About that 6-year-old boy accused of "sexual harassment" for kissing his schoolmate's hand.

I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about this yesterday, and I see this morning that Glenn Reynolds — calling the boy "the littlest casualty in the war on men"  — is linking to James Taranto — who's blaming Obama (because of a requirement that schools protect students from sexual harassment).

I agree that someone that young should not be labeled with an offense that contains the word "sexual." (The school district, barraged with criticism, has relabeled his offense "misconduct.") And I would locate the issue of suspending him within the larger problem of the "zero tolerance" approach.

But I do think that the school is right to forbid kissing. The boy's mother, who naturally wants to defend her child, tells us that the children were "boyfriend and girlfriend" and that the girl "was fine with it." That may make the misbehavior less severe, but it does not take it out of the range of what a school should forbid.

By the boy's report, it happened "during class, yeah": "We were doing reading group and I leaned over and kissed her on the hand." That isn't acceptable in-class behavior! The school should forbid that. I don't understand saying it's fine for boys and girls who like each other to freely express that affection with hand kissing during class. How about a little support for the school teachers who expect discipline during their lessons? You're not allowed to whisper back and forth or pass notes either. This is basic classroom respect. Have we all forgotten?

From the 7-year-old girl's Christmas list: "A little thing that can turn into anything at anytime."

From "My Kid's Insane Christmas Wish List, Annotated." (Via Metafilter.)

Also on the list: and "A pet puppy. Border collie with a peacesign coller, and a leash" and "1,000 bucks."

The dad's annotations are not as enjoyable as they'd be if he'd resisted appealing to Deadspin readers by using the f-word repeatedly. Not that I don't use that word. Just that he's interacting with the innocent expression of his young daughter, and — even though she's not reading this (not yet, anyway) — it doesn't work to say things like "The fuck is this?" and "Great. Fucking great."

Too bad, because otherwise this is seems to be great material. And maybe I want to take a stronger position on appropriating the sweetness of children for cheap, adult yucks. I know that when I was a young girl, it hurt me to hear adults finding great amusement in what I only understood years later to be how adorable I had been long ago when the concept was quite unknown to me.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said...

American Girl Dolls are the perfect Grandmother-to-Granddaughter gift, if you can afford it.

File this information away, Althouse, just in case :) Not sure if you can get them through the althouse portal.

Well, you sure can! Here's Saige, the American Girl Doll of 2013, and here's her border collie, Rembrandt, who comes with a leash. Don't know if it's a peace sign "coller." Seems to me that if the father did a little more poking around in Amazon, he'd have figured out that the child wasn't requesting a real border collie, just an accessory for the Saige doll she wants.

And thanks, again, to all who've been doing your shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

"Since 1965, women with children have logged increasingly more time watching television and driving..."

"... and increasingly less time playing with children, doing chores, and exercising, according to a new report published this week in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings."

In 1965, mothers of children aged 5 to 18 spent 14.2 more hours a week being physically active than being sedentary. In 2010, they spent 3.8 more hours a week being sedentary than they did on physical activity.

Interesting, but why did they put driving in the same category with watching TV? Because one sits to do it? Chauffeuring the kids around used to count as one of the child-rearing tasks. I suspect the reclassification has to do with the focus on the woman getting enough exercise. We're so much less concerned with what's good for children that helping them get to their various events and social occasions is equated with lolling about in a recliner.

And why was "playing with children" seen as physically active? Much playing with children involves sitting around while they do things with toys and games. Building blocks, dressing dollies, playing Candyland and Old Maid, operating the electric train — these were all done sitting down. Yeah, there are those running and jumping around kids' games that we played in the 60s — tag, hopscotch, monkey-in-the-middle — but Mommy didn't play those games. It would have been bizarre for Mom to join in on, say, jump rope.

Much of the work of raising children has to do with simply being present and watchful over long periods of time. It's not an exercise routine. If Mother is concerned about burning calories she's probably less vigilant. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and my mother didn't play with me. But she was around, relatively nearby when I played. Kids played with kids. Go out and play. Find something to do. And we did. Whether she sat down and whether that sitting involved a TV doesn't matter. It so happens that my mother stood, read the newspaper, and listened to the radio. But you see my point: Child-rearing is not an exercise routine, and our present-day focus on adults getting exercise should be kept separate.

