Current Affairs

Didn't realize the economy was quite this bad:

The news from Myanmar Burma just keeps getting worse. As many as 100,000 may be dead, and the thugs who run the place are putting up all kinds of roadblocks for a world that wants to help:

But the U.S. ambassador to Bangkok said later the United States was still waiting for approval from Myanmar.

Kouchner suggested on Wednesday invoking a U.N. "responsibility to protect" to deliver aid without the junta's approval, but France's bid to make the Security Council take a stand was rebuffed.

A member of another misunerstood and put-upon minority (only 10 million Americans out of more than 300 million) asks for our understanding:

A Dartmouth professor feels the heat and flees the intellectual kitchen:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

The march of progress in the Mideast:

The ulema in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province have declared that use of mobile phones by women is haram, or forbidden in Islam. The Urdu-language newspaper Roznama Khabrain reported that the imam of Jama Masjid Hazrat Umar Farooq made the announcement during his Friday sermon.

Aren't allies wonderful?

Headline of the week:

Filling Coastal Zones With People Complicates Hurricane Evacuation

Those darn people. They complicate everything, don't they?

A reminder of just how far we've come:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

No, this is not a joke:

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

Remember "The Harrad Experiment"? Yeah, I once thought it was brilliant, revolutionary, just the antidote for the stodgy sexual mores of my parents' generation. Of course, I was in high school at the time.

Same fantasy world, modern-day version:

Feliz Cinco de Mayo, that strange American celebration (it's not that big a deal south of the border) of Mexicans kicking some French butt. Actually, maybe it should be an American holiday