Some people don't quite get the polls I put up around here.

Here's recent, typical criticism, aimed at the poll called "Althouse without comments." The aggrieved emailer writes:

I wanted to point out that you chose the options for the attitudes we might have towards your new policy. Exactly two of those choices implied that the new policy was detrimental, and both of those choices were framed in terms of emotionally negative or dismissive attitudes. You did not, for example, provide a choice like "I loved reading and writing comments, I will miss them, and I don't see how the blog can be the same without them." You gave us "I am aggrieved and grudging" and "the blog is nothing to me." You then pointed out that the only people who objected to the change were negative soreheads, and good riddance. OK, have it your way.

The sentence that begins "You then pointed out" is (badly) paraphrasing what I wrote here.

I wrote back:

The polls are a form of expression for me. No one has to take them, and I make no claim that they are anything but a kind of poem that I've written that you're allowed to play with.

Do you see how Althouse thinks of her polls?
	Yes, like everything at Althouse, they're dishonest and all about her.
	Yes, the individual lines, like this one, are as lines in a poem.
	Yes, she thinks she's an artist and has no insight into whether her work is crap.
	No, because there's really no "thinking" to speak of.
	No, because I'm preoccupied with what I think and Althouse won't talk about that.
	No, because if the lines don't rhyme, I haven't got time.
pollcode.com free polls

Looking downwards at the dog.

My point of view, right now:



You can find peace with your downward dog, and I with mine.

AND: The cinematic version:

"Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee".. and the lady who sang that tune now drinks her coffee in heaven.

Page Morton Black was 97.

Mrs. Black, the widow of William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, curtailed her singing career after their marriage. But her voice lived on in the jingle, which was broadcast for more than 20 years....

The jingle’s original last line, “Better coffee Rockefeller’s money can’t buy,” was changed in 1957, after John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family complained.

The line became "Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy." Today, they've changed the word to "billionaires."

I wish I could find my favorite old Chock Full o'Nuts commercial — the one with the line "many times, in many suitcases," which became an all-purpose catchphrase for years with me and RLC (who emailed me the link above). Instead, I'll have to give you this a dreadful old commercial, in which Page Morton Black appears dressed up, atrociously, as Snow White.

ADDED: RLC emails to say thanks, "But for the life of me I can't see why you didn't use" the joke he'd suggested: "The Chock Full o'Nuts girl has gone to meet her coffee-maker!"

Why are those German home-schooling parents seeking asylum in the United States?

Germany is in the European Union, which has a right to free movement, and Ireland, for example, offers a right to home-schooling. Here's email I received after yesterday's post about the case:

While not normally the type to comment on your blog posts (or anyone else's for that matter), I am somewhat confused by the attention and rallying point that the homeschooling-Germans-seeking-asylum story seems to have become for that community. While in theory there could be — somewhere in the world — a non-US citizen whose desire to meet perceived religious obligations by homeschooling could rise to the current US standard for granting asylum, the facts of this particular case don't seem to meet that standard. I currently live in Ireland, where the right of parents to homeschool their children is enshrined in the Constitution (Art. 42(2)). If the German parents' sole goal is to raise and educate their children in a homeschool friendly environment, they could easily emigrate to Ireland under the EU's right to free movement of persons and avoid the Congressional / Supreme Court challenge in the US entirely. I would assume that the Home School Legal Defense Association wants a poster case to publicize its views, but in light of the available facts, this just doesn't seem to be the most compelling case for that.

Great point. The 6th Circuit said they hadn't met the asylum standard because Germany wasn't targeting religious believers, just applying the same standard to everyone. In the United States, you don't have a constitutional right to special treatment because your desire to do something otherwise forbidden is based on religion. It's a simple equality principle.

What about all the Muslims in France who are forbidden to wear the veil in public? Would they all have a claim to asylum in the United States?

American law also includes some substantive due process ("privacy") rights about child-rearing, and these might get you to some right to home-school if you were already in the United States. It's very hard, however, to see this as a basis for asylum. If we're going to think in these terms, we might as well open the doors to everyone who wants to immigrate. We have rights that other people around the world would like to have too. Why stop anybody? I suspect that those who are championing the German home-schoolers are embracing them because they like the home-schooling cause, but it can't work like that, picking and choosing your issues.

ADDED: Why does Germany forbid home-schooling? Is it seen as important to assimilation, creating a common culture, and safeguarding against inculcating racism/anti-Semitism?

MORE: Another emailer writes, answering the question in the post title:

Perhaps because they don't want to have to flee twice.

Ireland allows home schooling with "reasonable regulation" which is inherently a matter for disagreement and can be quite unreasonable in practice.

Also, the homeschool community there is tiny and has a hard time agitating against further regulation.

Ireland has or will adopt the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which has been used in other countries to tightly regulate the content of education (most recently in the Vatican).

The US has the freest education system on earth and is unlikely to adopt things like the CRC which treat children as permanent wards of the state.

Homeschooling in Europe is tiny and under constant attack and there are few genuinely private schools.

That's why those seeking freedom to educate might flee here.

AND: Yet another emailer says:

Because they seek ideological control over their subject populations.

The current excuse is that the "Rights of the Child" include the right to be taught the political, religious, and social views that the government wants taught.  Unsurprisingly the generic progressive world view.

He links to this speech by the HSLDA President. Excerpt:

Kimberly A. Yuracko, a professor from the prestigious Northwestern University School of Law, wrote an article for the California Law Review claiming that there are legal and constitutional limits on the ability of homeschooling parents “to teach their children idiosyncratic and illiberal beliefs and values.”...

