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Saturday, July 30, 2005On the Frist thing:On the stem-cell question, I oppose creating embryos for the sake of destroying them for parts. I also oppose a puritanical objection to stem-cell research that limits our lines of inquiry for the sake of making sure that stem-cell research never goes anywhere lest an incentive arise to create an embryo for the sake of destroying it. Like my abortion position, it's a complete muddle designed to convince partisans on both sides that I'm on the other side but not completely horrible. Shameful, I know. And I'm not even running for office... The Frist question is another matter. Bill Frist has been Senate Majority Leader for a while now. He ought to have some idea of how Washington works and how his actions impact his party and his standing in Washington. But who cares? My real problem isn't what he does or doesn't know. It's how little I know about him. I didn't like Dole or Lott. I really didn't like Mitchell or Daschle. But I knew why. All I know about Frist is he's a doctor who sometimes saves lives while he's out on the road. Every time he does this, I wonder why he doesn't quit the Senate and go do something useful with his life. The stem-cell gambit hurts not because conservatives will be mad or liberals will be happy. It hurts because other than the "doctor moments," most of Frist's time on the national stage has served to muddle his positions and those of his party. We have nuclear options that don't explode, and now we have stem-cell flip-flops that don't quite make sense politically or ethically. What we don't have is a clear picture of who Frist is other than a nice guy doctor who can't quite figure out what or who he wants to be in a body created not for the personal evolution of its members but as a means to formulating and refining the prospective laws of our country. At this point, it is highly unlikely Frist would get my vote, at least, in any primary. Not because of any position he took or didn't take, but because I'm not that confident about the candidacy or presidency of a guy who after years in Washington still gets mentioned more for his old job than for his work on the Hill. 
posted by gbarto at 6:40 PM Stuttaford's picking on Deepak, who explores death as an illusion produced by our consciousness' clinging to the past. "Death can be viewed as a total illusion because you are dead already. When you think of who you are in terms of I, me, and mine, you are referring to your past, a time that is dead and gone. Its memories are relics of time passed by. The ego keeps itself intact by repeating what it already knows. Yet life is actually unknown, as it has to be if you are ever to conceive of new thoughts, desires, and experiences. By choosing to repeat the past, you are keeping life from renewing itself."You think that's wacky? Check out this guy: He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 10:39)Does not the second quote indicate the renunciation of "I, me, mine" and a life bound up in the comfort of known experiences in favor of a path to a new, unknown but renewing life whose alternative is a death foreordained if not technically arrived? The dirty secret of the New Age is not that its totally unheard of nonsense, but that a lot of it is a reformulation of ideas that have been on offer for centuries, not to say millenia. Chopra delights in connecting Christian theology to Buddhist conceptions of the universe and his connections aren't always that farfetched. I don't know if Stuttaford is a Christian. If he is, he ought tred carefully, as the Christian faith (which is mine, if not his) has a lot of goofy ideas that no sane person would contemplate unless faith impelled him to consider them long enough to realize the truth within. What's worse, since the New Age draws a lot on the old ones, making fun of its precepts without looking at them seriously engenders the risk of making a case for the risibility of your own faith. We all know that Deepak needs to lighten up sometimes. But in his casual dismissal, Stuttaford comes off as being every bit the "I know better than this idiot" sort he perceives Chopra as being. Reading HuffPo, I expect to find people who take their worldview for granted and casually dismiss those with whom they disagree without bothering to argue or consider the point. The Corner, though, should do better. (As for the humorless, self-righteous TurkeyBlog, let's not even go there!)
posted by gbarto at 5:53 PM from MSN: Smart Mouth How good is your vocabulary? I got nine. Of course that's because I read these: If you too want to know wild, wacky and wonderfully abstruse words - or merely aspire to being obnoxiously learned in such matters, check 'em out.
