Endangered Species: Time To Apply The Brakes Before We Go Over The Cliff. A Guardian/UK editorial: ‘The new “red list” of endangered species, published this week,

confirms that the diversity of life on the planet faces its greatest threat since the

catastrophe which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.’

The Doomsday Argument. “99

percent of all species that ever lived have gone extinct, including every one

of our hominid ancestors. In 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed

the “Doomsday argument,” a statistical way to judge when we might join them. If

humans were to survive a long time and spread through the galaxy, then the

total number of people who will ever live might number in the trillions. By

pure odds, it’s unlikely that we would be among the very first hundredth of a

percent of all those people. Or turn the argument around: How likely is it that

this generation will be the one unlucky one? Something like one fifth of all

the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of being one of the

people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of

witnesses around— so now is not such an improbable time.” Discover

Berkeley professor of linguistics John McWhorter, apparently brought to outcry from his experience of the inferior quality of work done by black students he taught at Cornell, Stanford and Berkeley, risks lynching by other African-Americans for passages like this from his new book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America:

…the time has come for us to reconceive the black college

professor who sits in the trendy new restaurant emoting

about how oppressed he is between forkfuls of gourmet

pasta, his free hand alternating languidly between his

six-dollar glass of cabernet and his white significant

other’s knee under the table, and [who is] about to catch

a twenty dollar shuttle to the airport the next morning to fly to a conference where

he will meet dozens of African Americans just like him, most of whom got special

attention on their job searches because of their color, and most of whose research

has been funded by universities that bend over backwards to shower grants upon as

much minority-oriented research as possible. Okay, four years ago this professor

was driving through a white neighborhood in his Honda Accord and a policeman

pulled him over on a drug check. But why, if ‘Success Runs in Our Veins,’ if we

survived centuries of slavery, if we are so wonderful, does that episode negate the

victory and richness of the rest of this professor’s life? What kind of oppression is

this?

McWhorter appears to courageously confront what he characterizes as the victimhood built into American black culture, rejecting both the “congenital dumbness” argument of Jensenism and the Bell Curve, and the forgiving noblesse oblige explanations of liberals which demand no responsibility from African Americans for countering their oppression. New York Observer

The Spike Report alerts us to the reports in both the New York Daily News and the New York Times of an apparition of the Virgin Mary on a cracked living room window of a home in Perth Amboy NJ. Believers are flocking to catch a glimpse. The two papers have different slants on this, and there’s quite a distinction between the photos which they choose to accompany their reports.

This whole Neal Pollack hubhub feels like a smarmy inside joke foisted on the rest of us. Makes sense Dave Eggers is involved. Getting It In related news, the Voice Literary Supplement reports on the explosion of literary journals into adventurous book publishing. (Pollack is Eggers’ McSweeney’s first book offering.)

Wacky uses for common products. The compiler uses brand names for each product, and obtains the manufacturers’ permission before he describes an offbeat use, so don’t expect anything kinky.

Child organ stockpile prompts inquiry, surgeon being sought for “…an indignity of human remains…” BBC

The Guardian weblog pointed me to this delightful little fiction by Margaret Gray on life’s frequently asked questions. The Blue Moon Review

Ecstasy variant kills six in Florida. “The deaths were attributed to tablets that in addition

to the usual ecstasy ingredients also contained either

PMA (paramethoxyamphetamine) or PMMA

(paramethoxymethamphetamine).” These are powerful stimulants that, in the amounts used to adulterate the MDMA (Ecstasy), have massively elevated body temperature. MSNBC

Snake charmers push for Olympics. A 3,000-strong Indian coalition’s answer to what it feels is the Olympics’ bias toward sports in which American and European athletes excel — make snake charming an Olympic sport. BBC

More zero-tolerance inanity: an 11 y.o. girl in suburban Atlanta received a 10-day school suspension because the 10″ chain on her Tweety bird wallet is construed as a potential weapon. ‘A spokesman for (the school

district) said: “These items have been used in the past

as weapons. A chain like the one in question can have

any number of devices attached to it and it becomes a

very dangerous weapon.” ‘

Ventura says he knows what it is to be black. Party bias like race bias, he says. Pioneer Planet

Lost wallet washes up four years later, intact. [via Obscure Store]