I’m a fan of  “kung fu” movies, as is my son (though he’s a much more fervent fan than I).  My husband, not so much.  However, I’m hoping he’ll go with me to see “The Forbidden Kingdom” when it opens on April 18, and stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li.  Together.  In the same film.  How cool is that going to be?

See for yourself — here’s a link to the trailer, which looks really, really, really awesome.

Yes, the plot seems a bit cliched — An American teenager, obsessed with Hong Kong cinema and kung-fu classics, finds the legendary stick weapon of the Chinese sage and warrior, the Monkey King, in a Chinese pawnshop.  He travels back to ancient China to join warriors on a dangerous quest to free the imprisoned Monkey King.

Sounds like great fun for a Saturday afternoon.

(Hat tip to Mark Shea)

The New York Times is apparently developing a masochistic taste.  After being slammed last week for running a poorly-researched, error- and inuendo-ridden piece on John McCain’s supposed romantic entanglement with a lobbyist (a piece so lacking in credibility that even the Times’ subscriber papers, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, refused to run it), it has now run an article questioning whether McCain is eligible to be president. 

McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone while his father, an admiral in the Navy, was stationed in there.  From the New York Times article:

The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president? In the case of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming.Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah H. Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

This is complete hogwash.  Section 1, Article II of the U.S. Constitution states:

Article II: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

The argument is that McCain isn’t a “natural born” citizen because he was born on a military installation.  The State Department states that U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.

That line of argument is irrelevant.  “Natural born” means being a citizen from birth, rather than starting out as a citizen of another country and being naturalized.  You can be born as a U.S. citizen EITHER by being born in the country OR by being born of U.S. citizen parents. McCain’s parents were U.S. citizens, so he’s a natural born US citizen.  Per the State Department:

Birth Abroad to Two U.S. Citizen Parents in Wedlock: A child born abroad to two U.S. citizen parents acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under section 301(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). One of the parents MUST have resided in the U.S. prior to the child’s birth. No specific period of time for such prior residence is required.

(Note the phrase “acquires U.S. citizenship at birth” — seems pretty obvious that means natural born!)  McCain is a natural citizen and fully eligible to run for the office of president.  (Whether or not you vote for him is your decision!)  I would love to see someone file a lawsuit challenging McCain’s eligibility.   They’d alienate just about everyone who has ever been in the military, the State Department, and the government, and been stationed/posted overseas.

Well, I sort of figured the polls would heat up as we get closer to the General Election. Now me, I am not one to discuss or argue politics much, other than a few comments here and there, much to the sometime dissatisfaction of my wife. (She loves to argue politics. Come to think of it, as her previous blog shows, she likes to “correct” a lot of people on a lot of subjects, but you know, many times she is right. Just wish she would do it earlier in the day.)

The New York Times/CBS News conducted a poll recently, and although I don’t usually put much stock into polls due to their overwhelming numbers they poll, I found this one kind of ironic. The headline is that the poll indicates Obama is beating McCain.

It says: “The national telephone poll was conducted Feb. 20-24 with 1,115 registered voters, including 427 Democratic primary voters and 327 Republican primary voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all voters, plus or minus five percentage points for Democratic voters and plus or minus five percentage points for Republican voters.” [I figure that could mean to be up to 8 % error with less than 1/10000th% of the population.]

It goes on to say:

“But there are signs of vulnerability for Mr. Obama in this national poll: While he has a strong lead among Democratic voters on his ability to unite and inspire the country, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is still viewed by more Democrats as better prepared for the job of president……When all voters are asked to look ahead to the general election, Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee, is seen as better prepared for the presidency, better able to handle an international crisis and more equipped to serve as commander in chief than either of the Democratic candidates.”

From what I read of this, and taking it at face value, Mr. McCain is the best choice overall. He would get things done and get them done better than the other two. And this is the overall view of both Democrats and Republicans polled. Well, excluding the other 361 people in the poll who I guess just didn’t answer anything…

Now, I haven’t made up my mind yet as to who I will actually vote for. I think, as I believe a lot of people out there do, that I am going to have to wait to see which two people I have a choice of.

But I have to admit I am puzzled. If Mr. McCain is considered the best qualified, Hillary is considered the most qualified Democrat, and Obama is considered as “new blood” or being looked at as “new change for America”, wouldn’t being the person most qualified in the areas of international arenas, military control, and better prepared to BE the President, isn’t that the same thing as a change in America?

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that President Bush has been like many presidents before him. Lousy advisors, human, and keeps butting heads with the Congress. Congress, you say? Don’t get me started….

