A new study was trumpeted by the media last week, indicating that girls do no worse on standardized math scores than boys. Clearly, the commentary added, the disparities of the past were due to social preconditioning, not genetic differences, and our war against this evil stereotype is finally paying off.
Heather MacDonald took a closer look at the study, and discovered that, once again, the media reported only part of the story, the part that seemed to match their agenda. There was another angle they conveniently ignored: “while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges.”
Boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.
Men and women are inherently different, in ways that we are still struggling to understand. To deny this basic fact of human nature is not only intellectually dishonest, it suppresses the diversity that academics insist is so vital among the human community.
It’s been almost two years since Alcatel and Lucent Technologies merged to become Alcatel-Lucent. The merger was supposed to create a strong telecommunications equipment manufacturing competitor. That didn’t happen. The new company has yet to post a profit, and second quarter losses were just announced at $1.7 billion. Consequently, the company’s top executives are being forced out. Analysts apparently never expected this combined leadership team to make it, and their hunch has played out.
I have a personal interest in this story. I began my career in high-tech at Lucent shortly before its creation as a spin-off from AT&T. I watched from the inside as the company rode the dot-com bubble for all it was worth, then crash spectacularly when the bubble burst. Carly Fiorina’s book, Tough Choices, revealed some of the discord that went on among the executive team as they tried to deal with a rapidly changing market. But there was too much of the old AT&T regulated monopoly mindset still running the show, and the company never could break out of the pack. The endless rounds of layoffs finally caught up with me in 2003, and I moved on to greener pastures.
It’s sad to see a once-great company reduced to such a pitiful condition. High-tech has always been a gambler’s game, but no amount of luck can overcome executive mismanagement.
Obama packed the house in Berlin last week with his speech on the Berlin airlift of 1948-49. But as Jeff Jacoby notes, the Democratic candidate fudged the history books in his recitation of events, leaving out some key information, and extracting the wrong lessons from the story.
Not once in his Berlin speech did Obama acknowledge Truman’s fortitude, or even mention his name. Nor did he mention the US Air Force, or the 31 American pilots who died during the airlift.
Indeed, Obama seemed to go out of his way not to say plainly that what saved Berlin in that dark time was America’s military might. Save for a solitary reference to “the first American plane,” he never described one of the greatest American operations of the postwar period as an American operation at all. He spoke only of “the airlift,” “the planes,” “those pilots.” Perhaps their American identity wasn’t something he cared to stress amid all his “people of the world” salutations and talk of “global citizenship.” . . .
Obama’s speech was a paean to international cooperation. “Now is the time to join together,” he said. “It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads.” No – it was a Democratic president named Truman, who had the audacity to order an airlift when others counseled retreat, and the grit to see it through when others were ready to withdraw.
Obama is like a schoolgirl who is just dying to gain entrance into the “in” clique among her peers — he will do whatever it takes to buy their approval. The idea of standing on his own two feet and proudly representing American exceptionalism would be too embarrassing.
I don’t want a “citizen of the world” serving as my President. I want a citizen of the United States, which is what the Constitution calls for. If Obama is ashamed of that limitation, he has no business running for this office.
UPDATE: Andrew Ferguson re-read Obama’s speech for specific policy statements, but found only vague rhetorical flourishes, nothing that would tell us what he would actually do to confront the very real and specific threats to America and her allies.
Floating along on a cloud of metaphor and generality allows Obama to do what he wants to do, in the Berlin speech and elsewhere. As a public figure he means to rise above any hint of conflict, and to suggest that problems and dangers dissolve when we “come together.”
Like the beauty pageant contestant who gushes that her ultimate dream is “world peace,” Obama doesn’t have a clue how the real world works. Unfortunately, neither do many of the people who will be voting in November.
David Bueche details the slithering path of Obama as he weaves and bobs around and among various positions on Iraq, Reverend Wright, and other issues. His conclusion: Obama is simply practicing his postmodernist philosophy, which recognizes no fixed truth, but views everything as relative. This alone spells trouble for the country if he becomes our commander-in-chief.
If Barack Obama becomes the 44th President there will quickly come a day when he realizes that, although his buddies in media and academia really love this postmodern journey he’s on, the rest of world looks to the President of the United States for fixed principles, clear convictions, and a well-grounded view of reality. Given what we’ve seen to date it’s far from clear that Mr. Obama is intellectually or psychologically disposed to meet the challenge.
While we were out Friday evening for dinner and a movie, a freak summer thunderstorn roared through our area. The wind took out what was left of the large Bradford pear tree standing near our back porch, and deposited it on the side of our house. The tree damaged some roof tiles, and crushed the railing on our side deck.
Needless to say, I spent Saturday cleaning up the mess, and taking a few pictures along the way (click each picture to see an enlarged version).
