February 2002

Trophy Jew
Mark Steyn is mad about the murder of Danny Pearl: American, Jew and trophy.

Let's assume that all the chips fell the jihadis' way, that they recruited enough volunteers to be able to kidnap and decapitate every single Jew in Palestine. Then what? Muslims would still be, as General Musharraf told a conference the other day, "the poorest, the most illiterate, the most backward, the most unhealthy, the most unenlightened, the most deprived, and the weakest of all the human race." Who would "the victim of the world" blame next? The evidence of the Sudan, Nigeria, and other parts of Africa suggests that, when there are no Jews to hand, the Islamofascists happily make do with killing Christians. In Kashmir, it's the Hindus' fault. There's always someone.

Robert Fisk is nuts. Once again, he manages to blame Westerners -- in this case, journalists who wear either military or native garb -- for Islamofascist violence. Plus he complains that Steyn wrote that Fisk deserved what he got when he was beaten by an Afghan mob. Odd, because Fisk's point was that he deserved what he got. I guess it doesn't sound the same when other people say it.

Steyn notes that Fisk speculates on why Pearl without mentioning the J-word. -- 2/28

U-name-it blogs
Is there a better name than "warblog'' for anti-idiotarian commentary weblogs?

Kathy Kinsley nominates "polblog." It's hard to say, though.

Eric Robinson: "P-log" with "p" standing for politics or pundit.

Thomas Manning -- a blog fan without his own blog! -- suggests "tablog". He adds:

What astonishes me is the number of intelligent, thoughtful people there are in this country.  It is no longer possible to limit the national debate to those few individuals who fill the chairs on Sunday morning talk shows or the NYT/Washington Post columns.  -- 2/28

Oh no, Leno
Koreans have united to condemn Jay Leno for making a dog-eating joke about their Olympic skater.

The rival parties' criticism came after former Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil called Jay Leno, host of U.S. NBC's "The Tonight Show," an "ill-mannered ugly guy" in response to his controversial joke about skater Kim Dong-sung's disqualification at the Winter Olympic Games.

The Koreans have a point. Leno is an ill-mannered ugly guy. -- 2/28

Unfriendly veal
American rubes don't much care about the European Union, laments a British journalist, who who talked to a man at a Birmingham, Alabama restaurant. In the great blogger takedown tradition, James Lileks analyzes the Guardian story. -- 2/28

Evil and wrong
Kathleen Parker has a great analogy to describe people who excuse Danny Pearl's killers by calling them "people with legitimate concerns'' or "victims of American imperialism.''

They're evil and, if that's not enough, they're wrong. We'll be wrong, too, if we don't have enough confidence in what makes us right to respond appropriately to prevent the atrocities sure to continue. Given our clear ignorance of our own moral foundations -- and our absurd pride in misplaced tolerance -- we may deserve our enemies' contempt.

We're like a nation of abused women. We can't stand the abuse, but on some sick level, we feel we deserve it. So we take another beating, cry our little eyes out, and, by our unwillingness to name Evil, invite another beating. -- 2/27

Blogrolled
I've been blogrolled by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan and Mickey Kaus were my role models when I started this site, a little more than a year ago. I'm very flattered to be included on his weblog reading list. However, I don't get why I'm Harriet to Tim Blair's Aussie. I get the Ozzie and Harriet thing, but I don't get any farther. Are Tim and I a couple in some bizarre, transcontinental way? A "Harriet the Spy" reference? Perhaps I'm thinking too much.

On the renaming of warblogs: Rich Whitten suggests that politically oriented weblogs be known as poliblogs. Too cute, I think. -- 2/27

Out with the in crowd
Maureen Dowd complains that Alpha girls lose their power after junior high. Robert Musil calls Dowd a Zeta girl, a washed-up Heather and other unflattering things.

I am reminded of my daughter's week at Girl Scout Camp, when she was 10. She reported that the most favored girls slept in a circle around the Alpha Scout, with their sleeping bags touching hers. Allison was in the second circle of social acceptance; she was allowed to sleep with her bag touching the bags that touched the bag of the Alpha Scout.

All of this Alpha stuff is about lording it over other girls with less social confidence. Thank God it loses its power as girls grow up. -- 2/27

Baby-sitter to doctor
Test scores can't be the primary factor in admission to University of Texas graduate and professional schools. So how do they pick future doctors, lawyers and MBAs? The Dallas Morning News reports on the many factors, including taking care of children after school, proficiency in a second language and performance on tests compared to students from "similar socioeconomic backgrounds." (Via Virginia Postrel, who's back to blogging after a stay in LA.) -- 2/27

Gnat's dad
James Lileks' Tuesday Bleat was very funny. Read it. -- 2/27

Home again
Afghan-Americans are returning to help their battered homeland, reports the Los Angeles Times. -- 2/27

Schools for Afghanistan
Kamran and Zohre Elahian are providing seed funding for 2,000 schools in Afghanistan through Relief International, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

"When you see how much you have compared to 99 percent of the world, it really changes your priorities big time,'' says the Iranian-born entrepreneur and investor, who co-founded chip maker Cirrus Logic and 10 other tech companies.

Last week, I made fun of women college presidents who placed a full-page ad in the New York Times proclaiming their "special support" -- in the form of words -- for women's education in Afghanistan. The Elahians -- former refugees themselves -- are actually doing something. Building started six weeks ago; nearly 200 classrooms are under construction. Relief International plans to build 2,002 village schools and train 1,0001 female teachers. -- 2/26

Free the blogs
My campaign to rename "warblogs'' goes forward, or perhaps sideways.

Rand Simberg likes "freeblog'' better than "warblog.''

Justin Slotman of the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan writes:

I think warblog is the best term, as it's historically accurate; it refers to the point where most of the blogs that are warblogs came into existence. I know it doesn't refer to your site in particular, but it does to most. I mean, I consider myself a warblogger even though I don't cover the war like I used to, but because the kind of blogs that got me into blogging are warblogs.

Geoffrey Barto's new slogan for TurkeyBlog: "One small voice in the proud tradition of FreeBlogging."

I've found an existing freeblog site -- in Polish, I think.-- 2/26

A partner is not a parent
John Leo debunks a New York Times story headlined, "Two Parents Not Always Best for Children, Study Finds." Turns out the study looked at low-income single mothers living with a male partner, usually not the father of her child.

Researchers found that 42 percent of cohabiting couples broke up within 16 months. This "churning" of boyfriends (a word used by Andrew Cherlin, a well-known family researcher and an author of the study) is so disruptive to children that some might be better off if their mothers quit bringing in new lovers and just stayed single.

Real dads are much safer for kids than Mom's boyfriend, Leo points out. -- 2/26

Bloggers are free
Andrew Sullivan's Blogger Manifesto is an excellent discussion of the significance of "peer-to-peer journalism.'' (But why that hideous brown background color, Andrew?)

Bloggers became Internet sherpas - experienced guides to all the information and wackiness out there. . . .

What it basically means is that a writer no longer needs a wealthy proprietor to get his message across to readers. He no longer needs an editor, either. Psychologically, this is a big deal. It means a vast amount of drivel will no doubt find its way to the web. But it also means that a writer is finally free of the centuries' old need to suck up to various entities to get an audience. It means that the universe of permissible opinions will expand, unconstrained by the prejudices, tastes or interests of the old media elite.

The New York Times also has a weblog story in Technology, but it muddles personal diaries and public commentary blogs, missing the libertarian/right warblogs entirely.

I think "warblog'' should be replaced by a broader term. Perhaps "opblog,'' though it's a bit cryptic. "Commentblog'' is too long and clunky; "comblog'' too vague. "Infocom'' combines information and commentary, but "infocomblog'' sounds like a Navy project. "Journo'' and ''pundit,'' are possible prefixes, I guess. I think "freeblog'' is my best offering: It gets in free speech, independence from that old media elite and libertarian orientation with a faint echo of "freebooter.'' What do you think, guys? -- 2/25

Tampering with success
Reading scores soared when Baltimore schools adopted a phonics-intensive reading program. Now, the Baltimore Sun reports, school officials want to change to "balanced literacy," which some suspect means dropping phonics for "whole language.''

In 1998, Baltimore chose a phonics textbook series from Open Court Publishing for kindergarten through second grade. Educators credit the emphasis on phonics in the primary grades with the leap in test scores. Last year, 56 percent of first-graders scored above the national average in reading, compared with 29 percent in 1998.

Baltimore elementary students spent three hours a day on language arts; Open Court devotes 45 minutes to teaching phonics, with the rest spent on writing, reading from an anthology and other activities.

In the "balanced'' alternative, phonics is taught for 20 minutes a day. Teachers read to students for 20 minutes; for another 30 minutes, students hold a book and follow along silently as the teacher reads aloud. After 90 minutes of other activities, students end the period with 20 minutes reading a book of their choice.

A few schools went "balanced'' in 1977; 10 more did so last year. School officials didn't point to any evidence that all that reading by teachers led to better reading comprehension by students. -- 2/25

What Luci's friends didn't know till it was too late
Luci Williams Houston, a San Jose Mercury News photographer, was an extraordinary human being. Only after her she was murdered last year did her many friends realize she'd been battered by her estranged husband, now charged with her murder. Michelle Guido's story about Luci's life and death, "A victim's hidden struggle,'' is very, very good.

Luci's mother, Catherine, finds peace in her faith and in knowing what her daughter gave to the world. ``She did just what she was brought into this world to do -- to love, to love, to love -- to give love and show love.''

Luci really was like that. -- 2/24

Correction
In response to the Slobo-googling item, Justin Raimondo writes:

You incorrectly cite me as the source of a comment by T.V. and Alida Weber that "McCain will form a fascist third party." This is incorrect: While they did indeed post my column to a Yahoo news group, the article in question nowhere accuses McCain of fascism, or of forming a "fascist third party."

This, of course, is a tried-and-true smear technique: citing the views of some nutball, and then imputing them to the real target -- in this case, me.

