Attack of the Lynx! [Part VI]

Some of these are a little older than others, but all caught my interest at some point so you will be interested too :)

• Baby dies because parents are too busy playing video games.
• 6-year-old becomes youngest girl in Oregon history to commit suicide
• Woman sues Canadian company for sending her phone bill...which reveals her secret affair.
• Was the 20th Century the Playboy Century (How Hugh Hefner Changed America)?
• Perhaps related, the lefty Daily Beast gives you 15 ways to predict divorce.
• Trenchant analysis from The Atlantic: What happens when the so-called "Best and Brightest" fail?
• And what does it say about our country when 20 percent of American atheists profess a belief in God?? (Or our polling, as the case may be.)
• And on two lighter notes to end, check out where ND ranks on the most expensive season tickets in college football.
• And how do you see colors? :)

Google is treating me badly so I'm not sure if this got published or not...Apologies if I bore you with my repetition.

Link Dump, Special Health Care Edition

If you don't care about American politics, this post may not contain much valuable information for you. However, if you're reading this blog, you probably should care about American politics, because it almost certainly impacts your life. With that caveat...

First, some explanation/analysis of the health care bill signed into law by President Obama today. David Frum is his usually contrariarian but common-sense-filled self in a nice explanation of what the law will do on CNN.com. "[T]oday's defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry." Tyler Cowen predicts the effects of the bill (warning: a little wonky) on the middle class. Nate Silver runs through the math of repeal (not likely.) The editors of National Review offer a conservative call to arms - Some substantive critiques, but I tire of invective rhetoric. And of course, no truly great reform can be enacted without asking that all-important question: How does it affect the Amish?

David Brooks has had some excellent columns lately that I haven't had a chance to post. From Feburary 2: "According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children...In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away."
Then, later in Feburary, he turns his sights on the role of the elite (again): "As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower...The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower."

And have I mentioned that I love Ross Douthat - From February 23, a great post: This isn't the GOP he (or I, if I may humbly associate with the thought) had in mind. "Republicans are well on their way to sounding like Bill Clinton circa 1996 on entitlements, and Jim DeMint on everything else."

And because it wouldn't be a true post without a mention of culture and/or sex, here's an academic article on the shift in teenage sexuality over the past 100 years. From the abstract: "As contraception has become more effective there is less need for parents, churches and states to inculcate sexual mores. Technology affects culture." From the paper: "In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19. Now, 75% have experienced this." Haven't read the whole thing yet, but plan to...

The Campus Rape "Epidemic"?

Heather MacDonald with a provocative article in an article from the City Journal last year:

• The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely.
• In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences—supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.
  
• Campus rape ideology holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well.
• [I]f the rape industrialists are so sure that foreseeable and seemingly cooperative drunken sex amounts to rape, there are some obvious steps that they could take to prevent it. Above all, they could persuade girls not to put themselves into situations whose likely outcome is intercourse. Specifically: don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. Once you’re in that situation, the rape activists could say, it’s going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus “rape” epidemic would be wiped out overnight.
• Modern feminists defined the right to be promiscuous as a cornerstone of female equality. Understandably, they now hesitate to acknowledge that sex is a more complicated force than was foreseen. Rather than recognizing that no-consequences sex may be a contradiction in terms, however, the campus rape industry claims that what it calls campus rape is about not sex but rather politics—the male desire to subordinate women...But it is an absurd description of the barnyard rutting that undergraduate men, happily released from older constraints, seek. The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it’s not a reinstatement of the patriarchy. Each would be perfectly content if his partner for the evening becomes president of the United States one day, so long as she lets him take off her panties tonight.

Truer words, I fear, have never been spoken.

Post-Christmas Sale

From The Economist: "In 2008 37% of government workers were unionised, nearly five times the share in the private sector (see chart), and the same share that was unionised 25 years earlier. Over that period, the share of unionised private-sector jobs collapsed from 17% to 8%...As a result, public-sector workers are spoiled rotten."

