Free Republic

Are boys the weaker sex? Science says yes. But society is trying to deal with male handicaps." With those words, U.S. News & World Report opens this week's cover story on boys. The story is a case study in the pseudo-science, media bias, and general silliness that nowadays passes for knowledge about the differences between the sexes. The U.S. News cover story, written by Anna Mulrine, can't quite decide whether boys and girls need to be raised androgynously or educated separately. But in either case, as far as Mulrine is concerned, masculinity itself is the problem. Little boys are ...

After having an intern sneak in out of his apartment to do housecleaning and other duties, after carrying on with a flight attendant, after what no doubt were many other similar "romantic" (perhaps the most misused word in Condit coverage) relationships, Rep. Gary Condit has made a decision: He's a family man. Condit's minions justify his silence as a way to protect his family. This, as the Clinton scandal demonstrated, is the most convenient lie for adulterous public officials — they only want to protect their families. But Clinton's lies, and now Condit's, have nothing to do with their ...

As if his cowardice and inability to maintain the GOP's Senate majority were not enough, Trent Lott now can add desertion to his ever-expanding list of misdeeds as the Senate's Republican "leader." When the Senate turned to final passage of the Patients' Bill of Rights on June 29 at 7:34 p.m., Lott was AWOL. The pro-lawyer measure, cosponsored by Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) and John McCain (R., Ariz.), passed 59-36, without Lott's vote on either side. Fourteen minutes earlier, a less interventionist measure offered by John Breaux (D., La.) and Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) and endorsed as the Republicans' ...

Ann Noonan, policy director for the Laogai Foundation One of the most gruesome human-rights abuses in today's world is China's trafficking of its own executed prisoners' body parts to American residents. This atrocity was documented by testimony given June 27th during a U.S. congressional hearing. Congressman Henry Hyde, the chairman on International Relations, in a press release stated: By some estimates 90 percent of transplants performed in China use human organs taken from executed prisoners. Amnesty International reports that some prisoners are executed for such crimes as "counter-revolutionary offenses" a code word for pro-democracy activism. Holiday executions and "Strike ...

This is the one time of the year when we Americans reflect on how fortunate we are to have been born at this particular moment in time in this great country. There are 275 million Americans, but 6 billion people on the planet. We all had less than a 1-in-20 chance of being born American. Folks, we have won the most important of life's lotteries! In our recent book It's Getting Better All the Time: The Greatest Trends of the Last 100 years, my co-author Julian Simon and I ask the question: Why did so much of the human ...

The diversity enterprise invites politicians to see the university as an opportunity for ethnic spoils. By Peter Wood, associate provost at Boston University On June 28, Ward Connerly convened a meeting at the Reagan Library to discuss how proponents of race preferences are using the language and ideology of "diversity" in a bid to build support for programs that a large majority of Americans oppose. Successful referendums such as California's Proposition 209 and Washington's I-200, as well as numerous polls, demonstrate America's distaste for the type of affirmative action that involves quotas and legal preferences. But "diversity" is a ...

Mr. Dunphy* is an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department The Seattle Times reported last Tuesday that police officers are becoming increasingly reluctant to confront criminals in that city's black neighborhoods, for fear of becoming involved in controversial, racially charged incidents. The story, by Times staff writers Alex Tizon and Reid Forgrave, quotes several Seattle cops who admit to holding back in their enforcement efforts rather than risk being labeled as racial-profilers or worse. One officer, 17-year veteran Eric Michl, put it this way: "Parking under a shady tree to work on a crossword puzzle is a great ...

Steven Spielberg's new movie is — let me try to put this delicately — really, really, really bad. It's bad in almost every way. A.I. is bad in ways you never would have believed Steven Spielberg could be bad. It's painfully slow and boring; at least five times during the course of it I found myself making little wheel motions with my hands in hopes that I might speed things up on screen. It's cheesy and (for the most part) visually unimaginative, resembling mid-budget science-fiction movies of the 1970s like Logan's Run or Damnation Alley. (It even borrows colored ...

One of the oldest jokes in the world is the one about the three-legged pig. There are dozens of versions, but they all basically go like this: There's a traveling salesman making his way through the backwoods when he approaches a farmer to make a sale. He sees a three-legged pig hopping around behind the farmer and asks, "Hey, why does your pig only have three legs?" "That's no ordinary pig!" exclaims the farmer. "That is the smartest pig in the whole world. It saved my family's life." The farmer continues, "Last summer, the stove done broke and gas ...

