Blog Jones

This has to be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen:

Have you heard The Seanachai yet? If you haven’t, you’re missing out on the best podcast out there, period.

[Brief Interlude to define podcasting for the uninitiated:

Put simply, a podcast is an easy way to subscribe to audio content. Just like a newspaper subscription brings you written content every day, a podcast brings you audio content on a regular basis. Whenever the podcaster publishes a new mp3 file, the podcasting software automatically downloads it to a folder on your hard drive.

From there, you can either put the files on an mp3 player, burn them to a cd, or just listen to them, just like any other mp3 files. Some podcasting software will even automatically load them onto your mp3 player for you. (What convenient times we live in!)

You subscribe to a podcast with a program like Doppler or iPodder or any of the other programs listed here. I use Doppler myself.

End Interlude]

Now, there are many kinds of podcasts, although most are spoken-word rather than music. Some, like the Rip-n-Read Blogger Podcast, are about current events. Others, like the CIO Podcast and the Slashdot Review are about technology issues. Others are about business issues, like 800-CEO-READ Podcasts, still others are about spiritual issues, like those at Godcast.org. The Seanachai is in a different category altogether: It’s very entertaining short fiction.

In fact, here’s a new 60-second commercial that he’s created to promote the podcast. Go listen, then come back.

…

My personal favorite stories are The King of the Lendu, A Very Slow Getaway, and his St. Patrick’s Day Episode.

Now, fair warning for the easily offended, since my audience does consist primarily of conservative Christian BJU students: The author does occasionally curse, so don’t play it too loud in the dorms. (Personally, I’ve decided that people curse, and that you’ll cut yourself off from a lot of good content–like the Seanachai–if you don’t learn to ignore it. Besides, you can’t go through life expecting the whole world to change its behavior because it offends you. But I do realize that others don’t feel the same way; hence the warning.)

It’s really a great podcast, full of very interesting and entertaining stories. And hey, it’s free! What more could you ask for?

Oh, one more podcast to mention: If you prefer hearing some of the classics, I recommend Tim Aldrich’s readings of Sherlock Holmes stories. He’s already completed A Study in Scarlet and is in the process of reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

Podcasts definitely make my commute to BJU much more entertaining.

I know I said no more Schiavo posts, but I couldn’t resist this:

Ain’t that the truth?

(Cox & Forkum via Dean Esmay.)

is Garfield funnier in Russian than in English?

(If you’re using the “Wordpress Default” theme, then right-click on the picture and click “view image” to see it uncompressed. Or switch to my Starry Night theme for a minute.)

It looks OK from the outside, but wait until you run it through the airport security scanners.

Try explaining that to the burly security guard while you’re on the floor with a gun at your head. “It’s not a nuke, honest!”

This story was brought to you by The Inquirer, a website run in a country whose language has no word for “laptop.”

(Via Engadget)

I am loath to post on this topic again; it doesn’t fit with the tone I like to keep on this blog. The story is too emotionally charged. And I hate to add anything to the “All Schiavo, All the Time” news climate we’re finding ourselves in. (If I were a politician, I’d pick now to push some really unpopular legislation, while no one’s looking.)

But, here I am anyways.

Once again, the courts have come down on “Michael’s side.” I use the scare quotes, because no one really wins on this one. According to one source, that makes 22 different judges that have come to the same conclusion, probably not counting the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the case.

And I have to say that I’m proud of Jeb Bush. At least one politician knows the limits of his powers, unlike certain members of Congress. (I’m referring to their attempted abuse of their subpoena power, their interference with states’ rights, and their general political grandstanding, using Schiavo as a pawn to push their own political ends. For a particularly egregious example, read Ronald Brownstein’s column that begins “Does the ‘culture of life’ extend to the victims of gun violence?”)

Jeb, on the other hand, knows that he doesn’t have any legal standing to intervene. So, we have one or two politicians who won’t disregard their oaths to uphold the laws of the country.

As far as the accusations that we’re torturing Schiavo by starving her to death, it turns out that ceasing food and fluid can be painless, according to the L.A. Times quoting doctors Robert Sullivan, Perry G. Fine, and Ira Byock, as well as a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In fact, the Times story states (my emphasis):

After suffering through cancer, the middle-aged woman decided her illness was too much to bear. Everything she ate, she painfully vomited back up. The prospect of surgery and a colostomy bag held no appeal.