posted by gbarto at 5:16 PM Friday, July 29, 2005DSTVirginia Postrel writes here about Ed Markey's proposal to extend Daylight Savings Time, an idea of which she does not approve. Notes Postrel, those things DST is meant to correct might be worsened, not improved, in the Sunbelt, which is where an increasingly large percentage of the population lives.My own thoughts are that 1) retooling things for a reconfigured DST could very well cause more trouble than even the claimed benefits and 2) ideally, it shouldn't matter. In an era where a highly regulated industry - the railroads - set the pace for the country, government initiatives made sense. In an era when local ordinances decided what decent people did, and where and when, government initiatives on time might have had their place. I even grew up in an era where time zone differences divided the country into distinct regions - according to which national network feed they picked up. But... we are in an era where e-mail, the net and cable news are 24 hours, the season's hot HBO show can be watched three times in 24 hours by the night owls among us and the fax can come in any time. We are in an era of 24 hour stores and 24 hour lives. The workday is not sunrise to sunset. Nor is it nine to five. The hours are set according to when people are buying, meeting, watching, etc, contingent upon there being employees willing to show up at those times. This morning, I started one job at 7:30 a.m. I finished another at 7:30 p.m. In between, I bought my lunch at an establishment that is open from 10-7. I bought my dinner at a place open from 8-11. The person who rang up my dinner order started work at 3. In the middle, I visited a bookstore that is open from 9 to 11, visiting the café that is open till 10:30, before deciding to go down the way to where I had lunch, rather than ordering from the café clerk whose shift usually starts at 11. My last stop this evening was at 8 p.m. at a 24 hour grocery. There was a line because one of the cashiers was "on lunch." Incidentally, I did not visit the local Unamás, a small Mexican chain, even though I could have got there before they closed - they have extended summer hours that they set, all by themselves, without government direction. I guess I've given away where I stand on DST. It's not a question of wastefulness or savings, but of long-term irrelevance. Yes, most businesses with traditional hours dutifully adjust for DST. Those with posted hours usually play along. But, increasingly, as summer hours, special events and competition with 24 hour outlets take off, the clock has come to be an instrument for keeping track of the hours we set for ourselves, not calibrating life with the hours nature used to set for us. In its own way, it would be good to get rid of DST. Not because it's a bad concept, but because it's one more thing to bicker over as a society when we could be making these decisions ourselves. If you run a bait and tackle shop, you should open an hour before sunrise, regardless of the time. If you run an ice cream shop, your summer hours ought to run till the sun slips over the horizon and the air becomes chilly. And if you're a doctor, you'll see me two hours later than promised, whether we mark it down as scheduled for two, seen at four or scheduled for three, ready at five - oops, maybe we'll see you tomorrow. Okay, maybe the way we calibrate time as a unified society can make a difference... Seriously, though, if we want to play it smart, we'll do ourselves the most good if we treat DST initiatives the way we treat so many other government efforts to solve our problems, working to maximize the good and minimize the harm in paperwork consequences while going about our business as before. By the way, for the history of DST and ideas about why it does and doesn't make sense, check out the books above. I particularly liked Save the Daylight.
posted by gbarto at 10:39 PM Brandon Denning, quoted at Instapundit... The question then becomes this: When is it appropriate for a minority of senators—perhaps as few as one—to prevent an up-or-down vote on the nominee by filibustering? The common response is that a filibuster would be proper if the nominee's "views are out of the mainstream." Again, that raises the question that I posed yesterday: Who and by what standard is the "mainstream" measured?Would not a valid measure of whether one is in or out of the mainstream be a vote of the elected representatives of the people? Given the repeated election of Republicans to higher office, one suspects that People for the American Way not only considers itself more American than the American people, but more mainstream as well. If conformance to mainstream norms is so important, what is needed is not the threat of filibuster by fellow Senators but some sort of check on nominees arising in the House, that being the body that represents "the people" and that by its origins is the Constitutionally superior representation of the American mainstream. One suspects, however, that if John Roberts or anybody else were too far out of the mainstream, our fine Senators would vote against the up or down confirmation, since the tendancy for elected officials to cash in their own careers to advance that of the President is not pronounced. The filibuster game can be placed in the same category as the Roe v. Wade game: It is another chance for elected officials to play games through the courts while evading electoral consequences for their actions and eschewing contemplation of their obligation to actually lead, govern and, as appropriate, stay the hell out of things. If the Republicans want to railroad a fruitcake, an American people that elected them in spite of warnings by the left that the GOP would do so deserves the weirdo judge. If the GOP gets itself ditched by actually railroading a fruitcake, it deserves that consequence. And if the left wants to tell us that every Republican appointee wants women having back alley abortions for the sake of family values, it deserves to be forced to eat crow when they don't or, worse, be left to explain how it could pursue such an amateurish foreign policy and social agenda when the high stakes called for more responsible leadership than that afforded by Governor Yeeeaaargh. The reality is that the GOP nominates people right of center, and the public finds this unpalatable, but it cannot turn out these bums when the alternative is led by people who on 9/11 were drafting apologies, not reciprocative declarations of war. This is a choice the times and the nature of democracy force us to make. It's time to dump the filibuster and see where Bush, the GOP and the Dems stand when their votes and actions reflect movement to change the world, not to game the system.