This is the third major branch to have fallen out of this tree. There’s not much left now, so I’ll take out the rest of it this fall and plant something else. This is the last Bradford pear tree I will have in my yard. They are supremely beautiful trees, but much too fragile for the Kansas weather.
Any suggestions on what kind of tree I should plant?
We saw the new X-Files movie this evening. Here are my initial impressions.
It’s definitely an X-file, though with a much darker edge. There are no alien conspiracies in this one (although I did catch a glimpse in one scene of what appeared to be the shadow of an alien through a curtain — totally inconsequential to the plot). The plot instead descends into a maelstrom of human depravity that will leave some viewers squirming in their seats. This is definitely not one of the more light-hearted episodes of the series.
I was especially intrigued by the changes in the primary characters. Mulder and Scully have definitely aged, and the years have not been kind to them. We’re given hints of bitter disappointments in their recent past that have drastically altered the careers of both. They are individually struggling to rebuild their lives, and that search, as always, brings them back together again. But the playful sparring that once characterized their relationship is gone, replaced by a sad, desperate search for purpose. Only at the very end are we given a glimmer of hope that their efforts at personal redemption might be paying off.
A couple of Easter egg notices: During a scene where Mulder is fumbling with his cell phone directory while driving a car, look carefully at the names on the phone. I thought I caught a glimpse of the name “Gillian”. In another scene, as the camera follows Scully through a hospital hall, there is a gentleman seated on a bench to the left of the screen that looks remarkably like Chris Carter, the director and producer.
Finally, be sure to stay through the credits to the end. There is a brief vignette that is sure to raise a lot of questions about the future of our resolute heroes — the first question being, will there be a third movie?
USA Today finds Obama’s position on the surge to be inexplicable.
The great irony, of course, is that the success of the surge has made Obama’s plan to withdraw combat troops in 16 months far more plausible than when he proposed it. Another irony is that while Obama downplays the effectiveness of the surge in Iraq, he is urging a similar tactic now in Afghanistan.
In other words, Obama is for the surge at the same time he is against it.
UPDATE: Ray Robison sees another irony coming out of Obama’s trip to Iraq: The attention he has drawn to conditions there may work against him.
Many Americans genuinely did not know that we have essentially won in Iraq until now. They thought that Obama was delivering the straight truth to them on Iraq. But now they know he was being less than candid. The Independents and conservative Democrats now might see that he was not telling them the truth.
Recently I explained why I have not joined the rush to dump the gas hogs and buy an economy car: the recent run-up in oil prices is simply unsustainable.
Analysts at Lehman Brothers now forecast average oil prices of $110 in the last quarter of this year, falling to $90 in the first quarter of next.
My fear now is that it will drop so low that energy — especially the domestic drilling issue — will become a non-issue in the fall campaign, allowing Obama to return to his empty message of “change, hope, yada, yada, yada” to mesmerize the electorate. And Americans have such terribly short memories, they’ll fall for it.
Patrick Michaels takes apart Al Gore’s recent call for a national project to convert our entire electrical generation infrastructure to non-fossil fuel sources in ten years.
Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context.
On point after point, Michaels shows how Gore’s exaggerated claims fail the test of truth. Gore has a pre-determined outcome in view (centralized economic planning), and he cherry picks the data to support that outcome.
There is no doubt that mankind will someday wean ourselves off fossil fuels. But I have much more confidence in free market forces to accomplish that feat, than in Gore’s ability to build a government bureaucracy to do it.
As Obama departed for his overseas trip, the conventional wisdom predicted that his poll numbers would experience a good bounce from the increased publicity. But so far it isn’t working out that way. Michael Barone analyzes the most recent polling numbers and sees some disturbing trends for Obama.
If McCain is competitive or leading in economically ailing Michigan and Ohio, something interesting is going on.
Poll numbers at this stage of any campaign are notoriously fickle, so we can’t read too much into them. But I believe it’s safe to say that the Obamamania World Tour 2008 isn’t playing all that well at home.
Hugh Hart of Wired.Com interviews Chris Carter, producer and director of the new X-FIles movie, opening this Friday. Includes interesting insights into the extraordinary lengths he went to prevent spoilers from leaking during production.
For years the Democrats have gladly carried the water for environmentalists who had all kinds of plans for saving the planet using federal money and regulations. But $4 gasoline is changing the picture. Now all those enviro-wacky schemes are viewed by voters as exacerbating the problem, with little in return.
The environmental movement is facing a critical moment. Democrats who support the greenies in their most ambitious goals, and scariest pseudo-scientific rhetoric, suddenly seem woefully out of touch with American voters.
They are trying to hold the line for now, but with a major election looming, sooner or later Democrats have got to change their tune, or face a reckoning.
Democrats, after a long holiday from reality occasioned by cheap oil, are beginning to understand that either they have to take up the challenge of meeting America’s need for oil, or voters will find someone who will.
