Month: May 2006

No, not a new novel by Midge Decter. A Fox News Special. Greg Djerejian explains.

A new front has just opened up in the Second Amendment debate. The usual NRA argument is that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. I’ve always been almost-persuaded by this. The missing link is what actually owning or handling a gun does to male psychology. Does it ramp up testosterone all by itself and thereby make firing a gun more likely? A new scientific study suggests just that:

Psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., enrolled 30 male students in what they described as a taste study. The researchers took saliva samples from the students and measured testosterone levels. They then seated the young men, one at a time, at a table in a bare room; on the table were pieces of paper and either the board game Mouse Trap or a large handgun. Their instructions: take apart the game or the gun and write directions for assembly and disassembly.
Fifteen minutes later, the psychologists measured saliva testosterone again and found that the levels had spiked in men who had handled the gun but had stayed steady in those working with the board game.

Over to you, Mr Civil Rights.

That’s Mary Cheney’s response to the push by the far right to amend the federal constitution to strip her and every gay person of the right to legally marry or partner the person they love. I look forward to the socially conservative blogosphere describing her as "hysterical." She’s just stating the truth. And she is one of the least hysterical human beings you could wish to meet.

Tony Blair’s expiration date just got moved up a jot. The Tories now have an eight percent lead over Labour. Blair now has exactly Bush’s approval rating: 31 percent. Money quote from a Labour parliamentary rebel: "We have been eyeball to eyeball, and the prime minister has blinked."

Everyone knows that Gordon Brown will be fighting the next election as Labour leader. And so the next few months become an interminable series of internecine Labour spats, uncertainty, and Machiaveliian maneuvring. That can only help the opposition, now calmly united by the pleasant but, until now largely vacuous, leadership of David Cameron. It seems to me that Blair’s chances for pushing through real reform of pensions and the health service are all but lost. He should quit now, give Brown a chance to prove himself, and give the Brits a year or two to measure the comparative qualities of Brown and Cameron as future prime ministers. Two recent prime ministers hung on to office, past an obvious chance to get out while the going was reasonably good: James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. Both regretted their inability to walk away from Number 10. Blair should heed that history and go soon. Like before the summer.

(Photo: Luke MacGregor/AP.)

The faculty vote down Gallaudet’s new president, Jane Fernandes. Money quote:

Fernandes, 49, said she is caught in a cultural debate. "There’s a kind of perfect deaf person," said Fernandes, who described that as someone who is born deaf to deaf parents, learns ASL at home, attends deaf schools, marries a deaf person and has deaf children. "People like that will remain the core of the university."
Fernandes is married to a retired Gallaudet professor who can hear. So can the couple’s two children. Some people who were deaf at birth can learn to speak through intensive speech therapy.

First, a student uprising. Then a faculty revolt. Identity politics is clearly far from over.

My essay on the subject is currently the most emailed piece on Time.com. Thanks for your many emails. Keep them coming. I’ll address several critical points in the next few days. 800 words is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

(Photo of Tim and Beverly LaHaye by Thomas Michael Alleman for Time.)

The debate over the relationship between tax cuts and spending increases continues here.

Yes, my corporate overlords have now added them. Most bloggers know what they are; and most experienced blog-readers do as well. For those who don’t: they’re basically a way for you, the reader, to see what other blogs are saying or not saying about various posts on this site. If you click on the "Trackbacks" doohickey beneath each item, you’ll get a fresh page with the item and various responses from various blogs. It’s like a comments section, with the entry-barrier of being a blogger yourself. If you want to follow a controversy or discussion raised in a post, click the trackbacks link (the number attached to it represents the number of links), and follow your nose. If you’re a blogger and want to attract readers to your site, linking helps bring my readers to your site – so link away and join the fun. Win-win. We’re doing it as an experiment. But it’s another little connecting thread between the MSM and the blogosphere. May the conversation blossom.

He says he didn’t approve of the inflammatory, partisan copy on the jacket of his book, "The Party of Death," that completely conflates such a "party" with the Democrats. He "didn’t much like it," he says.

King’s College, London, just out put their latest PDF report on rates of imprisonment in the world. The rates are given as the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people in the population at large. It’s pretty staggering that by far the highest rates of imprisonment occur in the U.S. The U.S. rate is 724 for every 100,000 people – up from 505 in 1992. Of major countries, the only close competitor is Russia with 581, and Cuba at 487. Iran and Israel, to give examples of countries with internal conflict, clock in at 206 and 209 respectively. Most major U.S. allies are in the 130 range or lower. I’m not sure what any of this proves. But this much we can say: the land of the free is also the land of the unfree. Millions of them. Texas, by the way, has an imprisonment rate of well over 1,000. There’s no country on the planet – no dictatorship on earth – as confortable with locking people up as the state of Texas. The detention policies of the current administration may be more understandable in this context.