Thursday, May 07, 2009

Not the face of the movement

I've been wondering whether to say anything about the Perez Hilton beauty pageant scandal. (The scandal is about Hilton's atrocious behavior; it's not about the runner-up contestant.) But Stan has basically said it for me:
As I said, I'm glad that Carrie stood on principle. I don't think she was treated fairly. I am not surprised, but I am disappointed that she has been so abused for stating her opinion. Up to this point I'm with you. But when we begin to see a beauty queen as our best spokesman on the topic of same-sex unions, I have a problem. Congratulations, Carrie, for standing on the truth. Now, can we find a better "front man"?
Yes, please. And don't miss Stan's followup post, either:
One side says, "We are intolerant and judgmental of sin" and the other side says "We are not intolerant or judgmental ... but we hate everything you believe". Which of those is hypocritical? You tell me.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Preaching to myself

As I'm once again in job-search mode, only this time in a much less rosy economic climate, I needed to go back and read my own words today.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Book Lists

National Review Online has linked to a list of the books high school students should supposedly read before graduating. K. J. Lopez has already said she's gotten feedback from folks saying The Great Gatsby doesn't belong on the list. I read Gatsby in ninth grade; the only thing I remember from it is that one of the towns was West Egg. Dumb name, that. A supremely unmemorable book, I recall thinking even as I was reading it. Perhaps I was too young too appreciate it, but I doubt it.

The worst inclusion is the one I read most recently: The Catcher in the Rye. The only reason I finally picked it up last year, to be honest, was that I felt a little like Mel Gibson's character in Conspiracy Theory: it was a classic that everyone had read, except me. I suppose I wanted to feel "normal".

Guess what? Normal sucks. Catcher is a lame excuse to force (or, alternately, allow) high-schoolers to read the F-bomb approximately one thousand times in one hundred pages.

So here are the other ones that I've read: The Bible (duh); Declaration of Independence/Constitution/Gettysburg); Huck Finn (though I preferred Tom Sawyer); Macbeth; The Iliad; Great Expectations; 1984; The Scarlet Letter; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Frost's poems; Dickinson's poems; and Machiavelli's Prince. Those are the ones I remember, anyway, and without exception I'd recommend them. I'm still partial to John Wesley's quote regarding The Prince (tip o' the cap to this blogger, who perhaps has been raised on the A Beka Book curriculum, as I was):
“In my passage home [from Scotland], having procured a celebrated book, (the Works of Nicholas Machiavel,) I set myself carefully to read and consider it. I began with a prejudice in his favour, having been informed, he had often been misunderstood, and greatly misrepresented. I weighed the sentiments that were less common; transcribed the passages wherein they were contained; compared one passage with another, and endeavoured to form a cool, impartial judgment. And my cool judgment is, that if all the other doctrines of devils which have been committed to writing since letters were in the world were collected together in one volume, it would fall short of this; and, that should a Prince form himself by this book, so calmly recommending hypocrisy, treachery, lying, robbery, oppression, adultery, whoredom, and murder of all kinds, Domitian or Nero would be an angel of light, compared to that man.”
UPDATE: Jeff the Baptist linked - thanks!

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Numberless enviro news makes me skeptical

AP IMPACT: Tons of released drugs taint US water

I don't doubt that having certain levels of certain chemicals in wastewater streams is a bad thing. But stories like this (linked by Instapundit) do not prove that those levels exist. (To his credit, Prof. Reynolds says so, too.) Furthermore, the numbers they do present occasionally undermine their narrative. Consider the following:
Two common industrial chemicals that are also pharmaceuticals - the antiseptics phenol and hydrogen peroxide - account for 92 percent of the 271 million pounds identified as coming from drugmakers and other manufacturers. Both can be toxic and both are considered to be ubiquitous in the environment.
Wait a minute - 92% of the load that you're wigging out about consists of antiseptics? And they're ubiquitous in the environment anyway? Color me unimpressed. Two paragraphs later there's this:
Residues are often released into the environment when manufacturing equipment is cleaned.
I suppose they'd rather we leave the toxic stuff in concentrated form on the factory equipment for the workers to get sick on. More:
What's more, because the EPA hasn't concluded at what level, if any, pharmaceuticals are bad for the environment or harmful to people, drugmakers almost never have to report the release of pharmaceuticals they produce.
Since we don't really know what level is harmful to people, and given the dramatic and proven benefits that pharmaceuticals have generally been to human populations, shouldn't the burden of proof be on these advocacy organizations to demonstrate that a given level is toxic?
Another codeine plant, run by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Noramco Inc., is about seven miles away. A Noramco spokesman acknowledged that the Wilmington, Del., factory had voluntarily tested its wastewater and found codeine in trace concentrations thousands of times greater than what was found in the Delaware River. "The amounts of codeine we measured in the wastewater, prior to releasing it to the City of Wilmington, are not considered to be hazardous to the environment," said a company spokesman.
Classic alarmism. They don't tell us what the absolute levels are in the Delaware River or in the waste stream, or compare those to any known standard or toxicity level. They just insert the entirely plausible statement that the level in the wastewater is THOUSANDS OF TIMES GREATER than the general level, insinuating that THIS IS BAD without ever establishing that as a fact. If you'll pardon the imagery, this is a little bit like complaining that the level of poop in my sewage pipe is THOUSANDS OF TIMES GREATER than the level in the Atlantic Ocean. It may be true, but it's entirely irrelevant.

