Newsweek on the decline of creativity in America and solutions. Change-oriented and conscientious programs, staffed with teachers who support and encourage student curiosity, can turn this around.

This really requires understanding what creativity is, which as the article describes is alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, i.e. lots of unique, seemingly themeless ideas coming together to form a solution to a particular problem. It’s not solely genetic, nor does it “grace” anti-social folks on the autism spectrum. The most critical paragraph of the article for me is:

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy – contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

Kids who are encouraged, engaged, motivated, and open to the world. This really requires parents, teachers and politicians – adults, essentially – to stop being narrow-minded and mopey doomsayers. Try to remember when you were a kid.

With that, I return to my own creativity block.

Go read Pistolette’s take on Mitch Landrieu’s State Of New Orleans speech. All of it.

If you come away from it thinking “Boy, am I glad I don’t live in that city,” you are blind and deaf. It is everywhere in this country and especially bad when visitors from India say, “Hey, this sounds just like home!”

Meanwhile, back at the oyster farm, they’re all dead and, as oil comes ashore, the Mississippi coast faces its largest environmental crisis since Katrina. Someone alert Haley Barbour. Oh wait, he doesn’t really care.

Southeast Asia handled the tsunami aftermath better than this.

The loss of LeBron James to the Miami Heat will hit cash-strapped Cleveland in the wallet, no doubt about it. But, it will hurt Akron, where James is from and more than a star attraction, the most. It’s a pretty tight-knit Catholic-school sports community up there and they’re losing their hometown kid who stayed.

Each post and tweet on the topic has given me Brett Favre Deja Whiplash something awful. LeBron owes Cleveland nothing – Big Sports is a cold hard business after all, well it is when franchises fire players as opposed to when they’re dumped – but The Ego of The Decision. Why do so-called professionals and their handlers have to be such divas about it and not just Quietly Go like grown ass men?

To my Ohio family: Big Group Hug. We’ll always have Repeat The Three-Peat.

Gotta go put my neck brace on. Ow.

I can already see how important this issue is to you.

California Drops State Rock Over Asbestos Content

Californian state senator Gloria Romero’s (D-East Los Angeles) bill (SB 624) looks to give the state mineral Serpentine the boot because some deposits contain a small amount of asbestos. Romero states, “[Serpentine] contains the deadly mineral chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, exposure to which increases the risk of the cancer mesothelioma.”

Dear Senator Romero, East Los Angeles has far worse problems like its citizens being mistaken for illegals over in Arizona, not to mention crushing poverty and the fact that your state budget is now weeks overdue.

What we need is a bill to teach science given that the state legislature doesn’t even know what asbestos, serpentine and serpentinite are to begin with.

From Looking For Detachment

Asbestos is not a single mineral, and in fact isn’t the name of any defined mineral at all. Asbestiform is a particular mineralogical habit that some minerals take: long fibers often in veins or masses. Asbestiform and fibrous, as crystal forms, are similar, with asbestiform being a more extreme version of fibrous.

and the Lab Lemming

There are 20 forms of serpentine, only one of which is an asbestos mineral. The very dangerous amphibole asbestos minerals specifically mentioned in the bill are completely unrelated to serpentine.

Forget all of the above and ask yourself this: How does “outlawing” serpentin(ite) prevent or cure mesothelioma?

This is what happens when science, thorough research of the issues and common sense are run over by spineless legislators as state employees head for minimum wage. They find a scaperock.

What next? Wisconsin drops galena because it contains lead and the same with limestone in Tennessee for trace amounts of arsenic. Nope, didn’t say it. Don’t give them any ideas.

Update: Sacramento Bee | California state-rock bill has serpentine agenda. It turns out that it’s not a simple case of “nanny state” but something more sinister: a jobs stimulus plan for personal injury lawyers.

Were SB 624 to become law, declaring serpentine as carcinogenic, it could widen the opportunities for lawsuits against owners of property with naturally occurring outcroppings of serpentine. And it’s become a new skirmish in the perennial war between personal injury lawyers and the business-backed Civil Justice Association of California.