"I think that children are like animals that don't have any natural predators left and they're just not afraid of anything...."
"I know people want to get their kids and travel. I get that. However, I never flew until I was 19+ yrs."
That's putting it brutally — in the comments to the WaPo article "Flight attendants want to ban lap-babies on planes/Experts agree that flying with a baby in your lap is a safety risk, but regulators still allow it."
"The average child has its image shared on social media 1,300 times before the age of 13...."
The 3-year-old boy who won World Book Day.
"Founded at the pinnacle of the British Empire, the [Manchester Museum] is now undergoing a rethink..."

The picture depicts a group of birds, largely line drawings; all save the first are shackled on a wire or, according to The Washington Post, a "sine-wave branch" over a blue and purple background which the MoMA equates with the "misty cool blue of night giving way to the pink flow of dawn." Each of the birds is open-beaked, with a jagged or rounded shape emerging from its mouth, widely interpreted as its protruding tongue. The end of the perch dips into a crank....
"Perhaps no other artist of the 20th century matched Klee's subtlety as he deftly created a world of ambiguity and understatement that draws each viewer into finding a unique interpretation of the work."...
Sometimes, the image is perceived as quite dark. MoMA suggests that, while evocative of an "abbreviated pastoral", the painting inspires "an uneasy sensation of looming menace" as the birds themselves "appear closer to deformations of nature".
They speculate that the "twittering machine" may in fact be a music box that produces a "fiendish cacophony" as it "lure[s] victims to the pit over which the machine hovers".
Kay Larson of New York magazine (1987), too, found menace in the image, which she describes as "a fierce parable of the artist's life among the philistines": "Like Charles Chaplin caught in the gears of Modern Times, they [the birds] whir helplessly, their heads flopping in exhaustion and pathos. One bird's tongue flies up out of its beak, an exclamation point punctuating its grim fate—to chirp under compulsion."
Arthur Danto, who does not see the birds as deformed mechanical creatures but instead as separate living elements, speculates in Encounters & Reflections (1997) that "Klee is making some kind of point about the futility of machines, almost humanizing machines into things from which nothing great is to be hoped or feared, and the futility in this case is underscored by the silly project of bringing forth by mechanical means what nature in any case provides in abundance."...
Since a characteristic of chirping birds is that their racket resumes as soon as it seems to be ending, the bird in the center droops with lolling tongue, while another begins to falter in song; both birds will come up again full blast as soon as the machine's crank is turned.
"I know auto theft is a growing issue, not just in Denver but everywhere, and it’s infuriating to be victimized like that, but I discourage any resident to taking a vigilante approach."
Can an owner of a car use an app to go in search of his stolen car? If he does, is it wrong to be armed? If, on finding his car, persons in the car point guns at him, isn't it self-defense to shoot the gun? I understand that the authorities like the idea of leaving it to them to decide what to do about crime, and I can see why they generally prefer that people not risk a confrontation, but I don't think it's "vigilantism" to go to retrieve your own property and to engage in legal self-defense.According to political scientist Regina Bateson, vigilantism is "the extralegal prevention, investigation, or punishment of offenses."[1] The definition has three components:
- Extralegal: Vigilantism is done outside of the law (not necessarily in violation of the law)
- Prevention, investigation, or punishment: Vigilantism requires specific actions, not just attitudes or beliefs
- Offense: Vigilantism is a response to a perceived crime or violation of an authoritative norm
A boy thinks he might be in trouble, arrives at a plausible defense and delivers it in the most delightful regional accent on the face of the earth.
"Last week, in a conversation with colleague Gail Collins, [Bret] Stephens argued that a couple with a combined income of $400,000 a year doesn’t necessarily have a lifestyle we’d describe as 'rich.'"
Writes Megan McArdle in "The $400K conundrum: Why America’s urban rich don’t feel that way" (WaPo).
Compared with the old establishment that survived on inherited wealth and social position, they are insecure, and many worry that their offspring will be downwardly mobile, which leads them to spend virtually all of their outsize disposable incomes on preparing the children to become star performers in the next round of competition....
What self-respecting mammals don’t want their kids to have it at least as good as they did? At the median household income, that’s even a semi-plausible demand, because here all government needs to provide is median-grade public goods.... If you would be satisfied knowing that your child had a secure but unremarkable life managing a Walmart in some exurb, the government could probably guarantee that....
But — as McArdle sees it — if you worked hard enough to get to $400,000 a year, you expected something bigger for yourself and then you'll probably want the same — and more — for your children, and — overspending for them — you're stuck with an ordinary life for yourself. The Camry. The eggs.
Is that really the explanation for the Collins/Stephens agreement? I don't know. But if it is, there are some good solutions for young people looking on and thinking I don't want that to happen to me:
1. Don't have children.
2. Don't get the idea that you're special and you need to win in economic terms. If you sort of win — within the range that you're likely to win — you'll still have an ordinary life, and it will be much more work and much more disappointing. So come to terms with your mediocrity early. If you do this, it's easier to....
3. Live somewhere cheap (and close to nature).
4. Do some sort of work that you can enjoy and feel good about.
5. Go ahead and have children. If you're doing ##2-4, you can skip the non-having of children. Make life about love, not boosting these random new humans to the next higher rung above some other couple's random new humans.
"We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams."
Wrote Steve Tesich in "A government of lies," published in The Nation in 1992.
The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves. The dismantling of our Republic goes on, and if the spiritual and intellectual vigor of our children is the true indication of our future, then our future is even more troubling than our present....
We keep asking why the level of our children's intelligence and competence, as measured by all our tests, keeps dropping. The reason is very simple: We don't want them to be well educated. The last thing we want now is for an intellectually and spiritually vigorous generation to confront us with the question of what we have done to this country....
We have lost both faith and contact with our national myth.... When lost, the most dangerous thing one can do is to blunder blindly ahead. The comparison may be too extreme, but when Europe was lost in the Dark Ages it went back to its heritage for enlightenment and proceeded into the Renaissance. We have that option as well, and with it the hope and promise of our own renewal....
Tesich — who won an Oscar for writing the 1979 movie "Breaking Away" — was credited with coining the term "post-truth."
Here's a Nation article about the coinage — "Post-Truth and Its Consequences: What a 25-Year-Old Essay Tells Us About the Current Moment." That's from November 2016, when Oxford Dictionaries made "post-truth" the "Word of the Year."
You still have something of a grasp on truth if you can use the term "post-truth." You're probably observing that other people are living in the realm beyond truth, but you're still in touch with the truth, you must be thinking, perhaps dishonestly.
Obviously, November 2016 was the time for finally getting around to making "post-truth" the "Word of the Year." We know what happened in November 2016.
Tesich had died by then. He had a heart attack in 1996. Wikipedia says:
Steve Tesich was born as Stojan Tešić (pronounced TESH-ich) in Užice, in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on September 29, 1942. He immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister when he was 14 years old. His family settled in East Chicago, Indiana. His father died in 1962.
I was reading about Tesich not because I was researching "post-truth," but because I was reading about "Breaking Away."
That happened because after watching 2 seasons of "The White Lotus," I started watching another HBO series created by Mike White, "Enlightened." And I loved the scene in Season 1, Episode 9 where the Diane Ladd character has a conversation with another old woman in the grocery store. Who was that other actress? She seemed so familiar. It was Barbara Barrie, who, 3 decades earlier, had played the mother in "Breaking Away."
So I merely stumbled into the Steve Tesich essay and "post-truth."