People today are really confused, it seems to me in my old age.

"Singing and acting are actually very similar things."

Says Harry Dean Stanton:

"Anyone can sing and anyone can be a film actor. All you have to do is learn. I learned to sing when I was a child. I had a babysitter named Thelma. She was 18, I was six, and I was in love with her. I used to sing her an old Jimmie Rodgers song, 'T for Thelma'." Closing his eyes, he breaks into song: "T for Texas, T for Tennessee, T for Thelma, that girl made a wreck out of me." He smiles his sad smile. "I was singing the blues when I was six. Kind of sad, eh?"

ADDED: Here's "T for Texas," sung by Joe D. Johnson. I'm not familiar with this singer, but get the feeling he was better known for "Rattlesnake Daddy."

"No, the [Chick-fil-A] CEO did not jump out of the hidey-hole slide, point at me... and yell 'You're one of the gays!' as I had imagined."

Writes Carolyn O'Laughlin, the Director of Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College, in The Wall Street Journal (which I'm reading because a reader emailed asking what the author's point is, whether her position as Director of  Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College is relevant to that point, and why The Wall Street Journal is publishing this sort of thing).

O'Laughlin is a member of a 4-person family consisting of 2 adult women and 2 male children, and they're on a road trip where they want to stop at the restaurant with a play area, and it happens to be a Chick-fil-A, which she put on her "list of places to avoid" when its CEO "went on record indicating his support for only families that meet the 'biblical definition of the family unit.'"

But O'Laughlin has a moderate approach to using her spending power to nudge businesses. She wanted to favor J.C. Penney, for using Ellen DeGeneres and "families like ours" in their advertising, but there was a pothole in the parking lot, so she went somewhere else, and she'd like to reward Starbucks, but it's overpriced, so she snubs it.

Noting that life is "complicated" and you've got to see the "nuance" and be "practical," she goes to the Chick-fil-A, buys the food, but hates the atmosphere — not because it's anti-gay, but it's noisy and chaotic (because of the very play area that made her overcome her political aversion to the place).

"Let's get out of here." I say to my boys.... Standing outside, my wife and I look around with road-trip decision paralysis. A kind Chick-fil-A employee comes toward us with four trays. "Y'all could sit on these if you'd like," she says. We smile, thank her, and set up a picnic on the grassy island between the parking lots of Chick-fil-A and Burger King. We're having it our way.

So what's the point? It seems to me that the point is that life is complicated, and we make individual choices to suit our own needs and tastes, some of which include politics and morality, and part of what we get to choose is how hardcore we want to be about where we go and what we buy. Also, the lower-down employees of a company are individuals with their own lives, making their own choices, just like you, and it's good for everyone to remember that.

This not the point of the article, but just something I'd like to add: Picnicking at ground level in a parking lot is not a good idea. Not only is it unfair to the business that has provided tables and chairs and wants to project an image of tidiness, but it's not a clean place to eat. Grassy does not equal clean. Grass doesn't magically repel the filth from the cars, and it attracts dog poop, human sputum, and dog and human pee.

China changes its 1-child policy to allow 2 children if one parent was an only child.

I can't tell from the CNN report what happens where both parents were only children, but I'm guessing the rule is a maximum of 2 children, and that rule applies if either or both parents were only children.

And, for what it's worth: China announces it's abolishing labor camps. 

ADDED: Here's a more substantial article:

For decades, most urban couples have been restricted to having one child. That has been changing slowly in some cities, which have had rules on the books that couples can have two children if both parents are single children. That policy will be further relaxed nationwide. Many rural couples already have two, or sometimes more, children....

If carried through, the relaxation would mark the first significant nationwide easing of family-size restrictions that were put in place from the 1970s, said Wang Guangzhou, a demographer at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

“This is the first time that a central document has clearly proposed allowing two children when a husband or wife is an only child," said Mr. Wang, in a telephone interview. “Now it’s just talking about launching this, but the specific policies have to be developed at the operational level.”

I note that if a couple has that second child, they are depriving their own first child of the right to have more than one child (unless that child marries an only child).


