Electric Josh

Scoot
Building a balancing scooter. How to have your own gay little scooter for less than five grand. Via /..
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SD
More baby pictures.
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Bennett
Yet another reason it's good to have taken a pile of philosophy classes and to live in a town with a good Sunday paper:

In his Washington office, I asked Bennett which he thought was a bigger factor in determining where people end up: luck (by which I meant the pre-birth lottery), or personal initiative and character.

The normally voluble Bennett fell quiet.

"Genes are part of the first?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Parents are part of the first?"

"Yes."

"The first," he said. That is, luck.

Recalling his years as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, he explained, "Having visited the schools, I'm convinced that you can change people's lives and people can change their own lives. But it's hard. Those things [genes, parents] matter hugely. They don't matter completely. But they matter hugely."

What should that imply for public policy? I asked.

Bennett cited the Marine Corps as proof of the "plasticity" of human nature, and of the potential for institutions to alter luckless lives for the better. Kids from the inner city come back from boot camp after 11 weeks and they're transformed, Bennett said, with new values, a new spirit, a new future. Mediating institutions -- family, churches, schools -- can create opportunities for people to "exercise autonomy and make a difference in their own lives. A lot of people aren't there because they're in crappy families, crappy schools, crappy neighborhoods."

Bill Bennett, I thought, meet John Rawls...