posted by gbarto at 4:46 PM Wednesday, July 27, 2005Hmm. Cicero finds a report about the racist implications in London bobbies shooting a white Brazilian. He's scratching his head too.
posted by gbarto at 8:25 PM Subconscious Censorship in the Media? Nicholas Kristoff has a very good column on the media's (lack of) coverage of the Darfur genocide. He notes all the things the media apparently prefers to cover and makes a pretty convincing case that this isn't just a matter of there being so much going on that they can't get to it. I was struck by this observation: When I've asked television correspondents about this lapse, they've noted that visas to Sudan are difficult to get and that reporting in Darfur is expensive and dangerous. True, but TV crews could at least interview Darfur refugees in nearby Chad. After all, Diane Sawyer traveled to Africa this year - to interview Brad Pitt, underscoring the point that the networks are willing to devote resources to cover the African stories that they consider more important than genocide. [my emphasis]Umm. Isn't the Mainstream Media supposed to be superior to, say, blogs, because they undertake those risks and expenses to cover the hard stories? Or would my reading of all the BBC stories on Darfur put me above the average American newspaper in terms of serious inquiry into this very serious matter? (By the way, that's a hypothetical me, though I've been reading about Wilson/Plame, not Tom Cruise, the TurkeyBlog isn't going to beat the Times to the punch on Darfur.) Just one thought: What's going on in Darfur? Arab Muslims are killing Black Muslims in a genocide intended to extend Arab controlled Muslim lands. Is it just possible that a media ticked off about our efforts in Iraq and throughout the Middle East has a mental block on reporting about authentic Arab Muslims murdering left and right, particularly when the victims are fellow Muslims and the goals are far less noble than reclaiming the lost glory of Andalusia? If the powers that be in a predominantly white, Christian society were massacring Black Muslims, the MSM would know what to do. But to call attention to Darfur is to face the awful possibility that an Arab Muslim with a gun in his hand and America's disapprobation isn't always a freedom fighter. And then the black and white world of bad America, good everybody else that rules the media's thinking blurrs into shades of gray. I'm not saying that the American media leaders got together and said, The deaths of these Black Muslims are tragic but they run up against our storyline about Arab Muslims as a swell bunch of people who only turn to violence in response to Western oppression and invasion. But I do think the American media has a subconscious inability to perceive the importance of any story that includes the concept of Arab Muslim but not Bush's imperialism. Too bad for the folks of Darfur that the genocidal maniacs slaughtering them just happen to be indirectly tied to a group that the media wants to make us sensitive too, not wary of. Nicholas Kristoff says, If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.Let's try another one: If only the Darfur genocides were being committed by Halliburton. The Times would front it every day.
posted by gbarto at 3:44 PM Tuesday, July 26, 2005Either America is getting loopy or MSNBC is trying to boost its numbers. Anyway, they filed these two today and their readers put them on the "most popular" list. I suppose our linking them won't help, but here you go:Woman admits having sex parties for teen boys Colorado mother wanted to be ‘cool mom,’ admits supplying drugs, alcohol Two nights ago I watched the Seinfield in which Jerry opined that the nice thing about being adopted is you can tell yourself maybe your parents never had sex... Nebraska man charged for sex with wife, 13 Families support couple, but prosecutor calls union ‘repugnant’ Some might say they did the honorable thing - she was pregnant. Maybe the prosecutor would have felt better if she'd aborted. Though I don't think you could say that while running for reelection in Nebraska... We're not even going to touch the "related items" that popped up on the sidebars for these stories.
posted by gbarto at 6:18 PM Space shuttle takes off on historic flight NASA’s fleet returns to space after Columbia; questions arise over debris A 1½-inch-wide bit of tile captured on camera appeared to fly off the shuttle’s belly, on the edge of a door that encloses the nose landing gear. It was not clear if the tile had been struck by anything. Pieces of tile, which protect the shuttle from searing heat on return to Earth, have been lost on past flights without preventing a safe homecoming.Let's hope that holds true. For safety's sake, cross your fingers and thrice whisper, "Private spacecraft are coming."
posted by gbarto at 6:14 PM |
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