Normally Strange

The blog is dead!

Long live the updated, Movable-Type enabled, spiffy blog! Entries from this blog will be migrated soon have been migrated.


UPDATE: It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This blog is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the web it'd be pushing up the pixels! It's metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! This is an ex-blog!

Okay, more bloggy goodness

There's just no way I can let this pass without comment. A Catholic charitable organization has been ordered to provide insurance coverage for contraception to its employees by the Supreme Court of California.

Without prejudice as to my opinion about mandating health benefits in the first place, may I just ask what on earth is SCOC thinking? In my opinion, the Catholic ban on contraception is both incomphrensible and actively immoral -- more or less what the Church thinks of my life, I'm sure. That said, this is the sort of thing that makes me want to agree with conservatives foaming at the mouth about judicial activism.

Note to the ACLU: I used to belong to your organization. Then you started pulling, or maybe I just realized that you were, antiliberal stunts like this. I may not like the Catholic Church or the Catholic faith, but they're every bit as protected under Amendment the First as anyone else. This is not a freedom-enhancing decision. Quite the reverse, in fact. Stop it, please.

No More Bloggy Goodness

Until I get the new site set up.

12 days in, already it's that time

That was fast. So, I like blogging, and I'm going to keep doing it. Which means: getting off blogspot. Within (I hope) the next 24 hours, I'll be moving, and soon thereafter I'll be migrating over to Movable Type. Oh yes, and a minor tweak to the name, the blog will be called "Oddly Normal". Very creative, I know. We'll have RSS feeds and working permalinks and comments and images and trackback and everything, good times. Thank you to my readers -- all five of you -- for encouraging me to keep with this.

I really enjoy Joanne Jacobs's site

That said, however, I can't read it too often, lest I suffer from multiple cerebral hemorrhages. There's usually something there that makes me want to scream with frustration. Today, for instance, we have this.

Instead of teaching standard ways to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and long division and then drilling students with worksheets, teachers present several options for solving problems and encourage kids to use those that make sense to them. Rather than spend weeks or a single class on one subject, lessons bounce around, covering several areas in an hour. Computation is practiced by playing games, and students must continually explain why they're solving problems in the ways they've chosen.

Note to educators: the multiplication table is not a topic which requires creativity, different ways of knowing, obsessive introspection, group work, empowerment, self-esteem, or any of those those things you love so well. What you do, see, is memorize a hundred different little equations, and then recite them in an order determined by this adult in the classroom. We used to call this adult a teacher. I don't know if those still exist in our modern educational system, if not, perhaps we should get some. They might help. We called the recitals "tests" or "quizzes", and they helped determine whether or not our children is learning, to coin a phrase.

I think I'm about to have a Howard Dean moment. Excuse me, won't you.

US gas prices rise seven cents

Not a very interesting story, but it does illustrate a point I'd like to make to some of the more doomsaying people out there. It is simply not the case that we will continue on our merry way, drilling and pumping oil, and then one day, in 2026, perhaps, the oil will run out and our civilization will collapse.

Well, no. What will, of course, happen, is that as oil becomes harder and harder to get at, suppliers will demand higher prices, and gas prices will, well, rise over the course of many years or decades. When gas prices get to $5/gallon, for instance, getting an electric or hybrid vehicle will seem a lot more attractive. Maybe those CNG-based engines that are so popular on busses around here will be adapted for the private fleet. If heating oil becomes too pricy, people will switch to gas, or electric (ultimately powered by wind, or nuclear, or solar, or whatever else is determined in the power plant arena). Long before we've extracted the last drop of petroleum, our economy will adapt to using other energy sources.

This is one of the many benefits of living in a market economy.

This may not work as well as they think

Making highschool dropouts sign on the line before they leave, that is.

I mean, A for effort (*snark*) and all that but:

I'm willing to wager most HS dropouts are marginally literate, if that, so sending them a letter may not be the most effective form of communication

What are they going to do if the kid doesn't sign? Kick him out?