Justin wasn't the real target. But I'm happy to say that his article called McCain's predicted third party hawkish and militaristic, not fascistic. The nutballs -- that is, the Webers -- added that characterization. -- 2/24

How to gain the disadvantage advantage
Kate Coe writes:

As the mother of a SoCal high school freshman, I'm avidly following UC's admissions requirements. If I threaten to kill him if he doesn't do his homework, does he gain points for growing up under the threat of violence? And if he doesn't do it, can he claim he was too scared to do the work, thus gaining more points? And if he does do it, will the high grades negate the violence issue?

Will there be a black-market in victim stories for white kids? Can I hire someone to terrorize us, so we'll have something to overcome?

My reply: There's no need to hire a professional traumatizer. Victimization is in the mind. If your student thinks he's a victim -- or can get an admissions officer to think so -- that's all it takes. Alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, homosexuality and death of beloved friend or relative are the classics; all are politically correct and impossible to disprove. But don't ignore the identity crisis he might have suffered on learning of his 1/32 Native American heritage, or the youthful poverty he might have experienced when both parents were in graduate school. For the neo-disadvantaged, creativity counts. -- 2/24

When fat doesn't fit
I think the Jazzercise franchise in San Francisco missed a bet by refusing to hire an extra-large aerobics instructor who doesn't fit the fit 'n slim image. Many extra-large exercisers might welcome an instructor who's packing a floor-shaking 240 pounds on a 5-foot, 8-inch frame.

Jazzercise saw it differently, telling Jennifer Portnick she's too portly to exemplify the benefits of aerobic dance. Since weight discrimination is illegal in San Francisco, Portnick has filed a complaint with the city's Human Rights Commission.

Running a business is not yet illegal in San Francisco, but they're working on it. -- 2/24

Education are impotent
Gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez laid out his education plan in a grammatically challenged letter to the Texas teachers' association. Someone -- probably an English teacher -- passed the letter to the Dallas Morning News.

"I believe that curing our problems in education is a matter of priorities, for example, only half of the staff of Texas' schools are teachers and only half the school budgets are spent on instruction," says one sentence that should be two and is missing a comma after "teachers."

Still, Sanchez is a regular Shakespeare compared to Tim Blair's subliterate correspondent who, employs all of, Sanchez's missing, commas, in his, idiotarian rant. -- 2/24

Dishonor murders
"Honor killings" cut across cultures and religions, says a Human Rights Watch official. Moira Breen replies:

Crimes of passion are a human universal but hundreds of millions of women live in cultures where they don't live in fear of mutilating or homicidal attacks from the families for real or perceived misbehavior. And if they are so attacked their cultures do not tolerate or support the perpetrators.

Politically incorrect. And, of course, correct. -- 2/24

Friends of Slobo
I've taken up Matt Welch's Slobo-google challenge. Among the signers of the petition in support of poor, persecuted Slobodan Milosevic are T.V. and Alida Weber of Chicago. They've written frequently to defend Serb honor, denigrate Kosovars and attack NATO; Alida identifies herself as an "American-Serb.''

I found some odd posts on a Yahoo message board. They describe AmeriCorps as "Hitler Youth" and, quoting Justin Raimondo of antiWar.com, predict McCain will form a fascist third party. Yet the Webers themselves have third party affiliations. In the Nov. 27, 2000 Southern Party Newsletter ("The Cutting Edge of Southern Nationalism''), the Webers are described as pro-South activists. That appears to mean pro-Confederacy. They speculate that Clinton will use the electoral confusion to remain in power.

Since the U.S. Constitution makes him commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, removing him from office could be a formable task, unless the legitimacy of the election is completely resolved to the satisfaction of top American military leaders. . .
 
This is a potential crisis that can affect the entire world. Clinton is the commander-in-chief of the military and has launched bombing attacks both on unexpected targets and on a sovereign nation after issuing an ultimatum that could not be accepted by the leaders of the nation that he wished to bomb. CLINTON HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT HIS DISPOSAL. -- 2/24

Foxy me
As of noon Eastern time, I'm FoxNews.com's weekend weblogger. I'm hoping that the blog highlights will persuade hordes of new readers to click on over, read all the QuickReads, bookmark the page -- and put a few dollars in the tip jar. Actually, one horde would do. -- 2/23

Dubya documentary
Alexandra Pelosi's movie of The Boys on the Bush Bus is very good, writes Matt Labash in The Standard. (He gets to the point eventually.) Democrat Pelosi just can't help liking W.

Through it all, Bush commands the stage in the back of the plane. He proudly models his western wear. He eats cheese doodles out of plastic airline cups. He lobbies Pelosi for her vote, telling her, "If I lose, you're out of work, you're off the plane, baby." When she asks why she shouldn't vote for someone who will protect the little guy, he earnestly declares, "I am the little guy. My brother's 6'3". Have you noticed that? I'm about 5'11"."

Vice President Al Gore was expected to score an easy win over the dim-bulb Dubya. Pelosi's campaign-trail documentary shows Bush's strengths -- character, as well as good-old-boy charm.

Pelosi had conducted a super-secret margarita-fueled straw poll among reporters in the back of the plane about who they thought would win the election. Most predicted Al Gore. Somebody leaked the results to outside media. Embarrassed by the disclosure, and fearful that it would cost them access to Bush, most of the pack refused to come near Pelosi the next day. But in an act of kindness, Bush did. In Pelosi's telling, he said, "When they see me talking to you, they're gonna act like they're your friends again. But these people aren't your friends. They can say what they want about me. But at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are."

I know who I am, and I know who my friends are. -- 2/23

Two policies on one China
President George W. Bush tells China the U.S. will defend Taiwan, and calls for "peaceful resolution'' rather than China's policy of "peaceful reunification.''

Former President Bill Clinton goes to Australia to give a speech (for $300,000) to a conference backing "peaceful reunification'' of China and Taiwan. Is it proper for an ex-president to undercut U.S. foreign policy? I don't think so. -- 2/23

Containing Islam
In the Cold War, the U.S. "contained" communism, notes Paul Donnelly. George Kennan's policy was to fight communist expansion by force, tolerate commies who gained power in free elections. "We chose which communism we would fight over.''

Donnelly wants a similar policy for Islam. Muslims decide whether to practice an us vs. them ideology or go with the "religion of peace'' thing; we decide which Islam we need to fight.

Then he provides a link to the speech delivered in 1948 by Judge Noah Sweat of Mississippi when he was asked how he felt about whiskey.

If when you say whiskey, you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation and despair and shame and helplessness and hopelessness --- then I am certainly against it.

But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies and heartaches and sorrows; if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways and hospitals and schools, then I certainly am for it.

This is my stand, and I will not compromise. -- 2/23

Answer to evil
"Evil'' is a simplifying word, as the Europeans tell us. So what would they call the videotaped murder of reporter Danny Pearl? A French woman, Mariane Pearl, calls her husband's killers by name.

From this act of barbarism, terrorists expect all of us to bow our heads and retreat as victims forever threatened by their ruthlessness. What terrorists forget is that they may seize the life of an innocent man or the lives of many innocent people as they did on Sept. 11, but they cannot claim the spirit or faith of individual human beings.

The terrorists who say they killed my husband may have taken his life, but they did not take his spirit. Danny is my life. They may have taken my life, but they did not take my spirit.

I promise you that the terrorists did not defeat my husband no matter what they did to him, nor did they succeed in seizing his dignity or value as a human being. As his wife, I feel proud of Danny. I trust that our struggle will ultimately serve the greater purpose of resisting those evil people casting a shadow upon our world. -- 2/22

Eurobureaucrats vs. free speech
The Council of Europe wants to criminalize online "hate speech'' -- as defined by European bureaucrats. -- 2/22

Happy birthday, Allison
My daughter is 21 years old today. All those in Blogville with rug rats and Gnats, take heed. This is what happens to the little kid with chocolate ice cream cake on her nose. She turns into a beautiful, intelligent young woman. -- 2/22

Hand of friendship pats self on back
Women college presidents want to support education for women in Afghanistan. Do they raise money to pay for textbooks, teachers and schools? Send professors to staff Kabul University? No, they buy an expensive full-page ad in the Feb. 20 New York Times with their names and this erratically bold-faced message:

To the Women of Afghanistan

We, as women presidents and chancellors of American publicly supported colleges and universities, extend the hand of friendship to you. We have much to learn from one another and, together, we can identify and accomplish many goals. We therefore reach out to you, the women of Afghanistan, as you participate in rebuilding your nation.

As leaders in higher education, we take as one of our fundamental responsibilities the duty to work for justice for the people of all nations. As women presidents and chancellors, we offer our special support for the redevelopment of education for women in Afghanistan and add our voices to your own in the struggle for greater human rights and a more peaceful world.

What's the point? The women of Afghanistan aren't going to read it. Times readers, burdened as we are with so many issues, haven't been sitting around thinking: Gee, I wonder if women educators are in favor of education for Afghan women? Would they support human rights and peace, or not? Oh, they're for it! That's a relief.

No, we haven't been thinking that. We've been thinking: Gee, the money you spent on a self-important ad could have provided "special support" for the salaries of a lot of female teachers in Afghanistan. -- 2/22

R-E-A-D the research
Bush's "Reading First'' initiative requires schools to use reading strategies that research has proven effective. That rankles educators who know the research supports the direct, explicit teaching of phonics, Education Week reports.

"'Scientifically based reading instruction' is code for a particular kind of instruction," said Gerald Coles, the author of Misreading Reading: The Bad Science That Hurts Children. "If you want to have a form of literacy education that is stepwise, hierarchical, small-to-large parts, with minimal democratic participation, that has very strict outcome goals, then you can use research to try to facilitate those goals."

Yes, we want literacy education with a strict outcome goal: More children learning to read. If stepwise, hierarchical and small-to-large works best, then that's what we want. And we'll get more democratic participation from readers than from illiterates.