And so, against the advice of her doctors, the patient decided to stop eating and drinking.

Over the next 40 days in 1993, Dr. Robert Sullivan of Duke University Medical Center observed the woman’s gradual decline, providing one of the most detailed clinical accounts of starvation and dehydration.

Instead of feeling pain, the patient experienced the sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete lack of food and water. She was cogent for weeks, chatting with her caregivers in the nursing home and writing letters to family and friends. As her organs failed, she slipped painlessly into a coma and died.

(I found the above story via Instapundit who found it by way of Daily Pundit.)

So, it turns out that death by a complete lack of food is actually a fairly peaceful way to go. (The story does say that eating a little food or water will cause hunger pangs and other unpleasantness, but having absolutely nothing causes the euphoria.)

So you can’t use that argument anymore: She is not being tortured to death.

Next, some argue that because her eyes move, she’s not in a persistent vegetative state. Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, of the American Council on Science and Health, writes the following, which I also found via Instapundit, my emphasis again:

While we at American Council on Science and Health have been determined to remain on the sidelines of the raging national debate about the fate of Terri Schiavo (this is largely a legal and ethical issue, not a scientific one), we cannot remain silent about the outrageous misrepresentation of scientific facts about this case that has been occurring in the past ten days.

The medical reality of Ms. Schiavo’s case is this: She has been in what is medically referred to as a “permanent vegetative state” for the past 15 years, ever since her heart temporarily stopped (probably due to the severe effects of an eating disorder), depriving her brain of oxygen. Brain scans indicate that her cerebral cortex ceased functioning — probably just after she experienced cardiac arrest in 1990. Ms. Schiavo’s CAT scan shows massive shrinking of the brain, and her EEG is flat. Physicians confirm that there is no electrical activity coming from her brain. While the family video repeatedly shown on television suggests otherwise, her non-functioning cortex precludes cognition, including any ability to interact or communicate with people or show any signs of awareness. Dozens of experts over the years who have examined Ms. Schiavo agree that there is no hope of her recovering — even though her body, face and eyes (if she is given food and hydration) might continue to move for decades to come.

Those are the harsh facts.

Ah, you say, but what about the doctors who said that she was misdiagnosed? Dr. Whelan continues:

Thus it was shocking that Sen. Bill Frist — a heart surgeon before becoming Senate majority leader — went to the Senate floor twice last week to argue that Florida doctors had erred in saying that Terri is in a “persistent vegetative state.” How did Frist arrive at this diagnosis? From watching the family videotapes.
…
Yesterday, there was another public challenge to Ms. Schiavo’s well-established diagnosis: Florida governor Jeb Bush announced that a “very renowned neurologist,” Dr. William Cheshire, had concluded that Terri had been misdiagnosed and that she was really only in a state of “minimal consciousness” rather than a persistent vegetative state. He used this “new diagnosis” to argue that “this new information raises serious concerns and warrants immediate action.”

As it turns out, Dr. Cheshire is not “renowned” as a neurologist — his limited publications focus on areas including headache pain and his opposition to stem cell research. Dr. Cheshire never conducted a physical examination of Ms. Schiavo, nor did he do neurological tests. Dr. Cheshire is director of biotech ethics at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a nonprofit group founded by “more than a dozen leading Christian bioethicists.” Everyone is free to be guided by a personal agenda — and it is clear that Dr. Cheshire has his.

This, combined with the fact that the court-appointed doctors, who are the only ones whose opinions mattered, agreed that Schiavo is in a PVS, invalidates the argument that she’s not in a PVS.

Next argument: Folks, life support is life support. Whether it’s pumping air in someone who can’t get air into themselves (via respirator) or it’s pumping food into someone who can’t feed themselves (via feeding tube), it’s still artificial life support. The only difference is that you can live a few days without food and water, while you can’t live without air for more than about twelve minutes, and that only if you’re a trained diver. Come on now, this argument was pretty weak to begin with.

Is it murder to withdraw artificial life support from Mrs. Schiavo? I don’t think so, and 22 judges who were closer to this case than any of us are have come to that same conclusion. If it was murder to withdraw such life support, we’d have hospital after hospital full of dead people being artificially kept alive.

