"Extreme Breastfeeding."

The name of a new reality show that will be on The Discovery Channel.

I learned about it from an article titled "Most Support This Mom�s Right to Breastfeed in Public. Then They Realize How Old the Kid Is�."

The child is 6. She's quoted saying: "Sometimes it tastes like candy canes... It tastes like lots of different things." And: "I might stop when I�m eight." And: "It�s my favourite thing to do when I�m not at school. More kids should, because it�s good for you."

It's good to protect and nurture your children. You can do that by breastfeeding them and you can do that by keeping them out of the media. I don't know how many months or years of breastfeeding are ideal, but I'm pretty sure that zero is the right answer to the question How many reality shows should a kid be on?

By the way, the 6-year-old child is named Aminah. I imagine that's pronounced "a mynah." A mynah bird is known as the most able mimic of all the talking birds. When a 6-year-old makes an assertion like "More kids should, because it�s good for you," I think it's a safe bet that she is mimicking an adult. In this case, there is a mother who seems to be seeking narcissistic satisfaction, which � who knows? � might taste like candy canes.

The dog didn't have a bucket list!

"New York Man Takes Dying Dog on Bucket List Adventure Across the Nation."

Why would you take a suffering, dying dog on a big road trip instead of just keeping him in his familiar, comfortable home? For Instagram? For cheeseball "human interest" stories in the media?

"The model has responsibility; she paid a high price for a feel-good moment with Bill Clinton."

"But he was riding the back of this small charity for what? A half-million bucks? I find it � what would be the word? � distasteful."

Said Doug White, head the master�s program in fund-raising management at Columbia University, commenting on the way the Happy Hearts Fund operates and got Bill Clinton to appear at a posh gala. Petra Nemcova's charity spent $363,413 on the affair:

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramis� and, because orange is the charity�s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.

And Bill Clinton, who had previously declined invitations to accept an award from Happy Hearts, responded to a donation of $500,000 to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Both Happy Hearts and the Clinton Foundation have the stated goal of helping Haiti. As the HH spokesperson put it: "We believe that we can create the most impactful change by working together."

"Did Laurence Tribe Sell Out?"

Asks lawprof Tim Wu in The New Yorker. Key paragraph:

How you feel about this work probably depends on how you feel about the use of the Constitution as an anti-regulatory tool and the idea of corporations as constitutional �persons.� Tribe has taken a strong view of individual rights; his view of corporate rights is similar, and in this capacity he has at times advanced constitutional arguments that might invalidate great parts of the administrative state, in a manner recalling the Supreme Court�s jurisprudence of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. In that sense, the current condemnation of Tribe can be seen as part of a larger progressive backlash against the use of the Bill of Rights to serve corporate interests.

You wouldn't treat an adopted child like that.

Do you believe the drone policy really is: "Before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured"?

That's what Obama said last week, but I don't see how it can possibly be true, and I don't really understand why he would state a policy in terms that are so plainly unbelievable. If that were the standard, how he could use drones at all � let alone carry out hundreds of attacks? And if that's not the standard, why say it's the standard, since (if it's believed) it's encouraging the enemy to defend itself by keeping hostages and other innocents in their midst? If it's not believed � and I think it's on its face unbelievable � it wrecks his credibility.

These questions occurred to me as I listened to the panel discussion on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday, which began with a clip of Obama saying the words that appear in the post title:

[AP reporter JULIE] PACE: [W]hen he said that we were not going to take strikes unless there was a near certainty that civilians would not be killed[:] How can you -- how can you be sure of that?...

[National Journal reporter RON] FOURNIER: ... I think anybody who... has a problem like I do with this drone strategy, still has a problem. And maybe more so, the fact that the president promised that... he was going to be transparent, about how, about why and how we conduct war from a robot in the air blowing people away.... [W]hen the president of the United States says we're going to deal with near certainty, really? How do you come up with near certainty? Is that just a talking point that you say two years ago and then we find out that you can't do it? Let's put some meat on the bones, Mr. President.

[Fox News political analyst BRIT] HUME: It seems to me that they probably had near certainty. What they didn't have was actual certainty. And that's always going to be the case....

So one answer to my questions is: It depends on what the meaning of "near" is.

The drone policy was also questioned because of the way it kills people who could be captured and used for intelligence, which is related to the question of near certainty, because intelligence is needed to get to near certainty. If you keep killing everyone, how do they know whom they're killing? I suspect that after the fact they deem everyone who was there an enemy, at least as far as they can (and they couldn't in the case of the 2 specific hostages). And they don't want the trouble of detainees.

