"Hey, Sandy Berger..."

... boxers or briefs?"

I'm thinking boxers, 'cause they're roomier.

Ideal for transporting briefs.

Sickening

[verbatim AFP story]

India losing 7,000 unborn girls daily to selective abortion
Tue Dec 12, 2:34 PM ET

India is losing almost 7,000 girls daily because of the traditional preference for sons which cause many people to abort female foetuses, the UNICEF said.

"India is one of the few countries worldwide with an adverse child sex ratio in favor of boys," the United Nations children's agency said in its annual "State of the World's Children 2007" report. "Nationwide, 7000 fewer girls than expected are born each day, largely due to sex determination," the report said.

A study by British medical journal "The Lancet" said this year that India may have lost 10 million unborn girls in the past 20 years, but Indian experts say the figure is not more than five million.

Under Indian law, tests to find out the gender of an unborn baby are illegal if not done for medical reasons, but the practice continues in what activists say is a flourishing multi-million-dollar business.

Northern Punjab state has one of the worst sex ratios in the country, with 798 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six.

The national average is 927 -- still well below the worldwide average of 1,050 female babies. UNICEF said there were fewer than 800 girls per 1000 boys in 14 districts of Punjab and neighbouring Haryana, both of which are prosperous state.

Girls in India are often considered a liability, as parents have to put away large sums of money for dowries at the time of their marriage. Many grooms demand dowry well beyond the means of the families of their spouse. Centuries of tradition also demand that couples produce at least one male child to carry on the family name.

The UN agency said the practice was more rampant in affluent areas, because they provided better access to medical techniques to determine the gender of the foetus. Girls continued to be neglected after birth because of a preference for sons, UNICEF said. "After birth, son-preference continues to persist, leading to the neglect of girls and their lack of access to nutrition, health and maternal care in the critical early years," the report said.

Mitt Romney's Problems

Here is a useful piece by National Review Online's Byron York summarizing how Mitt Romney's past positions are haunting his current presidential run.

Last week Romney had a Q&A session with NRO, conducted by friendly interviewer Kathryn Jean Lopez, covering this same turf.

Put me down as highly suspicious of his timing.

"Goreishly Warm"

My attempt at some new slang, as in "In the Washington, D.C. area it has been Goreishly warm in November and December. Makes you wonder if there's something to all that Global Warming stuff...

...then again, August was so cool it was practically Hillaryesque."

Miss Dewey? I Don't

Microsoft has debuted its new search engine, Miss Dewey. It seems that MSN.com is losing out so badly to Google that they have decided to create this new gimmicky thing. Miss Dewey is a live-action actress who responds to whatever you type in the search box. The actress that plays Miss Dewey is certainly attractive, and her sometimes naughty reactions will attract her 15 minutes of fame (after all, I'm writing about her...), but the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.

Dewey's responses are a bunch of pre-filmed Flash video clips (the whole thing is wrapped in Flash, which is why it takes so long to load). After typing something in, much clunkiness ensues, as the parser analyzes your text and searches its database of clips for something relevant or at least supposedly humorous. Only after the chosen clip plays do your actual search results appear.

It feels so 1993, back in the day when video game makers were talking about "interactive movies." None of that stuff worked, in either a critical or popular sense. (By contrast, "interactive drama" is a field still alive and growing).

The root of the problem: you cannot interact with static media. Or, as my guru Chris Crawford puts it, "You can only interact with process, not data."

I'm using "interactivity" here as a formal term of art, not in the informal, colloquial sense. Just because some web page has a button that says "click here" does not mean that actual interactivity is taking place. Too often, something like Miss Dewey promises interactivity, but when it fails to deliver, we get bored and never come back.

It's all about expectations. When you click on your TV, you don't expect interactivity, so you don't experience this kind of frustration (you do of course experience all the other frustrations associated with the infernal Tube).

I hope to write more soon about the emerging medium of computer-based interactive drama, how this field differs from video games, and how interactive drama may provide authors a new way to explore the unchanging human condition in a form that has particular appeal to the postmodern person.

Listen to Robbie George

Here's an excellent Christianity Today interview with Robert P. George, a Princeton professor, on the roots of our cultural problems. George discusses his book "The Clash of Orthodoxies," the divide between popular and elite opinion, the relationship of faith and reason, and the growing alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics.

Robbie George is a leading advocate for applying the Church's Natural Law tradition to moral questions. And, I'll have you know, he's also a terrific bluegrass musician.

What Does It Mean to be a "Centrist" Today in the U.S.?

Well, I guess it means you live just southwest of St. Louis, Missouri.

George Will had a recent column talking about the effect of U.S. demographics on national politics, and this line intrigued me:

"...the center of the nation's population, now southwest of St. Louis, is moving south and west at a rate of two feet an hour..."

I just had to find that map, which took all of two seconds with Google (I'm old enough to still find this new Internet thingie flat-out amazing).

It shows how the "mean center" of the population has moved from 1790 to 2000 (I thought only right-wingers were mean?). Click on the image for a bigger view, or check out the even-larger Census Bureau .pdf which I screen-captured.

Note the distinct turn South right after WW II, at the dawn of the air conditioning age. The current trajectory appears headed for El Paso.

And look, you can find the population center of your very own state right here.

Sunni/Shia Maps of the Middle East

This map of the Middle East on the PBS site shows the percentage of Shia Muslims in Middle Eastern nations (thus revealing the Sunni percentage), and this one gives a complete breakdown of religious, ethnic, and language distribution of the region. Very helpful. Lots of other history of Islam and the region as well on these PBS pages.

New Citizenship Test Questions Announced

The test that new U.S. citizens must take is being substantially revised. Just announced, here are the 144 questions that new citizens must study; of these, they will be asked to answer ten selected questions (randomly selected, I guess), and must answer six correctly.

I've been reading the questions, and I think they are pretty good, and a definite improvement over the old set.

And yes, though it's surely a cliche, I'll add: "Every American should be able to answer these."

First Muslim U.S. Rep. to Swear on the Koran. So, What Does the Constitution Say?

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will take his oath of office on the Koran rather than the Bible.

In response, conservative pundit Dennis Prager has written a column criticizing Ellison. Prager's column is posted on the American Family Association website. The AFA, a religious right organization, is also asking people to push for "a law making the Bible the book used in the swearing-in ceremony of Representatives and Senators."

There's only one slight problem: it's blatantly unconstitutional to require a member of Congress to swear on the Bible, or to swear on any holy book for that matter:

Article VI of the U.S Constitution reads in part:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Forcing a person to swear on the Bible or get lost is not an option. Also note the option to offer an "Affirmation" rather than an "Oath."

Look, I'm a card-carrying member of the religious right, and I'm also very concerned about our abandonment of the Melting Pot ideal in favor of a mushy multiculturalism (just look at Western Europe if you want to know where the wrong path leads).

But these are complex issues, requiring principled thought, prudent action, and careful rhetoric. While it may get even more difficult to decide the best ways to stop the hemorrhaging on the cultural issues front, we can start by eliminating the Prager/AFA approach. Brute force that ignores the Constitution is dumb, it won't be effective, and it's wrong. We have to continue to argue for and from America's first principles, which are conveniently summarized in the Declaration of Independence and given the force of law in the Constitution. Let's leave the blatant disregard for the plain meaning of the text to the Left, shall we?