:Reasonable Force

The missing bride-to-be from Georgia turns out to have developed a case of cold feet and run away, according to this AP news story.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – A Georgia bride-to-be who vanished just days before her wedding turned up in New Mexico and fabricated a tale of abduction before admitting Saturday that she got cold feet and “needed some time alone,” police said.

Okay, how many people already had the fiance, John Mason, tried and convicted for her murder? Considering that it so often turns out to be the case in these highly publicized “missing” cases, I don’t suppose that’s surprising.

After more than a few “48 Hours” episodes recounting such grisly tales, my wife and I have asked each other incredulously how any man would be stupid enough to murder his fiancee, girlfriend, or wife and think that he would get away with it?

Maybe some do, but there are plenty more (it seems) whose “one-armed man” stories don’t hold up. Seeing that the search had been called off and stories of polygraph tests and mounting suspicion had begun to build, I’m glad that this one turned out differently.

But I’d sure hate to be stuck with the bill for that wedding.

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I was engaged in some discussion over at Evangelical Outpost and decided that some of my comments really ought to make their way into a post here.

It was rightly pointed out that pro-life objections to embryonic stem cell often neglect to address the underlying issues regarding the existence of the large numbers of embryos resulting from fertility treatments. These embryos, pro-stem cell research advocates argue, are already slated for destruction in many cases. We would counter that one evil does not justify another. Kelly J. Hollowell, on behalf of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, makes this point in her analysis of a 2001 letter to President Bush, signed by 80 Nobel laureates in support of embryonic stem cell research:

To suggest that it is permissible to use embryos for research purposes because an already tragic decision has been made to destroy them represents an absolutely chilling lack of moral conscience.

This mentality is consistent with Nazi medicine. Taken to its logical conclusion, prisoners on death row, the elderly, patients in chronic comas, mentally retarded persons, and others destined to die or be cast away from society could and should be used for experimentation in the name of furthering research to save others.

That begs the question, however, of why more noise isn’t made about the fate of these embryos in the absence of using them for research, or about the procedures that produce them in such abundance to start with.

I think for many, the answer is simply that two and two haven’t been put together. For others, however, it is more likely the awareness that it wouild be political suicide to come out publicly with a hard line against commonly accepted fertility treatments that prevents this issue from being raised. That applies, sadly, to pastors as well as politicians.

I suggest that the root of the problem is that, in all things, but certainly when it comes to having children, we have made our desires paramount over an older view that accepted conception as the province of God. Clearly I’m speaking primarily of believers here.

The modern Christian (or postmodern, if you will) determines when and if they will have children, and how many. Soon they will choose whether they will have a boy or a girl, if they’re not already. Soon after, they will determine in advance height, hair color, and whether they prefer athletic or musical aptitude.

If our career goals are incompatible with children we use birth control. If, when we’re ready, children are not forthcoming, we go to the fertility clinic. When we’re ready to stop having children we undergo surgery.

I’m not arguing against examinations and/or treatments to make sure all our parts are in working order, but beyond that I would suggest that we have lost the view of children as blessings bestowed upon us by God and view them, rather, as something to which we are entitled when we’re good and ready, and only in the quantities with which we’re comfortable.

This is one area in which we have adopted the world’s view of things without even blinking. When we begin to examine the extensions of our arguments against some of these more abominable practices, however, our error is brought to light.

Understand, please, that I am not condemning any and all fertility treatments. In a fallen creation it is difficult at times to know how far to go in correcting things that don’t seem to be working as they should. My wife and I have discussed where we believe that line is and we will not cross it. Each one’s conscience would have to advise them in this.

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I’ve been informed of a problem preventing anyone from commenting. In that spammers are included in the “anyone” group, that’s not entirely bad, but some feedback would probably be beneficial.

I’ll try to get that fixed presently.

UPDATE: I believe commenting is fully functional now. Why not give it a try?

