Thursday, April 28, 2005

54-40 or Fight!

Austin Bay breathes life into the old bogey that scares Canada and gives secret pleasure to us jingoistic Yankees: the "domino effect" of Quebec nationalism causing Canada's western provinces to join the U.S. Here's my question: legally speaking, is such even possible?

Let's say that Quebec goes, and then British Columbia and Alberta follow suit, as do New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E. Island, and inevitably, Newfoundland, leaving the Dominion of Canada with Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

Do the inhabitants of B.C. and Alberta, even as an independent entity, have any standing under U.S. Law to petition Congress for entry? Wouldn't we have to annex the territory first, and THEN grant statehood?

The only precedent we have to guide is is that of Texas, which joined the U.S. after ten years as an independent republic and fifteen years as part of Mexico. It's not the best precedent, either. To begin with, most of the Texans who led the independence movement, with a few notable exceptions, were former U.S. citizens who had moved south of the Louisiana purchase. So the Texans who petitioned Congress to join the U.S. in 1837 and again in 1844 were, by extraction, U.S. citizens "coming home." No such status exists for British Columbians or Albertans.

Moreover, if there's anything the Texas affair demonstrates, it's that these matters are not going to be easy. Tensions with Mexico over the Texas Annexation led to war. We might scoff at the possibility of Paul Martin playing Santa Anna, but no pol likes his constituency reduced without his consent. Especially not to the disliked imperialist southern neighbor.

The irony of quiet, sensible Canada becoming the powder-keg of North America makes it normally a scenario kept to Diplomacy games and South Park movies. But the world has seen stranger things.

The Essayist #6: the Un-Sustainable

My great-grandfather was, in his elder days, what they used to call a "triple-dipper": he had Social Security, a U.S. Post Office Pension, and a State of New York pension. And by the time he died at the ripe old age of 88, he had collected from the system much more than he had ever contributed to it.

I remember that as I read about the U.S. Government taking over the pension plan of United Airlines (Hat Tip: Mickey Kaus).

The temptation to use this to blather fulsomely about Social Security is overpowering, but I should keep a few things in mind:

  • The airline industry is a money pit second only to the U.S. Government.

  • A private pension plan going belly-up is precisely the kind of thing that scare the cat food out of people who don't want Social Security messed with.

  • I am using way too many bullet-pointed lists.


  • Fortunately, I am armored by the fact that United is planning to shift into a 401k plan. You know, the kind that allows individuals to invest a portion of their income into private accounts and then uses the money to invest in stocks, bonds, and other securities, managed by people who do that for a living, and then holds the money there until the person retires? They estimate they would have to spend $200 million a year to do that, instead of the $9.8 billion they're currently short of.

    Traditional pension plans are on the way out. They're un-sustainable, because a) they're too costly if run honestly and b)they're too easy to run dishonestly. Union pension plans were a common source of mob money, and the biggest problem with United's p.p. was that it was allowed to run underfunded for so long.

    Those opposed to the President S.S. plan tend to act as though only a few tweaks will be needed to put the ship back on course. Raise taxes here, cut benefits here, and all will be well. They're not quite wrong, but wrong-headed. Trying to maintain Social Security as currently constituted is like trying to jury-rig the engine on a B-17 while supersonic jets whizz by. Sure, you might be able to keep the old beast in the air a bit longer, but are you sure you want to? Is it really worth the aggravation of the double whammy of making workers pay more to get less?

    Plus, how long before we have to do this again? Are demographics really our friend on this one? Is this cut-output, raise-input a temporary measure against the harsh winter of Baby Boom retirement, or the beginning of a series of similar measures, until the U.S. Government has to start looking for Japanese bankers to bail out our old folks?

    In economics, that which provides a return non-commensurate with investment is deemed wasteful. The costs provided with putting everyone's retirement through one central clearing-house makes such a system wasteful. And that which is wasteful, inevitably, must be discarded if the rest is to survive. Wasteful becomes Un-sustainable.

