• The price of early literacy? Myopia, or your parents were right about eyestrain, or why the nerd stereotype wears glasses. (I started reading on my own early and have worn them since my teens but know I inherited the eyesight.) That and sunscreen and rickets might be related. Reading problems largely occur among families where there is no family member who speaks English. I don’t know if statistically that’s true; without numbers it sounds like nativism/xenophobia. Little kids are incredibly adaptable; I know second-generation people whose first language is something else (Russian, in some cases WWII refugees born in transit camps; and Italian, born to 1920s immigrants) and are fluent in American English simply from immersion in school and the community. I don’t think any of them are illiterate. Another point I picked up somewhere else: might anti-nerd stereotyping come from anti-Semitism? (Resentment of bookish, naturally high-IQ Jews, the survivors after years of persecution.)
• Hypocrisy among some pro-lifers. Warmongering.
• Ron Paul: of course the economy still flounders after the stimulus. It continued the basic problem of malinvestment of resources.
• The new leader who promised to bring change has largely failed to do so, and has continued or expanded many of the most pernicious policies of the Bush years. Liberals who had hoped for glasnost and perestroika instead got Bush’s third term with a kinder, smiling, intelligent face.
• Drunk arrested for not driving car.

Labels: libertarianism, politics