William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting question: We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all...Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming?" The answer is lengthy, but worth reading, if only to open your mind that what we view as "friendship" is fairly modern invention.

From Reuters Japan: A government study researching teen pregnancy says that "Teens who skip breakfast as middle school students tend to have sex at an earlier age than those who start the day with a proper meal."

And Dave Barry's take on 2009 is hysterical, as usual. Love that man.

Nazis, Conservatives, and Religious Nut Jobs

I really like the "Letters of Note" blog...Here's a note from Hitler that's a pretty good piece of history.

Frum asks the uncomfortable but prescient question: "Can Conservatives Govern?" The nut graf:

• "One attendee said something very thought-provoking. “Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in power then – because our principles don’t allow us to respond to a crisis like this.”

  My answer: If your principles don’t allow you to save your country when it needs to be be saved, then there’s something wrong with those principles."

A follow-up on that "Gospel of Prosperity" nonsense: The Atlantic's Hanna Rosin asks: "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"

Threats

Three little things to brighten your Sunday:

The "war on terrorism"/"war on terrorists" - "Remember, the bad guys are totally committed — and they are not tired." Worth reading if only this is Tom Freidman writing, not Bill O'Reilly.

The Aging of America - This chart updates every couple seconds showing the distribution by age over time of our nation's population. And yet we shouldn't worry about the solvency of social security.

"Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" - "Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy. Good people will be even happier in heaven after they die. The religious beliefs of American teens tend to be -- as a whole, across all traditions -- that simple. It’s something Jews and Catholics and Protestants of all stripes seem to have in common. It is instrumentalist. "This God is not demanding," say the authors. "He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good." (from "The Revealer".)

Back to School Flurry of Miscellany

Beyond the kind of flippant title, this blog post does have some interesting sociological implications/stuff in it...

As usual, Medved has an insightful take on politics in the near future, although I still think talking about 2010 is very premature.

Two ABCNews.com medical stories: The Girl Who Could Feel No Pain and The Girl Who Was Addicted to Abortion.

This is a fascinating graphic that takes a while to load, showing the amount of time different groups of people spend doing different things during their day. I dare you to spend less than 5 minutes on there (and I bet it's impossible.)

Two pictures that are a little creepy and probably inappropriate but have been used to try to spread positive societal messages (don't click on the links with children around): "AIDS is a Mass Murderer" and "The Media Messes With Our View of What Beauty Is" I'm all for PSAs against AIDS and for accepting yourself, but is this not too much?

Although it's not entirely accurate (and I like Pepsi's taste better,) this graphic was kind of cute:

Hurray for tradition.

Speaking of tradition, here are some Notre Dame related links to warm your heart: The Notre Dame online jigsaw puzzle (also available in real life.) Someone at the ND gameday site has been going crazy with panoramic camera recently, so check that out as well.

Also, we're being reviewed? Goodness GE is getting desperate.

High Glitz. Lunacy, and Fox News

These photos make you think America is pretty messed up - It's an art gallery casting a spotlight on the truly creepy ways people dress up their kids in the search of fame these days...Like Little Miss Sunshine but real.

David Frum is generally pretty solid, and I like his recent take on the stupid "Obama has no birth certificate" conspiracy people. "So here’s the hypothesis. Barack Obama Sr. has brought his new wife to Kenya. (A journey for which there is precisely zero documentation.) There, she bears him a child. Then — in an era before jet travel and at a time when plane fares cost many, many times more than they do now — she immediately gets on a plane from Mombasa to Nairobi, then another plane from Nairobi to Cairo, then a third from Cairo to London, then from London to Gander, Gander to maybe Chicago, Chicago to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Honolulu. Arriving in Honolulu she presents her — what? two-week old infant? — to the authorities and asks for a birth certificate. Oh — and she also retroactively places birth announcements in the local papers." Uh-huh.

