I Speak of Dreams

Fighting Back Against "The World Is Soooo Dangerous Now": Free Range Kids

Lenore Skenazy let her son Izzy make his own way home from Bloomingdale's in New York City a couple of weeks ago, and wrote about the experience in the New York Sun.  It was a man-bites-dog story, as Izzy is only nine--.  Lenore wrote another column for the Huffington Post:

Last week I wrote a column for my newspaper, The New York Sun, titled, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride The Subway." It basically said that I let him do this because he wanted to take a trip solo, he knew how to read the map, and I had every confidence that he could find his way home.

Two days later, said son and I found ourselves on the Today Show, MSNBC and FoxNews, trying to convince anchor after anchor after anchor that:

1) This was not a crazy idea - as they could see from the fact the kid was sitting there, grinning. And

2) I am not a crazy mom, as they could see from...

Well, that's the point. Not all of them could see. The mere fact that I'd let my son out of my sight made me seem nuts to more than a few people, who wondered why didn't I follow him, or keep checking in with a cell phone, or wait until he was 34 and balding before I let him go out on his own.

Skenazy is looking to give her son "a longer leash."

But here's what I've learned from all the folks who don't want to do that, and send bile-filled notes instead: For some reason we live in a society that sees little difference between letting a child frolic in the front yard and letting a child frolic in front of a firing squad. It's impossible for people to calculate the difference between real and remote risks.

So she's started a blog, Free Range Kids, to counter the coddling and hypervigilance -- even countering the helicopter parenting phenomenon.

At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.

Go and tell your story of raising Free Range Kids.

 

Innuendo and Hysteria over McDonald's Joining the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce

On March 12, The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce announced that Richard Ellis, vice president of communications for McDonald’s USA, has been elected to its board of directors.

Those opposed to homosexual rights were immediately up in arms and have proposed a boycott of McDonald's.

Below the fold, more details, and the post that won Ed Brayton's Ridiculously Hyperbolic Rhetoric of the Week award.

But before you read the rest, do these things:

• Call  (or better yet, buy a meal) at your local McDonald's and tell the manager that you are proud of McDonald's commitment to diversity.
• Write or email McDonald's President, congratulating McDonald's on their commitment to all Americans:
• Andrew J. McKenna, President McDonald's
  McDonald's Plaza
  Oak Brook, IL  60523
  Phone: 1-800-244-6227
  or: 630-623-3000
  Fax: 630-623-5004
  E-Mail: Use the form at McDonald's Website (see below for the text of my message)

Message to Doc Searls: Get Totally Well, Soon!

Doc thought he had strained a muscle or something but it ended up being much more serious.

Those of us who used to be younger ought to heed the message: Obey The Warning Signs!

Here's hoping he makes a total and complete recovery.

Willingham on the Value of Practice

Practice Makes Perfect--But Only If You Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection, by Daniel T. Willingham (American Educator, spring 2004

Some evidence that a great deal of practice, and not just talent, is a prerequisite for expertise is the "ten year rule," which states that individuals must practice intensively for at least 10 years before they are ready to make a substantive contribution to their field. What about prodigies like Mozart, who began composing at the age of six? Prodigies are very advanced for their age, but their contributions to their respective fields as children are widely considered to be ordinary. It is not until they are older (and have practiced more) that they achieve the works for which they are known.

How are such studies relevant to the average student? Few students will become a Mozart, Shakespeare, or Einstein, but if we want children to understand and appreciate excellence, we would do well to send the message that excellence requires sustained practice. The athletes and artists revered by many students excel not solely by virtue of their talent, but because of their hard work. Edison remarked that "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." The relative percentages of talent and practice are unclear, but the necessity of long periods of focused practice to exploit inborn talent is not.

SIWOTI Syndrome

Someone Is Wrong On The Internet Syndrome.

