MIT Engineers

[hedge]

$3K to rebuild a transmission? I got mine done for $800 a few years ago, never had a problem with it since. Rear wheel drive, though...

[Bklyn]

Seems to me that this is a situation of politics trumping women's health...

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... ut/252451/

No more donations from my househould.

[hedge]

Have just been in a longish Facebook "discussion" concerning this. Enjoy...

Jordan Lea
Sorry Ms. Komen but respectfully you will have to race for the cure without my resources.

Susan Linning it is RIDICULOUS!!!!

Mike Castleman I guess they had the same message for PP regarding "reproductive services"...to each his own and how we wish to deploy our resources.

Jordan Lea I disagree Mike. They opted to politicize women's health. It , as should some other things , remain sacred.

Will Rand Part of their decision is Planned Parenthood doesn't do mammograms as so many suggested. Makes sense a breast cancer society wouldn't fund them. Plus, they are under various criminal investigations for some of their clinics.

Will Rand http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... print.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... m-claim/20
www.washingtonpost.com

Mike Castleman How does a private organization's decision to stop funding a private organization because they disagree with that entity's use of public dollars or lack thereof equal politcizing?

In no way has PP been prohibited from doing what they do or raising additional funds to do what they do. How are they damaged other than being outraged that a "private" source of funding has decided (for whatever reason) to apply their resources differently?

Regarding what is sacred: Philosophically i would submit that "Life" is sacred and that "health" is a subset of Life. Health is a byproduct of circumstance and choice...Is a woman's health more sacred than a man's or a child's health?

Since i didn't ask the question the first time...how have they politicized women's health in your opinion?

Jordan Lea They bowed to political pressure from the pagan right.
Men's health is sacred because it is a man's world. Viagra is covered by health insurance. HRT is not.

My mother lost her mother and her sister to breast cancer. She survived it but barely .

I am comfortable that I understand the issue. I know for a fact that many with a particular agenda choose to misrepresent the role of PP. Of course if one is a right wind but bag and is comfortable hiding behind his religion to manipulate the truth to further his religious beliefs the sin of lying is noble not sin.

Harrison Mangum Kisner Jordan - beautifully said. Poor women will be hurt by this. WWJD? My favorite quote about Jesus : if he came back today and saw all the things done in his name he'd never quit throwing up. Cancer is evil, help is help, let's help the people. There's a relatively efficient delivery system in place - use it. Whores & lepers .......

Jordan Lea Mike is lucky I am close but not close enough to Tejas to come down there and put him in a banana split. Ski school starts in a few minutes so I am radio silent until days end.

Chelle Kelaher Go jordan go! I hate pink anyways!!!!

Mike Castleman Since the conversation has devloved into ad hominem jabs we have entered the land of non-debate and have moved onto diatribe.

You still haven't answered my question...you've made fun of christians, men, men's health, conservatives, religion in general and by approximation i guess...me. (Trust me...I have experience with Jordan's rapier wit even when it is less rapier and more battle axe...even though i love the guy it doesn't mean an unprovoked punch in the nose doesn't hurt)

As outlined by your logic...it doesn't matter in the least whether Komen provides funds to PP or not. The mission statement of eradicating breast cancer is the number one goal and hasn't changed, therefore, if Komen's resources will still be used to further the battle against breast cancer then what is the loss given the higher purpose of battling breast cancer?

In the scheme of things the outrage towards Komen is facinating and seems to me to be more ideologically motivated and perhaps politcally motivated on it's own. How might I think that? Over the last 4 years Komen's financial gifts to PP has ranged from $500k to $800k per year...PP receives over $300 MILLION per YEAR in government grants and contracted funds.

The outrage seems to me to be totally divorced from the fiscal reality of Komen's decision. If the financial impact is so utterly negligable I can only conclude that level of outrage and vitriol about Komen's decision is derived from some other well of motivation.

Jordan Lea Contrary to Will Rand's post PP is a huge provider in the first line of defense in the prevention of BC.

BC is primarily a women's issue. PP is a women's health provider.

SC bowed to political pressure plain and simple. They , in my opinion should not have. I will vote with my feet and I made my opinion public.

And the Christian right has wrongly put PP in their sights for years and this is more of the same.

I claim relevance on all of the above.

Edmund Major I find this cyclical argument to be quite appropriate on Groundhog Day...I am now going to grab a dictionary and try and figure out what you guys are arguing about.

McLean Brice ‎"How are they damaged other than being outraged that a "private" source of funding has decided (for whatever reason) to apply their resources differently?"

Outrage can be very damaging...

Jordan Lea As can indulgence

Dawn Baker Combs Does Planned Parenthood provide free mammograms? Their website does not list mammograms as one of their services. http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-center/

Will Rand PP says they don't provide mammograms. This selective outrage is just another attempt to drum up political support for PP, which receives an obscene amount of money from the taxpayers despite a very poor safety record in a lot of clinics. Komen cites the fact they are under criminal investigation as the reason they aren't donating. Their policy is not to donate groups if they are being charged or investigated for criminal matters. Their donations are a drop in the bucket for PP anyway.

