Do Racial Preferences Limit Black Lawyers?:
Now comes Richard Sander, a UCLA Law School professor, with the first in-depth statistical study of how preferences actually affect black law students' academic performance, passage rates for the bar, and job prospects. His stunning and copiously documented conclusion: "Blacks are the victims of law school programs of affirmative action, not the beneficiaries."
Thomas Sowell: Once in a lifetime (via Jayson at PoliPundit):
Both political parties understand the historic high stakes in these appointments. Senate Democrats have dug in and refused to allow some judicial nominees even to be voted on by the full Senate because these were judges who believe in applying the written law, not imposing judges' personal notions as the law of the land.
With the agenda of the political left increasingly rejected by voters at the polls, the only way to get the items on that agenda enacted into law is to have judges who will decree the liberal agenda from the bench. Too many judges have already done that on everything from gay marriage to racial quotas and the death penalty.
It is not these or other particular issues which are the highest stakes. The highest stakes are democratic self-governance versus judicial fiats that threaten to make a mockery of the American system of government by elected officials.
Also see his following comments on filibusters. I ♡ Thomas Sowell.
lgf: Media Spin vs. Reality (about the Rumsfeld visit to Iraq). I actually didn't mind the first article when I saw it earlier. I think it's great that just any soldier was able to ask the SecDef frank questions and get frank answers.
Update: According to Drudge, it seems a reporter coached those soldiers to ask those questions!
I'm getting to see some interesting articles by following Richard Lindzen around. The Australian: Andrei Illarionov: [Kyoto] Protocol is just lots of hot air:
The fact is the Kyoto protocol that will be a global treaty within months is based on fraudulent science. Assertions that global temperatures are higher today than any time in the past are completely false. Fluctuations in climate patterns have existed for millions of years -- for all earth history.
Global temperatures were higher in the Roman times when grapes were grown on British islands and Hannibal's elephants walked through the Alps into Italy. They were higher in the medieval period when the Vikings found and colonised the island that they have called Greenland and when Norwegians grew grain on the fields that are 300m in altitude higher than it is possible to do today.
Temperature variations in the course of the earth's history have been much greater than the increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the last century. In the past, the earth's climate was warmer, the global temperature rose faster, sea level was higher, floods were more severe, droughts lasted longer and hurricanes were more devastating than they were in the 20th century. Moreover, the best available temperature data from satellites show negligible temperature changes over the past several decades.
As pointed out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Richard Lindzen, perhaps the world's most respected atmospheric physicist, if global warming were to occur it would be accompanied by reduced rather than increased numbers of severe weather patterns.
Even with Russia on board, the Kyoto treaty will do little to global CO2 emissions considering that 70 per cent of the world's CO2 is emitted by countries not subject to Kyoto restrictions. Moreover, this share is growing as China, India and other non-Kyoto developed and developing countries grow faster than pro-Kyoto ones. Countries around the world must choose what is more important for them -- stagnating, at best, living standards due to Kyoto sclerotic regulations or the rising well-being of billions of people without them.
The Kyoto protocol requires a supranational bureaucratic monster in charge of rationing emissions and, therefore, economic activities. The Kyoto-ist system of quota allocation, mandatory restrictions and harsh penalties will be a sort of international Gosplan, a system to rival the former Soviet Union's. This perhaps explains why it finds such ready support in some quarters. But that's why it should be a warning signal for those who value economic and political freedom.
Last May the Russian Academy of Sciences published its conclusion on Kyoto -- the protocol does not have scientific ground whatsoever. Nobody among Russian decision makers considers the Kyoto protocol either scientifically proven or economically beneficial for the country. The only reasons for Russia's decision to ratify were purely political.
Meanwhile, Blair is trying to get Bush to agree to a "Kyoto-lite", even though Britain hasn't been able to meet its own goals for emissions reduction.
Thursday, December 9, 2004
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new⇒Perl 6 1.0 in March?
No, Parrot is not Perl 6. Parrotis a prerequisite for Rakudo Perl1.0, bu...
Andy Lester: Dec 1, 8:40pm