I am rather surprised to note that I apparently did not make significant note of Rebecca Hagelin’s “Jailhouse Middle School.” I certainly read it, and it certainly doesn’t come as much surprise, but rather just an unneeded confirmation of what I know goes on. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t comment on it. It certainly isn’t exactly “safe” for me to do so, as a guy, I’m not allowed to comment on girls, how they act or what they wear. Unless I am complimenting them of course. See my previous post today for a little more on this theme. Anyway, while I am skating on thin ice, I am going to go ahead and crash on through. Ms. Hagelin’s (I am really not sure, is she a Mrs or not? I hope so, she has children.) more recent article, “Parents: it’s time to step up,” improves on the original. It introduces the theme of parental responsibility! The idea that parents should parent. Wow! What an original concept!

The issues are many - far too many to focus on in one column - so I want to focus on just one: How do so many other little girls end up looking like sex objects?

How? Because their parents let them. And because many of the schools have given up - administrators are just too tired, or too lazy, or too liberal to care anymore. Moms and dads, administrators and teachers, it’s our fault if America’s little girls look like a tramps.

Face the facts: Most 12 - 16 year olds don’t have access to a lot of cash - unless, of course, their parents give it to them. And, last I heard, if you’re below the age of 16 you simply can’t hop in a car and drive yourself to the local mall. Nope, it’s not the kids’ money that is being spent, it’s the parents’ money. And it’s usually the mom that happily drives the little darlings to the mall for a fun day of shopping. Face it: Little girls dress according to what their mommies allow.

I thought mothers were supposed to protect their daughters, to teach them to value themselves and their bodies. What chance does a little girl stand of keeping her childhood or innocence intact when it’s mommy that’s driving her to the store and paying for the thongs, the itty-bitty skirts, the hipster jeans and the plunging necklines?

And when did fathers start letting their precious little girls dress like “ladies of the night”?

In “Judge not,” Rich Tucker agrees with the overall line of thought in my Friday, 4th of March 2005 15:17 post. The decision that the Supreme Court made was all well and good, rational people can argue back and forth. The rationale they used is, however, a horrid continuation of making up things on the fly.

Update: 20050307-1548 David Limbaugh’s article, “The new age Supreme Court,” also agrees.

Update: 20050307-1614 as does Mark Alexander in “Judicial supremacists and the despotic branch.”

Update: 20050308-1142 See also George Will’s “Wrong on all counts,” Jeff Jacoby’s “A phony ‘consensus’ on youthful killers” and Armstrong Williams’s “Judicial tyranny“.

Update: 20050310-1017 Edwin J. Feulner’s “Courting trouble,” Jonah Goldberg in “Upholding Kennedy’s brain” and Terence Jeffrey in “Justice Kennedy should stand for re-election” all chime in also.

Kathleen Parker is apparently a rather exceptional woman. She thinks that fathers are not useless, that men have a point, a value, an reason for being beyond mere procreation. She makes this evident in “Undoing the damage of male-bashing, one daughter at a time,” an article that warms my heart to read. What is more amazing is that a college professor, a female college professor, actually agrees with this heretical idea, and is teaching a class based on it. And isn’t being fired. There are some interesting statistics here, and I’m somewhat tempted to get the book it mentions. It would be yet another on my unending to-read list.

Continuing to develop a robot theme, “Ants - learning from the collective” once again brings us an example of basing our robots off of nature. If this works, if they make real, useful robots, especially nanotech robots, on these ideas, we will, once again, be significantly blurring the lines between life and non-life, intelligence, and what Neil Stephenson would call “pseudo-intelligence.” Again, I raise the specter of irony: several hundred years from now, the thought of these robots having been created will be as ludicrous to “science” as the thought of man having been created is now. Of course this implies a break down of history at some point, so that things must needs be rediscovered. Any number of things could cause that though, give or take a thousand years and you might not even need a breakdown, just the normal blurring of time and the change of preferred format for information.

The things we don’t know are at times more amazing than the things we do.

In science news today, apparently stars can be planet sized, and older bipeds taller than younger ones. “Newfound Star Smaller than Some Planets” talks about the discovery of a very “small” star, apparently only a little bit bigger than Jupiter, though, apparently, denser. They claim this discovery helps solidify definitions of planets, stars, and brown dwarfs, but to me it only seems to confuse things more. In related news, “Spitzer Space Telescope Finds Bright Infrared Galaxies” talks about the discovery of some galaxies that are not visible to ground based optical telescopes. It seems they are behind a huge dust cloud, and that they were discovered by an orbiting infrared telescope. This seems to raise two questions, how much dust is out there, and how much mass is in other galaxies we can’t see?

Also in the news today, we have a palaeontology story. “Oldest biped skeleton discovered” reports that a number of bones from a skeleton older than Lucy was found in Ethiopia. It is dated “to between 3.8 and four million years old.” Apparently it walked upright, based on an ankle bone, and was taller than Lucy. This last is apparently quite a surprise. But will it change any theories? I doubt it. The BBC also reports on this, in “Scientists unearth early skeleton,” but offers nothing more really in the way of details.