Funmurphys: the Blog

McMahon's Law

Tom McMahon has posted his very own law:

Whenever a blogger posts at length about a hateful e-mail he has received instead of responding to the legitimate arguments advanced by the other side, that blogger has lost the debate.

Syria, Lebanon, and US

I keep asking myself about the Syrian response to Lebanese demonstrations and demands why they don't carry out the same policies they did in the past -- suppression, torture, murder -- especially since those methods were effective in the past and are what are still used within Syria. There is a real risk to a strong man regime like Assad's when it appears weak, and being chased out of Lebanon by a bunch of ordinary people is weak. Perhaps the younger Assad isn't as sensative to possible danger as his father was, but it would be very interesting to know the calculus he is using to decide its better to leave than stay. Somehow, I don't think the babeness of the protesters enters into it.

Wretchard has a great post about Lebanon, Syria, and wider American policy. To wit: "If this analysis is correct, the world crisis should accelerate rather than diminish in the coming years and months, not in the least because the United States seems to have no plan to fill the power vacuum with anything. The promotion of democracy is at heart an act of faith in the self-organizing ability of nations; it means getting rid of one dictator without necessarily having another waiting in the wings. It is so counterintuitive to disciples of realpolitik as to resemble madness. Or put more cynically, the promotion of democracy is a gamble only a country with a missile defense system, control of space, homeland defense and a global reach can afford to take. If you have your six-gun drawn, you can overturn the poker table. In retrospect, the real mistake the September 11 planners made to underestimate how radical the US could be. This does not necessarily mean America will win the hand; but it does indicate how high it is willing to raise the stakes."

How high? Well, the Pentagon just ordered 30,000 more JDAMs to go with the over 112,000 they've already ordered. That's a pretty high raise, but we're not even close to going all in.

Smartapalooza

Wizbang finds a report of a beauty queen with an IQ too high to be made fun of. A Slovenian TV show wanted to compare the supidity of models with the smarts of scientists but couldn't when Iris Mulej had a higher IQ, 156, than the shows female nuclear physicist [insert joke about how Larry Summers was right, then run like hell]. Looking at the picture (yes, Wizbang always has a picture for a story like this) I have to stay I would have stayed with physics longer if anyone in the program looked like her.

I wonder how long before she's on Howard Stern.

Rest At Last

Terri Schiavo died this morning. Now everybody will get on with their lives except for Terri and her family. Terri goes to her rest and her family will get on with their grief.

Now perhaps we can turn to making sure that the law is clear on matters not of terminal or end stage care, which wasn't what her case was about, but on custodial care. I wonder once the disable groups weigh in how the story will change, but I already know the answer - the media will melt and reframe the story.

Judicial and Media Failure

In what is hopefully not just one more burning coal in the heap poured on the Schindlers' head, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has agreed to a rehearing of their appeal by the whole court.

I have to consider Terri Schiavo's saga as a terrible judicial and media failure on top of a great personal tragedy.

The judicial failure is that a judge would make a determination that ends someone's life on such scant and conflicting evidence and that the courts above would or could do nothing. If she had been a condemned prisoner, the Governor could have pardoned her, but in our truly great legal system, he can't do anything. In the words of that famous Christian republican, Nat Hentoff:

Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case—Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him—to have her own lawyer represent her.

Greer has declared Terri Schiavo to be in a persistent vegetative state, but he has never gone to see her. His eyesight is very poor, but surely he could have visited her along with another member of his staff. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, Terri Schiavo is indeed responsive beyond mere reflexes.

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die.
...
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.

To me the crux of the legal failure is how a single judge can end a person's life by his steadfast purpose in doing so.

The simple story is woman suffers brain damage and her mental capacity is sharply diminished, althought the exact amount is still in dispute. Years later the husband collects a large settlement partly for him but mostly for the care of his wife. Then the husband suddenly remembers her wish not to live this way and sues in court to not let her eat or drink. The judge hears conflicting testimony on her desires and a recomendation from her original >guardian at litem not to stop nourishing her because the husband has two huge conflicts of interest - money and sex since he stands to inherit a ton of money and he is currently bopping another woman but rules that the woman should die as it was her very own desire. The womans parents appeal as most of her family feels that was not her very own desire, but the desire of her ersatz but real in an all too binding legal sense husband. The appeals drag on for seven years during which husband lives with other woman and fathers two children with her. Also during this time the Florida Legislature passes a law which make the state's governor her guardian, but this law is soon declared unconstitutional by another Florida court. When the original judge in Florida rules he's had it with all these appeals and sets a deadline when the food and water will be witheld, the publicity really intensifies and the US congress passes a law which allows the woman's family to have a new day in court but this time in Federal court. The Federal court rules that the family already had it's day in court so there.

How is this reported in the press? Right Wing nutters want to keep body alive against former occupant's wishes and will do anything, include appeal court rulings, to do it. And that's the most accurate part of the reporting. Tim at Random Observations has a lot more about what you didn't hear, Power Line takes on the so called GOP talking points, Patterico deflates the phoney baloney polls, and Nat Hentoff gets the last word on the courts and the press:

Contrary to what you've read and seen in most of the media, due process has been lethally absent in Terri Schiavo's long merciless journey through the American court system.

"As to legal concerns," writes William Anderson—a senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University—"a guardian may refuse any medical treatment, but drinking water is not such a procedure. It is not within the power of a guardian to withhold, and not in the power of a rational court to prohibit."

