After its first major update in 20 years, the new guide for psychiatry will impact the diagnosis of ADHD, autism, depression, etc:

“The highly controversial decisions involved in producing the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, have a potentially broad impact: They can affect which services children receive in schools, what treatments patients receive from doctors and even how people are viewed by society.

Experts involved in the guidebook say the changes will give clinicians greater precision in diagnoses and treatments. Critics counter that the new language will make it too easy to turn the stresses of ordinary life into mental illnesses, resulting in some people getting too much treatment.

…The handbook plays a big role in American society. It determines which diagnostic codes medical professionals use for specific patients and can affect whether health insurance pays for treatment. The DSM’s wording also can dictate which social services people are entitled to.”

Full story here.

I want this mom on my police force:

“During the chase, the girl’s mother spoke with police on her cellphone. At the time, she was apparently not aware that her daughter had been put out of the car less than half a block from where she’d been taken, according to The Albuquerque Journal.

’Albuquerque police Chief Ray Schultz said neighbors began yelling, which is what made the suspect push the child out of his car,’ reports KOAT TV.

Fleeing from the girl’s mother on Interstate 40, the suspect “tried to fake an exit on Carlisle Boulevard,” the newspaper reports, citing police spokesman Robert Gibbs. After they left the interstate, the mother succeeded in stopping the man’s car in southeast Albuquerque.

’She essentially pitted him,’ Gibbs said, referring to a police maneuver that involves ramming a car to stop a chase, The Journal reports.”

The full story also reports that another young girl had been abducted in that neighborhood last week, and was returned after being sexually assaulted. This quick-thinking, determined mom might very well have led police to the man who committed that crime.

Two weeks ago there was a headline about a North Carolina teen who was barred from having a picture with her one-year-old son in her high-school yearbook. The students had been encouraged to bring personal items to pose with, and Caitlin Tiller felt that her son was her greatest gift.

Teachers felt the picture would “send the wrong message” to other students. But Caitlin’s message was a positive one: She felt her son had inspired her to graduate early and continue on to college. She told the local news station, “He helped me get to where I am today. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without him.”

Now we have a story out of Michigan that two teens are being told they need to retake their yearbook pictures to hide their baby bumps. Apparently the district superintendent feels it is necessary because of the state’s abstinence-based approach to sex education.

One of the girls made the point, “What’s the difference of letting me walk for graduation, letting me walk around the school? It’s the same thing.”

This all reminds me of when I was attending a Catholic all-girls high school in the 1980s and pregnant girls transferred into our school because they were kicked out of others. I remember thinking that those other Catholic institutions might actually be encouraging their students to secretly get abortions so they woudn’t have to drop out. Not very pro-life.

But of course, it is a fine line to walk: Can we prop up those who have accepted the responsibility of their actions — and are doing the best they can — without simultaneously promoting teen pregnancy?

The good news is that our nation’s efforts are working. Teen pregnancies and births are both down more than 40 percent since their peak in the early ’90s. So I don’t see how a few pictures will have that much of an effect.

As a conservative, I definitely prefer abstinence-based sex ed. And as a feminist in the traditional sense, I see nothing wrong with showing our support for those young women who are continuing to pursue their education. We can send the message that pregnancy and parenting — while not the best paths to take as a teen, and ones that are best avoided until marriage — are not a dead end. It will be a tougher journey, but we will be there to help them make their way.

From today’s New York Times:

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

We often speak of “Mommy’s mommy,” and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.

The rest here.

One of the world’s most notable food malcontents, Mark Bittman, just reviewed a book by one of the world’s most self-righteous food nannies, Michael Pollan. I’ll save you the time and bottom line it for you: The food malcontent liked the book written by the food nanny.

Bittman describes Pollan’s new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, as an exploration on how food is transformed by cooking. Predictably sycophantic, Bittman begins by instructing the reader on why Pollan deserves our respect, saying that Pollen is responsible for the seven “most famous words in the movement for good food,” which are “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Most Famous? Sorry Julia, Alice, and  Mr. Beard.

Of course, Bittman is correct in characterizing Pollan as a high priest to those who follow and feel a part of the foodie movement, those unquestioning masses who burst into tears at the site of organic kale, “happy” chickens, raw milk, and poor children weeding inner-city-school garden plots. To them, Pollan is the Dear Leader of the modern foodie culture.

