Harriet unobserved
All heroes have clay feet, it’s how they get around. It’s oddly consoling to find ours (Bush-supporters) demonstrating his in matters other than what affect national security directly. Grim consolation that. Forget it.
Instead read John Fund’s feet-discovering piece in Online Journal on the non-vetting of a nominee — “How She Slipped Through: Harriet Miers's nomination resulted from a failed vetting process.”
GW, we hardly knew ye.
Let us hope he's good at ducking
[P]olicies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.
One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong. [Italics added]
This is Charles Murray in Commentary for September, 2005, reprinted on Wall St. [Opinion] Journal online. He’s the Bell Curve author who is breaking self-imposed silence on innate abilities because of the response to Harvard U. President Lawrence Summers’s “mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks [last January] about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics.” Summers was “treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected.” Murray found this “depressingly familiar” and reminiscent of the response he got from Bell Curve. It’s time to talk about innate group differences, says Murray.
The It’s All about Me Group, as in Lede (Opening) ‘Graphs:
"When you are old, another will gird you and lead you where you do not wish to go" (Jn 21:18). So Jesus prophesied St. Peter’s death in old age. The saying, however, has always had a gnomic quality for me, as if it applied in some sense to us all.
– Drew Christiansen in Jesuit weekly America
In October 2003 I was part of a scholarly meeting that honored the memory and accomplishments of Raymond E. Brown, S.S. . . .
– Daniel J. Harrington in Jesuit weekly America
It was nearly 4 p.m. Tuesday when I pulled the Marshall Field's credit card from my wallet, borrowed a pair of scissors and walked over to State and Randolph with a vague notion of carrying out some sort of protest.
– Mark Brown in Sun-Times
I spent many late nights at the Billy Goat tavern -- the airless, grimy basement under Michigan Avenue beloved by Chicago's newspaper crowd, who made it a hangout years before "Saturday Night Live" brought it fame.
My special order is a hamburger with mounds of the Goat's extra-burned chopped onions, Diet Coke and chips.
– Lynn Sweet in Sun-Times
Patty smart, Patty not smart
Patty Hearst says we are the most frightened, but how is she so in touch with us? I do not feel her hand on my pulse.
So I said on seeing the Drudge head, which was legitimate but partial. In her interview, with the NY Daily News, on the other hand, she did have something to say apart from claiming to know how we feel, such as:
"I was kidnapped by terrorists. It's not like I'm numb to this and think it can't happen. But . . . there's so much weeping and wailing and memorializing, my feeling is it'd be a lot healthier if people didn't externalize so much and kind of bucked up a little bit."
That said, she looked, unfortunately, to that which is to be the sole source of our sense of well-being:
"What good is our government if they can't keep our level of fear at a point where we can think about what's really going on?"
Which, apart from its politics is to whine about the shortcomings of Holy Mother the State.
Po-poor-what?
Wednesday Journal column is up —
“Irony, sexiness, bibbing and gesheft, all in one column” — a veritable potpourri.
Another form of TV?
Our electronic age has risen up to bite us in more ways than to have us wired for sound on “L” and subway, oblivious to all about us but our own “sound,” to judge by this from Orion Magazine, winner of the Independent Press award for general excellence for 2004 and a new one on me, I must confess:
[R]ecent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.
The article is “Charlotte’s Webpage: Why Children Shouldn’t Have the World at Their Fingertips.”
Now you see it, now you don't
David O’Brien of the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., a truly venerable Jesuit institution, writing in another truly venerable institution, the Catholic Democrat lay-edited Commonweal Democrat about “The Politics We Need: BALANCING PUBLIC GOODS & PRIVATE INTERESTS,” calls for “stronger government.” Not bigger but stronger, so there’s hope in Catholic left-ville yet.
Not quite. He opposes it to Republicans’ “smaller government”; so what are we to think?
That it’s change-the-terminology time for Democrats again, the folks who are no longer liberal but progressive, for instance, and committed to choice not abortion.
"Plus le change . . ." *
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*Ask your Francophone friends about this.
Uncle Sam and some little nephews EMPLOY people!
Hey, welcome to Chicago, the city of big government shoulders, as seen
in this list of biggest employers at Crain’s Chi Business in which four of the top five are governmental bodies.
