Category Archives: Culture

Housecleaning

So, after many years of things “not functioning properly,” S brought home a Dyson. We’ve gone through about two vacuum cleaners in the last six or so years, which is pretty silly. We realized pretty quick, however, that this thing isn’t for the casual user and gives new meaning to the word suction and complex home care.

Borders

From the CSM

In reaching its determination, the high court said former Attorney General John Ashcroft overstepped his authority in November 2001 when he rewrote regulations under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) making it illegal for Oregon doctors to prescribe drugs to help a patient die.

“The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. “The idea that Congress gave the attorney general such broad and unusual authority through an implicit delegation in the [Controlled Substances Act’s] registration provision is not sustainable.”

Mr. Ashcroft said that federally controlled drugs could be prescribed only for a “legitimate medical purpose,” and that helping someone to end his or her life was contrary to the healing mission of physicians.

Justice Antonin Scalia said in a dissent that Ashcroft’s directive should be accorded deference by the courts and allowed to stand. He added that he found reasonable the former attorney general’s conclusion that helping someone die was not a “legitimate medical purpose.”

“Virtually every medical authority from Hippocrates to the current American Medical Association confirms that assisting suicide … is not a ‘legitimate’ branch of that science and art,” Justice Scalia wrote. “If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.”

Scalia was joined in his dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas.

In rejecting the so-called Ashcroft directive, the majority justices said the CSA is aimed at policing drug abuse, addiction, and narcotics trafficking rather than providing an avenue for federal micromanagement of state efforts to regulate healthcare and end-of-life issues.

This part–“The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise”–is the pattern.

New Years

And so the illusion of a new year presses on with a kind of weird madness, as usual. The year as we have it is a cycle: January meets January as the sun and earth play their natural parts. Can there be a new January? Do you want to remember last year’s January? There’s this from last year’s Jan 2 2005 post

Well it’s now 2005 and counting. Not much to say about the new year, except to wish those stricken by tsunami well in the recovery, survival, and rebuild. What horrors on the beaches.

Susan at Spinning is writing about narrative as she gears up for fiction writing. I’d suggest not to worry about short or long story, but rather about story and how it manifests. In fiction we’ll be dealing with shorter forms to start because we can manage a lot of them in a semester. Each story will demand what it demands. But I winder if as she writes them she sees the whole circle? Do I when I compose a story? Sure, a vague sense of what the story might look like at resolution.

What about the novel Suttree and Edson’s short Dinner Time as examples of story? One is long, the other short. Different shapes, but story nonetheless. But how they both drill into memory.

John Timmons announces the IF course for the Summer, too. Teaching at Tunxis is itself a lesson in timewarp.

Now it’s 2006 and counting and I’m half-way through Krauss’ Hiding in the Mirror and rewriting a section of Sandoval, extending a path where the link structure now just seems odd in the novel, such that I ask: “Why did I join these text spaces in the first place?” Better: “What was the thinking here?”

Intelligent Design and the Lemon Test

Judge John Jones has found for the plaintiff in the Kitzmiller case. The order can be found on page 139 of the pdf.

A declaratory judgment is hereby issued in favor of Plaintiffs pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 2201, 2202, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 such that Defendants’ ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and Art. I, § 3 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Here’s more of the court language, whose tenor and force is plainly stated

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.

For more go to The Panda’s Thumb.

Questions of Labor

From the Ordinance of Laborers, 1349

The king to the sheriff of Kent, greeting. Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many seeing the necessity of masters, and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages, and some rather willing to beg in idleness, than by labor to get their living; we, considering the grievous incommodities, which of the lack especially of ploughmen and such laborers may hereafter come, have upon deliberation and treaty with the prelates and the nobles, and learned men assisting us, of their mutual counsel ordained:

That every man and woman of our realm of England, of what condition he be, free or bond, able in body, and within the age of threescore years, not living in merchandise, nor exercising any craft, nor having of his own whereof he may live, nor proper land, about whose tillage he may himself occupy, and not serving any other, if he in convenient service, his estate considered, be required to serve, he shall be bounden to serve him which so shall him require; and take only the wages, livery, meed, or salary, which were accustomed to be given in the places where he oweth to serve, the twentieth year of our reign of England, or five or six other commone years next before. Provided always, that the lords be preferred before other in their bondmen or their land tenants, so in their service to be retained; so that nevertheless the said lords shall retain no more than be necessary for them; and if any such man or woman, being so required to serve, will not the same do, that proved by two true men before the sheriff or the constables of the town where the same shall happen to be done, he shall anon be taken by them or any of them, and committed to the next gaol, there to remain under strait keeping, till he find surety to serve in the form aforesaid.

I was just going over this as a matter of course and thought the similarities interesting to current wage issues.

What has ended

What ended this week is the illusion that words can substitute for real work and real knowledge. This was the last, spectacular failure of the internet bubble, the final burnout of paper businesses that had no business and paper politicians who had no cause and paper experts whose expertise lay in their bogus credentials or in the wealth of their pals.

We’ll know the details in time. We’ll have years of investigations. We already know the answer. We filled key roles at the top with lawyers and promoters and press agents and cronies, and when we needed them to do their job, they held press conferences instead.

And we filled key roles on the line — police and fire and public safety — with too many people who weren’t up to the job, or whose leaders weren’t up to the job. Frightened by snipers and rumors, they sacrificed the lives of men and women and children in danger, lives entrusted to them, to save their own. They turned in their badges or grounded their choppers. Their duty was hard; they did not do it.

From Mark Bernstein.

In this vein I’d been contemplating a sort of Plato’s Republic post on a character who, having heard many reports about Homeland Security and the billions “supposedly” spent on prep, readiness, and planning for multiple kinds of catastrophe, leaves his house and finds that it was all just a media job, that such a place really didn’t exist beyond a name. He returns home and clicks to CNN to hear more about “reality.” It was supposed to be a joke.

More here at Scientific American on what was known. It’s not just this area, either. There’s plenty of work to be done.

This is not about being perfect or understanding Mr. Hobbes. It’s about competence and honesty.

Resources and Standards

In this country, we have the capability to provide everyone with a basic living standard. People shouldn’t have to fight for that. They should have the opportunity to compete for things beyond a basic standard and they will. I’d argue that such a program would result in more creativity, more curiosity, and less general misery. I see this in small places, in comments students write when they see something they hadn’t noticed before, even the tough ones, who think they know everything. A line of poetry nudges one to remark on an alternative, and from then on it’s up to them. It goes beyond quantification.

Just a thought.