Reading First is based on a report by the National Reading Panel, a federally convened group that analyzed the research.

The report of the National Reading Panel has come under considerable scrutiny for its narrow focus on experimental and quasi-experimental studies, meaning those that have measurable results. It excluded ethnographies, case studies, and observational research that many researchers say offer critical insight into how particular methods of instruction play out in the classroom.

Let me contruct the meaning: The report looked at controlled scientific studies with measurable results. It ignored anecdotes.

The March Scientific American -- not online -- has a major article on how to teach reading. -- 2/22

Daddy vs. loathsome Nazi professor
Great Lileks' Bleat/Screed arguing that family love doesn't lead to terrorism. Instapundit's link doesn't work. Neither does Lileks' link. But mine does! -- 2/21

Gosh!
Samizdata lifts a Tech Industry Daily story on blogging, which is growing like a creature from outer space in a '50s sci-fi movie. Blogger added 41,000 new blogs in January? Gee whillikers.

In January alone, at least 41,000 people created new Web logs using Blogger, Wired News reported yesterday. A Web log, or "blog" for short, is a tool for self-publishing on the Web, and often features links to Web sites that the writer finds interesting. It's like a one-person discussion group. Web logs have now crossed a tipping point, leaping from a "self-contained community" to a group "large enough that there's many different Web logs," according to Evan Williams, who runs Blogger, one of the most popular services for creating a blog. Some have put the total number of Web logs at more than 500,000. -- 2/21

Apocalypse not
Two Vermont teen-agers are charged with a double murder, and the Atlantic Monthly sees "The Apocalypse of Adolescence.'' In Slate, Timothy Noah points out there's little evidence that small-town Vermont is being overrun by superpredators.

Ron Powers writes that the defendants "may come to be seen as representatives of a new mutation in the evolution of the murderous American adolescent.'' Noah replies:

The key phrase here is "may come to be seen as," which blends two weaselly journalistic hedges, "may come to be" and "is/are seen as." Individually, these formulations—one speculating about what may occur, the other speculating about perceptions that may be correct—can be hard even for exacting scribblers to forswear. But by blending the two, Powers commits serious hackery, rendering the succeeding clause and the two sentences that follow very nearly worthless.

Powers says homicidal teen-agers feel ignored by adults; committing murder is their way to feel important. It's not very convincing. -- 2/21

Progress report
In the Feb. 20 New York Times, Richard Rothstein explains how "value-added'' analysis can show how a teacher affects students' achievement. The trick is to analyze each student's rate of progress and look for variations in the pattern. -- 2/21

Hot times in Antarctica
Global warming and cooling predates the industrial era, says a Stanford study.

. . . new geologic evidence unearthed from deep-sea mud deposits strongly suggests that Antarctica experienced periods of extreme warming and cooling long before the invention of the automobile.

"We've got a sedimentary record that reveals very significant changes in water temperature and ice melt during the past 7,000 years," said Robert Dunbar, professor of geological and environmental sciences. "The cause of these highly variable climate changes is still a mystery." -- 2/21

Supreme test for school vouchers
The U.S. Supremes heard the Cleveland school voucher case today; reporting for Slate, Dahlia Lithwick predicts a 5-4 win for vouchers, even though most parents use them at religious schools. O'Connor is the swing vote.

Many of the nine justices have such different and irreconcilable tests for government violations of the Establishment Clause that the past 20 years have amounted to little more than an elaborate swapping of constitutional baseball cards. Justice Kennedy favors testing to see whether there's been religious coercion, but he'll throw his weight in with Thomas to hold that if state aid is neutrally allocated, it can still be constitutional. Justice O'Connor rejects the neutrally allocated test and instead has cooked up a test that would make aid constitutional as long as students' choices were freely made. But she also frets about the appearance of government endorsement and the feelings of objective observers who might be excluded from the religion being funded. Justice Breyer seems to have signed off on some version of O'Connor's test. And still the bones of Lemon v. Kurtzman—the sucky 1973 case laying out the original foundation for these various tests—rattle around to confound meaningful discussion. . . .

O'Connor is about to invent a new Establishment Clause test called the "lots of other choices" test. -- 2/20

Bilingual battle
Bilingual education lost at the polls in California four years ago, but it's gaining ground by lobbying Latino legislators, writes Duke Helfand in Los Angeles Times. Sen. Richard Polanco, chair of the Latino Caucus, plans to introduce a bill that would require children to be taught in the language they understand; for 1.2 million Latino students with limited English proficiency, that would be Spanish.

Even without a new law, the State Board of Education has approved regulations that would let school officials file waivers to place elementary students in bilingual classes, unless the parents -- often deferential to "experts'' -- took action to reject the waiver. That nullifies a provision of the "English for the Children'' law passed in 1998, which requires parents to file a waiver request in person at the school. From here, go down to English Learners, click on the regulations pdf file and keep going till you get to Parental Exception Waivers.

Here's an intriguing angle:

Privately, state officials criticize the advocates' demands, saying bilingual programs customized to individual students would bankrupt school districts.

"There's no way we are going to allow that," said one state board member, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. "It would break the system."

Yes, alert readers. State board of education members are afraid of reprisals.

Linda Chavez's bilingual-bashing column is here. -- 2/20

One little, 69 little, 99 little Indians
Here's a sad-funny story from the Sacramento Bee that tells you a lot about how public school funding works.

In the mountain town of Colfax, population 1,495, only one child has been identified as being solely American Indian or Alaska Native, according to the latest U.S. census.

So when Colfax Elementary School was denied $31,000 in state funds last fall because 69 American Indian students failed to meet academic standards, angry parents began to ask questions.

"No one can understand how this happened," parent Janice Beyer-Erickson complained to the Colfax Board of Education. "There can't be more than a handful of Native Americans in the whole school."

Colfax managed to enroll 99 of its 499 students in an federally funded Indian Education enrichment program. (Only 69 are old enough to be tested by the state.) Parents who said they had some Native American ancestry, however slight or speculative, got their kids 30 to 60 minutes a week of enrichment, such as making Kachina dolls. Beyer-Erickson's two children are among Colfax's faux Indians; they are 1/32 breeds.

Then came the state accountability system, which requires all ethnic subgroups in a school to show improvement. The test scores of Colfax's faux Indians declined -- probably because they were missing reading, writing and math to make dolls. To get a state bonus, Colfax will have to give up its federal Indian money.-- 2/20

Theology matters
During the Cold War, the U.S. didn't try to fight communism without mentioning ideology, points out Paul Donnelly in National Review Online. So why are we fighting a war against militant Islamic terrorism without mentioning theology?

Blandly mumbling of a "religion of peace," the Bush administration shows no clue that we face a theological struggle as much as a military one, that what we mean by "Islam" will be as decisive as what we meant by Communism.

Of course, it's not up to the U.S. to decide Islamic theology. Donnelly hopes the ideas of Tariq Ramadan, who lives in Switzerland, will prevail. His interview with Ramadan, author of "To Be a European Muslim,'' is on Salon Premium. -- 2/20

How many points for poverty?
Susie Suburban has a 4.0 grade point average and 1450 on her SATs. Danny Disadvantaged has a 3.0 and 1100. Who gets in to Berkeley? The new "comprehensive review'' policy is supposed to take students' disadvantages into account, but it's not clear how. There are rumors of a point system, writes David Stirling in the San Francisco Examiner. So many points for being raised by a single mom -- but what about a grandmother? So many points for poverty -- but how deep and for how long? Disability reportedly is worth 400 points: Are all disabilities the same? First in family to college will be worth points, but who's fact-checking what applicants say about their parents' education?

If Susie Suburban is smart, she'll come up with a plausible, uncheckable tale of woe -- dad's an alcoholic, mom's a drop-out -- to supplement her extra-curriculars. -- 2/20

And baby makes two
Conservatives are downplaying welfare reform's success in lowering out-of-wedlock birth rates, writes Mickey Kaus. It might undercut their plans to promote marriage as a way to keep kids off welfare. The black out-of-wedlock birth rate has fallen for six years in a row, Kaus says. But it's still astronomical: 68.5 percent of black babies were born to an unwed mother in 2000, down tfrom 70.4 percent in 1994. Many of those babies start out with two cohabiting parents, but dads who don't marry tend to drift away from the family, especially if they don't have a steady, meat-on-the-table job. I think there's plenty of room for a program encouraging parents to get married. A privately funded charity called "Jobs for Dads'' is my dream. -- 2/20

Olympian
The International Bobsled Federation won't let Michael Voudouris -- competing for Greece in the skeleton -- use a sled with a 9-11 memorial painted underneath. Voudoris' father is Greek, but he grew up in New York City. A medical technician, he raced to the World Trade Center to help after the attacks. Voudouris painted the twin towers and the names of the nine medical technicians killed there on his sled, along with a 30 for the number of Greek nationals killed and 32 for alumni of his high school who died. Too political said the IBF. -- 2/20

A great contraceptive
From "Family Well-Being after Welfare Reform,'' a new report by the University of Maryland's Welfare Reform Academy:

In 1986, a single mother was only a little better off going to work than being on welfare but, by 1997, she was able to double her income by doing so. . . . Isabel Sawhill concludes, “Work is, I would suggest, a great contraceptive.” -- 2/19

GI Joe College
I've got a new column, "GI Joe College,'' up on TechCentralStation.com. I like this new paradigm: I write; they pay me. Though, come to think of it, the check for my first column hasn't arrived yet. -- 2/19

Laughing at cows isn't funny
"Tongue Tied'' on FoxNews.com has some great items. My favorite is the following:

A game of cow bingo at Florida Southern College is under fire from animals rights activists because the animal in question might get stressed out by all the people laughing at it, reports the Lakeland Ledger.In a letter to the president of the college, a PETA cruelty caseworker said it can be emotionally devastating for an animal to be exposed to ridicule. She also objected to the animal being used for entertainment purposes.

