Day: December 6, 2000

Charley Reese Hates Al Gore for the All the Wrong Reasons

There are a lot of reasons I can think of to dislike Al Gore, but Orlando Senitel columnist Charley Reese has the worst reason I’ve ever heard someone offer for being revolted by the Vice President.

I suppose I owe it to folks to explain why I don’t like Gore. Well, he annoys me. He tells lies. And some years ago when he was in Congress he sat like a lump while some rock star insulted in his wife. I wrote him off then. A man who won’t defend his wife’s honor has no business being a commander in chief. I thought at the time that if Frank Zappa (he was the rocker) had said about Bess Truman what he said about Tipper Gore, Harry Truman would have dived over that table and punched his lights out right there on live national television. Andy Jackson would simply have killed him, as he had killed other men who made the mistake of insulting his beloved Rachel.

Is Reese insane? The reason Zappa insulted Tipper, of course, was because Tipper was leading the fight at the time for labeling of records to which Zappa was vehemently opposed. If you’re going to act as a public figure, you’re going to get attacked by opponents who might have things to say that aren’t so nice.

Moreover, I’m not so sure that homicide is still an appropriate method for dealing with an insult (it is always better to outwit rather than overpower an opponent — not to mention much more satisfying).

Will The Real Wacko Please Stand Up?

MSNBC reports that Alec Baldwin recently attacked online journalist (and I use that term loosely) Matt Drudge. Baldwin said, “I would put him in the wacko category.”

I’m not necessarily a big fan of Drudge, but this is coming from a man who thinks we should abandon important medical research that could save millions of lives because it involves killing some mice and other animals.

To my mind Drudge and Baldwin are kindred spirits (actually I respect Drudge more because he never made such a horribly bad movie as The Shadow.)

Ignoring the Will of the People on Medical Marijuana

Writing for the Los Angeles Daily News (and reprinted in FrontPageMag.Com), Chris Weinkopf points out the hypocrisy of the “count every vote” mantra from Democrats. At the same time that Gore and Clinton claim every vote must count, their administration is arguing before the Supreme Court that the results of a 1996 California election must be invalidated and ignored.

Why? Because voters in California dared to legalize marijuana for medical use.

When it comes to medical marijuana, the “will of the people” doesn’t mean squat. In fact the Clinton-Gore Drug Enforcement Agency has threatened to arrest and prosecute doctors who prescribe marijuana to their patients in the few states that have legalized the drug for medical purposes.

As Weinkopf writes, “Gore might like to wax on about how “a vote is not just a piece of paper, a vote is a human voice, but ever since Proposition 215 made the ballot, the administration has done all it can to silence the clear voice of California voters.”

On the other hand, Weinkopf conveniently forgets that Republicans have also been more than willing to ignore elections that included the medical marijuana issue. When Washington, DC, voted a few years ago on a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for medical purposes, Republican Bob Barr of Georgia authored an amendment that not only to prohibited certification of those results but also forbade the city to publicly release unofficial vote totals. The Congress was later overturned on the last point by a federal court, and it 69 percent of voters approved the initiative.

George W. Bush, for his part, has said that although he opposes the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes, it is an issue that should be properly left to the states rather than the federal government. For his part, Gore has waffled on the subject, writing a strong anti-medical marijuana letter in 1997, but then endorsing medical marijuana in a debate with Bill Bradley last December.

Medical Pot Goes to the High Court. Chris Weinkopf, Los Angeles Daily News, December 3, 2000.

Apple Back in the Red — What Is Management Thinking?

Yikes. I feel sorry for anyone who bought Apple stock back in July — losing 66 percent of a stock’s value in about less than 5 months has to hurt. A CNET story on Apple’s latest earnings warnings included both the usual Apple problem plus a shocking revelation.

The old news is that Apple simply isn’t making a dent with Windows users.

“Why would they be any immune to these problems than anybody else?” PC Data analyst Stephen Baker said. “If people are not willing to upgrade, that hurts Apple more than some of the other makers. A big part of the iMac business and the PowerMac business is people buying new machines. Apple on an overall basis is not taking share from the Windows guys.”

When the iMac first came out, I thought Apple had a pretty good shot at picking up sales from people disappointed at the complexity of maintaining a Windows system. I suspect the dirt cheap prices on low-end Windows machines is simply erasing any advantage the iMac had. I’m amazed at what I can walk out of Best Buy with for only $600 or $700.

The really shocking thing is that Apple is sitting on a ton of cash and Jobs was bragging about it to analysts.

Jobs noted that Apple has about $11 per share in cash and short-term investments, compared with Gateway’s $3 per share and Dell Computer and Compaq Computer’s approximately $1.75 per share each.

“We have an Arnold Schwarzenegger balance sheet,” he said, “with over $4 billion in cash.”

If I were an Apple investor I’d be wondering why? How is sitting on $4 billion in cash getting Apple any closer to achieving the sort of growth in computer sales that it needs (the last time I checked, Apple was still in the business of selling computers rather than hoarding cash).

In fact if its revised fiscal year revenues are correct, Apple’s cash holdings are 66 percent of revenues. Way too high for a company having the sorts of problems Apple is having.

Infant Received Pig Heart Valve

The BBC reports that 16-month old Amy Davies, who lives in Great Britain, received a heart valve transplant from a piglet when she was just seven month olds. The infant had a large hole in her heart as well as severe blockage of one of her heart valves. Surgeons said she was too small for an artificial valve and they doubted she could cope with the immunosuppressive drugs that are needed to prevent the body from rejecting artificial valves.

Many animal rights activists argue in favor of a ban on such xenotransplants arguing that the animal, in this case the piglet, have rights that supercede the human infants, and/or that the risk of diseases crossing from swine to human is simply to great to offset the medical benefits of such transplants.

Source:

Baby given piglet’s heart valve. The BBC, December 4, 2000.

How Long Until Colleges Create Affirmative Action Programs for Men?

In recent months there have been a number of news stories about a gender discrepancy at American universities and colleges that is likely to grow even larger in coming years — women now are disproportionately represented in higher education.

This year, for example, men made up only 44 percent of admissions to colleges and universities. For a variety of reasons, that percentage is likely to decline further before it stabilizes. By 2010, the United States Department of Education estimates that men will make up only 42 percent of higher education admissions.

Already some colleges are creating what are essentially affirmative action programs for men to increase “diversity” on campus, and thanks to the feminist mantra that a statistical discrepancy is prima facie evidence of active discrimination, such programs are likely to survive and expand.

According to a Daily Telegraph (UK) report, The University of NOrth Carolina and DepauL University have already started targeting potential male students with more outreach than female students, including extra mailings with more emphasis on traditionally male areas of study such as engineering. Meanwhile, some women who applied to the University of Georgia sued that university because they argued it’s admissions policies were biased toward men. They lost their suit.

The Daily Telegraph claims that the decline is attributable to men opting not to go to college to pursue more lucrative independent careers such as with Internet companies, which may be true for a very small segment of men, but is unlikely to explain the entire difference. Rather the difference is attributable to the fact that women as a group tend to do better in high school then men as a group. Women have much higher graduation rates, and although men tend to do better on standardized tests than women, this is only because the male sample of test takers is skewed because far more men tend to take tests such as the SAT and ACT.

Given the disparities, should there be affirmative action programs for men? Absolutely not. Affirmative action programs were a lousy way to try to compensate for statistical disparities when they favored men and they would be a lousy way to compensate when the statistical disparities favor women.

Source:

University women in a class of their own. Philip Delves Broughton, The Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2000.