What's life? What's death? One of these days I ought to pontificate. The problem is, I've seen much too much death -- more than most people my age. I've known death up close and personal. Familiarity with it does not qualify me as an expert though, so I should probably shut up and let this post die a graceful death. Otherwise I'll set myself up as an expert on something I admit know less about precisely because of my familiarity with the subject matter than the people who claim to know a lot about it but don't.

At least I know something about the unknowable.

Knowing what I don't know is knowing something.

So, rather than pontificate, I'd like to leave a suggestion, based on my experience with 20-plus deaths, and my own close brushes, glimpses if you will, with what's on the other side (I should add what isn't for those who want to see it that way).

It isn't about politics.

Politicization of death ought to be the last straw. Based on my experience, I really ought to be furious by the denial and stupidity that's been on display these past weeks.

The only reason I'm not in a total rage is that I've been there, and I know it's about letting go -- and in the most personal way imaginable.

Politics is the absolute antithesis of that.

So the people who want to politicize death are in reality more ridiculous than they are despicable, which is some comfort. They're more in denial than in touch.

And they too will die.

UPDATE: Lest anyone get the idea that I am condemning Terri Schiavo's supporters, I am not -- because I was one of them. I don't think I need to repeat that I thought it was wrong to pull her feeding tube. My point is that the exploitation of death -- especially the human fear of death -- is terribly misguided.

Via Glenn Reynolds, here's a religious blogger who feels pretty much the same way (about politicization):

I disagree with the position of the Instapundit (and others), but then again he, and others, are looking at it from the perspective of a law professor. I on the other hand am not so constrained to see it merely as a Constitutional issue, but one of a concerning cultural paradigm shift. A good topic for a good healthy debate - not to spew venom at those who disagree. Stop It!

Third - expect voices from the euthanasia lobby to get very loud very shortly.

Fourth - expect members of the Body (both conservative and liberal) to exploit this for all sorts of political and/or financial gain.

All in all, a sad day.

Via this radio show (transcript here, via the YodelMeister), I just heard that a blogger I'd never wanted to hear of -- one Malachy Joyce (sex unknown, but who has been described as a "pissy little Buchananite") -- has started an official delinking campaign, and he or she has accordingly delinked the following blogs (what follows is the actual html; I'd love to know why so many multiple links are provided for the letters of each delinked link):

A SMALL VICTORY
BEAUTIFUL ATROCITIES
COX&FORKUM
DIGGERSREALM
INDC JOURNAL
INSTAPUNDIT
LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS
PROTEIN WISDOM

Not sure what their crimes were, as I can't keep up with the fast and furious fur-flying these days. But I imagine they said stuff with which M. Joyce disagrees.

To my mind, that is no reason to delink anyone. I have plenty of links to people who have not only disagreed with me, but who have insulted me. I try to be as polite as I can no matter what the insults, and occasionally I cross my own line of civility, although I try not to let it happen too often. There is no duty whatsoever to give anyone a link, but delinking is a squalid thing to do. In fact, I agree with Frank J., who said it's the ultimate insult to a blogger.

I have never delinked anyone, and I have no plans to. Even when I have been deliberately delinked (as happened at least one time that I know of), I deliberately didn't delink in return.

But I have to admit to feeling a little neglected here, knowing that I'm not even good enough to deserve a delinking from ol' hunnert percent of whatever it is that's being totaled.

Waaaahhhhh! Nobody hates me!

(And I'm still waiting for the Classical Values Watch. . . .)

UPDATE: From Bill at INDC (link via InstaPundit), I just found out that 100% Trash is probably just another Hillary Clinton operative. . .

(Sometimes I'm easily fooled.)

UPDATE (04/01/05): As of this morning, I've apparently been delinked by my own blog! I'm speechless, and I can offer no explanation for this outrageous insult . . . I knew my self esteem was low -- but this goes too far.

MORE: Glenn Reynolds has apologized. And it's about time. In fact, it's long overdue. But how can any apology begin to restore the wreckage of countless ruined lives, blended puppies, and dreadfully exploited protest babes?

Nevertheless, bleeding heart, incessantly-whining libertarian that I am, I think this threat to take away Glenn's Legos is a tad harsh. After all, he tried to be good, and he's promised not to do it again!

MORE: Retrofuturistic (who has had the good sense to delink me deliberately and redundantly) adds an important point to this debate:

[T]his Malachy Joyce character has never heard of Blog Retrofuturistic.

BTW, the argument about anti-Semitism is interesting, and while I'm not sure the beenie remark completely proves it, considering this announcement -- HUNDREDPERCENTER RE-ADDED TO GOOGLE NEWS! -- I'd say the evidence is accumulating. . .

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

-- Mario Savio

I love to kvetch about how I prefer California to the East Coast! And, much as I hate to have to eat my words, occasionally something so foul, so odious, so grotesque comes along that I find myself unable to ignore it.

I should have foreseen that something like that would happen earlier today when Justin directed me to Little Green Footballs' link to this photo and videoblog of Ward Churchill addressing the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair.

Before clicking on the link I prepared for the worst. I am well acquainted with Churchill, the fake Indian claim, the little Eichmanns remark -- the rest of it. A sickening and disgusting display I fully expected.

But nothing prepared me for this:

What do I have to do to make them stop? Throw my free market body on the grotesque gears of scrotalist apparatchiks?

I'll say this. Shocking though he may be, Ward Churchill has been upstaged. (Well, I guess someone had to show some balls.....)

And while Churchill and the "scrotal inflation" warriors may not realize it, the fact is that by working together, they're all helping to show the rest of the world that freedom is a many-splendored thing.

Why can't al-Jazeera show the world what is tolerated in the land of George W. Bush? Huh? Huh?

Who knows, it might also be a good way to cut down on immigration....

(Thanks for the tip, Justin! Hmm... Is he trying to get me to stay here on the East Coast??)

Terri Schiavo died this morning.

While I don't think that removal of the feeding tube was right (and have said so repeatedly), I think it should be remembered that it was Michael Schiavo who wanted the tube pulled, and the courts which ordered this carried out.

It wasn't the ill-defined "Culture of Death." (Often referred to as "we.")

We didn't do it. And therefore, I didn't do it -- any more than I shot the Columbine victims.*

*Or, for that matter, clubbed the seals.

AFTERTHOUGHT: In the course of the debate over the morality of feeding tube removal, what seems to be getting lost is this: had Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers agreed on the feeding tube removal, Ms. Schiavo would have starved to death years ago and no one would have heard of this case. (It happens every day.) To me, the dispute between the parties is the distinction. But I fear that for many, this distinction is being forgotten, and while I know I'm repeating myself a bit, I'd hate to see a kneejerk overreaction lead to the imposition of a feeding tube requirement even when people don't want such things.

Over at More Than Human, Ramez Naam has a few sensible observations to make regarding the term "transhumanist".

I tend to take the view that almost everyone is a closet (or at least potential) transhumanist.