But I’m only a conservative independent Democratic Republican, so what would I know? [Or as my wife sometimes says, "bull-headed!]

Oh yeah, I mentioned this is from the New York Times, so take it with a grain of salt. On second thought, make that a pound. Hey, they lost 361 people…I didn’t.

What usually happens around 11:30 p.m. at my house …

Are you watching the Oscars tonight?  Not me.  I haven’t see any of the films nominated for Best Picture (Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, and Atonement), and only a few of any of the films nominated in other categories.  Atonement is the only one I want to see.  Lately, it seems as though Hollywood is making movies for someone other than most of the movie-going public, which is why there are fewer of us every year.  (Juno was the 18th highest-grossing picture of the year, No Country for Old Men was 40th, Atonement was 53rd, Michael Clayton was 55th, and There Will Be Blood was 78th.  Source: Box Office Mojo)

My sister, on the other hand, goes ga-ga over the Oscars.  She fixes an elegant array of hors d’oeuvres  (she is a true gourmet — I love going to her house for our annual family reunion!) and sits down to watch all the red carpet hoopla and all 4 hours of Oscar ceremony.  My brother-in-law enjoys the food, a few beers, and wanders in and out of the room.

Via Instapundit, I found this amazing montage of Hollywood’s most glamorous actresses, where each image morphs into the next one. 

Frankly, it’s a better montage of the last 80 years of Hollywood than, I’ll wager, anything on tonight’s Oscar yawneroo.   Despite all the creative talent in Hollywood, the Oscars manage to churn out the most boring, dull, wretchedly paced montages — every year.  I truly think just about any film studies college student could do better. 

Trying to remember the name of each actress was difficult.  I only got half of them, and I’m pretty much of a movie buff.  (Hint: It begins with Mary Pickford and ends with Halle Berry.)

I am not a fan of Microsoft (we bought my computer last month instead of later this year specifically so I wouldn’t have to have Vista as my operating system).  But I do believe in giving credit where credit is due.

Since 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured bucketfuls of dollars (about 1.2 Billion) into malaria research.  Apparently, that’s not good enough for the World Health Organization (WHO).  From the New York Times article:

The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the world health agency’s policy-making function. …

Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”

Also, he argued, the foundation’s determination to have its favored research used to guide the health organization’s recommendations “could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.” …

The World Health Organization is a United Nations agency with a $4 billion budget. It gives advice on policies, evaluates treatments — especially for poor countries — maintains a network of laboratories and sends teams to fight outbreaks of diseases, like avian flu or Ebola. It finances little research; for diseases of the poor, the Gates Foundation is the world’s biggest donor. (emphasis added) …

At the end of the article, comes this little paragraph:

There have been hints in recent months that the World Health Organization feels threatened by the growing power of the Gates Foundation. Some scientists have said privately that it is “creating its own W.H.O.”

So let me see if I have this right.  Bill and Melinda Gates are putting money (great big giant gobs of it) into getting rid of malaria. They’re paying people to do research to help save lives.   The Gates Foundation isn’t preventing  anybody else from doing malaria research.  And WHO has a problem with this why?  Might it be because WHO isn’t getting the money directly?  Given that the United Nations (the parent organization of WHO) doesn’t exactly have a sterling record with respect to corruption, money laundering, anti-semitism, cronyism, etc., I wouldn’t be giving it to them either.  I’d be putting it toward actually developing a treatment and cure for malaria.  Much like the Gates Foundation is doing.

Though I never finished college, I have always valued education and knowledge — not just for the career it might get you, but for my own personal growth. History, science, religion all fascinate me, and I read — a lot. I’m not passing myself off as some super genius, but sometimes people react as if I were. My mother speaks 7 foreign languages; my brother-in-law solves complicated math problems (for fun) — they’re geniuses. Me, I just I know a wide variety of things and can make cogent arguments, and that definitely does not make me a “genius.”

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Susan Jacoby wrote an article entitled “The Dumbing of America.” I have to admit, the title of her article ticked me off — speak for yourself, I thought. Don’t lump all of American into your smug little liberal tirade. And then I read the article. As much as I really, really hate this, I’m going to have to agree with a lot of what she says.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. …

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. …

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Have you ever read Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984? They all dealt with the trajectory society has been taking. Those authors expressly or implicitly recognized the deep value of books and their development of an independent thought process. Books fire and even demand imagination, video does not. Like the ubiquitous panty-less shots of our latest ‘celebrities’, video leaves nothing to the imagination.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge. …

According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.” …

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

Of course, this isn’t new — I’ve been hearing this for years. I’m not sure I agree that the problem is a cultural one. TV soundbites and declining reading are just a symptom and not a cause. Getting to the root of the problem begins by acknowledging that new media can be just as vibrant and educational as old media. What we need to figure out is how we’re going to encourage intellectualism within the new paradigms. If we are to be a nation of readers, we need the skill, the passion, and the texts to do so. And we have miles to go in that regard.