This isn't about the end stages of care of a terminal patient but an injustice done to a particular person. I'm not a big Jesse Jackson fan, especially since he shows the ocasional flash of the man he should be, but he is right:

I feel so passionate about this injustice being done, how unnecessary it is to deny her a feeding tube, water, not even ice to be used for her parched lips," he said. "This transcends politics."

Of course, other people have to weave this into the same dreary tapestry they weave every thing into, whether it belongs or not. Like Paul Krugman, who continues to not make sense, as in:

America isn’t yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren’t sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

Hey Paul, if we really should worry about assassination by domestic extremists, who would get wacked in this case? The judge, liberal politicians, crazy pundits? Nope, I'm not advocating violence, but if anyone were iced, it would be Michael Schiavo because then it would be over - her parents would be Terri's guardian and they would immediately order proper care be given.

Stem Cells

They've found another source of stem cells -- hair follicles. Scientists have turned them into nerve, brain, skin, and muscle cells. I'm sure that with a little more time, the list will grow. Remind me again shy we have to have fetal stem cells to conquer disease when the adult body is rife with them?

When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease

I sometimes think the fruit of my loins are growing up in a different world than I did. Oh, it's still good ol' planet Earth, Terra to you SF types, and yet it's not. And of course, I don't think I grew up in the same world than my progenitors did, either. For instance, space flight was the realm of Jules Verne for my father; for me it was a prime time TV event -- the two things I watched on TV at school were the Apollo launches and day games of the World Series that the Cardinals were playing in. Now not only is the space program not big news, they don't even play day games in the World Series.

And that's nothing compared to all the other changes. Radio was the medium of mass communication for my parents; for me it was TV, and now it's the internet. There were no electronic gadgets for my parents growing up (the refridgerator is not a gadget, it's an appliance); I had the TV and the Hi-Fi; my children have so many I can't keep up. There are more ways to be bored than ever before.

Childhood itself has changed, though. At least I and my parents were allowed, nay encouraged, unsupervised play. In the summer my brother and I would set forth after breakfast, return home just long enough to have lunch, return home again when my father whistled to inform us that he was ready to eat dinner, and then venture forth again until long after sundown (unless there was something good on TV, but with 5 channels to choose from, that wasn't too often). Who let's their children play outside after dark anymore? How many children play unsupervised or without that modern invention, a play date?

Every sport my fruit play envolves an actual team with a coach, a league, and uniforms. I never played organized sports outside of school. We played in the backyard. We never had an umpire or referee -- we just argued and had the ocasional do over. At Webelos camp, when my son and his friends were playing baseball at the camp site one would call umpire. Call Umpire! I about fell out of my chair the first time that happened. And they still had about the same amount of arguing and number of do overs as we did.

I don't remember a lot of rushing around and business as a child, except at certain times like Christmas, or my parents stressing out over a general lack of time. Not too long ago my son asked when we had our next free Saturday, and I had to tell him it was at least 6 weeks away. Hope you make it, I'm not sure I will. We have tons more physical stuff but a lot less time. People get stressed because they can't get around to doing everything they feel they need to do, let alone just what they want to do.

And safety. Boy, are we safety nuts now. When I tell my kids when I was their age, we didn't have seat belts, or bike helmets, and that we roamed for miles without a parent around, or could be gone for home for hours without the police being called, they look at me like I'm from another planet. Yep, we were expected to have the sense of dog who knows how to get back to his food and bed without outside help. Kids didn't require constant supervision then, now they have to monitored in case something, anything happens.

One time I took my daughter and some friends to see a movie, and one of the parents asked me to see the movie with them because she was worried that otherwise they might be abducted. When I was a kid, we weren't constantly barraged with every kidnapping, abduction, school bus crash, or incident involving a kid that happened anywhere in the good old US of A. We aren't better informed now, we're just poorly informed on an enormous scale.

We didn't have extreme sports because we set up ramps for bikes or sleds without a second thought. I played iceless hockey just about every recess at school and was covered with bruises accordingly -- my brother was high sticked in the eye but when it healed he kept on playing.

We didn't worry about pesticides either on our food or in our homes, we worried about bugs in our food or in our homes. We didn't watch what we ate but we were somehow thinner. And that's the way it was.

Holy Saturday

To go with your Good Friday post, here is a painting:

"Christ on the Cross", by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez.

Oil painting on canvas from 1632, now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain.

Good Friday

In honor of Good Friday, some Christian links:

Eric from In The Agora meditates on the meaning of Jesus's words on the cross: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.

Kim at the Upward Call considers suffering by design: "Not only was it suffering by design, but also by obedience. Jesus embraced the pain. He chose it – “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). " Kim explains the design and its importance.

Coffee Swirls surveys the wondrous cross and Isaiah: "In the spirit of just how simple the gospel message truly is, I will let this post speak for me today, as Christians observe Good Friday to commemorate the passion (the suffering) of Jesus Christ."

Rebecca at Rebecca Writes talks about what the resurrection proves to the world: "The Christ we take to the world is not just another prophet or teacher, and not just a humble servant, but the one whom God has shown to be the very Lord of All--the Son-of-God-in-power--by his resurrection from the dead."

Tulip Girl notes "At this stage in my life, so much of my reading and studying is filtered through the perspective of mothering. This includes my studying of the Bible and theology. I find the deeper I dig into God’s Word, the more light it shines on my life--and how I ought to mother." I feel the same way about fatherhood. While I stop there, Tulip Girl doesn't and describes her thoughts on how to restore gently and carry burdens.