    I don't expect many Democrats to agree with me on this. To their minds, the value of the central clearing-house is that it provides simplicity and accountability. But to mine, these are illusions. There's nothing simple about the machinery needed to run the place, and somehow those on the inside are gaming the system to suit their needs. In the end, all that's left is a monument, bearing the big letters "WE CARE."

    Tuesday, April 26, 2005

    I Love My Dead Gay Savior...

    Let's make a few things clear: Bishop Gene Robinson did not actually say that Jesus Christ might have been gay, so all the headlines need editing. He merely pointed out that J.C. was a "non-traditional man," who "travelled with a bunch of men," (Hat Tip: Chris McCullouch)and allowed the rest of us to fill in the blanks (and his spokesperson to deny the validity of such inference). So this is less of a story than some are making it out to be, and for that, I can be only grateful.

    But I'm more interested in the logic behind the supposition, given that the continuous press coverage of the things Robinson says makes him, for the moment, uniquely influential. Let us examine the evidence:

  • Jesus never married

  • He did, in fact, wandered around the desert with a bunch of dudes.

  • The Apostle John was known as "the one Jesus loved"

  • He had a very strong relationship with his mother.

  • He spoke out against lusting after women with severity above and beyond that of the Mosaic Law.


  • There are more than a few, who faced with this (deliberately incomplete) information, will say "Oh my god, like, HELLO!" and those won't all be gay people. One of the understated conflicts about modern discourse is the amount of disbelief in the possibility of chastity. It informs our arguments on abortion, sex education, AIDS prevention, and yes, gay marriage. To many on the left, the concept of virginity and chastity are things that, like "the troops," they will claim to respect but do nothing to aid. They will not submit to the preaching of chastity, to the preaching of disciplining the sex drive. That's "unnatural." The degree to which the supremacy, the complete irresistibility of the sex drive has been taken as an article of faith among the left, and never questioned, is fascinating. And many righties are so busy tuning in to South Park to demonstrate hipness that they can't be bothered to notice anymore.

    Therefore, anyone who speaks to loudly on the subject is a warped freak who hates sex. Anyone who attempts to practice chastity is either a psychological eunuch or, somehow a hypocrite (this last has been the chief damage done by the child-abuse scandal in the Church). And anyone who practices chastity and then preaches to others about chastity is, in the view of many, little short of a genocidal fanatic if he does so in AIDS-ravaged Africa.

    And therefore, a holy man who is the promised Godhead in the minds of billions of people worldwide cannot possibly have been acting according to the doctrine that his followers pronounced for millenia after him. Nope, he's simply queer.

    Now, I write none of this as an exemplar of chastity, not in the purest sense of the term. My own opinions have never stopped me from doing things that would offend my mother if she knew of them. But I blame all this on my imperfect understanding of the need for chastity (which is not, strictly speaking, the same as virginity), not on the impossibility of chastity. I am reminded of Ghandi's line on Christianity: "It's marvelous, I wish somebody would try it!" Which works for chastity as well as for blasphemy.

    Oh, the Militia's Plenty Good Enough to Put Down the Rebellion...

    StrategyPage sounds off on the woeful state of our war reserves prior to the Iraq War. Now this is one reason I could see for having waited to take out Saddam.

    It reminds me of a debate I once had in college with a group of pals who were vociferous (while I was Excorsist-esque) in their contention that the Defense budget should be greatly slashed because there were no wars on the horizon (this was 1995, when the aftershocks of the end of the Cold War were still being felt). Loudly I shouted that I didn't know who we would have to fight, but that it was ludicrous to believe that we would never have to fight again.

    Now were my friends relishing the thought of future U.S. casualties? Of course not. Most of them, I'm sure, opposed this war and the casualties it requires. But this has been our habit since the Revolution (a point I made in the argument, as I recall), to sing "I ain't gonna learn war no more," and then leave to the next generation the task of learning war, all over again.