I seriously doubt that the standard yammer about lack of opportunities, etc., that the kid has no doubt heard at least sixteen thousand times in his life will be effective this time

Further, there's a cooked statistic at the bottom of the page: "According to Chicago school officials, 13 percent of the district's 435,000 students drop out annually". Thirteen percent drop out rate, yeah, that's pretty good? Oh wait, that's 13 percent per year, and high school usually lasts four years. Translating that to an actual "doesn't finish high school" rate can't be done precisely without knowing enrollment and dropout patterns, but it's probably not far from 50%.

Perfectly true statistic that's very likely to be read the wrong way, most likely intentionally. There are a lot of those in the world.

Schroeder's SPD falls from grace in Hamburg

I'm not an expert on German politics, but I feel reasonably comortable saying Germany's comatose economy is recent years has at least something to do with this. And this is certainly continuing a pattern, which has included Schroeder's losing his party leadership.

Okay, America and American politicians, I want you to pay attention: this is what happens when you combine generous social welfare benefits with rigid labor markets (note: that's the same thing as "protecting our high-paying manufacturing/IT/whathaveyou jobs", you know).

Via Sullivan

Perils of Blogging

This site is currently the #1 google hit for "self-aggrandizing asshat", with or without quotes. Sigh.

Mugabe acts like Mugabe, France approves, America sleeps

If there's any government in the world that can hold a candle to North Korea's in the evil department, it must be Zimbabwe's. We modern westerners like to pride ourselves on the lessons we learned from World War II and the Holocaust. We'd like to think that we've learned the true evil of genocide, the danger of uncontrolled and uncontrollable dictators.

With all due respect, I don't think that this is the case. We've got death camps, murderous secret police, genocide, persecution, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the rest of the lot going on right now, in this world, in 2004. Right in front of our eyes. Naturally, we in the west can't prevent all of this, we are human and have limits just like everybody else. But the way so many comfortable, well-fed people in the west will approve of this, tacitly or overtly, or at least say that, (a) it's all America's, or the West's fault, and (b) the use of military force to address any of these problems would be racist, imperialist, for oil, etc. belies our pretentions.

Mugabe is feted in Paris. Kim Jong Il is given oil, food, and privacy to slaughter his subjects by the million in exchange for his unverifiable promise to halt nuclear weapons research. America's disgraceful history with slavery is, rightly, held to be a stain on our nation, while the present-day slave trade in the Sudan is just an expression of cultural preferences, if indeed, it isn't entirely a lie. The same groups who were screaming at us that we support dictators all over the world screamed all the louder when we actually toppled one of the nastier ones.

The Left, as a whole, has no better a record than the Right on these issues, and vice versa, it's not a partisan issue, nor is it a specifically American one by any stretch of the imagination. We not only don't put a stop to these atrocities, we make excuses for the perpetrators. There is active, widespread political opposition, from many nations, from all parties, to actually doing anything about these issues. This isn't even always indifference, it is often complicity and approval.

I'm no idealist about human nature: we're as red in tooth and fingernail as any other species, when you get right down to it. Nothing about the above surprises me, sad though it may be. Genocide is nothing new, torture is a well-established tradition, and hating the other has more often been held to be morally necessary than morally repugnant.

I just think that we should recognize this fact. Humanity hasn't fundamentally changed since the Holocaust, and we comfortable westerners delude ourselves to think ourselves exempt.

Virginia Postrel is right

As always. The article analogizes free trade in the world today to free trade between the states in the US over the course of the last 200 years, and does so spectacularly well. It's an extremely powerful historical refutation of trade protectionism. A summary can't do her justice, just read the whole thing.

Note: Do yourself a favor, and read Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies, too. Postrel is one of my personally favorite authors, and one of the most incisive thinkers around today.

Weird Blogger Quirk

The program by that name, that is. If you open a "post" window, wander off, come back, and write something, the timestamp will be the time you opened the window, not when you posted. The post below was timestamped at 7:57am on the 27th (right before I left for work), but I didn't write a durn thing until about 5:50am on the 28th. This is strange. Normally strange. I changed the timestamp.

