Octopodial Chrome

Nat Hentoff—an (intelligent) atheist—writes on the Schiavo affair. His conclusion? We don’t execute murder-rapists in so grotesque a fashion, and yet we consign an innocent woman to a horrible death on no greater evidence than that of a suspect husband and his siblings.

Deroy Murdock aptly demonstrates that objectors to the murder of Terri Schiavo need not be religious. The simple fact of the matter is that a retarded woman is being murdered: no man of conscience—Christian, Jewish, deist, agnostic or atheist—can countenance that.

Fortunately, he was able to alert folks as to what happened.

David Boaz has an excellent solution to the marriage debate: privatise it! He writes:

Marriage is an important institution. The modern mistake is to think that important things must be planned, sponsored, reviewed, or licensed by the government. The two sides in the debate over gay marriage share an assumption that is essentially collectivist. Instead of accepting either view, let’s get the government out of marriage and allow individuals to make their own marriage contracts, as befits a secular, individualist republic at the dawn of the information age.

Written in ’97, it’s no less true today.

A eight-character password is hardly sufficient to protect your data; a multi-word passphrase is necessary. But how should one be chosen? Diceware Passphrases are chosen completely randomly using a large list of English words (I would recommend adding a nonsense word in the middle of the phrase in order to confuse anyone knows that you use the system). Of course, a complete security plan encompasses more than just passphrases and includes such issues as physical security—but every little bit helps.

As just about everyone in the civilised world knows, a woman named Terri Schiavo lies dying in a Florida hospital. Is she dying of organ failure? No. Is she brain-dead? No. What, then, is killing her? The answer is that she’s being starved to death.

The reason given is that her husband claims that such was her wish were she ever in a so-called persistent vegetative state. Of course, he’s hardly a reliable witness, given that he stands to gain both financially and personally upon her death (he has had two children by another woman, with whom he has been living for many years.

There’s disagreement on whether or not she’s actually in such a PVS: the major witness testifying to that effect is a man who advocates starvation of those with Alzheimer’s, who hasn’t spent even an hour with her or ordered even the most basic scans necessary to diagnose such a condition (and which diagnosis is necessarily incorrect more than 40% of the time anyway).

Is she dead? No. Is she brain-dead? No. Is she on life support (as conventionally understood)? No. She’s just a brain-damaged woman who cannot feed herself. As infants, none of us could feed ourselves, nor did we show much evidence of intelligence either. Granted, our prognosis was better—but there are physicians who believe that Mrs. Schiavo could recover a significant amount of cognitive ability.

The whole thing stinks. If she were brain-dead, then the only argument would be over whether or not she should be dismembered and her organs used in others. But she’s not: her brain, while severely damaged, continues to work. Were she on life support (i.e., having her lung and heart operated by machine), then at least the argument could be made that many consider that a kind of heroic measure. But she’s not: all she has is a simple little feeding tube. Yes, she’s retarded. Since when did that merit being tortured to death by starvation?

The whole mess is despicable. An innocent woman is dying an agonising death and the great mass of people simply don’t care.

Colby College hosts weekly events where students can learn about beer and wine. I think that this is an excellent idea. In moderation, alcohol is pleasant; it is healthy; it is tasty; it is good (witness the fact that Our Lord made the stuff). Abused, it’s a rotten thing indeed.

Events like these introduce students to what drinking can be; witness the comment of one girl, I always thought I hated wine. But now I realize that what I hated were the $3 bottles of wine I bought at the grocery store. Now that she’s seen what the good stuff is like, she’s much less likely to go out and buy a $3 bottle to get drunk—and one simply doesn’t have enough cash to get smashed every night on $20 bottles. So the quantity of her drinking will no doubt decrease and the quality increase. This is a Good Thing.

In his article MTV Smut Peddlers: Targeting Kids with Sex, Drugs and Alcohol, Casey Williams writes, It has been a year since Janet Jackson deliberately exposed her breast to a world-wide audience that included millions of unsuspecting children during the MTV-produced 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. This quote to me reveals the utter lunacy of some of my friends on the cultural conservative side of things (I count myself firmly in that number): how many tens of millions of times is the female breast exposed to children every day in the act of breast-feeding? It’s not the exposure which is offensive (indeed, I can’t see that there is much wrong with non-sexual nudity in general), but rather the context. The infant who suckles at his mother’s breast is not harmed; the child who sees a couple hooking up is.

