University of Chicago Professor Questions whether Palin is a Woman

As someone who has been around academics, this is not particularly surprising.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

Doesn't speak well for the state of sex education in Illinois, does it?

The thing to understand is that academia doesn't really value diversity per se. Groups that are perceived to be fairly liberal are viewed as underrepresented and helped to gain admittance, but once an individual in these groups is identified as a conservative they are no longer allowed to count as a black or Hispanic or a whatever other underrepresented group that they were being used to proxy for.

UPDATE: A friend of mine, Robert Hansen, reports that the local newspaper for Hanover, NH contains a similar story. The first line says: "Sarah Palin is No Woman."

"Our tax system is a voluntary tax system." - Senator Harry Reid (D, NV)

I warn you that no matter how dumb you think Senator Harry Reid is he will fall below your expectations in this interview. By this reasoning I guess that the Jim Crow laws were voluntary.

The Muslim World's Dr. Phil: The Secret of a Good Marriage, Beat Your Wife

The expert, Al-Arifi, has such useful advice as not beating the wife on places where the beating can show. Apparently, this is a widely watched expert in many countries in the Middle East.

Americans Getting Shorter and Lack of Health Care?: Be serious

New research shows that Americans are coming up short, but not in terms of money or lifestyle. Our growing problem is with our height.

The study, conducted by the University of Munich and Princeton University, found that the United States had the shortest population in the industrialized world, and the reason may have to do with the way people live. . . . .

Komlos said height revealed a lot about a country's well-being, including how long its citizens lived and how healthy they were. Researchers said that one reason for Denmark's high ranking could be that the Danish health-care system provides better care to children when they are young, the time of life when most growing takes place. . . .

This is a recycled claim about heights. For a long time Americans were relatively better feed than people in outher countries. Nothern Europeans (people who lived in colder climates) tend to be taller. As the standard of living improved in Europe, they caught up to the US. So why is height falling in the US? Simple, the percentage of the population from northern European stock is getting smaller. We have more people from Mexico and from China and other warmer places where people tend to be shorter.