Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a column by George Will.

Here is the latest on the mass murder at Northern Illinois University, where my friend Mylan Engel teaches. Michelle Malkin is reporting that NIU’s campus is a gun-free zone. Can you say “sitting ducks”? Will progressives never grasp that if you forbid the carrying of firearms, you ensure that only criminals have them?

Here is a review of David Frum’s latest book.

Here is a scene from today’s stage of the Tour de Langkawi.

Spring training began today. Life begins anew.

To the Editor:

Pretty soon the same people who bring you those TV car ads featuring reckless driving are going to replace windshields with flat-screen television screens, thus freeing drivers altogether from the nuisance of watching the road (front page, Feb. 12).

Are automakers completely losing their minds? Do we have to wait for the inevitable fatalities to mount before federal law bans the growing number of distractions in automobiles?

Theodora Briggs Sweeney
Horsham, Pa., Feb. 12, 2008

Here.

The point of a tutorial relationship is to exercise a discipline that teaches the subordinates to control mere impulse and behave rationally. This task has become more difficult with every recent generation. Engines of distraction such as radio, television, computers, mobile phones, canned music, and the rest have multiplied. We live, it has been said, in an era of continuous partial attention. The parental tutor has a hard task trying to control these influences, and an impossible one from that early age in which the child spends more time with his or her peer group. In any case, many modern parents are uncomfortable with the hierarchical aspect of the tutorial relationship because it inevitably distances them from their children. The philosopher Locke thought that only when the children became adult could they become the friends of parents, but today’s parents hate the distance that authority requires. They want to be friends from the toddler stage onwards.

(Kenneth Minogue, “Conservatism & the Morality of Impulse,” The New Criterion 26 [January 2008]: 8-12, at 10)

Here.