Tim Blair has cancer

Terrible news indeed.

Atlanta has topflight cancer care, so he could come and visit me. OTOH, I'd then have to take him out pub-hopping, and I'd be really embarrassed to have a cancer patient drink me under the table.

We're pulling for you, mate.

How to get your creationist letter published in the newspaper

The creationist website Answers in Genesis has been having a terrible time getting their letters printed in the newspapers since their "museum" opened, to widespread derision. They complain about it at length in the article linked below, and then offer this to any of their fellows in a similar pickle:

Here are some pointers that, if followed, will increase your chances of getting a letter published:

1. Check the maximum number of words the paper will allow for a letter. If you have some scientific, engineering or similar credentials, you might want to call the opinion page editor at the newspaper and ask to be considered to write a guest column instead. You may be given twice the length of a letter to the editor. Important pointer: many letters are not accepted by papers because they are too long. Always find out what length the paper will accept.
2. Try to submit your piece within one or two days of the evolutionist article/letter appearing. Submitting it three or more days later makes the topic “old news” for many editors. The likelihood of your letter appearing in the paper diminishes each day you wait to submit it. (Thus, emailing your letter to the editor is better than using the mail; do not, however, send it as an attachment.)
3. Do not use inflammatory language. Be respectful (yet firm).
4. Have someone with excellent writing skills proof your letter before sending it.

And, most importantly,

Be absolutely sure to be accurate in what you write. Double-check your facts and main points against what you find at this website (using our powerful search engine) and other reputable sources.

Somebody enable their irony settings, please!

To stone or not to stone?

Is stoning women taken in adultery permitted in Islam? Four Florida Muslims try to lawyer the question away, here.

Remember, class: it's only a tiny minority of Muslims that want to subjugate us all. The vast majority of peaceful moderate Muslims merely wish to scold us for noticing.

Kenya election violence

My church shares our building with a Kenyan congregation, and they are really hurting with all this violence. So say a prayer for peace over there, it's ugly and, as strongly Christian a nation as Kenya is, it needn't be.

First Things blogger whiffs a hanging fastball

Sally Thomas, whose previous output I'm not familiar with, post this rather pointless piece about a crude juvenile book.

I am the last person in America to have heard of Walter the Farting Dog. [...] While neither of us is exactly a lace-encrusted Victorian holdover, we shared a grandmother who could not bring herself to mention the name of any bodily function whatsoever and therefore spent our childhoods being ordered to wash our hands before long car journeys and church. Our more up-market great-aunt used routinely to inquire of us as seven-year-olds whether our noses needed powdering. None of this particularly mystified us; it was how people talked in the South. We assumed it was how all people talked, everywhere.[...] Here is a plot summary:
1. Some kids bring home a dog from the pound.
2. You know the title, so already you know what’s wrong with the dog.
3. Dad wants to get rid of the dog.
4. The very night before the dog goes back to the pound, some burglars break into the house.
5. The dog overpowers them, to put it with nose-powdering delicacy.
6. Hooray, we love Walter, Walter can stay, the end.

Ms. Thomas records her ambivalent reaction, or lack of:

So it was not that I was shocked, exactly, to learn of the existence of a children’s book about a farting dog—merely interested, you understand.

I've nothing against rather pointless blog posts--obviously, if you've been reading for awhile--but I saw the perfect kicker to this one. G. K. Chesterton had the number of shock artists way back when. Dig:

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.

What a great aphorist he was...

New media bias quotes of 2007

Just in case you haven't had your fill of year-end roundups, here's the Media Resource Council, with their annual slew of self-damning media quotes, in this handy .pdf file, and in this page of links to incriminating video.

Actually, with the advent of talk radio, and as the internet age has progressed, the annual roundup of these quotes has become less interesting. The MRC is becoming a victim of its own success in exposing liberal media bias. The MSM has adapted to being scrutinized for slant, nowadays. Many of these quotes are from opinion shows and such, rather than from straight news. I personally don't get too aggravated at finding a liberal opinion in a liberal's column. I mean, we don't get mad at George Will for having an opinion, do we? Why get mad at Bill Maher, then? So go ahead and enjoy these, and be grateful that you young whippersnappers never had to throw your remote at Walter Cronkite, and feel like you were the only one in the world who felt the same way.

And speaking of best of the year quotes, keep an eye on Blair's place. His annual collection of Aussie groaners has appeared more sporadically in recent years--I think he's gradually phasing it out, unless he's publishing it elsewhere--but it's worth the suspense once it does appear. So far, all he's offered up is this and this.

Another stem cell breakthrough

A team of American scientists reported Sunday that they had widened the scope of a Japanese breakthrough in stem cells that many experts have hailed as the greatest medical achievement of 2007.

In November, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and colleagues announced they had reprogrammed human skin cells to have the multiple potency of stem cells culled from human embryos. [...]

Reporting on Sunday in Nature, a team led by George Daley of the Children's Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts, say they have been able to use the same four genes to derive iPS from foetal lung and skin cells, from neo-natal skin cells as well as from skin samples taken from a healthy human volunteer.