Mark Byron's Edifier du Jour is from John 17. Mark's take:

We too often look at salvation as the end of the process; our ticket's punched for Heaven and all's right with the world. It is the end of one process but the beginning of yet another, the process of taking that worldly soul and re-manufacturing it for godly uses. That process will sand off some of the hooks that the less-savory things of the world like to attach themselves to; the world will start to she-dog about the removal of those hooks, but let it.

And if that isn't enough for you, then the Christian Carnival should help.

Its Over

Now that the US Supreme Court has decided not to issue an emergency order to reconnect the feeding tube for Terri Schiavo, all that's left is for her to die. No doubt there are other similar cases throughout the country, just without all the publicity. It is a mystery, though not a complete one, why some cases receive publicity and interest, and others languish outside the limelight. This is often cited as a right to die case or a right to life case, but to me it seems more of a lack of proper law coupled with a case of incompetence coupled with a case of husband wanting money and new wife.

My biggest problem with the case is that any court would try to ascertain someone's intent to live or die based on off-hand remarks and not written instructions when the mechanism for written instructions exist and that a court would find clear intent when there is complete disagreement between a husband on one hand and all of his wife relatives on the other.

Given her age, I think it likely that Terri never gave much thought to whether she wanted to live or die in this situation, so to fish around in people's recollections for off-hand remarks and impressions and have her life depend on what one person makes of all that strikes me as the height of hubris and folly. No legal system should have a judge in that position. A judge made a finding of fact about a decision when there is no real evidence that such a decision was ever made. It's not like deciding who pulled a trigger or who robbed a bank. If anything comes of all this, I would hope that it is every state passes a law to keep such legal wrangling from happening again - and I would use the old legalism, if it wasn't said in writing, it was never said at all.

I think it illustrates several things - one of which is that there does seem to be a huge divide in this country. And too often both sides are too busy being partisan to listen to what the other side is saying. Hear you have people who don't have any problems with appeals to stretch out for more than a decade in a death penalty case, and in so doing have no trouble thinking that courts make mistakes all the time, claim that seven years is too long because it's not like a court would make a mistake.

Another is that this divide is fed by an information gap -- the information that the two sides of this issue are using are completely different. I can't say this often enough or strongly enough, but the mass media in this country is terrible. Awful. They suck. There's a reason why the oath to testify is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and no reporter ever wants to be under oath to testify. It just isn't in them to tell the whole truth and nothing but. They've been misinforming me my entire life and it would be folly on my part to expect them to change now.

So instead we have one narrative told by the mainstream media, of a husband who is heroically fighting the forces of extemism so that he can fulfill his wife's wishes, and another told in alternative media of a husband who is trying to kill his wife so that he can keep the settlement money and marry the mother of his two children. And on the one hand, the wife's condition is clearly that of a vegetable, not only is nobody home but the lights are pretty dim; and on the other we have a woman at best not properly diagnosed to at worst misdiagnosed, refused any treatmant by her husband to hasten her departure, who does have some mental capacity. It's like the bring-out-your-dead scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Eric Idle wants someone hauled off to the ash heap even though he isn't dead yet. And the mortician does Eric a favor by bashing the guy over the head before taking his body away. Only this time, it isn't funny.

Oops

Patterico notices something interesting -- Judge Greer of Terri Schiavo fame didn't believe a witness because he thought the witness had his dates wrong, but it turns out the judge had his own dates wrong. But nothing to worry about, there is possibility of judicial error, no need for a fresh look. Yeah, right.

Another Curtain Falls

Another creative titan dead - Redmond Simonsen is dead at 62. He was the creative force in graphics for SPI, and I'm sorry to say if you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably never will. Still, his passing made the New York Times:

"As S.P.I.'s vice president and art director, Mr. Simonsen standardized the look of the games, fitting historically accurate, visually comprehensible information into small spaces. The company's earliest game boards were black and white, with playing pieces (there might be several hundred) that had to be glued onto shirt cardboard and cut out by hand. The games were soon produced in full color, with die-cut pieces ready to punch out.

Redmond Aksel Simonsen was born in Manhattan on June 18, 1942, to Norwegian-American parents. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Cooper Union in 1964 and afterward worked as a graphic designer of book jackets, album covers and advertisements.

S.P.I. began in the summer of 1969, when Mr. Simonsen and Mr. Dunnigan took over Strategy and Tactics, a gaming magazine. Mr. Simonsen redesigned the magazine, including in each issue a complete game, plus a historical article about the battle it simulated. The company released more than 400 games in a little more than a decade, and by the mid-1970's, Mr. Dunnigan said, it manufactured more than half of all the war games sold worldwide. It also produced science fiction and fantasy games, several of which Mr. Simonsen designed."

All of us who love to play games owe Mr. Simonsen a huge debt.

Public Health Wins Another

Some good news for a change: the US has eliminated Rubella from our shores. I did my part years ago when the first vaccine came out and kids were vaccinated en mass with the new and thankfully no longer used vaccine gun. The day was grim: lined up at a local school with all the other kids from the area, hearing the worker at the start of the proceedure tell us that it would only sting a little while we could watch the kids getting their shots yell and cry from the pain, holding a bloody cotton ball to the their shoulders. That's a day I won't soon forget, but it was worth it.