Later Mr. Williams writes, Parents witnessed first-hand the incessant crotch-grabbing and revealing clothing, the dangerous mixture of aggression and sexuality, and the relentless sexual simulation and stimulation that characterise MTV's programming. That’s the real problem. It’s not whether or not a very particular body part is shown; it’s the context in which it is shown. There is nothing at all sexual about Kathy Bates; there’s a great deal attractive about Amanda Peet. Likewise, it’s not the breast per se but the crotch-grabbing, the freaking, the degradation of man and woman &c. which are so offensive.

Sex and sexuality are good things in their place; so too are violence and aggression (if you disagree, try fighting a tiger or wolf without them…)—it’s their misuse and misdirection which is so distressing. The current culture, though, twists good things to perverse ends. As Exhibit A, I present hip-hop. Now, music and dancing have always been ways for young men and young women to attract one another. This is the nature of things. But recently we have seen a new phenomenon. If the waltz, big band and doo-wop (and, in fact, every previous form of music) were music for making love, rock-and-roll was music for having sex (the name itself came from a euphemism therefor…); and now we have hip-hop, music for rutting like beasts. Where the older forms at least paid lip-service to love, rock & roll was all about lust—but hip-hop isn’t even about that: lust at least has an object, while hip-hop is all about the self. In its milieu others exist solely to satisfy one’s base needs, not to spur one onto higher things.

As Exhibit B, I present hip-hop (it’s bad enough to require double-treatment). Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, certainly: sweet and proper it is to die (and by extension, kill) for one’s country. But where older sentiments extolled violence as a means to good ends, semi-recent culture loved it as a thing unto itself, and hip-hop extols cruelty as an end. There are beasts which kill for sport (cats leap to mind), true, but they are few and far between, and until recently we despised them for it. The rap culture is about barbarity and cruelty not for defence of wife & children; not for love of country; not even for prevention of worse evil—but for love of barbarism.

I understand that the Greeks developed a philosophical system in which every vice was considered a perverted virtue: lust is perverted love; pride is perverted pleasure in doing a proper job; greed is perverted self-preservation and so on (there are better names for the Græco-Roman virtues, but I cannot remember them). The problem with the modern world is that we elevate the vices into virtues. In our age lust is laudable; pride is something to be proud of; greed is good.

If rock and roll reduced men to the level of their feelings (not that feelings in themselves are bad), modern music (if that term can even be applied to a mish-mash of tones, without logic, form or reason) reduces men to the level of the animals. But at least the beasts of the field have an excuse: they were not created for any great destiny or purpose. But we were made in the image and likeness of God, made to worship and become like unto Him—and our perversion of His visage is foul indeed.

Victor Hanson examines Ward Churchill, Colorado’s most embarrassing professor today.

On 6 May 1945, the newly-liberated Orthodox prisoners of Dachau celebrated Christ’s resurrection. They made their vestments from hospital towels and Red Cross emblems; they used a spare Catholic prayer room for their chapel; they recited the services from memory—but once again Christ’s Church triumphed over evil.

From Cleolinda, Troy in Fifteen Minutes. Very, very, very funny.

Æons ago C.S. Lewis wrote the wonderful Chronicles of Narnia: fantastic adventure fiction for children. They’re really quite good and, as is typical of English children’s fiction of the time, enjoyable for adults as well. They are also not shy about the realities of life: Peter must clean his sword of a foe’s blood, lest it stick in its sheath; Eustace gets hungover from mead and so on.

My mother has a nice set; my brother Thomas has a nice set; someday I should like a nice leather-bound edition of the Chronicle of Narnia, preferably with the illustrations (all of them) by Pauline Baines. Something to Google about for—perhaps I can find something on Amazon or somesuch.

I’ve discovered an interesting article on meat pickled in mead vinegar. I’ve made wine and beer (malt) vinegars, but mead is so expensive to make that it’s hard to justify the expense.

Tonight in honour of St. Patrick I drink a single malt scotch. Why a scotch? Because it is produced by that bunch of Celts who didn’t rebel against their rightful king in wartime in this century (the Scots did side with Parliament against King Charles I, but that was awhile ago); who aren’t responsible for the longest-running terror campaign in history; and who don’t disembowel men who disagree with them in public (again, this is recently…). Also, scotch is much superior to Irish whiskey.

