We are getting to the point that using actual embryos is going to be completely unnecessary. It’ll be almost medieval to suggest using them, when skin (which is the largest organ in your body; did you know that?) are able to produce what’s required. I wonder how much the advance of methods to create embryonic-like stem cells was pushed forward by George W. Bush’s restriction of embryonic stem cell lines that could be used. Bush, then, was not anti-science, but pro-ethical-science.

US researchers have reported a breakthrough in stem cell research, describing how they have turned human skin cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time.

The method described Wednesday by Oregon Health and Science University scientists in the journal Cell, would not likely be able to create human clones, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center.

But it is an important step in research because it does not require the use of embryos in creating the type of stem cell capable of transforming into any other type of cell in the body.

The technique involves transplanting an individual’s DNA into an egg cell that has been stripped of genetic material, a variation of a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer.

"A thorough examination of the stem cells derived through this technique demonstrated their ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells," said Mitalipov.

1. If our plan holds, this is the next “family” car after the kids move out … or the equivalent in 2017.
2. A few years in the cellar.
3. “Mystical” … what does that mean to ABC I wonder.
4. The standards … they are double, eh?
5. An aesthetic is a method for evaluating art. By what aesthetic is that worth that much? Not one I might fathom.
6. Some games and a photo-essay.
7. Two very different posts on exercise, here and here.
8. While you’re thinking about the IRS.
9. Ink on skin meets religion in the Middle East.
10. OK liberals … defend this! or this.
11. School and men.
12. Frakking and the obvious.
13. He calls it “inexcusable” and is right glad his Chicago training taught him how to have no tracks back to himself on this one … at least as long as those losing their jobs keep their mouths shut.
14. And we end with a discussion of a fictional figure in popular media.

Ben is a recent convert to Catholicism, while I am a  long-time Protestant. And yet there are commonalties that people tend to ignore too often. He highlighted one of those commonalities in a recent Facebook post.

Here’s a thought experiment for Christians arguing for biblical support of homosexuality and/or homosexuall [sic] marriage:

On the subject of homosexuality theologians as diverse as the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther and every other major pre-20th century Christian thinker stand in complete agreement. Such unanimity is all but unprecedented in the tradition. Even a doctrine as fundamental as the Trinity has greater diversity of thought than homosexuality.

Regardless of how you view the authority of tradition, doesn’t such complete agreement deserve to be acknowledged and taken seriously? If you say yes, how can you justify the near complete lack of engagement with the tradition by those arguing for an understanding of Christianity that is pro-homosexuality? Wouldn’t such a drastic change on this issue demand a lengthy and complete engagement with the tradition?

If you say no, how do you justify the implicit claim that your interpretive abilities are superior to 2,000 years of unanimous teaching on this issue - Protestant, Catholic and otherwise?

Ben shows that, over the millennia, smart Christian guys from all over the spectrum, have been unified on this topic. I made a similar point 2 years ago when I noted that the Bible speak of homosexuality 100% negatively, and of marriage 100% heterosexually. I said essentially the same thing, "Ignore all of that collected wisdom at your peril."

The religious Left has been accepting homosexuality as a "non-sin" over the past 40 years, and same-sex marriage as blessed just for the past 10 years or so. Relatively speaking, however, this is nothing compared to the unanimity of the faith for the last 2,000 years. If one is going to throw out 2 millennia of doctrine, you had better have a good argument that a) this is really what the Bible says and b) the other guys were wrong. Yelling "Equality!" is not such an argument.

1. Do drones work?
2. More on the same.
3. Researching for the government. Heh.
4. The liberator and open source.
5. First there was lather rinse repeat now we find eat, pray, drink.
6. Liberty. Three notions of liberty (freedom to choose, loving neighbors/community, and now … freedom to make laws). Do they differ at the core or just the edges?
7. Cheating.
8. Multi-culturalism and its claims … a test lab.
9. The last weeks scandal that was lost.  Another list. A prediction … I’m not convinced he’s lost them yet.
10. Dogs and medical methodology and recommendations.
11. “We don’t rush in half cocked” …  of course we do, if we have to. Remember McClellan  and the Civil war … responding too much to the fear of losing and the unknown leads merely to just plain losing.
12. Biden-the-knucklehead takes credit for the White House promoting fracking. Promoting fracking? What is he smoking?
13. Danger danger Will Robinson!!!

