2/22So I was watching the news yesterday and they told us: "Iraq said that they shot down a western aircraft over an airfield, but the US and Britain say this is not the case." And that's the end of the story. This seems like the culmination of the new crossfire-style of news reporting whereby you have to 'present both sides of the story' and apparently nobody is able to ascertain if one side is right. as in accurate. as in there are some FACTS around somewhere.. color me empiricist but I thought facts had something to do with something? Contrast this with a real, decent news article I read yesterday about how here in Boston folks are clamoring a return to neighborhood schools (a retreat from the whole busing concept). What was nice about the article was that the journalist did a bunch of research on whether quality of education was higher, more kids went on to college, anything was any better when kids were going to schools in their own neighborhoods or in other neighborhoods . And she came back with actual data, bless my soul. This seems like a rarer and rarer occurrence. To swing back to the pessimistic-frustrated side of things, a friend of mine told me that Mr. Big Shot New York Giuliani is trying to make sure that no data is collected on what happens to people after they "get off welfare." anyone know the skinny on this? bastard. because we wouldn't want to know anything about whether a policy works.

2/19 Charlton Heston spoke at Harvard Law school the other day on "winning the cultural war". Apparently winning the cultural war involves reciting some of the lyrics to "Cop Killer" in a raspy voice. not going to argue with that...

No actually I'd love it if I could stop there but there's just so much more to say on this guy. but first on his presentation--fox news showed about equal time footage of Chuck speaking about the ills of affirmative action, antigun laws and "pee cee"; and of Chuck as Moses in 'The Ten Commandments" parting the Red Sea. And the kicker: "Heston is still an activist, just like in the 1960s when he marched with Martin Luther King. And he's still...under fire." never mind the moral 180 degrees since then. You know, action is action, moral, immoral, positive, destructive, no matter. God I hate that kind of crap. However, it actually gets worse: another article about Heston quotes him equating pee cee with "the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Selma and the water cannons at Montgomery." I'm not even going to ask who can believe this kind of bullshit. Obviously the man hit his moral and mental peak back in the 60s and shoulda hung himself out to dry out long ago.

I have a few longer things in the works but they'll have to wait. possibly until I mail in my gradschool applications. getting down to the wire, here.