So, when do we pull the plug? Again, the question has to be “Who decides?” And again, because Terri left no living will, and because Michael is her closest relative, and because the courts have not found him guilty–nor has he even been charged with–any crime against his wife (the slander of Terri’s parents notwithstanding), you have to come to the conclusion that Michael Schiavo is the one who is given the burden of choice here.

That’s the way I see it.

Well, after you buy your “His Essence” candle so your room can smell like Jesus, you can sit down and snack on a Chocolate Cross.

Here’s what I find interesting about this story:

A spokesman for the Roman Catholic diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, finds the new product insulting. He says, “The cross should be venerated, not eaten.”

Um… Doesn’t the doctrine of transubstantiation mean that you (believe you) routinely eat the body of Christ? So, are you saying that Christ should be eaten, and not venerated? (See also Matt 23:16-22)

This looks really, really cool.

I tried doing this; it’s harder than it looks, and it only works from one angle. (No wonder we haven’t invented cloaking devices yet.)

(Via Engadget)

Hey, guess what! I’ve secured a summer internship at the local Chamber of Commerce. You can now guess what I’ll be writing about starting the Monday after graduation. (Or, if you insist, "commencement.")

Anyways, I need to be getting ready for our final day of Bible Conference right now. (Best speaker so far: Mr. Craig Hartman, Ian Paisley’s replacement and a Jewish convert to Christianity. He had a really interesting sermon about the passover and relating it to the last supper.)

(Via Mounty’s Corner)

Peter Chianca has a great column up about the Easter Bunny:

The Easter Bunny has got to go. Yes, I know what you’re wondering: Whyshouldn’t the holiest day on the Christian calendar be represented by a 7-foot-tall pink rabbit, who may or may not be wearing a vest? Well, for the same reason that people shouldn’t ever marry Charlie Sheen - because it makes no sense.

It’s a great article; read the whole thing.

Do I Need A Jacket?

Who would ever want normal wedding cake when you can have a “three-tier pork pie“?

This belongs in James Lileks’ The Gallery of Regrettable Food along with my old Cheddar Cheese Cake recipe.

(Via Dave Barry’s Blog)

When I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, it broke the plugin I was using to post via email with. I’ve since upgraded to John Blade’s Email Hack from my old Keitai plugin. Now it will only post mail from a particular email address (no spam posted to my blog) and it will post pictures.

It’s pretty neat.

Samizdata.net, a libertarian group blog, has an excellent post by Robert Clayton Dean from Texas about the Schiavo case. Since BJU students cannot access Samizdata.net (”Free web hosting” again), I’ve decided to copy his post in its entirety:

Various precincts of the US body politic are obsessed with Terri Schiavo, a young woman who has been at the center of an ongoing familial, legal, and now, sadly, political dogfight.

In very broad terms, Terri Schiavo is unable to make decisions for herself. She is apparently brain damaged, and has been in some degree of coma or “persistent vegetative state” for years. Her husband wants to withdraw artificial life support and let nature take its course. Her parents want her kept on life support indefinitely in the hopes that some day she will make some degree of recovery. As ever, you can find a medical expert to present just about any side of this that you want. This situation is, sadly, all too common.

The uproar around Terri Schiavo illustrates rather nicely the key distinction between libertarians and, well, everyone else. For libertarians, the critical question is “who decides?”, based on their belief that you should be able to make your own decisions in life. Most other folks, it seems, don’t care “who decides” nearly as much as they care about “what decision is made,” and particularly, “whatever decision is made, it —- will better be one I approve of.”

In Terri’s case, this means that all sorts of folks who you think would know better than to invite the state to participate in medical decision-making are doing exactly that, because Terri’s husband has made a decision that they do not approve of.

So, not only have we been treated the spectacle of the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, trying to elbow his way to Terri’s bedside so he can dictate what care she will receive, we also have various Florida legislators trying to insert the State of Florida into the mix. Now the US Congress, apparently not satisfied with embarrassing itself* in its ongoing investigation into steroid use in major league baseball, is preparing to abuse its subpoena power to block the decision made by Terri’s husband.

A fundamental principle of health care law, and one dear to the hearts of libertarians, is that you must give informed consent to any treatment before it is administered to you (with an exception in cases of emergency when you are unable to communicate, in which case the caregivers are allowed to assume you want life-saving treatment). A doctor who treats you without your consent has committed assault and battery. It is your right to refuse any treatment at all, even if it will mean your death, and so long as you are a competent adult no court or legislature can intervene to force treatment on you.

