Richard Bennett

The University of California signaled its intention to become a haven of mediocrity by withdrawing from the National Merit Scholarship program:

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale said some UC chancellors initially might have harbored concerns that, if they scrapped the National Merit program, they would lose out on talented students and be punished in the rankings published by such magazines as U.S. News & World Report. He called the decision “another move in the direction of doing what you think makes the most sense rather than be concerned about what it will mean for the rankings.”

Elaine S. Detweiler, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit National Merit Scholarship Corp. in Evanston, Ill., dismissed speculation by Carnesale and other academics that some of the 200 other participating universities might follow UC’s path. Detweiler called the PSAT “the most equitable way” to identify academically talented students from around the country, noting that the same exam is given to students at 22,000 high schools in all 50 states.

“We regret that finalists in the extremely competitive National Merit program who may wish to attend a UC campus will no longer have the opportunity to earn a Merit Scholarship sponsored by the university and, more importantly, receive the recognition for academic excellence that accompanies a Merit Scholarship,” she said.

Other defenders of the National Merit program, including other universities that actively recruit the winners and the winning students themselves, say it remains a helpful way to identify talented candidates even if the selection process is flawed. Some have pointed out, for example, that students are less likely to have taken test preparation courses before the PSAT than before the SAT.

The message is very clear: smart kids better avoid UC.

With apologies to the moonbats of the left, this story shows why we need to stick around in Iraq a while longer:

Baghdad — Inside the morgue at Kindi Hospital lay the remains of Amjad Kudeer. He was 13 when fragments from a suicide car bomb struck him in the head and chest Wednesday, killing him instantly.

Outside the door to the refrigerated room, Amjad’s sobbing mother called his name over and over, as if to summon him back to life. Then she looked up and asked: “What did he do to deserve this? They are killing children. Why? Why?”

Amjad and more than a dozen other children from east Baghdad’s al-Khalij neighborhood made up the majority of the 27 people killed when a suicide bomber drove into a crowd that had gathered around U.S. soldiers who were handing out candy and small toys, police said. The attack also killed one soldier, according to the U.S. military, and wounded at least 50 people.

Rove or no Rove, there are serious things going on in the world and we need to deal with them.

Media pacifists are jumping all over Mark Yost for complaining about the biased coverage of the war in Iraq, but the good people aren’t just rolling over and taking it. Here’s an excellent defense of Yost:

Anytime someone dares to call into question the motives of the media, we can count on Lovelady to come to the defense of the far-left extreme — anyone out there remember the Eason Jordan affair? Easongate was all the fault of the “wacko neo-fascist bloggers,” or so Lovelady would have had us believe in the dozens of posts he made in cyberspace.

I don’t doubt for one moment that President Bush and his advisers made mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war. I do not, for one minute, believe that he purposefully lied to the American public about the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power or the importance of introducing democracy in the Middle East as a way to stem radical Islamist terrorism. I believe with all my heart that the Iraqi people are better off today and will be better off in the future because of the American intervention to remove Saddam. Just peer into the dozens of mass graves uncovered in the last couple of years and tell me you disagree with me, Steve.

What America is attempting to do in the Middle East is nothing short of revolutionary. After years of supporting regimes that were friendly to our interests but suppressed their own people, President Bush has decided that the only course of action is for America to do all it can to foster self-determination in a vital region of the world. Not American-style democracy, mind you, but true local self-determination. And each day, on the ground in Iraq, there are dozens of small steps taken toward that goal. Yes, there are missteps and miscalculations … yes, there are setbacks as today’s suicide bombing of U.S. soldiers giving candy to Iraqi CHILDREN, but the ultimate success of the mission is not in doubt in my mind because of the determination of this president.

The predictability of Steve Lovelady and the Columbia Journalism Review has become something of a joke over the course of the last few years. They’re preaching to the choir while lecturing a public that increasingly writes off both of them as useless relics.

The media can’t play the same game with Iraq they played with Vietnam because there are too many alternate routes for news to take these days, but they’re certainly trying, relics that they are.

