Ear prints?

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Criminals are used to trying to avoid leaving fingerprints at a crime scene. But now British scientists have developed a computerized system that allows them to identify ear prints just as easily.

Privacy in Retreat?

Drudge linked to this William Safire column lamenting loss of privacy in the wake of 9/11.

But it turns out that he was only working himself up to fussing about attempted research into abortions by the Justice Department. Why, the sanctity of medical records might be violated!

If in fact the Justice Department was trying to assemble a list of abortion recipients for some sort of harassment, then I say hang the creeps. But that's not what's going on here - their stated purpose is to see if partial birth abortions are medically necessary. And the radical pro-abortion crowd can't stand this, because they know very well that it will expose partial-birth abortions as being medically unnecessary and irrelevant to the health of the mother.

What's really going on here is that politics have trumped science again.

The gallstone and the spleen

Much-abused Attorney General John Ashcroft is having his gallbladder removed today.

This reminds me of an old item from the Corner. I'm sure some lefty will be reusing it in one form or another.

Protein Wisdom is back!

I don't care if you just followed Reynolds' link - go back anyway. Tomorrow too. And the next....

Marketing whizzes

Last night Jay Leno showed some headlines featuring "Outhouse Springs" bottled water. Of course I had to look it up on the web.

Yep, it's for real:

This brand of bottled water was dreamed up by an advertising agency that wanted to gauge how effective outdoor billboard ads could be. So they put 40 billboards advertising the fictitious Outhouse Springs Water up around Charleston, South Carolina. The billboards sported slogans such as "It's #1, not #2!" People definitely noticed the ads and actually started asking for the stuff at retailers. Demand became so intense that the ad agency eventually made a deal with a bottled-water company to produce a limited run of Outhouse Springs Water. It's on sale now at Piggly Wiggly's in Charleston.

More here. The Leno gag suggests that the stuff is still out there.

On a somewhat related note, I've heard that there is a unique cheer at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. "Let's Go Peay!"

Virginia Postrel says:

This sort of indirect genetic evidence for human evolution is going to pile up until it resembles the overwhelming geological case against believing the earth is a few thousand years old.

Maybe so. But to say so is an act of faith.

Is there a competing scientific theory (ie that does not involve creation of humans as they are) for how human brains got to be the way they are? Not that I know of. But that is not the same as saying the current theory is correct. It might be telling us more about the ingenuity of the practitioners in the field in creating alternative explanations.

....you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows....

Kevin McGehee notes how certain elements have attempted to overthrow much of American traditional culture.

Just how long do imperial judges and liberal attack lawyers think we'll stand for this nonsense?

Martha Stern?

Martha Stewart was found guilty of several charges on Friday. She has been a big donor to Democrats. So how long will it take for someone to claim that the Administration is behind her troubles?

Maybe if she hurries she'll be able to tell her side on the Howard Stern show before he's taken off the air. You know, last I knew they were both unattached...

Politicized science from the American Anthropological Association

The AAA shows a hitherto unsuspected interest in the Constitution of the United States:

"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."

You know, Samoans are probably still laughing at Margaret Mead, and but let's assume that these people know what they're talking about this time and aren't addled by liberal politics. Why did they phrase their statement as they did?

In particular, is there any evidence that gay marriage will *not* harm societies? Is there any evidence that gay marriage will be beneficial to a society?

Don't cry to me about proving a negative. It's too bad if they have a hard time answering these questions - they're fair, obvious and relevant. If the AAA didn't want to have to deal with them they should have kept their mouths shut.

Planned Parenthood vs. science and life

Did you hear this?

A team of researchers in central Africa say they've uncovered what appears to be the earliest evidence of the human family ever found -- a skull, jawbone and teeth between 6 million and 7 million years old.

But Planned Parenthood is going to sue them for releasing this information because it violates that family's privacy.

Well, no, as far as I know Planned Parenthood isn't going to sue. But given their recent conduct who can be sure? After all, how is it that release of records of abortions kept by Planned Parenthood would violate the privacy of patients even if their names were removed?

But hey, I'm not a lawyer. And I'm not a doctor either, but how is it that all of a sudden after passing an intact fetus backwards, all but it's head, there suddenly is some medical necessity to (as the link puts it) "puncture its skull"? Breech delivery is essential to the procedure, but is more dangerous to the mother, so where's the concern for her health? And by the time the mother has survived this, just what is left for the mother to miss? It seems clear that the mother's health has absolutely nothing to do with this procedure.

And that's what the govt intends to prove. But Planned Parenthood, with so much of their revenue dependent on killing fetuses, can't permit science to advance this way. Keep moving, no conflict of interest here!

Perhaps there are those who think that a partial birth abortion does no worse than "puncture its skull". After all, nobody would want to stick a syringe into the back of their skulls to have their brains sucked out, to facilitate the subsequent crushing of their skulls. We can't let mama know - it might affect her health.

Incidentally, do you suppose PETA would approve if we slaughtered animals by sucking their brains out and crushing their skulls?

You've lost it, Howard

Yes, I've seen and heard Howard Stern. And I never guessed he'd be this whiny.

Sorry pal, but you're caught in a backlash caused by Janet Jackson's stunt and this attempt to force gay marriage into law without consultation. If it were this easy to get critics off the air, Bill Clinton would have had Rush Limbaugh stuffed and mounted.