Love Is the Plan, The Plan is Death

After the efforts of Congress to get the Terri Schiavo's parents a new day in court, another judge has dealt a terrible blow by denying an emergency order to keep feeding her. Congress acted because it felt that her parents hadn't gotten a fair shake in the state courts; the judge ruled that because the state courts had spent years mishandling the case, that was good enough for him. This is just one more example of why I no longer respect our legal system. The criminal system is a game of roulette that pretty much defines capricious and arbitrary, and the civil system is out and out extortion. The judiciary as a group seems to this poorly informed observer to be a combination of stupid, smug, and arrogant. Yes, there are good judges, but they are being overwhelmed by the lousiness of the rest.

I have to say, I'm not wild about passing a law to cover a specific situation like this. I suppose the problem is that on the one hand its poor process trying to fix bad judging, and on the other its a woman's life at stake. We don't have consistancy -- we don't want to execute mentally defective people who are criminals, but it's peachy to starve someone if they are guilty of nothing more than being inconvenient. We have very clear rules on how to pass on a dead person's property, but we can pass someone on because her husband, who has some clear conflict of interests, wants to say goodbye. It should be simple -- in the absence of clear written instructions, nobody should be denied food and water or even medical care for that matter. If you don't want to live past a certain level of ability, write it down, notarize it, and let people know. Otherwise, you get to hang on.

We allow executive clemency to handle situations the courts either got wrong or handled poorly in the first place for criminal cases, but not in a case like this. Jeb Bush could pardon someone he thought was wrongly convicted of a crime in Florida, but he can't keep Terri Schiavo off her own death row. George Bush could do the same for someone convicted in Federal Court, but his hands are tied the same in this case. Frankly, I don't see a lot of difference between executive clemency and Congressional clemency, which is what the law they passed represents. They are both Deus Ex Machina, and the only defense is that they are used to help the innocent.

Tom Maguire covers the subject like a rug, with coverage of the basic issues of the situation, the media bias on display (with a special shoutout for the NYT), and why this isn't a case of Right-To-Life hypocrisy. Where does he find the time?

Wow, That's Real Money

Something to boggle the mind: Somebody is paying 1.85 billion dollars for Ask Jeeves. Yes, that's right, I said billion. Of course, they aren't actually paying cash, they are swapping their stock for Ask Jeeves stock, and the stock market valued Ask Jeeves at 1.43 billion dollars Friday at close, so maybe the deal isn't as crazy as it sounds at first blush. And when you consider that the market values Google at just under 50 billion dollars, maybe it's me that's crazy. Here I talk about convergence last week, and I'm astonished when the market has already priced it in.

And Yahoo bought Flickrfor "undisclosed terms" -- well, to be disclosed later.

All this makes me wonder what my little internet company is worth -- OK, it's not really a company, but if people are prepared to provide me with real legal tender for it, it could become one real quick. Here that, Barry Diller?

Apple Report

While Andrew Sullivan worries about alienation via iPod, Robert Cringely and an unnamed correspondent look at convergence (without using the word, which is so last century) and the Mac Mini.

But in the case of Apple, is the iPod a razor or a blade? In other words, is Apple a hardware company or a media company? ... To me, it seems that Apple has reversed the relationship of razors and blades, and eliminated the loss leader role entirely. Apple makes very little money from selling songs, but it does make some profit. Apple makes a LOT of profit from selling iPods. So the song is the razor, not the iPod, and that's because the price sensitivity is currently about the content, not the player. ... So Apple isn't in the content business, they are in the hardware business, and will be for sometime to come. But my friendly reader sees it differently.

And to top it off, the leaders of the future are trending Macintosh -- at least those at Harvard (the Stanford of the East Coast) according to the Harvard Crimson (what a blatant rip off of Cardinal) which reports increases in use and sales of Macs on campus.

No wonder my Apple stock is up. Yes, I'm a Mac person. Pity or applaud as you will.

(If I really wanted traffic, I would of course start the food fight with a line like PC sucks, Macs rule! I do, but I won't.)

Legal Murder

Terri Schiavo is set to start the slow, agonizing process of starving to death tomorrow. I find it to be a process where a husband gets to murder his wife, collect the money meant for her, and live with his new girlfriend without consequence by using the state as his instrument of death. But that's just me. The unvarnished facts are bad enough, without my interpretation.

The struggle is often cast as an extension over the fight over abortion; personally I don't see it that way. If Terri had left a living will, or made her intentions known that indeed she did not want to live this way, I would support her decision. But the only evidence that she didn't want to live this way is her husband's word. Forgive me if I find it hard to rely on given the large sum of money and the other woman involved.

One Blog Roundup

Are you reading Ranting Profs? You ought to, or you might have missed a few things, like

Rick Bragg was fired by the New York Times for using uncredited stringers -- that is passing off someone else's reporting as his own. Guess what, everybody is doing that in Iraq. What's the difference? Good question Cori.

No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Could it have been because they were moved at the start of the war? According to the NYTs, it was more of that looting George Bush failed to prevent. According to Hitch, it was a carefully planned military operation. Still, if there were no WMD, what was looted? Just the equipment to make them, which wasn't used because?

What really happened with the Italian kidnapping in Iraq? Like did the Italians refuse to cooperate with the Iraqi investigation during and after the kidnapping? Just like they didn't tell the US what was going on? Great job there Italy.

Which is more important -- the sentencing in the Peterson case, or the first meeting of the Iraqi Parliament?. It's a trick question of course, because who cares about the Iraqi parliament. No wonder some people don't think the American sacrifice in Iraq is worth it, because we have no idea what's really happening.

