13 May 2008 
Technology and rightness
This Associated Press piece on “designer babies” highlights how — for some — the ability to do something is sufficient grounds for its rightness:
But Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said she’s not troubled by the work. She said the idea of successfully modifying babies by inserting genes remains a technically daunting challenge.
“We’re not even close to having that technology in hand to be able to do it right,” she said, and it would be ethically unacceptable to try it when it’s unsafe.
Does Hudson mean that if we did have the technology in hand, it would be OK to proceed? What does she mean by “unsafe?” Indeed, how would one know if a procedure is safe, unless it is tested (as a potentially unsafe modification) on a living human being?
Please, let us not make the most helpless among us into guinea pigs for so-called advancement.
11 May 2008
Obama misunderestimates the expanse of our country
Perhaps his staff used fuzzy math to compute the number of our Union?
Ah, you gotta love these rumors on the internets…
8 May 2008
Darwinism and good
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Marilynne Robinson captures well a dilemma that occurs within Darwinism:
Surely we must assume that a biosphere generated out of any circumstances able to sustain life is as good as any other, that if we make a desert, for example, and the god of survival turns his countenance upon the lurkers and scuttlers who emerge as fittest, under the new regime, we can have no grounds for saying that things have changed for the worse or for the better, in Darwinist terms. In other words, absent teleology, there are no grounds for saying that survival means anything more or other than survival. Darwinists praise complexity and variety as consequences of evolution, though the success of single-celled animals would seem to raise questions. I am sure we all admire ostriches, but to call a Darwinist creation good because it is credited with providing them is simply another version of the old argument from design, proving in this use of it not the existence of God but the appropriateness of making a judgment of value: that natural selection, whose existence is to be assumed, is splendid and beneficent, and therefore to be embraced.
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, “Darwinism,” p.44
It doesn’t prove theism (or creationism, for that matter), but the Darwinist inability to adequately explain why something is or isn’t good would itself seem to undermine its usefulness as an explanation for the natural world.
Sure, a Darwinist might argue that they’re only performing empirical analysts of what things are — not the why. But I submit that we can’t truly know the what without knowing the why.
5 May 2008
Spies like us
It’s a cold war redux as the government of Belarus cries “spy”:
Belarus on Monday accused the United States of recruiting citizens into a spy ring aimed at undermining the ex-Soviet republic.
The U.S. State Department said the allegation was “just ridiculous” and that the department was considering whether to close its embassy in Minsk.
Tension has been building between Washington and the authoritarian regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, and most U.S. Embassy employees have been expelled in recent months.
Valery Nadtachayev, a spokesman for the main security agency, the KGB, told Belarusian television on Monday that the U.S. Embassy had hired 10 local citizens to take photographs of police officials, airports and villages near the state border.
For an administration that still calls its state security agency the KGB, this isn’t a surprise. Just last week the U.S. talked of closing its embassy due to diplomatic shenanigans which, although revived in the past months, have roots that go back more than a decade.
When I lived in Minsk in 1998-99, the U.S. ambassador was absent much of the time because Lukashenko evicted him along with emissaries from other countries because their houses were too close to his own. Basically, they were in the same neighborhood, and he wanted them out.
Ten years later, Lukashenko still seeks to evict (or suppress) anyone who criticizes his authoritarian style government.
Could it be that U.S. operatives are snapping nefarious photos around the countryside, exposing weaknesses in preparation for invasion? It’s highly doubtful, but in Lukashenko’s world, anything is possible — anything except a few people taking pictures.
3 May 2008
Hidden in plain sight?
From a front-page story in today’s Washington Post on Internet safety:
Alan Portillo didn’t think much, if at all, about his online vulnerability. Then the 15-year-old heard technology teacher Wendy Maitland list three pieces of information an online predator would need to find him.
Birth date, she said. Alan’s age was on his e-mail.
Gender. His full name was also on his e-mail and topped his MySpace page.