And the Cleveland kidnapping story is doing it again, from another angle.

The problem, once again, is that at the heart of the Gosnell nightmare were the reports that he was DELIVERING late-term fetuses and THEN killing the infants — after delivery. In other words, these infants were no longer “fetuses,” according to the dictionary, when the abortionist snipped their spinal cords.

Now, were are seeing some interesting, and related, issues emerging in Cleveland, where prosecutors are preparing to throw the book at the alleged kidnapper and torturer Ariel Castro.

The issue is that the state prosecutor may seek the death penalty.

Now, from the perspective of the journalists defending a consistent use of the term “fetus,” even when the term is inaccurate (see Gosnell coverage), here is the hard-news question of the moment. If the prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty for Castro in this case, who did he kill? What human persons with full dignity and legal rights, under this nation’s current legal regime, died during these alleged crimes?

The Get Religion blog takes the angle of how (or if) the reporters "get religion", and it highlights good and bad examples. However, in the Gosnell case, the bad examples were legion. It’ll be interesting to see how the media deal with a death penalty in the Cleveland case.

1. Seems like a good thing.
2. Well, time is probably something they have on hand.
3. More things than are dreamed of in your books, perhaps.
4. Bravo.
5. Hey! That’s an old standard “dad” line.
6. Privacy or “market research”.
7. ad hoc gun show.
8. Number 6 is Mr Obama who appointed them, eh?
9. Alienated, young, and male.
10. To quoth the President a few days after the Benghazi incident “a shadowy figure behind the video sparked the attack” … “nothing new was learned” … yep. Nothing new, except that doesn’t mean what you think it means.
11. Mali watch.
12. Classical education and what that used to mean.

1. Colorado oversteps. Would local zoning laws do it?
2. All that sex talk makes Lucy a duller girl.
3. A set of odd wheels for bikes.
4. Devil(s) … impersonal or not?
5. Why? Maybe they were wearing swim suits not sweaters. More on that IRS thing here.
6. Touche.
7. Purple prose.
8. Great apes and swimming … and the resultant map.
9. Heh.
10. A mom reflects on mother’s day.
11. Losing the left on the Benghazi kerfuffle.
12. A good question, after all most of the research was supported by your taxes. And is arXIV sufficient to ameliorate the problem?
13. Famousness.

The White House talking point on Benghazi is that the hearings “told us nothing new”, which I think isn’t exactly what they were hoping for. You’d think that they would be wanting those hearings to exonerate them, instead of confirming what we already knew, i.e., that they were scoundrels.

The women who were his victims did report him, but that still didn’t get anything done. His clinic went 17 years without an inspection, even though there were inspection-worthy complaints in the interim. Various state agencies did nothing even after victims’ lawyers contacted them.

And another group turned a blind eye to this; Planned Parenthood. President and CEO of Planned Parenthood SE Pennsylvania Dayle Steinberg said that her organization knew about this but did not report it. Instead she said, “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health.” The buck doesn’t stop here. It doesn’t even stop for a rest. And of course, the Department of Health was one of those delinquent state agencies.

I have complained that the media have ignored this story, and they have, but even before they tried to sweep it under the rug, Planned Parenthood, various other abortion doctors, and various state agencies all turned a blind eye to what was going on here. If there is a war on women, the abortion industry is on the front lines.

1. One thing you don’t have to worry about shopping in the Midwestern ‘burbs.
2. Yah, that will work. So, does that mean the state department is completely ignorant of how difficult stopping a 2 megabyte zip file from being disseminated might be. I mean, why even bother. Setting aside the point that there is no actual reason for them to try to stop it in the first place.
3. Diversity and USC.
4. Modern atheism, likely flash in the demographic pan.
5. Modern reason takes a turn to the dark side. (in which dark implies ignorance and such)
6. Uhm, Ms Pelosi is grandstanding … let’s see “sequestration” is keeping a very very wealthy woman from “visiting the troops” … does that mean sequestration is keeping her from buying a plane ticket? Nope. Making phone calls? Nope. So how is sequestration stopping here. Answer,  Uhm, no … it’s not and … Ms Pelosi … you are flat out lying.
7. Impeachment. Although there is no reason to impeach Mr Obama … the Senate has Democratic majority, there is no point.
8. Fear the duck.
9. A danish writer of some renown compares Easter/Pascha celebrations in Rome and Greece.
10. Short answer, no.
11. A book list.
12. Used weather, dirt cheap.