I also liked the "Take Back the Date'' campaign against turning Feb. 14 into Victims' Day. An ad shows Cupid walking past a showing of The Vagina Monologues.

Ten other campus newspapers accepted the ad, but the Collegian at first said it wouldn't run it because, as business manager Amy Hibbard told the IWF, "We don't like to print things that might be controversial." This is the same paper that last year wrote about an on-campus Sex Faire featuring a "Tent of Consent" and a "C**tfest" featuring naked lesbian performance artists.

Update: Cathy Young takes on Victims' Day in the Boston Globe. -- 2/19

Murderers' grievances
Barbara Amiel in Telegraph defends America's war on terrorism, though not the triumphalist tone. I particularly liked this:

EU Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten, in the Guardian last week . . . characterised September 11 as "the dark side of globalisation" and saw its remedy as addressing "the root causes of terrorism and violence".

Patten's Shavian views are probably due to his combination of a Catholic notion that all people are good and a socialist view that all people are ultimately perfectable. For him, the authors of a ruthless murder of thousands of innocent people were motivated by legitimate grievances and the answer to their crimes is to address these grievances.

. . . On this basis, once the Battle of Britain was over, we should have stopped fighting Hitler in order to find out what the "root causes" were of the grievance that made this man want to kill millions of innocent people. -- 2/19

Too much pressure
That French skating judge who said she was pressured to vote for the Russians told a French newspaper, L'Equipe, that she was pressured to say she was pressured. Then, reports ExpatPundit, she told Le Monde she'd been pressured to say she was pressured to say she was pressured to vote for the Russians. I can't wait for tomorrow's developments. -- 2/19

Hunger doesn't make people nicer
Responding to the "Simple, natural, lousy'' item below, Harlan Sexton challenged the idea that greater comfort doesn't make people "morally better,'' arguing: "Being hungry and sick makes most people less compassionate and brave."

A variation on this sort of stupidity is the case of a kid I knew in college. He wished he had lived in the time of Beethoven, because he had missed his "chance for greatness". I asked him how good his chances for greatness would have been if he'd been among the vast majority of people that never got an education, or if he had died of in childhood. And then I told him that it was nonsense that the problems faced by great people of the past had been any more tractable than problems today. (He thought that he could have been a great scientist in those days, and perhaps he could have, if he could have gone back with all of his textbooks!) He said something about being held back by small minds, and I couldn't resist telling him that it was his mind that was undersized, not other peoples. He didn't talk to me after that, so it worked. -- 2/19

Breasts in BlogLand
Speaking for LDBs (Less Endowed Bloggers), Megan McArdle complains of unfair competition for eyeballs by Samizdata's semi-clad Nataljia.

For over a month now, we have watched as certain bloggers have used predatory tactics to unfairly steal blogoshare. Rather than standing in solidarity with their fellow female bloggers and building a truly inclusive, empowering blogging community, they have instead used their outsized power to hoard more than their fair share of blog readers. We have dreamed of the possibilities of the internet where, no longer weighted down by the physicality of the "real" world, we might build a new, radically empowering space. Instead we are confronted with the intrusion of the same old patriarchal paradigms and exploitationist power structures into our precious new nest.

And, as Reynolds says, read the comments. I suggested a Blogger Burqa would cover any anti-competitive spheres. The males responding -- and they do -- want more vigorous competition for their eyeballs -- which are in danger of falling out -- from voluptuous and leggy bloggerinas. -- 2/18

New structure, same old teaching
Here's an academic in touch with reality: Harvard Prof Richard Elmore, writing on why school reforms flounder in the Harvard Education Letter. The structure changes but the teaching doesn't.

In fact, the schools that seem to do the best are those that have a clear idea of what kind of instructional practice they want to produce, and then design a structure to go with it.

My favorite story, which is now increasingly confirmed by the aggregate analysis of block scheduling—the current structural reform du jour of secondary education—involves a high school social studies teacher I interviewed recently. I asked him, “So what do you think of block scheduling?” He said, “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my teaching career.” I asked, “Why?” And he said, “Now we can show the whole movie.”

. . . The pathology of American schools is that they know how to change. They know how to change promiscuously and at the drop of a hat. What schools do not know how to do is to improve, to engage in sustained and continuous progress toward a performance goal over time. -- 2/18

AriZoner
Newby blogger Edward Boyd of Zonitics fears Arizona's attorney general will take a dive on defending the state's English immersion law in court. I also learned that Randall Gnant is running for governor of Arizona. Zonitics says he is gnot going to gwin.

I have to love and link to a blogger who tells readers to give money to me. -- 2/18

Simple, natural, lousy
What has technology ever done for us? Samizdata's David Carr responds to Scott Rubush's assertion that technology doesn't improve the quality of life.

I, too, am deeply nostalgic for the days when I could rise from my rat-infested bed of straw in the middle of the night to milk a goat, bury a couple of my children and vainly try to dig a turnip out of the frozen soil with rudimentary hand-tools. Those were the days when we had real quality of life.

After all, what has technology ever done for us, eh?

Well, I suppose there's the steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines and manned flight.

But, apart from those things . . .

A great rant. Read it all. -- 2/17

How stupid can you get?
Marshall Thomas demanded a DNA test of blood on his pants to prove his innocence in a rape and stabbing. However, testing didn't confirm Thomas' claim that it was his own blood. Some of the blood matched the victim's; the rest came from the victim of a another rape. -- 2/17

Bilingual ed is undead
When Ron Unz's Proposition 227 swept to victory in 1998, enrollment in English immersion classes went up; so did test scores. Thinking California's bilingual ed program was dead, Unz moved on to push anti-bilingual initiatives in Arizona, where he scored a big win, and now in Colorado and Massachusetts, where polls show strong support for teaching in English.

But Unz forgot the stake through the heart and the garlic. California's bilingual educators have risen from the tomb, pushing the State Board of Education to "clarify" 227 rules. Last week, the board gave tentative approval to a regulation that would let teachers and administrators apply for waivers to place children in bilingual classes; parents would have to sign the request but wouldn't have to initiate it. The new regulations, which are up for final approval next month, also require a one-time waiver after 30 days of English instruction; till now, the law was read as requiring 30 days of English instruction at the start of each school year, followed by a new waiver application if the parent didn't think the child was ready.

Unz is pushing the political angle: The State Board of Education is filled with appointees of Gov. Gray Davis, who opposed 227; his likely Republican challenger, Richard Riordan, backed 227.

I think the real story is the test scores. Unfortunately, it's not a simple story.

The simple version is this: Non-fluent second graders taught in English score much higher in reading, language arts, spelling and even somewhat higher in math, compared to students in bilingual classes. Second graders in 2001 were the first cohort tested to be educated after 227 went into effect. Of those in bilingual classes, 13 percent tested at or above grade level in reading. Of those taught in English, 31 to 32 percent were reading at grade level. You can find the state's subgroups data by using the pulldown menu, or you can get Unz's pdf file from Mickey Kaus.

Only it's not simple because there's no data on students' English proficiency when they started school. Bilingual ed defenders say kids with low proficiency were more likely to be in bilingual before 227. That's probably still true, though the need for parents to apply for a waiver may have changed the dynamics. In addition, the English group is pulled up by high-scoring Asian students, who rarely have access to bilingual classes.

And that's just the simplest of the complications.

I'm still digging for useful data, trying to write a free-lance article. Only my innate obstinancy keeps me going, because I fundamentally think it doesn't matter. Bilingual ed is dead as we knew it. In any state where voters can decide education policy, it will lose. Only the best programs -- "two-way immersion'' for middle-class Anglos as well as Hispanics -- will survive.

Americans want every kid to learn English. Immigrant parents want their kids to learn English too. Everyone -- except for bilingual educators -- believes it's easy to learn a language when you're young, harder when you're older. Everyone -- with previous exception -- thinks teaching kids to read English rather than Spanish will lead to more kids who can read English. Unz can say: Look at the test scores, and use your common sense. The bilingual lobby must say: We experts know better. -- 2/17

Last week I went to a debate at the Union entitled "Is American exceptionalism an arrogant delusion?" The proposition speakers were all Brits, of course. There was a poli sci prof who was completely drunk, a writer of some kind and a couple of students. They argued that yes, America is "exceptional," but that it uses this exceptionalism to evade international law. Of course, 9/11 stuff was brought up; their attitude was that sure, it was a tragedy, blah blah, but what can we Americans expect when we're mean to everyone? Except for the drunk guy, they argued very well.

The opposition was not as good. After a student and a faculty member, both British, came a visiting American student who was supposedly on the "National U.S. Debating team," but was so bad I felt embarrassed for my country. She wasn't expecting people to jump in all the time to argue with her, and she got really flustered. The last guy was James Rubin, who worked for Clinton. He was definitely the best of the opposition (and
incredibly cute!), but even he wasn't very good. He made the point I wanted somebody to make all night, which is that if you admit that America IS exceptional, obviously exceptionalism ISN'T a delusion, but the rest was pretty cheesy: "This is a country with Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King."

I was expecting the proposition to win by a landslide, because they argued so much better and there was obviously so much more audience support for their side, but apparently the opposition won. So Oxford doesn't hate Americans after all.

On Feb. 28, Oxford Union has scheduled a debate on the proposition: This House believes that Islam is incompatible with the West. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a columnist for the Independent, will argue for the proposition; Yvonne Ridley, the Express reporter arrested by the Taliban, will oppose. -- 2/16

Academics vs. reality
Antonio Lasaga, a Yale geology professor, met a seven-year-old boy through a mentoring program; he raped the boy on numerous occasions until he turned 13, videotaping some of the abuse. He also collected thousands of images of the sexual torture of children. Lasaga admitted the crimes.

At the sentencing hearing, three academic colleagues asked the judge to let the brilliant geologist off easy.

