![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/quotes_7a.gif)
Government Not a Team Player: How Federal Policy Discriminates and Destroys
In the 2012 Olympics the U.S. women’s gymnastics team finished first and won a gold medal. The U.S. men’s gymnastics team, on the other hand, failed to earn even a single medal and finished a dismal fifth. That result, and a broader decline in men’s college sports, is the direct legacy of federal gender quotas.
In 1980 the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) featured more than 70 men’s gymnastics teams but by 2012 fewer than 20 remained. In 1981-82 there were 1,367 male gymnasts but only 318 by 2010-11, when many more schools were part of the NCAA. Declining college opportunity causes male high-school gymnasts to lose interest and that, in turn, affects the men’s Olympic gymnastics team. It last won gold 28 years ago in 1984, with performers such as Mitch Gaylord, Peter Vidmar and Tim Daggett.
The federal government imposes gender quotas through the “proportionality” requirements of Title IX. The measure assumes men and women are “undifferentiated” and mandates that athletic opportunities conform to female/male enrollment. The easiest way to gain proportionality and avoid lawsuits is to eliminate men’s teams. The more than 2,200 victims include the Boston University football program, the Colgate University baseball team, the Princeton wrestling team and the UCLA swimming and diving team, a gold medal powerhouse.
In 1999 the University of New Mexico eliminated men’s wrestling, swimming and gymnastics. Men’s rugby was the longest standing team at UC Berkeley, going back more than 100 years and winner of 25 national titles. But in 2010 UC Berkeley downgraded the men’s rugby team to varsity club status, placing it below the intercollegiate level and rendering it ineligible for university financing. The team was a victim of the Title IX proportionality requirement. “We’re a team of 60 young males in the program,” coach Jack Clark told reporters, “so that head count hurt us.”
College bosses, a rather spineless lot, deny anti-male discrimination and claim that financial considerations are also in play. That may be true, but by taking federal education money in the first place, even in the form of federal student aid, college bosses put themselves under Title IX rules. Such federal measures, like athletic performances, should be evaluated not by their equal-opportunity claims but by their destructive results. The Olympic medal count, and the forced decline of men’s college sports, shows that Title IX tilts the playing field against men.
View full post on MyGovCost | Government Cost Calculator
Canadian • Canada key player in ‘world’s largest illicit drug market’
VIENNA—Illegal Internet pharmacies are selling illicit drugs and prescription medicines online and are increasingly targeting young people, a U.N. drug agency warned Tuesday.
The International Narcotics Control Board also described North America as continuing to be “the world’s largest illicit drug market” in 2010; parts of Europe as the homes of industrial scale cannabis factories; and growing poppy cultivation in West Asia.
Focusing on Internet pharmacies as a growing threat, a summary of the agency’s 2011 report cited the agency’s head, Hamid Ghodse, as saying such use of social media “can put large, and especially young, audiences at risk of dangerous products.”
The Vienna-based board urged governments to close down illegal Internet pharmacies. It also called on them to seize substances that have been illicitly ordered on the Internet and smuggled through the mail.
The organization noted “high levels of illicit drug production manufacture, trade and consumption,” with “vast amounts produced in all three countries” in North America — the United States, Canada and Mexico.
About 90 per cent of the cocaine reaching the United States is transited through Mexico, even as an increasingly harsh crackdown by Mexican authorities is forcing some drug cartels to move their operations to Central America, the agency said.
It identified Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua as achieving the status of “major transit countries for smuggling drugs primarily destined for the United States” in 2010.
Cannabis was a major problem in Western and Central Europe, with plants “increasingly cultivated on an industrial scale, mainly indoors, and with the involvement of organized criminal groups,” the agency said.
“Europe accounts for the largest proportion of the global opiate market, and the abuse of heroin is the biggest drug problem in Europe in terms of morbidity and mortality,” according to the summary.
The agency noted “significant increases in opium production” in West Asia last year and warned that higher prices for crop growers in Afghanistan and planned cutbacks in international troops in the country “could lead to even further increases in production beyond 2011.”
It identified parts of Africa as representing a growing problem, both in terms of drug transit routes and of opiate consumption.
Cocaine trafficking from South America through Africa and into Europe “has emerged as a major threat in recent years,” the agency said, with criminals increasingly shipping the drugs in containers and commercial aircraft.
“Heroin enters the continent through East Africa and is smuggled, either directly or via West Africa, into Europe and other regions,” said the summary noting that authorities made “record seizures” of heroin in Kenya and Tanzania last year.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/artic … arket?bn=1
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue Feb 28, 2012 2:32 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com