White Noise.

The new Michael Keaton movie "White Noise" features something called "electronic voice phenomenon." Here's the site the trailer touted - American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena.

The commenters at Free Republic are skeptical.

Spooky stuff.

Happy New Year.

It's 9:56 pm. Fox News is running the countdown to 2005 in Chicago. I'm going to watch it and then cut out of here to go watch Blade 3 at the Edwards down the street. After all what's the point of complete independence if you can't exercise the freedom to watch a B-grade movie based on a minor Marvel comic character?

Yippee! It's New Years in Chicago!

Margaret Cho - Comedic genius or dull, peevish gasbag?

Ace of Spades convincingly sides with the latter narrative.

Cho has shown up here at various times when she went on some ignorant anti-Catholic screed or when she shared some choice bit of her narcissism. And it turns out that she isn't even funny. As Ace of Spades observes:

"True, Cho is increasingly subject to random bursts of hyper-sincere political monologuing ("How dare they ask you to die for your country, yet not allow you to be who you are?") that some viewers will find offensive, others courageous, and many, just plain dull."

Really? I had no idea.

Now this just plain dull comic you're talking about -- this is the one you claim to be hysterically funny, right?

"But the odd soapbox rant seems a fair price to pay for 75 minutes in the company of this uniquely gifted and exceptionally honest performer, who appears to have been born to stand in front of thousands of people and speak the unspeakable: 'I look at children and feel nothing,' she deadpans in a subversive bit about her lack of maternal instincts. 'I ovulate sand.' "


Yes, that is unspeakable indeed. No comic before Cho has ever stated that she despises children, especially other people's children.

I mean, it's not as if you can walk into the Laff-Shack any day of the week and find a hack comic telling the crowd that he thinks children ought to fly in the cargo compartment of a passenger jet. It's not as if Greg Giraldo, for example, does do 90% of his act about how much he hates his wife and kids and considers the travel associated with stand-up comedy to be its greatest selling point. (Giraldo is funny, by the way. I'm not calling him hack.)

And we might have been lef to believe that Cho viewed her abortions as a kind of tragedy; it turns out, though, that it's "all good" since she doesn't like kids anyway.

More Natural Law and Causuistry blogging.

Christopher Blosser at Against the Grain posts on a recent Guardian article about Piux XII's apparent instructions that baptized Jewish children who had been left in the care of Catholics and Catholic institutions because of World War II and the Holocaust not be returned to their Jewish relatives. I don't have the details or anything other than a general feeling of horror at that idea.

There is an interesting discussions at Amy Welborn's Open Book between a variety of "sides" ranging from knee-jerk Vatican apologists to more subtle thinkers. On the latter, please do a "control 'F'" search for the comments by "Cheeky Lawyer" and "Dreher" which are extremely worthwhile. I like this one by "Cheeky Lawyer" at 11:33 am:

And don't forget the actions of young Polish priest just after war. A childless Christian couple had taken in the child of Jewish friends. The Jewish friends did not survive the Holocaust. The couple wanted to keep the child and baptize him. They sought out a young Polish priest for advice asking whether they should baptize the child and raise him. The priest said, "No. Follow the wishes of his parents and find living relatives to give him to." They followed the priests instructions. That priest is now our Pope.

Also this at 3:22 pm:

