Here’s the latest online widget being highlighted throughout the blogosphere.

And here are my results:

People with similar backgrounds who are already divorced:  18%

People with similar backgrounds who will be divorced over the next five years:  8% *  In general for the five-year divorce prediction rates, those with less than 3 percent are at lower
    risk, 3 - 7 percent are of average risk and more than 7 percent are at higher risk.

Feel free to post your results in the comments section.

Professor Althouse and her readers have been discussing tattoos a great deal lately. I don’t have a tattoo, and I strongly suspect I never will; but I’ve always thought it would be kinda cool to have the polo-horse figure tattooed on my left chest in the same place that it normally appears on the shirt. An anti-tattoo tattoo, if you will.

Do any of SA’s readers have a tattoo or a tattoo story to tell?

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

This is why every state needs attentive state legislators — if you don’t, glaring drafting errors can result in absurd features:

Nebraska’s “safe-haven” law which allows parents to abandon children at hospitals without being prosecuted has been garnering lots of news.   The reason?  While other states have similar laws, other states also have an age-limit.  Nebraska’s law does not.  So parents can abandon their teenagers - no need for a “person in need of supervision” or other proceeding.

Legislators are supposedly going to close the “loophole.”

From Family Law Prof Blog.

Disgusting.

(LvMark)

This is counterproductive behavior IMHO.

It has been interesting to observe the public debate over Barack Obama’s associations with individuals whose personal histories can only be categorized as radical.  Bill Ayers is a former terrorist.  Jeremiah Wright preaches race adversarialism.  For the most part, Obama’s friendships with these men has been water off a duck’s back for the electorate.

Imagine a different scenario.  There is an evangelical candidate.  He is the best evangelical candidate ever.  A Rhodes Scholar, a distinguished lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court, astoundingly eloquent, you get the idea.  This candidate is a conservative, but answers all questions in such a way as to avoid making anyone uncomfortable.  He hits all the right chords.

Further imagine that the record shows this man was once heavily involved with Christian reconstructionists who believe stoning should be re-instituted for adultery.  He went to a church for two decades where a Christian reconstructionist preached each Sunday.  One of his mentors was part of a group that bombed abortion clinics.

Where would that candidate be right now?  And how different would that candidate be in terms of associations from one Barack Obama?

Michael J. New has today’s must-read piece.

SA’s many California readers might want to read this before voting on Proposition 8.

Disgusting.

Rule by judicial fiat.

This may just be the post of the year.

There’s now a website where academics can sign a statement in support of Bill Ayers, who has recently come under renewed scrutiny due to his associations with Senator Obama. Here are some of the more deranged excerpts:

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—“unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.

*     *     *

[T]he attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought. They serve as warnings that anyone who voices perspectives and advances questions that challenge orthodoxy and political power may become a target, and this, then, casts a chill over free speech and inquiry and the spirit of democracy.

I’d like to say that I’m shocked that so many academics have rallied in support of a man who is a black mark on their profession, a man who bombed the pentagon and other military facilities and says he “can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility” of committing such bombings again.  However, given what academia so often preaches and/or tolerates, I’m not really surprised.

I have to say, that’s a mighty charitable way of putting things.

This is huge:

In November of last year, researchers in Wisconsin and Japan announced that they had successfully transformed regular adult cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without the need for embryos. The advance (involving so-called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells) pointed to a potential path around the moral and political debate over embryonic stem cell research, but some advocates argued that because the technique relied on retroviruses, which might be connected to some risks of cancer, they might not be safe for clinical use.

Today in the journal Science, a group of Harvard researchers reports successfully reprogramming adult cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without the need for such retroviruses, and so without the cancer risk . . . . 

More then ever, it appears that the promise of such pluripotent cells can be explored—all the way from basic science to the clinic—without the need to use or destroy human embryos, and so without political or ethical controversy. As President Bush put it back in 2006, in defending his approach to the issue and describing the iPS technique (which was then still largely theoretical), science and ethics need not be at odds; with the right policies and the right scientific techniques, they can be championed together. Here’s hoping.