Now that it's just Cori, I'm wondering when she'll change the name.

The Future of News?

There have been two things that have marked the news business from its start: distinction by time and media. That is to say, the news business has been divided up by when and how the information is delivered. Right now we have three media: paper, TV, and Radio, and we have several times a day, daily, weekly, and monthly. Media has often determined when information is delivered. Now some news ownership may span multiple media and times, but typically the gathering and dissemination end of the business has stayed fractured in those cases even while the business end of the business may have been more closely meshed.

What is the future of news? Convergence. I know that's a buzzword of long duration but little effect, but that doesn't mean that it's time won't ever arrive. Sure, we've seen some of the future already with different news media putting their product on the web, but you know instantly what kind of parent organization produced the product based on content and how it is organized and presented. But convergence will arrive, and with it, the balkanization of news delivery will end. CBS news will compete directly -- in the same time and media -- with the NYT, the WaPo, and even the St. Louis Post Dispatch and KMOV. OK, nothing you haven't heard before, just barely seen.

With this digital convergence, the media will be the internet, not the airwaves or paper, and the time will always be now, not tomorrow's edition or the 10 O'Clock broadcast. And so we will go from the push model to the pull model, and a great deal of the conventions of the news media will go out the window. Information will not be structured the way it is now. It is unhelpful to have information thrown into broad category buckets like "international news" or "entertainment" and then below that a series of unrelated articles - articles based on the current model of puting out a slug of info at a certain time - even when the articles are related.

Quite frankly, time will disappear as a basic organization element - it makes no sense when information is updated on an as gathered basis and grabbed by different people at different time. I think we'll see a persistant structure populated by dynamic data -- kind of like libraries (only more dynamic). While you know where to go look for a certain subject, what's actually on the shelves changes with time - as new books are written. Only in the case of news, I think you'll just get down to a single file that is updated, rather than a series of files over time (which is how we get news stories today).

Four For Tuesday

Steve Verdon takes an indepth look at Jeffrey Sachs proposal to end world poverty and is skeptical of the theory behind it. Me too, but Steve actually has equations to back it up.

Wizbang compares protests in Lebanon to those in America and finds a case where a third world country is much better than us. Oddly enough, it's the one Wizbang post today without a hot babe in it.

Back to economics - Tom Maguire has a lengthy excerpt of Niall Ferguson's outlook for the US dollar and the Asian central banks and finds things are gloomier for them than us, which is something I keep telling my mother when she brings it up as her latest doom and gloom prophecy.

Jenne defends the importance of special education for gifted kids with her own personal story. I can give the other side - the fruit of my loins have stayed engaged because of gifted education.

Petty Is As Petty Does

The Marines have made their countermove to the UAW: We don't need you're stinking parking lot. OK, it was "However, I've made my decision -- either you support the Marines or you don't." -- Lt. Col Joe Rutledge. So they found another parking lot and the UAW is stuck with their really incredibly stupid and petty descision to kick Marines off the lot for driving either a non-US nameplate car (how can you tell a "foreign car" otherwise) or one with a pro-Bush bumpersticker. I could have tolerated the foreign car distinction, but pro-Bush bumperstickers? I have only owned US nameplate cars (although I'm not sure that my Dodge qualifies anymore, especially since it was manufactured in Canada). This makes it harder to keep buying them, even though I know that not all autoworkers, or even the majority, are that boneheaded and petty.

My Name Is Wanda

It would seem that Steven Levy has forgotten the famous cartoon punchline, on the Internet, nobody know's you're a dog. Mr. Levy thinks the top ranks of Bloggerdom isn't sufficiently representative of the rainbow of America. Well, McQ applies his usual reality check, and I'll supply mine.

Back when I started The Murphy Nexus, which was an online family newsletter with a difference, most of the people I linked to and was linked by were women. Another woman who I knew from posting at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Forums once asked my why that was, almost as if it were a bad thing. I had to consider that because I hadn't ever examined my linkeragy based on gender, race, etc. My answer was that what I found interesting in connection with a family newsletter was mostly being written by women, and the people who found my little corner of cyber-space link worthy were women.

If you were to examine my list of links from this here blog, you'll find that there are more men then women. Again, not that I've paid attention or tried to link to more men, but that's just who I've found I wanted to link to. I have never linked to anyone or not linked to anyone because of their gender, race, etc. I have linked to people simply because I like to read them. Some I have found because they linked to me first and so showed up in referrer logs. Most I have found the old fashioned way - somebody else linked to them. I try to link to people who make me think, or make me laugh, (hopefully both). I don't link to only people I agree with. Generally I don't even notice the person's name until I go to link them and I look for it as I try to list people by name and not by blog name. Now, that doesn't always mean much -- for example if you can't figure out that Busymom is written by a woman, you're not heteronormative enough.

I'm curious as to what the solution is to achieve sexual and racial parity of hits on blogs. If you're links don't match the sexual and racial distribution of ... what, you're county, state, nation, the world? you won't be linked to by ... like minded people? I suppose that's the beauty of blogging - there is no top down control. There is no way to impose solutions from the top -- they have to come from the bottom up. You can't make bloggers link a certain way, but you can persuade them.

UPDATE:

Jeff Jarvis has a lengthy entry on this subject which I substantially agree with.

Shelley Powers has a lengthy post too with a lot of good points and insight. I have to say even though I don't agree politically with her and understand half of what she says when she goes all technical, I love her blog. It's a treat to read her and an honor to link to her.