The research is important as it marks a step forward to "patient-specific" stem cells -- in other words, transplanted stem cells that carry the same genetic code as the patient and thus cannot be rejected as alien by the body's immune system, they say.

I've always been too cowardly to take a stand on abortion, as the logical conclusion of most positions are odious to me. It's one of the mercifully few issues in American public life where our ideals of liberty and morality are in direct conflict. So developments like this are most welcome here atop my fence.

Remembrance

In renewed sympathy to Mike Hendrix, proprietor of Coldfury.com, who's had the memory of his late wife befouled by a progg-blogger who shall here go unnamed, and only semi-linked.

"When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

"For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I'm feeling most ghost-like, it's your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I'm feeling sad, it's my consolation. When I'm feeling happy, it's part of why I feel that way.

"If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who I am will be gone.

"Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well."
--Frederick Buechner

Another counter-intuitive global warming datum

What is one of the dire consequences of having the arctic icepack melt? It then re-freezes at a record rate, come wintertime.

What a surprise!

Sen. Sam Brownback in the On The Square section of First Things! He's applauding the recent stem cell research breakthroughs.

This shifts the debate fundamentally. Those who had moral reservations about research on the youngest of humans but were persuaded of the need to pursue treatments can now support this promising research without compromising their pro-life conviction. At the same time, those who claimed that embryonic research was the only promising way forward can unite around a promising new technique that presents no ethical dilemmas.

What the vast majority of Americans want is now possible: the pursuit of promising research that does not cross ethical lines, honors human dignity, and preserves innocent life.

As is so often the case with science news, the actual facts aren't quite so pat as the headlines make them out to be. We're still years away from putting these discoveries to any practical use. But it is a ray of hope, in what had been an increasingly ugly ethical war.

The Wheels of Justice Grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly...slowly

Imagine if the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi high command had not been held until the year before the United States' Bicentennial. Imagine if the secret speech Nikita Khrushchev gave denouncing Stalinism had not been given until the year after the Apple MacIntosh was introduced.

Got it? Now imagine if the first trials of the top Khmer Rouge cadres had not been held until, oh, last week.

Heart surgeon by day, attack copter pilot by night...

...or on his days off.

This story has been wending its way through the wires over the past couple of weeks, in various forms (i.e., some versions don't include the successful outcome of an Arab baby's heart surgery). An Israeli heart surgeon, "Yuval", regularly saves the lives of Arab children. He also regularly fires on Arab terrorists, as a Cobra attack helicopter pilot.

Yuval’s oldest son was born in the 1990s, after the Oslo accords. He dreamed that his son wouldn’t be drafted. Then, in 2000, the second Palestinian intifada erupted. Suicide bombers blew up Israeli discos and cafés.

Israelis responded with force. Palestinians from Gaza were banned, including the men who labored with Yuval. Yuval flew targeted assassination missions, killing about 15 intifada members, he said. After a strike, Yuval said, he would emerge from his cockpit successful, yet feeling bad, his hair wet with sweat, his neck reddened with tension.

Some pilots quit. They criticized the military. Yuval called them “unforgivable.”

As he snapped pink pajamas on his daughter, Yuval said, “If you think you’re more moral, stay in and fight the battle the way you think it should be fought.”

Such is the life of citizen-warriors, who dwell in a land where their mortal enemies are but a brief bus ride away. It's actually a touching story, and although this Jewish news media watchdog group found reason to carp, it's actually a fair slice-of-life bit of reportage. If some psychic conflict is intended to be suggested here, I didn't find it. In fact, one immediately thinks of the lack of psychic conflict among the Palestinians, murdering Jews one minute and coming to Israeli clinics the next. The doctors there do their jobs without bias, but admit: when Jewish terrorism victims are brought in through the Arab waiting room, it gets hard when they cheer.

2007 Hurricane season ends

Well, my suspicions have been borne out. Apocalypse is what they predict, but weather is what we get.

No known connection, but...

The Pope on why atheism leads to tyranny

"The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world."

The Creation Museum Report

Gifted science fiction author John Scalzi visits Kentucky's Creation[ist] Museum, and is badly over-matched by the sheer idiocy of the place. The first goodly chunk of his report is little more than a string of awed expletives. He collects himself long enough to make this point:

The problem with this is that creationism isn’t a theory, it’s an assertion, to wit: The entire universe was created in six days, the days are 24-hour days, the layout for the creation and for the early history of the planet and humanity is in the first chapter of Genesis and it is exactly right. Everything has to be made to conform to these assertions, which is why creationist attempts at science are generally so damn comical and refutable.

Then he turns his attention back the museum, and his muse is trumped again, as back come the expletives. Then he finishes up with a "to each his own" dismissal of the whole enterprise.

In case John is still curious about what creationists say happened to the dinosaurs after the Flood, I humbly direct him to this Jack Chick tract. Better duct tape your head first, though.

Nature + Sin = Consequences

The rates of sexually transmitted diseases are ticking up, after a long period of decline. From a NYT article:

The incidence of gonorrhea, which had declined sharply, has risen in the last two years in this country while the number of chlamydia and syphilis cases continue to rise, federal health officials said yesterday.

