Charles Littleton, 22, was defiant, even after being Tasered by police, when he resisted efforts to remove him from a Saginaw, Mich., City Council meeting. He said he had to stand up for his right to wear his Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, despite a rule banning hats for men inside.
Why are punks wearing baseball hats all the time? I've never understood why it's rude to wear a hat indoors, but I equally don't understand why young guys are militant about wearing them. Can anyone point me to a similar phenomenon as precedent? Maybe the long-hair phenom of the 1970s? This inane sartorial defiance has me flummoxed.
Maybe those baseball wearing youths should be spanked, while we still can:
Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, wants to outlaw spanking children up to 3 years old. If she succeeds, California would become the first state in the nation to explicitly ban parents from smacking their kids.
Up to 3 years old? I'd throw in the towel. I've spanked each of my first six kids, on average, about three times each, and almost all of those came when they were two and three, and almost all of the spankings were mild swats (I've only spanked one of my children hard, when he was ten (for lying) and I made sure the rest of the kids were within earshot). If I couldn't establish the spanking precedent while they're still in diapers, I'd probably have to wail the bejeebers out of them later.
Since 1999 there have been nearly one million victims of rape, child molestation, sexual homicides, and rape and molestation of handicapped children by illegal immigrants here in the U.S.
I've been seeing more and more stats like that. Thing is, it's hard to get a grip on it. One million victims in the past seven years. Does that make an illegal immigrant more likely to commit the crime than the rest of the U.S. population? I haven't seen stats on that crucial issue. If the answer is "Yes, an illegal immigrant is far more likely to commit such crimes," I say, "Build that southern wall fast." If they're not more likely to commit such crimes, then stop bringing up this stat. It's just a scare tactic.
Brews You Can Use
I believe I mentioned part of this before, but from the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly:
[A] pair of health economists found that American males who drank heavily when they were tenth-graders in 1990 earned more money in 2000, on average, than their peers who were teetotalers as teens. (The researchers found no such link for women.) Meanwhile, a study from the libertarian Reason Foundation reports that self-described drinkers (male and female) earn 10 percent to 14 percent more than nondrinkers. Drinking, the authors argue, may help build the kinds of social networks that lea to workplace success. The Reason study also finds that men who frequent bars at least once a month earn a further 7 percent wage boost. For women, however, regular barhopping has no discernible effect–on earnings, anyway.
Later addendum: Yikes! I posted the identical story last Friday. I might be losing it. My apologies.
Budweiser has reached an agreement with the Czech brewer of Budvar. I guess it's a pretty big deal. I'm also guessing that "var" is Czech for "sucks."
