The numbers coming out of Asia are staggering: more than 43,000 dead from the cyclone in Burma and possibly up to 50,000 lives lost from the earthquake in China. Please remember to pray for the people of these countries and for those trying to help them.

Here’s a great article on the soft near-porn of magazines like Maxim, which convince men that they’re only admiring the aesthetic of the feminine form, rather than stewing in their lust.

[These magazines] exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on - her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

Ah, and there it is.  Sin is almost always the result of a weak imagination.  Unable to imagine a better way of doing something, unable to imagine a God who’d care, unable to imagine a richer experience, human beings follow the path of least resistance.  A good article.

McDonald’s has seen its share of competition through the years and has reacted to it with mixed results. Just recently, the fast-food giant tried to take on Starbucks by offering its own “Premium Roast Coffee,” and now Mickey D’s is trying to win back market share from one of my favorites, Chick-fil-A.

It’s no secret that McDonald’s new “Southern Style Chicken Sandwich” is a direct knock-off of Chick-fil-A’s flagship product, right down to the buttered bun with two pickles slapped on. (There’s also a biscuit version much like Chick-fil-A’s breakfast offering.) Plus, McDonald’s developed and tested the sandwich right in Chick-fil-A’s backyard, metro Atlanta, and success there led to it’s nationwide roll-out earlier this month. Today, you can try one for free with the purchase of a medium or large drink. If you’ve eaten one, let us know what you think. Has McDonald’s captured the essence of the Chick-fil-A sandwich? Or should they stick to the McRib?

I’ve always liked Chick-fil-A, even when I only could get one when I happened to be at the mall. Now with its freestanding locations, I’m able to get a Chick-fil-A fix more often, and I appreciate how the local franchisee does a lot to support schools in the area, including my daughter’s. I also respect founder Truett Cathy’s decision to keep his restaurants closed on Sundays. A decision that, according to the FAQ at Chick-fil-A’s website, was made for both practical and spiritual reasons: “[Cathy] believes that all franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to rest, spend time with family and friends, and worship if they choose to do so.”

Yesterday, as I was driving through west-central North Carolina, I saw a billboard touting McDonald’s new offering while simultaneously taking a jab at Chick-fil-A’s never-on-Sunday policy. It read something like, “McDonald’s New Southern Style Chicken Sandwich, available all-day, every day, including Sundays.” That just made me want to stick with Chick-fil-A even more.

Paul Peterson, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is doing something more and more people seem to be doing.  He’s a respected educator with serious academic credentials and clout among the indoctrinated, and he’s blaming much of public education’s problems on public educators: namely the unions and the government offices who conspire with them.  He calls them the “educational-industrial complex.”

Before the education-industrial complex was erected, America led the world in its commitment to education. From the earliest days of our Republic, many small towns each heavily invested in the community’s students, more so than any other nation. Teachers and students were held accountable to community expectations. Local investments contributed to a vibrant educational system that expanded rapidly, helping to propel the nation to the world’s pinnacle by World War II.

Notice the theme here: local control, accountability to the community.

Around 1970 or thereabouts, the educational-industrial complex was hammered into place: School boards gave teachers collective bargaining rights. State governments assumed greater responsibility for financing the schools. The courts instructed schools on the civil liberties of their students. Regulations multiplied. America gained a federal Department of Education. And state and federal dollars poured into the system […] Grades inflated, learning faltered, graduation rates stagnated. The mammoth, expensive, drug-infested, security-obsessed high school was better suited for incarceration than learning.

The only schools that will thrive are those where good teachers can be hired, regardless of “certification”; where bad teachers can be fired, regardless of how long they’ve taught or how nice they are; where students can be held to higher standards, disciplined, rewarded, punished, and pushed; and where administrators can be creative and accountable.  The government won’t be able to do much of that.  Save Western Civilization.  Go private.  Go homeschool.  Go somewhere.  Horace Mann and John Dewey never saw it coming.