Stories like this one, of a brain-dead women who awoke from coma, make me want to give thanks for the amazing goodness of God. 

As Raleane (Rae) Kupferschmidt lay motionless in her hospital bed, family and friends said their final goodbyes and the funeral home was called.

But just as the grieving began in her Lake Elmo home, Kupferschmidt woke up from her coma. 
(snip)
Since then, her mother has steadily progressed. Sturm said her mother’s take on it is this: “I’m a lucky lady. I owe it to the grace of God.”

Rae should be discharged from the hospital today. The funeral home has been taken off notice.

“I had come to grips that she had died,” Sturm said. “And now I get my mother back. That doesn’t happen very often. It’s an amazing gift.”

Two thoughts crossed my mind when reading this.  The first was to give thanks.  Which made me realize that this is one of the many reasons that atheism will never be a big seller.  It denies the very real human impulse to give thanks.  Christianity isn’t about fear – the average prayer isn’t about pleading with God to spare the believer, but about thanking God for this and that blessing.  

That’s why the central act of the Christian faith is the Eucharist (Greek for “thanksgiving”).  Or what my protestant brothers and sisters call Communion.  We come together as a community to give praise and thanks to God, to celebrate the Risen Christ. 

The second thought was that stories like this one are why we need to be so very careful when we decide someone is in a vegetative state.   No physician ultimately knows conclusively what is happening with a person and so we must always err on the side of preservation and caution —  this is, by the way, someone’s life.

Well, here is the news again.  As I have said, I peruse the news daily and found an article that does not surprise me, although it is irritating.

Seems another bank credit card has raised their rates, and it appears they are raising them regardless of previously announced industry standards.  In other words, they simply raised their rates.  And it appears they do not care if anyone complains or not.  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23049330/.

It used to be, seemingly a very long time ago, that business was always touting ”the customer is always right”, and they showed customer loyalty in the way they did business.  If the customer had a complaint, you could call them, discuss the problem, and usually it worked out in a compromise.

Now, it is not the case.  You are lucky if you can find a phone number to call a honest-to-goodness real live person.  And press one all you want because you have to press at least a gazillion other numbers afterwards IF you are lucky enough to figure out their phone tree. Then, even once you get someone live, they usually have to pass you on to another person because they can’t handle that type of problem, who in turn passes you on to another person, and so on.  You know all about it, don’t you?  Sure you do.

My wife and I understand how this goes.  She has been a card carrying customer of a major retail store, who is talking about changing into a number of little stores on paper.  She has been a member since 1984.  So what did they do?  Raised her interest rate on her card to over  25%!!  So much for generating customer loyalty. So I tried to call and find out why.  Oops, I’m not the PRIMARY card holder, even though I have a card too.  So they won’t talk to me about it.  Gave up I did, because I didn’t want to have a heart attack from the frustration.

There is one thing that puzzles me.  There are articles everywhere about how the economy might be in trouble.  Who is hurting?  The consumer.  So what is the best way to help the consumer who is hurting, other than give him free money to spend in the next 4 months? [See articles on economy boost.]  RAISE his interest rates on all of his credit cards, of course!

If consumers don’t have enough money NOW to pay their bills, does it make any sense at all to raise his interest rates because he CAN’T pay his bills.  That is the ongoing industry philosophy right now. Sure, let’s make it even HARDER for them to pay their bills.

Got to love this country!

The English shopping chain, Woolworths, has withdrawn the ’Lolita’ line of bedroom furniture for girls after furious parents pointed out sexual connotations of the name.

“What seems to have happened is the staff who run the Web site had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either,” a spokesman told newspapers.

“We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

Now, I don’t know which is more depressing — that there are people who see nothing wrong with overt sexualization of young girls and think naming a girl’s bed after a pedophile’s fantasy is clever marketing, or that they had never heard of, much less read, the 1955 Vladimir Nobokov novel.  Or hadn’t seen either of the two film adaptions. Or listened to the lyrics of the Police song, “Don’t stand so close to me.”  Or heard of Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita.”

I think ignorace is actually more frightening to me. The former I’ve just come to expect.

Anyone want a Jack the Ripper knife set?