Msgr. Albacete a friend of the Pope and a great man in his own right tells a story of the Christian freedom he witnessed in the current Patriach of Venice, Angelo Scola. Albacete who was then a professor at the JP II Center for Marriage and Family in DC and Scola who was visiting as a scholar there for a semester were spending a Sunday together. They were somewhere up near Baltimore. They were scheduled to go to the Dominican House of Studies for Mass (where Scola was to preach) and then go to friends' for dinner. The dinner had been long planned. The hadn't yet gone to or celebrated Mass that Sunday. As they were returning to DC a terrible rain storm hit I-95 and they had to exit. They waited out the storm and eventually it became clear that they weren't going to make the Mass. Albacete lamented to Scola that this meant that they would now have to leave their dinner hosts early as they would need to rush back and say Mass before the clock struck midnight. Scola turned to Albacete and said, "Tonight this dinner will have to be our Mass. These people have been planning our coming for weeks and they don't expect us to rush off." He was cutting into Albacete's legalism. They spent a delightful evening with friends freed from the burden of having to rush off and saying their Mass to meet the rules. In my mind and Albacete's I believe this was the height of Christian freedom and virtue. I think one would have a hard time arguing that Scola a friend of the Pope's and Albacete were lax priests who need to get with the program. Scola may perhaps be our next Pope and he certainly is a great defender of the faith. But this story illustrates the Christian freedom that we are all called to but so few of us every attain. Scola recognized that the true fulfillment of the law would be made in remaining true to Christ's presence there in those people who had long be planning on his attendance at their home. He realized that he and Albacete had made a good faith attempt to go to their Mass. And he had the freedom to be able to say no to legalism.

According to Father Kosterski's lectures on "the Ethics of Aristotle", the Aristotelian approach to virtue as a habit of choosing the "golden mean" depends a lot more on the example of others who have weighed the myriad of factors that go into the formation of "just the right" conduct; this approach is distinction from what I have come to think is the more popular contemporary approach of defnining a rule that applies to all situations and people, which Kosterski says is a legacy of Immanuel Kant. The examples of Wojtyla and Scola are therefore instructive to all of us crypt-Aristotelians.

Tsunami.

Lane Core has a prayer and a nifty graphic of how the earthquake generated the tsunami from a global perspective.

Needless to say, both are worth checking out.

Another False Hate Crime Allegation.

[Via The Volokh Conspiracy.]

As a plaintiff's employment attorney part of my job is to weed out the probably true claims of discrimination and retaliation from the false. It's sometimes easy and sometimes it's very, very difficult. My rule of thumb tends to be that the more cliche the fact pattern, the more skeptical I am likely to be about the claim. My general sense is that modern racists, for example, are unlikely to trade in the metaphors of Alabama circa 1955.

I think, though, that I might have spotted this one if it came to me:

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — Police said a 22-year-old man was charged with filing a false report about a hate crime.
Floyd Elliott, of Independence, told police that on Dec. 14, two subjects attacked him in the parking lot of his apartment complex. He said the attackers cut him in the stomach, branded him with a hot knife, and attempted to carve the word "Fag" on his forehead.
Investigators were suspicious about the report because the head carving was backwards, as if done while looking into a mirror.
Later, Elliott admitted to police that the injuries were self-inflicted. He said he falsely reported the attack to increase the police presence in his neighborhood.

Perhaps it was a band of dyslexic racists?

From the straight to video file.

I saw a review for this movie - Northfork- which has the proverbial all-star cast - Nick Nolte, James Woods and Darryl Hannah. It looked good, but the review at IMDB suggests why it may have bombed. The Reckoning is another one that looked good in the trailer, but the review indicates why it went "straight to video."

So I guess it's going to be "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou " this weekend.

In the distance they heard the mighty bellow of a neutered chihuahua....

Powerline, which was recognized as "Best Blog" by Time magazine for blowing the whistle on Dan Rather, is incompetently savaged by one of their hometown political columnists, a man named Nick Coleman, who trots out a bunch of ad hominem non sequiturs in an attempt to slur the Powerline guys. Read the Coleman editorial as an example of how the mainstream media has become unhinged; for years Coleman has been the BMOC with his right to manufacture opinion - why he even tells us how he swung the 1990 Minnesota gubernatorial election to Arne Carlson in order to prevent the endorsement of the StarTrib editorial board from being circumvented (!!) - and now a bunch of amateurs are trespassing on his turf and, worse still, getting recognition from Time magazine.

The real indication of how far Mr. Coleman is from the realities of the new media is that he doesn't realize how close he is to becoming an adjective. Remember how Robert Fisk gave his name to "fisking?" Mr. Coleman may be close to immortality for being the first person to "pull a coleman."

The lesson is not to get in a fight with someone who buys their pixels by the bandwidth.

