"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African..."

"... that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

Says the famous paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey. That's a funny quote, isn't it? It starts out so big. If only everyone would accept evolution, then... then what? What would follow? He doesn't say World Peace. He says a chance of a better response to challenges.

I'm sure the people who don't believe in evolution think if only everybody would believe that God created human beings in His own image, that we'd have a better chance of responding better to challenges.

Here's a poll about what works, pragmatically, not about what is true. That is: DO NOT use this poll to express your belief in the existence of God and His role with respect to the creation/evolution of human beings:

What belief is more likely to overcome disharmony among the people of the world?
	God watches over and loves His Creation, humanity.
	Humankind arose from evolution, with no divine plan or supervision at any point.
pollcode.com free polls

Anticipating your possible need to express your belief in what is true, I am providing this additional poll:

What is actually true (or most likely true)?
	There is a God, and He created human beings in their current form.
	There is a God, and He created the process of evolution that unfolded over the eons.
	Human beings evolved without the participation of any God.
pollcode.com free polls

"Ann Althouse pushes back, and she has a point. But watch a few episodes of 16 and Pregnant..."

"... and you might think that 'it’s wrong' is a useful heuristic for people incapable of fully understanding what 'it will be hard' actually means."

Writes Instapundit, pushing back to my pushback on the "Dan Quayle Was Right" article.

Let's take a closer look at this "useful heuristic" concept, which expresses something truly profound about the role of traditional religion and other conservative philosophies in society. Look at what is being admitted. There are a whole lot of people who are insufficiently smart, competent, and emotionally stable to make a decision involving a complex set of factors, so we need to dominate their minds with a starker structure of "right" and "wrong," even where those of us who are really smart and able to process complex factors know it's not really a matter of right and wrong. 

Instapundit continues:

At any rate, after twenty years of hearing SUV drivers described in terms more applicable to Himmler, the 1992 condemnations of moralistic language from political leaders ring particularly hollow.

So... because lefties put their arguments in starkly moralistic terms, it's tiresome to hear about the way righties overuse morality talk. I get the point. In fact, what bugs me the most about lefties — what motivates me to go after lefties much more than righties on this blog — is the way they set themselves up as the good people and prance and stomp all over the place shaming and blaming the people who won't agree with them. Having lived in Madison for the last quarter century, I am fed up with their domineering bullshit. The reason my blog appears to skew conservative — when I am a political moderate — is that I am not surrounded by pious, overbearing right-wingers sneering at me and gasping about what a bad person I am.

BUT: I am not saying that domineering bullshit from righties is okay because lefties do it too or do it more or do it nearer to me. I don't like it.

"The Tea Party's Senate Insurgency Hits Texas."

Have you noticed Ted Cruz?

A former state solicitor general and clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the 41-year-old Mr. Cruz... is a staunch defender of states' rights, or what he calls the "forgotten Ninth and 10th amendments." He was the lead lawyer representing Texas before the Supreme Court in Medellin v. Texas (2008), after the International Court of Justice had tried to override Texas's justice system, and in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) he wrote the amicus brief on behalf of 31 states challenging a gun-control law on Second Amendment grounds.

He favors school choice, personal accounts for Social Security and a "low uniform tax rate—either a flat tax or the FairTax," he says, and his goal in the Senate would be to "cut federal spending as much and as quickly as possible." He's contemptuous of congressional Republicans who suggest that some of the popular features of ObamaCare can be retained. "I will work to repeal every last word of the law," he insists.

Mr. Cruz's Hispanic surname also isn't a liability when many Republicans seem to be searching for the next Marco Rubio. Like the Florida Senator, Mr. Cruz is of Cuban descent and has a gift for communicating his conservative credentials to right-leaning audiences. (At the same time, some Texans grumble that the Princeton and Harvard Law grad has the Barack Obama disease of coming across as a slick know-it-all, "the smartest guy in the room.")

Too smart? Not the right kind of Hispanic? We shall see. The primary is tomorrow. The "establishment" guy is David Dewhurst, the Lt. Gov. He calls Cruz "Washington lawyer Ted Cruz."

Sarah Palin, who seems to have the magic touch, has endorsed Cruz. I'm making a tag for Cruz (and not for Dewhurst), so that's something like making a prediction.

ADDED: You can listen to Cruz arguing for the independent power of the states in Medellin here. (His turn begins about halfway through.)

Memorial Day.

"So what happened to all those candidates embodying the spirit of Egypt’s modern progressive democratic youth movement..."

"... that all those Western media rubes were cooing over in Tahrir Square a year ago? How are they doing in Egypt’s first free presidential election?"

2 photographs from this week in Wisconsin politics.

(The first photo, by me, is from the People's Brat Fest. The second photo, by Meade, is from an equal pay press conference.)

"One sign that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is likely to win the election on June 5 is the sudden disappearance of national media attention to the race."

Writes Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard:

The networks and newspapers that gave wall-to-wall coverage to protests in the streets of Madison in the spring of 2011 and excitedly reported on the drive to collect signatures to force a recall have gone relatively quiet as a succession of polls show Walker leading.... Obama himself, who once promised to walk the picket lines with his union backers when their interests were threatened, seems to want no part of the recall​—​or at least not a high-profile part.

Police gun down a man who is — quite obviously! — unarmed.

It's obvious, because he is naked. They gun him down, because he his eating the face off another man, who is also naked. They continue shooting until the man is dead because one shot doen't stop him from devouring the other man's face.