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I can’t claim to be any sort of writer simply because I don’t do enough of it. Still, I fancy myself fairly gifted in the use of the language; certainly far more skilled than I am at any sort of mathematical exercise! Being many years removed from school, however, and wanting to hone these skills further, I thought it would be good to have on hand a reference. I ordered the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style from Amazon, and I have had occasion to use it quite a few times in the few months since I purchased it. For example, seeking reassurance on the proper punctuation accompanying the use of but to connect two independent clauses, I referred to the manual. When I did, I was delighted to find this liberating tidbit in section 5.191:

Beginning a sentence with a conjunction. There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but, or so. In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions. It has been so for centuries, and even the most conservative grammarians have followed this practice. Charles Allen Lloyd’s 1938 words fairly sum up the situation as it stands even today: “Next to the groundless notion that it is incorrect to end an English sentence with a preposition, perhaps the most wide-spread of the many false beliefs about the use of our language is the equally groundless notion that it is incorrect to begin one with ‘but’ or ‘and.’ As in the case of the superstition about the prepositional ending, no textbook supports it, but apparently about half of our teachers of English go out of their way to handicap their pupils by inculcating it. One cannot help wondering whether those who teach such a monstrous doctrine ever read any English themselves.”

I have followed the practice of using conjunctions at the beginning of sentences for years, going simply on the grounds that it sounded right. Always, though, I have thought myself to have been violating the rules, though I knew, as the above statement supports, that I had read sentences begun that way in many works of established authors. The preposition myth, likewise, has nagged me to the point that I will often contort my language in an effort to avoid violating what I now know to be a nonexistent rule.

Sweet literary freedom!

(But can I shake free of the chains of pseudo-grammatical imprisonment?)

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But not from me. At least, the official one won’t be from me, as Denyerec, the author of the original AMM hack for WP, has announced that he will be updating the tool to a new and improved plugin for WP 1.5.

I do intend fully to redesign this place, re-write the Amazon Media Manager plugin for WP1.5 and make it nicer, and also FINALLY get around to writing a decently simple gallery thing that WordPress will be friends with. They will.

It’ll be happening soon…

That’s a good thing. I need a project to hone my PHP/MySQL skills on, but that may have been a bit ambitious. Maybe a nice “Hello, World…”

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In a shameless display of self-promotion… wait, this is a blog, isn’t it? Right.

Anyway, after grappling with code for hours, I’ve added a slick Bookshelf page that displays books that I’m reading, have read, and am going to read. I accomplished this using some built-in WordPress coding features and a customization of Denyerec’s Amazon Media Manager.

Basically, I added a status field to the table with values for “unread”, “reading”, “read”, and “reference.” Then I modified Denyerec’s query to accept a parameter for that field so that I can retrieve books specifically in the states described. Obviously, this mod only makes sense for books. Still to be done is a modification to the admin interface so that I’ll be able to update status codes there instead of going directly to the database. I also intend to tackle the task of adapting AMM to the plugin model for WordPress 1.5.

This is pretty much my first crack at PHP/MySQL programming so I’m excited to see it work once I get it done.

Hmm… lightning outside. Think I’ll stop for the night before something gets fried!

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I haven’t linked anything by Mr. Lileks in a good while and this is a gem. He expresses bemusement at nominal Catholics who dreamt of a left-leaning successor for John Paul II.

I have my doctrinal differences with the Catholic church as well; I understand the reasons for requiring priestly celibacy, but I don’t agree with them. I don’t agree with many Catholic positions on issues regarding sexuality. Growing up Lutheran, I was gently guided away from the clanging errancy of Maryolatry. Because I disagree with the Catholic Church on these and a few other matters, I am– how do I put this? – NOT CATHOLIC. Hence I am always amazed by people who want the church to accommodate their thoughts, their new beliefs, their precarious and ingenious rationales, instead of ripping themselves from the bosom and seeking a congregation that doesn’t make them feel like a heretic banging thier head on Filarete’s doors. To those who want profound change, consider an outsider’s perspective: the Catholic Church is the National Review of religion. You may live long enough to see it become the Weekly Standard. In your dreams it might become the New Republic. But it’s never going to be the Nation. And if ever it does, it will have roughly the same subscriber base.

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Political mealy-mouthing makes me queasy, as does the endless handwringing from the left. Give me a break. Did these champions of the downtrodden immigrant worker not know that the Governator meant that the border needed to be secure rather than literally closed?

And did the Governator really have poor language skills to blame for using the word “closed”? Or could it be that the word is common enough shorthand for border security that any reasonable person could have expected it to have been understood?

And once again, we have a flagrant misuse of the word hatred by the left.

“I don’t think the governor identifies himself with that kind of rhetoric,” said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Democrat. “I don’t know why he said it, but I’m very pleased he has totally removed himself from those folks who espouse that kind of hatred.”

It’s not hatred. It’s not xenophobic. Policing the border is common sense when virtually anyone can stroll across your borders and you happen to be in a war against an enemy who operates in small cells and as individuals to blow up as many people as they can.