I'm all for avoiding obvious mistakes by dumping drugs into rivers at concentrations that are known to be harmful to humans, even locally. But I want to see some hard numbers, like, say, the number of gallons of water these 271 million pounds of toxic substances were dumped into, before I'm convinced.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Capacitive Diractance

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present two engineering feats for the ages:



The above technology is based on an older version, seen here:

I can't wait for the 21st century edition. I think there's some serious stimulus opportunities with this technology...

Monday, April 06, 2009

Huh?

Backwards editorial argument of the day:
Finally, an idea that could benefit both Detroit and everyday Americans. We're talking about a cash-for-clunker idea that needs fine tuning but should see fast action in Congress.

The plan calls for government rebates ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 for drivers who turn in older, low-mileage gas hogs. The payments could be used to buy gas-thrifty, newer models, providing an instant boost to automakers.

It's an across-the-board win: Gas guzzling clunkers will be retired, more efficient cars and trucks will take over, and pollution and foreign oil dependency lessened. Detroit stands to collect cash for its assembly-line output instead of begging for another Washington handout.
Um, can somebody explain to me how a $5000 government rebate for trading in your 2006 Hummer fails to qualify as "another Washington handout"?

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Term Limits. Term Limits. Term Limits. Term Limits.

Dave Ramsey brings the point home while discussing BonusGate: We desperately need term limits for these clowns in Congress, just as we have for the Presidency. More thoughts:

The Obama administration has been absolutely cowardly over BonusGate, and so has Chris Dodd. Here's the bizarre thing: They were actually right the first time, if you believed their initial alarmist claims about all the bailouts and stimulus stuff. On Wednesday I pointed out to the Power Line guys that Timmy Geithner and Larry Summers had asked Dodd to not restrict the AIG bonuses. Dodd eventually got his story straight (probably from Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher - I wonder if JournoList was involved?) and tried to palm it off on Treasury, who should be taking responsibility with Dodd for approving the contractual bonuses.

But the point is this: The bonuses were apparently the only way to retain the people at AIG who, according to the Obama Administration, were the only ones who could fix this problem. Remind you of a certain Treasury secretary selection process? 'We have to forgive Geithner's tax evasion because he's the only one who can fix our mess.' So if Obama&Co (and Bush&Co, but I repeat myself) were correct about the severity of the situation, how if we let AIG go under then the whole system would come crashing down, then keeping the bonuses was absolutely the right thing to do in order to keep the company that we now own from imploding. And now that the bonuses have become politically unpopular, they don't even have the intestinal fortitude to stick to their economic principles and defend their initial decision (with the possible exception of Summers). Which is another way of saying they don't have any economic principles. And we wonder why investors aren't confident.

Seems like since electing The One, we've gotten a whole slew of The Ones for free. By next year Al Gore ought to have a really interesting take on what e pluribus unum means...

By the way, Chuck Grassley's suicide comments frankly disqualify him from holding high office in this country ever again, as far as I'm concerned. He should go.

John Hinderaker has a good take. So does this Politico writer, who actually noticed the now-controversial clause even if the morons voting on it didn't.

The sad thing is that Obama won't even stick up for his Treasury department, which tells me that he either has no clue what their plan is or doesn't care. If I were feeling cynical, I'd guess that Obama's fine with letting the economy tank so long as it gets his social engineering agenda passed.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Science Vs. Morality: The 4000-Year Test

PJ O'Rourke (referred to ironically by Instapundit as a "noted Christianist") makes a superb point while discussing Obama's doublespeak on embryonic stem cell research:
But, lest anyone think I'm not serious, let me quote with serious revulsion the following passages from the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)--that great compendium of all the knowledge science possessed, carefully distinguished from ignorance and misunderstanding, as of a hundred years ago:

[T]he negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.

