Such arrogance, to oppose the possibility that others with horrendous diseases might be helped by stem cell research. This commercial is aimed at the campaign of Rep. James Walsh. It applies equally to Senator Jim Talent of Missouri. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4tFk9WLjwM[/youtube] "How come he thinks he gets to decide who lives and…
I just had a (loud) discussion with a pro-life friend who told me what his church is telling people about this amendment. Now, this guy is intelligent and literate, but has fully bought into the Bible-as-inerrant-literal-truth philosophy. Maybe you've read Erich's Missouri Amendment 2 entry from April. Maybe not. Here…
For a short time, I watched a few of the “forensic science” shows like CSI, mostly for a laugh at the junk science. I was particularly amused at the tool used to analyze metal. The actor put a hub cap in a plexiglass box, the box was filled with smoke or mist, and the printer spewed out paper. On that paper were the exact components of the metal, so much of this, so much of that. Then the formulation was compared to their list of hub cap manufacturers, and lo and behold, there were two retail distributors of that brand hub cap in the city. It was hilarious, like Lucy stuffing her shirt with chocolates from the speeding assembly line and about as likely.
I’ve stopped watching those shows, partly because they can only create so many magic plexiglass boxes, and because they’re so gory (regurgitated by a large snake was the end for me). I also read a (true) story of a lawsuit involving lost ashes of a loved one (cremains) and the two got me thinking about our funeral customs.
There are really some odd customs, and chief among them for me, since I have to face them repeatedly (one bad thing about getting old is that your friends and family are old, too, and you lose a lot of them), is our ‘dress up’ custom. That is where we take a body, dress it up in special clothes (sometimes bought new for the occasion, sometimes picked out …
Primatologist Frans De Waal has spent much of his career pointing out how incredibly similar the emotional and moral behavior of human animals is to the behavior of many other animals (he focuses especially chimps and bonobos). In this post, I will comment on De Waal's 2005 work, Our Inner Ape, where De Waal substantiates his stunning conclusion (well, stunning to those who just can't bear to acknowledge that humans are animals - see here and here and here) that the precursors of morality are easily seen in animals other than human animals. More specifically, De Waal demonstrates that there is a well-substantiated continuity between the proto-moral behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos and the full-bloomed sense of morality that we see in human animals. De Waal is clearly frustrated that people consider only human aggression to be "animalistic," but not human empathy. De Waal describes studies clearly demonstrating empathy in many animals, ranging from rats to the great apes. Children as young as one year of age naturally reach out to comfort others. Household pets such as cats and dogs can become upset (just like children do) when family members feign distress. Empathy therefore develops even before language. This would seem to demonstrate that top-down rule-based (therefore language-based) versions of morality don't capture the essence of what it means to be moral. [More . . . ]
You can feel the tide turning. New Republican scandals and indictments are revealed every week. This week, of course, we learned yet another lesson about the Republican version of morality--the kind of morality where horny political leaders relentlessly hit on young boys, a love so stunning that the conservative church…