"Drip, drip, drip." I like that. Except that it's been sounding like Niaggra Falls to me for years.

As a matter of fact, if you look at virtually any statistical measure of welfare in our society, minorities come out significantly worse than the general population- ( and, by "minorities", I primarily mean the large "indigenous" minority groups, non-Cubano Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans). If you take the statistical measures for middle class whites, they come out relatively well in comparison with the statistical measures for our OECD peers, whereas our general population statistics lag OECD standards. Minorities bear the brunt of this lag, so environmental insult is added to injury, which is added to insult. This has long been the case; it is simply a matter of "normalizing" this reality, so as to treat it as a natural state of affairs, and thereby prevent it from coming to expression, or de-legitimize any indigenous expression of it, by shifting it into deformed and therefore distorted channels.

Much as I loathe Tony Blair, he and his running buddy Gordon Brown were recently arguing that, on something like 33 out of 55 statistical measures, the poverty rate had been significantly improved since the election of the "New Labor" government. Would that we had such an attentive government!

I know. Not a chance.

i find it odd that you guys defend a program whose purpose is to increase the number of blacks and hispanics in medicine. i believe programs like this are really a waste and most americans would agree.

also life expectancy for hispanics is actually higher than that for whites.

for 1999:

total male: 74
total female: 79.7

white male: 74.7
white female: 80.1

black male: 68.3
black female: 75.1

american indian male: 72.8
american indian female: 82.0

asian male: 80.8
asian female: 86.5

hispanic male: 77.1
hispanic female: 83.7

source: www.census.gov/population/projections/ nation/summary/np-t7-b.pdf

Has anyone read the story that's been in British papers lately describing a Pentagon report declaring global warming to be a national security issue?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html

It's a hell of a story that I haven't seen picked up in the US yet. Where's the coverage? It sure seems like a prime-time story to me....