The Bob Zadek Show

This Sunday, Lenore Skenazy - aka the “World’s Worst Mom” - returns to the show to discuss the latest trends in coddling vs. free range parenting.
My home movies from Queens, New York circa 1947 show me and my best friend Susan playing with cap pistols, water pistols, a ping pong ball gun, a Red Ryder B B gun, toy tin soldiers, a boy scout knife, and a toy machine gun with blinking red lights.

Yet not one of my friends died of gunshot wounds. In fact most of us are afraid of guns.

Maybe zero tolerance is not that necessary. Perhaps some of the societal measures we are taking to protect children are even backfiring.

We hear non-stop coverage of school shootings and child predators while the threat of Childhood Lack of Resilience Syndrome (CLORS) goes virtually unreported.

Symptoms of CLORS include easily bruised feelings, obesity, depression, lack of curiosity, and fear of exposure to new ideas once the child leaves home for college. Professor Jonathan Haidt (founder of Heterodox Academy and a co-founder with Lenore Skenazy of LetGrow.org) has observed many patients in the advanced stages and found the condition notoriously difficult to cure.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Lenore Skenazy has been offering the equivalent of a CLORS vaccine since her national debut as “World’s Worst Mom” in 2008 when she wrote an article titled, Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone, (New York Post, April 1, 2008).

Since then, she’s been leading the Free Range Kids movement – defending victims of a false hysteria that presumes all strangers “guilty until proven innocent,” despite falling crime rates. She last joined me to discuss her LetGrow initiative – helping parents let go of their helicoptering, and letting kids grow into functioning adults.

I’m thrilled to welcome Lenore back to the show this Sunday to review the latest threats our kids’ freedom to be kids – from the War on Recess to reading logs.

Mark my words – the “War on Recess" will fare just like every other government “War on [fill-in-the-blank].”
As this article in Harvard Health Publishing confirms, kids need sunshine, risk, and socialization to become functioning adults.

Lastly, we discuss Utah’s new law that protects parents from the charge of neglect when they let their kids play outside by themselves. Ahh, the sweet smell of Federalism!

Follow her latest project at LetGrow.com, and tune in live to the show of ideas – not attitude.

How would the analysis of the impeachment saga change if everyone took
their ideological blinders off?

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Last month, I spoke with Gene Healy about his persuasive cover story for Reason, arguing that we should all calm down. Perhaps the Ukraine phone call was not even the most impeachable thing Trump did in the month of July of last year, but it wouldn’t hurt to send future presidents the message that they cannot act with impunity. Fair enough.

I have argued that on principle, a President may sometimes be duty-bound to investigate his political opponents – and even use the threat of withholding aid to a country that doesn’t cooperate.

Does this apply to Trumps’s infamous “perfect phone call”?

You can read or listen to my conversation with Gene and decide for yourself whether Trump committed an impeachable offense.

Now Peter Suderman at Reason further complicates things, writing that By Withholding Funds to Ukraine, Trump Broke the Law. The Government Accountability Office agrees that the Office of Management and Budget – an agency of the executive branch – was required to submit a reason to Congress for delaying the funds under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Trump and his lawyers argue he was acting within the law and his presidential authority to conduct U.S. foreign policy.

It’s a tricky issue that opens up many important questions from the balance of powers to the wisdom of foreign policy that includes sending millions of dollars in “anti-corruption aid” to places like Ukraine.

Few people have been following the impeachment as closely as John Rothmann – an author, Bay Area radio host on KGO 810AM, and frequent lecturer on American politics and the presidency. John also has one of the finest private libraries in the country – 15,000 volumes, specializing in American political history and political biography. He says Trump must go, and that if the Senate acquits it’s the end of America as we know it. He joins me this Sunday for the full hour.

But what would the Founders say? What are the important principles in play? And how would the analysis of the impeachment saga change if everyone took their ideological blinders off?

As the Senate prepares to vote “guilty” or “not guilty” in this historic case, I urge listeners to withhold their judgment and wait until after they’ve listened to this Sunday’s edition of the show of #ideasnotattitude.