[A]fter puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thought.

The above are quoted--not out of context--from the article titled "Negro" written by Dr. Walter Francis Willcox, chief statistician of the U.S. Census Bureau and professor of social science and statistics at Cornell. I trust I've made my point.

Now let's look at the things morality has known. The Ten Commandments are holding up pretty well. I suppose the "graven image" bit could be considered culturally insensitive. But the moralists got nine out of ten--a lot better than the scientists are doing.
I made a similar point on this blog a long time ago:
On any question involving both ethics and technology, ethical considerations must come first, and must be answered with near-total disregard for technological considerations. When technological issues are treated as more fundamental than ethics, ethics is no longer ethics, but rationalization. Put less abstractly: Any life-and-death ethical answers at which we arrive today must be the same answers we would have come up with 500 or 1000 years ago. Technology must serve ethics, never vice versa.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Nature hears no dissent

The journal Nature declined to print my letter to the editor, so I'm going to post it here for the benefit of my readers. In their polite rejection letter, they claimed that they have to be very selective due to space considerations. That may be, but this week they published four Correspondences compared with last week's dozen or so. All four had to do with science funding levels; none were about embryonic stem cell research, the subject of my letter. First, I quote at length from the letter that merited my response:
...The controversial and moral question of when human life actually begins is the basis of limitations placed on work such as somatic-cell nuclear transfer or the derivation of new cell lines from embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization procedures. On 29 May 2008, the Brazilian Supreme Court approved legislation allowing stem-cell research. One of the arguments for this approval is that embryos that have already been frozen would never be implanted in the uterus.

Although many people affirm that human life begins when the sperm is impregnated into the egg, either naturally or artificially, they ignore the role of the uterus. Human status is attributed by some to 5-day-old embryos, which consequently would receive the same protection rights as any person. Do frozen and/or inviable embryos, which could never be implanted in a maternal uterus, deserve this status? To begin the process of forming a living human, there must be connection of an embryo to a mother's epithelial cells. This requires the interaction of the embryo with the endometrium (the wall of the uterus).

The Brazilian constitution states that the civil rights of a person begin at the moment of live birth. The law extends these neonate rights from the moment of conception — but only if the baby is born alive. A fertilized egg that is not implanted in the uterus is neither a neonate nor a person. According to traditional Roman law: "Nasciturus pro iam nato habetur, quotiens de commodis eius agitur", which translates as "The unborn child is treated as a child already born in all things respecting its interests". This was presumably conditional on its being born alive. If not, then this protection becomes obsolete.

For a human being to exist and to benefit from civil protection laws, the uterus is a crucial component.
My response follows, edited for the blog only slightly:

SIR: [This letter] is replete with facile and pernicious arguments. First, for what purpose are “leftover” human embryos (which have their own unique DNA) to be frozen at all? Has it not always been that people were rightly squeamish about destroying human organisms which could potentially later be implanted in a womb? [M. Z. Hemingway made the same point at GetReligion, in the comment thread.]

Secondly: Any law stating that “the civil rights of a person begin at live birth” is absurd from the outset because the moment of birth is, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete fluke. In particular: At which point during the baby’s traversal of the birth canal does it count as a “live birth”? When the head emerges? What if the child is breech? What about C-sections? More broadly, if a mother has a C-section scheduled for March 13, does the baby have no human rights on March 12, even though she could have been born prematurely, say on March 1, and easily survived?

Thirdly: Far and away their worst contention is that the protections of law for unborn children become somehow retroactively obsolete if the child is not in fact born alive. In that case, there are plainly no protections at all! If the argument hinges on the “intent” to bring the baby to birth, I strenuously object: Since when do a third party’s fickle intentions determine a first party’s personhood? Such an argument is useful only in defending odious practices like slavery, and the wanton destruction of human organisms is of the same order of enormity.

I do not care one whit about the putative (and still unproven) “utility” of embryo-destroying research. Harvesting organs from day-old infants could prove “useful”, as could enslaving an identical twin of yourself so as to have a backup of your body, and I trust that we are not yet so far gone as a society as to deny that these would be wrong. Having demonstrated that there is a line, the question becomes where it should be drawn, and this question cannot be answered by science alone. Science is not inherently ethical; it must be politically regulated, particularly where it infringes on human dignity.

There's more to be said. I'll bet some of you can say it yourself, in the comments.

Monday, March 16, 2009

upgrading layout...