A Groan Of Puns

Just in case you missed it, Wizband has the very funny results of their latest contest. One of the winners is the title of this post, so you have been warned.

Not All Bad

The St. Louis Post Dispatch is not a very good newspaper, even as newspapers go, unless you like your leftism served up smug and unthinking. And the columnists there are generally pretty awful, at least since they fired Elaine Viets for reasons not apparent to her readers. Yes, that includes the sports page, although I'm partial to Jeff Gordon who is a nice guy, at least he was to my wife when she worked briefly as a bank teller.

But in the interest of fairness and giving credit where credit is due, I'd like to point out that there are two spots you can read good columns - the business section and the outdoor section at the back of the sports page -- and I don't even hunt or fish. The Talk Tech guy is pretty good, as this column on iPods and PDAs shows. But Dave Nicklaus is far and away the best they've got -- he'd be worth mentioning even at a good newspaper. Try this column on the minimum wage and see what I mean - balanced, factual, thoughtful. Something you rarely get in the rest of the daily fishwrap -- any daily fishwrap. What's funny is reading one of his columns, and then not much later get the editorial page's take on a subject. Nicklaus writes about how college prices are driven up by third party pay and their ability to engage in "perfect pricing" through the financial disclosures involved in financial aid - the editorialists complain that the Bush administration isn't providing enough public money to reduce the cost of private tuition. When Nicklaus writes about soaring healthcare costs (here for example) you get a thoughtful look at competing factors with no villains, and the editorialists counter with how big companies and rich doctors work a "patchwork quilt of payers" to drive prices up -- mainly because they unswervingly advocate a single payer, namely all of us paying taxes. Actually, I should be happy that the rest of the columnists don't seem to read Mr. Nicklaus, or he might just disappear from the paper.

Fake or Real?

Stromata Blog has a great post about the Shroud of Turin (hat tip Cronaca). Nathan Wilson, described as a conservative Protestant, has developed an extremely easy way to make a 3-D negative image on cloth -- just like the Shroud. Put a positive image (on glass or other transparent material) above a cloth in sunshine, wait days, and viola, a 3-D negative image appears as the portion under the clear portion is bleached lighter.

Tom Veal and David Nishimura struggle with the two possible scenarios:

The shroud could have been created by someone, say a crusader, taking an ancient burial cloth (and therefore having the correct age, pollen, and weaving) to a painter who then created an image on a very large piece of transparent material that depicted crucifixion images at variance with the accepted iconography of how Christ was crucified, leaving them out in the sun for days, then deciding that that wasn't good enough, turning the shroud and the transparent image over, lining up the image on the underside of the cloth with the flipped image and repeating the process.

On the other hand, the shroud was real yet somehow escaped notice by Christians until 1354 when the de Charnay family could no longer contain themselves, or it was discovered by a Crusader in the Jerusalem area who took it home to France and only then was it discovered to be a relic.

As Tom Veal says: "It seems to me that all theories about the Shroud are quite improbable." Which is pretty much what a friend who was a Shroud lore fan told me years ago -- it confounds believer and unbeliever alike. And yet it exists, which I suppose is its own miracle.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Science marches on. We report, you deride.

Researches can tell from a single sample of saliva how many cavities a kid is going to get by the age of 30. They can even tell which teeth are at most risk. Apparently, it's all in the sugar chains. Now I'll be able to emphasize to my son if he should be brushing his teeth to avoid the drill or the cold shoulder.

Here's new meaning to giving someone the finger, but apparently you can tell something from the length of a man's finger.

A man's index finger length relative to ring finger length can predict how inclined that man is to be physically aggressive. Women do not show a similar effect. A psychologist at the University of Alberta, Hurd said that it has been known for more than a century that the length of the index finger relative to the ring finger differs between men and women. More recently, researchers have found a direct correlation between finger lengths and the amount of testosterone that a fetus is exposed to in the womb. The shorter the index finger relative to the ring finger, the higher the amount of prenatal testosterone, and – as Hurd and Bailey have now shown – the more likely he will be physically aggressive throughout his life.

"More than anything, I think the findings reinforce and underline that a large part of our personalities and our traits are determined while we're still in the womb," said Hurd.

At last scientists are studying something useful -- does the order you appear effect how you're judged during a competition. And the answer is: Go last if you want to be first. A researcher studied European ice skating competitions and the Eurovison song contest. I guess she was too busy in the lab to hear that ice skating is fixed.

The search for life in the Universe may be on going, but Astronomers now have good evidence that carbonated beverages exist out there with their discovery of a "burper". I hope they don't discover evidence of Mexican food in outer space. What's a burper? A source of intense bursts of radio waves that isn't a quaser. I guess I should be happy they don't name celestial objects after TVs anymore.

In another break through, researchers have discovered that people immersed in a virtual world don't notice pain. The virtual world the researches used was a game played wearing a special headset with two small computer screens and a special sensor, which allows the player to interact with the game and feel a part of its almost dreamlike world. Sounds to me like some researches wanted somebody else to pay for their video game habit. I know people that when immersed in a video game don't notice time, the urge to pee, or even how badly they smell. I can see big pharma getting rid of Vioxx and instead making high end video games. I'd like to develop that ad campaign: Video games - good for what ailes you.

Astronomers didn't take time off to celebrate their discovery of burpers, and also managed to discover the smallest star yet.