California supreme court refuses to stop same-sex marraige

You have no idea how suprised I am by this. I know it's not final and all, and I still think the courts will kipper these marriages eventually, but I'm astounded they've been going on as long as they have.

Congratulations, Kate

The Venomous One has quit smoking. Yay. I did that myself, several years ago. It's so worth it. Best of luck!

Blogospheric Sampling Error

It takes effort to bear in mind that the views you read each day do not form a representative sampling of public opinion. It's easy to spot when others do this: e.g. opponents of the Iraq war, most or all of whose friends oppose the war, most or all of whose reading material is written by an anti-war author, who think the near-universal unpopularity of the war will sink Bush's reelection campaign. Of course, the war enjoys majority support and isn't likely to sink Bush.

The flip side of this, of course, with that the blogs and other media I read, I tend to agree with the author 50% to 90% of the time, depending on the author. This gives my view of others' opinions an inherent skew that has to be adjusted for -- e.g. trade protectionism is really quite popular, and lots of people are scared of more recent developments in biotechnology.

I don't really have a point here, except to remind myself that one's friends and/or self-selected reading material is about as unrepresentative a sample as you can get, and movements in opinion expressed there should be taken with a grain of salt.

Good News

Oxblog has been counting noses, and says there are 42 senatorial votes against the FMA (out of 81 senators who've responded). This is certainly a positive development, but, well, votes can change. I still think it's very likely to pass, if not in this Congress, than the next.

4,000 Pedophile Priests Since 1950

Nationally, that is. Is there some sort of cult going on inside the Church or what?

The panel noted that any evaluation of the crisis had to take into account that much of the abuse involved men preying on boys, the source said. And the report said that church leaders' failure to discipline sexually active priests created an environment that made clerics reluctant to report abuse of children.

Is this the broken-windows theory of the priesthood? This is the lamest excuse I've heard in a long time. Apparently, the Catholic hierarchy doesn't see the difference between a priest having consensual, if illicit, sex with a 30 year old and a priest raping a 10 year old. You guys are seriously fornicated up.

The findings are sure to fuel debate among Catholics on two controversial issues: whether the church should try to screen out gay priests and whether celibacy for clergy should be optional.

Naturally *snark*. Of course, the Catholic Church is free to disallow gay clergy for whatever reasons they choose -- freedom of religion and all that. But might I suggest a policy that might work to drive away the kiddie-diddlers a bit better? When a bishop learns that one of his priests raped a child, he calls the police! Shocking, I know, but it just might work.

Your papers, Amerikanische Schweinhund!

This is disturbing. There's a flagrant misuse of the word "democratic" to mean "free*", but even so. This is one of those grand European traditions that America should have no part of. Presumption of innocence, people! Especially for someone not even accused of a crime.

Courtesy of Myria and The Bitch Girls

* No, they are not the same. In a democractic country, as the wise man** said, 51 percent of the population can vote to pee in the cornflakes of the other 49. This is not freedom.

** Jonah Goldberg, although I'm not certain that he originated it.

Summer of Love

Myria Writes:

I suspect it's going to be a long summer. Once May 17th[the day gay marriage in Massachusetts goes live] hits things will get even more interesting one way or the other.

Michele blogs that 2004 looks a lot like 1968, only worse.

At least it looks like the Democratic convention won't turn into a literal riot this year, I guess. Inside Fleet Center, at least. Who knows what the streets of Boston will look like?

Iraq, gay marriage, Halliburton, judicial activism. For such a rich country with such a tradition of (relative) stability, America in 2004 has a hell of a lot of strife going on. Especially if the summer is abnormally warm, I wouldn't be at all suprised to see demostrations turning to protests with an eighty percent chance of riots, looting, and isolated pockets of murder. It may not happen, I hope it doesn't. And I expect we'll survive it -- after all, 2004 may be 1968, but 1968 was no 1861, and we survived even that.

But I will stock up on bottled watter and canned foods.