Slate’s got a late, but very special, issue on procrastination.  Very good stuff, including this encomium to the time-wasting computer game called “Solitaire.”

Though on its face it might seem trivial, pointless, a terrible way to waste a beautiful afternoon, etc., solitaire has unquestionably transformed the way we live and work. Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture. It has also helped the human race survive innumerable conference calls and airplane trips. If solitaire is not the most important computer program of all time, it is at least in the top two, along with Minesweeper.

It’s the electronic version of taking a smoke break and letting the gears of your brain rest for a moment.  In that way, it’s actually a time-saver.  It’s also remarkably user-friendly.

The gameplay and aesthetic have remained remarkably stable; a visitor from the year 1990 could play the latest Windows version without a glitch, at least if he could figure out how to use the Start menu. It also remains one of the very few computer programs, game or nongame, that old people can predictably navigate. Brad Fregger, the developer of Solitaire Royale, the first commercial solitaire game for the Macintosh and the PC, told me that his 89-year-old mother still calls regularly to brag about her high scores.

I don’t play it.  Do you, and why?

At least 15,000 people perished when a 7.9 earthquake rocked China Monday. The grief is great as bodies are pulled from the rubble and families learn that a loved one didn’t survive. But for the parents whose children perished when the schools they were in collapsed, the grief is often compounded:

Not only must thousands of parents suddenly cope with the loss of a child — they must often cope with the loss of their only child.

China’s population minister recently praised the one-child rule, which dates to 1979, saying it has prevented 400 million children from being born.

Children who, had they been born, might have offered some comfort to hundreds of grieving parents.

Waldo?

Yes, the beloved children’s character is no longer confined to colorful book pages. He’s hiding out on a rooftop somewhere in Vancouver, Canada, thanks to the work of art student Melanie Coles.

Coles’s project, Where on Earth is Waldo?, is a twist on the popular series of books Where’s Waldo?,but instead of identifying Waldo among pages of cluttered illustrations, players will hunt for Waldo using the popular virtual globe program, Google Earth. Coles constructed a 55-foot long Waldo, clad in his characteristic red-and-white striped sweater, matching ski cap and glasses, on a rooftop in Vancouver, Canada, though she’s keeping mum on the exact location.

Coles hopes eager online sleuths and game players will try and track down Waldo’s exact location using the satellite imagery in Google Earth. But it won’t be easy — not only do users have to find Waldo’s Canadian roost, it’s unknown when any aerial imaging equipment will next swing over Vancouver, meaning the image of Waldo could surface in Google’s system at any time.

Until that happens, however, an image overlay was added to Google Earth so you can start searching for Waldo now. Anyone game? Let us know if you find Waldo!

One of the most coveted endorsements was handed to Barack Obama last night. John Edwards made a surprise appearance at a Michigan rally to throw his support behind the senator: “We are here tonight because the Democratic voters have made their choice, and so have I.”

A person close to Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he wanted to get involved now to begin unifying the party. Edwards and Obama spoke by phone Tuesday night, and Edwards agreed to fly to Grand Rapids the next day.

Considering that this endorsement would have meant much more months ago, what impact will it have on the showdown between Obama and Hillary Clinton?

Bon jour!

Today’s quote is from a writer: “One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

In my ongoing series of posts about how we need to rethink the whole college model - including the way we get kids there and what we do to them there - here’s an article from The Atlantic Monthly by a professor who seems to agree.  He teaches at two colleges “of last resort” - places where average and worse students end up, and most of them can’t do what should be required of all liberally educated graduates: they cannot write.

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

So, what happens when this happens, when so many students fail and show that they are radically unprepared for college work?

What actually happens is that nothing happens. I feel no pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces-social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students-that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.  

No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

Ah, so true.  It is a broken system.  Too many students fail, so grading gets easier.  Grading gets easier, education gets worse.  On and on, until China takes over.