I am not anti-immigrant. I’m for reasonable border controls. In a time of war against terrorism it is reasonable to tightly control the means of entry and to subject each individual to, at the minimum, some routine identity verification cross-checked with criminal databases. Sorry, but a personal note from Vicente Fox pinned to their shirt is not sufficient.

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, etc. Just be sure that they don’t appear in any home videos of decapitations or have dynamite strapped around their midsection. Or that they’re not members of homicidal Latin American gangs.

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One of the cornerstones of the Carolina Panthers football franchise has died at age 45 to intestinal cancer. Looks like I’ll be buying a number 51 jersey this year.

Pat Yasinkas of the Charlotte Observer writes:

Sam Mills, the Carolina Panthers linebackers coach and one of the best players in franchise history, has lost his lengthy battle with intestinal cancer.

Mills, 45, died Monday.

Mills was diagnosed in August 2003. At first doctors, told him he had only several months to live. But Mills battled the disease bravely. He underwent chemotherapy and radiation, but continued coaching.

He was an inspirational force to the Panthers’ run to Super Bowl XXXVIII, delivering an emotional speech to the team before a playoff victory. Mills continued coaching through the 2004 season, but took a turn for the worst in recent weeks.

Thanks, Sam.

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You may not have caught it, but during SuperBowl XXXIX a commercial aired announcing a contest sponsored by Volvo and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

No, not Virgin Atlantic.

Virgin Galactic.

Strange name for a company, you might think. Not so strange when you know that the grand prize of this contest was a trip into space on the first commercial space ship. Granted, the word galactic still might be overreaching a bit considering that these first commercial flights will just barely be reaching space.

Still, I submitted my entry and would love to have been the winner. Not to be, however. At least not this time. There’ll be another contest from someone soon. Otherwise I just might have to start saving my $200,000 for a ticket!

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Despite all of my Christian experience having been in evangelical protestantism, it still feels presumptuous for me to say something like, “I hope the Pope was saved.”

And if I were a radio talk-show host, I might be at risk of losing my job.

Pope John Paul II was, by all human standards, a great man. Even for those who disagreed with his views, whether Protestants critical of Marian dogma or abortion-rights activists opposed to his ardent defense of the sanctity of human life, it is undeniable that his was a remarkable life, spanning momentous and tumultuous times. In human history, his name is indelibly etched. Yet, it is by no means impossible that the leader of the most powerful Church in the world, a man regarded by many as one of the most devout and spiritual Popes to have lived, died in his sins and will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

As I noted from the outset, even the suggestion of that possibility seems preposterous even to my Protestant ears. This has more to do, however, with the pervasive nature of postmodern thinking and the siren-song of ecumenism than it does a rational consideration of the Biblical criteria for salvation weighed against the beliefs enumerated by the man once known as Karol Jozef Wojtyla.

If, however, Scripture is your standard for discerning truth from error, it should be plain that one’s eternal disposition depends not a whit on the sum of good works done nor the high esteem in which one is held, nor even the extent of one’s involovement in a religious body, but only on the sovereign grace of God.

⁸For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– ⁹not by works, so that no one can boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9

Within both Protestantism* and Catholicism there are men and women who are bound for heaven and others who are bound for hell. I would say the same for some other nominally Christian groups, cults more like, such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, some of whose members may stumble into a relationship with the genuine, living Christ of the Bible despite the doctrines of their leadership.

The evangelical’s fear is that the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, treated as on par with Scripture, place upon Paul’s simple prescription of faith encumbrances that act more as a barrier to the saving grace of the Gospel than the means by which men might obtain it. Can you truly be trusting in Christ’s completed work on the cross for salvation if you accept Rome’s teaching that faith is insufficient apart from sacraments administered by her priests? That is our concern and that is why, crass and impolitic as it may seem during the period set aside for mourning a man beloved by many, we cannot help but discuss these issues as we hear so many presume that, if there is such a thing as heaven, he must surely be there.

*Protestantism here defined as purportedly Christian denominations having some historical/theological link to the Protestant Reformation. Obviously today there are many groups that fall under this exceedingly broad category that have nearly abandoned all pretense at anything remotely resembling Biblical Christianity, having rejected the Bible as authoritative in any way. Many of these groups would be of more concern theologically than the Roman Catholic Church, which generally has applied additional layers to Biblical truths rather than rejecting those truths and stripping them out of faith and practice.

