"Stand and Deliver" parte dos

Here's a great article about four Mexican high school kids who beat the likes of MIT in an underwater robot competition. It is a must read.

In addition to it's entertaining quality and feel good story, it brings up interesting questions on whether America should offer loans and in-state tuition to illegal aliens.

"Next time it will be eaiser. It always is."

National Review has two great columns today discussing abortion, Shiavo, and euthenasia.
Here's a few excerpts from one:


The charade here was not performed to protect Terri Schiavo's dignity but to increase the public's comfort with the devaluation of life. So it was that Michael Schiavo's lawyer, the euthanasia enthusiast George Felos, sketched for the media (which was naturally not permitted to observe Terri's deteriorating condition) a rosy portrait of Terri's extremis: radiantly beautiful, soothed by soft music and the comfort of a stuffed animal....

Why not kill Mrs. Schiavo quickly and efficiently, by depriving her of air to breathe? In principle, that would have been no different from denying her the other basic necessities of life. Why not give her a lethal injection? The law would not have allowed those methods; but the reason nobody advocated them was that they would have been too obviously murder. So the court-ordered killing was carried out slowly, incrementally, over days and weeks, with soft music, stuffed animals, and euphonious slogans about choice and dignity and radiance. By the time it ended, no one really remembered how many days and hours it had gone on. The nation accepted it, national polls supported it, and we all moved on to other things.

Here's another discussing infant euthenasia, a practice prevelant in parts of Europe.

Asian UN tiff

According to the NYTimes, there is a "grass-roots" effort in China to oppose Japans placement on the UN security council. Somehow, the Times thinks that "allowing" the people to participate doesn't compromise the integrity of the petition.

By allowing millions of people to sign their names to a petition against Japan,
Beijing's new leadership seems determined to show that recent Japanese actions
have so inflamed popular sentiment that China has no choice but to adopt a
tougher diplomatic line.

To my thinking, in any fair world, a democratic nation that contributes as much financially to the UN should have a greater role in decision making. However this is the UN, and Russia, China, and France (two dictatorships and an old woman) get vetoes, while Japan and India don't.
Some make the claim that Japan hasn't atoned for past imperial abuses...

North and South Korea...argue that Tokyo has not done as much as Germany to
atone for its imperialist abuses and that it cannot become a leading member of
the international community unless it addresses the legacy of mistrust among its
neighbors.

...but nothing is said about current human rights abuses in other veto weilding members. We'll see how the UN shapes up, but I'm not to hopeful.

"It's a whole newt world!"

The opinion journal has three interesting book review on Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." Newt famously engineered the Republican Revolution nearly 10 years ago. Unfortunatley, he was/is a great politician in every sense of the word (including the Bill Clinton sense).

Immigration Blog

For those readers in the Southwest U.S., I ran accross an interesting immigration blog. It discusses the "minuteman project" a little, as well as other relevant issues.

Those aware of the whole minuteman vigil going on this weekend would probably be interested in finding out that the MS-13 gang is planning to target minuteman members this weekend.

Mustafa

I've always been a friend of IMAO's "know thy enemy" segments, but every once in a while they hit the truth dead on:

In the insect family, the flea is most closely related to the trial lawyer.

They also noticed an interesting link between facial hair and military fortunes:

Hitler was the first dictator in modern history to prove that a bad moustache is
no match for American military might.
Hussein was the
latest.
Looking YOUR direction, President Asad...

However they did forget this guy.
Come to think of it, do all bad guys have 'staches? ...or is bad hair and weird jumpsuits enough?
(last link: I meant the one on the right)

Another Bogus Memo?

Believe it or not, the MSM might have been fooled by another fabricated memo. This one involves a "GOP talking points memo" that was supposedly distributed to republican Senators to aid them in discussing the Schiavo case. Powerline bloger, John Hinderaker is all over this one. As usual, the media shot first, and then asked questions.

How Has Ward Churchill Come So Far?

Victor Davis Hanson lays the wood on Ward Churchill and Academia in his excellent column on National Review. In it he posts four rules of how a regular Joe, with below average intelligence, can become a tenured professor without possessing a PHD. You really must read the whole thing, but here a few experts:

Rule 1: Profess to be as far left as possible, understanding that extremism in the service of utopian virtue is no vice.

. . .Most academics are retiring sorts. They enjoy the tranquility of the campus and its isolation from the conundrum of society at large. But like peaceful sheep grazing in green pastures, they are easy prey for rapacious wolves. Professors are especially vulnerable to a bully and showman like Churchill, whose record of both oral and written intimidation leaves most disturbed, frightened, or at least convinced to steer clear of this loose loud popgun when he goes off. ...

Rule 2: Among the nerds and dorks, act a little like a Brando, Che, or James Dean, a wild spirit that gives off a spark of danger, who can at a distance titillate Walter Mitty-like admirers and closer up scare off the more sober censors.