Barbara Ehrenreich has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times.  Now, I normally wouldn’t agree with anything either written by Ehrenreich or published in the Times, but she’s actually on to something here:

GREED — and its crafty sibling, speculation — are the designated culprits for the financial crisis. But another, much admired, habit of mind should get its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking.

As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.

Positive thinking is endemic to American culture — from weight loss programs to cancer support groups — and in the last two decades it has put down deep roots in the corporate world as well. Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you’re a “positive person,” and no one becomes a chief executive by issuing warnings of possible disaster.

I’m not entirely sure that I agree that our financial crisis is due to an excess of idealism, but she has a point about the optimistic nature of the American nation. (more…)

This is not the type of basketball player most Americans want their kids looking up to:

Josh Howard’s decision-making has again come into question after he was filmed disrespecting the national anthem.

And the Mavericks are taking steps to help Howard and their other players avoid controversy in the future.

In a video posted on YouTube, the swingman is shown at Allen Iverson’s charity flag football game in July. When the national anthem is being sung, various participants are shown mugging for the camera. When the camera gets to Howard, he says: ” ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is going on. I don’t celebrate this [expletive]. I’m black.”

Howard goes on to make a difficult-to-discern comment that includes a reference to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m still one of those who sees a patriotic gloss on American sports.  When a player insults our country this way, it degrades the sport and defies the expectations of the fans.

However, some people responding to the article felt differently, as in this comment:

Who cares? This is a free country; we have a first amendment right to free speech, which includes dissent. You may not agree with it but it’s hardly news-worthy. What is truly un-American is demonizing those who exercise our most cherished rights to protest, dissent, and speak freely.

I can’t abide this kind of obtuse rhetoric.  Everyone who spouts this drivel should have to write the following on a blackboard one-hundred times: “The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from criticism. It protects the dissenter the same way it protects that dissenter’s critics.”

This is an excellent television series that many of SA’s readers will enjoy, and which features one of my former co-clerks, Elizabeth Kirk.

An on the money blog post by Jonathan V. Last at First Things:

There are reasonable criticisms that can be made of Sarah Palin, both as governor and a vice presidential selection. Yet little of what we have seen in the last six days has been either reasonable or critical (in the traditional sense of the word). Instead, much of the left and many in the media simply lashed out at Palin, particularly at her family.

And not only the fringiest parts of the political fringe: A writer at the Washington Post attacked Palin for the fact that her seventeen-year-old daughter was going to have a baby. A writer for The Atlantic openly questioned whether or not Palin’s four-month-old baby, who has Down’s Syndrome, was actually hers. The utterly unfounded suggestion was that the baby was Palin’s daughter’s and that the governor had faked her pregnancy. Proof of the baby’s birth was demanded.

(more…)

This is fantastic news that everyone should celebrate.

(LvJJ)

This issue isn’t going away, Senator McCain.

How can you reconcile your belief that “life begins at conception” with your support for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research?

That is the title of the latest essay by the inestimable Hadley Arkes at The Catholic Thing. As Peter Wehner points out at National Review Online, the federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act is the brain-child of Professor Arkes. You can read about the Act and its history in Professor Arkes’ wonderful book, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Here are some excerpts from The Catholic Thing piece:

(more…)

This is beyond horrifying.

(LvPaulC)

Simply amazing.

Lydia McGrew has the details.

And you can read the opinion here.

(Opinion Link via John in Nashville)

Michael J. New has today’s must-read piece over at NRO.

I am not sure I agree with all of New’s points, but it is a thoughtful piece and well worth your time.

I suppose this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it still does.

Yet another excellent post from the fine folks at The Art of Manliness.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

This is a debate worth having.

And it looks like the tide is finally turning in the right direction thanks to the hard work of groups like the American Life League.