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Let me just say that I’m not a web developer or designer. At this point, I’m a tinkerer at best. That being the case, you can maybe understand my pleasure at having the developer of my current theme acknowledge my addition of a horizontal navigation bar and credit me on a downloadable version of his Flex theme for WordPress.

I sent my changes to Phu Ly at If..Else Log simply for some feedback. He surprised me by incorporating my additions into a variant that he generously named SCP Flex (.zip file). To make use of this theme, extract the files into your wp-content/themes folder, then navigate to the Presentation folder of your Admin interface and Select the theme.

Note that the navigation bar is providing links to pages on your blog. If you have no pages then only the Home link will show. Incidentally, I have no idea what will happen if you have more pages than will fit across the width of that bar! Guess I’ll make some dummy pages and find out tomorrow. I do know that you can modify the wp_list_pages() template tag to grab pages selectively rather than the whole lot. See the documentation.

Be sure to check out Phu’s other great theme designs and other content at If..Else Log.

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Thanks to some tips from other WordPress users, credited below, I was able to get the Amazon Media Manager hack working with WP 1.5, allowing me to manage my media database from WP’s admin interface and to display selected items on my site. I had started learning php so I could figure these things out on my own but, as I am wont to do, got distracted to other things.

Thanks to The Listless Lawyer for instructions to get this working, to Aakar for his contribution, and to Denyerec for creating the original Amazon Media Manager hack for WordPress.

Hopefully, Denyerec will re-release this handy tool as an ‘official’ plugin for 1.5 soon, but it’s worth fiddling with the code to get the old version working until he does.

NOTE: If you are attempting this, you may have some problems with Aakar’s instructions for adding a line to menu.php. The line should read:

$menu [50] = array(__('Media'), 5, 'amazonphp.php')

Insert the above line after this statement:

if ( get_option('use_fileupload') )
$menu[45] = array(__('Upload'), get_settings('fileupload_minlevel'), 'upload.php');

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I’m creating a new category called Future Now to highlight stories like this one that bring the stuff of science fiction books and movies into the world of the really real.

There’s a hand lying on the blanket on Matt Nagle’s desk and he’s staring at it intently, thinking “Close, close,” as the scientists gathered around him look on. To their delight, the hand twitches and its outstretched fingers close around the open palm, clenching to a fist.

That’s the intro to the afore-linked article in the UK’s Guardian Unlimited about experiments that are successfully allowing patients with brain implants to control electronic devices from computer-linked televisions to robotic limbs.

The implications of brain-mapping technology like this are staggering. For starters, the potential boon to prosthetics is very exciting. Replacement limbs such as Luke Skywalker’s hand in The Empire Strikes Back are certainly not difficult to envision.

Experiments on monkeys have already revealed further possibilities:

In previous studies, his [Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University] team showed that when monkeys had their brains hooked up to robotic arms, they assimilated the arm, effectively making it their own. “Their brains actually incorporated the robotic arm by dedicating neuronal space to it. We want to see if the same thing happens in humans,” he adds. (emphasis mine)

That suggests that, given lots of time and work, human brains could actually learn to control not only replacement limbs, like prosthetics, but extra ones, bringing the image of a Doctor Octopus-like harness with utility limbs from the pages of comic book and film to reality.

Then, of course, there are the military applications. For all the skill that our fighter pilots currently possess, how much better would they be if their brains were integrated with a control system designed to respond to their thoughts? (Someone asked me why we, by which he meant me, always think of the destructive potential of new technologies first. I don’t know why. I’ve just always really loved the war toys.)

Of course, right now the experiments involve cutting a hole in your skull and tapping into the brain. This statement, while it may be pie-in-the-sky, sounds far more appealing:

Ultimately, Donoghue says there should be no need to connect cables to peoples’ heads to read their minds. Miniaturisation should bring smaller devices that can be powered through unbroken skin and transmit signals wirelessly from the brain to a processor worn on a belt that triggers the intended device.

Don’t think I’ll be signing up until we reach that point, thanks.

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(hat tip: My Sister… I’d link her website, but I can’t decide which one )

I hadn’t read Ann Coulter in a while… I needed it.

Focusing her acerbic wit on the decisions of the judiciary in the Schiavo case, Ann breaks it down thus:

If being (a) on a liquid diet, and (b) unresponsive to one’s estranged husband are now considered grounds for a woman’s execution, wait until this news hits Beverly Hills!

Sorry. That just made me smile.

That clip doesn’t do the article justice, though, so check it out.

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