And the world retreats back into its shell

So, Europe is imposing trade sanctions on the US because the US gave certain companies an underhanded subsidy. John Kerry has his dander up about outsourcing. Edwards, of course, is a even angrier about it. Steel tariffs, sugar quotas. NAFTA under fire. Farm subsidies are rife both in the US and in Europe.

It drives me to drink, it really does -- although I'd better prefer domestic brands, it seems! Maybe it's just my usual pessimism, but this seems an awful lot like the gains in free trade made over the last 50 years are starting to erode. Of course, this isn't all that suprising, we are, after all, entering a new historical era in many ways -- Communism gone, 9/11, the nascent United States of Europe coming into being, a new wave of European anti-Semitism, old alliances falling apart if not already defunct. The Post-World War II years seem to be over.

Random thought

For all the people who hold that homosexuality, or a homosexual 'lifestyle', is a choice freely made*.

I've got a question. If homosexuality is a choice, how much would I have to pay you to be Andrew Sullivan's boyfriend/Ellen DeGeneres's girlfriend, as appropriate? Would you renounce you heterosexual lifestyle and act in an exclusively homosexual manner for the rest of your life for a million dollars? Ten million? Immortality? Unquestioned dictatorship over the entire planet? What's your price?

*Note: this does not categorically include either all opponents of gay marriage, nor all people who think that homosexuality is immoral, nor all people who think homosexuality isn't specifically genetic.

Boston priests allegedly molested 815 children

That's in the 54 years since 1950. So, let me get this straight, as it were. One hundred and sixty-two priests have been implicated. That's exactly three priests a year. The numbers that follow aren't quite so backed-up, and are just back of the envelope musing, but I'm trying to be as generous to the Church as I can.

I'm not well up on the number of priests in Boston, but it's a pretty heavily Catholic city of about 800,000. According to adherents.com, there were approximately 50,000 American Catholic priests serving in 1997. Distributing them equally across the nation, that's one per 6,000 citizens. Boston's heavily catholic, so call it one per 2,000 there -- that's 400 priests. Assuming an average time spent in the archdiocese of 10 years, that's 40 new priests a year, 3 of whom would be kiddie-diddlers. That's better (worse, actually) than one in fifteen.

I could make any number of points about this related to recent items that have been in the news, but I'm not going to. I'm going to let the numbers speak for themselves.

John Paul, you have a serious problem here.

UPATE: On re-reading the article (did it change?), I see that CNN reports that these represent "approximately 7 percent" of the priests who served during that period. 3 out of 40 is 7.5%. I'm so good.

Bush Tightens Cuban Travel Restrictions

Okay, I'm not exactly a fan of Fidel. Kill him as soon as possible, as far as I'm concerned: he's bad the Cuba and bad for the world. It's just that I'm not exactly certain what these restrictions are mean to achieve. Americans who want to go to Cuba still can, I think, just go via Mexico or Canada or anywhere else. Trade between Cuba and the US is already pretty much nonexistent. And I really doubt this has a whole lot to do with national security as such. This certainly won't knock over Fidel, he's been ruling with an iron fist for 45 years now, through far worse than this. What's the point?

Conclusions

From the last few days:

Alan Greenspan may well be the only federal government-oriented figure who's at all sensible about anything anymore.

A lot of people really just don't like gays very much. At all.

Trying to write about the Center For Science in the Public Interest is more difficult than it looks. I can't get more than three sentences in without becoming incoherent with anger.

Blogging isn't, yet, as much of a time sink as I thought it would be.

I have too many opinions. Yes, thank you Laura, we already knew that.

Listen to Greenspan!

He knows what he's talking about.

We're lucky here in the US. We get to see Europe go down the public finance hole a good 10 or 15 years ahead of us -- they're starting to tip in right now, in fact, the last couple of years. Maybe it'll sober us up. Maybe.

Speaking of Judicidal Activism

SCOTUS has decided that states are within their rights to specifically exclude students of theology from eligibility for scholarships.

(Full disclosure: I'm an atheist.) If this isn't clearly discrimination on the basis of religion, I'm hard put to come up with something that is. I have my doubts about the utility of public funding for the study of theology, but nothing that doesn't apply equally to sociology, literary criticism, or any department whose title includes the word "studies".