On the labor camps, the new rule is:

“Abolish the system of re-education through labor,” said the decision, which proposed expanding community correction to partly replace the system.

“This is a significant step forward,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher who specializes on China with Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization with headquarters in New York.

“It doesn’t mean that China is going to be kinder to dissent and to its critics,” said Mr. Bequelin. “But it’s an important step to do away with a system that not only profoundly violated human rights, but was also standing in the way of any further legal reform.”

"Kids React to Gay Marriage."

This video has gone viral.

Much as I support same-sex marriage and think these children are adorable, I have a few problems:

1. Using children to get out a political message. They're too young to consent, so it's an invasion of their privacy, and they're too young really to understand the issues, even if their out-of-the-mouths-of-babes opinions charm us (especially when we agree).

2. The video is edited, so we don't hear any "wrong" answers the videographers didn't want us to hear, and we don't hear the extent of the leading questions and promptings by the adults... which takes us back to point 1: using children. When you do things with children, that particular child's interests must be placed first.

3. These children — at least most of them — have probably already been indoctrinated. We're told they are "from California." What schools have they attended? What have they been told? Do they even know what sexual feeling is? Do they understand the issue basically in terms of being nice to other people and liking what you like?

10 least-impressive details in this NYT "Motherlode" piece by a man who's giving himself permission not to berate himself for being fat.

1. The name of the column is "Motherlode," but it's more Fatherload.

2. The man pauses, shirtless, in the middle of doing a diaper change, to gaze at himself in the mirror and contemplate his body.

3. The recipient of the diaper change is not only old enough to speak in full sentences, but is mature enough to notice his father's self-esteem issues and to boost his ego with a line — "You look great" — that's in the traditional category "Things men say to their wives" not "Things sons say to their fathers." (The latter category should not include any complete sentences delivered during diaper changes. "Things sons say to their fathers" during diaper changes should consist of little more than "da da.")

4. A grown man, who tells us he's not overweight, not only shames himself over his body, he shames himself for shaming himself and calls it "body bullying."

5. A grown man who's ashamed of his self-shaming attempts to counteract the shameful shaming by engaging in another, presumably better form of obsessing about his body which he labels "ironic 'fat talk.'"

6. It's not until the 10th paragraph that we learn he is not married to the mother of the diaper-using 2-year-old boy, and the way we find out is through one of the examples of his "ironic 'fat talk.'" He says he's "fond of asking my lady friend if clothing items are 'gripping my curves.'" Lady friend. You have a child, man. And you think banter with your girlfriend will amuse us? We're reading the "Motherlode" column, and we're still wondering about this poor boy and the effect on him. We don't enjoy this sudden appearance of the coyly named "lady friend"!

7. Finally, in paragraph 12, we get concern for the boy, which comes in the form of worrying about his inheriting the dad's physical and mental tendencies (putting on weight and self-shaming).  The concern about the contagion of bad personality traits almost immediately brings this man back to his own needs: "And at what point does being a good parent and setting a good example drain us of our personalities?"

8. His realization that he needs to refrain from self-shaming for the sake of his son immediately brings this man back to benefits for himself: "I’ll think more positively about my body and myself."

9. He's picked up that "my body, myself" duality that's been pandered to women since the 1970s. You are your body, mister. Deal with it.

10. The last 3 paragraphs don't even mention the boy. They're only about the man and his "lady friend."

"Mystery - a blonde angel without an identity."

"Greece riveted" by the "blonde angel" found amongst the (non-blond) Roma.

"Raising kids of color by white parents... requires a racial consciousness that is common in families of color, but rarely developed in white families."

Writes Frank Ligtvoet, the founder of Adoptive Families With Children of African Heritage and Their Friends. He's white, with 2 black children.

The National Association of Black Social Workers declared in a resolution in 1972 that transracial adoption was cultural genocide. The wording was, and is, cruel, but it is hard not to see its deeper truth: a Korean or black kid raised in a white world has lost his or her culture.

Black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) kids in transracial families belong to that family and also to the black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) community. Even if the white parents don’t like that idea — and there are too many who don’t — they will be confronted with it anyway.

