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I first became interested in homeschooling several years ago after a friend with six kids began homeschooling in San Francisco out of necessity – the public school system wanted to send each of her kids to a different school. Instead of hiring six Ubers each morning she decided to start homeschooling her kids herself.

What she told me about the experience was very different, and much better, than what I expected:

• It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum since the kids were able to study when they were best prepared and motivated. No time was spent on bureaucracy / classroom management.
• The kids could deep dive into their own interests, thus learning self-direction and creativity without the requirement to stick to a fixed schedule and curriculum largely driven by logistical concerns
• A lot of basic material could be covered through online courses, such as those offered by Khan Academy
• A lot of learning occurs outside the home and is social

The last point was the biggest surprise to me. Especially in the Bay Area, there is a wealth of group learning activities that are offered outside of regular school. The Exploratorium, Academy of Sciences and Museum of Craft and Design, to name but a few, offer tours and classes. New microschool startups, such as QuantumCamp which offers one-day per week science programs, are popping up. Parents group together to informally organize their own classes.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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At some point in your life, you’ve probably been asked to donate blood. If your blood is type O, you may have been asked to donate even more, because your blood type is the most useful and is less common. The difference between blood types may seem small–people with blood types A and B have an extra sugar molecule bound to the surface of their red blood cells–but a transfusion of the wrong blood type can be fatal. For example, the immune system of a type O individual will launch a massive attack on the “invading cells” of a type A individual, all because it detects that sugar molecule.

Now researchers from the University of British Columbia have figured out a way to change the type of blood donated by volunteers, by using an enzyme that simply snips off that extra sugar, called an antigen. The result: The blood is more like type O, the universal donor.

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Somebody (or more likely, bodies) managed to lug a bunch of construction blocks into a railway station and painstakingly glue them together to seal off a door on an S-Bahn train. Many initially thought the wall was fake, but now police and railway authorities have confirmed the ballsy action.

I’m sorry, but I think this is hilariously funny.

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There are surprisingly few recollections under way today of the final ignominious chapter of our Vietnam agony, when the U.S. was chased out of Saigon.  I wonder if there isn’t a larger subtext here.  We not only seem to be re-running the 1960s at home right now (Ferguson, Baltimore, etc), but we seem to be trying to re-run 1970s foreign policy too, with American retreat leading to chaos, instability, and increasing the threat of new wars.

Maybe a few people recall how wrong the left was about what they predicted would take place after the U.S. finally bugged out of southeast Asia.  (We didn’t just bug out; we also cut off aid to our friends and allies in the region, degrading their own chances for self-defense and survival.)  Let’s recall what leading liberals had to say at the time, especially about Cambodia.  Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times: “What future possibility could be more terrible that the reality of what is happening in Cambodia now?”  It was, Lewis wrote a few weeks later, only our “cultural arrogance” that led us to believe that “our way of life must prevail.”  New York Times reporter David Andelman wrote that the vast majority of Cambodians “do not voice any concern about such issues as the shape of a peace or possible postwar reprisals,” while another Times reporter, Sydney Schanberg, wrote that “it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” Sen. Alan Cranston said that “the ‘bloodbath’ that some people fear after the fighting stops if the [Khmer Rouge] insurgents take over is only conjecture.”  The Los Angeles Times said the aid cutoff was “for the good of the suffering Cambodians themselves.” Columnist Joseph Kraft asked, “Does it really matter whether Cambodia goes Communist?” And after South Vietnam followed Cambodia’s fall, the New York Times carried a news story, datelined Phnom Penh, with the headline: “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.”

I remember that date. It was not a happy time.

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The Washington Post reports that a prisoner who was in the police van with Freddie Gray says he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” According to the Post, the prisoner’s statement is contained in an affidavit that’s part of an application by the police for search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest or transport.

Once again, the ASSUME bug appears to have bitten a lot of people.

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It’s official: rubella, a disease that can be deadly for fetuses, has been eliminated from the Americas. The news was announced today by a scientific panel convened by global health authorities, reports The New York Times. The Americas is the first World Health Organization region to eliminate the disease.