Update: Hah! I was right about Coleman's incipient immortality. Here's Jim Geraghy's column and Instapundit has a nice round-up of snarky responses to Coleman.

Natural Law.

Secret Agent Man recommends Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law (Goodrich Lecture Series) and offers a long post on the limits of natural law. SAM's argument seems to be a natural law approach which is unmoored from the revealed truths of Catholicism will inevitably degenerate into an exercise of justifying current prejudices. He offers the Canadian Supreme Court's recent excursion into legalizing homosexual marriage as an example of precisely this sort of natural law thinking.

Certainly, there can't be any strong argument that there is a tendency for natural law thinkers to believe that their own particular prejudices reflect the eternal structure of the universe. During the early Twentieth Century this tendency could be seen in Lochner v. State of New York, which struck down laws governing working conditions in the name of freedom of contract. In the latter Twentieth Century, it was the rights of privacy that held the trump card.

But I think this misses the point about natural law. The natural law approach is ultimately premised upon the idea that there is something permanent in human nature and that permanent thing transcends social convention, much as the law of gravity transcends social convention. Natural law is natural law because its based on an essential human nature, rather than the "accidents" of a particular time or place. Ultimately, the natural law approach is based upon a claim about empirical reality; there either is such a human nature or there is no such thing.

Hence if a "natural law" is violated there should be obvious and generally painful repercussions. For example, attempt to "circumvent" the law of gravity and you fall flat on your face, Attempt to violate a law, rule or principle that is inherent within human nature and you get a sick or disfunctional individual, community or society. Contrawise, if you see a sick or disfunctional society, odds are that you also have some contravention of natural law. I personally don't think its surprising that the legacy of the Soviet Union is a declining Russian population where ideas of trust are foreign; I think you have a working out of natural law because there is something in the essential gregariousness of human nature that needs trust and will tremendously misfire in a culture of institutionalized informers. Likewise, I think that there is a natural law idea in the principle that marriages are not matters of convenience or mere contract, and I think the tremendous disfunctions associated with divorces in both parents and children is a consequence of ignoring that idea.

Of course it is quite possible for people and societies to ignore their disfunctions even as they die in squalor. Every multiculturalist and everyone who celebrates the myth of the peaceful primitive should be forced to read Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Robert B. Edgerton, at gun point if necessary. Edgerton's book details the incredible variety of ways in which primitive societies have managed to starve and oppress themselves into extinction, such as by having taboos against fishing certain lakes even while they're starving. Edgerton provides a nice counterpoint to Marvin Harris or for that matter to Richard Posner's Law and Economics, both of whom have the singular ability to assure us that every cultural practice must have some utility to the society.

My point is that it may be more reasonable to reason from empirical evidence to a natural law view than to generate a natural law philosophy in a vacuum and then apply it.

Spoiler - Million Dollar Baby.

[Via Amy Welborn.]

I'm grateful for this review of Clint Eastwood's new film, "Million Dollar Baby." I'm sure that I would have gone to see the film and been blind-sided by the triumphalistic message of a formerly devout Catholic engaging in euthanasia.

I'm also beginning to wonder whether Eastwood has some latent "issues" with the Catholic church. In Mystic River I began to have that "here it comes" feeling when Eastwood framed crosses as the centerpiece of the scenes involving the child molesters. The movie didn't go in that direction, but the obvious linking of Catholic symbols with the molesters would normally, in other movies, turn into a stock indictment of the Church and its flawed human agents. I suspect that something ended up on the cutting room floor, unless the symbolism was merely gratuitous.

One of the Welborn commenters makes the interesting point about what was the "big deal" with a competent quadriplegic refusing extraordinary medical treatment; couldn't she have simply asked to have the artificial respiratory system turned off?

Hmm. Good question. According to the Catechism:

Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate. It is the refusal of "overzealous" treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one's inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decision should be made by the patient if he is competent and able, or if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected. (Number 2278)

The morality of "turning off" artificial respirators has long been accepted by Catholic philosophy; in fact, in the seminal Quinlan case, Catholic theology was cited as a basis for Karen Ann Quinlan's "right to die with dignity." (The problem with the Schiavo case isn't the result per se; it's the idea that providing food and water and hygiene is ever "extraordinary" or "burdensome.")