Sepia Mutiny, a blog for second-generation Indo-Americans, is pretty anguished over the identity of the London terrorists. Here’s a bit of analysis:

When I was a child my mother told me a story that her mother had told her. I can only re-tell the story as it was told to me:

Once when mami was young she was at a train station. There was a strange man there who simply looked at her and hypnotized her. The man was a Fakir. She followed him unable to control herself as he led her away. Fakir’s have magical powers. Really Abhi (I was shaking my head in disbelief). They are Muslim and they kidnap and convert you to Islam. Luckily the family got her back before she walked too far off. She didn’t remember anything that happened afterward and said she couldn’t control herself. A Fakir can just look at you and you’ll forget everything, your whole life.

Now bear in mind that my family is from Gujarat, where bigotry has persisted for generations. My mom is not a bigot but she believed (and still does) that a Fakir has mystical powers that can brainwash a normal person and get them to walk away from their life and convert to Islam (even though not all Fakirs are Muslim and the Sufi order is the least fundamental). I actually asked her to tell me this story again when I went home just last month.

Most of us know at least one person that is a “born-again” into some religion. Various things motivate these people. Many of them (like at least one of these bombers) were described as being out-of-control before their conversion (or re-discovery of their family religion). Others feel overwhelmed by the influence of the world they live in and retreat back to a basic set of instructions that they think will bring order to the chaos they feel. Some take this “order” too far by trying to impose their interpretation of that order on others. Most born-agains however are perfectly sane and choose to practice their new beliefs in private without a harmful thought toward anyone. How do we recognize in our second generation peers which path they have chosen to walk?

Commenters note that the fanaticism evinced in the terror bombings is more commonly Islamic than Hindu.

They were all second-generation Pakistani-Brits, and didn’t fit the profile that we generally associate with West-hating religious nuts. They were educated and into sports:

Shehzad Tanweer, 22, was an outwardly ordinary young British man, a university graduate who studied sports science and loved cricket and football.

and employed in the caring professions:

Like Tanweer, Khan seemed an unlikely suicide bomber. Friends said he was married with an eight-month-old baby girl and that he worked with disabled children in a primary school.

but very religious anyhow:

Hussain lived with his parents and neighbours said he had become “very religious” two years ago.

I would hope that their mosque is heavily investigated.

A revisionist theory is floating around to the effect that suicide terror isn’t about religion but some sort of reaction to American occupation. This is a load of bunk, of course. The USA has had troops in Germany for 60 years and the Germans haven’t sent us any suicide bombers. Let’s get real, OK?

Juan Cole, of course, said this about the terrorist bombers: “…this bombing could not have emanated from the British Muslim community.” What a genius.

But he’s changed his tune

Legislators in democratic societies who are thinking about how to respond to this problem should give serious thought to RICO-like laws that could be used to curb religious cults, which typically isolate members, indoctrinate them, manipulate them, and sometimes coerce them. Cults avoid scrutiny by harassing critics and whistleblowers, often in ways that police find it difficult to respond to. The enormous problems modern societies have had with groups like Christian Identity, the Koreishites, Aum Shinrikyo, and now al-Qaeda, suggests that current legal frameworks are inadequate to address this problem. Ex-members, victims and critics of cults need a legal basis for protection from the cults. The American Family Foundation is doing excellent work in this regard.

Cole is fundamentally correct, and I agree with his prescription completely. We can’t allow destructive cults to operate freely under “freedom of religion” protection when they’re functionally the same as organized crime. Sorry, Tom Cruise, but you’re busted.

Parkinson’s drugs can mess you up big time:

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, have found that certain drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease can cause patients to become addicted to gambling. The drugs, called dopamine agonists, also have been found to boost patients’ appetites for sex, food, and alcohol.

“This is a striking effect,” said J. Eric Ahlskog, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic. “Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual.”

In one case, a 54-year-old married pastor gambled daily at the local casino, hiding his losses from his wife.

In another, a 41-year-old computer programmer who had never gambled in his life became “consumed” with Internet gambling.

In a third, a 68-year-old man with no history of gambling lost more than U.S. $200,000 at casinos over a six-month period.

I wonder if that’s this guy’s problem, or this guy’s, or this ones; this guy for sure.