“At this point, there are so many pieces of the puzzle to fit together that it’s almost irresponsible not to speculate about this sort of scenario, along with all the others.” – my me-zine hero and friend, Mickey Kaus. All the others? So it’s ok to speculate about anything that might possibly, conceivably, potentially, have to do with Chandra Levy’s disappearance? Everyone Condit has ever slept with? Every dirty-talking phone-call he might ever have had? Every tryst he might have conducted? Every stain on any piece of clothing? OK, Mickey. Here’s a challenge. If it’s ok to speculate about any possible scenario, why haven’t you repeated the Newsmax story (almost immediately yanked from the wires) that linked Condit to bisexual orgies, Harley-Davidson rapes and murders, Haitian prostitutes, and on and on? Hey, it’s all speculation. It’s almost irresponsible not to publish them. Put your website where your mouth is. And why haven’t you published the name of the ABC News reporter? I would if I had the information reliably. Do you have a source?
I REPRINT, YOU DECIDE: Two interesting responses to my tadpole analogy, which I now realize is full of holes. Interesting holes that I am working on filling for a column next week. These emails home in on the whole ‘potential life’ issue. They might help clarify things:
“Your analogy on stem cell research is interesting, but here is something that I have always thought about regarding human life.
My oldest daughter Erin is 11 years old. When she was in utero, the doctor thought we had lost her, but my wife had an ultrasound and it turned out Erin was still alive. If we had lost the baby, it would have been Erin we lost, not some mass of cells. Erin was always Erin, even before we knew her. In the same way, stem cell research will not be carried out on masses of cells. It will be carried out on Jim, Cathy, Janie, Tommy, and yes, Erin.”
“This is getting zen, baby. You really are making it too complicated. It is what it is in the moment. Otherwise you enter the realm of probability. If you eat fertilized eggs for your scrambled egg breakfast, are you getting the nutritional value of a chicken or an egg?
The frog is in the future. The (egg?) is in the past. The tadpole is in the moment. You are cutting off a probability for a frog, sure. The tadpole may well have died before it grew to frogdom, but you can make certain deductions about lake health using your big old brain. It doesn’t matter. You still killed a tadpole and would be tried under the green court of law for tadpole death not frog death.
If you kill a child, you cut off the potential adult, but you didn’t kill an adult, you killed a child. If you freeze a fertilized egg you are not freezing an adult or a child, you are freezing a fertilized egg.
My pro-life cousin got in vitro–twice. That means a few embryos were discarded. She doesn’t think of them as her lost children, trust me. She thinks of them as fertilized eggs. Well, she thinks of them not at allactually.
If those in vitro fertilized eggs had not existed, neither would her children. Their probability line would have been cut off. (You do realize that lots of fertilized eggs are naturally discarded by a woman’s body without implantation…Should we mount a campaign to save their lives????)”
The Dish 