    Note the closing:

    The U.S. Transportation Command, and several other agencies involved in this mess, have all taken the pledge to set things right and sin no more. They are half right. Everyone will hustle to get the system patched up and functioning for now. But in the future, the same rot and sloppiness will seep back in. That’s what has happened time and again in the past. Odds are, it will happen yet again. People like to talk about future wars, but no one likes to spend money on getting ready to buy, store and ship the needed supplies.

    Indeed. Not when there are bureaucracies to be built and vague, impressive-sounding "wars" on social ills to be waged.

    My point? Only this: Do you think this kind of behavior, I don't know. odd for a nation reputed to be so warlike and imperialistic?

    Monday, April 25, 2005

    Okay, one more...

    Adding Mickey Kaus to the blogroll, because he's just about the only Democratic Blogger I can enjoy reading at this point. He's as fair-minded as most bloggers get, and that's worth reading.

    See the Music Inside My Head

    While I decide if the universe is monolithic or dualistic or a monolith containing a dialogue, here's a list of what I've been listening to lately:


    Tangerine Dream - Cyclone

    Interpol - Antics

    Reverend Horton Heat - The Full Custom Gospel Sounds

    Jesus and Mary Chain - Psycho Candy

    Why? Because.

    Sunday, April 24, 2005

    Checking in...

    I meant to post on Friday, and Thursday, to tell you about Friday's post, but Blogger upchucked. I'll be back tommorrow, at which point all the people who checked me out on wednesday will have moved on to greener pastures. That's the way it goes, I guess...

    Wednesday, April 20, 2005

    Whoa.

    My hit count just went through the roof. Who the devil just linked me? I can't find anyone that wasn't there already...

    Is LiveJournal the Mortal Foe of Blogger?

    Added a few links to Friends' sites, one of which is my dahling girlfriend's. I've noticed that not many Blogger sites link to LiveJournal sites? Is this a cultural divide? Outward-focused "news of the world" bloggers vs. Inward-focused "today I am blah..." live-journalists?

    Deaf "Culture" and Needless Issue Manufacturing

    During one of my post-graduate education classes, I watched a film in which the issue of cochlear implants for deaf children was beat to death like a red-headed horse by a pack of ravenous Frenchmen. I wanted to be deaf by the time the movie was over, just so I wouldn't have to listen to it any longer.

    Right on the Left Coast has this post on the crux of the work -- that "deaf culture" is valid and needs protecting. I'm personally of the opinion that parents have the final say in whether invasive surgery is to be performed on their children. If deaf parents have a deaf child, and don't wish to put in the implant, no one, I think, has the right to compel them to do so. But, as providing for the needs of deaf children in education is a requirement upon the state, the state will be able to come up with a "compelling interest" to sue for it in court. Look for continuing legal hullabaloos.

    By the same token, a set of hearing parents who wish to give the gift of hearing to their deaf child should be able to do so without self-important "deaf activists" trying to "defend their culture." Let me be plain: I care not a whit about "deaf culture," whatever that might be. I'm not impressed with activists who want to refuse people the possibility of regaining one of the five senses merely so they can keep their numbers up. That impulse is no less tyrannical than that behind compelling surgery over the will of the parents.

    To conclude: deafness is not so disabling as to require government intervention, and no disability "culture" has any say over the wishes of a mother and father to have their child be able to listen, speak, and enjoy music and theater. In all cases, let the parents decide, however they wish.

    Can we all agree to that?

    Tuesday, April 19, 2005

    Is the Pope Catholic?

    Being so used to the phrase "Pope John Paul II" I admit that it will be a while before I get used to the sound of "Pope Benedict XVI." I had the same problem, as a boy of twelve, getting used to the sound of "Bush Administration" instead of "Reagan Administration". In 1989, Reagan was the only President I remember. As I was not yet two when John Paul II became Pope, he's the only pope I remember, though he was the third of my lifetime.