That is to say, when presented with a biotech product that will produce a clear improvement in their lives and that 1) is reasonably affordable; 2) has been demonstrated as safe; and 3) doesn't carry an awful social stigma, I believe the majority of Americans and Europeans would be willing to use the product...

...I don't think I need to convince the hardcore Kassians of anything to have a positive effect. If I can reach the people who are uncomfortable with biotech enhancements simply because they don't understand them, and educate those people on some of the myths and realities, I think that's enough to sway public policy.

I tend to agree with that, and I enjoy hearing it proposed in a sober, sensible manner.

This line of thinking also contributes to my dislike of the term "transhumanist". I think it's a horrible word from a PR standpoint. It adds a taint of weirdness - the very thing that makes people uncomfortable - to technologies that will either not work or will have straightforward benefits.

Amen to that. The term conjures up precisely the wrong image, and generates the exact opposite of popular appeal. You look at some of the folks who really go for it, and you get a sinking feeling. Much the same could be said, of course, for any group with a Mission.

In my mind, there's no need for the label at all. The vast majority of things transhumanists want, if they work as advertised, will be desired by millions of mainstream consumers...

A situation devoutly to be wished for. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the enthusiasm these developments can generate. It's sometimes difficult, looking at the wonderful possibilities around us, not to be swept away on a tide of irrational exuberance. I'll take optimism over pessimism any day, but, yeah, it can be overdone.

I'm about halfway through Mr. Naam's book and thoroughly enjoying it. It has much the same temper and tone as the passages quoted above. More on that when I've finished it. While careful to stay grounded throughout most of the book, in the final two chapters he allows himself a little more latitude for the "sense of wonder" stuff.

Yes, I skipped ahead to the end.

If the technologies he speculates about are actually brought into being, then humanity is in for some big changes. Some readers (Ms. Schaub?) will immediately think "Borg", or "Comprise". That's the kneejerk negative.

A more positive outcome might be more like John C. Wright's "The Golden Age". If he hasn't already done so, I would urge Mr. Naam to check it out. It's a great read.

Hey, if Dr. Schaub can spout fiction with a straight face, then so can I.

This is a post which really should have been written by Justin.

Justin might have even called it "Meet Dr. Watson." Anyway, one Robert T. Watson has managed to steal the global warming show today with a huge, Drudge-linked, incendiary doom-and-gloom headline along with plenty of Chicken Little predictions:

Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up'

Tim Radford, science editor
Wednesday March 30, 2005
The Guardian

The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.

"Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it says.

The report, prepared in Washington under the supervision of a board chaired by Robert Watson, the British-born chief scientist at the World Bank and a former scientific adviser to the White House, will be launched today at the Royal Society in London. It warns that:

· Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

· An estimated 24% of the Earth's land surface is now cultivated.

· Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers has doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40% and 50% of all available freshwater running off the land.

· At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.

· Since 1980, about 35% of mangroves have been lost, 20% of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20% badly degraded.

· Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown disease to emerge.

From what I can glean about Dr. Watson, his real gripe is that he lost his job as Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Here's Patrick Michaels on Watson's 2002 demise:

A variety of factors conspired against Watson. Ten years of carping about the United States did not endear him to the current Administration, nor did his expressed preference for doing global warming policy rather than global warming science.

"Global Change," a Washington newsletter, said of Watson in 1997: "In his work for the federal government and now the World Bank, Watson retains his involvement with science but can also influence directly and strongly the social issues that matter to him." Of his potential to influence policy, Watson said, "I find it an order of magnitude more rewarding, much more rewarding."

Watson in that interview described the Clinton Administration's position on global warming as "absolutely admirable." Of the then-Republican Congress, he said, "Rather than moving things forward constructively, we've [?] been trying to make sure that the things we've been doing were not undone."

That quote probably didn't help him with the current Administration. Nor did his statement at a U.N. press conference in Shanghai on the day of George Bush's inauguration: "A country like China has done more, in my opinion, than a country like the United States to move forward in economic development while remaining environmentally sensitive." A look at the opaque air of Shanghai and Beijing argues otherwise.

Watson was in Shanghai to preside over the approval of the UN's third and latest compendium on climate change, which included a ridiculous "storyline" (that's what the UN now calls its forecasts) of an 11°F global warming in the next 100 years. Those of us in the scientific community who reviewed the document never saw this outlandish projection because it was inserted after our peer review. John Christy, the Alabama scientist who has developed the satellite temperature history (which shows very little warming) subsequently told a hearing chaired by Senator John McCain (R-AZ), "This is one forecast that isn't going to happen."

At the time, the UN also made 244 other temperature forecasts, all cooler. But Watson seized on this one and told the press that it "adds impetus for governments to live up to their commitments [under the Kyoto Protocol] to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases."

There's lots of hot air. But most of it emanates from Watson, who has been called one of the world's leading "Political" scientists:

Watson presided over the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR), published last year. The assessment reports are supposed to be a comprehensive review of the state of climate science in support of the international climate negotiations. What they have become under Watson's guidance is a political bludgeon to enforce global warming orthodoxy.

The first inkling that Watson was manipulating the panel's work for political ends was two weeks before the 2000 presidential election. A draft of the report's Summary for Policymakers was leaked toThe New York Times, which reported that the IPCC "has now concluded that mankind's contribution to the problem is greater than originally believed," and that, "Its worst-case scenario calls for a truly unnerving rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit over 1990 levels." The leak was clearly calculated to aid Al Gore's campaign.

In January 2001, Watson publicly released the final draft of the summary, even though the report itself was still under revision, producing another media circus. Watson chimed in that, "This adds impetus for governments of the world to find ways to live up to their commitments … to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases."

The Summary for Policymakers, written by U.N. politicos rather than scientists, is used by Watson to misrepresent the science. IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Lindzen noted that the 35-page chapter that he worked on was summarized in one sentence, and avoided any mention of the many problems with how the models misrepresent key climate processes.

By releasing the Summary for Policymakers before the report itself, Watson assured that its alarmist message was well ingrained in the public psyche before the real science could get a fair public hearing. Watson's unorthodox strategy has achieved the desired political impact as the report itself has been largely ignored.

Unfortunately, the report itself wasn't free of Watson's meddling. The new report estimates that the Earth's average temperature would rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius -- or 10.44 degrees Fahrenheit, which The New York Times rounded up to 11 -- over the next century, a big change from its earlier estimate of 1 to 3.5 degrees C.

The higher prediction is not based on new evidence or on a new understanding of the relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change, but on an unwarranted change in the assumptions about future population growth, economic growth and fossil fuel use.

Stephen Schneider, a professor at Stanford University and staunch proponent of the global warming agenda, expressed reservations in Nature magazine about the new assumptions. According to Schneider, "This sweeping revision depends on two factors that were not the handiwork of the modelers: smaller projected emissions of climate cooling aerosols; and a few predictions containing particularly large CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions."

