Current Affairs

What? Classroom lectures can't overcome biological urges?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

The Gore Effect has apparently spread to the general population:

More than two dozen demonstrators braved cold, wet weather Saturday in Reno to attend a rally designed to draw attention to global warming.

The event was cut short by heavy rain and sleet, said organizer Lisa Stiller of the Northern Nevada Coalition for Climate Change.

If the whole Don Imus thing has seemed much ado about nothing, perhaps this will explain it:

A fascinating look at interracial dating, who is interested in it and who is not:

Let's hear it for one of the most diabolically clever government inventions ever, withholding, which lets our income-tax payments disappear a liittle every paycheck instead of coming in one big bill that would lead to national ourtage. As a result, we've gone from a nation founded on revolt over taxes that were a relative pittance to a nation of whining but compliant muggees:

I do not care about the Don Imus controversy, I do not want to read or hear any more about the Don Imus controversy, and I refuse to have an opinion about the Don Imus controversy. The last thing the world needs now is one more opinion about the Don Imus controversy. This about says it all:

With the deadline for tax filing coming up on Monday, it's time to take our annual look at tax facts, such as: Middle-class taxpayers use tax loopholes far more than the rich do. In 2005, the federal government took $2.4 trillion out of the pockets of the American people, about the same as the size of the entire U.S. economy in 1959 in inflation-adjusted terms. About three-fifths of Americans think their taxes are too high:

Can there even be anything like a blind date these days? By the time of the first meeting, we can find out just about everything there is to know about the other person:

In some ways, having a social networking page — or pages — has become the new calling card. It's a way for people to check out photos and find out what they have in common, even when they've already met in person.

In "The Bridge Over the River Kwai," Lt. Col. Nicholson (the Alec Guinness character) refuses to make his officers help enlisted-men prisoners build the bridge between Bangkok and Rangoon that the Japanese Col. Saito needs -- it's in the Geneva convention that officers can't be made to do manual labor. Saito doesn't care about that -- he just needs the bridge, and they are all his prisoners, after all -- so puts the British officers in the "ovens," metal hot boxes. But Saito eventually backs down, so desperate is he for the bridge.

This will be a terrible disappointment to some of you, but the world is getting more civilized all the time:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.