    I will also freely admit to being a trifle surprised that the conclave elected Ratzinger. I was expecting them to go with the Nigerian, or one of the Latin American, cardinals (their names have escaped me). So, too, apparently did many of the press, who fairly frothed at the thought of the Church electing a younger, darker, liberal-er, dare-I-say-it sexier prelate. I can taste the disappointment in their copy: all that excitement, and waddya get? Another old white dude telling us we need to be holy. BOOOOORRRRRIIIIINNNNNGGGGG....

    ABC calls Ratzinger a "hard-liner," as though his views on abortion, homosexuality, etc., (you know, all the important things) were somehow different from those of JPII. In fact, if anyone had been paying attention, they'd have known that all of the "popeful" cardinals had been appointed by John Paul, and all of them solid on doctrinal fidelity as that pope viewed it. So, Andrew Sullivan's histrionics aside, no Pope elected today was going to be opening the preisthood to women or repealing Humanae Vitae. The Doctrine is the doctrine, consecrated by time and usage, and it doesn't change just because people wish it. If you have a problem with your Pope viewing the doctrine that way, then I have a place for you to go.

    UPDATE: I haven't even read Sullivan's display on Benedict XVI, but the degree to which he has become a figure of ridicule is astounding, given how many of us stopped by his blog first thing in the morning two years ago.

    ONE THING MORE: My girlfriend is a pro-choice Lutheran who voted for Kerry (which has got to mean it's the real thing). When we discussed the new Pope's positions vis-a-vis abortion, homosexuality, contraception and whatnot, she said, "Well, I wouldn't expect the POPE to approve of those things..." If she gets it, how come so many Catholics can't?

    Monday, April 18, 2005

    File Under "Toothless Moral Opposition"

    I don't know that I completely accept the premise of this post at Catholic Light, that Gay Anglican bishops will of necessity be pro-abortion Anglican Bishops. As gays tend to be of the political left, that's generally an acceptable rule, but exceptions are not impossible.

    What I am truly interested in is the logic that this particular Anglican Bishop, gay or no, uses to arrive at a pro-choice position:

    "Abortion," he said yesterday, is "not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole. On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman's right to choose."

    Let us parse this:

    The first part of this "Abortion is not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole," suggests that a fetus posesses a moral worth greater than a mere appendage of the body. One could be forgiven for inferring that the fetus has a value intrinsic to itself. Human entities (and, being a fetus inside a human woman's body, we can only label this a human fetus) which possess intrinsic value are generally referred to as "persons", and, as a matter of law and habit, considered worthy of protection, by other humans, and by the law.

    The second part "On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman's right to choose," seems to say that no one may come between a woman and the choice she makes regarding what goes on inside her body. That which no one may interfere with, human beings have habitually termed "sacred." So, an abortion is a sacred matter concerning a woman and her body. Many will find that term inappropriate, but the speaker here is a Bishop of the Anglican church, and thus, for Anglicans, one empowered to speak as to which matters are sacred and which are not.

    So the fetus is a person, deserving of protection, and abortion is a sacred matter involving no one but a woman and her body. Which is exactly the opposite of what the bishop said.

    I may be rhetorically reaching, but it is to prove a point: is there anyone out there who actually believes that Bishop Robinson is in any way troubled by abortion? Does anyone believe he's actually spent a half-hour's reflection on the suffering inflicted on pre-neonates, and the physical and emotional damage done to the woman? In fairness, I don't know the man, and he could be sincere on the subject, but I doubt it.

    And if he isn't, what does he bother stating anything that even sounds like a moral judgement against abortion? You know why: it's a rhetorical shibboleth, designed to soothe the other side's opposition into a go-along-to-get-along situation. But it goes nowhere towards teaching or persuading anyone to adopt the Anglican view of abortion as something impermissible for "birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience." In fact, judging from some of Bishop Robinson's later remarks (follow the link), I doubt very much he'd deem aborting a fetus because you wanted a girl instead of a boy a sin.

