Misleading headline

The headline says "Segregation persists in town behind Brown". It goes on to tell of a local public school that is 99% black, and another one that is 90% white.

OK, but the 90% white school is a private school. Brown v. Board of Education was about public schools and certainly couldn't force the integration of private schools.

I've lived in the rural South, and one of my junior high schools had been the black senior high. I'm not under any illusions about why that private school is there, and there are countless others like it throughout the South.

But can no one else see something fishy about a statement like "separate is inherently unequal", such as is asserted in Brown? Someone actually claimed that "...if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation." Yeah, right - black kids are automatically shortchanged if white kids aren't present. Am I the only one that sees that as insulting to blacks?

It's long past now, and IMO integration did me good. I didn't have to spend half my day commuting across town to satisfy some judge's idea of racial justice though. There had to be a way to make this happen without inflicting such questionable law on us in the process.

Feminism where it's needed, for a change

A group of Muslim women are "reclaiming the rights Islam gave women in the 7th century. Go sisters go!

Stolen from Instapundit.

Put me on that jury!

"Single mother says she can't afford $500,000 fine for daughter's downloads"

Bastards.

Voices of the dead

Well, sort of.

Where the rubber meets the road

"STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swedish aid organization will roll out a new line of defense to the country's emergency services next week -- the condom ambulance.

From Friday, June 4, amorous couples can call the telephone number 696969 and a white van featuring a large red condom with wings as a logo will deliver them a packet of 10 prophylactics.
'We need to increase the usage of condoms,' said Carl Osvald, marketing manager for the Swedish Organization for Sex Education, the non-governmental organization behind the initiative. 'It is 50 percent about pregnancy and 50 percent about sexually transmitted diseases.' "

Old English slang

No, we're not talking about Chaucer - this is just something I found from the Gutenberg project which lists some English slang from around 1800.

This explains a lot of things

Have you marveled at French behavior regarding Iraq and the Middle East. I have a theory - their moral philosophers have been sleeping.

Beaker's Corner points us here, where we learn that French aren't getting enough sleep (and we Anglo-Saxons are at fault).

I'll admit that the French have developed leisure as an art form. The products which they are best known for, wine and cheese, came about because the French learned that if they sat on their asses long enough, microorganisms would do their work for them. Too lazy to bathe or shower, they invented the bidet, and that only because they believed that venereal diseases came from riding horses.

But it doesn't stop there. In business, they find it easier to sell overpriced goods and services to dictators like Saddam Hussein than to compete against modern economies. There's the 35 hour work week, which may be even too slack for them. And let's not forget the millions of unassimilated immigrants - their next war with Algerians might happen on French soil.

IMO what they need is a wake-up call.

Grudgenetics

What do you know? - it turns out that all those stories about white masters beating black slaves here in the US weren't true after all. For those of you who find this controversial, the answer is right here.

You see, Isaac Cortez Bynum is charged with murder by abuse in the June 30 death of his son Ryshawn Lamar Bynum. He did so because African Americans today are affected by past centuries of U.S. slavery because the original slaves were never treated for the trauma of losing their homes; seeing relatives whipped, raped and killed; and being subjugated by whites.

The slave theory is the work of Joy DeGruy-Leary, an assistant professor in the Portland State University Graduate School of Social Work. In the hands of Bynum's state-appointed lawyer, "I think it can be proven. The problem is it's brand new. It's not as easy to present in court as something that's been established over years."

Yeah really, especially if you try to do it with a straight face.

But really now - if this is the first case identified after all this time, then there must not have been so much abuse after all, right? Or has this been sneaking under the radar for all these years?

Or else maybe this is the leading edge of a wave. Soon there will be millions of cases of black men killing their children because of this effect. Someone call DCFS!

Yeah yeah, we must be able to study ideas and follow the truth where it leads us, and weird ideas are OK as long as we reject them. But this one doesn't pass the first order giggle test. As far as I'm concerned the lawyer who put this forward should be billed for wasting the court's time.

Like animals

Debra Saunders: Target of the week: "Animal-rights activists went to the home of a Chiron employee one night last year to send a message. They pounded on her front door, rang her doorbell and shouted, 'Open the door,' followed by an epithet. Another night, they shouted through bullhorns and then bragged about it on the Internet. Someone also exploded two pipe bombs in her workplace.

Her crime? She was a paralegal for the Chiron Corp. in Emeryville, Calif., which engages in animal research to develop vaccines and other lifesaving products. It was her bad luck that Chiron had contracted with the animal-research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences -- and worse luck that animal-rights activists had formed a group committed to putting Huntingdon out of business, a group that was willing to intimidate any individual toward that end."