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The shape-changing wings are an alternative to flaps, whose hard edges generate drag and noise. That drag is, at times, sort of the point. Looking out a wing seat on a jetliner as it lands, it’s possible to see the flaps angling up and down to slow the plane or turn. The flexible edge still allows this, bending and contorting in drag-increasing ways when needed, but it does it all under a smooth, continuous surface. Servos and actuators inside the flexible shell of the aircraft pull strings that then contort the wings’ surface, bending and warping to produce an effect similar to mechanical flaps. The smooth wings promise to be more aerodynamic in flight, which helps to save on fuel.

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Forensics specialists have a few ways to tell twins apart, such as testing sperm or using identifying markings like tattoos or scars, but these techniques are very limited. Now a team of researchers has developed a new way to differentiate twins’ DNA by identifying parts of it that have changed over time because of environmental factors.

Whoops, there goes the mystery writhers’ plot device….

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3D aficionados have been printing everything from candy to guns, and the technique has been making its way into the biomedical realm, generating everything from functional organs to prosthetics. In 2012, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan implanted splints 3D-printed out of a special biomaterial in the airways of three children with tracheobronchomalacia, a condition that may cause their airways to spontaneously collapse. The customized splints have done more than just keep the boys alive—they are flexible enough to allow the children to continue healthy growth so that they may no longer need respiratory intervention. The researchers published their work today in Science Translational Medicine.

Tim Urban chronicles another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Special Snowflakes.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs.  A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.

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President Obama called on Americans “to do some soul searching” in the aftermath of the rioting that occurred in Baltimore on Monday. Obama offered a perfunctory condemnation of the rioters, but then, as the Washington Post reports, criticized “Americans, including the news media and some politicians, for failing to address the chronic problems of men, women and children who live in poverty and find their opportunities limited because of poor schools or long stints in prison” (emphasis added).

Of course. He doesn’t dare admit that the riots were the simple result of Underclass black people acting badly, so he has to draw some sort of moral equivalence to scape the goat.

The people who need to do some soul-searching are Democrats: Guys, these people are your Base. What does that say about YOU?

Jon Gabriel points out some inconvenient truth.

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But let us express compassion for poor wee Brooke, a thirty-something special snowflake from the UNC Chapel Hill Department of Commie Propaganda (that is, Journalism). When I went to boot camp in 1987, my company commander was a SMC Baldwin. That’s Chief Signalman for you civilian types, though the rating was apparently merged with Quartermaster in 2004.

I kind of wonder what old Baldwin would think of his namesake slandering veterans as though military service turns Americans into some kind of foreign, invasive species. Veterans support and defend the Constitutional right of Brooke and her ilk to be as false and useless as they want to be. There is some irony to be mined in how the era of Hope and Change segregates Americans into victim groups, like the Baltimore rioters, and target groups, like veterans, Christians,  and males (trifecta for me!).

Read it. And watch the video.

In the following interview from Australian television, you’ll hear a Malaysian Associate Professor Dr. Shamrahayu Ab. Aziz discuss Islamic law, particularly as it applies to apostasy (death) and adultery (stoning). You’ll notice that Dr. Aziz is forthright in her explanation for the hudud punishments prescribed for these crimes — no sacred lying or misdirection. She acknowledges that the penalties are indeed required, but insists that they are not the point. The point, apparently, is the beauty of the sacred system created in an Islamic state by the enforcement of such punishments.

Read it.

Good.

Read it.

A Georgetown University administrator has a deeply troubling message for the campus’s College Republicans: scrub video footage of the recent Christina Hoff Sommers talk, or else.

The hour-long video shows Sommers—a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and individualist-feminist—giving her classically liberal take on gender issues while several left-leaning students hold signs accusing her of being a rape apologist.

According to Lauren Gagliardi, an assistant director of student services at Georgetown, the protesters did not consent to appear on camera, and so the College Republicans and the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute (which sponsored Sommers’ talk) have a responsibility to edit them out of the video. In an email to the group obtained by The Washington Examiner and published at Legal Insurrection, Gagliardi promised consequences if her demand was not met swiftly….

The suppression of free speech in academia continues at an accelerating pace.

Mark Steyn is dismayed.