Obama is an easy target, but according to John Dickerson, writing in Slate, John McCain is not doing a very good job of scoring hits. McCain’s attacks seem disjointed and indiscriminate, not guided by a strategic vision.
More seriously, McCain is not doing a good job of defining who he is and why Americans should vote for him. According to Dickerson,
It’s harder to know what McCain stands for. He’s for the surge and remedying global warming, yes, and for allowing states to drill for oil off the country’s coastlines. But those are data points, not an arc. The criticism I hear from inside and outside the campaign is that McCain lacks a line that tells people where he’s going to take them if he’s president.
McCain is already at an extreme disadvantage, with the media openly cheering for his opponent. He needs to get his act together and build a cohesive message that will resonate with voters, if he hopes to have a chance in the fall.
In commemmoration of Obama’s current globe-trotting excursion, with his adoring media anchors in tow, Michelle Malkin has commissioned her readers to submit possible T-shirt designs. Check out the hilarious results here.
What will be the dominant energy source in the 21st century? Nuclear? Nope. Solar? Wind? No, and no.
It’s natural gas.
Robert Bryce looks at the numbers, and sees a growing reliance on natural gas as a primary energy source in coming decades. The world has huge reserves of the stuff, and the technology already exists to harness it.
What’s more, the molecular composition of natural gas means the world will be continuing its march away from carbon-based energy toward hydrogen-based energy.
From prehistory through the 1700s and early 1800s, wood was the world’s most common fuel. Wood has a carbon-to-hydrogen ratio (C:H) of 10 to 1. That is, it has about 10 carbon atoms for every hydrogen atom. But as the Western world industrialized, wood lost its dominance to coal. Coal was a dramatic improvement over wood with a C:H ratio of about 2 to 1. But coal was destined to lose out to oil, particularly for transportation, thanks to oil’s greater energy density and a C:H ratio of 1 to 2. Over the coming decades, natural gas will be the big winner, a result of its 1 to 4 C:H ratio. Thus, when compared to wood, natural gas has 40 times as many hydrogen atoms as carbon atoms.
In effect, this means the world’s economies will be reducing carbon emissions simply by following market forces, even without onerous government incentives.
Coal and oil will stay around for years, but the future belongs to natural gas.
While Al Gore is lecturing us about the need for making sacrifices to save the climate, business owners in Germany have reached the limits of what they can tolerate under their government’s onerous carbon reduction plan.
The mood in the German business world has soured — managers no longer have the stomach for academic lectures.
They’re talking openly of simply moving operations elsewhere, where they can afford to stay in business.
In the wake of the 2000 Presidential election, in which a candidate lost the popular vote, yet won the election on the basis of a majority of the electors, some politicians have been making noises about abolishing the Electoral College.
Jeff Jacoby explains the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in creating the Electoral College, precisely as a deterrent to strict majority rule.
The Electoral College (like the Senate) was designed to preserve the role of the states in governing a nation whose name – the United States of America – reflects its fundamental federal nature. We are a nation of states, not of autonomous citizens, and those states have distinct identities and interests, which the framers were at pains to protect. Too many Americans today forget – or never learned – that the states created the central government; it wasn’t the other way around. The federal principle is at least as important to American governance as the one-man-one-vote principle, and the Electoral College brilliantly marries them: Democratic elections take place within each state to determine that state’s vote for president in the Electoral College.
As Jacoby notes, Senators who argue for abolishing the Electoral College on the basis of “every vote must count” are inadvertantly arguing for abolishing the U.S. Senate, an institution in which every state, regardless of population, has equal representation.
After listening to windbags like Harry Reid for awhile, that may not be such a bad idea.
Seagate has just announced a new 1.5Tb hard drive. That’s 1.5 terrabytes, or 1.5 trillion bytes.
My first computer, an IBM 8088, had a 10Mb (megabyte) drive. That’s .00001 terrabytes. At the time, I couldn’t imagine ever filling it up. Little did I know.
If I get one of these babies, I’ll never need more storage, because there’s no way I could ever . . . oh, never mind.
Australian John McLean has delivered a devastating blow to the credibility of the IPCC, the UN body upon whose work the governments of the world have depended to support their anti-global warming agendas. McLean performed a painstaking review (PDF file) of the authors of Chapter 9 in the latest IPCC report on anthropologic global warming. He found an almost incestuous relationship among the authors that calls into question the objectivity of their findings.
The relationships between most of the authors of chapter 9 demonstrate a disturbingly tight network of scientists with common research interests and opinions. The contrast between this close-knit group and the IPCC’s stated claim to represent a global diversity of views is remarkable and does not augur well for the impartiality or integrity of chapter 9’s conclusions.
He names names and provides detailed examples of the cozy connections among the authors. Not surprisingly, these connections have kept skeptics from having their voices heard in the IPCC’s findings.