Bittman doesn’t try to hide his glowing approbation for the man who has, more than any other food writer, made hating conventional and reasonably priced food hip and cool. Pollan gets a gold star for urging shoppers to “shop on the perimeter of the store” and to “stay out of the middle of the supermarket” where a lot of perfectly healthy — and more important, more affordable — food is stocked. Pollan’s vilification of food found in the middle aisles coupled with his constant drumbeat that people must eat “fresh and local” food in order to stay healthy is probably one of the reasons that 98 percent of frozen food products are experiencing flat or declining sales in this country.

According to new research, frozen food’s declining sales are also partly due to consumers’ concerns about the nutrition and quality of the product. In other words, people don’t think frozen food is healthy. Such an unfortunate misunderstanding of frozen food’s good qualities is particularly distressing considering the work being done (with your tax dollars) to encourage Americans to eat healthier. While fresh vegetables are, of course, a fine option, frozen food, in many instances, is more nutritious than fresh food because produce destined to be frozen is picked at its peak — unlike food meant for the produce aisle which must be picked earlier for shipping. Food picked at its peak and then frozen locks in the nutrients. This is why frozen food is a healthy, convenient, and cost effective means of getting good food.

The other benefit of frozen food is that it’s already washed. I’m not about to suggest that washing produce is an impossible task, but I will say that it’s nice to open and microwave a bag of frozen peas some nights. Busy moms and dads understand that short cuts like this are always helpful. Yet, Pollan sees convenience as a slippery slope to a frozen-pizza lifestyle — where people rely entirely on prepackaged convenience meals provided by big bad business. In fact, Pollan all but blames rising obesity rates on big business, telling Bittman:

We know why people don’t cook: because the marketers of prepared food have taken over our kitchens. . . .

Big Food has convinced most of us: “No one has to cook! We’ve got it covered.” This began 100 years ago, but it picked up steam in the ’70s, when Big Food made it seem progressive, even “feminist,” not to cook. 

But was it really “Big Food” that made us less interested in cooking, or was it the fact that women — the primary cooks in the average household up until the 1970s — started leaving the home to go to work? For Pollan, however, this isn’t a chicken and egg question. He knows which came first — big business and its discouraging impact on American home cooks.

This absurd conclusion misses the reality that the food industry simply reacted to the demands of the growing number of working women who no longer had time to cook for their families. Hence convenience foods — frozen lasagnas, pizzas, and all sorts of things that made it easier for moms to hold down a job and put dinner on the table, too.

Naturally, Pollan’s solutions involve big government. While he does encourage the first lady to “use her bully pulpit to promote home cooking” — something I agree she should do — Pollan ultimately sees encouraging people to cook as a government responsibility. He says:

First, we need to bring back home ec, but a gender-neutral home ec. We need public health ad campaigns promoting home cooking as the single best thing you can do for your family’s health and well-being. A tax on prepared food, but not on raw ingredients, is another good idea.

I have a better solution: Michael Pollan should stop denouncing whole sections of the grocery store. He should spend a little more time perched up on his bully pulpit encouraging busy parents to purchase healthy, moderately priced items that are stocked in the middle of the store. Canned and frozen food is a good solution for many families struggling to provide their children healthy food at a good price.

Pollan will always have his followers and his fawning fans (like Bittman) but the real advice we need to give parents is to cook for your family. Do the best you can using a combination of fresh, frozen, canned, convenience, raw, and whole ingredients. What matters is making the effort to provide your child a homemade (or half-homemade) meal. After all, no one’s perfect . . . except Pollan in Bittman’s eyes.

Don’t say we weren’t warned by Ike. From the Washington Post:

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, Cinderella was on the phone with her next client. “Are you ready? Everybody there? Okay, here I come.”

The princess put away her cellphone, gave her crown a final tweak and climbed out of her Kia, ready to rock her fourth birthday party of the weekend. This Cinderella is a gown about town.

“I think I’ve done more than 800 parties now,” said Rebecca Russell, owner and principal Cinderella of Princess Parties of Virginia, as she guided her voluminous blue skirts along a Chantilly cul-de-sac. “It’s just getting busier and busier.”

It is an enchanting time to be a professional party princess. On the tails of a massive marketing blitz of all things tiara-ed, the ancient childhood appeal of the fairy-tale heroine has exploded into a modern princess-industrial complex. Amid thousands of princess products and millions of begowned little girls, it turns out there is a decent living to be made by chipper-voiced entrepreneurs ready to displace the old party clown.

“It’s just grown like crazy,” said Heidi Martin, who recently started a party princess company in Stafford and now books a stable of 25 Cinderellas, Belles and Pocahontases for gatherings all around the region.