Chlamydia and gonorrhea are the two most common diseases among those doctors must report in the United States. And the 1,030,911 cases of chlamydia in 2006 are the highest ever recorded for any nationally reported disease in any year, the officials said in releasing their annual report on sexually transmitted diseases. They said that because of underreporting, a more accurate estimate is 2.8 million new chlamydia cases annually.

(There's also some shocking demographic aspects to these data, but that's for someone else to parse.)

So back to the Seventies we go, when the ripples from the Sexual Revolution's Sixties splash first spread out over the pond of our society. And may the consequent Great Relearning not be far behind. People forget that we didn't always live in a time of medical miracles, and thanks to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we may yet outlive said age. A syringe in the ass can't bail you out of all the possible trouble your naughty bits get you into.

What's the best defense? A happy marriage, which the Constitution unfortunately only guarantees the right to pursue, not to have.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.
--George Eliot

Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness and of our miseries. A marriage of love is pleasant, of interest, easy, and where both meet, happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and, indeed, all the sweets of life.
--Joseph Addison

No fleeting piece of nookie will ever be worth all that. If you have steak at home, you don't have to sneak out for hamburgers. Tainted hamburgers, as it happens.

Related: In case someone suspects me of Christophallic judgmental triumphalism, I direct your attention to this sad bit of red state notoriety. As someone once said, the Anglo-Protestant moral ethic doesn't stop people from sinning. It just stops them from enjoying it.

People watching in traffic court

So there I was, sitting in traffic court, waiting for our turn to plead our case. My wife had gotten tagged for a couple of moving violations, but she insisted to fight them in court. So we had gone in to plead, then come back on the trial date, only to have it postponed because the officer was on "court leave". It was rescheduled for a couple months later, on a bad day for me, as it turned out. But I couldn't reschedule, even though my reason was at least as good as whatever reason the officer had blown off the first date.

We were among the last to be tried, so I had time to watch the other people go through. The jump-suited prisoners from the city prison were dealt with first. Then it was on to the "civilians". Of note were these cases:

Most were traffic cases, and most of the defenses (few of them had lawyers) were along the lines of "you must have clocked someone else in front of me". One Afro/Carib woman's defense was that everyone else was illegally parked, so why ticket her? Another tried to be slick and file a motion requesting the court to re-enact the traffic stop, or something like that. This guy also pleaded his status as a military veteran, a soldier in Desert Storm. The motion was denied, and the solicitor threw his veteran's status back at him: "Many of us are," he said, and then proceeded to reel off years of speeding and red light running tickets the guy had collected over the years. Guilty.

One case was for disorderly conduct. A single mom, a hash-slinger at Picadilly's, had blown up at her slumlord about her roach-infested apartment, and was jailed. The judge and solicitor were sympathetic, found her guilty, and sentence her to time served and let her go.

The only not guilty verdict of the day came on an expired tag charge. The man had a paper from the DMV of another state saying that his tags were still current at the time of the stop. The judge apparently decided not to punish him for a government paperwork snafu, and let him go.

Finally it was our turn. We were given a fair trial and found guilty on both counts. The judge asked for "mitigating or aggravating" circumstances before handing down sentence. The solicitor recommend a light fine, since she had no prior convictions, and the violations were due more to confusion than recklessness. So, we got off lighter than if we had paid the fines straightaway. All in all, quite an educational experience.

Pictures of transitional fossils

Here is a nice gallery of transitional fossils, from the Cambrian on up to the advent of prehistoric man. They're from a new book by paleontologist Donald Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. Looks like a good pushback against creationists and their lies, if anyone who's on the fence happens to read it. Coverage of a Q & A with Dr. Prothero is here.

Giving Charlie Brown the Mommy Dearest treatment

I watched a few minutes of the PBS special on Charles Schulz, in which his kids were carving him up. I didn't like it. However unequal to his familial responsibilities he may have been, those adult kids are betraying him, and for what? For what?

Healthcare costs money? Those damn conservatives!

I've boycotted Daily Kos since his despicable "screw them" remark about murdered American contractors in Iraq a few years ago. But even I can feel a pang of sympathy, when a Deep and Real and Concerned and Pissed Off progressive bumps into the fine print in his health insurance.

I feel sorry for Kos, if this is his first big run-in with insurance red tape. I got it hot and strong early on, and by the time my oldest was in kindergarten BC/BS had paid a third of a million for her. Pretty much all of the trouble I had to unsnarl was the result of muddle, not malice, on the part of the insurance or the healthcare provider. There are plenty of people out there who really ought to be stocking the salad bar at Golden Corral, and not messing around with medical records. The trick is to keep records, know your deductibles, copays, and out-of-pocket obligations--and don't yell at the phonebots. I once got a collection notice, and through patient sleuthing discovered that the hospital's data had become corrupted when they migrated it to a new server, erroneously showing me in arrears.

When The Hillarycare Revolution comes, there will be no more fine print. Just an infinite number of competent, dedicated, government health & insurance workers, and an infinite amount of money to pay them.

And I want a pony for my birthday.