Once again I was link hopping like a mad bunny and can't give credit where credit is due.  Somehow I ended up here which lead me to Kevin Kearney's Protestors and Patriots: Who's Stupider?

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

We know you don't care what we think about the war. But since all of the swill being written about it seems to fall into one of two camps ("war is, like, bad" protestors, and "let's get it on" patriots) and fails to recognize that things aren't black and white, we offer the goofballs on both sides some suggestions that might help them see a more sane world, the one in which most of us live.

From Brian Leiter:

Texas is the second largest buyer of school textbooks in the US and, unfortunately for the nation, the power to approve and reject textbooks is vested in the hands of a small State Board of Education, which is dominated by the Texas Taliban, that frightening brand of Texas politicos who are committed to making the law of (their) God the law of the land. The publishers frequently cave in to pressure from the Texas Taliban, and edit and revise their textbooks to appease them, since they can't afford to have their books rejected from the Texas market. The result is that the Texas Taliban affect the content of textbooks in dozens of other states.

[...]

A nice thing about the Texas Taliban is that they actually publish their "criteria" for evaluating school textbooks. You can read them (and weep) at the web site of Mel and Norma Gabler, a kindly looking couple who have done more than anyone to try to undermine public education in Texas. They do catch the occasional error in school textbooks, but the errors they want to add (about law, about history, about science, about economics) are just breathtaking.

Remember, this isn't just a Texas issue, since the textbooks selected by the Texas State Board of Education are likely to end up in the classrooms of children from Michigan to Florida to Oregon.

11:31:20 PM    

but I would ascribe a different cause.  According to a recent Danish study, adults with children are less likely to commit suicide than those without, and young kids add an extra layer guarding against suicide for women..." The study's researchers theorize:

It is possible “that the presence of children and/or young children may increase parents' feelings of self worth, possibly based on their perception of being needed,” the researchers said. Children might also provide emotional support to their parents during tough times, they said.

As a parent of a young child who has myself suffered severe depressive episodes, I can tell you that the number one reason that I feel irreversibly rooted to this planet now is my child.  No matter how dark or deep the pit is, I now have a reason and purpose larger than myself and I could never wound my child so fundamentally by violently removing myself from his life.   It's not about how I fel about myself though; it's about how I feel about him.

Just my .02

10:37:13 PM    

I have purposely kept the links to the left a very select list of the blogs that I visit every single day.  My blogroll is a longer list of sites I visit, and my personal "favorites" on my home desktop is 3x that long.  One day I will cough up the dough to have a paid Blogroll account and then I will really categorize the links.

In any case, Matt Bivens' Daily Outrage  is a short, to the point, daily must read that I particularly want to point out today.  Folks only have until Thursday to tell the National Forest Service not to exempt the Tongass and Chugach national forests from current restriction on road building and logging.  His post has all the links you need.

5:22:07 PM