In related news, Gawker put together an interesting little cross-section of the approval/TV ratings of Fox News Channel and the Republican Party:

And speaking of lunacy, this pretty much qualifies: "Call these unpaid internships that you pay for...A company called the University of Dreams, the largest and most visible player in an industry that has boomed in recent years as internship experience has become a near-necessity on any competitive entry-level résumé...says it saw a spike in interest this year due to the downturn, as the number of applicants surged above 9,000."

Junk from the week ending August 7, 2009

Ramesh Ponnuru has some trenchant thoughts on the Obama HC push in Time: The lead is priceless:

• "There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey. The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, "the status quo is untenable." Our health-care system is rife with "skewed incentives." It gives us "a whole bunch of care" that "may not be making us healthier." It generates too many specialists and not enough primary-care physicians. It is "bankrupting families," "bankrupting businesses" and "bankrupting our government at the state and federal level. So we know things are going to have to change." Obama's second major point is that--to quote from the same broadcast--"if you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don't want you to have to change ... So what we're saying is, If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it." So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?

In other health reform news, Jim Capretta points to a recent CBO letter that should put whatever proof any who needs still needs convincing past the standard of "reasonable doubt" that this is going to be pricey: "The net cost of the coverage provisions would be growing at a rate of more than 8 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019...Revenue from the surcharge on high-income individuals would be growing at about 5 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; that component would continue to grow at a slower rate than the cost of the coverage expansion in the following decade. In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits [pdf] during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window."

Culturally, Mark Regnerus in Christianity Today makes "The Case for Early Marriage:"

• "I am suggesting that when people wait until their mid-to-late 20s to marry, it is unreasonable to expect them to refrain from sex. It's battling our Creator's reproductive designs. The data don't lie. Our sexual behavior patterns—the kind I documented in 2007 in Forbidden Fruit—give us away. Very few wait long for sex. Meanwhile, women's fertility is more or less fixed, yet Americans are increasingly ignoring it during their 20s, only to beg and pray to reclaim it in their 30s and 40s.
• "I know, I know: God has someone in mind for [young women,] and it's just a matter of time before they meet. God does work miracles. But the fact remains that there just aren't as many serious Christian young men as there are women, and the men know it. Men get the idea that they can indeed find the ideal woman if they are patient enough. Life expectancies nearing 80 years prompt many to dabble with relationships in their 20s rather than commit to a life of "the same thing" for such a long time. Men have few compelling reasons to mature quickly. Marriage seems an unnecessary risk to many of them, even Christians. Sex seldom requires such a steep commitment. As a result, many men postpone growing up.
• "The abstinence industry perpetuates a blissful myth; too much is made of the explosively rewarding marital sex life awaiting abstainers. The fact is that God makes no promises of great sex to those who wait. Some experience difficult marriages. Spouses wander. Others cannot conceive children. In reality, spouses learn marriage, just like they learn communication, child-rearing, or making love...In sum, Christians need to get real about marriage: it's a covenant helpmate thing that suffers from too much idealism and too little realism. Weddings may be beautiful, but marriages become beautiful."

Seven pages, with some dryer sections, but recommended for all who might consider becoming married someday.

Lastly, The Economist has a report on an issue near and dear to my heart: "A generation ago, home-schooling was rare and, in many states, illegal. Now, according to the Department of Education, there are roughly 1.5m home-schooled students in America, a number that has doubled in a decade. That is about 3% of the school-age population. The National Home Education Research Institute puts the number even higher, at between 1.8m and 2.5m."

Attack of the Lynx! [Part V]

The Economist has a cleverly-written while fairly pedestrian look at the first half-year of the Obama administration. Some choice quotes:

• "An impression is being formed in Washington of a presidency that is far too ready to hand over the direction of domestic policy to Congress; that is drifting either deliberately or lethargically leftwards; and that is more comfortable with lofty visions than details."
• "He has been curiously ill-served by a press short of useful criticism, with liberal America prepared only to debate what sort of water he walks on best, while conservative radio hosts argue over when exactly he became a communist."
• "What should Mr Obama do? He must come down from his cloud and start leading. The House Democrats could be usefully reminded that their present 78-seat margin owes everything to the president’s coat-tails; they are endangering his popularity."