"He is in his most productive years," said Hubert L. Barnes, 73, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and former head of the prestigious Geochemistry Society.

"When you penalize Tony for his indiscretions, you also penalize society," he said.

The word "indiscretions" evoked gasps from some in the audience.

Another professor said it was a misunderstanding. "He speculated that Lasaga's hands must have slipped while he was playing with the boy and the mistake was misconstrued as fondling." A third suggested Lasaga get the same six-year sentence as the "hockey dad'' who murdered another father in fight.

(David) Strollo, a seasoned prosecutor, was incredulous after the hearing. "In all my years as a prosecutor, I have never heard people deliver comments so disconnected with reality."

Lasaga was sentenced to 20 years in prison. -- 2/16

Who's simple now?
"Simplistic Criticism of U.S. Overlooks Complex Realities'' in Frankfurter Allgemeine argues that Europeans "underachievers'' are angry at "being repeatedly reminded of their inability to play even second fiddle militarily."

What enrages many Europeans, who are in fact not as united as they like to think, is perhaps not so much the U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Iraq as the realization of their own powerlessness on the questions that really count. Their reflexive indignation is directed at an America that has already licked its wounds and gotten back to business, and is now refusing to let anyone constrain it, least of all those who are unwilling or unable to act on their own. -- 2/16

O Winkler pioneers
Reading Moira Breen on why Americans aren't English -- upper-class or riffraff -- reminded me of the Pioneer Jewish Settlers of Winkler Project. The Mennonite settlers who founded the Manitoba town already have a memorial. Descendants of the Jewish pioneers are raising money to put up a bronze plaque with our ancestors' names.

My great-grandparents, Abraham and Sara Greenblatt, arrived about 100 years ago, along with a brother, Isaac Greenblatt and following a sister, Etta Nitikman. Counting all the other Nitikmans and the Buchwalds, who married in, half the families are relations or connections. Other names are Silver, Cohen, Sirluck, Danzker, Gladstone, Safeer, Zelig and Goldberg. And the first names: Aaron and Lifsche, Yosel and Freyda, Usher and Bella, Morris and Flossie. Not a Jason or Ashley in the bunch.

The Mennonites came for religous freedom and wheat farming. They talked the Jews, their neighbors in Russia, into coming to do the non-farming jobs. They got the freedom too. My great-grandfather was a peddler, trading with the farmers for butter and eggs. When he died, my great-grandmother and the four children moved to Omaha, where a relative had arranged a second marriage. So Grandma Tillie became American, instead of Canadian. Still, I have a yen to throw in a little money for the plaque in honor of those brave people who left everything they'd known to search for a better life in a new country.

For those who think they have Winkler roots, e-mail [email protected] or [email protected].

If the San Jose Merc hadn't screwed up its archiving, I'd give you a link to a great story headlined "San Jose to ring in new year with Latino flair.''

San Jose's annual Tet Festival, the traditional Vietnamese New Year celebration, kicks off today with an unlikely motto: "Si, se puede!'' . . .

The weekend festival at the Santa Clara County fairgrounds will open with the American national anthem performed by a young Mexican singer. Mariachi bands will play on stage next to Vietnamese pop singers. And to commemorate the year of the horse, a singer from the Mexican state of Jalisco will ride in on a horse to wish everyone, in Spanish and English, a prosperous new year.

No, we're not English. -- 2/16

U.S./U.K. win war, lose on artistic impression
"French judge gives Taliban victory'' reports SatireWire (via Instapundit).

Despite making what most observers agreed were "obvious technical errors," such as surrendering, the Taliban were awarded victory in the Afghanistan war last night after the French judge said they won on presentation.

The decision snatched triumph away from a U.S./U.K. pair who most agreed put on a magical, career-defining performance last month. -- 2/15

Needed: brain transplant
Denzel Washington's new movie, "John Q,'' has an absurd premise: Responsible family man with HMO coverage has to hold doctors hostage at gun point to get his son a heart transplant. The evil hospital exec tells dad his boy won't get on the transplant list unless the family can put down a $75,000 deposit; a doctor tells them the county hospital is inferior. So what else is a father to do?

Gee, I can think of a few things. Such as: Make a public plea that will raise cash and force the hospital to back down.

The Feb. 14 Wall Street Journal has two related articles: An American Medical Association committee is looking into a pilot pay-for-parts program to encourage more organ donation; the American Association of Health Plans is lanching an ad campaign that blames high health care costs on mandated coverage for mental illness and contraceptives and laws that make it easier to sue HMOs. "Sometimes it seems like health plans are the only ones trying to make health care more affordable,'' the ad says.

The Journal quotes an American Hospital Association vp as saying that no hospital would fail to do a transplant because the patient can't pay.

John Q's real problem is that his child may die before a heart is donated that's a suitable match. So, I'll be waiting for the movie's campaign to encourage fans to fill out organ donor cards. All the stars from Denzel on down should announce they're future organ donors.

I'll also be waiting -- with less eagerness -- for some crackpot to shoot up an ER in imitation of John Q's "protest." -- 2/15

High church hatred
The Spectator's "Christians Against Israel'' cover shows a long-nosed, flop-eared cleric burning an Israeli flag; the inside story is headlined "Christians Who Hate the Jews."

It is not an anti-Semitic or anti-Israel screed, as Instapundit implies, alluding to the New Statesman's Jewish conspiracy story. To the contrary, Melanie Phillips writes that the archbishop of Wales and others are warning that Anglican and Catholic hostility to Israel is a product of "the ancient hatred of Jews rooted deep in Christian theology and now on widespread display once again."

A doctrine going back to the early Church fathers, suppressed after the Holocaust, had been revived under the influence of the Middle East conflict. This doctrine is called replacement theology. In essence, it says that the Jews have been replaced by the Christians in God’s favour, and so all God’s promises to the Jews, including the land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity.

It's hard for me to believe theology is the key issue. It's more likely to be the idea that the West is always wrong, and yet the very Western idea of rooting for the underdog is always right. -- 2/14

Harassment liability
If a supervisor gropes in the closet, and the victim doesn't report it, can the employer be sued for sexual harassment? The California Supreme Court will take a second look at an appellate decision that held the employer responsible for failing to create a harassment-free environment, even though the company took action as soon as the problem was reported.

The vicim, who worked for the state Department of Health Services, waited 20 months to report inappropriate comments and touching by her supervisor. When she did speak up, the department took disciplinary action; the supervisor retired. -- 2/14

No-tech school for high-tech kinder
When high-tech parents choose a school, they don't necessarily want a laptop for every urchin. Courtesy of alert reader Cris Simpson, here's an Oregonian story about a private school in Intel Country with zero computers per kid; one third of the students are children of high-tech professionals.

The Swallowtail parents' belief -- that computer skills are best taught at home or postponed until high school -- runs counter to that of many of their colleagues and neighbors, public school parents who worry aloud that their elementary-aged children don't have adequate access to the fastest, best computers. . . .

Swallowtail students study art, language, music and dance, as well as classroom basics.
Beth O'Mahony's fifth-grade daughter, Erin, is knitting multicolored socks using yarn she dyed herself.

In contrast, the Hillsboro School District's technology curriculum expects fifth-graders to know how to scan their own artwork and suggests the use of "portable keyboards such as Alphasmarts to type out a complete story on an imaginative Northwest Indian legend." -- 2/13

Adult ed
"Porn star to lecture Jewish congregation about sex" -- 2/13

Linked!
I've made the "commuter blog stop'' section of Libertarian Samizdata. I shall dream of a posh future. Unlike others, I can't achieve ego gratification via self-googling: The other Joanne Jacobs -- an Australian professor and "webmaestro" -- keeps popping up. So I have to rely on links to keep my self-esteem at a California-appropriate elevation. -- 2/13

Islam by the book
Daniel Pipes and Rod Dreher critique the treatment of Islam in Houghton Mifflin's "Across the Centuries,'' a seventh grade social studies textbook.

From Pipes:

Jihad, which means "sacred war," turns into a struggle mainly "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil." Islam gives women "clear rights" not available in some other societies, such as the right to an education? This ignores the self-evident fact that Muslim women enjoy fewer rights than perhaps any other in the world.

From Dreher:

If the Islamic chapters seem like they could have been written by a Muslim activist group, that's no accident. The California-based Council on Islamic Education, founded in 1988 to fight what the group believes is anti-Muslim bias in the classroom, works closely with textbook publishers to review and develop teaching material.

In an update in The Corner, Dreher corrects an error -- Muslim men can marry four wives, not seven -- and quotes a Houghton Mifflin response:

As directed by the state of California, these books were to be written with 'Historical Empathy.' Thus, the textbooks do not focus on accounts of violence, cruelty or hatred on the part of any religion. In accordance with California state standards, 'Across the Centuries' focuses on how the beliefs of certain cultures help shape their motivation and their effect on history.-- 2/13

BritBlogBash
I see on Libertarian Samizdata there's a British Bloggers' Bash on Feb. 23. Hold off a bit, guys. I'm planning to be in Merrie Olde E the first two weeks of March, visiting my foreign bureau.

If I meet with Britbloggers, that makes the trip a business expense, right? (I'm doing my taxes.) On the other hand, I need income from which to deduct expenses. So I'll mention to readers that contributions to the Amazon tip jar have fallen to embarassingly low levels. Yet I'm averaging close to 1,000 visitors a day, quadruple the levels in late September, when I got the reporting function up and running. Give so I can afford to buy a pint for my blogmates abroad. But no spotted dick, whatever Sullivan says. -- 2/12

Lies about the dead
The civilian death toll in Afghanistan is lower than previously reported, according to an AP analysis (via Matt Welch).

Although estimates have placed the civilian dead in the thousands, a review by The Associated Press suggests the toll may be in the mid-hundreds, a figure reached by examining hospital records, visiting bomb sites and interviewing eyewitnesses and officials. . . .

