Brian.Carnell.Com

There is an abundance of evidence that despite some feminists claims to the contrary, it is boys rather than girls who on average are systematically under performing in schools. The big question is why. Veronica Dahl, a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, offered an explanation — boys know they are part of a “ruling class” and as such know they can “laze a bit” because it won’t affect their position in society.

This is, of course, an absurd claim. Boys are far more likely to drop out of high school than girls are, and people who fail to obtain high school diplomas have very limited economic prospects. Women who graduate high school and go on to college earn far more, on average, than do men who drop out — position within Canadian and American society is today based largely on merit.

Freelancer writer Ilana Mercer became entangled in a mini-controversy after criticizing Dahl for making this statement. As Mercer relates in an article about the controversy (Male bashing in academe), Dahl’s position seemed to be that a) Dahl didn’t actually mean what she was quoted as saying, but b) nonetheless what she didn’t mean to say was in fact an accurate explanation of boys’ poor academic experience.

Mercer wonders,

What do you think would have befallen Prof. Dahl had she ventured that the only reason women are underrepresented in the engineering sciences is because they are lazy and know a man will eventually take care of them? I wager the Prof.’s fitness to teach women would have been called into question.

Source:

Male bashing in academe. Ilana Mercer, LewRockwell.Com, June 15, 2001.

For the past several years there has been a worldwide boom in farm crops, making it difficult for many American farmers to survive. And for the fourth year in a row Congress has done the single dumbest thing imaginable to deal with the plight of farmers — it passed a massive bill to provide emergency payments to farmers.

The problem is that the low price of farm commodities means that least efficient producers should switch to some other commodity, but instead Congress is going to reward the least efficient producers meaning they’ll go on with producing crops even though they can’t possibly recoup their costs, much less make a decent profit.

According to Fox News, opposition from the Bush administration kept the bill from being even higher. Rep. Larry Combest (R-Texas) wanted to up the price tag to $6.5 billion but apparently abandoned that effort when advisers to George W. Bush said they would recommend the president veto the bill if it were higher than $5.5 billion.

But the principle here is exactly the same as the various proposals and schemes for controlling energy production — market interference merely encourages inefficiency and, while it might feel good and be politically palatable now, will only cause further problems in the future.

Source:

House approves billions in farm aid. Associated Press, June 26, 2001.

Last year Hollywood heavily supported Al Gore and Sen. Joe Lieberman in their run for the White House. Now many of those same Hollywood folks find themselves under attack by Lieberman’s perennial support for censorship.

Lieberman’s latest proposal is a bill that would grant the Federal Trade Commission to go after the entertainment industry for “deceptive advertising.” Joining him to co-sponsor the legislation is none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The bill would give the FTC the ability to fine entertainment executives who “target” children with ads for movies, music and video games which are rated as requiring parental advisory. Imagine, for example, that an CD has a “Parental Advisory” for explicit lyrics, but there’s an advertisement for the CD in Seventeen or some other magazine read by minors. In that case the FTC would be empowered to investigate and fine the company.

William Baldwin, the actor and president of the Creative Coalition which opposes the bill, said, “A governmental role in defining ‘acceptable’ entertainment is an indirect form of censorship.” Actually I’d argue it is a pretty direct form of censorship.

Ironically, the man that many in Hollywood worked hard to defeat is reportedly unlikely to support the bill. A spokesman for Bush recently said that it would instead concentrate its efforts on working with the entertainment industry on better means of self-regulation — exactly what Baldwin and the Creative Coalition advocate.

Many in Hollywood, including Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America, believe that the Lieberman bill would mean an end to the voluntary ratings of movies as companies would stop having their films rated in order to avoid potential liability.

Sources:

Celebs urge pols to drop marketing bill. Pamela McClintock, Variety, June 21, 2001.

Bush resists Lieberman’s fight against Hollywood. NewsMax.Com, June 22,2001.

Scientists in Great Britain recently announced the development of a more accurate test for tuberculosis.

The new test is able to diagnose the disease much more quickly. Great Britain recently suffered a small outbreak of tuberculosis in which 60 people linked to a school became ill. Had they been able to diagnose the disease earlier, far fewer people would have been exposed to the disease.

About 8 million people contract tuberculosis each year, and about 8 million people die from the disease.

Source:

More accurate TB test unveiled. The BBC, June 22, 2001.

There have been a number of stories in recent days about the failure of the UN to raise the $10 billion it wants for its AIDS fund. Salon.Com’s Daryl Lindsey recently conducted an interview with public health expert Carole Collins which does a pretty good job of outlining why the AIDS fund will have very little effect on the pandemic even if it comes close to the $10 billion. As Bill Clinton might have put it, It’s the poverty, stupid.

Unfortunately, Carole Collins can’t quite see the forest for the trees and falls back on the old “we need more foreign aid” saw. That strategy will work only if the aid can be routed around the corrupt regimes that have caused the poverty in the first place. If you want to do something about AIDS in Zimbabwe, for example, the last thing you want to do is allow Robert Mugabe anywhere near the money (Mugabe’s taken Zimbabwe from a shining example of what is possible on the African continent down to the depths of economic disaster).

In fact, when you look at the countries that have the highest incidence of AIDS, the tend to be those nations in Africa that are the most non-democratic. Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Namibia, Malawi (Botswana and South Africa break the rule here, but the legacy of apartheid has made it extremely difficult for those countries to respond to the AIDS crisis).

Researchers with the West Africa Rice Development Association have introduced a hybrid strain of rice, Nerica, which will allow African farmers to obtain higher yields without significantly altering current farming practices.

The hybrid is a combination of an African rice strain that is highlight resistant to weeds and harsh African conditions as well as an Asian rice strain that gives high yields. The combination is the result of 10 years of research on various strains of rice.

Although the rice doesn’t require additional fertilizers or insecticides, ironically it has been slow to catch on because African farmers assume that any new hybrid will require such expensive additional resources. The researchers who developed the new strain of rice are trying to obtain more seed in order to try to spread the popularity of the hybrid.

Source:

Rice hybrid raises African hopes. Corrine Podger, The BBC, June 18, 2001.