To come up with the outlandish CO2 projections, for instance, Watson formed a group of academic scientists, environmental organizations, industrial scientists, engineers, economists, and systems analysts that decided to "create 'storylines' about future worlds from which population, affluence and technology drivers could be inferred. These storylines "gave rise to radically different families of emission profiles up to 2100 -- from below current CO2 emissions to five times current emissions," according to Schneider.

To get the final "dramatic revision upward in the IPCC's third assessment," he wrote, it combined the climate sensitivities of seven general circulation models (GCMs) with the "six illustrative scenarios from the special report" within a simple model to get 40 climate scenarios.

To add insult to injury, these storylines were not subjected to peer review. In fact, they were added to the IPCC report during a "government review" after the scientific peer review was concluded.

Watson's actions proved that he was not fit to continue as the head of a scientific review process. The product of his tenure was not science but advocacy. The IPCC's new chairman faces the difficult task of getting the IPCC to promote sound science rather than political advocacy masquerading as science.

For all I know, he's a pal of Rifkin, Ehrlich and company. Where is Justin when I need him?

Anyway, I'll grant that the man has stamina.

Nonetheless, it is a bit unfair. Watson really is indefatigable, or at least he doesn't show fatigue. At the interminable U.N. meetings, such as the one that slapped together the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, he stayed up all night, a lot of nights, to craft text acceptable to Al Gore. In an earlier incarnation, as a graduate student in atmospheric chemistry at University of Maryland, and later as honcho of NASA's stratospheric chemistry program, his drive and commitment were legendary.

Along the way, though, Watson discovered that his true calling wasn't science so much as it was using science to tell people what to do. And he's proud of it, too. In April 1996 he left his position as associate director of President Clinton's Office of Science and Technology Policy for the World Bank. In an article on the job change, Washington's greenie gossip sheet Global Change wrote:

In his work for the federal government and now the World Bank, Watson retains his involvement with science but can also influence directly and strongly the social issues that matter to him. [Said Watson:] "I find it an order of magnitude more rewarding, much [italics in original] more rewarding.

UPDATE: Here's today's Drudge headline:

If the Phildelphia Inquirer did that based on such a crummy story, I'd be all over them.

(Glad I'm not a journalist, and don't have to answer to anyone....)

The "2nd Annual Flim-Flam-Fabulous April Fools Edition of the Carnival of Vanities has been posted by Eric Berlin. The entries are supplemented by fictitious, made-up posts.

Each set of five Carnival entries you see below consists of four real and true postings from all around the Web. And one entry in each set is a complete fabrication. Can you avoid all the traps I've set to fool you? Can you tell which entries are fake and which represent cold, hard, and profoundly weird reality? Only one way to find out. Start clicking.

So go enjoy it.

Joe Gandelman's (via Glenn Reynolds) very thoughtful piece made me think about a question I don't think about too much: am I a journalist?

While there's a huge debate going on among and between MSM journalists and bloggers over whether the latter are really "journalists," I think there's something being missed.

At the risk of sounding insolent, I'd like to ask, does it matter?

To me, the whole thing feels a little like whether I'm a liberal or a conservative. For years now, my answer has been that I think what I think. The labels ("conservative" and "liberal") are bestowed on me by others -- usually in a manipulative manner, and I have found that those calling me a "liberal" tend to be conservative, while those calling me a "conservative" tend to be liberal. It's a process of manipulative exclusion: if you don't agree with me, I'll accuse you of being on the other side and maybe that will hurt your feelings into agreeing with me!

And now it's "I'll say you're not a journalist!"

But did anyone ever ask me whether I wanted to be a journalist?

Frankly, one of the reasons I took up blogging was my anger at journalists -- particularly their supreme arrogance. I spent almost ten years trying to get the bastards to take another look at the Watergate scandal, only to repeatedly discover that journalism is dominated by a cadre of high priests who cut their teeth on Watergate. Media Titans like Woodward, Bernstein, Rather, Hersh, who never cease reminding ordinary mortals that they -- the all-knowing, all-seeing JOURNALISTS -- Delivered Us From Evil By Saving Us From Nixon!

Without debating the particulars of Watergate here, their attitude gave me (and gives me) the creeps. Would I want to "be" one of them?

Hell no!

Blogging allows me to think what I think and say what I think. Once I allow someone to define me, I lose some of that freedom. That loss of freedom begins with accepting the definition. From there it's a very slippery slope to joining.

There's that old expression, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," but again I ask,

what's to join?

I blog because I don't have to join. So that no one will have the right to tell me what to think or write. Or what not to.

To "be" a "journalist" strikes me as akin to joining a (very) gated community.

I prefer no gate.

Speaking of free speech, I'm trying to make sense over what Houlin Zhao, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, said about the Internet:

People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service? If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

I've had two cups of coffee now, and I'm at more of a loss to understand it than I was last night. This man -- who wants to run the Internet via the United Nations -- is wholly unable to distinguish between government controls and the absence of government controls! Thus, he says, "if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service?" Such a mindset assumes that government must be everything -- an all-seeing, all-knowing entity which must grant or deny permission before anything can happen.

The reason I can't understand the man's thinking is because it is not thinking. It's a circular mass of mindless totalitarianism run amok.

And these people want to take over the Internet?

Why, yes.

Obviously, it all makes sense -- to them.

And if we let them, they will!

Via InstaPundit, I see that more controversy (see last night's post) has developed over the use of the expression "gay terrorist":

Gay activist Michael Rogers, of Blogactive.com, continues to target critics in an ongoing saga of an online jihad within the blogosphere.

This time the target was LimeShurbet.com, a blog whose site was taken down overnight by the site's commercial service provider. According to sources, LimeShurbert had taken GayPatriot's "WANTED: GAY TERRORISTS" post and created his own "wanted poster" targeting Michael Rogers and John Aravosis (Americablog). Rogers alerted the service provider which then shut the site down.

Here is a message from LimeShurbet.com's blog author, Robert Shurbet:

I will be back, content intact one way or another. Michael Rogers has tried to silence a voice of dissent. He will fail.

UPDATE 3:16PM - Robert Shurbert posted the following on Haloscan:

Show your support for GayPatriot by placing the "WANTED" banner from my sidebar on your blog.

GayPatriot deserves to have his voice heard! All gay conservatives have a voice that needs to be heard too! The gay community is not a "liberals only" club any more than the Republican party is for "straights only." It is high-time gay conservatives and those that support them speak out against the terrorist tactics employed by Michael Rogers!

Don't let Michael Rogers silence a voice of opposition. He can try to silence one - he cannot silence many.
[Robert - Haloscan - 03.29.05 - 1:29 pm

Third, I enjoy satire. And I think the poster in question is quite amusing. Plus it's art!

All good reasons for displaying it here.

BTW, I refuse to be "outed!" (The term has no meaning to me anyway.) I'm staying right here in my hard-earned, openly public, closet!

Good luck making me come out! And good luck making me take it down!

MORE: Via Michael Demmons, here's some very entertaining reading.

Whee!