Your faithful Heritage automaton brings you this public service announcement: "One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Top 10 Reasons Obamacare Is Wrong for America." But seriously, please do read it, even if you disagree with all 10, I think it's really important. It is 1/6 of the American economy, after all, and we all come into contact with it at some point.

In related news, from Rasmussen via Sullivan:


Enough politics.

I found this article from October 2008 in the NYT that raises some interesting questions about both infidelity and social science research: "Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men...data show that in any given year, about 10 percent of married people — 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women — say they have had sex outside their marriage."

I've always been a little skeptical of the mega-church crowd (Osteen, Warren, et al) and this Slate piece by Clint Rainey raises some interesting points - "God wants to give you your own home." Sorry, I missed that in my Bible. ("It's not my job to try to straighten everybody out," Osteen famously told Larry King in 2005, adding, "My message is a message of hope.")

St. Paul was awesome and this is kind of even more awesome. "Benedict said archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul."

"The girls—all white and middle class—started budding breasts a full year earlier than their counterparts just 15 years ago (the age of menstruation had advanced about four months). While that’s a stunner in itself, the real head-scratcher was that the change in girls’ body weight was minimal and couldn’t account for the difference. Nearly all the girls in both groups were relatively thin...So if fat isn’t resetting the puberty clock, what is?" Two theories are divorce and the media, according to the Double X blog.

Book: "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart," Bill Bishop

• “In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties.”
• “The Big Sort, then, is not simply about political partisanship, about how Americans vote every couple of years. It is a division in what they value, in how they worship, and in what they expect out of life.”
• “The old systems of order – around land, family, class, tradition, and religious denomination – gave way. They were replaced over the next thirty years with a new order based on individual choice. Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-minded sources of news and entertainment.”
• “Unsurpassed prosperity had set people free – free to think, speak, move, and drift. Unsurpassed prosperity had enriched Americans – and it had loosened long-established social moorings.”
• “The more educated American become – and the richer – the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view, [Diana] Mutz wrote [in “Hearing the Other Side.”]
• “We have migrated into ever-narrower communities and churches and political groups…We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings…In thts time, we have reshaped our economies, transformed our businesses, both created and decimated our cities, and altered institutions of faith and fellowship that have withstood centuries. Now more isolated than ever in our private lives cocooned with our fellows, we approach public life the sensibility of customers who are always right. “Tailor-made” has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government too. But democracy doesn’t seem to work that way.”
• “In 1976, the average winning margin in the 50 states and Washington, DC, was 10 percentage points…In 2008, the average winning margin…was 17.4 percentage points.”

It's Against the Laws of the Universe!

It's not often you find something akin to wisdom on Late Night TV, but Craig Ferguson (love his accent) comes close:

Gay marriage etc

Courtesy of 538, two gay marriage items of interest. First, current law and attitudes -



Secondly, some predictions for all 50 states: Will Iowans Uphold Gay Marriage?


If you don't regularly read Ross Douthat, start. Every Monday in the NYT. Here's his (trenchant) thoughts from July 13.

SO TRUE SO TRUE SO TRUE - I don't agree with the hypothetical causes, but it's still funny: "The generation that ignited Pottermania as preadolescent readers is approaching college graduation or entering the workplace, and they have kept alive this flame of their early adolescence." Cute.

In honor of Vincenz Czerny

For all you ladies eyeing each other with envy and longing, your waiting is over: Presenting My Free Implants

Thank you, New York Times, for bringing attention to something that has always bugged me about Mr. President's rhetoric: His fondness for men of straw. Also, I call on every loyal son (and daughter) of Notre Dame to rally and protest his latest outrageous comment. Last NYT piece of note - I thought Kristof's column about disgust and politics hit home: "People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives." That explains a lot. :)

Nate Silverof 538.com is at it again with an interesting little analysis of the number of abortions in each state plotted against the number of people who self-identify as pro-life. Intuitive, but interesting.