And a team of Astronomers in Cambridge, worried about being left out of all the discoveries, announced they discovered an invisible galaxy. Yeah, sure you did. OK, they really did, and this is important, because it's this giant dark galaxy made out of something so exotic that instead of getting silly and calling it noseum or no-frickin'-clue or bandersnatch they call it dark matter.

Right Here, Right Now

I remember the Reagan years quite well. He was mocked as an amiable but bumbling moron who was leading the US to disaster by confronting the USSR. The left admonished him to just get along with the USSR, don't confront them, don't apply pressure, and quit calling them names. The evil empire speech caused far more frothing and conniptions on this side of the Iron Curtain than the other. When Reagan responded to Soviet medium range nuclear missiles in Europe with nukes of our own atop Pershing and cruise missiles, we were warned by left and the realists that we were playing chicken with the future of mankind. The Nuclear Freeze movement sprang into being, and amazingly it existed only on one side of the Iron Curtain -- the side that was only starting to deploy nukes. But that was the refrain on the left - accomidate, pull back, never criticise, don't antagonize them because you'll only make it worse. As it turns out, they were dead wrong. Theirs was the losing strategy.

So excuse me if I find a certain similarity in the response to Bush II -- except where Reagan's critics thought him amiable, Bush's find him evil. And we're beginning to discover that maybe, just maybe Bush's strategy of confrontation, speaking the truth, using force if necessary is having the same effect in the Middle East that Reagan's same strategy had on Eastern Europe and the USSR. Now there are clearly differences between the two -- e.g. Bush has used far more direct force than Reagan, and where Reagan confronted a powerful elite in one powerful nation propping up powerful elites in lesser nations, Bush confronts a diverse stew of tyrannies, factions and groups. So while the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was abrupt -- once it became clear that the USSR couldn't stop one, they all fell, I don't expect the overthrow of tyrannies in the Middle East to be as abrupt - each will have to fall on its own, although clearly people in one country will be emboldened by success (or chastened by failure) in other countries.

The doom sayers have been warning us of the wrath of the Arab street, and it finally made an appearance. Not against the US though, but against Syria. The Lebanese looked at what happened in Iraq and decided they wanted some. Now every tyrant worries that their own people will make the same decision. What did they see happen? They saw the brutal suppression by a dictator, they saw him slaughter over 500,00 of his own people during different revolts against him. Then they saw him toppled by America, and they saw the first tentative steps of the Iraqi's to live free. They see that America is serious about dealing with tyrants - as witnessed by the continuing committment to Iraq despite the combat deaths. They see America's committment to free elections - as witnessed by the loss of America's handpicked man in the Iraqi elections without any response from America. But most importantly, they see the people of Iraq standing up for themselves -- still dying at the hands of the remnants of their old tyrants regime, but now not being ruled by their fear.

Usurpers and Destroyers

I'm a death penalty agnostic; I still struggle with the issue. If I were in a voting booth with the stark choice before me: Abolish the death penalty, yes or no, I don't know how I'd vote (as I've written before). Oddly enough, the case that gives me pause, the case where I say to myself, "if anybody deserves the death penalty, it's this guy" -- that's the case that first the Missouri Supreme Court reduced the penalty from death and now the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that reduction in penalty. And I'm really unhappy with both courts -- not about what they ruled but how and why. I'm not alone in that -- if you think judicial decisions are all dry and windy dissertations without feeling, Justice Scalia's dissent will disabuse you of that notion rather quickly.

I'm unhappy because of the MSC decision in the first place because it ran directly counter to the precedent of the USSC. In the words of Justice Scalia:

To add insult to injury, the Court affirms the Missouri Supreme Court without even admonishing that court for its flagrant disregard of our precedent in Stanford. Until today, we have always held that "it is this Court's prerogative alone to overrule one of its precedents." State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U. S. 3, 20 (1997). That has been true even where " 'changes in judicial doctrine' ha[ve] significantly undermined" our prior holding, United States v. Hatter, 532 U. S. 557, 567 (2001) (quoting Hatter v. United States, 64 F. 3d 647, 650 (CA Fed. 1995)), and even where our prior holding "appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions," Rodriguez de Quijas v. Shearson/
American Express, Inc., 490 U. S. 477, 484 (1989). Today, however, the Court silently approves a state-court decision that blatantly rejected controlling precedent.

One must admit that the Missouri Supreme Court's action, and this Court's indulgent reaction, are, in a way, understandable. In a system based upon constitutional and statutory text democratically adopted, the concept of "law" ordinarily signifies that particular words have a fixed meaning. Such law does not change, and this Court's pronouncement of it therefore remains authoritative until (confessing our prior error) we overrule. The Court has purported to make of the Eighth Amendment, however, a mirror of the passing and changing sentiment of American society regarding penology. The lower courts can look into that mirror as well as we can; and what we saw 15 years ago bears no necessary relationship to what they see today. Since they are not looking at the same text, but at a different scene, why should our earlier decision control their judgment?

However sound philosophically, this is no way to run a legal system. We must disregard the new reality that, to the extent our Eighth Amendment decisions constitute something more than a show of hands on the current Justices' current personal views about penology, they purport to be nothing more than a snapshot of American public opinion at a particular point in time (with the timeframes now shortened to a mere 15 years). We must treat these decisions just as though they represented real law, real prescriptions democratically adopted by the American people, as conclusively (rather than sequentially) construed by this Court. Allowing lower courts to reinterpret the Eighth Amendment whenever they decide enough time has passed for a new snapshot leaves this Court's decisions without any force--especially since the "evolution" of our Eighth Amendment is no longer determined by objective criteria. To allow lower courts to behave as we do, "updating" the Eighth Amendment as needed, destroys stability and makes our case law an unreliable basis for the designing of laws by citizens and their representatives, and for action by public officials. The result will be to crown arbitrariness with chaos.