When the patient is not a decisional adult, someone who will make decisions on their behalf must be located. You can appoint your own surrogate decision-maker, via a health care power of attorney (which I strongly recommend). Some states have lists of “deemed” surrogate decision-makers on the statute books, such as spouses, parents, siblings, etc., in rank order so everyone knows who has authority in a given case. As a last resort, a court will appoint a guardian.

The whole process is focused on the proper issue of identifying “who will decide.” Once the decision-maker is identified/appointed, they stand in the shoes of the patient. The state retains (or should retain) only the most limited role, to ensure that the decision-maker does not abuse their power. Clearly, the decision to withdraw life support is a decision that Terri Schiavo could make for herself. Indeed, my wife has told me that if she were in Terri’s position, that is exactly what she would want. Her husband’s decision to make it in her stead is by no means an abuse of his power as her surrogate decision-maker - such decisions are made routinely, every single day, across the country by people charged with the heavy burden of making health care decisions for someone else.

What we have in the Schaivo case, then, is the legally appointed and recognized decision-maker making a choice that is well within his purview. Multiple court reviews have concluded that he is the right person to make the call, and his decision should be honored. To this libertarian, that is the end of the matter, because the very essence of being a libertarian is respecting the decisions of others even when you might decide otherwise. To a broad spectrum of conservatives, however, the fact that medical decision-making should be private is of no concern when the decisions made are decisions they disagree with.

Kevin Drum links to a post on another blog, Majikthise, that describes several myths about the Terri Schiavo case, with links to other sources. It turns out that I was mistaken about Schaivo being brain dead:

Terri is neither comatose, nor brain dead. She is in a vegetative state because her higher brain centers have been destroyed and replaced by fluid.

She links to a blog by a medical doctor, which quotes still another blogger quoting the June 2003 (!) opinion of the Second District Court of the State of Florida:

Over the span of this last decade, Theresa’s brain has deteriorated because of the lack of oxygen it suffered at the time of the heart attack. By mid 1996, the CAT scans of her brain showed a severely abnormal structure. At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state, totally dependent upon others to feed her and care for her most private needs (emphasis added).

Majikthise also responds to attempts to discredit Schiavo’s character, including charges that Michael wants Terri to die so he can inherit a large sum of money (less than $50K of a million dollar fund to care for Terri remains) and charges of Michael abusing Terri.

The fact that Schiavo also turned down a million dollar offer to go away should make it clear that this is not about money.

Go read Majikthise’s entire post.

I saw The Incredibles for the first time this week. A very good movie; you’re only cheating yourself if you don’t go and see it.

Fair warning: There are spoilers in the extended entry.

First we had the WWJD fad.

Then we had the Prayer of Jabez fad.

Now we have the Purpose Driven Life fad.

Next: The candles that smell like Jesus fad!

Key quote:

Bob Tosterud and wife Karen say the formula is all spelled out in Psalm 45.

“It’s a Messianic Psalm referring to when Christ returns and his garments will have the scent of myrrh, aloe and cassia,” says Karen Tosterud.

Via Dave Barry.

As you no doubt already know, Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was pulled today. I haven’t really been following this story too closely over the past several weeks, but here are my thoughts:

If Mrs. Schiavo made it clear that she did not wish to be kept alive artificially, then she should not be kept alive artificially. Of course, the problem is that we don’t know if that’s what she really wanted, because she did not sign a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order or living will.

Her husband, Michael, says that she made her desires clear to him. In the absence of any written orders, he, as her closest living relative, gets the right to make this decision for her, regardless of his moral character. Therefore, if he decides to have the tube pulled, it should be pulled.

Some would regard this as murder; is it really? Or is it just “letting nature take its course”? Is it not just turning the case over to the Highest Power?

Is withholding unwanted medical care murder? I don’t think so.

Now, one detail remains: Over the next week or two, Mrs. Schiavo will essentially be starving to death. This will be an extremely painful experience, described by (at least) one commentator as torture. We don’t want that; I’d recommend that Schiavo receive some sort of painkiller to ease her passing.

The woman is brain-dead. It’s time to let her go.

UPDATE: See my next post on this topic.

I went by the P&P office today to get the tickets I actually wanted. The lady was reasonably efficient and friendly. A much better experience than last time.