I guess, tentatively, that if it is moral for an incompetent to refuse extraordinary medical treatment, it would be equally moral for a competent to refuse such treatment. I find something intuitively disturbing about this conclusion, however, and will need to do further study. (On the other hand, it wouldn't disturb me if a person says "I'd rather not have that heart transplant operation," but it would disturb me if a person chose death rather than taking a single antibiotic pill?)

Democracy Now!

Actually, "Republicanism Now!"

You know, the thoughtful, reflective system that makes rational policy decision rather than throwing $3 Billion (!) at a perceived problem in a fit of knee-jerk reaction.

A case in point: Junk Science (no permalinks so do a "control F" search for "scam") links to a Wall Street Journal Online article about the California Stem Cell initiative. Apart from enriching the backers, the initiative will start immediately costing California taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in paying the debt service on the bonds:

The law, which passed with 59% of the vote and vocal support from Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, authorizes $3 billion in bonds to pay for new research and facilities. And even though the interest rate will double the ultimate cost over 10 years, backers of the initiative said that the money raised from the bonds won't cost the state anything for the first five.

Or so most Californians thought before a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle noting that the Prop. 71 campaign misrepresented the measure in major ways. In fact, says the paper, "Interest payments will begin immediately, paid out of the bond money itself -- meaning that tens to hundreds of millions of 'research' dollars must be used to pay debt service."

Nice work, majority of California voters.

Sometimes I'm very smug about the fact that I'm a "ignorant, superstitious, mind-controlled religious zealot who opposes progressive biotechnology because it blurs the ontological status of humanity" rather than one of those "highly-educated, super-intelligent, rational humanists who oppose a theocracy because that would consign Christopher Reeves to a lifetime of quadriplegia" who voted for this swindle.

For the record: told you so.

Odds of God Smiting a Sinful World Now at 3.8e-05

Jonah Goldberg links to a NASA site that says the "Palermo Scale" rating of the the most recent killer asteroid striking the earth is "zero." This page says that an Impact Probability of 3.8e-05 means there is a 0.003800000% chance of Earth impact or a 1 in 26,000 chance of impact or a 99.99620000% chance the asteroid will miss the Earth, which is good news, I guess. (On the other hand, give enough million years and the odds that a 1 in 26,000 times event occurring seem to be pretty near certain.)

Neat site.

By the way, Foxnews has an earth scientist who says that some of the smaller islands may appear to have moved because of uplift which changes the shoreline; I don't think he confirmed the reports of "islands moving." Apparently, the earthquake may also have changed the length of the Earth's rotation. The Chilean earthquake changed the Earth's rotation by 8 millionth of a second.

Interesting.

Update: But, of course, A Voyage to Arcturus has the details on the "killer asteroid" story. He reports the odds of an impact at 1 in 56,000.

Woohoo.

"Two Cultures Smackdown" Update: On the other hand, the Beehive - the Fresno Bee's blog - has a post reporting that the odds are 1 in -gulp - 300. But that calculation is based on a 5 day old article, so I'm going with the science wonk instead of the - I assume - liberal arts majors, unless the Fresno Bee folk can explain what "3.8e-05" means.

On the other hand, this asteroid impact calculator that the Bee linked to is pretty nifty. So far I have not obliterated the Earth, but I have managed to spew myself and everything within 250 miles out as ejecta from the impact.

Sorry, Fresno.

Those Crazy, Mixed-up Methodists.

Get Religion asks:

So what does it really mean, when a Protestant congregation celebrates a novena in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, parading a "2-foot-high statue around the neighborhood, singing songs and reciting the rosary"?

Don't know. Maybe they've "deconstructed" everything they once held sacred?

Assurance of Salvation.

[Via Against the Grain.]

The Pontificator has some worthy reflections on the question "are you saved."