Imagine the fuss if someone set off some pipe bombs at an abortion clinic. Why don't these creeps get the same kind of coverage anti-abortion protesters get?

"Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States."

Quoth Reggie Rivers, star of the storied Denver Broncos backfield of the early 90's, who must have taken a few too many shots to the head. What an ignorant SOB!

He might be a one-trick pony - here he compares the treatment of gays to that of blacks in the '50s. I didn't see that, but my history books must have left out the gay high schools and how they all of them had to sit in the back of the bus. Imagine how horrible it would have been to have gay-only public bathrooms.

Incidentally, unless he was one heck of a blocker he wasn't so hot a pro player either. In the 1994 season, which happens to be the first one I found on Google, he was good for 1.9 yards per carry and 83 entire yards. In total yardage he fell between two quarterbacks (David Klingler and Neil O'Donnell), and they both had more yards per carry.

But that's enough from me. We'll let Baldilocks do the wet work here.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

It serves him right for hanging around with Madonna:

BOSTON - Stating that someone is homosexual does not libel or slander them, particularly in light of new court decisions granting gays more rights, a federal judge has ruled.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner came as she threw out a lawsuit by a former boyfriend of pop singer Madonna who claimed he was libeled because his name appeared in a photo caption in a book about Madonna - under a picture of Madonna walking with a gay man.

I'd be amused if some gay group sued this guy for defamation because he said calling him gay was defamatory.

Know your place

Mark's Bitch Letter Generator for women, and Mark's Apology Note Generator

Pictures and profiles of Al Qaeda suspects

Right here, via The Corner.

Stem cells - why can't the ESCR proponents be honest?

Call me a Cro-Magnon if you want, but sometimes the only response some people deserve is a good old-fashioned bust in the mouth. And these lying conniving embryonic stem cell advocates are heading rapidly for that territory. I've been sitting on this post for a few days gradually sucking out venom and haven't fully succeeded.

See this by Eric Cohen on National Review Online. First the general:

The promise of embryonic-stem-cell research is very real but wholly speculative. No human therapies of any kind have yet been developed or tested, and none are on the horizon. And the notion that embryonic stem cells will cure "cancer" and "heart disease," broad categories of disease that encompass a complex array of particular ailments, is unsupported by even informed conjectures.

Now more specific:

"There are estimated to be more than 400,000 IVF embryos, which are currently frozen and will likely be destroyed if not donated, with informed consent of the couple, for research." This implies that while the Bush policy funds research on only a few dozen lines, hundreds of thousands of embryos are out there for scientific use. But this is simply false. The same 2003 study that arrived at the 400,000 number made it clear that only about three percent of these frozen embryos are actually available for research — the others remain in the custody of the parents who created them, and are specifically designated for future use in initiating a pregnancy. Whether the parents really plan to implant them or not — some parents simply cannot bear to let them go — these embryos are not public property. The study further did the math, and concluded that if all available frozen embryos were used only for embryonic-stem-cell research, they would yield about 275 lines of stem cells. Not thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands, but 275 is all scientists can expect to get from frozen IVF embryos.

But it gets worse:

This points to a serious question about the intentions of embryonic-stem-cell advocates. In the May issue of Scientific American, prominent embryonic-stem-cell researchers Robert Lanza and Nadia Rosenthal wrote that the actual therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells would be hampered by immune-rejection problems that could only be overcome by cell treatments compatible with the immune system of patients. "Hundreds of thousands of ES-cell lines might be needed to establish a bank of cells with immune matches for most potential patients," they wrote, and "creating that many lines could require millions of discarded embryos from IVF clinics."

We will likely never have "millions of discarded embryos," and nothing the president can do could change that. Moreover, the article suggests how far we might be from any workable treatments using embryonic stem cells. Does the House letter mean to call for a national project whose end is millions of embryos created for research? How many of the 206 signers understood that this might be necessary? And while it is true that many scientists believe we can find cures with fewer embryos, what will they do if Lanza and Rosenthal are right?

B-b-but we only have a few lines to work with!:

Finally, the letter offers no evidence that the number of available lines has already proven to be a barrier to any particular researcher's specific work at this point. No other advocate or scientist has offered such evidence either. It is certainly true that more money for more lines could mean more work would get done. But that is not the same as saying that ongoing work has hit a wall because of the limited number of lines now available for federal funding, or that it will soon hit such a wall.

