Ah, but I love Doghouse Diaries.
State-of-the-art 1st-Century technology makes it more portable than scrolls.
Reading Technology
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Say Good-Bye to Catholic Hospitals
So says Cardinal George of Chicago (h/t Ace):
The cardinal does not not speak as someone who can, with the stroke of a pen, order all Catholic Hospitals to shut down. Rather, he lays out the dynamic that will happen if the HHS contraception mandate is not rescinded:
What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the Church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the Church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down …
So, for the sake of contraceptive drugs, which have been around for fifty years, the President is going to set in motion a chain of events that will unmake a tradition that has done the nation inordinate good.
In a pluralistic society, we ought to be able to have A) contraceptive drugs, and B) Catholic hospitals. But the president is insisting that we cannot have B if B refuses to embrace A. And that is the bluntest form of tyranny. Ace puts it rightly:
There can be no separation of church and state when the state has its fingers in every pie.
There can also be no separation of business and state, economy and state, free speech and state, sex and state, parenting and state, education and state, or health and state. Because there is no separation, fundamentally, of citizen and state.
The state is all. Individuals only matter to the extent they serve the state and the state’s agenda.
Because the state’s agenda is for our own good.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Thoughtcrime Does Not Entail Missing Your Connecting Flight. Thoughtcrime *is* Missing Your Connecting Flight.
Sometimes, just for a giggle, I put myself in the mindset of someone who believed that when the government takes over an operation, said operation becomes more efficient and less fraught with petty tyrannies. I really try very hard to believe that people who work for the government operating according to a Hive instinct, and so think of nothing but satisfying their mission of SERVICE rather than use the perquisites of their office to settle scores and lord it over those peasants not fortunate enough to bear the King’s Writ.
Fortunately I can usually stumble across something like this before the headache starts.
Now let’s consider, just for a second, that rather than express an inconvenient, politically incorrect truth, that Mr. Jones had said something actually racist. You know, something really offensive and bigoted, which denigrated an entire people and expressed an assumed superiority of his own ancenstry. Let’s say that such occurred.
So. &#%ing. What?
Why is it the task of Airport Security to police passengers for racist utterances? What has that to do with Airport Security? Why cannot they let the other passenger tell Jones to shut his prejudiced pie-hole, if it bothers them? Why can’t everyone have a good and frank dialogue on race, provided that tempers spill not out of control?
Because the exercise of power on the part of the state is also an exercise on the part of the proles, who must learn to obey their betters?
I thought so.
Arbeit macht frei!
Quiet Monday
You could not pay me to care any less about the Oscars. A million dollars would not spur me to care less. “I’m sorry,” I would say to your offer of a million dollars, “but the task you set before me is impossible. Human boredom can only do so much.”
So enjoy this instead. Blogging will be light today.
The Problem with the Movie Rating System
Ace uncovers it in a (generally positive) review of The Woman in Black:
The PG-13 rating is misleading. It doesn’t have the typical red flags of an R-rated movie. And I guess you can’t give someone an R for mood and tone and pervasive morbidity.
So they got a PG-13.
But it’s really an “R” movie, as far as kids.
This is a problem with the ratings system. Total Recall has graphic violence, language, and nudity, so it’s R-rated, but let’s face it, it’s cartoonish (fun, but cartoonish) and is going to have next to zero impact on a kid.
On the other hand, this movie doesn’t have those things, and is going to cause nightmares.
The MPAA doesn’t exist to prevent nightmares, but to provide a fig leaf against criticism from the cultural right. As long as it exists, the movie industry can say that it is censored and oppressed by prudes, hence the need for daring, bold films which attack your taboos re: sex and violence.
The Yawning Chasm of the GOP Primary Season
Gingrich is likely to win Georgia and Tennesee. (h/t Memeorandum)
What that means, I have no idea. But neither does the media:
Gingrich increased his lead slightly since a poll conducted earlier in February, receiving 38 percent of the vote. Rick Santorum received 25 percent, Mitt Romney 19 percent and Ron Paul 4 percent in the poll.
Numbers were similar when broken down by men and women. The number of undecided voters remains at 13 percent before the March 6 primary.