UPDATE (03/30/05): Michael Demmons reminds us that free speech lovers (as well as those opposed to "outing") should go right ahead and copy the above "WANTED" poster without fear of recriminations. While I can't vouch for other ISPs, I am delighted to see confirmation from Michael that Host Matters (also home to Classical Values) is not easily intimidated:

Content cannot be defamation by definition unless it can be shown that the content is inherently and deliberately untrue. In your particular case, a simple google of “michael rogers gay” brought me to an article by The Independent (UK) about the very bullet points you have listed in the graphic, with quotes from him related to that subject. Further searches reveal other stories by regular journalistic outlets as well, with and without quotes. Suggesting people email him to voice their opinion of his actions is also not an actionable offense, since a look at his own site has links for email to the addresses you have listed - since he is inviting contact via email, and lists available addresses, your posting of them poses no violation of any of our policies or of any statutes. It is your opinion that his actions are as you describe them, and people are free to agree or disagree as they see fit, and post their own opinions, if they’d like to do so. In addition, there is nothing in your graphic that urges any violence against anyone - it reads, in fact, more like the sort of online boycott calls that go around from time to time. Therefore, we would take no action related to complaints by the individual about this item on your page other than to suggest he take it up with you.

Regards,

Abuse Investigations
Hosting Matters, Inc.
http://www.hostingmatters.com

UPDATE (03/30/05 -- 08:30 a.m.): Both the GayPatriot site and that of its current author, Christian Grantham seem to be down as of this morning. (No idea why....)

UPDATE (03/31/05): Here's more on a guy whose name I didn't think was worth mentioning at the time . . .

I never had the, um remotest idea that such a thing would happen, but alas! Glenn Reynolds is promoting a device which enables censorship.

Perhaps we should have seen it coming. After all, he has previously defended copyright-infringing technology, as well as guns.

It's a slippery slope down the remote path.

I never thought I'd be advocating such a thing, but isn't it time that we think the unthinkable and ask ourselves.....

Has the time finally come for REMOTE CONTROL?

At the very least, should the sale of television remotes to children be prohibited? Shouldn't there be a waiting period? To this I imagine the proponents would come up with simplistic slogans like:

Remotes don't turn off televisions. People turn off televisions!

Outlaw remotes and only outlaws will have remotes!

But I am not remotely persuaded by remote hypotheticals from people who don't have the remotest idea what they're advocating.

Something must be done.

In the latest outbreak of zero tolerance, a school has forbidden a student from bringing to school a picture of her Marine Corps brother -- because he is holding a gun in the picture:

If a student wants to share a photo of her brother's chosen career, the Marine Corps, it stands to reason that a weapon will be part of it.

Unless, that is, the student attends high school in the Salem-Keizer School District. Then she'll be told that the photo violates the district's zero-tolerance policy for weapons.

That's nuts.

This is the same weekend, remember, when Salem is festooned with yellow ribbons because hundreds of our National Guard troops have returned home from a yearlong stint in Iraq. Welcome home, soldiers, but could you digitize the weapons out of your photos before visiting our local high schools? We don't want our impressionable kids to get the wrong idea about what you've been doing.

In most cases, the district is right to forbid students from carrying or displaying any kind of weapon at school, even on a T-shirt. This city has had problems in the past with gang violence. A school shooting this week in Minnesota serves as a painful reminder of the allure guns hold for some troubled kids.

However, "zero tolerance" can be an overly rigid approach to solving problems. That's true in the case of Shea Riecke, the McKay High freshman who hoped to bring a photo of her brother, Cpl. Bill Riecke, to her social studies class.

What a great chance for an alert teacher to engage kids in a discussion about a career that some of them quite likely will choose -- will be recruited for, in fact. The photo shows three Marines stationed in Iraq, one bare-chested, carrying a fully automatic rifle and a machine gun between them. They look young, serious and yet brash.

How much more it says about their situation than the alternatives the school district is said to have suggested -- a photo of Cpl. Riecke in dress blues or the same photo but with the weapons removed by computer enhancement.

(Via G. Gordon Liddy, who protested that "pictures of guns are not guns.")

A picture is an image is a depiction is a thoughtcrime is a gun!

And I'm very concerned....

Because if an "image" of a gun is the same thing as a gun, then what about images in textbooks? Should students be allowed to study such evil images as part of their "history"? I think it's high time that depictions of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam had all "images of guns" airbrushed out.

And why stop with gun images? Isn't it also time for a crackdown on words that evoke these images?

Here's Andrew Sullivan on the Schiavo case:

It's been striking lately how the rhetoric of some conservatives has morphed into revolutionary tones. Bill Kristol, at heart an ally of religious radicalism, calls for a revolution against the independent judiciary we now have. Fox News' John Gibson has argued that "the temple of the law is not so sacrosanct that an occasional chief executive cannot flaunt it once in a while." Bill Bennett has said that the courts are not the ultimate means to interpret law and the constitution, that the people, with rights vested in the Declaration of Independence, have a right to over-turn the courts if judges violate natural law precepts such as the right to life. Beneath all this is a struggle between conservatives who place their faith in the formalities of constitutionalism and those who place their literal faith in the God-revealed truths they believe are enshrined in the Declaration, truths that alone give meaning, in their eyes, to America as a political project.

What interests me as a political pragmatist is that the Republicans may be spelling their defeat in 2008 -- much to the advantage of Hillary Clinton, who is all but certain to be the nominee.

As Sullivan argues elsewhere:

For others, the Schiavo case is a first battle to win over the religious right primary voters who will determine the next Republican nominee. The Republican leadership is gambling that the intensity of their religious base will outweigh the more general public's disdain for this exercise in government over-reach. The broader public, they calculate, will forget. The zealots will always remember. And if Schiavo dies, they will have a martyr as well. And they will figuratively prop her up as a symbol in the campaigns to come.

Anyway, the Republicans are right that as a general rule, the attention span of the American public is very short.

But I think there's something about death which tends to make it the exception to this general rule. Most people spend their lives in mortal fear of death. And regardless of the merits of the Schiavo matter (as I've said, I don't think her tube should have been pulled) the fact is that Big Government has poked its nose into one family's struggle with death. This is likely to be remembered, and exploited.

And exploited.

(No matter what I say, please remember that these doomsday scenarios need not happen. My hat's off to Bill Quick and Jon Henke for thinking ahead. And need I mention Glenn Reynolds?)

UPDATE: Just this morning, I see that Michael Schiavo is requesting an autopsy, contrary to earlier reports. Is someone thinking about 2008?

MORE: A lot of bloggers are debating whether the religious right has gone too far this time. InstaPundit links to a fascinating debate between Jeff Jarvis (who's great, and who links to this excellent analysis by Joe Gandelman) and Hugh Hewitt, who articulates the conservative position better than anyone else, and makes a good point about avoiding stereotypes. The problem is that I find myself agreeing with much of what both Jarvis and Hewitt say, which prevents me from declaring either a "winner."

But my truest sentiments are with The Anchoress:

Randall Terry and his zealots full of certainty and moral superiority are now coming off like their unbearable counterparts on the left. Their rhetoric is becoming the equivalent of "America is a horrible country because Bushitler is killing people in Iraq!"

