The World Against Us

Was reading rather disturbing post at Alternet about girls bonding together to cope with the ultimate paradox: huge achievement coupled with very low self-confidence.

The article talks about girls in high school and college, and refers to a recent article in the NY Times by someone whose job it is to reject girls for college. Yes, that's right: there are too many qualified girls and not enough qualified boys applying. And they can only take so many students each year.

And here's where I want to vomit: having a female majority apparently makes a school undesirable, as colleges go.
So they're all struggling valiantly to make sure they don't have that!

I get it, teenagers (college-age) are hormone-driven, and everyone is shopping for Mr/Mrs. Future Spouse in college. And yes, diversity is good.

But. Something is seriously screwed up here. Isn't it our turn to be the majority???

I don't have a solution for the current problem, but my solution for the future is simple: USE BIRTH CONTROL. Clearly, these problems all stem from overpopulation, do they not?

In other news about overpopulation and where do we put all these talented people, someone brought this week's immigration uproar to my attention.

So here's the hypothesis:

The Bush administration wants a large nonvoting population. They always win elections when only 20% of the eligible voters actually go to the polls.

Having more illegal-but-guest immigrant workers is perfect for this, because they generate income, but aren't allowed to vote.

This has interesting implications, since most of middle America seems to believe that the majority of immigrant workers are uneducated avocado pickers in California. Au contraire, mes amis, what about all the immigrants who come here for the science? The last numbers I saw still showed the majority of postdocs in this country as non-American citizens.

Could it be working against the scientific community to have so many people here doing science but not caring or having the time to learn about our political system? Are we missing opportunities to educate and lobby Congress to fix all the problems with NIH and NASA because the majority of highly trained scientists are either

a) not from here, so don't know
b) not planning to stay, so don't care beyond what affects them immediately?

I've witnessed both the cluelessness and the unwillingness to plan ahead from postdocs in general, not just foreign postdocs. But if we're supposed to be the future of science in America, and the majority of us aren't Americans, why are we all doing it here?