"In my junior year, I attended a class in which the professor made a compelling argument for conducting animal research related to punishment."

"He promoted it as having the noble goal of finding ways to minimize the use of punishment in humans while maximizing its effect. When he announced he was looking for a student to work in his lab for class credit, I took the job. First, I had to learn how to shock a pigeon.... As I look back on this nearly 50 years later, I am astonished that the daily grind of depriving, shocking and killing these animals did not move me to leave my job...."

From a NYT op-ed by Paul Gazda � "a visual artist and an advocate for animal rights and pesticide-free environment."

Here's the top-rated comment:
Click for more �

"For all the righteous concern people expressed about the welfare of my children, what most of them failed to understand was that taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering."

"When I stepped behind the camera and my kids stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors, and we were making a photograph together. And in a similar vein, many people mistook the photographs for reality or attributed qualities to my children (one letter-�writer called them 'mean') based on the way they looked in the pictures. The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph. Even the children understood this distinction...."

Writes Sally Mann, whose very arty photographs of her (sometimes naked) children were published to much elite acclaim in 1992 and � simultaneously � intense criticism as �manipulative,� �sick,� �twisted,� �vulgar� � in part because of what Mann calls the "cosmically bad timing" of coinciding with the controversy about Robert Mapplethorpe�s photographs. Mapplethorpe had "included images of children along with sadomasochistic and homoerotic imagery," and: "Into this turbulent climate, I had put forth my family pictures."

From the comments there (at the NYT):

There is absolutely no question that Sally Mann is a photographic artist of great stature. There is also no question that were she not, she would have had her children taken from the home decades ago, and probably would have been jailed. If the father down the block from Mann took similar photos and made them public, he would have been thrown under the jail house. She was, and remains, ethically tone deaf - at best. To use one's children, who cannot possibly understand the ramifications of what they are doing, as one's subjects to create sexually charged images, is the grossest violation of the concept of informed consent. and is inexcusable.

"If you want to start taking classes at an Ivy League university unenrolled and undetected, says Guillaume Dumas, a 28-year-old Canadian, start with big lecture courses."

"If you must sit in on a smaller seminar class, it�s important to show up consistently starting with the first session, instead of halfway through the semester. Also, one of the best alibis is that you�re enrolled as a liberal-arts student. 'That's the kind of program that's filled with everything and that you expect people to be a bit weird, a bit confused about what they do,' he says. From 2008 to 2012, Dumas claims he did stints on a number of elite North American universities�Yale, Brown, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and McGill, to name a few�sitting in on classes, attending parties, and living near campus as if he were an enrolled student. This deception may sound like a lead-up to a true-crime story, but Dumas�s exploits appear to be harmless, done in a spirit of curiosity."

From an Atlantic article by Joe Pinsker titled "The Man Who Snuck Into the Ivy League Without Paying a Thing/Guillaume Dumas attended classes, made friends, and networked on some of America's most prestigious campuses�for free. What does this say about the value of a diploma?" I went to that article because Instapundit linked to it in a way that made me want to say exactly 1 thing, but now, I want to say 10 things, and the first one is the one that Instapundit, by quoting only the title, made me want to say.

1. What it says is the class sizes are too large.

2. Sitting in on large classes was, in fact, the (obvious) trick Dumas used.

3. For smaller classes, if my name were Dumas, I'd pick French Literature.



4. The author of the article stresses the lack of need for a degree, which is good news for Scott Walker. (I'm just dragging Scott Walker into whatever I can, because that's the thing now.)

5. The author of the article never addresses the ethics of stealing what others are paying for. He's presenting it as if the payment is for the "diploma" and not for all the services provided.

6. The author has interestingly misused the word "alibi." An alibi is a defense based on your being somewhere else, which is what "alibi" literally means in Latin. Dumas needed an explanation for why he was there, not for why he wasn't there.

7. Perhaps the author first learned the word "alibi" � as I did � from The Four Seasons: "Big girls don't cry/That's just an alibi." That's not right but it rhymes:



8. Speaking of the 1960s, there was a network sitcom about what Guillaume Dumas didn't actually invent. The sitcom was called "Hank":



9. Back in the days of "Hank," we used to call somebody who was doing that a "drop-in" � slang based on "drop-out."

10. You'd think the schools would do more to prevent theft of services from drop-ins, but when they are big and when they don't rely on high-level classroom discussion from prepared and qualified students, they are asking for it.