"Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else." - Ogden Nash

***

China fakes reports from space - "China's state news agency published a despatch from the country's three latest astronauts describing their first night in space before they had even left Earth. The Xinhua agency, which has sometimes been accused of carrying state propaganda, took down the story and blamed it on a "technical error"."
Ah, China. The land of lies.

What Clarence Thomas might have to say about Sarah Palin - "Liberals inclined to blindly support affirmative action would do well to contemplate the lessons of Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas. Although the former exudes unflagging self-confidence and the latter may always be crippled by self-doubt, both have become nearly frozen in a defensive crouch, casualties of an effort to create an America in which diversity is measured solely in terms of appearance."

Rebellion, Revisited - "'[C]olleges and universities do not need a single additional “conservative”… What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists – all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few “conservatives”.'... The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of Furr and Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination, or paranoia, may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t."
I like this comment: "Idealogues begin with argument and reason. When that isn't effective enough, they follow with lies and emotion"

Prototype - We’ll Fill This Space, but First a Nap - "Dr. Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.” In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it."

Sound Judgment: Does curing deafness really mean cultural genocide? - "Militant "Deaf Pride" activism first gained national visibility in 1988, when six radical students at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the country's only liberal arts university for the deaf, successfully blocked the appointment of a hearing university president by organizing student protests. This movement has consciously modeled itself not only on the civil rights activism of the 1960s but even more directly on the gay pride movement. Just as gay activists sought to remove the stigma of "sickness" from homosexuality, deaf activists have been trying to challenge the view of deafness as a deficiency. They draw an explicit analogy between efforts to restore hearing to the deaf (or to prevent deafness altogether) and efforts to "cure" homosexuality... Northeastern University psychologist Harlan Lane, a prominent (hearing) champion of "deaf culture" who asserts that to define deaf people as hearing-impaired is like defining women as "non-men," has received a MacArthur fellowship and rave reviews for his work... Quite a few deaf people see these activists as an arrogant minority trying to impose its will on everyone else. It is worth noting that only about a quarter of the estimated 2 million profoundly deaf people in the United States use sign language... Perhaps the best way to learn something from the Deaf Pride movement is to see it as a reductio ad ab-surdum of modern identity politics."

YouTube - TBGSS - Lesbian Speed Dating - "The Big Gay Scetch Show Lesbian Speed Dating"
Tsk tsk, homophobia!

Our Singapore F1 Race Queen in Comparison - Hurr hurr.

Foreign Affairs: Give War a Chance - "An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat... Each time, the opponents used the pause to recruit, train, and equip additional forces for further combat, prolonging the war and widening the scope of its killing and destruction. Imposed armistices, meanwhile—again, unless followed by negotiated peace accords—artificially freeze conflict and perpetuate a state of war indefinitely by shielding the weaker side from the consequences of refusing to make concessions for peace."

Supply and Demand: Wall Street Will Drown Alone - "It has shown that the financial and non-financial sectors experience quite independent changes, especially over the short and medium term... GDP growth has been high following high yields just as often as it has been low. It is equally hard to detect a correlation between stock returns, long term bond returns, or commodity returns and subsequent GDP growth. Quite simply, history has shown that the non-financial sector can do well when the financial sector does poorly, and vice versa... Wall Street’s woes are and will be largely limited to Wall Street. The Bush administration should not use the power of the IRS to force the rest of us to board Wall Street’s sinking ship... But, as long as the government does not get in the way, the marketplace will quickly react to provide the non-financial sector with financial services, even if the main players in that marketplace are no longer named Lehman, Merrill, or Goldman."

Smaller Banks Thrive Out of the Fray of Crisis - "Banks throughout the United States carried on with the business of making loans yesterday even as federal officials warned again that their industry is on the verge of collapse, suggesting that the overheated language on Capitol Hill may not reflect the reality on many Main Streets... Dunkelberg, a professor of economics at Temple University and chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, added that a recent survey of that group's members found that only 2 percent said getting a bank loan was the great challenge facing their businesses. "If you can't get a loan, my advice is to go see your local community bank," Dunkelberg said. Even some of the nation's largest banks, which have pushed hard for a federal bailout, deny that the current situation is forcing them to reduce lending."