I Speak of Dreams

More Low Behavior On The Right

I am in favor of the state staying out of reproductive issues of all kinds. This means, of course, that the continuation of a pregnancy should be between a woman and her doctor.

Making Light has sponsored links in the left-hand column, below the fold. One is to SaveRoe (a Planned Parenthood link) that points out a disgusting comment Karen Hughes made this week:

How to Raise a Thug IV

Clarence (who has tomato trouble) wrote about a home or family thug training camp in his neighborhood.

Right here on our block, in the middle of a "preferred location" that is the choice of newcomers moving into our Tri-State area, there is a training camp for small terrorists.

Our Kind of Comic

So we were watching Tivo tonight, and came across: Maria Bamford. The site doesn't do her justice. She has this deft, stealth way of being absolutely enraged....in a way that you can listen.

Naked Ladies Against the Jihad

A particularly odd meme thingy is making the rounds, about a novel way of rooting out fanatical Islamicists hiding in American suburbia.

Beagle posts it just as it is.
Juliette posted it, but declined to play. She said she got it from Amy Ridenour, who got it as an e-mail, and likewise declines to play. Sean posts it as if it were real. This game site lauds American teamwork. Mu Beta Delta snickers over it.

Politically Correct

Oh, boy. I've been a member of Curves for about 5 months. I also do a bootcamp kind of thing.

Curves has been criticized in the media (see links at the end) and in blogs. Turns out some of the information is disputed.

How to Raise a Thug III

APRIL 27--Meet Elizabeth Lyvers and John Robert Gray. The dimwitted Kentucky couple was arrested Sunday for felony child abuse after taking pictures of Lyvers's two-year-old son smoking pot. The pair was nabbed when an employee at the convenience store where Lyvers, 24, and Gray, 20, dropped off their film called cops after seeing the offending images. According to Bardstown police, one photo shows Gray holding a pipe to the child's mouth while an unidentified man--who is being sought--lights the pipe (after his arrest, Gray acknowledged that the device contained marijuana). Lyvers's son--and a one-year-old fathered by Gray--were removed from the couple's home by state child welfare officials.

In case you don't get to the photos, these criminally insane idiots are white.

Previous examples.

Fear the Furries?

I knew about furries and plushies (warning: mild sexual content). I had inadvertenly found out about pony people (stronger sexual content warning). I guess I was dimly aware of Otherkin (warning: foil beanie alert, also thought protectors ON).

But now....a debate (well, a bunch of people standing up and shouting their opinions): Should we fear these people?

Joey de Villa told me about the debate. He said:

That's right, it's a debate about furries and otherkin, and it goes on and on and on, with trolls putting out the flamebait and LiveJournalers "rising" to the challenge with less debating skill than the omelette I had for breakfast.

Freedom Fighters or Thugs

I don't usually do political stuff, but this struck me as worthy (thanks, Scott)

A Hamas suicide bomber blew up two armed Palestinians who tried to rob him at gun point in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas claimed the “stickup men” worked for Israeli intelligence, while Palestinian security forces said the two were ordinary thieves.

I guess stupid criminals are a world-wide phenomenon. Even in Austrailia.

Nicole Townes and Adult Violence

I've had almost 900 hits today, lots looking for Nicole Townes. I wrote a digest of the story on March 11. In that story, I pinned the blame squarely on the adults, especially Monique Baldwin, who kept egging on the thugettes as they beat Nicole Townes.

Evidently AP put out a story about rising violence between girls, using Nicole as the lead-off. It is somewhat misleading, as this really was adult-inspired violence. It starts like this:

Subtleties of Mass Testing

Kimberly over at Number Two Pencil has a really good discussion of the subtleties of building a good test, responding to news reports from Oregon, where 10th graders are failing a math test in massive numbers (unlike last year).  Go read the whole thing.

I don't know if I'd call problem-solving tests in math "faddish," and such items are not automatically unsuitable for high-stakes testing. When the state's employers claim they need more citizens with solid problem-solving skills, they're right, and one way to test those skills is with this type of item.

But such items are more difficult to develop properly, and they may very well test a narrow area of the domain, making it hard to generalize the results to the overall math construct. What's more, that one item counts the same as the multiple-choice exam, so if none of the three options are appealing, an examinee is at a real disadvantage. There's research to suggest that examinees, when given a choice of topics, don't always do a good job of knowing what they're good at.