Supporters of the decision keep saying "The US has joined the rest of the world". Screw that. My ancestors didn't come here because the US is like the rest of the world. I don't keep living here because of the weather; I stay here because we aren't like the rest of the world. Why do non-Americans get a "vote" on how we live here? If I wanted the unelected to issue decrees, I could go live in Europe or Zimbabwe. Why this pean to peer pressure? When did conformity become a good thing? What happen to the bravery and importance of dissent? I don't want the United States Supreme Court looking at laws in Europe, ignoring the consensus of the European people which is different, and saying that some mythical foreign consensus should be imposed upon the American people.

But what about this consensus that executing killers under 18 is cruel and unusual punishment? Isn't that why we have elections and legislators and initiatives? What better way for an emerging consensus to emerge? It certainly beats some jackanape in a robe from taking the temperature of the American people by sticking a thermometer up his own ass, which is what just happened.

In urging approval of a constitution that gave life-tenured judges the power to nullify laws enacted by the people's representatives, Alexander Hamilton assured the citizens of New York that there was little risk in this, since "[t]he judiciary ... ha[s] neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment." The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961). But Hamilton had in mind a traditional judiciary, "bound down by strict rules and precedents which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them." Id., at 471. Bound down, indeed. What a mockery today's opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years--not, mind you, that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed. The Court reaches this implausible result by purporting to advert, not to the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment, but to "the evolving standards of decency," ante, at 6 (internal quotation marks omitted), of our national society. It then finds, on the flimsiest of grounds, that a national consensus which could not be perceived in our people's laws barely 15 years ago now solidly exists. Worse still, the Court says in so many words that what our people's laws say about the issue does not, in the last analysis, matter: "[I]n the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment." Ante, at 9 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards--and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent.

And as for the idea that there should be a bright line based strictly on age, well, again I'll let Justice Scalia do the talking:

Indeed, this appears to be just such a case. Christopher Simmons' murder of Shirley Crook was premeditated, wanton, and cruel in the extreme. Well before he committed this crime, Simmons declared that he wanted to kill someone. On several occasions, he discussed with two friends (ages 15 and 16) his plan to burglarize a house and to murder the victim by tying the victim up and pushing him from a bridge. Simmons said they could " 'get away with it' " because they were minors. Brief for Petitioners 3. In accord with this plan, Simmons and his 15-year-old accomplice broke into Mrs. Crook's home in the middle of the night, forced her from her bed, bound her, and drove her to a state park. There, they walked her to a railroad trestle spanning a river, "hog-tied" her with electrical cable, bound her face completely with duct tape, and pushed her, still alive, from the trestle. She drowned in the water below. Id., at 4. One can scarcely imagine the terror that this woman must have suffered throughout the ordeal leading to her death. Whatever can be said about the comparative moral culpability of 17-year-olds as a general matter, Simmons' actions unquestionably reflect " 'a consciousness materially more "depraved" than that of' ... the average murderer." See Atkins, 536 U. S., at 319 (quoting Godfrey v. Georgia, 446 U. S. 420, 433 (1980)). And Simmons' prediction that he could murder with impunity because he had not yet turned 18--though inaccurate--suggests that he did take into account the perceived risk of punishment in deciding whether to commit the crime. Based on this evidence, the sentencing jury certainly had reasonable grounds for concluding that, despite Simmons' youth, he "ha[d] sufficient psychological maturity" when he committed this horrific murder, and "at the same time demonstrate[d] sufficient depravity, to merit a sentence of death." See ante, at 18.

...

In the instant case, by contrast, the moral proportionality arguments against the juvenile death penalty fail to support the rule the Court adopts today. There is no question that "the chronological age of a minor is itself a relevant mitigating factor of great weight," Eddings, 455 U. S., at 116, and that sentencing juries must be given an opportunity carefully to consider a defendant's age and maturity in deciding whether to assess the death penalty. But the mitigating characteristics associated with youth do not justify an absolute age limit. A legislature can reasonably conclude, as many have, that some 17-year-old murderers are mature enough to deserve the death penalty in an appropriate case. And nothing in the record before us suggests that sentencing juries are so unable accurately to assess a 17-year-old defendant's maturity, or so incapable of giving proper weight to youth as a mitigating factor, that the Eighth Amendment requires the bright-line rule imposed today. In the end, the Court's flawed proportionality argument simply cannot bear the weight the Court would place upon it.

The details are why ever since I heard them I've always thought that if anybody deserved death for his crimes, it was Christopher Simmons. And it's those details that should matter, not age.

On a side note, the state park Shirley Crook was murdered in was Castlewood -- the park my cub scout pack has camped in, and I posted pictures of just below. That beautiful shot from the bluffs - around the river bend on the left is the railroad trestle Simmons shoved her off of to her death.

I agree pretty much with everything Dale at QandO had to say about this decision, especially his final words: "It was never the Framers' intention that the court become a judicial oligarchy with the power to legislate from the bench. The clear intent of the Framers was to provide a government where the will of the people prevailed. That is why we have a government with congressional supremacy. Congress wields substantial power over both the executive and legislative branches for precisely that reason.

Clearly, it's time for congress to begin exercising their prerogative to bring the Supreme Court under control. "