Um?

Putting the "never" in never-been-kissed...

Book: “How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse"

Quotes that struck me from "How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse,” by David Frum, resident scholar at AEI and former Bush43 speechwriter.

• “The social transformation of the 1970s was real and was permanent. It left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant; less deferential, less self-confident, less united; more socially-equal, less economically equal; more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual; less literate, less polite, less reticent.”
• “37 million American – meaning one household out of four – had suffered a rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny or auto theft in 1973. In cities of more than 100,000 population, the victimization rate was one household out of every three.”
• [Eisenstadt v. Baird] “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For the 20th-century Americans it was sexual freedom.”
• “The 1879 Connecticut statue overturned by Griswold had not been enforced in decades. The birth-control pill appeared on the market in 1961, a decade before the birth rate plunged. It was women’s preferences, not contraceptive techniques, that changed in the 1970s. The women of the 1970s wanted small families – often, they wanted no family at all.”
• “The dumbing down of the curriculum was encouraged by changes within the teaching progression. The 1970s were the decade in which teaching was transformed from a low-paying, relatively prestigious profession to a relatively well-paid, unprestigious occupation.”
• “What divides left-wing social activism from traditionalist is the locus of the sin to be stamped out. The left has usually been drawn to collective problem (segregation, poverty, sexism, the war in Vietnam); the traditionalists, to individual vices and weakness (drunkenness, drug addiction, abortion.)”
• “More than two-thirds of the women who turned eighteen between the end of the Korean War and the Kennedy inauguration acknowledged sleeping with only one man as of their thirtieth birthday – their fiancé or husband, presumably. Only 2 percent of the women who turned eighteen between 1971 and 1980 could say the same thing on their thirtieth birthdays.”
• “If nonmarital sex between consenting adults was okay, as a majority of American was coming to believe, how did it become wrong if those adults happened both to be women or both to be men?”
• “It is telling that of the thirty-five states that ultimately ratified the ERA, twenty-two did so in the ten months before Roe v. Wade, and only thirteen in the ten years after.”
• “Between 1972 and 1980, the proportion of Americans who…paid attention to public affairs “most of the time” dropped from 36 percent to 26 percent…But was it really so surprising? For a decade, power had been massively and systematically transferred from the elective branches of government, where it could be controlled, to no-elective branches, where it could not…Was it surprising that a country whose government had decided to treat its people like subjects should find that those same people no longer felt themselves to be citizens?”
• “In 1980, there were 27 million poor people in America, or about 12.4 percent of the population, approximately the same proportion as in 1965. The level of poverty [after LBJ’s “Great Society” efforts] in the United States had not much changed over those fifteen years, but its character had. Poverty, before 1960 mostly rural and white, became urban and nonwhite. Almost 70 percent of America’s poor lived in metropolitan areas in 1980.”
• “[After the 70s,] Americans were not retuning to the era of laissez faire. Rugged individualism no longer swayed them, Neither, however, did the social-democratic ethos of the middle years of the century. Americans were moving on to something new, a creed that blended the antique ideal of self-reliance with a soft sense of entitlement for those who made some minimal effort on their own behalf,. It was a fuzzy political idea – perfect for the fuzzy era to come – and the struggle to imbue it with meaning would define the politics of the post-Cold War era.”
• “The parents’ myth [of the “Greatest Generation”] is much more appealing than the other: Who would not be prouder of having fought through he mud of Guadalcanal than having fornicated in the mud at Woodstock? But…it is as foolish to idealize the past as to condescend to it…Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, ever had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the county been more economically equal, never had it bee more ethically homogenous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering.”
• “The Vietnam war did not merely discredit the government that chose to wage it; it discredited the habits of mind that made the war possible; it discredited the very style and sensibility of mid-century America, from Bob Hope’s entertainment of the troops to the coats and ties in college dining lounges. It taught an entire generation the oppositional style that to this day so often substitutes for real politics.