And the Scots get to wear kilts. The kilt is not an Irish garment in any sense of the word—and yet in the past few decades the idea of an Irish kilt has arisen, which wouldn’t be so objectionable were it honest: it’s something new, not something ancient.

Also, the Irish are responsible for more whey-faced Celtic New Age goofy-music than any ethnic group on earth.

I will grant that their girls are pretty and their landscapes equally so.

Almost 43 years ago the first excerpts of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; nearly 3 years ago Ronald Bailey noted the harmful effects that her book has had.

Jonah Goldberg points out the pressing feline menace. Apparently feral cats are a major predator of rare bird species, and in response Wisconsin is proposing that they be hunted. Now I’ll admit that I’m a life-long cat-hater, but the idea of hunting cats seems so eminently sensible. After all, the big cats hunt us.

Ever wondered what a cartoon character’s skeleton looks like? Well, wonder no more.

The trailer for Star Wars Episode III as it should have been. Warning: can be a bit crude. But horribly spot-on!

A Slashdot poster argues that the prequels actually do a good job. Well, I’ll have to wait until I see Episode Three—but I’m not holding my breath. George Lucas has utterly destroyed an incredible story.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking of wearing a Jedi costume to the premier. It’s the last time I’ll have that chance, after all…

I went and saw The Wallflowers with my youngest brother this evening. Wow! I hadn’t realised how many truly great songs they’d released: One Headlight, of course; Sixth Avenue Heartache too; but also Heroes and The Difference. I also didn’t realise that the lead singer is the son of Bob Dylan (which would explain why I thought he sounded like a cross between Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen at various points). They know how to handle a crowd (their opener too had this down pat)—at one point, the lead singer grabbed a fan’s cell phone and sang into it!

Also, I got to talk to a girl, so all in all it was a nice evening.

A Norwegian study finds that the eldest child is the smartest and best-educated. Given that I am the eldest, this comes as no surprise. I can’t wait until my brothers see it…

Joel Spolsky reports an unexpected fact: incentive pay hurts productivity. Research has shown that folks do worse when given incentives than when not!

Only you can save this fluffy white rabbit!

Pavel Kohout points out that Europe is rapidly becoming extinct. The birth rate in many parts is 1.2 children per woman—an absurdly low figure. And yet in the Islamic world continues to grow at a healthy pace: at current trends by 2050 there will be more people in Yemen than in Germany. The European welfare state is destroying itself. If leftists truly valued diversity, they would decry this: the loss of European culture is no less important than the loss of aboriginal Australian culture (indeed, considering the relative good to come out of each, rather more important).

Jonah Goldberg writes about the current votes-for-felons advocates. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats are in favour of allowing felons to vote. This is and should be a matter for the states to decide, although the right decision is to generally oppose it.

Interestingly, no-one comes out in support of the right of felons to bear arms…

It’s interesting to note that in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was 31 and Anne Bancroft was 36, yet he played a young man in his early twenties and she a woman in her very late forties or early fifties. There is a lesson to be learnt there.

I should explain first that I’m out of beer and won’t buy any until Monday. Well, I was up in my loft fetching some supplies when what do I find but a bottle of Aberlour 10 year old sitting all sad & lonesome in a crate. Life is good!

I like the idea of building with earth. Such things as flexible form rammed earth (aka Superadobe) and cob (warning—authoress is a New Age loon) are fascinating to me. For one thing, working in mud and clay offers much more exciting possibilities than a traditional wood-and-steel framing. For another, it’d just be so cool to build a house (or even just an out-building). Of course, the downside is that such homes probably have almost no resale value—but if one plans to live there for many years than it probably doesn’t matter much, and they’re so cheap that resale value’s really not all that important.

Maybe someday I’ll have a piece of land I can play with!

The Linux Cookbook (perhaps more accurately called The Unix Cookbook) is a collection of various clever ways to do thing on the command line. Worth a look, even if just to see how folks used to do things. Me, I still use the CLI for just about everything—it’s fast and pleasant to use, and doesn’t get in my way.

A long-time HP engineer writes on the disaster which was Carly Fiorina. The sidebar and other articles are very interesting. She was a truly loathed CEO and managed to drive one of the best tech companies around straight into the ground. As far as I know, rumours that she was secretly working for IBM are false, but she couldn’t have helped us more if she had…