Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

John Kerry, Nuanced Foreign Policy Analyst

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I never understood back in 2004 (or any other time, for that matter) why people told me that John Kerry was such a brilliant man, when it was always clear to me that he was a pompous, arrogant windbag, and a certifiable moron.

I think that this bears out my thesis:

Kerry isn’t just stereotyping blacks. He is stereotyping Muslims too. And he is drawing an equivalence between American blacks, a racial minority in one country, and Middle Eastern Muslims, a religious majority in a whole region. To John Kerry, it seems, all “disenfranchised” people look alike.

Never mind that, as Greenwald points out, “Arab Muslims [are] none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.” Never mind that in some African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, Arab Muslims still enslave blacks.

To Kerry, it seems, all “oppressed peoples” look alike. The man has all the intellectual subtlety of a third-rate ethnic studies professor.

I think that “third-rate” is an overrating.

And on a related subject, can anyone explain to me how blacks have somehow acquired this bizarre mythology that Christians enslaved them, and that Muslims are their liberators?

Anyone familiar with the history of slavery know that the blacks were sold into it by the Arab traders, and that it was only abolished due to moral pressure from (wait for it) Christians.

Which brings me to the next subject, which is the general disconnect from reality of the so-called “black liberation theology” of which, apparently, Obama’s church is one of the biggest proponents.

So. OK. The Senator says that he doesn’t agree with everything preached in his church. Let’s get down to brass talks.

What journalist has the stones to call him on it?

I’d like to see someone ask him questions like this:

Senator, your church believes that Jesus was black. Do you agree? If not, what do you believe his ethnicity was?

Your church believes that the “white church in America” (whatever that means) supported slavery and segregation, and that it is the Anti-Christ. Do you agree with that assessment?

Your church supports a “liberation theology,” which is generally understood to be a form of Marxism justified by the Bible. Do you share the support of your church for that ideology?

If you don’t agree with your church on these issues, which seem both extreme and fundamental, how can you remain a member of it, when there are so many alternatives? Certainly most Americans would not.

Do you believe that nurturing these sorts of beliefs are helpful to African Americans? If not, why do you continue to implicitly support them by continuing to attend and donate funds to your church?

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Redefining Dead

6 Comments

It’s a couple weeks old, but here’s a very interesting article on the current debate among medical ethicists of when someone should be considered dead for the purpose of organ donation:

Truog is one of a handful of vocal critics who believe the medical community is misleading the public — and deluding itself — with an arbitrary definition of death. The debate, which is being fought largely in academic journals, has important implications for the modern enterprise of transplantation, which prolonged the life of more than 28,000 Americans last year. Truog and other critics believe that changing the rules — and the bright-line concept of death that underlies them — could mean saving more of the 6,500 Americans who die every year waiting for an organ.

…This debate exposes a jarring collision: On the one hand, there is the view that life and death are clear categories; on the other, there is the view that death, like life, is a process. Common sense — and the transplant community — suggest that death is a clear category. Truog and other critics suggest that this is to ignore reality.

“They think, ‘We can’t remove these organs unless we decide that you’re dead,”‘ says Truog, “so the project becomes gerrymandering the criteria we use to call people dead.”

Many people assume that we have good criteria for determining when someone is dead, but we don’t and never have. I wrote about this several years ago, during the Ted Williams cryonics controversy:

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.

I find it heartening that this debate is finally occurring, rather than the medical community dogmatically keeping its head planted firmly in the sand. Because it lends further credence to the concept of suspension (cryonic or otherwise), and clarifies whether or not cryonics patients are alive or dead. The only useful definition of death is information death (e.g., cremation, or complete deterioration of the remains). As long as the structure remains in place, the patient hasn’t died–he’s just extremely ill, to the point at which he’s non-functional and unable to be revived with current technology.

In fact, given that this debate is about organ donation, it’s quite applicable to cryonics. In a very real sense, cryonics is the ultimate organ donation (and in fact it’s treated that way under some state’s laws). You are effectively donating your whole body (or just your head, in the case of a neurosuspension) to your future self.

