Links

So Amp posted some links a couple days ago and stole all my freakin’ links. Seriously, just as soon as I’ve gathered up enough links to feel like I’ve got a good-sized link post, Amp does one and posts everything I’d been saving for you Alas readers so I just abort the idea entirely. It sucks. Seriously man, get with my schedule…

Anyway, here are a few things I found interesting that Amp didn’t snatch up (yet). In no particular order:

• Ms. Lauren and Feministe has a marvelous post about education, standardized testing, and the cynical game of No Child Left Behind from the perspective of a future teacher.
• Take the Book Quiz. I did, read the book that was recommended to me (The Sound and the Fury) and actually kinda liked it. (via Raznor)
• Speaking of Raznor, he was accepted to NAU for grad school, so everyone give the man a hand.
• Here’s why I love One Good Thing so much:
  8:00 p.m. I spend time envying bloggers who are better than me, such as Wonkette, who writes,

  Are assholes drawn to the District by some force of nature? Like a giant mother asshole calling her young?

  I spend at least five minutes pretending I wrote that.

  And I spent at least ten minutes pretending that I’d written that witty little bit. Seriously, flea has a great blog going on there. There’s a reason my significant other has read the site’s entire archives and I’ve started on them myself.

  Two crazy liberals can’t be wrong!

• Have you ever called tech support and wondered what the fuck was wrong with them? Salon has your answer. (via Tom Tomorrow)
• Echidne with a good (although old, for which I apologize) post on why people in other countries aren’t too happy with the United States.
• Mark A.R. Kleiman on the connection between Judaism and liberalism.
• S-Train on the similarities between terrorism and gang warfare and how to fix them both.
• What if, when his gall bladder went to hell, John Ashcroft hadn’t been insured? AlterNet preaches it.
• I’ve been meaning to write my great abstinence education follow-up post for, well, months now. Until I get around to that, content yourself with this little brick in the war:
  Teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who don’t pledge abstinence, according to a study that examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents.

  Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups’ STD rates were statistically similar.

  The problem, the study found, is that those virginity “pledgers” are much less likely to use condoms.

  “It’s difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you’re not going to have sex,” said Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, who co-authored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale.

  “The message is really simple: ‘Just say no’ may work in the short term but doesn’t work in the long term.”

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