The Daily Pulse, Friday, April 1.

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Dilbert creator Scott Adams triggers a feminist firestorm.

 
Travis Snider is in the starting line-up in tonight's Blue Jays home opener against the Twins.

Return of the boys of summer

Kevin Glew's 2011 Blue Jay predictions. (CBC) Harper, Iggy, other celebs canvassed on their regard for baseball. (Mark Zwolinski, Toronto Star) 

Trouble spots

Libyan rebels seek arms, money, to oust Gadhafi. (Abigail Hauslohner, Time) * Revolution in Arab world is opportunity for Islamists. (Patrick Martin, Globe and Mail) * Tripoli roiled by Gadhafi defections. (David Kirkpatrick, NYT) * Most high-level Libyan regime officials trying to defect, diplomat claims. (Cassandra Vinograd and Dancia Kirka, Globe and Mail) * Gadhafi renews vow to fight to the death. (International Business Times) * Yet is thought to be seeking means of escape. (International Business Times) * In Ivory Coast, Ouattara forces poised to attack residence of intransigent Gbagbo Abidjan, loser in last year's election. (Loucoumane Coulibaly and Tom Cocks, Reuters) * Reports have former Gbagbo loyalists defecting en masse. (Drew Hinshaw, Christian Science Monitor)

Tragedy in Japan

 
At Nagahama hospital, checking radiation levels of workers attempting to repair stricken Fukushima reactors. (AP)

Reactor repair teams assume they will die, some within weeks. (Dominic Di-Natale, Fox News)

Dereliction of duty

Amnesty International says Canada no longer leads on human rights. (Campbell Clark, Globe and Mail)

Excited States

Poll shows Americans' disfavor with Tea Partiers at record level. (Nate Silver, NYT) Apathy with Tea Partiers turns to scorn. (Erik Hayden, Salon)

Sarah Palin tries (lamely) to defend whopping Alaska state subsidy for her TLC doc. (Christopher John Farley, WSJ) A costly advertisement for herself financed by a bill Palin herself signed during her brief gubernatorial tenure.

The end of "compassionate conservatism." (Jonathan Cohn, New Republic) Hating Obama and fearing the Tea Partiers, today's GOP doesn't even make a pretense to caring for the disadvantaged. But then, then original CC wasn't convincing. "I'm confused," Robin Williams said. "It sounds like a Volvo with a gun rack."

Clinton, Rice, Powers, Albright - women as warmongers. (Charli Carpenter, Foreign Affairs)

 
This is the nail-biting time of year when applicants wait to learn if they've been accepted at top schools with low admission rates, including Harvard (6.2%), Columbia (6.4%), Yale (7.4%) and Princeton (8.4%).

College applications soar, but admission rates are plummeting. (Eric Hayden, Atlantic) Best applicants are smarter than ever.

Virginia Tech fined $55,000 for two-hour delay in alerting students to 2007 killer. (Colleen Jenkins and Jerry Norton, Reuters)

Dilemma over U.S. natural gas, savior or budding environmental disaster? (Bryan Walsh, Time)

Michigan Democratic U.S. Senator Stabenow among climate-action delayers. (Andrew Leonard, Salon)

Vox

Joseph Stiglitz: America as an "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" society. (Vanity Fair)

Tom Malinowski: Why no credit for Obama in preventing Libyan genocide? (New Republic)

Aviva Dove-Viebahn: Stymied progress toward gender equality since Geraldine Ferraro's 1984 race. (New Republic)

Francis Lam: Higher food prices aren't all bad. (Salon)

Annals of Commerce

 
Tony Hayward, fired as CEO of BP PLC over Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and massive oil spill. (Getty Images)

BP managers could face manslaughter charges over 2010 Gulf rig explosion. (Justin Blum and Alison Fitzgerald, Bloomberg News)

Warren Buffett's halo slips over peculiar firing of a potential successor. (Ben Protess, Evelyn Rusli and Susanne Craig, NYT)

RIM licenses 30,000 patents to guard against encore of past IP wars. (Kit Eaton, Fast Company)

Frank Stronach's Magna retirement after 50 years comes with bundles of cash. (Greg Kennan, Globe and Mail)

My life with Bill: Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen spills the beans in memoir. (Vanity Fair)

On the other hand

 
Libya-bound pilot of a French Mirage fighter jet. (Reuters)

Obama's new lease on life for humanitarianism. (Stewart Patrick, Foreign Affairs)

The road to humanitarianism hell is paved with "good" Interventions. (Micah Zenko, Foreign Affairs)

Social studies

Why men feel better about themselves after first sex, women feel worse. (Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon)

Careless consumerism: You're spending eight times' what you think. (Brad Tuttle, Time)

 
Obesity epidemic compels automakers to order bigger crash-test dummies. (Nicola Twilley, Good Environment)

Shocker: Study finds attractive people are happier, richer. (Kelly Bourdet, Nerve.ca)

Weight-loss surgery reduces migraines. (Thomas Maugh, LAT)

1 in 10 Britons move because of nasty neighbors. (Bob Aaron, YourHome.ca)

Friday reviews

 
Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes star in controversial TV drama "The Kennedys." (studio handout)

"The Kennedys" is "a lurid family drama that happened to change the course of history." (Alessandra Stanley, NYT)

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. (Michiko Kakutani, NYT) "In almost everything Wallace wrote, including The Pale King, he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life." (Whew, that was an expensive sentence.)

Source Code: Techno-thriller is Groundhog Day on a train. (Stephen Cole, Globe and Mail) Jake Gyllenhaal shines in cool, romantic Source Code. (Andrew O'Hehir, Salon)

Koch brothers' self-expose in a Weakly Standard love letter disguised as a profile. (Jonathan Chait, New Republic) "It is very easy to overestimate the sinister character of the Kochs. These are basically just a couple of not-terribly-sophisticated thinkers who happen to be sitting on a huge pile of money."

 

 

Comments

[Rob Graham]

Reading that article by Stiglitz I hear the sound of knitting needles.