The glorious logic of international diplomacy:
1) North Korea imports materials to make a nuclear warhead, violating international law.
2) North Korea builds nuclear warheads.
3) North Korea detonates nuclear warhead.
4) US/UN push nations to inspect cargo entering North Korea for illicit materials.
If searching cargo was going to work (which I doubt it will), shouldn’t we have done that *before* they tested a nuclear bomb?
I teach a large class at a university, and every year I have students come to me with disabilities asking for accomodations. One time I had a person with an eye condition requesting an exam be printed in large font. One time I had a student with cerebral palsy who couldn’t fill in the scantron bubbles on a multiple choice exam and asked that she be able to circle answers and have it hand graded. Accomodations for such physical disabilities are usually easy to provide, and almost always serve solely to level the playing field — a student who didn’t have the disability who received the accomodation would get no advantage from the accomodation.
A second class of disabilities require accomodations that are intended to level the playing field, but also could be seen as a form of advantage to the student receiving them. The most common of these is extra time on the test. This is to help students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia who can’t read the questions as quickly as non-dyslexic students. Similarly, some students are allowed to take the test in distraction-free environments (i.e. private rooms) –this aids students with attention deficit disorder who have trouble focusing on the test when other people in the room are coughing or shuffling papers. While the purpose of these accomodations is to remove an impediment that disadvantages these students, these accomodations are qualitatively different from the first group in that they would provide an advantage to a non-disabled student who received them.
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As a political science major in college and in graduate school, I took quite a few classes on statistics. And in those classes, I learned no more important lesson than this: improbable events happen all the time.
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Apparently, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon over the weekend. (I’d recommend that you check out the Washington Post’s history of our dispute with North Korea over their nuclear program, if you need a refresher. Good stuff.) And, of course, the United States and the United Nations are scrambling to do something about it. But there are a few things we should all keep in mind.
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The GOP is in serious trouble. That’s trouble with a capital “T”. It goes beyond the abysmal polling. It goes beyond the Foley scandal. And it even goes beyond the continuing bad news out of Iraq.
If you want to know how seriously the GOP is messing up right now, just check out their website.
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