By the way, here is a wonderful interview with Christopher Blosser, Catholic intellectual heavyweight,former Mennonite, webmaster of Against the Grain and so many other blogs and, of course, the ultimate defender of Cardinal Ratzinger.

One question: where can I pick up one of those nifty "putting the smackdown on heresy since 1979" coffee mugs?

Abortion and Aesthetics.

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly lets the mask slip on the "abortion-is-a-great-personal-tragedy" rhetoric that cynically gets recited by some abortion supporters who don't really appreciate the tragedy involved. We saw this recently with Margaret Cho and last summer with the woman who killed two of the triplets she was carrying so that she would be spared the greater tragedy of shopping at Costco for large jars of mayonnaise.

Drum writes:

I'm usually in favor of more inclusive language, greater sensitivity, etc. etc. But obsessing about the emotional turmoil of getting an abortion just doesn't work. Since we fundamentally believe that there's nothing wrong with pre-viability abortion, shouldn't our job instead be to persuade women that they shouldn't feel emotionally whipsawed if they choose to get an abortion? It's awfully hard to take both sides.

Exactly right. If being a fetus were not simply one of stages in the development of a child, there might not be anything wrong with "pre-viability abortion:" or, pace the Dutch, with refusing ordinary medical care to preemies, which Drum presumably would refer to as "post-viability abortion." If a fetus, however, is simply one stage in the life of a person that, ceteris paribus, runs from conception to death, then there may be something wrong with "pre-viability abortions." The point is that anyone thinking through the issue has to choose on which side of the river he's going to travel.

Adrienne calls Drum on his position:

I think you've fundamentally missed the point. Pro-choicers--and a lot of Democrats--believe that there's nothing wrong with pre-viability abortions being LEGAL. I don't know a whole lot of folks who believe that pre-viability abortions in general are morally neutral or "no big deal." The fact is, abortion may be a necessary procedure for some women, but pro-choicers have got to stop pretending that it isn't a gut-wrenching, emotional, traumatic decision/situation. So persuading women not to feel "emotionally whipsawed" for having an abortion is not only a waste of time, but probably counterproductive, since for most women abortion comes with a lot of emotions/depression/regrets.

Drum wins the point for moral obtuseness but logical rigor with this reply:

Adrienne: I don't quite get what you're saying. Who are the Dems who pretend that abortion is no big deal? It seems to me that most Dems go out of their way to acknowledge this. John Kerry certainly did.

Still, our basic position needs to be to help women move away from the guilt and depression. That's hard to do unless you're forthright about abortion being morally OK.

And there you have it: the pro-choice position is positively incoherent on the questions of (a) should women feel bad when they have abortions? and (b) if they do, why do they feel bad?

If someone was committed to a truly secular, scientific worldview, he would reduce this to anthropology. First, do women feel bad when they have abortions? Apparently some do and some don't. Andrea seems to think they do.

Second, why do they feel the way they do? It could be a social artifact; some women feel the way they do because they are the victims of a false consciousness. Or it could be real and more innate; people are - or should be - distressed when they kill other people, and even more so when they kill their children, and no amount of positive spin is going to change the understanding that what abortion does.

If you read the remainder of the posts, you can see both sides of this debate over "moral positivism" and "natural law" given expression. For example, Tony Shiflet endorses the "false consciousness" theory:

There should be no guilt and depression, because there's nothing wrong with having an abortion. The reason "guilt and depression" are out there, to the extent that they are, is because of the right wing.

Tinfoil disagrees and seems to be gesturing at the natural law idea that abortion involves some intrinsic evil that only a "total sociopath" would ignore:

My girlfriend in college had an abortion. I was and still am a staunch supporter of choice.

However, the idea that there should be no guilt or depression is crazy. Unless you are a total sociopath, it is a very personal, gut-wrenching decision.

Saying that abortion should be guilt and depression free only helps the Right to paint pro-choice people as careless and callous.

