High schools must be putting something in the water these days.
One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.
[via USA Today]
Happily, it looks like Iraqis turned out to vote in exceedingly high numbers despite threat of injury, despite exhortations from clerics to boycott, despite everything that has happened to them in the past two years.
The chairman of the Independent Election Commission of Iraq, Fareed Ayar, said as many as 8 million people turned out to vote, or between 55 percent and 60 percent of those registered to cast ballots. If 8 million turns out to be the final figure, that would represent 57 percent of voters. […] The predicted low turnout in Anbar, a hotspot of Sunni resistance to the American occupation, was exceeded to such an extent that extra voting materials had to be rushed to outlying villages, where long lines were formed at polling stations, Mr. Ayar said.
Hopefully, 2005 will be Iraq’s as 1989 was Germany’s, 1992 the Czech Republic’s.
[via the NY Times]
Stevie and me at his going away party, 15. January 2005.
During the early party of The Giant NYC Blizzard of 2005 That Indirectly Ruined the C Train and Thus My Life.
Inclusion of references to and pictures of herself has prompted Katie (my lover) to view this blog. According to Miss Connor, the temptation to look at her gorgeous mug was just too much to resist, but in no way should this visit be construed as an indication that she will be back in future. The editor is happy with what he can get and hopes that she will reconsider her position at some later time.
In other Katie-related news, she was among the confederacy of dunces that attended the wrong party on Monday evening.
Katie (my lover) and George at the crashed party, 24. January 2005.
Listen up kids (literally), it is No Name-Calling Week this week. So if you don’t have something nice to say, save it for next week.
Have you ever been invited to invite-only party, get there, take advantage of the free bar, check out the guy with insanely big hair, only to find out the next day that you ended up at the wrong place and the hair was actually a fur hat? No? You should try it, it’s a really good time.
Regret the Error posted a funny retraction scenario. The December issue of Vanity Fair, edited by Graydon Carter, gave an wrong title for an editor. Regret imagines if Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, another Conde Nast publication, found the error.
Anna Wintour: Graydon you pill! You gave Susan Train the wrong title in an article in your December issue! I want it corrected immediately! And stop printing articles about fashion or I’ll have Si revoke your Town Car privileges!
Graydon Carter: Anna (inhaling smoke) I’m sorry. I’ll have it (exhaling smoke) corrected in the next issue Can you believe Bush won the (inhaling smoke) election even after I published my book? Please don’t tell anyone I grew up in (exhaling smoke) Canada.
Anna Wintour: (already hung up)
Word on the street is that Spongebob Squarepants is gay, people. This is shocking. I am shocked. Absolutely shocked. I urge everyone to destroy their Spongebob Squarepants videos and related paraphernalia, preferably by burning. You can find more information about the “insidious” character by reading this piece in the New York Times.
Seriously though, you should read the article. You will see jut how desperate some people are to find dangerous “pro-gay” themes where none exist at all — not even a teeny tiny bit.
Now that Chief Justice William Renqhuist’s departure from the bench seems more a question of how soon instead of if, everyone is frantically trying to guess who the President will select to replace him. Word on the street (read: Time magazine) is that, of those candidates already on the Supreme Court, it’s a toss-up between Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Thomas is black, so that would be a good political move for the President, but it looks like people are leaning toward Scalia.
He is the most conservative member of the court right now — not at all one that would be able to build consensus among the other justices, which is a big job of the chief justice. I’ve written about Scalia before — he ordered a journalist’s tapes of one of his speeches on free speech destroyed by a US marshall. He failed to recognize the irony, but was still called down by pretty much everyone in the world for his nigh-on-illegal order. Plus, he seems more ideological than the other justices and that scares me — if there are places for blind ideology, even half-blind ideology, the court is not one of them.
Hopefully President Bush will look at one of the other justices or look outside the court for a replacement because I don’t want to have to delete this post when Nino comes after me for saying disparaging things about him.
A big controversy surrounds something that the president of Harvard said at a conference a few days ago. Apparently he seemed to claim that women were underrepresented in science and engineering careers because of innate differences between the sexes. Naturally, in the overly politically correct halls of America’s Academia there was a resounding thunder of offense, calls for his sacking, censure, apology, etc.
A Slate.com article paraphrased what he really said:
He offered three possible reasons for this gender gap. The biggest, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers are willing to spend 80 hours a week away from their kids. The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering. The third factor was discrimination by universities. Summers said repeatedly that Harvard and other schools should work to eliminate discrimination. (emphasis added)
How is citing the facts of test scores considered impolitic? Because the facts don’t fit will with sensitivities about the differences between the sexes. But are there differences between the sexes? Studies have shown that, genetically, males and females are about 1% to 2% distinct; about the same difference between a male human and a male chimpanzee or a female human and a female chimpanzee. So there are genetic differences — the Slate artciel asks: could that produce differences in the brain? Yep, it sure does.
You’d expect some of these differences to show up in the brain, and they do. A study of mice published a year ago in Molecular Brain Research found that just 10 days after conception, at least 50 genes were more active in the developing brain of one sex than in the other. Comparing the findings to research on humans, the Los Angeles Times observed that “the corpus callosum, which carries communications between the two brain hemispheres, is generally larger in women’s brains [than in men’s]. Female brains also tend to be more symmetrical. Â… Men and women, on average, also possess documented differences in certain thinking tasks and in behaviors such as aggression.”
Our trouble is that we confuse equality of opportunity with equality. I doubt that genetic differences account for any real difference in maximum potential intelligence between men and women, but some men are more intelligent and women and vice versa. I echo the sentiment of William Saletan, the author of the Slate article:
Last year Harvard offered only four of 32 tenured positions in the arts and sciences to women. A genetic difference between the sexes doesn’t mean four was anywhere near the right number. It just means the number doesn’t have to be exactly 16.
[read the Slate article]
UPDATE: A UC Irvine study found that there are no real disparities between the intelligence of men and women. However, there are “significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.”
Word on the streets of Europe is that Colgate and MasterCard are cool but Exxon and Marlboro aren’t. Researchers at a market research firm asked people in the UK, Canada, France and Germany to rate American brands. They then produced a lovely chart. Kodak, Visa, and Heinz are considered only moderatly American, whereas others, especially those with “American” in their name, are very American and are not well-liked at all.
People are so strange.
[via Slate.com]
I’m certainly no student of Eastern European post-Soviet history, at least beyond a passing understanding of Czech and German peaceful transitions. Still, having spent some time in the CR I feel a fondness toward those nations still operating under post-Communist regimes or emerging from them. Last Fall Ukraine went through an election crisis that would have begun a serious deterioration in the democratic institutions of the country.
The presidential election was clearly rigged, the outgoing president wanted to hand power to his chosen successor rather than let the chips fall where they may. But the Ukrainian people didn’t much care for the then Prime Minister, Viktor F. Yanukovich, and so they protested. It sounded and looked much like the Velvet Revolution that occurred in the CR in 1992 — hence my initial interest. They are calling it the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
In an article in the NY Times today, I read that the government was actually going to launch a huge violent crackdown on the protesters in an effort to prevent what ultimately happened anyway — e new presidential election. What is most interesting is that the security services where the ones to sew the undoing of the crackdown. As the article points out, it is highly unusual for former Iron Curtain security agencies to oppose ruling regimes. In this instance it was a blessing.
You’d do better to stop reading my blathering and read the NY Times instead. The link is below.
[via the New York Times]
The population of China has reached 1.3 billion. I guess the one child policy isn’t working so well these days. Chairman Mao would be so upset.
