Monday, February 21, 2005
Family & Marriage: Shut up, or the bunny gets it! A new wave of child-rearing manuals calls for an end to soft parenting.
A county clerk can legally refuse to issue a marriage license for a polygamous union, a USA federal judge has ruled, turning aside the argument that a landmark Supreme Court decision overturning anti-sodomy laws should also be applied to plural marriage.
Education: NZ Herald assistant editor John Roughan says the seeds of the NCEA exam debacle were planted 20 years ago.
Society & Values: The ipod is a symbol of an important cultural change -- people are now living in a social cocoon. Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished. People no longer want to know what's going on around them.
Welfare: Tony Blair is planning to woo stay-at-home mothers in the forthcoming general election by pledging a big increase in their basic state pension if Labour is re-elected. The proposed manifesto pledge, worth at least £3 billion, would mean that women would be entitled to full state pensions regardless of how many years they had worked. At present women do not qualify for a state pension if they have not been in full-time work for at least a decade.
Abortion: More than 1,000 girls aged 14 and under in the UK have had abortions in a single year, according to government figures. In addition, 148 were performed on 11, 12 and 13-year-olds.
Law: USA Research psychiatrists say they can now quantify evil, and they will be lobbying state legislatures to adopt their "depravity ratings" for use by courts determining whether to impose the death penalty on convicted murderers.
If you’ve ever wondered why – no matter who holds political power – American society always seems to drift to the left, legal scholar Mark Levin has the answer: the black-robed justices of the Supreme Court, subverting democracy in favor of their own liberal agenda. The Supreme Court imperiously strikes down laws and imposes new ones purely on its own arbitrary whims.
Crime: There is no quick fix to the high rate of young offenders in NZ committing more crimes, the leader of a recent review of Corrections schemes has said. A study carried out by Corrections Department psychologists showed seven out of 10 youth offenders were callous and showed a lack of empathy or remorse.
And now for something completely different: I'm sure you have seen many hilarious examples of Japanese and Chinese English. Unfortunately, improvement appears to be slow. Helen and I host many Asian students, and on the weekend one gave me a gift of a pen and pencil set. The set (purporting to have been manafactured in the USA), came with the following instructions:
"Indication of pen's usage & maintanth:
A. Usage: Dipping penpoint into ink, circumgyrating sopping up in strument for ink and revolving penholder tight."
As Flanders & Swann said in one of their skits: so we did that!
A county clerk can legally refuse to issue a marriage license for a polygamous union, a USA federal judge has ruled, turning aside the argument that a landmark Supreme Court decision overturning anti-sodomy laws should also be applied to plural marriage.
Education: NZ Herald assistant editor John Roughan says the seeds of the NCEA exam debacle were planted 20 years ago.
Society & Values: The ipod is a symbol of an important cultural change -- people are now living in a social cocoon. Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished. People no longer want to know what's going on around them.
Welfare: Tony Blair is planning to woo stay-at-home mothers in the forthcoming general election by pledging a big increase in their basic state pension if Labour is re-elected. The proposed manifesto pledge, worth at least £3 billion, would mean that women would be entitled to full state pensions regardless of how many years they had worked. At present women do not qualify for a state pension if they have not been in full-time work for at least a decade.
Abortion: More than 1,000 girls aged 14 and under in the UK have had abortions in a single year, according to government figures. In addition, 148 were performed on 11, 12 and 13-year-olds.
Law: USA Research psychiatrists say they can now quantify evil, and they will be lobbying state legislatures to adopt their "depravity ratings" for use by courts determining whether to impose the death penalty on convicted murderers.
If you’ve ever wondered why – no matter who holds political power – American society always seems to drift to the left, legal scholar Mark Levin has the answer: the black-robed justices of the Supreme Court, subverting democracy in favor of their own liberal agenda. The Supreme Court imperiously strikes down laws and imposes new ones purely on its own arbitrary whims.
Crime: There is no quick fix to the high rate of young offenders in NZ committing more crimes, the leader of a recent review of Corrections schemes has said. A study carried out by Corrections Department psychologists showed seven out of 10 youth offenders were callous and showed a lack of empathy or remorse.
And now for something completely different: I'm sure you have seen many hilarious examples of Japanese and Chinese English. Unfortunately, improvement appears to be slow. Helen and I host many Asian students, and on the weekend one gave me a gift of a pen and pencil set. The set (purporting to have been manafactured in the USA), came with the following instructions:
"Indication of pen's usage & maintanth:
A. Usage: Dipping penpoint into ink, circumgyrating sopping up in strument for ink and revolving penholder tight."
As Flanders & Swann said in one of their skits: so we did that!