With each passing day, last week’s visit by Julie Bishop, Aussie Foreign Minister, to the offices of Charlie Hebdo seems more and more like some strange dream – or glimpse of an alternative universe where the inheritors of western civilization are not a bunch of spineless grovelers frantically trading core liberties for multiculti delusions. Six days on, Miss Bishop is the exception that proves the rule:

Canadian author Michael Ondaatje is among a group of at least six writers who have withdrawn from next month’s PEN American Center gala, citing objections to the literary and human rights organization’s honouring the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Ondaatje is the guy who wrote The English Patient. He’s not the only bigshot pulling out….

Read it.

They could do a lot worse. At least he’s actually fought to defend Western civilization, unlike most of the people in the British — or Australian — government.

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Bill Whittle illustrates the dim bulbs graduating from college in the 21st century with a sad lesson from 2006, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice received an honorary degree from Boston College. About fifty brave students showed their bad manners and disrespect fearless rebellion by standing and turning their backs while she spoke. Such brave speaking of a silent truth to power is a good example of immature discourtesy. A maturity they no doubt failed to attain in their college classrooms. I’m impressed: for about $250,000.00 per undergraduate “education” fifty of these students came out even more ignorant than when they entered the ivied halls of Boston College.

Of course, if they had turned their backs on Hillary (not that any of them would), they’d have been suspended and their graduations would have been in danger.

Ordinarily Wiley Miller is a dependable Voice of the Crust but every now and then it apparently gets too much.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Some of us manage to rant on the Internet without an Ivy League degree, but that’s just because of our “cis privilege,” I guess.

Of course.

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And who could blame them? The role of ‘journalists’ in fostering violent confrontations of this sort is vastly underrated.

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This is what we’ve descended to when it comes to cultural engagement: A charity group that raises millions of dollars annually to fight AIDS has canceled a fundraiser because the gay guys who own the club hosted a reception with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The Gaystapo never forgives, and it never forgets.

This looks like a case of cutting off your, uh, whatever, to spite, you know, whatever….

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Well, technically it’s not ‘genocide’, since Christians aren’t an ethnic group any more than Muslims are a ‘race’ — so let’s just go with ‘mass murder’, at which Muslims (starting with Mohammed (MHRIH) their Prophet), excel.

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A crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $109,000 for the Christian-owned bakery Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Oregon was removed Saturday after complaints from gay rights advocates.

The website GoFundMe said in a statement that the page was yanked because the campaign violated the policy against raising money “in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts.”

Freedom of association is now a ‘heinous crime’. Glad we cleared that up.

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So, how come a generic drug that costs pennies compared to a new targeted agent that costs thousands of pounds isn’t in clinical use? The data is there, the drugs are there and certainly the patients are there. At this point we begin to stray from medicine and into the arena of intellectual property and incentives.

There is a huge regulatory burden and massive costs involved in running the largest Phase III trials normally required to convince doctors to change medical practice. What’s more, drugs need to be licensed for new uses and this also incurs costs. Who pays for all this?

With no guarantee of a return on investment, we’re left with a class of drugs that has huge potential but we don’t have the incentives in place to see the science confirmed and the drugs moved into clinical use after that confirmation.

And God help you, as a private citizen, attempting to do this on your own — they can’t put you in jail for using it but they can sure as shit put the people who make it and the people who sell it to you in jail (Hell, War On Drugs!).

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According to the Post, it took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

Much of the Foundation’s money goes to travel ($8.5 million in 2013); conferences, conventions and meetings ($9.2 million); and payroll and employee benefits ($30 million). Ten executives received salaries of more than $100,000 in 2013. Eric Braverman, a friend of Chelsea Clinton, was paid nearly $275,000 in salary, benefits, and a housing allowance for just five months’ work as CEO that year.

Bill Allison is a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group once run by prominent leftist Zephyr Teachout. In Allison’s view, “it seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why. The annual lovefest between Democratic politicians and Democratic journalists hasn’t generated any actual news in a long time. But this year’s event was perhaps notable because it exposed our president’s bitterness, as he approaches the end of his term. Humor is often revealing. Obama began with a joke that would be considered crude in a junior high school locker room:

After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, “Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?” And I said, “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.’” (Laughter and applause.)

Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. (Laughter.) New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. (Laughter and applause.)

If I had said something like that when I was 12, my father would have whacked me. Now, we have a president so pitiful that he thinks such crudeness is appropriate humor.

