn’t an insult.

Jason of Fish Or Man writes about his recent arrest in Spokane, WA.

I’ve read (though, unfortunately, I didn’t bother saving a link) the accusation that Jason was “spoiling” for this fight, that the “auto ballet” in the beginning of the story serves as evidence that he was just some jerk looking for trouble.

While I don’t think he was trying to start this fight (that is, I don’t think he was actively trying to get pulled over), the content of some of his other open-carry posts does make me wonder whether he’s truly carrying out of a desire for self-defense or a desire to start a legal battle. My conclusion is that it just doesn’t matter. Whether he’s carrying because he’s glad he has the right to carry a weapon, or he feels endangered when he doesn’t have the weapon close at hand, or even if he was carrying the weapon purely in hopes that some gun control nut will start an argument, he has the right to carry that weapon.

If I felt like proving a point about First Amendment rights, I could go stand in front of the Alabama courthouse that recently had its Ten Commandments monument removed and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top of my lungs, and the First Amendment would protect me. The Constitution doesn’t care if I’m standing there exercising my rights because I believe my religion requires it. The Constitution doesn’t care if I’m exercising my rights out of a desire to protest the removal of the monument. The Constitution wouldn’t even care if my entire purpose was just to annoy people. Rights aren’t dependant on intentions.

Assuming Jason’s story is true (I believe it is, but with the internet, you never know.), the way he was treated is completely outrageous. (Though, as Steve, of Hog on Ice points out, arguing with cops can only lead to problems. Even if you’re sure you’re right, it’s better to take the ticket and then contest it later.) Reading his blog makes it obvious he’s not the type of guy I’d really like to spend a lot of time with (possibly because the encouraging-arguments-in-public thing reminds me of myself, when I’m not actively reminding myself not to be a jerk (I try, but fail miserably on occasion…)), but that doesnt’ change whether or not he has rights. Even if his story isn’t true, I worry about the amount of hostility that people receive just for being gun owners. When the write to bear arms is infringed, when only “special” people (read: cops and soldiers) can have weapons, we’re one step closer to a totalitarian state.

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Mostly unrelated: Joe Huffman has “Just one question” for you:

Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?

He seems pretty confident that the answer is either “No,” or “I don’t know.” In either case, he points out that if one can’t prove that restricting certain freedoms makes people safer, then there’s no reason to restrict that freedom.

I think he makes a good point.

Jack Shafer calls him a First Amendment Chicken Little. In his column, Getting the Chills, E. J. Dionne, Jr. covers recent arrests of journalists who refuse to reveal their sources.

Now, according to The Post, the Justice Department has been asked to consider opening a criminal investigation into leaks about the satellite program. Will laws designed to keep secrets from our enemies be invoked to keep secrets from the taxpayers?

I think Dionne misses the real point here. Laws designed to keep secrets from our enemies must also apply to keeping secrets from taxpayers, because the United States is a free society, and by revealing things to the citizenry at large, we must assume our enemies will see it, too.

YAnd of course there is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s interminable investigation in the Valerie Plame case. At issue is who leaked to columnist Robert D. Novak the fact that Plame, the wife of Bush administration critic Joe Wilson, was a covert CIA agent. It’s illegal to disclose the names of undercover agents.

You might think Novak would be the journalist on the griddle. But for now it is Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine who are being threatened with spells in the slammer — up to 18 months. Their “crime” was to talk to sources about the Plame story and then refuse to tell Fitzgerald who those sources were. As Cooper dryly told CBS last week, “Putting me in jail won’t reveal who leaked to Robert Novak.”

Putting Cooper in jail probably won’t reveal who talked to Novak. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is to punish Cooper for his obstruction of an investigation that had legitimate reasons to ask who his sources were. His source(s) may or may not have been the same as Novak’s, but they did provide information about this case, and may have information that can help federal investigators track down the leak.

They participated in a story that helped in the outing of a covert CIA agent. Surely anyone whose head isn’t entirely filled with rocks can see why there would be laws to protect this kind of classified information. There’s a legitimate reason for the government to want to know where this leak is. Sure, Miller and Cooper can keep their mouths shut, but tossing them in prison for it seems a fitting punishment. If I had knowledge of a federal crime and kept my mouth shut, I’d be tossed in prison (since the 5th Amendment only provides for my right to remain silent to protect myself). Being a journalist doesn’t provide for some magical protection that allows one to flaunt the law.

What makes a journalist, anyway? Blogs are, to some, online journals. Couldn’t anyone be a journalist? Surely, Matt Drudge provides information to a larger section of the public than some reporters at, say, the Charleston Gazette. How do we determine which people are worthy of protection from laws about obstruction of justice? Simple answer: if it’s obvious that a law has been broken in providing the information, a reporter owes it to the public to reveal his or her source. If the source won’t come forward without a promise of anonymity, then it’s up to the reporter to decide whether or not to quote the source. If the source is quoted and protected, then the reporter must be prepared to face the consequences for being an accomplice in a crime.

According to MSNBC, murders of pregnant women seem to be on the rise. It’s difficult to be sure, because pregnancy isn’t a statistic that’s usually collected with regards to murder, so the collected data isn’t there to examine.

The idea that someone would commit murder because they think fatherhood would “cramp their style” shouldn’t shock me. After all, no one complained very loudly when, during one of the presidential debates, John Kerry said that he believed abortion was murder, but that he still supported its legality. That stance, essentially, says that women can commit murder if they don’t feel ready for motherhood — why should I be shocked when men choose the same path?

Please don’t take that as my expressing support for these men, or even saying that I believe that the abortion (which I don’t like, especially when it’s used as just a form of after-the-fact birth control, but I’m not entirely ready to say it should be outlawed) is the same thing as a man killing the woman carrying his child.

The MSNBC report includes quotes from Pat Brown, a Minneapolis criminal profiler:

For some men, she said, the situation boils down to one set of unadorned facts: “If the woman doesn’t want the baby, she can get an abortion. If the guy doesn’t want it, he can’t do a damn thing about it. He is stuck with a child for the rest of his life, he is stuck with child support for the rest of his life, and he’s stuck with that woman for the rest of his life. If she goes away, the problem goes away.”

Again, while I don’t support this point of view, it does bring up an inconsistency in the way men and women are treated with respect to children. Is that inconsistency problematic? It bothers me on one level, but it’s not like men can choose to carry the baby to term, so there are reasons for the differences.

Of course, maybe these are isolated incidents, not indicative of an increase in violence against pregnant women. Without a full set of data, it’s hard to determine whether there really is a problem, much less what the source of the problem is.

While Rachel Lucas was saying “It’s 71 degrees at my house, suckers!” and complaining about the coming cold front that would drop temperatures to 20 degrees in her area, I was complaining about the four degree weather that was haunting us here.

Two or three days ago, I would’ve said that 40 degrees was an unbearable temperature. After scraping the ice off my van and driving to work shivering waiting for it to heat up just a little in single-digit misery, I’m rather enjoying the 40 degree heatwave.

More regular blogging will commence soon. I apologize to all two of my readers for not having written for this blog more often.