Not the election, silly! (Although, yes, the election.) His mind!
Check out McCain in this video as he blows off a Wall Street Journal reporter because the Journal hasn’t given McCain the homage he feels is his due from the media….
The Republican presidential candidate seems to be getting a little testy lately. Is it because he can’t do anything right?
“There seems to me no question that the Batman film ‘The Dark Knight,’ currently breaking every record at the box office, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”
Andrew Klavan, the Wall Street Journal today, “What Bush and Batman Have in Common.”
I love that—push the boundaries of civil rights. Here’s another quote that that construction reminds me of:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. …Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
The readers of this blog are, as they say in a certain part of New England, wicked smart, and will need no citation for this quote.
Lots of newspapers are reporting on a new study published in Science which demonstrates that girls do as well as boys on math tests.
“Girls are just as good as boys in math,” said Wisconsin’s Janet S. Hyde, lead investigator of the study, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
The news articles consistently refer to Larry Summers’ infamous remarks about alleged “innate” differences between men and women when it came to aptitude for science and mathematics.
Such as:
But attitudes - and aptitudes - have been changing. In 2005, after former Harvard President Lawrence Summers suggested that women may be biologically unsuited to succeed at math, he was ultimately subtracted from the top post.
(Get it? “Subtracted from”?)
But a closer look at the study suggests that using it to knock Summers isn’t entirely fair. After all, Summers was specific in suggesting that differences between men and women were only found among outliers—the very best and the very worst. And the study doesn’t really resolve that issue.
Among math whizzes, there remain sex differences.
But they don’t add up to anything definitive. For instance, there are more white boys than girls with scores in the 99th percentile. But among Asian-Americans, it’s reversed: girls outperform boys.
On the other hand, there’s no question that some (if not all) of the past differences in math/science achievement levels between boys and girls was due to cultural biases such as lowered expectations, the way girls who wanted to study math and science were discouraged from doing so, and teacher biases.
Were I still at 02138, I might write (or assign) a piece about how Larry Summers’ remarks have inadvertently produced enormous scholarly attention to this area and many unintentional but positive consequences. Probably not much consolation for Summers, but I think it’s true nonetheless.
The magazine satirizes the New Yorker’s satire…and the McCains, to boot!
In an effort to combat “germs,” a Maryland supermarket has installed a shopping cart wash.
Not too long ago, I saw advertised a pen with a “germ-resistant” surface.
When and why this obsession with germs began would be a topic for an interesting magazine piece.
Hmmmmm……
The Los Angeles City Council has passed a one-year moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South LA, an attempt to fight obesity among the largely African-American population of that neighborhood.
I sympathize with the effort. Poor communities often have an obesity problem that is aided and abetted by fast food. (I see it in my own Soha—south of Harlem—neighborhood, as probably one out of every six businesses on 125th Street is a KFC, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, and so on.)
But won’t this just be a boon to the existing fast food joints, who’ll now have less competition than they would have otherwise?
Rather than a restriction on new businesses, I’d prefer to see some sort of economic support for businesses that actually sell fresh fruits and vegetables, which are notoriously hard to buy in the inner-city…..
Of course, whether or not poor people would actually buy healthy food if it were available is another question. A friend of mine used to lease ATMs to bodegas, often in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and used to have a lot of dealings with the owners of those little markets. The owners told him that, even when they stocked fruits and vegetables, their customers wouldn’t buy produce; they preferred candy, potato chips, soda, Twinkies and so on.
They’re stealing manhole covers for scrap in Philly…to protests, Starbucks is closing a store in Newark, New Jersey….food-stamp use is soaring in Massachusetts….
Around the country, the signs of this recession (regardless of what the administration says, let’s call a spade a spade) are manifest.
The silver lining? It’s good for Obama, who’s been having a good week on the foreign policy front even as he consistently seems more empathic than John McCain when it comes to economic suffering.
Sure, it’s only July, as some posters have commented, but the AL East is starting to get interesting. The Yanks have won five straight thanks to the rejuvenated bat of second baseman Robinson Cano and unexpectedly strong pitching. The Sox have beaten the hapless Mariners twice in a row, victories which shouldn’t really mean much but at least put a stop to their three game post-All Star slide.
Of course, you still have to consider the Yankees underdogs here, if only because of their injury situation. Johnny Damon will come back, but his arm problems will return with him. Hideki Matsui is gone for the season, almost surely. Same with Jorge Posada, who’ll be replaced by Jose Molina, who gets a hit about twice a week. That’s a loss of about 137 RBIs from 2007. (Last season’s totals less what Posada and Matsui have driven in this year.)
Plus, pitchers Chien-Ming Wang and Phil Hughes are hurt, with Wang, a 19-game winner last year, probably out till 2009.
Other players are having subpar years. Derek Jeter is hitting .284, about 40 points off last year’s average. A-Rod may have 21 homers and 59 RBIs, but that’s still well off his pace of 2007, in which he had 54 homers and 156 RBIs. Melky Cabrera has been a non-factor.
On the plus side, my guy Jason Giambi, after an abominable start, has 20 homers and 56 RBIs, and Mike Mussina is threatening to win 20 for the first time in his long career (root for him-he deserves it), Andy Pettitte has been terrific, and for Mariano Rivera, there are insufficient superlatives.
Will it be enough to overtake the Red Sox, or must the Yankees hope that (as I think a lot of people kinda-sorta expect) the Rays will fold down the stretch?
Can’t wait for this weekend’s Yanks-Sox series…or the season ender on 9/26-9/28 (unfortunately, at Fenway—given that it’s the end of Yankee Stadium, what were the schedulers thinking?).
The Yanks sweep the As….
Yanks: Winners of three straight.
….thanks to a tremendous game from Andy Pettitte,
Red Sox: Losers.
….the Sox get their butts kicked by the Angels, and suddenly, we have a pennant (or at least a wild card) race on our hands…