More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other’s work. Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have coauthored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.
McLean’s conclusion:
Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if such claims were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community. On the evidence presented here, the IPCC’s selection of its chapter authors appears so prejudiced towards a predetermined outcome that it renders its scientific assessment of the climate suspect and its conclusions inappropriate for policy making.
Someday the current global warming hysteria will be taught in universities as a good example of how not to do science.
Recently I commented on my purchase of a reel push mower. I still use it occasionally, but only if I have a good chunk of time to burn. Usually I’m in a rush to get the yard mowed before I have to go on to the next chore, so I crank up the ol’ Snapper rider and let ‘er rip. Still, I do enjoy the occasional relaxing turn about the yard with the reel.
Apparently a lot of other people are getting on the reel bandwagon, too. This summary of the pros and cons of using a reel mower mirrors my own experience.
Maureen Dowd looks askance at the apparent lack of humor in Obama’s persona.
At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?. . . . .
If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.
Contrast Ronald Reagan, whose immense popularity with the people — and even his effectiveness among fellow politicians — was directly related to his self-deprecating sense of humor.
In my experience, people who can’t laugh at themselves usually have serious self-identity issues. And those issues usually affect their ability to deal wisely with others. If tough times are ahead for the American people, what kind of President do we want leading us — a Reagan, or an Obama?
As Dowd concludes, “if Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.”
There is some humility involved in mocking oneself successfully, and although all Presidents (and virtually all politicians) have to have a rather large ego to run for office in the first place, the presence of a genuine sense of humor acts as reassurance that their egos are not too massively swollen.
UPDATE: Obama may be a stuffed shirt, but that only provides more fodder for the late-night comedians. You’ll find a great collection of Obama jokes here. My personal favorite (via Jay Leno):
Well, the Democrats are now preparing for their convention in Denver, and they have hired the first ever director of greening. They say that this year that everything about their convention will be green, including nominating a candidate who’s only been a senator for a couple of years.
Ex-journalist and current academic Paul MacRae recounts the path of inquiry that led him to reject the claims of the global warming crowd.
I can’t claim to be an expert on climate science. But, as a former journalist, I do claim an ability to know when someone is not dealing honestly with the public. And everything I have read since I began my research convinces me more and more, as my book title argues, that most of what we, the public, have been told about global warming is misleading, exaggerated, or plain wrong, including the claim that the planet is warming.
MacRae is writing a book on the subject, due out next year. In the meantime, bookmark his blog.
Lance Fairchok looks at the Democrats’ renewed attempts at reinstating the Fairness Doctrine to “restore balance” to the airwaves. He sees a more sinister motive at work.
If they succeed, media reform will inevitably morph from an attack on talk radio to an assault on cable, to new print “standards,” and to broadcast “guidelines.” It is all about control and the totalitarian instincts the socialist left gravitates to, they cannot help it, it is in their bones. This is not a slippery slope, it is a roller coaster ride to censorship and if the left defines the rules, the freedom of speech we enjoy now will be a thing of the past, buried in regulation, litigation and outright intimidation.
Despite all the flowery talk about balance and fairness, a single question should force us to think carefully about the real impact of imposing this rule: Who will determine whether broadcast content is “fair”? Why, faceless government bureaucrats, of course. Unelected, accountable to no one, and impossible to fight–except by whatever political power happens to be dominating government at the time. In other words, the “Fairness Doctrine” would become just another weapon of political control. The only casualty would be the marketplace of free ideas, so crucial to an open and well-informed society.
A new study has concluded that Greenland’s rate of melting is not accelerating, and in fact may actually be decreasing when viewed over a longer timescale. The study, which used 17 years of satellite measurements to reach its conclusions, determined the overall yearly movement of ice to the sea is not increasing, and is actually decreasing in some places.
Or maybe 17 years is not enough of a span to detect a reliable trend?
Remember during the Democratic nominee debates when all the candidates boycotted Fox News because it was a conservative hack machine? Now Hillary has apparently seen the light, and has given her imprimatur to the cable network as being “fair and balanced” after all. Her top strategist, Howard Wolfson, has just joined Fox as a political analyst, alongside Karl Rove.
Aides to Mrs. Clinton came to view Fox News as distinctly fair to her in a news media climate that they believed favored Senator Barack Obama.
At the rate this is going, maybe Hillary can mount her next run for the White House as a Republican.
Sick of the leftist, politically-correct nonsense that infests so much of higher education these days? Just wait a few years — the current crop of Marxist baby-boomer professors is gradually being replaced by younger, more moderate colleagues.
Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
If great historical epochs help shape a generation’s political and cultural outlook (think the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.), then ponder the effect of the Reagan revolution and the fall of Communism on the generation that came of age during that time — and are now rising up through the ranks of academia.
