Friday, September 20, 2013

Safety is Not a Virtue in Childrearing

It's funny how this reflects my long standing attitude so well: Getting hurt is a good thing for children. Not killed, not maimed, just hurt.

It teaches them that taking risks has benefits, and sometimes has bad consequences. Those are important lessons. Going through life too afraid to have fun, and making sure that those around you have no fun either, is a prescription for despair.

Mollie Hemingway:
I care deeply about my children’s safety. But safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.

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FBI Can Use Your Android Phone to Spy On You

Peggy Noonan on her Wall Street Journal blog:
Consider just two stories from the past few days. The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Danny Yadron had a stunning piece Friday that touches on the technological aspect of what our government can now do. The FBI is able to remotely activate microphone on phones running Android software. They can now record conversations in this way. They can do the same with microphones in laptops. They can get to you in a lot of ways! Does this make you nervous? If not, why not?
Reuters has a piece just today reporting that data gathered by the National Security Agency has been shared with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency that is supposed to be in charge of counterterrorism is sharing data with an agency working in the area of domestic criminal investigations.
The original WSJ article is behind a subscriber firewall.

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The New Civility: Sacramento Democratic Party Version

Sacramento Democratic Party Communications Chair Allan Brauer apparently thinks that "May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases" is an appropriate Tweet about those with whom he disagrees.

But Republicans and Libertarians are repulsive, so it is apparently OK with the Democratic Party.

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