Our daughter once threw a tantrum on a crowded street on the way to school, and the only way to move forward involved dragging. It was not a pretty sight, and a black woman who had witnessed the scene came up and, bypassing my partner, who was doing the dragging, addressed our child: “Is this your father? Is this your father?” She was claiming our daughter as part of the black community.

(None of my existing tags fit the race theme of this article. Racial politics, racial profiling, racial humor, racists, race and law, race and education, race and intelligence, race and pop culture. I resist creating new tags, but I had to do it here.)

Normally, we admire actors whose performance looks like real life. But if it's actually real...

... and we're being scammed into thinking it's acting, there's no performance that can impress us, only the illusion of performance.

Once you know it's real, you can't admire the acting. You could admire the nerve of the performers to go through the ordeal, but only if they chose to do it that way. Were they paid enough? Did they willingly submit to whatever surprises the filmmaker had in store for them? Did they know there were limits to what would be imposed on them? What power did they have to draw the line?

What if you knew that the actress in a rape scene had no idea what the scene would be and a willing actor was directed to rape her on the set? Assume that afterwards, she was convinced that it worked to produce what looks like a great acting performance, for which she might receive an Oscar, and she was persuaded to keep the director's methodology secret. But the truth slipped out somehow. Would you refuse to see the movie because of the way it was made? If others chose to see it, would you denounce them as moral cretins?

Related questions:

What did Alfred Hitchcock do to Tippi Hedren to produce the footage that became the movie "The Birds"?

Should an actor get drunk to play drunk?

Do we prefer to watch love scenes with actors who really love each other or actors who have to act like they love someone they hate?

Did Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie fall in love because they got so deeply into the roles they were playing in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and never found their way back to their previous personas?

If an actor stays in character for months — on set and off — is that acting or something like madness?

Are very young children playing movie roles undeserving of acting credit because their performances arise out of their childish inability to distinguish fantasy from reality?

What do they say to little child actors to make them cry and emote?  

Were animals harmed in the making of that movie?

"You need to help me make the bed."/"You need to take me to the ball."

Did you like that? You need to answer in your king's voice.

"To Fix Education Look to the Past."

That's the headline at #1 on the Wall Street Journal's "Popular Now" list, and I guess those words are working better to win clicks than the actual title on the essay from last Saturday "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results," which is framed around the story of a hardcore teacher from the 1960s, "a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky."

Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated...

The teaser on the sidebar "Popular" list got me to click, but my hopes are dashed. It's nice to look at the past for sighs and nostalgia and exclamations of "You can't do that today," but you can't look to this past and see how to fix education.

The essay writer, Joanne Lipman, does try to extract some lessons — "A little pain is good for you," rote learning works, etc., — but she begins with predictable disclaimers:

Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. 

(We're using "modest proposal" unsarcastically now?)

Lipman assures us that "Studies have now shown" that something she calls "conventional wisdom" — nurturing self-esteem and a joy in discovery of knowledge — is wrong.

Kupchynsky was a music teacher, and I don't know what went on in Ukraine that led to his ferocity and his relocation to a northern New Jersey high school, but he was off the norm even then. (I happen to be an authority on high school in northern New Jersey in the 1960s. I had 4 years of direct personal experience.)

Anyway, Lipman has a book to sell, about Kupchynsky, and maybe it will fire up the same crowd that got excited about "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" a couple years ago. Remember that? It was also about drilling youngsters into proficiency playing classical music.

But most of what kids need to learn isn't music performance, and those who get carried away thinking about strict music education ought to demonstrate their love of strictness by being stricter with themselves as they contemplate the effectiveness of different approaches to educating children. Consider whether there's something self-indulgent, sentimental, and even perverse in your dreams of fixing education by getting tough with children.

Did you instinctively resist my suggestion? Ah, you just took my tough test of whether you are serious about toughness.

And you failed!

The mutable sexuality of an internet celebrity.

Antoine Dodson, the hide-you-kids-hide-your-wife viral-video celebrity, has been tweeting about causing a pregnancy in a woman:

"I just became the happiest man alive!! My beautiful Queen and I are having a baby!!" he tweeted. "Wait what?" one user wrote. "Aren't you gay?" another added.