Pretentious "Shamanic Journeys"

Chris is again hitting it out of the park on the spiritually pretentious.  Last week it was on The Shangri-la Delusion; this week it is bobos and purchasing shamanic wisdom.

I had to stop for a moment to let that sink in, find the deep bedrock substratum of my inner-racist Ur-tantric archetypal unconscious and have its way with the roof-brain chatter of my First World Western ego. Yippee ki yay, m0therf^cker!* I check my ears in the mirror. Hmmm.

Fundamentalist young earth creationists, IDers, and the homosexual agenda hysterics are such easy targets it is easy to overlook the other targets, but Chris doesn't overlook much.

=====

* yes, I bowlderized.  Get over it.

Photography and Racial Issues

Vogue Magazine proudly announced that the image to the left was "the first time a black man had been on the cover of Vogue."  Some people thought the image was racist; other people thought it wasn't.

Me -- if anything, it's sexist: the active, aggressive man and the passive woman.  But a big deal?  No.  Fashion photography, after all.  Both people in the image are self-consciously performing. 

The image I think is a big deal is the one on the righ: not posed, not taken by a famous and gifted photographer -- the people in the image are unselfconsciously  being.  The image is from the newspaper report of  a tragedy in Columbus, Georgia.  The  police officer (I suspect he is a motorcycle patrolman) is escorting a hospital worker into a hospital.

Twenty years ago there was a notorious civil rights march and counter-march in a near-by county,  Forsyth, which seemed to pride itself on its almost 100% white population. 

My gaze keeps switching from their clasped hands to each of their faces. Two worried people, one doing his job, escorting her to her job.

I'm not saying that everything's fine there in Georgia, racially speaking.  I'm just saying --twenty years ago those two people wouldn't have been walking together, and not hand-in-hand.   Recognizing that progress has been made doesn't preclude the idea there's a long way to go.

I read about the story here which led me here.

Hillary Clinton's Connection to Douglas Coe and The Fellowship

On March 25, 2008, Hillary Clinton criticized Barack Obama's religious choice: "He would not have been my pastor," and compared Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Don Imus.  As a white, pretty-much-unchurched woman, I didn't get the import of her words.  Rikyrah, writing at  Jack and Jill Politics, set me straight.  Rikyrah then pointed me on to the Booman Tribune, who reported on Clinton's association with Douglas Coe and the Fellowship, as noted by Joshua Green and Barbara Ehrenreich:

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of rightwing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family  reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs.

The Booman Tribune wants the Democratic Party leadership to step in and  "call this contest."  The Queen of Spain asked HRC to Step Down in February.  Yesterday Robert Creamer reviewed the math and asked the superdelegates to commit to Obama  now.

 

Reparative Therapy Exposed

Reparative Therapy seeks to change homosexuals into "normal heterosexuals". 

You should listen to this interview with Jeff Williamson at Box Turtle Bulletin on his experience with reparative therapy.  Mr. Williamson is an impressive young man.

Exemplary Blogging: Alonzo Fyfe's Open Letter to Ben Stein: A Must Read

The "documentary" Expelled has been much in the news, because on March 20, noted evolutionary biologist PZ Myers was refused entry to a showing, while his guest, the equally noted atheist Richard Dawkins, was allowed in.

I mentioned l'affaire Myers here, where this comment by JennyAlice sent me over to Atheist Ethics, the blog of Alonzo Fyfe, who wrote A Better Place. 

Back in August, 2007, Fyfe wrote an open letter to Ben Stein, on Stein's assertions in the  the documentary Expelled:

1. Belief in a  a being greater than man is basic to science
2. There is an "anti-religious dogmatism" active in "Big Science" and
3. "scientists and educators are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator."

Fyfe's letter reads in part:

However, the film (or at least descriptions of it) bring up the issue of freedom of speech, which is a moral issue, and that is the sphere that I write in.

The rest of the post is a patient refutation of Stein's three claims,  of how science actually works, and how Intelligent Design (ID) and creationism fail the test of science.