Obama seems to share Hillary’s attitude of ‘Why can’t you people just do what you’re told?’

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The 4-foot cubes are made of a concrete aggregate infused with a foaming agent, which creates air bubbles. The bubbles give the cubes a low density, which allows them to collapse on impact. The number of air bubbles can be adjusted to create different strengths depending on whether an airport caters to larger or smaller aircraft.

I suppose it really isn’t practical to use tail hooks and arresting wires….

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Computers are getting smarter and stronger while employees, with their health insurance, pensions, and vacation time are becoming increasingly expensive. The writing is on the wall; plenty of jobs, at least as performed by humans, aren’t long for this world.

Of course, no one knows exactly how automation will shake up the worker economy, but there will almost certainly be winners and losers. IT and creative jobs will proliferate while administrative, factory, and service employment will largely go the way of the dodo.

And for labor unions, that may very well mean that the bell tolls for thee. While unions have generally been in decline for some time, automation may prove to be the proverbial dagger through the heart.

Labor unions are predicated on a situation where workers have no economic leverage because they are in jobs that anybody who is literate and numerate and has an above-room-temperature IQ can do, so the supply always vastly exceeds the demand. Unions attempt to compensate for a lack of economic power by involving political power, be it strikes, picketing, thug violence, or governmental capture. Robots don’t vote and they always do what they’re told; no workers to organize, no union. It’s just that simple.

Of course, unions will attempt to ‘organize’ the workers who are left, but it’s questionable how effective that would be. Despite the attempts by tech firms to import cheap coders from overseas, most ‘knowledge workers’ don’t see themselves and commodity labor — somebody can’t just walk in off the street and after a week’s training do a web site or a smartphone app (although plenty have tried). Thus unions have focused on the remaining commodity labor ares, such as services, government employees, and (sadly, but it’s true) education. It will be interesting to see how long that long retreat can be maintained.

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“We’re sort of seeing the world order cracking around the edges,” says Robert Kagan, a conservative author and historian whose writing has caught the president’s attention. “The only thing Obama can hope is that it doesn’t completely collapse while he’s still president.”

Him and everybody else. Michael Crowley in Politico writes, “Obama took office vowing to end America’s wars. Now we’re in at least five, and U.S. officials are unsure what to do about it.” In the meantime the public can listen to him tell jokes.  That is probably the highest and best use of his time until Hillary Clinton becomes president — an event which the press believes is foregone.  A survey of 70 journalists assigned to the White House revealed that 63% of White House correspondents think Hillary will be the next president. 21% think it will be Jeb Bush. Marco Rubio is given only at 4% of making it.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Scientists have proven for the first time the role of a protein in cell walls which causes sufferers’ airways to narrow and handicap or prevent breathing.

A class of drugs known as calcilytics – first created to treat the bone disease osteoporosis – have been found to reverse all symptoms associated with the debilitating respiratory condition.

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The 14-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, allegedly encouraged an Australian teenager, Sevdet Besim, to behead, run over or shoot a police officer on Anzac Day.

He is also accused of encouraging Besim, from Melbourne, to carry out an attack on a “loner” in their own home.

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I am not making this up.

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SMUGGLERS who transport migrants across the sea to Europe have said that nothing will stop them from bringing in thousands more – even military force.

…

But one 34-year-old smuggler, who identified himself as Abu Ahmed, said:”Even if the EU threatens to strike our properties, destroy our boats, the issue will not stop. We are not the problem.”

The man, who makes thousands of dollars from the scheme each month, told The Times: “The migrants themselves are desperate to cross. Some of them, particularly the Syrians, have started buying their own boats and making the journey alone without our help. You can’t stop them.”

There you have it – straight from the horse’s, uh, mouth.

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It’s a transparent armor so good it might turn the phrase “glass cannon” on its head. The Naval Research Laboratory developed a manufacturing process to reliably make a strong, transparent ceramic that also allows infrared cameras to look through it, which most commercial glass can’t do. Now that the process is complete, the NRL is sharing the technology with industry so they can scale it up to make giant sheets of transparent, lightweight, bulletproof clay.

