Vox Popoli

71 – Wisconsin
62 – Bucknell

Well, the Orange and the Blue made a game of it. Good on them. It was a no-lose situation, since knocking off a big name program like Kansas is about as good as it gets for a small school in March. But McNaughton is only a sophmore, so as the White Buffalo says, next year we’re going ALL THE WAY.

France’s political elite was stunned on Friday by an opinion poll that showed for the first time a majority of voters opposed the European Union constitutional treaty. Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, warned of a “political cataclysm” if France voted No to the constitution in a national referendum on May 29.

However, Mr Delors predicted that the Yes campaign, which has only just been launched, would ultimately prevail. “I believe in the good sense of the people. They will not confuse this vote with questions of internal politics,” Mr Delors said in a newspaper interview.

The poll of 802 people, conducted earlier this week, showed that 51 per cent of respondents would vote No if the referendum were held on Sunday. Support for the Yes campaign slumped 14 points from the previous month to 49 per cent, following a tumultuous spell in French politics.

I’m sure that even a few no votes won’t kill the EU, since it’s about as genuinely democratic as the Third Reich it is designed to replace. But it’s good to see that some Frenchmen are beginning to rethink the wisdom of a dictatorial pan-European empire. It wasn’t a good concept when Napoleon and Hitler were running one, and doing the same thing with a few soulless Brussels bureaucrats in charge is no improvement.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

That’s a direct quote from the White Buffalo, following Bucknell’s upset of Kansas. The boys will all be walking a little taller today. Next up, Wisconsin.

badger badger badger badger BISON BISON

UPDATE: Chad the Elder snorts in disbelief: Their basketball squad just got bounced by noted basketball powerhouse Bucknell. Buck-frickin’-nell?

Word ’em up, Elder-san. Buck-frickin’-nell. B-U (clap, clap) beat you (clap clap).

A few years ago, Space Bunny and I had Thanksgiving dinner with a pro basketball player and his wife. He played for Georgetown back when they were trouncing us in the first round of the tournament. He not only remembered the game, but was kind enough to say that the Bison had hung tough with them for the first twelve minutes. It’s good to see them finally pull one off at the Big Dance.

Ben Shapiro grows out of Three Monkey Republicanism:

The time has come to do away with judicial review as a whole. The judicial branch has been politicized to such an extent that judges who fulfill Hamilton’s qualifications – judges who compare legislation to the actual Constitution – are dubbed conservative extremists, while judges who legislate from the bench are termed moderates. The system has become so thoroughly corrupt that the only choice left to us is a constitutional amendment ending judicial review of legislative acts.

“How can legislatures be trusted not to violate the Constitution, if there is no check upon them?” many will ask. The check will be the people themselves. If our elected lawmakers violate the Constitution, they will be answerable to us. This is not the case under our current system: Our judges are answerable to no one.

This is without a doubt young Mr. Shapiro’s best piece yet. I would only change one thing, which is to remind him that the federal judiciary actually is answerable to us. It’s called the Second Amendment.

When in the course of human events….

In a marriage of modern mythmakers, the Walt Disney Co. is marketing a film based on C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. And in doing so, Disney will take a page from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on Lewis’ novel for children and Christian allegory, will be released Dec. 9.

For Disney, the Christian marketing campaign represents a sharp break with corporate policy. Apart from Disney World’s annual Nights of Joy concerts, the film is the company’s first undertaking with the religious community. For some evangelical leaders, it represents the effective end of their Disney boycott.

The entertainment giant, which bills itself as a “Magic Kingdom,” has carefully avoided religion for most of its history. Yet Disney has launched a 10-month campaign aimed at evangelical Christians to build support for Narnia, a $100 million, live-action and computer-generated animated feature it is co-producing with Walden Media.

Given the success of THE PASSION and THE LORD OF THE RINGS, it would be incredibly stupid for Disney to have turned Aslan into a dechristianized were-beast, Peter and Edmund into gay lovers, Susan into a dominatrix attracted to animals and Lucy an abuse survivor gradually recovering her memories of her mistreatment at the hands of the Professor, but given Disney’s recent history, you’d be hard to put it past them. Fortunately, greed appears to have gotten the better of the usual Hollywood propaganda, so it’s possible that the movie might actually be all right.

I’m rather looking forward to it, but then, it wouldn’t disturb me if they messed it up the way it would have disturbed me if Peter Jackson had destroyed THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I very much like Narnia, but I don’t love it in the same way I love THE DARK IS RISING or even THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN. Among other things, what happened to the electric appliances after the first book? Were they lost in the Telemarine dark age?

Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times:

The Democratic Party commits seppuku in the heartland by coming across as indifferent to people’s doubts about abortions or even as pro-abortion. A Times poll in January found that 61 percent of Americans favor tighter restrictions on abortion, or even a ban, while only 36 percent agree with the Democratic Party position backing current abortion law.

Although some regulars here have attempted to play around with the numbers and “prove” that most Americans favor a pro-choice position, their position is difficult to defend given the assertion by a liberal New York Times columnist that nearly two-thirds of the nation wants to junk Roe vs Wade and restrict women’s “right” to slay their unborn children.