    This kind of thinking runs parallel, to my mind, with the people who say they thought Saddam was a murderous bastard and they're glade the Iraqis are free, but detest the mechanism that brought that about. It's a child of "9/11 was awful, but..." It is a declaration of moral awareness hamstrung by a refusal to take the action that awareness demands, and therefore amounts to nothing more than an expression of aesthetics, not morality.

    Now, any good leftist can point out where people of my camp to the same thing, but with different issues (poverty being the leadoff hitter, the death penalty perhaps batting cleanup). And I don't know that they'd be wrong to do so. And this is where alternative proposals are so important. There are ways of dealing with poverty other than the bureaucratic spawn of the dead command economies. But if abortion and terrorism and Saddam Hussein are such bad things, what do you plan on doing about them?

    You asked for More Al Gore, and We're Giving to You. Hard.

    Adiemantus has resurfaced, and, as always, he's worth reading.

    The Swing and the Pendulum

    Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that everything Rich Lowry is reporting in this piece for NRO is accurate, and let us accept the possibility that therapy is not all its cracked up to be. Many will oppose such out-of-hand as right-wing hack work, but let's work from it.

    If it is true, than the argument of Signmund Freud--that all civilization is based upon repression--gets an corollary added to it: not only civilization but, to a degree, human happiness, is based upon repression. To pick our scabs and wallow in our pathologies slow our progress. Stoicism is necessary for survival.

    But let us not damn in defending. If stoicism were to be universal, we would not have mouths. And let us not forget that it was the repressed Protestant persona that fathered the touchy-feely jargon-spewing therapy culture that thrives today.

    Friday, April 15, 2005

    The 9 Types of Types

    I've always been a fan of Matt Groening's cartoons, even though he's a polar opposite of my kind of politics. I remember the cartoon whose captions are linked here (Hat Tip: Vodkapundit), and I remember chuckling at them when I didn't have a girlfriend. But looking over the list now, I notice something:

    Is it just me, or are the guys the effeminate ones here? And the women the dominating brutes?

    There's Joe Sensitive, the Dreamer, and Flinchy, with only Bigfoot fulfilling the role of standard-issue caveman. Even the Sneak is oddly fey, sneaking around like a weasel rather than shouting "Bathe her, and bring her to my tent!" like a warrior. As for Old Man Grumpus, think "college professor", "senior editor," and "Dave Matthews fan."

    Now look at the ladies. Out of Nine types, three are clearly Alpha-Females (Old Yeller, the Bosser, and Huffy), two are by-nature uncontrollable, (Wild Woman Out of Control, Woman From Mars), and two are the wilting kind (Sickly, Vaguely Dissatisfied). Ms. Nice Guy is clearly "One of the Boys" and any chick who gets into sports carries a degree of ambiguity gender-wise.

    All anecdotal, of course. And it leads one to wonder about the kind of men (what, no Perpetual Jock? No Capitalist Captain? No Perpetual Geek?) and women (No Nun-in-Training? No Yammerbox? No Geekess?) Groening encounters. But when I consider the memes about the demasculation of modern society that flew around back in the 90's, and when I consider that underlining such an idea was likely the farthest thing from Groening's mind, I find the co-incidence fascinating.

    The Four Things Civilization Needs

    Boxing Alcibiades links to this heartening report of what's been going on in Tanzania since socialist Julius Nyerere stepped down as President in 1985. Rose-colored glasses, to be sure. But When P.J. O'Rourke toured Tanzania in the late 90's for his book Eat the Rich, he found a country that had "made nothing from everything," a deeply poor, albeit peaceful country. That the introduction of market economics is beginning to turn all that around, is both obvious and pleasantly surprising.

    Property rights. Rule of Law. Suffrage. Universal Education. The basics, folks. Everything else is gravy, and like gravy, can mess up the arteries if you gorge on it.

    Thursday, April 07, 2005

    The Remnant

    John Derbyshire of National Review is not known for being the most optomistic man in the known universe. This is the man who famously declared that the U.S. was not going to go to war against Iraq, largely because he felt we lacked the cojones. There's more than a little of the doom-and-gloom-crochety-old-drunk-in-a-pub-for-whom-nothing-is-ever-right about him. We ought to take that into consideration.