One factor contributing to inflated estimates was the distortion of casualty reports by the Taliban regime. Afghan journalists have told AP that Taliban officials systematically doctored reports of civilian deaths to push their estimate to 1,500 in the first three weeks of the war in an attempt to galvanize opposition to the bombing. . . .

A reporter for Bakhtar, the government news agency, told AP he'd seen eight bodies after one air strike; it was changed to 20 in the official dispatch, then raised to 30 on Taliban-run radio. In addition, military deaths were reported as civilian deaths.

Of course, the numbers could go up as human rights' groups get to more isolated areas. And there have been troubling recent stories about air strikes called in based on dubious tips from locals. -- 2/11

Upper crust Fritos
Here's a very New Yorkie take on George W. Bush's lack of culture. He's a "lowbrow from the upper-crust ghetto'' because he doesn't know from yenta, vegan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Stone Phillips or HBO's "Sex and the City." Bush likes Fritos, peanut butter, Chuck Norris, Austin Powers and "Cats."

New York Times reporter Frank Bruni, who was assigned to cover Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign and the first eight months of Bush's presidency, describes the 43rd President of the United States as affable and good-natured, but shallow and largely clueless about many aspects of the culture of the nation he heads. . . .

Bush, who gets generally positive treatment from Bruni in the book, nonetheless comes off in parts as a stranger to America outside his own upper-class WASP background. When reporters on the campaign trail used words like "vegan" or "yenta," Bush had no idea what they were talking about, Bruni writes.

Who's upper crust and "largely clueless about many aspects of the nation'' here? Is it the Frito-chomping Austin Powers fan? Or writers who think urban culture is the only culture there is? -- 2/11

Giving teaching a try
Pushed by lay-offs and pulled by post-9-11 soul-searching, more people are seeking teaching jobs, reports the New York Times.

The most striking increase is in applications to programs that recruit people from other careers, provide minimal training and send the new teachers into short-staffed schools, typically in poor urban neighborhoods. . . .

One such program, in Washington, D.C., has received 45 percent more applications than it had this time last year. Another, serving Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., has had a 40 percent increase. More than 5,000 people from other careers have applied to teach in New York City starting in September, compared with 1,250 at this time last year.

The hope is that technology and finance professionals will help fill the need for science and math teachers. But will the new teachers stay on the job when the economy picks up again? -- 2/11

In stir, with Mr. Coffee
No wonder the Europeans are screaming about Camp X-Ray. No CD players, satellite TV, Mr. Coffee, tennis or conjugal visits. Held at a U.N. detention center (via The Corner), Slobodan Milosevic gets everything but a mint on his pillow at night.

His daily routine begins when he is let out of his three-by-five-meter (nine-by-15 foot) cell -- which has an en-suite shower, coffee maker and satellite television -- at 08:30 in the morning and locked up again 12 hours later.

He is free to spend the day wandering around the communal areas of his wing, to cook a meal in the shared kitchen, play cards and chess with other detainees, exercise in the gym or take a stroll in the exercise yard, which he favors.

All detainees are free to play volleyball, football or tennis in the prison's sports hall. . . .

Like other detainees he is entitled to share private moments with his wife in an "intimacy room." -- 2/11

Waiving the voter's will
California's Board of Education agreed last week to let bilingual teachers apply for waivers to educate children under 10 in their native language. Under Proposition 227, which passed four years ago, children are taught in English unless their parents seek a waiver. They must start the year in an English classroom; the state board repealed that provision too. Michael Barone urges Gov. Gray Davis, who's been good on education issues, to enforce the people's will.

With bilingual classes limited, test scores are soaring for Latino elementary students. Immigrant parents are pleased to see their kids learning English, which is essential for their success. Many teachers are coming around too.

"Bilingual was a noble idea," a school counselor told me. "Teachers were dedicated to it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work."

Why is the state board bowing to pressure to go back to the bad old days? I don't get it. -- 2/11

Love is a many-splintered thing
Moira Breen explains love and marriage to a refugee from the '60s, who's shocked to discover that society frowns on infidelity.

Peace love dove to you too, Star-shine. Now, could you turn down the volume on "Free Bird"? Thank you. A word here. Society really doesn't give a rat's ass about your satisfaction or mine one way or the other. What it wants you and me to do is turn the demon spawn our pursuit of satisfaction may produce into reasonably non-criminal members of society. -- 2/11

New and improved!
My brother came over and got the new template up and running. My links have come. Old Quickreads are available with a click of the Archives button. Some day soon, permalinks are possible. Maybe.

I'm working on a free-lance piece on whether laid-off techies are seeking jobs as math and science teachers. I asked my laid-off brother about it. "No," he said. "It's the money." When you've been making $90K or more, a teacher's starting pay -- about $35K in Silicon Valley -- just isn't enough. Not with a big mortgage and a family to support. His buddies are worried about making it on $70K -- if they get another job. -- 2/10

Guilty when proven innocent
Zero Tolerance Nightmares has some outrageous cases posted. For example, a straight A student in Georgia was suspended, banned from sports and kicked out of National Honor Society because his father left a scraper and a pen knife in the car. The family is now paying hefty private school tuition to keep their son's Naval Academy hopes alive. -- 2/10

There's a meaning?
You can add your thoughts about the Meaning of Life here. It has something to do with the viral nature of the Internet and a book called "America.com: On September 11," which "uses computer communication (chats, email, web sites, weblogs, bulletin boards) as an organizing principle through which to examine the events and themes
of September 11 and its aftermath." -- 2/10

A grammarian without a bicycle
The diagramming debate goes on.

Robert Wright, who's a middle school teacher, writes:

Students don't become better writers by learning sentence diagramming any more than a child learns how to ride a bike by studying physics.

The best way to learn grammar is by studying a foreign language. Studying grammar is essential for learning a foreign language but pretty near a waste of time for improving expression in one's native language. In the last 25 years there's been a tremendous amount of research on the teaching of writing and nobody anywhere recommends a return to sentence diagramming.

I remember learning all sorts of tenses I'd never heard of when I took French. The teacher told us that we'd be prepared to say, in French, "I would I were a primrose." Sadly, it has never come up in conversation. -- 2/10

Ask a stupid question, get a smart answer
Asked by an Arab editor about the Jewish conspiracy to smear Islam, Thomas Friedman writes a first-rate column.

Maybe, just maybe, many Americans are upset because 15 Saudis took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, private Saudi charities financed Osama bin Laden and hundreds of Saudis fought with Al Qaeda against America in Afghanistan . . .

The standard view of America in the Arab-Muslim world is that America is rich and powerful because it is crass and materialistic. And since America is just about material interests — not values — why can't it understand that its real material interests are with the Arabs, not with Israel? The Jews must be manipulating things.

The truth is exactly the opposite. America is successful and wealthy because of its values, not despite them. It is prosperous because of the way it respects freedom, individualism and women's rights and the way it nurtures creativity and experimentation. Those values are our inexhaustible oil wells. Americans naturally gravitate toward societies that share those same values, and they recoil from those that don't. -- 2/9

Taliban in exile
Living comfortably in Pakistan, several high-ranking Taliban ministers tell a Telegraph reporter that they'll be back in power some day. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan, they say. Osama bin Laden they think has fled to Saudi Arabia or Yemen.

Of course, their grip on reality might have slipped a bit.

"The Taliban leadership do not believe the Twin Towers attack was carried out by al-Qaeda," he continued. "According to my own opinion, the attack was wrong. It is not Islamic to kill innocent people like that."

How did they explain the videos in which bin Laden talks of the attack. "We do not believe those videos. They were fake," he replied. -- 2/9

Zero for moronic adults
Richard Aubrey writes:

There are two advantages to zero tolerance. One is that it teaches kids how stupid adults are and how the kids are going to have to be smart in order to survive in a world run by morons.

The second is that it takes away discretion from the adults who run things. Zero tolerance is a response to the total hash adults make of discretion. Remember Mark Twain: First, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards. -- 2/9

Too cute to live
New Olympics rule: Opening ceremonies may not feature a cute child, a dream sequence or non-parade, non-torch pageantry lasting more than 15 minutes. -- 2/9

Athena the Hun
"Beware the Yikes of March" is a very, very funny NY Times story with quotes from "Non Campus Mentis," a compilation of historical stupidities by U.S. and Canadian college students.

In this chronicle from the Stoned Age to the Berlin Mall, Judyism is a monolithic religion with the god Yahoo. Gothic cathedrals are supported by flying buttocks. Hitler terrorizes enemies with his Gespacho. Caesar is assassinated on the Yikes of March and declares, "Me too, Brutus!"

"Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman were known as the `Big Three.' "
"Athena the Hun rampaged the Balkans as far as France."
"Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granola, a part of Spain now known as Mexico." -- 2/9

Mourners blame Taliban
A U.S. bomb blew up a Taliban munitions depot, killing a Kabul man's son, two daughters and a nephew. Who does he blame? Mullah Omar. -- 2/9

A is for average
Grade inflation isn't just a Harvard phenomenon, reports USA Today.

Fewer than 20% of all college students receive grades below a B-minus, according to a study released this week by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That hardly seems justified at a time when a third of all college students arrive on campus so unprepared that they need to take at least one remedial course. -- 2/9

Sound instruction
California's switch from whole language to phonics is the subject of a New York Times story. Unfortunately, it doesn't really describe the difference between the two approaches.

In the California phonics program, children do not simply sound out syllables but also read passages for comprehension. The whole-language approach also teaches phonics, but more implicitly, in the context of stories meant to engage.

It would be more accurate to write: In the whole-language approach, it's assumed children will learn phonics implicitly as they listen to the teacher read engaging stories and guess-read, using pictures and context.

The story also includes a valuable point about the sharp rise in first grade reading scores in Los Angeles Unified. The district switched to Open Court, a phonics program; "frequent assessments'' now diagnose teaching problems. And LA took federal money that had been used to hire aides -- "unskilled paraprofessionals'' -- and used it to hire literacy coaches to help teachers improve reading instruction. Finally a state initiative curtailed bilingual education.