Will Rand One of the more troubling charges, besides covering up child rape, is that PP gives away or gave away defective condoms. Hope that wasn't on purpose.

Jordan Lea They are not under criminal investigation. That is total bullshit Will. A Florida legislator is investigating them from a legislative angle. Florida Congressman may be able to cook the books on Presidential elections but they cannot prosecute.

McLean Brice ‎"Komen cites the fact they are under criminal investigation as the reason they aren't donating. Their policy is not to donate groups if they are being charged or investigated for criminal matters.

So they're not donating to the catholic church. I'm sure you're cool with that, right Will? If everybody adopted that policy, the church would be broke. I'm definitely cool with that...

McLean Brice How do you start a new paragraph in this thing? Every time I hit "enter" to start a new paragraph, it posts whatever I've already written. Now I'm bitter...

Will Rand A northeast Kansas sheriff's department has nearly finished investigating the shredding of state documents seen as key evidence in a criminal case against a Planned Parenthood clinic."http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/9 ... Documents/
Kan. sheriff nears end of investigation into shredding of records in Planned Parenthood case
www.therepublic.com
TOPEKA, Kan. - A northeast Kansas sheriff's department has nearly finished inves...See More
about an hour ago · Like
Jordan Lea Maybe you can find something on Fox or Rush. They are equally as honest.
about an hour ago · Like

McLean Brice Those links that Will included (but now has evidently deleted for some reason) from some outfit called "Live Action News and Opinion Blog" also appears to be a stellar source for factual data...

Will Rand I didn't delete anything. Ask Jordan.

Edmund Major And to think this all started with an apology...frankly the only interesting fact in this whole thread thus far...is that you can't start paragraphs by hitting "enter"...Hope facebook works out this issue prior to the IPO.

McLean Brice Actually you evidently CAN start a new paragraph within a single post, as Jordan and Mike have so adroitly proven. Alas, they seem to be jealously guarding the secret....

[Jungle Rat]

You rebel you.

[hedge]

I have learned how to start a new paragraph in a Facebook post. But I'm not going to tell you how...

[Jungle Rat]

I saw you ask me that over there. No idea.

[aTm]

I have never had the desire to add breaks in my facebook posts into hard paragraphs, but the first thing Id probably try is to hit shift+enter a couple times.

[Hizzy III]

Forget that. Let's go back to this sutble yet intriguing phrase that I pulled from about midways through the exchange:

right wind but bag

What exactly is a (and I'm assuming the intended spelling) right wing butt bag? Matter of fact, what is a butt bag? Is that like a diaper?

You Caucasians will have to enlighten me on such smack talk.

[Bklyn]

I couldn't take reading the silliness mixed in with the sanity of those FB posts. I guess that's why I don't FB. I stopped reading after a bit. I could get nothing constructive out of it.

With that said, I do see it as an issue being politicized by the Komen Exec Board. It's their right to allocate funds the way they wish. It's my prerogative to give as I see appropriate.

The whole PP issue is one that strikes me more on the socio-economic side than anything.

[BigRedMan]

Forget that. Let's go back to this sutble yet intriguing phrase that I pulled from about midways through the exchange:

right wind but bag

What exactly is a (and I'm assuming the intended spelling) right wing butt bag? Matter of fact, what is a butt bag? Is that like a diaper?

You Caucasians will have to enlighten me on such smack talk.

Yes in the 1600s - 1700s, people of wealth would walk around with leather made bags tied to their asses so they could poop anytime they needed. Back in those days, there was no such thing as fiber supplements and such so the urge could strike at any time. So they could go about their entire day / night of socializing with other people of wealth and not have to worry about interruptions. That is how business got done back in the day. I guess they were the first to use the ABC method of business. When they would return home in the evening, they would have servants assist them in cleaning up themselves and cleaning the bags for future use. Further proof is provided by paintings from that era. If you notice, usually the men didn't wear very tight fitting pants to allow some extra room in the ass area. Also, most of the painting have men standing in the majority of them as well, sitting would provide some discomfort if you had used said butt bag. However, the great stomach flu of 1756 but an end to the butt bag era.

So calling someone a butt bag after that become more of a mocking / sarcastic type insult. The "poor" didn't understand why it was so difficult to excuse yourself, go out to the wooden shack outside, and use the hole in the ground that was there just like God and Mother Nature provided.

Now that this has been cleared up, please help us Caucasians out on a few things:

1. What are "chitlins" and why do you people love them so much?

2. Saggin

Thanks in advance.

[Bklyn]

I can almost always tell the ethnicity of the author depending on their position...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-0 ... n-hsu.html

[eCat]

I can almost always tell the ethnicity of the author depending on their position...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-0 ... n-hsu.html

and he didn't get accepted to an Ivy League school?