Another veteran on John Kerry

From a letter to John Kerry that was forwarded to Jay Bryant:

I saw brave men fight and die; I saw brave, good men pass out all their rations to hungry kids, build churches and schools, donate to orphanages, cry silently at the sight of villagers slaughtered by North Vietnamese, but I never saw anything approaching the war crimes that you happened to witness as your boat sped by villages on the river bank. If you witnessed atrocities and did not report them, you are guilty of aiding and abetting. If you lied, you are simply unfit for leadership at any level.

......

I know dozens of retired military professionals. None of them support you - there is a reason for that. They all served honorably and well, and they all believe that you did not. I know war heroes, and your, sir, are no war hero.

Ralph Nader - why he's running

According to Thomas Sowell.

Want the truth? They've moved on.

A Democratic-leaning online group will run television commercials in 17 presidential battleground states starting Thursday to counter President Bush's multimillion-dollar advertising blitz that will begin the same day.
Democratic-leaning? Boy, you can't sneak anything past that reporter.

Check out Hawspipe to see what to expect from MoveOn's ads.

"It just never came up"

It's sad to see a man outlive his reputation. Here's former "objective" newsman Walter Cronkite, speaking in San Francisco on the longevity of his marriage to Betsy:

"I do think one of the factors was we were of different sexes." He looked delighted as the laughter billowed around the room.

Now imagine Walt feeling a rush of terror - joking or not, he had just dared to suggest that the sexual composition of marriage might have some correlation with its success! How would he talk his way out of this one?

"That doesn't mean I wouldn't have been happy to be married to several friends I had of the same sex," he followed. "It just never came up in our particular relations."

Never came up, eh Walt? They have pills for that now, you know. And you can always just catch instead.

Are you "coming out", Walt? Or are you just whoring to the audience?

And is there the slightest chance that you've just insulted your wife? "Oh, her? Well, I would have been happy with this one, or this one, or this one...." Make him pay, Mrs. Cronkite, make him pay.

Go home Walt, while some of your dignity is still intact.

A gay wedding in Saudi Arabia?

This is what Reuters says.

CNN is reporting that a South Korean credit card firm announced mass layoffs through cell phone text messages.

Daniel Boorstin, RIP

Daniel Joseph Boorstin, 89, the prizewinning and bestselling author and historian who had served as librarian of Congress and director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology, died of pneumonia yesterday at Sibley Memorial Hospital.

Boorstin was author of two dozen books, which were translated into at least 30 languages. Millions of copies have been sold around the world. The best known include a trilogy on American history, a trilogy on world history and a 1962 social and cultural commentary titled "The Image." In this book, Boorstin coined the phrase "pseudo event," which he described as a staged happening with little or no purpose other than to generate publicity. He also postulated that some celebrities were famous chiefly for being famous.

You can't go wrong reading any of this man's works.

Required reading

That's right. This piece is long, but it's worth every word.

My experience with gay politics is that they are the nastiest, hands down. All dissent is met with ad hominems, and their public protests are always the rudest. And on a personal level you run into crap like the emotional blackmail someone tried with Michele a week or so ago.

Nevertheless I've been trying to write a post to treat "gay marriage" as something worthy of analysis in an environment where its supporters' positions essentially boil down to "WAAAAH!". The advocates have the usual insults for their opponents. The opponents in turn always seem to invoke philosophical or religious arguments which only work if you share their values.

The post above is mostly what I wish I had written. Thanks to Malcolm S. of Occam's Toothbrush for leading me to it.

Well, I have to quote some of it:

What happens now if children grow up in a society that overtly teaches that homosexual partnering is not "just as good as" but actually is marriage?

Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.

Can you doubt that the textbooks will be far behind? Any depictions of "families" in schoolbooks will have to include a certain proportion of homosexual "marriages" as positive role models.

Television programs will start to show homosexual "marriages" as wonderful and happy (even as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive and conflict-ridden).

The propaganda mill will pound our children with homosexual marriage as a role model. We know this will happen because we have seen the fanatical Left do it many times before.

So when our children go through the normal adolescent period of sexual confusion and perplexity, which is precisely the time when parents have the least influence over their children and most depend on the rest of society to help their children grow through the last steps before adulthood, what will happen?

Already any child with any kind of sexual attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible destiny, despite the large number of heterosexuals who move through this adolescent phase and never look back.

Already any child with androgynous appearance or mannerisms -- effeminite boys and masculine girls -- are being nurtured and guided (or taunted and abused) into "accepting" what many of them never suspected they had -- a desire to permanently move into homosexual society.

In other words, society will bend all its efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young people and encourage it.

Now, there is a myth that homosexuals are "born that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.

In fact what evidence there is suggests that if there is a genetic component to homosexuality, an entire range of environmental influences are also involved. While there is no scientific research whatsoever that indicates that there is no such thing as a borderline child who could go either way.

Those who claim that there is "no danger" and that homosexuals are born, not made, are simply stating their faith.

The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

It's that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."

They are unhappy, but they think it's because the rest of us "don't fully accept them."

Homosexual "marriage" won't accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it.

They will make it harder for us to raise children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take their place in the reproductive cycle. They will use all the forces of our society to try to encourage our children that it is desirable to be like them.

I don't care what they say, today is Sadie Hawkins day.

What's the origin of the Sadie Hawkins dance?

When I first heard of it, in 1972, it was celebrated on February 29. The initial concept showed up in 1937, and by 1939 hundreds of colleges were celebrating it.

It's hard to believe that Li'l Abner has been gone for 27 years.