The side of the angels

The Episcopal Church did the right thing.

Thanx to dougs

DADT

Almost every group in America wants to let gays and lesbians serve in the military, which means that once again the president and Congress are stupider than the American people.

Thanx to Oliver Willis

Funding white males

Venture capitalist admits he thinks like venture capitalist.

Thanx to Geek Feminism.

Interesting approach

Rejection desensitization

Thanx to andrewducker

Degradation

So much for the idea that the TSA wouldn't have to do all that nasty invasive stuff if we had a system like Israel's.

Thanx to rm

Keeping them in their place

One of the great unannounced projects of the 20th century was the abolition of class. The United States ignored it in the hope that it would go away; that worked every bit as well with class as it did with the People's Republic of China. The USSR tried to smash it; that was just as successful, plus millions of deaths.

So it seems we are stuck with class, and we should think about making it work better. One answer is to cut the ends of the curve: make the uppers less powerful and the lowers less miserable. The other is class mobility, enabling lowers to reach the higher level they belong at. It's easy to pick on the ways in which lower-class people with the ability to rise are pulled down, by a culture of poverty that says, "Don't get ahead of yourself" (meaning "Don't get ahead of us") and the collectivists (many of them not poor) who turn it into an ideology.

But of course the real problem is the way they are pushed down, for irrelevant reasons like race or sex, by the classist assumption that all those born into the lower classes belong there, and by plain stupidity. fjm reports a particularly gross fail from the UK.

15 minutes

Sarah Palin is jumping the shark. Will she shoot it from the air?

Thanx to Oliver Willis

Women as property

Good thing we're allies with Saudi Arabia instead of those nasty Muslim countries that oppress women. epi_lj informs me that they are on the U.N. Council for Women's Rights, presumably because there is no U.N. Council against Women's Rights.