[NOTE: This has been drastically edited from the original post. I left to go to a wedding and instead of hitting save I hit Publish. Doh!  But as an antidote to all the distressing, depressing political news, here - have a positive, inspiring story about a kid who is doing something remarkable.]

I’ve posted a couple of times about “Windmill Guy” William Kamkwamba.  His new children’s book is out!  The book looks great – nice art, and of course Kamkwamba’s story is incredible for readers at any age. From his blog:

After my primary education, I was accepted at and began secondary education in Malawi. I began first form (equivalent to a high school freshman in America) and took two trimesters out of three. After the second trimester, I was forced to drop out of school because my family and I did not have enough money to pay the school fees.

I was out of school for five years.

Our family is poor like many families in Malawi and Africa, and as a result, we have no electricity in our village or my home. For many years we had only paraffin candles to light my home at night. They are expensive, smoky, smelly and have to be purchased about 8 km from home.

During that time I decided to try to get as much education as possible by reading as many books as I could find. An organization called the Malawian Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a project of USAID contributed a large quantity of books to the primary school library near my home. I read many of them.  One of the books I read was called Using Energy, a primary school textbook about how energy is made. Inside the book there were plans for a windmill. I decided to build a windmill to provide power for my family.

(Here’s his book for adults.)  So at 15 years old, he built a windmill out of scrap parts, including a bicycle frame. Then another, larger one.  People started talking, journalists came out and did a story on him, and funds were raised so he was eventually able to go back and finish high school.  These days Kamkwamba is here in the United States. He is a sophomore at Dartmouth and has an NGO called Moving Windmills which is improving the lives of many people in Malawi.  Here’s a short film, which is being expanded into a full documentary, about William.

I just love his story – how he overcame adversity, worked hard and creatively and made something that is generating wealth for himself, his family, and his town… it just keeps spreading.

(And for more positive info on Africa, don’t forget the documentary, Africa – Open for Business, which powerfully illustrates that the continent houses, in addition to thatched huts and starving babies with distended bellies, modern cities with high rise buildings and thriving stock exchanges.)

Ice-T, Ice Cube, whatev… One of the whitest white guys on television surprisingly knows his rappers. I have to admit – since I haven’t really enjoyed rap since the Sugar Hill Gang, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and old-school Run DMC – I didn’t know who that guy was either. I knew he wasn’t Ice-T but only because I sometimes watch Law & Order: SVU.

Consider this my 2012 kind word for Mr. O’Reilly: well done, sir.

If you’re a subscriber, thank you. I’m always kind of perplexed that anyone’s interested in reading something I wrote, and no one is more surprised than I am when I see that another person has subscribed to get posts in their inbox.

Unless you’ve subscribed in the last couple of weeks, you are receiving the old format emails, sent out by Google’s Feedburner system. And you can continue doing that indefinitely if you like. But the new WordPress system sends out emails which are better formatted and include screenshots of video so you can at least see if you’re interested in clicking through to watch.  It also includes options of how often you want to receive email – with each new post, once a day, or once a week. If you want to switch, all you need to do is unsubscribe to the existing emails (there is an unsubscribe link in each one) and type in your email address on the PH home page in the sidebar where it says Subscribe to Blog via Email. You’ll get an email with a link to confirm, and voila! You’re all set.

Amanda Marcotte blithely dismisses concerns about making Plan B available without an age restriction, so that 11 year old children well under the age of consent may obtain it.

 (Though, of course, the sex has already happened when the Plan B is purchased, so really, people who float this argument are just arguing that it’s better for the 11-year-old in question to be pregnant than not, which seems really cruel.) The reality is that fewer than 1 percent of 11-year-olds are sexually active,

According to the US Census, there are 10,097,332 girls between the ages of 10 and 14, so 1% of that is 100,973. While her example is of 11 year olds, I don’t believe any state’s age of consent is 14 or less.  She suggests that our opposition is because we think “that it’s better for the 11-year-old in question to be pregnant than not.” I’m not sure if Marcotte is just being stupid or if she’s being dishonest in order to dismiss our concerns and get on with something she thinks is more important, but there are actually some pretty reasonable arguments for opposing giving Plan B to children under the age of consent. One is that those children need protection and guidance from adults simply due to the fact that they are too young to engage in sexual behavior.  Another is that this is a strong medication, recently only available by prescription, and we do not judge children capable of self-medicating.   And if my daughter were 11 years old and trying to purchase Plan B, I’d be mightily curious where she got about $50 to spend on it.  An 11 year old – or any child 14 or under – wanting Plan B would naturally lead to a whole host of questions any decent parent would want to ask. She continues,

so the real people hurt by these restrictions are the 15- and 16-year-olds having sex with age-appropriate partners and those 17 and older who have a legal right to the pill but find that having to ask for a pharmacist to fetch it  is too much of an obstacle, because either the pharmacy counter is closed or because the pharmacy staff won’t hand it over, either out of ignorance or malice.

Anyone who is old enough (mature enough) to have sex is old enough to brave the pharmacy counter. If they can’t manage that, we should be thinking up ways to discourage them from having sex, not thinking up ways to enable them to avoid the consequences of it.  But don’t worry about children and teens too immature to be having sex. According to Marcotte, there’s a bigger problem.  On at least two occasions, adults have had difficulty buying Plan B.

I give you the story of Jason Melbourne of Mesquite, Texas. Melbourne went to the Mesquite CVS to buy Plan B for his wife, who had to stay home to look after their two small children. The reward he got for being a good husband who goes to the drugstore to buy lady things for his wife was resistance from the pharmacy staff, who refused to sell him the drug…

[...] Melbourne is the second man in Texas who has reported being denied Plan B at a CVS to the ACLU. Considering how many people don’t contact the ACLU after having their rights violated—or who would believe the pharmacy staff’s claims—that suggests this could be a widespread problem.

It is absolutely ridiculous for children whom our society insists cannot be trusted to take a Midol at school on their own to be able to buy medication with potentially serious side effects to deal with an issue they need help in dealing with – whether they realize it or not.  These are not short adults. They are children. But even if it actually is a widespread problem instead of a couple of anecdotes, it’s a problem easily solved by adults without making this medication available to children.