But it will continue to tie the legal system up in knots, and declaring cryonics patients to be alive would be a problem under the current cryonics protocols, because unless one is wealthy, the procedure is paid for with a life insurance policy. If you’re not declared dead, then you don’t get the money to preserve yourself. But if you don’t preserve yourself, you’ll eventually be clearly dead by any criteria, as your body decomposes. At which point the policy would pay off, far too late to preserve your life.

And of course, if a cryonics patient isn’t considered dead, then the heirs won’t get any inheritance at all. Cryonics patients already have enough fights with relatives over the amount that they’ll inherit due to the cost of the suspension. Keeping them legally alive will only make this situation worse. We really need to come up with some creative new laws to deal with this, but I suspect it’s not a very high priority among legislatures who, when they deal with cryonics at all, generally instead of facilitating it, attempt to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence. And that’s not likely to change any time soon, regardless of the state of the debate in the medical ethics community.

Political Commentary

A Disaster Brewing For The Democrats?

27 Comments

In Denver.

Denver is not equipped to handle any convention scenario other than a coronation, and certainly not the most (potentially) contentious national convention in 40 years.

It is important to point out that the state of Colorado, and the city of Denver, is currently nearly completely controlled by Democrats at every level of government. This puts these locals in a box, politically and from a law enforcement standpoint. This sets up a scenario similar to Seattle 1999 WTO debacle. I happened to be living in downtown Seattle during that awful experience, and what stands out is that the city and state (even the Federal Government at that time) were all controlled by Democrats at every level, even police chief. That meant they were politically unwilling to confront their own in the days leading up to the summit: that is, the anti-globalism/WTO protestors, greenies, and union members that were planning major marches, civil disobedience, and even outright mischief.

The reason is simple, they didn’t want to alienate their own constituencies by seeming too heavy handed. The result was that by the time they had to crackdown, it was too late and with police state tactics, water cannons, gas cannisters, police in riot gear, and dusk to dawn curfews on the streets. There is still a lot of these scenes on YouTube and many disenchanted lefties are promising a repeat in Denver this year. Any variation of this would be a potential public relations disaster for the Democrat nominee in trying to win Colorado, and one that would virtually ensure not only a McCain victory in the state, but a stigmatization that could likely lead to major setbacks for the Democrat party in Colorado for years to come.

[Early afternoon update]

It’s already starting, and it’s still March:

Spagnuolo has been meeting monthly with city officials for a year, hoping to win the right to use Civic Center throughout the convention. He says 50,000 war protesters are coming for a march from Civic Center to the Pepsi Center on Aug. 24.

He said Thursday that he would not respect the host committee’s permit and would occupy the park, even if it forced police to intervene.

Referring to the $50 million in federal security money slated for the convention, Spagnuolo said Denver police would need “$25 million to protect the Pepsi Center and $25 million to protect Civic Center.”

I have no sympathy. When your political party encourages and welcomes brown shirterry (as long as it’s aimed at “neocons” and “globalists,” and “capitalists,” and other evil people), this is what you get. Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas.

[Update at 1 PM]

More bad news for the donkeys:

In a sign of just how divisive and ugly the Democratic fight has gotten, only 53% of Clinton voters say they’ll vote for Obama should he become the nominee. Nineteen percent say they’ll go for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and 13% say they won’t vote. Sixty percent of Obama voters say they’ll go for Clinton should she win the nomination, with 20% opting for McCain, and three percent saying they won’t vote.

That’s already starting to show up in the national polling, where McCain is way ahead of both Hillary! and Obama. As I’ve been saying for months, the Dems have set themselves for a shellacking, because both of their lead candidates are unelectable in the general, and the internecine strife just makes it worse. Their only hope lies in a brokered convention, and a different candidate, and even then, it’s unlikely that they’ll recover.

Political Commentary

Sauce For The Gander

3 Comments

Clarice Feldman has some useful advice for Howard Dean:

Have Carter rerun the entire damn primary before June 7. Really, Carter can do this.

I suppose right now you’re saying,” Where did he get this idea?” I’ll tell you, friend. it came to me listening to Carl Levin who asked, “How can you make sure that hundreds of thousands , perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?”