The report can be found here: In Dissent It is a long document, but I thought we should have it here at FR.

A study being released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity finds strong evidence of racial and ethnic discrimination in the admissions policies of five state medical schools: the Medical College of Georgia, Michigan State College of Human Medicine, University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, State University of New York (SUNY) Brooklyn College of Medicine, and University of Washington School of Medicine. The study is posted on CEO's website, www.ceousa.org. Under any interpretation of the civil-rights laws, these schools are in likely violation. The study finds that racial and ethnic considerations are much more than a mere tiebreaker or ...

Peter Wood, associate provost, Boston University College is about more than book learning; it is an experience that shapes character." Some version of this sentence can probably be found in every college's viewbook, promotional video, or CD/ROM. And surely it is accurate: Even the students who learn the least from formal instruction somehow seem to acquire some of the attitudes, habits of mind, and dispositions to act that are characteristic of the colleges they attend. But in many respects contemporary higher education is hostile ground for improving character. Trendy humanities departments celebrate the splintering of personal identity; postmodernists dismiss ...

Occasionally a law is passed that is more than a mere rule for governing public life. It registers a changing attitude and crystallizes it into a decisive change in the culture. The official history of such a law may be written in court decisions, but its effects are felt all the way down to the minutiae and imponderabilia of everyday life. Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act. At commencement a few weeks ago my university gave a teaching award to a professor for her outstanding work in teaching statistics. In a letter recommending her for the award, one of ...

Editor's note: This article is intended for people with at least beginner to intermediate fluency in Trek lingo. To explain everything would bore both the people who care about such weighty issues — and the people who don't. “And the information superhighway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek.” — Homer Simpson For the first time in over a decade there is no first-run Star Trek series on TV. I never thought I would say this but…that's good news. The final episode of Star Trek Voyager, which aired last week, was a perfect example of ...

Jerry Taylor & Peter VanDoren. Mr. Taylor is director of natural-resources studies at the Cato Institute. Mr. VanDoren is the editor of Regulation magazine. In an op-ed in Thursday's New York Times, California Governor Gray Davis, with all the desperation of a politician staring electoral oblivion in the face, once again tried to hang the California power crisis on "them" — the "unconscionable" power generators, the do-nothing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the "irresponsible" Republican president, the incompetent former Governor, Pete Wilson, and, perhaps, if his poll numbers continue to drop, space aliens, Sasquatch, and neo-Nazi militia groups. Kick back with ...

It was amiable chitchat, a piece of fluff for last Sunday's New York Times. Just how do you get hold of tickets for The Producers, Broadway's hottest show, a musical about a musical devoted to Hitler? The newspaper ran through the alternatives: sleazy scalpers, cunning concierges, even a crafty charitable contribution or two, and then fell back on that most effective of Manhattan ruses, "It's whom you get to know." For, as the Times explained, every night the "house" hangs on to tickets for distribution to a favored few. Readers were told that Rocco Landesman, the show's lead producer, ...

In a perfect world, Senators James Jeffords and Trent Lott would be on a one-way flight to Papua New Guinea right now, each with a copy of the Donner Party Cook Book duct-taped to his chest. Alas, Washington is as far from perfect as Bismarck Arch is from Burlington, Vt. Nonetheless, Republican and conservative activists are still enraged over "Benedict Jeffords's" split from the GOP. With Jeffords unable to face a primary opponent until 2006, true believers can do little more than hope that Jeffords suffers when he looks in the mirror and ponders the pain he has inflicted ...

My wife and I sighed with delighted relief as the college classes of 2001 graduated this spring. Our oldest daughter finished law school, while our son completed his undergraduate degree and joined the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. There is hope for them both, as there is for our other daughter, who finished college two years ago and appears to be unimpaired. All three of our children seem to have survived their travels through the left-wing fever swamps of academia, and for that we are grateful. They have emerged…unpink! We know that other parents aren't so lucky. Imagine spending tens of ...

Just announced that WGN TV in Chicago that Mayor Daley has received the call --- Boeing coming to Chicago.

In my nearly 14 years in Manhattan, I have bought the New York Times perhaps three dozen times, usually after a colleague recommended an article relevant to my research. I always clip that specific piece, then toss the rest, much as a matador might snip a defeated bull's tail before dispatching the carcass to the nearest abattoir. Why my disdain for America's so-called "paper of record?" Unlike most commentators, I boycott the cult of the New York Times. It holds journalists, politicians, and other opinion makers in a Svengali-like trance. If the Times says the sun will rise in ...