Even in career-obsessed Washington, where legions of professional women command six-figure salaries and care more about office shoes than glass slippers, parents find themselves helpless in the face of the fierce princess passions of their 3-to-6-year-old girls.

My 6-year-old daughter is in this phase, and by far the worst part of it is the glitter. It’s everywhere. But it could be worse I guess — my daughter’s favorite princess right now is Merida from Brave, so she runs around the house with a crown, a floor-length (glitter-covered) gown and a bow. A warrior-princess maybe?

 The rest here.

I was recently invited to be apart of a gender-studies forum at a university up in Denver. I love these invitations because it allows the opportunity to mix with others who see the world a good bit differently. I wrote up some reflections on the experience over at Boundless.

Many things strike me about the gender-studies crowd, but one thing that is so obvious is that, as an “academic” discipline, they sure just make it up as they go along. And they are far more at odds with any current science than anything you will get from any religion department. There seems to be more evidence for Bigfoot than there is for the basic assumptions these folks operate under.

Two stunning examples of how the earnest folks over at MSNBC view children (and use them).

1) Here’s Melissa Harris-Perry explaining who your children “belong to.” Consider this is a very intentionally scripted promo piece, not a careless comment.

A blog post on The Atlantic last week (also picked up by the Daily Mail) details the circumstances surrounding a family being kicked off a Denver-to-Baltimore United Airlines flight because they asked that a violent PG-13 movie being shown on the drop-down television screens be turned off to prevent their four- and eight-year-old children seeing the movie.

The movie being shown was a moderately successful Hollywood action film called Alex Cross, which, according to the parents involved in the incident, was rated by United’s own in-flight magazine as “T” for “Adult Themes.”

Here’s the movie’s description on IMDB:

 A homicide detective is pushed to the brink of his moral and physical limits as he tangles with a ferociously skilled serial killer who specializes in torture and pain. 

Now, doesn’t that just sound like a fun movie for the whole family? Here’s a review from a website that advises parents on family-friendly films:

The violence isn’t as extreme as, say, a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it’s probably equivalent to one of the newer Bond films. In other words, it’s not just shootouts, but also scenes of torture, a decapitated head, and a pregnant woman killed for pleasure by a villain who takes joy in inflicting pain. Even iffier? In the end, the movie’s message seems to be that even officers of the law sometimes need to take a morally questionable path toward justice. Also expect some language (“s–t,” etc.), a scene with a lingerie-clad woman, and lots of GM vehicles.

Hmmm . . . decapitation, torture, and murdered pregnant women. It’s hardly Finding Nemo and it certainly makes these parents seem reasonable in their request to have their children spared seeing this violence.

#more#After these parents requested that the monitor be turned off, the flight attendant expressed concern for the folks sitting behind the family who would not be able to watch the movie (because clearly we should worry about the adults who will be robbed of this cinematic experience). Luckily, those passengers proved reasonable, telling the flight attendant that they did not need to see the film. Yet the attendant still refused citing lack of authority — because who doesn’t need the okay from the airline’s legal department to turn off a television?

When the parents asked if the captain had the authority to turn off the screen, the attendant told them that they would have to ask the captain after the plane landed . . . you know, after the blood and guts had been spilled on screen in full view of the children.

Shocked yet? Shocked at the utter stupidity of the cabin crew and the lack of common sense, decency, and kindness they extended to these parents who have every right to control the things their children see (particularly when they are paying customers just like the rest of the passengers)? Well, get ready for more shocking details.

More than an hour later the captain, [name withheld for now], announced that due to “security concerns”, our flight was being diverted to Chicago’s ORD. Although this sounded ominous, all passengers, us included, were calm. After landing a Chicago police officer boarded the plane and, to our disbelief, approached us and asked that we collect our belongings, and follow her to disembark. The captain, apparently, felt that our complaint constituted grave danger to the aircraft, crew and the other passengers, and that this danger justified inconveniencing his crew, a few of whom “timed out” during the diversion, and a full plane of your customers, causing dozens of them to miss their connections, wasting time, precious jet fuel, and adding to United’s carbon footprint.

Obviously, the Captain’s behavior was outrageous. One certainly hopes the airline reviews his competence to fly. Yet, there’s an issue that goes beyond the captain’s action.

United Airlines should take responsibility for choosing this wildly inappropriate in-flight film — particularly on a plane with drop-down screens. Unlike some PG-13 movies which receive that rating mainly for the adult storyline or for adult language, (which parents can deal with by not providing the child with earphones) the Alex Cross has visible violence which parents cannot control.