Balance. Things are out of balance. But imbalance by the left is shrugged of in the press and never used against the democrats. Imbalance on the right, that's another story. It is, as I said, the story that is gift, and it's going to keep on giving.

And Glenn Reynolds is absolutely right about Randall Terry:

....[H]e needs to be loudly and regularly denounced as a nut. Otherwise you're in the same boat as lefties who don't want to be identified with Ward Churchill, but happily use him when they want to draw a crowd.

(In fact, the Terry / Churchill axis is surprisingly close -- they both view 9/11 as a necessary chastisement for a sinful America. If that's not a distinguishing mark of full-bore idiotarianism, I don't know what is).

STILL MORE: Jesse Jackson has arrived on the scene.

(Wouldn't want to have a circus atmosphere develop....)

AND MORE (03/30/05): Nat Hentoff's Schiavo piece in today's Village Voice is an awfully good read, and provides food for thought to people who'd probably otherwise never hear it:

Months ago, in discussing this case with ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, and later reading ACLU statements, I saw no sign that this bastion of the Bill of Rights has ever examined the facts concerning the egregious conflicts of interest of her husband and guardian Michael Schiavo, who has been living with another woman for years, with whom he has two children, and has violated a long list of his legal responsibilities as her guardian, some of them directly preventing her chances for improvement. Judge Greer has ignored all of them.

In February, Florida's Department of Children and Families presented Judge Greer with a 34-page document listing charges of neglect, abuse, and exploitation of Terri by her husband, with a request for 60 days to fully investigate the charges. Judge Greer, soon to remove Terri's feeding tube for the third time, rejected the 60-day extension. (The media have ignored these charges, and much of what follows in this article.)

Michael Schiavo, who says he loves and continues to be devoted to Terri, has provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife (the legal one) since 1993. He did have her tested for a time, but stopped all testing in 1993. He insists she once told him she didn't want to survive by artificial means, but he didn't mention her alleged wishes for years after her brain damage, while saying he would care for her for the rest of his life.

Terri Schiavo has never had an MRI or a PET scan, nor a thorough neurological examination. Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, a specialist in heart-lung transplant surgery, has, as The New York Times reported on March 23, "certified [in his practice] that patients were brain dead so that their organs could be transplanted." He is not just "playing doctor" on this case.

During a speech on the Senate floor on March 17, Frist, speaking of Judge Greer's denial of a request for new testing and examinations of Terri, said reasonably, "I would think you would want a complete neurological exam" before determining she must die.

Frist added: "The attorneys for Terri's parents have submitted 33 affidavits from doctors and other medical professionals,all of whom say that Terri should be re-evaluated."

In death penalty cases, defense counsel for retarded and otherwise mentally disabled clients submit extensive medical tests. Ignoring the absence of complete neurological exams, supporters of the deadly decisions by Judge Greer and the trail of appellate jurists keep reminding us how extensive the litigation in this case has been—19 judges in six courts is the mantra. And more have been added. So too in many death penalty cases, but increasingly, close to execution, inmates have been saved by DNA.

As David Gibbs, the lawyer for Terri's parents, has pointed out, there has been a manifest need for a new federal, Fourteenth Amendment review of the case because Terri's death sentence has been based on seven years of "fatally flawed" state court findings—all based on the invincible neglect of elementary due process by Judge George Greer.

MORE: John Hawkins' Schiavo FAQ is well worth reading too.

UPDATE (03/31/05): While it's probably too late to write an update that few will see, I feel obligated to make an exception here, because just as I realized that I'd forgotten to credit Glenn Reynolds for that link to Right Wing News's Schiavo FAQ, I read this:

...[T]he entire "libertarian" culture []... is astutely ignoring the actual facts of Terri's case, preferring to argue peripheral issues instead. InstaPundit happens to embody that culture to a tee, unfortunately.

(Once again, link via Glenn Reynolds.)

I guess that mean that I am not part of the "libertarian" "culture" -- because I haven't ignored the facts.

Has Glenn Reynolds?

I must ask: why would the "fact-ignoring" Glenn Reynolds bother with the RightWingNews link?

(I guess I should point out that one of the reasons I read InstaPundit is because I prefer facts to labels.)

FINAL NOTE: Considering that apparently sane people are still defending Randall Terry, this quote is well worth remembering:

"Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... If a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple.... Our goal is a Christian Nation... we have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."

[Randall Terry, Head of Operation Rescue, from The News Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Aug 15, 1993]

Via InstaPundit, I see more confirmation of what I've been warning about for some time: war on gay conservatives [and non-conforming gays generally].

Thanks to the efforts of two noted practitioners of a form of stalking they euphemistically call "outing," GayPatriot (who started his blog to oppose such tactics) has quit blogging -- apparently to save his job. (Fortunately, the blog is being continued by GayPatriotWest.)

Getting someone fired is the lowest form of sleazy backstabbing I can think of. Going after someone's job is analogous to robbery, because it takes away someone's living. If anything should be a crime, it's that.

From what I can determine, GayPatriot's crime was to call these tactics a form of terrorism. If someone makes enough trouble that you lose your job, it might not be terrorism in the legal sense, but is it terrorism in the moral sense?

Let's see how my dictionary defines "terrorist" . . .

terrorist: 1. One who favors or practices terrorism; one who administers or coerces a government or community by intimidation.....

Webster's New International Dictionary (Second Ed., 1958)

Without getting into the question of favoring terrorism, I think it's fair to ask whether threatening to have someone fired constitutes intimidation.

There's a lot of it going around.

There'll be a lot more too.

UPDATE (03/29/05): Michael Demmons had this email exchange with Gay Patriot:

According to GayPatriot, whom I had an email exchange with following Rogers’ pseudopsychopathic episode, here’s what happened:

He had somehow found out who I am and called my employer. He terrorized my secretary and threatened to call the police, FBI and sue my company as well as threatened a nationwide boycott of my company’s products. My secretary was scared to death and was shaking in fear.

If a terrorist is one who terrorizes, the Mike Rogers is one of them. That’s his job - to make gay conservatives so fearful of being outed that they will do anything he asks. Mike Rogers called GayPatriot’s employer because of a blog posting. If Rogers was actually concerned about his own safety - a ludicrous claim - he would have made his first call to the police. That wasn’t his concern though. His concern was intimidation, and what better way to intimidate someone into silence than to go through the trouble of finding out his employer’s name, and then start making harrassing, theatening phone calls.

You spend your life terrorizing and intimidating people into doing what you want, and you wonder why someone calls you a terrorist?

Mike Rogers is a petty man, and I am glad to see how much he is being called out by some of the larger blogs for this act of complete immaturity.

Did gay marriage exist while Ronald Reagan was governor of California?

Boi from Troy, citing the Sacramento Bee, says yes:

In May of [1972], a brief item appeared in The Sacramento Bee, saying that three lesbian couples would share in a "holy union" ceremony at the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church, which today has more than 300 churches worldwide.