The story doesn't say it, but the federal money had been going to hire bilingual aides. Often, Mexican immigrant children were taught to read in Spanish by an unskilled aide, while their monolingual teacher taught reading in English to other students. -- 2/9

That tattered ensign
As a compromise, the Ground Zero flag will be carried in the Olympics' opening ceremony to symbolize the host nation.

Writing about the flag flap, columnist Ann Killion admits that the International Olympic Committee despises Americans.

And when Juan Antonio Samaranch, then the IOC president, left to testify before Congress about the (bribery) scandal, Jacques Rogge tried to buck up his spirits by telling him, ``The spittle of toads never reaches the light of the stars.''

That's the same Rogge who succeeded Samaranch as president and had some say in the decision about the flag.

But she thinks it might offend someone -- the Al Qaeda delegation? -- if U.S. athletes carry the flag that survived the World Trade Center bombing, instead of carrying a brand-new flag.

Americans may feel strongly about their tattered flag. But if at another Olympics, another country -- say Iraq or Somalia -- had a flag symbolic of its emotional plight, perhaps a tragic loss connected to the United States, would we feel the same way?

If Iran, Iraq or Israel -- who march close together at Olympics -- put up symbols offensive to their neighboring nations, would we support that?

Sheryl McCarthy, writing in Newsday, agrees, saying the IOC was right to try to "keep politics out of the opening ceremony." Besides, it's time for Americans to "move on.''

For five months, Americans have lamented the events of Sept. 11 in private and before the world. At some point, doesn't this endless wallowing in our national misfortune get tiresome?

Yes, we were hurt badly. But murder, mayhem and misery are playing out on a daily basis all over the world. If we're going to make the Olympics a place to highlight the fallout from terrorism and war, then at the very least the Summer Olympics will have to feature a parade of coffin-carrying Israelis and Palestinians and limbless refugees from Sierra Leone.

Each Olympic team carries a national flag in the opening march. So, why can't the U.S. team choose to carry a previously flown flag? They didn't want to carry coffins or those "missing" posters or "axis of evil'' signs. They didn't want to hold a memorial service. They asked to carry a flag in a ceremony that features flags. If someone finds it offensive that Americans get emotional about our flag, well, you know what they say about the spittle of toads.

Perhaps other countries have a national flag that symbolizes courage, resolve, strength, unity or grief. Let their athletes carry it in the parade of nations. Unlike speed skating or the slalom, love of country is not a win-lose competition.

Jeff Jarvis thinks spectators should stand up and sing "God Bless America.'' "The Star Spangled Banner'' would be appropriate too, though less singable. The Australians sang their national anthem at the Sydney games, and I, for one, didn't feel the least bit offended. -- 2/8

Zero sense
A middle-school boy was suspended because his mother packed a plastic knife in with the birthday cake he'd taken to school. An honor student was suspended for five days for fighting off an attacker. A girl with Midol? Suspended!

Yet two Virginia legislators got nowhere when they tried to introduce some common sense to the state's zero tolerance laws. As Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher's "Drop that spork!'' explains, one bill would have given school board's discretion to consider the seriousness of the offense and the offender's record. The other exempted self defense, non-threatening possession of a plastic utensil and over-the-counter medication with parental permission.

A member of the Henrico County School Board, desperate to save a system that teaches children the opposite of discretion, even played the terrorism card, arguing to lawmakers that plastic utensils are a primo tool for budding hijackers.

An 8th grade boy took a knife away from a suicidal classmate. He was commended by the school board -- and suspended for four months. Once he'd disarmed the girl, he had a knife on campus. Zero tolerance. -- 2/8

Wimp no more
Awful as they are, shows like Fear Factor and The Chair indicate a zeitgeist change, argues Instapundit.

Instead of mastering trivia, or weeping, Oprah-like, about trivialities, the shows are about keeping your head while things go bad around you, about staying cool. Yeah, they bear the same resemblance to real war that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? bears to a Ph.D program, but that's not the point -- game shows have to be stupid, as a requirement of the genre. But in their own way, they're harbingers of a different kind of national mood. Sympathizing with whiny wimps is out. We want people who can take it.

Yeah. -- 2/7

The subject is diagramming
BloggerLand loves to parse. Matt Welch, Shiloh Bucher and Linda Chavez are diagramming buffs.

I heard from Geoffrey Barto of TurkeyBlog, which is the place to go for Victor Hugo analysis. When Barto used diagrams to teach college French, he found many students had never heard of such things as subjects and direct objects.

Sadly, a lot of teachers got the idea that focusing on grammar stifles self-expression. In truth, it fosters it. A lot of students hesitate to write because they know it's coming out wrong but don't know why. A good grammar background gives both the confidence to put down a sentence and the intelligence to make it an effective one. Maybe someday more educators will catch on to this point. Meanwhile, we can look forward to a lot of incoherent self-expression from those who are so far out of touch that they don't even realize it.

After learning the basics in 1966, Oreta Hinamon Taylor was caught in an educational fad.

The rage in my middle school was something called "transitional grammar" which the teacher never understood and neither did we. 

However, Taylor managed to enroll her daughter in an Atlanta middle school that still teaches grammar and diagramming. -- 2/7

Geekazoids by the Bay
Nick Denton (via Welch)takes a jaundiced view of post-boom Silicon Valley, though he's mostly trashing San Francisco.

Supposedly cosmopolitan, San Francisco is in fact a collection of separatist ghettos. Mexicans live in the Mission, Gays live in the Castro, Chinese out in Sunset, and transient yuppies in the Marina; and they avoid eachother as much as possible.

The city is entirely lacking in glamour. The old money is inbred, and the new money is too geeky. The pretty people are in Los Angeles or Miami; the intellectuals are in New York; and the carpetbaggers left as quickly as they came.

Denton predicts The City, as SF likes to be called, will soon be left to the vagrants, anti-social geeks and obsessives. Good reading, though I doubt it's really that bad. -- 2/7

New England vouchers
According to a Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation study, school vouchers are raising test scores and saving money in Maine and Vermont. Some towns, reluctant to build schools, give parents a tuition voucher good at any public or non-sectarian private school. -- 2/7

Small classes, small effects
Reducing class size to 20 students in kindergarten through third grade is wildly popular in California -- and wildly expensive. It's cost $8 billion over the past five years. The results? A study by a battalion of think tanks found "no relationship between statewide student achievement and statewide participation in class size reduction." Furthermore, schools are cutting teacher training, music, technology and library budgets to pay for smaller K-3 classes.

"All of this raises the question of whether some of the money that is used for class-size reduction might not be more productively used elsewhere," RAND researcher Georges Vernez said. "I think that's probably a debate that should take place."

Brian Stecher, the report's co-author, said it is impossible to separate positive effects of smaller classes from other simultaneous reforms, such as new testing and reading programs.

In addition, class size reduction has worsened the state's teacher shortage.

The decline in teacher qualifications (education, credentials, and experience) in elementary schools has leveled off, but it remains substantial, with roughly 15% of elementary teachers not being fully credentialed. As in the past, teachers with less than full credentials were more likely to be located in elementary schools serving low-income, minority, and English learner populations. -- 2/6

Power grab
What's good for unionized teachers isn't necessarily good for students, writes Daniel Weintraub in the Sacramento Bee. California's teachers' union wants to put everything on the bargain table from wages and hours to standards, curriculum and textbooks. The CTA doesn't always put education first, Weintraub observes.

The teachers unions, for example, have made it harder to fire incompetent instructors and have installed seniority systems that all but ensure that the toughest-to-teach kids -- immigrants in the inner city -- will have the least experienced teachers. Both policies make sense as goals of an effective labor union, but the results can work to the detriment of the kids for whom the schools are there in the first place.

Wayne Johnson, CTA's president, wants the union and administrators to negotiate in secret, with no parent participation.

. . . his views reflect the arrogance of a union that believes experts know all and that parents and the community are best seen and not heard. He seems to be forgetting that in the public schools, teachers may be the labor, but parents are the management.

Johnson says that public-school teachers, college graduates all and many with advanced degrees, deserve to be consulted as professionals about the work they are asked to do. He's right. But that is not the same as giving their unions the ability to dictate education policy in contracts negotiated at the threat of a strike and set in stone for years so that future school boards cannot change them.

Speaker-elect Herb Wesson, a liberal Democrat, reportedly will carry the CTA bill. -- 2/5

Diagramming makes a comeback
I didn't like diagramming sentences in 7th grade English, but students in my day weren't supposed to like everything they did in school. I learned my subjects, verbs, participles and gerunds, getting some sense of sentence construction.

When formal teaching of grammar went out of fashion, so did diagramming . But it's back writes Jay Mathews, in a fascinating Washington Post column.

Three years ago, appalled that even some of her best students did not understand the functions of different parts of speech, and unable to find a helpful textbook, (Robyn) Jackson unearthed an old grammar book and noticed the sentence diagrams. She began to teach diagramming to her Advanced Placement students, and she found the careful dissection of each sentence made it easier for her to explain why their own writings sometimes did not make sense.

For the National Council of Teachers of English and most teacher training programs

sentence diagramming in particular and extensive grammar teaching in general are as popular as a temperance lecture at a local tavern.

"In general, the teaching of grammar does not serve any practical purpose for most students," a 1996 NCTE journal article said, citing many research studies. "It does not improve reading, speaking, writing, or even editing, for the majority of students."

An entire generation of teachers has been told that sentence diagramming is not only difficult and boring, but also likely to sour students on writing and public speaking and make them reluctant to do their English class homework. Most writing teachers say that it is much better to introduce rules of grammar gradually and naturally as they edit students' work.

