STARK RAVING MAD

Several hundred leopard frogs, brownish green and up to 2" long, have hatched this year from a pool that was used for nuclear wastes at Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the 1940s and 1950s. They are heal-thy, but radioactive above the natural background. They are no danger to anybody unless eaten, and to prevent such a calamity, the government has decided to install a 3 ft high fine-mesh "frog fence." That may keep the frogs in, but how will it keep the soul food seekers out?

In Iceland many people believe in elves or huldufolk, and roads sometimes avoid large rocks so that engineers do not disturb the enchanted spots where the huldufolk live. Now the elves must be considered in environmental impact statements, and factory construction can sometimes be halted while the elves find another place to live. (Reader's Digest Dec. 91, pp.193-194). This is, of course, merely a mix of superstition and tradition that does not abuse science. I would find Ehrlich and Schneider a good deal less sickening if they did not talk about adiabatic gradients but based their theories, as honestly as the Icelanders do, on huldufolk.

Angela Davis, V.P. Communist Party USA, bail jumper and Stalinist lackey (in 1968 she rejected the pleas by her Czech fellow Communists to put in a word to the Russian leadership to stop the the savage repression) still claims to believe in the victory of Com-munism. So evidently do the profs in America's halls of higher learning who have incorporated her racist book Women, Race & Class in the freshman curriculum at several formerly prestigious universities (Dartmouth Review, 11/27/91). Hers is not the only "book" so honored. Among the many other gems in the radical feminist treasure chest, there is Mary Daly's opus subtitled "Metaethics of radical feminism," with a new intergalactic [why not exothermic? or anisotropic? or conditionally convergent?] foreword by the author. The telling title of this "book" is Gyn/Ecology.