Something I don't get

I'm trying to imagine the implications of being an evangelical Christian in today's political environment. I'm about as far from that status as one can possibly get, of course, so it's a mite difficult, and everything here is subject to being dead wrong.

Okay, so I think, if I were an evangelical Christian, I would believe three things (among others):

1. A fetus is a fully-vested human being, therefore abortion is murder. Therefore, well over a million murders are performed in this manner each year in this country. It's two Holocausts per decade, i.e. six Holocausts since Roe v. Wade.
2. Gay sex is immoral and destructive to the family as an institution. Gay marriage is nonsensical and apt to cause further sunder the institution of marriage, which is the glue than binds society together.
3. No-fault divorce is immoral and destructive to the family as an institution. No-fault divorce is an exercise in moral relativism and has been, for 40 years now, sundering the institution of marriage, which is the glue that binds society together.

That seems about right, right? Without prejudice to my opinions on any of the above issues, this is a fair description of what most evangelical Christians believe (among other things)?

Politically speaking:

(1) Is still fought, in a largely desultory fashion, through the legislatures. The battle is largely around the fringes of the issue.
(3) No longer elicits any meaningful protest, just a bit of rhetoric now and then.
(2) Necessitates an immediate constitutional amendment.

So, apparently, gay marriage is worse than six Holocausts, and worse than scores of millions of broken homes. Now, I can understand being opposed to gay marriage, and even opposed to gay people. But doesn't this seem a little bit out of proportion?

UPDATE: A further couple of things I don't get.

As you've probably seen, two of the favorite arguments from analogy in this debate are "if you ban same-sex marriage, why not interracial marriage?" and "if you allow same-sex marriage, why not man-goat marriage?"

Why do so many people on each side of this issue see one of these analogies as obviously relevant and the other as obviously fallacious?

FURTHER UPDATE: Yes, I think both analogies are fallacious.

Words that no longer mean anything

Some words get the meaning sucked right out of them by overuse, especially when what they're overapplied to is a stretch of the meaning of the word in any event. This is especially a problem with words that are picked up by one group or another as a term of insult.

The pre-eminent examples of that these days are, I believe, "fascist" and "terrorist". Please. George Bush is not a fascist, and neither am I. The NEA is not a terrorist organization, and neither is the US military.

Opposing affirmative action does not make one a racist, and neither does favoring it. Opposing same-sex marriage is not proof positive of anti-gay bigotry, and favoring it is not anti-Christian bigotry.

Further, literally does not literally mean figuratively, although figuratively, it apparently does.

UPDATE: Also "hate", "radical", and "agenda".

In honor of the Center For Science In OurThe Public Interest

I will eat a big plate of nachos for breakfast this morning. Although in deference to the fact that Taco Bell food tastes awful, I'll make my own. I will have a more substantive rant about this group of busybodies later today, but right now I've got work to do and nachos to eat.

To Ban or Not to Ban?

The Blogfather thinks this statement made by the president yesterday indicates only support for a constitutionalized version of DOMA. And Bush does yammer on more than a little about states' rights and the full faith and credit clause.

But, I think the last two sentences of the ninth paragraph indicates pretty strongly that Bush is backing an amendment to ban all gay marriage, not just to allow states to avoid recognizing other states' marriages:

Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife. The amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage.

"Definfing and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman", "fully protect marriage", "defining legal arrangements other than marriage". It's of course possible that I'm missing something, but this looks like support of an outright ban to me.

Call me paranoid

But I find this somewhat disturbing. I mean, compared to the idiocy of the War on Drugs, it's not exactly breaking new ground here, although this is in a different arena. Would the FBI shut down, say, a newspaper whose classified ads were used to conduct illict trade this unthinkingly?

Getsapo this isn't, but still. Stop it, please.

Civilization Collapses, Film at Eleven

Ahh, The Onion. You know some people think like this.

Bush To Gays: Drop Dead

I don't think I need to provide a link.