And if you think you can tell a four- and eight-year-old to simply avert their eyes (like one insensitive travel blogger suggested), you don’t know kids. I strictly limit my children’s television viewing, but when it’s on, they go into a coma-like state. Even if it’s on mute, my children’s eyes will stare, lifeless, at the screen.

Perhaps these airlines need a reminder that they charge parents for children’s tickets and therefore should afford a parent’s wishes a little respect. United Airlines should be ashamed of their behavior and rethink not only their in-flight selection, but how they treat people traveling with children.

From the Sun-Times:

Parents urge Emanuel to walk same school routes their kids will take

“Walk the walk,” parents said Tuesday morning at a demonstration at City Hall, calling on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to try out the often dangerous routes between the schools that Chicago Public Schools officials aim to close and the schools where their children will be sent instead.

Starting Tuesday, groups of parents will walk the routes to point out problems along the way, parents said at an emotional news conference at City Hall organized by the group Raise Your Hand.

“Gangs are going to interact with our children. I don’t want to see no child harmed,” Avanette Temple said of Delano Elementary School, 3937 W. Wilcox.

If the school board approves the closing, Delano students will be joined in their current building by children from Melody Elementary, 412 S. Keeler, more than half a mile away. The school will be called Melody.

“Mayor, you said you were going to take care of our children,” Temple said, crying. “I need you to walk that walk. We have to do it, our children have to do it.”

The rest here.

I’m a mom of three little boys. BOYS.

Life can be a little messy in our house. And, truth be told, I sometimes feel like I’m an unpaid short-order cook in the county jail . . . that is, when I’m not an unpaid laundress at the county jail. But you know what’s really nice? It’s nice when companies try to figure out what I want and what will make my day go by a little smoother. You know why I appreciate this? Because Mother Nature isn’t one of your girlfriends and she’s not going to come over to sit with the kids while I go have a mommy-timeout at the nail salon. Want proof? Watch Survivor.

Luckily, companies are trying hard to tap into that mom and dad demographic. You know who I’m talking about, the “good grief, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in seven years” demographic. That’s the demographic to which, sadly, I belong, and I kind of like the fact that companies are trying to impress me.

I like cheese sticks, single-serving applesauce, and JELL-O and yogurt cups. I love that some genius at StarKist came up with the idea to stick a tiny spoon, mayonnaise, relish, and some crackers on the side of an easy-to-open can of tuna. I love the already sliced apples that now come in Happy Meals and the fact that fast food restaurants figured out that square cartons of milk don’t fit in car cup-holders. I love squeeze-y yogurt packs and those adorable boxes of mini-penne and tiny bow-tie pastas. Snack packs of goldfish and crackers are a life-saver and who doesn’t love tossing a kid a 100-calorie serving bag of cookies. I love disposable diapers (sorry, hippy cloth-diaper devotees). I love fitted sheets, and kid-sized towels, and modern strollers. I love (the now-unavailable) drop-side cribs. I love dishwashing detergent that comes in tiny little packets and I love those laundry pods — those ingenious little one-stop shops for sudsy goodness. Baby products have evolved to such a degree that my mother now actively resents these products being absent during my baby years.

Why do I love these things? Because I’m tired. I’m tired of messes, and cling wrap, and washing tiny plastic containers, and sometimes it’s nice to throw a cheese stick in my kid’s home-packed lunch. I like it when companies think about the mommy demographic because I’m tired of cleaning up the detergent spills on top of my washer.

Yeah, yeah . . . first world problems. I get it. But can’t we just celebrate — for once — how fortunate we are to live in an economy where the market responds to parents’ demands? That some guy or gal gets a paycheck to tell the corporate heads what Julie — the tired mom of three energetic, mess-making little boys — needs to make her life just a smidge easier? That’s pretty cool, right? I’m no different than most moms. I want convenience, short-cuts, and a smattering of hassle-free products.

What I don’t want is some do-gooder worrying that I’m not doing my job properly. What I don’t want is some celebrity food writer with a live-in nanny and housekeeper making me feel guilty for occasionally letting my kid have some goldfish crackers and telling me kale chips are super easy to make (do these people actually wash the kale — a rather time-consuming endeavor — or do they consider the sand and grit just a good fiber source?). What grates on me is when these nannies assume I don’t know how to keep dishwasher and laundry pods out of the mouths of my children.