Last May, Dodson claimed he wanted "a wife and family" and "to multiply and raise and love my family that I create." Dodson explained in a series of tweets that he had become a "True Hebrew Israelite descendant of Judah" and referred to his former lifestyle as "foolish."

"I have to renounce myself, I'm no longer into homosexuality," he concluded.

ADDED: He doesn't seem to be denying his homosexual orientation, just rejecting the behavior urged by the orientation, which is exactly what many religions teach. He isn't claiming to be sexually attracted to the woman that he's gotten pregnant. You'd think if he were devoted to following traditional religious teachings he would refrain from pregnancy-causing behavior outside of marriage. Who knows what the whole story is?

There are several moral/religious issues that we can't disentangle in this particular case without knowing more. And I don't really need to know more about Antoine Dodson to go on with the issues raised in a more general fashion:

1. A man's desire to produce offspring is separate from his desire to have sexual intercourse with a particular human being, and many men of homosexual orientation have produced children with women who don't interest them sexually. One reason it's helpful to be honest and not repressed about homosexuality is so that people don't deceive themselves into entering sexually unsatisfying marriages.

2. A homosexual man who wants a family with children might attract a woman into a marriage (or other child-bearing relationship). He could be deceiving himself and her — which is very sad. He could be only deceiving her — which is just plain wrong. Or the 2 of them could be eyes-wide-open about what they are doing, which is, if they really understand what they are doing, a matter of individual choice.

3. It's a separate issue whether that man and woman, having formed a family like that, give each other permission to find sexual satisfaction with other partners. That's not traditional morality, but it is a matter of individual choice.

4. And it's a separate issue whether a man and a woman, having come together to bring a child into the world, must stay together to raise that child. This is the most serious moral issue, because the child isn't given any choice.

"Young men in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada have also fallen behind."

"But in stark contrast to the United States, these countries are energetically, even desperately, looking for ways to help boys improve," writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The Atlantic.

Using evidence and not ideology as their guide, officials in these countries don’t hesitate to recommend sex-specific solutions. The British Parliamentary Boys' Reading Commission urges, “Every teacher should have an up-to-date knowledge of reading material that will appeal to disengaged boys.” A Canadian report on improving boys’ literacy recommends active classrooms “that capitalize on the boys’ spirit of competition”— games, contests, debates. An Australian study found that adolescent males, across racial and socioeconomic lines, shared a common complaint, “School doesn’t offer the courses that most boys want to do, mainly courses and course work that prepare them for employment.”

This tracks the "Gendertopia" hypothetical I use in my Constitutional Law II class when I teach about Equal Protection and classification by sex. And it ties to the topic, raised in the previous post, about schools using nonfiction books to teach reading, an issue I tied to the boys-falling-behind problem here.

Hoff Sommers stresses recognizing the differences between boys and girls and taking steps to help boys (which of course lights a fire under those who've argued that girls have been held back and if anyone's going to get special help, it should be girls). I recommend avoiding all that drama and ideological struggle by embracing what are, after all, the best American values. We don't need to follow Britain and Canada. We should forefront individuality, autonomy, and freedom.

How? Have a variety of schools, built on different learning models that are built on preferences that  relate to things that could be portrayed as stereotypically male and stereotypically female, but don't talk about how the learning styles are male or female, and don't bias the individual children and their parents to match the boys to the boy style and girls to the girl style. Give them choice and freedom. If your son or daughter wants to learn how to read with science books, to experience a teaching method built on games, contests, and debates, and to figure out how things work by taking them apart and putting them back together, he or she could pick the school that works like that. And there's an equivalent school — perhaps with the cooperative projects and long periods of quiet reading — that can be chosen by boys and girls who flourish in that environment.

I realize that I'm being stereotypically feminine in wanting to move forward in a way that makes everyone happy and avoids discord, but I'm sure that the schoolchild version of me would pick the school built on the stereotypically male learning model. Don't dissuade girls like the young me from going to that school by calling attention to it as a solution for the problems of boys. And don't propagate the idea that boys are a problem, that masculinity is a disease! That's all so unnecessary, and it's offensive to the core American values of individuality and freedom.