Called Spinel, the material is made in a lab from synthetic powder. Under the right conditions, it can be shaped into strong, transparent sheets. The NRL has worked with the material for decades. Earlier production strategies used crucibles and high heat, which left behind imperfections that made the crystalline glass murky. To reliably produce clear material, NRL used a hot press under a vacuum. An added bonus to this method is that it allows the spinel to be pressed into shapes–for example, a dome for a new camera turret or a sloping panel that’s flush with a wing.

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The unanswered question: ‘To you, you’re a woman. And maybe to me you’re a woman. But to a woman are you a woman?’

I’d say probably not.

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Last week, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s and Colorado brewer New Belgium announced they would collaborate to create a new Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, billed as “an ice cream infused craft beer.”

A more SWPL product it’s hard to imagine.

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With mass migration from Africa to Europe much in the news, it’s worth looking into the background of the late Amedy Coulibaly. He was the anti-Semitic Islamist terrorist who followed up the Charlie Hebdo massacre by murdering four hostages at a kosher grocery store in Paris after first killing a policeman.

…

Note that Coulibaly was born France into a family of ten children. So he was a second generation terrorist. In other words, these are not short-term problems that the current mass migration across the Mediterranean is aggravating.

Mali is a large patch of dirt in the Western Sahara and Sahel, the home of the famously remote city of Timbuktu.

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Argentina’s top spy, who was also a major figure in the events surrounding the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman earlier this year, has fled the country.

…

Nisman, of course, is the the prosecutor who, far from ‘holding up’ an investigation into that attack, alleged Kirchner was involved in covering it up, and then was found dead the morning before he was due to testify. This week the prosecutor who took over that case formally dismissed it, amidst jeers from his colleagues that he was a “grave digger.” Kirchner, meanwhile, fingered her own intelligence service as part of a sinister conspiracy against her, setting off a train of events that led to Stiuso’s flight.

Nice of her to take this time from cozying up to Putin to get arms to use against Britain in the Falklands. Where does she fine the time?

Read it.

That the Hillary! candidacy is doomed is now a foregone conclusion. Madame Defarge has no aptitude for the job, only a taste for it, and a venomous certainty that it is somehow rightfully hers. But when you’ve lost Jon Chait….

…

There follows a list of the various Clinton disasters we have lovingly been chronicling here for weeks now. Still, it’s instructive that the default mode on the Left is to attribute to “disorganization,” “greed” and “sloppiness” (hello, Sandy Berger!) what is almost certainly outright and overt criminal behavior, undertaken in the belief that no one would ever be held accountable.

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And here it is: ACLU Sues Feds to Force Catholic Charities to Provide Abortions for Illegal Immigrants.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the ACLU and the current Democrat mindset.

Now, if Catholics were Muslims, there’d be a lot of firebombed ACLU offices coast to coast — but, of course, they’re not.

Survival Orb.

Steel Star Trek Coasters. A fool and his money are soon parted – that’s what the free market is all about.

Leatherman Bit Kit.

Liese Hair Reset Straightener Wipes. Lack of straight hair has never been one of my problems, but I imagine it would be useful for somebody.

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California’s housing prices plummeted after the bubble burst in 2008, but now are approaching levels not seen since the market’s height—especially along the Southern California coast and around San Francisco Bay. This has reignited the perennial question: What should policy makers do to promote “affordable” housing?

Of course, Stay The Hell Out Of It is never on the table.

In San Jose, the subject of the court case, the city requires builders of more than 20 housing units to set aside 15 percent of them at these lower prices—or build 20 percent as low-income housing elsewhere in the city, or pay the city a fee of $122,000 for each “inclusionary” unit. The city requires the buyers of these reduced-price houses to sell them to other lower-income buyers in the future, or turn over price gains to the city.

The legal issue isn’t solely about housing, but about whether cities have unlimited power to extract concessions from homebuilders for things that are not “impacts” from the project. In other words, it’s legitimate for government to require new developments to pay to mitigate the effect of the new residents on local infrastructure (roads, sewers, fire service), but is it OK for cities to require affordable housing just because officials want to see more of it built?

Apparently so.

Read it.

Since taking office, Obama has refused to stand by his word. On Tuesday, April 21, the White House announced that it would again, for the seventh year since Obama’s pledge, not use the word “genocide,” thereby disappointing many human rights activists.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Really — if Obama were secretly a Muslim, what would he do differently?

Rezd it.

I don’t doubt it a bit.