See, I read that and remembered that Carter does this all the time. He’s the election certifier extraordinaire. From his supervision of the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic to his oversight of the Chavez recall collection in Venezuela he’s become the one man in the world who can, with the acquiescence of the entire world, put a gold stamp of approval and purity on a completely unfair and corrupt election. Fraud in counting votes? In registering voters? Discrepancies between the number of cast ballots and voter registration lists? Jiggered machines? Doesn’t matter. The guy will keep his eyes and ears closed and stamp the entire thing kosher.

See, what I’m saying, is that there’s no way you can resolve the present contretemps without at least half your party claiming the result is unfair. They will always believe the nomination was “stolen” from their candidate and given the players and so-called rules of your party’s nomination process, they will have a point. So why not go whole hog. Have the process planned, overseen and supervised by the man who’s given his stamp of approval to crooked elections everywhere else on earth. He was YOUR president, after all. He’s good enough for East Timor and not for his own party?

Maybe he could even win another Nobel Peace Prize.

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

4 Comments

John Tabin writes that, regardless of the election outcome, the next president will be a fascist:

JOHN McCAIN IS a huge admirer of TR. His career has been marked by an instinctive enthusiasm for regulation. He brags of a military career chosen “for patriotism, not for profit,” clearly viewing civilian life as debased.

Goldberg’s Afterword, “The Tempting of Conservatism,” holds up McCain and the “National Greatness Conservatives” who backed him in 2000 as an example of how progressivism can enthrall conservatives. (Possible good news: McCain has praised free markets in the course of this campaign — for the first time in his political career, according to McCain biographer Matt Welch.)

Hillary Clinton’s calls in the ’90s for a “new politics of meaning” and for the state to act as the “village” that raises our children has deeply totalitarian implications that Goldberg discusses at length. In 1996 she declared that “there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.” Assessing her worldview, Goldberg labels Clinton “The First Lady of Liberal Fascism.”

Barack Obama’s enormous rhetorical talents have already earned him an extremely creepy personality cult. His wife declares that her husband “will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism… And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

John Tabin writes that, regardless of the election outcome, the next president will be a fascist:

JOHN McCAIN IS a huge admirer of TR. His career has been marked by an instinctive enthusiasm for regulation. He brags of a military career chosen “for patriotism, not for profit,” clearly viewing civilian life as debased.

Goldberg’s Afterword, “The Tempting of Conservatism,” holds up McCain and the “National Greatness Conservatives” who backed him in 2000 as an example of how progressivism can enthrall conservatives. (Possible good news: McCain has praised free markets in the course of this campaign — for the first time in his political career, according to McCain biographer Matt Welch.)

Hillary Clinton’s calls in the ’90s for a “new politics of meaning” and for the state to act as the “village” that raises our children has deeply totalitarian implications that Goldberg discusses at length. In 1996 she declared that “there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.” Assessing her worldview, Goldberg labels Clinton “The First Lady of Liberal Fascism.”

Barack Obama’s enormous rhetorical talents have already earned him an extremely creepy personality cult. His wife declares that her husband “will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism… And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

John Tabin writes that, regardless of the election outcome, the next president will be a fascist:

JOHN McCAIN IS a huge admirer of TR. His career has been marked by an instinctive enthusiasm for regulation. He brags of a military career chosen “for patriotism, not for profit,” clearly viewing civilian life as debased.

Goldberg’s Afterword, “The Tempting of Conservatism,” holds up McCain and the “National Greatness Conservatives” who backed him in 2000 as an example of how progressivism can enthrall conservatives. (Possible good news: McCain has praised free markets in the course of this campaign — for the first time in his political career, according to McCain biographer Matt Welch.)

Hillary Clinton’s calls in the ’90s for a “new politics of meaning” and for the state to act as the “village” that raises our children has deeply totalitarian implications that Goldberg discusses at length. In 1996 she declared that “there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.” Assessing her worldview, Goldberg labels Clinton “The First Lady of Liberal Fascism.”

Barack Obama’s enormous rhetorical talents have already earned him an extremely creepy personality cult. His wife declares that her husband “will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism… And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”