1. A little honesty … to bad we don’t get more of that in politics.
2. Speaking about things needed in politics … we can dream, eh?
3. Space and fire.
4. About the WDML.
5. Spin backfires.
6. Actually it’s not a “game changer”. Zip guns have been around for a long time and this is just another zip gun.
7. And on that topic … you do realize there is no actual need to reinforce the notion that the left is completely ignorant when it comes to firearms.
8. Apparently Ms Clinton had an accurate accusation.
9. Fracking comes to Asia.
10. Well, duh.
11. Yikes.
12. Boots on the ground, costs, and performance … works for military performance and applies to lots of other things too.
13. A confession.

1. Well, that’s to be expected. That arab “spring”  is a thing to behold.
2. Actually, I think the motive or at least the logic of “what did he want to achieve by that” is not very clear.
3. “The most callous thing” which means  Mr Biden completely lacks any imagination at all. Or has led an incredibly sheltered life to not realize that there are hundreds (thousands) of “more callous” things that man has done to man than that.
4. Girlfriend?
5. Doing the treadmill right.
6. Very very pretty. This too.
7. Archaeology underwater.
8. Pesky trends for the gun control = emergency crowd.
9. Where it’s not cold when it rains.
10. Apparently the “is not welcome” at Church is a recent lefty meme, alas … not true.
11. The Paschal (Easter) 2nd homily from the Russian patriarch (the first was the original by St John Chrysostom spoken at every Orthodox Paschal celebration for many many centuries … when something is done right … why change?).

1. Progress isn’t always.
2. Fast has multiple meanings.
3. A bishop does good.
4. Heh.
5. Logic and the not-pro-life crowd.
6. Some Irish history.
7. Sounds like …. (or of language and memory)
8. Hermeneutical fail … in that I have no idea what is meant by that reply.
9. A possible future.
10. In trying to parody (highlight?) loony remarks of the other side, the poster comes of as a, well, bigger loon. Wonder if that was the plan.
11. Healthcare and Oregon.
12. “Cleared for transfer“.

1. The gun/girl culture.
2. Mr Obama’s buddy defends his bombings … unsuccessfully it seems.
3. Hmm.
4. Even handed remarks from the left, or not.
5. And in that vein … yikes.
6. Culture.
7. Statistics and risk.
8. From the weekend, (Christ is risen).
9. Mental health and guns.
10. Book burning and the interwebs.
11. Well, did that just end the gun control debate?
12. Happiness metric.
13. Perhaps more than just cultural pressures?

In a scene from Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, the mathematician skeptical about whether the park is a good idea, watches the T-Rex burst out of its enclosure and says, "I hate being right all the time."

Princeton Professor Robert George and other defenders of traditional marriage understand these sentiments. For years, they’ve warned that redefining marriage beyond the union of one man and one woman wouldn’t-indeed couldn’t-stop with same-sex unions. The same reasoning that extends marriage to same-sex couples would easily be applied to polygamy and polyamory also.

The standard response to these concerns was scoffing and accusations of fear mongering.

Well, the fences are down and the beast is loose.

He provides 3 examples of recent attempts to argue for them just within the past few months. But these arguments are not new. It’s just who is presenting them that is.

As Dr. George pointed out in "First Things," when Christians pointed out the logical link between same-sex marriage and polygamy, proponents of same-sex marriage rejected the connection. They insisted that "no one is arguing for the legal recognition of polygamous or polyamorous relationships as marriages!"

George writes in response, "That was then; this is now." The "then" he referred to was last week; the now is today.

George predicts that Keenan’s article "will not produce a single serious critique by a major scholar or activist from the same-sex marriage movement."

Now he would love to be wrong. But defenders of traditional marriage know that the enclosures that kept marriage a "monogamous and exclusive union" are being dismantled. And no one should be surprised by what emerges, least of all those doing the dismantling.