Whole grammar! The prevalent notion in education today is that nothing should be taught directly, especially if students might be asked to work. All skills should be learned "naturally.'' Or -- to use another sentence fragment -- not at all. -- 2/5

Mr. Potato Head, Sr.
Mr. Potato Head is celebrating his 50th birthday this year. A New York Post story refers to Mr. P as "toy, family man, movie star, government official - and now, senior citizen."

Excuse me. Senior citizen? Like Mr. P, I was born in 1952. I am not a senior citizen. I am mature. Not even that some days. -- 2/5

Idiotarians at WalMart
In "Retailing dynamism" (how K-mart blew it), Virginia Postrel mocks Whirl-Mart., an idiotarian performance art/protest.

'Whirl-Mart' is an experiment that can be approached from several different angles. As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle. As a ceremony, it is a counter-ritual to shopping that transforms the super-store and its wall-to-wall array of products into a surreal and colorful cathedral.

Actually, it's a bunch of people who show up at a Wal-Mart at a predetermined time and push empty shopping carts around for an hour, following each other in single file.

These living sculptors think they're superior -- esthetically and intellectually, perhaps even morally -- to the lumpenproletariat, who go to Wal-Mart because they can buy what they need and want at the lowest possible price. -- 2/5

Where parents go to school
Accelerated School in South-Central Los Angeles is the "lazy student's nightmare," writes Steve Lopez in the LA Times. They can't tell Mom there's no homework. She knows there's always homework.

The charter school is also tough on lazy parents: They have to spend three hours a month on campus and attend at least five parent meetings.

"At my old school, parents were really not welcome at all," says kindergarten teacher Steven Hicks, who moved to Accelerated from another campus this year and was named one of 12 L.A. County teachers of the year in September. "No one knew anyone by name, and if a parent showed up at school, the attitude was, 'Why are you here?'"

For another kind of school experience, Steve Sherman sent me this story about the school registration mess in Boston. Parents -- one of them a public school teacher -- waited 194 days to find out which school their kindergartener would be assigned to. -- 2/5

Riding the stock
In response to "Choosing risk,'' Bob Cavalli writes:

Anyone who has a 401K plan at work knows full well that they are encouraged to diversify their holdings to prevent exactly what happened at Enron. Dare we say greed? These people were making fortunes, riding the stock to huge values, rather than making Enron stock only a part of their retirement investments. Granted, much of the rise in the value of the stock may well have been based upon cooked books, but if we dare called these people greedy, they would cease to be the victims that politicians and media types are looking to "protect."

BTW, let's do invade France. -- 2/5

Bellicose Americans
According to the latest Gallup poll, Americans are willing to fight Iraq, Iran and any other country President Bush cares to name. (Gallup didn't ask about France.) Bush' s approval ratings for the war on terrorism remain amazingly high.

89% approved of the current U.S. military action in Afghanistan.
77% favor taking military action in Iraq
71% favor taking military action in Iran
45% support military action against terrorists only if they threaten the U.S.; an additional 49 percent support military action against terrorists even if they don't threaten the U.S. -- 2/4

Choosing risk
"Workers choose to gamble on 401(k),'' in the San Jose Mercury News makes an important point: Many employees invest in their own company stock because they think the risk is worth the potential reward.

Employees at a number of large Silicon Valley companies invest retirement funds in company stock, creating accounts that are in some cases twice as financially risky as investing in a benchmark stock-market fund such as the S&P 500 index.

In most cases, employees choose to take this gamble. When the company stock rises, employees prosper. When the stock dives -- as it has for many valley companies in the recession -- workers lose.

In Silicon Valley, workers aren't clamoring for government protection, reports Margaret Steen.

``If I had it to do over again, I'd have paid closer attention to where I had my money,'' said (William C.) Smith, the PG&E worker. But he doesn't like the idea of the government telling him how to invest his money.

He added, ``If I make a mistake, it's my mistake.'' -- 2/3

Enronaround
The best analysis of the Enron debacle I've seen so far comes from Dave Barry.

Q. How, exactly, did Enron make money?
A. Nobody knows. This is usually the case with corporations whose names sound like fictional planets from Star Wars. Allegedly, Enron was in the energy business, but when outside investigators finally looked into it, they discovered that the only actual energy source in the entire Enron empire was a partially used can of Sterno in the basement of corporate headquarters.

Update: According to James Lileks, it's no coincidence that Enron sounds like a Star Wars planet. -- 2/3

Founding blogger
John Adams, revolutionary proto-blogger? Random Jottings makes the case (via Hofer). -- 2/3

Our foreign correspondent reports from Oxford
Hey Mom,

Last Monday Leah and I went to gay night at one club with our gay roommate Roberto, which was fun because at least we knew what we were getting ourselves into. But then Wednesday, while Berto was out on a date with a guy he met Monday, Leah and I went out again, this time determined to meet straight British men. We went to a popular club where we'd been before, and were stoked to find tons of good looking, well-dressed guys there. There weren't even many women to offer competition! We were a little surprised when none of them seemed into dancing with us, but we kept thinking it would pick up as the night progressed. It took us three hours to figure out it was gay night there, too.

Thursday I was feeling too sick to go out, but Leah and Berto and another friend of ours, Chris, went to the bar connected to the Oxford Union, which is a pretty standard college hangout . . . most nights. Apparently, Thursday nights, it's -- you guessed it -- gay night.

BUT, Roberto did tell us that Wednesday night while he was out with this guy he met, they stopped at our favorite kebob van, Sid's. Berto asked Sid if "his girls" had been by that night, and Sid apparently got really excited and said, "Are they really your girls?"
Roberto confirmed that yes, we were, and Sid was apparently really jealous and told Berto how hot he thought we were. Berto told us he considered selling me and Leah to Sid in exhange for ten lamb kebobs, but decided against it.

Correspondent Allison is going to join her fellow Yanks in Oxford for a mass viewing of the Super Bowl. With her luck, it will be gay night. -- 2/3

Saving innocent Afghans
The U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan killed 1,000 civilians, estimates Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. And will save the lives of more than 100,000 Afghans each year.

In each of the last few years, without anyone paying much attention, 225,000 children died in Afghanistan before the age of 5, along with 15,000 women who died during pregnancy or childbirth. There was no way to save those lives under the Taliban; indeed, international organizations were retreating from Afghanistan even before 9/11 because of the arrests of Christian aid workers.

Since the Taliban's fall, Unicef has vaccinated 734,000 children against measles, preventing 35,000 deaths, "in a country where virtually no one had been vaccinated against the disease in the previous 10 years." With continued aid, Unicef thinks the child and maternal mortality rate can be cut in half in five years.

Working from United Nations figures, if Afghanistan eventually improves just to the wretched levels of neighboring Pakistan, that would mean 115,000 fewer deaths a year of children under the age of 5, along with 9,600 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year.

Kristof's numbers don't consider the 100,000 Afghans who died of hunger In the last year of Taliban rule. Some 600,000 were at risk of starvation in June, 2001, reported the New Delhi Daily Telegraph. The U.N. World Food Programme was threatening to pull out because of Taliban corruption and laws making it impossible to get food to needy women. Now Afghans are getting food aid.

"There will be no famine in Afghanistan this winter,” said Catherine Bertini, executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Programme, which trucks the food aid into Afghanistan. “There will be deaths, because the country was in a pre-famine condition this summer before the war started. But it will be isolated, and not large-scale.” -- 2/2

Do despair
In a Corner item poking fun at Maya Angelou's line of inspirational schlock, such as the lavender-scented "Maya Angelou Courage Sachet," Rod Dreher suggests

the "Philip Larkin Misery Sachet," which smells of must and stale cigarette smoke, or the "Dylan Thomas Drunkenness Sachet," impregnated with the aroma of whisky and barf. Coming next year, no doubt, from the evil geniuses at www.despair.com.

Click on the Despair, Inc. link for items such as BitterSweets ("Valentine's candy for the rest of us'' in five chalk-like flavors), the 2002 Consulting Calendar ("If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."), Pessimist's Mug ("You'll never be able to see the glass as half-full again!"), the Demotivators' Variety Pack and more. -- 2/2

Doo-doo Enron
A friend sent me this mp3 parody of the classic Dah Doo Ron Ron.-- 2/1

OK vs. not so great
Glenn Reynolds sums up neatly why the word "evil'' makes so many people uncomfortable.

I think that what makes people cringe about good/evil discussions is that if you admit that good and evil exist and can be told from one another, it creates obligations: to oppose evil, and to support (and be) good. That's work, and it involves responsibility.

It seems to me that it's possible to admit that good and evil are not always clearcut, while still admitting that the distinction remains. To some people, though, that's apparently too big a mental effort.

By the way, Anthony Swenson at Coyote has evidence to support the Reynolds clone thesis. -- 2/1

Post-Clinton pathos
Bob Cavalli responds to the item on Maureen Dowd's anti-"Bushie" column.

Ms. Dowd has become a rather pathetic figure post-Clinton, reduced to
snotty insults, bushels of straw men, and some really hack stuff (joining
Molly Ivins in that purgatory), lighting candles at night for any Democrat
to somehow win in '04. Her column is typical; the "Bushies" are
"strutting", "acting" as though the war is over, but telling us otherwise.
Wow. I can't think of a more strut-challenged administration than GWB,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, et.al.

I like "strut-challenged.'' -- 2/1

Offline
After 20 minutes with a tech guy, I'm back online. I lost my Internet connection last night. It wasn't my fault. I didn't do anything weird. It just stopped working. I turned things off. I turned them back on. It still didn't work. This is supposed to be science, right? Not voodoo.

Maybe it was a sign from God telling me to do all my offline work. -- 2/1

Satan #1
Here's a funny line from Best of the Web, in response to an "axis of evil'' response from Iran: ""There are some satans in the world, but America indeed is the great Satan . . . The Islamic Republic of Iran is honored to be the target of wrath and anger of the most hated Satan in the world."

Somehow we have the image of President Bush at an awards dinner, standing on the dais and declaring: "I'd like to thank all the little satans who help me get where I am today." -- 2/1