    Nonetheless, I think today he has a point. While everyone who isn't nailed down is crowding Rome to view the mortal remains of John Paul II (I'm waiting for the media backlash against the media overexposure to kick in), Derb is airing the dirty laundry, not of the Pope himself, but of the Church, and no, he doesn't mean anything having to do with priests, children, and K-Y Jelly. He means the gradual erosion of spirituality in the post-modern world, the "posthuman tsunami," as he puts it (I'm proposing a five-year moratorium on the use of the word "tsunami" as a metaphor. Any takers?).

    For in spite of the fact that we all loved John Paul, we all hate going to Church nowadays. We all hate any doctrine (birth control, abortion, euthanasia, etc.) that gives us anything more thant momentary inconvenience. We have been trained by modern society to demand release from any pain unjustly caused us, and we have been trained by modern academia to find a way to blame the whole for any particular pain. Despite this saint's leadership, none of that has changed.

    So we're doomed. Brave New World, here we come.

    But I demur. John Paul II stood for freedom of religion, and freedom of religion is no small thing. As long as religion is not muzzled or censored by the state, religion can grow, and where religion can grow, religion will grow. Look at the Evangelicals in the United States, who are so successful in preaching their version of Christianity that they've made inroads in Latin America and even forced the coastal humanists in their own country to shudder at them. The mass of humanity may be willing to turn their brains into genome-mapped pleasure domes, but not everyone is. The religious impulse is harder to kill than anyone not acquainted with it will realize. Time Magazine proclaimed God dead in 1966, certain that religion would fade away. In 2005, the death of the Pope is the biggest news story of the year. Hardly seems like an end, does it?

    But even if Derbyshire is right and worldwide church attendance dwindles to the 10% it likely is in infidel France, so what? Either that 10% is right about their being a transcendent God who promised that the gates of hell would never prevail, or they're wrong. If they're wrong, the Brave New World is no threat to anything, because the Brave New World will be right. If they're right...then they Brave New World is no threat to anything.

    I am reminded of the path of the Jews in the Old Testament: raised from slaves to all-conquering zealouts to effete, polytheistic sacrificers to grist under the treads of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires. When the Jews went away to Babylon, most of them, too, wallowed in the luxury of the Morning Star's Kingdom and forgot their God. But a handful, the Remnant, stayed true, and to them God promised return and restoration:

    Cease your cries of mourning,
    wipe the tears from your eyes
    The sorrow you have sown shall have its reward,
    says the Lord,
    they shall return from the enemy's land.
    There is hope for your future, says the Lord;
    your sons shall return to their own borders.
    Jeremiah 31:16-17

    This would make John Paul II not John the Baptist, heralding the new age, but Josiah, the last good King of the Davidic dynasty, who labored mightily to restore the old-time religion, and largely failed, because the people had decided that the Mosaic Law was archaic and required re-interpretation in the light of their modern society. Of Josiah it was written: "Before Him there had been no king who turned to the Lord as he did, with his whole heart, his whole soul, and his whole strength, in accord with the law of Moses; nor could any after compare with him." Yet his kingdom was devoured by Babylon within a few generations, then reborn in such a way as would never allow it to bow to foreign gods again.

    So if God will seek to punish the Catholic Church for the sins of its past (sins that John Paul II knew well), fear not. The remnant will see it's way through to the other side, and be there when the Brave New World is no longer new, and no longer brave, and surrenders as meekly as tyrants inevitably do.

    Wednesday, April 06, 2005

    Interesting Times

    Is it me, or is this decade a lot more dramatic, and substantially so, than the last one? We got 9/11, the War, the Death of a Pope, the prospect of popular, pro-democracy, peaceful revolutions in corners of the world that are strangers to them, etc. What was going on at the mid-point of the 1990's? The Republican takeover of Congress? The Fall of HillaryCare? Yugoslavia's meltdown? All minor, parochial happenings, unless you happened to be caught up with them. Nothing worldwide, except for Aids.

