A while back I mentioned Warren Farrell’s Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap and What Women Can Do About It. “A wage gap?,” by John Leo, brings this book back up, quoting rather more statistics than the previous article did. The book remains recommended reading.

A new advance in portable shelters is discussed in “Need a Building? Just Add Water.” A pair of British engineers have thought up the idea of reinforcing a standard tent with cement, resulting in a setup where you wet the material, inflate it, and then allow it to dry, giving you the equivalent of a portable building. Very cool.

“Critically ill baby dies after being removed from life support in Texas” should horrify you. It should horrify you that it has happened at all. It should horrify you even more that it has happened here in the United States. Doctors can now, in Texas at least, override your wishes about your children’s health, and what medical treatment they receive. A doctor can decide that efforts to preserve your life are “useless” and let you die sooner and faster. How long until we start defining down “useless” efforts and “worthless” lives?

If you read past the bias in “ New row on climate ‘hockey stick’,” you’ll note that there are significant concerns about the validity of the models that show a dramatic increase in temperatures since 1900. Two points stood out. One: they were looking for a “hockey stick” pattern. Two: phenomena that we have fairly reliable historical records for, such as the unusual warm period from 800AD to 1400AD and the unusually cold period from 1600AD to 1850AD do not show up in the standard results. One of the controversial paper’s authors states that “uncertainties in the methods used for climatic reconstruction underestimate the changeability of climate in the past.” Hmmmm. Sound at all like there is a presupposition that only man can change the climate?

Charles Krauthammer is a hypocrite. Fairly blatantly so. At the top of “Thou Shalt Not Create,” after quoting President Bush’s commitment to end research on human embryos, he says

That declaration drew more than applause. It received a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle — demonstrating that even amid the confusion and dishonesty in this country’s bioethics debates, some truths remain self-evident. And one of those truths is that human embryos are to be created for the purpose of producing human babies, not for commerce and not to be dismembered for study or spare parts.

but further down in his article, he’s not opposed to, is in fact in favor of using the discarded embryos from IVF for research. Apparently, in his eyes, it is okay to destroy a human embryo if you create it for some other purpose, but not if you create it to destroy it. The hypocrisy here is nearly self evident, but I suppose I must acknowledge that there is one loophole. I would argue that IVF is equally immoral, and equally deserves to be banned. It is, just as cloning would, creating human life with the intent to end it: to discard most of the created embryos. It is possible that this logic, self-evident to me, has not occurred to him. If so, he is not a hypocrite, but an fool. Were he ever to read these words, he might not like that appellation any better. ;-)

Yesterday I referenced a pair of articles on Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose husband wants to let her die so that he can marry another woman and keep her money. Today, I am reminded of this by Chuck Colson’s “Life or death in Florida.” I often disagree with Mr. Colson, he can get Protestant-preachy, but this article nicely sums up the fact that people we think are unaware sometimes are aware, the sketchiness of Mr. Schiavo’s own position, and the lamentable, deplorably lack of protection that Terri Schiavo is receiving, protection that one would have thought would be built into our system. As Mr. Colson says, “As things stand, any convicted felon on death row would now be granted more rights than Terri. At least the felon would be allowed legal representation.”