For what it's worth, I think that Drum and Tony Shiflet have the better of the argument as a matter of scoring debate points. If you're going to adopt a principle that makes abortion legal, you have to also maintain that there are no evils associated with it, otherwise the tendency will be to step in and address those evils through laws that might make abortion "rare" as well as "legal" and "safe."

On the other hand, as a matter of lived experience, Tinfoil and Andrea have my vote. Some people do feel moral pangs after the act of abortion. Some may not, but so what? Some people don't feel moral qualms concerning, inter alia, murder or infanticide. Moreover, at the least, there is something about the "rah-rah approach" to abortion, such as that voiced by Tony, which comes across as unpleasantly callous.

Update: At this subject, and most others, I have purely amateur standing. I only post these things to let other things I'm writing gell, such as the brief I'm writing on the treatment of religious property under Alaskan law. After Abortion provides a much better perspectives on the "qualia" of abortion than I'm ever likely to provide.

Sumatran Earthquake.

In Principio has a colorful map showing the scope of the recent earthquake near Sumatra.

Jonah Goldberg is claiming that the earthquake moved Sumatra 100 feet.

Color me skeptical. If I were a character out of one of Heinlein's novels, I would take out my slide rule and translate meters into pounds into joules, or somesuch, and reach the conclusion that the surface of the earth would have melted if that were the case. (I think that actually one of his characters engaged in exactly that exercise.) I suspect that a 100 foot shift would have liquified everything on Sumatra.

But, hey, I could be wrong. The last time I took physics was in 1979, back when we still thought that the universe was infinite for both time and space and the smallest bit of matter was the atom. (Also, light set the absolute limits for acceleration. Which I guess it still does, dammitall.)

If there's any science wonks out there who want to confirm or deny the story, I'll listen respectfully.

Archimedes was right.

[Via The Volokh Conspiracy.]

Check out this amazing series of photos which provide an interesting object lesson in the concept of "leverage."

I hope no one was hurt.

"The right to die is the right to be free."

That's a line from Robert Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon," which had a number of interesting riffs including a return of the social acceptance of dueling and the conventionality of suicide in a future where life might seem without meaning.

Heinlein's characters in that book would have casually accepted the 10 Myths of Assisted Suicide which are debunked by Spiked-Online. The theme running through the Spiked article is that there is no effective law against suicide; if someone wants to kill themselves they can do so at any and at any place. The legal reforms that the right-to-die community wants are designed to allow others to kill.

Frequently, the ones whom these laws are designed to eliminate are the disabled. The Spiked article contains this paragraph:

This is no abstract fear voiced by philosophers such as Baroness Warnock, as Jane Campbell, writing recently in The Times (London), discovered. Campbell, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, a muscle-wasting illness that means she cannot lift her head from her pillow unaided, was hospitalised for a case of pneumonia. The consultant treating her said that he assumed she would not want to be resuscitated should she go into respiratory failure. When she protested that she would like to be resuscitated, she was visited by a more senior consultant who said that he assumed she would not want to be put on a ventilator. According to the Disability Rights Commission, this was not was not an isolated incident. As Campbell says, these incidents 'reflect society's view that people such as myself live flawed and unsustainable lives and that death is preferable to living with a severe impairment'

Two visits to impress on Jane the idea that she should get with the program and opt out of her flawed life if the opportunity presented itself.

At least she got some choice in the matter. According to a news brief from Philosophy Now Dutch doctors are legally prohibited from reviving preemies. ("In Holland the law decrees that no baby is resuscitated if born at or before 25 weeks gestation.") This law would seem to be entirely consistent with the recently reported Groningen Protocol that takes life or death decision out of the hands of the parents and places such decisions under the control of the medical profession.

Only the good die young.

Foxnews reports that Packer Great Reggie White - "The Minister of Defense" - has died of a heart attack at 43.

As a non-sports fan/non-Packers fan, White struck me as a good person. He seemed to have a personna that didn't focus on himself and the player profiles which aired during games always pointed out that he was an ordained minister with an active youth services program. In short, whatever his defects, it seemed that White concerned himself with some things that were once quaintly known as "virtues."