Concern that kids will mistake these small laundry pods for food or candy is a particularly bizarre issue, made even more bizarre when a United States Senator decided to warn the American public of the dangers of these laundry pods. Apparently forgetting that children mistake basically everything for food, New York senator Chuck Schumer said of the laundry pods: “I don’t know why they make them look so delicious.”

Except that kids don’t really think that way. They don’t just think laundry pods look delicious; they think everything looks delicious. Kids are well known to stick just about anything in their mouths. Reasonable moms know this. So, maybe Senator Schumer should advise parents to start acting more reasonably by putting these pods (and basically everything that shouldn’t be consumed by a child) out of the reach of children? Might a little personal responsibility be in order here?

And, as long as we’re trading horror stories; how about one about pour-able detergent, in which a friend of mine told me that the reason he and his wife switched to the single serving pods of detergent was because one his children poured detergent on himself and it was a hassle to clean up both him and the floor. As my friend said of his own experience with the laundry pods, “we’ve never had a problem with pods because all of kids know that we do not keep food on top of the washing machine.”

Smart Dad. Smart kids.

Look, I get it. People care. But wouldn’t it be nice if they just kept their caring to themselves. Let me care about my own kids and trust me to have the sense to keep dangerous items on high shelves.

More importantly, let’s not discourage industry from coming up with these innovations, innovations that make my life just a little easier.

Even though my fellow NRO writer David French pretended to like Woody Allen movies during our short period of dating, he began watching high-body-count movies as soon as I said “I do.” The more explosions, aliens, and patriotic themes, the more enthusiasm he expressed as he walked out of the theater. The new movie Olympus Has Fallen — about the coordinated attack of North Korean terrorists on the White House — seems like the type of movie my husband (and maybe other NRO readers) might enjoy.

According to Rebecca Cusey’s review:

There’s something about the narrative that hits a sweet spot in the zeitgeist. It’s the sense of America hit from without by barbarians. It’s feeling of America as Rome, battered and tested, but America finding deep within the courage and strength that made her great in the first place.

With lots and lots of explosions. 

She concludes:

Some critics will surely hate the flag waving and simplicity that the movie projects. It lacks nuance. It’s too black and white. We never sense the depth of the bad guy’s suffering soul. Too rah-rah, patriotic, basic good versus evil.

They’re right. And that’s why you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. 

Read her whole review here, and enjoy the trailer below.

A Tampa bus driver has been fired after video surfaced of her — literally — kicking a special needs student off of the school bus:

Hillary has now announced she now supports same-sex marriage after many years of opposing it. Actually, Hillary’s articulated support for the natural family has been quite clear and well thought out through the years, significantly more so than many of her liberal peers trying to walk a tight-rope for political reasons.

Here are two of the most notable examples:

Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman.

And, from It Takes a Village:

[E]very society requires a critical mass of families that fit the traditional ideal . . . an adult mother and father and the children to whom they are biologically related . . . both to meet the needs of most children and to serve as a model for other adults who are raising children in difficult circumstances. We are at risk of losing that critical mass in America today.

Is it conceivable that both Clinton and President Obama, who has recently “evolved” on the issue, did not recognize this “fundamental civil right for all American citizens” (as they phrase it in the current, sound-bite tested rhetoric) before now? Or did they not really believe what they previously said about the importance of marriage as an institution binding men and women to one another? Either conclusion is deeply troubling if we are to take them at their word. 

Shocker: The shoes Sarah Jessica Parker wore while playing Bradshaw in the HBO series and movies have ruined her feet.

Joseph C. Phillips — the actor who played Denise’s husband on The Cosby Show (and later became famous as Justus Ward on General Hospital) is speaking out after a social-studies teacher asked his 15-year-old son if he was mentally unstable. What would cause a teacher to ask such a question? The Blaze reports:

 

Phillips explained for radio host Tony Katz on Saturday that California social studies teacher James DeLarme was walking by when he saw Phillips’ son and his friends looking at the picture. The 15-year-old has been working part time and chose to buy the Airsoft BB gun with his earnings, his dad said, and wanted to show his new purchase to his friends.

The teacher “snatched” the camera out of his hands, and when the teen asked when he would get it back, the teacher reportedly responded: “That’s for the police to decide.”

“It’s just a picture, Tony!” Phillips told the radio host. “There were no threats involved; there was no horseplay, monkey business happening at the time. It was my son’s camera; he shows it to his friends, who are all very interested and excited about it as well. The teacher happens by, snatches the camera, and that’s when the real nonsense began . . . ”

The teacher then allegedly took the camera to another teacher, who said she was “disturbed” by the image. After scrolling through the entire memory and returning the camera, the teachers began to question the “mental state” of Phillips’ son, he said.