What the story, and a follow-up, didn't say was that one of the couples wanted the union registered with the state, said then Rev. Joseph H. Gilbert, who has since retired.

So Gilbert went to the Sacramento County clerk's office and asked for a confidential marriage license, which can be issued only to couples who are living together as husband and wife at the time they apply. As Gilbert recalls, a man in the back "looked up and smiled at me and tore off three forms," instead of just one.

"That's when I knew he'd read the article. He knew what I was doing," said Gilbert, who filled it out accurately and returned it after the ceremony, no questions asked. He believes it was filed, though confidential licenses cannot be viewed by the public without a court order...

When the Rev. Freda Smith took over the Sacramento congregation in 1972, she took out confidential licenses for at least a dozen gay couples in the 1970s - again, without challenge...

The rhetoric then sounded pretty much like it does today. In declaring that marriage must be between a man and a woman only, Nestande was quoted as saying that that definition is "the essence of Western civilization."...

But Sacramento gay activist Jerry Sloan believes that revealing this page in California history could be politically potent. "I don't know why any of these couples haven't come forward already," he said. "If they have been married the last 30 years, California hasn't slid off into the ocean."

And, with more than 3,000 gay couples married in San Francisco - a number growing daily - Western civilization still appears intact.

The idea behind this is to provide a way for people who have been living together to be married without the embarrassment of admitting in public that they were not really married in the first place.

I guess that's a matter of interpretation.

The devil is always in the details.

I hate to talk about personal issues, but just this once I'll make an exception, and weigh in on the great razor debate now rocking the blogosphere.

I'm with Michael Demmons:

....if you use a blade, stick with it. Here’s why. Men, in general, always had smoother skin when they became older because they shaved with a blade. What do you need when you shave with a blade? You need cream. Where does that cream go? On your face, obviously. What’s in the cream? Moisturizers. Since men have largely stopped using blades, they’re now as wrinkled up as old ladies are, when they never were in the old dayes!!

As to the blade, I love the Gillette Mach 3 (or the previous Mach 2), with the triple blade. I almost never cut myself shaving because the three blades add the kind of stability you'd never get with a single blade. I admit, the styling of these razors gets a little ridiculous. Almost scifi, like a rocket ship about to blast off.

But my view about heavy beards finds confirmation:

Tom Nardone:

Type of Use: A very thick, fast growing beard. I've had really bad luck with electrics because my beard is too thick. Using an electric made me look like I forgot to shave. Before the Mach 3 I was using an Atra. I never switched to the razors that flexed to "match the contours of your face" because they seemed a little to unrealistic to me.

I've tried the stubble look, as well as the bearded look, but I'm enough of a barbarian as it is without needing to look like one.

UPDATE: More on the Mach 3 Turbo, along with a complaint that it does not, um, vibrate like the power version:

And oh how it vibrates. The folks at Gillette truly have taken it to the next level with this little honey. The three blades trim your whiskers as effortlessly as an opposing quarterback slicing and dicing the Vikings secondary, while the vibrating handle creates the sensation of a gentle massage. Shaving really doesn't get much better.

MORE: In the general spirit of this blog, it's probably worth a reminder that the civilized ancients believed in shaving the face -- and more.

The Romans also disapproved of pubic hair; young girls began removing it as soon as the first hair appeared. They used tweezers, which they called the "volsella". They also had a kind of depilatory cream, the "philotrum" or "dropax", sometimes made with bryonia, the forerunners of the current depilatory creams. Waxing was also a way of depilating; this was done with resin or pitch. And the practice of pubic hair removal wasn't unique to Rome. It was practiced in even the most remote parts of the empire. Julius Caesar (101-44 BC) writes that, "The Britons shave every part of their body except their head and upper lip." It is reported that Poppaea, wife of the Roman Emperor Nero, used depilatory creams to remove unwanted body hair daily. The latest available creams included some wonderful ingredients, like resin, pitch, white vine or ivy gum extract, ass's fat, she-goat's gall, bat's blood, and powdered viper.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Dr. Schaub: The cloning of human beings would be the triumph of the Machiavellian project to conquer fortune and bring everything within the power of human choice and calculation...It shows how human dignity is bound up with the lottery of nature and how the ground of human dignity could be imperiled by an attempt to extend human controls over the human essence.

In talking of the complexity and difficulty of the bioethical enterprise, chairman Kass was, perhaps, being diplomatic...Nonetheless, and with considerable trepidation, I feel I must take issue with the statement.

The trepidation arises because Mr. Kass was my teacher at Chicago and because I believe the nation-at-large is now blessed in having him as their teacher...

Of my teacher, I would like to ask, is it either incorrect or misleading or unhealthful to see the dispute over cloning as of a peace with the slavery crisis and the abortion debate? And, further, if the example of Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral complexity and the intertwinededness of good and evil and the intractability of the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and more likely that we will end up in "Brave New World?" where despotism masquerades as a conception of the good?

Dr. Kass: Let me say one thing. Diana, I don't know what to say to you. I mean, it's one of those wonderful moments where, if I might return a compliment, Leo Strauss' famous remark that one should always teach as if there were a silent student in the class that was one's superior in heart and in mind.

I won't finish the thought, but it's perfectly clear, Diana, it was, I don't really know how to answer you...

December 9, 2003

Dr. Kass:We want to perform better in the activities of life. But do we want to accomplish this by becoming mere creatures of our chemists or by turning ourselves into bionic tools designed to win and achieve in inhuman ways?...We want longer lives. But do we want it at the cost of living carelessly or shallowly with diminished aspiration for living well...

Dr. Schaub: In the course of deepening our understanding of our own desires and of the goods we seek, the report leads us to doubt whether the sorts of biotechnologies that are likely to be developed will really satisfy us, despite the fact that they're being offered to us as answering certain deeply felt and widely shared human desires and aspirations.

Dr. Lawler: I now have to say what I hope you already know. The case I just gave for conscious, biotechnological mood control only makes sense to those who really believe that we do or will be able to completely understand human consciousness or the human soul. So it doesn’t make much sense to me. And I think this penetrating report would be even more powerful if it were more consistently confident that the mood control project is finally mission impossible-in fact, finally nuts...

Our futile biotechnological pursuit of happy souls will erode still further our experiences of continuity, permanence, love, and friendship- our genuine connections with the world and the human beings around us-that really do moderate our genuinely human experiences of homelessness in this world...So all honor to and God bless Leon Kass for getting government to venture a bit into thinking about the soul.

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

Dr. Kass: Two additional members are joining the council...Peter Lawler, a distinguished political philosopher and student of American government...

Diana Schaub, a young political scientist and also a student of literature, has written insightfully about the attitudes of the young and the old, a perspective crucial to understanding the way society will confront its aging demographics.

Both are known among their colleagues for their openness to discourse and their devotion to public deliberation and democratic decision-making.

Their personal views on the matters to come before the council in the coming term are completely unknown, but I am confident that they will come to them only as a result of genuine reflection and a full consideration of all the scientific and other evidence.

