Let the bodies hit the flooooooooor

I remember, from my days as an Iraq war-supporting college student, heading out with some fellow conservatives to counter a bunch of anti-war protesters. We played a CD -- including Saddam's "I Can Change" song from South Park -- but it wasn't until we got there that we realized we should have added Drowning Pool's heavy-metal hit "Bodies" ("Let the bodies hit the floor!").

Anyhow, apparently a lot of military folks got the same idea, and the band even has a new pro-soldier song, Shawn Macomber reports in the Spectator. It's a very interesting story; they say they get a great response whenever they play near a military base.

I was supposed to see the band open for Disturbed around the time "Bodies" came out, but they had to cancel to shoot a music video. At the show, a bunch of members of all the other bands came out to play "Bodies" in Drowning Pool's stead, which was pretty cool. If I recall correctly, the bill also included Systematic and Stereomud.

Chuck Norris: Don't pick president based on hotel rooms

From his WND column on Huckabee:

It's time to quit choosing our leaders based solely upon charisma or one strong suite...

Grammar tip here. I am such a jerk.

Everything ever reported about the Jena 6 was wrong?

This CS Monitor story by a local reporter seems a bit far-fetched, but the guy's been covering the case since the very beginning, so he'd be the one who'd know about this stuff.

Among the more explosive accusations of media incompetence:

--There was no "whites-only" tree at Jena. When a student asked about it, it was as a joke to drag out an assembly. The next day, when nooses were found hanging from the tree, they were a prank by white students aimed at other white students on the rodeo team. According to the expulsion committee, the white kids had "no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history. When informed of this history by school officials, they became visibly remorseful because they had many black friends. Another myth concerns their punishment, which was not a three-day suspension, but rather nine days at an alternative facility followed by two weeks of in-school suspension, Saturday detentions, attendance at Discipline Court, and evaluation by licensed mental-health professionals."

--The DA didn't make intimidating comments toward black students. "When District Attorney Reed Walters spoke to Jena High students at an assembly in September...according to Walters, 'two or three girls, white girls, were chit-chatting on their cellphones or playing with their cellphones right in the middle of my dissertation...I said, "Look, I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make your life miserable so I want you to call me before you do something stupid."'"

I'm not sure how much to believe some of this. A high school student in a biracial community -- which, by all accounts, has had its share of racial incidents -- doesn't know that nooses have racial significance? Also, if the media story was so off that there isn't even a tree known for the white kids hanging around by it, why did it take so long for someone from the community to say so?

Journalists are so awesome with statistics

Megan McArdle quotes a correction from the AP:

LONDON (AP) — In an Oct. 11 story about a study examining global abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, The Associated Press erroneously reported that nine out of 10 women will have an abortion before age 45. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and the World Health Organization calculated that an average woman would have 0.9 abortions in her reproductive lifetime (between the ages of 15 and 44), given currently prevailing rates. The figure was arrived at by combining higher abortion rates in some areas and lower abortion rates in others; some women have multiple abortions and others have none. The rate is an average and it does not mean that nine out of 10 women worldwide have abortions.

For the record, in the U.S., about one in three women will have an abortion before turning 45. Which is disturbing, because to raise the total abortions to .9 per woman, the average woman who has a single abortion has to have almost three of them.

We don't need no (Ivy League) education

Thomas Sowell has an interesting NRO piece about how the "top colleges" aren't always the best places to learn:

Big-name professors are unlikely to be teaching you freshman English or introductory math. Some may not be teaching you anything at all, unless and until you go on to postgraduate study.

In other words, the people who generated the prestige which attracted you to the college may be seen walking about the campus but are less likely to be seen standing in front of your classroom when you begin your college education.

 
That's certainly true. Prestige and rankings are not good measures of professor performance.

There are few if any value-added measures used to evaluate colleges; I didn't have to take a standardized test before and after getting my journalism degree so people could see how much I learned. Instead, most rankings measure input, or the high-school successes of each year's freshman class. And as Sowell points out, "selectivity" is determined by the percentage of applications rejected, so colleges encourage kids to apply even when they certainly won't get in.

But I think he overstates his case:

Some students get sunk deep into depression when they are notified in April that they have been rejected by some Ivy League school that they had their heart set on. When they are accepted, some parents go deep into debt to finance the education of their offspring at the college of their dreams.

Seldom is either reaction warranted.

Even if a big-name college doesn't teach you anything a different college couldn't have, (A) it has brand recognition and (B) it's proof that you had high enough test scores to get into a big-name school. Most companies aren't allowed to do, say, IQ tests on potential employees, so they use degrees as a proxy. If you apply for a job, an Ivy League name will improve your chances.

Still, this is the first time I've seen some actual data indicating that Ivy League degrees might not be all that necessary, even for high-level accomplishment:

You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.

Though to play devil's advocate, where do they get those Ph.D.s? In what fields? And how do the incomes match up? I know that some people will go on to graduate programs just to get a big name on their resumes, where B.A.s from the same big-name university can get by without extra schooling. Maybe its not that Harvey Mudd better prepares you for graduate school, but that Harvey Mudd graduates feel like they need another degree to do what they want.

Health care idea

From Slate:

McCain is challenging fee-for-service medicine, though not to the point of mandating that doctors be put on salary.

I'm against the government mandating that, but wouldn't that be a selling point for a private clinic? Insurance companies, and people buying their own care, would flock to it: "At most clinics, doctors make more money for prescribing more drugs, which means sometimes they give you medicines you don't really need. But at Incentives Care, we pay our doctors on salary so we can keep your costs down."

Is there a good reason this doesn't already happen, or is it just the medical racket at work?

Hitchens a ride to the atheism debate

I'm all about bashing Christopher Hitchens in The American Spectator, but I disagree with much of this essay from James Bowman.

Here's his idea:

The Hitchens argument in essence boiled down to this: if God existed, He would have to be as much of a liberal humanitarian as I am. Since the misery in the world and the violence in the Bible show that He obviously isn't any kind of a liberal humanitarian, it must be equally obvious that He doesn't exist. Q.E.D. The tautological nature of this argument appeared not to have been noticed...

First of all, a tautological argument is by definition true, provided its component parts are true. To disprove Hitchens, rather than playing logic games (you can't make that argument! It says so right here, in my textbook!), one must argue that (A) God exists, but is not a humanitarian, just like it says in the Bible or (B) the Bible, written by men, does not depict God with perfect, literal accuracy. I'm an agnostic, but personally I'd go with (B). If God really killed the entire human population save Noah and thought it was OK to sell one's daughter into slavery, I'm not sure I'd want to go to heaven.

Bowman prefers (A):

The Biblical characterization of God as "Lord" was explicitly based on...social hierarchies, since it was obvious to everyone up until relatively recent times that the rules applying to lords, if any, were completely different from those applying to ordinary people. Likewise, the metaphor of God's fatherhood drew on the general assumption that fathers could as a matter of course not be bound by the same rules they naturally laid down for their children.

God can treat us like garbage, but we can't do the same in return. As a factual assertion that's fine -- as I said, it's one of the powerful arguments against Hitchens -- but it doesn't speak all that well of worship. Why would I bow to someone who treats me like garbage? Even if I obey him, the rules he's bound by won't make him reward me as he said he would.

Also, Bowman twists words here:

If the law has any force, someone must be above it. Who decides to invoke it, when he does so, and what he decides to do with it are questions that can only be determined by someone who is above it, at least to that extent. The law does not enforce itself.

In common parlance, being "above the law" doesn't mean you're a police officer or a judge who's enforcing the law; it means you can break the law and get away with it. They're two completely different things.