ZIP code. A photo on the page showed an area near his neighborhood, with “Arlington” emblazoned across one building.
“I thought it was nothing. But when I saw the examples, I started thinking, it’s a big deal,” the Wakefield High School freshman said. After the February lesson, he said, he deleted the photo and his last name from the page.
Well, kudos to the kid on deleting that sensitive information from the web. Now nobody knows his age, gender , or where he lives — except for those upstanding citizens who read the Post, of course.
2 May 2008
Horsing around
Saturday marks the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby. For most of my life, I never paid much attention to it. I had watched it a few times on television, but never really understood its appeal — until I lived in Louisville, Kentucky for six years.
The first spring I was there, I worked part time with nearly half of my weekly hours falling on Friday (I had no classes so I could work all day). On the Thursday before the race, I made and off-hand comment about work tomorrow, and my boss looked at me like I was crazy — we were not going to be open on Derby Day!
The local schools were closed too, I soon found out (on Friday, a race called the Kentucky Oaks is run at Churchill Downs). Apparently, the school system couldn’t find enough substitute teachers to replace all the teachers who would take off for the race. Rather than give all the students (and teachers) detention for skipping school, the schools decided not to fight it.
My better judgment (not to mention my sheer amateurism) has kept me from ever putting money down on a race, but I do like to pick ‘em and watch. Last night my wife and kids decided to get in on the game too, so here are our picks to win (with odds at time of posting):
- My pick: Colonel John (4-1)
- My wife: Undecided (note: this not the name of a horse)
- My son, age 3: Bob Black Jack (20-1)
- My daughter, age 1.5: Big Brown (3-1)
What are your picks?
1 May 2008
Also-ran for president: Jack Grimes
If you prefer a little more emperor in your 2008 presidential candidates, then Jack Grimes is your man.
Grimes, who is the United Fascist Union’s candidate for ‘08, lists as one of his priority issues to “establish a global government, similar to the Roman Empire built upon an Axis of economic trade to raise the standard of living everywhere on the planet.”
Oh yes, there does exist a United Fascist Union. It’s unclear the size of the Union’s membership, but it is clear that they employ stealth methods to hide their numbers. Why else would the group’s website URL [http://joanne21921.tripod.com] be so cryptically pedestrian?
When choosing his political heroes, Grimes doesn’t pick from the standard lot of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington. A candidate who wants to win must choose his heroes from history’s winners — that’s why Grimes looks to none other than Benito Mussolini and Sadaam Hussein as role models.
He claims to admire Mussolini because:
…he created an entirely new form of socialism that could bring about economic equality and create social justice for all men.
For Grimes, Hussein holds the key to America’s economic success:
We would like to restructure the American economy, bridging the gap between classes by instituting a form of socialism called Corporate Statism. Take America off of a metallic standard establishing instead a Work Point Standard like Mussolini did in Italy. We also favor abolishing paper money & the creation of a system of electronic credit & debit revolving around Transferable Work Point Cards.It is vital that we revive America’s heavy industry. The United Fascist Union could acheive this objective by replicating what Mussolini & Hussein have already achieved respectively in Italy & Iraq.
Take a successful model and build upon it — that’s the Grimes way. After all, he’s the only candidate to have portrayed Adolf Hitler on Star Trek. What more qualifications could the President of the United States need?
Will Grimes’ trains be running on time in November? Only time will tell.
[This post is fourth in a series on the other 2008 presidential candidates called "Parade of the also-rans." See the whole series here.]