UPDATE: My former personal secretary reminds me that mere quotations are pallid things compared to a vigorous commentary thereon. I had hoped to let the words speak for themselves, but I am urged to spice things up a bit. Here goes.

The question I'm attempting to illuminate is simply this. Does "His Nibs" ever stretch the truth in what he doubtless perceives to be a good cause? Looks like a big fat yes to me...

Their personal views on the matters to come before the council in the coming term are completely unknown...

After reading the rather fulsome praise (and yet more florid opinion) oozing about the stage at these events, peals of wild laughter would seem to be the most appropriate response. But wait, it gets better. According to the Slate article I linked to above,

The ruckus over changes in the composition of the President's Council on Bioethics has its roots in a White House meeting that occurred on July 9, 2001. It was during this meeting that President Bush began to formulate his policy on stem-cell research...

Mr. Bush had asked Dr. Kass to bring along someone who had a different viewpoint from his own. He thought Dr. Callahan would have a different view, but as it turned out he too disliked the idea of destroying embryos and had a position similar to Dr. Kass. This apparently made a big impression on Mr. Bush.

As well it should. This would be the same Daniel Callahan who memorably said,

There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.

Thanks for thinking of us, Dan. As the Slate article notes,

Callahan was a Democrat and former editor of the liberal magazine Commonweal, but it stretches credulity to suggest Kass had no inkling that Callahan, a longtime friend and colleague, would have views on stem cells that were similar to his own.

If memory serves me correctly, Daniel Callahan is singled out in the forward of "Toward A More Natural Science", originally published in 1985, as being tremendously helpful during the exploration and elaboration of the ideas in the book. Long walks, long talks, that sort of thing. I'll post the line in its entirety when I get the chance. Here's more from Slate.

Kass was asked by his commander-in-chief to present a true debate. Even if Kass honestly didn't know that Callahan would agree with him, it was negligent of him not to find out....The story of the Great Non-Debate goes a long way toward explaining why journalists are unwilling to cut Kass much slack now that his intellectual honesty is being called into question once again.

UPDATE: Here we are. From the preface, pages xii and xiii…

The author of this volume is by rearing a moralist, by education a generalist, by training a physician and a biochemist, by vocation a teacher—and student—of philosophical texts, and by choice a lover of serious conversation, who thinks best by sharing thoughts and speeches with another.

And how. Move it along sir, people are waiting.

Such a fellow incurs many debts—especially regarding a book written over fifteen years—which at this juncture he wishes gratefully to acknowledge.

Right. A list of names worthy of an Academy Award Acceptance Speech follows, for the most part thankfully omitted here, but among whom we find (envelope, please), Dan Callahan…

Dan Callahan and Will Gaylin and my other colleagues at the Hastings Center have provided a warm and lively collegiality and steady invitations to develop and present my own thinking

So by the time of the Great Non-Debate they had known each other for, what, fifteen or sixteen years at the very least? It can be hard to get to know a man in just sixteen years, regardless of the warmth of his collegiality. But still, an accurate surmise or two wouldn’t seem totally unreasonable. Seems unlikely that it was a blind date.

Great news from Randall Parker. The Germans are now officially fatter than Americans...

The International Obesity Task Force estimated that Finland, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Malta have exceeded the United States figure of 67% for overweight or obese males.

Good news indeed. As a "Person of Weight" myself, I feel no guilt in indulging my schadenfreude (a German word, you know) at the expense of the Deutsche Volk. And how delightful to discover that there is such a thing as an "International Obesity Task Force." I envision it steaming into San Francisco Bay, laden with low-carb snacks.

"O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

Ray Radlein at Science Fiction Blog made a cogent point regarding Diana Schaub. He refers to her use of Star Trek as a springboard to wisdom…

...one may well wonder about the qualifications of Professor Schaub, who is neither an Ethicist nor a Biologist, to sit on the President's Council on Bioethics. Well, thanks to the Sun, we can now rest easy, secure in the knowledge that she has turned for guidance to two impeccable sources of wisdom: Abraham Lincoln and Star Trek.

She did keep her two influences separate, however, so we don't have to worry that she was talking about "The Savage Curtain," at least. Because basing national policy on the results of a battle between Good and Evil staged by a powerful lava creature would just be silly, wouldn't it? Plus, it's a third season episode — one of the very last, in fact — and we all know what that means.

I know exactly what he means. The rest of the blog is also worth checking out. Just be careful where you click. As he illustrates in this post, some artwork can be mentally scarring.

Just as a for instance, how about this giant robot vagina laser cannon? It may not be work safe, but it certainly does open one up to new cultural perspectives. What would Captain Kirk do?

For a yet more venturesome, um, venture, try this Severus Snape/ Witch-King of Angmar slashfic. Not for the easily offended, it features explicit adult (though still hilarious) content. Actually, hilarity is sometimes hard to gauge, so maybe this won’t be your cuppa. Caveat emptor.

...Yet the ring was quite a lovely thing, beckoning with a deceptively wholesome golden light, although Severus had no doubt the black stone had the depth hidden within it to contain a stolen soul, and he wondered what the hell he was doing accepting anything from a personage that resembled in any way an unusually charismatic Dementor...And before he knew it, it was on his finger. Had he put it on?...He couldn't remember... And he looked up at the proud creature that was now glowing with a pale funguslike light--square jawed and skeletal, handsome somehow and yet fell and unclean, cold as bones and yet somehow heating a hidden flicker of monstrous desire within him, and it was smirking, and intent, and unfastening his robes...

While others stand lamenting the decline in the arts, vigorous new forms sprout up amidst the crannies…

Changing course (and not a moment too soon), I must confess to feeling just a smidge of contrition at taking Diana Schaub to task the other day. Further research shows her to be as nice a person as could reasonably be hoped for, with a very endearing love for her dogs…

The 8-year-old Portuguese water dog jumped into a rowboat on Montague Lake, shook the water from her curly coat and soaked her co-owner, Diana Schaub.[Cute picture in article] Instead of scolding Dill, Schaub wrapped her arms around the black dog and cheered.Dill had just earned her "courier water dog excellent" certification at the first Southern Splash Water Trials, hosted by the Movers & Shakers Portuguese Water Dog Club of the Carolinas. Her brother Fennel -- who completed the same trial Saturday -- also belongs to Schaub and Lauren Weiner, both of Baltimore, Md.

…As well as having friends who have leapt to her defense (nice graphic!), which is also a good sign.

Anyone who champions American Staffordshire Terriers, these days, has at least a little good in them. Alas, her politics as a whole are not so agreeable to me. I think that her “embryo research equals abortion and slavery” analogy is severely flawed. Flawed, hell, it’s just plain wrongheaded, and will get people killed to boot. And that bothers me.

A friend once asked me, “Why do you let these people irritate you so much? They don’t have any real power. They’re not going to win.”