I know Christina Hoff Sommers is trying to stir us up and we need to rouse ourselves, but once roused, people will fight, so let's have some impressive harmony-enhancing solutions at hand.

"If a possum takes up residence in your shed, grab a barbecue brush to coax him out. If he doesn't leave..."

"... brush him for twenty minutes and let him stay. Let a dog (or two or three) share your bed. Say the rosary while you walk them. Go to church with a chicken sandwich in your purse. Cry at the consecration, every time. Give the chicken sandwich to your homeless friend after mass.... Put picky-eating children in the box at the bottom of the laundry chute, tell them they are hungry lions in a cage, and feed them veggies through the slats. Correspond with the imprisoned and have lunch with the cognitively challenged. Do the Jumble every morning."

Tips from Pink — of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin — made public via obituary by her 6 children and 17 grandchildren.

She was 85, so the Richard Dawkins approach to thinking about child abuse applies (if you've got any inclination to condemn that "hungry lions" method of getting kids to eat vegetables).

Could you assemble a similarly charming list of tips from the quirkiest things your mother did? Consider the potential for matching the love these children and grandchildren showed and the alternative: Indict mom for child abuse.

The other day, when Meade and I were traipsing around in that Wisconsin landscape (the photo of which sat at the top of this blog for 18 hours), we were talking about stories people tell about the hardships they endured as children and, in mockery, we started listing the worst things that were done to us, some of which would, I think, be regarded as criminal child abuse today. For example: In the summer, I was taken to Ocean City, New Jersey for a thorough, painful sunburning. (And, no, it did not "turn into a tan," as some people used to say — and Meade still says — about the way their skin functions.)

"This is exactly the kind of photo you shouldn't post of your child."

That is: the kid's face.

Paranoia (of facial recognition) strikes deep.

The list of the adultress, the unfair headline, the "orgasm of life," the twice-seen movie, the arcane logo, and the corporate cult.

I'm no fan of adultery, but "Google mistress more into sex than 'love' and kids," trashing 26-year-old Amanda Rosenberg (who's linked to Google co-founder Sergey Brin), is an awfully unfair headline.

The NY Post has gathered its information about what Ms. Rosenberg is "into" from a lightweight blog post of hers titled "The 10 Least Inspiring Sentences on This Lululemon Tote." Here's the blog post, which has a picture of the begging-to-be-mocked tote bag. #1 on the list is "1. Children are the orgasm of life." Calling that sentence "uninspiring" — I'd call it a lot worse — is not taking the position that one is not "into" kids. The blog post ends with Rosenberg identifying herself as "a misanthropic Brit who lives in San Francisco and works in Silicon Valley," and "She's currently struggling to come to terms with Californian optimism and cannot believe someone actually wrote the sentence 'children are the orgasm of life.'"

Sounds about right to me.
I was in a Lululemon store the other day — just throwing away time while waiting for my ride after seeing a movie. (I saw "Blue Jasmine" a second time, on the theory that a second viewing would inspire me to write a blog post in the style of this 9-point list I did on "Doubt." But I didn't have that experience of details bursting out and themes connecting up that I'd expected based on loving the movie the first time and getting over an hour's worth of conversation out of it. Instead the movie on second viewing turned out to be exactly what I thought I saw the first time. Knowing the story in advance, I admired the sharp storytelling, done through expert writing and editing, but I didn't uncover any cool listables.)

I didn't know I was in Lululemon, because I didn't see that word anywhere, and I looked. I saw the logo, which I had to look up just now to determine that I was, in fact, inside the store whose handbag Amanda Rosenberg mocked. At the time, seeing the logo on the sign over the door...



... I thought "Omega?" (Ω.) At the Lululemon website now, I see:

The lululemon name was chosen in a survey of 100 people from a list of 20 brand names and 20 logos. The logo is actually a stylized "A" that was made for the first letter in the name "athletically hip", a name which failed to make the grade.

So... it doesn't look like an "A," and the store's name doesn't begin with "A." Is it supposed to feel like a secret club, like you're hip (athletically) if you get the logo? Is it somehow connected the way yoga is (sort of) religion, so replacing the name with a seemingly unrelated symbol — like the fish that means Jesus — delivers the vibe that you're entering a cult? Is it connected to "I am the alpha and the omega"?

