According to commenters on this Tapped post, some schools in the US ban children from riding their bikes in. And one commenter says that othe parents have complained to the school that he is endangering his children - by letting them walk to school! Join the carpool, you madman!
Via Ezra Klein, a small study indicating that holiday time brings short-term health benefits (they didn't test for the long-term).
I really should look for more of these studies.
Sweet jebus. One-third of Americans don't take all their holiday time each year.
That is particularly surprising given that in the United States full-time employees have 3.9 holiday and vacation weeks off a year. But this is paltry when compared with European countries, including the United Kingdom (6.6 weeks), France (7) and Italy (7.9), according to the 2004 figures compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
A study released last year by the Families and Work Institute found that American workers have on average 16.6 paid vacation days but that more than one-third of employees (36 percent) did not plan to use their full vacation.
[...]
The study also found that only 14 percent of Americans go away for two weeks or more at any one time.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum has more on this. for once, his comments are actually worth a read - if only to be horrified by tales of people being fired for taking any time off at all, or being told they can go on leave, but have to remain on call, and can't be more than two hours away from the office. Two hours? The intensification of the American workplace continues, not only unabated but more rapidly than ever.
It really would be interesting to write a book on this. Or have it as a chapter in my book on why the US is completely fucking batshit crazy.
Ezra Klein offers a good explanation of why the adulter-riven Republican party seems to be made out of teflon when it comes to public perceptions of party morality.
Via Kevin Drum
R.I.P. TOM DELAY....Ruth Marcus memorializes Tom DeLay in the Washington Post today and does a fine job. However, I — like many others — will always remember him best for his reaction to the Columbine shootings in 1999:
Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.
The man who said this has been one of the most powerful leaders of the Republican Party for over a decade and was treated seriously by the DC press corps the entire time. Never forget that — about either the Republican Party or the press. All the rest is trivia.
UPDATE: Actually, this quote appears to be a paraphrase. The real rant is even more unhinged.
I do like when Matt Yglesias defends poor old sclerotic Europe from the excessive claims of our countrymen. He's very good at it. Now if you'll pardon me, it's back to picking through the rubbish bins.
The economic performance of the large continental European economies -- France, Italy, and Germany -- really does leave a great deal to be desired. That said, the American press seems dogmatically determined to vastly overstate the extent of the problems. This editorial in my morning paper argues that "European governments seem unable to summon the strength even to address the economic sclerosis eating away their prosperity -- much less challenge American power." Mixed metaphor aside, Europe isn't becoming less prosperous. Rather, it's becoming more prosperous at a slow rate. If Europeans were actually getting poorer, then I think you'd see much more electoral support for dramatic changes.
As things stand, it's always worth noting that European economic growth could be boosted rather easily if the European Central Bank would loosen monetary policy. My understanding is that they've been maintaining a tighter-than-necessary monetary policy in order to deliberately provoke economic pain in the hopes that this will inspire voters to agree to adopt additional labor market flexibility and cuts in social welfare expenditures. Europeans probably should make their labor market more flexible (I'm radically less convinced that Europe's big welfare states are a problem) but European elites should consider the possibility that this would be easier to accomplish under conditions of prosperity. Obviously, nobody's going to want to make it easier to fire people under conditions where nobody has a reasonable expectation of getting a new job after they're laid off.
Via Normblog:
"The Bush administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide. I give my full support to the Call to Drive out the Bush Regime."
Jonathan Freedland has a fairly sensible and thoughtful article on the differing ways in which Britain, the US, and, to a lesser extent, France, seek to instill national identity in ethnic communities. Arguing that Britain doesn't do nearly enough on this front, he says that the French model, of demanding that everyone see themselves as French, is far less potent than the American system, in which immigratns and ethnic groups are allowed or even encouraged to keep a sense of their ehtnic identity, yet also strongly encouraged - through ritual and the overall national mores - to also see themselves as American. Hence "Italian-American", "Mexican-American", etc.
As evidenced by his book on the subject, Freedland has a fairly rosey view of the US, and his quote from a Muslim-American seems very pie in the sky and cherry picked, but he may well have a pretty decent point here. Everyone's talking about an identity gap, and how these kids - privileged and unprivileged alike - are seeking to fill it through radicalism. It's quite likely that if Britain did have a stronger sense of its own identity right now, and a stronger idea of how to instill that into the disparate groups that make it up, there would be less of an identity issue. Who knows whether that would have meant that we wouldn't have been bombed or not?
Next day: They get letters. As one rightly points out, Freedland overlooks the fairly high number of terrorist acts perpetrated in the US by whiteys such as Timothy McVeigh. I suspect that Freedland is no better than most of us: at gut level, he reagards attacks by those who seem to be Other as more frightening and dangerous than those we can more easily identify with.
It's an easy thing to do. McVeigh I can see as a wingnut. We share similar heritages, so I have an idea where he's coming from and where he went horribly awry. I can say that he's subnormal, and point to reasons X, Y and Z why.
But I don't share a cultural heritage with second generation, very angry Muslims, nor does most of the UK. We don't really know the whys of their actions, and we don't honestly know what the norm is to compare them to. We think and hope we do, but there hasn't been enough time, and Muslims are not yet assimilated enough, for people to not habitually or instinctively still see them as Other. This doesn't mean they're hated or feared as a norm - give me an unknown brown person over a known white crazy anyday, but it does make them unknown commodities. With McVeigh, we can see that he is a huge anomaly within a hopefully generally sane group. But are Muslims going to assimilate? How anomalous are these kids? Certainly in their actions they're very anomalous, but in their beliefs are they? We don't really know yet, because it's too soon, and there's that seemingly huge religious divide.
Well-reasoned post by Yglesias on why the US should aspire to be one of the more generous nations in terms of aid, as opposed to fairly middling, as it currently is. We see ourselves as world leaders and world shapers, which is why we spend so much on defense. Seeing ourselves thus, should we not be more proactive with aid in an effort to shape the world?
Of course, it's inevitable, at least under a conservative administration, that we'd try to shape it in our own mold, eg by discouraging condom use. So there are some serious disadvantages to us ponying up more. But I'd guess that the advantages to the developing world would outweight them.
Also, Dan Drezner has a long post on Americ's generosity/stinginess. As he sees it, we're 9th out of 21 OECD countries. Comments are a bother, though: a bit too much knee-jerk Anti-Europeanism from an American with a big chip on his shoulder.
It's an urban legend! The World Series isn't really named after the New York World. According to Snopes - and Cooperstown - there's no evidence whatsoever that the NY World ever did anything more than cover the games. Drat!
Oh, and by the way, someone won the World Series last night. Boston, was it?
