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At one time people thought it common sense to distinguish between a Connecticut Yankee and a Southern black and expect very different things from them. Today that kind of distinction is thought outrageous, but people still differentiate a Harvard graduate from a high school graduate who just got out of the Marines. The change is … More ...

There’s only one possible explanation for everything: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) says the reason Osama is so popular worldwide is that he’s into day care centers. In the meantime, the reason “[t]here are crises in every one of our schools in this country” is that there’s not enough Federal money to go around.

Where … More ...

What it’s like to teach literature in multicultural technocratic England: Teachers, targets and theatre trips. Taking schoolchildren to the theater becomes impossibly difficult when there are no standards, so you can’t expect people to behave right and keeping the kids safe becomes an infinitely complex task. So you don’t bother doing it. Back in … More ...

Don’t worry, we’re all being looked after:

• The NYC Health Department is warning doctors they could face malpractice suits if they don’t push patients to kick the smoking habit.
• English parents wanting to take pictures of their children playing “football” [I believe soccer is meant] will be asked to sign a form saying the

I don’t know enough about French intellectual life to comment, but this seemed worth passing on: French Intellectuals take off the gloves in slugfest over `new reactionaries’.

“Free to be you and me,” or maybe “The Way of the Cross Goes Bad”: Man held for German ‘cannibal killing’. A follower of Jeffrey Dahmer decided the easiest way to get a victim would be to place an ad in the gay press, so he did. Someone volunteered, and after setting his affairs … More ...

New Labour is New Age, at least in the person of their First Couple: Ev’rybody must get stones (neolithic stone circles, that is). Cherie Blair does come off from the story as a bit of a crackpot. Is this a weakness of women in politics? Saul went off to see the Witch of Endor, but … More ...

International politics as therapy: U.S. Pledges to Push Democracy in Muslim World. We’re going to work with the regimes in Muslim countries to help them work through their problems. Am I the only one who finds the language in this article bizarre?

Is the EU a threat or a fantasy? One sometimes wonders: A pair of meteors head for Brussels, both called Fraud. It’s not clear from the article how big the problem of corruption is at present, but it’s structural and seems likely to get far worse with the expansion of the EU to Eastern … More ...

A rather neat application of the principle everything is really its opposite: Judging Judaism by the Numbers. Numbers don’t matter, the author says, because “the ongoing conversation that is Judaism can happen anywhere, between anyone.” Buddhism can be the triumph of Judaism. And “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” really means “radical … More ...