“That essentially says they’re not right now in Newt Gingrich’s camp so they’re either going to break for Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney,” said Channel 2 political analyst Bill Crane
Pardon me, but how do you know that, Channel 2 Political Analyst Bill Crane? Maybe they’re hoping that someone else will impress them, and if no one does they’ll follow the bandwagon and pull the lever for Newt.
I at least recognize my ignorance.
I say, we corral our troops out of Afghanistan and nuke the place from orbit…
Into the Hysteria
Rick Santorum is apparently a killer. Because he wants to ban amniocentesis.
Except what he actually said was this:
Free prenatal testing “saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”
So what I guess I see him saying is that prenatal testing, if a matter of choice, ought to be a matter of payment as well. Which, I can’t really argue with.
This is the problem I keep seeing in the contraception/abortion brouhaha: the equivocation of refusing to pay for with banning. Surely, if these tests are so wonderful, they’re worth the money.
But spiraling health care costs! Indeed. Which is a separate issue. If we had a sensible health care system in which prices reflected actual costs, matters would be different. Instead, we find ourselves forced to assent to things out of egalitarian obligation. Which is how our health care system became screwed to begin with.
One thing I don’t understand is the need to perform an abortion on a fetus with a small chance at life. Why kill what’s going to die anyway? Why not give a human a chance, however remote?
And that’s why I’ve never been able to embrace abortion as a moral act. Opponents of abortion are consistently told that they have no right to judge another’s hard, painful choice. And maybe so. But abortion itself includes an act of judgement, and of a far starker kind. To abort a child is to say “This human is unworthy to live.”
And that does not become less true if you tell me how unworthy I am to say it. Stipulate that I have no standing, due to the unfortunate placement of my organs of generation outside my abdominal cavity. Stipulate that I have never walked, and can never walk, down the sad cruel, road of a woman with an unwanted baby. Stipulate that I do not understand.
The question “Who are you to judge?” still applies evenly.
Assail at will.
Our Green President
I am certain that, were a serious environmentalist to assess the claim that Obama is the pocket of the environmental movement, he/she would sniff, and say something along the lines of “Better than Bush, I suppose, but hardly committed to really turning around our imminent catastrophe.” Such is the nature of ideological commitment.
But it is plain fact that this president has deliberately slowed energy production in order to achieve environmental goals. So saith Investor’s Business Daily (h/t Instapundit):
Obama has chosen almost always to limit production. He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.
His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index. The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011. Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”
Again, from the point of view of serious environmentalists, this is Barely Adequate. It is analogous to Boehner and McConnell settling on reducing the rate of growth for government spending, rather than spending itself. Obama is restraining the growth of the petroleum economy, rather than cutting the actual size of it.
So, is Obama an environmental moderate? That depends on what you mean by “moderate”. The hard-core environmentalist wants energy consumption seriously reduced; Obama wants to replace the means of consumption without reducing the rate.
Neither is achievable, due to a brace of Inconvenient Truths:
- Renewable Energy Sources are not capable of replacing fossil fuels, now or in the immediate future.
- Real reduction of energy consumption means a reduction of living standards that nobody will willingly embrace until they have to.
So, even if Global Warming is as real as the alarmists suggest, we have no good solutions to it. A good solution is a low-CO2 energy source that is scalable to our energy consumption needs.
I’m just sayin’…
Vaginal Probing!
Before my daughter was born, I went to several ultrasounds with my wife. It never occured to me that the procedure was something being forced upon her against her will. It was part of the process. Not sure I’m getting how that’s rape, unless everything that breaches consent is so defined. If the baby passes through your vagina when you’d intended a C-section, is it raping you?
Little Miss Attilla expounds on the issue:
What is the alternative way, other than a sonogram, to judge the approximate size and developmental stage of a human fetus? I will tell you: the nurse practitioner (or doctor, or nurse, or clinic worker) places one hand on top of one’s pelvis, and the other hand in the vagina, and evaluates the size and age of the baby that way.
There is no way to judge fetal age without putting something into a woman’s vagina, and in most states it’s illegal to perform an abortion without establishing fetal age—it’s just that one technique provides a less accurate, less detailed picture than does the other.
After which, she discusses the relative discomfort of a) rape, b) an abortion, and c) an ultrasound, all of which she has experience with. Read the Whole Thing.
