Summer movies. We love to talk about them, lament their perpetual decline in quality, speculate about which ones will strike gold and which ones will strike gold, not to mention hold forth on what should have been instead. Then we forget about them. Poor summer movies. Here’s a recap of the 2005 summer movies I happened on.

“Minority numbers plunge at Latin” screamed a Boston Globe headline after public exam high school Boston Latin statistics showed that non-white enrollment at the school is down a whopping 3.6 percentage points since 1998/99, the last year the school used race as merit, from 49.7% to 46.1%.

Plunge, indeed.

In order to milk maximum indignation over the “plunge,” the paper focuses exclusively on Latino and black students, who, predictably, fared horribly without the support of racial favoritism: Black enrollment went from 18.5% to 10.3%, Latino to 5.3% from 8.4%.

Ignored by the Globe article are the massive gains by Asian students, who increased their share to 30% from 22.7% in 1998/99, dwarfing gains by white students.

Boston’s overall student population was more than 75 percent black and Hispanic in the last school year, but the two groups made up less than 16 percent of Latin School pupils. They made up nearly 27 percent of enrollment in 1998-99, the last academic year before the court ruling took effect barring the use of race in admissions.

While white students make up 14 percent of the city’s schools overall, they are nearly 54 percent of the student body at the Latin School. The class that enters the school Sept. 8 continues the trend.

”I would like it to have a higher representation of black and Latino students than it does,” Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant said in an interview. ”It was possible to do with the set-aside, and it’s been harder to do without it.”

Payzant said the Latin School — where the number of black students dropped from 435 to 250 from 1998-99 to last year and the number of Hispanic students from 198 to 134 — has the highest admission standards of the three exam schools.

While few Americans seem to dispute that there is an “education gap” between American students and students in most other industrialized countries, there is a reluctance to accept that a) there is a similar gap within America between white and Asian students on one hand and black and Latino students on the other, and b) that that gap, in fact, makes up much of the gap between America and the rest of the industrialized world.

Instead, a lot of Americans prefer to pretend that there is simply an admissions gap, where blacks and Latinos are dramatically underrepresented at elite institutions because of some kind of mismeasurement of student ability.

Free speech is untouchable, stupid freebie dead-tree boxes shouldn’t be. This is dadgum disgrace:

Muttawa, the anonymous Saudi blogger who quickly made a name for himself with his eloquence, wit, and scathing criticism of the Saudi royal family but then went silent on August 10 last year, has picked up blogging again.

Två juridikstuderande unga kvinnor sommarvikarierade på en av Halls hårdare avdelningar och - tänka sig - upprördes över arbetsklimatet!

Företaget där jag var anst¨lld för några år sedan hade en kvinnlig receptionist som tidigare jobbat som fängelsevakt på en Maximum Security-anstalt i nordöstra USA. På fängelset hade hon burit full skyddsmundering hela tiden hon vistades på avdelningen, bl.a. glasvisir som skydd mot den piss och skit som en del fångar slungade mot henne när tillfälle gavs. Hon slutade jobbet när, som hon sa, tröttnade på att riskera livet för $10 i timmen.

För två sommarvikarier att gnälla på arbetsmiljön och personalens sätt att hantera den är parodiskt.

Efter ett milt uttryckt körigt säsongsuppehåll kunde regerande Super Bowl-mästarna New England Patriots glädja sig åt att försvarsklippan och lagkaptenen Richard Seymour kommit överens med Patriots om kompensationsnivån för 2005 med klubben och därmed avbrutit sin träningsstrejk. Patriots har visserligen visat under de senaste tå säsongerna att ingen är oersättlig, men efter förlusten av först Ty Law, sedan Tedy Bruschi och bara dagar innan träningslägret drog igång Ted Johnson har laget nog med folk att ersätta.

Law, en av ligans bästa cornerbackar, lämnade klubben pga en kontraktsdispyt. Bruschi drabbades av en hjärinfarkt några dagar efter den senaste uper Bowl-segern. Han brinner av iver att börja spela igen, men ingen läkare har ännu varit villig att friskskriva honom. Det ryktades redan tidigt i år att Johnson skulle lägga av med fotbollen, men han dröjde med beskedet ända till förra veckan. Han fattade beslutet mot bakgrund av de många hjärnskakningar han drabbats av under sin tio år långa karriär som markspelsknäckade inside linebacker. Tillsammans har Law, Bruschi och Johnson 9 Super Bowl-segrar.

Most polls about how people view abortion ask questions about Roe vs Wade or to what extent abortion should be legal, but who really thinks or talks about abortion in those terms? Here’s how the question really should be framed:

Do you favor slaughtering unborn babies

OR

Do you favor oppressing women?

I strongly favor slaughtering unborn babies
I somewhat favor slaughtering unborn babies
I somewhat favor oppressing women
I strongly favor oppressing women
I am undecided
I do not know

That’s more like it, although “Oppressing women” doesn’t sound quite as harsh as “slaugthering unborn babies.” Suggestions, anyone?

(Sticklers for scientific methodology are sure to object to asking two questions in one, but, like, uh, whatever)

I am not the only right-winger who grimaced in, at least in my case, disgust when reading or hearing President George W. Bush saying that Intelligent Design theory should be taught in schools along with evolution. Call me a Godless heathen (and why not, since I am a Lutheran), but I happen to find evolution a most convincing theory and ID an irrelevant narrative for people who see God as an interventionist fixer and tinkerer. To take up scarce (and maybe sometimes even valuable) classroom time to teach, preach, or discuss ID seems like a colossal waste.

Not to doubt the President’s sincerity, but I think his partial embrace of ID is more compassionate than passionate. I think he’s throwing the proverbial bone to the many evangelical Republican voters who support ID and or oppose evolutionary theory being taught in public schools. Since that’s what they want, and since this a is republic with strong democratic tendencies, and since they are an absolutely critical part of the Republican Big Tent coalition, I’m fine with the President’s cavalier short changing of the scientific method upon which American power and affluence are built. Really. I have no problem with it whatsoever.

OK, it disturbs the heck out of me, but every vote counts, and, to paraphrase a line from an old Steve Martin movie, I’d rather win with the evangelicals than lose with the smartest people in the world.

I still can’t believe Rupert Murdoch shelled out $580 million to buy MySpace, but I think I’ve figured out what MySpace is: Open Source Maxim.

A Lydia Lowe has an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe where she gloats about going lawyerevial on Beantown. Some number of elderly immigrants haven’t bothered to learn English, so they’ve been bothered by a lack of ballots and voting instructions in Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Spanish.

Carpundit offers an outlandish solution.