Alarmist greens have created a fire hazard that they’re now using to blame
climate change, says CEI’s Myron Ebell.

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Radical environmentalists are increasingly using militant rhetoric to make the case for a proverbial “War on Climate Change.” What else is the Green New Deal if not Total War – the complete mobilization of the American economy – against the boogeyman of man-made emissions?

Myron Ebell (Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) notes that compared to the Green New Deal, even WWII and FDR’s New Deal were moderate (WWII only lasted four years – the Green New Deal would be permanent). In other words, the GND is social engineering in green garb – naming “unjust oppression” as one of its ancillary targets, and using soviet-style central planning to achieve its objectives.

Myron was a key figure in the Trump transition team who laid a foundation for the United States’ withdrawal from the genuinely oppressive Paris Climate Accord. He and his colleague at CEI, Patrick J. Michaels, recently wrote an article for the Washington Examiner demonstrating the latest area where the eco-warriors have overplayed their hand.

We are constantly lectured on a tenuous link between hot, dry weather and fires in places like California and Australia, yet misguided land management policies have created the very conditions which are now being blamed on climate change.

Skeptics are labelled “deniers” by those who ignore a much clearer correlation between the prohibition of prescribed burns and the rise of mega-fires such as the one now devastating Southern Australia.

California legislators would do well to remember this bit of native American wisdom:

Fire is medicine.
As the Guardian reports:

“For more than 13,000 years, the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash and hundreds of other tribes across California and the world used small intentional burns to renew local food, medicinal and cultural resources, create habitat for animals, and reduce the risk of larger, more dangerous wild fires.”

Groups like the Yurok Cultural Fire Management Council largely get a free pass for their counter-cultural environmental stewardship. Independent scholars like Myron and Patrick, however, have their motives and funding sources questioned by government-funded technocrats, whose budgets depend on dire predictions of impending doom.

When will environmentalists wake up to the wisdom of the Australian aborigines and native Americans, to see that not all human intervention is bad?

Myron joined the show of ideas for the full hour to discuss the problems with modern environmentalism and CEI’s efforts to de-escalate on the latest fronts of the “climate change” battle.

Frank Buckley’s American Secession presents a convincing argument for
letting states go their own way, and lays out a constitutional pathway for
it to happen.

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Jonathan Bydlak of the Institute for Spending Reform reviews the budget
numbers for the War in Afghanistan in the wake of the Afghanistan Papers.

We are now on our third President acting as commander-in-chief in the “Forever War.”
George W. Bush started it. Obama continued it. And Trump promised to end it, but hasn’t.

Ready for some depressing numbers? Take a deep breath:

2.5 Trillion – the total cost of the War in Afghanistan (including indirect costs such as military benefits and medical expenses), as estimated by the Institute for Spending Reform

2,400 - The number of U.S. military casualties since the start of the war.

18 - the number of years we’ve been in Afghanistan (note that babies born after 9/11 are now eligible to serve in the “war on terror”)

21 - the number of veterans who commit suicide every day.

For those who were paying attention, the recently released “Afghanistan Papers” showed that all of this has been for virtually nothing. They also revealed the extent to which we’ve been lied to with each extension of our military presence in the region.

The one silver lining is that it’s not too late to get out of Afghanistan – or at least to draw down troops to a bare minimum. Jonathan Bydlak, President of the Institute for Spending Reform, released a report that puts the costs of the War in Afghanistan in perspective, and proposes potential savings of up to $400 billion over the next four years.

President Trump take note: Americans and military alike support an end to the War in Afghanistan. Drawing down just 5,400 troops would generate massive savings for the American taxpayer. What are you waiting for?

I discuss the new report, and the broader implications of the Afghanistan Papers (which went largely unnoticed by the media at large).
Learn why Ron Paul called the War in Afghanistan the “Crime of the Century.”

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Just flirting with socialism is still dangerous, as the lasting damage of
the Great Society demonstrates.

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Gene Healy says we should put down the popcorn, and let the process play

out.