I held my nose and voted for Gore in 2000. Ten months later, New York and Washington were attacked, and I became glad he lost. Bush's performance in the war, and foreign policy generally, have been sterling, and throughout 2002 and for most of 2003, I was quite certain I'd vote for the man. In this, by the way, I was going against the beliefs of just about everyone I know and care about. My parents, family, friends, vague acquantainces, all of them just couldn't believe that I, I of all people, would vote for Bush, that warmongering Texan! How could I do such a thing?

And now? Well, I'll more than likely vote for, and send my donation money to Kerry, disgusting though he is.

I agree that the Massachusetts SC overreached, and I'm as suprised as anyone that Gavin Newsom's same-sex marriages here in San Francisco are still going on. And I do think that attempting to change to constitution is far more (legally) legitiamate than either of the other two. Antis: you guys do have the procedural high ground here, much as I am loth to admit it. Still, attempting to amend the constitution to allow pedophilia* would be procedurally legitimate, too, and this doesn't mean I'd support it, or even think the people behind it were morally sound.

It isn't Bush's fault that this became such a prominent issue in this election cycle. Still, regardless of why we are here, we are here, a darn shame though it may be. So, reluctantly, I probably won't be voting for, or donating to, Bush this year. My parents will be relieved.

* See? Everyone can use reducto ad pedophilia, not just those arguing against gay equality.

Putin sacks entire Russian government

There is just no conceivable way this can possibly be good.

We're back in the USSR, it seems.

The smell of barbequeued statistics in the morning

I know I shouldn't blog at work. Bad Laura. But sometimes, you come across something which is such arrant nonsense, so obviously intellectually dishonest, that you must fisk it immedaitely. An op-ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle is such an item.

Preface: I'm not an education expert, but I do know how to cook statistics. The author appears to be an enthusiastic, though inept, practitioner of this art. Shall we?


Workers in the United States are finding it more difficult to compete in a global marketplace because they have lost one of their biggest advantages -- superior education. But instead of expanding access to higher education for workers, politicians are slamming the door shut with policies that restrict access.

A serious charge, and important if true, of course. Only letting rich folk in, are we? That is a problem.

Funding for higher education is one of the greatest security threats facing our nation. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United States has the highest percentage of citizens enrolled in higher education, but its rate of public spending on these students ranks a paltry 98th. China ranks 35th in per-pupil spending and India ranks 44th. These countries compete for jobs in the global market because they offer an educated workforce that can be hired for lower wages.

So, we have the highest percentage of citizens enrolled in tertiary education, and we are restricting access -- "slamming the door shut", as she wrote two whole sentences ago. You'd think the author would at least wait before telling us the single statistic that would most handily shoot down her entire thesis. She gets credit for mentioning it, though.

Leaving aside the overwrought absurdity of calling this a "security threat", apparently private spending on education doesn't count. Paying your way to better your job prospects, or just out of insatiable curiosity? Parents footing the bill because it's the thing to do? Sorry, that doesn't count, you don't really have access to education, you capitalist! Even so, I find that 98th ranking hard to believe on an absolute-dollar basis, I'd wager the ratio in question is (Public spending per student)/(Per capita GDP) or something of that nature.

This year, the United States will graduate 1.2 million students with bachelor's degrees. In contrast, India will graduate 2.1 million and China will graduate 2.5 million. These college graduates from India and China aren't "stealing" U.S. jobs and opportunities; our country is losing its competitive edge. It is a situation that is in our interest to remedy.

Offhand, that seems to imply we've got twice the degrees awarded per capita of India, and a bit more than double that of China. Remeber, they have three to four times our population.

America's community colleges can play a key role in helping to transform our workforce into one of the finest in the world -- but we need political help. Education policies are crafted to fit college students as politicians see them -- recent high school graduates. But the profile of today's student has changed, and our policies need to reflect this.

Political Help, n.: Educationalese for dollars.

Approximately 5 million students are enrolled in community colleges nationwide, almost half of all U.S. undergraduates. At the Community College National Legislative Summit held earlier this month, it was reported that 39 percent of all students in higher education are over the age of 25. Forty percent of all students in higher education work full time, try to raise families and pay for their education without qualifying for financial aid.

