What Gender Differences? Claremont McKenna Professor Explains

Yep. My hometown press is going for the big one: the innate differences between Man and Wo-Man. (Or as some of my Scripps associates have put it, "Womyn.")

Careful now, my fellow Bostonians. You know not where you tread. Remember Summers?

Fortunately, they quoted one of Claremont McKenna's finest professors: Diane Halpern.
You might remember her from my previous post about interracial dating. Here she is again, challenging the myth of gender differences. She's quoted at boston.com:

In 2000, psychologist Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College reviewed a range of studies of cognitive abilities in areas in which you might expect to find sex differences, such as problem solving, computation, and spatial and verbal abilities. She found that differences were so slight as to be inconsequential. Cognitively, there is far more variation within each gender than there is between boys and girls.

Could it be that gender is actually a construct? Could it be that some men are "girlie men" and some women are "manly women"? And that society forces us into our gender roles?

Well, as one G.O.P. candidate would contend, sometimes society can come in the form of late night shows...

Visting Pomona Professor on the Wildfires

In case you missed it, there's been a heckuva fire on the West Coast. Fortunately, friends and family in the area are coping as well as can be expected. This ain't a Katrina, contrary to what the Mainstream Media wants to find. As for yours truly, it rained ash the other day and it smelled of barbecue. Planes fly overhead going to and fro the fire.

The cost of the fire is massive. According to The New York Times, we're talking at least a billion. That's billion with a 'b'.

Fortunately, visiting Professor (and probable liberal) Char Miller has a solution for what ails us. (Academics always have solution that sound better on paper than the bureaucracy they breed. Take heart, fellow citizenry. Government, academia, and the tax man are here to help!)

Miller, a visiting professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College, notes that: "We have a couple of options. We either accept that we will burn out every few years but don't expect massive amounts of money being spent on rescue. Or, we pay the taxes that are required to underwrite a full-fledged, fire-fighting operation on an annual basis, which neither Californians nor anyone else seem quite willing to do."

...

"One thing flood-prone areas know post-Katrina is that you don't allow people to live in landscapes that you know will kill them. Fire is much more predictable and recurring than floods. The question is why do national, state and local regulations prohibit or discourage people from living in low-lying areas or make it impossible to get flood insurance when there are no such regulations to prohibit people from living in wildfire ecosystems."

"Yes, this would pose a problem for California. Yet we're spending billions fighting this fire and spent hundreds of millions in 2003. You'd think we'd get the hint."

This kind of logic is like blaming a short skirted woman for encouraging her rape. It's disgusting on all fronts, but let's attack it anyways.

Of course, L.A. won't vote for a tax increase for its citizenry. Nor should it. But what seems far more insidious is how the taxes will hit the businesses. L.A. is notorious for having its businesses pay the costs of improvements and forcing them out. In all likelihood, Miller-esque regulations would breed a bureaucracy that would suck more dollars out people's pockets and gentrify still more residents out of L.A. county.

If you ask me, it's better to burn out than to fade away.