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Kid-Friendly Policies Don’t Help Singles
As someone who doesn’t plan on having kids, I am acutely aware of the inequity described in this piece. In short, it’s unfair that taking time off to have (or care for) kids is preferenced over taking time off to complete a degree (or travel, or relax, or do any one of a number of other personally and socially utile things).
Audit finds Education Dept. missteps
“Missteps” is a fairly generous summary of what amounts to gross corruption in the Education Department’s “Reading First” program. To wit:
It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.
In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn’t support, according to the report released Friday by the department’s inspector general.
“They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” the Reading First director wrote, according to the report.
Blatant favoritism based on an equal mix of ideological fervor and straight corruption… now, what does that remind me of? Wait for it, wait for it… oh, right.
Man bites panda after zoo attack
Umm…
Newspaper photographs showed him lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages over his legs.
“I bit the panda on its back but its fur was too thick,” Mr Zhang recalled.
He went on: “No one ever said they would bite people. I just wanted to touch it.”
With that in mind, a word of general warning: just because it’s cute doesn’t mean it won’t maul (or, at least, bite) you.
Thai PM ‘overthrown in army coup’
I realize that this may just be a function of poor translation, but a coup announcement that includes the phrase, “We ask for the co-operation of the public and ask your pardon for the inconvenience” just strikes me as funny.
Princeton Drops Early Admissions
Following Harvard, Princeton is dropping its early admission program. This has an even greater impact, since Princeton’s program was Early Decision (the binding kind), and accounted for about half of the freshman class.
Does this mean that a sudden avalanche is on the way? Probably not; at least, most of the other Ivies and other elite schools have indicated that their early admission programs aren’t going anywhere this year. Still, it’s a great step.
Unfinished Tolkien work to be published in ‘07
My name is Kevin, and I’m a Lord of the Rings geek.
Audience: Hi, Kevin.
Yeah, yeah, make fun all you want; at least *my* literary obsessions are post-pubescent (I’m looking at you, HP fans).
Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq
I was initially going to title this post “Incompetence 101″, but having re-read the article I’m convinced that the antics described here are more like the graduate seminar of cluelessness and malfeasance.
Why have career professionals when you can have political hacks?
Why ask about relevant experience (finance, public health, law enforcement) when you can ask about Roe v. Wade? (After all, Iraq would surely crumble if the rate of abortion exceeded infant mortality or fatalities from suicide bombings…)
To wit:
To recruit the people he wanted, O’Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.
Smith said O’Beirne once pointed to a young man’s résumé and pronounced him “an ideal candidate.” His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.
Nigerian candidates in graft con
Oh, Nigeria.
A number of Nigerian politicians have been conned out of thousands of dollars by people selling papers purporting to certify them as “corruption-free”.
The following is best read with a Jeff Foxworthy inflection: your country might be a cesspool of sketchiness if…
…conmen are selling “corruption-free” certificates (and politicians are buying them!)
Left veteran just wants to retire
That’s awesome… the politburo won’t let this guy retire!
(I do want to point out how hard the BBC fights for a joke - they had to use “nyet”, despite the fact that we’re talking about India…)
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