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Is he a Nuke?

This is pretty much my experience when I was in the service. I had 100% in most of my schools as did my dad.

I used a Nuke to increase my GPA by forming a team with him.

His dedication to detail and mathematical skills were an excellent addition to my video games, depression, anxiety, and general social withdraw.

I used the same technique when I partnered with the woman with the highest GPA in my chemical engineering major.

I might not have cared about school, but I knew how to find the people who did and work with them. I'm not quite sure they benefited from me, however.

Damn near everyone I knew in school in the Navy was spending tons of free time either drinking beer or playing video games. I almost never saw anyone actually studying. The ability differences showed up between the ones barely passing and the ones carrying 90+ averages despite the lack of studying.

My program wasn't nuke, but it was the next hardest. A lot of the guys who failed out of nuke school went there instead... we called them "nuclear waste."

Last night while finishing the game Deus Ex my son asked me to read to him a book that he talked me into buying--Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul. The only time he asks me to stop reading is when there is a cut scene. I know he is hearing and remembering what I read to him because he often asks me to look up more information on things I just read, especially terms he has not heard before so he can understand them better and he is able to come up with really good analogies that go along with whatever subject we just read about. He is able to summarize and discuss the main points of what we read at dinner when his dad his home much better than I can. He sounds so much smarter than I do when he speaks and has for years because of this ability to take in information from everywhere and then analogize it to help explain the material.

I have noticed that he does well on the fast paced three player online game Triviador so I know he has managed to pick up lots of general knowledge even though he has played video games for years.

One more thing I find interesting about his video game playing is that he found that he was able to pick up accents very quickly from the voice actors and then do impressions. When he discusses or explains things he often throws in quotes done in various accents to match the person who originally said it and it makes him fun even more fun to talk to.

Has he read Milton's Areopagitica?

You might also read "Road to Serfdom" by Hayek.
Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
"Bionomics : Economy as Ecosystem" by Rothschild "Crowdsourcing" by Howe.

I second the recommendations, and since political science seems to be a strong interest for him, if he is curious at all about the history of how we ended up with the Republican Party we have today, he might also want to check out "Rule and Ruin" by Geoffrey Kabaservice.

Thank you. He has not read Milton's Areopatica and I noticed that it was on the Project Gutenberg so we can read it online for free. I can read it to my son on the iMac my husband bought for me while he is playing games, of course. It makes it so easy to look up words and get more information.

I will also check out your other recommendations. We will have a lot of time to read because my son has to stay in a brace that makes it difficult to do anything but sit most of the day. He will have to wear this thing until he stops growing so I think we will have several years to do a lot of reading. I try to think of this as a positive thing. This would be much harder for a kid who didn't already love to read and learn all day long.

Thank you. Political science does seem to be a big interest for him now. He also likes political humor. He really enjoys watching things like the Colbert Report.

The full title of the book is "Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party", and judging from the title, it is a partisan screed. Aculady, I could recommend many books critical of the Democratic party and the current president, but this is not place for it.

The book is actually a meticulously researched history of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, which dominated the party 50 years ago, and how it came to be marginalized.

I didn't find it a partisan screed at all, and neither did the CS Monitor or the New York Times, or any of the numerous other national sources where it has been reviewed.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek thought it was worth publishing not one, but two excerpts back in December. I didn't realize they were complete shills for the Democrats.

I didn't realize we'd already reached that Orwellian state where we can't even talk about the fact that things used to be different than they are today without that somehow being a partisan act, and, since Lori's son is young enough that he's likely never seen an Eisenhower-type moderate Republican, I thought he might enjoy reading the history, which is exceedingly well-written, as I would expect of a book written by a historian who lectured in history at Yale.

I thought context for the current political scene might be useful.