I apologize if the site looks funny for a bit - I'm upgrading to Blogger Layouts and it will take a little while to get all the changes done.

Thanks for visiting, as always!

UPDATE: The page is mostly done. Let me know in the comments if anything's not working properly!

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Pre-post on embryonic stem cell research

I've got a big post on embryo-destructive stem cell research coming, but not just yet.  I have submitted a letter to the editors of Nature magazine - I'm waiting to see if they'll print it before I air the same arguments here.  In the meantime, here's a cornucopia of links about the recent Obama decisions to end the federal funding restrictions on ESCR and to end the additional funding for non-embryo-destroying research:

Krauthammer: Morally Unserious in the Extreme


Neither Bill Clinton nor Dr. Sanjay Gupta know that an embryo is already fertilized.


GetReligion on Clinton/Gupta and the ESCR decision coverage.

Saletan to ESCR Supporters: You just won the stem-cell war.  Don't lose your soul.
(Too late.)

The American public has no idea what they're talking about when it comes to ESCR, so polling is completely unreliable in this area.  (More extended version here.)

If you happen to have access to Nature, you can read this letter to the Editor that raised my hackles.

I'd say "Enjoy", but this isn't terribly enjoyable. Next week I promise a "real" post...

Saturday, March 07, 2009

They haven't even staffed the Treasury department yet...

But they've got enough resources to use the IRS to intimidate their political opponents:

Political Persecution: Audited For TaxCheatStamps.com
Today I received a letter from the IRS that my 2007 tax returns are being audited. Less than one month after launching TaxCheatStamps.com.
Read the whole thing, and keep an eye on Michael Williams' situation. This is exactly the sort of thing that lefties always imagined Bush and Cheney doing, and now we're seeing it two months into the Obama administration.

Friday, March 06, 2009

No, State did not "work hard" to get their Russian right

VIDEO: Wrong red button - David S. Cloud - POLITICO.com
She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift—a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word “peregruzka” printed on top.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise. Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”
Mrs. GkFrk happens to have her bachelor's in Russian, so we have the Katzner Russian-English dictionary. (Surely they had one of these at the freaking STATE DEPARTMENT??!?) Anyway, between our Russian-English dictionary and various online sources there are a number of translations of "reset" that can be used. Though many of the usages seem to be somewhat specialized, there is nothing remotely approaching "peregruzka". Even Babelfish translates "reset" as the Russian word meaning "to return or restore", which seems to be about the right sense, but the word looks nothing like "peregruzka".

The Mrs. informs me that "pere" is usually approximately the same sense as the prefix "re-". However, our Russian-English dictionaries translate the particular word "peregruzka" as any of the following: "transfer of cargo, transfer of shipment, overload, surcharge". So perhaps Mrs. Clinton is trying to overload the already strained U.S.-Russia relationship? Or try this on for size: Given our Cold War history, a bright red button marked "Overload" might have some rather frightening connotations.  "Peregruppirovat" (apologies for the amateur transliteration!), which is alphabetically close to peregruzka, means to "regroup", which is probably what Clinton had to do after the mistake. Mrs. GkFrk also found "peredelat", which means "to alter, refashion, recast"; that's the closest match we could find that has the intended meaning.

Note: the research in the previous two paragraphs took me and Mrs. GkFrk precisely five minutes to perform.  And we did it for free.

Doesn't anyone in the present Administration know anything about diplomacy? Or, at least, not making complete fools of themselves? I mean, I liked Bush okay and think Obama's domestic policy is so far disastrous, but I expected better from Obama&Co. on the foreign cultural sensitivity front, if nothing else.  Now I think State worked about as hard on that translation as Mrs. Obama did on those Marine One toys for Prime Minister Brown's kids.

Via Instapundit and the Corner.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

David Brooks' Kool-Aid hangover

Quite a statement, this:
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
Um, Mr. Brooks? Some of us have not forgotten that actions speak louder than words. If Obama's actions directly counter his words, his words are as far from responsible as it gets.

And how, pray tell, did you miss Obama's pre-election record as the most reliably liberal voter in the United States Senate? How could you possibly have thought Obama was anything approaching a centrist? Words? Really? Have you that exalted an opinion of your occupation as a wordsmith that you have confused rhetoric with reality?
If they can do that, maybe they can lure this White House back to its best self — and someday offer respite from the endless war of the extremes.
"Best self"? What sort of pie-in-the-sky patronizing hogwash is that? Mr. Brooks, the Obama White House is what it is. I'm sure President Obama thinks this is his best self, thank you very much.

At least you're finally sobering up. I think.