Uncle Mitt looks more and more like the Republican John Kerry reincarnate every day.

The self-proclaimed “lifelong hunter” was later found out to have only actually hunted twice—once at the age of 15 and then once again last year. He’s now clarifying:

“I’m not a big-game hunter. I’ve made that very clear,” he said. “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. I began when I was 15 or so and I have hunted those kinds of varmints since then. More than two times.”

I’m not sure laying out the have-a-heart traps at your Rocky Mountain chalet really counts.

16. It ain’t where you from, it’s where you’re at.
15. Cash rules everything around me.
14. Ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks.
13. Season’s change, mad things rearrange, but it all stays the same like the love doctor strange.
12. The suckers have authority.
11. Kings lose crowns but teacher’s stay intelligent.
10. Elude the hook and your whole beat’s tookin’.
9. Straight out of Compton there’s a brother that’ll smother your mother and make your sister think I love her.
8. When sales control stats I place no faith in the majority.
7. If you find true love hold on till the end, ’cause we all know the women outnumber the men. I caught one to play me close like her name was Glen, and I’ll be damned if I ever let it happen again.
6. The meaning of raw is Ready And Willing.
5. Jay Dee don’t do no parties for free (no lie).
4. You want to learn how to rhyme you better learn how to add, it’s mathematics.
3. It’s about love for cars, love for funds, loving to love mad sex, loving to love guns. Love for opposites, love for fame and wealth, love for the fact of no longer loving yourself, kid…Stakes is high.
2. It’s bigger than hip hop.
1. Notorious B.I.G. — the best that ever lived, the best that ever did it, that best that ever lived it.

Here’s Keith, speaking of his father:

“He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

So that’s his secret!

Can you believe Juan Ponce de León thought the Fountain of Youth was in Florida? Pffft.

UPDATE: Turns out he was joking. Or so he claims.

Just caught a winning entry of the Flux iPod Student Film competition, a motion graphic polemic featuring some enlightening sentiments:

Only a nation of morons would elect an idiot president

Ish like this makes me glad college liberalism is only a temporary state of being. Cause, you know, dude, when it comes down to it, the general population is just, like, soooo much stupider than I am.

Andrew Sullivan the other day approvingly linked to a Peter Suderman post on The Corner ripping apart the so-called “self-esteem movement”:

Interestingly, the article reports that, surprise surprise, even young kids are pretty adept at spotting false praise, and that power-blasting fake praise at kids actually ends up reversing the incentive structure.

Outrage over children with high self-esteem is probably 10 years too late (Kurt Cobain died in April of 1994, and since then teen esteem seems to be doing alright). That said, it’s worth noting this outrage is a bit misguided.

Self-esteem based education isn’t some sort of process by which educators heap false praise on undeserving kids in order to foster a distorted sense of self-worth; that’s kind of dumb, and clearly doesn’t work. Improving childhood self-esteem is all about encouraging kids to explore activities and attack problems using approaches that match their learning style, and then (honestly) praising their accomplishments. It’s all about positive reinforcement, not false reinforcement. Kids learn and behave differently, and education should be geared toward emphasizing those individual methods by which kids are successful (in everything from math to recess) and should reward kids for doing good work.

Conservative opposition to the “self-esteem movement” seems largely based on a lazy interpretation of how self-esteem learning works; almost a straw-man argument based on worst possible practices.

It’s a misconception similar to the way conservatives often reduce affirmative action to a matter of employers hiring unqualified black people just because they feel bad about racism. Which isn’t really the case; affirmative action is all about employers looking beyond what they would normally consider the employment pool in order to find good people they wouldn’t have otherwise even considered, due to a number of institutional factors that stem from a legacy of racism in this country (less access to elite schooling, etc.).

Sure, some employers are lazy and hire the first handful of black folks that come their way just to satisfy a quota, just as some teachers are lazy and heap false praise on their students rather than working with those kids to find methods that fit their learning style. But this is the fault of lazy individuals, not a misguided “movement.”