Saturday, April 30, 2005

News Snippets

WARREN FARRELL has authored a new book called “Why Men Earn More,” and he has some interesting information regarding the wage gap. Women may indeed earn 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, but there are reasonable explanations.

According to a recent book review by John Leo, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that companies paid men and women equal money when their titles and responsibilities were the same. But women often choose jobs with lower pay and less responsibility in order to care for family and pursue other interests.

Other findings reported in his book: men who have never married and are college-educated make only 85 cents for every dollar earned by women in the same demographic. Women are often paid more than men in more than 80 career fields like financial analyst, engineering manager, statistician, surveying technicians, agricultural/food scientists, and aerospace engineers.

Also interesting: women who work as investment bankers enjoy starting salaries 16 percent larger than men. Women working part-time make $1.10 for every $1 earned by men. And so much for the “glass ceiling” -- Women are 15 times more likely than men to become top executives in major corporations before the age of 40.

IN EARLY March, 80 dolphins found themselves stranded in shallow water in the Florida Keys. No one knows how they were stranded, but volunteers are working around the clock to save them. The dolphins are too weak to eat, so yes – the volunteers are using feeding tubes to provide nutrition to the near-vegetative dolphins.

How do we know that these dolphins didn’t swim into the shallows as an effort to end their own lives? Aren’t the volunteers who are forcing them to keep their blow-holes above water acting as human ventilators?

I hope the Florida court system ordered these artificial means of life-support removed so the dolphins could experience the absolute euphoria that we are told comes from starvation. After all, humans shouldn’t be the only ones to enjoy the right to die with dignity.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF is a columnist with the New York Times. I enjoy reading his work, because even though we often draw different conclusions, he is the epitome of intellectual honesty.

A recent Kristof column looks at the ever-decreasing level of trust the public has for the news media. He says, “Since 1973, the National Opinion Research Center has measured public confidence in 13 institutions, including the press. All of the other institutions have generally retained a good measure of public respect, but confidence in the press has fallen sharply since 1990.”

Kristof continues, “If one word can capture the public attitude toward American journalists, I'm afraid it's ‘arrogant.’ Not surprisingly, I think that charge is grossly unfair. But it's imperative that we respond…not by dismissing [the charge], but by working far more diligently to reconnect with the public.”

I agree with you, Mr. Kristof. Reporters, editors, columnists – everyone connected with the media must stop looking at the general public as a group of uneducated fools. While no aspect of the media is innocent, the large national newspapers are the worst offenders. And Kristof hits the nail on the head with this comment:

‘We also need more diverse newsrooms. When America was struck by race riots in the late 1960's, major news organizations realized too late that their failure to hire black reporters had impaired their ability to cover America. In the same way, our failure to hire more red state evangelicals limits our understanding of and ability to cover America today.”

SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED diseases are spreading at alarming rates. According to Dr. John Diggs, the rates of infection of just one kind of STD have reached near epidemic proportions. Nearly one in five female college students are infected with HPV, or Human Papillomavirus. And don’t think that HPV just means warts, Dr. Diggs notes that “nearly all cervical cancer is caused by HPV. Moreover, in the USA, more women die from cervical cancer than die
from AIDS.”

The Centers For Disease Control estimates that “19 million STD infections occur annually, almost half of them among youth ages 15 to 24.” This in spite of more than two decades of graphic public school sex education – or perhaps because of it.

I find it interesting that every time we start a new program to address a problem, the problem gets no better, and often gets worse. Sex education, like welfare, fails to address the root of many of societies problems – human nature.

We’re basically immoral hedonists by nature, and it takes discipline and restraint to make us good people and good citizens. But many of our social reform efforts are based on the notion that responsibility equals morality. Unfortunately, responsible hedonism is costing us 15.5 billion dollars every year, and that’s just the cost of STD’s.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home