Read the whole, ridiculous story here. My favorite line was Phillips’s assessment of the social-studies teacher who initially questioned his son: “I’m not sure he’s qualified to teach social studies. He certainly isn’t qualified to psychoanalyze my kid.”

For Christmas, I got my two oldest kids calligraphy pens to make their Lord of the Rings elvish writing look more authentic. (I’m married to this guy, so they didn’t really have a chance to escape their geek heritage.) However, I didn’t know how lucrative calligraphy could be, at least if you are employed by tax payers. Apparently, sequestration has caused the White House to shut its doors to tourists coming through Washington, but not to cut the salaries of these three people:

Patricia A. Blair, who has an annual salary of $96,725, and her two deputies, Debra S. Brown, who gets paid $85,953 per year, and Richard T. Muffler, who gets paid $94,372 every year. 

I can’t say anything bad about this dad’s actions:

A Watertown man has pleaded guilty to a criminal charge for smashing up a head shop after his adult son overdosed on bath salts from the store.

Dan Avery, 49, pleaded guilty Friday in Jefferson County Court to a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree criminal mischief. He was sentenced to a one-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay $638 in restitution for the damage he did to Tebb’s Headshop in Watertown.

Plus, you gotta love that Avery called 911 on himself:

Avery was arrested in July after he went to Tebb’s the day after his 24 year-old son was hospitalized after overdosing on “glass cleaner” that he’d bought at Tebb’s.

Avery drove to the store from the hospital and asked the clerk if the store sold bath salts or glass cleaner, Avery has said. The clerk then showed him the products and instructed Avery how to use them, Avery said.

He told The Post-Standard in July that he “just went crazy” in response to seeing his son in the hospital. He smashed a glass countertop and a couple glass ashtrays, then threw glass pipes from the shelves at the store clerk, Avery said.

Afterward, Avery returned the bat to his truck, went back into the store and lectured the clerk.

“You’re a sick man to sell this to these kids, knowing it’s gonna twist their minds, ” Avery remembered saying. “You’re pathetic.” Then Avery asked the clerk for a phone, called 911 and waited for police to arrive and arrest him, Avery said.

The Miami-face-eater attack, which was blamed on bath salts at the time, happened in May 2012. Governor Cuomo went on to ban the synthetic drugs in August 2012.

Recently, Todd Palin and his partner Scott Davis headed out again on their annual Iron Dog race.  As you heard many times during the hysteria of the 2008 election, he’s won the race several times — four at last count!  This year, after traveling over 2,000 frozen miles, they sped across the finish line in Fairbanks.  

In a very classy move, he donated his winnings to the Chris Kyle Memorial Fund.  See a photo of a decal on his snow machine honoring the American sniper here.

David Brooks has an op-ed today on President Obama’s SOTU proposal to increase funds for early childhood education. Some excerpts:

Today millions of American children grow up in homes where they don’t learn the skills they need to succeed in life. Their vocabularies are tiny. They can’t regulate their emotions. When they get to kindergarten they’ve never been read a book, so they don’t know the difference between the front cover and the back cover.

But, starting a few decades ago, we learned that preschool intervention programs could help. The efforts were small and expensive, but early childhood programs like the Perry and Abecedarian projects made big differences in kids’ lives. The success of these programs set off a lot of rhapsodic writing, including by me, about the importance of early childhood education. If government could step in and provide quality preschool, then we could reduce poverty and increase social mobility.

Let’s drop the political correctness here. What Brooks is saying is that we have millions of American children who have failing parents. We have kids from single-parent homes. Kids whose parents have never bought them a book. Kids who are being raised with little to no respect for education.

But somehow, the government, can fix this? Can replace parents?

Brooks, after admitting that the data on Head Start shows it isn’t working, writes:

Enter President Obama. This week he announced the most ambitious early childhood education expansion in decades. Early Thursday morning, early education advocates were sending each other ecstatic e-mails. They were stunned by the scope of what Obama is proposing.

But, on this subject, it’s best to be hardheaded. So I spent Wednesday and Thursday talking with experts and administration officials, trying to be skeptical. Does the president’s plan merely expand the failing federal effort or does it focus on quality and reform? Is the president trying to organize a bloated centralized program or is he trying to be a catalyst for local experimentation?

So far the news is very good. Obama is trying to significantly increase the number of kids with access to early education. The White House will come up with a dedicated revenue stream that will fund early education projects without adding to the deficit. These federal dollars will be used to match state spending, giving states, many of whom want to move aggressively, further incentive to expand and create programs.