30 April 2008
Adventures in words
Daniel Boorstin on word overusage in America:
The word “adventure” has become one of the blandest in the language. The cheap cafeteria at the corner offers us an “adventure in good eating”; a course in self-development … in a few weeks will transform our daily conversation into a “great adventure”; to ride in the new Dodge is an “adventure.” By continual overuse, we wear out the once common meaning of “an unusual, stirring, experience, often of romantic nature,” and return “adventure” to its original meaning of a mere “happening” (from the Latin, adventura, and advenire). But while an “adventure” was originally “that which happens without design; chance, hap, luck,” now in common usage it is primarily a contrived experience that somebody is trying to sell us. Its changed meaning is both a symptom of the new pervasiveness of pseudo-events and a symbol of how we defeat ourselves by our exaggerated expectations of the amount of unexpectedness — “adventure” — as of everything else in the world.
It doesn’t come as a surprise to most that words like “adventure,” and “event” (it’s the Nissan/Furniture Liquidators/Desperate Housewives event of the year!). What’s shocking is that Boorstin wrote this in 1961, and it reads like it could have been last week.
PS. Can anyone spot which overused word I (over)used in the paragraph above?
29 April 2008
Evangelical espionage
Just how crazy are those wacky evangelicals? Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wanted to find out, so he went “Undercover with the Christian Right” by immersing himself in the world of TBN star John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church.
There’s much not to like about the methods that Taibbi employed for the piece, which is an excerpt for a forthcoming book. First of all, to act as if you’re going in to uncharted territory by investigating pentecostal Christians is a little disingenuous. After all, this is America. There’s a pentecostal on every corner — they’re not that hard to find.
Second, why in the world would a reporter use an alias when signing up to attend a retreat at John Hagee’s church? Was he afraid someone would recognize him as a writer for Rolling Stone? The folks he described didn’t strike me as the type to sit waiting each month with bated breath for their copy of RS to arrive just so they can read Matt Taibbi. Understandable if he were investigating the mafia, but pentecostals?
Third, Taibbi suffers from a condition common to many media professionals: ignorance of the evangelical landscape. The reason for this undercover stint, he claims, was to “to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush.” To claim Hagee as the cornerstone for the evangelical mind-set in America is pretty big leap. Hagee is at best a subset.
That said, Taibbi does come away with a few observations of which evangelicals should take note. This passage in particular highlights the kind of psycho-babble that often shows up even in churches outside the pentecostal sphere:
The program revolved around a theory that [retreat leader Philip Fortenberry] quickly introduced us to called “the wound.” The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
[...]
We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry’s blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat (”Tighten your saddle, he’s fixin’ ta buck” was how “cowboy” Fortenberry put it), when we would experience “Victory and Deliverance.” But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to “find your wounds” (”My husband hid my Saks card!”) at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.
When a writer for Rolling Stone can recognize that your preaching is more pop-psychology than biblical truth, you’re in trouble. Sadly, much of the evangelical landscape shares this wholesale adoption of talk-show therapy. It’s a practice the Apostle Paul might well refer to as conformity to the world.
The gist of Taibbi’s piece is to show how markedly different these alien Christians are from the norm. Though he saw some pretty nutty stuff (glossolalia in the form of Russian band DDT!), it’s ironic just how much wasn’t as different from the world as it should have been.
28 April 2008
The Bible on Googling oneself
Well, more or less:
“It is not good to eat much honey, Nor is it glory to search out one’s own glory.”
Proverbs 25:27, NASB
Welcome
Welcome to TruePravda, an eclectic hive of commentary, opinion, & general mischief from the pen of Jared Bridges.
On The Side
CNN Money has some helpful articles on saving fuel, and avoiding gas-saving myths.
Still think something can’t be kept quiet this day and age? How Tennessee’s Chris Lofton quietly faced and beat cancer
What’s In a Name? Anthony Esolen on “stay at home moms,” “housewives,” and the differences therein.
Man Takes Wifes Name in Marriage: Perhaps we should all take up a collection to help him buy some dresses…
Over at the FRC Blog, I post about the Post’s wacky take on organic milk, boxed drinks, and world hunger.
What of those perpetual adolescents who continually defer adulthood in lieu of a search for meaning? Cameron Ming says that “finding yourself” is a crock.
Our nomadic future: The Economist on how you can prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy
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