[Bklyn]

He probably did. He attended Berkeley, however.

this was an interesting post in the Comments section:

Expand Prof. Hsu makes several critical errors in his op-ed.

1. The primary issue is whether discrimination exists, not whether "it is a common belief among Asian-American families" that there is discrimination.

2. Hsu claims that SAT "statistics seem to support the claim of bias across most of
elite higher education", but his source of data, the Campus Life and Learning (CLL) study at Duke University, refutes any such glib appeals to test scores. The CLL project has published about 20 statistical regressions measuring various aspects of academic performance at Duke (such GPA during the 8 semesters of college, graduation rates, honors at graduation, etc) and in all these statistical analyses, whenever high school academic credentials are taken into account, Asian students are found to underperform relative to whites. The studies include a number of direct and indirect controls for choice of major, socioeconomic background and other factors, so these robust findings cannot be easily attributed to Asians choosing harder subjects. Indeed, one of the findings of the study cited by Hsu is that SAT scores and other academic credentials, not race, are the key to students' choices of major.

3. Underperformance of (East) Asian-Americans relative to credentials is seen not only in the many Duke CLL studies, but in essentially every other post-admission context for which studies or public data are available in the past 15-20 years, such as the Espenshade-Radford-Chung analysis of class rank at selective colleges, or Jesse Rothstein's study of grades in the UC system. This underperformance is, again, the opposite of the signal that would be expected if discrimination took place, and it is most clearly visible in the same sorts of objective national exam metrics after college, on which Asians outperformed whites in high school. For example, statistically, Asians underperform on the LSAT relative to the verbal SAT; underperform their LSAT scores in law school grades and bar passage rates; underperform on the medical licensing exams relative to MCAT scores entering medical school; and underperform on university math competitions relative to high school contests. These are individual-level effects that are often visible in easily gathered population level numbers, such as Harvard having a much smaller fraction of E.Asians among its recent valedictorians (about 1 in 10) than the E.Asian fraction of super-qualified students who won the top accolades in high school (about 1 in 2, or higher, as hinted at in Professor Hsu's request for data on applicants with perfect SAT scores). If discrimination were taking place one would expect to see Asians dominating the college-level academic metrics even more so than in high school, but the opposite occurs. The same is true for Princeton and the other Ivies for which data is available.

4. A disclosure of detailed admissions data would certainly be interesting, but low-resolution data can be criticized as inconclusive, while high-resolution data such as a spreadsheet listing all applicants' credentials (SAT, GPA, data on high school, etc) and admission results, can be parsed to show discrimination whether or not it actually exists. The reason is that there are many race-neutral admission factors that on average disadvantage Asians, and a statistical study (such as the much publicized regression studies performed by Thomas Espenshade) would falsely detect them as an "Asian SAT penalty" even if the admission procedure were race-blind. Examples include: relatively higher Asian clustering by high school, by major, by geography and by extracurricular activities; colleges' use of admission metrics that compare applicants to others within those clusters, such as class rank; different weighting of verbal and math SAT; and the consideration given to athletics (and some types of athletics more than others) in admission.

5. Hsu disregards direct statistical evidence against discrimination, such as the positive Asian effects calculated in Espenshade's study at the lower income levels, and the statistical studies performed by the Center For Equal Opportunity on data from elite public universities (Berkeley and Michigan before the ballot initiatives, UVA, Wisconsin recently) showing either no effect or a slight advantage for Asians. Similarly, Daniel Golden has for years mis-stated the U Michigan study results, which tend to exonerate rather than indict the school of charges that it discriminates against Asians. The Berkeley, UVA and Wisconsin studies found positive admission effects from being Asian but this interesting fact was not reported anywhere.

6. Hsu, like Daniel Golden before him, incorrectly interprets a difference in average SAT scores for enrolled whites and Asians at a given university (in this case, Duke) as an indication of discrimination in admission. A complete analysis for Duke would require a separate long comment, but as above there are race-neutral factors that operate, such as NCAA Div I athletic admission, a 15 percent North Carolina quota, and separate SAT-intensive admission to Duke's engineering school, that would raise the Asian SAT average well above that of whites in the student population even if both groups are treated equally in admission.

[eCat]

you want racial bias? Asians are great at math but everyone wants a jew as their accountant.

[aTm]

Everyone?

[Jungle Rat]

Just the ones who want to get rich.

[Hizzy III]

"Is you some kinda fool?"

[Jungle Rat]

[hedge]

"Further proof is provided by paintings from that era. If you notice, usually the men didn't wear very tight fitting pants to allow some extra room in the ass area."

Thank your god that you didn't live back then, BRM, as the world supply of cotton in those days would scarcely have been enough to provide "extra" room in the ass area of your breeches...

‘CALL down the hawk from the air;
Let him be hooded or caged
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.’

[sardis]

you want racial bias? Asians are great at math but everyone wants a jew as their accountant.

Because math and accountancy are two different things...