As probably one of the few conservatives in the history of the world to have sent their son to a Harlem public school, let me offer my opinion: this won’t work.

The school I sent my school to was a charter of sorts, but was created before there were charter schools. It was called Central Park East and made famous in the Meryl Streep movie Music of the Heart about teaching the violin to kids from Harlem, a core part of the curriculum for select students at school. Since the school was a NYC school controlled by the DOE, but allowed to uses its own curriculum, the entrance requirements for the kids focused more on making sure the parents bought into the school’s teaching philosophy than if the students were good kids or not. Basically, the school wanted parents who a) understood that CPE teaches differently than the rest of the DOE schools and b) were going to be involved.

No teacher, no program, no amount of money can replace an involved parent. Involved parents make sure their kids do their homework. Involved parents make sure their kids are on time and not missing too much school. And most important, involved parents value the education and help the teachers make the school better.

Don’t get me wrong. I think our education system, especially for children with failing parents, needs a major overhaul. But the first step to making the system better is to realize and accept that all parents are not created equal. This is evidenced in the superb documentary, Waiting for Superman, about Harlem parents and the lottery process to get their kids into a charter school, and a better education. They want options. They are demanding options. But school teacher unions and Democrats won’t give them to parents. Brooks thinks the news on the Obama reforms “so far. . .is very good.” 

I guess Brooks missed the whole Obama-Democratic-Union axis-of-mediocrity and their continued attempts to end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. 

I’ll end with one last Brooks excerpt:

These programs do not perform miracles, but incremental improvements add up year by year and produce significantly better lives.

Incremental change. That’s it. That’s what Brooks wants for billions in taxpayer money? A recent Pew study on second-generation immigrants in America shows the folly of Brook’s incremental change argument. Some of the study’s major findings:

Educational and Economic Attainment: Adults in the second generation are doing better than those in the first generation in median household income ($58,000 versus $46,000); college degrees (36% versus 29%); and homeownership (64% versus 51%). They are less likely to be in poverty (11% versus 18%) and less likely to have not finished high school (10% versus 28%). Most of these favorable comparisons hold up not just in the aggregate but also within each racial/ethnic subgroup (e.g., second-generation Hispanics do better than first-generation Hispanics; second-generation whites do better than first-generation whites, and so on).

And. . .

Belief in Hard Work. About three-quarters of second-generation Hispanics (78%) and Asian Americans (72%) say that most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard. Similar shares of the immigrant generations of these groups agree. By contrast, 58% of the full U.S. population of adults feel the same way, while 40% say that hard work is no guarantee of success.

Immigrants to America — both legal and illegal — aren’t waiting around for incremental change. In one generation, the children of immigrants are better off than the parents and view hard work will lead to success.

Late this summer, Toyota began airing a very provocative commercial in Japan for their snappy little 2013 Auris hatchback. The spot features a saucy topless model supposedly drawing our attention to the car, but of course the commercial could be hawking second-hand thumb-tacks for all the viewer cares. Only the sultry car-model exists:

Johnnie Moore, author of a new book called Dirty God, wrote an article on FoxNews examining how Jesus “was, is and would be a capitalist” if he were dropped into America today. He begins by writing, “It would not surprise me if Jesus recruited his disciple Matthew, Capernaum’s chief tax collector, just to get one more taxman off the street.”

Well, that goes against the oft-repeated claim that — if he were hanging out in the United States today — Jesus would be some sort of wealth redistributionist, camping in Union Square with the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Moore states three reasons for his belief.

1.  First, Jesus encouraged his followers to exclusively practice voluntary, personal charity. 

2. Secondly, in two awfully capitalistic moments, Jesus once stated outright that “a worker deserves his wages (Luke 10:7),” and delivered an entire parable praising the profitable, investment strategy of some workers while condemning the single man who didn’t make a profit as “wicked and lazy.” 

3. Thirdly, Jesus didn’t see the government as the answer to society’s greatest moral and social ills. In fact, up until the very end of his life, he fought against his own disciples who were imagining a revolution that would end in Jesus being set up as an earthly king.

What do you think? Read his full piece here.

Her name is Saige and she’s fighting against cutting funds for education!