White's life and death were oddly juxtaposed with this article on Mike Tyson I was reading when Fox reported the news of White's death. Here's what that article has to say about Tyson's self-understanding of his life:

"Dying can't be as bad as living," he muses. "There's no way that dying can be as bad as living. But while you're living you have to live.

"I don't know what I'm doing. I just live, I guess, get some food. But I don't cook. I go to restaurants every night." Asked how he fills his days, he replies: "I don't do anything. My life sucks."

Cash-strapped after blowing a £200million fortune, he has sold all his mansions, got rid of the pet tigers and flogged the luxury cars to move into a £60,000 two-bedroom house in Phoenix, Arizona.

He even has to put his own rubbish out now. But he denies that he has left the back streets of Brooklyn, where he grew up, for good.

"I live wherever I can," he says, before pondering whether it has all been worth it.

"I've reached a point in my life when I think: 'Damn, what is all this s*** for?' You forget about all the fighting and all the training.

"But I guess I'm fortunate enough, right? Never have to wait in line for anything, never have to worry about getting a nice girlfriend, a good-looking girlfriend. I don't know, it has its advantages."

The death of sports heroes was associated with a meditations on the meaning of life in A. E. Houseman's poem "To an Athelete Dying Young", which simply can't be beat for its wonderfully depressing tone:

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder high-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It whithers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

What is the purpose of life? Houseman's poem seems to suggest that glory is the purpose of an athelete's life and that once his active days of setting records is over, the best that the athelete can do is to die. Tyson clearly provides some support for Houseman's view as he slides into pathetic decline.

A different perspective on the purpose of life was Aristotle's "eudaimonia" or the state of happiness which comes from living a balanced integrated human life. The process of reaching that balance involved the exercise of arete,or virtue, which Aristotle understood to be those traits that led to the strongest flourishing of human life.

White appeared to have had some kind of balance during his glory days. He was a player and a minister. He also transitioned into a life of service after his playing days were over. Had he lived, I think that we would have been treated to decennial retrospectives that chronicled his continuing accomplishments. I think that White had "eudaimonia" and I don't think that anyone would argue that Tyson had the better life.

Update: Here's another article about a young soldier killed in action. It's a very painful piece to read.

One of the mourners at Thomas Maximilian Kolbe Doerflinger’s funeral was heard to comment, "What a wasted life."

Mike Tyson's life is on the way to being wasted: not Doerflinger's or White's. Their lives were short, but not wasted.

Second Update: Get Religion provides a balanced review of White's life. The post has this paragraph about a photo in USA Today which describes a post-game prayer meeting purportedly of Packer players only:

Close, but this caption misses one of the major themes in White's career. In the photo, his tree-limb-sized arms are embracing several players -- from the Patriots. This is one of those post-game prayer meetings for Christians from both teams. There are Packers next to Patriots and it is very clear who is the leader of these men from both teams. Viewers have never seen one of these post-game prayer and fellowship rites, because officials at Fox, CBS and ABC have always declined to show them. But they happen and White was one of the people who started them, reminding everyone that football was football and life was life and it should be clear to everyone which was more important.

Check out the post.

Must Read E-Mail from an American Soldier.

This e-mail about a wounded American soldier's encounter with the SecDef is going around.

Is it true? It has the flavor of an instant urban legend. Nonetheless, it is quite moving.

Why should we care about the story? Because our soldiers are doing a job that needed doing, and because their sacrifices for this country should be honored, and, ultimately, the attacks on Rumsfield are simply the opening wedge for degrading the American effort in Iraq which will inevitably slop over and degrade our troops. The "Peace-Left" learned that approach worked in Vietnam and none of their talk about supporting the troops could remove the stain of Kerry testifying that his fellow soldiers and sailors were war criminals.

Ann Coulter offers a different defense of Rumsfield and some amusing observations on the culture that would reduce Christmas to the "Giving Tree" Festival.

Update: The Banty Rooser assures that the e-mail is no urban legend.

Thanks for the information and for sharing an insider's view of an event that would otherwise have been lost.