Category Archives: Political Commentary

The Latest Lunar Bombardment

LCROSS will hit the moon in the middle of the night in this time zone, so I’m not sure whether I’ll get up for it. There was a lot of idiotic commentary (in comments) over here the other day. I wonder if the president will apologize for this unprovoked attack before, or after the event? Or does he only apologize for things that his predecessors did?

[Update a few minutes later]

It really is amazing to see the number of commenters sincerely worried that we’re going to knock the moon out of its orbit, or break it in half.

[Late evening update]

Frank J. was way ahead of NASA:

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Of course, Frank’s always been way ahead of the curve.

From Guns To Butter

How a gun-control case can lead to economic liberty. I hope that the DC gun-rights advocates make this argument — it would be harder for the court to ignore if they do.

And it reminds me that much of the “progressive” agenda is rooted in its racism. One of, if not the key, arguments in favor of the minimum wage when it was first passed was that it would protect the jobs of white men against blacks. And the purpose of gun control for much of its history (as Sullum points out) was to keep guns out of their hands, lest they protect themselves from Klansmen carrying out “justice.” And of course, the irony is that now, in DC, blacks are being murdered by other blacks on a daily basis because they are denied the legal right to defend themselves.

The Hypocrisy Of Senator Shelby

Clark Lindsey points out the difference between the senator’s view of the space industry, and that of other industries. Somehow, I suspect that his views would be (or at least appear to be) more consistent if he were a Senator from some other state. But as is, the disparity is jarring.

[Wednesday morning update]

Here’s more on the latest nonsense from the senator, at the Orlando Sentinel, and Space Politics. Note the comments.

The latest mantra from the Ares defenders is apparently to pick up on Doug Stanley’s comment that the committee didn’t have enough time to properly evaluate it. The response to this, of course, is that if they didn’t, then Doug didn’t have enough time to select it, either, because he had about the same amount of time, if not much less. The Augustine panel worked this for most of the summer. ESAS only took sixty days.

[Bumped]

The Ends Of Life

National Review has come out with an editorial against a recent editorial in Nature, advocating a change in the legal standards of death to facilitate organ donation. While I agree that we should be very careful in doing so, and I also agree that this could actually reduce the number of people willing to donate, I disagree that it’s not worth discussing, or considering, as the NR editors believe. Here’s the key point that I think both sides miss:

The editorial asserts that current law misunderstands death as an event rather than a process — which hardly justifies refusing to wait until the process is over. This argument merely puts a “scientific” gloss on a value judgment. Nature argues further that current law supposedly pushes doctors to lie about when death has occurred to get organs. But it is the utilitarian, parts-is-parts attitude toward human life that pushes some doctors this way, and that this proposal exemplifies.

…The editorial concludes that “concerns about the legal details of declaring death in someone who will never again be the person he or she was should be weighed against the value of giving a full and healthy life to someone who will die without a transplant.” Whether someone is actually dead is not a “legal detail.”

The problem is that death is a process that the law doesn’t recognize and that yes, whether someone is actually dead (at least in conventional terms) really is a legal detail (for instance, it varies from state to state — what is legally “dead” in CA may not be in NY). This is the problem that cryonicists have had for decades, except in their case, they want to donate their own organs to their future selves, and thus they tend to have a self interest in getting a legal declaration of death as soon as possible, even if not clinically dead.

As I wrote years ago during the Ted Williams controversy (one that has, unlike Ted himself, become recently resurrected in a macabre way):

The popular and conventional view of death is that it’s a discrete condition; now you’re living — now you’re dead. The weary declaration of the sawbones is just a formality — we all know from the movies that when the bad guy has been shot down violently, screaming or groaning, or breathed his last, he’s dead, or when the heroine gently closes her eyes, she’s gone to a better place, never to return.

But real life, and death, is a bit more complicated than that. It is not an objective, scientific condition, but a legal one, declared by a doctor or coroner. It’s like baseball. A ball thrown over the plate is not a ball or a strike until the umpire calls it.

The reality is that life and death are not binary states — from one to the other is a gradual transition. Rather than an instantaneous transformation from living to resting eternally, the body gradually shuts the plant doors and turns out the lights, one by one. Cells die individually, and the rhythm of life slows steadily to a halt.

But even that halt can be restarted with defibrillators and enthusiastic inflation of lungs with oxygen. In fact, modern hypothermic surgical techniques take a patient into what most would think a state of death (no heartbeat, flat-lined electro-encephalogram, no respiration) and then return them to life. In fact, during the properly performed cryonic suspension, such resuscitation is done (after a legal declaration of death), though under deep anaesthesia, to allow proper circulation of the cryoprotectant fluids throughout the body and particularly to the brain.

There’s no point at which we can objectively and scientifically say, “now the patient is dead — there is no return from this state,” because as we understand more about human physiology, and experience more instances of extreme conditions of human experiences, we discover that a condition we once thought was beyond hope can routinely be recovered to a full and vibrant existence.

Death is thus not an absolute, but a relative state, and appropriate medical treatment is a function of current medical knowledge and available resources. What constituted more-than-sufficient grounds for declaration of death in the past might today mean the use of heroic, or even routine, medical procedures for resuscitation. Even today, someone who suffers a massive cardiac infarction in the remote jungles of Bolivia might be declared dead, because no means is readily available to treat him, whereas the same patient a couple blocks from Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills might be transported to the cardiac intensive-care unit, and live many years more.

So it’s not as clean cut as the NR editors might like it to be. Doctors have to make a decision in order to save lives, and sometimes they have to confront ugly choices about which life to save, in a real-life lifeboat dilemma. There is only one death that is real and irreversible, and that is (as I describe at the link) information death (and some people think even that may be ultimately overcome through quantum mechanical dervishes of one sort or another). If we’re going to have a useful ethical discussion on this issue, we have to come to terms and some kind of agreement on basic assumptions, not about when death occurs per se, which will always be somewhat arbitrary, but when we can consider someone available to be a donor. It’s not a pleasant conversation, but it’s a necessary one, unless and until the NR editors can come up with a better and more objective definition of their own.