In the May 2010 edition of the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Catherine Ross, a law professor from George Washington Law School, published a broadside aimed at the hundreds of thousands of families homeschooling represents....

Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, from the Emory University School of Law, wrote in 2009 of her fear of parents with “oppressive, hierarchical belief systems.” She says,

Indeed, the long-term consequences for the child being home schooled
or sent to a private school cannot be overstated. The total absence of
regulation over what and how children are taught leaves the child
vulnerable to gaining a sub-par or non-existent education from which
they may never recover. Moreover, the risk that parents or private
schools unfairly impose hierarchical or oppressive beliefs on their
children is magnified by the absence of state oversight or the
application of any particular educational standards.

So what does she recommend should be done about all of us?
Private education should be banned. All of it. Private schools, religious
schools, homeschools.

Note: In the United States, the right to send your children to private schools, including private religious schools, is extremely well-established. 

"Feeling nostalgic? Can’t get enough body hair? Want to experience the celluloid life pre-Stonewall?"

"Here’s our guide to some of the most notable (and gayest) old-school flicks from before the millennium."

These films may not be perfect. In fact, some are downright offensive by today’s standards. But they are all in some way groundbreaking for their time period and considered in sequence they provide a record of mainstream culture’s changing attitudes towards gay men.

It's nice to be in a place where these movies can be seen from a distance and even enjoyed. I was living in Greenwich Village where they were filming movie "Cruising" (circa 1980) and remember the protests. By then, the pushback was already strong, and it was embarrassing for Al Pacino to be involved in the project. Now, this weird old artifact of unhappier times can be watched for fun, apparently. I guess it depends on who you are and where you are on the that's-not-funny spectrum of human psychology, which might be gender-linked.

The Pope's people took a wrong turn in Rio, plunging him into a frenzied, ecstatic throng?

This happened "in his first minutes back in South America since becoming pontiff."

I smell publicity stunt.

Francis' driver had turned into the wrong side of a boulevard at one point, missing lanes that had been cleared. Other parts of the pope's route to the city center weren't lined with fencing, giving the throngs more chances to get close, with uniformed police nowhere in sight to act as crowd control.

My skepticism alarm is clanging.

The three dozen visible Vatican and Brazilian plainclothes security officials struggled to keep the crowds at bay. Francis, however, not only looked calm but got even closer to the people. He rolled down his back-seat window, waved to the crowd and touched those who reached inside. He kissed a baby a woman handed to him.

Fabulous theater. Nicely Jesus-y.

A reading from Matthew 19:

13 Then people brought little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked them.

14 Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

ADDED: "He rolled down his back-seat window...." The Pope's car doesn't have electric windows?

Instapundit opens up comments in a "grand experiment."

He writes:

I’ve opened ‘em up before — and, for that matter, Ann Althouse did it once when I was away, to much excitement — but this new system should be much better. 

The system is part of "the new rollout of tech at PJ Media will allow one sign-in to work across the whole site," so you've got to join their system to be able to comment. And they will be able to manage you in ways that I was not able to manage my commenters (some of whom really were trying to destroy my blog and waste all our time).

Someone at Instapundit named Stoutcat says:

Where Althouse closes a door, Reynolds opens a window! This is an excellent idea, and I'm anticipating much enjoyment and eddification from reading your commenters, who are, no doubt, as far above Althouse's commenters, as hers were above the general horde.

Instapundit responds:

Yeah, Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free gives me pause. But there' s no connection -- this has been in the works for months as part of PJ's single sign-on thing.

As for "Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free," if that's what he's seeing, that is in fact only appearance. The loss has been very painful, because I believed the comments gave the place a lot of energy. But some unknown proportion of the commenters were people with ill will, who wanted destruction, and deleting even the ones we knew about had become literally a full-time job. But I wasn't in some big old system with lots of tech people. I've kept independent, with the simplicity of the people's platform, Blogger, which won't let me exclude people. I could only delete, which was a technique that my most aggressive antagonists used against me (and against all the other commenters who'd contributed so much over the years).

That really hurt, but I'm an optimist, and — like a blog — I live in the present and move forward, so I find the good in whatever the situation is, continually making choices about how to keep things as good as possible, and the day came when the balance of good and bad in the comments experience tipped so severely that I couldn't maintain the sunny denial needed to put up with everything. Since then, I've felt the loss, and part of the loss is seeing exiled commenters talking about me elsewhere on the web, forgetting/ignoring the problem that made me close the comments — as if I would shut off the comments because people attacked my writings! — and saying such nasty things about me that I could get depressed brooding about the real proportion of good faith to bad faith commenters.

But I've got to resist traipsing down that detour as I continue on the road of blogging, where I've found so much joy in the past and hope to find more, doing things in this newly simplified style. Meanwhile, Instapundit gets fancier, as PJ Media makes its play to become a social media enterprise. That's the road I've diverged from. I can't be your social media website.

I've redefined my task as something I can do alone, not that I'm alone. I've got Meade — the commenter I married — walking with me every step of the way. I've got all the joy I can handle, and maybe it is joy at being comment-free. I'm a less is more kind of person. My own version of that slogan is: Better than nothing is a high standard. I do notice and take joy in the negatives that I'm free of. That's called freedom, and comment-free is a kind of freedom.

ADDED: I said it back in 2004:

Why do you blog? > To live freely in writing.