Of course I agreed. I had to; my own words were being thrown back at me. Don’t you hate it when that happens? In the long run, I’m confident their agenda will not prevail. In a century or two, people will look back in wonder and shake their heads. But that’s the long run. It’s the short run that worries me. During the next few years, real damage could still be inflicted. That’s why I keep ranting about it.

Say there’s a disease that kills 100,000 people a year. If a therapy can eventually be developed that saves just ten percent of those people, it would be a good thing, right? If someone manages to drag out and delay that development by as little as five years, that’s 50,000 people needlessly dead.

I’m intentionally choosing conservative numbers here. My personal belief is that many more are at risk, and you can find some quite interesting numbers along those lines. Are the people responsible for that five year delay morally responsible for those deaths? Opinions vary, but depending on the exact circumstances I would be inclined to say yes.

It’s not quite as simple as not donating to the tsunami relief fund. I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. What I would blame them for is trying to enact legislation banning the relief fund outright, all over the world, forever, when donors are clamoring to give.

Some say let’s take our time. Let’s think it through in advance. What’s the harm in that? Medicine has always been slow to adopt new techniques. It’s an inevitable part of the process. Just look at poor Semmelweis.

I would reply yes, I know. It’s already far too slow. If anything, that increases the sense of urgency. Do we really want to pile yet another layer of gluey, obstructionist bureaucracy atop the glacially slow mess we already have? Do we really want an ultimately ineffectual moratorium putting the brakes on a promising avenue of research? Well, some of us do and some of us don’t. And we may never talk our way to a compromise. Look at the level of discourse we’d be up against…

Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion...Is it either incorrect or misleading or unhelpful to see the dispute over cloning as of a piece with the slavery crisis and the abortion debate? And further, if the example of Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral complexity and the intertwinedness of good and evil and the intractability of the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and more likely that we will end up in Brave New World, where despotism masquerades as a conception of the good?

If various parties deliberately attempt to shut down embryonic stem cell research, those parties should at least be willing to acknowledge the possible human cost. Mostly, they don’t. Instead, they paint rosy pictures of adult stem cell research picking up the slack. That’s all we really need, they say, that embryonic stuff is just mad scientists running a con game. Not so fast, please.

Various reputable scientists have repeatedly, publicly (and truthfully) said that we need to study both kinds of stem cells. Both kinds. The research paths are mutually reinforcing and illuminating. To say that one or the other is unnecessary is something we simply don’t know at this point. We simply don’t know.

My personal preference is that we do whatever it takes (ethically, of course) to speed things along. If you have a particular problem with the sanctity of first month embryos there is very little I can do to ease your conscience. I don’t feel that way myself, nor do many other Americans. We just don’t see the problem. If I order a sturgeon fillet and my waiter brings me a shot glass full of caviar, have I been well served? No. That is not a sturgeon fillet on my plate. If I contested the matter with my waiter, I don’t think he could simply pour a jigger of milt in, and say “Now it is!”

"A seed is not a tree."

Of course, less controversial techniques will eventually come along. But it’s hard to predict when. At a wild guess…later than we would like. We should be using what tools we have now, all of them, to the best of our abilities. But we aren’t. As Reason, over at “Fight Aging!” has pointed out time and again, there is a chilling effect on investment at work here. Private companies don’t want to spend dumpsters full of cash and then have their work declared illegal. It’s only prudence on their part to hang back a bit, waiting for a more settled legal situation. And as I’ve already said, a delay finding cures will end up costing lives.

It aggravates me that so many people profess to find death ennobling. It's how we cope with death that's ennobling, not the death itself. The fear that people would do nothing worthwhile without that constant spur of mortality urging them on strikes me as foolish gloomy hearsay. There are plenty of other spurs to get people up and moving. Love and lust. Poverty and peer pressure. Curiosity. Showing off. Mercy. We might find people building more cathedrals, not fewer, if they had a chance to see their projects all the way through.

For a fact, I have known many old people still in good health to be resistant to new endeavors. They tell me that they don’t have enough time left to make it worth their while. It’s sad. Then too, many younger people stick it out with a dead end job, or even a lucrative trade that they hate, because they feel that they have “come too far to turn back”. They have commitments, and can’t afford the time and money it would take to re-skill. Or so I hear. How conducive to creativity and human flourishing is that? I would change all that, if I could. Others are more conservative.

Daniel Moore wants to defend our humanity, to keep us human, surely a laudable goal. But on closer inspection, how exactly does one go about such a thing? What real world actions do you have to take to “keep man man”? If all you are talking about is “friendly persuasion,” then we really don’t need a government program. We already have the first amendment. Talk away, and good luck to you! But what if you actually wanted to be effective? You would need to take steps.

A more muscular policy might look a lot like arresting or heavily fining scientists and doctors for illicit research (as defined by legislators and advocated by some bioethicists). You would also want to maintain a comprehensive real-time database of who is doing what in the research community. Government monitors might need no-knock warrants on request, along with wiretaps and computer surveillance.

Since customers would be willingly complicit in such activities, to be truly effective, penalties would probably need to extend down to the end-user level. So defending our humanity would also look a lot like arresting people for trying to purchase life-extending therapies for themselves or their families. Suppressing enhancement technologies might require much the same tactics. The end result of these policies would be to force such people to use offshore providers.

Interestingly, our farsighted congress is way ahead of such miscreants. If memory serves, Sam Brownback has been trying to pass a law forbidding American citizens from using embryonic stem cell therapy abroad. Uncle Sam takes an interest in his citizen’s doings wherever they may be. I can’t imagine that this is what Daniel has in mind, but if he is serious about getting the job done, I don’t see anything less being effective.

If you’re not willing to accept a police state, you should probably be more accepting of change. Incarceration is even more aggravating than a “national conversation”.

Do we really need this “national conversation”? What’s the point, anyway? Schaub and Kass can make up stories about how bad things will be. Someone like me can make up stories about how good things will be. In the worst case, they could tell each other such stories for years on end, talking past each other, never achieving anything solid or meaningful.

People could, I suppose, continue to live their short diseased lives, dying young, waiting for a consensus that never arrives, and for what? At the end of that time we would still have reached no firm conclusions. We would have no facts. Just opinions. Great bales of opinions, neatly typed and attractively bound. The only way to be sure, to really know, is to run the experiment.

...the perception of endless time or of time without bound in fact has the possibility of undermining the degree to which we take time seriously and make it count...And so the question would be...is there some connection between the limits that we face and the desire for greatness that comes from recognition that we are only here for a short time?...If you push those limits back, if those limits become out of sight, we are not inclined to build cathedrals or write the B Minor Mass, or write Shakespeare's sonnets and things of that sort...

So we make the leap from "has the possibility" and "is there some connection?" to "we are not inclined to" within a couple of brief paragraphs. Certitude on the half-shell, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of airy disquisition. Saltation indeed.

So we'll stop building cathedrals? Stop writing great music, great poetry? What if the simple act of living longer does in fact rob us of something ineffable and precious?

Here's a fair question. What if it doesn't?

No time for an egg hunt!