Which should be pretty obvious, if you think about it. Legislators wouldn’t keep passing laws restricting abortion and having them shot down by the corrupt judiciary if they didn’t hold plenty of popular appeal.

Jonah Goldberg considers the silence of the felines:

Well, the inconvenient truth is that cats kill more American birds, particularly songbirds, than DDT and pesticides ever did. Wisconsin is considering allowing residents to shoot feral cats in part because a respected study found that felines kill between 7.8 million and 217 million birds in Wisconsin alone. Data from a Michigan study suggest that some 75 million birds are killed there just in the summer alone.

Estimates for how many birds cats kill in the United States vary almost as widely. The lowest estimates are around 100 million and go up to the 2.5 billion, though the consensus seems to hover around half a billion. What this leaves out, of course, is that many vulnerable bird species are particularly threatened by cats (and, alas, sometimes dogs as well), a non-native predator that often kills small animals for the fun of it….

For example, Carson’s memory is still invoked regularly by the anti-pesticide movement today. Anti-pesticide activists claim that some 67 million birds die every year from such chemicals. In other words, compounds that make food cheaper and more abundant for everybody kill between 10 and 20 percent of the number of birds killed by cats every year. And yet, environmentalists are terrified of making cats a major issue, because it will split the movement. An official at the World Wildlife Fund calls the cat issue a “third rail” for environmentalists.

Get rid of a bunch of filthy beasts AND upset the environmentalists while preserving nature. Do you see any downside? Because I sure don’t.

From the New York Times:

American colleges and universities do such a poor job of training the nation’s future teachers and school administrators that 9 of every 10 principals consider the graduates unprepared for what awaits them in the classroom, a new survey has found.

Nearly half the elementary- and secondary-school principals surveyed said the curriculums at schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, lacked academic rigor and were outdated, at times using materials decades older than the children whom teachers are now instructing. Beyond that, more than 80 percent of principals said the education schools were too detached from what went on at local elementary and high schools, a factor that made for a rift between educational theory and practice.

Yep, good thing we have those professionals making sure that our children get educated. Can’t leave it up to their parents, we need PROFESSIONALS like these highly trained, highly intelligent education majors who possess the requisite teaching certificate from a school of education.

Or something….

Most of you probably remember my contemptuous response to the Atriocities attempting to wax morally superior over my so-called anti-semitism. As I have said before, the idiocy of the Jewish leadership in America knows little in the way of bounds, as they go far out of their way to piss off the overwhelming Christian majority in this country by attempting to define everything openly Christian as illegal, anti-Constitutional and anti-semitic.

Meanwhile, in post-Christian Europe, things continue to literally heat up. I received a phone call from one of Space Bunny’s best friends a few minutes ago. She called to tell us that a synagogue very close to her husband’s parent’s house had been burned last night, as well as a Jewish-owned fabric shop. This was in Switzerland, of all places, not generally known as a hotbead of anti-semitic activity, although a rabbi was stabbed to death in Zurich four years ago.

If the Jewish leadership is ultimately successful in forcing Christians and Christianity out of American public and political life, they will learn to bitterly regret it. Not because Christians will seek revenge, but because non-Christian hatred for Jews will begin to blossom in America just as it has in Europe.

John Derbyshire performs the customary evolutionist quote-a-dope:

Several readers have sent me Fred Reed’s rumination on evolution (go look for the March 7 column), which I had anyway read — I am a great Fred fan. Fred & I have been exchanging occasional emails for a few years, and are basically simpatico — he knows a surprising amount of math. What did I think of the March 7 column? Well, I think the answers to some of Fred’s questions are rather obvious. E.g.: Why are so many biologists reluctant to say “I don’t know” when they don’t know the answer to a question? Because they are members of the human race, that’s why. Who among us is *not* so reluctant? (Not anti-evolutionists, for sure!)

Where Fred raises actual technical questions about the processes of evolution, they are ones that have been dealt with many, many times over, in books and on websites that are easy to find. This website is particularly good & well organized. I have started just sending the link for it in response to people who harass me with 2,000-word screeds about abiogenesis, frog proteins, or color vision. It’s all there, with plentiful references for further reading.

Sure, Derb, and that’s how one answer questions about math, right? After all, the vast majority of questions about math have been answered many, many times over, in books and on websites that are easy to find, and yet he never has a problem answering them in those cases. If anyone bothers to go check this one out and determine if it answers the specific questions Fred raised, do let me know. I expect it’s the usual weasel-wordeded, multi-citationed fury signifying nothing. Also, given that scientists and the sciencismic faithful claim that scientists are above the aforementioned human frailty by virtue of their training, Derb’s defense is embarrassingly weak. It reminds me of the way journalists are supposedly trained not to be biased….

I’m an anti-evolutionist and I have no problem whatsoever saying “I don’t know”. Beacuse I don’t know, neither does Derb and neither do the PhD-credentialed biologists. I’m starting to think that the last people to seriously believe in evolution were the eugenicists; the fact that most people who claim to believe in evolution find eugenicism completely repulsive demonstrates what little faith they have in natural selection.

Still, there’s no shame in that. After all, Jesus repeatedly pointed out the same thing about his followers.