Hot momma!
Now, now, Time. It's OK. Mother Earth's here.
Don't cry. You were just having another bad dream about the sky falling. You and your cousins in the media get them all the time. U.S. News & World Report had such a bad one earlier this year about global warming it had to go to the hospital, remember?
There, there.
Yes, it's true I'm probably warming up a little. And yes, it's really spooky when so many scientists say my glaciers are going to melt away and my seas are going to rise unless you humans stop putting so much carbon dioxide into my lungs.
But you're a big boy now, Time. In fact, you're in your 70s. Let Mother Earth put a few things in perspective about these frightening stories you've been hearing.
Remember in the 1980s when you were having those terrible nightmares about acid rain and my enlarged ozone hole? Remember in the mid-1970s, when you woke everybody up screaming in the middle of the night because scientists were saying I was entering a new Ice Age?
Some day, Time, when you're older, you'll look back at global warming and see that it was like those silly scare stories -- a mix of media hysteria, oversimplified science, New Age religion and creepy Green politics.
Meanwhile, don't worry about me. I'm a lot smarter and harder to understand than all the scientists of the United Nations will ever know. I'm a tough old gal, too. A century or two of human smokestacks and car exhausts are nothing compared to eons of asteroid impacts and volcanoes.
So go back to sleep, Time. And in the morning, tell your editors to get a grip. Tell them your "Global Warming" special report is just as unbalanced and sensationalized as U.S. News' was. Tell them it's not nice to make Mr. Bush a bogeyman for not signing the Kyoto Protocol to cut CO2 emissions.
And tell them if they want to do their part to save Mother Earth, they could begin by wasting fewer trees on dumb stories about global warming.
Drop out or flip out
The Weekly Standard's cover story this week offers an interesting and plausible explanation for why excellent suburban high schools like Columbine seem to "incubate" student mass murderers while the worst violence-wracked inner-city high schools do not.
The answer, says sociology professor Jackson Toby in "Let Them Drop Out," is that the very rare few students who are murderously miserable, for whatever reason, often feel "trapped" in exalted high schools.
Social, cultural, parental and peer pressure make it impossible for unhappy or violence-prone students to drop out -- which is what they do in inner-city schools.
High drop out rates serve as a safety valve, says Toby, who offers some good, sensible suggestions about giving unhappy and/or dangerous kids more options to drop out for a while.
The guiding principle, he says, makes great sense for all high school kids, even if they aren't planning the next school cafeteria massacre: "Try not to trap kids" in school and give them more options to leave for a while.