"Exit polls in West Virginia showed two of every 10 white voters said race was a factor in their decision and only a third of those said they would support Obama against McCain."
http://optimussven.livejournal.com/3130
"al-nakba" or "al-naqba"? Reflects accurate Arabic vs. misguided Hebrew, and people picking up the same.
http://a-steep-hill.livejournal.com/180
cap and dividend
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/0
gotta protect the dignity of plants, you know
http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=887
Tolkien claimed Middle-Earth was the prehistory of Europe... allegedly from
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
Long essay, but good, on bio-conservatives/theocons, Leon Kass et al, and the bankrupt idea of "human dignity".
Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.
Conspicuous by their absence are several fields of expertise that one might have thought would have something to offer any discussion of dignity and biomedicine. None of the contributors is a life scientist--or a psychologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, or a historian.
Despite these exclusions, the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years),
[Kass] came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization, then popularly known as "test-tube babies." As soon as the procedure became feasible, the country swiftly left Kass behind, and, for most people today, it is an ethical no-brainer. That did not stop Kass from subsequently assailing a broad swath of other medical practices as ethically troubling, including organ transplants, autopsies, contraception, antidepressants, even the dissection of cadavers.
"Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)
Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties.
For two decades, a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society.
That's what's advising President Bush on bioethics issues... hey Jordan, ever have qualms about supporting the Republicans and trusting them to guard our values?
edit: In updating the Wikipedia page on transhumanism, I found linkies. The Ruth Macklin essay Pinker mentions, and the Human Dignity report. The first link also has lots of responses to her essay, most indignant, a few noting the disconnect between medical practice respecting the dignity of a particular patient and banning various techniques like cloning or IVF because they "affront human dignity" in some nebulous sense, with Macklin having had the latter in mind and the comment defending the former.
edit the second: discussion of commission members and contributors
http://www.eggandsperm.org/
"Equal protections, but no genetically engineered conceptions." In other words, we would federally recognize same-sex civil unions that do not grant conception rights, and prohibit all forms of conception that do not join a man and a woman's sperm and egg.
Note that this isn't just a matter of concern about near-term safety of genetic engineering or artificial gametes; he's into a total ban on anything like this. "All children should be created
On the other side is http://www.samesexprocreation.com/
Original source: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/20
I'd missed this. The chief prosecutor of the Guantanmo war crimes tribunals quit last year in protest at the tainted process.
Defense lawyers said Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser who was supposed to provide impartial advice to the trials' overseer, had effectively joined the prosecution team.
Davis has alleged Hartmann pushed prosecutors to file cases before they were ready and wanted "sexy" cases that "had blood on them," such as one where an Afghan prisoner was accused of throwing a grenade that injured two U.S. soldiers.
Davis said Hartmann tried to dictate which lawyer would try cases and overrode Davis' ban on filing charges that relied on evidence obtained through the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The Pentagon plans to try as many as 80 of the 280 prisoners in Guantanamo on war crimes charges, and 14 cases are currently pending. Since the United States began sending foreign captives to Guantanamo in 2002, only one case has been resolved, that of Australian former prisoner David Hicks.
Mmm, fair and speedy trials, untainted by torture. Wait, that's un-American.
The Arizona senator criticized national government-run health plans in some European countries.
"I'm not going to do like the Europeans have and have expensive health care systems that are neither efficient or, frankly, the quality we have here in America," he said.
"Expensive" apparently means half the cost of the US while living longer.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080428/ap_
GAO says the White House lets various agencies and non-scientists interfere with the EPA's assessment of chemical risks.
But remember, we have to vote Republican, or the terrorists will win!
The US has a research facility on Plum Island, away from livestock, reachable only by helicopter or ferry. Homeland Security wants a new lab, quite possibly located near livestock herds.
"there are financial concerns about operating from a location accessible only by ferry or helicopter."
"An epidemic of the disease, foot and mouth, which only affects animals, could devastate the livestock industry."
"the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages."
This seems like classic penny-wise, pound-foolish. Not to mention something to file under "is there anything this administration won't try to screw up?"
Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.
Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.
Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?
Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.
Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.
There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.
Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.
59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.
I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.
A one-way mirrored public toilet
Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.
"American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 for his or her French counterpart." Note that's 20% more hours.
"Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can hope for something between four and ten,"
"of the world's developed countries only the US and South Africa offer no universal medical coverage"
"In 1970 GDP per hour in the EU was 35 percent below that of the US; today the gap is less than 7 percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, Austria, and Denmark is similar to that of the United States; but the US is now distinctly outperformed in this key measure by Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, ...and France.[4]"
"Europeans even appear to be better at generating small and medium-size businesses. There are more small businesses in the EU than in the United States, and they create more employment (65 percent of European jobs in 2002 were in small and medium-sized firms, compared with just 46 percent in the US)."
"Yes, in certain respects the UK today has real affinities with America: the scale of poverty in Britain, and the income gap between rich and poor, has grown steadily since the 1970s and is closer to that of the US than anything found in Western Europe. British hourly productivity is well below most West European rates." And the teen pregnancy rate is more like the US, too.
'The new US secretary of state was widely quoted in 2003 to the effect that the United States intends to "forgive Russia, ignore Germany, and punish France."' And the US's long campaign against democracies continued...
"a popular joke: Britain was promised that Blair's Third Way would bring it American universities and German prisons—what it is actually getting are American prisons and German universities."
I have an old friend whose family escaped from the Iron Curtain when she was young; she said her father was quite Republican for their anti-Communist history, and commented herself on the public disdain for "papers, please!" in movies yet it being difficult to travel in the US without some now. And that was back in 2000. I wonder what she or her father think now.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/1
"We would've written a check to Antigua, paid them to go away," said John Magnus, a trade lawyer at Miller & Chevalier in Washington. "Instead, they pressed the point."
Magnus said "the strategy they've pursued is not designed to advance the interests of Antigua. It's pique and anger from some individual businessmen."
Translation: "Why aren't they taking our bribe? Why are they insisting on the rules?"
- Mood:
amused
Very brief Krugman post on the National Review's fear of universal health care and how it might mean a permanent shift away from conservatism. Comments note there's an implicit assumption that universal health care would work, if not it could be revoked by the electorate and drive them back to conservatism.
Old LJ post on religious discrimination by the Salvation Army.
That report (PDF) on Iran? The administration has been sitting on it for the past year, while saber-rattling about the imminent nuclear threat.
Way I see it, this sets a precedent for Rumsfeld being kidnapped to stand trial in France. Right? Right?
Giuliani claims NYC was the only city to see crime go down continuously from 1994, when Chicago did as well, that NYC had had 1800 murders a year for 30 years before 1994, when it only hit 1800 in 1980; that re reduced spending 7%, when his own memoir says it went up 3.7% a year; that UK prostate cancer survival is 44%, vs. 74.4% -- and he kept using the false statistic even when the source objected.
Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who once worked for Mr. Giuliani, said he doubted that the issue would hurt him politically.
“When he talks about New York, people see it,” Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, “and they feel it, and if a number isn’t quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them.”
You know, statements like that are why "reality-based community" isn't an arrogant title. He gets reality wrong? No one cares! Because he feels good!
Libertarianism, at least at its core and best, and why judge it by less if you don't do that normally? is as much a burning idealism as communism. When you join the Libertarian Party you sign the Non-Coercion Principle, forswearing the initiation of force, or forswearing fraud, and force except in self-defense. A not stellar but classic libertarian science fiction series had an alternate history splitting on a Declaration of Independence which talked about the "unanimous consent of the governed" (the real one lacks 'unanimous'.) Just as it is morally obvious to a communist that people in need should be helped or that goods should be distributed fairly (meaning evenly, to the communist), and obvious to an anarchist that property and capital should be made available to those who can use it, not sequestered in "ownership", it is morally obvious to a libertarian that people should not initiate force against each other (and that this is fair). Not having taxes flows from that (taxes are, ultimately, collected by force) but it's not the point. The point is that people shouldn't be forced, should be left alone if they wish to be, should be free to associate as they choose and to make voluntary contracts. The point is that voluntary association and exchange should be the basis of society, not force.
You can say the idea is impractical; you can argue the ideas are incoherent when looked at critically, but it's no more all about avoiding taxes or social Darwinism than gaming is all about fat smelly cat-piss men or killing imaginary people and taking their imaginary stuff.
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