Saige Copeland loves spending time on her grandma’s ranch, riding horses and painting. Her school made the tough choice to cut art classes, which means she’s lost her favorite subject. So when her grandma decides to organize a “save the arts” fundraiser and parade to benefit the school, Saige jumps on board. She begins training her grandma’s beautiful horse, Picasso, for his appearance in the parade. Then her grandma is injured in an accident, and she wonders what she can do to help. Can she ride Picasso in the parade and make her grandma proud? Can Saige still raise money to protect the arts at school? Author: Jessie Haas. Paperback. 128 pages. Ages 8+

I’m thankful my daughter picked Caroline for Christmas instead, whose “beloved papa” was imprisoned by the evil British during the War of 1812.

What does a father do with his infant son while his wife is away? Videographer Emio Tomeoni made this video for his wife so she could see exactly what goes on. Very funny:

I gave a paper in D.C. last week on the real war against women, the war against women’s fertility. The day after my talk, a man in the audience forwarded this to me. “How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society” is from The New Republic, hardly a stooge of the Bishops’ Conference.

“The scary consequences of the grayest generation” is the subtitle. As of 2010, the average age of a first-time mother is 25.4, as opposed to 21.5 back in 1970. That means a lot of women are older, much older, than the average. So, what are some of the consequences?

• The risk of birth defects associated with Artificial Reproductive Technology is larger than people realize.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had defects. 

• Advanced age of the mother increases the likelihood of trisomy:

The risk that a pregnancy will yield a trisomy rises from 2–3 percent when a woman is in her twenties to 30 percent when a woman is in her forties. 

In a trisomy, a third chromosome inserts itself into one of the 23 pairs that most of us carry, so that a child’s cells carry 47 instead of 46 chromosomes. The most notorious trisomy is Down syndrome. There are two other common ones: Patau syndrome, which gives children cleft palates, mental retardation, and an 80 percent likelihood of dying in their first year; and Edwards syndrome, which features oddly shaped heads, clenched hands, and slow growth. Half of all Edwards syndrome babies die in the first week of life.

• And, advanced age of the father has risks associated with it. As men age, their DNA does not replicate as precisely. Increased risks of both autism and schizophrenia have been associated with advanced paternal age.

Researchers in Iceland, using radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men pass on more de novo — that is, non-inherited and spontaneously occurring genetic mutations to their children as they get older. In the scientists’ study, published in Nature, they concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a 20-year-old to bequeath de novo mutations to his children.

We are experimenting on children. We have no idea of the full impact of artificial reproductive technology or advanced parental age on our children. We want to believe that it is possible to delay conception until women are “ready” for children. Delayed childbirth was the goal of the radical feminists. We have achieved that goal, and we are doing almost anything to avoid looking at the data showing the very real problems with it. As society lurches from one disaster to the next, I think it is about time we rethink some of our premises. Was this “having it all” thing really worth what we are paying for it? And do we really have the right to make kids pay for it?

Just asking. 

My thoughts on the hook-up culture, intended for all students, male or female, straight or gay. 

My answer to the scientists behind this study: duh.

I know not every NRO reader agrees with Kathleen Parker, but she’s spot-on today with her challenge to the president to address the epidemic of “fatherlessness” in America:

One of my great hopes for a Barack Obama administration — and thus one of my personal disappointments — was that he would use his bully pulpit to emphasize the importance of a two-parent family, and especially of fathers, to children’s well-being.

Few understand better than the president the value of a present and involved father. Much of his literary work and his examined life pertains to his own absent father. By his example, he has certainly demonstrated his own commitment to parenting — and his family is a source of pride for all Americans. But the true story of fatherlessness in this country can’t be repeated often or forcefully enough.

This is not a new story.

Children who grow up without fathers tend to fall into patterns of destructive behavior — from drug use and truancy to early promiscuity, delinquency and, in too many cases, incarceration. Children raised in fatherless homes are also more likely to grow up in poverty, which is no fault of their mothers but is a fact.

Also well-known is that these pathologies and consequences are more prevalent in the African American community where, as it happens, most children are born to unwed mothers. Is this the fault of the mothers? Absolutely not. Can a child raised by a single mother prosper? Sure, but it is the exception, including the president, that proves the rule.

Here’s another rule: You can’t solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge it. Yet in today’s sensitive environment, to even suggest a problem that might feel offensive to some is to risk being labeled an “-ist” of some variety, followed by a public flogging.

Therefore, to suggest, as University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia recently did, that blacks and Hispanics are falling behind in education because they tend to come from single-parent families (largely mothers who are both poor and often uneducated) is pure blasphemy.

The rest here.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give an Ethiopian child who can’t read or speak English a tablet computer and you create the next Bill Gates:

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

The rest here.