STARK RAVING MAD

The racist practice of quotas in awarding scholarships and stipends preferentially to blacks has at last found men willing to speak out. "Many of the awards arc not based on need, but on merit," complains the WSJ (10/7/92, p. B-1). "It's deeply troubling to me," says Harvard President N. Rudenstine. He says he may take steps to reduce the growth of merit-only awards if the school con-tinues to lose black students. If that fails, Harvard may have to con-sider merit scholarships of its own, stressing that this would be done only as a last resort.

There was no punctuation in a sign held up at the Demo-cratic convention: "Gay and Lesbian Animal Rights Caucus." (Reason Nov. 1992).

Rejected by the NRC: a petition by the General Electric Stockholders' Alliance to require that a detectable odor be injected into the emissions of nuclear power plants. (Federal Register, vol. 57, no 158, 8/14/92.) [Radioactive levels of uR/hr are readily detected with small, portable, simple equipment. To do the same with odor at some distance from the plant, the source would have to emit a truly pestilential stench.]