    I know all history is really a simultaneous sowing and reaping of the hearts of humanity, but it seems to me that this is a time of tectonic shifting, of places and possibilities moving in new ways.

    The other possibility is that all this is but the aftershock of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which fell so softly as to lead us to believe that we had escaped all consequences. Come to think of it, the U.S.S.R. did technically end in 1991, so I guess you can put that one in the 90's column. So maybe it was the late 90's, the "Roaring" part if you will, the era of Monica Lewinsky, that will be remembered as silly and without consequence. Hell, maybe after the 2006 elections and the (very) gradual petering out of the Iraq insurgency, the pace of history will entropy and we can settle back down to American Idol and swinging the Stock Market again, and the late 00's will be another little nap until China decides to go after Taiwan or Asian Bird Flu starts dropping people like flies, or (insert unforseen event here).

    I don't know. You don't know. All we know is all we are...

    Tuesday, April 05, 2005

    Ill News

    Peter Jennings has lung cancer. When I was a boy, my family watched ABC news exclusively, and so saw the news and Jennings told it to us every night. To this day, I can recall the timbre of his voice when he described the trading on wall street as "moderate". To many on my side of the aisle, Jennings is just another head of the MSM hydra, but he was always a dignified, gentlemanly, non-document-forging head. While I find the tone of his group mailing bizarre(switching from a gentle self-chiding as one who alternates from "cranky to really cranky" to a droned statistic about how many millions of Americans are "living with cancer"), I can't think of many who would want to speak ill of him.

    Hopefully my compatriots in the blogosphere will not not prove me wrong. In the meantime, best wishes to him and his at this time.

    The Great Debate

    Volokh brings up the subject of whether a tomato is actually a fruit or a vegetable, and finds himself cutting through a mass of legal and botanical verbiage, and concludes that they are both. A logical conclusion, I suppose, but one which will not hold water. The placing of the seeds and the purpose of the bloom have nothing whatever to do with the average persons classification of fruits and vegetables.

    The delineation is actually palate-related: fruits are sweet, vegetables are bitter or salty or starchy. Apples, oranges, banannas, pomegranates, grapes, strawberries, etc., are fruits. Beans, squash, potatoes, asparagus, etc. are vegetables. Tomatoes, which taste like the rotting interior of a gangrenous wound, are therefore vegetables.

    I defy anyone to refute this distinction.

    I knew him when...

    Boxing Alcibiades has gone crazy, filling himself up with bloglinks and posting all over creation. The Bastard's built himself up into a Flippery Fish while I'm still a Lowly Insect. I send little radiating beads of hate, cheer him on, and tell you to go check him out.

    Monday, April 04, 2005

    So, Anything happen over the break?

    I pretty much absented myself from the Terry Schiavo hullabaloo, because I felt the matter better presented in other formats. John Leo aptly sums up what went on in case you just turned over the rock.

    One thing I did notice about the a particular argument that people who were opposed to keeping Schiavo alive kept using. "The religious right is out of control," or some facsimile thereof, they'd say.

    "Out of control."

    Look, I can see getting annoyed at involving the federal government in a matter this private. And reasonable people will disagree as to the proper point to allow nature to take its course. But to say that the religious right is "out of control" for wanting to save Schiavo's life, such as it was, says a lot more about you than it says about religious conservatives.

    We aren't talking about organizing a crusade or setting Jews on fire. We're talking about attempting to re-insert a feeding tube into a disabled woman. Maybe doing so is superfluous, maybe it's not even what Terry Schiavo would have wanted. But if you can't see and understand what motivated the right-to-life crowd, then you might consider if you argued for Schiavo's death for the reasons you thought you did. And if the only reason you wanted to see her die was because it would annoy Pat Robertson, then you are the bigger asshole.