Special Interesting things

From a NYT Magazine elegy to his father , by Christopher Buckley - "The term “control freak” is pejorative. Put it this way: Few great men — and I use the term precisely, for Pup [William F. Buckley] was a great man — do not assert total control over their domains. I doubt Winston Churchill ever said, “Whatever.”" Love it.

Let's all get married - "Married people earn more, save more and build more wealth compared with people who are single or cohabiting. (Say what you will about the benefits of cohabitation, it's a categorically less stable arrangement, far more prone to division than marriage.)" And as far it goes, I agree, to an extent.

Single and dead mothers

It's the controversy that will not die, for better or for worse: "Notre Dame is regarded as an academic powerhouse and conservative Catholic bastion..." I'm honestly surprised that the controversy has had the legs that it has.

With a tip of the hat to April 6's "Best of the Web Today" from The Wall Street Journal: "Ludwig Minelli described suicide as a “marvellous opportunity” that should not be restricted to the terminally ill or people with severe disabilities." Commentary:

• "Except for the method of death, this is indistinguishable from suttee, the Hindu practice of widow-burning. Suttee is very rare today, thanks in part to laws enacted by both the British Raj and the government of modern India. But here we see a new form of it arising in Europe under the guise of progressive ideas about the "right to die." It is an example of how moral relativism can lead to absolute barbarism."

Lastly, the CDC just came out with statistics about the rate of births to unwed mothers - 38.5 percent. Basically, 2 out of every 5 children being born today are born to single mothers. Point for debate: This is good for society/no. Discuss.

Crossing my Ts and dotting my Irish eyes

For those who are hoping for an exciting football season next year, team profiles by MSNBC/The Sporting News and ESPN.com can not help but raise anticipation and excitement a little.

I apologize for the following heft. My virtual post-it is groaning under the weight of so many abandoned links.

"I think me and the person I do it with will both profit greatly from the deal." - I can't see how that $2.5 million investment is worth it for any sane male at any stage in life, but what do I know...After all, America's consumed with an irrational obsession with purity, apparently. So what better to do than turn it into a game? Rah rah capitalism!

In the mood for music? Zap! Jesus is a friend of mine that has got to get into my life. Two for one! The accompanying videos are what basically make the both of them, though. Please share.

***PARTISAN INTERLUDE*** "Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits." In 1999.

"In another [study,] a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent." Innnnnnnteresting.

From your local Heritage automaton: A Doctor's Right. But seriously, though, why can't we just let them do what they think is right? Please?

That's enough for now.

Attack of the Linx! [Part III]

These are mainly things I want to get back to reading tomorrow or at a certain point.

"Red Sex, Blue Sex"

"Thank God America Isn't Like Europe -- Yet"

"But Enough About You..."

"Weekend Opinionator: Obama's Communication Breakdown"

"An Open Letter to Fr John I Jenkins, C S C, President of the University of Notre Dame"

The last one is my own contribution :)

Ketchup

Slight backlog of stuff I've been meaning to put up for a while now, so bear with me:

This is just weird. Some people are messed up. Body integrity identity disorder? I'm sorry...

You may have seen this story out of Florida, which has been in the news recently...But here's my question: If it's such a disgusting and shocking thing, why would have it have been any less shocking if the abortionist made it to the appointment on time and sucked the baby's brains out?

Rick Santorum is awesome and gave a great speech at CPAC while I was there.

I'm not generally a William Saletan fan, but it sounds like he is genuinely trying to find the middle ground, but he just doesn't "get it:" It's not just a political issue, it's a cultural and moral issue. But if he's saying things like this - "This isn't a shortage of pills or condoms. It's a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It's a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation—and the subsequent killing, through abortion—of a developing human being." - then at least we have common ground we can try to work towards, even if I would disagree with the methods. (And I and other conservatives aren't the only ones doubting the conventional wisdom...)

More to come someday.