But here's the part that really chaps me:

Stepping back, a pattern of facts emerges. Embryonic-stem-cell research is promising but so far purely speculative; the federal government in no way limits such research in the private sector; supporters of the research believe they can obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding in the next few years, as the creation of new stem-cell institutes at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin demonstrates; and yet, despite the ethical objections of a very substantial portion of the public, stem-cell advocates insist that Congress should compel every American to support the research with tax dollars, and to make that happen they inflate the promise and distort the facts surrounding the research.

We have obscenely rich individuals like Ted Turner (giving a $billion in stock to the UN? He would have done better with Enron) and George Soros who fund fashionable lefty causes - why don't they pony up for this rather than roping in all of us? Obviously this isn't about human health, it's about getting their way and forcing the rest of us to participate - they can have what they want without involving the govt and they choose not to.

Enough - I'm not disgustingly rich, so if I know what's good for me I'll have to drop this now. Just read it all, and then ask yourself why it's more important for the govt to pay than it is to get the work done.

Food for thought

"For more than a decade I believed that the first President Bush made a massive mistake in leaving Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. I almost voted against him for this wobbliness in 1992. But the longer the fight drags on in Iraq today, the more I thank God that the first Gulf War stopped with the liberation of Kuwait."

Criminalizing policy disputes

Carl Bernstein has drunk the Kool-Aid. Whatsamatter Carl, been second banana to Bob Woodward for too long?

Today, the issue may not be high crimes and misdemeanors, but rather Bush's failure, or inability, to lead competently and honestly.

Yeah, I like the idea of a President leading competently and honestly, but unlike Bernstein I think we have that now. To hint at impeachment is far beyond the pale of even rabid partisanship.

Elsewhere in the article Bernstein rants about Abu Ghraib prison, going so far as to speak of an American Gulag. That's rich, because the original Gulags in the Soviet Union were often used for people guilty of "thought crime". You know, people who disagreed with the Establishment. Working from the wrong set of principles, such people obviously could not be competent or honest, so they had to be locked up.

And if Bernstein keeps this nonsense up maybe he should be confined himself. Not to a gulag, but an old-fashioned mental hospital.

Right answer, wrong reason

Back in engineering school it wasn't enough just to get the right answer. The staff went over the supporting work, and if they didn't like it you'd still get marked wrong. It cost me letter grades more than once when I was a little too terse for somebody's taste.

But I wanted to be an engineer. If I were willing to settle for lower standards I would have been a green.

That's not to say that greens can't come up with the right answer sometimes. Looky here:'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming':

Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.

His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.

Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.

We've learned a lot since the last generation of nuclear power plants was built. They've performed well in terms of safety and reliability, and the next generation will be even better. And whether you buy Lovelock's beliefs about global warning or not, you have to recognize the correlation between the availability of energy and economic capacity.

So under the circumstances, I'll give Lovelock full credit for getting the right answer.

Dedication

In recognition of a recent travesty at Cannes, I present "The Man without a Country".

News cycles

That journalistic paragon Matt Drudge's front page currently contains this: "President fell off bike Saturday.. Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, 'Did the training wheels fall off?'... Reporters are debating whether to treat it is as on or off the record... Developing... " Yep, that's our diplomat - Indymedia or DU couldn't have said it any better.

Yep, President Bush had a spill:

President Bush suffered cuts and bruises early Saturday afternoon when he fell while mountain biking on his ranch, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

Bush was on the 16th mile of a 17-mile ride when he fell, Duffy said. He was riding with a military aide, members of the Secret Service and his personal physician, Dr. Richard Tubb.

"He had minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees," Duffy said. "Dr. Tubb, who was with him, cleaned his scratches, said he was fine. The Secret Service offered to drive him back to the house. He declined and finished his ride."

Bush was wearing his bike helmet and a mouth guard when the mishap occurred. Duffy said he didn't know exactly how the accident happened.

"It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."

Of course Kerry had his own little spill a while back. No mountain biker, he fell when he hit a patch of sand. He wasn't riding a mountain bike, but all the same it's that much less reason to be speaking of someone else's "training wheels".

Heads and tails

: "It has been reported that when the remains of Japanese soldiers were repatriated from the Mariana Islands in 1984, sixty percent were missing their skulls.'" Follow that link to get an idea of what kind of pictures were published in Life magazine during WWII.

Link stolen from Colby Cosh. The link that follows includes one of those prison pictures that looks like a Massachusetts bachelor party, so it may be NSFW, but he has much to say about the Abu Ghraib prison affair here. (Arse gratia artis? - oh stop it!).