Good for them. Given that they're enrolled in community colleges, they probably don't need much in the way of tuition help, right? Those tend to be pretty cheap.

In Washington, politicians are debating how to proceed with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which both funds federal aid to students and provides resources to serve at-risk populations. The system for awarding financial aid is in need of significant restructuring to benefit community-college students, especially in California. Most of the financial aid regulations are still built around the premise of supporting traditional college-age students who live "at home." In addition, federal policies have strayed from an emphasis on providing access to higher education for low- income families to helping middle-income families pay for rising tuition at universities.

Low-income students have a hard time getting a college education because most of their elementary, middle, and high schools have passed beyond the tragedy stage and are now a farce. Maybe this is just me, but perhaps ensuring that children can, say, read by age 18 should be a priority. After all, more than half of the students at CSU have to take remedial classes, for stuff that they should, ideally, have learned in middle school, let alone high school. But this isn't my area of expertise, so I'll let it lie.

In Sacramento, some legislators believe California's community colleges are a bargain, and they may again attempt to raise tuition. This could include a charge of $50 per unit for students who have already earned a bachelor's degree. Students who qualify to enter CSU and UC are being diverted to community colleges and will be given priority during scheduling and in the transfer process into the state's universities. What message do these policies send a laid-off worker looking to make a career transition?

It's imperative that we provide access to educational opportunities for our workforce. If this country is to become competitive, the laid-off high- tech worker who wants to enter a new career needs to be treated the same as the recent high-school graduate when it comes to financial aid and tuition costs.

This country is quite competitive, I think. And given that, as the author stipulates, we have the highest proportion of our population enrolled in higher education of any nation, I'd guess lack of college degrees isn't the problem, to the extent that there is one.

Rosa Perez is president of Cañada College in Redwood City, where she has formed partnerships with four-year universities and private industry to offer bachelor's degrees on the Cañada campus.


Ah yes, that would explain it.

Attention Baby Boomers

The present year is 2004, not 1969. You are a 54-year old advertising executive, not a 19-year old trust-fund-revolutionary-cum-student. American troops are in Iraq, not in Vietnam. Marijuana has come in and out of fashion three times since the last time you smoked it. You are no longer the flower-power hope for tomorrow, you are the SUV-driving hope for yesterday. John Kerry is not a Hanoi-Jane-loving commie, and George W. Bush is not a chickenhawk. You are not staging a second youthful revolution against The Man. You are The Man. The Vietnam War is over, and is no longer relevant to anyone but historians and military strategists. Present-day college students are engaging in their youthful rebellion against you by becoming conservatives.

The times, they have a-changed.

UPDATE: Based on leading indicators, and given that human nature is roughly constant, a significant fraction of my generation and the next will be bleating about the Iraq war until the end of time. So it's not just the boomers.

HRT Linked to Asthma

That's hormone replacement therapy, a regimen meant to lessen the symptoms of menopause. It now has been linked to the development of asthma.

This is pretty good reporting, as health affairs go -- they actually mention the total sample size (about 70,000), the incidence (about 0.5%, overall), and the actual odds ratio (twice as likely to develop as the control group). It's based on actual studies, not one sensational case that's in the news or a handful of lawsuits. Further, AP seems to have done a good job of adding the appropriate caveats -- don't know for sure, other possible explanations, and so forth. There's no figurative hyperventaliting, and no transparent political motivation.

This is good health reporting for a general audience.

The folks on the Atkins diet, cell phone radiation, and mad cow beats should pay attention.


One quibble: they didn't mention whether the odds ratio was age-adjusted. It likely was, given how clinical studies work, but they really should indicate that if it is so. Rates and odds ratios unadjusted for age, sex(irrelevant in this case), prior conditions, and so forth, are pretty nearly worthless. Eg. Tall Americans are more literate than short Americans, a conclusion I have come to without doing any research whatsoever. To make this meaningful, however, I really should age-adjust my results to account for the fact that children are shorter and less literate than adults.