Investigators believe the victim may have been homeless and laying down when the crazed man pounced.

But why was the victim naked?

ADDED: "And the guy was like tearing him to pieces with his mouth, so I told him, 'Get off!'... You know it's like the guy just kept eating the other guy away like ripping his skin.... Police officer came over, told him several times to get off and a police officer climbed over the divider and got in front of him and said, 'Get off!' And told him several times and the guy just stood his head up like that with a piece of flesh in his mouth and growled."

"What’s wrong with Johnny Depp playing an Indian?"

"Nothing now, because he is an American Indian. If the Comanche say it, then it is so."

... Now that he’s one of us, he’ll need to learn more to help us.

At the Glass Pipe Café...

... you can talk all afternoon.

"Half of us thought that he wasn’t John Waters, because that would be impossible, and half of us thought that he was."

"So we argued about it for one exit, and the only way to resolve it was to just turn around and go back."

The things people do to generate material for a book.

"t was two people able to agree to disagree and still move on and have a great time. I think that’s what America’s all about."

"Facebook, I wanna thank you..."

And I want to thank you... for the sublime horribleness.

(Via Buzzfeed.)

"When you aren’t sure whether the lingering sensation that you aren’t liked enough is a rational response to unfair circumstances..."

"... or is in fact symptomatic of your tendency to blame your environment for your own failure to self-actualize, drink."

Item 2 in "The Overthinking Person’s Drinking Game." There are many items!

Via Metafilter.

"Twenty years later, [Dan] Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic."

Writes Elizabeth Sawhill in the Washington Post, citing the increased number of children born to unmarried mothers and correlations between being such a child and having a worse outcome in life.

Now, what Quayle said was:

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong... Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

Quayle took some gratuitous shots at women in his notorious remark, and he could just as easily have put his main point in a way that nearly everyone would agree with. So, I dislike this simple declaration that he was right (which I've seen many times). He phrased it in a way that's either deliberately or unwittingly provocative.

Some single-parent families are better than others and some mother-and-father families are worse than others. I question whether it's the single parent per se that's the problem — where it can be shown that it's worse — or whether more women who get into the single-parent position are the irresponsible/disagreeable/poorly skilled kind of person.

Another problem with what Quayle said is that he characterized the kind of woman that we'd presume to be responsible — the "intelligent, highly paid professional woman" — as doing 2 things she might not have been doing: 1. "mocking the importance of fathers," and 2. treating child-bearing as "just another lifestyle choice." This "Murphy Brown" woman might very well prefer to have a solid marriage with a father in the house but not be able to make that happen. And she might dearly and virtuously want to mother a child.

I know Quayle was saying that the TV character provided women with a role model and might have fooled us into thinking raising a child alone would be easier than it is, but he was focused on getting out a rival moral message. Murphy Brown is telling you it's fine, but I need you to know it's wrong. There's a difference between saying it will be hard and it's simply wrong.

"In A World Where..."

"... One Teen's Voice Is An Internet Hit."

It's the People's Brat Fest...

On the Library Mall, here in Madison, Wisconsin, today. It's "brat" as in "bratwurst." Please spare me your sausage-based wisecracks.

The Industrial Workers of the World were there, with their "Abolition of the Wage System" flag, under the "God" banner:



You could "Stand with Women"...



... and listen to the "Mighty Wind"-ish band, with the iconic Wisconsin Blue Fist image on the back of the stand-up bass:



You can run, but you can't escape the politics:

Can you convict a man of murder when all you have is a confession?

There's nothing corroborating his statements. He just said he did it, 33 years ago, and he's a man with [perhaps?] mental illness. This is Pedro Hernandez, arrested in the Etan Patz case. People want to believe that at long last, we have the answer and a man to punish, but do we really know?

“You want to make sure he’s not a chronic confessor,” the [unnamed] detective said. Many books are about those who confessed to crimes they did not commit...

Mitt Romney journals his "feelings" on his iPad.

Feelings? The Romnster has feelings? What feelings?

"The only time I'm unhappy is if I've done something that hurt the prospects for the success of our effort," he said of his frame of mind, adding that his errors "make me want to kick myself in the seat of my pants."

"I've had a couple of [gaffes] during the campaign, which have haunted me a little bit, but I'm sure before this is over will haunt me a lot," he said.

I await the memoir.

By the way, have you heard of the 8 ghosts that haunt "Dreams From My Father"?

The Pope's butler has been arrested!

"His job included handing out rosaries to dignitaries and riding in the front seat of the 'Popemobile,' a vehicle used for public papal appearances..."

Did you just get a Mardi Gras image from that job description, like I did? Picturing the Popemobile, with the butler tossing out rosaries?

Anyway, the butler, Paolo Gabriele, 46, is one of the few individuals who has access to the Pope's desk, and there have been leaks of "hundreds of personal letters and confidential documents" to a journalist who published them in a book called "His Holiness."

It seems absurd that the butler did it. Here's a Straight Dope inquiry into the old phrase, supposedly based on hackneyed mystery novel plots.

"Unless you revive it by rereading it, re-imagining it, performing it, it’s a dead thing..."

"You have to reread it to make it live again."

Except we're not rereading it. It's a movie: "On the Road," which, oddly, has never been made into a movie (despite many abortive efforts over the last 6 decades).

If you actually want to read it — would it be a reread for you? — buy it here. Amazon suggests making a triple feature out of "On the Road," "Howl," and "Naked Lunch."