...Victimization is essential to academic man. Under the warped tenets into which affirmative action has devolved and the existing protocols of the blame industry, at first glance this put a pink heterosexual American male like Churchill in a seemingly tough bind. What cover or exemption, after all, is there when his scholarship, teaching, or academic citizenship is found wanting? That dilemma Churchill solved brilliantly when he endowed himself with two new unimpeachable personas: the noble but victimized Native American, and the half-noble but nevertheless traumatized Vietnam veteran. ...

In short, Churchill’s Indian and Vietnam-veteran pseudo-affiliations — replete with long hair, camouflage, and sunglasses getup — were worth at least a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, reinvent yourself as anything but a white, straight American male.

...Recalcitrant, unbending, immobile, a throw-back to a better, more idealistic age — this is the rock-cut image that the perpetual ‘60s professor taps into. And Churchill, with his photo-studio manufactured profile, pageboy locks, occasional fake Indian name, hip street lingo, and sassy banter did it better than any we’ve seen in quite a while — or at least well enough to wow the flabby university committees that allowed him to cash in.

Rule 4. Don’t worry about the anti-capitalist’s embarrassing six-figure salary, plush job, lifelong guaranteed employment, and fondness for jet travel and hotels. Just keep acting like an ageless denizen of the Woodstock nation, professing to be a timeless dagger pointed at the heart of money-grubbing square America.

Read the whole thing.

A kink in the path of evolution

Wizbang blog has an interesting link to a NY Times article that adds serious doubt to the conventional view of evolution.

Here are a few sections from the article:

Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.

The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system.

This new finding substantially weakens the modern understanding of evolution.

Wizbang makes a poignant observation:
My argument about evolution is and will always be, that all you loud mouth people who accept as some sort of fact etched in stone that man evolved from some primordial ooze are just as religious as the people you bash.

He certainly has a point. I think modern scientists are so wrapped up in themselves that they find themselves incapable of expressing that they really haven't the slightest idea concerning the origin of man, let alone the Universe. In a very real sense, scientists and academics bend over backwards to accept any evidence or theory that might suggest man evolved from apes.

Scientists are so eager to find the missing link (a half-man half-ape species) that any time a skeleton is found which resembles a man they declare that the link has been found. Every single time, the scientists have to recant and claim that they only found a now-extinct species of ape. Here's a list of a few examples.

I witnessed a startling occasion of this academic fraud while watching a program on the Discovery Channel. On the program, scientists discussed a finding that could be the missing link. However, when they connected the hip and thigh joint together, it was apparent that the animal walked on all fours, thus dashing their hopes. I was wrong when I thought that this minor inconvenience would stand in their way, for all they had to do was grind the bone to its "original" position to allow a joint that would make the animal stand upright.

The famous find of "lucy" also lauded as the missing link, is contrived. The gaping hole in the skeletol structure is the knee joint, found 200 ft deeper and nearly two miles away. This is simply a case of putting a human knee joint with that of an extinct ape.

Apologies

I need to apologize to any readers (if you really are out there) and to J-red for slacking off. I have been focused on getting into grad school, so as to break the "ignernt cunservativ" stereotype, and have let it get in the way of blogging. Honestly...where are my priorities?!

I really regret that I missed the opportunity to post on several "free speech" violations. (Ward Churchill especially).

The Supremes. At it again.

Iowahawk has a great satire of the Supreme Court's recent ruling regarding the execution of minors that relied heavily on internatinal law.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a far-reaching decision that will likely create complicated consequences for the American livestock and wedding-planning industries, the Supreme Court this morning ruled 5-4 that all US marriage dowries "must include three non-diseased oxen."
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited "the weight of the expansive penumbra surrounding the historically emerging and prevailing opinions of tribal shamans from Lesotho to Myanamar" in issuing the historic ruling in American Cattleman Association vs. Modern Bride, Helverson, et al.

While I haven't read the decision, nor pondered the ramifications of executing minors, I cringe everytime international law is used extensively.

Powerline points to a relevant in the Washington Times:

It happens that only 15 years ago the Supreme Court found that the kind of statute in question was constitutional. But, rather than overturning that case, the court yesterday found that in the last 15 years a national consensus against such punishment had emerged. The majority based that conclusion on the fact that "18 states -- or 47 percent of states that permit capital punishment -- now have legislation prohibiting the execution of offenders under 18," and four of those states have adopted such legislation since the Supreme Court's ruling of 15 years ago.
As Justice Antonin Scalia fumed in his dissent: "Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death penalty States can constitute a national consensus. Our previous cases have required overwhelming opposition to a challenged practice, generally over a long period of time." In this case, a majority of relevant states approve the practice.

All these rulings have gotten me in the mood to read Robert Bork's recently released book Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide View of Judges.

Fox News Reports that the book contains various examples of the growing influence of international law "including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's references to the 'useful decisions' by the Privy Council of Jamaica, the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe for a 1999 case involving allowable delays of executions."

Bork is certainly right in declaring that "international law becomes one more weapon in our domestic culture war.”