If George was right about what would happen, would critics also be right about the predicted results of this breakdown?  Marriage is more "for the children" than any other institution or government program that has had that label slapped on it. The best arrangement for children is to be raised by their loving and committed biological parents.

And yet, we are tinkering and tearing down the one thing that can best protect the next generation. The results have been predicted to be calamitous. If we were right about predicting the slippery slope this far, wouldn’t it be prudent to consider whether we’re right about the rest of the ride?

1. Let’s start with some doodles, of a non-graphical sort.
2. If you believe a thing to be true, it’s not lying … if you publish it in a paper however, it means your editor is sleeping on the job.
3. Racial blinders. It’s not race, it’s culture, btw.
4. Oh go ahead, be happy.
5. Looking at the prospect of naval warfare and situational/geographical tactics.
6. Are we really talking about Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread?
7. Coloration.
8. Considering the Boston brothers with bombs.
9. And something more to be said on that front.
10. Rolling back the clock, is it possible?
11. Heh.
12. The trials and tribulations of covering the military.
13. In need of financial advice.
14. Mad skillz.

The definition of marriage is plastic. Just like heterosexual marriage is no better or worse than homosexual marriage, marriage between two consenting adults is not inherently more or less “correct” than marriage among three (or four, or six) consenting adults.

If you don’t think that same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy, you must refute her arguments that make that link. I don’t have to refute them, because a) I don’t think the definition of marriage is plastic, and b) I do think one leads to the other. If you do think marriage should be…whatever, but don’t think it leads to polygamy, you’ve got your work cut out for you. But if you are up to the challenge, let me hear your argument.

And now we have this.

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to … create public policy to repeat it. It’s allegedly being instituted to allow the poor to participate in the housing recover, but you can be sure that it won’t be a temporary measure, because any attempt to return to semi-sane credit checks will, will, be demagogued, once again, as eeevil Republicans throwing the poor out on the streets. This has to prove without a doubt that Democrats only care about intentions, not results. Even if the results have just finished happening.

Short-attention span voters love this stuff. Obama just thinks anything Bush did he can do better, and in this case, he very well could. We just did this, like, six years ago, and Barney Frank told us it was all good and not to worry. And then we had to bail out a bunch of banks, because we made them make loans to people who couldn’t pay them back, because, you know, racist / sexist.

1. Your tax dollars at work … OK. probably not your tax dollars but somebodies. Golly, gubmit sure is silly.
2. Ooh, surprise, taxes going up is the “hidden” plan.
3. Better than raising taxes any day of the week.
4. Which is another reason why not to do this.
5. A prediction made.
6. Another.
7. Hollywood and the musical.
8. Remember this.
9. Not alone in that confusion.
10. Despicable? or just ordinary ho hum?
11. What if you didn’t kill him, just put a round in a lung?  That’ll usually take the vim and vigor out of a guy.

This week has been crazy. The hotel web site crawls (which I can access at night). I’m with only sketchy phone service, no data, and no network all day. Odd doing that during a non-vacation day.

1. Pressure and the working world.
2. Syria and a prayer request.
3. Bike tech of a different sort.
4. Going way past the feed the beast notion.
5. Shale.
6. Not wrong. Christian. Jesus pointed out evil men love those who love them, love the man that hates you .. that’s a little more difficult.
7. Jane Austen and game theory.
8. Stupidity in schooling.
9. This is strange. On a Christian group conversation blog, a fellow “can’t imagine a leader not hung up on power” … Uhm, there was this Galilean fellow, you might call him the  leader of a movement, some time back …

izzat ’nuff?

1. Yikes.
2. Keep on training.
3. Poetry so bad it has to be read to believed. (refer also to prior feed the beast suggestions).
4. Repugnance.
5. Women and the Greatest Generation (of).
6. Immigration and a 1k mile border fence … but not in the US.
7. Geesh. Please, can we stop listening to/hearing from this moron.
8. I was once in that place.
9. Russian Roulette considered.
10. Uhm. Wrong answer. Sex is determined by XX or XY pairings in chromosomes … you are not “neither” or “both” but one or the other, if you’re human.
11. Hey! Notice. The first quote is by one speaker. The second by others. People of the same party can have different notions and expressing different ideas is not a 180 shift of a viewpoint.
12. Love and the ordinary Puritan.