I Google "lululemon cult" and get 218,000 results. "Lululemon's Cult Culture: Get Fit or Die Trying""

Lululemon wants you to know it's "elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness" and "creating components for people to live long, healthy and fun lives." But, dig deeper, and you'll learn about Landmark Forum, the ultra-secretive, eerily cultish educational series, which Lululemon employees are "strongly encouraged" to attend. Before you're in line for Landmark, you're bombarded with Brian Tracy motivational CDs and a book club that culminates with Atlas Shrugged.

"12 Utterly Bizarre Facts About The Rise Of Lululemon, The Cult-Like Yoga Brand":

The founder is an Ayn Rand fan and the company takes its values from Atlas Shrugged....

Wilson believes the birth control pill and smoking are responsible for high divorce rates—and the existence of Lululemon itself....

"A rare look at the luon empire of Lululemon/The story of a Vancouver business that inspires cult-like devotion":

Part of the initiation and training in the company, known as “on-boarding,” involves setting your vision and goals, referred to as one unit, “vision-and-goals,” in company parlance....

“You’re a whole brain, a whole body, a wholehearted person. You should be focusing on all these things. When your life is firing on all cylinders – so when home’s working, personal’s working, career’s working, health is working – you’re going to be great at work. It’s just going to happen,” [said  said Margaret Wheeler, senior vice-president of Human Resources (“People Potential”)].

"Lululemon: A Cult, a Phenomenon or Just a Great Brand":

Lululemon promotes its brand, its community and its culture with local events, some quite large in scale. In New York this September, an event entitled, “The Gospel of Sweat” was staged at Riverside Church inviting people to “Come together to build community, engage spirituality, and celebrate fitness!”

It's just a brand. Do you want your comfy clothes made out of cotton or synthetic fibers? It all depends on how much you sweat. Sweating sounds lowly, and there's religion(ishness) to elevate things. The Gospel of Sweat. But it's not religion. It's not religion because they obviously don't care about heresy.

And because Ayn Rand was a big old atheist. What's that "A" for again?

Which reminds me...



... do not commit adultery. It will expose all your old blog posts — and all your new movie scripts — to unsympathetic reinterpretation.

Rush Limbaugh cites facts that raise the "the obvious question: How do elections happen the way they do?"

The facts:

CNN is down, the networks are down, while conservative books sell through the wazoo and end up number one on the New York Times list.

The most listened to radio talk shows are conservative.  The most watched cable news network is conservative. ... We own books; we own talk radio; we own cable news. 

His answer is:

We're nowhere in the pop culture.  We are nowhere in movies.  We're nowhere in television shows.  We are nowhere in music.  Nowhere!

On the fiction side of books, we're nowhere, in terms of what conservatism is, being cool and plot lines and that kind of thing.  We're not in the classroom, we're not in academia, we're not the professors and the presidents of universities.  We are not school superintendents.  Those are very crucial because they get people when they're young, young skulls full of mush. They get to make and form those brains and basically propagandize them and indoctrinate them however they wish.

It wasn't liberals who originated the idea that has most famously been phrased: "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man." That was the methodology of traditional religion. Liberals — of both the right and left — should value the autonomy of the young. They should revere it. They should perform their sacred duty to develop and guide young mind. Yet they fight for the power to indoctrinate. Shame on all of them.

The central characters in good pop culture stories tend to be free and independent, so Rush's frustration that conservatives can't get hold of the "fiction side" of things is reason for hope. Left-wingers of the big government variety should have the same problem appropriating pop culture. Even if the various stars mouth left-wing propaganda, they can't imprint that agenda in the stories, which require strongly autonomous heroes and heroines.

Chicago Public Schools provides "safe passage" maps for school kids...

... to help them deal with new school assignments after the closing of 47 schools and to soothe parental worries about children crossing rival gang territories and vacant buildings and lots.

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said... “This is nothing new.... Kids have been crossing gang lines for years to go to school. We have a program in place that’s very clearly worked. We’re doing more of it this year based upon the school closings."...

Because so many schools closed this year, CPS added nearly $8 million to the program and is hiring an additional 600 people to escort students along designated safety routes....