Month: May 2009

Christianism vs Christianity

The poignancy of this is pretty profound:

Attorney Dan Monnat said Tiller was shot as he served as an usher during morning services at Reformation Lutheran Church. Monnat said Tiller's wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time of the shooting.

To assassinate someone is evil enough; to do it in a church service, as his wife looks on is staggering. And the terrorist is still at large:

Capt. Brent Allred

said Wichita police were looking for a gunman who fled in a 1993 light

blue Ford Taurus registered in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam, Kan.

Gateway Pundit notes:

Police were looking for a blue Ford Taurus with a K-State vanity plate, license number 225 BAB. Police described him as a white male in his 50's or 60's, 6'1," 220 lbs, wearing a white shirt and dark pants. The car is reportedly registered out of Merriam, Kansas a suburb just to the southeast of Kansas City, Kan.

Robert Stacy McCain, about as far right as one can get, is appalled:

Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.

O’Reilly’s Target Shot Dead In Church

The abortionist, George Tiller, was shot to death … in a Wichita church this morning. It was the culmination of a campaign of domestic terrorism against him:

Protesters blockaded Tiller's clinic during Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993. Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting… Tiller's clinic was severely vandalized earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, his lawyer said wires to security cameras and outdoor lights were cut and that the vandals also cut through the roof and plugged the buildings' downspouts. Rain poured through the roof and caused thousands of dollars of damage in the clinic. Tiller reportedly asked the FBI to investigate the incident.

Christianist terrorism is no more defensible than Islamist terrorism. And there is a Bill O'Reilly connection:

On Friday, November 3, 2006, Bill O'Reilly featured an exclusive segment on his show, The O'Reilly Factor, saying that he has an "inside source" with official clinic documentation indicating that George Tiller performs late-term abortions to alleviate "temporary depression" in the pregnant woman. According to reporting data provided to the Kansas Board of Healing Arts for the year 1998, all of the post-viable partial-birth (dilation and extraction) abortion procedures performed in Kansas during that year were performed because "the attending physician believe[d] that continuing the pregnancy [would] constitute a substantial and irreversible impairment of the patient's mental function." Tiller responded to O'Reilly's statements by demanding an investigation into the "inside source" through which the information was leaked, suggesting that Phill Kline, then the Kansas Attorney General, was responsible. Kline denied the charge.

O'Reilly calls Tiller the "so-called baby killer" below. He calls his outfit a "death-mill, which is exactly what it is":

Gutting Obesity

William Saletan thinks about the future of obesity on America:

People on diets aren't losing weight. But people who get bariatric surgery are losing weight. Governments see this difference, and they're increasingly interested in paying for the surgery if, as evidence suggests, it's cost-effective. According to a study published last year in the American Journal of Managed Care, "Downstream savings associated with bariatric surgery are estimated to offset the initial costs in 2 to 4 years." So look out, fat folks. As we learn more about the intractability of your condition, the good news is that people may stop expecting you to diet or exercise your way to a thinner body. The bad news is, they may start expecting you to go under the knife.

The History Of Cats

KITTENMauricioLima:Getty

Scientific American checks in on the world's most popular pet:

Considering that small cats do little obvious harm, people probably did not mind their company. They might have even encouraged the cats to stick around when they saw them dispatching mice and snakes. Cats may have held other appeal, too. Some experts speculate that wildcats just so happened to possess features that might have preadapted them to developing a relationship with people. In particular, these cats have “cute” features—large eyes, a snub face and a high, round forehead, among others—that are known to elicit nurturing from humans. In all likelihood, then, some people took kittens home simply because they found them adorable and tamed them, giving cats a first foothold at the human hearth.

(Photo: A kitten rests near an Iraqi soldier outside a farm house while US soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment (not seen) question its owner about suspected activities in the area, during a joint military patrol in Sadr Al-Yusufiyah, just south of Baghdad, on May 13, 2008. By Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images.)

Mean Girls

Jesse Bering investigates why teenage girls are so cruel to each other:

Although most researchers acknowledge the somewhat speculative nature of evolutionary arguments in this area, female social aggression among reproductively viable females is usually interpreted as a form of mate competition.

Hess and Hagen, for example, suggest that the sex differences uncovered in their study would likely have been even more pronounced in a younger group of participants. Evolutionarily, historically and cross-culturally, they point out, girls in the fifteen- to nineteen-year-old range would be most actively competing for mates. Thus, anything that would sabotage another females’ image as a desirable reproductive partner, such as commenting on her promiscuity, physical appearance or some other aberrant or quirky traits, tends to be the stuff of virile gossip. Also, the degree of bitchiness should then demonstrate a sort of bell-shaped curve over the female life course. On the surface this seems mostly true. Anecdotally, I can’t think of a single postmenopausal woman who seems hell-bent on undermining another woman’s dating life…

Ready. Set. Wait.

Scientific American covers the state of stem cell research:

[S]cientists at last mostly have what they have been asking for. And the public should now prepare to be disappointed. To address the most obvious one first: practicable ESC-based therapies are years away. The upcoming tests of Geron’s paralysis treatment, for example, will look only at how safely it is tolerated by patients; tests of its effectiveness are further off. The therapeutic cells helped mice to partially recover from spinal injuries, but in humans they might fail to do the same or, worse, might induce tumors. It will take time to find out.

New drugs often take five to nine years to progress from phase I testing to market. Moreover, many if not most of those future therapies based on ESC research may not actually involve ESCs. Patients, after all, will not be able to supply embryonic cells directly from their own body. Therapeutic ESCs would either have to come from immunologically matched stockpiles (the equivalent of blood banks) or be cloned for each patient individually. Both solutions would involve technological and legal headaches. Using adult stem cells or others reprogrammed for versatility from a patient’s own tissues may therefore prove much easier. (Adult stem cells are indeed already used to treat some blood-related and orthopedic disorders.)

(Hat tip: 3QD)

The Fruits Of Political Darwinism

DiA makes a very important point:

[I]t's odd to see smart people talking as though the set of planks that make up each party's platform are bound together in some coherent way that flows from the two timeless essences of American political thought. It seems equally true to say simply that the mix of positions held by each party is the equilibrium response to the mix adopted by the other. As these debates over party identity show, this isn't necessarily the case in the short term, but the very identity to which purists want to hew is itself necessarily the product of the harsh evolutionary pressures of the electoral system.

"Republicanism" just means "the combination of views that were historically capable of securing a majority often enough to establish one of the two governing coalitions". Juggle the initial conditions—the demographic facts or the issues that are salient—and you almost certainly get a different coalition mix. I understand why one segment of the coalition would be eager to see their own views determine the direction of the party as a whole, but it seems silly to express this in terms of the language of authenticity.

The Beginnings Of God

Biologist Lewis Wolpert has a theory:

[O]nly human primates understand the causal and intentional relations that hold among external entities. Tomasello illustrates this point for non-human primates with the claim that even though they might watch the wind shaking a branch until its fruit falls, they would never shake the branch themselves to obtain the fruit. Some primates are, nevertheless, at the edge of having causal understanding. Once causal belief evolved in relation to tools and language, it was inevitable that people would want to understand the causes of all the events that might affect their lives — such as illness, changes in climate and death itself. Once there was a concept of cause and effect, ignorance was no longer bliss, and this could have led to the development of religious beliefs.

(Hat tip: Vaughan)